Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (3 page)

“Get down here,” Ox said. When I sat next to him, he popped my helmet and helped me out of the hood.

“What about Russian sensors?” I asked.

“We’re tight.” Ox pointed to two lights on the floor next to us, one green, the other red, and I saw the green one glowing dimly. “Green means go. A good seal, so they can’t see our therms, even if we unbutton, and we don’t need the chameleon skin in
this
domicile.”

Snyder pulled a small tin from a belt pouch and began flicking it, his finger snapping against the lid. His teeth were unbelievably yellow. “The good life,” he said.

Ox laughed, slid a small player out of his pouch and hit a button. I couldn’t believe it. Old music from the ancient world, rock. Nobody listened to that shit anymore except me, and as I sat there, it seemed… right. I didn’t know these men and hadn’t really seen much of them down in the tunnels, since we had been buttoned up for most of the time, and the only one I really spoke with was Ox. But I had listened and watched. They all had a look, and it wasn’t the one you saw on any of the troops that made it to the rear for R & R; out here the look was more raw, a tightness in their faces and eyes that manifested in a kind of cornered-animal thing even when they grinned. Always looking for signs of danger, always moving.

Snyder was a kid, from Jamaica, I think, and like the rest of them, he’d grown out his beard, but it grew only in patches, so it looked as though someone had ripped out tufts of hair.

“What’s zipped?” I asked.

“Zipped?” Snyder thought for a minute. “It’s a long trip.”

Ox grabbed the tin and opened it. He pinched the dark
material inside—it looked like finely ground dirt—and pressed a tiny wad inside his lower lip.

“It’s tobacco. But we add a special ingredient, tranq tabs.”

“Tranq tabs?”

“Illegal shit,” Snyder explained. “They give them to the crazies, the Gs, to make ’em not so crazy, keep ’em fighting and energized.”

“The Gs,” I said. “Genetics.”

Ox tossed the tin to Burger, who repeated the ritual and then threw it to Snyder. “Around their second year of service, Gs start to lose it, unstable. At first they didn’t give ’em anything and some Gs went nuts, wiped an entire battalion of Army on the push northward from Bandar. Then came tranq.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a mixture of haloperidol, fentanyl, and some kind of speed—in elephant-sized doses. We got some from a very friendly supply sergeant last time on leave. You crush up the tabs, mix it with dip, and there you go. Zip. We can’t smoke anything on the line—screws up the air handling when everyone lights up—and there’s no way a human could take a G-dose of these things. Can’t inject anything through suits unless you’re a corpsman. So mixing tranq with dip gives us just the right cut and a new way to see the war.”

Snyder finished and handed it to me. I looked at the stuff suspiciously, not because I didn’t want it—I wanted it more than anything—but because I didn’t know if I could keep my fingers steady long enough to take some. When the shakes eased for a moment, I dug in.

“Whatever you do,” said Snyder, “
don’t
swallow.” He held up a finger and spat onto the floor. “You spit.”

Cool and easy, all grins. Everything seemed smooth and I swore I smelled the snow, even over the stink of our own bodies. The music got louder. It took me a second but I realized that there was no fear—no war, even—just us and music that I could see coming out of the speakers, and I started giggling, unable to stop even if I had wanted to. I was about to swallow when Ox warned me. His voice sounded faraway and slow, so damn slow.

“Spit.”

“What’s your name?” Snyder asked.

I don’t remember telling him, but I must have.

“Oscar Wendell?” Ox asked. He and the others started laughing then. “No, no, no,
hell
no. We’re gonna give you a new name, your war name, ’cause you been born again, son of Kaz. Oscar Wendell will now be known as Scout.”

“Scout?”

“Well, Scout,” said Snyder. “Welcome to the jolly green brotherhood, no turning back now, nothing to do but crank on. Crank fire.”

Crank fire.
We cranked fire, and looking back, I realize I was glad for the drugs, for the cushion they gave me, a cocoon that filtered reality and kept out the really bad stuff or made it seem as though nothing was
actually
happening and everything was a dream. Two hours later the snow stopped, leaving the battlefield covered by an additional foot. I was on watch with Ox. The white made it difficult to concentrate and I had to close my eyes every few seconds to keep from getting dizzy; even though I had spat out the zip a long time ago, its effect still bounced in my head, keeping the edge off but blurring my sense of time and vision. Something moved out there. It looked like a piece of rubble melted into the snow and then rose
from a new position, closer, so when it happened again, I told Ox.

“Button up,” he said. The mood shattered in an instant. Ox’s and the others’ fingers blurred as the Marines yanked on vision hoods and snapped the cables into place, and it got dead quiet when Snyder killed the music. All I had to do was put on my helmet, but I was the last one finished.

“Cycle the air.”

Snyder hit a button and I heard a hiss, watching the temperature gauge on my heads-up drop rapidly. It stopped at five below zero. Burger popped open a firing port under the window and the floor light flickered from green to red at the same time he shoved his grenade launcher through. Ox and Snyder popped their ports, too, and gestured for me to do the same, so I poked my carbine into the narrow opening, and it clicked against the sides as my hands shook.

“Contact.” Ox’s voice crackled in my ear, over the radio. “Grid Foxtrot-Uniform-one-six-five-three-five-zero.”

The captain answered, his voice surreal, a caricature of what it should have been, as though someone pinched his nose while he spoke. If things hadn’t been so tense, I might have laughed. “Roger. Artillery off-line, weapons free, sentry bots show green lights. Green light.”

The shapes crept forward. It was almost impossible to detect, and had I not been paying attention, they would have crawled all the way, hundreds of white blobs that moved forward in a continuous line, so slowly they seemed barely to shift. Chameleon skins. Our suits, and theirs, had been coated with a reactive polymer, wired to the suits’ computers and power systems so that it sensed
one’s surroundings and changed to the same color as the closest objects. That was why they had been so hard to see, and it reminded me of what Ox had said, how he’d described them. Spooky. Popov was a ghost.

“Why are they moving so slowly?” I asked.

Ox grunted. “ ’Cause of our sentry bots. The bots can detect heat, but armored suits mask heat. That leaves motion and shape detection, but if you’ve got your second skin activated, move slow enough, and stay low…

“Crafty little bastards,” said Snyder.

I shook my head, trying to concentrate. “How slow?”

“Once they reach our security zone,” said Burger, “about two feet a minute.”

Two feet a minute. Outside. If a plasma barrage came and you were out there when it hit, instant crisp. I’d seen the bodies and wreckage on flatcars in Tashkent, smelled it when the wind was right. Ceramic melted at plasma temperatures, and the dead bodies looked like lumps of rock. These guys had come from their own lines, almost three klicks away. Slowly. That meant they had been out in the weather for almost a day, come plasma, snow, or anything, and that kind of dedication indicated that whoever these men were, they
really
wanted to kill us. What had we ever done to them?

“I think I’m going to puke,” I said.

“Well,” said Ox, “then let’s get this over with.
Burger.
”

Loud pops sounded from my right as Burger worked his grenade launcher up and down, left and right, arcing deadly eggs toward the oncoming shapes. Posts on our flanks must have opened up at the same time, because brilliant flashes blossomed over the snow several hundred meters away, toward the Irtysh River, and then from the
opposite direction.
Big push,
I thought. There were thousands of them. Burger’s grenades—alternating between thermal gel and fléchettes—melted or punctured anything they hit, and the Russians reacted immediately; advance troops rose from their crawl and sprinted forward, firing at our bunker so that all we saw were lines of tracers leaping out of thin air.

“Right about… Ox said, “now.”

Sentry robots beeped to life at the appearance of moving targets. Metallic columns popped up from buried tubes across the entire front and sprayed explosive fléchettes, strafing and mowing like avenging angels as they sucked ammunition from bunker magazines far below.

“Crank up, Scout!” said Snyder.
“What are you waiting for, man?”

I didn’t have time to think, not even like,
Wait a second, I’m about to wipe someone I don’t even know.
Didn’t happen. Those thoughts came only later, in nightmares. Daymares. As soon as my finger touched the trigger, a green sighting reticle appeared on my goggles, and I heard the tinkling of fléchettes as they fell through the flexi-belt and into the carbine. I didn’t feel a thing. No kick. The barrel magnets launched the fléchettes down and out so that all I saw was a line of red streaks—each one the tiny fleck of phosphorus that lit up when a fléchette hit air. I had time to think then. Time to think that it was beautiful, like fireworks, but just a few seconds later, there were no more targets and the sentries lowered slowly into their holes to leave me gasping for air and searching the horizon for something, anything, that might be trying to kill me.

“Grid clear,” said Ox.

Burger pulled his launcher in and slapped a new clip into its base. He probably thought it was over; we all did.

“Man,” I said. My finger ached. I didn’t realize I had been squeezing so hard, and smelled the sweat, the awful smell of terror and salt, inside my suit.

Suddenly a salvo of enemy grenades arced toward us. They came unexpectedly, and from the popping of their launchers, I guessed that some Russian troops had remained in the rear, motionless. The grenades hit directly on our position, most of them concentrated on Burger’s section, and thermal gel smoked as it tried to burn through the glass. I heard them then; the Russians screamed and it seemed like an entire army charged at us.

“Oooo-rah! Pobieda!”

“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.

“
Oooo-rah
means ‘kill,’ ” said Ox. “
Pobieda
means ‘victory.’ ”

A second wave rose from the rubble, and the sentries again sprang from their holes, picking them off easily. Windblown snow fell in gentle swirls as once more the front became quiet.

We didn’t say anything.

Our relief showed up later, and it took us about two hours to get down. Burger had bought it. One direct hit on his port burned through the tiny alloy door, and then a fléchette grenade followed to send a bunch of needles through his chest and out the back, opening a quarter-sized hole on either side, and I wondered if from the right angle you could look clear through. It took us longer than normal to descend, because it was hard to fit into the elevators with a corpse.

When we got back to the tunnels, I yanked off my helmet
and threw up, my body trying to rid itself of the tobacco and drugs, but it was the
memory
I wanted to vomit out. We hadn’t even known that Burger had bought it—not until someone tapped him on the shoulder and he slumped over. On the way down in the elevator, his guts had started coming out of the hole, and for a moment I remembered my real job.

Burger would make some story.

The genetics came a few days after we lost Burger, and that word popped into my head again. “Pulitzer.” Nobody in the press had been this close. A hundred of them showed up in the tunnel, silent and eerie, all identical, all girls.
Engineered.

I wished I had my holo unit as they passed in front of me. Beautifully deadly, and all grace. The girls had mustered out of the factories, ateliers, manufactured at a trickle for now, but it was a trickle that made a difference—one that even the Press Corps noticed. Since the Russians had shown up a year earlier, every action where we were able to retake the mine had involved the use of genetically engineered troops. Line units had entire legends built up around the Gs.
“You should have seen them, man, just one squad of Gs wiped an entire battalion of Pops, moved like lightning on speed.”

They were probably about sixteen or seventeen years old, and their bald heads were nearly flawless, would have been if not for thick calluses formed by the friction of their hoods. These didn’t wear helmets for some reason. Maybe it was because they were too cool, like Amazons in formation, and they knew it. Instead the girls carried
their lids like I had, on straps hanging from their belts, and they marched into the tunnel without a sound, silent phantoms in black armor.

“What’s all over their faces?” I asked. Their heads had been coated with something like grease, a dark green that hid most of their features.

“Thermal block,” Ox said. “Gs hate helmets worse than we do. Especially the ones near the end of their term. Thermal block cuts down on emissions. Not perfect, but they’re crazy anyway.”