Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1

by T. C. McCarthy

  I’d already experienced the attack side of underground engagements, but this would be my first on defense.

  “You’ve defended a tunnel before, right, kid?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I wasn’t in the first return wave, though. Those guys all bought it almost as soon as they reentered our pos and engaged. Hey, I never asked you. Why are you even here in the first place?”

  At first I didn’t have to answer. Someone called over the radio, and you wouldn’t have heard the message because of all the other traffic, except it was the one message everyone had been waiting for—and dreading at the same time.

  “Zero-deev.”

  The officer in charge of the kid’s section, a captain, stood and got everyone moving. Popov was close enough now, about twenty meters away, so we heard the borer chewing through rock and grinding it, a screeching that vibrated the walls and made little ripples in the puddles that had collected on the floor. A section of the wall had begun to glow white on infrared. We filed out the large exit tunnel and waited for an engineering team to maneuver a huge alloy plug into the entrance, sealing it with thin hoses that injected rapid-curing quick paste.

  I began to shake.

  “So why are you here?” he asked again.

  “I used to be a reporter.”

  “No shit? For real, like with a news station?”

  “For real, but not a news station. Stars and Stripes.”

  He adjusted his hood and tightened its straps. “I thought those guys were all military. But you’re not with them anymore?”

  We still had time to kill before they broke through, and talking helped keep my mind off what would soon happen, so I told him everything—about Ox and my early days on the line, about Bridgette and the retreat from Pavlodar, and about Karazhyngyl.

  “So that’s why you’re so screwed up,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Drugs. There were a couple of guys in my unit at Almaty who did that shit, zip, and we all stayed away from them. It messes with you.”

  I said, “Thank Christ.”

  “What for?”

  “I thought you were going to give me a lecture on how messed it was to fall for a genetic.”

  He thought about that one for a second before snapping his helmet in place. “Nah. They’re not bad-looking. I could see that.”

  Our engineers had just finished placing charges so they would blow the plug at the appropriate moment when it was time to counterattack. We listened. The Russian borer vented into the tunnel we had just vacated, and the noise sounded like the hydraulic brakes letting go on a big rig followed by loud pops as waterlogged rocks exploded, and a few seconds later the plug grew white-hot, groaning as it expanded against the surrounding tunnel. The borer must have moved through the position to hit the other side, because the wall against my back started trembling, making my teeth chatter. I prayed that the plug wouldn’t dislodge by accident. Then our vents opened up and we heard the roar of gas being forced through narrow channels drilled through the rock on either side of us, a noise that made me grin as I thought that maybe some Russians had just fried.

  Someone issued the general retreat code and we froze.

  “Say again?” the captain asked. A few seconds later he started yelling us. “Back up. Get to the exits—now!”

  At the time I had no clue what was wrong, but my gut sensed that things were about to go from kind of crappy to downright nightmarish, and every nerve told me that I had to be the first on the elevator. The kid must have sensed it too. We pushed against the sea of Marines, all of them fighting to get out, and all of them oblivious to the captain’s pleas to calm down.

  Flashbacks of winter in Pavlodar. Once the kid and I navigated the maze of tunnels, the elevators, and then the ladders, we saw what must have been the full mass of our forces wading through rubble. Words couldn’t describe it. My suit had auto-synced with the kid’s unit, and the captain’s voice came over, calmly telling us to move in an orderly fashion toward Samarkand, where our tanks and APCs had formed up to receive us, but the problem was that we couldn’t not bunch up. Units mixed among other units in a group of men so dense that it pushed me on all sides and at one point I feared falling down, knowing that I’d be trampled. Then the Russians opened fire.

  As soon as the first rounds fell, all order collapsed. The kid and I scrambled, at first trying to scuttle from one rubble pile to the next, but the futility of it soon became apparent when clouds of men, half molten, flew through the air, threatening to kill us with their impact. I didn’t think about Sophie, or home, or much of anything during moments like those. The entire world collapsed into a bubble that enclosed only me and a single thought—that I needed to be in the mountains, out of range of Russian guns. The kid and I moved through our artillery positions and saw the cylindrical pits, their clamshell ceramic doors wide open to let out the smoke from self-destruct charges that had gone off only a few minutes before, a signal that things were worse than we had hoped; we had blown our guns in place. That meant we weren’t coming back.

  “What the fuck is that?” the kid asked.

  Beyond the gun emplacements lay the ore concentration yards, which should have been empty, since the contractors had left days earlier. But they weren’t. Men boiled up from ramps leading to the smelting station, and from that distance it looked as if something was wrong with them; their movements were jerky and their armor so bulky that it made you wonder how they could even walk.

  Someone yelled that they were Russians.

  “Powered armor?” I asked.

  The kid said, “Yeah.”

  We and several Marines took positions behind rubble piles and opened fire.

  At first I thought I was missing, and slowed my trigger finger to take more careful aim. Fléchettes flew from my carbine, their tracers flicking out in groups of a hundred, and when they struck, the projectiles made tiny sparks, so it was clear the rounds were finding their targets but couldn’t penetrate. With a sense of horror I realized it: with powered servos you could change the armor completely, make it thicker or of a harder but heavier material so that normal infantry weapons would have little or no effect. It made them more tank than man. Soon they opened fire, but instead of using fléchettes, Popov let loose with rockets and grenades, adding to the confusion generated by plasma rounds that still fell, and I ducked when I saw a rocket corkscrew directly at us, blowing the front half of our rubble pile to hell.

  “Screw this,” I said. “Without grenades we can’t touch them.”

  “I’m with you.”

  We were just about to make a break for it when a cheer erupted. Ten APCs rumbled out of what remained of south Jizzakh, and had torn through the rim of ruins that separated the ore yards from the rest of the town, opening wide gaps through which poured hundreds of our troops. At first I wondered where the men came from. All of them had been armed with anti-tank rockets, and the first group advanced toward Pops under a cover of plasma fire from the APCs and rockets from troops who had taken positions atop walls. As I watched, it hit me the way they moved without fear or hesitation and coordinated perfectly with hand signals. These were genetics; Sophie was probably with them.

  Before I knew what I was doing, my legs, still wobbling with uncertainty, carried me toward them.

  “Where are you going?” the kid yelled after me.

  “Sophie!”

  “Who?” But when I didn’t answer, he gave up trying to figure it out and caught up to me. “We’re in the open, Oscar.”

  “I know.”

  A grenade blew just behind us and droplets of thermal gel hissed on my shoulder.

  “We’re heading toward the Russians, Oscar, not away.”

  “I know.”

  Then another rocket screamed between us, bouncing off a slab of concrete to disappear somewhere to the rear.

  “They’re shooting at us. You mind telling me what the fuck we’re doing here?”

  We reached the girls’ flank, and I plopped down be
side one of them, catching the end of her prayer and ducking when the girl’s rocket launcher roared to life, sending out a cone of flame that barely missed my head.

  “I know one of them. Sophie. I’m trying to find her.” I expected him to be outraged, to scream at me that I’d risked our lives for a genetic and what the hell was wrong with me, was I still crazy? But he didn’t.

  “Oh,” he said, taking cover too.

  I slapped the girl’s shoulder and shouted, “Where’s Sophie?”

  “Who?” she asked, not even pausing during her reload.

  “Sophie. She’s one of you. The doctor in Samarkand said that she was special because she didn’t deteriorate as quickly as the rest of you, would live longer.”

  “Oh.” The girl finished loading and popped up immediately, taking only a second to aim before squeezing off another rocket. “That one didn’t come with us because she is still with your doctor. And she’s not ‘special’; she is unworthy.”

  “Excuse me?” I’d known them long enough to know that to a genetic, it was probably the worst insult imaginable.

  “She was not meant to be one with us. You can tell because she doesn’t have the mark.”

  The next time the chick popped up, her head disappeared in a bright flash, probably because a Popov had zeroed on her the last time, had been waiting for her to try it again. Bits of her ceramic slapped my helmet with a snapping sound.

  “Come on,” I said to the kid.

  “Where to now?”

  “Samarkand. To the hospital.” I jumped up, doing my best to sprint, and he followed me.

  “Oh, now it’s OK to run away?”

  By the time we got to the hospital, Samarkand had transformed into something like a riot, with troops pushing through the streets and heading southwest, hoping to climb the next mountain range and make it via miracle over the Turkmenistan plains and onward to Iran. Nobody had been ready for this. The kid and I gave up trying to stay in touch with the Marine unit via coms, and we scrambled through the crowds in front of the hospital. Walking wounded had already assembled and were waiting for ambulances and APCs to arrive to carry them from the city.

  There was no guard in the building that used to hold the cages. We vaulted the steps and burst into the room where we had first seen them, where she now waited, standing at the window. She was crying and turned to face us.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I wanted to go with them. But the doctor kept me here, said that he wanted to continue testing, but now what?” She had dressed in armor and wore her vision hood, pushed back with one headphone pressed against an ear. “I’m listening to our command net. We will be overrun.”

  The kid and I looked at each other. “What’s going on? Why is everyone retreating?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “We don’t have a clue,” the kid said.

  “Russian genetics are pushing south through western Uzbekistan and will cut off our escape route to Iran within a few days. The others stealth bored into our rear areas here while sending fusion borers to our lines as a ploy. All units have been ordered to fall back immediately to regroup in Türkmenabat, while my sisters hold here.”

  “Oscar,” the kid said, “this isn’t good.”

  “I know.”

  “Seriously. It sucks. We gotta bail. Now.”

  “So bail.”

  I walked over and hugged her, pulling her in close while I tried to do the math, figure out how we’d get her to Iran without being caught by her handlers. “Hey, kid, take off your suit, you’re about her size.”

  “What?”

  “Take it off!” I turned to Sophie and spoke into her ear. “Your suit is synced to genetic forces. Anywhere we go, they’ll know it’s you. You have to get dressed in the kid’s suit and then we’ll move out.”

  “What about me?” the kid asked.

  “So what if they think you’re a genetic? The second you take off your helmet, you explain to them that your suit got fried, so you lifted one off a dead genetic. It’s cake.”

  “Unless they shoot first.”

  Still, the kid got undressed, and I watched out the window while they traded suits behind me. Below us in the street, the crowd of soldiers parted and a line of APCs, trucks, and tanks pulled up, making me feel safer for a moment. There were so many variables: the Russians and their powered armor; their genetics; and our own Special Forces, who’d be on the lookout for girls like Sophie, ones who tried to escape. But there wasn’t another choice.

  It was time to go home, as long as we could break through the Russians to our west, and we’d let the cockroaches have Samarkand. Sophie would come with us.

  EIGHT

  Last Stand

  There was an aspect to desperation so positive that it had gone unappreciated in my life, perhaps buried under filth or ignored under a mountain of terror, but when we headed southwest out of the city, my legs felt weightless and there was no hunger. The fear was still there. But it had transformed into something useful, a sense that ahead of us lay unknown forces in ambush but that we’d overcome them no matter what. We had to. Popov and our forces raced each other; they tried to cut off escape to our west while we pushed ahead in a mad attempt to get out before the trap closed. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean just me; the kid and Sophie had the sense too; everyone felt it. Once again our auto-drones and the Russians’ weaved and boomed overhead, but nobody looked up and most didn’t wear helmets, so as our guys marched or sat on the backs of APCs and tanks, you saw it on their faces, the same look you knew had fixed on yours: grim determination. Desperation was a new friend. There was only one way out, forward, and it felt good to be on the attack, even if it was an attack toward the rear, because of one simple fact: when it was over, if we won, we’d go home.

  We had made it out of the city, stopped only once, by a Special Forces patrol that made the kid take off his helmet, but the kid talked his way out of it. Sophie had gone unnoticed. APCs would stop every once in a while and load up with walking troops, so for a time we trudged in a long line at roadside, but eventually the numbers whittled down, until the closest soldiers were a group of five men, about two hundred meters ahead. Just when I was starting to get creeped out, like we had been forgotten in the rear, a passing tank stopped next to us and the commander leaned out.

  “Wanna ride?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where did you guys come from?”

  “We’re the last tank out of Samarkand. I’d say the Russians are close behind, but our genetics… you gotta hand it to them.”

  We climbed onto the back and grabbed hold when the monster lurched forward, kicking up mud and ice as it accelerated.

  “How much farther to Türkmenabat?” I asked.

  The commander shrugged, answering before he dropped back inside. “A hundred klicks, give or take, but I wouldn’t want to walk it. Popov won’t be far behind.”

  I leaned against the turret and looked ahead, listening as windblown snow struck my helmet. The highway went on forever. This section of Uzbekistan had mountains, and the road had been cut in a straight line by our engineers so that it ran through them, pointing directly at a notch in a small distant range. We passed the other group of soldiers and the tank stopped again, but the men waved the commander on after explaining that they were supposed to be there, engineer volunteers left to booby-trap the road and slow the Russian advance. When we started up again, I said a silent prayer, wishing them well, but was secretly grateful that it wasn’t me.

  Sophie clicked her helmet against mine. “We will not have time to defend in Türkmenabat; the Russians will chase us as soon as they can, but if we stop, we will be trapped.”

  “I know.”

  “Do not worry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because God watches over us, but not them.”

  I remembered what the other genetic had said to me about her outside the ore concentration yard. “Sophie, what does it mean that you don’t ‘have
the mark’?” She didn’t say anything at first, but then wrapped an arm around me.

  “I will explain that to you someday. But not today.”

  As soon as we crossed the Amu Dar’ya River, I flinched and dropped to the tank’s deck to make myself small. Engineers blew the bridges. The one we had just crossed dropped in three sections, splashing into the wide river to send up muddy waves, and then a railway bridge next to it leapt upward when a series of detonations swallowed its piers in smoke. It fell slowly. The bridge seemed to sigh with relief as a wide section of it careened over, finally slamming into the river. But I knew it wouldn’t stop them. Popov’s vehicles were the same as ours, amphibious, but still, just knowing that someone was thinking tactically and that we’d have easier targets once the Russians waded into the river made me feel better; the engineers had just bought us some time.

  The sun set, submerging Türkmenabat into the dimness of twilight, and if the last hours of Samarkand had been a riot, this place was a scene of total order. We jumped off the tank. A line of infantry had formed on the side of the road and we got in place, waiting our turn for a group of NCOs to tell us where to go.

  When I stepped up to the table, they waited for my suit to sync with their terminals. “Who the hell are you?” one asked.

  “Wendell.”

  “I can see that. I mean what the hell are you doing here? You’re a civilian.”

  “I know. I used to be a reporter and then got assigned as a Marine unit historian. DOD.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a civilian.”

  The group of them started talking to each other rapidly, reminding me of a bunch of clucking chickens, and I heard the tired sighs of troops behind us. Eventually the sergeant I’d been speaking with turned back.