Blood Relative

by James Swallow

  He reached over to Ferris. The pilot's breathing was shallow. "We have to get out," said Rogue. "Norts will be vectoring spy-sats into this area to look for downed pilots. They'll mark our landing for sure."

  Ferris gave a slow, difficult nod. "Right, right," he managed, unfastening his seat straps with leaden slowness. "I could improve my technique a little, I think..." He stumbled to his feet, dragging a survival kit from a locker that had burst open. "Still, any one you can walk away from, eh?"

  "If I had a head," said Bagman, "I'd have a headache."

  Rogue saw Ferris recover a snub-nosed slug pistol and stuff it in a suit pocket. "Let's move. You follow me, go where I go and do what I say and you'll keep breathing. Understand?"

  Ferris nodded again. "Sure. This is your turf now, right?"

  Rogue kicked out the hatch and dropped to the ground, panning Gunnar across the expanse of glassy nothingness. For a long moment there was nothing but silence, the absolute, oppressive quiet of a tomb.

  The pilot emerged behind him. The alien landscape gave Ferris the creeps. "Which way?"

  None of them wanted to speak, as if daring to utter a word would shatter the miserable stillness and bring black memories rushing back to claim them. At last, Bagman gave a peculiar synthetic cough. "Huh. Nothing's changed."

  "We need to find cover," said Rogue in a low, loaded voice.

  "Quarter-klick to the north," Helm answered immediately, anticipating the GI's requirements. "A network of crevices. Some shallow nooks in there."

  Rogue took off at a jog without looking to see if Ferris was following and the pilot charged after him, giving the pod one last farewell glance. In the distance, in the opposite direction, the plume of smoke from the shuttle coiled up into the clouds, a dark ribbon against an oil-stained sky.

  The Quartz Zone was riddled with shallow craters and fissures where the fused surface was cracked and broken, and Rogue's unerring eye for defensive shelter quickly found them a surface cave where they could hide. Ferris sucked plastic-tasting water from a tube in his suit and watched the GI drop his gear.

  "Bagman, dispense entrenching tool." The backpack complied and Rogue unfolded a memory-metal spade, walking out to the edge of the crevice. The GI slammed the blade of the tool into the glassy earth and began to dig.

  "What's he doing?" Ferris asked.

  "Burial detail," replied Helm.

  Ferris saw the GI remove Zero's biochip and put it to one side. A sudden, icy realisation struck him. "Skev... This is it, isn't it? This is where you guys... Where you-"

  "Died? Bought the farm? Copped it? Got scragged?" Gunnar said. "Yeah, more or less."

  The pilot shook his head. "Is there any part of this damn planet that isn't somebody's war grave?"

  Helm spoke again. "We're about twenty, maybe thirty klicks from the drop point." The artificial voice seemed distant now. "Mass capsule landing, it was. Seven ships, full compliment of pods. The Norts had been tipped off, see. They were waiting down here with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers."

  "Coffin-breakers," Bagman broke in.

  "Gunnar... He was hit first," Helm continued, and Ferris felt like the voices from the biochips were not really speaking to him; this was some kind of litany for the dead men, the unwritten memory of their shared trauma.

  "I got out, soon as the pod touched down," said the mind in the rifle. "Hammered a hundred of those Kashans. Fed the bastards eighty-eights and gamma grenades like they was goin' out of style." Gunnar was silent for a moment. "Redball and Tagger, they were covering the flank, but then they were gone and I didn't see the Nort with the plasma sphere. Rogue tried to warn me... Next thing I know, I'm bleeding out right there on the glass."

  "He put your chip in his rifle," said Ferris.

  "My rifle!" Gunnar retorted. "It's my damned rifle." There was another pause. "I was ghosted but Rogue got me out... I wasn't the last, not by a long way."

  Bagman began to speak, picking up the thread of the recollection. "We had no choice. We had to fall back, regroup, so anyone who was left formed up into skirmish units and we splintered. Figured we'd have a better chance of making it to pick-up that way."

  "We got to the edge of the zone with five of us left in our team," added Helm. "Bag, Rogue and me, plus Joker and Cowboy. Scopes got popped by a buzzsaw mine on the way and there was nothing left of him. Then we ran into the Kashar Legion... They were sweeping up after the ambush, looking for survivors. They pinned us down in a crater and waited for us to use up our ammo. The map called it Strongpoint Siouxie, but it was just a hole in the ground."

  "They didn't wait long, though." Bagman's tone was hollow. "They sent a drill probe in after us. I remember the heat... The smell, like overcooked rations. There was a split in my chest, you understand? Big enough to put my fist in." The chip made a low, guttural sound. "Nnnn. Then I woke up, woke up on silicon. Just like that."

  Ferris found he couldn't look away from Rogue as the GI carefully placed the inert dog-chip in its tiny, shallow grave. "What... what about you, Helm?"

  "He almost made it," said Gunnar, with a hint of sorrow in his words. "Joker finally got through to Milli-Com on the link and they sent down a chem-strike to screen us."

  "Rogue and me took the alpha route," Helm began. "I don't know how we did it, but lady luck had us in the palm of her hand that night. We charged right over the Nort line and just kept on runnin'. Two days later we were on the Oxide Shore."

  "No one else?"

  "Just the two of us," said Helm.

  "Four," insisted Bagman. "Four of us."

  "Whatever," Helm became terse. "Anyway, long story short, we wade out into the Orange Sea to get to the shuttle and a bunch of Nort foils pop up and missile the boat..." The synth turned angry. "Those sneaky bastards, we never even got a chance to shoot back! Damn it, they knew! Every one of those Nort goons, they knew where we were every step of the way!"

  "There was a traitor." Rogue entered the shelter. "A Souther general sold us out."

  Ferris nodded. This part of the story he'd heard, the legend of the lone GI searching for vengeance. "You really think you're gonna find some clue, then? You reckon this Delta place has something to do with that guy?"

  Rogue fixed him with a look that was razor-sharp and cold with malice. "We need information. We need to know."

  SEVEN

  HUNTER HUNTED

  They travelled under cover of chem storms and nightfall, with Helm plotting erratic courses across the glass to avoid the footprints of orbital satellites. Rogue navigated by the dark disk of the Valhalla wormhole in the sky above them, the baleful black sun like the unblinking eye of an ancient war God. Ferris did his best to keep up, but the pace the GI maintained left him spent and panting. Rogue never chastised him for his unfitness, just stood by and waited for him to catch his breath before they moved off again.

  By the end of the second day, Ferris began to wonder why the trooper didn't just leave him out here to fend for himself. If the circumstances were reversed, the pilot would have been hard pressed to find an excuse not to do otherwise. He was slowing the GI to a comparative crawl. Perhaps it was something in him, Ferris wondered, maybe a kind of genetic imperative wired into the soldier's vat-grown brain? Rogue had to have some programmed bias toward preserving the lives of civilian and allies, otherwise he would have left Ferris sitting in the escape pod and headed out alone.

  He watched the GI's back as Rogue walked in front of him, the unchanging, almost mechanical gait of his stride the same as it had been all day. Rogue never seemed to tire and his biochip buddies were always awake, certainly. He had no doubt that Bagman's rearward facing sensors knew exactly where Ferris was at any moment.

  They were close to cresting a ridge when Rogue came to a sudden halt and uttered a terse command. "Down!"

  Ferris sank to his knees as Rogue crouched and crept forward to the lip of the silica bank. "Trouble?"

  The pilot flattened himself and crawled up to the lee of a broken, glass
y boulder. Laid out below the ridge was a shallow canyon, pitted with impact craters and broken stubs of rubble. This part of the Quartz Zone had been a settlement, back before the thermal bombardments, and there were some remains of the buildings that once stood there. Ferris squinted. He could see something moving, a handful of vague shapes.

  "Southers," said Rogue. "Recon patrol by the looks of their gear."

  Ferris could barely make out that the blobs were actually people. "You can see that from here? You got eyes like a hawk!"

  "There's raptor DNA in us," said Bagman, popping open his manipulator. "A pinch of tiger as well." The arm produced a pair of field glasses. "Here, use these binox."

  Ferris took them and studied the party of troops. Five men leapt into definition through the long-range lenses. "They're moving pretty fast. I wonder why?" The body language of the soldiers was tense and anxious.

  Rogue scanned the landscape. "They're being chased."

  "By who?" asked Ferris. "Can't see anyone else out-" His words caught in his throat as one of the Southern troopers suddenly spun around in place, a gush of blood exploding out of her chest. Seconds later the cracking report of a single las-round reached their ears.

  The other troopers panicked and turned away from the direction they had been running in, instead making for the heart of the canyon and the ruins.

  "Stupid," murmured Helm. "They're walking right into it."

  Rogue answered Ferris's unspoken question. "There's a shooter out there, herding them deeper into the canyon. My guess is there'll be another rifleman waiting on the ridgeline over the ruins. One pushes them in, the other picks them off."

  "Where's the shooter?"

  Rogue pointed toward a tilted fragment of grey glass. "There, see him?"

  Through the binox Ferris saw only the shadows cast by the rock; but then something detached itself from the darkness and moved swiftly forward. It had only gone a few steps when the man-shape paused and looked up. The pilot's heart froze in his chest as the figure looked directly at him.

  Instantly, Ferris shrank into the cover of the boulder. "Did he see me?"

  Rogue shook his head. "No, he's moving on."

  The other man swallowed hard. The expressionless face he'd seen through the binoculars was chilling and alien. "He... he had green skin, no mask. Some kinda helmet over his eyes, his head..."

  "Not a helmet," said Gunnar irritably. "It's dermal armour plating, fused to the skull. Thick enough to deflect a hotshot from anything less than close range."

  Rogue's eyes narrowed. "It's a Nort Genetik Soldat. Our opposite numbers."

  "Huh," added Helm. "Not like any kind I've seen before, though. He looks different, bigger."

  "Must be the new improved model..." Bagman said dryly.

  "You're not just gonna let those men get killed off one by one, are you?"

  Rogue dropped into cover. "Bagman, gimme the walkie-talkie." The GI passed the hand-held radio to Ferris. "Take this. Sing out if things start to get hairy."

  "Wh-what are you gonna do?" the pilot stammered.

  The GI pointed. "I'll double-time it around the lip of the canyon, see if I can't get behind the second shooter and take him out. Reckon he's in the busted tower to the west."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "It's where I would be, the best vantage point, good fields of fire. You head down the ridge, follow that Nort GI, but stay out of his way."

  "Copy..." Ferris gulped.

  "Eh," grunted Gunnar. "We just gonna leave flyboy alone? If tall, green and handsome down there gets hold of him, he'll sing like a synthi-vox!"

  Rogue shoved his rifle into Ferris's hands. "Which is why you're going to keep him out of trouble." Before Gunnar could protest, Rogue was sprinting away, vanishing into the dark.

  Ferris watched him go, staggered by the GI's speed at a full run. He gingerly raised the rifle. "Uh... So, where's your safety catch?"

  "Inside the barrel," Gunnar growled. "Why don't you take a look down it and see?"

  "Never mind," said the pilot, and he carefully turned the gun's muzzle away before moving off over the ridge.

  "A ghost," said Johnson. "It's a ghost! Those Godless abortions, they're phantoms!" In his exertion, the Souther soldier was steaming up the inside of his faceplate.

  To his right, Zeke threw him a sharp look. "Knock it off, son. You're wasting oxy panicking."

  "Yeah, the sarge is right," added Ruiz, hefting the Blowpipe launcher in his hands. "You keep babblin' and you'll end up ventilated like Taylor back there!"

  "She owed me money, skev it!" Purcell said in a snarl. "This is number ten."

  Zeke raised a balled fist, halting them all. "Quiet, all of you!" The veteran paused, scanning the canyon. "We gotta find high ground before these Norty freaks flank us."

  "Maybe... maybe they already did..." mumbled Johnson.

  Purcell stepped closer to Zeke and lowered her voice. "Sarge, this don't feel right. We're walking into an ambush, I can taste it."

  The woman's words made the sergeant hesitate; Purcell was a good soldier with excellent instincts, which was what had kept her alive on Nu Earth so far. He glanced around. The wind moaned through the canyon, disturbing drifts of mirror-bright fines where they pooled around the ruins. Zeke's heart hammered in his chest. It seemed like they had been running for days, but it was only hours since things had started to fall apart. The patrol was supposed to have taken them up and away from their unit for a standard reconnaissance sweep, but then the las-fire had come out of nowhere and killed three men in as many seconds, the lieutenant among them. Taylor had only survived because the radio backpack had absorbed the shot meant for her, but now she was gone too and with no communications and not a damn clue as to where they were, the remnants of Zeke's squad were running out of luck. They needed to hole up, try to find their location on the digi-map and return to their unit; but those green monstrosities that had jumped them never slowed. He gave an involuntary shudder. The dead eyes, that bony mask for a face... Whatever the Norts had bred out here, it was a walking horror show.

  "Sarge?" Purcell repeated, shaking him out of his reverie.

  He pointed to a long, flat piece of wall. "There. Get up and dig in. That's an order!"

  She gave him a disgusted look, but obeyed.

  G-Soldat NG/442-Sigma had not moved for the past twenty minutes. He was well concealed in the ring of smashed bricks that at one time had been a church's bell tower. The barrel of his weapon, a Mowzer K-Type Stalker, protruded slightly from the cover of his ash-coloured camu-cape. The mimetic camouflage threads in the flexible material matched perfectly to the optical register of the surrounding stones, and with the thickness of his plastiform epidermis hiding 442-Sigma's body heat, there was nothing to alert the Souther prey to his presence. Sigma's designated squad mate for this mission, G-Soldat NG/181-Beta, had already scored two kills on this training sortie and he was eager to claim some for himself.

  There was little room for any other kind of emotion inside Sigma's mind. Almost everything but hate and fear had been excised from his intellect; what could be deducted by selective gene-engineering, invasive brain surgery and impulse response blocks was cut away, the rest suppressed and manipulated by chemo-psychological conditioning. G-Soldat NG/442-Sigma understood that he was a weapon, an intelligent field munition with one mission: to kill the enemy.

  And yet, deep, deep inside the regimented, programmed core of the Nort GI's psyche there was a tiny, bone-deep centre of aggression and need that craved violence. Had such a thing been part of his make-up, Sigma might have recognised the almost sexual anticipation of murder bubbling away under his iron façade.

  The four remaining Southers were well inside his kill zone now and they bobbed up the shallow hill toward him, awkward and afraid as they looked desperately for any signs of enemy activity. Sigma understood fear; it ruled him. Fear of her. Fear that he would earn her displeasure and fail, fear that an error on his part would return him once more to t
he debriefing chambers where additional, painful programming was provided to the Soldats who did not meet the Kolonel-Doktor's stringent mandates. He elected to wait a little longer, so that the Souther troopers would not be able to scatter too far when the moment came to fire. He flexed the finger on the Mowzer's trigger in preparation, then he heard the crunch of boots on glass behind him.

  G-Soldat NG/181-Beta would not have dared to approach from the rear, which left only one possibility. The Nort Genetik Soldat tensed and with a grimace of annoyance, he exploded out of cover. The camu-cape fluttered away as he turned to face his new adversary.

  Rogue hadn't expected the Nort GI to be so fast - the last ones he fought had been sluggish in comparison - and it almost took him off guard. He leapt without thinking, colliding bodily with the enemy soldier. The fractal-edged combat knife in his right hand sank into the G-Soldat's breast to the hilt as they came together, but the Nort seemed utterly unaware of the wound. The dull white crest of bone on his armoured skull nodded forward and butted Rogue hard on the helmet.

  "ZZzzt!" spat Helm, the impact rattling his circuitry.

  Sigma recognised the form of the Southern gene-trooper automatically; the profiles of this inferior example of his kind had been given to him among the endless indoctrination sessions of his in-vitro training. The prospect of killing a GI kindled the murder-lust in him a little higher and Sigma forgot about the human soldiers for a moment. They were locked for long seconds, the Stalker rifle held between them like a quarterstaff, blue and green hands gripping it, struggling for command of the weapon. Rogue gave a savage tug and in return Sigma pulled the trigger. The shot blazed past Rogue's face, but the nictitating membranes over his eyes cut away any hope of dazzling him.

  Down in the canyon, the laser blast echoed through the air and Zeke shouted out an order. "Scatter!"