Subterrene War 03: Chimera (29 page)

“Relax,” said Jihoon, “it’s me.”

The room was pitch-black, and I probed the concrete floor for my vision hood, attaching the wires to my suit by feel. The infared clicked on. Jihoon and Lucy stood by my bed, and she motioned with her hand to follow so I grabbed my gear and ducked into the narrow tunnel.

In the main passageway, ten
Gra Jaai
waited, equipped with modern combat suits and the cloak and hood that
I’d seen Lucy wear during the fighting. She handed me and Jihoon a set. The others showed us how to wear it and attached the hood with strips of webbing so that it hung on my back out of the way.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“There are two hours until sunrise. These men and women are going on a long-range patrol, and you’ll need thermal protection for your metallic gear if you join them; these cloaks and hoods can withstand very high temperatures and also function as chameleon skins. Our sisters pushed Chinese and Burmese forces back over ten kilometers. Two reserve Chinese battalions were so surprised that they retreated toward Moulmein, thinking that Americans had arrived unnoticed; now is the right time for you to get through the line.”

“What about Margaret and Chen? How will we find them?”

My incoming message light blinked on, and Lucy smiled. “The
Gra Jaai
patrol route is mapped so that much of it heads in the right direction, and you will see when to break off, near the river. I just sent you Chen’s coordinates. Do you need power?”

I nodded, and Lucy handed us both a bandolier, each loop of which had been stuffed with a fuel cell.

“The cloaks are wired to your suit and should synch with the main computer. Activate their chameleon mode the same way you would your armor.”

Lucy spun and walked away then, calling over her shoulder, “Margaret is expecting you, Lieutenant, both of you. Take care to mind your manners; she’s not as forgiving as I am.”

O
ur path took us far south of Nu Poe and into the mountainous jungle where we stayed clear of paths for fear of Burmese traps or electronic surveillance. The
Gra Jaai
escorting us were all Japanese. One of them walked point tens of meters ahead, impossible to see except for the blinking dot on my map that showed me where he and everyone else were. Even if we’d wanted to move fast, we couldn’t have. The jungle was so thick that bushes and leaves slapped into my helmet almost continuously, and in some places they obscured the very ground, so I had to feel my way through, hoping that I wouldn’t step off a cliff or onto a mine. We stopped every few minutes to listen in the darkness, but everything was still as if the jungle was satisfied that to our north so many had died that the blood would eventually reach this far and saturate the clay, feeding it.

Before sunrise our patrol stopped. The
Gra Jaai
flicked off their chameleon skins and arranged themselves in the bushes to pull leaves over their bodies and disappear as if they had transformed into foliage themselves, and one of
them clicked over the radio that we should do the same to conserve fuel cells. I helped Ji and made sure he was hidden before finishing my own camouflage and then lay there. It was pitch-black in my helmet; my anxiety amplified the sounds so a mouse nearby made me think that a Chinese scout was moving in, and I heard my own breathing in the tight space of my helmet. Those were the most horrible moments for me. Blinded by the darkness and, once morning arrived, the layers of green over my face, the only place to retreat was further into my mind, which turned its focus toward Phillip; before I knew it tears had started to form, fogging my goggles so that I prayed for sleep to come quickly.

“Jihoon,” I whispered over the radio.

“What?”

“You asleep?”

“No.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About this,” I said. “About everything so far.”

There was silence as Ji thought. It took so long for him to respond that at first I assumed he’d fallen asleep and I was about to say something when he cleared his throat; his voice shook. “This is way insane, Bug. I think I made a mistake.”

“No, you didn’t. Hang in there. It takes awhile to get used to all this, and it’s your first action.”

“Bullshit. I trained for half my life in the tanks, and it’s not like they didn’t make it seem real. There were even smells. But they have kids on the line. The kids laughed in the bunker, even when the missiles hit us. What the hell is that
about
?”

I wanted to leave my hiding place and shake the crud from his head, but all I could do was whisper, “It’s the satos. They’ve changed things here and to hell with them—Chinese
and
satos. But it’s samba time now, troop, so get some rest and study your map because we’ll be covering a lot of ground tonight. When we find Margaret, I’ll decide what to do with her.”

“You still haven’t really told me why you hate them so much,” he said. “The satos.”

Maybe it was the exhaustion. At first I didn’t want to answer, but as the silence wore on and sleep refused to come, my mental guard slipped, and it wasn’t until it was over that I realized what I’d said.

“The Army chose Thailand as my first area of responsibility, and the bush wars went on for years. Last time I was here, SOCOM decided they wanted to test a new weapons system, and I was to hold off offensive operations until it was deployed with my unit—a battalion of the Royal Army. I loved those guys. The Thais were incredible fighters, really pissed that the Burmese had ever stepped foot in their country, and they had one officer named Major Po who saved my ass. The Burmese ran a snatch and grab and pulled me off the line into the bush one night, and as soon as they took me into Burma, they started torturing me. In the open, right in the jungle. Po came after me. By the time the Thais arrived, I was close to dead, with half my back burned off. Po carried me all the way back.

“I had just recovered and returned to the line when SOCOM’s weapons arrived. It was close to the end of that particular border war, and the brass wanted to get this system in the field before the Thais ended hostilities because Kazakhstan was on the books but hadn’t really
kicked off yet. The weapons were satos. Boys. Winchester plant’s first batch of prototypes and I didn’t know what the fuck to do with them, but they sent another adviser whose job it was to lead those assholes, and you could tell that it wasn’t going to be pretty; the Thais hated them from the start because those kids were just… odd.”

“Boys?” Jihoon asked. “I never knew they produced male Germlines.”

“They didn’t want anyone to know then and don’t want you to know now. On our first operation we pushed into Burma and took one of their villages, which was great because it had been a strong point for Burmese operations in the area, and at first the satos impressed me. They had no fear. Enemy troops freaked out because the kids were so ruthless, and overnight word of the armored devils got out, so we probably could have taken the whole country. I don’t remember the name of that town. But I remember that after we took it, the American adviser told the boys to stand down and they refused, knifed the guy so badly they took his head off, which really sent them into a frenzy where they started killing anyone in sight, including Burmese kids. Including Thais. Major Po and I retreated with what remained of his force, and the satos followed us, attacking all the way so that by the time we got back to the line, it was just me and Po. The satos shot him before he reached the trenches. When I got there I turned around to see a bunch of them dismembering Po with their bare hands.”

I stopped talking. The story had brought with it memories forgotten, and they became so real that I swore I could have reached out and touched Po, his screams echoing in the jungle.

“What happened to them?” asked Jihoon. “To the satos?”

“I called in artillery and ordered the Thais in the trenches to open fire. Then sent a report back to command and never heard another fucking thing. So yeah. I hate freakin’ satos. Later I heard that they tried to use the boys again, early on in Kaz, and the same thing happened so they went with girls from then on.”

Jihoon said something else, but his voice had already started to fade as my eyes fluttered shut with the exhaustion of having trudged through the mountains and now having dredged up the past. It was a mental weight. Pulling out my memories had been like trying to drag myself out of quicksand, so once it was finished all I could
do
was sleep, and that was without telling the whole truth: that Phillip’s father had been part of the team that manufactured them—the same things that killed Po, the same things that I had hunted ever since.

We woke in the late afternoon and flicked on our chameleon skins so we could eat in the open. It was a bizarre sensation—no matter how many times I’d done it. My ration pack floated in midair, held in hands that had become invisible, and I squeezed the thermal capsule to wait for the meal to heat. We’d settled in a dense area so that I couldn’t see Jihoon; the one other visible person in our group was a Japanese
Gra Jaai
who ate under his cloak and hood, lifting fingerfuls of rice to disappear under the shimmer of his chameleon skin. I stuck the feeding tube through the membrane in my helmet and squeezed, finishing the mush before realizing that it had resembled franks and beans even though the label said steak and eggs. Everything tasted like franks and beans.
Whatever they did to process the food and mash it into a state where it could travel through the narrow tube added a flavor to it so that no matter what you ate, it all tasted the same. Or maybe my taste buds had deteriorated. I washed it down with water and wished that I had brought some bourbon with me, wondering if my bottles were still safe back in the bunker complex.

The sun had gotten lower and would soon set. Around us monkeys screamed, and in the jungle the bugs sometimes got so loud that they triggered my speaker safeties, cutting them off in a kind of stutter that soon threatened to make me crazy. And the sounds mesmerized so that at first I tried to count the number of different insects only to realize that the number was infinite and that I’d spent ten minutes in the effort before losing count and having to start over. I’d just begun to try again when it all stopped. You knew if the jungle got that still, that quickly, it meant that something was out there, and I dropped the pack to reach down for my carbine, flicking off the safety as my heart raced. I was about to scoop up my empty rations, to slip the pack into a pouch where it would be hidden, when the leaves next to me parted.

Time stopped. With breathing on hold, my heart pounded so that anyone nearby would have to hear it, and I willed myself not to shake for fear that the carbine, camouflaged now that I held it, would rattle against my armor.

It had to be Chinese. The thing turned the air next to me wavy and buzzed with electric motors that pushed through the shrubs at a creeping pace, which gave me minutes to pray that it wouldn’t collide with me and would keep on going. Instead it stopped. The spent ration pack lifted off the ground for a moment, and I heard a soft
chime followed by a mumbling voice as if someone spoke from deep inside a helmet. From there things got confused. The rations fell to the ground, and another shape crashed through the foliage to land on whatever it was next to me, knocking me down the mountainside into an uncontrollable roll where I grabbed at anything to break my fall. When I stopped, it was quiet again. Above me I heard a thump followed by a hissing and then a shriek that went on for at least thirty seconds before something cut it short. I moved back up the mountain, following the path of plants I had crushed until I stood among the red dots on my map, Jihoon and the others still masked.

In our midst lay an armored wreck, its carapace still smoking from whatever the
Gra Jaai
had done to it and its chameleon skin flickering on and off.

“What is that?” I whispered, and Kristen translated this into Japanese.

“Chinese scout,” someone answered.

Jihoon clicked into my private frequency. “It looks like a big dog. And look at those things on its front, what are they?”

A dog was a good description. The scout’s powered armor was low to the ground and had four widely spaced legs, articulated in two spots with alloy push rods that attached to armored motors. Its head was similar to the ones we’d seen the night before—a hemisphere dotted with glassy ports and short antennae. From its size, the main body looked large enough to hold one of the Chinese genetics along with whatever they needed for battery and food storage, and along the top ran a short Maxwell carbine in a fixed-forward mount. But what Jihoon referred to was something neither of us had seen. Twin blades,
short and square, protruded from the thing’s front and joined with hydraulic lines that pushed them together so that anything in between the blades would be severed clean.

“It has a carbine,” I said, nudging it with a boot to make sure it wouldn’t move. “And those things are mandibles, probably powerful enough to cut through our armor. How’d it die?”

“Thermite grenade,” another
Gra Jaai
said. “I jammed it under the chest plate. Let’s go. There is no time now; we have to move as fast as we can before more arrive.”

It was still light. We weren’t planning to move until darkness, but now the
Gra Jaai
led us in as fast a pace as we could manage in the steep, overgrown terrain. My legs started burning almost immediately;
age,
I thought,
is worse than death.
There was also a new kind of fear that made me think of being chased by wolves because the Chinese scout suits had evoked a sense that they were more animal than human, even though I’d seen an example of their occupants in the morgue. Thinking became difficult. Instinct said to run, and for the moment my heart threatened to pound out of my chest with the adrenaline that kept me going.