The Quartz Massacre

by Rebecca Levene

  "We got him, Rogue!" one of the biochips said, its mechanical voice crackly with excitement.

  "Not sure, think we might have just winged him," Rogue replied, sighting through his gun again.

  "Rogue, I think we have to get out of here now," Pietr said. Rogue snapped one look over at his fellow GI and seemed to reach the same conclusion. He tossed his gun back over his shoulder and ran to Venus's side, dropping to his knees on the ground to examine the wound for himself.

  "How you doing, Venus?" he asked.

  "I'm just peachy," Venus said, but her voice was husky with pain.

  Morgan picked himself up off the ground. He was so angry he was shaking. He thought he might have injured himself a little as he fell from his perch in the petrified tree, but he could feel no physical discomfort; the rage was all-consuming. To have been bested in combat, and by one of those blue-skinned Souther freaks!

  He snapped open his radio and opened his channel, though this admission of defeat tasted terribly bitter in his mouth. His comrades would hear of it and he would be shamed in their eyes, a fallen hero. "Base 342, Rogue Trooper is heading in your direction." He continued to glare in the direction of his nemesis as he concluded, "Make sure he dies."

  ELEVEN

  SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES

  Venus was too proud to let Rogue carry her, but she had her arm slung over his shoulder as he helped her limp towards the exit of the hydroponics plant. He didn't like how white she looked around the mouth, as if she was using all her strength just to keep from showing him how much she was hurting. The Souther trooper trailed behind, covering their back, though Rogue was glad that he also had Bagman's eyes covering the terrain. The boy had a spine, but he was green.

  "What's your name, kid?" he asked him.

  The boy seemed to hesitate a moment, perhaps surprised that Rogue had spoken to him. Then he said, "Peter. Peter, sir."

  "Just Rogue will do," Rogue said gruffly.

  "Though you can call me sir if you want," Bagman quipped.

  Peter looked puzzled, clearly not sure whether Bagman was joking.

  "Ignore him, kid," Gunnar said. "There are no ranks here. Cover our backs and you'll get our respect."

  "Got it," Peter said.

  "Rogue," Helm chimed in, and Rogue instantly knew that it wasn't good news. "I just intercepted a Nort transmission - looks like they're sending in reinforcements."

  Rogue cursed. He thought they might have bought themselves a little more time than that.

  Venus pulled away weakly from his grasp. "You'd better leave me," she said. "I'm only going to get all of you killed."

  "No way that's gonna happen, Venus," Rogue said, surprised at the emotion in his own voice. "So you might as well not mention it again."

  "What Rogue said," Helm growled.

  "Yeah, me too," Bagman added, sounding slightly less certain. "We're gonna need to head to higher ground, though. Kovert's map shows a gully that should lead us out of here."

  "I'll project it on your heads-up," Helm said.

  Rogue could see instantly where Bagman meant, a narrow ravine leading up into the mountains that would be highly defensible once they got there. But it was on the far side of the hydroponics plant, a good five hundred yard scramble though the derelict hulk of the building, maybe twenty minutes at Venus's crippled pace, if she could even make it that far.

  With that ability to read his thoughts, which both amazed and frightened him, she said, "Don't worry about me, Rogue, I'll keep up - all you gotta do is clear a path."

  Rogue wanted to say something else to her, though he wasn't quite sure what, but then the first Hoppa came into view and Rogue knew that he'd run out of time. He unwound Venus's arm from around his neck and pushed her gently towards Peter. "Take care of her and follow me."

  Even in the time it had taken him to do that, the decapitators were on them, buzzing like a vast mechanical swarm of hornets. It was a bigger cluster than any Rogue had seen before and he knew that he'd have no chance if he tried to take them individually. Worse, the little machines were fitted with enough AI to spot that Venus was the weakest member of the group, and like all hunting packs they would go for the weakest first.

  He could use that to his advantage. Veering to one side, he left them a clear path to Venus and they took it gladly, zooming in as if they could smell the blood still oozing from her thigh. Rogue got a brief glimpse of the white, shocked expression on Peter's face at this apparent betrayal. But the boy didn't leave his position at Venus's side, even though that left him in the path of the murderous machines, and Rogue didn't worry about it any further, just waited till they were almost on her, then dived straight at her, knocking both her and the boy to the ground.

  The decapitators were going too fast to change course so quickly. He saw the leader spin wildly, as if trying to correct its course, but they were only meters away from the pillar Venus had been heading towards. Then they were on it and a huge chain reaction exploded into a ball of fire. Rogue used his body to shield Venus from the shrapnel of the blast, little blackened pieces of decapitator shredding the dry vegetation all around them.

  He could tell that the fall had hurt Venus, but he didn't bother to apologise because he knew that she'd understand.

  From then on the battle was a frantic, grim fight for survival against odds he wasn't entirely sure he could survive. Hoppas dropped wave after wave of reinforcements into the derelict shell of the building, and where the Hoppas couldn't reach, the drill probes came.

  If it hadn't been for Venus, gamely struggling after him, leaning on the Souther recruit as lightly as possible, too proud to show she was down and very nearly out, Rogue felt that he might just have given up. Blank insect face after blank insect face loomed up in front of him, and one after another he shot them down. Whenever he could he stooped to gather the wreckage he left behind when he'd killed them, throwing it into Bagman's open maw, ordering him to make Sammie after Sammie, because taking down the Hoppas before they could deliver their deadly payloads was the only way he was going to win this battle.

  By the time they were only halfway to their destination, Rogue was so exhausted he felt his vision blurring. All enemies had started to look like the same enemy to him, as if he just kept shooting down the same man who just kept rising from the dead. One time, when he swung to take a shot at the drill-probe-delivered squad behind him, he caught a face in his sights and for a moment it was just another enemy and he was going to fire and take it down and move on. He realised that it was a face, a frightened young face, pale brows pulled up tensely onto its smooth forehead, and he recognised it as Peter. This one's on our side, he told himself, swinging the shot away to take out the Nort whose knife had been about the end the Souther's life.

  Miraculously, they were through, and the ravine loomed before them, a black slit in the grey rock of the mountain. There also was a Hoppa, hovering in the air to cut off their escape route, every gun trained on Rogue.

  "A Sammie would be damn useful right about now," Rogue growled to Bagman, aiming and firing at the Nort troops he could see ready to drop from the ship, but they were well-shielded behind its thick armour plate.

  "Working on it, Rogue," Bagman said.

  "Well, work harder!" Gunnar snapped. "I'm gasping for some ammo here!"

  Rogue ignored them both, concentrating on slowing the Hoppa's approach any way he could, throwing micro-mines at it that he knew didn't have the power to take it down but might at least confuse the pilot, stop him from homing his missiles on Venus, sheltered behind Rogue's body, the only protection he could offer her. Then he heard another noise. A drill probe, behind them.

  "I've got it, Rogue," Peter said. Rogue heard him load and cock his own weapon, then a volley of shotgun fire. The kid hadn't seemed like he was too well acquainted with which end of a gun was which, but Rogue knew the Hoppa was the bigger danger and he had to trust the kid to handle it. Fear for your life either brought out the best in people, or the wo
rst - seemed like it was time to find out which it was for the kid.

  The Hoppa was only ten metres away. No way its guns weren't getting a lock now.

  Bagman said, "Got it, Rogue." The robot arm reached out to drop the heavy mass of a Sammie missile into his hand along with the launcher.

  Rogue fitted and fired it in one smooth motion. Then he swept a protesting Venus up in his arms and ran as fast as he could towards the missile, knowing that if he didn't get past it, then the Hoppa and into the ravine, then the explosion of the huge vehicle wouldn't end just the lives of the troops on board.

  He nearly didn't make it. Behind him, farther behind than was safe, he heard Peter give a gasp of fear and pain as the searing heat of the fireball that was suddenly all that was left of the Nort Hoppa took him. Rogue carried on running, outrunning the conflagration, down the ravine, faster than he'd ever run before, as if Venus's weight in his arms was nothing.

  Venus had stopped protesting and her face was buried against Rogue's chest, shielding her eyes from the intense light of the explosion. He could feel her moist, warm breath puffing out in ragged gasps against his skin. She sounded bad, maybe going into shock from the injury or blood loss, but he couldn't worry about that.

  Even as he heard the explosion suck back in on itself behind him, its oxygen supply exhausted in the chem-heavy air, he kept on running. "Another Sammie, Bagman!" he shouted.

  "Why?" Bagman said, then seemed to realise that this wasn't the time for argument.

  Rogue could hear the hiss of air out of an oxygen tank and that meant Peter had made it, though he couldn't spare the time to turn round and see what kind of state the boy was in. He knew that as soon as the heat of the explosion had died down, and maybe before, the Norts would be sending every last man left down the ravine after them.

  Finally, the long dark tunnel broadened, and ahead of him through the grey rocks he could see the yellow sky coming down to meet the jagged edge of a plateau, the high mountain plain he'd been heading for. Only when he was a good twenty metres out on it did he finally turn around. The boy Peter was staggering towards him, further behind but still clear of the ravine, so Rogue put Venus gently down on the ground and reached out a hand towards Bagman. "Sammie," he said.

  Without a word, Bagman deposited the missile in his hand. Rogue fitted it to Gunnar, carefully this time - he couldn't afford to miss with this one. Then he aimed down the ravine and fired.

  "Not gonna get many Norts with that," Gunnar grumbled.

  "It's not the Norts he's aiming for," Helm said.

  Peter looked at him, puzzled, as if he was on Gunnar's side, not quite understanding what Rogue had done. Then the first rumble began, gentle at first, but building and building, the sound of rocks only loosely bound to each other deciding to cut and run. After that came the screams of Norts trapped in the fall, suddenly finding themselves facing not just a lone GI but a whole mountain on the way down.

  Then there was just silence and a cloud of dust rising up towards the sky from the avalanche far below.

  From the ground, Venus smiled up at him, though he could see the effort it cost her. "Sometimes, Rogue, very occasionally, you impress me."

  They set up camp for the remainder of the night not far from the giant rock fall that Rogue had caused. They were still perilously close to the Nort forces, even camouflaged under Rogue's field tent, but nobody argued. You only had to take one look at Venus, or hear her shallow, wheezing breaths, to know that she couldn't make it very much further without a rest. That she might not be making it much further at all.

  Once they had the tent set up, Bagman made some med kits for her, but she was so far gone that they could do little more than stabilise the damage. Helm could have asked Bagman exactly how bad Venus was hurt, but he chose not to. He didn't think he could handle that kind of news.

  He didn't think he could handle very much more bad luck. The fighting had been so constant from the moment he'd died, so unremitting, that he'd begun to find himself losing the fighting spirit he'd always prided himself on. He'd been bred for war, he'd always known that, but on Milli-Com he hadn't really known what that meant. Now, on the ravaged surface of Nu Earth, he began to grasp it. He was meant for this, day after day, week after week, and then year after year, with no end in sight, not even death - because that had already happened to him.

  The moon continued its path across the sky, silhouetted for a moment perfectly against the vast black hole, the gap in the fabric of space-time which was the one thing which made this hellhole so valuable, which had led his people and their enemies to reduce it to a hellhole in the first place. How appropriate, Helm thought, that we're literally fighting over nothing, over the ultimate void.

  He wondered for a moment why he even wanted a body again, when all he could use it for would be more fighting. But then he glanced over at Venus, and saw her smiling up at Rogue as he tended to her wound, the special smile she used to save for Helm, and he knew that he'd give anything at all to be flesh and blood again, to be the man that Venus had fallen in love with. He just needed some goddamn luck for a change. Was that too much to ask?

  The sun rose in the morning to sparkle off a very distant ribbon of water which Bagman assured them was the river where their boat was waiting. Helm spotted two life-signs crambling over the grey rocks towards them in the shape of the chem nurse, Sister Sledge.

  Rogue squinted at her. "How the hell did you find us?" he asked.

  She shrugged. "I got a message there'd been a train crash, and there might be survivors down below, but the way seems to be blocked by most of a mountain."

  "There was a train crash," Helm told her. "You're looking at the survivors, and yeah, we were the ones who caused the rock fall."

  The chem nurse smiled. He was flattered to see that she looked directly at him as she did, recognising that it was him who was speaking. That Souther recruit Peter, who Helm was convinced he had met some time ago, still couldn't seem to figure out which of the biochips was which.

  Then Sister Sledge spotted Venus, who was so weak now that Rogue had to hold her canteen of water as she drank, and her expression grew more serious. "Looks like there's some work for me here."

  Roughly forty minutes later, Sledge had patched Venus up better than Helm would have believed possible. The GI Doll's face had gone back from pale, icy turquoise to a much healthier sea blue, and her breathing was now regular and even, without that hitch of pain that had been growing more pronounced as the night wore on.

  "'Preciate it, Sister," Rogue said, the rough edge of raw feeling in his voice. Helm didn't like that at all. Rogue had no business going all emotional over Venus - that was his job.

  "No problem," Sledge said, gracing him with the sunny smile that hinted at feelings of her own, a hint Rogue didn't seem too inclined to pick up on. "Want me to take another look at the guys while I'm at it, see if there's been any further deterioration?"

  Rogue shrugged, a little too casually, Helm thought. "Sure. Everything seems to be okay, though."

  Sledge shrugged too. "Better safe than sorry."

  Rogue went back to looking after Venus as Sledge went to inspect Bagman, flipping his chip carefully out of his casing, so Helm watched Venus too, watched the sly little smile on her face as Rogue fussed around her like he was her damn mother. He was concentrating so hard that he didn't actually see the expression on Sledge's face himself as she examined Bagman, just saw the reflection of it in Rogue's. By the time he'd spun to face the chem nurse she'd schooled her expression to look calm, professional.

  "What's wrong?" Rogue demanded.

  "It's..." Sister Sledge began, then hesitated, like someone who couldn't bear to break the bad news.

  "Just tell me," Bagman's voice said from her hand. "I gotta right to know, don't I?"

  "All right," Sledge said. "The deterioration is much worse than I expected. At the rate it's going, I don't think you're going to last more than a day."

  A cold silence followed. Ven
us was the first to break it, swearing colourfully. "Those damn incompetent Milli-Com scum - they can't get anything right!"

  "Scan out, Venus," Rogue said flatly. "We can handle this."

  "It's... It's okay, Rogue," Bagman said. "I'm fine. I mean, I feel fine. We can still go after the traitor. I know I can keep myself together till then."

  "No way, Bagman," Rogue said. "That mobile lab you were talking about?" he said to Venus. "Call it. Arrange a rendezvous as soon as you can. I'll sweep the area, make sure there are no Norts around to mount an ambush, and then we'll get the boys fixed up."

  For almost the first time since he'd lost his body, Helm felt himself feeling pure and simple gratitude to Rogue, and he remembered why they'd been friends almost since the day they'd stepped out of the artificial wombs. He was so taken up with the thought that he'd soon have a body again, a body he could use to show Venus that he was every bit the man he'd always been, that he didn't pay much attention to what his scanners were telling him, to the sudden speeding up in Sister Sledge's heart rate as soon as Rogue said the words "call it". He didn't have any thinking space left over to wonder why those simple words should have got the chem nurse so nervous, or so excited.

  Pietr knew he couldn't go on like this. Just what the hell did he think he was doing? He'd come here to kill Rogue, and somehow he'd ended up fighting with him, and worse, fighting with him against his own men.

  As he trotted after Rogue through the shallow gullies of the high plain, heading for the rendezvous which Sister Sledge had set up for them, he wondered how many Norts had died in that avalanche, the one Rogue had set off so casually to cut off their pursuit. Ten? Twenty? A hundred? A hundred definitely seemed possible. When Pietr had run away from his regiment, he'd been resigned to the fact that they might think him a traitor, but he'd never imagined that he might actually become one.

  He looked ahead of him at Rogue, shadowed by the high walls of the gully, and thought that it would be very easy to just squeeze off a shot. Helm might warn him about it, but why would Helm even be checking up on Pietr? Except that he couldn't do it. Rogue had saved his life, several times, and he deserved more than to be shot in the back by a man he thought was a friend.