Subterrene War 03: Chimera (27 page)

“Where did everyone go?” I whispered. “The
Gra Jaai
?”

Remorro was still at the bunker’s vision slit, and he pointed toward the door we’d come in. “Outside. The whole complex is on alert, and everyone took their positions.”

“Everyone except the satos,” Orcola said. “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to wake you.”

“Where’d the satos go?”

“Nobody’ll tell us,” said Remorro, “but something’s up. All the
Gra Jaai
are grinning ear to ear, and it’s not their usual smile—the one they use when they think they’re about to die in battle. This one is more slippery.”

“Slippery?” asked Ji.

Orcola coughed for almost a minute before answering. “Like they have a surprise for the Chinese because it’s the kind of smiling they do when the Burmese are about to be slaughtered. But I’ll be damned if I know why they think
that
will happen.”

The sun drifted downward as we waited. To our west was another mountain range and beyond that, I figured, another and another until you hit the ocean or India, and my goggles frosted over as I struggled to look into the sunlight, begging for the thing to set. But darkness in the bush was another matter, and I’d been back for less than a week—hadn’t experienced night in the deep jungle for years. It couldn’t have changed much, though. From what I remembered, the jungle came alive at night with sounds different from the ones you heard during the day, and on moonless nights the varying shades of green transformed into blacks and grays, shapes that moved on their own and convinced you that something was out there. Ghosts roamed the bush once the sun disappeared. So at the same time I wished for night, I dreaded it.

A shimmer caught my attention. The spot was midway between our position and the Burmese line, and I fixed my eye on it to try to see better, then looked on either side to define the borders of whatever it was. At first it looked
like a heat mirage. But then the spot inched to my left before zipping back in the direction of Burma where it disappeared into the jungle below.

“Anyone see that?” I asked.

“Affirmative,” said Ji. “Something with chameleon skins activated, moving fast. Really fast.”

Orcola cursed under his breath. “Mimis’ armor doesn’t have skins. One of the Chinese scouts Lucy described?”

But nobody answered him. How would
we
know? We knew simply that somewhere out there the Chinese waited, and nobody had told us the size of their force, which for all I knew could have been a single battalion of genetic horror or more than a division. Why was I pushing on? I glanced over at Ji, who stared downslope and aimed over the top of his carbine, and from inside his helmet came the sound of muted whines as his goggles zoomed in or out. He was searching for the enemy. This would be Jihoon’s first real taste of combat, and it could be his last. The thought of calling it quits, right then, occurred to me, and the more we waited the better the idea seemed because this was insane, and I struggled with the temptation to run. A tiny voice kept begging me to quit. Who would blame us if we left? Who was going to survive in this place anyway? There wouldn’t be anyone to tell the brass what happened, and Jihoon and I could make up any story we wanted, and besides, maybe Chen was already dead. Margaret had gotten a head start on us, and for all we knew she’d wiped the guy and was on her way back, or the Chinese had gotten
her.
We knew nothing. One thing, though, was certain: Ji wouldn’t live to see his thirties. Whatever drive to follow Margaret had been there that morning, it evaporated in the face of Chinese
invasion, and I was about to tap Ji on the shoulder—to tell him we were leaving—when Remorro clicked in.

“Getting something on the general frequency.” He listened for a moment and then made a swirling motion with his finger. “Make sure your suit comps are synched with mine; we’re getting a dumper.”

“A data dump?” I asked. “From who?”

“
Graa Jaai.
It’s terrain data. Incoming now.”

My map blinked onto my heads-up display in light green and now showed the same information we’d seen earlier on Remorro’s holo map: the Thai-Burma border with our strong points and trenches shown as dots and lines. But now there was something else. Red blocks representing Chinese troops blinked onto the map on the Burmese side of the border, in a pattern that suggested they would concentrate forces on Nu Poe. It made sense. The mountains were lower to our south, but the Burmese roads to them were either nonexistent or impassable, and the mountains to our north were even more remote, that much farther from Bangkok. Nu Poe was the perfect border crossing, and why make the effort to bore when a topside attack would succeed? I flicked through the troop data and saw that there were no armor or motorized units, which made me feel better because it meant Chinese APCs and tanks were too large for the mountain roads and so had been left behind. My relief evaporated, though, as I read further.

“How’d they get this data, and do we know if it’s reliable?”

“No idea,” said Remorro, “why?”

“Because it’s an entire Chinese division of genetics in powered suits—heavy infantry with supporting scout elements.
An entire goddamn division.
”

“Nobody told us war would be
easy,
” Orcola said.

“Fuck this.” I grabbed Jihoon by the arm and slung my carbine, pulling him toward the door.

“Where are we going?”

“Anywhere but here. I’m aborting the mission. We don’t even work for the Army anymore, remember?”

Remorro turned and called after us, and I looked back to see the
Gra Jaai,
six of them, watching us yell at each other.

“What the hell are you looking at?”
I screamed at them.

Remorro sounded shocked. “It’s over two hundred klicks back to Thailand by road, and you can’t move in a straight line unless you sprout wings. You’re freaking crazy. If we get overrun, you won’t get halfway to the secondary line before the Chinese catch up with you. At least here you have a chance.”

“Here,” I said, turning for the exit, “is the only place we have
no
chance.”

But before I could get out, the door swung open and a mass of
Gra Jaai
swarmed in, including their children, pushing me and Jihoon against the wall in their effort to find cover. Most of them jabbered. It reminded me of a group of tourists who had come to a zoo because some of them lifted their kids so they could get a view out the vision slit, just before bombs and missiles struck the jungle around us. There had been no warning of aircraft. Later I figured that high-flying drones or strategic bombers out of China must have done the job because there had been no sound or giveaway at all until the explosions rocked the concrete overhead and sent bursts of flame to jet through and engulf us. Our suits—even the baglike
battle suits of the
Gra Jaai
—could withstand exposure to the flames, and some of the children laughed or screamed with joy. I let go of Jihoon. The attack lasted an hour, and I marveled at the fact that none of them showed the least sign of fear, and once it ended the
Gra Jaai
acted
disappointed
it was over, shooing their kids back out the door and into the trenches.

“How did they know?” I asked.

Before anyone could answer, Kristen chimed in. “Lieutenant, I’ve been monitoring local friendly force communications and have managed to decode one of their encrypted command channels.”

Remorro started to talk, and I waved him quiet. “I love you, Kristen. What can you tell me?”

“The locals have full access to Chinese communications and have, themselves, developed the means to monitor and decode all Chinese transmissions—even ones using frequency hopping. The Chinese have been preparing to launch an air attack out of Rangoon, and the girls knew about it half an hour before the assault began.”

“How are they doing it?”

“It’s not clear, Lieutenant.”

I told the others and glanced at the
Gra Jaai
nearby. Most of them had left, except for the six who had manned the bunker with us previously, and they sat against the far wall playing cards. It was nighttime now; my infrared had kicked in, and it wouldn’t be long before I’d need a new fuel cell.

“Sometimes I really hate these chicks,” Remorro said. “They can do stuff I’ve never dreamed of, and we only learn about it after the fact.”

“You didn’t know they’d broken the Chinese codes?”

“There’s a lot in this place they haven’t shown us. The
satos have labs and production facilities for repairing weapons and armor. Today was the first time I ever knew they had a morgue. Look, a lot of the
Gra Jaai
were scientists, engineers, and doctors before they came here from Japan and signed up for this mess, so it’s not surprising they can break encryption and make things. But I didn’t have any clue about this.”

Before I could answer, the
Gra Jaai
tossed their cards aside and got up, running to man the autocannon. Now it was too late to get out. We heard the
whump
of friendly artillery firing from somewhere behind us and the low roar of shells as they passed overhead, and I waited for the impact.
Nothing.
All of us moved to the view slit and peered out. The artillery continued firing, and from no-man’s-land to the distant jungle below, we saw tiny flickers of detonations that sounded like muffled firecrackers, after which a cloud of sparkling material settled into the trees and over the ground. From what we could see, it looked as though the barrage covered almost the entire front and penetrated several kilometers into Burmese territory.

“What is that stuff?” asked Jihoon. “Chemical rounds?”

I shook my head. “It reminds me of when we used microbots to hunt satos; the bots would transmit precise location data of any power source like the ones used in armor or small electronics, and looked exactly like that on infrared after you fired them from their launchers. But I’ve never heard of micros fired from artillery shells.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Remorro.
“Look.”

At first, when the material settled over the open area below us, nothing happened. Then my heads-up went crazy. Our suits were equipped with short-range shape detection to assist with targeting, and until that point there
had been no indication of anything unusual, but soon outlines began flickering in red—a sea of shapes, two hundred meters away and moving too slowly for motion detection to kick in. The Chinese had arrived.

“I see it,” I said. “Do the
Gra Jaai
vision hoods have shape detection, Remorro?”

The autocannon opened fire before he could answer. It sounded like a huge zipper, and the gun’s thick barrel spat so many rounds that its tracers formed a laserlike beam, piercing the air and cutting into shapes that crept toward us. It was a signal for the other
Gra Jaai
. Everyone in the trenches and the bunker started firing whatever they had, and I watched my carbine’s fléchettes burn red as they streaked into the mass of oncoming shapes, only to bounce off, ricocheting into the air or fallen trees. The mass kept coming. When the Chinese reached a point a hundred meters from us, flashes erupted from them and grenades pelted the front of our bunker, some of them flying through the view slit and detonating behind us so that thermal gel hissed on the ground. They were close enough that we could see them now, and I stopped firing, awed by what had taken form.

“Are those Chinese?” asked Jihoon.

It was the first time I’d seen anything like it, and the fear was so intense that the sound of my own voice surprised me, making me wonder if someone else had spoken. “What else would it be?
Just look at those things…”

Thousands of Chinese troops walked toward us in heavy armor, their arms and legs solid metal or ceramic that carried them over the fallen trees, and grenade launchers attached to their shoulders fired without stopping. They looked like robots. A tiny hemispherical turret rested
where the head should have been, and I focused on one as it rotated, bristling with sensors and antennae. The realization that somewhere inside these frames were those things we had seen in the morgue filled me with dread because we weren’t fighting
men
; these were semimachines, and for all I knew the Chinese genetics hadn’t any humanity in them to speak of—wouldn’t discriminate between man or child. Most of them targeted the autocannon. Beside me I heard a scream, and the weapon went silent, the
Gra Jaai
now writhing on the floor as thermal gel smoked through their battle suits and ate them alive.

“Chameleon skins,” I said. “And cease-fire.”

“What?” Jihoon asked.

“Do it!”

We flicked on our chameleon skins; except for the dead
Gra Jaai
and a slight shimmer where Jihoon and the others stood, the bunker looked empty.

“Now what?” someone whispered.

“Now,” I said, “we wait. Get down and don’t move. Those artillery shells we fired must have been some sort of microbot, one that deactivated Chinese chameleon skins.”

“So?” hissed Jihoon.

“The satos were expecting this. Let’s see what happens next.”

In the silence we heard Chinese armor servos; the motors buzzed to translate heavy feet, which made an odd squishing and clunking noise that got louder as they approached. At fifty meters out, the Chinese switched from grenades to fléchettes, and it wasn’t long before the sound of return fire from the
Gra Jaai
outside died off to nothing so that except for the enemy’s noisy advance, the
battlefield went silent. We waited. Jihoon’s breathing had become shallow and rapid, and the sound made me concentrate on mine, willing it to slow down because panicking wouldn’t do any good. For a while it worked. Then the Chinese began systematically working every possible location where
Gra Jaai
could be hidden, which included our bunker, so that tracers pinged off the far wall to ricochet everywhere, some of them glancing off my chest and helmet. I caught a glimpse of what happened next; I popped my head up for a fraction of a second, catching it when the satos sprang their trap.