Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1

by T. C. McCarthy

  He hadn’t answered because he was dead. The entire fronts of his and the other one’s helmets were shattered, what was left of their faces spilling onto the sand.

  Sophie woke and took my hand. “Where are we?”

  “We’re at the front. These two are gone.”

  “Get their weapons.”

  Once I had gathered their grenade launchers and clips, we settled in to wait for morning.

  “I had the strangest dream while you were walking,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “That I met Bridgette.”

  The words sent a shiver up my spine, and I flinched when a pair of tanks opened fire to our front, about four hundred meters away. One of them must have hit something, because the rounds burst, then caused multiple explosions in the distance.

  “She was beautiful,” I said, “but not like you.”

  “How am I different?”

  “Bridgette was curious about men, like you are, but she never really wanted to live.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  I thought for a minute, and we ducked when the entire front lit up with firing from both sides, tiny grenade flashes and plasma bursts mingling in a kind of light show that from farther away would have been interesting, like it had been in Samarkand. As it was, I wanted to bury myself in the sand.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I still love her.”

  Someone jumped into our hole and I almost fired on him, which would have been idiotic, because at that range the grenade might have killed us along with him. It was a Legion officer. When he saw our suits, he spoke in almost perfect English instead of French.

  “I can’t sync with your suits; open a channel.” Once we had, he went on. “Good. I’ve uploaded map data, so take a look at it when you get a chance. Tomorrow we’re making the final push. When the time comes, don’t stop to gather wounded, just keep going. This will be our only chance at breaking through.”

  He got up to leave and I stopped him. “Hey, pal, I’m looking for two buddies of mine. They stick together. One is a British guy with your outfit, the Legion; the other is an American kid but he’s wearing a genetic combat suit.”

  “Yes, I saw them. The only reason I remember is that someone tried to shoot the one in genetic armor before he could show that he was human.”

  “Where? Is he OK?”

  He pointed toward the front. “About there, with a tank hunter unit, three hundred meters away and very close to no-man’s-land, but he was fine when I last saw him. Good luck finding them, I hope you make it. I hope we all make it.”

  When he left, Bridgette wrapped my hand with one of hers. “Why don’t you know their names?”

  “Whose?”

  “Your friends’.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t feel the need, maybe because names don’t matter that much anymore.”

  She pulled me in closer and it drove me crazy to be with her and not be able to feel that skin, to instead have to hear ceramic against ceramic.

  “I think it’s good that you still love Bridgette. She seemed like a very nice person, and I would have liked her immensely. But we shouldn’t stay here until morning.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you should find your friends. Rest. In a while I’ll wake you up, and we will move out while it’s still dark, because nobody should be separated from their friends unless they want to be.”

  Sophie didn’t need help, because we crept from the hole after switching on our chameleon skins, moving toward the front on our bellies. When we got closer, incoming plasma rounds raised the temperature and I watched the suit indicator climb. Tiny lumps of molten glass spattered the sand around me, hissing when they landed, so that as I pushed forward, the landscape turned into something resembling a moonscape more than anything earthly. Whenever we passed a hole or a group of men, I hissed out, calling for the kid, because I didn’t want to risk using the general frequency, which was already busy with traffic. It was excruciatingly slow. Half an hour later we found a strongpoint, which consisted of three tanks that looked as though they’d been toys tossed into the air before landing on their sides, propped against each other; we moved in and deactivated our skins.

  A group of men, protected by the walls of destroyed tanks, stood in a circle around something, and I was about to ask one of them about the kid when they all laughed. It was the coldest laugh I’d ever heard. Their conversation played out in helmet speakers, making it impossible to tell who said what.

  “You little fuck. Thought you’d get away with it.”

  “Kill him.”

  “To hell with that, let’s mess him up. Guy wants to play some more, don’t you, Popov?”

  Then I heard a boy’s voice, which sounded even younger than the kid’s, and its slightly accented English made him sound innocent, maybe a little slow. “You will all die. Where are your sisters?”

  I pushed into the circle to get a better look, leaving Sophie to sit in the sand. In the middle of the circle lay a Russian genetic. His armor had been scorched, and it looked as though it was two inches thick in places, with massive servo boxes at key joints, and tubes that must have held hydraulic systems. The outside was covered by things resembling exposed pipes. But his arms were missing. Both had been blown off and the shoulder pieces dripped what in night vision looked like blood, but I suspected it was more likely hydraulic fluid of some kind. The image of kids pulling the wings off a fly popped into my head. The guy’s helmet was off, and he looked like the one I had seen so long ago in Karazhyngyl; he was a boy who should have been in high school and who smiled at all of us, either oblivious to the danger or ignoring it.

  I nudged a Marine next to me. “What’s going on? How’d he get here?”

  “We caught him trying to infiltrate the lines, maybe spotting our pos.”

  “Shouldn’t we hand him over to an officer, let them interrogate him?”

  “What officer? You see any around?”

  The Russian laughed at that, making me shiver. “Your officers are all gone. Bandar ‘Abbas is gone. How long has it been since any of you heard word from Bandar?”

  “Shut up!” one of the others yelled. He kicked the boy in the face, and I heard a sickening crunch.

  “Is that true?” I asked. “Did something happen in Bandar?”

  Nobody answered.

  One of the men walked up to the boy and pulled out his combat knife before kneeling by his side. You’d think I would have been horrified at what I knew was about to happen. I wasn’t. I wanted him to be tortured, and my mind shifted into a gear that had never existed before, one where revenge overrode any scraps of decency that I had managed to maintain, and one where the need to punish this one for everything—for Bridgette, Ox, the general, and even my father—became so intense that I shouted something like “Cut his balls off,” and someone shouted back, “He doesn’t have any balls.” We all started shouting after that so the mob of us became a unified thing, a machine of retribution and God take the Russian. The man used his knife to cut one of the boy’s ears off, and the fact that the kid didn’t cry out, didn’t beg, made me angrier. We wanted him to squirm.

  “My brothers will be here soon,” he said, shaking the blood off his hair. “And when they come, you will not be welcome in any world.”

  The man with the knife lost it then and slammed it into the Russian’s windpipe, silencing the boy with a thud. The spell broke. My hands shook and it felt as though my suit vents had clogged. A sense of claustrophobia took hold and I grabbed the Marine next to me to keep from falling over.

  “You OK, pal?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for the kid. He’s wearing genetic armor, but he’s one of us and is traveling with a Brit from the Legion.”

  “Mate?” The one with the knife wiped it off in the Russian genetic’s hair and then walked over. “You made it!”

  The kid, who had been standing in the circle opposite me, joined us and slapped me on the back. “Holy shit. We
thought we’d never see you again!”

  I should have been happy, but the circumstances of our reunion had changed things, made me wonder how it was that my friends had done this. Then I remembered what I had wanted to do to the Russian. It just didn’t matter.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you guys. Is it true that we’re moving out tomorrow?”

  “It’s true,” said the Brit. “And then on to Bandar.”

  The kid said, “If Bandar is even still there.”

  “Why, what have you guys heard?”

  The Brit sheathed his knife with a snick. “Command lost contact with them two weeks ago, and rumor has it that Pops nuked it, the port and everything. It’s why your government OK’d the use of kinetics. Where is Sophie?”

  We walked back to where I had left her, and Sophie lay in the sand, curled up with both knees pressed against her chest. She wouldn’t respond to me at first. The kid and the Brit dug shallow holes and lay down next to us, arranging their rockets and the launcher so they’d be ready quickly. I rested my hand against Sophie’s helmet.

  “Are you there?” I asked.

  “I’m here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She said nothing at first but then asked me to take off my helmet and vision hood, which I did. I scrunched down, hoping that no snipers were nearby.

  “Would you let them do that to me?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Torture me like that. Cut my ear off.”

  My stomach turned and I felt sick again with the thought of what had just happened. “Never. I’d die before I’d let that happen to you.”

  “But you yelled. With the rest of them. I heard it.”

  “He was a Russian, Sophie, a genetic.”

  She slammed her fist into my jaw so hard that my head snapped back into the sand with a thud, and for a moment I thought I’d black out.

  “I’m a genetic!”

  I waited for someone to say something, to run over and wipe her at that very instant, but nobody moved except for the Brit and the kid, who shifted in their holes.

  “You might want to keep that shit down,” the kid said. “Just sayin’.”

  Sophie yanked her helmet off and spat on me before she started sobbing, and I had to pull her close, feeling as though I’d made the biggest mistake of my life and wanting to take it back. But it was too late.

  “I’m sorry, Sophie,” I whispered. We lay there for an hour, and in the east the sky started to turn a lighter shade, dimly illuminating the sand and wreckage.

  “It’s not your fault,” Sophie finally said. “I would have done the same thing. My sisters would have. It’s not your fault.”

  But something about her voice made me wonder if she meant it. At any moment, the order to move out would come, and I didn’t care. In less than a minute I’d managed to fuck up the one thing left that mattered to me, and nothing would change it. As we lay there, my mind raced, trying to figure out a way to make it better, to rationalize what I had shouted at the boy, what I had felt—anything to use to try to explain it all away so we could go back to the way it had been the day before. But nothing came to me.

  When the sun rose, orders arrived, flashing on our heads-up displays at the same time someone announced them over coms. An explosion boomed in front of us. I looked up and pulled on my vision hood and helmet, watching as wave after wave of auto-drones swooped down on the Russian positions, and it made me start to feel better, knowing that we’d be getting help from somewhere despite the fact that Bandar might no longer exist. I gave Sophie the next dose of medicine and began to lift her up but she slapped my hands away.

  “I can move on my own for now.”

  The Brit and the kid gathered their things and waited.

  “You guys ready?” I asked. They gave the word and we all moved forward. Sophie fell a couple of times and yelled when I tried to help her up, while all around us the shapes of men left their holes in the sand, forming a wave of soldiers that crept toward the line. Our tanks opened fire. Soon they too began to move, inching just in front of the infantry to give us some cover from enemy fire. Sophie was falling behind. I grabbed her then, and she screamed at me to let go, pounded on my shoulders, but I ignored the blows and forced her onto my back.

  “You’re not going to fuck this up. I don’t care if you hate me now, screw it. But I won’t let you fuck this up.”

  Eventually she fell limp and cried. That was how I moved into my final battle of the war: with the Brit and the kid at my side, a broken genetic on my back, and a feeling of dread that I had changed more than I’d realized. I’d become less than subhuman and didn’t deserve to make it out.

  Second Chances

  The war became a blur, my mind a singularity that sucked in on itself so that all I felt was the weight of Sophie and a vague sensation that the kid and the Brit stumbled on in front of me, their shapes sometimes getting lost behind curtains of sand and smoke. There were screaming and forms. Tanks, behind which we marched, rotated their turrets to either side and vomited plasma, but we didn’t see if they hit anything, because of the obscurants, dust clouds that defeated our infrared and laser targeting with burning ribbons of magnesium. As I pressed on, it occurred to me that we should have been high, that once upon a time it would have been cool to think that we walked through an infinite sparkler and into some fucked-up land of enchantment. You forgot more than you remembered, but you remembered more than anyone should. There was a group of Popov genetics who had gone unnoticed during the advance and sprang from the sand to ambush a few Legion soldiers to my left, but the Gs didn’t fire any weapons. They punched through the men’s armor with bare fists and ripped out handfuls of skin, and it was so unreal that I didn’t react except to think it was a strange thing to do. Someone fired rockets at the group, killing everyone, and I thought, Well, yeah, that’s OK, because now those guys are gone, out of it all, so it won’t hurt anymore. And then there was a wounded Marine who begged for help because his legs were gone. He said, “Please, don’t let me die here,” and I said, “It’s not such a bad place. I can’t carry you anyway.” He started crying before I lost sight of him. There were so many scenes that I stopped processing until much later, when they shoved into my thoughts without warning. An hour into the advance, we paused in a Russian trench, popping our helmets and taking the time to recover what strength we could, grinning broadly because whatever else had happened, we hadn’t died yet, and from the radio traffic we knew that things were going well. Bandar had never felt closer.

  “I love my rockets,” the kid said to me.

  “They’re really good rockets.”

  “No, you don’t understand, old man. Take for once. I really, really love them, like I’m the ultimate badass and these are magical things, rounds that never miss. I took off a G’s head this morning, hadn’t even waited for the tone and just squeezed off, so the warhead never had time to arm, it just took his head, all kinetic. I’m the reaper.”

  “They’re insanely good rockets,” I said.

  “Yeah, man, that’s more like it. Insanely good, now I get why you were a reporter, that’s a good word for them. Crazy.” He paused to take a drag off a cigarette the Brit offered him and ducked when a series of grenades cracked around our position. “Fucking Popovs. I’m ready, Oscar, ready to make it happen, like who cares if we’re up against Gs, man? These guys are like little girls, little ape-men.”

  “You’re the rocket man.”

  “I’m the freakin’ rocket man. And a half. Insanely good.”

  Sophie didn’t say anything, and when it came time to leave, I lifted her onto my back again, and we moved out, returning into the haze. The tank commanders waved us on. Something told me that as long I was in a cloud, nothing could touch us, so I positioned myself as close to a tank as I could, walking within the backwash of sand that it kicked up, and catching only glimpses of the battle as it unfolded on either side. I flinched when the vehicle suddenly blew into a cone of pl
asma because a Russian rocket had streaked out of nowhere and slammed into its reactor section, and I watched as something arched overhead trailing a thin line of white smoke. It thudded to the ground next to me. Once I recognized what the thing was, I pushed on, trying to figure out how the tank commander’s head could dislodge from his torso and fly that high, hit the sand, and still have a look of surprise on it as if the guy had been freeze-dried at the moment of death.

  We stopped again an hour later and ate lunch underneath the shell of an APC, shoving in as much food and water as we could before our stomachs stopped working out of fear. Exhaustion only masked so much. Once you got used to the walking and dead, fear always found a way back in; adrenaline could keep flowing for only so long and then it hit you again—that you didn’t want to die, but that this was the worst possible place for someone with a death phobia.

  “I can’t taste my food,” the Brit said.

  I nodded. “I know, this shit is awful.”

  “No, I mean I can’t taste it, can’t taste anything, mate.” He ripped off his vision hood and there it was—that look. The Brit was augering in. I just knew that in a few minutes, maybe seconds, he’d lose it, so I glanced at Sophie in the hope that she’d say something to make it stop, but she looked away.

  “Bandar,” I said.

  “What about Bandar?”

  “I bet they have good food in Bandar. Better than this crap. I bet by the time we get there, everything nuked will have been fixed, rebuilt, and that we’ll get the good stuff as soon as we make it in.”

  “It’s all in Bandar?”

  “It’s all in Bandar.”

  The Brit smiled then and shook his head. “Shit.”

  “You should relax,” the kid said. “Just trust in the rocket man and everything will be waxy.”

  “Hey, kid,” I said, and he stopped eating to look at me. “They’ll make you give up your rockets in Bandar, you know. You can’t take them home.”

  “That’s messed,” he said with a genuine look of disappointment. He tossed his pouch to the side and rebuttoned his helmet. “Maybe the war won’t end, then. Maybe we’ll come back and keep going, push back north.”