She spoke over the intercom in Russian. “I think you’ll
like North Korea, Catherine. You can’t destroy nature, not with anything man-made. The wildlife has taken over everything, and now the country is more beautiful than ever. Just wait.”
I scanned the forest on either side of the tracks, watching the trees crawl by at twenty kilometers an hour. “How long until the border at this speed?”
“Just over three days. We can relax to some extent until then, but keep your eyes open.” She clicked into the general radio channel and spoke Korean, which Margaret translated. “Safeties off, weapons hot. Kill anyone within ten meters of the tracks and announce any hits on detectors. Out.”
It didn’t take long to get our first look at nuclear devastation. Less than ten minutes after we started, the tracks took us due east—a direction in which we had never traveled for logging—and into the thickest forest I had seen, the trees towering over our tracks and some of them leaning at a dangerous angle, about to collapse. Then the trees gave way to open fields. Our tracks angled slightly north, guiding us into the ruins of a city that had been abandoned, its buildings rising from the middle of a swamp so that bushes climbed from the bases of their concrete structures, vines reaching to the very top as though something had reached up from the mud and was slowly demolishing everything. Our detector alarms screeched, forcing me to knock my helmet against the turret ring in surprise.
Yoon-sung heard the bang and laughed. “That’s why we seal the cargo, Murderer. Don’t worry. Our cars are shielded, and the dose we’ll get is next to nothing.”
“So,” I said, “the attack has already begun.”
“We have plenty of tranq tabs from the stores Misha gave us,” said Margaret, her sarcasm obvious.
“
You’ll
need them soon, I think.” I smiled. There had been no hallucinations in a while, and something told me there wouldn’t be any more unless it was a message from Megan or the dead, not a hallucination but a way to see the path.
“Do you want me to man the turret?” Margaret asked.
“Maybe later.”
“Are you sure? It could take your mind off things if you had something to concentrate on.”
“I said
no
. You begin to bore me.”
I wanted to enjoy the scenery. The turret gave me and the commander/driver, Yoon-sung, the best view of our surroundings, a three-sixty panorama of abandoned humanity and the victory of forest and swamp. Margaret, who monitored the detectors, had no view unless I piped it to her. She was to make sure that our automated cars up front, their sniffers barely clearing the wooden ties and ballast, kept moving and that a nominal number of sensors functioned. It was tedious. Her view consisted of a bank of computer screens and indicators, row upon row of numbers and blinking lights that rarely changed and that would be sure to tell
me
nothing. And Yoon-sung had confided in me that she had grown concerned with Margaret, a concern that I shared because Margaret had turned into something I recognized, an organism that closely resembled the way I had been only a few months ago.
She will kill, even when the time doesn’t call for it; I think she is going mad
, Yoon-sung had said, and I nodded, not sure how to respond. Margaret’s spoiling manifested in a different way—through whoring—but the process had
converted her nonetheless so that now she hated everything, most of all herself.
“Fine,” she said, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice. “If you hallucinate, even once, I’m going to take over from you.
Murderer
.”
“We will settle our differences, Margaret. Soon.” I felt her stare then, but she said nothing and Yoon-sung only chuckled.
Some time later, the scout cars leaned slightly as the tracks angled sharply southward in the direction of Khabarovsk.
“Yoon-sung, the Chinese are in Khabarovsk.” I said.
She sounded amused. “Are you scared?”
“On the contrary, I plan. They might inspect us.”
“I told you a long time ago, they are our friends. There will be no inspections; the Chinese are expecting us, and with a quick bribe of their officials we’ll continue on our way.”
“Bribe?” I asked. “With what?”
“You’ll see when we get there.” I tried to pry it out of her, but Yoon-sung refused to say anything more on the subject.
Her answer created a sense of something hidden, a stirring in my chest that urged me to remember something, anything she had ever told me, so that I could predict what it was that the Chinese would take as a trade. But nothing came. Wolf pelts, methanol, wood—all of these the Chinese could gather themselves, and the only thing I could think of that they didn’t have was us. Margaret and me. The Chinese had no American genetics of their own and General Kim’s warning came back, “
You don’t know what she has planned for you and your
friend
,” and I checked the flechette pistol in my belt holster to make sure its fuel cell was still full. My newfound serenity came from accepting that fate would unfold the way it was supposed to; but it didn’t include volunteering for experimentation by Chinese researchers.
We saw Khabarovsk long before we got there. It was early in the morning of our second day when smoke billowed up from the city and into the sky, turning the air over the trees black, and we were kilometers away when the thud of artillery started shaking the scout cars slightly. Movement caught my attention. I spun my turret to face the target and zoomed in on a squad of soldiers, their deep green armor and red stars clearly visible as the
things
ran parallel to the tracks.
“Do you see that, Yoon-sung?”
She sounded as excited as I was. “Are they keeping pace?”
“No, I have them at fifteen kilometers an hour, a little slower than us. But it’s a constant rate. No man or woman could run like that for long, not even our sisters.”
The squad leapt over wreckage and then turned in unison, wheeling like a flock of grounded birds before disappearing into the forest on our right. My breathing was shallow, rapid, from excitement. And despite a suspicion that whoever manned the armored suits was probably like the Russian thing we had found months ago in the forest, there was no revulsion. For a moment I envied the troops, wondering what would happen to the rest of my sisters, regular Germline units, if Americans adopted the model. Would they be discharged? Or would they be
taken off the line and detailed with menial tasks? This was a new era of combat and it forced one to reflect on the fact that what Misha had said was true: once you had seen a squad of them moving in the open, you had to admit that Margaret and I were obsolete.
The scout cars pulled into Khabarovsk station long before the train did, and Margaret and I stayed inside while Yoon-sung left. I watched her through my targeting sight. She climbed onto the platform just as the train’s first diesel engine emerged from the trees behind us, and then she faced the main station—a ruined structure, still on fire, which made it hard to follow her on video. Before our train pulled in, a platoon of armored Chinese troops walked out of the smoke and dust, picking their way carefully through the wreckage. Yoon-sung waved to them. I kept my weapons trained on the one closest to us, but a moment later three turned simultaneously to face me and my targeting alarm tripped, a red light flashing on my heads-up display and warning that we had been lased for range. The things lifted their arms and pointed grenade launchers.
“Catherine?” Yoon-sung’s voice crackled in my headset. “I suggest you point our turret somewhere else. Our hosts aren’t happy with it.”
I fingered the controls until the guns faced in another direction. “Done,” I said, and the warning alarm switched off.
“Thank you.”
The train pulled in behind us finally, its brakes hissing when they locked, and Yoon-sung stood with her arms folded as she faced the Chinese. Nothing happened. Five minutes later, Margaret and I looked at each other.
“What are we doing here?” she asked.
A flash of plasma burst nearby, overloading my view screens at the same time my temperature indicator flickered upward. “We’ll find out. But it is unusual; I thought the Chinese had already secured Khabarovsk, and there is no reason I can think of for this level of conflict.”
My movement indicator caught something, past the station and in the city. I zoomed on the target area and saw a group of what looked like civilians—women and children—being forced through ruined streets by armored Chinese troops and then into waiting trucks. The outside microphone picked up their screams. One of the soldiers shut the back of the truck, which had a solid box-body in the rear, obscuring my view of them, but then another truck pulled up and a second group piled in. Then a third. For as long as we waited the armored troops moved back and forth, loading civilians as war raged all around them, pausing only once to fire streams of flechettes into a group of children who decided to run. None of it disturbed me. Instead, while I watched, I wondered what they would need women and children for and where were the men? My interest was no more than curiosity, the same kind Alderson might have had while pelting me with questions, and after watching for a few minutes more I decided that from a tactical perspective there was little explanation. The strategic perspective yielded only questions. Nobody would need factory laborers so badly that it was worth risking turning an entire city of civilians against them, and there had been no news of the Chinese underground facilities at all, so nothing of the scene made any sense—not even after their officer arrived.
A scout car crawled over the rubble and ground to a
halt behind the soldiers who faced Yoon-sung; its top hatch popped open to emit a human, his head protected by a green helmet that he pulled off with a smile. He jumped down onto the platform and greeted Yoon-sung. I fought the urge to train my turret in their direction again, to point the microphone so Margaret could translate, but it would have been foolish; the three armored soldiers still faced me. Yoon-sung and the man laughed, and he hugged her, before waving the armored soldiers forward, where the whole group of them passed out of sight, walking in the direction of the train’s rear.
“What are they doing?” asked Margaret.
“I can’t see them; they went toward the back of the train.”
Margaret pulled her pistol and lay it on top of a bank of electronics. “If they come for us, I’m not going quietly.”
“I thought the same thing. There is something strange here, but don’t get upset, Margaret. This will reveal itself.”
“Use the turret gun,” she said. “We can lower the wheels and break from the train.”
“I can’t have you react, Margaret. Do nothing. It will play out.”
Margaret screamed.
“You are not my Lily!”
“No. I’m not.” I unclipped from the turret harness, and dropped to the compartment floor before grabbing my own pistol and pressing it against her faceplate. “But you will listen to me. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, the night of the coup is over and I see the way, will never again hesitate to act. Do you want to settle everything now?”
“You’re a coward,” she said, but her voice trembled. “You can’t kill me, you couldn’t even kill the North Koreans that night, ones you barely knew.”
“I will do this to put you out of your misery. I know where you are, don’t forget that I have walked that road, the one your mind is on now. I know that any exit for someone in the desert is a relief.”
The blue power indicator from my weapon reflected off her faceplate. Margaret said nothing. We stayed like that for a minute, after which she started crying and I took her pistol before climbing back into my turret.
Five minutes later, one of the soldiers reappeared. The thing used a pincerlike hand to grasp a rope, towing something behind it that hadn’t yet come into view. When it did, I cocked my head in confusion. People. I told Margaret to watch through her computer screen and piped in the view. One of the other cars must have contained humans, and from their features they appeared Russian, hobbling after the Chinese troops one after another, the single rope looped around each neck. The men wore nothing, and clearly shivered as they walked barefoot over ruined concrete toward the line of trucks and civilians. Some started crying. All of them looked more starved than we did, the skin of their cheeks hollow and gray to the point where I wondered if I watched skeletons or men, and soon, the remainder of the Chinese troops emerged to move in the same direction, the last one carrying the most mystifying thing of all: the Russian I had killed in the forest. All its sockets had been disconnected from its suit, the wires and tubes severed, so that short stalks of fiber optics still protruded from its eyes, and the Chinese soldier held it gently with both ceramic arms as if carrying a baby that it didn’t want damaged.
Yoon-sung shook the officer’s hand and then waved good-bye as she strode back to our car. “Let’s go,” she said, slamming the hatch behind her.
“The Chinese were shooting children in the city,” I said. “What is this all about?”
“What?” Yoon-sung asked. “What was what all about?”
Margaret nearly exploded. “Are you kidding us? Those people. Who were they?”
“Russians,” said Yoon-sung. She radioed the order to move and we started forward before she continued. “Russians we captured the day before you arrived at Chegdomyn, and the one you killed in the forest. The Chinese want them.”
It still made no sense and I shook my head. “For what?”