The Quartz Massacre

by Rebecca Levene

  He let that thought go, let all external feelings float away, and concentrated on the present situation. He needed to break the security protocols on the Hoppa to enable him to fly the thing.

  At first, he couldn't make sense of anything. He just experienced a blaze of light and snatches of sound whizzing past in either direction, too quickly for him to understand them. It was almost too much, and he had to fight the urge to retreat from it, to close off his mind from this alien mechanical one and reassert his sense of self.

  He fought it with every soldier's instinct that had been bred into him for an entirely different sort of battle. Then he used the thing which hadn't been bred into him, the thing which set him apart from the other GIs: an ability to impose order on chaos, and to make sense of things that human minds weren't designed to grasp.

  Even before he'd been able to insert his mind into the machines he was studying, he'd learnt to solve this sort of problem by visualising it as something concrete, something his mind would find easier to manipulate.

  Now that he was nothing but mind, he found that visualisation still worked, but he ended up participating in his own imaginings. He'd quickly learned to stop seeing the insides of computers as battlefields - there was enough fighting on the outside.

  He thought strongly of a city - one laid out on a grid, a very logical city where the pattern of lights in the huge towers and the height of the skyscrapers themselves all possessed meaning.

  After a few moments, he was in the city. He took a moment to marvel at it - something from his mind that was out in the world. There were no people in it, just the buildings, straight and tall, reflecting the light backwards and forwards between them. Perfect. But he wasn't here to look, didn't have time for it. He was looking for - that. The vast opaque wall dividing the heart of the city from the rest. That was what he needed to take down. In the real world outside the machine, the wall was the security protocols, the black ice preventing unauthorised access to the Hoppa's controls. That didn't matter. He'd seen it as a wall, so it was as a wall that he'd have to deal with it.

  Sounded like a job for some high explosives. Just as well he'd imagined himself into this world too, in his old, true form. He pulled a batch of mico-mines out of his kitbag and headed towards the cliff-face of darkness.

  In the cockpit of the Hoppa, it felt like only a second had passed before Helm said, "It's done, Rogue. Access all areas."

  Rogue nodded and squinted down at the Hoppa's control console. The one to gun the engine was pretty obvious, and he flipped that first, but after that it was hard to tell which of the serried ranks of dials and levers actually made the damn thing take off. He shrugged and twisted a purple knob. There was an enormous growl, the machine heaved, jerked and the engine cut out. Well, obviously not that one.

  "Err, Rogue," Bagman's voice said. "Do you actually know how to fly one of these things?"

  "Nope," Rogue said. "Guess I'm about to get a crash course."

  "Literally," Gunnar muttered.

  "I'll fly, you fire," Helm said, as some outside force seemed to take over the controls and they assumed a healthier-sounding hum. "We got two Hoppas on our tail already and we aren't off the ground yet."

  It was only now that Pietr was away from the camp, far enough away to be sure no one was pursuing him, that he realised he had no idea where he was going.

  Under the sickly yellow stars of the Nu Earth night, he sat down on the ground and put his head in his hands. He'd taken supplies and he'd taken his weapons, but he hadn't really thought beyond that.

  He found himself fighting the urge to cry, something he hadn't done since he was eleven years old and Jaze had broken the model Hoppa that he'd spent weeks assembling and painting. Jaze had laughed at him, calling him a baby, and Pietr had sworn never to cry again. He wouldn't cry now. He swallowed back the lump in his throat and swiped an arm angrily across his eyes - before realising that he couldn't touch them because the visor of his chem suit was in the way. That was something else he hadn't thought to bring. Without a field atmos-tent, he'd be stuck in the chem suit twenty-four-seven. It was designed to recycle everything his body produced, but that would still only see him through a few more days.

  He stood up again, gazing out over the silent, humped landscape. Okay. This wasn't a problem. He just needed to find another camp, a small one somewhere back behind the battle lines where security should be lax. And how was he going to find that? For a moment he despaired. He wanted to just sink down onto the ground and stay there, sitting, until he died of hunger, or chem-poisoning, or - if he was lucky - a Souther patrol took him out. But that would just be proving everyone right about him. It would prove Jaze right about him. He just needed to think. He might never have been much of a soldier, but he'd always been a good thinker - if he hadn't signed up for the infantry to follow Jaze he could easily have found himself a job in intelligence. It was time he started using some of it.

  He realised that there was a sound on the periphery of his attention: a rushing, trickling sound, somewhere to his left. It must be the river he'd passed after he'd first left the camp. Vague memories from basic training came back to him, lectures about the importance of securing all supply routes, aerial, land and aquatic. Where there was a river, somewhere along its length there would be a base. He smiled for the first time since Jaze had died. Jaze had always said that thinking got a man dead, but maybe Jaze hadn't known everything.

  Two hours later, he was trotting away from Base Camp Delta Xeta with a new atmos-tent and a crypt-enabled radio unit.

  He flipped open the radio as he walked and tuned it to the general news channel. Almost immediately, he found a report about a lone Souther's brutal murder of Grand Admiral Hoffa. The monster had somehow broken through the defences of Nu Paree and killed the admiral in his own command centre, cruelly letting him choke to death on the chem-tainted air outside.

  Pietr felt his heart contract with a feeling that he told himself was excitement. It could only be the Rogue Trooper.

  Helm pushed the left wing so far down the Hoppa was almost flipped onto its back, and by about a centimetre the machine managed to avoid crashing straight into the tall spike of the Miterrand Tower.

  "Jeez, Helm, watch where you're going!" Bagman shouted.

  "Scan out, Bagman," Helm said tightly. "I'm concentrating."

  "Could've fooled me," Bagman countered, but he shut up after that.

  Rogue could tell Helm wasn't finding the Hoppa easy to steer. The machine moved like it had been designed to do something else entirely and some halfwit had reconfigured it to fly at the last moment.

  There was another building approaching, what might once have been a look-out tower but was now just a decaying concrete odalisque. Helm steered away from it early this time, and the building whooshed by his left flank, clearing it by a good three metres.

  Then the traitor's Hoppa was in Rogue's sights and he didn't have any more time to worry about Helm's driving. He laid down a tracery of fire, saw some of it catch the wing of the traitor's Hoppa, and prepared for another strafing run. Then the two Hoppas that Helm had been trying to shake closed in and by the time Rogue had disposed of them, the traitor's Hoppa had pulled away once again and their own was signalling damage to its aft engine.

  Helm ignored the damage and gunned the engines to full power, surging after the traitor's craft.

  "Err, Rogue, there's-" Bagman said.

  The blast hit the Hoppa from underneath. The cockpit was filled with the acrid smell of burning plastics and the machine bucked and swayed like a wild animal with a mind of its own. Its left wing brushed against the high side of an old public building, dislodging bricks and mortar with a horrible grating noise, then the right sheered clean through the ion-power lines, loosing a shower of sparks that erupted over the wings and in the cockpit itself. Rogue smelt the crest of hair on his head singe and he risked lifting a hand from the gun controls to put out the small fire that was burning there. The automated defences in th
e cockpit took care of the rest, spraying a clinging foam over the area and into Rogue's eyes, nearly blinding him.

  "A-A fire from the ground," Bagman said sheepishly.

  "Yeah, thanks for the heads up, Bagman," Rogue said sourly, turning his guns downwards, trying to pick out the tiny targets of the anti-aircraft guns below and hoping that Helm would be able to evade their fire until he did.

  The fire from below came thick and fast, flashes surrounded by clouds of black smoke that blinded him. And up ahead the sun was rising, sending fierce rays towards him through the sullen yellow atmosphere.

  "Rogue-" Helm said.

  "Later," Rogue snapped back, cutting him off.

  "Rogue," Helm said. "There's pursuit, ten Nort Hoppas coming up fast behind."

  Rogue swore. They'd made up some distance on the traitor's Hoppa ahead, but now it looked like the problem would be finishing the pursuit in one piece. "Can you get me a visual on that, Helm?"

  "Comin' up," Helm shot back.

  A second later, Rogue's forward viewscreen had a second image superimposed over it. He had a moment of disorientation, then his mind, as it had been trained to do, separated out the two images and he studied the second, a view of the looming dark shapes of the enemy craft closing in on him from behind. He swore again and sent out a stream of white-hot plasma, taking two of the Nort craft down in one searing blast.

  "Nice shot," Bagman said.

  "Yeah, but I ain't gonna be able to stop 'em all," Rogue said. "Two of 'em are trying to flank us."

  He saw them curving out from one of the two images superimposed in front of him. He didn't wait till they were square in his sights, just calculated where they were heading - trying to force him downwards into the A-A fire, he calculated - and shot there. His guess was right. The fist exploded in a ball of ionised metal, droplets splashing onto the viewscreen of Rogue's own Hoppa. He saw the red cloud of the Nort pilot's vaporised blood puff out from the wreckage. The second Nort Hoppa swerved at the last minute, but not far enough. The ion fire caught against its left wing, and it limped out of the battle towards the ground.

  Helm used the time it bought him to gun the craft forward, redlining the thrusters until they were back on the traitor's tail. They were almost close enough for Rogue to see the face of the traitor, his dark form visible in the clear plastic dome of the Hoppa's cockpit.

  Rogue suddenly realised that he was dreading seeing the traitor's face. Dreading finding out that it was someone he knew, someone he had trusted. Dreading most of all that it would be his own face staring at him, the face of another GI who had led all his brothers to their deaths.

  The Hoppa in front swerved left where Rogue had expected it to go right, straight into one of the wrecked buildings, and before Rogue could protest Helm had taken them in after it. It twisted straight towards the ground, and Rogue had a moment of panic before he saw the wide dark mouth of an underground chamber yawning to swallow them. Then they were in, flying through what must once have been Nu Paree's sewer system, and the chase took on a whole new complexion.

  It was like flying through a vast, three-dimensional maze. The traitor was a good pilot, Rogue gave him that, but Helm was better now that he had mastered the controls. In the central chamber of the sewers - a huge room, dominated by waterfalls of rank green water - the traitor had to turn and fight.

  Rogue lashed stream after stream of fire after him, but nothing seemed to quite find its mark, and the traitor was firing back, forcing Helm to dodge and weave in turn. Finally, Rogue had a clean shot lined up, and the traitor's Hoppa shot straight up, out of range, out of an exit that Rogue hadn't even noticed.

  "Damn him!" Helm swore, and took them up after him, but Rogue had lost his shot.

  The exit took him out over a vast dam, and there was more A-A fire here, and Lazooka units too, but Rogue took them out easily because this time there was no way the traitor was getting away from him. At last, there was nothing between him and the traitor but clean air.

  "We've got him now," Rogue said. While he was speaking, he brought his forward gun round to bear on the craft in front of him. It took one second to line up the shot: the left wing, underneath the engine mounting, disabling but non-lethal. He wanted to take this bastard alive.

  The shot sped off on a trail of ionised air. Just before it hit, the shock wave from the last Lazooka round he'd taken out hit the traitor's vessel. The explosion bounced the Hoppa up and left, putting the cockpit itself straight in the path of the oncoming missile.

  The traitor's craft screamed towards the ground, the figure within engulfed in fire.

  "You got him, Rogue!" Helm said.

  The traitor's Hoppa continued its precipitous descent, greying out into a vague silhouette as it fell into the chem that hugged the ground. "He's disappearing into the mist," Rogue said to the others. "Track him down, Helm. We'll land and check the wreckage."

  There was nothing living in the wreck. If Bagman had still had eyes he might have been tempted to search anyway, pawing through the molten metallic ruin for any trace of the man who'd betrayed them all. But his new internal sensors which were intended to monitor Rogue's health status, told him that there were no life signs aboard.

  Fine. They'd been revenged. Why didn't it feel better? Shouldn't he feel like it was over, like he'd done his duty as a GI and could feel proud? But of course nothing had really changed. Their friends were all still dead. And so was he. Then he saw Rogue reach into the wreckage and pull something out: a blackened strip of cloth. No, not just cloth, uniform.

  "Souther insignia," Bagman said, using his sensors to peer through the burnt surface to the cloth beneath.

  "And those are general's stars on it," Gunnar added. His voice, even mechanical and filtered, was thick with disgust. "It really was one of our own commanders who sold us out."

  "Picking up signals from a Nort base nearby. Could be where he went," Helm said.

  "Went?" Bagman said. "There's no way he survived that. He didn't go anywhere, apart from being smeared over the surface of Nu Earth."

  "No, Helm's right," Rogue said. "If he'd died in the crash there'd be something left, some organic trace. And you're not picking anything up, are you?"

  Bagman realised that he wasn't. It wasn't just that there were no life signs, there weren't the right sort of molecules around to account for the remains of a man. "No," he said reluctantly. "I guess not."

  "C'mon, guys," Rogue said. "Let's go bag ourselves a traitor general."

  He strode off through the still smouldering vegetation around the wreckage.

  "Now hang on, Rogue," Helm said. "I thought this mission was going to end when we killed Hoffa. Now we're tracking off to who knows where to find a man who might not even have survived."

  Rogue stopped walking. Bagman could tell from his elevated heart rate that he was either surprised or angry, or maybe both. "What, you're saying we should let the guy who betrayed us just walk away free?"

  "No," Helm said. Bagman knew that if he'd had teeth he would have been gritting them. "I'm saying we should go back to base, get re-gened, then go after him."

  "But by then it might be too late," Rogue said. "You've still got a clear week before any trouble starts in your chips. And you know we've got to follow while the trail's hot."

  "Rogue's right," Gunnar said. "We're GIs. The last GIs. It's up to us to get this traitor general, no one else."

  After a pause, Bagman added, "Yeah. We go after him. It's what Sandman and the others would want us to do."

  "Fine," Helm said. "I guess I'm outvoted."

  Rogue just nodded and began to march again, blue legs swinging through the yellow chem mist and the white smoke of the crash.

  A second later, Helm's voice spoke again, but this time Bagman knew it wasn't vocal: he was saying words that only Bagman and Gunnar could hear. "You know he's never going to stop, right? He'll keep on going till we're all dead, him included. We'd be doing him a favour by bringing us all in."

 
"Scan out, Helm," Gunnar said uncomfortably, "Rogue's made the decision. And since he's the only one here with a body, I reckon we're stuck with it."

  "He's got a body," Helm agreed. "But he still needs his equipment. He still needs us. And what if there was to be an... unexpected failure, something crucial he'd have to go back to headquarters to fix."

  "No way!" Bagman said, shocked. "And you say he's the one who's gonna get us killed!"

  "Oh, I'm not talking about during battle," Helm said. "I'm just saying, somewhere where we're safe, if Gunnar was to jam, or your micro-mines suddenly fused-"

  "Forget it!" Gunnar roared, a painful electronic spike through their circuits. "I ain't doing it, Helm, and that's final."

  "Me neither," Bagman said, and Helm shut up. Bagman clamped down tight on his transmissions, making sure nothing leaked through on the comms band they all shared. The last thing he wanted Helm to know was how very close he'd come to convincing him.

  Out in no-man's-land, the pursuing figure had no idea of the argument that had silently raged between the gun, the kitbag and the helmet he could see on the blue figure caught in the sites of its sniper rifle.

  All it saw was the figure itself, trudging doggedly on to who knew where. Rogue Trooper clearly had no idea he was being watched. The figure looked back through the rifle's viewfinder and readjusted the barrel the slightest bit till the crosshairs centred on Rogue's head once again. All it would take would be one tiny squeeze of the trigger, and Rogue would fall, unheeded on the blackened earth, never to kill another Souther again.

  SEVEN

  VENUS IN FIRE

  A finger tightened on a trigger, and a bullet too fast and hard for even Rogue's skin to deflect was moments away from ploughing through his skull.

  But then the finger relaxed. Better to know exactly what was going on before making any rash and irreversible moves. The figure straightened up and trotted towards the site of the crash that had so intrigued the Rogue Trooper earlier. A few seconds later, and it had found the scrap of material which had told Rogue everything he needed to know.