Something about the look in her eyes revolted him and the GI drew back from her. "Yeah, well let me know how it goes with that."
The woman smiled again. "Of course you have your doubts. I would not have expected otherwise... But I can offer you something in return."
Questions were churning inside Rogue's mind like a hurricane: questions about Zero, about the Traitor General, the Quartz Zone. "I don't think so," he said.
She tapped a slender finger on a bio-schematic of a G-Soldat. "You've seen my creations first-hand, you know they're vastly superior to anything Clavel or the Southers created-"
"Not so superior that I couldn't kill two of them without breaking a sweat," Rogue interposed.
Schrader continued, ignoring the interruption. "There are new crops in the tubes as we speak. Your comrades entombed on those pathetic slivers of silicon, I can give them life again. Do you really believe that Milli-Com will regen them when you finally turn yourself in? They'll be erased, cancelled like the rest of the GI programme." Her eyes flashed. "I can make them whole again!"
"No one's going to collaborate with you, Schrader," he replied, a little too quickly. Rogue hid his thoughts with a scowl; in truth, he couldn't be sure that Gunnar, Helm and Bagman wouldn't be swayed by the offer of a new life after an eternity of artificial non-existence.
"I think you will, Rogue." The scientist nodded to herself, a chilly certainty crossing her pale features. "Because only I can provide you with the single thing that drives you, the object of your quest..." Schrader selected a digi-pad and pressed the activation stud; on the screen the faces of four men scrolled past in quick succession. Each was a Souther general, one of a contingent of officers stationed aboard the Milli-Sat known as Buzzard Three - and one of them was the traitor who had caused the destruction of the GI platoons at the Quartz Zone drop.
Rogue's expression turned to stone as he remembered his showdown with the men on Buzzard Three, the attack that had destroyed the station and the flight back to Nu Earth in a sabotaged escape pod. Only one other lifeboat had made it down - and on board, the man he knew as the Traitor General.
Schrader saw a change in the GI and knew she had put the hook in him. She touched another switch on the digi-pad and a voice, thick with distortion and static, spoke in low, urgent tones. "Buzzard Three agent-in-place, debrief session nine. Subject, Souther Special Programme two-two-eight. It is my opinion that the development of the Genetic Infantrymen is the single largest threat to the Nort domination of Nu Earth-"
She silenced the playback. "The voice of your Traitor, Rogue, from my data files. His intelligence on the creation of your kind was quite extensive." The four faces continued to flicker across the screen. "Which one is it? That's the question. You've stared at these faces for hours, haven't you? Searching their eyes for some glimmer, some clue that could reveal which of them was your betrayer... I can give you that knowledge. I can tell you where to find him." Schrader's voice dropped to a hiss. "I can give you justice!"
"You're lying."
Schrader shrugged. "He's a traitor, worthless to your side and to the Norts. His life is a pitiful price to pay for your goodwill, Trooper."
Rogue's eyes never left the digi-pad. After a long silence, he asked, "What do you want from me?"
The kolonel-doktor's milk-white face blushed with genuine excitement. "All in good time, Rogue. I need you to rest first. I want you fit and well."
"What about my buddies?"
"They're being held in the armoury," she replied, then tapped a communicator tab on her collar. The door slid soundlessly open to reveal a pair of Nort troopers. "These men will take you to your quarters. You will be monitored, so please do not attempt anything rash."
Rogue said nothing and followed the guards.
When the door sealed behind him, Volks turned to the scientist. "This is a dangerous game, Lisle. If the GI suspects you are misleading him, he'll kill you."
"You will address me by my rank or as madam director, Kapten Volks," she said without pause, "and while your juvenile concern is touching, it is misplaced. The identity of the Traitor is only the lure that will bring Rogue closer to me." Schrader licked her thin, blood-red lips. "He'll understand soon enough. You all will. I'm going to change the face of Nu Earth forever."
As he walked, Rogue mentally ticked off his checklist of observations about Kolonel Schrader's personality; she was insane. He could see it in the motions of her eyes, the shallowness of her character, voice and manner. The icy heart of a sociopath beat in the scientist's chest and the GI knew that she wouldn't hesitate to burn him or anything else to get what she wanted. He needed to get off the defensive, and fast - but he couldn't do it alone.
The two guards hustled him into a cylindrical elevator. With a slight jolt, the lift began a quick ascent. Rogue glanced up; in the middle of the elevator roof was an unblinking camera eye.
He waited until the lift had passed the second level and then hit out, fast as lightning. With his manacled hands he punched into the camera and shattered the mechanism inside; at the same instant he kicked with his leg, breaking the knee of the Nort to his left. The first guard was still falling as his elbow came down and shattered the other trooper's nose. Wet crimson exploded from his nostrils and he yelled.
Rogue was on him, forcing the manacles into the soft meat of his throat. There was a sickening crack of breaking bone and the Nort died choking on his own blood. The GI turned in place; hand-to-hand combat inside the confined elevator was an exercise in the controlled application of force. He flicked the emergency stop switch and the lift ground to a halt just shy of the third level. The Nort with the smashed leg tried to prop himself up on his rifle and failed, slipping to the floor. Rogue took a handful of the Nort's chem-suit and hauled him up, bouncing the soldier off the wall. The guard landed a couple of hard punches to Rogue's ribcage, but the GI shrugged them off. With the economical motions of a thousand combat kills, Rogue hit the Nort again and he went limp in his hands, dangling like a rag doll.
His guardians dealt with, Rogue reached up to the hatch in the elevator roof and tore it open. Above him, the lift shaft extended away to the upper floors.
TEN
TURNCOAT
The guards had their weapons trained on the doors as the elevator arrived, the emergency override automatically returning it to the lower levels. The body of a trooper toppled forward and landed in a heap and from inside a second figure in Nort battle gear gave a weak wave.
"The hatch..." he coughed. "The blue-skin went up through the hatch..."
"Verkammt!" swore the korporal in charge of the unit. "Get to the upper tiers, seal off the shaft!" His men, used to following his orders without question, broke apart into two-man teams and headed to their assigned positions. The soldier glanced at the injured man. "Are you all right, comrade?"
"Dak..." wheezed the trooper. "I'll be fine." He got to his feet and pushed past the korporal and into the corridor.
The other soldier accepted this with a nod and then climbed into the elevator, using his rifle's torch to illuminate the shaft. Higher up, he could see a vent cover torn open and a shadowy shape in the dimness. Someone was up there. The korporal began to climb and called back over his shoulder. "You there! Come with me!"
The guard from the lift didn't acknowledge him and continued to walk away. It was then that the korporal realised the other Nort trooper was wearing his chem-suit hood up.
He should have recalled his men. He should have approached the figure with backup; instead he strode over to the guard and spun him around. "I gave you an order-"
The korporal's words died in his throat as he matched gazes with the reptilian yellow eyes staring out at him from the goggles of the full-face hood. "GI!"
"Mistake," replied Rogue, and buried a stolen vibro-dagger in the Nort's chest. He held the korporal towards him in a deadly embrace, watching life leave the soldier's eyes. Acting quickly, Rogue recovered the knife and threw the Nort's corpse into the eleva
tor along with the dead guard. He glanced up through the vent in the roof; he wouldn't have long before the Norts who were searching the levels above discovered the body of the second guard stuffed into one of the vent shafts. Sealing the lift door shut, he turned on his heel and made his way toward the armoury.
The voice was muffled as it came through the heavy hatch. "There's been a prisoner breakout on this level! The Genetik Infantryman is loose!"
Master Sergeant Kolt gave his subordinate Lars a sharp look. "The equipment!" he snapped. Kolt raced over to the holding area where the GI-issue helmet, rifle and backpack were lying. "He might try and recover his gear-"
Kolt turned and saw Lars keying in the code to open the hatch. "What are you doing? He didn't give the password!"
Lars had the door half-open before he realised his error, but by then it was too late. He tried to slide the heavy hatch back, but a muscular arm shot through the gap and grabbed a handful of his tunic. Lars was pulled straight into the doorframe with a bone-jarring impact. Rogue curled his thick fingers around the edges of the hatch and pushed, his enhanced musculature widening the gap against the whine of the automatic servos. The GI dived into the armoury, tucking and rolling; behind him, the hatch slammed shut and resealed.
He barely had a moment to get his bearings before a laser bolt skipped off the floor near his head. Rogue scrambled into cover behind a cluster of ammunition cases.
Kolt yelled out across the room. "Lars! Lars! Are you all right?"
"He's out for the count, Nort," Rogue replied, glancing at the unconscious trooper. "Just you and me."
"Good!" snapped the sergeant and fired again. "I won't have to share the kill, then!"
Rogue weighed the vibro-dagger in his hand; he'd have to get closer if he wanted to use it. But there was something that rang a wrong note in his mind, something familiar about the report of the gun that the Nort was using. He chanced a quick look over the top of the crates and glimpsed the sergeant sweeping the room with a GI rifle in his hand.
"Come on!" Kolt said, as if he sensed Rogue's scrutiny. "I'll take you down with your own weapon!"
"Gunnar!" shouted Rogue. "Trigger lock!" The GI leapt from his cover and sprinted through the lines of gun racks.
But Kolt didn't react; he drew a bead and - impossibly - fired again. Rogue saw it coming and twisted aside behind a cargo pod, but he was too slow to avoid a glancing burn as the beam lanced over his shoulder. The Nort swore and he heard him shifting position.
Rogue examined his injury. Could the Norts have done something to his weapon? The command to the biochip in his rifle should have automatically engaged a safety catch that only he could override, but that clearly wasn't working. "Gunnar! Helm! Bagman! Sound off!" he called out. No reply came in return.
"Not so cocky now are you, gene-freak?" said Kolt. "You know, this is a nice gun. Too good for the likes of a blue-skin. I think I might keep it."
Rogue said nothing, listening to the Nort's voice, trying to pinpoint where he was standing. Silently, he ran his fingers over the equipment cases in the cargo pod, looking for anything he could use. He had to move quickly; although the gunfire wouldn't carry through the armoury's soundproofed walls, it wouldn't take Volks long to figure out where Rogue had gone.
"Nothing to say? No matter, I can still find you." Kolt raised the rifle to his face and squinted down the target scope. With a flick of his finger, the Nort switched through the sight's vision modes. "You can't hide from eyes that see in the dark..."
The GI's hands closed around a rod-shaped device and he gave a cool smile.
Kolt swept the gun over Rogue's position and saw the faint trace of warm flesh; even though the Genetic Infantryman's engineered skin was designed to give off an extremely low heat signature, at this close a range it was still enough to target him. "Now I see you!" the sergeant grinned.
"Now you don't," Rogue snapped and threw the rod into the air; it burst into a brilliant glare of orange light. The signal flare alone would have been enough to flash-blind a man, but peering through the enhanced infrared scope on the rifle made Kolt's eye burn with a sudden, terrible agony. The Nort clawed at his face and reeled away.
The nictitating membranes over Rogue's eyeballs protected him and he easily disarmed the sergeant, clubbing the flailing Nort unconscious with the rifle. "Mine, I think." The GI flipped over the weapon and his blood ran cold; the reason for Gunnar's failure to obey his order became clear. The chip slot on the rifle was empty.
He felt tightness in his throat. The air in the armoury seemed to be getting thinner. Ignoring the sensation, he scrambled to the rostrum where his helmet and backpack were secured. Both Helm and Bagman's dog-chips were missing from their slots as well.
"What the hell?" Rogue wheezed. He was finding it hard to breathe and his vision was fogging. The air! He strained to listen and heard a faint hiss of escaping atmosphere. Volks had found him, but instead of sending in more men, the kapten had sealed off the armoury and evacuated the air. Rogue fumbled at his backpack. "Need... oxy-bottle..." he said aloud, but without a biochip in the pack's slot, the manipulator arm remained inert.
The GI opened the pack, but his sight was now turning grey, tunnelling. Reasoning became difficult, each thought as slow and heavy as a glacier. Every movement of his lungs seemed like a colossal effort; Rogue's kind could breathe anything in the mess of poisons that made up Nu Earth's atmosphere, but he still needed some amount of air to survive. He fumbled through lazooka shells, aerosol canisters, chem-tone tubes, his desperation increasing. "Can't... Bagman, help..."
Rogue collapsed, dragging the backpack off the stand as he fell. The contents spilled out across the armoury floor in a confused scatter, the emergency oxygen cylinder rolling to a halt close to his outstretched hand, too late to save him from oblivion.
Kolonel-Doktor Schrader entered the command centre and the duty officers parted before her automatically, like flights of birds startled from trees. She didn't spare any of them a glance; until they had some purpose to fulfil, they were beneath her notice. In the middle of the circular room, Kapten Volks stood on the observation dais, elevated above the duty stations so that he could keep a watch on all of them. He came to attention as she approached.
"Madam Director, I apologise for disturbing you at this early hour."
She silenced him with a glare; Schrader had been awake since well before the dawn, unable to sleep, eager with the possibilities that her new acquisition represented. "I have been reviewing the GI's bio-sample results. Most interesting."
"Indeed." Volks had taken the opportunity to let Schrader's tek-droids perform a number of other "examinations" while Rogue was unconscious, before placing the clone in a secure holding cell guarded by a las-web. "Has he recovered?"
Schrader nodded. "How many Nort soldiers do you think he has killed since they decanted him, Johann? Hundreds? Thousands? He's a fascinating specimen."
Volks looked away. "Was it necessary to let him run loose through the facility? He could have done anything..."
"Don't second guess me, Kapten," she replied. "I understand the mindset of these gene-troopers better than you ever will." Schrader nodded to herself. "I must break him, do you see? He must come to understand that I alone control his fate. When he does, Rogue will give me his loyalty willingly." She paused. "He's down there in his cell, unable to think of anything else but what has happened to his biochip comrades."
Volks glanced up at a monitor screen displaying the interior of Rogue's cell. The GI was carefully performing a series of unarmed combat exercises, swift katas blending the most lethal elements of a dozen martial arts. He seemed none the worse for wear after his asphyxiation a day earlier.
"The Southers programmed that into him," Schrader continued. "Loyalty to his fellows, obedience to authority, the need to protect the innocent..."
In spite of himself, Volks gave a low snort of derision. "He doesn't seem that obedient to me. He's a deserter, after all."
"Only
because his morals have given him a higher dictate to adhere to. I'm going to use that to my advantage." She turned away from the monitor, the ardour for her pet project cooling. "I hope you did not summon me here to hear more of your trivial worries, Johann."
Volks let the insult pass and indicated the main screen. A sector map of the Quartz Zone was displayed there, focussed on Domain Delta's position. A quartet of dart-shaped targets was approaching the base. "Long-range sensors detected a formation of Vulture-class atmocraft on an convergent vector. IFF signals match those of hoppers from General Rössa's command." He faced her. "The lead ship has been transmitting a hailing code on the general's private frequency and they've broadcast repeated requests to speak to you."
"You have not replied?"
"No, as per your standing orders."
Schrader considered this for a moment then snapped out a command to one of the other officers. "Have the Rogue Trooper brought up here, quickly."
Volks was startled. "Kolonel, are you mad? You would allow the blue-skin to simply walk into the heart of our operations?"
"I see an opportunity to use this to my advantage." She gave the kapten a loaded stare. "I do not need to explain myself to you, Johann. For your own good, I advise you to never question my sanity again." Schrader turned and summoned another officer. "You. What is the position of the flyers?"
"Uh, passing over the outer perimeter of the test range now, Madam Director,"
"Excellent. Activate area effect countermeasures and ready the dome's defence batteries."
Volks saw what Schrader was planning and lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. "Kolonel, this will only escalate matters! Perhaps, if we allow them to believe that the general was killed by an enemy attack, or-"
"You're second-guessing me again," she said, her voice deceptively light. "If you make a habit of it, you will displease me."
Blood Relative Page 13
