Subterrene War 03: Chimera (2 page)

“Clean?” I whispered. “Bullshit. She’s rotting. Close.”

My suit chimed, surprising me. “Priority transmission, Sergeant, with the proper authentication key for Rabbit Five; should I play it?”

Rabbit Five 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, a station that tanker cars once used to fill themselves from hundreds of now-empty oil 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 lucky, her vision had blurred, with both eyes a milky-white. For now, though, Kristen stayed quiet; my heads-up read 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 a centimeter of space separated me from the ceramic, and the only way to open it was to pop it from the neck ring, then unbuckle it from the back so the entire assembly 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, 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 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 underneath 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.”

“Subterrene 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 angry, and to hell with whoever might be zeroing in 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 signs 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 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 goatherds never did, and it was funny because I knew all these Turkmens so well while none of them knew me. The kids had come close—once—to finding my hiding spot in the scrub, buried under a thin layer of sand and goat dung, 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 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 rail yard.

“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 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 reactors 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 she disappeared 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, daring me to go to the one place I hated: underground.

“Damn it,” I said, trying to convince myself that it would be easy, and went in.

My vision hood switched to infrared at the same time 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 external mics 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.

The girl smiled. “I want to live.”

“That’s going to be a problem.”

“I’m unarmed. In Turkmenistan. Look.”

She raised both hands. One was a stump that dripped blood, and the skin above it had turned a deep black, boiling with infection and rot, and her one remaining hand didn’t look much better. The girl’s left eye had gone white, and she must have flipped because she started toward me, a rotting zombie of a genetic, all of about eighteen.

“Are you here from God?”

I backed toward the entrance, centering my targeting reticle on her forehead. “Where have you been, and who helped you escape? Kristen, record this.”

“Are
you
God?”

“You’re hallucinating,” I said. “It’s the spoiling. Your mind and body are breaking down, consuming themselves because you’ve reached the end of your shelf life. Try to keep it together. I need you to answer a couple of questions, and it will all be over.”

“People don’t have shelf lives.”

“You aren’t people. We created you;
people
made you.”

“Are you God?”

“Who helped you escape?”
I screamed, knowing that in a second she’d go for me, and when she took another step closer, I decided to get it over with. The fléchettes cracked through her skull, and she dropped into the sewage, face-first, making it easy for me to dig the tracking device from her neck. Kristen chimed up when I scanned it.

“Unit one-three-two-seven-four-nine. Given name of Allison. Terminated postschedule. Transmitting.”

I hiked back outside to let the scum slide down my legs, hoping it would dry and dreading the smell that would hit once I took off my helmet.

The sun started to set on the horizon, and from the tank farm I had a good view of it over the Caspian so that I rested my back against a block of concrete, lay my carbine across my legs, and began to peel off my helmet—not even caring when the stink assaulted me. As soon as I lit the first cigarette, it all melted away. The mission was over. From there I’d motor across the sea into Armenia, then board transport back to the States until I got the next call, Wheezer and me grinning at each other as we ran across some tarmac and onto a waiting transport. Missions were the reason to live, the only things worth doing, and Wheezer was a good partner to have.

It wasn’t clear how I’d make it, having to wait for the next one, because I’d been home once in the last three years. And home didn’t work for me anymore.

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?” the kitchen asked. Its computer
sounded arrogant, made me want to put a fist through the wall and find its circuits, rip them out one by one to taunt the thing, and let it know that the end was near. “Egg yolks contain harmful cholesterol. Medical records indicate a thirty percent chance that your arteries could become dangerously obstructed within the next ten years.”

I shut off the voice function and sighed.
Home.
Beatrice had relocated to one of the reclamation sites, a frontier city in the west, the region hardest hit by the years of war and famine, an old city that the government was trying to repopulate. It was a second front of sorts. Fighting for peace meant fighting against nature and the aftereffects of nuclear war, and someone in the government thought that by plopping down a few thousand people to stake its claim that maybe things would take care of themselves. It had been three weeks since I’d first returned, and already I was sliding down into my thoughts, drowning, so that when the call had come at 3 a.m., I nearly laughed out loud. But that would have woken her and the kid, and I didn’t want her to see me so happy—relieved that I’d be heading back out on a new mission.

You could cross our apartment in ten steps, and it had a tiny kitchen plastered with advertisements for the marvels of self-contained living—like the one above the sink, a sticker declaring that the Government Omni-Unit was smaller, more efficient, and less expensive to install than other modular brands. I rinsed the measuring cup. The moisture collectors came to life, humming like trapped hornets to remind me that in the west, life existed on a knife’s edge, where reuse wasn’t just a slogan but something that could mean the difference between having enough water or not. I unbuttoned my uniform tunic and
smoothed it over a chair to make sure that I didn’t get it dirty while cooking. Then I shivered, not wanting to think about water, and switched the voice back on.

“… And the use of butter for cooking is ill-advised both from health and rationing perspectives. Your allotment for the month is almost gone, Sergeant Resnick.”

“I know!”

Half an hour later, the alarms went off in both racks. Phillip emerged first. He bounced out of his bed as I watched, and like a kid, the boy didn’t bother to say anything before he plopped in front of the holo station, where he swayed back and forth and ran both hands through the projections.

“Use less, want less,” he sang with a commercial. “Less waste means more for space. Opportunity is what we make of it!”

“Good morning, Master Phillip,” the kitchen said. “Today’s a big day for your father.”

I stiffened at the reminder, wondering if Phillip would know it meant I’d be leaving, and watched Beatrice pull herself out of bed.

“Jesus.” She moved to the side and waited for the master rack to retract into its wall. “I’m still exhausted. You’re up early.”

“I got the call last night. Deployment’s in an hour.”