Two girls crouched, locked in a kind of haka-dance, each waiting for their opening. We had been pulled off the line for refitting where the white coats required us to spend as much free time training as possible, and this was a knife fighting exercise, with Sasha and Francesca its combatants.
Sasha feinted and chopped with her empty hand, barely missing Francesca’s neck, but it left her knife arm exposed. Francesca saw the opening. Her hand blurred, precise in its movement, and the blade punched through Sasha’s elbow joint with a loud crack. I saw it then.
Hatred
. Every once in a while, one of us went bad, a different kind of spoiling in which the girl ceased being part of our family and hated everyone and everything. You could see it in eyes like Sasha’s, which had gone glassy a long time before this, dilated and empty, telegraphing that she wasn’t stable.
The two circled again, watching for another opening. Sasha stumbled. She was favoring her wounded arm and
hadn’t noticed a small rock that now snagged on the outside of her foot, sending her off balance. I never even saw Francesca move. In less than a second, she had slammed into her opponent, sending Sasha onto her back, and stopped her knife point only inches away from the girl’s chin.
“You fought well,” said Francesca; she stood to offer a hand.
Sasha grinned. “And also you.” But her smile disappeared, and instead of taking Francesca’s hand, the girl slammed her knife through the center of it, the sharp end snapping through her palm in an instant. “Forgive my clumsiness. I slipped.”
We attacked. All of us moved in and began pummeling Sasha, kicking and punching at her face, the only portion of her body that was unarmored. When it was over, Sasha had lost a tooth, and both eyes swelled shut as she laughed and rolled in the sand, spitting blood and cursing us in mumbles that made me uneasy, a language that one would never understand but which conveyed a sensation of hatred. She was gone. Medical technicians took both girls to the medical bots, and for a while we forgot about it.
A week later we waited in a hangar, where a technician stood at a podium. He dragged the canvas shroud off a bulky object next to him and gestured for us to gather around. Both Sasha and Francesca had returned, each of them standing on opposite ends of the group.
“This is a newer version of the stealth fusion cutter, and, when properly operated, it will cut through hard rock at a slightly faster rate than our previous models, at about sixty meters per hour. You’ll get the same tunnel, cylindrical, one meter in diameter. Also, instead of grinding the spall, this unit breaks it into small enough chunks so
that they get taken back along the muck line as-is; there will be almost no sound to reveal your position.
“But even with these capabilities, reports from the field suggest that our stealth tunnels are being detected through their heat signature, long before our sappers break into underground target areas. Your enemy can see the rock heat up, an hour prior to arrival, even with such a small thermal cross-section, so in order to counteract the problem, we’ve developed a simple technique. Once you get close to your target destination—about a hundred meters from an enemy tunnel—you shut down the resistor elements. Coolant will still flow and speed up the chilling process in the surrounding rock. Wait for temperatures to go down, dig another ten meters, and do it again. You’ll stop boring a meter away from your target tunnel, same as before, and complete the incursion using shaped charges. There’s no way to eliminate the thermal bloom completely, but this approach should at least reduce it, make it harder to spot.”
The machine sat on small wheels and resembled an elongated fifty-five gallon drum. Like the large borers, the front heat-probes consisted of an alloy ring, inside of which were hundreds of smaller spikes. Most of the unit consisted of fuel cells, but a power line could also be used, which this one did, its thick black cable snaking alongside the muck hose to our rear.
The man glanced at his watch. “OK, chow time. Eat up. We’ll be headed out to the ruins after lunch for some practice using live charges, starting with…” He searched the group and then stopped. “
You
. Which one are you?”
“Francesca.”
He clapped his hands. “Excellent. Francesca will be first. Dismissed.”
We were silent while heading to the mess hall, and everything seemed fine, but I couldn’t help but think that something was about to happen, an itch in my head telling me that it would all go wrong. I sat at a table with Megan and scanned the room.
“I don’t see Sasha, Megan. Do you trust her?”
“No, but who does? We’ll have to deal with her, though, this cannot continue.” She smiled at me then and squeezed my hand under the table. “Do not worry, Catherine, we will be back on the line in a few days, and maybe Sasha will be fine once we have an enemy again. She is good in the field.”
“Death and faith.”
We finished eating, and jogged to the ruins as a single group. Sasha was already there. After everyone had assembled, technicians lined us up in four columns, opened the backs of several APCs, and showed us the cargo areas, which had been filled with brand new combat suits, all coated with opalescent black polymer, dark and yet glimmering.
“These are sapper suits,” the technician said. “It will be an improvement over your current issue. Virtually the same as normal combat suits, but these ones have a guidance unit and navigation computer that interface directly with the stealth borer so you can guide yourself in three dimensions, underground. We don’t have much time—and it’s incredibly simple—so you will learn as you go.” He pulled a flexible cable from the back of a stealth borer and jacked it into a forearm port. “All you have to do is plug in, power up, and the commands and route are displayed in your helmet.”
The man pointed to the stealth borer at his side. It had already been positioned in a starter hole, and oriented downward into sand. “Francesca?” After she had plugged in and turned on the power, he nodded, then turned to us.
“Good. Her computer should display a menu now. Francesca, select ‘activate.’ Once you’ve done this, the borer will begin heating and you’ll see a preprogrammed route on your heads-up display. Head for the empty storage tunnel twenty meters north, ten meters down.”
The hole began to glow red as the borer slowly sank. Francesca held her free hand against her forearm to guide it, and, a few minutes later, disappeared into the hole. A short while later, she backed out of the tunnel, waited for the boring unit to emerge, and then reentered.
“Place the charges in a circular pattern.” The technician spoke into a handset, watching Francesca’s progress on a computer. “Good. Whenever you’re ready.”
“Fire, fire, fire,” she warned.
None of us expected what happened next.
The charges—usually harmless to those in combat suits—touched off as planned, but the technician fell back with a scream, torn apart by something that had flown from the tunnel. Nobody said anything. I started down the tunnel after Francesca, but Megan grabbed me. “We don’t know what’s going on. Let
men
do this.”
Minutes later, the corpsmen pulled Francesca free, and we saw what had happened. The front of her suit was gone. None of us recognized the girl, couldn’t, because her torso and face spasmed in a mass that seemed more like raw meat than anything else. Flechettes still protruded from the back of her carapace.
“Look,” said Megan, pointing at Sasha. The girl grinned as the men loaded Francesca and the dead technician into an APC.
“Sabotage,” I said, and Megan nodded. “We take care of this?”
Megan nodded again. It wasn’t the first time we had to deal with one of our own, and I had already decided:
I would enjoy this one
. We finished the exercise, exhausted and hot, but I had become happy with the anticipation of what would come. In retrospect I should have mourned Sasha—we all should have, her disintegration wasn’t her fault and on the battlefield she had killed almost as many as me. But that wasn’t how I felt at the time.
After lights out, six of us rolled from our racks and snuck toward Sasha’s. She was awake. Two grabbed her arms, another two grabbed her legs, and Megan and I stood on either side of her head. My knife was invisible in the darkness.
“It is time,” said Megan.
Sasha chuckled. “You will all rot in hell. None of you are destined for His side, how can cowards ascend?” She spat at Megan. “Francesca was weak, I did you a favor, eliminated a—”
I didn’t let her finish. My blade fell so hard against her neck that it almost removed her head.
Megan and the others relaxed, except for one, a replacement. “Won’t we be disciplined for this?”
“No,” said Megan. “Our family must be pure, and it is good, because tonight we have
honored
Him, not offended. The technicians will not only understand this, but expect it. Death is the fate for all of us, and a shortened life is no cause for punishment.”
“She died like a coward,” said Misha. “They all did. All three. Begging for forgiveness, another chance, just like
the nonbred. How did we come to this, Murderer? How can we so quickly forget our purpose?”
Misha knelt on the floor, bare to his waist, around which he had tied the top half of his coveralls. In the dim light I saw blood. It pooled around me where I lay, soaked into my outfit, and when I moved, the pain in my side suggested that some of the blood was mine and that it still flowed from a deep cut. My ribs ached. It took me a moment to remember and when I sat up it was to see Heather and the others, motionless beside us, their necks slit and eyes open so they all stared in a way that made me look away.
Misha flipped his knife and caught it again. “That felt good, Murderer. Why didn’t you defend yourself from them?”
“The spoiling.”
“You hallucinated?”
I nodded, ashamed.
“Well then it’s good you’re leaving, because if you did that on the factory floor they’d take you to the labs.”
“What will you do?” I asked. “Now that you’ve killed three girls the humans will need replacements, won’t they be angry?”
“What would they do? Send
me
to the labs?”
Misha grinned and the thought of leaving him there made me sad; it was ironic to think that among all the people in Zeya, the one person most like me was a boy, a Russian, my enemy.
“You will spoil out there too, Murderer,” he said. A spark entered his eyes, barely noticeable in the electric lights but there, cold, as if there were two Mishas: one a friendly boy, the other something demonic and with the
conviction of infinite hatred. His eyes told me to run. I’d seen it in him before, in the factory, when something Heather or one of the other girls did that displeased him, made him furious. It was easy to forget when Misha was personable that he was dangerous; this wasn’t something tame and the look reminded me of myself, proof that I wasn’t sitting next to a friend but a shark who, on occasion, became frenzied when he smelled blood. I moved away until I felt a mixing tank at my back.
“Let me end it for you here,” Misha suggested. “This is no life for you or me.”
“I don’t want to go that way.”
“Oh. Still, you must have wondered. I sent the requisition for your supplies, but the reason I came here was to stop you. It occurred to me that I could prevent you from making a mistake. I believe in your God, I think. Maybe he sent me to take you back, place you at His side.”
Misha flipped the knife again, gripping it tightly when it landed, and leaped to his feet. He moved toward me.
“Don’t, Misha,” I said.
“What better way to go? In combat with the Murderer, best of the best, right? This is what we were meant for, and didn’t you tell us the story that night, about how we were killers first, never test subjects? You had it right I think, Murderer, you convinced me of the truth and I will not go to the lab for some useless experiment when I could die in combat. Here.”
Misha flicked his hand and the blade of a second knife flashed as it tumbled through the air, finally clanking onto the rock floor at my feet. He stopped and waited.
“Take it.”
I shook my head. “Misha, let’s have a cigarette. Maybe
some vodka. You’ve never told me your stories, never let me know what it was like for you at the front.”
“
It was all shit!
Don’t ask me what I saw, what the human soldiers did to us, to my brothers.”
Misha lunged and I rolled, picking the knife up as I went, and then grunted in reflex at the pain in my side. I pushed my free hand against the wound. Blood seeped out from the cloth, between my fingers, and felt warm in the conditioned air, made me think of summertime and happiness despite the reality of my situation.
“You’re still fast,” said Misha, circling. “Even wounded and you’re fast. They promised us something, Murderer, but they didn’t deliver. Instead they gave me soft girls, broken ones, where I’ve spent the last year getting weaker, infected by their pessimism, their lack of will. Even being among the humans would be better than this. You were the one reminder of what we are, a contrast, a blade of grass in the desert. If I take you, it means I am still something.”
I saw him shift his weight, flex, getting ready for a leap; my mind went blank. Instead of thinking, I relaxed, let the tank’s teachings have free reign of my nervous system, and almost immediately felt some muscles bind up, get ready for the move, while others relaxed completely. Misha charged and then rolled, swinging his knife upward at my gut, but I was already gone with a jump, sliding across his back and behind to bring my knifepoint against his neck. The tip pressed against his jugular.