"What now, Rogue?" Bagman asked.
"Now we find out who was responsible for the massacre at the Quartz Zone."
"Rogue," Helm said urgently. "That Nort, before she started torturing me, she mentioned a name."
Listening as Helm relayed the words Natashov had spoken to him, Rogue carried him out of the room where he'd died.
A few seconds after they'd gone, two figures stepped out of the shadows. They looked rather foolish, with their bowler hats and waxed moustaches, but that was all on the outside. On the inside, they were every bit as ruthless as the surgeon-kapten who lay dead on the floor.
"Well, Mr Bland," said one. "It seems we know where to find a living biochip."
FOUR
DESERTER
Steel watched the film through narrow, slitted eyes. It showed a Souther flag fluttering in the breeze. The sky behind it was blue, dotted with white clouds. It was nowhere on Nu Earth, that was for sure. Then the picture faded and was replaced with one of a soldier, a strange blue-skinned creature wearing Souther insignia. Steel knew that this was a Genetic Infantryman, though he'd never seen one himself, and the information about them had only been released to the rest of the Souther army after the genetic freaks had botched the Quartz Zone offensive so spectacularly.
Bred for war, the other Southers had been told. Bred to be failures, Steel reckoned. Bred to be less than real men. The viewscreen was showing pictures of the infantryman in action, clearly shot during his long training at Milli-Com. Above the pictures, the caption "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DESERTER?" appeared.
Then a voice, the sort of voice Steel was used to hearing in this sort of film, spoke. "Be alert, Souther!" it said, as if Steel wasn't alert twenty-four hours a day, never letting his guard down for a moment. "One of the Genetic Infantrymen, the last reported survivor of the Quartz Zone Massacre, has gone renegade, refusing to obey orders to return to Milli-Com. This cannot stand. He's a deserter, and must be treated as such."
The screen faded to a still shot of the deserter as the voice continued, "Learn this face well. If you encounter him, approach him with extreme caution."
Steel almost laughed out loud at that. Caution wasn't a word in his vocabulary.
"Alert the military authorities, and let military justice deal with this dangerous renegade."
The shot changed to one that Steel recognised. Nu Atlanta. He'd fought a battle there during his first year of service, had nearly lost an eye and taken the eyes out of seven Norts in revenge.
"In other news," the voice continued, "Nu Atlanta has finally been declared pacified and safe from Nort attack. To celebrate, Milli-Com Command has ordered R and R facilities to be set up for our victorious boys."
A ragged cheer went up from the hundreds of troops from the East Continent command post who'd been gathered to watch the film, but Steel wasn't really paying attention. He couldn't get the picture of that deserter, that filthy traitor, out of his mind.
Traitors made him almost as sick as Norts did. He touched the necklace around his neck, made from twenty-three trigger fingers of the Nort snipers he'd taken out, and resolved to add a blue finger to his collection.
Further towards the back of the room, another figure was watching the film with interest. Colonel Kovert looked round at the faces of the other Southers, flushed with anger at this desertion by one of their own, and knew that some of them would not be satisfied to leave the matter to the military authorities, whatever the film had instructed.
He turned to the operative behind him, still lurking in the shadows. "The Rogue Trooper," he said. "I want him found."
Rogue had been crouching in the shadows, staring at the small base for so long that Bagman was beginning to wonder if he'd fallen asleep. The chem clouds were low, blocking out the sun almost entirely and turning day into night, as if the black hole that filled one quarter of the sky was slowly eating away at the rest of it. Helm, Bagman had discovered, could see even in the dark now that he'd lost his physical body.
Bagman couldn't. He guessed the extra senses they got came from the piece of equipment they were plugged into. It made sense. Bagman's vision was no better than before but unlike Helm he almost felt like he had a body of his own: arms, legs, head, fingers, toes. Only trouble was, they were Rogue's arms and legs and head. The kitbag he controlled was the source of everything Rogue needed, so the intelligence implanted in it had been granted detailed information about its carrier. Bagman would have bet good money that he now knew Rogue's body better than Rogue knew it himself.
He knew when Rogue was hungry and gave him food. He sensed the slight tear in the ligament of his shoulder, the place where the muscle was lifting away from the bone, and he fed him the nano-tube which would target and cure that precise injury. He looked after Rogue better than his mother would have, if Rogue ever had oner.
On the whole, he thought Helm and Gunnar had got the better deal. Being a nursemaid just wasn't that much fun.
"You sure you can do this, Helm?" Rogue said, snapping Bagman out of his reverie.
"No problem," Helm replied. "You get me in there, hack me into their communications net, and I'll pull everything I can on Grand Admiral Hoffa."
"You ready for this, boys?" Rogue said.
Bagman and Gunnar said they were, though Bagman didn't get the point of Rogue asking. They'd be going in whether Bagman and Gunnar were ready or not. Rogue had the body, so Rogue called the shots.
The stronghold had a small crew, some machine-gun units, a few NCOs running them, one sniper, and a whole load of fly-by Hoppas ready to drop more Norts and the odd decapitator along with them, but none of them knew what had hit them. Rogue went in strong and hard, taking out a sniper first with a bullet through the head, before turning to the Hoppa landing pad. He didn't want them bringing in more reinforcements before Helm had done his job.
For the brief but intense minutes of battle, Rogue was in another world, a world of reflex where thought wasn't needed or welcome. In the days since he'd marched away from the Quartz Zone in search of Admiral Hoffa, he'd found himself thanking the Gene Genies for the brutal training back on Milli-Com. There was no room for fear in battle, they'd told the GIs. Rogue hadn't realised how true that was until he'd started putting his life on the line down here on Nu Earth. Fear slowed you down, it made you cautious, and caution got you killed.
Rogue wasn't cautious at all. He went straight in, Gunnar blazing, dodging and weaving but never wavering. A moving target was harder to hit, and he knew his body could take some punishment before it caved. He was shooting all the time, not a constant stream, stopping to target, wasting no shots. By the time he was halfway into the control centre, thirty Norts were dead.
When he'd reached the corpse of the radio operator, they all were dead. Afterwards he allowed the fear to take him, the knowledge that any second out of the last thousand might have been his last. He noticed a burn on his arm and realised how close a beam had come to getting him, but he'd felt nothing at the time.
"Medpac, Bagman," he ordered, and slapped the nano-infused pad onto the scorched flesh. Then, before it had even sealed to his skin, he put Helm down next to the radio terminal and jacked him into the nearest port. He took a few seconds to secure all the doors, then went to crouch in the one that he knew wouldn't remain sealed for long, the one that led deeper into the base and towards the rest of the Norts.
In the seconds while he waited for the Norts trapped inside to bypass the door-control he'd blasted shut, he took a look around the place. It was a dump. The equipment all looked second-hand and third-rate. There was no strategic importance to this little scrubby section of Nu Earth, Rogue knew, so the Norts hadn't committed any decent resources here. This was exactly why he'd picked it. It might be a backwater place manned by troops the Norts couldn't be bothered to equip properly, but it still needed to keep in touch with Nort Central Command. That's the beauty of networks. Point A is connected to points B through Z.
Or at least Rogue hoped so. Helm was
still working away, and so far he hadn't shown any sign of making progress. Maybe the Nort network had security protocols even Helm couldn't crack, in which case they were back to square one as far as tracking down General Hoffa was concerned.
Rogue stopped worrying about it when the small chamber was suddenly filled with the acrid smell of metal melting, and a second later the first Norts became visible through the glowing hole they'd bored into the thick steel of the doors.
He took three of them down with Gunnar before they'd even realised that they'd made it through the door. After that they took up defensive positions and started firing back. Rogue was sheltered behind a good strong steel partition, but he knew it couldn't last through a concerted barrage, and there was always the chance that a stray shot would take out Helm.
"How you doing, Helm?" Rogue asked him.
"Almost there, Rogue."
It was funny, the voice sounded like Helm's now, with all his inflections and personality in it. Rogue wasn't sure if that was because in the days since he'd possessed it, Helm had been altering the helmet's speaker to reflect his speech patterns, or if it was just that Rogue was getting more used to the strange mechanical grate of his friend's new voice.
He picked off another Nort trooper who'd been foolish enough to poke his head round the upended bench they were using for cover. His head exploded in a bloom of blood, and Gunnar let out a whoop of satisfaction - until he saw the horde of reinforcements pouring in behind the fallen man, clutching Lazookas and other artillery heavier than Rogue was equipped to deal with.
"Take your time, why don't you?" Gunnar shouted back at Helm. "It ain't like we got anything else going on here!"
Helm ignored him and just shouted out, "Got him! Let's get out of here, Rogue."
Using Gunnar to lay down a steady stream of suppressing fire, Rogue dived out of the back entrance, the one he'd carefully tunnelled down to give himself a clear escape route.
When the Nort troops made their way cautiously into the central chamber he'd vacated, they had one second to enjoy the regained territory. Then they had another second to notice the micro-mines scattered across the surface of the floor.
A second later the micro-mines went off and they weren't noticing much of anything.
"Where to, Helm?" Rogue asked as soon as they were clear of the explosion. The land surrounding the base was featureless scrub, all life wiped from it by the pervasive chem, save for the hardiest plants and ugliest insects.
"Nu Paree," Helm replied. "According to what I picked up, he's scheduled to have a meeting there in three days' time."
"Nice job," Rogue said, and instantly regretted it. If Helm had still had a face, he knew from the second of lethal silence that followed that it would have been twisted into a furious scowl. As it was, the anger was confined to the voice.
"Don't patronise me, Rogue," Helm said. "Just cause I haven't got a body doesn't mean I haven't got a mind. I'm a GI same as you."
"I know," Rogue said as calmly as possible. "It was a good job. I couldn't have hacked into those systems with a body or without one."
"Too right," Helm said, but he sounded mollified.
They both stopped speaking when they saw what was in front of them: an entire Souther squadron. Every one of them pointing their weapons at Rogue.
Rogue had his gun at the ready too, he always did, but they were Southers, damn it! Even if he could take them all out, he wouldn't want to.
"Drop your gun, deserter!" the lead Souther said.
"Forget it, soldier!" Gunnar said, but Rogue ignored him and threw the weapon to the ground. Gunnar let out an indignant squawk.
Rogue held his hands carefully away from his sides. "What is it you boys want?" he asked the Souther soldiers.
Their leader smiled nastily and took a step nearer. As soon as Rogue could see his face through the distorting lens of the chem suit, he knew that he'd made a mistake. It was the smile of a man who could only find pleasure when someone else was experiencing pain. His eyes were a blank green, devoid of feeling. And around his neck Rogue could see a necklace of human finger bones -some with the flesh still clinging to them.
Helm saw them too. "Good move, Rogue," he said. But by then there was nothing Rogue could do about it. The other soldiers in the troop had moved round behind him and secured his arms to his sides with razor wire. Helm was taken from his head and tossed casually into a corner.
They couldn't know about the biochips, he realised, which gave Rogue some sort of advantage, but he couldn't begin to see how to use it.
"I'm Sergeant Steel and I've got orders to take you in," the leader said. Then his smile widened, looking even crueller and a little crazy. "Hope you don't mind if I bring you back in pieces."
Pietr couldn't figure out why the others were treating him like a piece of dirt. A small squad of Southers had been spotted approaching from the chem-river valley on the other side of the mountains, and the Kashan Legion - fresh from their victory at the Quartz Zone - had been sent to intercept it.
Easy in, easy out, their commander had told them, though Pietr still found himself shaking with fear. It didn't help that he was alone, the other Kashans leaving a space around him as if he had some kind of infectious disease. He could see them talking to each other, laughing, and he was sure it was about him. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but then why did they keep looking over at him?
He told himself not to worry about it. Battle was coming, and he needed to concentrate on that. Concentrate on not getting killed.
A good start would be to stop his hands shaking. He could see his beam rifle, wavering as he held it, the muzzle pointing at the ground one minute and then weaving towards the lowering green-yellow clouds the next. He tightened his fist until his knuckles whitened and the gun steadied.
It was just in time, as the first wave of Southers broke over the brow of the hill. These were nothing like the blue-skinned devils they'd fought in the Quartz Zone. They were just ordinary men, in chem suits like Pietr, but they still terrified him. He tightened his grip on the rifle still further and fired. Ahead of him, one of the Southers stumbled backwards, a blackened hole in his chest. Pietr didn't know if it was his shot which had taken him out, but he told himself that it was and it gave him the confidence to go on.
For a while, he didn't think, just fought, and he found that when his own life was on the line he didn't have any hesitation about killing. For a while, he even found himself smiling, or at least his mouth was set in a rigid grin, as he ducked and weaved and somehow miraculously came through the hell of machine-gun fire and micro-mines unscathed.
Then he saw a cluster of five Southers heading straight towards him and he knew he couldn't take them on alone. He looked around, expecting backup and found that there was no one there.
For a second, he thought that all his comrades must somehow have been killed. Then he flicked a desperate glance to his right and spotted them, standing aside, watching. Watching and deliberately leaving him to face these Southers alone. He opened his mouth to shout for help, then shut it again. Even at this distance, he could see in the other soldiers' stances that they had absolutely no intention of helping him.
He looked back at the Southers, terrified. They all had their weapons trained on him. He could see the leader grinning, a white slash in the brown oval of his face.
Suddenly a stray burst of ion fire caught them from another corner of the battlefield. For a moment, they were just black silhouettes, shadow puppets on a stage of blinding white. Then there was nothing but a smear of soot on the red rock of the hillside.
After that the battle was over fairly quickly. Pietr didn't fight, just stood shivering on the sidelines. He knew that he should be dead. Worse, he knew that his comrades wanted him dead.
As soon as the all-clear was sounded, he strode up to Schulz, one of the figures he'd recognised watching him as he faced a squadron of Southers alone. So angry he forgot that Schulz outranked him, Pietr grabbed the other man by the sho
ulders and spun him round to face him.
"What the hell were you doing out there?" Pietr shouted.
Schulz shook Pietr's arm off contemptuously. "Doing out where?" he said nonchalantly. Around him, the other members of the squadron all gathered, facing Pietr. It wasn't difficult to guess which side they were on.
"You left me to die!" Pietr shouted.
Schulz laughed, amused by Pietr's anger. "Sorry, but we thought you'd just walk away." There was a slight pause, then he added, "You know, the way you did when you saw that Souther freak who killed Surgeon-Kapten Natashov."
Pietr felt his blood freeze in his veins. He took an unconscious step back from Schulz. They'd seen it. How had they seen it? But of course there had been surveillance all over the station. No doubt someone had been reviewing the tapes to see how the Souther had breached their security and had ended up witnessing Pietr's humiliating inability to face the man who'd killed his brother.
"I raised the alarm," he said, trying to cover the catch in his voice.
"Yeah - to call other men to do your fighting for you," Schulz said contemptuously. Then he just walked away, as if Pietr wasn't worth talking to.
Pietr remained frozen to the spot. They'd seen it. They knew what a coward he was. And if he'd thought his life in the legion was unpleasant before, he was sure it would seem like nothing to what came now. For as long as his life actually lasted.
Rogue could feel the razor wire digging into his skin, breaking through the flesh so that he felt a tickle of his blue blood oozing over the top of it. They'd tied it much tighter than they needed to, tight enough to wound. There was absolutely no way he was getting out of it.
He looked around, but even his sensitive eyesight couldn't spot anything helpful in the night-darkened landscape of low hillocks and scrubby bushes.
The Quartz Massacre Page 8
