The Quartz Massacre

by Rebecca Levene

  Rogue realised that she didn't know where the biochips were. He reached in and flipped out Gunnar's for her, careful to keep a hold of it as the ship began to dip and yaw in the rough coastal waters.

  "Just don't drop me," Gunnar's voice said from the chip, higher and more mechanical sounding now that it wasn't vibrating through the metal of the gun.

  Sister Sledge didn't reply, already absorbed in examining him through the eyepiece of her medi-scope. She was wearing a puzzled frown, but after a while Rogue began to think that the frown meant something else. After more than ten minutes, she leant back and handed the chip back to Rogue.

  Rogue slotted it back into its housing on the gun, watching her worriedly as she still didn't say anything.

  "Come on lady, open up!" Gunnar said eventually.

  "Well, I'm not sure," she said.

  "Just tell us!" Helm shouted. "We're soldiers. We can take it."

  "It looks like there is some deterioration in the bio-circuitry to me," she told them, her voice assuming a comforting tone she'd probably practised on hundreds of dying men. "It shouldn't look that bad that soon. I think maybe the degradation happens faster than Milli-Com predicted."

  There was a silence after her words.

  "How long?" Gunnar said.

  Sister Sledge's hand was in front of her mouth, as if she could shield them from her words that way. "I think only days before it's irreversible."

  "Then I'll get you back to Milli-Com in two days," Rogue said. "That's a promise."

  "Here," Sister Sledge said, holding out a docu-chip towards him. "I've entered the call-out code for a mobile field hospital unit that's based in the mountains above here. If you call them when you're ready they should be able to come and pick you up."

  "Though I can't figure out why you're so keen to get back inside your bodies," Venus said. "Trained to kill and then to die, to be reborn to kill and die again. At least ordinary soldiers get to end it. For us there's no escape. Maybe you should just let those chips degrade, drift away and get some peace. Bodies aren't going to bring you anything but more war, more grief."

  "Yeah, but without a body how are you and me ever going to be together again?" Helm asked, sounding hurt that Venus could talk about his death so casually.

  Before Venus could respond, they finally drew near the shore and they were too busy finding a safe landing spot for more talking. As soon as Rogue had pulled the nose of the ship onto dry land, Sister Sledge hopped out.

  "You gonna be okay?" Rogue asked her.

  "I can look after myself," she told him, smiling. "Hope you can say the same. Take care of yourself, Rogue."

  "Always do," Rogue said. He watched her until she clambered over the nearest stack of boulders. She turned round at the last minute to give him a final wave, and then her suited figure disappeared from sight.

  "Well, good riddance," Venus said. "Last thing we need is a civilian slowing us down." After he'd secured the boat, Rogue offered her a hand to help her ashore, but she ignored him and leapt ten feet clear onto the dry sand above the breakers with catlike grace. The sky lowered orange above her, and the land was broken up by great granite limbs of rock arching overhead. In the distance was the sound of artillery fire, echoing strangely round the deformed landscape.

  "Incoming Souther transmission, Rogue," Helm said.

  There was the squawk of a distant signal being patched in, then a slightly nasal voice said, "Rogue, this is Colonel Kovert. The Norts have already started their preliminary assault on Nu Atlanta. You're the only thing I've got to stop them."

  Kovert sounded supremely confident that Rogue would do exactly as he wanted. "Kovert?" he said suspiciously. "I've heard of you. You're Military Intelligence."

  Gunnar seemed to be on the same wavelength as Rogue. "Yeah, more Milli-Com top brass. Why should we trust you?"

  Kovert didn't seem phased by their hostility. The only emotion Rogue could detect in his voice was a veiled amusement. "Because I'm the only ally you've got."

  Suddenly, Venus's voice intruded on the transmission, sounding just about as pissed-off as Rogue had ever heard her. "Not the only ally, sir. And the situation isn't exactly what you think-"

  Kovert's voice cut across hers. "I know. I've always suspected there was a traitor in Souther High Command. Thanks to you, now I know I was right."

  "You knew?" Now Venus sounded incandescently furious. "And you didn't tell us?"

  "Are you saying you could have stopped the Quartz Zone massacre?" Rogue asked, his voice lower than Venus's but even more deadly.

  "I didn't find out what he was planning until it was too late," Kovert said. "And even if I had, I doubt that anyone else at Milli-Com would have believed me. It's a serious accusation to make without evidence to back it up. Even now my hands are tied. It's up to you to track down the traitor general and bring him in." His voice became smoother, almost wheedling. "If you do that, I'll do everything I can to help you and your comrades."

  "Typical Milli-Com brass," Bagman grouched. "He pulls the strings and we take all the heat."

  "Synth out, Bagman," Rogue said firmly. No point antagonising Kovert till he'd got what he wanted out of him. "One thing, colonel. My buddies here need re-gening I want your guarantee that'll happen as soon as I've completed the mission in Nu Atlanta."

  "You have my assurance," Kovert said. "Now go and defend that Hovertrain - if the Norts take it out, the Southers will have no escape route out of Nu Atlanta. There's thousands of our men in there who need you, Rogue." Rogue decided that he trusted him just about as far as he could spit him, but there wasn't much he could do about it right now. Even if Kovert hadn't asked him, there was no way he could have left the unprepared Souther forces to die at Nu Atlanta, yet more victims of the traitor.

  "Okay, colonel," Rogue said. "You've got a deal... for now."

  Even over the radio, Rogue could hear the self-satisfied smile in Kovert's voice. "Good. Now, Venus, it's time for you to return to base. I can't have an agent of mine being seen to give aid to the Rogue Trooper. That wouldn't look good at all."

  "Funnily enough, Kovert, I don't give a flying decapitator how it looks. Rogue needs my help and he's getting it."

  "Venus-" Kovert began warningly.

  "See you when the action's over, sir," Venus said, and broke the communication.

  Back on Milli-Com, Kovert looked at his radio, hissing with static now, and smiled. Everything was going exactly as he intended.

  Rogue was close to the base that guarded the hovertrain station when he saw the dogfight in the sky above him, one Souther Hoppa engaged by a pair of Norts, and clearly getting the worst of it. A streak of machine-gun fire shot from the Nort to the Souther, and a moment later the Souther vessel was falling towards the horizon and the ground, belching fire from its back end as it went. Helm projected the screaming voices of the Souther crew into his ears, sending out a mayday signal they probably thought no one would attend to. Rogue could hear the flat hopelessness in their voices.

  "I've got the crash sight, can get you there in less than five," Helm said.

  "Someone might have survived," Bagman added, though he sounded like he doubted it. Rogue doubted it to, but while there was a chance he had to take it.

  "Ready to rescue some Southers?" he asked Venus.

  She smiled, the white slashing grin of battle. "Always ready."

  There were plenty of Norts who were ready too, crawling out of their boltholes in the ground and dropping onto the Hoppa landing pad as persistent as the stinging scumbugs who flickered around them. Rogue wasn't sure he would have made it without Venus. But whenever his back needed covering, she was there, taking out the marines who were creeping up behind him with a couple of shotgun blasts. He didn't know how he'd have done it without Helm or Bagman either, laying out the field of conflict for him, telling him where his friends and enemies were.

  Suddenly he had to cope without them. A Nort trooper popped his weapon round an elbow of rock and loosed off a st
range, lightning-looking round, and a moment later all Rogue's instrumentation went dead.

  "What the hell," he growled, tapping his helmet in a vain attempt to bring it back on line.

  "EMP round," Venus told him. "New Nort technology. Don't worry, it'll wear off after a few seconds."

  It did, but not before a brace of Norts had nearly got the drop on him as he ran through the blackened gouge the falling Souther Hoppa had made in the granite. After that he was very careful to keep an eye out for those troops, which was hard to do when they stayed hidden and only showed their faces for the millisecond they needed to fire. They managed to get him twice more before he finally cleared the area enough to reach the Hoppa's escape pod.

  "You okay, guys?" he asked the biochips as he picked his way through the still-scorching wreckage.

  "Right as rain," Bagman said, but Rogue thought he detected a light glitch in the electronic modulation of his voice. He frowned but kept his thoughts to himself. If the chips were degrading, the EMP blast couldn't be helping, but worrying about it wouldn't help either.

  He was startled out of his reverie by a sudden shifting in the debris around him. A moment later, a door had been kicked open from the inside and a group of five Southers spilled out onto the ground, quickly rising to their feet. When their leader saw the red Souther insignia on Rogue's belt, he smiled. When he saw the blue colour of the skin above it, the smile slipped.

  "Yeah, I'm the Rogue Trooper," Rogue told him. "Want to make something of it, or do you wanna get out there and stop the Norts shooting down any more of our men?"

  The Souther sergeant, his face shiny with sweat under his chem mask, hesitated a second, but no longer. "We've got to reactivate that defensive gun. A stray shot took it offline, and now there's nothing to stop those damn Norts shelling our boys to hell as they try to get on the hovertrain."

  "I'm on it," Rogue said. "Where can I find the gun?"

  "I'll need to get you inside the airlock. Then I'll open up the service tunnels for you. A frontal attack would be suicide. But..." His eyes swept over the rusted domes of the base ahead of them. They were crawling with Norts, more coming in all the time, heavy shotgun units and more EMPs too.

  "We'll take care of it," Gunnar said. "Just lead the way."

  The Souther started when he heard the voice emanating from Rogue's weapon, then again when Venus joined them, blood dripping off her bayonet from a Nort who had come too close, but he collected himself soon enough when the Norts closed in.

  Only now that he was fighting side by side with normal Souther troops for the first time could Rogue appreciate his own advantages. They were so bulky, so clumsy in their chem suits - bigger and more unwieldy than the insectile, blank-faced Nort suits - and they were so damn slow. Rogue felt like having them tag along was making his job harder, not easier. Still, there was no way he was leaving them behind.

  Getting through the outer airlock and into the dome which held the entrance to the power dome was a long hard slog, but Rogue was pleased that he lost only one of the Southers on the journey. He caught a brief glimpse of the boy's face, waxy-white behind his chem mask and terribly young, then vaulted over it to let off a shotgun round at a troop of Norts who'd made the mistake of clustering too close. Then he was there.

  "I've sealed the main route through. You'll have to take the service tunnel," the Souther sergeant said as Rogue and Venus paused in the doorway. He hesitated, then added, "Good luck, trooper."

  "You too, soldier," Rogue said. "Get your men onto the hovertrain. I'll join you as soon as the gun's back online."

  The sergeant saluted him, then trotted off without a backward glance, his men at his heels.

  "Come on, Rogue, what are you waiting for?" Venus called from inside. He ran after her, through winding intestinal lengths of tunnel, until he came out into a space so large it was hard to believe it was indoors, harder still when he saw the blots of lighting shooting up and down the vast coil in its centre. Right at the very top, dwarfed by the distance but still obviously huge, sat the anti-sub cannon.

  "So, we gotta go all the way up there?" Bagman said.

  Rogue pulled his straps tighter on his shoulders. "Yep."

  "Well, I'm glad its your legs doing it, not mine."

  The climb was long, and it wasn't peaceful. There were Nort troops coming up close behind, more of them no matter how many he and Venus picked off. He was gasping for breath by the time he reached the top, his heart thundering so hard he could feel its beats like blows against his chest. Beside him, Venus had barely raised a sweat.

  "I'll cover you, Rogue," she said. "Do what you need to do."

  Rogue took a look at the control panel. It seemed simple enough; just some power needed rerouting to get the gun back online. He initiated the diagnostics, then patched Helm into the control mechanism.

  "Looking good," Helm said. "All systems online. What do you want me to do?"

  A burst of machine-gun fire ricocheted from the piping beside him, spraying rust into Rogue's eye. "Can't stay up here. You'd better set it on automatic and we'll head out and try to get our troops onboard the hovertrain."

  "Got you," Helm said. "I'm gonna set it to hit anything that's Nort and moving."

  A second later, the protective screen in front of the gun slid open and they were given a high, dizzying view of the battle below. Suddenly, the view was blotted out by the squat shape of a Nort Hoppa squeezing through the narrow gap.

  "Great," Gunnar said, sounding like he meant it. "More target practice. Get that Sammie attachment on me, Rogue."

  "Can't do it," he replied. "Didn't have any time to make more Sammie rounds."

  The Hoppa was so near, Rogue could smell the acrid clouds of its exhaust. Only the complex maze of the pipes around them saved them from the hail of bullets it was spraying towards them.

  Venus was grinning. "See, this is why you need a girl in the outfit. Us girls plan ahead."

  A Sammie missile streaked out from the end of her gun and took the Hoppa out with a fireball that lit up the whole inside of the dome, so that for an instant the lightning arcing up the coil itself was overwhelmed, flicking negative from white to black against the red.

  Rogue didn't hang around to admire the display. He flung himself over the edge of the platform, vaulting two levels to land on a walkway thirty feet below, and proceeded to get the hell out of there, Venus hot on his heels. Echoing deafeningly through the chamber, the missile fire of the cannon sounded out, doing its job as well as it knew how, just like him.

  As soon as Venus and Rogue made their way out of the airlock they could see that the fight inside had just been a warm-up. There were more Norts there than he knew were living, and every one of them was determined to stop a single Souther from making it to the safety of the hovertrain he could see hulking at the far end of the base.

  "Subfire's the main danger," Helm told him. "You'll need some heavy artillery to take it on."

  Rogue was already on it. There was a Hell Cannon to the left of him, a few Norts manning it, but that didn't matter. A shotgun round and some micro-mines from Bagman and the cannon was his. After that it was easy. The horizon was filled with the humped silhouettes of Nort subs, but the cannon was more than a match for them. Rogue concentrated on taking them out one by one, waiting out the recharge time between rounds impatiently, while Venus covered his back, putting a hole through any Norts stupid enough to think it might be a good idea to take back the cannon.

  When the last Nort sub disappeared from sight, sunk by his fire or submerged prudently beneath the waves, the Souther landing craft made it in. The troops it disgorged looked weary, their faces glazed with tiredness and prematurely lined with cramping fear and the bitterness of defeat. Rogue saw one of them look up, realise the distance still to go to the safety of the hovertrain, and sit back down again on the shelf of the craft, as if he just couldn't face fighting on for that little bit longer.

  The first Nort Hoppas hove into view and the man joined
his comrades as they pelted through the chaos of battle away from the shore, survival instincts kicking in whether he wanted them to or not.

  Rogue lost sight of him. He dropped the Hell Cannon - it was powerful but too slow - and found himself an AA-gun instead. The Hoppas were harder targets, buzzing to and fro like hyperactive wasps. Even when he took one down, chances were it managed to disgorge a pack of Norts onto the ground before it fell. Those Norts in turn fell on the Southers, cutting down the battle-weary men as they fled.

  Rogue couldn't worry about the dead, only the living. He set his mouth in a hard line and carried on firing, killing, finally fighting beside other Southers where he belonged. Thanks to the traitor, Nu Atlanta might be lost, but thanks to Rogue there were going to be plenty of Souther survivors making it out of there.

  "Rogue," Bagman said, after a time period that felt like hours, but could have been minutes or days. "Rogue, we're getting flanked at the back."

  "Most of our men are on," Helm spoke into his ear. "Time for us to join them."

  "Hey, but I haven't had a chance to kill any Norts yet," Gunnar said. "Gotta bag me a couple at least."

  "You can clear a path back for us," Rogue said, reluctantly abandoning the AA-gun and taking Gunnar back into his arms. "Should be enough Norts to keep you happy."

  He wasn't kidding. He and Venus had to fight their way through a horde of the troopers, a mixture of the blue-clad marines and shotgun and EMP units. Bagman used up pretty much his entire supply of micro-mines salting the ground behind them to stop the Norts taking them from behind. In front, Rogue stopped seeing individual men. He just saw the Norts as a swarm, as relentless and featureless as the chem roaches they resembled.

  Then, almost without him realising it, he was on the train. He leant over to pull Venus up beside him, and she was too tired to protest, her body almost a dead weight in his arms. The Southers must have been waiting for him. The troopers manning the guns at the rear of the train saluted, and then the vast machine roared into life and pulled out of the station - slowly, then faster, faster still, whistling the wind painfully past the abrasions on his face.