Free Sunshine by T.C. McCarthy

Sunshine
    T he inside of her combat suit smelled like fear. And old socks , she decided. Kyung had been buttoned up for almost three days now, longer than she had ever wanted and two days longer than anyone in her corporate division. A record.
    “Six thousand meters,” the computer said, “approximately one full Chinese division, ETA six hours. I warned you not to sneak away from the main force, Miss Kyung; you’re not a soldier. There’s now an eighty percent chance that if we don’t move farther south immediately, we will be unable to rejoin with friendly forces near Pak Chong Hui City.”
    Kyung wiped the ice from her faceplate to get a better view of the ridgeline opposite hers. She had seen it again. The thing looked like a man, but Kyung swore that it moved like a dog, sniffing the air before it disappeared in a cloud of snow.
    I hate dogs , she thought. Whatever it was, the thing reminded her of a story her grandmother had told a long time ago…
    “Chinese forces now five thousand nine hundred and ninety-five—”
    “Kill tracking mode,” she said, quieting the computer. “Open journal.”
    A green cursor appeared on Kyung’s display, typing words as she spoke. “Note to head of systems: Enemy tracking mode needs adjusting. I suggest an ability to customize the time between announcements and more sensitivity on volume controls. Oh, and John, the next time you assign me to a frozen rock for testing I’ll bite your ears off. Entry complete. Transmit once we’re back at Pak Chong Hui.”
    Testing. John Leonard, director of the company’s Armor and Weapons Division, wanted a field test of this, their newest and most promising combat suit, and Kyung hadn’t trusted the mission to anyone else. So she had volunteered herself. But John hadn’t said anything about field trials on a planet this far from Earth in a zone this hot, and nobody bothered to tell her that the war had been going so badly or why it had even started in the first place. They were the worst of this war: the Chinese. Kyung knew the division moving toward her wasn’t comprised of men or even genetically engineered humans—not in the strict sense—because New Beijing had never signed the Genetic Weapons Convention and excelled at engineered atrocities, their soldiers consisting of half-human things with only a torso and a head. Here, on one of our systems—on Koryo. Instead of a person with a complete set of normal organs, the Chinese grew human-like things that could plug directly into electronics packages, the suits’ sensors providing their eyes, nose, and ears, and once there, the bodies never left their armor until dead. This was what had taken a third of her country’s newest planet, bringing with them remnants of Pusan’s oldest enemy—the North Koreans. Here, on Koryo!
    Her text disappeared as soon as the entry logged, and Kyung wiped another layer of ice from her helmet. Temperatures were dropping quickly now, she thought, her suit’s power cells draining in the fight to keep her warm.
    “Why do the Chinese even want this planet?” she thought out loud.
    “Insufficient data to draw any specific conclusions, Miss. But Chinese patterns suggest that once Korea unified and subsequent wars prevented Beijing from further acquisition of Earth-bound resources, they and what remained of the North Korean holdouts—”
    Kyung waved with impatience. “I know all that; tell me something I don’t know.”
    “Certainly, Miss Kyung. I’ve been trying to raise Division every three minutes and still can’t get through, suggesting a high probability that we’re being jammed.”
    “You think?” Kyung asked. She fought the urge to hammer the side of her head against a rock to shut up the computer once and for all because she knew the danger she was in, didn’t need a reminder; this wasn’t her first time field-testing a new system, something which required taking risks to get the final prototype tweaked. But that thing she had