Subterrene War 03: Chimera Read Online Free Page B

think,
God, this one is fast.
My fléchettes snapped through her torso; tiny spots of blood appeared on her white T-shirt as the needles worked their way upward, bursting through her neck and forcing her to the asphalt.
    My car trunk didn’t want to work. I slammed my fist on it, working the key until eventually it gave, everything moving in slow motion.
Grenade launcher,
I thought.
Where is the fucking grenade launcher?
I lifted it, resting the barrel on the top of the car, running through a list in my head:
blinds open now; movement; they are still there.
    The first grenade detonated when it hit glass, sending shards everywhere so that people in the street screamed, running for cover while I fired a second, a third, and then kept going until the clip chimed empty. Speed was important now—to clean up before the chicks had a chance to scatter into the sewers or wherever else, making it that much harder for us to track them down, if we ever found them again at all. I grabbed the carbine, a special model without a hopper but three thousand fléchettes in a banana clip that angled upward. The weapon was short for tight spaces.
    My legs didn’t move as fast as I wanted them to and crossing the street seemed like it took an hour, the apartment steps endless. I wasn’t afraid, didn’t feel anythingexcept a vague notion that the movement carried me into a zone where it all clicked by the numbers, the knowledge that everything was as it should be, making the next few seconds
smooth
.
    The door splintered when I kicked it, and I sprayed the room, moving forward in a crouch. It got quiet then. A siren blared in the distance, getting louder, and it took me a second to realize that they were all dead: three satos on the floor and splayed in different poses, with expressions of surprise on their faces as if the grenades had shredded their minds—before they had a chance to figure things out. By the time I made it back to the car, the first local cop had already arrived.
    “They
were
genetics?” he asked.
    I nodded. “Three in the flat, one on the street. Shredded.”
    He looked at Wheezer and shook his head. “I already checked him. He’ll be out for a bit but should be OK. Nothing that won’t mend.”
    “Yeah.” I tossed the carbine into the trunk, then slid into the driver seat, trying not to say anything that would show how glad I was that she hadn’t killed him. “But he missed all the fun.”
    The car didn’t want to accelerate and whined as if it were angry that it had to move. I hated the things. Wheezer was right: screw urban ops; give me the steppes or the jungle—the night—where we’d play the game
our
way with microbots and air support, would get to carry our weapons in the open instead of having to lock them in the trunk. Even walking across Turkmenistan would have been better then being trapped in a plastic box because at least out there you’d have a combat suit.
    The mission hadn’t ended. I thought we’d get the recall notice as soon as we got back to the hotel, by which time Wheezer had come to, but instead of the regular phone call, we got orders to head to the Sydney desalination plant south in Cronulla.
Cronulla.
It was the kind of place where immigrants wound up, a rats’ nest forming the working-class slums of Sydney, a megacity that was more Asian than anything else, and every night we heard gunfire from the battles raging between Korean and Japanese gangs—the product of a decades-old war and famine that had spread from east Asia to the entire Pacific. We drove through a Korean neighborhood on the way to the plant, and I marveled at the front yards, none of which had a blade of grass or a shrub. Each lawn had been replaced by a concrete apron, some decorated by imitation stone statues, but most contained groups of young men who stared at us as we passed, their eyes indifferent to who we were as long as it was obvious that neither of us was Japanese. Finally we crested a hill and turned