With effort, Rogue hauled himself into a seat. "Take us in," he ordered.
The man-shapes in the holding cells knew something was wrong; they could tell it from the way that Schrader stalked past them, an unwavering purpose in her eyes. She did not spare them a glance and the scientist passed the biochip chamber and entered the sub-level's main lab. From a concealed flesh-pocket of artificially cultured skin, Schrader removed a needle-like key, protein-chain encoded to her personal DNA profile. The tiny spike fitted into a socket on the lab's central control panel, activating a sequence of remote commands that once given, could not be countermanded.
In a way, it was liberating. Perhaps, after so long down here in the depths of the dome, labouring over microscopes and gene-modules, Schrader had lost sight of what she was truly trying to achieve. It was, after all, only the greatest scientific minds who had the will to take their research beyond the realms of possibility and into rockcrete reality. It was time to redress the balance; time to take the last step.
She glanced at the synthesiser pod where the viral clades were birthing and swarming, hungry for release. "Very soon," she promised them. "First I must discard everything inconsequential."
A prompt on the console offered her a single question. Commit? Yes/No?
"Yes," she told it.
In the cages, Schrader's legions of mistakes howled and moaned as the hatches that held them prisoner dropped away. Glass panels retracted into the wall and shuttered doors that had never been opened yawned. Watery light filtered down from the levels above, beckoning them.
Then it began. The ultrasonic pulses drove the mutants out and up from the sub-levels. The half-human test subjects, the Soldat rejects - the things that defied any kind of classification with their malformed bodies and grotesque faces - all of them took their new freedom with wild fervour; but there was something more they wanted, another motive that forced them forward.
They wanted revenge. They wanted it badly. They took it in bloody screaming ruin from everything they came across.
Volks had seen war; he had seen death and brutality, been close enough to taste the stench of it through his oxy-mask. He had been there the night the GIs died in the Quartz Zone, watched his men rip their lander pods from the sky with rockets. He remembered the indigo slick of blood across the glass. Volks had never admitted it to anyone else, but something inside him had broken there in the shimmering wasteland. Even as his army cut their victory from GI flesh, Volks had tasted a fear of something he had never encountered before. Retribution.
Kapten Volks had known that one day it would come. One day, he would pay for standing there, ankle deep in the dead, turning a traitor's betrayal into a massacre that would live in infamy long after Nu Earth was dust.
His fears were there for him on the monitors of the command centre. Every display from the dome's internal security cameras showed the same thing, Nort soldiers in frantic retreat, guns chattering into shifting hulks of blue-green flesh. Creatures with too many fingers on their hands ripped men into shreds; they took up dead men's guns and destroyed anything that moved. Volks could see that the butcher's bill was being paid in full.
She had brought this to bear. It was so clear, now that it was too late for him to prevent it. He had meant no more to Schrader than the microbes that swarmed in her Petri dishes. Volks, and everyone who served her will in Domain Delta, were nothing but tools and now she was disposing of them, using her errors to do the job for her. He slumped against the panel. In all his life, he had never known a sense of defeat so powerful and so sure as what he felt now. Johann Volks owed this failure to himself, his vanity and his obsession for Schrader.
All about him, men were panicking, some of them fleeing their posts, others watching with frozen horror the unfolding mayhem around the complex. Schrader had been careful to pick senior officers with certain character flaws for her staff; they were so much easier to manipulate. The command centre was a hard point, well protected in comparison with the rest of Delta, but it was not impregnable. Tier by tier, corridor by corridor, the tide of death was closing in.
From the perimeter defence station a junior officer called out a warning. "Incoming aircraft!" In the confusion, Volks almost missed the announcement.
"Show me," he ordered.
The operator brought up a camera view of a Nort hopper. The remote monitor zoomed in. Volks saw the numeral "3" on the tail and a dozen cramped figures squeezed into the open-air cabin. The flyer was weaving - no doubt to avoid the aim of the dome's automatic guns - and as it turned Volks got a glimpse of blue. "Freeze that image," he demanded. "Give me a close up."
The picture grew, resolved, and there was the Rogue Trooper, surrounded by grim-faced Souther soldiers.
"The GI!" yelped the operator. "Missile batteries one through six answer ready, Kapten! On your order?"
Volks studied the pixelated face of the clone soldier. He had survived, just as Schrader predicted. "Stand down weapons," he said curtly. "Open a comm channel."
"Sir?" the officer gave him a quizzical look. "Those are Sud soldiers-"
The Kapten's pistol was in his hand and pointed at the operator. Volks noticed it as if it belonged to someone else. "Do as I say."
Ferris tapped the threat warning light, confused. It remained inert. "That's freaky. They were goin' for a missile lock and then nothing..."
Purcell spun up the door gun. "Damn Norts are up to something."
"Reckon they got their hands full," said Zeke, peering through Ferris's binox at the dome. "Looks like all hell is breaking loose down there. I see... Well, I don't know what they are, these things. They're ripping the Norts apart."
Rogue didn't have to look to know what the veteran meant. "Schrader's pets, all the mutants she bred tampering with GI DNA."
Ferris pressed a hand to his helmet communicator and glanced over his shoulder. "Rogue, you ain't gonna believe this."
The pilot toggled a switch and Volks's voice filled the cabin. "Trooper. Can you hear me?"
"I'm listening."
"I suppose I should not be surprised that you are alive..." There was a lengthy pause. "Lisle... Kolonel-Doktor Schrader has betrayed the party and the people of Nordland, and I... I stood by and let it happen."
Rogue's jaw hardened. "What do you want, Nort? Absolution?"
"Yes," came the reply. "She's going to unleash something horrific on this planet. Everything she touches will become warped and inhuman, like..."
"Like me?"
"Like you," said Volks. "That cannot be allowed to happen." After a moment, the enemy officer spoke again. "I have released the locks on the prison complex. Your comrades are free to escape, if they can. I still have some honour, Trooper. Once, this was a war for ideals and principles. Now it is nothing but a nightmare, a circus for traitors and madmen."
"She has to die, Volks," said Rogue. "You're not going to stop me."
"I won't," said the Nort. "I'm calling for Wildfire, Trooper. You understand?"
"Holy skev..." Zeke muttered.
"You will have little time," Volks continued. "There must be no doubt... There must be an end to it."
Rogue nodded. "Tell your men to stay out of my way." The GI made a throat-cutting motion to Ferris and the pilot severed the link. "Get this crate on the ground, then find something that's fast and big. Get those prisoners out of here."
"What's 'Wildfire'?" asked Purcell.
"Nort code," Bagman answered. "An emergency order for an immediate orbital saturation bombardment."
"Where?" Sanchez demanded.
"Here," said Rogue, as Domain Delta rose up in front of them.
SIXTEEN
BLUE MURDER
Freimann turned the corner and found himself at the business end of a dozen assault rifles. It was a miracle that the geneticist wasn't instantly struck down with a bellyful of las-rounds and for a second he felt like a complete fool, brandishing the prybar he'd salvaged from the maintenance store as if it were some mythical swor
d.
The Nort troopers looked at him, surprised to find another human being still alive in the carnage of the lower tiers. Some were hooded, others wore their chem-masks rolled back, but even those who covered their faces could not hide their fear. Everyone else in this part of the dome appeared to be dead or... Well, the other people Freimann glimpsed as he ran weren't actually people at all. He tried not to think about the blood on the walls and the torn body parts.
"Doktor Freimann?" said one of the soldiers. "Those creatures, what are they?"
"Monsters..." said another man, more to himself than to the rest of them.
The geneticist had to agree. The blue-green things that he had seen tearing men and machinery apart with their clawed limbs were the creations of a mind free from any such distractions as sanity. Even as he had fled from their carnage, Freimann had not been able to avoid the screams of the creature's victims. He gulped air. "They are some kind of genetik aberrations. I don't know where they came from." He lied automatically.
"I do!" said the other trooper, face reddening. "You made them, didn't you?" He grabbed a handful of the scientist's lab coat. "You and that frigid bitch Schrader! They'll kill us all!"
"Get off me!" Freimann swung the prybar in the air and the Nort released him, obeying by drilled reflex more than actual thought. Emboldened by his action, the scientist drew himself up to his full height, pausing to straighten his glasses. "I need to get off this level and you men will escort me."
"There may be other staff on this tier that need to be located-"
"N-No!" Freimann spluttered, suddenly afraid he would be left behind. Fear gnawed at him; if these men knew for sure that he had assisted Schrader in the experiments that created the throwbacks, they would certainly leave him here to die.
The trooper brought up his rifle again. The barrel winked at the scientist as it drew level with him. The other Norts were doing the same thing and the blood drained from Freimann's face.
"Down!" said the soldier, shoving him to the floor.
Freimann hit the ground and saw what the Norts were actually aiming at; a tide of mutant flesh bore down on them, man-shapes boiling along the corridor, some of them running along the walls using clawed feet, a surge of cerulean skin, talons and teeth. He shrunk into a foetal ball and hung on to the prybar.
Gunfire clattered over his head, streaming into the wet shrieks of pain as unnatural throats cried out. Then there were noises like snapping bones, organic tearing, the flash-bang of laser shots, screams and wails and hot splashes of ripe blood.
When silence fell, Freimann dared to look up. His spectacles were dripping with fluid and his view was foggy. There were blurry shapes everywhere, heaps of dark green and blue piled on the pink rags of the Norts. He fumbled, trying and failing to clean his glasses. The men and the mutants had wiped each other out as he had cowered beneath them.
Something moved in the mass of corpses and caught the hem of his lab coat. Freimann screamed and hammered into the bloodied limb with his weapon, smashing apart a skull stained with azure liquid.
It was only when he recognised the texture of human brain matter dripping from the fork of the prybar that the scientist realised he had killed the trooper who had grabbed him. Freimann staggered to his feet. There were noises approaching the intersection, the scratching and scraping of claws on plastiform. He turned from them and ran, panicked breaths roaring through his lungs.
The last series of commands went into the communications array and with that Kapten Volks crossed the point of no return. Of the men that remained with him in the dome's control centre, none of them seemed to be paying attention to anything other than their own little slices of the disaster unfolding inside Domain Delta. A few people jumped as a gunshot rang out from one of the secondary consoles, and a body slumped, the wet rain from a nest of severed arteries falling from the suicide's fresh corpse. Volks paid no heed to the self-inflicted death; perhaps it was a better way to perish than being ripped to bits at the hands of Schrader's stillborn children.
He ran the sequence with mechanical fluidity. An officer of his rank was required to review the pattern of a Wildfire protocol on a regular basis and in his dutiful way Johann Volks had committed the routine to memory in just the same fashion that he had programmed himself to field-strip his handgun in pitch darkness. The command was a last ditch tactic to be employed by officers who knew their positions were about to be overrun by the enemy, but for a facility like Delta it had a secondary function. The Norts knew the power of biological weapons only too well; after all, they were the nation that had unleashed such horrors as black fog, bio-wire and agent magenta on the galaxy. The order, when given by the senior officer at bio-research base, would also serve to forestall any spread of contamination. In a place like Nu Earth, such an edict seemed almost laughable, but the command would bring swift and unstoppable nuclear desolation to anything caught in its sphere of influence.
"Wildfire," Volks told the computer, pressing his ident tag to the scan plate. "Expedite immediate."
The words "Confirmation?" displayed on the screen.
Normally, Volks would have required Schrader's authority to proceed. Instead, he fished a second ident tag from a belt pouch and rolled it between his fingers. The oval plastic card was discoloured with blood; Volks had removed it from the body of General Rössa just before the corpse had been burned. At the time, Johann hadn't understood why he felt compelled to do it, but now he understood that on some level, he had known that he would eventually come to this moment. Volks pressed the tag to the scanner and the computer gave a beep of acceptance.
Wildfire command sanctioned. The words marched across the screen. Estimated time to execution, twenty-seven minutes and forty-three seconds.
Volks sat and watched the numbers fall ever lower.
Rogue put a double-tap of las-rounds into the head of something that looked like an emerald-coloured cherub and followed it down to the floor from its perch on the ceiling. Thin steam from boiled fluids issued up from the corpse.
"Eh," said Helm, scanning the thing. "That is ug-leee."
The GI moved on without sparing the dead mutant a second glance. Rogue felt no compassion for the enemies that he killed - that was built into him at a genetic level - but he still could not shake the faint sick sensation that had collected at the pit of his gut. Leaving Ferris and the others to secure the landing pad, he'd raced away into the dome proper and without pause, Rogue had killed six of Schrader's "mistakes" so far. All of them were hideous creatures, parodies of his physiology and that of the G-Soldats, but on some marrow-deep level he couldn't elude the feeling that he had something in common with the poor, maddened things. Rogue's emotional palette was stunted by his creators, his responses tuned to the dark end of the spectrum; still, he carried a small beacon of pity for the mutants. He wouldn't let it stop him from killing them, though.
He saw a figure running headlong at him and raised Gunnar's sights to his eye.
The dam of Freimann's panic broke open when he saw the blue-skinned man in front of him. The scientist saw nothing but the promise of death in those blank yellow eyes and he lost all reason. Freimann ran at the blue man, the prybar held high over his head, and he screamed a banshee yell that echoed down the corridor. All the geneticist wanted was to get out of the dome, to escape and run and hide. The fact that the air out there would kill him as soon as he took a breath was far from his thoughts. Freimann was hysterical with terror.
Rogue fired a single shot and blew the prybar out of the Nort scientist's grip. The improvised weapon went spinning away to lodge in a wall and its owner tripped over his own feet in fright.
"Calm down," the GI said, hauling the geneticist to his feet, reading his ident tag, "Freimann."
"Aaaaaaa!" the Nort screamed.
Rogue shrugged and slapped Freimann to silence him. "Better," he said.
"Please don't kill me!" Freimann quaked. "I'm sorry... I'm sorry for what we did to you."
"
We?" Rogue repeated darkly. "You worked with Schrader?"
He nodded, head jerking, the words hissing out in a flood of confession. "She told me it was for the good of Nordland, but I never thought she would experiment on people or dig up the dead. Please God, don't let me die here..."
"Well, well, looks like we lucked out. I'm almost glad I didn't shoot you," said Gunnar. "We got ourselves one of Schrader's lab monkeys here."
"How about it, Freimann?" added Helm. "You clean the ice queen's test tubes for her?"
The Nort struggled in Rogue's grip, the insult bringing a little of Freimann's innate pride to the fore. "You insolent synth. I'm a grade six geneticist!"
"Oh, really?" Rogue hoisted the little man off the floor until his feet were dangling. "In that case, you'll know how I can get to Schrader's sub-level."
"Oh, oh no," Freimann shook his head, the fear blooming again. "We were... I was never allowed down there, none of us! It's her private laboratory!"
"There's gotta be a way. If she let those freaks out, I can get in!"
"Answer him," growled Helm.
The scientist blinked. "There are access shafts for the orb-drones... For when the specimens were brought to the other labs for experiments or dissection."
"How do I open them?"
Freimann held out a key card in a shaky hand. "H-here. This will unlock the hatches..."
Rogue tore the card from the chain around the scientist's neck, making him squeal. "Thanks."
"Huh?" said Helm. "I got this good chip, bad chip interrogation stuff down pat."
"Oh?" Bagman sneered. "Which one were you?"
"Synth out," Rogue snapped, releasing the Nort. "We got work to do."
"Wait!" Freimann yelped. "I told you what you wanted! You can't leave me here!"
Blood Relative Page 21
