Subterrene War 03: Chimera (26 page)

“That character is Japanese for death, Lieutenant,” Kristen said.

“Thanks. Get ready to translate and call me Bug.”

“Yes, Bug.”

I spoke as loudly as I could—without shouting—as Jihoon and the others crowded into the bunker behind me. “Who’s in command?”

“Are you here to fight?” The question came from one of the
Gra Jaai
at the view slit, a woman who had been watching the Burmese line.

“We’re here to go on patrol. Tonight.”

“Lucy sent word that four nonbelievers would be going with us, but the patrol has been canceled. We will have to wait until after the Chinese attack.”

“When will that happen?” Jihoon asked.

“When will the sun die? When will the rats come back to feed on corpses, since their more greedy cousins hadn’t known that nerve agent is deadly? God commands the Chinese even though they don’t realize it, and God will determine these things such that they will come to us in blessing, as a holy test of our belief. Come. It is time to pray.”

The entire group went onto their knees then, and one of them held a tiny package—a miniature battle suit—from which a baby began crying so that the woman or man holding it began rocking back and forth, shushing the infant quiet. The bunker made me feel sick. When some of its occupants shifted to begin praying, they revealed piles of rats that still twitched from the chemical attack, and a mixture of mud and human waste covered the floor on which the mother held her baby. Behind me, Ji gagged, and I grabbed him.

“Don’t throw up in your suit.”

He looked through his faceplate, both eyes magnified by the goggles underneath to show dilated pupils. “This isn’t what I expected, Bug.”

“Get your shit together. Throw up in that suit, and you won’t be able to clean it for days, maybe weeks, because we’d have to decon before removing our helmets. Your suit is coated with nerve agent. Don’t freakin’ throw up, or so help me, I’ll just shoot you now to get it over with.”

“I asked for this, huh?” Jihoon’s eyes narrowed, and it took a second to realize that he was trying to smile. “We don’t want to go back to those days.”

“Right. Just shut up. And if you have to, go back into the trenches but keep low, and whatever you do, don’t puke.”

The
Gra Jaai
ignored us then as they prayed in one voice, and Kristen’s translation crackled in my ears. “I have sinned through my own fault. In my lack of conviction and through those I have failed to kill; in my actions and actions I lacked the courage to take. I ask the blessed Catherine and all the fallen before us, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for death and faith, for glory and sacrifice, to our God whose blessings bring war.”

Now
I
felt like throwing up. This was my first close-up look at human converts to the satos, and it strengthened my belief that we’d be better off without genetics—not just because the ones in Thailand were past their shelf life, but because without them, people like this, who had nothing to lose and just wanted to trust in
something,
never would have been created. The Japanese and Karen must have been desperate if they’d reached out for Margaret. Then again, all it took were the memories of the children in Bangkok, the squalor of Khlong Toei, and the riots at the airport, and I came close to understanding how people in those situations might have chosen a faith based on madness because it promised at least one thing: a home. Maybe a family. But that still didn’t make it right, and I stepped over and through the
Gra Jaai
, who now prayed as I worked my way toward the bunker’s vision slit. With my back to them, I wouldn’t have to watch; I wouldn’t have to think about the fact that they’d been fighting in at least six inches of their own waste.

A thin haze hovered over the ground as the nerve agent evaporated in the heat. But it wasn’t enough to conceal the secret of the line or hide the fact that beyond the vision slit a wide swath of ridgetop jungle had been erased for as far as I could see, leaving jagged stumps of banyan, palm, and hundreds of other trees, their trunks lying in every direction and splintered from having been struck by artillery. The line’s secret was this: it was artwork, a tapestry that described easy ways to die. Fallen trees would slow anyone who tried to work their way up a steep slope out of Burma, where they’d then have to cross five hundred meters of no-man’s-land, and every time the enemy tried to push forward they’d have to climb over the fallen trunks, exposing themselves to fire from our trenches. So many bodies had collected that you couldn’t see the clay. Men and women in loose battle suits lay between the fallen trees and had been dead long enough that decomposition and heat inflated the fabric like balloons, while artillery had burst through others and scattered parts for some distance. But for the
Gra Jaai
, this wasn’t enough death. In front of the bunker, and at regular intervals in either direction along the trench lines, they had impaled enemy soldiers on tall stakes to allow them to rot for everyone to see.
This is nothing like the last time I had been here,
I decided again; the bush had decayed even further in my absence, its constant war cry resulting in the early onset of cancer.

I clicked into Remorro’s private frequency. “You were right. Even their atrocities have atrocities.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet.”

“Why? What else have they done?”

Remorro joined me at the bunker’s view slit, but he
spoke over the private frequency and kept his helmet speakers off so nobody else would hear. “Before the Chinese arrived, the
Gra Jaai
and Karen troops would raid behind Mimis’ lines. All the time. Sometimes they went for enemy assets—ammo dumps, you know. But most of the time they went to capture children from the Burmese villages.”

“To make them into
Gra Jaai
?” I asked.

“That would have been better. No. Whenever the Burmese attacked, they’d raise them on the stakes, alive, where they died from stray fire. And the stakes weren’t that sharp. So even if they lived through the battle the kids’ own weight would make it take hours, sometimes days to impale them; it was so painful that I saw some of the kids jerk around, forcing the stakes through themselves just to get it over with.”

“I understand,” I said.

Remorro’s voice sounded sharp then, angrier than I’d yet heard him. “Oh. You
understand
? Explain it to me then, asshole.”

“This isn’t my first time in the bush, Remorro. And I hunted these chicks across central Asia. You get exposed to their beliefs, and they’ve been so indoctrinated in the tanks that even the ones who’ve gone insane still haven’t given up on
God.
They’ve just given up on the idea that dying for mankind is the only way into heaven. So to the
Gra Jaai
and true believers, when they kill children they probably believe two things: one, that it will make the enemy act irrationally, and two, that kids go straight to heaven when they die. To the satos, killing is an act of kindness. So I may not like it, and it might still make me sick, but yeah, I’m starting to get it.”

“I get sicker every day.” Remorro leaned both arms on
the view slit, resting the chin of his helmet on his hands. “So now that the Chinese are here, what do we do?”

I glanced at the
Gra Jaai
and saw them sway back and forth, then looked onto the battlefield. “There’s nothing we
can
do except pray for them to attack us topside, that they won’t bore underneath us or build a road to a section of the line that’s undefended. What happened to the mining gear—the stuff that made all these tunnels?”

“Gone. I only got here a year ago, though, so for all I know it’s around here somewhere, hidden in one of the side hangars or something.”

Only a year.
Looking at Remorro, you’d think he’d been in the bush for a lifetime, during which it had bored him from the inside and emptied his body into a thin husk that shivered within his suit. He wouldn’t last much longer. We all had our own missions, and his was to stay here because the satos had worked it so that if he left they wouldn’t allow a replacement, and the brass would figure it was better to have someone—anyone—on the inside, even if they were dying; SOCOM lived for its reports and had probably ordered him to stay put until he kicked it. On the other hand he’d made his own decision and could have told both sides to go to hell, so at first I hadn’t been sorry for him. But now that I’d
seen
the field…

“Why don’t you just go back to Bangkok?” I asked. “You could get treatment there.”

“Thought about it. But Orcola and I decided to stay put until the Chinese break through; then maybe we’ll haul ass. To tell you the truth, though, we don’t really
want
to leave.”

The statement left me speechless, and I almost laughed. “What?”

“I’m serious. Have you been back home recently? To the States?”

“Yeah.”

“Out here you get to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t bother the satos, and there’s nobody telling you how to take a piss so you don’t waste water, and I don’t miss being threatened by some semi-aware just for complaining about Congress or the president. And I
like
the people. The
Gra Jaai
aren’t so bad once you get used to them. If I weren’t so old and so sick, I might give their training tanks a try.”

I did laugh then and ducked when a stream of tracer fléchettes leaped from somewhere on the enemy side of no-man’s-land to smack into the concrete over my head. We slid to the floor and sat in the bunker’s filth.

“You have no idea how screwed up that way of thinking is, but I agree with you.”

“Why is it screwed up?” he asked.

“Because these days the one way to get any privacy is to leave the States, go to war. In Thailand. In the bad bush where there are thousands of ways to die, and all of them are ugly.”

My eyes didn’t want to stay open. The day’s action had worn me out quicker than I’d realized, and now that all the firing had stopped the jungle insects started in with a mixed orchestra of buzzes and chirps, their music shifting in some rhythm that the jungle understood. Our bunker mates still prayed in front of me. I wondered how long they’d go at it before I realized that they were mumbling something, but it was too low to pick up on my helmet mics, and Kristen hadn’t offered to translate.

“What exactly do the satos teach them?” I asked.

Remorro rested his carbine across his lap and began disassembling it to clean the parts. “I only know what I heard. By the time I got here, the satos were pretty much the same way you see them now, and Margaret herself came close to killing me once when I stood up to her. I’ve never seen anyone fight them like you did.”

“What did you hear?”

“That when the satos first arrived, they had lost it mentally—all of them past the two-year discharge point so their minds were frying. And whatever they’d been taught in the ateliers about dying in combat or reporting for discharge once they reached eighteen, it was all gone. They were terrified. Even once the Thais managed to reverse the genetic safeguards so they’d stop rotting, the girls still couldn’t get their shit together. But then comes Margaret. She traveled across Russia and Korea to get here, along with a sato named Catherine, ‘Catherine the Eternal,’ who taught her how to get back on track, to reach God’s side again. Margaret started preaching to them about ‘the one path,’ and from then on these chicks have been holy hell for anyone who gets in their way. Now they’re more deadly than they were when we first fielded them.”

“Why?” I asked.

Remorro pulled out his combat knife and used it to skewer a huge cockroach. “Because now they’re convinced that we, the nonbred, are inferior. We’re not even worth talking to.
Unless
you’re a
Gra Jaai
human.”

It was late in the afternoon when Jihoon woke me. The bunker had gone quiet. Prayers had ended and just a handful of
Gra Jaai
remained, two of them struggling with an
object that at first refused to come into focus as my eyes blinked from exhaustion. Finally, when they came closer, I saw a huge Maxwell autocannon; the pair lifted it to the vision slit, where they slid the weapon into place and then locked it onto a fixed mount. The autocannon was an impressive weapon. It fired thousands of rounds a minute, and each fléchette—about ten times the size of a carbine’s—had alternating high-explosive, armor-piercing tips or tungsten penetrators, but the high rate of fire also meant it consumed ammo like mad. Both men shuffled back and forth, ferrying ammunition crates to arrange below it.

Orcola clicked in. “Keep your speakers off, and don’t switch to the general frequency unless you need to because the
Gra Jaai
hate it when someone uses it for nonpriority traffic. Remorro will monitor it anyway to let us know if anything comes up. We’re all on a private group frequency; I sent you the key.”

I flicked on Kristen’s power with my tongue. “Kristen.”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Key me into the frequency that someone just sent. Check the system in-box.”

“Done,” she said.

I stood and almost cried out. The morning’s trek through the tunnels and then crawling to the bunker under fire made both knees feel as though they’d give at any moment, and my back ached from having fallen asleep at an odd angle, but I did my best to hide the pain. I stretched, then leaned against the concrete wall for balance.