Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 by T.C. McCarthy Page A

and the tunnel wouldn’t stop spinning. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the edge was still off, everything smooth, and I did my best to wipe my face with an empty ration pack.
    “You are ill,” she said.
    “Nah, I’m OK.”
    “We attack soon.” She pointed to the tunnel plug and I saw a team of sappers working plasma torches, cutting through while a forklift waited to catch it. “I thought you might want to come, to share.”
    I kissed her. She was real close to me, and her breath was incredible, feminine. It had been a long time, and I was so gone that I just did it without thinking, not considering that maybe she didn’t want to kiss someone who had just puked. But she kissed me back. And when it was over, she smiled.
    “I will miss you, Scout.”
    Bridgette stood and hesitated before leaving. “Remember me. It will be nice to leave this place and know that we will be remembered.”
    “Yeah. I won’t forget, kid.”
    When the plug fell out with a clang, Bridgette moved into the tunnel with the others and it screwed with me. I didn’t want her to go.
    The fact was that although I didn’t see it, the downward slide had begun long before, a transformation in which the human part of me had begun to dissolve to be replaced by a hybrid thing, part earth and part war, a shift that was clear only in retrospect, maybe looking back when you hit sixty years old. Bridgette reminded me of the old Oscar—before Kaz. She had a light in her face that said nothing about what she had been designed to do, because it was the glow of someone young who still had things to experience, the same things I had taken for granted or forgotten, and her presence reminded me of them. Bridgette made you forget where you were.
    “Get some,” the sergeant said.
    “Huh?”
    “I can’t believe you’d even touch one of those things. Gs and reporters screwing. Now I’ve seen it all.”
    It finally started to break through then, that something wasn’t right. These weren’t the Marines I remembered; they were nothing like Ox, and I wished he was there, actually missed Burger and Snyder too, wanted their corpses to show up and keep me from having to look at the sergeant.
    I stood and moved toward the attack tunnel, slipping on my hood to see in the darkness. Screw the Maxwell, I thought. It was too heavy.
    The captain stood near the tunnel entrance and nodded at me.
    “Welcome to Pavlodar!” he said again. “No weapon?”
    “Nah—I’m a reporter, with
Stripes.
”
    “I haven’t heard of this,” he said.
    “You haven’t heard of
Stars and Stripes
?” I asked. It was
all
wrong, and even through the zip, it started to tingle, the pucker starting early. “Where are you from?”
    “Poland. I joined up last year so I could get my citizenship.”
    I had to get out of there. It was too amped up, even for me, and there wasn’t anything in particular that got me on edge; it was more a feeling that somewhere in my subconscious an internal computer had crunched the numbers while I wasn’t looking and now sent me a message that it couldn’t divide by zero. The girls had vanished into the tunnel, but I thought if I walked after them, I might get to the Russian lines in time to see it. To get some, or at least get away from the captain.
    That’s when the shit started.
    “You can’t go there,” he said. The guy was grinning and it occurred to me that he was too young. Like a teenager. The vision hood had concealed it from a distance, but now that he was close, it was obvious and crazy. He grabbed my arm with one hand and nearly broke my wrist in a grip so strong it was like nothing I had felt before; then he lifted a carbine with his free hand.
    The others never had a chance. Fléchettes ripped through the Marines, cutting some of them in half, and none of them even got to return fire; they weren’t ready. A couple started running toward the exit tunnel, and the captain let go of me so he could steady his aim and cut them