Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (20 page)

The kid pulled his helmet on. “It’s midnight.”

As soon as he said it, the impacts stopped, sending us back into the tomblike quiet of the basement, and I felt a chill at the realization that the artillery had stopped at such an exact time. I jumped to my feet.

“Let’s go.”

“What’s going on?” he asked. “I thought we were staying here.”

“Let’s go.”

I felt it in my groin first, a kind of fear that forced its way up into my stomach and then my chest, tightening everything so that I fumbled my way through the door, pausing only for as long as it took both of us to make sure the door wouldn’t lock once we pushed it shut—in case we wanted back in. The kid scattered rubble to hide the scrape marks, and then we booked up the stairs and back into the hotel.

A loud thump made us duck before I realized what it was.

“That’s outgoing.”

“Shit.”

I glanced out one of the lobby windows and in the distance saw the flash from our guns, the few that had survived the constant threat of artillery and air bombardment, and then watched to the east as plasma flashed; it was too far to see the impact, but I saw the blinking lights against the sky. Then the radio, which had played only static a moment before, cleared, and everything went to hell.

“They’re coming,” I said.

“Who’s coming?”

“Popov.” The kid just stood there, his carbine muzzle
scraping the floor as he stared at me. “What?” I asked. “Did you think he was just going to let us sit here all fall, all winter?”

“I don’t want this.”

I knew where the kid was going, and his hands started trembling so that he could barely grip the Maxwell. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled.

“Don’t think about it. Let’s get to the command tunnel and find out what’s going on.”

I kept him moving. Negotiating Almaty’s rubble during the day was hard enough, but making it through at night—even with light amplification—was worse, and you always risked falling into some unseen hole or shaft, never to be seen or heard from again. It took forever. By the time we got close to the outer trench line, we heard the shouts of men as they filed out from the tunnels below, taking positions to get ready for whatever came next.

We passed a tank that was still in one piece, and its commander hung from the turret hatch, leaning over to adjust one last bit of rubble. I called up to him.

“What’s going on?”

“We got about two hundred thousand inbound infantry, ten thousand vehicle targets, and an unknown number of air contacts. They’re all headed this way.”

“From the north?”

He sounded astonished, like I could
be
so stupid. “From every direction, dumb-ass.” He dropped into his vehicle and shut the hatch.

“I don’t want this,” the kid repeated.

“Nobody wants it. It just is.”

The elevators had already gone down by the time we worked our way through the main entry ramp, weaving
through a sea of men whose faces—if we could have seen them—would have been a portrait of everything I felt. How could I have been so crazy, to wish for the attack to happen? Already I missed the hunger and boredom, cursing myself for having been even more stupid than the tanker had thought, for not having enjoyed the past few weeks for what they’d meant: that we were alive. Finally the elevators came and we waited for the soldiers to disembark before pushing our way on.

When we got to the command post, it was almost empty, manned only by a few men in orange coveralls who monitored seismic stations.

“They coming underground?” I asked.

One shook his head. “We’re tracking a group of hits that might be borers, but their tunneling ETA is something like two days out. Plenty of time. Topside is another story.”

“Where’s General Urqhart?”

“Airfield.”

The kid and I had popped our lids, and looked at each other before putting them back on, retracing our steps to the elevators. This time, it was going to be nearly impossible to move aboveground.

Topside, the rubble fields lit up with Russian plasma, and it was the closest I had been without being under some kind of cover, without closing my eyes and hiding from the full spectacle of its destructive power. Shells actually came in slowly enough that you could see them. Plasma rounds arced overhead as bright streaks that smeared upon impact before expanding into huge inverted bowls of bright light, like jellyfish that appeared out of nowhere and then vanished almost as quickly as they came. It took me a moment to hear the screams. Then I
realized that the kid was screaming and that we had frozen there, like idiots, exposed and protected only by the walls of the entry ramp. I grabbed him and we moved out.

There were no trenches traversing the city, and it would have been smarter to go back down and take the long way, moving from tunnel to tunnel and circumnavigating the city underground, but I couldn’t stomach the thought. Anything could happen during the time it would take. By the time we popped up near the airfield, Pops might have already overrun, and we’d be dead the moment we stepped into air.

“Keep moving,” I said to the kid, half dragging him from rubble pile to rubble pile.
“Move it!”

“This is total bullshit.”

“Think of it as a party.”

I barely heard him when a plasma round impacted nearby, but the kid said something like “You’re a nut job,” and I laughed.

“Why do we have to find the general?” he asked.

That stopped me. It took me a second to figure it out, and when I did, it wasn’t clear if the answer made any sense, but it was the only one I had.

“I don’t know. Something tells me we have to find him.”

To the kid’s credit, it was enough. He followed me now, so I didn’t have to pull him along, and we dove under blocks of concrete whenever the scream of shells came too close, waiting for the heat to wash over us and remind us that soon we’d belong to Popov. Without a working chronometer, I had no idea of the time. But eventually we made it to the western perimeter of the airfield, just as the sun had begun to turn the sky pink, and I slid into a trench, grabbing the first guy I saw.

“Where’s the general?” I asked.

“Who?”

“General Urqhart, where is he?”

The guy didn’t look at me but raised his arm slowly, eventually pointing at an underground entry ramp about a hundred meters east of our position. The ground was completely open. I gave the kid the thumbs-up, and we leapt from the hole at the same instant a plasma round landed in it. My only thoughts were realizations that I had suddenly become airborne and that I had been there before, a long time ago, when I’d first met Bridgette. I landed in the open. It took a moment to get my bearings and regain my wind, but when I finally did, I saw the kid next to me, pulling the remains of his helmet from his head, his hair singed off and eyebrows gone.

“Am I OK?” he asked.

“Yeah. No hair, though.”

“What about my face,
is it burned
?”

I heard the panic in his voice and I wanted to joke about it but decided he might lose it completely if I did. “No, kid. You’re fine.”

We made it to the ramp in less than a minute and dove down, rolling to the bottom before allowing ourselves to breathe.

Russian forces had broken through to the south. The general grinned at me from his chair as he typed commands into a keypad or barked orders into his headset, and he looked like a gnome in green armor, the vision hood lending him a kind of ancient-aviator appearance. The whole scene seemed out of place. I’d never seen him this happy.
Now that there was fighting to do, the old man I remembered was back, and he chewed so hard on his cigar that the end fell from his mouth, severed.

“Oscar, you dirty bastard, got any weed?”

“No, sir. I quit.”

He paused to yell into his headset before responding. “Well, ain’t that the shit. Good for you. Best thing that could have happened—well,
almost
the best thing; I’ve got something better.”

“What, General?”

“You want to get out of here? Go to Tashkent and link up with the last of our retreating units before they head for Bandar?”

I didn’t know what to say. The general’s grin went even wider when he saw the look on my face; he snapped his fingers twice, and an Air Force sergeant appeared from nowhere. Neither of them could have known how the question twisted me. I felt my knees begin to tremble, and only then did I realize how much effort it had taken to push the fear down, bottle it up so that I could accomplish the simplest tasks, like walking and breathing. For a moment I felt as though I’d faint.

“Sergeant,” the general said, “how long until the auto-drone arrives?”

“Five minutes, sir. It’s inbound now at Mach three.”

I cleared my throat, finally finding my voice. “Sir, what are you talking about?”

“You and your boyfriend.” He pointed at the kid. “I’m asking if you want to get out of here. Command wants me to evacuate, leave my boys in Almaty and hightail it out on an evac-drone so Popov will get his hands on one less general. I say to hell with that. I’m staying.”

And that was why his men loved the guy. You saw it in the sergeant: a kind of worship as he listened to the general, a look that transcended all the dirt and crap that had affixed to the man’s face, turning it from something that resembled a bearded lump of charcoal to the face of a cherub.

“Sergeant, the drone can hold two, right?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir. And if these two won’t take it, count me in.”

“Ha! My ass. If I stay, you stay.” He turned back to me and stopped smiling. “Well? What do you say?”

I looked at the kid. You’d think this would be an easy decision, but it wasn’t. The thought of bugging out and leaving everyone behind, especially the general, had instilled a feeling in me that sent tendrils throughout my brain and underscored the sense that deep down I was a coward—that by escaping I’d prove it to everyone. But then the memory of my father came back.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “Yeah. I want to get out of here.”

“Don’t thank me yet. The drone still has to make it through Pop’s defenses—there’s a reason we don’t use airborne assaults and helicopters anymore—and for all I know, you’ll be shot down before you get ten feet off the airstrip. But hell. It’s worth a shot.”

I shit you not: the kid dropped his carbine and hugged the general, breaking into a tantrum with no sign of stopping.

“Oscar,” the general said before extending his hand. “The sergeant will show you guys where to wait.”

I took it. There wasn’t anything to say, and the only thing to do was stare at the guy and shake his hand, knowing deep down that I’d never see him again.

“Thanks, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Just tell your catamite to stop humping my leg and we’ll call it even.”

We waited at the entry ramp and crouched against a wall; the airfield was a mess. It was hard to imagine how a drone would land on the strip, which had become pockmarked by shallow plasma craters and dotted with the wreckage of supply drones that had tried to land over the past few weeks only to get shot down. A stream of tracers shot past, and I flinched at the snaps. The sergeant gave us updates every once in a while and he was trying to be cool about it, like it would help, but the constant reminder ratcheted up the tension every time. It was almost over. Not at any other time in Kaz had I been that scared, knowing that whatever happened, it would probably take place in the next thirty minutes, and either we’d be killed or we’d make it out. The kid wasn’t talking. He just sat there, staring at the runway and clutching his carbine to his chest like it was some kind of security blanket. Safety was in reach, and the fact that it was out there, waving to us, made it that much harder to accept that irony could rear its head in a second and swat down the promise of escape just as quickly as it had materialized. When the drone screamed overhead, barely clearing the ramp’s roof, we both jumped up and the sergeant had to grab us.

“
Not yet.
The drone will land from the far end and taxi this way. When I give the word, you break cover and sprint, but keep your heads down.”

“How far?” I asked, but the volume of fire suddenly increased, drowning my words.

“What?”

“How far will we have to run?”

“About a hundred meters. When the doors pop, you guys will have about thirty seconds to embark; it leaves whether you make it on or not.”

My jaw started working, chewing at the insides of my cheeks so that I could keep my teeth from chattering. Our drone had turned into a black dot in the distance and it would have been nearly impossible to see except for the tracers that reached up from Russian positions, pointing to it with lines of red light. When it turned for the approach, it got steadily larger, a gray speck that was slightly darker than the sky and grew with each second until it touched down at the runway’s far end in a puff of dust. The aircraft sped down the strip, heading straight for us, and I had the strangest sensation, as though it was a shark with wings. When it got close enough, the sergeant slapped my shoulder.

“That’s it. Good luck!” And he left.

The kid and I leapt to our feet at the same time and sprinted. I didn’t hear anything, because all my attention was focused on the drone, which had already begun a slow turn, its autonomous computer ticking by the seconds that it had been told were allowed on the ground. It felt as though every Russian gun had been trained on it. Plasma rounds began bursting on the strip, and I noticed the temperature indicator leap all the way from green to red at the same time a shock wave hit, hard enough that I almost fell into the kid and knocked both of us down. And still there wasn’t any noise. All I heard was my own breathing and my whispers as I urged myself to run faster.