We split into fire teams of four girls each—one grenade launcher and three carbines—and filtered westward into the alleys. The grenadiers announced they were switching to shaped charge. When we approached the first house, our grenadier fired in a detonation that shook the ground, and once the dust settled I saw the perfectly circular hole in the wall, getting bigger as I sprinted
toward it. I dove through. All of the houses we searched held only dusty furniture, as if their inhabitants had simply vanished, and by the time we reached the far outskirts, we had gained nothing except the sweat that had soaked into our undersuits.
“Lily,” someone said. “The
building
.” But Megan had already seen it.
“Deactivate stealth, town clear.”
Maykain had one tall structure, near the main road, a concrete warehouse; its slabs had been stacked end to end, forming a poorly constructed, now crumbling, façade. We had found the friendly unit. They hung from the building’s windows, upside down, stripped of armor and undersuits so that a soft rain of blood fell from them to form a rough red square outline around the building. In the dying light we saw words, scrawled across a bare section of concrete.
You cannot win
.
Megan ordered one of the teams to search the warehouse. At first it went normally. They blew a hole on one side and entered, the bangs from their movements echoing through empty alleyways, until we saw a bright flash followed by a shock wave that threw me backward. We thought it had been a remote detonated trap, a mine, and fanned out, searching for any remaining enemy units but soon we realized four charges had probably been set to a timer. The explosions had touched off simultaneously, one at each corner, bringing the building down on our sisters in a geyser of dust.
I didn’t understand it then—the point of fighting that way, of defeating our forces at a key road crossing but then abandoning it. There had been
no
attempt to hold.
They simply hit and then vanished, so that we called for a flight of drones to search the steppes westward, but by the time the aircraft arrived they found only empty plains. Our enemy had been as ghosts, just like us.
“We are ghosts,” Margaret whispered to no one. She thought I was still gone, and her tears hadn’t stopped, leaving pink tracks on her cheeks and freezing in spots on her armor. “Nobody sees us and it’s not because of stealth mode, it’s because we no longer exist. We’re already dead, and this is hell, but nobody told us.”
“If this is hell, then we should just keep moving, find a way to make it ours.” I lifted my head from her lap and thanked her before going on. “But I don’t think it’s hell, Margaret. We can kill humans. For me, it suggests we’re in heaven.”
She laughed at that, which I took as a good sign, even though I wasn’t sincere in my bravery.
“So what now?”
I shook my head. “We keep going. Chegdomyn is immediately south, and from there we’ll skirt Khabarovsk and move to Korea. We’ll at least try.”
Margaret ran a hand through her hair, and her breath came out in clouds. “I’ve been listening to the radio, Murderer. The Chinese control Russia from Khabarvosk almost to the sea west of Sakhalin, and we’re wearing Russian armor with almost no fuel cells left—not to mention food. We can’t get through.”
“Then some Chinese will die before we do. Let’s go.”
“Sometimes,” said Margaret, “I hate you.”
We moved slowly, unwilling to use stealth mode and
drain our last cells, but hoping we’d see anyone before they saw us. The forest was silent. Only the sounds of our feet, which crunched through a centimeter-thick layer of icy crust, broke the quiet stillness, making me realize just how silly it was to try and hide when we made so much noise. The forest ended less then a kilometer from where we had rested and we stood behind trees, shocked at what lay before us: an infinite field of destruction. Russian armor and APCs littered what looked like a frozen swamp, with stands of cattails bending under the weight of ice that clung to their ends. Smoke still billowed from the vehicles. The popping of ceramic plates sounded in the distance, their noise like firecrackers, which made Margaret and me flinch with each snap, and thousands of Russian bodies lay strewn in the snow, their armor shattered from flechettes or molten from plasma and thermal gel. Margaret was about to sprint out and I grabbed her.
“Their fuel cells, Catherine,” she explained.
“Not yet.”
And we waited. I don’t know what forced me to make that decision, maybe some premonition carried over the snow in a cloud of smoke, but we were about to break cover when we saw something move; it was far away, and almost immediately disappeared among the tanks. But it came again—then from other spots, more than one shape, slipping among the wreckage. The figures flicked in and out of sight, any one hard to see, but eventually different glimpses formed an image in my mind of men and women, covered from head to toe in what looked like padded clothing and who stopped only for a second to snap off fuel cells or gather weapons from the dead before disappearing again.
“They are so fast,” Margaret whispered.
“Snowshoes. They’re wearing snowshoes or skis.”
A flight of drones appeared out of nowhere and we saw the people dive under wrecks or bury themselves in snow, so that within seconds they were invisible. I flicked to infrared. Nothing. Whoever they were, these were humans trained in how to disappear and we watched in fascination, almost forgetting to take cover when the missiles and bombs fell, scattering snow, ice, and ceramic across the frozen swamp, sending shards of armor to embed themselves in trees. Within a few minutes the attack ended and we waited before seeing the people emerge again, continuing to scavenge. One finally came into clear view and I zoomed in to get a better look. A thick kind of fur hat protected his head and face with a flap that wrapped under his chin and over his nose, leaving only a pair of thin eyes exposed. He stopped. The man appeared to stare directly at me and then whistled so that the rest of them disappeared again, melting into the wreckage. We watched each other for a minute before I stepped into the snow, into the open, and held up both hands to show I was unarmed. At first he stood there, frozen. Then the man started a fast glide toward me, pushing off from side to side on thin skis. My heart pounded. I heard Margaret start to pull her pistol from its holster and stopped her with a glance before the man finally stopped, barely three meters in front of us.
I lowered one of my hands and waved with the other one, shocked when he waved back.
“What now?” I asked Margaret.
“You tell me. We might not have a lot of time before another attack. Who are they?”
The man cocked his head at the sound of our English and said something I didn’t understand, but Margaret stepped forward and answered, speaking something that sounded like Chinese before she turned.
“They’re Korean.”
“What are they doing here?” I asked “Unarmored?”
“They want us to come with them, and he says it’s not safe to stay here. I’ve explained we’re escaped American prisoners.”
I didn’t want to go. Not with them. These were humans and although the Atelier lessons had included the Koreans, all the Asian nations, and their wars, it was different to see one in person for the first time and feel his stare, an expressionless unblinking one. Unreadable. Margaret must have seen my hesitation and threw up her hands.
“What else are we going to do, Catherine?” She turned back to the man and said something else, conversing with him for a full five minutes before finishing. “They said the Chinese haven’t arrived yet but they will, either from the south or out of the west, but that they won’t bother them. They’re friends with the Chinese. Just like they’re friends with the Russians.”
“Is that why the Chinese just attacked them?” I asked.
“Catherine, you know those were drones. They can’t tell a friendly unit unless you’re wearing a transponder.”
Margaret was right. There was no other option; we’d revealed ourselves to them and even if we ran now we’d freeze to death in the open once our fuel cells finally drained, and one death was just like any other so what did it really matter? I pushed into the snow, moving toward the man, who motioned to the others. Within seconds they had surrounded us. The Koreans carried Russian
weapons, probably ones they had just stolen, and trained them on our chests as the man took our pistols, then pushed Margaret and me southward, toward Chegdomyn. Their pace was relentless. One group sped ahead on cross-country skis, pausing every once in a while to wait for the remainder who guarded us; by the time we reached a road I had begun to see stars from exhaustion and the act of pushing through snow—deeper now that we had moved into the open—made my muscles scream. I wanted to lie down. At that moment if someone had offered to kill me I might have accepted the fate, but the road offered an easier path, one on which our feet didn’t sink too deeply, and soon the agony faded a bit, allowing me to catch my breath. They pushed us through another small forest, and then over a half-ruined bridge that crossed a frozen river; on the other side, a rusted sign declared in Russian that this was Urgal. But it wasn’t on my map display, and soon I understood why.
A thin steel cable ran through rusted pipes that had been driven into the ground on either side of the road, and hanging from the cable at regular intervals were small signs. Faded. Ice and snow covered most of what remained of old paint and lettering, but enough was there to see the radiation warning symbols, and almost at the same instant the warning beep came alive inside my suit. A dosimeter began reading my exposure. The Koreans didn’t have dosimeters or armor, but they sped up, pushing us even faster, until we reached the other side of the abandoned village where the radiation beacon flickered out. We continued south across an empty field, indescribable in its breadth; here and there large tree stumps sticking up through the snow suggested that a forest had once existed
but had long since been conquered. The radiation and trees retaught another lesson we had absorbed in the tanks, described to me in more detail by Misha: that the Asian wars had gone nuclear, and had spilled over into Russia.
Ten minutes later the group led us into Chegdomyn. They pushed us into a low hut, most of it underground except for the roof, and then tossed us a pair of Russian fuel cells before saying something to Margaret and shutting the door.
“They said to stay here and to not come out. Or we die.”
Almost as soon as my helmet hit the cold earth, my eyes flickered, and I whispered. “Why would they kill us now?”
“Not them. The Chinese will be here soon and if we’re seen, they’ll kill us. He said they may already have forward observers in the town, sent from Khabarovsk.”
This time, I never felt the nightmare coming.
They needed a forward observer and there were no humans available.
We
would infiltrate. Megan and I crawled through Pavlodar’s rubble, moving down into craters and then up the other side on our bellies, flinching at the sound of aircraft booming overhead, their wreckage littering the rubble with blackened metal that fell without warning. The shaft of a broken water tower was close now. One hundred meters. Then fifty, and a few minutes later we sat at its base. The Russians had established an aboveground defensive line, and our intelligence suggested they would soon move out from it for another push, coordinating with underground forces. Megan and I would help stop it.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
I slung my carbine. “Yes.”
We climbed the remains of a ladder, hand over hand, careful to ensure that we moved slowly enough to evade motion sensors, watching power levels drain more quickly when our chameleon skin activated. It took us ten minutes to reach the top. Fifty meters up we crawled out onto a sheet of bent iron, its edges jagged as though God had reached down and torn it to pieces, where we lay still and watched.
The Russian positions extended for as far as we could see. Their forces had massed on the northeastern edges of the city, tiny figures in black armor, who, from this distance, resembled worker ants. Before radioing in, we mapped the positions, marking plasma cannon locations, APCs, and troop concentrations; our fingers moved quickly over forearm controls to lock in the data. After we sent the report, we had one last job: to wait. As soon as the enemy began to move out, we would call in the artillery and retreat to our underground position.
Megan was hard to see. The chameleon skin made her outline shimmer, as if she were an optical illusion, no more than a distortion in the air next to me so that this time I had to reach out and touch her. To make sure she was real.
“I am here,” Megan said.
“It’s strange.” I shook my head and scanned the line again.
“What?”
“Us. The only time we get time to be alone is when we cannot afford to pay attention to each other.”
Megan laughed quietly. “This is war, Catherine.
Sometimes I wonder if you are human, the way you think and talk. We have but one purpose. ‘To serve him and—’ ”
“ ‘And to kill any enemy who stands in our way, any who block the path of His holy word,’ ” I finished the scripture for her and sighed. “They show no sign of moving out yet.”
“This bothers you?”
Clouds had gathered overhead and the suit temperature indicator had been dropping steadily since we came topside. I shivered. “It will snow soon. This will cause trouble.”