Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (42 page)
A new voice spoke through the speakers while we organized. “Glory unto the faithful. On this, the day of your birth, a choir of angels sings your praise in heaven, telling God that He should watch for the time when you join him, to sit at His side after serving mankind. This you
shall
do, in honor of your creators.
“It is said that ‘all the earth shall be devoured in fire. For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they serve my Masters with one accord. From beyond the rivers the daughters of His dispersed ones shall bring offering. On that day I will not be ashamed for any of my deeds in which I transgressed against God; for then he will take away from our midst those who spoiled, and
they shall no longer be haughty in His holy mountain. He will leave in our midst a meek and humble people, and we shall trust in the word of our Creators.’
“Rejoice, for
you
are His daughters and ours, a holy Germline, Germline 1A, and you will bring to Him eternal glory through death and with sacrifice. So sayeth the
Modern Combat Manual.
”
While the voice read passage after passage, Megan helped me into my orange jumpsuit, and when we looked at each other, I knew she was the one.
It didn’t matter now, in Kazakhstan, that those memories were old; it was the same look I gave her on that afternoon, when we slid from the bottom hatch of our compartment and stretched outside the APC under a dim sun. We smiled. I didn’t need to say it to her: it was an amazing day, cold and bright like on the day we were born, and we would be together when the enemy turned to face us. My hatred burned with an intensity it hadn’t mustered since the day before, and both legs trembled, wanting to move out regardless of whether the others were ready.
Our APCs had stopped across the border, west of Keriz and inside Kazakhstan where vehicles spread across the countryside. To our north, contrails marked the passage of autonomous fighters, semi-aware drones that fought on instinct, twisting through the sky in patterns like braided white ropes. Russian ground attack craft tried to cross south, the APCs making an attractive target as they stopped in the open to assemble, but so far our fighters had kept the aircraft away. Every once in a while you saw a black streamer fall, followed by a cloud of fire and then a distant thud.
“It is here,” said Megan, “in the air.”
I nodded. “Death and faith.”
“I will kill all I see.”
“And we will bathe in the blood of mankind, washing ourselves of their sins.”
She said, “Let it go. Detach.”
But I didn’t answer.
You could tell a battlefield from its smell. Burned metal tinged with rot, acrid enough that it felt like it would singe the tissue in your nose, foreign enough that it made you clench fists with the impatience to wade in. Only about half of us remained. Many of my sisters—the ones who had led the shock assault earlier that day, underground—had partially melted armor, bubbled from plasma attacks. Several were absent an arm or a hand. Despite the wounds, they would feel nothing, because the nerves had shut down, and blood vessels had sealed themselves to prevent further fluid loss. A plug of ceramic—locked in place with quick paste—would seal the suit breach and maintain thermal integrity. I felt proud. This was
my
unit, and none of us had spoiled to the point of being combat ineffective, so our dead now looked down from Heaven with the same sense of pride. Our wounded were the new girls, the replacements, and before they helmeted, you saw that their faces still glowed, but now it wasn’t the glow of nervous expectation; it was the glow of having killed, of
knowing.
We began our advance, following on foot behind APCs, which moved at jogging pace, sending sheets of mud and snow into the air and coating our suits in a dripping mess. Our feet made sucking sounds as we plodded. On either side of us, a full division of Foreign Legion and Marines advanced at our flanks.
Human.
There were no words to describe it, no way to understand except through experience. Trudging. Fighting against the mud with every step so that within five minutes your muscles screamed, and then having to continue like that for thirty minutes, an hour, two. I was near the edge of our formation, close to a group of Marines. You could see some of them, their armor almost new, as they twitched with every explosion or dropped to the mud at the first hint of tracer fléchettes. Many of them began stumbling and barely lifted themselves, falling behind as we continued. Nobody cared. The exhaustion got so thick, so fast that it was all anyone could do to keep her eyes open, let alone pull a straggler from the mud. I could have blocked the pain, willed it away the same way I twitched a finger, but the sensations reminded me that I hadn’t been discharged yet, so they became comforting things, reminders that there was more killing. Pain was familiar now. Welcome.
At times a walking plasma barrage moved ahead of us so that we moved faster, jogging over a crust of hard glass. It was a godsend, and I heard Megan whisper her thanks. We spent the whole first day of the advance like that, walking, then jogging, and soon I remembered that distances in Kazakhstan killed resolve almost as easily as the spoil. A tree on the horizon might look close. But as you walked through the day, it barely changed position and was enough to drive you mad with the feeling that you would never reach it.
Then, at last, contact. Close to sundown, Megan and I found ourselves in a hole with three Marines. One of them screamed as Russian grenades cracked on every side, sending sprays of thermal gel over our position to hiss
and smoke as the droplets melted whatever they touched. The other two men were hardly better. Both huddled at the bottom of the crater, screaming to us that we had encountered the outermost positions of a Russian defensive line.
I kicked one. “How can you aim from there?”
“Get up and fight,”
said Megan, but the men cursed at her.
She grabbed the grenade launcher from one and peered over the lip of the hole. I fell beside her. A hundred yards away, behind a small rise, tiny flashes marked the position of a Russian grenadier whose helmet and shoulders the low sun outlined, and we had to duck when a spray of white tracer fléchettes kicked up the dirt around us. Megan dialed in the range. At the same moment she popped back up and fired, I sprinted from the hole, doing my best to zigzag through the mud toward the Russian position, not able to think through the haze of fatigue.
We continued like that for a few minutes. I would drop to the ground when she stopped firing, until her grenades started detonating ahead of me again—my sign to get up, keep going. Finally I got close. I waited for her to stop and almost immediately saw the shape of a Russian behind the edge of a fighting position. His helmet was black, with paired round blue vision ports instead of a single slit like ours, and a series of cables connected the outside of the helmet to a power pack so that they draped over the man’s shoulders like thick strands of hair. You almost forgot why you were there, transfixed by the realization that he was so close, his proximity releasing an influx of hatred that made you want to scream. The man shimmered in the
light. I saw all of them then, the ones who jeered at us as we waited for the cars in the rail yard, who pelted us with empty food packs, but especially the ones in white lab coats, always there when we returned from the front, eager to punch data into their tablets as they forced us to answer questions. This was a man. It was rare to get this close, and it made you want to savor the moment, to get even closer and rip his helmet off so you could watch his expression change with death.
I slipped a grenade from my harness, hit the button, and waited for its detonation before rolling into the hole to push the dead Russians aside. “Check fire, Megan. Clear.”
A set of three shafts led straight down in the center of the hole, the only way the Russians could have survived our plasma barrages. I tossed in grenades to make sure the shafts were empty, and then let the exhaustion wash over in a warm tide, numbing my muscles and nearly sending me to sleep. The sun set at that very moment, and according to our locators, we had made it to a point west of Karatobe.
They
were in Karatobe. The Russians had retreated there to establish a major defensive line on either side of the Syr Dar’ya River, with Shymkent well to the south.
Tomorrow,
I thought with a shiver.
Tomorrow is our day.
Megan flopped down next to me and yanked off her helmet. She laughed. I removed mine before kissing her, after which we lay against the dirt wall of the hole and stared up—the sky turning an unbelievable reddish orange as the sun’s light faded—waiting for the stars, something we never got tired of seeing. Megan especially loved stars,
and they always brought wonder to her face. Soon I would dream. Sleep was a thing feared, something that resurrected buried memories and then twisted them into nightmares, a time to avoid. But you couldn’t evade sleep any more than you could avoid the men in white coats.
The Subterrene War
Germline
Exogene
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by T. C. McCarthy
Excerpt from
Exogene
Copyright © 2011 by T. C. McCarthy
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: August 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-17992-8
