Subterrene War 03: Chimera Read Free

Kristen announced, “readings well above baseline, concentration gradient bearing two-seven-nine-point-eight.”
    And everything went still. The map blinked onto my display and I moved out, charting a silent course through the concrete-and-steel wreckage, a forest of towering oil tanks that had been blown to create a twisted still life, huge flaps of rusted steel that fluttered just a bit in strong gusts. The sun gave the air a kind of shimmer that happened in the third world. It was hazy with maybe a little smoke and dust so that you knew if you popped lid there’d be a strong smell of sulfur and alcohol from the power plants, maybe an occasional whiff of ozone from the fusion reactors and generators. She’d be on the other side of the next tank; her red dot beckoned to me, begged me to come in. I rounded the concrete base, my carbine already pointed in her direction… and she disappeared before I could get a bead.
    “This is crap.”
    “Target lost,” Kristen said.
    “No shit.”
    She’d gone to ground. My mind screamed at the prospect of having to follow, shouted that there shouldn’t be a tunnel, not this close to the sea where the water table would be high, and that it must be a sort of optical illusion, but it wasn’t. The entrance opened in front of me, a wide concrete wall, in the middle of which was a black hole, square and waiting, daring me to go to the one place I hated: underground.
    “Damn it,” I said, trying to convince myself that it would be easy, and went in.
    My vision hood switched to infrared at the same time I stepped in a kind of soft goo or thick water; then I knew what this was—a sewer, carrying the city’s filth to the sea—and that by the end of the mission I’d be covered with waste. My external mics picked up her breathing now, amplified it and homed in, the display telling me which direction to head, but it didn’t need to. She was there. The betty had backed against a wall to face me less than ten meters from where I stood, and she was missing one arm below the elbow. I flicked on my helmet lamp and switched back to normal vision, deactivating the suit’s chameleon skin so she could see me.
    The girl smiled. “I want to live.”
    “That’s going to be a problem.”
    “I’m unarmed. In Turkmenistan. Look.”
    She raised both hands. One was a stump that dripped blood, and the skin above it had turned a deep black, boiling with infection and rot, and her one remaining hand didn’t look much better. The girl’s left eye had gone white, and she must have flipped because she started toward me, a rotting zombie of a genetic, all of about eighteen.
    “Are you here from God?”
    I backed toward the entrance, centering my targeting reticle on her forehead. “Where have you been, and who helped you escape? Kristen, record this.”
    “Are
you
God?”
    “You’re hallucinating,” I said. “It’s the spoiling. Your mind and body are breaking down, consuming themselves because you’ve reached the end of your shelf life. Try to keep it together. I need you to answer a couple of questions, and it will all be over.”
    “People don’t have shelf lives.”
    “You aren’t people. We created you;
people
made you.”
    “Are you God?”
    “Who helped you escape?”
I screamed, knowing that in a second she’d go for me, and when she took another step closer, I decided to get it over with. The fléchettes cracked through her skull, and she dropped into the sewage, face-first, making it easy for me to dig the tracking device from her neck. Kristen chimed up when I scanned it.
    “Unit one-three-two-seven-four-nine. Given name of Allison. Terminated postschedule. Transmitting.”
    I hiked back outside to let the scum slide down my legs, hoping it would dry and dreading the smell that would hit once I took off my helmet.
    The sun started to set on the horizon, and from the tank farm I had a good view of it over the Caspian so that I rested my back against a block of concrete, lay