It took an hour to find the kid’s tunnel and then a minute to find him, slumped against the wall, asleep.
“Hey, asshole. Know where a guy can get laid around here?”
“What?” The kid jerked his hood back so he could look at me in the dim combat lamps. “Holy shit. You can walk?”
“Sure I can walk. The French doctors aren’t
that
bad.”
“Rumor is they cut your dick off.”
“It’s true. I didn’t need it anymore, thought maybe they could transplant it onto you, since yours never grew in.”
He stood up and hugged me. “Listen up, guys, this is Oscar. He’s a civilian, so amped up on war and death that he had to come see the sub for himself.”
The news drew some stares, and one of the Marines, an old man who looked about eighty but was probably forty said, “Then he must be crazier than any of us, because we
have
to be here,” and the others laughed before returning to whatever they’d been doing.
“So what’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re waiting.”
“For what?”
“The Russians are boring this way. Their ETA is in two days, at about fifteen hundred hours, give or take.”
It put everything in context. The tunnel was so quiet that you heard the slap of cards and the soft tumble of cigarettes that the Marines threw down to bet, and several others stared into space. My hands started shaking and I wondered: why hadn’t I stayed in the hospital?
“Almost makes me miss Almaty,” said the kid. “Almost.”
“I’m too scared to check my chronometer for some reason. How long have I been away—in the hospital?”
“Three months.”
Something felt wrong. It didn’t hit me at first, but then everything that had slipped away came crashing back—my father, the urge I’d had in Almaty to get home no matter what, and the faces of the dead. Only one thing made it all bearable—Sophie—but even she was a source of discomfort, because she was somewhere else. Hell. For all I knew, she was dead already.
The use of fusion borers meant that wherever the Russians hit us, they’d own that section of the line, and our guys would have to take it back in a kind of back-and-forth that seemed more like an exercise in ramming one’s head against a wall than a coordinated battle plan. Fusion borers did two things: They channeled through rock so you could move troops from point A to point B. They also produced plasma—lots of it. The first thing that happened when a borer broke through to your line was that it sensed the change in forward resistance and opened plasma vents, filling the opposing tunnel with superheated gas. If you were there when it arrived, you cooked. But there was only so much gas to be vented, and the defender usually had more reactors at his disposal, and many of these would be plasma-connected to the defensive tunnels so that as soon as the borer went dormant, Popov would get a dose; we’d dump gas right back at him. Back and forth. Our eggheads had been working on personal anti-plasma shields for decades but so far hadn’t produced squat, and even if they did, the power requirements were prohibitive and a magnetic field wouldn’t repel heat, so it wasn’t clear how much protection a shield would buy you anyway.
The short of it was that if you knew Pops was on his way, you did nothing until he got to a point called the zero-deviation position, the distance from the attack tunnels where we got our best read of his final destination, and the point at which it would be impossible for him to change course. Then you vacated that tunnel and sealed it. Both sides would take turns at squirting plasma into
the underground chamber, but at some point neither side would be able to vent anymore, and then everyone charged in to fight for the still-steaming rocks. Fun.
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 beside 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.