Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 by T.C. McCarthy

it was like a sucking chest wound, messy and offering little chance of recovery. Only drugs made it OK. Maybe an overdose would kill me, I thought,
and that would be all right too.
Death and faith, drugs and painlessness, bullshit and Kaz. The Gs were better than any human I had ever met.
    It took Ox’s task force, almost two hundred men and a pack of rusted-out trucks, several weeks to make the journey by rail and another two days to off-load vehicles and supplies. Most of Karazhyngyl—a tiny railway village—had escaped the devastation of plasma but had been deserted. It was creepy, like a ghost town. Ox ordered the men to construct a defensive perimeter around a hotel close to the station, but it was well into the summer before they erected a network of motion sensors and sentry bots.
    Despite the defenses, I felt uneasy. There was no subterrene here—subterrene didn’t exist in the outposts—and all we got were holes, dug into a sickly tan soil. Ox said it best.
    “We’re out here now. Alone. And I hate this place.”
    We had been there a couple of months when one day, in the distance, a long low whistle sounded and the nearby tracks rattled with the approach of a train.
    Ox sat up. “That ain’t right.”
    “What’s wrong?” I asked. He had already punched a button to put the men on alert, and a stream of them came running out of the hotel to man the perimeter. I did a mental calculation, counted one hundred and forty, with sixty out on patrol.
    “There’s no train scheduled for now,” said Ox. He clicked on to the net. “Heads up. Keep your eyes and ears open. First patrol, status.”
    Thick static made the response hard to understand. “One hundred klicks north of base, turning back now.”
    “Second patrol?” asked Ox.
    “OK, gunny, on our way back now.”
    Slowly the train lumbered into town, moving at less than thirty kilometers per hour, and shook the hotel’s few remaining windows as it clacked over a road crossing. I threw up when I saw it.
    The train consisted of an engine and an attached string of flatcars that stretched as far as we could see. At first I thought the cars had been loaded with recycling material: vehicle wreckage, parts, and anything else that had been taken from the battlefield to be reused and reshaped when time allowed. But I was wrong. It became obvious once the train got closer. Dead bodies had been stacked on eachflatcar like logs, the men still encased in shattered combat suits that barely kept their occupants in one piece, and neither I nor any of the others had our helmets on, so we struggled to snap them in place. Several of us were too late. Like me, some of the others puked into their fighting holes as the odor drifted through town, and I caught a glimpse of one body that had bloated to the point where it split the combat suit at its seams. It took twenty minutes for the last car to disappear.
    “Jesus.” Ox ducked into the hotel and ran down into the cellar, where we had established the task force’s headquarters. There they kept a tac-net radio, which had a much longer range than suit radios, wired to a mobile fusion reactor. Ten minutes later, he returned.
    “Russian push. They hit our front lines hard, and the flanks are being probed. So far our guys are holding but we can expect activity all along the rail line for the next couple of days. Task Force Agadyr captured an insurgent and got him to talk—a local, not a G-boy. Pops has partisans in all the towns around us, ready to go as soon as they get it wired.”
    “How long until patrols report in?” I asked. I was only a division historian, a civilian, but somehow I’d wound up as the unit’s administrative assistant. I didn’t mind, kind of liked it. Finally felt useful in the war.
    “About ten hours for each of them,” said Ox.
    Out here it was a different Kaz, one I hadn’t met. Out here, ten hours was a lifetime.
    A few hours later, night settled on Karazhyngyl. My external thermocouples