Subterrene War 02: Exogene (5 page)

A factory once stood nearby, its iron girders still poking up vertically among the wreckage, and two storage silos managed to hold on to their concrete sheathing, which had been riddled with shrapnel and partially melted by the heat of plasma. “Look,” said Megan, pointing to an APC that sat in the factory’s center.

We saw a Marine. The man jumped from the APC and scrambled over a pile of rubble, searching for a hole large enough to hide in, but all of them had been taken and the man began to curse.

“A fool,” I said.

“Fire, fire, fire,” someone announced over my headset, “eighty thousand inbound.”

Through a crack between concrete blocks, we saw thousands of rocket trails crest the horizon. The first missile hit the APC directly in the crew compartment and blew the front half into a cloud of ceramic, catapulting the vehicle ten meters into the air. When it landed the wheels popped off, one of them rolling directly toward our position while three missiles homed in on the movement. They struck simultaneously. I was closer than Megan, and screamed when the explosions blew me upward several feet, the huge concrete slabs flipping aside as if they had been feathers. Once I collected myself, Megan and I crawled into a new position, scurrying under one of the slabs that had been tossed over.

The attack ended quickly, and we waited for the next volley. But before the remaining Russian drones could fire another salvo, a squadron of Marine fighters roared overhead, forcing the enemy aircraft to flee, after which I looked down again to see the man who had been trying to find cover; he pulled himself along the ground, with both
his legs now missing. We watched, until a few minutes later he lay still.

Megan must have noticed something in me—despite the fact that I was still fully suited. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I pulled my helmet off and vomited; it surprised me more than it did her, and my scalp grew hotter until it felt as though the branding scar, on the back of my head, had ignited into flame.

After training they branded a lily on Megan’s head and epoxied a white enamel lily on each shoulder of her armor, symbols which meant that she could be followed, the purest among pure. It seemed like yesterday, but in a different world.

Our final atelier test had nothing to do with military training, but everything to do with faith. The unit Mother, Sister Miriam Anne, would conduct it. Atelier technicians assigned a hundred of us to each family, crammed into a small barracks with our mother’s apartment at the far end where she watched over her daughters. The mothers were all bald, but much older than us, and had their own uniform—a clean white dress, white shoes, and a white scarf that they tied over their heads to protect themselves from the sun. Of all of them, only Sister Miriam carried a rattan cane. Of all of them, Sister Miriam knew how to use the cane best.

On the evening before our final exam, we returned from field exercises exhausted, mud covering every inch of our orange uniforms and caking the partial armor and combat kits that now felt a hundred pounds heavier. Megan and I always grinned. In those days it felt exhilarating,
because as we mentally shut off each twinge of pain, it reminded us that we had almost made it, that soon we would be accepted into the sisterhood of warfare. Sister Miriam waited for us on the barracks steps, and frowned when she saw my arm draped over Megan’s shoulder.

“Miss Megan,” she said. “A
word
.”

Megan pushed me away and gave me her look,
I’ll catch up with you inside
, but after moving through the door I stopped to watch through a narrow window. Sister Miriam waited. When Megan got close to her, she lifted her cane and swung it over and over, until a spray of blood came from Megan’s mouth and spattered Sister Miriam’s dress. The red looked brilliant against the white. When Megan finally collapsed onto the ground, her bald scalp lacerated in several places, the beating stopped and Sister Miriam lowered herself to whisper something. Megan began sobbing.

After she finally returned to the barracks I tried to hug her, but Megan stepped back. “Don’t touch me.”

“Why? What did Mother say?”

She shrugged and removed the first aid kit from her pack. “They worry about us. You and me. They have seen us together.”

“So what?” I asked. “It matters for nothing, we are not the only ones who love each other.”

“It matters for everything!”
Several of the other girls stopped what they were doing and stared. Megan lowered her voice. “Tomorrow is our final exam. I
want
the lily, can’t you understand that? To be one among a hundred is a great honor.
Second only to death
. Our feelings make us less efficient, get in the way of duty, make us impure.”

I felt as though she had knocked the wind out of me,
and said nothing.
I wanted the lily too
. We showered in silence and walked through the mess line without speaking to each other, not even saying good night when the lights went out. The carbine kept me awake. Its cold barrel poked me in the cheek, and wouldn’t let me drift off, making me more and more nervous so that I forgot about Megan as the next day approached.
The day of our final test
. Reveille sounded before sunrise, and we rolled from our racks, dressing in fresh uniforms and boots. I had never been that nervous. But we were so ready—all of us—that they could have put us in a cage with a thousand lions and we would have leapt at them, shredding with our bare hands anything stupid enough to resist us.

Instead of lions, however, they gave us kittens. Our mothers issued them soon after we reached fifteen-equivalent and ordered us to care for the animals, to play with them several times a day. Mine I had named Megan, and Megan had called hers Catherine, and as we waited on the cold morning of our final exam, Sister Miriam stood in front of a row of APCs on the parade ground, where she pointed at stacks of small animal cages. You heard the kittens—now full-grown cats—mewling, and I felt something then, but didn’t know what to call it, didn’t recognize horror until later.

“Good morning, my daughters,” she said.

We answered in unison. “Good morning, Blessed Mother.”

“My people were created in God’s image, and you were created in ours. Facsimiles, identical to each other in every way, close to perfection. Serve humanity loyally and without question and, like us, you will earn a seat at His right hand.

“Today you become women. Perfection. The first of your kind were male, Germline-A, a failed experiment who turned on their creators, their aggression untamable, their bravery so psychotic that they became strategic liabilities and tactical failures. Not so with you. Today you are sixteen-equivalent. For the next two years you will kill at every turn, and the sight of fallen enemies will warm your hearts. Across the atelier right now, there are hundreds of ceremonies like this one, all of you destined for eternal glory, but within this group, in my family, there is one. One among a hundred. One Lily, pure and without sign of spoil.”

Megan shifted beside me.

“Megan. Step forward.” When she approached, Sister Miriam placed her hand on Megan’s shoulder and handed her the cat, Catherine. Then she attached a series of sensors to Megan’s forehead and stepped back. “When I give the command,” Sister Miriam said, “snap its neck.”

I didn’t know if anyone else saw it, but I did. Muscles tightened on Megan’s jaw and she cocked her head forward, signs of sadness that I recognized instantly. Even
I
felt something, a whisper, like someone had sent an invisible message that what was about to happen was
more
than just wrong.
Evil
. In the aftermath of the test and by the time we landed in combat, the sensation had gone, burrowed into the darkest parts of my mind where I never thought I’d see it again, but on that day it was clear.

“Now,” said Sister Miriam. Megan didn’t hesitate. She twisted the cat’s neck and Sister Miriam watched the screen on her palm computer, hit a few keys, and then smiled. She pulled a small metal rod from her dress and pushed a button; the end of the rod glowed white a few
seconds later as she walked behind Megan. “Lean forward,” she said.

Sister Miriam turned to us then and raised her voice. “This is your Lily. Follow her and listen to her words, for in them there will never be spoil, never a taint. She speaks for us, for the ateliers, and for God.”

Megan never flinched. Her skin smoldered, a quiet hiss as the brand melted the thin layer of flesh at the back of her scalp. We all lined up then, one by one slaughtering our cats. But a few of the girls must have done something wrong because technicians led them away and we never saw them again.

Where Megan had been branded a Lily, on the head, we also received the brand, a single mark on our skin, mine identical to all others: the number “1.”

I saw the lily on Megan’s head now, as the sun set over Tamdybulak. The scar had blended into her skin and one of the two enamel flowers on her armor had lost its petals; the other had completely broken off, and I wondered if she still felt the same about the honor—if time altered a Lily the same way it had spoiled me—but there wasn’t a chance to finish the thought. We had finished digging defensive positions and stared to the northeast when she pointed. A lone Russian in combat armor had crawled to the edge of a distant rubble field.

“Contact,” Megan said over the net. “Enemy scout sighted.
Catherine
.”

I wrapped my finger around the trigger, bringing up the sighting reticle, and slowly rested the carbine on a rock to wait for the feeling of joy that always preceded a kill. But it didn’t come. Instead the reticle trembled, its crosshairs bouncing around until I tongued another tranq
tab, waiting for it to dissolve and cool me with a promise of control. The trigger pulled, a burst of a hundred flechettes impacted against the Russian’s faceplate, and he fell back to disappear in the wreckage.

“Clear,” said Megan, and she placed her helmet against mine so nobody else would hear. “Why did it take so long?”

But there was no answer to give. Something had shifted in me, perhaps during the plasma shelling east of Keriz, or in the APC as we fled in the face of advancing Russian forces; I didn’t know. But whatever it was felt like a betrayal of the mind, a mutiny of the limbs, and when the truth materialized it hit me in the chest so that my breathing quickened to the point where my bio-readout blinked yellow in warning: I was hyperventilating. The spoiling had finally reached my core. It was fear.

“I wanted to take my time,” I lied, “to enjoy it.”

Megan laughed. “There will truly be a special place for you. In heaven. Because in hell they are all too scared of you.”

T
he Marine commander clicked in. He had surveyed the defensive line an hour before and I recognized his voice because he sounded musical, like someone who had once sung hymns to us in the tank, and for a few seconds it made me wonder if this was all a simulation—that an hour from now I would be born again, new and fifteen.

“Marine and Foreign Legion forces,” he said, “are ordered to retreat and reform at Uchkuduk. Genetic orders incoming.”

Megan and I heard men shouting and we rolled over to watch while Marines, some of them tossing their weapons into the rubble so they could run more quickly, retreated into their APCs, and when the vehicles had finished on-loading, the wheels turned slowly, rumbling southward in clouds of dust.
Abandoning us
.

One of the Marines shouted as his APC hatch swung shut. “See ya,
bitches
!”

And time stopped. My hands trembled in their gauntlets
in a way that was noticeable only if you looked closely and the suit air had turned rank, forcing me to endure the smell of terror, a sweat that wouldn’t stop although it was cold enough inside the carapace to make me shiver. The newness of the sensation fed on itself, made the fear grow in my chest until I clenched my teeth so that they wouldn’t betray my anxiousness with chattering.
Concentrate on the sky
, I thought,
the ground, anything
, until finally I saw a single clover that had survived the trampling, plasma, and digging that Tamdybulak had suffered for the last several years. The thing was new. Green, and it waved in a breeze. I was about to look away when the realization hit that it had survived everything, without a display of emotion and without fear, so that I slammed my fist against the plant until it collapsed into the dirt, buried under concrete and rock.

Orders eventually popped up on our displays:
Enemy attack expected within ten to twenty-four hours. Hold Tamdybulak. No relief expected. Maintain as high a kill-loss ratio as possible
.

“We need to increase the kill-loss ratio for series one,” said Alderson. He sat across from me, wearing the same white coat as always but this time he had come closer to the lines, underground, where wet air draped everything in a thick and invisible mantle. The atmosphere was steamy, and surrounding rock hummed with the sound of ventilation as a hundred pumps fought to bring cooler stuff from several kilometers above and force hot airborne waste—along with its scent of decay, sweat, and burning ceramic—into the alleyways of Shymkent, into
the sky, into the lungs of Kazakhs. And there were other sounds. Plasma shells pounded the rock above and my ears noted the vibrations, sending data to my mind where neurons converted frequencies into probabilities in less than a microsecond: these were Russian shells intended to deny the topside while their infiltrators crawled into our lines. Soon I would move upward. We would meet them, the Russian nonbred who had overcome fear and so deserved my attention, had earned more than an average death from heart disease, or old age, or cancer. Our humans called them Popovs. But the word didn’t fit and felt too demeaning, for even though the Russians
were
nonbred, at least they showed a kind of dignity in their efforts to die rather than fade off, showed fiber in a world of rubble and cowardice.