Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (30 page)

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t feel my feet anymore. It started in Samarkand, but now I do not know.”

The kid and I popped her suit, pulling her halfway out so that she could yank one of her feet from inside the undersuit, and I snapped on my headlamp to get a better look. The ends of her toes were black.

“Jesus,” I said.

“It starts now. The spoiling.”

“Jesus Christ.”

She had been given a bag of pills, the ones the doctor had cooked up to replace the girls’ tranq tabs, and Sophie took one before she smiled. “I rot. It is true what the sergeant said. I’m past my shelf life. Did Bridgette teach you nothing?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll figure something out. We’ll handle this.”

“There’s nothing to figure out, Oscar. Nothing to handle.”

Before we could say anything more, someone slid into our trench and almost knocked me over.

“Did I miss anything?” asked the Brit.

It shocked me how well the Brit took the news that Sophie was a genetic. Someone might as well have told him that the river was made of water for all his reaction, which amounted to his popping his helmet and holding out a hand with a muttered “a pleasure.” And as time passed, we talked, the Amu Dar’ya gurgling by while the temperature dropped so low that for a moment I had the terrifying thought that it would freeze overnight, allowing the Russian vehicles safe passage. Around midnight, there was a commotion. We buttoned up, except for Sophie, who kept insisting that she just needed to shut her eyes for a minute
and liked the feeling of cold air, and everything went quiet until a group of soldiers in trucks pulled up behind our section. A guy leaned over the trench.

“Fall out for new weapons.”

“What?” I asked.

“New weapons. Air-dropped. You’ll need them to crack Pops’s armor.”

The kid, the Brit, and a few others slid from the trench and spent the next ten minutes jogging back and forth from the trucks, ferrying what eventually looked like a hundred grenade launchers and thousands of crates holding clips. We passed them down the line. I had never fired a grenade launcher, and its weight comforted me; you knew something that heavy must be able to penetrate powered armor.

The Brit chuckled.

“What?” I asked.

“Our tanks.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t see them anywhere. Or our APCs. So where the hell are they? And our artillery is gone, so they must expect us to hold off Popov’s tanks with these little things.”

Someone next to him, an older guy from the sound of his voice, laughed out loud. “We’re done. We may as well break out the white flag, boys, beg for mercy. Maybe they’ll take prisoners.”

“Shut up,” the Brit said.

“What? Why? You said it yourself—we can’t hold off Russian tanks with these; so
what
if we can take out their infantry? They won’t be
swimming
across the river; they’ll come in APCs.”

“I said shut the fuck up.”

“Really? Shut up? Once the APCs get across, Pops won’t even have to debark. He can fry us with plasma and drive back and forth to bury us in this place, save himself time because he won’t have to dig new graves for the enemy. This trench will be our tomb. How do we live like this? My ass is infected so badly that the infections have infections, and my crap is black with blood. This trench is where we die.”

The Brit slammed the butt of his grenade launcher into the guy’s face and then leapt on him, struggling to pop his helmet. The whole time, the guy wouldn’t stop talking—didn’t even fight back.

“That’s right, Legion. Take it all out on me, punish me for telling the truth. You and the rest of us are finished, so take it out on me, and forget about the fact that out there is a beast. If you beat me enough, maybe you can join
their
side.”

Finally the Brit got his helmet off and I looked away. I heard the soft thuds of his gauntlet slamming into the guy’s face, and little by little the talking stopped, until the Brit had enough and everything went quiet.

I turned back. “Did you kill him?”

“No,” the Brit said. “But he’ll have to see the medic. Maybe we should call one?”

“Forget it,” said the kid. “He can find his own medic.”

The Brit took off his helmet and slid to the trench floor, where he lit a cigarette, its tip triggering my infrared sensors so that it looked like a tiny star. “I’m a deserter, lads,” he said.

“For real?” I asked. “Fuck it.”

“Yeah. That’s what I figured. When we got here, the pencil-necks tried sending me to the south side of the city,
to the Legion units. I hid out, came back, and bribed them with a bottle of vodka to tell me where you lot wound up. It’s not like I ran off to the Riviera.”

It was the first thing I’d heard that gave me some hope. “The south side? Could that be where our armor is, like maybe they’re going to attack and break out?”

“Maybe. I never got that far, but what’s left of our armor has to be somewhere.”

There was movement again. I had stood to stretch my legs and to try to acquaint myself with the targeting features of the grenade launcher, which differed from my Maxwell, and peered across the river toward Samarkand. When I zoomed on a boulder, something shimmered next to it, then vanished.

A booming loudspeaker shattered the silence from across the river. “Marines and soldiers of the Foreign Legion. Lay down your arms. You are encircled and there is no place left for you to run. We will be merciful and spare your lives, and you can live out your days at home with your wives and children and girlfriends. Right now in America, in France, everywhere, your countrymen are in bed with your women, and your homes are being robbed because you are here, unable to protect the ones you love. We will spare you. Lay down your arms and for you the war will be over.” Then the message repeated itself, over and over.

“Fucking Russians,” said the Brit.

“I think I know where the loudspeaker is. Should I pump a few grenades to take it out?”

“No,” said the kid, “let it go. At least it gives us something to listen to.”

Another set of trucks worked their way up the line and
we listened as they whined, some of the drivers stripping gears as they stopped and started. Another shape appeared at the edge of our trench.

“Anyone here have a heavy weapons MOS?”

The kid and a few others raised their hands. A few seconds later the man returned with help, and they passed rocket launchers and ammunition down to us.

“What are these for?” the kid asked.

“For Popov tanks. All you guys with a heavy weapons will be getting orders soon to form hunter units. It’ll be your job to take out any APCs or tanks that try to cross. Good luck.”

The kid sat and popped his helmet, then ran his hands through his short beard before he started sobbing. I lifted my grenade launcher, pausing only for a moment to zero on the area where I’d seen the shimmer, then fired a short salvo into the air. It took a few seconds for them to land. There was a quick flash, then two more, and the Russian voice went silent, followed by a subdued cheer from the men in our trench.

“Thanks,” the kid said.

Sophie woke the next day and smiled. Her face had gone so pale that as we lay on the trench floor, I didn’t notice the mud, only her dimpled cheeks, which trembled in a cold wind that blew across the river and carried away thin clouds of sand to the west. She said something, a muttered thing about her past, but it blew away too. Her voice—and everything about her—stirred memories of Bridgette, and I had to mentally swat them away with near-constant self-reminders that this was Sophie and that she differed
from Bridgette in an infinite number of subtleties, despite an identical appearance. Sophie was perfectly dying.

“We cannot linger,” she said.

“Why?”

“If we stay here, we are destroyed. Our forces will attack to the south today and then we will immediately move out to follow them. You will see. It is better to stay on the move and risk the offensive. Our leaders
know
this.”

I said, “I need to know.”

“Know what?”

“The mark. Why you don’t have it and what it is.”

Her face went blank then, and I wished I could take it back.

“We have a test to pass. Before they release us from the ateliers.”

The wind gusted again, howling over the trench so loudly that the kid stirred beside me, but he soon stopped moving. Down the line someone coughed.

“What are they like?” I asked. “The ateliers.”

“They are all I ever knew. Once. A long time ago now. It is where they taught us to hunt men and that we served a purpose greater than common soldiers—two purposes, really: to die in war and to spare the lives of human women. Did you have a mother, Oscar?”

“Yeah. Still do.”

“These men all have mothers.”

I nodded, not sure where she was going.

“Until there are genetics in sufficient numbers to replace
all
men on the battlefield, women are needed for birthing. It is a question of logistics and numbers, of mathematics. I asked our unit mother, Sister Jennifer, why
they didn’t create us as men—because it was obvious to all of us that men would have greater muscle mass, more aggression, and she told me something that was a secret. She could have been arrested for telling me. Sister Jennifer said that once upon a time, women like your mother would have fought in wars, but that those times had passed, because today it requires so many men to fill the battlefield, millions. Not one woman capable of bearing children can be wasted in war. And when human women wish to serve, and protest not being able to, they might claim that it is unfair not to allow women on the battlefield. But with us, as females, the military can respond that they
allow
women to serve, and that no more are required. She also said that earlier experiments had used male genetics, but that those units had turned on their handlers and were too aggressive. Many humans died.”

“But that’s all crazy,” I said.

“It is a question of numbers and has nothing to do with sanity. I would like to meet your mother.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know what it means to be a girl—not a real girl. In the ateliers, when we complete our training, they line us up for the final test. It is a test of murder, where we kill something… defenseless. The unit mothers monitor the exam, and those who fail are executed later, but most of the girls succeed, joining the sisterhood of warfare—a happy occasion, when the mothers brand them with hot metal. It leaves a scar in the shape of a cross on the back of their head, or the number one; the mark depends on the atelier.”

“But you don’t have one,” I said.

“I failed the test. I carried out the act but my readouts
indicated there was something wrong, and my unit mother led me back to the barracks, where she risked her life to save mine, and when she did it, I asked why, and she said it was because one of us should be closer to human. Sister Jennifer wanted me to learn—to become a woman. She left, and when she came back ten minutes later, she said that she had fixed everything in the computer system so that I would not be executed. They had been planning to kill me that day for my failure, but instead, because of her, I am here with you now. I carry no mark. And I have no idea what any of it means.”

I pulled Sophie closer, not caring if anyone saw, and kissed her so that our goggles scraped against each other.

“Why are you sad?” I asked. “Whatever makes you different from the others must be why your spoiling isn’t as advanced. It’s why you’re still with us, at least partially sane. It’s a good thing.”

“I am old, Oscar. And tired, and dying. The test forced us to kill something very dear, to prove that we didn’t care for life, but I did, even back then. I’ll never tell you what I killed.”

The Brit and the kid leapt to their feet at the same time and peered over the trench lip. At first I didn’t know what had woken them. Then I heard it. The wind carried to us a distant and faint sound of tanks and APCs, their high-pitched whines shifting in tone as the vehicles maneuvered somewhere behind a line of hills that rose from the far side of the river.

“They’re coming this way, mate.”

“Nah,” said the kid. “They’re leaving.”

“Why the hell would they leave? I’m telling you, get that rocket launcher ready. They’re coming for us.”

Without warning a flash lit the dim morning sky ahead of us, so bright that it frosted my goggles. They cleared a moment later. Then a second flash, a third, and then maybe a thousand more all at once. I smelled ozone inside my suit and glanced at the heads-up to see the readout flicker and jump before finally going dark, and then I heard the deep boom of explosions, so tremendous that they shook the trench and nearly collapsed the wall against which we leaned. A vast curtain of dust and smoke rose in the distance, stretching across the horizon.

“Jesus,” said the kid.

The Brit coughed. “They went nuclear. There go all our troubles.”

“Nah,” I said, “that wasn’t nuclear or we’d be getting rad alarms. I think we just used our space-based kinetics, and now there’s nothing stopping Pops from using his. We’d better get moving. Soon.”