The Quartz Massacre

by Rebecca Levene

  "Could be a way to the control booth up those cliffs," one of the GI's biochips said.

  Pietr looked up, then up again, at the almost sheer rock face. "No way we're going to make it up there," he said.

  "Don't worry about it kid," Venus said. "We'll take care of it for you, then come back down when it's open."

  "What about...?" the other Souther asked, then trailed off as he seemed to realise that the GIs were offering to risk their lives for him and he had no call to complain that they were leaving him defenceless.

  "Seem to have taken care of most of the snipers in the immediate area," Rogue said gruffly. There was no criticism in his voice but no sympathy either, just one soldier to another. "Just keep down, keep quiet and keep your eyes open."

  The Souther drew himself up and snapped off a salute. "Sir, yes, sir!"

  Rogue almost laughed. "I've got no rank in your army any more, soldier. Don't you know I've gone rogue?" Before the young trooper could stammer a reply, he'd run off into the darkness, Venus like a blue shadow at his heels.

  It was only when the GIs were gone that Pietr realised that not once during their entire journey through the forest had it occurred to him to hope that a sniper's bullet would find them. It's because I mean to kill him myself, just as soon as we're clear of this forest, Pietr told himself. I will kill him, I will, I just need time.

  "Think they'll be all right?" Venus asked Rogue as they scrambled up the rock face. The other GI was ahead of her and it gave her a chance to admire the clean, tight lines of his body as he scaled the rocks, moving with an effortless grace that had been bred into all their kind but seemed to have reached perfection in Rogue.

  "They can look after themselves," Rogue said quietly. "They're soldiers, same as us."

  "No soldiers are the same as us," Venus replied. "You know that."

  They were silent for the rest of the climb, concentrating all their energy on getting up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Venus liked this, this pure action, utilising every instinct she possessed and every skill she'd learnt. It made her feel whole. Everything else, dealing with people, dealing with Rogue - her feelings for Rogue, whatever they were, and she wasn't quite sure - that was all much harder.

  They wanted us to be machines, she thought, but they made us people by mistake. If they hadn't, Rogue wouldn't still be out here, chasing down the man who betrayed his friends, giving everything he has to bring him to justice. He'd have returned to headquarters after the battle like a good little soldier. And I wouldn't be out here either, following after Rogue because... Well, just because.

  After about ten minutes they reached a break in the cliffs and suddenly the solid rock opened up into a dark hole ahead of them. Above, the cliffs stretched upward, seeming to lean outward as if they were bending back towards the ground.

  "What do you reckon?" Venus said.

  "Try the caves, babe," Helm said. "The rock face above ain't solid according to my sensors."

  Venus looked at Rogue, ready for him to make the final decision. "Rogue?"

  "I say we listen to Helm," Rogue said "We can always turn back if there's no way through."

  There was a way through, though, and it seemed to be sloping upwards. The caves themselves were lit by a spectral, unhealthy green light from the glow of plants that had absorbed so much radiation that they'd started to emit it.

  The trouble was, they weren't the only mutants in the place. Venus and Rogue had gone no more than twenty paces when Venus spotted the first one, a bony, foot-high scuttling shape in the gloom.

  "Chem spiders!" she said, her voice an octave higher than she would have liked it. She fired off a shot but it went wild, the sound echoing round and round in the caves till it sounded like she'd emptied a whole magazine.

  Rogue followed with a shot of his own, more controlled, but this one missed too. "Thought you were locked on, Gunnar?" he said.

  "Damn things move too fast!" Gunnar snapped back. "You're gonna have to do it on manual."

  Things was right. Venus could see more of them, their legs chittering against the stone, mandibles clicking together in anticipation of the meal in front of them.

  Then, far quicker than she could have imagined, one of them sprang forward and sank those mandibles into her thigh. She let out a helpless scream of fear and began beating at the thing with her bare hand, crushing two of its legs but still not dislodging its jaws from her flesh. She could feel the slow, paralysing poison beginning to seep out from that grip and through her leg, numbing it, turning it into a dead weight on her body.

  "Knife, Venus!" Rogue said, letting off shots into the darkness, taking a couple of spiders down and missing a couple more.

  Feeling like an idiot, she groped her other hand down to pull the bowie knife from its sheath on her calf and carefully cut the hideous creature away from her skin. As soon as that one was gone, another one attacked, but she was ready this time and managed to cut it clean across the body, dropping it to the cave floor in two throbbing, faintly glowing halves. A horrible smell seeped from the corpse, the smell of a creature that liked its meat rotten.

  A few more shots from Rogue, and a few more close encounters with her blade, and the chamber seemed to be free of spiders.

  "You okay, Venus?" Rogue asked. She was warmed by the concern in his voice, but shamed by the cause of it.

  "It's just a flesh wound," she muttered. "I don't like spiders is all."

  Rogue gave her a long, considering look - then threw back his head and laughed. "And there I was thinking there wasn't anything on Nu Earth that could scare you."

  She smiled grudgingly. "Watch it, Rogue. I've still got a knife in my hand."

  Rogue sobered again. "Then you'd better get it ready. There are more where those came from."

  Even as he spoke, she could see the creatures approaching, tiny eyes glowing toxically in the darkness.

  "I'm Hind," the Souther trooper said to Pietr suddenly, his voice a nervous whisper. "Calman Hind." He held his hand out as if to shake it, then seemed to have second thoughts about it and dropped it again. "I just want you to know that, so if I die there'll be somebody who knows who it is who's died. I don't want to die nameless, do you know what I mean? I want it to matter to someone, even if it's someone I've only just met." Behind the chem mask his eyes were so wide with fear that Pietr could see the whites all the way around them. His breath was coming in short, terrified gasps so that his words puffed out in little jerks and gasps.

  "I don't want to die at all," Pietr said firmly. "And we're not going to."

  "Have you seen a lot of battle, then?" Hind asked, seeming a little reassured by Pietr's words. He dropped to a crouch, his arms clasped over his knees as if he was trying to make himself as small a target as possible.

  After a second Pietr crouched down beside him. "A few fights," he said.

  "This is my first," Hind told him. "I only shipped out to Nu Earth a week ago. The train was supposed to take me to my posting at Harpo's Ferry. Guess there's no point now. All the rest of my regiment died in the crash." When Pietr didn't respond, he asked, "Have you lost anyone, any, any buddies, in the war?"

  "Some," Pietr said, and then, not quite sure why he was revealing this: "My brother."

  Hind turned to stare at him. He looked stricken. "Oh, oh that's terrible. Were you close?"

  Unexpectedly, the question struck Pietr in the gut like a blow. Without ever having thought of it before, he knew that the answer was no. He and Jaze had never been close, had never understood each other in the slightest. Pietr had a better idea of the thoughts flitting behind this Souther's eyes than he ever had about his brother's. "No," he said, his voice so controlled that it came out flat and cold. "Not very close at all."

  After that Hind lapsed into silence. The only company was the click and whirr of the forest animals, invisible in the darkness around them, which seemed to press in on Pietr closer and closer as time went on.

  Hind seemed to feel it too because he di
dn't stay silent long. "Think they're ever coming back?" he asked. His voice sounded raw and shaky.

  "Sure," Pietr said, though he was anything but. "They wouldn't leave us, would they?"

  "No, of course not," Hind said, as if he was shocked that Pietr had even considered this as an option. "They're GIs! But what if something happens to them? What if they get killed, or hurt, and we just wait and wait until our oxygen runs out?"

  Pietr took a glance at the other man's tank gauge. "You don't need to worry, you've still got five hours left."

  Hind glanced at Pietr's tank in turn, and Pietr saw his face whiten, more ghostly than ever in the moonlight.

  "What is it?" Pietr demanded, hearing his voice quaver.

  "You've only got fifteen minutes left," Hind said.

  Pietr drew in a deep shuddering breath - wasting precious oxygen, he thought bitterly - then let it out again as a soft hiss. "Then they'll have to come back soon," he said, as firmly as he could.

  "No, no, we can't risk it," Hind said. "Here, I'll transfer some from my tank to yours. There's a valve somewhere." He began fiddling with the controls of his tank, detaching a tube from its side.

  "You can't do that," Pietr said, shaken by the offer. "You might need it for yourself."

  "Of course I can," Hind said. He was filled with a determination he had lacked earlier. "I'm not going to sit here and watch you die beside me, am I?" He reached across and began to attach the tube from his tank to Pietr's.

  A second later, his fingers dropped down slackly, and his head nodded forward onto his chest. At first Pietr thought that he had somehow fallen asleep, just dropped off in the middle of talking to him. But then he realised that the sound ringing in his ears was the shot from a sniper rifle and the liquid trickling darkly from the corner of Hind's mouth was blood.

  A moment later the gates behind him finally creaked open and the midnight blue figures of Rogue and Venus loped through the darkness towards him. Pietr barely even acknowledged them. He couldn't stop staring at the dead face of the enemy who'd been willing to risk his own life to save Pietr's.

  Morgan took a moment to enjoy the startled expression on the dead Souther's face. Little more than a boy really, but Morgan had killed boys younger than him. Then he lowered the rifle and took his eye away from the sight. With his focus broadened, he could see that the two Souther troopers were no longer alone. The darker shapes of the GI freaks had rejoined them, and somehow they'd got the gate open. This was proving to be a more challenging job than he'd imagined.

  Good. Kills were so much sweeter when you had to work for them. "Morgan to sniper units," he said into his radio. "The others are yours, but the Rogue Trooper is mine."

  It was on the way into the hydroponics plant that Pietr met his first Nort ground troops. The drill probe broke through the surface of the earth with startling suddenness.

  Pietr froze, but Venus and Rogue knew what to do. They took cover while the drill's own defences made attack impossible, then used their cover to take out the Norts who emerged with ruthless efficiently. Still, there were a lot of them, and when a second drill probe erupted behind them, there was no way they could take them all out before they'd closed the distance, especially with the beam rifles some of them were carrying.

  Pietr raised his gun, but for what felt like an age he just stood there, holding it, his finger slack on the trigger. These were his own men; how could he fire? One Nort came up to him, screaming a battle cry, insect-like and inhuman behind his chem mask, and suddenly it was kill or be killed and it didn't seem like any kind of choice at all.

  Pietr's finger squeezed the trigger even before he'd made the conscious decision and the Nort jerked back and down, never to rise again. After that it was easy to shoot two more - he just had to think about Hind's face as the boy had offered him his oxygen - and then the battle was over and they were able to trot into the hydroponics plant itself, a rusty derelict that had some air tanks on offer but not much else. Pietr hurriedly refilled his supply, giving all his concentration to the task, careful not to leave any of it over to think about what he'd just done.

  After a while, he became aware that Venus had crouched down beside him. A few feet away, Rogue was fiddling with his radio, trying to pick up a signal through the massive rock baffles around them.

  "You're green, aren't you?" Venus said. "This your first action?"

  "No," Pietr said uncomfortably. "I've been on Nu Earth a couple of weeks."

  "Which unit?" she asked. The question was casual, friendly, but it brought Pietr out in a cold sweat.

  "Fifth," he said, taking a wild guess, but Venus just nodded and it occurred to him that the GI's probably didn't have much to do with the regular army, didn't know any more about it than he did. He was careful to keep the relief out of his face.

  "Your voice sounds real familiar," Helm said suddenly, and the fear that had disappeared came back with full force.

  Pietr had to swallow twice before he could answer. "Guess maybe we saw each other back on Milli-Com," he said eventually. "I would have been shipping out around the same time as you." He had a sudden, vivid flashback of himself kicking a helpless GI prisoner as he lay bound on the floor of their boat, the prisoner that Rogue had risked so much to come back and rescue.

  "Yeah, maybe," Helm said doubtfully.

  Thankfully, Rogue's radio crackled into life and the conversation ended. "Rogue?" a voice demanded from the radio, in the clipped, confident tones that screamed top brass.

  "Still here, colonel," Rogue said. Something in his voice told Pietr that he didn't entirely trust the man he was speaking to. Then Rogue's tone darkened as he added, "Venus made it too, but most of the others weren't so lucky." It surprised Pietr to hear Rogue sounding as if he cared, as if the lives of the other Southers, men he'd never met before that day, really counted to him. Pietr had never heard the same attitude from his own comrades, and certainly not from the officers. Men were just cannon fodder to them.

  "I need you at Harpo's Ferry, GI," the voice from the radio continued. "There's a patrol boat waiting to pick you up at the river, a day's fast march from where you are. Sorry we can't get any closer, but those damn Norts have total air domination where you are. I'm beaming the boat's co-ordinates to you now."

  Pietr saw a robotic arm extend from the side of Rogue's backpack, holding out some sort of digital map to him. "Here ya go, Rogue," a mechanical voice said, and Pietr jumped before realising that it was just another of the biochips. "I've highlighted the area in red, shouldn't take us too long."

  Pietr could see the red dot from where he was standing, travelling across the surface of the digi-map as if the co-ordinate was somehow moving. "I'll be there, Kovert," Rogue said. "Just make sure the rescue craft is too."

  As Pietr continued to watch, not really paying attention, the red dot he'd noticed crept right off the edge of the digi-map and began to move steadily up Rogue's body.

  Only when it reached Rogue's head did he wake from his half trance to realise that something wasn't quite right about this. The biochip seemed to come to exactly the same realisation at exactly the same time. The robot arm did a perfect double take, then spun to look for the source of the dot, the laser beam, Pietr guessed, which must be projecting it.

  "Rogue, look out!" the biochip shouted.

  With a speed and fluidity that left Pietr in awe, Rogue rolled to the side then came back up to his feet, his massive gun already cocked and aimed at the source of the laser. The shot missed him by a good two feet.

  It passed straight through where he had been standing and buried itself in Venus's thigh with an audible meaty thump. She let out little more than a tightly controlled gasp of pain, but a gout of blood erupted from the wound onto the metal floor of the base.

  Rogue flinched slightly, as if he felt the wound himself, but he didn't spare a glance for his fallen comrade. Almost before Venus had finished collapsing to the ground, clutching her injured leg, Rogue had sent a return salvo in the directi
on of the Nort.

  A second later, another bullet came back in the opposite direction, almost as if Rogue's own shot had bounced, missing Rogue's head by little more than an inch. The GI was already on the move, weaving in and out of the ruins, snapping off shot after shot, never pausing long enough to present a steady target.

  "Soldier, I need some help here," Venus said, and Pietr guiltily snapped his attention away from the battle and towards the fallen woman. He knelt down beside her, but then just stared helplessly, watching the thick blue blood ooze out between the fingers she had clawed against the wound.

  "Know any field medicine?" she asked, forcing the words out between teeth gritted in barely contained pain.

  Pietr shook his head. He'd never felt more useless.

  "Never mind," Venus said. "Just help me fix a tourniquet for now. Got to get this bleeding stopped."

  Pietr nodded, then froze again. He had no idea what he could use to tie off the wound. Despite the obvious agony she was in, Venus managed a smile. "Don't worry, I'm not gonna die on you yet," she said. "Spare air tube on your chem suit could do it."

  Blushing, Pietr hurriedly pulled the tube away and began gingerly fixing it round her thigh.

  "Tighter," she grated.

  Pietr found he had to grit his own teeth as he pulled the tube tight, and Venus let out a hiss of breath, but she didn't complain so he tied it off in a double knot.

  Rogue was nearer now, double rolling over the ground onto his belly, and Pietr saw another of the lethal red beams that preceded a sniper shot crawling towards him.

  "Rogue, coming up at you!" he warned, but the other man ignored him, just standing there, looking calmly through the sights of his gun, letting the red light approach ever nearer. The GI drew in a deep breath, held it, and fired.