Subterrene War 02: Exogene (32 page)

Yoon-sung turned to me, and it looked as though she was smiling, for the first time showing a part of her that I hadn’t known existed: the ambivalence of a criminal. A complete lack of concern for the fate of others. “You know as well as I do, Catherine, how important good genes are.”

“What?” asked Margaret. “For
what
?”

I sighed, returning the view-screens to scan for targets, and not wanting Yoon-sung to know I suspected something more. “Experimentation and genetic material. We’re all raw materials, Margaret, if you think about it. And who knows what else the Chinese want. So that’s why there is new fighting then? Because the civilians of Khabarovsk have decided it’s better to die than allow their children to face whatever the Chinese have in store? What happens if the Chinese decide they want Democratic People for their experiments? What will Na-yung do then?”

Yoon-sung didn’t say anything at first. The scout car picked up speed, leveling off at twenty kilometers per hour, and we heard the rails clacking beneath us in a steady rhythm. Then she spoke.

“Na-yung has a saying that became famous after her coup. Self-reliance,
chuche
, is good, but noodle soup is better. We do what we have to, Catherine, to survive. Now, so must the Russians of Khabarovsk. They can all go to hell. If the Chinese come for us, then we will find a way out, the same way we always have.”

Yoon-sung decided that until we reached the border, we would keep moving, even at night, while one person took a shift at monitoring the detectors. There would be no targets, she argued; only the Chinese moved freely in this area of Russia and we’d get all the sleep we could manage because it would be needed once we reached North Korea.

During my shift on the second night, I had time to think. Yoon-sung and her people weren’t what they had appeared to be, and now I had proof that if pushed in the right direction, given the resources, they too would probably have created their own versions of Margaret, me, or the new generation of armored genetics. They had traded humans for a pass south, and she had smiled at it. If we had failed to convince Yoon-sung when we first met, if Margaret hadn’t succeeded in making Na-yung comfortable with the two strangers who had arrived in Russian armor, we would have been traded too. Our American advisors, both of them, had fought against the killing of innocents, had wanted to kill
us
when we took the lives of civilians and prisoners—their enemies—and now Yoon-sung had shown no such restraint. She had orders. But that meant nothing to me and even less to the condemned Russians who by now were dead, and even they, the Russians, had
given us a choice, hadn’t forced us into experiments. I had no moral objections to what Yoon-sung had done and didn’t mourn the loss of a few Russians or children, but it was the revelation that disturbed me, that I had been so wrong about her, about the North Koreans, about everything. Deep down, there was no difference between Alderson and Yoon-sung. Maybe she was worse.

Yoon-sung slept in a tight space next to me, a wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders and her head resting on her vision hood. I still couldn’t read her face. What dreams did she have? Did the dead, even the deformed genetic we had killed in the woods that day, did
they
visit in nightmares? Whatever friendship we once had, a solid structure that had been based on the common hardships of the forest and starvation, now seemed more like it was of sticks, suggesting that for her part it had been even less, a straw man; not only was there no guarantee that she or her leaders wouldn’t sacrifice us, there was a likelihood that this, in fact, was the plan all along. The path was clear. We still had Chinese-captured territories to negotiate, and passage may still have to be purchased through the sale of Margaret and me. I searched for my hatred. It should have been there, and not finding it frustrated me to the point where tears began rolling down my cheeks, until there was no place left to search because this wasn’t a time for hatred anyway. The only thing for this was calculus. Moving on from their camp had been the right decision, and things would need to be patched up between me and Margaret because now I suspected that whatever it was that had come between us, Yoon-sung was behind it. She had begun spending more time with Margaret than me. Both of them spoke Korean. In the last month, Margaret had begun referring to the possibility
that she might stay with the North Koreans, make Chegdomyn her home, where she was seen as a valued asset and rising star now that she had clawed her way from the trees. Calling her a valued asset was probably true on the part of the Koreans; to them, Margaret
was
valued. But valued for what? The irony was that she’d be safer once we crossed the border and moved into the contaminated remnants of North Korea, because there Yoon-sung couldn’t trade her to the Chinese.

I piped the forward view from the turret into the closest screen and watched, keeping my peripheral vision on the detector panel. The night slid by in white and black. A hundred meters in front of us, the rear of another scout car bounced over the tracks and I wondered who was in it. Chinese? Things had moved so quickly that there hadn’t been time to get a sense of the scouting unit, and no briefing to speak of concerning specificities, of how to handle the mission and who would do exactly what. Manning the detectors didn’t matter for the moment and I moved into the turret, zooming into the scout car’s rear, examining it for anything that might reveal its occupants’ identity. It was as if a voice whispered in my ear, conveying a message of danger that convinced my fingers to pressure the firing controls, lasing the distance to the car and preparing to shoot. Someone popped out of the hatch. The helmet hid their features, but they were clearly distressed and holding up their hands as if to ask what the hell was I doing. I pulled my fingers off the twin triggers. It seemed to satisfy whoever it was, and the person popped back into the car, their hatch swinging shut.

“Are you OK?” Margaret asked, speaking English for the first time in months.

“I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Why are you in the turret, is something wrong?”

“I’m not myself. I want to cross the border, Margaret, and get to where we’re going. But to do that we have to carry out His will.”

Looking up, she sat as best she could below me. “I don’t know what we were meant to do.”

“You were not meant to have sex for food.”

“She told you?” Margaret’s tattoos converged when she frowned but she didn’t look away. “I am not happy with how things turned out either.”

“You needed to eat and I understand because look at us. We’re barely alive. Starvation effects judgment.”

Now Margaret started crying again and I fixed my attention back on the view-screen, giving her time to think.

“They shot children,” she finally said, “at the station? You saw it?”

“Yes. But I shot children too, early in the war. Do you remember what it was like, when you were first given duty on the line?”

Margaret nodded. “I killed for the sake of killing. It was my duty.”

“It
was
your duty. And the children of Khabarovsk
were
just children, and now they have no cares—all the dead ones are free, for that matter—and are seated next to God. Now your duty is to keep going until you find the answer.”

“What answer?” Margaret asked. She moved to wipe away the tears before realizing that earlier she had fallen asleep with her helmet on and now couldn’t reach her face.

“
Your
answer, Margaret. The answer to the question, ‘who do you want to be?’ ” I tossed the pistol back to her, and she stared at it for a moment before tucking it back into its holster.

Margaret glanced at Yoon-sung then and motioned for me to put my helmet on. Once I had, she clicked into the intercom. “Yoon-sung told me I should whore myself. For food. I told her that I was hungry one day, and that was her suggestion, but despite the way it made me feel in Russia, I did it anyway because she made it sound so simple. Like it was normal. And for the past few weeks she’s been telling me you were crazy. Too crazy to follow, and crazy enough that we might have to get rid of you someday.”

“She said the same about you.”

“What do we do, Murderer? I don’t trust anyone anymore, and these people hug the Chinese as if they were family. I’ve seen humans. Humans don’t smile after they see children shot. Yoon-sung isn’t who we believed her to be, she would be happy to trade us, and we can’t ignore the fact that she betrayed her own mother to her government. This woman is a monster.”

I thought for a moment, forming the first part of a plan, but the entirety of it wouldn’t crystallize. “Do you know who is in the rest of the unit, the other cars?”

“Yoon-sung told me,” she said. “A couple of men from our logging unit and the rest are a mixture of soldiers who remained loyal during the coup.” She ran through the names and I recognized a few, but most were unknowns.

“What are you thinking?” asked Margaret.

I shook my head. “I’m not thinking anymore, that time is over. Just don’t speak and do everything I tell you.
Faith
.”

Margaret’s eyes went wide at the word, but it had the intended effect. There was a spark there now. I lowered myself from the turret and crawled to Yoon-sung, where I yanked the vision hood from under her head, ripping the wires from her suit and sending the woman’s head to bang against the ceramic floor. She woke cursing. Once her eyes opened fully, I slid my knife from its sheath and placed the tip against her throat.

“Margaret,” I said, “get in the turret. Jack your helmet in so you have full weapons control.” I smiled at Yoon-sung and moved my faceplate to within an inch of her nose. “Not the wake-up you intended, Yoon-sung?”

“What are you doing?” She tried to look past me, for anything that might help, but before she could move I lifted the knife and jabbed it downward, piercing one of Yoon-sung’s eyes; it took a second for her nerves to react, to send the message to her brain that something horrific had just occurred. A second later she screamed.

“Hush,” I said, “you still have one eye and it’s not that bad.
Chuche
, or soup, Yoon-sung, that’s what you should be thinking right now.”

“What do you want?”

“How much is an American genetic worth?” I asked. Yoon-sung was in so much pain that I had to slap her, to remind her that I was there and could take the other eye in an instant. “How much?”

“You are worthless. Margaret is worth quite a bit more.”

“Worth more to who? The Chinese?” After she nodded I went on. “And what about me?”

“We were going to let you go, to the south if you lived. The Chinese already have first-generation Germlines, but
nothing of generation two and know that the Russians have several. They fear that it gives Moscow an advantage. It would be easier to do it this way, to pretend the Chinese had set up a routine border inspection and let them handle it themselves; they were to kill you if you tried to stop it. Some of us wanted to do it in Khabarovsk, but you might have damaged too many people there since you were on turret duty, maybe even destroyed the train itself.”

I inserted the tip of the knife under her chin, cutting it so the blood flowed over the fingers of my left gauntlet, making my grip more slippery. She screamed again and I shifted, placing a knee on her chest before pulling the knife free.

“You lie. I was never going to see North Korea, and you would have either traded me or killed me. Why don’t you want us to see North Korea?”

“That’s not true,” she said. “I swear. Na-yung told me specifically to make sure you reached North Korea, that someone would be there to take you—but not the Chinese. She had sold information to someone, someone who knew that a Germline One named Catherine had been in Zeya and escaped, but even I was kept from the details.
I swear
.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“What do you mean? You know who I am.”

“I mean you speak many languages. They chose you to handle us, back in Chegdomyn. You translated for our hearings, and escorted us to dinner with Na-yung, knew exactly when to answer, when not to. No logger has that much intimate knowledge of the ruling cadre. So who are you, really?” I placed the knife tip under her good eye as a reminder.

“I am Chu Yoon-sung. Minister of Public Security. Na-yung wanted to learn everything she could about you before making any decisions, and couldn’t trust this to my subordinates, could only trust me.”

“So you’re the head of Na-yung’s spy organization?”

She nodded again, the lid of her good eye beginning to flicker, and I realized she was about to pass out. “Why do the Chinese need Russian civilians?”

“To repair genetic damage caused over the years. The Chinese had to survive after the war with a population reduced to almost nothing. They cloned themselves, underground, but the process was imperfect and now they need genetic material so they can inject more diversity into their population. Russian tissue will be like a genetic map back to civilization. They will also harvest the prisoners’ organs to replace those of wounded Chinese troops; with the proper immunosuppressants, it’s quicker and cheaper than growing new ones.”

“Last question. Exactly how many reserves are in the last two cars, and what are they armed with?”

“There aren’t any reserve troops in the rear; that car was reserved for the Russian prisoners.”

“Thank you, Yoon-sung. That was well done.” I snapped her neck then, the same way I had snapped General Kim’s.