Subterrene War 03: Chimera (34 page)

I looked away; one eye had swollen shut, and it hurt more than my shoulders, the cheekbone throbbing so badly that I wondered if it would heal. “When did I lie?”

“When you said you didn’t believe in God. Lucy told me you said she would go to heaven. So either you lied to her or you lied to me.”

“She believes in God. You do too. I don’t know what to believe, but if there is a God, I think you’ll go to heaven.”

“Why?”

“Time,” I explained. “I hunted your sisters, and they rotted from the inside out, machines designed for obsolescence within two years of being fielded, but not you. You overcame the safeguards. I don’t know what difference it makes, but now that you’ve spent so much time living, you seem different. Real.”

Margaret grinned and rested the candle on the floor again, waiting for melted wax to harden around its base. “How long have you been at war?”

“Since I was a teenager. Almost twenty years now, so it’s all I know.”

“I,” said Margaret, “have less than half of your experience, and it makes me jealous. You’re not like the ones who tried before; those men begged for mercy and swore that they weren’t here to kill me. Do you want to kill me?”

I nodded. “Yes. But they won’t let me.”

“And why aren’t you begging?”

I rubbed my face on the rock floor, trying to scratch an itch that wouldn’t stop. “I’ve been tortured before and begging never helps.”

“We thought you had because we saw your back when we hung you. You’re an interesting man, Lieutenant, and I want you to do me a favor.” She slid closer, and in the candlelight I saw half of her face, as if the other had been eaten by shadows. “Soon I’ll be gone. My sisters won’t know what to do. They are great warriors, some like Lucy may even be better at killing than me, but they have no vision. I need you to teach them.”

“Teach them what?” I asked. I sensed myself fading
out of consciousness and fought to stay awake; Margaret, I’d decided, was insane.

“Teach them everything; tell them the truth. You’ll know it the same way you knew to come here, to accomplish your mission. Get some sleep, Lieutenant. Tonight we’ll use you and your partner as bait because we want to kill more Chinese, and it will be an experience for you. The closest thing you’ll feel to being broken and hunted, just like the girls you killed for so long.”

The night’s heat was almost unbearable. Since Bangkok we’d been pampered by the suits’ climate control and now we knelt in the open, outside the temple, wearing undersuits so that the moist jungle air soaked into them and the garments did nothing to protect us from insects. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ears, and Jihoon knelt beside me in the same position, with both hands wired behind his back and tied to a post in the ground. Ants bit at my feet but moving them made it worse, and I glanced around in the darkness, trying to see something, but a distant moon cast more shadows than it did light.

“They beat the crap out of me,” Ji said.

“I know. They beat me too.”

He hung his head, his voice a mumble. “They didn’t even ask any questions, Bug. They just kept whacking the bottoms of my feet with a wooden baton and then waited for me to recover before starting again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk again.”

“Don’t think about it,” I said. “It’s just pain, and as long as it’s there you’re alive. Remember your training.”

“Training was bullshit. I want out. I wanna go home.”

Jihoon leaned forward against the rope and started sobbing. It happened this way sometimes, and the more they threw into the tanks the worse it was likely to get because this was a new product—maybe the first time Jihoon’s kind had been tested in a bush war, heading straight for operations over their heads. Someone had been too confident. It wasn’t that Ji couldn’t have hacked it; the problem was in the way you immersed new operators. My first missions had been as part of large teams where there was plenty of responsibility to go around and didn’t involve heading deep into Burmese territory to face the horrors of advanced genetic research. They’d given him too much, too soon.

“You’re a weapon,” I said. “Get your shit together.”

“What?” he asked.

“You are a weapon, made of bone and brains. Whining isn’t going to get us out of this mess, Chong, so you’d better get unscrewed right now, or I’ll break out just so I can come over there and snap your gook neck. You’re a killer. Act like one.”

Ji chuckled and shook his head. “You are such an asshole. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Yeah. Bea did all the time. She’d really like you; look her up after you get back to the States.”

When the insects stopped whining, I froze; neither of us said a word. An indescribable hum filled the air until it threatened to deafen me, but it came from inside, a kind of tightening of my stomach to the point where everything overloaded with the surge of adrenaline that coursed through my blood and into my head. Death had stepped into the clearing. I searched the darkness and urged my eyes to develop their own infrared so I’d at least see whatever it
was that had arrived, but nothing materialized, and it was a logical next step to say a silent prayer that Margaret’s girls were as good as everyone said.

It didn’t matter if we moved or stayed still, spoke or remained silent, because without suits and chameleon skins our thermal signature would stand out like a flaming beacon. Besides—from his breathing it sounded as though Jihoon was about to start screaming and that would drive me mad.

“I’m not sure I can ever go home again,” I said.

Ji just looked at me, his eyes so wide that they almost glowed white. “What?”

“Home. I don’t think I can go back. And I can’t stay in the Army.”

“Why not? You’re an officer now; you’ve got a couple of good years left.”

“Nah.” I shook my head. “I’ve hit twenty years, and now it’s time to bail. And I didn’t want to say anything, but there were a couple of times over the last few days that my knees almost gave out. I’m spent. And if I go back to the States I’ll firebomb the BAI or something; it just doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

“Jesus, Bug, you should have said something to someone; with genetic therapy you can get whole new knees, the knees of an athlete if you want. Just put in for the procedure.”

“There is no way in hell, Chong, that anyone is going to mess with my genetic makeup, especially not the Army. Not a chance in hell. Who knows what they’d put into me?”

“Then what’ll you do?” he asked. He was whispering, as if being quiet would make a difference, but I didn’t
want to explain the reality of our situation so I let him continue. “Where will you go?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ve only been good at one thing: killing. It’s all I ever wanted to do.”

Ji didn’t say anything, and for a moment I thought that I saw a flicker of movement from the corner of my left eye, the one that worked. There was no use looking to see what was out there. If it was a scout, the thing would be invisible, and either the satos would get it before we died or not.

“Did you wipe all those villagers?” Jihoon asked. “The ones who chased after us in canoes?”

“Yeah. And before you ask me how, there isn’t any explanation. I just did it. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t even bother me, and when my fléchettes chewed into the Burmese boy, he reminded me of Phillip, but it didn’t make any difference. He
had
to go. I miss Phillip more than ever. But I don’t miss that boy and will probably never think twice about it or lose any sleep.”

“But I don’t get it, Bug. If you can’t answer how, what about
why
?”

There was definitely movement now, coming into my field of view as something circled about fifteen meters away; soon it would attack and at least talking helped keep my mind off it.

“Because I’ve been doing stuff like that for twenty years, so why stop now? So I found out I have a conscience, that I care about Phillip; so what? It’s a little late for remorse. And those bastards could have reported our last known position to the Chinese. So fuck ’em, Chong. That’s
why.
I don’t get selected for ops because I’m good at handing out cigarettes and chewing gum. If you ever make it higher, get to the point where you select people
for missions, you’ll have to learn to
like
guys who operate the way I do.”

“To tell you the truth,” Ji said, “if I had to choose someone to go on such a screwed-up op with, I’d have picked you. Because you’re so freakin’ scary. You’re just like the satos, Bug, but sometimes I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

The Chinese scout gave up on stealth when it bounded over the clearing so we heard the heavy footsteps as it pounded clay. A moment later there was a flash. The bright light overloaded my retina and forced my good eye shut at the same time a wave of heat washed over me, but there was no place to hide, and it seared my face. I yelled in pain. The scout crashed into the dirt and rock between us and thrashed there, its metal spitting as parts of it melted to send droplets against my skin.

By the time I opened my eyes, Margaret had materialized, and the rest of her group stood around her, looking at us. She smiled and slung her carbine.

“Leave them here for the moment,” she said. “We may attract more Chinese this way.”

“I’ll kill you,” I hissed. Whatever respect or awe had existed the day before now extinguished with the realization that I’d been fooled; there was nothing special about her. She was the example of why it was so important to wipe out all the satos, and I’d been wrong to let myself go soft with Lucy and the others at Nu Poe. “Untie me and I’ll kill you now.”

The other girls looked stunned, and I suspected that the words held a special meaning for them; maybe nobody had ever spoken to Margaret that way. She shook her head.

“Not yet, Lieutenant.”

One of the girls cleared her throat. “Mother, he called you out, and you’ve never turned one down.”

“This one isn’t ready,” said Margaret. “And I want him at his best.”

They left us then, disappearing with a shimmer as they moved out. At least for a little while, the glow of molten metal made it so Jihoon and I could see for once, but that too faded until neither of us could see a thing.

By the time morning arrived, the satos had wiped two more scouts, and my skin screamed that half of it had been burned off from either proximity to the flame units or from having bits of molten metal splashed onto it. I fell asleep on my side. When one of the satos woke me to drag me back toward the temple, I realized that my pain wasn’t all from being burned, but that during the night I’d passed out on my side from exhaustion, allowing the ants to cover me and feed. The girls brushed the insects off and let us jump up and down, but Jihoon couldn’t stand. His feet looked about twice the size as normal, their bottoms bruised and cracked from beatings. Finally, the satos tossed us into our cells and locked the doors.

Once I was alone I started crying; it didn’t make any sense. We’d come all this way only to have the jungle betray us, and I wondered if the satos back at Nu Poe had let us live just so Margaret could have the fun of torturing Ji and me for a few days. It had all been a waste of time. Despite the sweltering heat, the room’s stone floor was cold and I tried to press my bad eye against it to help reduce the swelling. The exhaustion and pain combined
to overwhelm me; within a few seconds I passed out again, which was a welcome relief from reality.

Margaret shook me awake, and I had no idea how much time had elapsed. There were no windows in the cell, but she had her candle to alleviate the darkness.

“It’s a life with great purpose,” she said, “killing the Burmese and Chinese. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

“I don’t see any purpose except for sport.”

Margaret pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and I almost drooled. She placed one between my lips and lit it so I could breathe and let the nicotine wash over receptors that had been screaming for it for days, calming as soon as the drug hit them. Even the pains from hunger and lack of water vanished.

“It
is
a sport. Those who win get to shape the world. The Chinese are a scourge and have no concept of God, and you have no right to decide whether we’re right or wrong in our determination. We’ve spoken to them. Captured them and interrogated them. The Chinese have no concept of what it’s like to live outside their armor; their metal frames are to them as limbs are to us, and their ceramic is their skin. So why did I call them human? I lied. They are animals, and the scouts we trapped using you and your partner are searching for something, scouring the jungle for indications of a thing the Chinese want very badly, and I wonder if you’re too stupid to realize what that thing is.”

I gripped the cigarette between my lips, wanting it to last forever and scared that it might drop if I spoke. I clenched it between my teeth and mumbled, my voice a dry croak.

“You have an advantage; I haven’t had the chance to interrogate one.”

“The Chinese thought it would be easy to walk through our defensive line; they don’t even consider Germline units a threat because to them we’re inferior. Obsolete. They want Thai resources—metallic and genetic. When they take a country, they absorb its occupants for experimentation, looking for new and advantageous traits that they can insert into future production models. Eventually they will cover the world with one race, half-machine, half-synthetic man. But there’s a problem, and it’s called Sunshine.”