Chimera (n.)
Greek Mythology
: an imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts.
Genetics
: (a) an organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering, (b) a substance, such as an antibody, created from the proteins or genes of two different species.
D
zhanga. Nobody wanted Dzhanga. Not even the flies that swarmed over the mud, buzzing so loudly that they sounded furious, angry to have been born from some corpse in the middle of Central Asia, and maybe they wanted Dzhanga the least of all because for the flies there wasn’t any chance of seeing anything
except
Turkmenistan. Imagine that: living your entire life in a Turkmen slum, the highpoint of which would be finding the body of a rat in which to reproduce. At least I wasn’t a fly. But the war had been over long enough that missions were hard to get, and I’d waited so long for this one that there was no way to turn it down, so they’d dropped me from thirty thousand where I’d spiraled down and gone through layer after layer of clouds, descending on this, yet another stillborn Turkmen city, a gray and brown smear of humanity that barely clung to the banks of the Caspian and whose waters had become infected with the filth of people, a sheen of oil and scum visible as soon as I hit the five-thousand-foot mark and popped my ’chute. That had been a week ago. For a mission that was to have lasted three days, a week meant that this one was bad, that this chick wasn’t going down easy. But every step made me harder. Every day made the mission sharper. It didn’t worry me that I hadn’t found her yet, didn’t even register as a
problem—although I knew they were shitting back at the outpost, wondering why it was taking so long—because the mission was my life, and those endless days on the rack, nights without air-conditioning on a hotel’s bug-ridden mattress with stains that clearly hadn’t come from me, those were the hardest things to bear, so that a prolonged mission felt like vacation, like a dog must feel when you let it off the leash. Off duty and on stand-by, the world ate at your skin until you couldn’t wait anymore. You were supposed to stay in your hotel room, by the phone, because we didn’t carry cells and had no means of communication when off the line, no electronics at all and no indication that we belonged to the machine because we weren’t allowed anything regulation except weapons. No crew cuts, no uniform, and no salutes. To those crotch rotting hookers back in Armenia I was a businessman, some fool and a drunk, which, until now, had made me their best customer.
But not anymore. She was out there, and it wouldn’t be much longer because something told me she had started to fade.
In the bag by week’s end, that was the deal and you just knew this would be hairy because she was past discharge by more than six months, which meant the girl was supercharged and out there with no sense of reality, her world a kind of half-hallucination where fear and rage merged. Other cleanup crews wanted to split the job, but that wasn’t about to happen; alone was better. It took a special kind of solitude to hear the things I did and a wired mind to parse them until only valid information remained—little nuggets that most people would have missed because the fact that Dzhanga was a shit hole
would have distracted them. Being alone meant everything was mine. Time. The wind.
Smells
especially. Even the dead Turkmen who stared at me, slumped against the side of his hut on the other side of the dirt track, with eyes that looked happy instead of surprised, and which stopped me cold because there wasn’t any reason to be happy. Not in Dzhanga. Not anywhere. He shouldn’t have even been there if you thought about it, should have left the city abandoned as the oil industry had a hundred years before, the way you’d toss a fifty on some hooker’s lap without looking back. So his happiness was information; it just wasn’t clear if it was
useful
information. I knelt in front of him and stared into his eyes, which had glazed over after dying in a way that only the dead managed, and I grabbed him by his long beard, touching his nose against my vision port so I could get a better look, maybe through his retinas and into his brain so it could tell me what made him smile. He’d died instantly—when I’d fired four flechettes into his skull.
But there wasn’t anything to learn; instead my armor vibrated in a strong wind, a reminder to keep moving. It wasn’t the standard-issue armor they handed to regulars, and I took care of it the same way you’d take care of anything that meant so much, because even though I hadn’t paid for it with money, I’d paid for it with time; it was my own design. Instead of the thick green ceramic plates on normal suits, mine were thin sand-colored ones, sandwiching a millimeter of titanium, and the joints consisted of a special polymer, rubber, and teflon amalgamation that stayed quiet no matter how far I walked, preventing every plate from touching its neighbor with that annoying clicking sound, the one that would have gotten me killed
a long time ago, the one in which tunnel rats—the subterreners and their genetics, satos—wallowed until dead.
It took a moment for my sniffer to process the area and then… nothing. Not a single useful thing came from the Turkmen and, aside from a few molecules of hydrocarbons, remnants slowly detaching from the massive oil storage tanks that rusted behind me at the port, only dust filled the air.
“Negative,” the suit’s computer said, her voice that of a woman whom I had named Kristen, the same as my first girlfriend in high-school; she’d told me what I already knew from the display, but the sato was out here, and you felt it.
“Clean, huh?” I whispered. “Bullshit. She’s rotting and dripping. Close.”
My suit chimed, surprising me. “Priority transmission, Sergeant, with the proper authentication key for Rabbit Five; should I play it?”
Rabbit Five. That was my controller, Wheezer, across the Caspian and safe in Armenia, where he sat in a shack and monitored the occasional status-burst from the suit, relayed via satellite to his tiny dish on the edge of a runway. “Sure,” I said.
Wheezer was laughing. “You want me to tell you where she is? I have her marked, your little angel got her three hours ago and tracking is all green.”
He was messing with me. The angel, my targeting drone, flew somewhere overhead and saw everything so it was just waiting to pipe the information into my system if I wanted it, the sato’s exact location, but somehow it would have been cheating. Wheezer knew how much I hated the drone; his question had been a joke, the one thing he knew would piss me off.
“Do you wish to respond?” Kristen asked.
“Negative. Don’t want to risk another burst.”
I scanned the area. The hut was part of a string of shacks that formed a small neighborhood near Dzhanga’s abandoned rail-transfer point, one that tank cars from trains had used to fill themselves from hundreds of now-empty storage vessels, most of them ruptured and torn open from a long-forgotten war. When the wind blew through them, it moaned. An hour ago I had gotten my first hit, a single tone from my computer followed by the announcement
“Germline unit, reading above background,”
which meant that the chick was nearby and ripe, her skin starting to liquefy and if I was really lucky, her vision had blurred, with both eyes a milky white. For now, though, Kristen stayed quiet; my heads-up read only ambient temperature and weather data.
“Not much longer,” I whispered, and wiped a film of dust from both vision ports.
My headgear was custom. The helmet fit snugly so that only a centimeter of space separated me from the ceramic, and it was such a tight fit that the only way to open it was to pop it from the neck ring, then unbuckle it from the back so it would open in a clamshell fashion, just like the suit’s chest carapace. The helmet was art. A guy in New York had designed it, probably doped up and high, but the result had been something that resembled the head of a wasp, with wide oval vision ports and an extended “snout” that contained an integral collector unit to receive data from microbots or any one of a hundred other tools I used. Underneath it all, my vision hood clung like a second skin, so tight that I couldn’t afford the luxury of a beard. Nobody ever accused me a of being a subterrener, one of
those who lived among the fungus and rock, and who shit all over their legs because it was easier to just dump waste than to take care of it with a few steps to the nearest flush port; those men grew beards to cushion their cheeks from the rough canvas of the hoods, and came out of their bunkers with the bewildered look of a thousand Rip Van Winkles. It had been years since I’d fought underground, and my suit told everyone that its occupant was a specialized thing, “not to be used in tunnels or hangars.” The hood was the final piece, one last thing to set me apart from conscripts and those with the tired careers of lifers and superlifers; it had front magnetic claws that clicked into the sensor package on my helmet, which, in turn, sent data to my goggle lenses, a continuous heads-up feed of information that included chem-bio readings, and the ticker for nitrogen compounds, explosives, or the real deal: rotting, human flesh.
Soon, the dead Turkmen would interfere with my sensors.
I dragged the body into the man’s hut, glanced around to make sure there was nobody there, and then shut the door so I could look through the crack—when the computer chimed again.
“Priority message, Sergeant, keyed to a general emergency frequency.” But this time she didn’t ask for approval, since it was priority, and piped it in.
“Challenge-echo, challenge-echo, challenge-echo. Echo-seven-six…”
I waited for the numbers to rattle off. “Go ahead, Wheez.”
“War’s over, Bug. It’s official.”
“The war ended months ago, when the Russians pulled
out. That’s why Command wanted me to break radio silence?”
“No,” said Wheezer, “It means that we’re all being recalled. President just gave the order to pull in every man from the east and let the girls rot. We’re to go after them in Europe and friendly countries, but they want us out of the hot spots now. Something to do with the Chinese. Pickup at primary retrieval at oh-six, tomorrow.”
Now I was really angry, and to hell with whoever might be zeroing on my location, triangulating on the open transmission; I almost saw the radio waves, a huge neon arrow pointing down at me from the sky. “I have one betty out here somewhere. There’s sign everywhere and she can’t be far, I get readings every once in a while. I’ll come in when she’s dead.”
But Wheezer wasn’t listening anymore, and the radio stayed quiet. I flicked on my chameleon skin and slid out the door, shutting it gently behind me and wincing when the sound of children floated up the road from the main town to the north.
You wouldn’t have seen me. The goat herders never did, and it was funny because I knew all these Turkmens so well while none of them knew me. Only the kids had come close—once—to finding my hiding spot in the scrub, buried under a thin layer of sand and goat shit, because they had been playing soccer and one of them kicked into my face, sending their ball on a wild bounce when it should have kept going straight. The kid who chased it down had almost died then; but he went on his way and none of them knew how close it had been. The chameleon skins had been the greatest invention of the century, a polymer coating that—if you maintained it—
would bend light, allowing the suit’s wearer to blend seamlessly with the surroundings. Now the kids were at least a hundred yards away, but heading toward me, so I sprinted across the road and lost sight of them as soon as I entered the railyard.
“Probable Germline unit detected,” Kristen announced, “readings well above baseline, concentration gradient bearing two-seven-nine-point eight.”
And everything went still. The map blinked onto my display and I moved out, charting a silent course through the concrete-and-steel wreckage, a forest of towering oil tanks that had been blown to create a twisted still-life, huge flaps of rusted steel that fluttered just a bit in strong gusts. The sun gave the air a kind of shimmer that only happened in the third world. It was hazy with maybe a little smoke and dust so that you knew if you popped lid there’d be a strong smell of sulfur and alcohol from the power plants, maybe an occasional whiff of ozone from the fusion plants and generators. She’d be on the other side of the next tank; her red dot beckoned to me, begged me to come in. I rounded the concrete base, my carbine already pointed in her direction and watched her disappear before I could get a bead.
“This is crap.”
“Target lost,” Kristen said.
“No shit.”
She’d gone to ground. My mind screamed at the prospect of having to follow, shouted that there shouldn’t be a tunnel, not this close to the sea where the water table would be high, and that it must be a sort of optical illusion but it wasn’t. The entrance opened in front of me, a wide concrete wall in the middle of which was a black hole, square and waiting.
“Damn it,” I said, trying to convince myself that going after her would be easy, and went in.
My vision hood switched to infrared when I stepped in a kind of soft goo or thick water, then I knew what this was—a sewer, carrying the city’s filth to the sea—and that by the end of the mission I’d be covered with waste. My throat mic picked up her breathing now, amplified it and homed in, the display telling me which direction to head, but it didn’t need to. She was there. The betty had backed against a wall to face me less than ten meters from where I stood and she was missing one arm below the elbow. I flicked on my helmet lamp and switched back to normal vision, deactivating the suit’s chameleon skin so she could see me.