Subterrene War 03: Chimera Read Online Free

hallway, I broke into a sweat. The sun had risen, and as I trudged down the stairwell, wind threatened to open rattling doors that lined each side of the corridor. I tried to avoid the dwellings, which were vacant except for lingering ghosts. Unit after unit went by, their name placards either covered with grit or swinging on one fastener, and I couldn’t help but read the names in passing—Eleanor, Gillespi, Capozzi, and O’Leary—names that meant nothing to me in terms of personal knowledge, but which hung on my shoulders because I was a soldier and so they blamed me for their deaths. Each one was an additional weight, lead bricks that couldn’t be jettisoned until I burst onto the street, gasping for air.
    Bea’s building was identical to the blocks of housing units that stretched for miles in either direction, and it made me wonder why I hadn’t remembered what they looked like, despite having walked in and out every day for the past few weeks, and yet for some reason they were as unfamiliar now as when I’d first arrived. Concrete and narrow windows formed a never-ending series of bunkers, and empty pigeons’ nests tucked into broken sashes fluttered, as if announcing that even birds didn’t want to live there anymore. This was Dzhanga again. I loweredmyself to the curb and shook, cursing myself for having shown up too early for pickup because now all I could do was wait, think about what was going to happen, and do my best not to find a bar.
    “You’re approximately twenty minutes early for the crawler, Sergeant Resnick.” The voice echoed in the empty street from speakers mounted on tall poles next to cameras.
    “I know.”
    “It’s good to be eager.”
    “How would you know?”
    But the government system didn’t have an answer for that one. I lit a cigarette and blew it toward the camera.
    A few minutes later it spoke again, almost at the same time the sky darkened; I looked up to see clouds of red dust on the horizon, boiling in. “Looks like the first sandstorm of the season.”
    “I’d say so.”
    “Don’t count on it, though, Sergeant Resnick. The wind might die after all. To remain occupied I often incorporate data from stations all over the nation and make local weather predictions, which I then compare to those of dedicated semiaware weather-modeling systems. Did you know that my answers are the same as theirs, within error?”
    “No,” I said, wishing I could deactivate the voice on the street or somehow choke it into submission. “I suppose not.”
    “My operators encourage this as a redundancy. Weather modeling is a key to reestablishment in abandoned zones, and once successful in changing things for the better, we don’t want to go back to those days.”
    “Were you around in those days?” I asked.
    The thing had to think for a second. “No.”
    “Then how do you know that going back would be bad?”
    It had no answer, and I grinned. “Thought so.”
    The dust storm, I figured, would hit any minute, and I watched it approach—a wall of radioactive sand that looked as high as the buildings themselves—and it threatened to force me back inside, to wait with Bea and Phillip. But something was speeding at the front of it. A speck of black grew into the shape of a crawler, its high-speed tracks kicking up twin fountains of crud as it headed toward me. It squealed to a stop, the rear hatch lowered, and a corporal hopped out, speaking at the same time he waved a hand scanner over my wrist tattoo.
    “Sergeant Resnick?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I carry priority orders from Special Operations Command. You’re to report with me to Phoenix terminal for transport and assignment.”
    “Where am I headed after that?”
    “I don’t have that information, Sarge.”
    Special Ops Command. SOCOM. The corporal ushered me into the crawler at the same time the storm hit, so that just before our driver gunned the engine, I heard the patter of grit outside. I tried one last time, to see if I’d