Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Read Online Free

name?” Snyder asked.
    I don’t remember telling him, but I must have.
    “Oscar Wendell?” Ox asked. He and the others started laughing then. “No, no, no,
hell
no. We’re gonna give you a new name, your war name, ’cause you been born again, son of Kaz. Oscar Wendell will now be known as Scout.”
    “Scout?”
    “Well, Scout,” said Snyder. “Welcome to the jolly green brotherhood, no turning back now, nothing to do but crank on. Crank fire.”
    Crank fire.
We cranked fire, and looking back, I realize I was glad for the drugs, for the cushion they gave me, a cocoon that filtered reality and kept out the really bad stuff or made it seem as though nothing was
actually
happening and everything was a dream. Two hours later the snow stopped, leaving the battlefield covered by an additional foot. I was on watch with Ox. The white made it difficult to concentrate and I had to close my eyes every few seconds to keep from getting dizzy; even though I had spat out the zip a long time ago, its effect still bounced in my head, keeping the edge off but blurring my sense of time and vision. Something moved out there. It looked like a piece of rubble melted into the snow and then rosefrom a new position, closer, so when it happened again, I told Ox.
    “Button up,” he said. The mood shattered in an instant. Ox’s and the others’ fingers blurred as the Marines yanked on vision hoods and snapped the cables into place, and it got dead quiet when Snyder killed the music. All I had to do was put on my helmet, but I was the last one finished.
    “Cycle the air.”
    Snyder hit a button and I heard a hiss, watching the temperature gauge on my heads-up drop rapidly. It stopped at five below zero. Burger popped open a firing port under the window and the floor light flickered from green to red at the same time he shoved his grenade launcher through. Ox and Snyder popped their ports, too, and gestured for me to do the same, so I poked my carbine into the narrow opening, and it clicked against the sides as my hands shook.
    “Contact.” Ox’s voice crackled in my ear, over the radio. “Grid Foxtrot-Uniform-one-six-five-three-five-zero.”
    The captain answered, his voice surreal, a caricature of what it should have been, as though someone pinched his nose while he spoke. If things hadn’t been so tense, I might have laughed. “Roger. Artillery off-line, weapons free, sentry bots show green lights. Green light.”
    The shapes crept forward. It was almost impossible to detect, and had I not been paying attention, they would have crawled all the way, hundreds of white blobs that moved forward in a continuous line, so slowly they seemed barely to shift. Chameleon skins. Our suits, and theirs, had been coated with a reactive polymer, wired to the suits’ computers and power systems so that it sensedone’s surroundings and changed to the same color as the closest objects. That was why they had been so hard to see, and it reminded me of what Ox had said, how he’d described them. Spooky. Popov was a ghost.
    “Why are they moving so slowly?” I asked.
    Ox grunted. “ ’Cause of our sentry bots. The bots can detect heat, but armored suits mask heat. That leaves motion and shape detection, but if you’ve got your second skin activated, move slow enough, and stay low…
    “Crafty little bastards,” said Snyder.
    I shook my head, trying to concentrate. “How slow?”
    “Once they reach our security zone,” said Burger, “about two feet a minute.”
    Two feet a minute. Outside. If a plasma barrage came and you were out there when it hit, instant crisp. I’d seen the bodies and wreckage on flatcars in Tashkent, smelled it when the wind was right. Ceramic melted at plasma temperatures, and the dead bodies looked like lumps of rock. These guys had come from their own lines, almost three klicks away. Slowly. That meant they had been out in the weather for almost a day, come plasma, snow, or anything, and that kind of dedication