Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (9 page)

He looked away. It was hard to tell, since he was buttoned, but I’d been at it long enough and realized it was the wrong question. A killer question. “You know how it is, Scout. I had to get back.” That was all he had to say, and I knew what he meant.

Ox didn’t realize that Bridgette was with me, and I didn’t push it, didn’t want to risk another scene. But as we walked, trudging through snowdrifts, I noticed her acting funny. First the snowfall started to lighten and she got all twitchy, unslinging her carbine and smacking the ice from its barrel while looking rearward. A few minutes later, she stopped and stared at the ground.

“What’s wrong with that guy?” Ox asked. “He with you?”

I stopped too and was about to whisper to her that she needed to start acting normal, when she grabbed my harness.
“Move.”

I moved, followed her out into the nowhere, pushing through chest-high snow that hadn’t been packed down by a column of men, so it was incredibly hard going. Like torture. I was in one of those nightmares you’d see on shitty holos, where a character ran but didn’t get anywhere.

“Come on, Ox,” I said. He knew me well enough to listen, and followed.

When we had gotten about a hundred meters away from the column, she dove into the snow and motioned for us to get down. I hit it and then slapped her ankle.

“What’s up?”

“Look.” Bridgette held out her hand and for a moment I didn’t see anything, but then, all of a sudden, it was there. Her shadow. The weather had begun to clear and that would mean only one thing.

“Aw, mother of… said Ox. “Scout, make sure that chill can is on. And chameleon skins.”

The chill can sat below the suit exhaust, cooled it to the same temperature as ambient so we’d be invisible on thermal sensors. Mine was fine, and there was power enough for a short time with chameleon skins. Then I saw it. A group of Russian drones flew overhead, supersonic, so that we didn’t hear anything until the boom cracked and shook the ground, covering us in a minor avalanche that only got worse when the bombs fell, over and over. I tried digging. Wanted to get underground so badly that nothing else mattered. Eventually my gauntlets hit dirt, frozen solid into concrete with no way to get through, but I couldn’t stop and found out it was over only when Bridgette and Ox pulled me up, the tips of my gauntlets sanded flat.

A few minutes later it started snowing again. I don’t know how many guys bought it in that attack, but we walked over them for a couple of hours, on a road paved by corpses.

Ox went down one day out from Shymkent. At first he just looked tired, like everyone else, and I almost didn’t notice
when he dropped his carbine. It seemed normal. I was so tired that I felt asleep on my feet, my muscles beyond screaming and at the verge of quitting, so
I
would have dropped the Maxwell ages earlier. But then I heard him laugh. Ox started hitting the buckles on his carapace, one at a time, opening them so that he could get out—until I grabbed his wrist.

“What the shit are you doing?”

“I’m so hot,” he said. “Gotta get out of this suit.” His words slurred and I didn’t notice that Bridgette was right next to me.

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Hypothermia. Symptoms include lethargy, disorientation, euphoria, hallucination. Then death.”

It had gotten dark and the column came to a halt, which was good because I had to stay there, to keep Ox from unbuttoning while she watched. But it was bad because with the night, temperatures would drop even further.

“I’m so tired,” he said. “Just let me sleep for a while.”

After that, he fell over, and I couldn’t wake him up.

“What are
they
doing?” asked Bridgette, pointing.

Several of the Marines had collected webbing, ration packs, and other flammable material and threw them into a pile. Atop this they placed several frozen corpses. Then one of the men pulled the caps off three flares and tossed them on top so that the flash overloaded my infrared.

“Bonfire,” I said.

Men gathered around it, jockeying for position as they loosened their armor—to enable the heat to penetrate more quickly. I was about to drag Ox closer when I heard someone shout.

“Goddamn it!” An Army colonel pushed into the circle. “Put that shit out now, you’ll draw fire.”

“Screw you,” someone said, a Marine. “They can’t send aircraft through this shit, and even if they could, let ’em. The weather’s killing my men.”

“Captain, you listen to my orders or so help me God—”

The Marine drew his fléchette pistol and fired. He pointed at two of his men, who then liberated the dead colonel of his suit, tossing the already freezing corpse onto the flames.

Bridgette cocked her head, and I smiled. The last few days had been so bad and I was so tired that I had forgotten what she looked like, hadn’t seen her face since the scout car. That one gesture brought it back. I pulled her into the snow next to me.

“I think that the captain was right to do that,” she said.

“I do too.”

“Do you want to know what else I think, Scout?”

“Sure,” I said. “Love to know.”

“I think that you and these men are not so different from me and my sisters. Come. We need to get your friend near the fire.”

The closest thing I’d ever had to a real friend in Shymkent was Pete German, a freelance photographer. We went everywhere together, arrived in country at the same time. It was good, because I needed a photographer; the guy from
Stripes
had gotten appendicitis and had to leave, and they didn’t know when a replacement would arrive. So I picked up Pete.

He was one of those shits that caused trouble. Anywhere, every time. One night we got completely wasted and decided to hit the USO show in Shymkent’s downtown rubble, a real blowout with some comedian from the States. Pete was gay, and I think he had a crush on me, because he kept trying to get me loaded, always had the best drugs and wouldn’t share with anyone except me. I’d have to fight him off at the end of the night, though, remind him that I hadn’t yet joined the team.

On the night of the USO thing, we popped about ten pills each—ecstasy, meth, and I can’t remember what else—for what he called an on-the-town appetizer, arranged on a plate with a bottle of vodka to wash. We got
beyond
wasted that night. After getting there, Pete couldn’t keep his shit straight and started screaming at the performers, accusing them of stealing his cameras just before he stumbled onto the stage. That was when he puked. We had just eaten spaghetti for dinner and it came out undigested, like guts and blood, all over the comedian’s shirt and the whole place got quiet. Then Pete said, in a serious voice, “I think you’ve been shot.” Pete got more laughs than the comedian, because all the troops in the audience gave him a standing ovation as the MPs dragged him out.

He bought it the next day. I got him out of jail, and we walked past an abandoned phosphorus plant, the structures rusted and sad remnants of a time gone by. I could almost sense it a millisecond before it happened, as if my ears felt the pressure change just before picking up the sound.
Boom.
Kazakh insurgents touched off a bomb, probably thought we were military. The blast took off half of Pete’s head and sent me across the street, where I landed in the dirt before shaking it off to discover that my
friend had been scattered across the road in about ten pieces. At the time I thought it was especially bad because I hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye. But it wasn’t. Getting to say goodbye made things worse; I just hadn’t learned that yet,
wouldn’t
learn it until Bridgette and I got Ox back to Shymkent.

We saw ground fighting for the first time in weeks. She carried Ox by the shoulders and I had his legs, both of us stumbling and trying to stay awake. A few klicks away from us, on either side, plasma thundered, and I saw the brilliant globes of light burst upward from the steppes, Popov trying to cut off our escape, pinching inward from the east and west so that we were moving through a narrow gap about a mile across. I was about to suggest to Bridgette that we drop Ox for a rest when a loud cheer made me look up. We had made it. A few minutes later we passed the outer observation posts, and then the ruins of Shymkent’s suburbs, home free.

A loudspeaker broadcast a continuous automated message, which got louder as we made our way into the city. “Arriving troops, report to the assignment center at Hotel Dostyk. Follow the signs marked in blue. There you will be reattached to your units and given orders. Wounded, report to the hospital at town center. Follow the markers in red. Arriving troops, report to the assignment center at Hotel Dostyk…

There were a Marine APC and a group of corpsmen on one side of the street, and we veered toward them to drop Ox at their feet.

“Take him,” said Bridgette.

“What’s wrong with him?” one asked.

“Frostbite and hypothermia,” I said. Like it mattered;
the guy was hurting and it was their job. I nearly lost my shit waiting for them to move, but two of the Marines grabbed Ox and carried him to the APC.

“Move up to the relocation center, and fast,” one of them said. “Popov is only a few klicks out.”

Bridgette saw a pair of MPs approaching and dragged me into an alley, where she popped her lid and then mine. We kissed, and I couldn’t imagine that she liked it, because after spending all this time in my suit, I was rancid. But
I
liked it and wouldn’t let go, so she finally had to push me away to breathe. Then we did it again. It was weird, gentle; I barely felt her tongue brush against mine.

“I’m so happy to have met you,” she said.

“Me too.”

Bridgette was crying. I had an awful feeling then, like I didn’t get it but something major was about to happen. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s time for me to go. I love you.”

I remember what I said next; it will be etched in my gray matter forever. “I love you too. Let’s get married and have kids. A hundred Bridgettes, all with killer instincts and dead-on aim.”

She cracked up at that—half laughing and half crying while she wiped the tears from her eyes, unable to look at me. Then Bridgette shook her head. “I can’t have children, Scout, don’t be stupid. They didn’t design us that way.”

And that was the last thing she said. That was how she said goodbye, just before she walked over to the MPs. I stood there, in shock, unable even to move. Maybe I was too tired, but I don’t think I ever anticipated what she would do that day, not after spending all that time retreating
through Kaz, keeping me together, making it in the scout car like mad teenagers. She walked over and said something, and the MPs drew down on her, put a few fléchettes right through her forehead. When she collapsed, I lost it. Screamed. I ran across the street and threw myself at them, just before one of them slammed the butt of his carbine into my head to keep his buddy from being strangled.

Once I recovered from the MP’s butt-shot to my head, I found out that Phil Erikson at the Bandar desk had gotten my Kaz tickets yanked. The MPs actually drove me to the airfield to put me on the next transport flight out of Tashkent to the States. Apparently, the story I had sent Phil wasn’t a story at all. I swear I don’t remember doing this, but I typed “fuck you” about ten thousand times and slapped on a title: “What I Like About Doing Phil Erikson up the Ass,” by Scout. That last phone call—the one I had ignored on my way out the door—was
him,
calling to tell me I had been fired.

Still, having a friend in Brussels High Command helped a lot. It was even better because this guy was a Marine general, a hard charger who spent half his time in Kaz scoring dope, and the other half sniping Popovs from the front line. A military genius. General Nathan Urqhart was a small man, stout, like a midget, only bigger and with a barrel chest, and his kids, every Marine in the theater, loved him. I loved him too, because for all his shortcomings, the guy had his war bonnet on straight, knew the drill, and had subterrene in his veins.

Before I met him, one of his aides pulled me aside and gave me some advice.

“Don’t call him this at first,” he said, “but after you’ve developed rapport with the general, you should suggest that he needs a nickname.”

“A nickname?” I asked. I mean,
come on.
What the shit was this guy angling at?

“Yeah—the general digs them. Keeps waiting for someone to compare him to Chesty Puller.” I think the aide must have seen my blank face. Like,
Uh… what?
“You know, Chesty? Famous Marine from the twentieth century?”

“Nope,” I said. “Drawing a blank over here.”

The guy looked like he was about to take a dump on me, right there in the staff room. “Never mind. Who cares if you know who Chesty is? What’s important is that the
general
thinks you do. Just say something like he reminds you of that hard-ass in the twentieth century, blah, blah.”

Blah, blah
was something I understood. Perfectly.
Blah, blah
I could do; I was a reporter, for Christ’s sake. “Not a problem,” I said. “And thanks.”

I should have bought him a drink, because with God as my witness, the second I actually
did
it, the instant I suggested to General Urqhart that he was like old Chesty, I owned the guy. When I put the comparison in one of my stories, I could have screwed his daughter and he would have asked how it was, could he get me a beer? The old son of a bitch made it a point to put me up in his Bandar HQ every time he was in the area—five star and any chick I wanted—as long as I promised to go everywhere with him, like I was writing his biography or something. Did I do it? Hell yes, I did it. Of all the self-serving prick officers I encountered in Kaz, General Urqhart was the only prick who at least reserved part of his mental energy for
caring about Marines. So when he found out what that pair of Army MPs had done, he took a big verbal crap, right on their CO’s face, and came to see me himself.