"What are we gonna do, Rogue?" Bagman whispered in his ear. "Just tell me the plan."
Rogue almost laughed. "Hey, buddy, your idea is as good as mine," he whispered, though he didn't really need to. Steel and his men were standing a good ten feet away, laughing and drinking and having a heated debate about the best way to kill Rogue and how they were going to torture him first. The discussion was the only reason Rogue wasn't dead already. He'd even hoped for a while that it might escalate into the kind of argument where shots got fired and Rogue could slip away in the confusion, but the other men seemed too scared of Steel for that.
"Oh," Bagman said. After a while, he added, "But you have got a plan, right?" There was a slight edge of panic in his voice.
"Yeah," Rogue said wearily. "I've got a plan."
"Well, maybe you'd like to listen to my plan first," a voice said behind Rogue.
Rogue instantly tensed and tried to turn, jack-knifing himself against the hard ground, but he was tied too tightly.
"Relax Rogue, she's one of ours," Bagman whispered.
"She?" Rogue felt the figure behind him begin to press something against his bound wrists. He really didn't like the feeling of helplessness; it was one thing the Gene Genies had never trained him for. Almost snapping his back with the effort, Rogue managed to twist his head round on his shoulders and get a look at the newcomer.
It was a she. A chem nurse, to be precise. He could see the white of her uniform glowing palely in the light of Nu Earth's fractured moon. If Steel and his men had been watching more and drinking less, she would have been very easy to spot. She still might be. All it would take would be one person looking at the wrong moment.
As soon as his arms were free, Rogue rolled to cover and pulled the chem nurse down with him. "Thanks, sister," he said. "Now get away as fast as you can."
"Only if you come with me," she said. "They still outnumber you, and I didn't free you for you to fight Southers."
Rogue had been considering taking out Steel and his men. He reckoned the Southside would be better off without them, but he saw the pleading look in the nurse's big dark eyes and decided that revenge could wait. Besides, the Southside needed all the men it had after what had gone down at the Quartz Zone.
"Sure, sister," he said. "But I gotta get my equipment back first."
She frowned, a neat row of wrinkles on the forehead of her smooth white face. "You can get new kit as soon as you're out of here," she said.
Rogue shook his head. "Not like this. This kit's got my buddies in it."
"Too right!" Bagman said.
He saw her jump, a brief startled expression on her face, before she schooled it back to calm. "Biochips, got it. Okay then, trooper, I'll meet you over on that far ridge." And as quick as that she was gone. Rogue liked that. No messing with unnecessary talk, just going straight for the mission objective. The girl would have made a good soldier if she hadn't been a nurse.
He didn't waste any time himself, just began crawling over the ground on his belly. He knew where Helm was, a few feet from where Rogue had been lying, tossed away when they'd first captured him. Gunnar was more of a problem. They hadn't wanted to leave a weapon by their prisoner, no matter how securely tied he appeared, so Gunnar had been taken by their mess fire. Fortunately they'd moved a few feet away from that as their discussion about Rogue's death had begun, but that was still a few feet too close.
For a moment, Rogue went through the cold calculation: should he risk himself, Helm and Bagman to rescue Gunnar? Was that the best use of his resources? But he found that he couldn't carry on thinking that way, not even after twenty years of training from the Gene Genies. Gunnar wasn't an asset, he was a friend and there was no way in hell Rogue was leaving his friend to Steel's ministrations.
As it turned out, getting Gunnar was a breeze. The fire they'd lit in a pile of the scrubby, dried-out bushes had robbed the men of their night vision. Rogue, who'd been designed to adjust to changing light levels faster than thought, didn't have any such problem. He crawled to within feet of the men who were plotting to kill him, as silent as a snake, and not one of them even glanced round.
Gunnar had the sense to stay silent, unless he'd been damaged in the fall, so Rogue was in and away within seconds. He heard the words, "burn off his feet, make him walk on the stumps", and then he was out of earshot.
But when he snagged Helm off the ground, it all hit the fan. Steel must have finally decided on a plan - maybe the whole walking-on-his-stumps thing had taken his fancy - because suddenly the Southers were all looking over to where Rogue's body ought to be and wasn't any more.
Rogue used their second of shouting confusion to hightail it out of there. He could have used Gunnar to take them on, and in fact Gunnar was quietly urging him to do just that. But he'd told the chem nurse he wouldn't, and he'd rather make a clean break and not give his situation away.
So he just ran, silent, weaving through the dry, tangled vegetation on the ground. To his eyes, the landscape before him was as clear as daylight, but bathed in a blue light that made it look slightly unreal, as if it was all part of a dream from which he might soon wake up. Behind him he heard Steel and his men blundering and shouting. Their vision was nowhere near as good as his, but they'd managed to follow, and they were heading towards him. Good. He'd kept his promise to the chem nurse. He hadn't attacked them. But if they were going to attack him... Time to clean some scum out of the Souther forces.
The first soldiers didn't know what hit them. They'd expected Rogue to be on the run, not waiting to ambush them as they blundered about looking for him. They didn't know he could see in the dark. Ironic, really, that the Norts had turned out to know more about GIs than their own side.
The Southers' blood was black in the moonlight as it sprayed out of their bodies, but they died all the same. Steel wasn't so easy, though. He saw Rogue instantly, picking him out in the darkness with an old soldier's instincts and heading straight for him. Even when Rogue had riddled his torso with bullets, he kept on coming. At first Rogue thought he might be wearing some kind of new body armour, something the Southers had developed to be proof against their own weapons. But then he realised that Steel was getting hit. His body was juddering with the impact of the bullets.
He just kept on coming. His mouth was set in a stiff grin of agony but his eyes burned with hate. It was hatred stronger than any Rogue had seen in the eyes of the Norts he'd battled. This was personal. This man thought Rogue was a traitor. Fair enough. Rogue thought Steel was a traitor - to everything the South stood for, everything that made it worth fighting for against the Norts.
He put a bullet straight through Steel's mask and into his hate-filled eyes. The big man collapsed at his feet, still reaching out for Rogue. His hand touched Rogue's foot, grasped hold of it convulsively, and then relaxed.
After that it was a mopping-up exercise.
A few minutes later, Rogue was sitting in the lee of the hill, his wounds being tended to by the chem nurse, who'd given her name as Sister Sledge. For her sake, they'd lit a small night-globe. In its reddish-pink light he studied the shape of her face. Her lips were full and curved, and there was a downward tilt to them that spoke of a concealed amusement. Her eyes were huge and very dark, the same polished brown colour as her hair. She was pretty, he guessed - he hadn't had much experience of normal women. He found himself suddenly thinking of Venus, very glad she'd been spared the massacre in the Quartz Zone.
"You haven't asked who I am. You haven't asked why Steel and his men were holding me prisoner," he said after a few minutes of silence. "Don't you think there might have been a reason they had me trussed up like a pig?"
She shook her head, her smile emerging fully onto her face. "I know who you are," she said. "You're the Rogue Trooper. And I know about Steel, too. Every chem nurse does, we've all had to deal with the messes he's left behind, and I'm not talking about on the Nort side. The guy's warped."
"Get no argument from me," Gunnar said. "Sh
ould have just taken him down straight off."
Sister Sledge didn't seem phased by the biochips now that she knew what they were. "He was still on our side," she shot back at Gunnar. "And my job's about saving lives, not taking them."
"Yeah, well, mine ain't," Gunnar grumbled, but he subsided into silence.
"The orders were to bring you in, not kill you," Sister Sledge said to Rogue. Her expression grew self-mocking. "I'd try to bring you in myself but I don't rate my chances."
"So Milli-Com's after us too," Helm said. "Figures."
"But we're only doing our job," Bagman protested. "They ought to be cheering us on, not sending psychos like Steel out after us. We're heading after the Nort who ran the Quartz Zone campaign," Bagman said to Sledge. "Make him pay for what he did to our buddies."
"She doesn't want to know that," Rogue growled at Bagman.
"Doesn't need to know that, you mean," Sledge said, but she was laughing. "It's okay, I'll just patch you up and send you on your way. Where you go is your business." She slapped a final medpack onto the raw, oozing wire cuts on his arm. "Well, that's you done. I'm sorry I can't do more for your friends, but I don't carry that kind of equipment around with me."
"It's okay," Helm said. "We didn't expect you to be carrying re-gening gear into the field."
Sister Sledge frowned. Rogue felt a sudden stab of unease at the expression. "I wasn't talking about re-gening," she said. "I was talking about the, well, the degeneration."
"What degeneration?" the three biochips said, pretty much simultaneously.
Sledge suddenly looked very uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, I thought you knew. Of course you must have left before they found out."
"Found out what?" Helm snapped impatiently.
She seemed to wonder whether she should go on, then realised there was no way they were going to let her stop. "It's the chips," they said eventually. "There's a fault in them. A... an electrical seepage, I think, it's not really my field. Anyway, if you get yourselves re-gened within a fortnight or so it shouldn't be a problem, the degeneration won't have taken away any crucial memory functions."
"And if we wait longer than a fortnight?" Bagman asked, his mechanical voice tense.
Sledge looked even more unhappy.
"Just tell us, sister," Rogue said. "We're soldiers, we can take it."
"Speak for yourself, Rogue," Bagman said. "You're not the one who's falling apart."
"Shut up, Bagman!" Helm snapped. "Just spit it out, lady!"
"There'll be permanent deterioration in your personality. They'll still be able to re-gene you, probably, but what gets put back into those bodies might not be the real you."
A cold, dead silence followed her words. Rogue was sorry when a few minutes later she slipped off into the chem mist, her white-clad form soon lost, a ghostly after-image in the pale light of a new dawn.
"Hell, Rogue," Bagman said as soon as she was gone. "What are we gonna do?"
"We're gonna get ourselves straight back to the nearest Souther station and turn ourselves in, that's what!" Gunnar said.
"You only died three days ago," Rogue said. "There's plenty of time to hunt down Hoffa before anything happens. And if we leave it now the trail will go cold. Not to mention that as soon as we go back to Souther High Command they're gonna throw me in the brig, and you too probably as soon as they've put you back in bodies they can lock up."
"You're not the one risking your life here, Rogue!" Gunnar snapped. "We might not have two weeks like she said. They might've got that wrong."
"I am risking my life, every second," Rogue snapped back. "And unlike you, if I fall there'll be no one to put me in a biochip and give me at least a second chance."
"Well..." Gunnar growled, but Rogue knew he'd got to him. "What do you say, Helm?"
There was a long silence. Rogue wished he could see his friends' faces. He'd never realised how much he'd relied on them, how adept he'd grown at reading their emotions from the slightest flick of an eyebrow. Without those cues, he had no idea what they were thinking. He didn't like that feeling at all, as if his friends were drifting further away from him, lost in the mist like Sister Sledge.
"Rogue's right," Helm said eventually. "We have to keep on. We owe it to Ape and Killer and Sandman and all the rest. They'd do it for us, if the situation were reversed."
"Fine," Gunnar said reluctantly. "We'll keep on. For now."
"Hey, doesn't anyone wanna know what I think?" Bagman protested.
"You're outnumbered, buddy," Gunnar said. "And we stick together, don't we?"
"Yeah, yeah, course we do," Bagman said, but there was a hint of uncertainty in his voice.
Rogue knew that he had them with him. But he also knew that it might not be for long.
FIVE
GAY PAREE
Nu Paree was just the sort of city that Nu Earth was full of. Half-wrecked, riddled with bullet holes and missile craters and still lousy with corpses and the things that fed on corpses. But underneath it you could see what the place had once been, the hope with which it had been built. People had come here to make something, Rogue thought, and it was only after a while that they decided to tear it all down again.
Subliminally, he heard a low roaring sound growing in his ears, and before he'd even registered it as a fleet of Nort hoppas he'd ducked under cover, sheltering in the derelict remains of an old café. There were still half-eaten meals on one of the few tables that had remained standing after the roof collapsed. Judging by their state of decay, they were a good few years old.
The Hoppas took their time, travelling so low that the roar of their engines shook some china off a tilted shelf to smash on the tiled floor. They were searching, Rogue knew. For him? Probably not, but he had to plan the operation as if they knew he was coming. That way he'd be about as careful as he needed to be.
"Monsieur," a voice said from beneath a fallen beam, "I really must ask you to 'urry up with your order. We 'ave others waiting for the tables."
Rogue ignored it. It was just a service robot, still carrying out its programming long after there were any customers left to insult. He waited until the noise of the Hoppas had faded completely, and gave it another ten minutes before poking his head out of the shattered doorway.
In the distance, he saw the dark shapes of the Hoppas floating in to land by the largest building in the city, the giant, dark hulk of the cathedral. They seemed to have come from somewhere in the direction of the Mitterand tower. He'd passed the impossibly tall spike of it as he came into the place, close enough to see that its struts had been hung with the decaying bodies of Souther troops. Bagman had wanted to wait and pull them down, give them a decent burial or at least some dignity in death, but Gunnar had reminded him that they didn't have the time.
"Lots of Norts," Gunnar said.
"Yeah," Helm agreed, "looks like our Grand Admiral doesn't want his meeting to be disturbed."
Rogue thought Helm was probably right. It was hard to think of another reason why the area would be so infested with Norts. It wasn't like Nu Paree held any strategic importance. He shot another look round at the shattered remains of the once elegant town. The kind of real estate only chem rats valued.
"Wonder who he's expecting?" Bagman said.
"Not us, that's for sure," Rogue told him, hoping it was true. Then, before he could start worrying about that, he added, "C'mon, guys, let's go pay our respects."
Grand Admiral Hoffa was trying to study his face, peering at him curiously from beneath heavy brows, but he preferred to lurk in the shadows. It wasn't that he was ashamed - why should he be ashamed? He'd done what he did for the good of the Southers, for the good of the whole damn human race. But he'd always preferred the shadows, like the puppeteer he was, trusting to the darkness to keep the strings he pulled hidden. And he'd pulled Hoffa's strings most successfully. The Nort general had done exactly as he'd wanted.
"Congratulations, my friend," Hoffa said. The man certainly liked the sound of his own voic
e. He didn't think Hoffa had risen to his rank from the field. Born to it probably - that was the Nort way. "Thanks to the information you provided," he continued now, "the massacre of the GIs in the Quartz Zone has been almost a hundred per cent success."
He knew he was expected to respond. The admiral thought he had done this for the money, as if he would be motivated by so low a thing, but he was prepared to keep up the pretence. He liked to be underestimated. "Your praise is appreciated, Grand Admiral Hoffa," he said. "As is your fine Nordland brandy." Actually the stuff was vile, no match for the clarets his home planet's vineyard produced, but he wasn't going to tell this cretin that. "But what I really want from you is the payment I was promised."
Hoffa smiled, seemingly pleased that he was playing the part expected. No one wanted their tools to have minds of their own. "Full payment will be received once we can confirm that all the GIs have been eliminated."
He frowned at that. As far as he knew there was no question that all of the blue-skinned freaks were gone. And when he went back to Milli-Com to resume his day job he intended to make sure that no more would ever be created. He figured it shouldn't be too hard to persuade his fellow generals of that, not after their dismal performance at the Quartz Zone, and once they were gone, the Southside would be pure again, human. That was one thing the Norts got right: the importance of purity.
"According to some reports, it's possible that at least one of them may have survived," Hoffa said, almost smiling at the disquiet he knew must be showing on his face. Before he could say anything else, a huge explosion shook the foundations of the building. A screen fell from the wall to shatter against the floor, sending shards of glass shooting lethally through the air.
Hoffa staggered, struggling to keep his feet. "What's happened?" he shouted into his head mic, his voice shrill with fear.
A voice crackled through on the radio. "Admiral, we're under attack from a Souther Genetic Infantryman!"
Now Hoffa wasn't the only one who was panicking. He hadn't counted on this, hadn't imagined that any of the inhuman monsters could have escaped the trap he set for them.
The Quartz Massacre Page 9
