"Yes we can," said Gunnar, as Rogue walked away.
Freimann sagged against the corridor wall and looked frantically around. He could hear the claws scraping ever closer.
"I take it back," said Helm. "He's the bad chip."
In the black silence over Nu Earth, machines moved with clockwork purpose and patience, shifting themselves from static sleep modes to active battle-ready postures. The various orbital strata above the war-torn planet were clogged with the debris of battle, from the wrecks of murdered starships cut down by photon cannons to the shaggy clouds of fragments left by targeted meteorite bombs.
The life expectancy of an orbital combat drone was three days. Attrition on Nu Earth's space front had pushed both the Norts and the Southers into creating a breed of weapon that was cheap, dirty and disposable; "orbit drone" was a catch-all term for a thousand varieties of unit, each a combination of motive thrusters, a weapons package and a dog-smart artificial intelligence. Some of them carried pulse-fed X-ray lasers, created in the flare of a hydrogen bomb detonation that immolated the firing platform; the ones in very low orbits mounted cluster pods filled with "hard rain" sabots or sleet mines. Drones armed with nuclear warheads were the most prolific, using multi-role ballistic missiles that could be tasked to shoot at space vessels, aircraft or ground targets.
From a Nordland communications satellite on a high elliptical course around Nu Earth, a set of battle orders filtered out to a dozen nuke-armed orbiters and each obediently cleared the lethal payload it carried for launch. Across the night sky, the blunt prows of several multi-megaton weapons turned and dipped to face the same spot on the surface of the blighted world.
Rogue expected resistance - a laser-mesh grid maybe, an electrified panel - but there was nothing to stop him as the hatch slid open. He dropped into the shaft. There were no handholds, so the GI spread out spider-style and eased down the channel. None of the dog-chips spoke as he descended; all of them were concentrating on the inputs from their optics, scanning for alarm beams or concealed traps.
He dropped the last few feet and fell into a low crouch. They were in one of the holding cells that faced the sub-level corridor. Rogue tasted mingled animal scents on the air, but no trace of anything alive. The freaks were gone, freed to run out their rampage.
The GI used a limpet charge to blow out the cell window. He moved swiftly, inexorably. Ahead of him lay the biochip chamber and Schrader's private funhouse.
"Anything?" he said quietly.
"Negative," replied Helm. "No organics, nothing on audio. Infrared shows some fading heat traces. She came this way."
"Too damn quiet," Gunnar spoke for all of them.
"I don't like it," added Bagman. "What's she waiting for?"
Rogue frowned. "She wants to look me in the eye." He halted at the hatch to the biochip store; there was no visible locking mechanism and the door was seamless. He surveyed the edges of the frame, looking for weak spots. It would be impossible to blow the hatch open without risking the destruction of the delicate circuits inside.
"Rogue," Schrader's voice issued from a hidden speaker in the ceiling, "let's not waste time with any foolishness, shall we? I have the only key to that chamber." A second door further along the corridor yawned open. "You're welcome to come and take it."
"It's a trap," Gunnar said flatly.
"Sure it is," nodded Rogue. The GI coiled his muscles and threw himself through the hatch as fast as his enhanced reflexes could propel him. He got the briefest impression of a wide laboratory ranged around him before the air went red with laser fire. Rogue ducked and rolled as hot light stabbed at his armoured skin.
"Three o'clock!" spat Helm, and the GI turned his weapon and fired. The rifle spat and shredded a sentry gun protruding from the roof.
Bagman called out "Six o'clock!" and Rogue turned behind a low table, popping up to shoot off a second burst into another automatic turret.
His skin had been seared but not penetrated. The GI swept the room with his rifle and found Schrader watching him from behind a plastisteel shield. The scientist threw him a wan salute with one hand. She was seated at a console, a complex snarl of medical equipment growing out of it to envelop her other arm. Under the harsh lights of the lab, her skin was the colour of snow.
Rogue centred her head between the crosshairs and fired; las-rounds flicked harmlessly off the plex panels. "Bagman," he ordered. "Dispense seal-burster."
Schrader smirked. "Your box of tricks won't help you here, Rogue. I'm afraid the time has come for you to accept the truth. You are obsolete, GI. You and your kind are the old guard."
"Think so?" said Rogue. "I handled your G-Soldats easy enough. If they're the best of your new breed, what you've brewed up down here is nothing special." He gestured at the tanks of fluid, the incubator modules.
She shook her head. "A clone can never really be superior to a natural human, Rogue. You lack the spark... Perhaps you might call it the soul... In the end, you're nothing more than a talking doll, strutting and playing at being alive. True superiority requires the human factor." Schrader's face twitched as the medical machine hissed; it was doing something to her, burrowing things under her skin. "Only by merging both can my vision be complete, you see?"
"Sorry, but I'm not looking for a date," Rogue replied. "Open the chip chamber, Schrader, and I'll think about letting you live."
"And then what?" she asked, an edge of pain in her voice. What little colour remaining in her seemed to be fading away. "Do you have a hundred slots where you could put them, Rogue? Would you gather up all the dead men and carry them back to Milli-Com to be regened, or drag them around Nu Earth while you follow your quest for revenge, just like those in your war gear?"
Anger flared in the GI. "You violated the dead, you ripped apart the bodies of good soldiers for your twisted ideals. You have no right to hoard their-"
"Their what?" she snapped, her voice thickening. "Their souls? Is that what you think the biochips are, the spirits of your comrades turned into ones and zeroes? Pathetic!" Schrader got to her feet and tore her arm from the machine. Jets of yellow liquid hissed into the air and pieces of hardware clattered to the floor. Her arm was no longer a slender, milk-pale thing; it bristled with new muscle and the heat of changing flesh. The skin was ice-blue, the indigo hue spreading across the bare parts of Schrader's neck and face even as Rogue watched her.
"What the hell?" he breathed.
Schrader walked awkwardly as bone and skin shifted inside her. She gripped the vial of blue fluid she'd shown to Volks and Rogue and slammed it into an injector. "The human form, while superior, can be improved by the adoption of traits from gene-engineered beings. I have been enhancing myself for quite some time now, grafting GI and Soldat DNA to my own." She weighed the injector in her hand. "I must admit, I have been afraid to take the last step in this process. How foolish." Schrader pressed the device to her neck and pulled the trigger. The contents of the vial vented into her bloodstream and she screamed.
Rogue watched in nauseated fascination as the woman's body writhed and shifted underneath her clothing, the flesh darkening, taking on a pale, sky-blue brilliance. When she looked back at him, her eyes had become blank yellow slits. "Oh, the taste of it!" Schrader gurgled. "Yes, this is how it should be..."
She slapped at a control on the console and the shields retracted. A smile crossed her lips. "Let's play."
The command centre filled with smoke and flame as the hatch finally gave in. Schrader's mutants looted the armoury and found a portable Hellstreak, turning the sun-hot plasma on the barricade. Overspill lapped at the officers who had been too slow to get out of the way, melting the flesh from their bones. A backdraught of sickly sweet roasted meat smell washed over Volks and he suppressed a gag reflex, reaching for his pistol.
Gunfire erupted as the Norts turned their weapons on the inhuman mutants that swarmed through the molten gouge in the barrier. Many died, falling into pools of cooling slag thrown off by the plasma blast
, but then more came up and over the bodies of the dead, throwing themselves at the officers in feral fury.
Volks took a breath of searing air and got to his feet. He had nowhere to run to, nothing between him and the mutants but a single clip of ammunition. Blue-skinned death came thundering forward, a chattering, snapping, shrieking flood of murder.
Johann accepted his retribution like a good soldier; while behind him, the countdown display sank ever further.
Schrader exploded towards Rogue in a blur of movement, flashing across the lab in a series of loping jumps, springing from console to table to console. He lit the air with rifle shots, some of them ripping at the trailing edges of her lab coat and setting it aflame, others burning her mutating flesh.
Then she was on him, a banshee howl on her lips, her jaw distending and opening to reveal the buds of new teeth. She raked a clawed talon over his chest and in return he smacked her hard with his rifle butt. Schrader threw punches and he dodged. Her blows were far more powerful than he'd expected, but they were imprecise. The woman had strength to match the best of her NexGen and Rogue had no doubt that his own genetic code was probably part of the nanotech cocktail she had injected into herself, but Schrader was untrained and everything she did was about applying brute force. Still, her small, compact body mass meant she was faster than him and if she could prolong the engagement she might actually be able to win.
They traded strikes and Rogue felt his bones ring with each impact. His mind raced, tactically analysing the fight even as it unfolded. Schrader was mutating right before his eyes, with every passing second she was becoming his equal, getting the measure of her new abilities. He had to get off the defensive and shift the balance of the fight before the woman could use her advantages against him.
Locked together, he couldn't bring Gunnar to bear, but the rifle could still help. He jerked the trigger and sent a yellow-orange flash of las-fire into the ceiling, blowing out a strip of lighting strips. Schrader squealed, the glare from the muzzle dazzling her. She struck out in vicious, blind retaliation and caught the GI across the face with a backhand. Rogue felt his jaw go numb for a moment and the impact threw his helmet from his head. Helm clattered away across the room with a synthetic yelp.
Schrader reeled back, clawing at her face.
"Hurts, doesn't it?" Rogue growled. "GI eyes are extremely sensitive to light and dark and I'm betting your mutant hybrid peepers are just the same!"
"Damn you!" she shouted, sprinting out of his line of fire.
"That's it!" Bagman snapped. "Blind the harpy!"
Rogue nodded. "We gotta work together to nail her." He turned the rifle up toward the ceiling and unloaded the weapon into the lighting strips. The plastic bio-lumes shattered and broke, plunging the lab into darkness.
Schrader's mind and body were caught in a riot of sensations, pleasure and pain washing back and forth as her skin crawled and her bones reformed and changed. She spat like a ferocious wild cat as the lights sparked out; the delicate optical jelly of her eyes burned as the viral clades infested them, rebuilding her retinas to accept new wavelengths of light. She could still hear well enough, though. Schrader caught the whisper of a synth and padded toward it, keeping low. She knew the layout of her inner sanctum by heart and she would use that to trap Rogue and kill him. The thought of murdering the last GI with her bare hands lit a hot flare of excitement within.
"Over here!" she heard Bagman say. "This way, Rogue!"
I have you, she thought, grinning to herself. She could smell the Trooper's scent, the metallic sweat on his heaving muscles.
"Here!" Helm's voice came from the dark, in the other direction, and Schrader froze.
"I see her!" Gunnar snapped, and Schrader caught Rogue's scent again.
Behind me! She twisted and ducked as a combat blade sliced through the air where her chest had been. The GI had dropped his biochipped gear and come for her with a knife. She had to admire the cunning of it, using his own hardware to distract her attention from his approach. Pain erupted inside her, but she forced it away.
Gunnar saw the dull heat-shape of the Nort and locked on to it. "Got her! Firing!" Lasers blasted through the darkness and shots shattered flasks and retorts. Chemicals flash-boiled by the bolts burst into orange flame.
Rogue recoiled as a sheet of fire erupted. "Gunnar, you trigger-happy-"
Schrader hauled a beaker from the inferno and threw it at Rogue, sending a tongue of flame at him. The GI howled and stumbled.
Rogue beat the fire out and sprinted after Schrader, her shadow thrown into sharp relief by the dancing flames. She vanished through a second hatch and into the biochip chamber. The GI reached the door just as it began to seal shut and forced himself through the gap. The hatch slammed closed and trapped the two of them inside, alone with the silicon ghosts of the dead.
Schrader was in a heap on the floor, panting like an exhausted animal. She had missed the killing blow he had intended with his knife, but she had received a serious wound from the attack. Blood, dark and oily, discoloured the pristine white of her lab coat. Her uniform clung to her in rags where new growths of muscle had burst out of her.
"You're all alone..." she hissed, hauling herself up. "Just you and your pretty blade."
"Enough to end you," said the GI and he nodded at the biochips in the support unit. "And I'm not alone, not here."
Schrader spat out a harsh laugh. "You have no idea how wrong you are." She bared her arm to reveal a wrist communicator unit and raised it to her lips. "Activate electromag pulse."
From all around the room, a series of radiation emitters emerged from hidden panels, crackling with life. Rogue held out a hand, suddenly aware of what the scientist was about to do. "Schrader. NO!"
With a flash of actinic light, a massive surge of electromagnetic energy engulfed the biochip chamber. Naked and unprotected, the delicate protein circuits in the support frame boiled and disintegrated, sending screams of electronic agony into the air. The pulse struck Rogue like an axe blow and he collapsed to his knees, the biochip in the base of his skull burning like a supernova.
Schrader watched, her thin, purple lips pulling back into a cold smile.
SEVENTEEN
IMPACT
"Come on, come on!" Ferris said to the air. "What am I running here, a pleasure cruise?"
The pilot's hands danced across the controls of the Nort transport shuttle and he was rewarded with green lights on all systems. Just like every incident of Ferris's perverse luck, after they'd ditched the short-range hopper Purcell had found a fully fuelled and flight-ready strato-bird on its launch cradle. He suspected that some senior officer on the base had ordered the auto-teks to prep the thing for launch when everything started going wrong, but the poor bastard had never made it through the legions of freaks turning Delta into an abattoir.
The shuttle's cargo bay had a staff car and some skimmers on board, and Ferris wasted no time in releasing them through the drop ramp to make some space. Even as he ran the power-up sequence he could see figures approaching from the prison levels. He'd almost turned the automatic guns on them before Zeke had called out "Friendlies!"
Ferris's hand dropped to the throttle and he toggled the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, Freedom Spaceways flight one-oh-one is ready for blast-off!"
"Wait," Purcell's voice crackled, ignoring his flippant comment. "We're still packin' them in."
He glanced at the ship's sensor grid and saw blurry readings emanating from the upper atmosphere that looked suspiciously like missile re-entry tracks. "I hate to be pushy, but how much longer? I see incoming warheads, closing fast."
He heard Zeke yell over the noise of the idling engines. "We go when we're full and not before!"
The floor of the chamber came up to meet him and Rogue sprawled there, his combat knife lost to his nerveless fingers. His head was full of barbed wire, burning razors slashing at the inside of his skull. The GI tried to reach a hand toward the wall of salvaged biochips above hi
m, as if his long-dead brethren might help him. The keening throb of the electromag pulse underscored everything, wailing like a siren made of blades.
The slivers of silicon and protein matrix in the life support web were coming apart, catching fire and sparking. From the speakers of every synth came a death scream, a chorus of absolute agony as the minds of the dead men were overloaded with radiation. What little of their personalities remained intact from the massacre, the tiny broken fragments of self that still inhabited the darkest corners of the dog-chips, were boiled in a sea of radiation. Naked against the punishing onslaught, Rogue's comrades died by horrific, tortured degrees, their consciousness bleeding out.
"Killing... them..." He forced the words out of his mouth. "Stop..."
Schrader cocked her head to watch Rogue writhing on the floor, the thin streams of drool seeping from his mouth, the sapphire blood tricking from his nostrils. "How does it feel to die like this, trooper?" For a moment, she was her old self again, the analytical and calculating scientist. "I took care to ensure that the electromagnetic pulse frequency was exactly tuned to affect biochip circuitry. But you won't perish anywhere near as quickly as your old friends here," Schrader indicated the ruined chips. "Your engram matrix is buried deep inside the cortex, still wired into your primitive grey matter. Your death will be much more painful." She brushed a lock of blonde hair from her eyes and it fell out in a clump, showing a patch of blue-white scalp below; the woman was still mutating and changing. With every moment that passed she was less human and more hybrid. "I've seen your kind a thousand times," she whispered, "on Ararat, Ixion, Horst, Tango Urilla... And all of you eventually learn the same lesson; you are all fodder for the cannon."
Rogue's muscles convulsed as conflicting signals from his brain sent shocks through his torso, his limbs. At so close a range and so large a dosage, the energy pulse induced an epileptic state in the GI. The Southers called such weapons "Haywire" bombs.
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