Subterrene War 02: Exogene Read Free Page B

themselves, falling behind as we continued. Nobody cared. The exhaustion got so thick, so fast, that it was all anyone could do to keep one’s eyes open, let alone pull a straggler from the mud. I could have blocked the pain, willed it away the same way I twitched a finger, but the sensations reminded me that I hadn’t been discharged yet and so they became comforting things, reminders there was more killing. Pain was familiar now. Welcome.
    At times a walking plasma barrage moved ahead of us so that we moved faster, jogging over a crust of hard glass. It was a Godsend, and I heard Megan whisper her thanks. We spent the whole first day of the advance like that, walking then jogging, and soon I remembered that distances in Kazakhstan killed resolve almost as easily as the spoil. A tree on the horizon might look close. But as you walked through the day, it barely changed position,and was enough to drive you mad with the feeling that you would never reach it.
    Then, at last, contact. Close to sundown, Megan and I found ourselves in a hole with three Marines. One of them screamed as Russian grenades cracked on every side, sending sprays of thermal gel over our position to hiss and smoke as the droplets melted whatever they touched. The other two men were hardly better. Both huddled at the bottom of the crater, screaming to us that we had encountered the outermost positions of a Russian defensive line.
    I kicked one. “How can you aim from there?”
    “Get up and fight,”
said Megan, but the men cursed at her.
    She grabbed the grenade launcher from one and peered over the lip of the hole. I fell beside her. A hundred yards away, behind a small rise, tiny flashes marked the position of a Russian grenadier whose helmet and shoulders the low sun outlined, and we had to duck when a spray of white tracer-flechettes kicked up the dirt around us. Megan dialed in the range. At the same moment she popped back up and fired, I sprinted from the hole, doing my best to zigzag through the mud toward the Russian position, not able to think through the haze of fatigue.
    We continued like that for a few minutes. I would drop to the ground when she stopped firing, until her grenades started detonating ahead of me again—my sign to get up, keep going. Finally, I got close. I waited for her to stop and almost immediately saw the shape of a Russian behind the edge of a fighting position. His helmet was black, with paired, round, blue vision ports instead of a single slit like ours, and a series of cables connected theoutside of the helmet to a power pack, so that they draped over the man’s shoulders like thick strands of hair. You almost forgot why you were there, transfixed by the realization that he was so close, his proximity releasing an influx of hatred that made you want to scream. The man shimmered in the light. I saw all of them then, the ones who jeered at us as we waited for the cars in the railyard, who pelted us with empty food packs, but especially the ones in white lab coats, always there when we returned from the front, eager to punch data into their tablets as they forced us to answer questions. This was a man. It was rare to get this close, and it made you want to savor the moment, to get even closer and rip his helmet off so you could watch his expression change with death.
    I slipped a grenade from my harness, hit the button, and waited for its detonation before rolling into the hole to push aside the dead Russians. “Check fire, Megan. Clear.”
    A set of three shafts led straight down in the center of the hole, the only way the Russians could have survived our plasma barrages. I tossed in grenades to make sure the shafts were empty, and then let the exhaustion wash over in a warm tide, numbing my muscles and nearly sending me to sleep. The sun set at that very moment and according to our locators we had made it to a point west of Karatobe.
They
were in Karatobe. The Russians had retreated there to establish a major