Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Read Online Free Page B

tapped him on the shoulder and he slumped over. On the way down in the elevator, his guts had started coming out of the hole, and for a moment I remembered my real job.
    Burger would make some story.
    The genetics came a few days after we lost Burger, and that word popped into my head again. “Pulitzer.” Nobody in the press had been this close. A hundred of them showed up in the tunnel, silent and eerie, all identical, all girls.
Engineered.
    I wished I had my holo unit as they passed in front of me. Beautifully deadly, and all grace. The girls had mustered out of the factories, ateliers, manufactured at a trickle for now, but it was a trickle that made a difference—one that even the Press Corps noticed. Since the Russians had shown up a year earlier, every action where we were able to retake the mine had involved the use of genetically engineered troops. Line units had entire legends built up around the Gs.
“You should have seen them, man, just one squad of Gs wiped an entire battalion of Pops, moved like lightning on speed.”
    They were probably about sixteen or seventeen years old, and their bald heads were nearly flawless, would have been if not for thick calluses formed by the friction of their hoods. These didn’t wear helmets for some reason. Maybe it was because they were too cool, like Amazons in formation, and they knew it. Instead the girls carriedtheir lids like I had, on straps hanging from their belts, and they marched into the tunnel without a sound, silent phantoms in black armor.
    “What’s all over their faces?” I asked. Their heads had been coated with something like grease, a dark green that hid most of their features.
    “Thermal block,” Ox said. “Gs hate helmets worse than we do. Especially the ones near the end of their term. Thermal block cuts down on emissions. Not perfect, but they’re crazy anyway.”
    “End of their term?”
    He laughed and leaned his carbine against the wall. “The young Gs wipe the old ones when they turn eighteen. Honorable discharge. By then they’re too crazy to keep on the line, too far gone. At that point they’re sucking down tranq tabs like candy, and it doesn’t even faze ’em.”
    “Yeah,” said Snyder. “But they’re here. Only one thing to do now.”
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “Pucker,” Ox said. “And ask the captain if you can have another weapon. We’ll be pushing into the mines again, or else these chicks wouldn’t be here.”
    One of the girls approached the captain and handed him a stack of tickets. Orders. He nodded, and everyone watched then, looking for some sign of our fate in the captain’s face, not willing to give up hope that maybe it was all a big mistake, maybe this time there’d be no push.
    The girl returned to her group and on the way she passed me, close. Whatever they were, they
smelled
like girls, and for a second I felt like screaming, because if you closed your eyes and couldn’t see her, it
smelled
like she should have been sitting in school, driving guys crazywith a miniskirt. But she
looked
like a killer.
That
was subterrene; that was Kaz—where opposites existed simultaneously and just laughed at you, like,
Yeah? So?
    She sat against the wall and bowed her head with the rest of them.
    “Now what are they doing?” I asked.
    “Praying,” said Ox. “They’ve been fed some messed-up religion; it keeps them going.”
    I grabbed my recorder and turned it on, just in time.
    “Death and faith,” they said. The words were soft, sounded like a children’s choir, and filled the quiet tunnel with an echoing murmur. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven, earth, and death. I believe in warfare and destruction, his only children, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and taught through honorable suffering. I believe that death on the field is my proof, a sacrifice, to show that I remain among the faithful. The loyal. I believe in the atelier, the forgiveness of enemies brave