Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1

by T. C. McCarthy

  “What’s going on?”

  “We got about two hundred thousand inbound infantry, ten thousand vehicle targets, and an unknown number of air contacts. They’re all headed this way.”

  “From the north?”

  He sounded astonished, like I could be so stupid. “From every direction, dumb-ass.” He dropped into his vehicle and shut the hatch.

  “I don’t want this,” the kid repeated.

  “Nobody wants it. It just is.”

  The elevators had already gone down by the time we worked our way through the main entry ramp, weaving through a sea of men whose faces—if we could have seen them—would have been a portrait of everything I felt. How could I have been so crazy, to wish for the attack to happen? Already I missed the hunger and boredom, cursing myself for having been even more stupid than the tanker had thought, for not having enjoyed the past few weeks for what they’d meant: that we were alive. Finally the elevators came and we waited for the soldiers to disembark before pushing our way on.

  When we got to the command post, it was almost empty, manned only by a few men in orange coveralls who monitored seismic stations.

  “They coming underground?” I asked.

  One shook his head. “We’re tracking a group of hits that might be borers, but their tunneling ETA is something like two days out. Plenty of time. Topside is another story.”

  “Where’s General Urqhart?”

  “Airfield.”

  The kid and I had popped our lids, and looked at each other before putting them back on, retracing our steps to the elevators. This time, it was going to be nearly impossible to move aboveground.

  Topside, the rubble fields lit up with Russian plasma, and it was the closest I had been without being under some kind of cover, without closing my eyes and hiding from the full spectacle of its destructive power. Shells actually came in slowly enough that you could see them. Plasma rounds arced overhead as bright streaks that smeared upon impact before expanding into huge inverted bowls of bright light, like jellyfish that appeared out of nowhere and then vanished almost as quickly as they came. It took me a moment to hear the screams. Then I realized that the kid was screaming and that we had frozen there, like idiots, exposed and protected only by the walls of the entry ramp. I grabbed him and we moved out.

  There were no trenches traversing the city, and it would have been smarter to go back down and take the long way, moving from tunnel to tunnel and circumnavigating the city underground, but I couldn’t stomach the thought. Anything could happen during the time it would take. By the time we popped up near the airfield, Pops might have already overrun, and we’d be dead the moment we stepped into air.

  “Keep moving,” I said to the kid, half dragging him from rubble pile to rubble pile. “Move it!”

  “This is total bullshit.”

  “Think of it as a party.”

  I barely heard him when a plasma round impacted nearby, but the kid said something like “You’re a nut job,” and I laughed.

  “Why do we have to find the general?” he asked.

  That stopped me. It took me a second to figure it out, and when I did, it wasn’t clear if the answer made any sense, but it was the only one I had.

  “I don’t know. Something tells me we have to find him.”

  To the kid’s credit, it was enough. He followed me now, so I didn’t have to pull him along, and we dove under blocks of concrete whenever the scream of shells came too close, waiting for the heat to wash over us and remind us that soon we’d belong to Popov. Without a working chronometer, I had no idea of the time. But eventually we made it to the western perimeter of the airfield, just as the sun had begun to turn the sky pink, and I slid into a trench, grabbing the first guy I saw.

  “Where’s the general?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “General Urqhart, where is he?”

  The guy didn’t look at me but raised his arm slowly, eventually pointing at an underground entry ramp about a hundred meters east of our position. The ground was completely open. I gave the kid the thumbs-up, and we leapt from the hole at the same instant a plasma round landed in it. My only thoughts were realizations that I had suddenly become airborne and that I had been there before, a long time ago, when I’d first met Bridgette. I landed in the open. It took a moment to get my bearings and regain my wind, but when I finally did, I saw the kid next to me, pulling the remains of his helmet from his head, his hair singed off and eyebrows gone.

  “Am I OK?” he asked.

  “Yeah. No hair, though.”

  “What about my face, is it burned?”

  I heard the panic in his voice and I wanted to joke about it but decided he might lose it completely if I did. “No, kid. You’re fine.”

  We made it to the ramp in less than a minute and dove down, rolling to the bottom before allowing ourselves to breathe.

  Russian forces had broken through to the south. The general grinned at me from his chair as he typed commands into a keypad or barked orders into his headset, and he looked like a gnome in green armor, the vision hood lending him a kind of ancient-aviator appearance. The whole scene seemed out of place. I’d never seen him this happy. Now that there was fighting to do, the old man I remembered was back, and he chewed so hard on his cigar that the end fell from his mouth, severed.

  “Oscar, you dirty bastard, got any weed?”

  “No, sir. I quit.”

  He paused to yell into his headset before responding. “Well, ain’t that the shit. Good for you. Best thing that could have happened—well, almost the best thing; I’ve got something better.”

  “What, General?”

  “You want to get out of here? Go to Tashkent and link up with the last of our retreating units before they head for Bandar?”

  I didn’t know what to say. The general’s grin went even wider when he saw the look on my face; he snapped his fingers twice, and an Air Force sergeant appeared from nowhere. Neither of them could have known how the question twisted me. I felt my knees begin to tremble, and only then did I realize how much effort it had taken to push the fear down, bottle it up so that I could accomplish the simplest tasks, like walking and breathing. For a moment I felt as though I’d faint.

  “Sergeant,” the general said, “how long until the auto-drone arrives?”

  “Five minutes, sir. It’s inbound now at Mach three.”

  I cleared my throat, finally finding my voice. “Sir, what are you talking about?”

  “You and your boyfriend.” He pointed at the kid. “I’m asking if you want to get out of here. Command wants me to evacuate, leave my boys in Almaty and hightail it out on an evac-drone so Popov will get his hands on one less general. I say to hell with that. I’m staying.”

  And that was why his men loved the guy. You saw it in the sergeant: a kind of worship as he listened to the general, a look that transcended all the dirt and crap that had affixed to the man’s face, turning it from something that resembled a bearded lump of charcoal to the face of a cherub.

  “Sergeant, the drone can hold two, right?”

  He nodded. “Yes, sir. And if these two won’t take it, count me in.”

  “Ha! My ass. If I stay, you stay.” He turned back to me and stopped smiling. “Well? What do you say?”

  I looked at the kid. You’d think this would be an easy decision, but it wasn’t. The thought of bugging out and leaving everyone behind, especially the general, had instilled a feeling in me that sent tendrils throughout my brain and underscored the sense that deep down I was a coward—that by escaping I’d prove it to everyone. But then the memory of my father came back.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “Yeah. I want to get out of here.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. The drone still has to make it through Pop’s defenses—there’s a reason we don’t use airborne assaults and helicopters anymore—and for all I know, you’ll be shot down before you get ten feet off the airstrip. But hell. It’s worth a shot.”

  I shit
you not: the kid dropped his carbine and hugged the general, breaking into a tantrum with no sign of stopping.

  “Oscar,” the general said before extending his hand. “The sergeant will show you guys where to wait.”

  I took it. There wasn’t anything to say, and the only thing to do was stare at the guy and shake his hand, knowing deep down that I’d never see him again.

  “Thanks, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just tell your catamite to stop humping my leg and we’ll call it even.”

  We waited at the entry ramp and crouched against a wall; the airfield was a mess. It was hard to imagine how a drone would land on the strip, which had become pockmarked by shallow plasma craters and dotted with the wreckage of supply drones that had tried to land over the past few weeks only to get shot down. A stream of tracers shot past, and I flinched at the snaps. The sergeant gave us updates every once in a while and he was trying to be cool about it, like it would help, but the constant reminder ratcheted up the tension every time. It was almost over. Not at any other time in Kaz had I been that scared, knowing that whatever happened, it would probably take place in the next thirty minutes, and either we’d be killed or we’d make it out. The kid wasn’t talking. He just sat there, staring at the runway and clutching his carbine to his chest like it was some kind of security blanket. Safety was in reach, and the fact that it was out there, waving to us, made it that much harder to accept that irony could rear its head in a second and swat down the promise of escape just as quickly as it had materialized. When the drone screamed overhead, barely clearing the ramp’s roof, we both jumped up and the sergeant had to grab us.

  “Not yet. The drone will land from the far end and taxi this way. When I give the word, you break cover and sprint, but keep your heads down.”

  “How far?” I asked, but the volume of fire suddenly increased, drowning my words.

  “What?”

  “How far will we have to run?”

  “About a hundred meters. When the doors pop, you guys will have about thirty seconds to embark; it leaves whether you make it on or not.”

  My jaw started working, chewing at the insides of my cheeks so that I could keep my teeth from chattering. Our drone had turned into a black dot in the distance and it would have been nearly impossible to see except for the tracers that reached up from Russian positions, pointing to it with lines of red light. When it turned for the approach, it got steadily larger, a gray speck that was slightly darker than the sky and grew with each second until it touched down at the runway’s far end in a puff of dust. The aircraft sped down the strip, heading straight for us, and I had the strangest sensation, as though it was a shark with wings. When it got close enough, the sergeant slapped my shoulder.

  “That’s it. Good luck!” And he left.

  The kid and I leapt to our feet at the same time and sprinted. I didn’t hear anything, because all my attention was focused on the drone, which had already begun a slow turn, its autonomous computer ticking by the seconds that it had been told were allowed on the ground. It felt as though every Russian gun had been trained on it. Plasma rounds began bursting on the strip, and I noticed the temperature indicator leap all the way from green to red at the same time a shock wave hit, hard enough that I almost fell into the kid and knocked both of us down. And still there wasn’t any noise. All I heard was my own breathing and my whispers as I urged myself to run faster.

  The kid outpaced me. I watched in horror when a portion of the drone’s side cracked open, and thought that it had begun to break apart, but it was just the door opening, and the kid slid in, turning to beckon as the craft began rolling. I was still at least twenty meters away. The next thing I knew, he had grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside, just before the door sealed shut, locking us into a narrow space that was barely wide enough for two and uncomfortably similar to a coffin.

  “Are we supposed to buckle in?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I found a set of straps and lay flat on my back, struggling to get my arms through without tangling in the Maxwell. “We should have left our damn carbines on the runway.”

  “Holy shit. Look out the window.”

  There was a small porthole-style piece of glass near my face, and I turned to get a better view as the drone picked up speed. The ground flashed by. At first I didn’t know what the kid was talking about, but then saw it: lines of soldiers had made a break for it, hoping to get on the drone too and sprinting across the runway despite the exposure. A flash of light made me blink. When I opened my eyes, I saw the fading gas of a plasma hit and then a group of blackened bodies where a second earlier there had been about fifty guys.

  “That’s really screwed,” the kid said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “They’re all going to die, how can that not matter?”

  The plane began to lift off and then pulled up sharply at the same time its engines roared. It felt as though my weight had quadrupled.

  “It was either you or them, that’s why it doesn’t matter. You got parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ask them when you get home; ask them what you should have done. Screw those guys. We’re going to be OK.”

  Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did; we’d make it. When the drone banked to the southwest, its maneuver was so gentle that it felt as though I’d made it aboard a passenger plane, and I risked another look out the window. Maybe it was a hallucination—one last flashback to my drugged days or a spurt of insanity that just came with the territory of being a broken toy—but I’d have sworn that someone waved to us from the airfield below, a tiny figure in dark green armor that puffed smoke every once in a while before he disappeared underground. In the distance I saw the line of Russian armor and infantry, crawling slowly over our northern trenches like a wave of ants and beetles. The drone banked violently again. I grunted, trying my best to keep from passing out as it evaded some unseen attack, and without anything to focus on, there was only one thing to do: think.

  We’d made it out. The acceptance of that felt as though every muscle in my body relaxed at the same time, and without anything bearing down on me, I started crying. So many men. But I’d meant it when I’d said screw them. It wasn’t them I was crying about; it was the general and the fact that he’d made this happen—and that I hadn’t really gotten a chance to thank him. A nearby explosion rattled the aircraft and shattered my thoughts just as we went into a steep dive and began rolling. A few seconds later we came out of it. The plane leveled off and its engines settled into a constant whine, each second taking us farther from Almaty and danger.

  “You OK, kid?” When he didn’t answer, I yelled, “Hey!”

  “I threw up. I don’t want to talk right now.”

  “That’s all right. We’re out of that shithole.”

  The trip to Tashkent took about an hour, and it wasn’t long after we’d landed that I heard what had happened. Nobody could have lasted long without a solid defense. Most of the general’s men broke and ran, but there was no place to escape, and when they got to city center, they collided with friendlies running in the opposite direction, so the Russians just stopped and pelted the city with more plasma, finishing everyone off piecemeal. Pops didn’t take any prisoners. I thought at first that maybe the general had died fighting or committed suicide, but after a while doubted that anything like that had happened, or that it mattered anyway. What mattered was that he was gone and had given us a chance to keep going.

  But it wasn’t over yet. When the drone landed, a couple of colonels met us, and I could see the shock on their faces when we stepped out to reveal ourselves as a bearded freak and a dirt-faced kid. One of them wanted to shoot us on the spot, because he thought we’d taken the general’s place. But I guess the general had uploaded one last message, which the drone transmitted as soon as we got out, and it hit their computers before they could actually do anything to us. I asked one of them to send me a copy and he did.

  To the Commandi
ng Officer, Army Group Central: Decided to stay with my men, so take care of these two guys for me. Urq.

  The colonels left us there and we started walking from the airfield, following them toward a line of sheds.

  “Well, kid, we made it.”

  “I gotta get out of this suit.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because of the puke. Plus my hoses came off when the plane maneuvered. It’s a mess in here.”

  “Hell. That’s the smell of accomplishment.”

  Enter the Cockroach

  The main body of Army Group Central had fallen back to Bandar a long time ago, and the forces we linked with in Tashkent formed a rear guard—elements of First Marine combined with the French Foreign Legion’s First Cavalry Regiment. The difference between Tashkent’s units and the men in Almaty was palpable. There was no sign of hunger in Tashkent, and anywhere you went, you’d hear guys joking, despite the fact that overall nothing had changed; we were still losing. Plasma artillery struck in a constant rhythm on the north side of the city, and to the south our guns answered almost every shot, like a steady and off-beat drum. You didn’t need any other reminder that things were still bad. The biggest difference was that we didn’t need to watch the air anymore, but old habits were hard to break, and I lost track of the number of times I caught myself staring at the sky or flinching at the sound of overhead drones.

  The morning after our arrival, a French lieutenant kicked me and the kid awake as we slept under a concrete slab; I had trouble with the guy’s accent.

  “Marines?” he asked.

  “No. We’re not attached to any unit yet.”

  “Good. The French and stragglers will lead our fallback on Samarkand, so get up. You’ll be with us.”

  “What?” The lieutenant’s voice came through helmet speakers, and while we spoke, our combat suits danced their thing, linked up coms so that in the middle of it I started hearing him over my speakers but with a delay. That, the accent, and my exhaustion made him all but incomprehensible.