It told the figure everything it needed to know, too.
He'd thought the actual crash itself, the moment when the flames consumed him, would be the worst. But he'd been wrong.
This endless gnawing pain, eating away at his ability to resist it, eating away at his sanity until he thought the only way to deal with it would be by going quite mad, this was worse. Worst of all, he knew that people with the power to make the pain go away were a mere foot away from him.
The first hour after the crash was a blur. He must have crawled out of the wreckage, crawled away over the horrible grating ground, but he didn't remember doing it. His eyesight wasn't so good now, anyway. He thought one of his eyes might have started to boil before he'd managed to crawl away from the fire. He'd recognised the soldiers who'd found him by their voices. Norts.
They'd recognised him, too. That's why they'd refused him medical treatment when he'd begged for it in the dry rasp that was all that was left of his voice. One of them had even kicked him as he lay in the centre of their camp and the other had laughed. He hadn't really minded, because the pain of the kick had just registered as a pinprick against the maelstrom of shrieking sensation that was his skin.
He knew that if he wasn't treated soon he'd die. Well, it didn't matter. He'd done what he intended. He'd eliminated the genetic freaks, kept the Southside pure. Perhaps no one would ever recognise it, but he was a hero. So this, this agonising finale to his life, was a hero's death.
He breathed out, coughing and then screaming hoarsely at the pain of the cough, and waited for death to come. No, he wasn't ready. Damn it, he was only forty-three years old. He was far too young to die, far too important to die. He didn't deserve it. The world would be a better place with him still in it. "Listen to me," he choked out, as loudly as his ruined voice could manage.
"Shut up, Souther," the Nort said - a sergeant, he thought - and kicked him in the ribs again.
"I've got information," he said. "Classified. I was a... a general. I can tell you... I can tell you everything. Just... please... make sure I don't die."
For a while he thought they hadn't believed him. He wanted to say more but he just didn't have the energy. He could barely breathe, let alone speak. But then he felt something, a pressure against his arm, and then, amazingly, a surge of well-being pulsing through his bloodstream.
They'd given him painkillers. They'd believed him.
"There's one other thing," he said.
Base Commander Tellar couldn't believe his luck. To have found such a high-level prisoner - and one willing to trade information for his life - this was the kind of opportunity that could propel you right up the ranks.
"A Souther general?" General Vard said. "You're certain?"
Tellar studied his broad face with disdain. Vard was exactly the sort of man who'd prevented Tellar's promotion all these years, an old-school snob who thought anyone who couldn't trace their family tree right back to the homeworld wasn't worth talking to.
"One of my patrols brought him in a few hours ago," Tellar told him firmly. "He's badly burned, but he's offering to trade information in return for his safety."
Vard seemed to consider this for a moment, then he nodded, as if he'd made up his mind. "Send him to me. Any information he has could be vital for our plans to assault the Souther positions in Nu Atlanta."
Tellar would have liked to complain, but he knew that there was no way he'd have been able to keep charge of the prisoner himself. The most he could hope for would be to be given at least some fraction of the credit. That was why he had chosen General Vard to inform of his find. The man was a snob, but an honest one. "There's one more thing," he told him now. "He claims the enemy soldier known as the Rogue Trooper is pursuing him."
Vard frowned. "The reports say it was this Rogue Trooper who killed Grand Admiral Hoffa."
Tellar remembered suddenly that Hoffa had been a personal friend of Vard's. He had to fight to suppress a smile. It looked like he'd done even better than he realised by bringing the Souther turncoat in. He could already feel those kapten's pips glowing on the sleeve of his chem suit.
"Prepare a suitable welcome for the genetic freak," Vard said icily. "Hoffa's death must be avenged."
The base was one of the strangest Gunnar had ever seen. It took him a moment to figure out what it was: a satellite, huge, hundreds of metres high, crashed over on its side. It was almost beautiful, glittering dully in the sun, but it was a hell of a long way to climb. Knowing their luck, he was sure the traitor would have been taken all the way to the top.
"Hold up, there's some salvage here," Helm said, and Rogue obligingly attached him to the escape pod that lay in front of the vast satellite base, hooking him up to it to hack his way in.
A moment later, there was a sharp pop and the escape pod, with Helm still firmly attached to it, blasted off the ground and straight into the lowest levels of the satellite.
Rogue swore, but Bagman laughed. "Guess he really liked flying that Hoppa." Then he sensed Rogue's annoyance and added, "We'd better get in and get him back."
There was a Hoppa to take care of before they could do that. Fortunately, they'd already found enough salvage to put together a few Sammies. Gunnar had always loved firing them, back when he was just carrying the weapon they strapped onto. Now that he actually was the weapon - it was a hell of a buzz, firing off something that big and powerful.
He was almost disappointed when they were past the Hoppa and into the lowest reaches of the base. It was corridor to corridor action, even if the corridors were all inverted at ninety degrees to true, so that they were walking on the steel mesh walls with the floor to their left and the ceiling - spitting sparks from shattered lights - to their right. There weren't too many Norts left, but enough to keep Gunnar on his toes, and the way up seemed like an endless spiral through corridors that never changed. A third of the way up they picked up Helm again and that was about as exciting as it got.
Until they reached the top. In the upper reaches of the fallen satellite - exactly where Gunnar had guessed it would be - was the base proper. The rusted, ruined walls of the satellite gave way to gleaming new steel and plascrete, and suddenly there were lots of Norts around and none of them were feeling very friendly. Gunnar let out a whoop of joy, loving the feeling of his barrel heating up as he fired, a sensation that was like nothing he'd ever felt when he was in a human body.
Helm said something about taking out some computers to open some doors, but Gunnar wasn't really listening. Half his attention was on the battle.
Sometimes he felt like he was born to be this weapon, like the rest of his life had just been preparation for the moment when his biochip was slotted into the mechanism and he finally discovered the clean, brutal simplicity of the killing machine from the inside. When he thought this way, he saw his body as a chrysalis, something that he had to discard before he could become what he was really meant to be.
But that was wrong. His body was him, and he wanted it back, and that was taking up the second half of his attention. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't stop thinking about what Helm had said to him. About how they could force Rogue to take them back to base, turn them back into men again.
As the battle raged, he thought through what he'd do. Rogue was barrelling through the stark corridors of the base, homing in on his prey with that unerring instinct he had. Gunnar chambered some shotgun rounds for Rogue to take out a cluster of Norts disappearing through the door. Never gave up, Rogue. Never stopped. Never surrendered. Implacable, that was the word for it.
But if, say, the weapon he relied on suddenly jammed, no amount of implacability would get him to carry on then. He wouldn't put himself, or his friends, into danger by heading into battle without some decent hardware. Gunnar felt a momentary stab of guilt that he was thinking of using Rogue's loyalty against him, but he squashed it. Like Helm said, it was for the good of them all.
As he helped Rogue shoot an advancing Nort in the face and another in t
he gut, he considered how he'd do it. With that strange inner consciousness he'd never had as a man, he probed the workings of his own circuitry. Yes, there it was. If he made that connection, and disabled this transceiver, the loading mechanism would lock and it would look like a mechanical failure. Then he'd only have to-
His train of thought broke off as he realised that they'd broken through into the base's command centre. Except for one figure, the room was deserted. But that one figure was all Gunnar needed to see.
The traitor.
He looked at Rogue with a half smile. Gunnar wanted to wipe the smile right off that handsome face. He wanted to take the face and grind it into the plascrete floor of the room until it was nothing but raw flesh and bones. They were all dead. All dead because of this one man.
"That's him, Rogue. The traitor that sold us out," Bagman said.
Gunnar could hear all his own hatred in the other man's distorted, mechanical voice.
He saw the smooth, well-fed look of the man's face. He'd be willing to bet the traitor had never seen real action himself, just sat behind a desk and sent others to their deaths. Killing the GIs had been all in a day's work for him. "Milli-Com scum," he said. "This is for all our buddies that died in the Quartz Zone."
He felt Rogue's finger tighten on the trigger and let loose the round that was already in the chamber.
But the bullet passed straight through. The traitor remained standing, still smiling, as if nothing at all had happened.
Helm understood first. "It's a hologram!"
By the time Rogue had spun round, the Nort troops were all over the room, weapons ready. Gunnar wasn't going to let that stop him. If he was going down, he was going to take as many Nort scum as he could with him.
He felt Rogue's finger on the trigger and prepared to drop a new round into the chamber.
Nothing happened.
The mechanism had jammed. Frantically, he tried to work round it, to find the circuit that was malfunctioning and bypass it. It didn't work.
"Gunnar, I need ammo!" Rogue said. The Norts were closing in on him, and they were smiling.
"I'm trying!" Gunnar said back.
"You idiot," Bagman said, inside his mind where Rogue couldn't hear. "You weren't supposed to jam up during a battle!"
With a sudden cold certainty, Gunnar realised that Bagman was right. His earlier thoughts about jamming were exactly what had caused the problem now. He still wasn't used to having his mind inside a machine, not used to the fact that in the circuitry that held his consciousness now, a thought was no different from an action.
"I didn't mean..." Gunnar said out loud, then trailed off. He couldn't let Rogue know what they'd been talking about. What he'd been thinking about. And it was already too late. The Norts were too close. Rogue hesitated a moment, then let the gun drop to his side. His eyes circled the room, assessing exit routes, weaknesses, but as far as Gunnar could see there weren't any.
When Rogue was facing the hologram again, the damn thing smiled. "You want to see the face of the man who betrayed you, GI?" it said.
There was a shuffling sound in the ring of Norts, and two of them moved aside. In the gap they left was a Nort officer, the base commander most likely, and beside him a face that no one would ever forget. The scarring was lurid and fresh, flayed skin stretched too tightly over warped bones. The smile it wore was horrible, but still recognisably the same as the one on the hologram. Gloating and vicious.
"Here it is," the traitor said. His voice rasped harshly, as if it took a great effort to force it out through his scarred throat. "Do you like the new face you have given me?"
Gunnar wanted to say yes - to tell the bastard that even if he was still alive, thanks to them he'd never forget what he'd done, or stop paying for it, but he was already being taken out of Rogue's hands by one of the Nort soldiers, handled as carelessly as if he was just an ordinary gun, and it occurred to him that he'd be far better off if that's all the Norts thought he was. He stayed silent.
The base commander studied him closely. Gunnar wanted to put a round straight through his smug face. Thanks to his own stupidity, he couldn't. "Excellent," the commander said. "His GI weapon will make a fine battle trophy." He turned to the soldiers flanking him and gestured at Rogue. "Take him away."
As he was dragged from the room, Rogue turned to glare at the man who'd betrayed them twice. "This isn't over, traitor."
The traitor's smile widened. "I'm sorry I can't stay to witness your execution, but the information I have for my new allies is eagerly expected elsewhere." Almost as an afterthought, he added, "I really ought to thank you for attacking this base. Without you, I might never have been believed, but now my friends know that they can trust me."
Then the traitor turned away dismissively, and Gunnar could only watch helplessly as the friend he'd inadvertently betrayed was led from the room.
Pietr drifted through the outskirts of Nu Paree, thinking that he had never seen anywhere so dismal, not even on Nu Earth. The city was a ruin. Deep gullies ran between the shattered masonry of the buildings, and the shattered carcasses of service robots were everywhere, some still speaking in slurry, barely comprehensible voices, twisted joints sparking and hissing. There were bodies everywhere. Nort bodies. There was no doubt that the Rogue Trooper had been here.
Pietr bent to examine one of the corpses. The Souther came at him from the doorway of the nearest building. He must have lost his gun some time in the battle, because all he was carrying was a knife. The blade of it made straight for Pietr's stomach.
Pietr didn't even think. His pistol leapt into his hands with a speed and efficiency he'd never managed previously. Before he'd even registered the attack, he'd chambered and fired two explosive rounds and the Souther was lying on the ground two feet from him, blank eyes reflecting the yellow sky but no longer seeing it.
Suddenly shaking uncontrollably, Pietr knelt down beside the body. Check he's dead, he thought. Never leave a living enemy behind you.
But there was no doubt he was dead. The explosive round had left a two-foot cavity in his chest. He could see the compcrete slabs of the pavement beneath it. There wasn't any blood. The edges of the hole were blackened, seared shut with the intense heat of the fire. The man's face was completely untouched. No, the boy's face. He couldn't be any older than Pietr himself. His hair was sandy and mussed, and there was a smear of soot on his right cheek.
Pietr remembered how Jaze had told him about his first kill, how his brother had said that it made him feel like a real man. Pietr looked down at the boy's body and wondered what he felt. Did he feel more like a man now? Did he feel more like his brother now? The boy's unblinking gaze remained fixed on the sky. No answers there.
It was all right, he told himself. Maybe it wasn't the first one that did it. Maybe if he killed enough he'd start feeling like his brother, start being the sort of man his brother had been. Maybe.
"Do you know what's going to happen to you, freak?" one of Rogue's guards asked.
Rogue didn't reply, just kept looking, left and right, looking for the thing that would get him out of here.
The Nort paused a moment, as if hoping that Rogue would ask. When he didn't, he said with relish, "We're going to take you out of here, and we're going to tie your arms and your legs to stammels, four of them, and then we're going to send those stammels galloping away and your limbs are going to go galloping away with them. That's what your traitor general told us to do to you. How'd you like that, you Souther scumsucker?"
Rogue turned cold eyes on him. The man flinched away from his gaze, but Rogue looked away again without saying anything and after a moment the Nort recovered himself and sniggered.
"Reckon the freak's scared now," he said to the companion who was holding Rogue's other arm. Both hands were bound tight behind his back in three sets of military issue cuffs. They weren't taking any chances. The other Nort laughed, but Rogue noticed that neither of them would look him in the eye. Even bound, unarmed and hel
pless, they were still scared of him. Good, he could use that. He'd have to use that, because he was damned if he was going to let himself get pulled apart by stammels. That just wasn't how he saw himself dying.
"Well, you've really done it now, Rogue," Helm's voice muttered in his ear, too soft for the Norts to catch. "Now you're gonna get killed and we'll end up on some junk heap and we'll never know what it's like to actually feel anything again."
"Scan out, Helm!" Bagman whispered. "You know damn well this is your fault. If you hadn't told me and Gunnar to..." His voice drifted into silence, as if he'd suddenly realised that he didn't want to say whatever he'd been about to say. Rogue would have loved to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but if the Norts heard him doing it, they might just clue up to the fact that his equipment was a cut above the average.
"Listen, Rogue, I'm sorry," Helm said after a moment. "You were only trying to-"
After that Rogue stopped paying attention because suddenly the two hands holding him were going slack. He tensed to move, prepared to take advantage of the Norts' moment of inattention, to kill them with his bare hands before they could secure him again, but the Norts' bodies weren't where he expected them to be, they were already falling towards the ground. A micro-second after they'd done their work he heard the muffled shots ring out.
As soon as he realised what was happening, Rogue flattened himself against the wall of the corridor, cursing the cuffs that still held his hands secure. He couldn't assume that whoever had killed the guards had done it because they wanted to help him. For all he knew the shots could have been meant for him.
The Quartz Massacre Page 12