Subterrene War 03: Chimera Read Online Free Page A

miss them—Bea and Phillip—but still there was
nothing.
There had to be something wrong with me, but damned if I could figure it out, and it didn’t matter anyway; I’d be gone within forty-eight hours with other things to worry about.
    “Nice visit?” the corporal asked.
    I nodded.
    “Bet you can’t wait to get back home again.”
    I shook my head. “I’m not coming back. I’d forgotten how shitty the central-monitoring computers are.”
    “Well, we don’t want to go back to those days,” the corporal said without even realizing it, and I almost slammed him against the bulkhead.
    “Another sato. Another day.” Wheezer sat next to me in a beat-up eco job, the recycled plastic kind with an electric motor and two seats. A computer tablet sat on his lap. “Jesus, I hate these urban ops; give me a suit’s computer any day. It’s friggin’
day
time.”
    “Where is she?” I asked.
    “Two blocks up, on the left, three-slash-two-to-four. Pine Street. The locals know we’re here, right?”
    I nodded, pulling the car into an empty slot—far enough away from the target that we shouldn’t be noticed, but in position to get a good view. “Briefed ’em this morning. They’re glad to have us so they don’t have to deal with them.”
    “You see the news?” asked Wheezer.
    “What news?”
    “Chinese entered Burma—invited in by the Burmese—and spooked everyone in Thailand. Bangkok may go to hell any day now.”
    I shook my head, an imaginary whiff of jungle somehow overriding the smell of the car, elbowing its way into my head and making me shiver. “Emigration?”
    “Not yet,” said Wheezer, “but the Thais are expecting it and maybe some rioting. Soon. None of them want to be there if the Burmese have China helping this time. I wouldn’t have brought it up, but… you know. Everything that happened there.”
    I nodded. The memory of my last tour in the bush was enough to make me crawl with the feeling that everything was wrong until I pushed the thoughts out, forcing myself to focus on the present. There’d be time to quit, I figured, before things went south in Thailand, and there was no reason to think they’d send us there anyway.
    We saw Manly Beach from our spot. How’d she make it this way—to Australia of all places? It didn’t matter if I figured it out or not—the betty would wind up like the others—but I’d never been this far from a war zone to track one down. People laughed as they walked by our car, headed for the sand, some of them carrying surfboards and all of them oblivious to what had infested their corner of the world. If we did it right, they’d never know.
    “Movement,” said Wheezer, my signal to lift a pair of field glasses and aim them at the windows.
    She had one blind up, peering through the narrow crack that formed so that I could see those eyes, a deep blue like some exotic berry broken by a pinpoint of black pupil. There was another window nearby, and its blinds flickered too.
    “There’s two of them. Didn’t intel say there was only one?”
    Wheezer shook his head. “Friggin’ intel. This isn’t good, Bug.”
    I thought for a second, reaching for the ignition button and still staring through the binoculars when the first one looked directly at me. “We’re burned,” I said, cursing myself for parking too close.
Sloppy.
    “Let’s get the hell out,” Wheezer said, yanking a fléchette pistol from his shorts. “
Now.
”
    I had just put the car into reverse when the passenger window shattered. Wheezer didn’t have time to react. Oneof them had snuck up behind us, must have already been on the street, and punched through the glass as if it were paper. She slammed her fist into Wheezer’s temple and his head went limp, falling against my shoulder before I grabbed the pistol from his hand, kicked open my door, and rolled into the street.
    Her figure blurred when she slid over the back of the car, toward me, barely giving me enough time to