Read Online Subterrene War 03: Chimera by T.C. McCarthy - Free Book Online

one. Three fléchettes, one for each of the other Koreans, broke the sound barrier with cracks that resonated in the small space, and I pulled the satchel from my shoulder, motioning for the woman to put all the flexis into it. By the time she finished, I had stripped the corpses of everything in their pockets and then grabbed the woman by the arm, making sure she understood that we were leaving and that my pistol would be pointed at her. She nodded, and we headed outside to climb the stairs. Once at the top, I breathed more easily in the darkness and pushed her along the sidewalk, back toward our apartment where an hour later I had her tied up next to Ji.
    “Can you untie me now?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    I lit a cigarette and blew smoke into his face. “I don’t trust you. How’d you get the information?”
    He stared at me, his face an expression of rage. Blood had dried over his lip and on his nose, a kind of bizarre mustache that represented my entire career. The missions had grown just like that. They evolved over time in a hint of a pattern that anchored itself around murder, but in general they were all chaos, the unexpected and unintended rearing itself in every one and in ways that von Clausewitz never imagined but would have admired as a whacky “fog of war.” But this mission was different. My work had never underpinned a national strategy, and although Command hadn’t given an indication that this op did, the woman’s flexi-tabs suggested otherwise, and I stared at one, the diagrams of a sophisticated armor system glowing green in the otherwise unlit apartment. The girl’s eyes went wide, and her breathing shallowed with a terror that made me feel sick. She was right to be scared. I knew what would happen once we got our information. The fact that I’d just wiped seven humans had started to sink in, a sensation that I countered by reasoning that the kills had been necessary, that it was all for an operation around which you sensed the wheels of a military complex turning, getting ready for a new generation of warfare and preparing to defend itself against a threat that had never been seen before. Whatever the armor was, it was new, it was hard-core, and it hadn’t been designed for anything resembling a human.
    “Tell me how you got the information,” I repeated.
    “One of my friends who still works Assurance at the bureau. He passed it to me a few months ago without reporting through normal channels. He was listening to one of those
innocent
households you were so concerned about.”
    There was a certain smell to fear, and as the woman lay on the floor, Jihoon bleeding beside her, she had it—a mixture of sweat and human ozone. Its odor wafted up, as if salt and musk seeped from the woman’s pores, but Jihoon just smelled like ass. The fact that he wasn’t scared made me reconsider.
    “You going to try anything if I untie you?”
    He spat on the floor. “I might knife you in your sleep, you son of a bitch.”
    I knelt beside him and unhitched my belt, letting him go. “Don’t fuck with me. You have no idea what I can do.”
    “I’m beginning to get an idea.”
    “Look, Command was right, I do need you. You speak their language, and this is some messed-up stuff.” I showed him the first flexi-tab and waited for the reaction, but there was none. It bothered me. Jihoon was impossible to read, and it occurred to me that this guy would have been good at poker, his face so far having been unreadable except for the few times he wanted to show how much he hated me.
    “It’s a new kind of armor,” I said.
    “I can see that.”
    “But it’s not for people or satos. Look at the design for the occupant; the dimensions are for something with meter-long legs about an inch across.”
    Jihoon nodded. “I noticed. What happened to the others?”
    “Dead, along with the black market guys. Their contact was a woman, and I grabbed wallets along with everything in their pockets.”
    Jihoon