Genocidal Organ (32 page)

“Here, your ARs.” Williams passed the nanolayer liquid to me. AR contacts had the potential to fall out during strenuous maneuvers, so during battle it was better to use nanodisplay film. I dabbed my eyelids with cream so that the nanolayer wouldn’t form anywhere other than directly on my eyeballs and then dribbled the liquid into my eyes. The liquid quickly sensed the electric potential in my eyes and formed a thin membrane that would act as my AR display for the duration of the battle. The cream around my eyes insulated the rest of my face, preventing the liquid from setting anywhere it didn’t need to.

“All units check AR efficacy,” I called out, although by now this was no more than a formality—the other soldiers were already turning on their combat datalinks and checking the test patterns showing in their ARs.

“All correct here,” Williams called out. His eyelids were covered in huge globs of the white cream. “And as per usual I’m tripping out on the test pattern.” His eyes were wide open, staring into nowhere in particular, and he was grinning like a spaced-out junkie.

“Dude, you know you don’t need to pop your eyeballs out of their sockets in order to see the test pattern,” I said.

The test pattern had started coming up on my retinal film too. Complex rows of alphanumeric displays were swirling round, finding their benchmark for an alternative reality to be superimposed over the reality before me: a room full of Special Forces soldiers waiting in silent anticipation.

“Yo, panda face,” I said to Williams, “wipe that crap off your eyes.” I chucked him the towel I’d used to wipe off my own insulator cream. Williams tried to think of a comeback but ended up mumbling something lame about how pandas actually had black patches around their eyes and not white.

I ran a final equipment check. The BHI Combat Harness that I was wearing had a multitude of pouches attached, so checking everything bit by bit actually took a fair while.

“Hurry up, boss! We’re all in our coffins already!” Williams heckled, but I wasn’t about to be rushed. I double-checked at my own pace until I was absolutely satisfied that I had missed nothing, and then I joined the others in the coffins—the black Intruder Pods.

The Seaweed’s loadmaster entered and shut the lids on the apertures.

All light disappeared.

The Pods were lifted up. There was a slight tremor and the sound of something slotting into place. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the servo moving the Pod along. I realized that the low-frequency waves being generated by the movement were making me feel tense, so I clenched my fists, opened them, and clenched them again. Then there was a stronger vibration, and the Pod stopped moving. I knew I was now fixed into position in the airdrop bay.

There was another mechanical sound, and then I heard the sound of the outside air beating against the walls of the Pod. It sounded like cloth ripping and became louder and louder as the Flying Seaweed opened its belly.

“
You’ve got the lead, Jaeger One. Godspeed to you.”

And then I was falling from a great height.

Free-fall, as per usual.

Final guidance mode.

Unlike the time in Eastern Europe, our drogue chutes weren’t due to be activated until the very last minute. Back in Europe we had landed some distance away from our final destination, but this time we were going to land right in the enemy’s lap, and there was no time for foreplay. If we were to open our chutes at the same altitude we did in Europe, we’d be shot to shit by AKs and RPGs before we reached the ground.

Legs sprouted from the bottom of the Pod in order to help absorb the inevitable shock that was going to hit us as a result of leaving the chute opening to the very last minute. Four legs, very muscular—well, they were made out of artificial flesh—emerged to brace me against the Pod’s upcoming near crash landing. From below, it would have looked like a bowlegged giant hurtling down. I’d seen this sort of landing in training before, and I was shocked at how real, how fleshy the whole thing looked.

Just before I was about to hit the ground, the machine guns attached to the thighs (if you could call them that) of the artificial legs started firing to secure the landing area. The recoil from the machine guns set the Pod vibrating. I linked in to the Pod using my AR, and I could sense the ammo being used up at an extraordinary rate. I connected to the external visuals, and I could see three or four freshly bullet-riddled corpses of enemy soldiers near the landing area.

I felt an intense shock run through my body, but the antigravity mechanisms absorbed the worst of it. The next moment the Pod peeled away from me like a banana skin, and part of the Pod detached itself from the main body in order to take the shape of a Pathbreaker Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that would provide me with aerial support.

“Jaeger One touchdown,” I called and ran to take cover in the shadow of the nearest building. The other seven soldiers in my team landed in quick succession after me, and within fifteen seconds of my touchdown, all the Pods had entered self-destruct mode, their electrical parts destroyed by acid and the artificial flesh killed by having its supply of life-giving enzymes cut off.

I stuck my head out of the shadows to quickly confirm that the Pods were all dying properly and that the soldiers that had been shot by the auto-fire on our way down were indeed all dead.

The Pathbreakers that had emerged from the Pods were now in autonomous scouting mode; they were gathering information about the terrain and relaying messages among the team.

We converged on the building that we had identified as our target and slipped inside before the enemy had the chance to raise the alarm. Children with AKs charged us, and our guns cut through their little bodies like hot knives through butter. Outside was the sound of the covering fire and the chainsaw-like buzzing of the giant upside-down salad bowls we called Pathbreakers, and inside was the sound of screaming children.

We quickly killed all the children encamped in the lobby. Aiming for the leg or shoulder was simply not an option on a mission like this—it was shoot to kill from the get-go. Had we been facing adults, who had somewhat more predictable attack patterns, it might have been a different story. But children, children were fearless, and they never knew when to give up, and that made them unpredictable and dangerous.

The building was overflowing with children. The Praetorian Guard. Boys and girls of all shapes and sizes and ages kept coming at us, and we kept taking them down, one tiny shadow and one headshot at a time. Williams and I pushed our way down what once would have been a hotel corridor and started ascending a flight of stairs.

If this had been a battle between equals, of one modern army against another, the best strategy would have been to shoot to maim rather than shoot to kill. A severely wounded soldier didn’t just mean one enemy taken out of action, it could mean up to three, as two of his comrades would be tied up getting him to a place of safety. But on this battlefield, life was cheap, too cheap, and there was no culture of stopping to rescue an injured comrade. It just wasn’t done. As such, the optimal strategy changed: the safest course of action was to make sure that every single enemy combatant that you faced was instantly and one hundred percent dead. The leaders of these sorts of paramilitary groups would often supply their child troops with copious quantities of mind-numbing drugs to keep them revved up, obedient, and focused on battle. It became the children’s only way of temporary relief from their harsh lives. And when a drug-addled kid was charging at you with an AK rifle, shooting off a limb or two was simply not going to cut it. Even a fatal shot to the chest or guts might give them time to fire off a final salvo or two in your direction.

That was why we always had to take them down first time. As I was calmly advancing and killing every child in my way, it occurred to me that Williams and I were effectively drugged up in the same way by our own superiors. We had subjected ourselves to nanomachine sensory-masking treatment. If Williams or I were to take a shot right now, we wouldn’t
feel
any pain, we would only
know
about it.

So if the enemy wanted to stop us, they’d have to fire a lethal shot too.

I shuddered. If, for argument’s sake, Williams and I had to turn on each other, the only possible outcome would be that one or the other of us would have to die. We would keep firing at each other until a deathblow had been dealt. We were no different from the children in front of us.

My ARs flared up: armored vehicles and trucks from all around the town were converging on the building we were in. Having said that, their leaders were in here too, so it was not as if the vehicles outside could start blasting at us. They could have the biggest cannons in the world, but they’d still have to leave them behind and come in here on foot if they wanted to get us without harming their bosses.

The enemy redoubled its useless efforts to try and stop us from advancing, screaming like angry angels as they charged. Most of the boys’ voices had not yet broken, so it was impossible to tell just from the screams whether a particular voice belonged to a boy or a girl. A young girl, naked, breasts not yet formed, emerged through one of the doors. She had probably been servicing one of her commanders. She held an AK rifle to her skinny flank and started firing randomly in our direction. I calmly took aim at her naked torso and fired. Her flat chest split open and she collapsed. I stuck my head around the door frame to the room she had jumped out of. A man who looked like he could have been a commander was struggling to do up his pants. I shot him dead too.

At that moment I was in a perfect state. What I mean by perfect is that I could kill children without the slightest bit of hesitation. Anyone who thinks I’m stating the obvious—they were shooting at me, for God’s sake!—is seriously underestimating the power of both human morality and emotion. You never knew when either of those things was likely to spark up at the most inopportune moment and influence your judgment. Even highly trained soldiers. Of course, even in a normal state of mind I’d be able to kill children without compunction if my life depended on it. Most of the time. But you could never quite say one hundred percent. Not if you’d been brought up as a normal citizen in America.

Humans can, on occasion, end up prioritizing love or morality over their own lives. We’re warped. We’re a perverse species, capable of sacrificing ourselves in the name of altruism. Never underestimate morality. As Lucia said, altruism is to a certain extent an evolutionary instinct and as such has taken root deep inside the brain. Plenty of soldiers were, quite rightly, afraid of this instinct taking hold in them, blindsiding them, controlling their actions when they least expected or needed it.

That’s what BEAR was for. To protect against that worst-case scenario. Because the worst-case scenario would inevitably result in death. There was no recovery from it. That was why the ability to protect yourself absolutely against the unexpected encroachment of emotion and morality, even if only for that specific window of time, that little festival called war, where you were detached from society and a different set of rules applied, was so powerful.

I had been made perfect by counseling and chemical substances.

My ARs showed me where my targets were. On this floor. The team had the whole hotel under control. Our targets were trapped.

And then a bullet brushed my cheek. I ducked for cover as soon as I perceived the pain, and Williams fired off a salvo at the window where the shot had come from. Had my sense of pain not been totally subdued, I would undoubtedly have been unable to react so quickly and efficiently. I acknowledged the pain in my body without feeling it in any sense at all. A sniper had fired the shot from the fourth floor of a building some distance away. About five meters in front of me there was a girl whose head had just been opened up like a rafflesia plant. The sniper must have thought she was one of us.

“What do we do now, boss?” Williams asked, scowling. “It’s not safe to advance. Should we crawl under the windowsill?”

I used my battle link to contact Leland. “Calling Blue Boy. This is Jaeger One. Your current location is the corridor on the opposite side of the target room from us, correct? Over.”

“
Roger that, Jaeger One. But there are also windows on this side en route to the target room. I’d say odds on that there’s a sniper or two pointed this way too. Over.”

“Let’s smoke the corridors, boss,” said Williams.