Subterrene War 03: Chimera (25 page)

Jihoon looked angry enough to hit me, and for the moment it was as if we were from two different species, and why didn’t he get it? This was war. War was about
weapons. The ones with the biggest armies also better have the best weapons or their size wouldn’t matter a bit, and now China would have both; now it was clear how they’d rolled over the Russians.

“The Koreans,” I said, “found out about it and kick-started their own program in an attempt to keep up. They probably were going to keep it a secret from us until they made significant progress; that way they could sell the technology and make a killing.”

“These are
human beings,
” Remorro said, horrified. “Not weapons systems.”

“No!”
Lucy and I said it at the same time, and the thought of sharing an opinion with a sato made me feel sick, but I continued and pointed at her. “Lucy isn’t a human, she’s a sato.” Then I pointed at the thing on the table. “And that isn’t a human. It’s a tool. Both are manufactured by us, to be used by us and to be discarded by us.
By
humans.”

I glared at her as I finished. “Any time we want.”

“You,” she said, “are exactly what we expect of the nonbred.”

I cocked my head—the same way I’d seen so many of them do it—and smiled. “Thank you. Jihoon, get pictures and tissue samples, assuming it’s OK with our hostess.”

W
e need to speak with Margaret.” I checked my suit chronometer and saw it was now late morning, and Lucy had taken us back to the bank of elevators where she stopped, indicating we should go no farther.

She shook her head. “Margaret isn’t here; she left two days ago, and we don’t know when she’ll be back.”

At first I was disappointed. But the feeling soon faded because we had already accomplished a key part of the mission and now high gear had kicked in, pushing me forward so that meeting Margaret was the most important thing, more important even than Phillip, the mission a black hole that sucked me in and forced all other concerns to melt into the distance behind me. And the answer I’d given Lucy when she asked me if I would kill her had been true: I didn’t know what I’d do to Margaret. That would be the jungle’s decision. The bush had taken its hold on me again, awakened instincts long forgotten, and the mountains soaked into my skin, maybe along with the water that dripped onto our heads, a kind of aqueous tincture that acted on the brain. We still didn’t know what
Sunshine was, but something told me that Chen did. And Margaret might know more.

“Where did she go?” I asked. “Back to Bangkok?”

“Into Burma. She’s chasing a man who killed two of our sisters.”

“Chen.”

Lucy nodded and stepped into an elevator, sliding the gate shut. “Yes.”

“We need to find Chen too before she kills him. Can you tell us where she went so we can follow?” From the corner of my eye, I saw Ji look at me; I didn’t want to go into Burma any more than he did, but it was impossible now to resist the urge that had been reborn. This is what the bush did; it filled you with a sense of being able to do anything and combined it with an overwhelming feeling of dread, the combination of which, in turn, made the calculus of a mission easy because staying on the move was all that counted—getting things done so you could get out of the jungle as quickly as you’d gotten in. I wanted Chen dead. But I wanted his information first so we wouldn’t have to stay here any longer than necessary. “If she kills him, we could lose important data on Project Sunshine, and we can jump off now—get out of your way and catch up to Margaret.”

She shook her head. “Nobody is going into Burma; the line is closed, and even if she finds Chen, Margaret will most likely die on the return. It will be difficult for her to make it through Chinese forces. Margaret left us because she wanted to die.”

“Staying here isn’t an option,” I said, beginning to get angry. “If Chen is in Burma, we
have
to go.”

Lucy frowned and paused before pushing the elevator button. She glanced at Remorro. “Take them to the line. A
patrol is preparing to leave tonight. We have new weapons that we want to test against the Chinese abominations, and if the lieutenant can survive the mission, he can leave when it’s over. I’ll send Chen’s coordinates to your suit computers before you jump off.”

The elevator began sliding up, and I called after her, “How did you find out where Chen is?” but she was already out of earshot.

“You’re insane,” Remorro said.

“It’s our mission.”

Jihoon lit a cigarette. “Yeah. But nobody said anything about going into
Burma
.”

“Nobody said anything about not going there either, Chong, and if that’s where she is, then that’s where the shit happens. You can stay here, I don’t really care.” I slipped my vision hood back on, then my helmet, and gestured toward Remorro and Orcola. “You want to show me where the line is?”

Remorro stared at me for a second and then sighed. “Screw it.”

The walk gave me time to think, and I lingered in the rear while Jihoon machine-gunned our escorts with questions, wanting to learn as much as he could about the line. It wasn’t luck that tossed this mission into my lap. The fact that the satos revered Catherine as some kind of saint and ascribed Margaret’s knowledge of the Chinese genetics to precognition made me laugh at them, not pity the girls, and the brass had known it would be my reaction. They counted on my disdain. There were plenty of other cleanup crews available for the job, but none of them had
the kind of hatred I did for satos—an instinctive disgust that the girls were nothing more than frauds in human tissue—which kept me insulated from fear. Now that
they
wanted her to live, though, the brass had made my footing slippery. Dangerous. I wasn’t the right guy for the kind of negotiation they needed, and the decision was an order that ran counter to everything I believed, leaving me with an empty feeling that the military had betrayed mankind.
What a fucked-up way to fight a war,
I thought. To instill satos with a safeguard that resulted in their destruction only to have it hacked by some Japanese or Thai bioengineer, then to let these chicks roam freely—a series of mishaps that had allowed the girls to exchange the insanity of living rot for the insanity of belief in Margaret.
And in Catherine.
I preferred the ones that I’d seen in that last operation in Turkmenistan when the sato had begged for her life, asking me if I was God. When they were in that state, it was clear that the girls were something to be discarded or stepped on, an insult to the rest of us. And how exactly did one negotiate with a chick who
wanted
to die?

Bright sunlight surprised me in midthought. A new set of elevators had dumped us into a trench, and I looked up to see that the jungle canopy was gone, allowing the sun to burn down on red clay where lines of huge ants scrambled over it as rapidly as they could. I stepped into mud. A rat squeaked in anger and ran, joining a group of three others that bounded away from our group before stopping to look at us one more time and give me a chance to raise my carbine. Before I could fire all hell broke loose. Someone in the distance screamed in Thai, and Kristen said something like “incoming artillery rounds,” but I stood there like an idiot when the first shell landed a few yards to my right,
outside the trench. The impact shook the ground. A wave of dirt flew over us and struck my helmet, rocks and tree roots slamming it against my head and forcing me to collapse into the red mud. Then a bright light seared my eyes before the goggles frosted over, and the suit’s temperature indicator jumped upward at the same time I screamed.
Plasma.
It had to be the Chinese, I thought. They’d brought plasma artillery, mixing it with the ancient guns of the Burmese. Bright tendrils of the stuff played over the trench above me at the same time chemically propelled rounds thudded all around and shook the walls, and the ants and rats knew what to do; the ants and rats had disappeared.

Jihoon shouted over the radio. “This is crazy. Nobody can survive up here like this. We should go back until the barrage lifts.”

“Sure they can,” I said. “Just stay low and move forward. There has to be a bunker somewhere ahead.”

“It’s a hundred meters up, take the first left fork.” Remorro pointed ahead of us with his carbine, and we moved out.

The crawl lasted forever. I led the way, gritting my teeth with each impact, and artillery overwhelmed my senses so that perception shifted, blurring my eyes and tricking them into seeing things. A huge banyan trunk had fallen over the trench at one point. Three Burmese artillery rounds landed on it at the same time, obliterating the tree’s remnants in a cloud of splinters that stuck into the mud around us to create a field of wooden spikes, some of them a meter long, and when I started moving again, I realized that a splinter had gone through one of the rats to nail it into the mud where the animal now tried to run as fast as it could, all four legs scraping bits of clay
from the ground. It couldn’t have been real. But I stared at the thing, which fell limp while I crawled past, and I hoped that the first shell hadn’t given me a concussion because it just
couldn’t
have happened.

I turned at the fork and saw the bunker entrance. A squat concrete structure rose from the clay ahead of us, and the trench sloped downward so that the enemy would only see the bunker’s narrow horizontal slit under a meter and a half of steel-reinforced concrete. Someone stood outside. His skin was dark, almost a reddish color, and he was naked except for an orange strip of woven cloth that wrapped around his waist like a sarong. The man saw me and grinned. He made no effort to avoid either the plasma or the artillery shells and, as if to show off, lifted both arms and laughed just as the barrage tapered off. The man looked back at us then, and I recognized that we had stopped moving, frozen in the mud by incredulity, and he was about to say something when we heard a series of pops in the distance followed by a screeching sound. More shells detonated. But these ones never touched the ground and instead burst overhead to blossom into a thick fog that settled over the line and draped itself around everything, hiding the bunker and the man so that for the second time I thought I’d gone crazy.

“Did you guys see that man near the bunker?”

“The one in the orange skirt?” Orcola asked.

I breathed deeply, relieved that it hadn’t been an illusion. “Yeah.”

“Karen recruit to the
Gra Jaai
. If anyone shows the slightest bit of fear, that’s one of their punishments; they have to stay in the trench for an hour during a barrage—”

“Chemical agents detected,” said Kristen, interrupting.
“Checking seals, Lieutenant.” She stopped talking but came back with a gentle chime. “All systems sealed, filters nominal.”

“Can you tell what kind of agent it is?” I asked, trying to hide the sound of my fear.

“The presence of carbon phosphorus bonds suggests nerve agent, Lieutenant.”

I clicked back onto our group’s frequency. “Chemical weapons. Make sure you have a good seal.”

“No shit, chemical weapons,” said Orcola. “Now would you mind moving forward so we can take cover?
You’re blocking the whole freakin’ trench!
”

Chemical agents.
The thought made me want to get up and run, and as I moved forward, my armor started to glisten because the fog had begun to coalesce, forming tiny droplets that stuck to the ceramic on my forearms. Just the thought of a suit breach almost drove me crazy during those last few meters because I knew that it wouldn’t take much to kill, and a microtear in the suit’s joint material could let in more than enough. The drops or their vapor would seep through and make contact with your skin so that the next thing you knew you couldn’t breathe. Training kicked in then, but not in a good way; my mind ticked off the symptoms one at a time so that by the time I reached the bunker I had traced them all the way from tunnel vision and runny nose to seizures and eventual suffocation.

Jihoon was the first to notice the man—the one who had been standing there a few minutes before. “Look at that shit.”

“He’s definitely a Karen. And one of the
Gra Jaai
,” said Orcola.

“So?” I asked.

“Yeah. Just saying.”

“Any chance of giving him an antidote?”

Orcola shook his head. “He’s gone, and I’m not wasting it on the
Gra Jaai
.”

The man twitched in the mud as every muscle in his body contracted, the agent forcing his nerves to fire out of control and send signals that should never have been dispatched in the first place. He stared at the sky. Both pupils looked like pinpricks and streams of mucus ran from his nostrils until it all ended when Remorro fired a burst of fléchettes across the man’s chest.

I stood in a crouch, making sure that my head was below the top of the trench, and reached for the bunker door. “Looks like another one gets to see God before we do.”

Gra Jaai
, most of them in flexible battle suits like the ones we’d seen Thai soldiers wear on our ride to the front, filled the bunker. Most of them sat on the floor with legs pulled up to their chests, but a few stared out the bunker’s slit to stand watch over the field; their battle suits were ill fitting, and some looked like they wore an oversized trash bag so that it took a few seconds for me to realize that these were children and that their Maxwell carbines were as long as they were tall. Instead of the gaudy colors we had seen on some of the
Gra Jaai
, a single Japanese character had been printed in yellow on their chests.