Gunnar shook the thoughts from his mind and approached the downed atmocraft. Two sets of footsteps echoed through the warped hull and the rifleman dropped into a crouch. Gunnar's GI weapon was an extension of his own senses, a magnifying lens on his uncanny abilities. Before, in his old blue skin, Gunnar had known he was more than equal to any soldier on Nu Earth's blighted battle zones; now, in this impressive G-Soldat regeneration, he was the ultimate. The tingle returned as he sighted down the rifle scope. Through holes in the fuselage he saw a dark shape moving through the wreckage, picking at broken hardware, pausing and moving on. For a brief second, the watery daylight caught a flicker of mottled blue flesh.
Rogue. He was in Gunnar's sights, the black cross of the target scope tracing down the line of his neck, crossing his biceps. The sniper knew exactly where to aim, marking the spot where the nerve plexus of the GI's decentralised heart lay. The dull heat was consuming Gunnar now, as his finger curled around the pistol grip. It would only take one shot; just one.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
Ferris reached the cockpit and retched, holding down bile. What was left of the Nort co-pilot had spread itself across the control panel in a mess of flesh, bone and blood. The atmocraft's pilot was also dead, his comparatively intact corpse hunched over a side console. Gingerly, Ferris pulled the body away. Several of the panels were lit, indicating that some of the systems still had power.
He couldn't read Nort, but Ferris recognised some of the symbols. The pilot must have been trying to activate the Vulture's automatic defences in the final seconds before the missile hit them. The atmocraft had a two-tier countermeasures system that used self-targeting anti-missile lasers and a broadband jammer that blanketed the air around the ship with a microwave signal disrupter.
Ferris grinned and completed the dead man's actions, bringing the system online; it would be a nasty surprise for any hoppers trying to strafe the wreck when the las-gun turret shot back at them.
In Domain Delta's command centre, one of the desk officers screamed and ripped his monitor phones from his head as a bloom of red colour suddenly appeared in the middle of the test range map. The disc blinked on, instantly covering the cluster of dots representing the first group of G-Soldats and the suspected positions of the prisoners.
Schrader slammed her hands down on her panel. "What is this?" she demanded.
"Microwave disruption field," Volks read the answer from a sensor relay screen. "Something is generating a jamming broadcast in there. Hoppers two and three are still outside the range of the effect."
The scientist stabbed at her communications array and spat. The new signal was filling the airwaves with an incoherent garble on all frequencies - including the subliminal microwave band. "Silence it!" she demanded. "Do it now!"
"Must be the wreck of that IAA ship," Volks was saying. "They still have power."
"Rogue." She said the name like a curse. Schrader let out an angry, bitter laugh. "He's lucky, I'll give him that. We shall see how far it gets him."
The Vulture's jammer worked by cycling random pulses through the microwave radio bands that Souther missiles operated on, hoping to confuse and baffle them into self-destruction. As a side-effect, any microwave communication sources at close range found themselves caught in a shower of disordered static. For Gunnar, within a few feet of the transmission antenna on the atmocraft's hull, it was like a steel spike being buried in the back of his head.
The bio-neural implant was flooded with searing, razor-edged white noise and every muscle in the NexGen body went rigid. Gunnar twitched and jerked the trigger of his rifle; the las-round went high and splattered into the hull of the ship.
Rogue spun away by reflex, bringing his assault weapon to bear. He caught a glimpse of a green-skinned figure convulsing in pain, shooting wildly.
Gunnar's roar of distress went up and down as the agony from the implant rose and fell in time to the random bursts of energy from the jammer. Instinctively he knew that the ship was the source of his anguish and pain and he raked the hull with laser fire. "Rogue... Aaah! You son of a tube!"
The sniper glimpsed movement in the wreck's cockpit and turned his weapon on it, going to full auto-fire. His vision went red with rage as he tore ragged chunks of plastic out of the canopy.
Inside the cockpit, Ferris recoiled as laser bolts punched through the spider-webbed plex and bored holes through the dead Nort still strapped in the pilot's chair. Wild rounds hit the console and the jammer fell silent. He tried to get out of the way, but in the cramped bridge of the atmocraft there was nowhere to hide. A deflected shot tore through the corpse's throat and spent the last of its energy in Ferris's right leg, melting flesh and bone just above his kneecap. The pilot went down with a scream.
Rogue heard the cry and ignored it; Gunnar was his main problem. The sniper ducked out of sight, shaking off his pain. The GI closed his eyes, concentrating; he realised that he had become too reliant on Helm's sensors and Bagman's detector grids. The scanners in his GI-issue helmet and backpack would have detected Gunnar's approach long before he had the chance to shoot.
There was the click-snap of metal against plastic. Rogue knew the sound too well - Gunnar was reloading the GI rifle, slamming a fresh clip of las-rounds into the magazine.
Gunnar would not miss a second time. Rogue vaulted forward through a rent in the atmocraft's hull, flipping over into a tuck and roll that brought him up at the foot of the valley wall. In the same instant, Gunnar rose from his cover with the rifle in his hand and opened fire.
Rogue did the same; the Nort assault weapon was no comparison to the smooth, perfectly machined GI rifle, pulling up and to the left as it discharged. Rogue instinctively compensated and ran the shots up the hill and across Gunnar's chest in a line of burning darts. Capacitor cartridges spat from the ejector port in a stream of hot plastic as the gun emptied its one and only clip. A brief, brilliant web of laser light filled the air between them.
Gunnar's snap-shots were grouped closely, one cutting the air with a crack near Rogue's right ear, the other two gouging trenches in the meat of his shoulder. He had always been the better killer of the pair of them and perhaps at any other moment the victory would have belonged to him, but Gunnar's new flesh was still untested and that tiny factor of unfamiliarity tipped the balance.
Rogue's weapon clicked empty and Gunnar collapsed in a twitching, palsied heap. The GI swarmed up the side of the shallow valley to his comrade's vantage point. Thick, sticky blood gummed his hands where he touched pools of the emerald fluid. He recovered the rifle where it lay undamaged on the ground.
"Ruh... Rogue." Gunnar spat out the words between gasps of air through a wheezing chest wound. Oily sweat wreathed the G-Soldat features. "Gotta... kill..." he croaked. "Must die... Schrader made me... kill. Kill you!"
The GI cradled his dying friend for the second time in his life, watching the spirit in Gunnar's eyes flickering out. "Easy. I got you," he said. "I'm sorry," he added. Rogue had shot back on reflex, the muscle-memory of a thousand skirmishes taking over. It was only now as Gunnar bled to death in his arms that he realised he had made a lie of his vow to Schrader not to fight his friends.
"Rogue..." Gunnar's voice was thick with torment. "Help me. The pain! Skev, what did she do to us?" The GI felt the back of his skull. Around the implant, the green flesh was feverish and inflamed. "My guh-gun... Not again! Aaah!"
A groan of poisoned air escaped the NexGen and Gunnar's body went limp. Automatically, Rogue began to count back backwards from sixty. He rolled the body over and ran a hand over the spot where he would need to make the incision. The GI drew the rifle on to his lap, the weapon's open chip slot ready and waiting.
Rogue glanced around. When the Norts had disarmed him, they had removed the slender commando-pattern combat knife in his boot and he had no idea if the atmocraft's medi-kit would have a laser scalpel in it. He would have to improvise. The soldier's gaze fell on a piece of airfoil that had been sheared off
in the Vulture's crash landing, torn by chance into a rippled blade edge. It would have to do. Gathering the scrap of metal in his hand, Rogue set to work.
Bagman felt his gut lurch as he dropped from the open hatch of the hopper. Genetic Infantrymen never succumbed to motion sickness but for long moments his vision swam and the ground felt fluid beneath his boots. The pair of Nort G-Soldats that accompanied him said nothing, watching expectantly. The wave of nausea faded and Bagman reached up to massage his neck; the motion had become a reflex now, as if running his fingers over the implant would somehow regain him his equilibrium. The soldier felt sluggish, the weight of his GI pack pulling him off-balance. For the first time since he had opened his new eyes on the operating table, Bagman felt like he was out of place in the green flesh of the Soldat form. His thoughts were fuzzy, the edges blurring into one another.
"Team two, move out," Schrader's terse voice spoke over the communicator loop over his ear. "Proceed on foot and locate the GI. All resistance is to be met with lethal response."
When Bagman didn't reply straight away, the scientist spoke again. "You have your orders! Execute them!"
"Yes..." Bagman managed and walked on, away from the grounded hopper. With every footstep, the confusion in his mind increased. He had his orders, yes, and those were to be obeyed... But the pain from his neck was lighting up splinters of memory in his psyche, moments from his trek across Nu Earth and the instant when Bagman's life had ended at Strongpoint Siouxie. Gunfire and shouts drifted over the landscape; the Southers had engaged the other Soldats. In Bagman's mind, the sounds merged with those of the past.
"Not right..." he mumbled. "I shouldn't be here..."
The two Nort GIs with him exchanged glances; his behaviour confused them.
"This is wrong."
Ferris helped himself to the contents of a speed-heal pack in the atmocraft's surgical kit and limped from the downed ship, his looted pistol held tight in one hand. He spotted the GI and hobbled toward him. "Rogue! I heard shooting..." His words trailed off as he recognised the shape of the rifle in the trooper's hands, and the verdant bloodstains on his forearms. "Holy skev, what happened to you?"
Rogue held the rifle as if it had never been taken from him. "Gunnar's with us now."
"But he... They, they threw in with Schrader!"
"I had a wake-up call," grated the synthetic voice from the weapon. "I felt it, right there in my skull, like a buzzsaw through the brain. Something from the atmocraft, like razors..."
Ferris glanced back at the ship. "Whoa, that was me!" He nodded to himself, understanding. "The countermeasures system on the Vulture, I turned it on."
"I don't follow," said Rogue.
"Microwave disrupters, man," the pilot pointed at the antenna. "Norts use them to spoof missile seekers, but maybe they work on GIs too."
Rogue shook his head. "I never felt a thing. Those signals don't affect organic matter, even stuff grown in a tube."
Ferris considered this for a moment. "You don't have one of them implants, though, right? Your buddies do."
"Razors," Gunnar repeated. "Just for a second, it all went red. I could hear Schrader there, in my head, tellin' me to ice you, but Rogue was there too, pulling me back." The synth made a disgusted noise. "That psycho witch. What kinda games is she playing?"
"Conditioning," said Rogue. "I knew it. Those meat bodies she gave you were straight out the vat, Schrader didn't have the time to programme them to be loyal. She's gotta be reinforcing the indoctrination through the implants."
Ferris nodded. "The gear took a hit from trigger-happy here, but I reckon I could get it back online. Give your pals a headache, maybe?"
"Watch the lip, pinky," Gunnar snapped.
"Do it," Rogue demanded.
The pilot gave the rifle a long stare. "So... he's back on our side now, right?" The dull pain of the shot Gunnar had put in him was pushing through the numbness of the no-shock syrette he'd injected into his wound.
"More or less," rumbled the dog-chip.
The gamma grenades detonated with a hollow thump of noise, blasting another crater in the pockmarked wilderness of the range. Zeke watched it happen from his hiding place, afraid to look away from the hasty tripwire he'd set up in case his worried glances were the only things that were keeping it in place.
As he expected, the sharp eyes of the G-Soldats caught sight of the wire instantly. Zeke had seen them drop from the hopper with the sniper and break off, sweeping down towards the Southers like a pair of hunting dogs. Without a single spoken word of command, the two clones disconnected the wire and rendered the makeshift booby trap inert; but in the process, one of them stepped on the plastic contact switch that Purcell had improvised out of her torch and triggered the actual booby trap. Four grenades tied together by a lanyard chain-fired and ripped into the Norts.
Zeke grinned. These green-skinned clones were a different breed to the GI. Where the Rogue Trooper moved with the skill and composure of a veteran soldier, the G-Soldats were still green. Oh sure, they were fast and they were sharp as a sabre-cat, but they were just book-trained. None of them had been in the thick like Zeke, Purcell or the GI. "Move, move!" the sergeant called, beckoning to Purcell and the other survivors. "The other teams will be on their way!"
"Wait a sec," said Sanchez, walking forward with his revolver drawn. "'Fore you pat yourself on the back, let's make sure. I seen these greenies get up from more than your little love tap." The ragged soldier found the bodies of the G-Soldats close together and to Zeke's surprise they were still clinging to life. Sanchez used the large calibre pistol to put a bullet through each of their optic sockets. He indicated his own forehead. "Too tough to punch through their skull plates with ballistics," he noted. "Gotta shoot 'em in the eye."
Purcell jabbed a finger at the sky. "Hopper incoming."
Zeke threw Sanchez a look. "I said move."
A spark spat out of the cockpit console and Ferris cursed. "I think that's it. Wait. No. I got it."
"This isn't gonna work," said Gunnar irritably.
Ferris glared at the biochip. "This wouldn't be necessary if you had checked your fire."
"I've had a bad day," Gunnar's synth was acid. "So sue me."
The pilot said something under his breath and forced a connection into place. "There. The secondary bus was fried, so the signal strength is way lower than it was and patchy, but the range will be greater."
"Is it going to be enough to screw with Schrader's transmitter?" said Rogue.
Ferris flipped the power switch. "Only one way to find out." He handed the GI a microphone salvaged from one of the dead crewmen. "You're on the air with Radio Norty."
"Helm, Bagman, if you can hear me," Rogue said into the mic. "I'm not the enemy. It's Schrader; she's using your bio-implants to control you!"
"Schrader." The word cut into Helm like a knife of fire, bringing with it a cascade of hurtful images, a thousand subliminal cues that were designed to make him bow to every command the scientist uttered. He could hear Rogue speaking through the earpiece he wore, but the voice seemed like it was coming from everywhere at once. Rogue was all around him, in his mind, tearing at him, forcing him to see what he had become. Helm twitched; it was like emerging from a waking dream.
He looked down at his hands, at the dark emerald skin. "No," he said to himself. "Oh, no." Only the sensation of the GI-issue helmet on his head felt right; every other element of his self was like a mosaic of jigsaw pieces hammered into the wrong picture.
The other G-Soldats in the hopper studied him with mute suspicion, hands moving toward their rifles.
The hopper pilot turned in his seat to face Helm and the other troopers in the open cabin behind him. "There's a jamming signal being broadcast from inside the test range. Something is wrong."
Helm was just a hand's length away from the Nort. "Yeah, you're right," he said, a crystal clarity descending on him. With a lighting fast motion, he slammed his head forward and used the GI helmet to bu
tt the pilot on the nose, cracking the bone and tearing open the front of his chem-mask. The Nort shrieked and clawed at his face, the hopper controls out of sight, out of mind.
It all happened at once. Unguided, the hopper dipped sharply to port and began a spinning dive. The two G-Soldats collided with Helm, grabbing at him, tearing at toughened skin, and then the cabin slipped away under them as Helm's tether snapped. He was falling through the air, caught in a knot with the G-Soldats, the twisted earth rushing up to embrace them.
"Schrader!" The name was a block in Bagman's path and he stumbled over it. Heat, crippling and constant, washed over his chest and head from the burning brand in his neck. His fingers picked at the edges of his bony skull armour, as if ripping it off could bring some relief from the fire flooding through him. He staggered like he'd been gut-punched, one hand whipping out to keep his balance, the other clutching at his backpack.
Strong fingers gripped his wrist and pulled him off-balance. Bagman blinked away the agony behind his eyes and saw his G-Soldat chaperones watching him. Without orders, they were falling back into their usual operational patterns; kill anything that exhibited behaviour outside the parameters set by the kolonel-doktor.
"You are impaired," declared the one that was holding on to him.
Bagman touched the dispenser slot on the back of his pack and tapped an item code on the touch pad there; he knew the numbers like he knew the names of every GI that had died in the Zone. Item four-six-three dropped obediently into his palm.
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