Subterrene War 02: Exogene (15 page)

“They had no weapons other than knives,” I explained.

“How did you know that? Could you have been sure? What if in the time it took you to dispatch one, another had risen with a grenade launcher? What then? We’d all die, that’s what would have happened.”

The rest of the girls watched, and I imagined what they were thinking because I thought it too, that this was interesting, the dialogue leading to an event we had been trained to cope with but hadn’t yet faced.

“You are spoiling,” I said. “And we haven’t been on the field for even a few months yet. Curious.”

Some of the others laughed while color drained from Jennifer’s face. She looked to Megan. “I am not spoiling. I don’t fear anything.”

Megan shrugged. “Then Catherine is wrong. Explain it to me.”

“It’s a question of numbers, Megan. Our mission is to conquer the enemy without taking too many losses; to remain combat effective and still take the objective.”

Nobody laughed now. The sounds of engines surrounded us, but it may as well have been silent because we had become so focused on what would happen next.

“Who,” asked Megan, “gave you the job of understanding our mission? Our mission is to die on the field, and to take as many men with us as possible. And who gave you the task to judge Catherine?”

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” someone
said. “Catherine kills without mercy. Catherine kills in ways we, her sisters, have not yet mastered.”

Jennifer gripped her helmet with both hands, holding it up to her chest. “I did not mean anything by it, my Lily. It’s just that—”

Before she could finish Megan slammed the butt of her carbine into Jennifer’s face and then spun the weapon in midair, firing point blank until the girl slumped to the ground dead. Megan gestured to me—that I should get rid of her. I grabbed Jennifer under the shoulders and dragged her into a nearby ditch where she slid to the bottom, her face gone, riddled with so many flechettes that I could only guess at where her eyes had once been. When I returned Megan smiled.

“She wasn’t spoiling; this was something worse. Jennifer must have been defective but slipped through the final test.”

And they all cheered. In less than a second the girls gathered around me, slapping me on the back and everyone speaking at once so that I barely picked out the requests for training, to show them how I had learned to snap necks so easily, and how was it that God had granted me the gift of mercilessness? We all had the same training in the tank. Where had I learned these methods? I was about to try to answer at least some of the questions when I noticed Megan cock her head, listening to her radio, the smile gone from her face.

She motioned for everyone to be quiet and looked at me. “They want you in the rear. Now.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The men in white.”

“But why so soon and after such a timid engagement?”

Megan shrugged. “We don’t ask these questions.”

“Megan,” someone said, “will we advance without Catherine? We can’t go into combat without her.”

Megan didn’t answer. I pulled my helmet off to smell the fumes of unburned alcohol leaking from a nearby engine, and water vapor exhaust gave the atmosphere a moist, tropical feeling as I shouldered my way through the girls. Some of them muttered apologies for my fate—not that I was going to see the white-coats, but that I might miss the coming battle. My morale sunk. My hatred of men, especially the scientists, leapt in response as if the sudden depression fed it, and by the time I found myself in the midst of the main column I barely saw the vehicles, didn’t register the faces of girls from other units, because all I could think of was killing. Alderson wasn’t just a coward anymore. He was robbing me of purpose, shaming me by refusing to let me advance with family into the next battle.

In the rear of the column waited a caravan of trucks, huge alcohol-burning tankers and behind them equally large prime-movers towing trailers. A line of Special Forces saw me coming and opened to let me pass. The trailers bristled with antennae and communications dishes, and once past the guards I found myself in a sea of white coats where two Special Forces joined me, grabbed each arm, took my weapon, and escorted me into a trailer toward the rear. They expected trouble. A third one walked directly behind us, his flechette pistol drawn and pointed directly at the back of my head as they pushed me through a metal door and into a narrow hallway, two of them in the front now and the pistol-armed one in the rear.

Alderson waited in a room off the side of the main hallway, tapping a small table. “Undress,” he said.

“I have to return to my unit.”

“Not right now you don’t. We need you here.”

“For what?” I asked. “To observe your cowardice? To watch you shake, hear you wonder out loud if our drones will be enough to keep enemy aircraft away? The air is braver than you are, Alderson.”

“Undress.”

I did as he asked and a nurse came into the room, wiping me down with alcohol and peroxide. She then shaved my head until it was perfectly smooth again, and wiped it down too, the alcohol evaporating so that I had to will my body to warm itself because even the carpet felt cold under my toes.

“Follow me.”

Alderson and the soldiers led me from the small office into a white room, its walls and ceilings covered with a seamless ceramic material, polished, in the middle of which rested an operating table with nylon restraints. Machines surrounded the table. At one end, near what looked like a headrest, a medical bot rose from the floor. It was a metallic cylinder with sensors that resembled a snail’s eyestalks and retractable arms, the ends of which were hidden by red plastic stenciled with the words S
TERIL
e—O
PEN
B
EFORE
U
SE
. I lay on the table without being told to and allowed the men to strap me down.

“I need you to prepare yourself,” Alderson said, “for a procedure. It will be painful, even with your ability to block nerve impulses.”

The straps pinned me to the operating table, and air handlers sent a warm breeze across my naked chest and
legs, next to which Alderson stood, his white coat buttoned to the neck, a surgical mask positioned over his nose and mouth. I hadn’t noticed the window. Either that or I somehow missed the fact that a thin ceramic panel must have initially covered it, the panel now receding downward into the wall to expose glass, behind which another group of men in white coats waited. Watching.

“What procedure?” I asked.

“We need you for an experiment. If it works, your mind will synch with a new armor system under development, and it will put us years ahead of Russia in weapons development.”

I smiled. “My history lessons were complete enough that I know this is illegal, Alderson. The Supreme Court ruled on cybernetic issues over ten years ago.”

“The joining of human and machines, yes. But you’re not human.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” I asked.

“Then you die in glory. The Atelier Mothers have ruled that this is a battlefield sacrifice, one granting entry to the Kingdom, Catherine.”

“And if it works?”

“Then you also die in glory. It’s a test, nothing more, and once we get our data you will be discharged. Does this bother you?”

I felt a flutter in my chest, maybe the first sign of fear, but then thought of Jennifer. “I am not weak, like you.”

“Fine.” Alderson reached over and began pulling the bags off the med-bot’s arms, but a knock from the window stopped him. I turned my head. Beyond the glass stood a general, a Marine, so short that he barely reached the chin of the next shortest man, and his face was pudgy
in an angry kind of way. He glared at Alderson and gestured with a finger, mouthing two words silently around his cigar.
Come here
. I had never met one of the generals before but the black bands around his shoulder-boards meant the man was one of the supreme commanders, in charge of special units, in charge of me and my family. Once Alderson disappeared into the next room, the general winked at me before stepping out of view; I almost liked the man.

Alderson returned a moment later.

“Let her go,” he said to the Special Forces escort. The men took off their white aprons and refitted with weapons before pulling my straps loose.

“Get her dressed then send her back to her unit; the push is on in an hour.” Alderson paused to glare at me. “They’ve been monitoring you, Catherine. General Urqhart said to tell you to keep, and I quote, ‘fucking these bastards, hard, like a bitch in heat.’ He thinks you’re special.”

Once free, I swung from the table and spat on Alderson, before allowing the men to push me toward the door. “Maybe he is something you will never be. A warrior.”

“Other countries will beat us to it,” Alderson called through the door after me, “the Chinese or the Russians. Soon we’ll face things you’ve never dreamed of, half human, half machine, and all
this
means is that I have to pick another girl. One that isn’t so popular with Command.”

“Alderson was right, you know,” my bunkmate said. He sucked on the last bits of a cigarette and stubbed it out while the other boys nodded. “The last wars, the ones in Asia, didn’t totally exterminate the Chinese, despite Korean
and Japanese attempts; they retreated underground to prepare for a return. We hear the same stories you do. And the Chinese don’t share American concerns about law and machine.”

“Then again, neither do we,” added another boy. “We’re almost in Zeya now. We should sleep.”

The others moved through the aisle to get back into their bunks while the car lamps snuffed out simultaneously, and then, one at a time, their cigarettes went dark.

“What will happen to me in Zeya?” I asked my bunkmate.

“You will be treated like the others. Given a choice.”

“A choice for what?”

“To work in the mines or farms or factories, deep underground, or to join with Russian forces and earn the chance for revenge against the men who hunted you. Good night, Ubitza.”

Soon, everyone slept. Megan’s face appeared every time I closed my eyes, her short hair moving in the wind and her smile visible even at night, in the darkness by the river where they took her. I cried, not even noticing the intensifying pain from my feet.

T
he doors on either end of the car opened with bangs, and men filled the car in an instant, their voices calm, almost a whisper, Russian words spilling into the aisle in a slurred string of meaningless vowels. They carried the boys out, one by one. Eventually, hands grabbed me by the shoulders and knees, lifting me gently onto a stretcher and shuffling me into the light.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The sounds of shouting strained my ears and stabbing cold whipped around the stretcher, forcing me to curl into a ball and pull the blanket around as tightly as possible, until finally my eyes opened in slits. Zeya, an alleged city, was nothing. Snow covered every structure, and here, there, small chimneys poked through drifts, sending gray smoke into the sky where it blended with the clouds and sucked up flakes from a light flurry. The few tall buildings left stood empty; their steel frames had bent and a clear crust covered them, forming long icicles which pointed
toward the ground and threatened to fall. Military history, forced into my brain in the tank, burst out, streaming facts about an older war with China; chemicals, plasma, biologicals: all dropped more than two decades previously and still the area hadn’t rebuilt.
War upon war
, I thought. Why rebuild when another war, this one to the south, could ruin everything again? Experience gave me its own lessons—more effective today because I lived them instead of being force-fed in the tank. Beyond the snow fields, forest bordered the city on all sides, giving the feeling that nature had surrounded it, waiting for the right moment to attack and take back what it owned.

The men took me to a waiting truck and slid me into a rack under four other boys. I grunted with the jolt, my feet screaming about their death.

“Easy times ahead, Ubitza,” said my bunkmate, who rested in a stretcher opposite me. “But you’ll need to learn Russian.”

“Easy times for who?” I asked.

The truck’s door slammed shut, just before it jumped forward, a bumpy road making it an uncomfortable ride so that each jolt sent a wave of pain. My bunkmate grunted.

“Easy for everyone. We get to live in Siberia, you get to return to the war or work in the mines or underground factories. Mines aren’t so bad. Russia has a history of sending broken toys into its mines. But the factories… they’re better.”

Everyone laughed at that. I glanced down at my feet, which poked out from under the blanket, and saw the black flesh had crept upward from my toes, halfway to my ankles.

“How can I return to war with no feet? Even if the treatment works, they’ll have to be taken off.”