The Quartz Massacre

by Rebecca Levene

  But Helm had clearly performed the same calculation as Rogue. "No way," he said. "It's a suicide mission, Rogue. Let me do it."

  Rogue looked at him, at the steely look on his blue face, and knew that he wasn't going to back down. "Fine," he said. "We'll draw for it. Give me your tag."

  Helm didn't like this either, but it was too fair for him to argue with. He pulled out the dog tag from his belt pouch and handed it over to Rogue. Rogue slipped out his own and dropped them both into the helmet of a nearby Nort casualty. "Pick," he said to Helm.

  Helm dipped his hand in - and when he pulled it out it was holding Rogue's tag. Reluctantly, he handed it back to Rogue. "Fine, take the cannon. But if you die trying I ain't putting you in my equipment. You can rot in the ground."

  "Got that," Rogue said as Helm marched off without a backward glance. He tossed the Nort helmet back on the ground.

  "Hey," Bagman said. "What about Helm's tag?"

  Rogue unclasped his fist to show the tag still held within it.

  "You cheated!" Bagman said indignantly.

  Rogue shrugged. "It was for his own good. Now boys, you ready for that suicide mission?"

  By the time Pietr had rejoined his unit, he'd recovered his mind enough to know that he was lucky that Lieutenant Kurn had stopped him before he had a chance to embark on his suicide mission against the Southers. The rage had gone, but it left in its place a terrible shame. His brother had died a hero while he'd been cowering behind a rock.

  His fellow Kashans were in high spirits, almost dancing around the huge shards of crystal that filled the ground around them. He could hear snatches of the Nort national anthem being shouted out, and the men nearby were slurping surreptitiously from a flask of synth-brandy. He could smell the slightly chemical tang of it on the breeze.

  "We showed 'em," Private Schulz said. "We showed those blue freaks what a real man is!" His chem suit was splattered with blood, blue and red, but he was too filled with the manic joy of battle to care.

  "Hey," Sergeant Wilnerz called out when he spotted Pietr. "How many Southers did you bag?"

  "I, err..." Pietr stumbled, and the others all laughed.

  "I took seven," Schulz said. "Better than any man here, I'll wager - except maybe Jaze."

  "Where is Jaze?" somebody else asked, and every eye turned on Pietr, the weight of their gaze like a physical burden.

  Pietr almost couldn't get the words out. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. "He's dead," he managed to stumble out eventually. "One of the Southers killed him."

  "Stak," Wilnerz said, but the others greeted Pietr's words with a cold, accusing silence.

  "And what happened to the Souther who killed him?" Schulz asked eventually. "You must have seen him, if you know how Jaze died."

  "Nothing, I don't know," Pietr said, unconsciously backing away from him and half lifting his hands in a warding-off gesture.

  "So you let him walk away from your brother's corpse alive?" Wilnerz's voice was as cold as Jaze.

  Pietr didn't reply, just continued backing away straight into Lieutenant Kurn. Kurn grunted in annoyance and pushed him away. Pietr stumbled back, and when he'd regained his footing he saw that Kurn had deposited a pile of chem suits on the ground. There was something wrong about them and it took him a moment to realise why. They were Souther. The Souther insignia, a white arrow on red, stood out on their breasts.

  "Put them on," Kurn said. "Don't ask why. It's classified. Just do it."

  Schulz pushed past Pietr, digging his elbow into his ribs as he passed. "Why are you waiting, Pietr?" he said, loudly enough for the others to hear. "Seems to me this is the uniform you ought to be wearing."

  Brass paused with his vibro-scalpel inserted into the skull of the blue corpse laid out on the metal slab in front of him. He'd already dissected the muscles, seen how thick they were, the strengthened tendons and ligaments joining them to the super-dense bone. He'd removed and cut open the organs and estimated that they must work at five to ten times the efficiency of a normal human's. The heart which pumped the strange blue blood had two extra chambers, though he couldn't quite work out why. They should know more when Bland had finished his chemical analysis of the blood itself. And the liver - in there, somewhere, lay the secret of these creatures' ability to live unprotected on the toxic surface of Nu Earth.

  But here, in the skull, he was quite sure lay the real prize. After a moment his blade encountered some resistance and he carefully pried it out using his finest forceps. A chip - biomechanical by the look of it.

  Bland drifted over from the chromatoscope to peer over Brass's shoulder. After a moment, he frowned. "It appears to be non-functioning, Mr Brass," he said.

  Bland was no doubt right. There was a blackened edge to the chip which hadn't been caused by any injury the blue trooper had sustained. "Programmed to self-destruct, I'll warrant." Absent-mindedly, the tapped the forceps against his mouth, hardly noticing the stain of blue blood they left on his lips. "But what is it intended to do, eh? And how much might the Norts be willing to pay for it?"

  "Far more if we had a working one," Bland said. "Any thoughts on how we might acquire one?"

  "As a matter of fact," said Brass, "I have. Someone had very carefully removed the chip from that other body we found. If we find him, we'll have found our prize."

  It nearly was a suicide mission. Rogue felt like he might have every single gun in the Nort army pointed at him. A little while ago a few of them had been pointed at Helm, but he'd succeeded in taking out the machine-gun emplacements and was herding the GI survivors together, ready to make a run for the shore as soon as the Hell Cannon was taken out. This would leave the Norts free to focus everything they had on Rogue.

  He definitely wouldn't have made it if it hadn't been for Gunnar and Bagman. Bagman had eyes in the back of his head - literally - sensors that detected enemy lock-ons before Rogue even had the Norts in visual range, and when he needed breathing space to plant some micromines he just set Gunnar loose on his tripod to cover his back.

  But Rogue still didn't see any way that he was going to be able to take out the troopers round the Cannon itself. They were clustered too tight, and whatever armour they had seemed to be impervious to both bullets and micro mines.

  He stumbled over an inlet of the sea, ignoring the froth of chem that rose up round his knees, and took out one of the Norts, a lucky shot as the man stuck his head out from behind the defences. One down, who knew how many more to go? Rogue fell to his knees in the water, using the shallow bank as cover. The stream itself ran up within a few feet of the Hell Cannon, but there was no way he could use it for cover. Any closer and the Norts would have a clear line of sight over the bank.

  The water felt hot against his legs, as if it was so used to burning its way through flesh and bone that it hadn't quite accepted that this was a body it couldn't touch.

  Rogue thought about the bodies it could touch. Crouching in what they thought was safety only a few feet from the stream.

  Before he could consider whether it was a good idea, he ran down the stream straight towards the Cannon. "Cover me, Gunnar!" he shouted.

  "What-" Gunnar began, but then he was too busy to talk, firing every round he had to keep Rogue safe. The only thing that saved Rogue was the Norts' surprise. It hadn't occurred to them that he'd make such a pointless, sure-to-fail move.

  "Tent, Bagman," he shouted.

  "Rogue, are you feeling okay?" Bagman asked, his voice echoing over the deafening roar of machine-gun fire.

  "Now!" Rogue bellowed, and Bagman didn't argue any more. His robot arm dipped into the kitbag and pulled out the ultra-dense material of the one-sheet tent, the only protection a GI was supposed to need in the wild.

  It was resistant to everything. Waterproof. Windproof. Chemproof. As Rogue approached the Cannon, feeling the burn of ion fire as the big gun itself swung round to annihilate him, striking mere inches from his furiously pumping legs, he dipped the sheet into the water, scooping up
as much of the toxic stuff as he could. He snapped it up and out - flinging the chem straight over the heads of the Nort gunners.

  They screamed in pain, and he saw them fall and flail, tearing into each other in their haste to get away from the burning, acidic stuff. It was enough. In the few seconds it bought him, he vaulted up to the Hell Cannon, took every last micro-mine Bagman had left and flung them inside. The explosion was strong enough to blast Rogue off his feet and ten feet through the air, but it was enough to kill every single Nort defender and to put the cannon permanently out of commission.

  "Way's clear," Rogue shouted into his helm mic, too loud probably - he was still deafened from the explosion. "Get our guys down to the shore. I'll meet you there."

  But first he was going to have to wait until the world stopped spinning around at quite such a crazy rate.

  As soon as Helm got Rogue's signal he was up and running, the other GIs at his shoulder. He might think Rogue was a tight-ass who had far too high an opinion of himself, but when it came to battle Helm trusted him completely. If Rogue said the way was clear, then it was. They'd already covered half the distance to the frothing orange shoreline and Helm could see the sleek shape of the Hoverfoils arrowing over the water towards him.

  He picked up his pace, pausing only to pick off the occasional Nort trooper who'd escaped the explosion of the Hell Cannon, and soon he was wading out into the water. He was pleased to see that every GI who'd come with him was still with him. The foils were almost there, which was just as well, because the close up the stench of the roiling toxic waters was almost overpowering.

  "Here they come," he said into his mic. "Hurry up, Rogue. Our ride home's here."

  "Almost there," Rogue's voice crackled through to him, and he could see his comrade pick himself up from beside the wreckage of the Hell Cannon and half walk, half stagger towards the shore.

  The Hoverfoils were almost on them before Helm realised something was wrong. And by then it was far too late.

  The deck cannons opened fire, the Nort flags were suddenly unfurled above the ships - as if mocking the GIs for trusting them - and the men in Souther uniform who were no Southers at all began to scream and laugh as their guns mowed through the last GIs left on Nu Earth.

  "They're Norts!" Helm screamed to the GIs behind him. "It's another trap! Get out of the water!"

  On board the foil, Pietr clasped the deck cannon and found that his hands were frozen solid. If he hadn't been able to see the Souther troops, if they hadn't come so close that he could see their faces as their expressions turned from hope to confusion, anger and despair, he might have been able to do it. But the targets were too easy. It just didn't feel right to kill them.

  The blue-skinned freaks seemed so human when you saw them close up.

  None of the other Norts seemed to have the same qualms. He saw fountains of blue blood as the guns mowed through the ranks, cutting the bodies of the soldiers to shreds of flesh, flaying them almost like knives.

  There was one GI he noticed in particular, taller than the others, who seemed to be miraculously avoiding the carnage. He'd gathered a knot of men around him and against all the odds was leading them back to the shore. One blue-skinned trooper fell, then another, but still the leader kept on walking. Pietr found that he'd clenched his hands around into fists, willing the Souther on, willing him to make it. Then the controls of the cannon were wrenched out of his hands and the voice of Private Schulz said, "You useless Souther-loving scum coward," before the cannon was swung round and a blast of fire sent off straight towards that one remaining group of blue-skinned troops.

  Helm floated in the water. For a while he'd thought the floating was death, that he was floating away to the spirit realm that he'd heard the Gene Genies talking about, although it wasn't a place that they'd said GIs would ever go.

  The pain began, the terrible pain of multiple shrapnel wounds, and he thought that he couldn't possibly be dead, and that the reason his vision was so blurred was probably because it had been damaged in that last, all-encompassing explosion.

  After a while, he tried to move. It was useless. The feeble twitching of his limbs just served to upset him in the water and he ended up swallowing a burning mouthful of chem before he stopped.

  He felt the water move as a Hoverfoil eased towards him, and he saw the face of a Nort trooper peering down at him through his Souther chem mask. He started struggling again, hopelessly, trying to force himself to turn around and get away.

  "Stop!" the Nort said. "Bring this one aboard. Surgeon-Kapten Natashov wants one of these genetic freaks alive."

  Rogue saw it all from the shore. For a moment he moved forward, his legs striding towards his fallen comrade without conscious thought, as if GI loyalty was so deeply bred into him that even his muscles felt it. He soon stopped. He was too far away. There was nothing he could do but die or be captured too.

  "They're all dead," Bagman said. His new synthetic voice wasn't built to convey much emotion, but Rogue knew his friend well enough to detect the despair in his tone. "It was another trap."

  Gunnar just sounded angry. "The Norts have been second-guessing us since before this op began."

  "But how?" Bagman asked.

  Rogue thought that was a very good question, but not one they had time for now. "Worry about that later," he said. "First of all we need to get our comrade out of there." He didn't finish the sentence because he didn't need to. Then, he thought, we'll get revenge for all the comrades who didn't make it.

  THREE

  SURGEON-KAPTEN NATASHOV

  Helm was in a world of pain. His eyes kept fuzzing in and out of focus. Not good. A GI was supposed to be damn near indestructible. For that kind of thing to be happening he must have suffered some serious damage. Terminal damage.

  Then he felt a wet slapping against his chest and a sudden easing of the pain, as disconcerting as the silence after a scream. His vision cleared, and he saw that a Nort with a red cross emblazoned on his chem suit was leaning over him. A medic. They wanted him to live, then. That couldn't be good news.

  Once the pain had passed, he became aware that his hands and feet were shackled, spread-eagled against the deck of the Hoverfoil. His back was pressed to the damp metal surface of the thing, damp where the foul-smelling chem had washed over the shallow sides of the vessel. He could feel it eating away at the material of his fatigues. If he'd been an ordinary man, it would have eaten away at his flesh too.

  Gently, keeping his face carefully neutral, he pulled against the restraints. No go. They were rock solid, far stronger than they needed to be. It looked like they'd been expecting to pick up a GI survivor and had forward planned. That wasn't good news either.

  Helm tried to reassure himself that Rogue would be looking for him. If Rogue didn't die on the beach, too, he thought. If he can find a way to track the Hoverfoil to wherever the hell it's going.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a shadow that suddenly loomed over him, blocking out the sun. It was wearing a cumbersome Souther chem suit, but Helm was damn sure it was a Nort. Helm squinted up at him, but he couldn't make out the face in the shadowed hood. Then the figure stepped to one side and a beam of sickly early morning sunlight glanced in through the side of his visor, illuminating a face that was almost comically young. Round cheeks, lips just a little too full for a man, startled-looking blue eyes, studying Helm with an expression of fear, as if he was the one who was lying on the deck in chains.

  "Trying to see what a real soldier looks like, Nort?" Helm sneered.

  The Nort soldier jumped back, his hands half lifting as if to push Helm away. Helm heard a wave of laughter from the troops around him. So, this one was the butt of the outfit. There was always one. Bagman had been theirs, except he was also a damn fine soldier. The Nort looked barely strong enough to lift a gun, and without the killing instinct to fire it. Helm filed all this away, human recon, useful if he should ever be in a position to plan an escape.

  The Nort's expressi
on tightened as the mocking laughter continued and Helm heard one voice say, "Look at Pietr, chatting with the Souther like they're best friends." "Maybe they are," another one said, to renewed laughter.

  "You aren't a real soldier. You're a... a freak!" the Nort called Pietr said. His foot lashed out towards Helm's exposed stomach.

  Chained down as he was, Helm couldn't evade the blow. It caught him against an open knife wound. He let out a grunt as the air whooshed out of him, but carefully kept all other expressions of discomfort suppressed. When he could be sure his voice would emerge sounding sufficiently nonchalant, he said, "Yeah, striking an injured prisoner, that's about the level of you scum."

  He saw Pietr flush under his visor, a red stain on his pale cheeks. But the mocking laughter had stopped and at the periphery of his vision Helm could sense the other Norts watching the little scene unfolding before them with interest.

  "You filthy pigs killed my brother," Pietr said. He sounded a little more convinced of his own words this time.

  "Yeah, well, sorry to hear that," Helm said. As he saw the startled expression settle on Pietr's face, added, "If we'd been doing our job right we would have killed you too."

  That got him another kick in the guts, harder this time. Then Pietr dropped to his knees beside him and thrust something towards his face. It took Helm a moment to realise it was a little holo-cube, projecting the wavy image of some square-jawed Nort creep into the air above it.

  "That's him," Pietr said. "Recognise him? I want you to tell me who killed him. Was it you?"

  Helm thought about pointing out that there had been several thousand men on the battlefield and the chances of him recognising one of them were slim, even if they hadn't all been wearing chem suits. Besides which, whoever had killed this boy's brutish-looking brother was probably floating face up somewhere in the scum sea himself. But the boy was beyond that sort of rational argument. His pale eyes looked wild, and Helm guessed that he wasn't really in control of what was coming out of his mouth.