“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.
“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 systematica
lly 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.
Several explosions ripped upward through no-man’s-land. The blasts threw fallen trees into the air along with multiple Chinese, the rest of whom stopped to survey the damage, and from my vantage point you could almost sense the confusion the detonations had caused. Then meter-wide circular turrets rose from the ground. The turrets had been spaced along the strip of cleared ground, from our trenches to the jungle below, and I realized that the explosions hadn’t been mines intended to kill the enemy, but had instead been planted deliberately to remove debris and clear the way for the turrets to pop from deep underground. A long pipelike apparatus jutted from the turrets’ tops, which spun slowly, each one fixing on a target.
The Chinese closest to us faced the new threat and began firing, pelting the turrets with grenades. Still nothing happened. Finally, the pipes sprayed fluid to coat the enemy, and although I couldn’t see him next to me, Orcola must have also raised his head to look out.
“What are they doing?” he asked.
“Hell if I know. It looks like—”
The roar of flame interrupted me, and its brightness overloaded infrared so my vision kit shifted to visible light, after which I saw the turrets jetting white-hot flames. I wondered what good it would do. The Chinese armor would have been resistant to elevated temperatures—like ours—but when the flames enveloped their targets, they burst into bright spots of light, followed by a second round of sparks that were so bright my goggles frosted over for protection. Even from that distance you felt the heat. It baked my helmet and radiated through the hood onto my face, and the suit’s temperature indicator climbed until I realized that I needed to duck again.
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 20