Subterrene War 02: Exogene (23 page)

T
he forest brought my episodes more frequently. Margaret did her best to keep me from shuffling away when my mind left, by grabbing my arm and preventing me from hitting the trees, but soon the woods closed in again, made it impossible to see anything clearly. A lack of any view forced my mind to wander, pushed me toward a realization that I preferred Kazakhstan’s open steppes, maybe even longed for them. And thinking made it worse. It took some time to acclimate to the Russian suits but our ability to read their systems facilitated the process, and gave me another mechanism to stay in the present. Learning took concentration. The combination of tranq tabs and a focus on learning how to master my armor gave respite from hallucinations, and I studied the map display, charting our course east around the northern border of China, and then south toward Korea. It was so far; we soon gave up on estimating how long it would take—or wondering what we would do when fuel cells and food ran out. We noticed
that Russian suits consumed power at a slower rate than ours, despite the demands of heating us in icy conditions. Theirs contained an extra layer of insulation, sandwiched between laminated ceramic, so that as we pushed through waist-to chest-high drifts, our systems sometimes switched to cooling mode, to bleed off the heat that our carapace trapped.

Marching brought into focus two problems, the first of which stemmed from my physical condition. Endless advances would never be possible again. My body felt as though it had become a fragile thing that couldn’t be pushed, my muscles aching to the point of ceasing to cooperate altogether unless we broke for rest so I could catch my breath. And then there was pain. It shot upward from my feet when blisters formed, the undersuits’ footgear not a perfect fit so that before long I felt my heels bleeding, my blisters breaking open, weeping. Soon enough, the multiple sources of pain fused into one constant, searing, nervous impulse, too great to ignore but too great to mitigate. There was nothing to do but let it take me.

The second problem stemmed from the dead. At times the ghosts of Megan walked on one side, Heather on the other, and neither of them spoke, left me to imagine their thoughts and come close to screaming at them that I had no choice, but it wouldn’t have done any good. Their judgment was clear: I had earned the name Murderer, and somehow it had become a source of shame because to them killing was wrong. Tears came without warning. There was no way to explain the streams of them, only to thank God that my helmet kept them invisible to Margaret and that my body had become too fatigued to visibly shake with fear. How could killing be wrong and where
had
that
thought even come from? The new internal conflict grew in the tissues of my chest, not my brain, to move downward into my stomach slowly, but multiplying geometrically by the minute, to fill my gut with a sensation of dread—that behind every tree was one of my sisters, and that she would die at my hands. Sometimes Margaret asked me questions or spoke but I don’t remember responding, only that we kept moving. There was no sign of a Russian pursuit as we headed southeast in the general direction of Korea until at the end of the second week, Margaret stopped and looked up. They had come.

“Drones?” she asked.

“Freeze.”

And we stopped. But the aircraft didn’t attack us, didn’t even seem to focus on our area, instead screamed overhead and then dropped ordnance somewhere far to the west, a series of distant thuds too distant to be felt underfoot. Another wave screamed over, and another, and both of us looked at each other.

“What is it?” Margaret asked. “What in hell could they be attacking in that direction, on their own soil?”

“Look at your map.”

“So?”

“There’s nothing in that direction except China,” I said.

“So what are they attacking?”

I pushed Margaret, who moved without speaking. We both rushed even though we weren’t sure why, only knowing that the Russians wouldn’t send so many aircraft unless there had been danger from that direction and recalling Misha’s stories about the things in armor. Neither of us wanted to be trapped on a battlefield. But after a
while nothing happened, and we stopped every so often to listen for the approach of vehicles, until by nightfall the fear had subsided into a simmering kind of awareness that the Chinese border held something unknown, which hadn’t yet reached us.

We moved through valleys and crossed rivers, every couple of days changing fuel cells and chill cans, our stores rapidly dwindling until only a week’s worth remained. Margaret had noticed a city on the map: Chegdomyn. It seemed roughly the same size as Zeya and might provide a source of fuel cells and other supplies we could steal while avoiding the major city to its south, Khabarovsk. Chegdomyn inched closer on the display, until finally we were one day out. Margaret stopped us in the late morning and whispered to switch to chameleon skins, which I almost didn’t do because it would use more power, of which we had almost none. But as soon as I did, and fell into the snow, they finally came.

Russian troops swarmed out of the forest in front of us, and I marveled at the fact that we hadn’t heard or noticed any sign of them sooner. They didn’t bother to conceal themselves. It occurred to me that these troops were most likely reservists, lesser cadres that had been deemed unfit for service in Kazakhstan and sent to the east to man garrisons and outposts that were supposed to face no threat. Many of the men were weaponless. They shouted at one another, but there was no effort to retain cohesion and as the exodus continued I began to worry about one of them stepping on us, or that night would fall and the men would bivouac in the area. Night eventually did fall, but none of them stopped to rest, and for the entire episode neither Margaret nor I had dared whisper to each other over the
Russian radios, knowing that any pursuer would be able to intercept our transmissions. Eventually, by midnight, the flow of men slowed. An hour later it ended, and once more the forests became quiet so that we stood and moved closer to each other, switching off chameleon skins and digging in a bag for two of only three remaining cells.

“Should we turn on coms systems?” Margaret asked. “Maybe we’ll hear something.”

I shook my head. “We haven’t had time to do a thorough scan, to see if the doctor hid anything to help them track us. The transceiver would be the most logical place to conceal it.”

“Nobody is looking for us, Murderer. Something is happening. I counted almost a full division of men, and they taught our generation Russian markings in the atelier tanks; those were armored units that passed. Where were their vehicles?”

I thought for a moment, remembering Misha’s question about why the Americans would have sent so many men after me, and worried that they too might be able to home in on our signal; it wasn’t just the Russians who might listen. But eventually I sighed. “Go ahead.”

We both popped our suits, and I was thankful for the Russian design, the external cables allowing me to let go of my helmet so it hung on my back while I attached the communications line to my vision hood. Margaret and I glanced at each other when we were ready, and then powered them. At first I couldn’t understand. So many voices filled the channels, all of them speaking quickly so that the words were muddled, multiple transmissions crossing over one another in a confused mixture of status and contact reports. Finally Margaret grabbed my shoulder.

“What?” I asked.

“Chinese forces have broken through and taken 650 kilometers of border. Khabarovsk has fallen. They’re also pressing in toward Sverdlovsk, attempting to break Russia in two and take all of Siberia. All those
resources
, Catherine.”

The forest started spinning. What began as an unlikely goal had just turned into something impossible, and acceptance of the fact that we’d have to move through a war zone sank in. I dropped to my knees and vomited. Margaret sat beside me and started crying, her head between her knees, and I wished I was alone, without her, wished for the first time that I could see the ghosts of Megan again, maybe even Heather, so I could tell them they were right, ask them to welcome me home. Misha had given us flechette pistols. I pulled mine from its holster and made sure it had power.

“What are you doing?” Margaret asked.

“I’m not ready for the line anymore. I want someone to pull me off.”

But Megan, and the forest, both disappeared before I heard her answer or could use the pistol on myself.

Being pulled off the line meant boredom.
Sometimes
. Although early in the war we had reached Pavlodar quickly, the length of our supply routes from Iran was such that thousands of kilometers of roads and rails had to be protected. Supply lines often broke. The Russians, when they attacked, had less than two hundred kilometers to travel and wave after wave of them came, pushing us south and west, at the same time insurgents hit rear areas.
Vehicles and munitions disappeared faster than they could be supplied, so whenever we pulled to the rear for refitting, they ordered us to stay on alert as a reaction force. To plug the gaps.

One day Megan assembled us. “Gather weapons and ammunition. Two weeks’ rations. Form up at the motor pool, fifteen minutes.” It was the first I had ever sensed that she was uncertain.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. We helped each other suit up, holding the hoses and wires of our undersuits out of the way.

“Maykain.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Men are under attack. Over a thousand insurgents, partially armored and well organized, possibly led by Russian Special Forces or genetics.”

Maykain. A briefing ran through my head until I remembered:
key road junction, remote, important supply route that was to be held
.

“We will succeed.” I said.

“Perhaps. I do not doubt the
unit
; it is the distance that troubles. We’ll have no air cover on the way out, and no APCs. Division is supplying us with captured trucks. It will be… difficult. I have a feeling, Catherine.”

Difficult
meant that Megan had already assessed it, that many of us might not come back. A
feeling
meant that it could be worse than that.

After two miles, my teeth felt as though they had chipped from rattling as the line of our ten Tedom trucks bounced over the road, trailing dust. It was summer. The sun glared at us, but you felt cool fluid while it crawled through the undersuit tubes. We hadn’t yet helmeted, so
although our suit temperatures had been kept in check, our faces baked in the heat and I struggled to fall asleep, the rough jolting forcing me awake every ten minutes—into some vague reality, part dreamer and part dirt-breather. I found it hard to believe that anyone lived in such a place.

The villages we passed barely existed. Wooden shacks straddled the dirt track, most of them surrounded with warped fences to contain a few chickens, pigs, and sometimes goats. I remembered one settlement in particular. An old woman stood near the road, her white scarf almost identical to the ones worn by our mothers. She stared as we passed. The lines on her face cut deeply, and she scowled, shaking her fist at the trucks and shouting something in Kazakh—not Russian—when she bent over to lift something from the ground. At the same time she threw it, one of the girls swung her carbine and fired, the needles slamming into the woman’s brow and forcing her head back so that for a second it looked as though she laughed at the sky. The thrown object struck my shoulder and shattered into fragments. A dirt clod. At the time, it seemed silly that she had sacrificed herself just to throw dirt, but later I thought it brave.
Dirt against Maxwells and grenades
. We all tasted it. I was in one of the rear-most trucks, which bounced through the clouds of grit that the other vehicles tossed up, coating the insides of my mouth with a sandy paste, and by the time we neared Maykain, our black suits had turned light gray, then orange when the setting sun changed everything’s color.

It felt good to walk again. We put on our helmets and crouched, advancing in a skirmish line for the last kilometer, but Maykain was all quiet.
Dead
.

“No movement,” I said.

“Maykain Outpost, this is Ginger,” Megan said over the radio, repeating it three times. Nobody responded. She motioned to four girls on her right side, and they crept forward, inching toward the town while the rest of us went prone.

Nothing happened. The girls made it to the first line of houses, stopped, and waved us on. “Clear to here,” one said.

“Go stealth,” said Megan.

Maykain was different from the other villages, its buildings constructed of stone or brick, and some of them had been coated with stucco painted a brilliant white. The wind came. It howled through the town’s empty and broken windows as we advanced toward the center, stopping only to kick in doors and check each home like a mob of shimmering ghosts that I knew existed only because I saw the dots of other girls on my heads-up. The town, though, was
empty
.

“It is strange,” I said.

Megan grunted when we reached the main square. “Where are they?” She clicked off the tactical net, but I heard the muffled sound of her voice until she clicked back in. “We are to search the west side of town and secure the roads. This time watch for traps. Death and faith.”