Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (41 page)

If you enjoyed
GERMLINE
,
look out for

The Subterrene War: Book 2

by T. C. McCARTHY

Live forever.
The thought lingered like an annoying dog to which I had handed a few scraps.

I felt Megan’s fingers against my skin and smelled the paste—breathed the fumes gratefully, for it reminded me that I wouldn’t have to wear my helmet. Soon, but not now. The lessons taught this, described the first symptom of spoiling: when the helmet no longer felt safe, a sign of claustrophobia. As my troop train rumbled northward, I couldn’t tell if I shook from eagerness or from the railcar’s jolting, and gave up trying to distinguish between the two possibilities. It was not an
either-or
day; it was a day of simultaneity.

Deliver me from myself,
I prayed,
and help me to accept tomorrow’s end.

Almost a hundred of my sisters filled the railcar, in a train consisting of three hundred carriages, each one packed with the same cargo. My newer sisters—replacements with childlike faces—were of lesser importance. Megan counted for everything. She smiled as she stroked my forehead, which made me so drowsy that my eyes flickered shut with a memory, the image of an atelier, of a technician brushing fingers across my cheek as he cooed from outside the tank. I liked those memories. They weren’t like the ones acquired more recently, and once upon a time everything had been that way. Sterile. Days in the atelier had been clean and warm—not like this.

“Everything was so white then,” I said, “like a lily.”

Megan nodded and kissed me. “It was closer to perfect, not a hint of filth. Do not be angry today, Catherine. It’s counterproductive. Kill with detachment, with the greater plan.”

I closed my eyes and leaned forward so Megan could work more easily, and so she wouldn’t see my smile while smearing paste on my scalp, the thin layer of green thermal
block that would dry into a latex-like coating, blocking my heat. The replacements all stared at us.

“Can you tell us what to expect in Uchkuduk?” one of them asked. “It’s my first time—the first time for most of us. They mustered us a month ago from the Winchester atelier, near West Virginia. How should we prepare?”

“It’s simple,” I said. “There’s one thing they don’t teach in the atelier: Bleeznyetzi.”

Several of them leaned closer.

“Bleeznyetzi?”

I nodded. “It’s Russian for ‘twins.’ ”

“You are an older version,” one said. “We speak multiple languages, including Russian and Kazakh, and we know the word.”

“Then you know what our forces call us—the humans.”

“No. What?”

The train squealed around a sudden bend, pushing me further against the wall. I braced a boot against Megan, who had just fallen asleep, to keep her from slumping over.

“Bitches and sluts. The tanks taught English too, right?”

They left me alone after that. It was no surprise—we all learned the same lesson:
“Watch out for defeatists, the ones near the end of their terms. Defeatism festers in those who approach the age. Ignore their voices. Learn from their actions but do not listen to their words. When you and your sisters reach eighteen, a spoiling sets in, so pray for deliverance from defeatism and you will be discharged. Honorably. Only then will you ascend to be seated at His right hand.”
The replacements wouldn’t associate themselves with me for fear that I would rub off on them, the
spoiling a contagion, and for some reason it made me feel warm to think I had that kind of power.

“You’re incorrigible,” I whispered to Megan. “It is
not
your turn for rest.” But she didn’t hear, and exhaustion showed on her face, in thin lines that I hadn’t noticed before, while she slept. “I’ll tell you a secret: hatred is the only thing keeping me from spoiling, the only thing I have left, the only thing I do well.”

The armored personnel carrier’s compartment felt like a steam bath. Heat acted as a catalyst, lowering the amount of energy it took for the phantom dead to invade my mind, and I focused on my hands, thinking that concentration would keep the hallucination at bay. It was no use. The APC engine roared like a call from the past, and Megan melted away to be replaced by the dusty outskirts of Pavlodar, a bird jabbering overhead as we jumped off from the river. Five Kazakhs stood in an alley. They looked at me as if I was an anomaly, a dripping fish that had just stood up on two legs to walk from the Irtysh, and they failed to recognize the danger. Our girl named Majda moved first. She sprayed the women—who began to scream—with fléchettes, her stream of needles cutting some of them in half as she laughed. Majda wouldn’t laugh for much longer. A rocket went through her, leaving only a pair of twitching legs…

Megan was shouting at me when the vision evaporated.

“Catherine!”

The APC compartment reappeared. We sat encased in a tiny ceramic cubicle, strapped into our seats and struggling
to breathe alcohol-contaminated air as the vehicle idled.

“You’re spoiling,” she said. “You were laughing.”

I nodded and tongued another tranq tab—my third in the last hour.

“It’s an insanity,” Megan continued. “I worry. The spoiling seems to be worse in you than in any other, and someone will report it. One of the new girls.”

“It doesn’t matter. Soon we will kill again and then it will be as if nothing was ever wrong, as if destruction was a meal, maybe toast and honey.”

The turbine for the plasma cannon buzzed throughout the vehicle, vibrating the twenty cubicles like ours along each side and the three large ones down the vehicle’s spine. We had two ways out: the normal way, a tiny hatch in the floor, where we would come out underneath and roll from between the APC’s huge wheels; and an escape hatch in the roof, where we could pop out in an emergency. It wouldn’t be long before everything stopped and time would dilate with excitement, with the freedom of movement and a sudden breakout into the open, where one could find targets among men.

The turbines went quiet and I saw a tear on Megan’s cheek.

“It doesn’t matter,” I explained, “not because I don’t care about you. I do. It doesn’t matter because we’re dead anyway tomorrow. And I don’t
want
to die.”

“Don’t.”

“I don’t want to be discharged.”

“You speak like them, like the non-bred.”

I shook my head, ignoring the insult, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it
would be like to live past the age? Maybe the spoiling goes away.
Fades.
I have more killing to do, and they will rob me of it at eighteen.”

Megan shook her head. She turned and I saw from the movement of her neck that she had begun sobbing, which made me feel even worse, because my actions ruined the moment. This was to have been a sacred time. It was said that in quiet seconds during battle, when the firing paused, as it sometimes did without explanation, one heard His voice in the wind or in the silence of the suit, His hand on your heart to let you know that you were a sacred thing among the corrupt. So the time before an engagement was to be used for reflection, to prepare for glory in an hour of meditation that climaxed with a flash of anticipation, of wanting to prove one’s worthiness. But words ruined everything.

There were plans and strategies, mapped out in advance by human generals and run through computers, semi-aware, able to calculate just how far we could go before our systems reached their limit. It was a ritual beyond us—the way our leaders communicated with God and channeled His will. Nobody gave us the details. For the past two years, neither Megan nor I had known why the war existed, except what we had caught in passing during interactions with men, with human forces, the non-bred. But those were glimpses. They weren’t enough to answer all the questions, and soon we stopped asking, because it was enough to know that we fought Russian men, and we prayed that God would make the war last forever. A feeling of satisfaction filled me as I thought about it, as if knowing that God was a part of the plan was enough, something that made us invincible because He trusted us
to cleanse this part of the world, to allow a lily like Megan to exercise her will.

We would move out soon. Far below us, the advance shock wave of our sisters was already attacking, underground, pushing into Russian tunnel positions and killing as many as possible before we followed with the main force—a mixed army of humans and my sisters, exposed aboveground for the greater glory. Our attack would make Megan feel better, I was certain. Waiting never helped, but war?

War made us feel fifteen again.

They played it over the speakers when we were born at fifteen-equivalent—the hymn, a prayer known only by us, our first lesson, a call to the faithful:

This is my Maxwell. It was invented over a century before I was born but this one is new, this one is mine. The barrel of my Maxwell consists of an alloy tube, encased by band after band of superconducting magnets. I am shielded from the flux by ceramic and alloy barrel wraps, which join to the fuel cell, the fuel cell to the stock. My Maxwell carbine has no kick; my carbine has a flinch. It is my friend, my mother. My carbine propels its children, the fléchettes, down its length, rapidly accelerating them to speeds ranging from subsonic to hypersonic. It depends on what I choose.

My carbine is an instrument of God. I am an instrument of God. Unlike ancient firearms, the fléchettes have no integral chemical propellant and are therefore tiny, allowing me to fill a shoulder hopper with almost ten thousand at a time. Ten thousand chances to kill. My fléchettes are messengers of God. My fléchettes are killers. The material and shape of my killers make them superior armor penetrators. But my killers are not perfect. I am not perfect. My killers are too small to work alone and must function as a family. But I shall not worry. My Maxwell will fire fifty fléchettes per second, and fifty is a family. With my Maxwell I can liberate a man of his head or limbs. With my Maxwell I will kill until there is nothing left alive.

With my Maxwell, I am perfect.

It was then, at fifteen, that Megan and I met our first humans. Until that point, the technicians kept us in atelier tanks; we were alive and conscious, fed information and nutrients through a series of cables and tubes. The tanks gave us freedom of motion so we could put movement to combat scenarios played out in our heads, lending our muscles the same memories fed to our brains. Fifteen-equivalent was our birthday, when we became the biological equal to a fifteen-year-old human and slid from the growth tanks to feel cold air bring goose bumps and, along with them, a sense that the world was a both hostile and promising place, full of danger but also the opportunity for redemption.

First steps were awkward. Megan had stumbled when trying to stand and crashed into me, sending us both to the
cold floor in a heap. We giggled.
I’m Megan,
she had said, and I told her my name, after which we looked into a mirror, and I thought,
She looks just like me.
We were skinny girls, with leg and arm muscles that flexed like pistons under gravity, and that I knew could be used to kill the human technicians around us in hundreds of different ways. They had hair. Our heads had been shaved perfectly smooth and Megan and I sat there, on the floor, rubbing the tops of them and tracing our fingers over the scabs where only a few days before, cables had penetrated, and the thought occurred to me that if I killed one of the humans, we could take his hair, to glue it onto our heads just to feel what it was like. But the technicians were kind. They helped us both up, guiding us to the dressing area, where they gave us our first uniforms, orange, and bright enough that their color glowed under fluorescent lights. The sounds—not muffled by the gallons of thick fluid that normally surrounded us in the tanks—were enough to make me dizzy. I vomited on the floor.