Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1

by T. C. McCarthy

  This time around, the Pavlodar line reminded me of that, of Aktau and the hotel, a forgotten land, disconnected from the world and isolated, left on its own to mutate into whatever it chose. The tunnel Bridgette and I moved into was part of the Marines’ sector, and men sat on crates or lounged on the tunnel floor amid meter-high piles of ration packs, spent hoppers, and broken equipment. They had given up on pumping suit waste into wall ports. Human filth caked their legs where it had fallen from their dump valves, and piles of it collected on the floor. This wasn’t the Pavlodar I had left.

  A captain greeted us, his accent foreign, but at the time it didn’t seem strange; plenty of foreigners fought with us, hoping for American citizenship. “Welcome to Pavlodar!” he said.

  I let the Gs do their thing and went to talk to a sergeant.

  “Top, what outfit is this?”

  He looked up, barely moving. “First Battalion, Third Marine.”

  “Where’s First Marine?”

  “Other side of the city, about three or four klicks west. Who are you?”

  “He’s not a friggin’ G,” another one said. “That’s good.”

  I slumped against the wall and popped my lid. Needed it bad. I grabbed my tin, packed it, and scooped a massive pinch before noticing that my teeth had begun to hurt. Who cared? Soon I wouldn’t feel anything.

  “Scout, civilian reporter with Stripes.”

  “Oh man,” the sergeant said. Suddenly he was awake, animated. “You should have been here yesterday, we pushed and got our asses kicked, didn’t even have time to blow our tunnels, just plugged ’em. I lost half my guys, woulda made some story.”

  I looked where he pointed. A huge circular alloy plug had been sealed into the north wall, blocking what had once been an attack tunnel, and was the only thing between us and an empty passage—one that ran straight to the Russians.

  “When did you guys lose coms?” I asked.

  The sergeant and his men looked at each other like I was crazy. “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s why the Gs are here, said they lost communication with Third Marine a few days ago. There’s an entire division of genetics spreading out across the lines right now.”

  “Man, that’s off,” said the sergeant. “I don’t know who told you that but we’ve been in communication the whole time. I was just back at Battalion yesterday, all normal. Either someone got it backwards, or that’s just a story they told the Gs. What’re they like?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The Gs. You came in with ’em?”

  I nodded. The zip had kicked in by then and I grinned like a madman. “Wild.”

  If I hadn’t been wired to the gills, I might have been able to figure out that everything was wrong. Didn’t fit. But I didn’t care anymore; I was back in subterrene, rock walls on every side so that nothing could hurt me.

  Dan Wodzinski. Greatest reporter who ever lived. He blew a head vein when he found out that I’d got the nod for subterrene, for the line, and he didn’t try to hide it. We got piss drunk in the hotel, the bartender shaking his head until he left the bottle so he wouldn’t have to keep pouring. Dan had covered the Syrian Campaign back in ’45. He went in with the Special Forces when they first inserted behind the lines, and was practically a movie star, the Supreme Chancellor of the Press Corps, the one we all wanted to be. We hated and loved him at the same time, because he knew he was good but was so damn generous with his experiences—handed them out like candy to anyone who wanted a taste. That made it worse. It would have been easier to handle him if he had been good and a total prick, but because he was gracious about it, everyone assumed that he was a world-class jerk-off, not your garden variety.

  “You goddamn rube!” he said. “Man, I can’t believe you got the nod, serves me right for going freelance, no machine to bribe the right people anymore.”

  “Are you insinuating that I had to buy my way to the line?”

  “Yep. You couldn’t write your way out of a bad romance novel. No way. You could eat my ’puter, and you still wouldn’t be able to shit a sentence as good as my worst.”

  He got all serious then. Stared off in the distance, same look I saw on that Special Forces guy on the road—somewhere else, in a different world, channeling demons and ghosts.

  “It’ll end badly,” he said.

  “Don’t give me that crap. I don’t want to hear it.”

  He shook his head. “Nah, not you. You’ll be fine, go get some. I’m talking about the war. Even if we win, it’ll end badly.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The genetics. We played with nature and soon we’ll get it shoved in our faces, rammed into our bungholes whether we like it or not.”

  He must have seen the confusion on my face, read it.

  “How long do you think it’ll be before Popov makes his own genetics?” Dan asked.

  I didn’t know how even to start answering that one.

  That was a long time ago, but when I woke up in the tunnel, I remembered it. Bridgette had found me slumped over, and I had forgotten to take out my zip before passing out. Luckily, I had taken off my helmet. A puddle of puke had dried around my head, and as soon as I sat up, I dry heaved, and the tunnel wouldn’t stop spinning. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the edge was still off, everything smooth, and I did my best to wipe my face with an empty ration pack.

  “You are ill,” she said.

  “Nah, I’m OK.”

  “We attack soon.” She pointed to the tunnel plug and I saw a team of sappers working plasma torches, cutting through while a forklift waited to catch it. “I thought you might want to come, to share.”

  I kissed her. She was real close to me, and her breath was incredible, feminine. It had been a long time, and I was so gone that I just did it without thinking, not considering that maybe she didn’t want to kiss someone who had just puked. But she kissed me back. And when it was over, she smiled.

  “I will miss you, Scout.”

  Bridgette stood and hesitated before leaving. “Remember me. It will be nice to leave this place and know that we will be remembered.”

  “Yeah. I won’t forget, kid.”

  When the plug fell out with a clang, Bridgette moved into the tunnel with the others and it screwed with me. I didn’t want her to go.

  The fact was that although I didn’t see it, the downward slide had begun long before, a transformation in which the human part of me had begun to dissolve to be replaced by a hybrid thing, part earth and part war, a shift that was clear only in retrospect, maybe looking back when you hit sixty years old. Bridgette reminded me of the old Oscar—before Kaz. She had a light in her face that said nothing about what she had been designed to do, because it was the glow of someone young who still had things to experience, the same things I had taken for granted or forgotten, and her presence reminded me of them. Bridgette made you forget where you were.

  “Get some,” the sergeant said.

  “Huh?”

  “I can’t believe you’d even touch one of those things. Gs and reporters screwing. Now I’ve seen it all.”

  It finally started to break through then, that something wasn’t right. These weren’t the Marines I remembered; they were nothing like Ox, and I wished he was there, actually missed Burger and Snyder too, wanted their corpses to show up and keep me from having to look at the sergeant.

  I stood and moved toward the attack tunnel, slipping on my hood to see in the darkness. Screw the Maxwell, I thought. It was too heavy.

  The captain stood near the tunnel entrance and nodded at me.

  “Welcome to Pavlodar!” he said again. “No weapon?”

  “Nah—I’m a reporter, with Stripes.”

  “I haven’t heard of this,” he said.

  “You haven’t heard of Stars and Stripes?” I asked. It was all wrong, and even through the zip, it started to tingle, the pucker starting early. “Where are you from?”

  “Poland. I joined up last year so
I could get my citizenship.”

  I had to get out of there. It was too amped up, even for me, and there wasn’t anything in particular that got me on edge; it was more a feeling that somewhere in my subconscious an internal computer had crunched the numbers while I wasn’t looking and now sent me a message that it couldn’t divide by zero. The girls had vanished into the tunnel, but I thought if I walked after them, I might get to the Russian lines in time to see it. To get some, or at least get away from the captain.

  That’s when the shit started.

  “You can’t go there,” he said. The guy was grinning and it occurred to me that he was too young. Like a teenager. The vision hood had concealed it from a distance, but now that he was close, it was obvious and crazy. He grabbed my arm with one hand and nearly broke my wrist in a grip so strong it was like nothing I had felt before; then he lifted a carbine with his free hand.

  The others never had a chance. Fléchettes ripped through the Marines, cutting some of them in half, and none of them even got to return fire; they weren’t ready. A couple started running toward the exit tunnel, and the captain let go of me so he could steady his aim and cut them down.

  It was slow. A plasma torch lay on the floor and I grabbed it, no clue how to turn it on, but guessing it involved the red button on its side, and while I fumbled, he aimed at the running Marines carefully. I heard the shots, like a spray bottle.

  The plasma torch hissed, nearly cutting my fingers off, and I saw the captain smile again as he swung the carbine toward the noise. He didn’t even scream. The torch cut through his midsection. It cauterized everything, so there was no blood, but his two halves glared white on my infrared and then slowly faded as they cooled. He coughed once before the tunnel went quiet.

  Dan’s words ran through my head again. How long do you think it’ll be before Popov makes his own genetics?

  I was so dead and knew it, but for some reason I ran after her, into the tunnel, when every part of me screamed, Run the other way.

  They were way ahead. I sprinted for as long as I could, then stopped to button on my lid before hitting it again. Pops must have been jamming us. Static filled my coms, and with relays I should have been reading the Gs clear, even from the far end of the tunnel, but the girls didn’t click in until I’d moved almost a kilometer. The static cleared, replaced by her voice, but then again, all of them had her voice.

  “There will be a moment of reckoning,” one of them said, “and He will look down and judge, not our thoughts or words but our actions. Eternal life for the warrior, certain death for our enemies.”

  They all chanted then, low and reverent. “We were made in their image and we will die for their salvation.”

  The girls were somewhere up ahead. I heard one’s voice echo through the tunnel when she yelled, “Fire, fire, fire,” and then I saw them, crouching, stiff and tight with weapons pointed downrange. Not the ones I had kissed back at the train; these were different organisms, made of bone and ceramic that had been stitched tight so that when they blew the next tunnel plug, the group filed through a narrow gap, into Popov’s burrow, not even hesitating.

  “Bridgette!”

  One at the rear turned and straightened.

  “It’s a trap!”

  The gas bloom flashed, so brightly that even though I didn’t hear or feel it, its glare forced liquid crystals in my goggles to align—to frost over and keep me from getting flash burns. Plasma illuminated everything, like a tiny sun. The realization hit me at the same time the pressure wave did: the Russians had used artillery underground, probably manned by Popov’s Gs, and I wouldn’t feel a thing.

  By the time the overpressure hit, my goggles still hadn’t cleared, so I felt only the sensation of being lifted off my feet. Then something collided with me. Finally my goggles went transparent again, and I saw the tunnel walls whiz by, another body floating next to mine until we both hit the floor, sliding for a hundred feet.

  Her helmet had shattered and blood came from both nostrils, but she blinked. Alive.

  “Bridgette?”

  She nodded. “What happened?”

  “Popov has genetics. One of them infiltrated back in the tunnels, the captain. This whole thing was a trap. Pops cut off coms and arranged it so Third Marine thought they were communicating with the rear. They wanted you guys to come.”

  Bridgette blinked, then sat up. “I have to go back. My sisters.”

  “Are you nuts? You’re the only one left.”

  “It is not a choice,” she said. “I am at the end; it is time.”

  “Screw that.” I grabbed her wrist and pulled, putting her arm around my shoulders until she got steady. When I started leading her toward the rear, I had a guess why I did it—why I wanted to save her. The zip was out, gone for now, so everything was clear and made me realize that I didn’t have many friends. Not among the living. This wasn’t about my attraction to her. I didn’t care if she was a G or a dog; I couldn’t take any more, at least not now, didn’t want to inherit another ghost.

  The Russians shouted from behind us. “Pobieda!”

  “I’ll die anyway,” said Bridgette, matter-of-factly. “As soon as we return to Shymkent, it will be over for me. Discharged. There’s no difference.”

  “There is to me,” I said. “We can get you out. Down to Bandar. From there you can go to Sri Lanka, Argentina, anywhere.”

  We heard footsteps from the Russian lines and I saw her think, some cold calculus of war ticking through a machinelike brain.

  “You,” said Bridgette, “are too slow.”

  She slung her carbine and grabbed my arm, and at the same time Bridgette started dragging me like a sack, I thought, Man, she is mad hot. Exotic. Even with Pops on our ass, she was still beautiful enough to take my mind off everything else.

  Or maybe my mind was gone.

  You couldn’t get a sense of how empty the steppes were until you saw them from the ground, alone and in the open. We had cruised through Pavlodar’s ruins and stopped at the south side on a small hill, and when I looked out over the emptiness, it nearly made me cry. Snow covered the grasslands in a dirty gray layer, stretching toward a horizon that was a slightly darker gray. It was the first I had seen infinite. Somewhere out there lived Burger and Snyder, prowling and searching for me with all the time in the world, not wanting me to rest or forget that I was almost ready to hang out with them, if only I’d die and get it over with.

  There was no thought of stories or Pultizers anymore; everything had been distilled down to three needs: to move south, to stay low, and to get wired up. Aboveground, you spent most of your time trying to ignore the facts that you had a bull’s-eye painted on your back and that attack could come from any direction, anytime; aboveground, you spent all your time wishing for the underground, for fungus and waste that signaled a kind of safety only moles and Marines really understood. It was the second time I’d felt it—the sensation that I was horribly exposed and that somewhere overhead were Russian eyes that bored into my soul because I had become so obvious, outlined against a backdrop of snow.

  We heard the sound of engines and dropped facedown into a shallow depression. Marine APCs roared from underground hangars and sped southward, their turbines whining as they bounced over the broken terrain like eight-wheeled beetles. Behind the APCs, swarms of Marines ran from the exits and filled the steppes as they sprinted after them, trying to keep up.

  “It is still winter,” said Bridgette.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “In 1942 the Germans invaded Russia and were forced to retreat. It was winter then, and many Germans died from the cold, and so will those men, the Marines. Let’s move. The clouds are low and for now we won’t have to worry about aircraft.”

  From behind us I heard the thumping of big guns, followed by the blasts of plasma over the lines we had just vacated. I didn’t need more convincing, and we pushed through the snow.

  “You’re full of good thoughts, huh?” I asked.

  “
I do not understand.”

  “That story about 1942. It’s depressing.”

  She cocked her head, but I saw her face now through her broken helmet. It had that scrunched-up look of I-don’t-get-it. “It just… is. It is fact. We will have a hard time moving through this snow, over twelve hundred kilometers to Shymkent. One can assume that Popov will follow, and I would imagine that by now our rear forces are dismantling artillery for retrograde. There is no depression. Just fact and necessity.” Bridgette looked up at the clouds and then at me. “What is the temperature?”

  I checked my heads-up display. “Zero F.”

  “It will snow soon. We need to find shelter.”

  The static had returned on my headset and I tried switching channels but couldn’t get anything. “We’re still being jammed.”

  Bridgette just nodded and smiled. Way cool.

  I’d had a breakdown back in D.C. Kept it quiet and just sort of disappeared for a while after calling in sick. Ten days. I curled up in my apartment and cried, positive that if I moved, something bad would happen, that they’d come and get me—who wasn’t exactly clear, but they would, I was sure—as payback for all the mistakes I had made, people I had screwed. It went away on its own. Thirty pounds lighter and somewhat dirtier than before, I got up and barely made it to the shower, where I passed out. So I’ve always had crazy in me, mostly dormant.

  After that episode, I started seeing a shrink out in Bethesda—didn’t want to, had to. What did you do when you didn’t trust your own mind? I expected it to ambush me—grab me in the middle of an interview, turn me into a blabbering schizo, and make me rip my clothes off to run down the street naked. The shrink said Kaz was a bad idea.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Look at your past. Rock climbing. High-risk sexual liaisons. Drugs, and not just pills; I’m talking intravenous. Drinking to the point of self-destruction. Oscar, Kazakhstan is just another way to put yourself in harm’s way so that you won’t have to kill yourself; someone else can do it for you. I think you should reconsider and think about treatment at a facility.”