“It was fun at first,” I said, wanting to get her onto a different subject. “Like it was at the beginning.”
“And then?”
“And then… it changed. My mind betrayed me.”
“But
why?
” Margaret asked, her voice almost pleading.
I set the servos on auto scan and slid out of the turret. “It was doubt. The lessons, the teachings, none of them fit. God had different plans for me, and somehow I knew this, and so did my… Lily, Megan. She felt it too. I eventually doubted even that we should kill. And so we ran from the field and got captured, which is when I ran into you.”
“I don’t believe in God,” she said. “Not after the Russians did things to me. The worst wasn’t even what they did; the worst were the holos they showed us while they did it—images of America and the Germline program, the truth behind it and why they taught us about God. Man created God to make us believe in all this, to fool us into thinking that the only way to reach Him is through death in combat, but he doesn’t really exist.”
“He does. I believe what you saw, believe the truth of it, but none of those things matter. The fact that man would create such stories just means
they
are not with God anymore. It does not mean He doesn’t exist.”
“But how do you know? I see it in you, that you believe, and I know you’ve had the same doubts and maybe worse
experiences, so what changed it? What made a Germline-One go from absolute faith to complete doubt, and then back again?”
There was no easy answer. How did you explain something that took years to discover in the space of less than an hour? I could have said that Megan’s death contributed a speck of faith and a mountain of doubt, but that a continent of belief instilled by Misha and the other boys had countered that doubt because in them I saw a sense of duty that was unquestionable—duty to their brothers, which could never have come from teachings of man—and then there was an entire string of tiny, seemingly insignificant events, all invisibly connected, so that the statistically impossible came to pass as minor miracles. Would I have believed it at her stage of spoiling—that this had to be God?
In the end I took her shoulders. My gauntlets clicked against the ceramic armor and I rocked her back and forth, something that Megan had once done for me, to make the internal sensors rub against my back in a spot that one could never scratch without completely desuiting.
“I can’t explain it to you, Margaret. It’s just something you have to learn on your own.”
She sighed. “We’re coming up on Lebedinoye now. Should we get ready?”
“As soon as we hit the town’s outer marker.” I jumped back into the turret and fastened the harness straps, watching the water recede from us as the tracks curved westward, away from the sea. “Now,” I said.
Margaret hit the brakes, simultaneously disengaging the auto-drive function, and then flicked a series of switches that lowered the wheels. The compartment filled
with a humming sound. Slowly, pistons drove shock absorbers downward, lowering the six axles until we felt ourselves rise off the track, the steel rail-wheels finally clearing it before Margaret hit the accelerator.
“It’s been a while,” she said. The car bounced violently up and then crashed downward, knocking my head into the turret ring. “The last time I drove anything it was an electric cart in Zeya.”
I said something like
you’re doing fine
, but my attention focused on the view-screens looking for any sign of Chinese forces. If we’d stayed on the tracks we’d have been clear all the way to Khasan, the border town, our destination. But now that we’d left the rails in a bid for surprise, there was always a chance that the road would take us into the middle of a Chinese garrison, an unexpected destination for us and one that would require me to open fire as quickly as possible while Margaret did her best to extract us. The past few days had given me plenty of practice. Even when Yoon-sung had been alive, I’d mentally gone over the targeting and firing features, locking onto wolves, rabbits, and anything else I could use as a stand-in for hostile units. But so far, nothing used the road except us.
They waited for us just outside Khasan, in a place where the road and rail-lines re-converged at a narrow shoulder of land, on one side of which was a bog, the other side a steep hill. The first scout car’s auto-defenses never had a chance to engage before the Chinese opened fire, destroying it. The weapons systems had been designed so that as long as they were functional the guns could return fire in
the event their gunner had been killed, and the second car’s swung over just in time to launch a salvo of grenades at its attackers. Two armored Chinese soldiers fell back into the swamp and didn’t move.
But there were more than thirty more to take their place and in the distance a full company moved up from the Khasan rail yard to the south, along with three scout cars and an APC. All of them stayed dark green, not even bothering with chameleon skins. The third and fourth cars destroyed several more Chinese, and held their own until the APC got its range and started firing, obliterating the vehicles into flaming frameworks that continued down the tracks on inertia alone.
“Slow down,” I said.
“What?”
“Slow down. Let the train get further ahead and then cross the tracks behind it to move over the hilltop. Head south overland.”
The last scout car barely began firing when a salvo of rockets sent it flying off the tracks. I was about to open up with our turret when the train did something unexpected. It derailed. The engines had been traveling at forty kilometers an hour, so when they caught up to the crawling frame of one of the scout cars, the impact knocked the first diesel off the tracks, which did little to curb the train’s inertia. Its engines careened sideways. The things acted like bulldozers, scraping the earth of Chinese troops, who the diesel engines crushed under their weight and then smeared over the ground, and the things refused to stop, even when the APC started firing in an attempt to at least slow the train down. This was a juggernaut of sorts, the lucky by-product of a half-baked plan such that Margaret
slowed down too much, transfixed by the show that began to unfold. I had to yell at her to keep going. The scout car accelerated quickly, catching some air as it bounced over the tracks; and I felt the sensation of being thrown in an impossible angle when it began the climb, moving up the hill’s steep incline. At that point we were blind. There was no knowing if the APCs and soldiers had sighted us yet, which they probably had, or if their guns would be trained on us next, which they probably would, but at the very least we had taken out a significant fraction of their forces. This wasn’t Khabarovsk. Even when cross-border trade had been brisk, Khasan had been little more than a village; it was now marked on maps as a biological containment zone, uninhabitable by anyone sane, which meant there was no reason other than our arrival to have troops here at all—no reason for the Chinese to occupy it using the kind of strength they had farther north.
Margaret crested the hill and turned south, giving us our first look at the border. The town stretched out below, but like the abandoned cities we had already seen, vegetation had consumed it so the main road looked more like grass and weeds than anything of concrete; the houses, empty shells with their caved-in roofs replaced by trees or bushes or mushrooms. Khasan’s rail yard had fallen into decay and even from this distance you noticed that only one set of rails had been maintained because the grass around them rose only a few inches, whereas tall weeds entirely obscured the remaining rails, dotted here and there with the rusting hulks of cranes and empty cars. A kilometer away was the bridge. There was no way to tell if it was sturdy enough for our passage, but I knew that we wouldn’t have time to lower our rail-wheels, and there
was no road section, so we’d have to go across on railroad ties. Below the bridge, the Tumen River flowed by slowly, carrying with it the last chunks of winter ice.
“Make for the road at town center and then head straight for the bridge,” I called out to Margaret.
My eyes jumped at a flashing red light, thinking we had been targeted, but it was only the rad-detectors, which had suddenly jumped as we descended. The Chinese APC turned toward us. Its turret spun more quickly than the vehicle itself, so the thing’s barrel almost stared straight at my main view-screen; I opened fire with grenades, hoping for a lucky hit on a key sensor or the gun itself.
“
Move!
They’re about to fire plasma.”
Margaret gunned the engine and I felt the car slip sideways before the wheels regained traction on the slope, and we dropped into the town. The plasma round detonated on the hill behind us.
“Are we out of sight of them?” Margaret asked.
“For now. Keep moving forward.”
There wasn’t much time before we would leave the cover of ruins, and when I was about to launch obscurant ahead of us, the targeting light flashed on, indicating we had been lased from the rear. I launched two canisters of smoke to the front, vaguely aiming for the area where we’d break into open ground, and then spun the turret rearward. Grenades popped on our hull, their noise cracking through the interior like a thunderclap.
“Hits,” said Margaret, “rear deck.”
“Try and evade. Give me some time to deal with them before we have to break cover and face the APC.”
One of the Chinese scout cars had swerved onto the road behind us and I locked on, fingering the trigger at the
same instant. My thumbs dialed in the rounds, armor piercing, and although it wouldn’t do any good I willed my nerves to calm, the muscles to relax and hit everything smoothly. The grenades popped against their glacis. We couldn’t have disabled it, but the rounds must have convinced our pursuers to veer off; they skidded into a space between buildings. I had just reoriented the turret to the front when we hit the smoke and Margaret drove blindly through the obscurant cloud, using only her location indicators and map display to steer.
“Speed up,” I said. Something urged me onward, an uneasy feeling that we had to move.
“Why?” Margaret asked.
“Just do it.”
She gunned the engine again, and we broke from the haze just as a plasma round detonated behind us, sending both rear temperature sensors into the red. We lost the backward-facing camera. To our left the APC was trying to keep up, angling to cut some distance between us and the bridge entrance as its turret adjusted for range and speeds, but for now they were beyond my grenade range.
“I can’t shoot; it’s all up to you.”
I told Margaret whenever they prepared to fire so she could slam on the brakes or accelerate, and for next thirty seconds, which felt like thirty minutes, she kept us alive while working her way toward the bridge. I wasn’t even watching the view from the front. My turret stayed locked on the APC, rotating to keep its aim, but then I noticed that the range between us had stopped dropping; it increased now. Steadily. Suddenly our scout car shook with a deep roar and it felt as though the bottom would fall to pieces.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Where are we hit?”
Margaret laughed. “We’re not hit, we just hopped the rails onto the bridge.”
“Then why aren’t they firing anymore?”
I focused back on the Chinese APC and watched as two of its hatches popped on top, letting out figures dressed in green coveralls. They stared at us. Their turret still pointed in our direction but there was no way for them to fire without sacrificing their own two men, and so I exhaled, letting out my excitement at the same time I grinned.
“Why aren’t they firing?” asked Margaret.
“I don’t know. Maybe they don’t want to risk ruining the bridge in case they have to come over it one day. When we get to the other side, head for the far southwest side of…” I had to pause and switch to map view to read the name. “Tumangang. That should put more than enough distance between us and their plasma, and on the road south to Najin. We’ll follow the railway line for at least a while, until we have a better idea of what’s in store for us.”
It seemed like we stayed on the bridge forever. But eventually, we crossed into North Korea, which met us with a strange quiet and a sensation that at that point, Margaret and I were the only two people on Earth. The Chinese showed no sign of having followed. Margaret sped through Tumangang, a town just as abandoned as Khasan, and swerved at the main intersection where she leveled three saplings that had begun to make their way through the road.
She stopped there, letting the car idle. “I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“We’ll have to use the scout car waste system, and
dump our suits through their ports. We won’t be able to leave the car from now on.” Margaret pointed at the rad-indicator. Unlike our experience in Russia, the light stayed on, and the reading had increased slightly, showing no signs of abating.
I scanned the northern view to check for signs of the Chinese, but couldn’t see anything of the bridge or the far side of the river. “I’ve spent time like this before. It’s no worse than the tunnels. But we should take the time now to desuit and at least enjoy the freedom of the compartment, because as soon as one of us steps from the car, we’ll track the contamination inside; I can no longer fight infections like you.”
Margaret pulled off her helmet and laughed while she wiped sweat from her face. “I never made it to the tunnels, Catherine. They captured our train before we even had a chance to go underground.”