Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  “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.

  A half hour later we stopped. The map on my heads-up put us two kilometers inside Burma, and for a brief moment the thought made me want to give up because it looked as though we hadn’t moved. Ahead of us was a river. The Gra Jaai patrol route turned north to follow it, but the coordinates that Lucy had given us planted Margaret’s position almost ten kilometers due west, and the realization that we’d have to split up made me wonder if it was worth it; Jihoon and I would be alone then in the deep jungle. We could give up. For the second time, doubt crept in and made me question the decision to keep going, but I knew there wouldn’t be any going back. I smelled the mission. It was a mating call that the bush relayed from tree to tree and transmitted to the primal parts of my brain, which transformed the operation’s completion into an autonomic need, just as important as breathing.

  We listened to the jungle sounds, w
hich returned a few minutes after we fell silent, and I had to suppress the fact that my stomach wanted to vomit out breakfast. The bugs had become our early warning system. No matter how good your chameleon skin was or how slowly you moved, the insects knew everything and would give the enemy away long before he reached you but only if you stayed still, stayed quiet.

  “We have just over a kilometer to the river,” a Japanese woman said.

  I nodded, catching my breath and wondering what she looked like. “We’ll have to leave you there.”

  “You will need a way to cross the river. This time of year, the current will be strong. And on the far side was an enemy garrison, but our reports indicate they retreated with our counterattack yesterday.”

  “Do you know of any boats in the area?”

  A dot appeared on my map, a kilometer south of where we’d split up at the river. “There is a village,” the woman said. “You’ll probably find a boat there.”

  I waited for the Gra Jaai to decide to move, but instead we waited. In a few minutes the sun would be gone. Around me the jungle darkened so that the million shades of green shifted into black as the shadows took over to send me a message: the bush was glad to have me back. Here I had led Thai actions to murder villagers and soldiers; here were my secrets, the ones I’d learned to keep in my twenties before age had started to erode my mind with doubt and regret, and they laughed at me from the foliage so that when the woman spoke again it made me jump.

  “Why do you need Margaret?”

  “The US wants her to help. They’re sending more soldiers like her to keep the Burmese and Chinese from invading Thailand.” She and some of the other Gra Jaai chuckled at me, and it made me want to punch someone. “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Help?” she asked. “What help do we need? This is a blessing, not a problem. War is our way of life now, and we see the path set down by our ancestors the day our homeland was obliterated. Tokyo had become soft. Delinquent and corrupt. War is the way to reach God, and we honor our ancestors by returning to a way long forgotten by Japan, a way to see beauty and light.”

  “That won’t be possible once the Chinese take over your new home,” I said. “When they tear your children apart with grenades.”

  They laughed again, and the woman had trouble talking, trying to form words around what must have been a tremendous smile. “Our new King has friends, Lieutenant. Nobody wants the Chinese to even exist, and they have other enemies beside Thailand and America. We have allies who will arrive soon, and when they do, the Chinese will meet another angry people who have never forgotten them, not even after hundreds of years.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jihoon asked. He sounded as skeptical as I was, and the sensation that these people were crazy—more insane than satos—made me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just let the Chinese have Bangkok.

  “If you live,” she said. “If you make it to Margaret and return safely, then you will see everything, including that we don’t want or need American help.” The woman clicked off, then came back a minute later. “We move. A patrol three kilometers to our north was just destroyed by Chinese scouts and are now at God’s side.”

  “Are you going back?” I asked. “To Thailand?”

  “No. We push forward and finish the route.”

  “Fuck this,” Jihoon whispered to me. “Her and all the King’s friends.”

  In infrared the mosquitoes and moths looked more like shooting stars as we eased through the brush, and by now we moved downhill, descending from the mountain until we reached the edge of an immense flat clearing filled with rice paddies and low dikes. The Japanese woman led the patrol. She had indicated for us to hold at the clearing’s edge, where we spread out to leave about five meters between us, and it was enough space to make me feel alone, sorry for myself until I saw her marker inch out into the paddies; she’d be exposed, and the woman made no effort to move slowly, jogging as if she wanted to be seen, heading alone into the empty field. I flicked my safety off and got ready.

  The woman reached a spot about three hundred meters away before she froze. At first I wondered if she had bought it because her dot stayed put for almost twenty minutes, at which point streaks of tracer fire broke the darkness in front of me so that I stared through the reticle that had appeared on my heads-up, praying for a target—anything to shoot at and break the tension. She shouted on her way back to us, the dot moving so fast it occurred to me that she could have been an Olympic sprinter.

  “Five scouts,” the woman screamed. “Get ready!”

  A hand grabbed my shoulder, and I nearly opened fire. “Don’t shoot,” someone said. “Hold and we’ll handle them.” The guy moved off in the direction of Jihoon, and I struggled to keep my finger from squeezing the trigger.

  The woman was almost to us, and when she got into range, my vision kit’s motion and shape detection outlined her and at least three other figures approaching fast, otherwise invisible on infrared except for a faint gray smear and the firing of their Maxwell carbines. The things chasing her were close to the ground. At first it looked like the Chinese scouts would get close enough to pounce before she could reach us, but finally the woman put on a burst of speed that carried her back to the edge of the paddy, while just behind her the splashes in the paddy water stopped when the scouts leaped. Gra Jaai flame units opened fire. Beams of white leaped from the line to swallow the Chinese in midair, where they twisted through the leaves before crashing into the jungle behind us so the Gra Jaai followed them, pumping several bursts at the scouts as they ran. The Chinese thrashed into the brush, trying to get away before the burning metallic fuel damaged their systems to the point where all of them fell still.

  “That’s three,” someone said.

  The Japanese woman was out of breath while she whispered over the open frequency. “Stay still. Two more are out there, and there may be others I didn’t see.”

  “Can they see us?” asked Jihoon.

  I clicked into his private frequency. “We don’t know all their systems yet. Assume they can detect movement and shapes unless you stay absolutely still or move very, very slowly. And only use burst transmission, but stay off the air unless it’s an emergency. They might have direction finding.”

  Our group stayed put for over half an hour. After that, a chorus of frogs erupted from the paddies, their croaking a source of comfort because like the insects the fact that they made any noise at all meant that the animals hadn’t detected either us or the Chinese, and with each splash the frogs made, I had to hold my breath in an effort to keep from moving. At first the thought of the scouts terrified me. This wasn’t like the satos, who I knew and were a familiar enemy; these were the unknown, and a sensation of being stalked by some kind of monster made me wish I was back on the line where at least there was a measure of safety. Not doing anything was the worst for someone like me, inaction eating at my mind the same way waiting for a mission did until I’d had enough.

  “I’m going out there,” I said. “Someone give me a flame unit.”

  The woman clicked in. “Are you sure? You’re not one of us.” She said the last part as if the woman was sorry for me.

  “Just give it to me.” Ten minutes later one of the Gra Jaai crawled up slowly, inching his way to my side where he slid my cloak and hood off, then helped me detach my ammunition hopper and set my carbine to the side.

  The flame unit was a backpack frame with three cylindrical tanks attached to a flexible ceramic hose and tubular firing section, and I had to wriggle into the thing’s harness so slowly that my muscles cramped and began to tremble. When it was on it felt heavy, pushing me into the mud near the paddies. I waited until the guy helped me put my cloak and hood back on and was shocked to find that almost forty-five minutes had passed and that it wasn’t a guy who had been helping me, it was the patrol’s leader.

  “These average four to five long bursts before running empty,” she said, “and this one is half-full. You will probably
die.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The Chinese are worse than you because the Chinese have no souls, no honor.”

  “And I do?” I asked.

  She laughed and began tightening the flame unit’s belt around my waist. “I see why Lucy likes you. Why Margaret agreed to see you.”

  “What are you talking about? Have you spoken with Margaret?”

  “I am in constant communication with her. She monitors all patrols, even when on one of her own. Margaret is deeper inside Burma than any of us have been, and you raise our opinion of Americans by going after her. To kill her.”

  The fact that she had it all wrong confused me, and it took a moment to collect my thoughts. Why would it make her happy that someone was going to kill her? “I’m not going to kill her; I’m just going to find her and deliver a message, maybe ask a few questions, and that’s it.”

  “Then you,” the woman said, “don’t understand us at all.” She made one last adjustment to my belt, and one of the dots closest to me on the heads-up display map blinked. “You will move out now with Hiroshi, who will advance on your right flank. Good luck. The last place I saw them was from a position about three hundred meters out, and they were at the far edge of the clearing moving toward us. It’s best to go fast and get it over with, just draw them out so we can keep moving toward the river. If you run out of fuel”—the woman slid a thermite grenade into my harness—“use one of these as a last resort. It’s best done by jumping them from behind, arming the grenade, and then jamming it into the space between their chest or back armor and leg joints. If you can find them.”