And eventually Yoon-sung explained who the old woman was, the one with the medals. Ch’o Na-yung. The
Dear Leader. She had been twenty when the war began, a lieutenant in one of the women’s units that had marched northward in a mission to move North Korean Party officials, including the former Dear Leader, from the horror of Pyongyang to safety in Chegdomyn. It was to be a temporary stay. The Koreans in Chegdomyn straddled a line between Chinese and Russian relations because on the one hand they were a source of cheap labor to Moscow, and on the other had historic ties with China, the two having shed blood in an ancient war against a common enemy: America. Na-yung’s unit was supposed to have eventually escorted the officials to Dalian to form a North Korean government in exile, but the city’s nuclear destruction preempted their plans, leaving them stranded in the camp.
But the old system was corrupt. When a logger accused one of the Party ministers of raping his twelve-year-old daughter, the man was executed along with his child and anyone else who complained. Food and supplies went to the officials. Leftovers were to have gone to the soldiers and then to the loggers, but often there was nothing left, resulting in starvation and freezing for everyone except Party officers, which triggered a rapid decline of living conditions for everyone else, including Na-yung, since it was the loggers and soldiers who did the work—and because war had choked off virtually all supplies in the first place. Na-yung approached her colonel one day, weak with hunger. She found the woman, naked and in mid-copulation with the minister of People’s Security, the colonel’s cabin littered with empty bottles of alcohol and with a half-eaten chicken scattered across the dirt floor.
Na-yung reacted without thought. She shot the two in bed and then gathered the dirt-crusted chicken, returning
with the remainder to her unit, who devoured it, bones included. Na-yung explained what had happened. She expected to be shot by her sergeants, maybe one who had an eye on a promotion and wanted to take Na-yung’s position, but instead her NCOs cheered.
Then all of them did, including the enlisted women
. Na-yung realized instantly what she should do; she gathered her unit to quietly make the rounds of other platoons, telling them to join their coup or be shot, and again she found only willing supporters.
Everyone
was hungry. Starvation had converted Party loyalty to hatred of anyone attached to it, and her soldiers sped through the camp, executing every official they found until none remained except the Dear Leader, who fell on his knees in the snow, begging for mercy and promising to change conditions for the workers. Na-yung slit his throat while everyone watched. The Koreans then tossed the dead corpses into the forest to attract wolves and birds, which came in vast numbers, and which the loggers and soldiers shot for food. Since then, the leaders of the camp, the new Party, didn’t eat until the workers did and everyone served in the military having an equal stake in survival, even the untrusted. To Yoon-sung, and everyone else, Na-yung was a saint.
But to them, Maragret and I were still “the Americans.” Even though they included us in everything as members of the Third Soldier’s Logging Unit, it was almost spring before we gained real acceptance, and all it took was for one of them to die.
The fourth tree that morning crashed into the snow, and Margaret smiled at me from over the noise of her chainsaw while water exhaust billowed from its methanol engine.
“I’ll beat you today!” she shouted.
I shook my head, and shouted back through the padded face mask, “You always beat me!” and then returned to my clean-up work. The branches cut easily. By now my muscles had adapted to the hard work and pushed the saw through them, back and forth, as though the limbs had been made of balsa wood, and the sounds of chainsaws filled the forest with their screams, sending me into my thoughts. But then everything went quiet. I looked up and saw the other loggers standing, motionless, their eyes fixed in one direction so that when I turned to see what was so interesting I dropped my saw.
A Russian had emerged from the forest. He stood at the western edge of the area we had cleared and wore one of the powered suits I had seen earlier. Half of it shimmered, invisible. The other half had been damaged, its ceramic shattered in places to expose power lines, hydraulic pistons, and thin piping, some of which leaked a green viscous fluid that hissed and steamed in the snow. Upon seeing the thing my fear returned, surprising me with its intensity. At first I couldn’t speak and my legs felt as though they had vanished, leaving me floating on air so that I had no way to move, frozen, and only my eyes functioned as they focused on every detail. It had been too long. Margaret and I had finally let down our guard, forgetting war because of hard labor, but a moment later the lessons began ticking through—slowly at first, and dim, as though covered with mental dust.
“Tell them to get down,” I said to Margaret.
She spoke to Yoon-sung in Korean, who repeated it, and everyone vanished into the snow. “Now what?”
I couldn’t see its offensive systems, and suspected that
whatever weaponry it had was still concealed by chameleon skin, but it moved, rotating with a hum to face me. “Distract it!” I shouted, and then ran.
Grenades detonated in the spot I had just left, and followed me as I leapt over stumps, trying to make it to the trees on the thing’s right flank, its bad side. The grenades began to catch up. One of them detonated immediately to my side, sending a spray of thermal gel that ate through the outer layers of my coat. I gritted my teeth against the coming burns, but the gel died upon reaching the innermost layer, the one I had once thought consisted of ballistic cloth. It almost made me stop running.
What was this stuff made of?
I heard shouting then, probably Margaret, and the dull thud of something striking ceramic, but didn’t take the time to look, and sprinted into the treeline to begin working my way to the Russian’s rear. The pops of grenades sounded again, but this time they weren’t aimed at me.
A minute later I stood behind it, hidden by a tree. By now Yoon-sung had relaxed her original rules and allowed us to carry the old chemical pistols, nine-millimeter ones, as protection from the wolves and I eased mine from its holster, quietly chambering a round. Margaret’s voice still shouted from the clearing but there were no more grenades.
Then came the sound of an enormous zipper and I cringed, the sound immediately followed by snaps as flechettes broke the sound barrier and cracked into trees. I leapt from behind cover. It was four meters to the thing, and the snow fought me as I struggled closer while the Russian turned, its feet lifting and slamming back into the snow so it could rotate more quickly. It must have had
rear-facing motion sensors. But before it could turn completely, I leapt, grabbing a hold of where I knew the crack between its head and shoulder plates should be, pulling myself up onto the thing’s shimmering arm. There was no going back. The nose of my pistol barely fit into the crack and I emptied my pistol, not even remembering when the thing threw me off, sending my body to careen through the air and land against a stump.
For a second there was nothing. I lifted my head to look and saw no shimmer now so that all of the Russian was visible, and more green fluid ran from under its main carapace, steaming in the cold as it slid down armored legs. Margaret appeared at my side and smiled.
“Goliath slays the giant,” she said.
I felt my shoulder and nearly screamed. “Something is broken.” Margaret touched the spot, under my coveralls, and this time I
did
scream.
“Collar bone. It’s snapped.”
She helped me up from my good side, and by then others had gathered with Yoon-sung, and we approached the thing with pistols drawn. Margaret slid mine into its holster.
I sat in the snow as Margaret moved closer to the Russian, examining the armor and squinting at its characters. Finally she found what she was looking for, cracked open an access panel, and within a second the armor opened with a hiss while a massive frontal plate swung wide on pistons. The sight reminded me of what I had seen in the rail yard and I dry-heaved with the memory.
Inside was a thing the size of a baby, cradled by a padded harness. But its resemblance to anything human stopped there. It had no legs or arms, but a head larger
than normal rested on its shoulders, and when I noticed the absence of a mouth and nose I wondered how it could breath until I saw that among the hundreds of wires leading under its skin there were a series of tubes that poked into its chest, each one carrying a bluish liquid. Like we had seen in our sister, its eyes were gone. Instead, bundles of fiber optics had been attached to plastic ports that seemed to grow out of it, almost like goggles, and when the cold finally hit, the thing started struggling so that the cables shook and clicked against the carapace.
Yoon-sung emptied her clip and it stopped moving.
“You have seen these before?” she asked me in Russian.
“Not the final version,” I said, clenching my teeth with pain. “Only a prototype, the ones they tested on my kind.”
“Come.” She lifted me and motioned for Margaret to help, so we stumbled across the field, heading back toward the camp.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Na-yung. She will want to have dinner with us tonight. Na-yung will have questions, and you need to be ready.”
Margaret looked at the others, who followed close behind. “Where is Song-won?”
“Dead,” Yoon Sung said. “But he died standing up, shooting at the Russian so his children will now be allowed a place in the factories. Underground. Hurry now. We will have to vaccinate you and there is much else to do.”
“Vaccinate me?” I asked.
“Na-yung travels to China frequently and may carry… things. We have all been vaccinated. You will sit near her, and should be prepared in case she has been contaminated.”
“I am engineered to resist biologicals,” said Margaret, “I don’t need vaccination.”
Yoon-sung laughed at that and then grunted under my weight. “You weren’t engineered for these bugs.”
“Do you still want to run to Thailand?” Margaret whispered in English. The doctor had left, and the painkillers, combined with my tranq tabs to kill the pain, made me smile. They had set the bones; now all I had to do was wait for the plaster to dry and report to the dining hall.
“Yes,” I said.
She squinted at me. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why? It’s our plan, my plan, it’s what I’ve been doing all along.” But the truth was that I didn’t know why anymore; Margaret’s question made sense. Here we half-starved, constantly froze, and were so tired that we walked with our eyes shut, asleep before we even lay down. But I hadn’t had many hallucinations since I came. The work reduced everyone to the same level and although I suspected it was an existence that would horrify most humans, especially those like Alderson, it was the first time I felt part of something worth doing. Nobody had told us to take an objective and the only combat had been forced onto us, an engagement of self-defense to protect the logging unit. And strange as it might have seemed, logging was at the root of my confusion. The trees would be turned into lumber in underground factories to be shipped into Unified Korea in exchange for steel, wool, and other things that Na-yung’s people couldn’t get here. Wood waste was turned into methanol, cigarettes, and a hundred other things including fertilizer to help grow oil crops for their tractors and saws; the oil came from castor beans, grown in half-underground hothouses that
stretched for acres. You soon learned that if it was possible to make, these Koreans made it and because nothing went to waste, neither did we, instead being folded into the community. The fact that we were untrusted meant nothing because we were still a valuable part of a machine geared not for war but for survival; the Koreans made us feel like we were worth at least
something
.
But even that wasn’t enough to keep me there; an invisible cog turned in my chest, pushing me forward so that even though I couldn’t explain why, it was clear that staying wouldn’t be an option.
“There are others there, Margaret,” I said, hoping to convince myself as much as her. “Other girls who didn’t give up until they were free. And I still believe in God. I don’t think He wants me to stay here, even though I want to. But you can. I won’t make you come with me.”
She thought for a while, eventually shaking her head when the doctor came to release me. “No. I’ll go too.”
The clothes fit loosely, reminding me of how much weight I’d lost. There was no fat on anyone here. Yoon-sung had given both of us stiff wool uniforms that had been worn and patched in places, the leftovers from someone else who had passed on yesterday or ten years ago, and which smelled of chemicals that the Koreans used to keep their clothes from rotting in storage. The fabric of my jacket was dark green and around it she buckled a cracking leather belt, almost three inches wide. With no mirror Margaret and I laughed at the way we each looked, and for a moment it felt as though we had stepped back to an era that had faded centuries ago, and we were still
laughing when we stepped into the cold, heading for dinner. We entered the dining hall and I nearly jumped. The entire room clicked its heels to attention with a sound that reminded me of thunder, and Yoon-sung marched with us to the dais at the far end, pointing to where we should each sit, helping me ease into a chair next to Na-yung.
Yoon-sung sat beside me and translated the introductions. She had coached us on the way over: don’t speak Korean, only Russian, because my Hangul was horrible and I would risk insulting the Dear Leader; do not look at the Dear Leader, keep your eyes on the table; when one of the senior officers speaks to you, wait before responding, to allow the Dear Leader a chance to field the question or give you permission to answer. The rest I couldn’t remember, hoping that the instructions would come to me if I needed them. One other thing she told me I
wouldn’t
forget: that I would leave the table hungry, because it underscored the sense I’d had with Margaret—that these were a strange people, in that they were human
and
honorable. Party Officials only took half rations; they didn’t perform manual labor, and therefore had to scrounge the extra calories they needed.