Then they were through, emerging high into the mountains, the air suddenly bitterly cold, a starling contrast to the desert they'd left only minutes ago. The sun legions were back, but far fewer of them. The action below must have taken its toll, and maybe not many of them had the power to make it to this altitude. The Hoppas too were slowing, falling behind the train like runners who had finally given up the race.
Almost unbelievably, they were going to make it.
Secure in the sealed atmosphere of his field dome, Kovert stroked his moustache - a nervous habit he'd never been able to break - and studied the read-out in front of him. He hated surprises, especially the unpleasant kind. Damn his agents for not getting him information about the Nort plans sooner.
"Get me a line through to the Rogue Trooper now!" he shouted at his assistant.
The assistant bent obligingly over the radio, but his expression said he knew it was useless. The machine gave him nothing but static. "No go, sir," he said, straightening up. "Norts must be jamming our signal."
Kovert slammed both palms against the table with a loud crack. Damn it! This was the worst possible news.
At first, Rogue didn't know what the noise was. He thought it must be some other Nort vessel, bigger than any they'd yet met, something huge to let out such a vast roar.
But the noise wasn't coming from above them. It was coming from beneath. He felt it in the metal of the train, a terrible shaking that threatened to break the train apart. Only it wasn't the train that was collapsing, it was the viaduct beneath it.
"Rogue..." Venus said. She looked into his eyes, the emotion in her own unusually naked, and he knew that she'd felt their death in the fall of the viaduct.
"Scan out, Venus," he growled at her. "Just 'cause we're down don't mean we're out. If we stay with the train we've got a chance." Even as he was speaking he grabbed Gunnar, tying him to his chest, using his other hand to check that Helm and Bagman were secure. Then he grasped the handrail behind him, his grip as firm as he could make it but his body as relaxed as possible. Staying tense through a fall was the way to get hurt. Venus watched him, her mouth open as if she wanted to say something. Then she snapped it shut and did as he'd done. Her body curled in on itself, a small blue ball.
The train fell.
It was like the death throes of a huge serpent or an impossibly large beast. Metal shrieked as it twisted and sheared. The engine plunged straight into the ravine, tumbling thousands of feet to its destruction, nuclear engines toiling futilely to drag it along a track that was no longer there. The carriages were luckier. When the arches of the viaduct gave way, falling in graceful almost ballet-like curves, they threw the rest of the train against the side of the mountain.
The impact was loud. The Nort sappers who had placed the mines which led to this destruction were deafened, clasping hands instinctively against ears which were pouring blood. They'd never hear again.
The carriage carrying Rogue and Venus grated down the almost sheer cliff face, tearing out vast gouts of rock and vegetation as it went. Then, slowly, it began to turn. Faster, spinning as it tumbled, over and over, smashing itself against the rocks on each impact as if it had had enough of this torment, as if it wanted to die.
It seemed like a crash nothing could survive.
Far away, the sound of the crash could still be heard as a muted echo. The general - who had surrendered his name when he surrendered his nationality - smiled. Nothing stood in their way. Harpo's Ferry would fall. The last-remaining Souther-held land on this continent would be gone. After that, he thought, Nu Earth will be ours.
He paused a moment as he realised what he was thinking. That by "ours" he meant the Norts. The Rogue Trooper, that filthy mutant, had called him a traitor. Was the freak right? Had he betrayed his cause?
But no, it was the Southers who were traitors, all of them, traitors who sold their own heritage down the river when they allowed the genetic aberrations to be created. He had never wavered. He had always been on the side of the angels.
And the angels had destroyed the last possible hope for the Southers and the man who had taken his face from him along with them. He laughed. Life was good. Unless, of course, you were a Souther.
TEN
WALKING WITH THE ENEMY
The report came in only ten minutes after the traitor had first heard the explosion. These Norts are nothing if not efficient, he thought, glancing over at General Rushkin to see if he was impressed with his operatives' efficiency, but his face, granite grim, gave nothing away.
The figure reporting in on the giant vid-screen that covered one wall of the room wasn't giving much away either. The black visor which covered his entire head denied anything that might have been human about him. Even his posture was robotic, too rigid, too controlled, as if nothing as irrational as pleasure or emotion could move him. Still, the traitor liked what he had to say.
"Morgan reporting, general. The train has been destroyed."
The traitor allowed himself a small smile. But this wasn't the information he was most interested in. "And the GI?" he said.
Morgan nodded once, curtly. "Dead. Even if he survived the crash, he won't survive the petrified forest."
The traitor nodded back at him, then signalled to the hovering radio operator that the vid-link should be terminated. As soon as he was sure the screen was dead, he looked over at General Rushkin. "This Morgan, is he reliable?"
Rushkin looked surprised that he would even be asked. "That black visor he wears is only awarded to our best snipers, those that have killed more than a thousand Southers."
The traitor realised that he had heard of such operatives, the master snipers, but had always assumed that the stories must be Nort propaganda. It seemed not. He smiled at Rushkin, allowing himself to fully relax for the first time. A flicker of movement on another vid screen caught his attention, and he watched as two Blackmare tanks rumbled forward, their vast bulks dwarfing the small command post where the traitor and Rushkin sat. Around the tank massed the ranks of Nort infantry, an endless stream of them.
"Good," the traitor said. "With the GI dead and the information I have on the Souther defences, nothing can stop us now."
Pietr opened his eyes to darkness, but the darkness wasn't absolute. A spectral glow was coming in from somewhere to his left, a small chink in the gloom. He tried to move towards it, and only then realised that he couldn't move at all, that the reason for the pain he was experiencing was the mound of debris pinning him to the ground.
Suddenly it came back to him: the train had crashed. He was amazed that he'd survived it. He certainly hadn't thought he would, during the long, loud fall into the void. Experimentally, he tried to move his fingers and toes. They moved without difficulty, so it seemed that his paralysis was due to the weight of the wrecked train above him rather than any serious injury.
It was a miracle that his chem suit hadn't torn in the descent. Just one rip, and the toxic atmosphere would have finished him off long ago.
This just meant that he'd die slowly. After all this, to get so close... Well, maybe it proved his brother right about him: he was a born failure, a quitter who never finished a job. Jaze had died a hero. His parents would be sent his remains in a coffin draped in the Nort flag, with a full military guard in recognition of his service.
Pietr would die a deserter. His remains would rot here, forgotten and unfound, and all that his mother would know about him was that he had let her and his brother down. He wondered if he could ease his hand down to the knife that hung at his waist, open a vein in his thigh and at least let it all end quickly.
He was so absorbed in his self-recrimination that for a moment he didn't register the fact that the area of light above him was growing. Bit by bit, the grey-blue moonlit sky was being revealed. There was the sound of someone grunting with effort, and the clank and banging of fragments of metal and rock being cast aside.
Pietr found that he wasn't ready to die after all. "Here! I'm in here!" he sh
outed.
A few minutes later, he felt the pressure on his legs and chest ease and suddenly there was nothing between him and the open air but chem mist. The figure of his rescuer loomed over him, stark black against the silver moon. It reached a hand out towards him and he gratefully let it pull him to his feet.
Then the figure moved sideways, away from the moon, so that the moonlight shone directly onto its profile. For a moment Pietr thought it was just a trick of the light that it seemed so blue, but then it asked, "You all right, solider?" and he knew that it really was the Rogue Trooper.
"I'm... I'm fine," he stumbled, too numb to do anything else.
Before he could react, the GI shoved a bent metal pylon into his hands. "Then get digging. There are others still trapped under the rubble." He turned away without waiting to see if Pietr was obeying him, utterly confident in his command.
For a brief moment, Pietr had a clear line of sight at the Rogue Trooper's back. All he'd have to do would be to reach down to the energy pistol still strapped to his waist and snap off one shot. There was no way he could miss at this distance.
But his hand stayed stubbornly by his side and then the GI was out of sight, off helping some other trapped Souther, and the moment was lost.
It turned out that only six of them had made it out of the wreckage, along with the Rogue Trooper and another blue-skinned freak, a woman of all things, whom the other GI seemed to call "Venus". Pietr couldn't take his eyes off her though she paid him no more attention than she did to the scumbugs glowing and buzzing around them. She had eyes only for Rogue, eyes that lingered a little too long every time they passed over him. It bothered Pietr to see someone so clearly viewing the Rogue Trooper as a man, and not a monster.
The other Souther troops were looking at the GIs uncomfortably too, as if, even though they supposedly fought on the same side, they were no more at ease with them than Pietr was. Pietr was painfully aware, too that he wasn't fighting on the same side as everyone around him. He kept his face turned away, hidden in shadows, and prayed that no one would be able to see just from the cast of his features, or the discomfort in his eyes, that he was one of those who had brought them here in the first place, where so many of their friends lay buried. High above them, silhouetted against the sky, he could see the sagging, broken arches of the viaduct. Closer were the trees, moss the only living thing on them, their great, twisted shapes turned to stone in some long-forgotten natural catastrophe. In the moonlight they looked like the ghosts of trees, restless and haunted spirits which boded ill for everyone beneath them. Pietr didn't think he liked this place at all.
The other Souther troops seemed to share his unease. Unconsciously, they were grouping closer and closer together, as if the presence of another warm human body, even wrapped away inside a chem suit, could keep out the unearthly cold of the forest.
"Bagman, we need a heads-up on where we are. Any structures nearby?" Rogue said, and for a moment Pietr assumed he must be talking to one of the other Southers. The voice that answered seemed to come from Rogue's own equipment, a strange mechanical voice that sounded neither human nor computer.
"Digi-map's showing what looks like an old hydroponics facility nearby," the voice said. "Could be shelter and food there."
One of the other Southers must have seen Pietr's puzzled expression because he leaned over to whisper, "It's a biochip. All the GIs have them, absorbs their personality when they die and then their buddies can store them in their equipment till they get re-gened." He looked at Pietr suspiciously. "I thought everyone knew that."
"Oh, I knew about it," Pietr said hastily. "It's just actually seeing it, you know..."
The Souther seemed to relax. "Yeah, I know - freaky isn't it? And he's got three of them, Gunnar, Bagman and Helm they're called, all died at the Quartz Zone along with the rest of the GIs. But I guess a GI's tour of duty never ends, unlike the rest of us. Even when they die they don't get to ship home, 'cause this is the only home they have."
"The facility had better be close," one of the other Southers was saying. Pietr could see beads of sweat standing out on his face, shimmering a pearly white in the moonlight. "I've only got two hours of air reserve left."
At his words, there was a general fumbling with cylinders and gauges. Pietr was horrified to find that he had little over two hours' supply left himself.
"I've got less than thirty minutes left!" another of the troopers said, a note of barely suppressed hysteria in his voice. Running out of clean air would be a worse way to die than in the crash itself. He looked at his companion. "C'mon, let's go find that hydroponics plant." Not even bothering to check that any of the others were following, he set off at a sprint towards a small clearing in the trees ahead of them.
He was almost there when the beam of light hit him, a brief flash of red that was gone as soon as it appeared. The second after the light blinked out, a shot rang out, one single sharp retort. For a moment, Pietr thought it might have missed, but then the Souther toppled slowly to the ground, his hands clutched to his throat as a thick, black liquid pumped out of it, the colour of blood in moonlight.
"Sniper! Everyone get down!" Rogue said.
Pietr was on his face in the moss of the forest floor even before Rogue had finished speaking, his heart thumping so loudly that he thought the enemy snipers - no, his own side's snipers - would be able to track and kill him from the sound alone. Desperately he peered into the trees, trying to locate the source of the shot, but the forest gave nothing away.
"Nothing showing on my sensors, Rogue," a mechanical voice said, one of the other biochips, Pietr guessed. "They must be wearing stealth suits."
"We can still spot 'em from the red flash of the sighting beam," Rogue said. "Any of the rest of you got sniper scopes yourselves?"
"A girl never leaves home without it," Venus said.
Pietr saw Rogue give an involuntary smile and then quickly suppress it. "What about the rest of you?" he asked. No one answered, and after a moment he continued, "All right then, you soldiers better hang back. Me and Venus will clear a path through for you, and you can take care of any ground troops."
Take care of any ground troops: it was such an innocent phrase. But in Pietr's ears he heard it differently: you can kill any of your own men you see.
Before he had time to work out what he was going to do, Rogue and Venus were off, and Pietr found himself running after them despite his doubts, unprepared to find himself alone in the petrified forest with nothing but the smouldering wreck of the train for company.
There weren't any ground troops, though, just the snipers, hidden high in the canopy of the trees, loosing off shot after shot at the Southers below, so that Pietr found himself jumping at the slightest sound, the snap of a brittle stone twig beneath someone's boot, or the tinkling rustle of the wind through the petrified leaves. And though Pietr wasn't asked to kill any of his fellow Norts himself, he found himself silently and helplessly cheering Rogue and Venus on as they did it for him, feeling a leap of joy when one of their shots found its mark and there was the distant scream of a sniper dying.
Despite the other people in the forest, Pietr felt terribly alone with his fear and his uncertainty. At first the Southers had clustered together, but as soon as they realised this made them an easier target, they'd spread apart, trying to make themselves as small and silent and insignificant as they could, hiding in the moon-shadows of the vast dead trees.
Even so, Pietr saw two Southers fall, then another. One was the man who'd complained that he only had two hours of oxygen left. Not a problem for him now, Pietr thought morbidly as he stepped over the other man's corpse and tried not to look at the expression of pain and fear on the dead man's face.
Rogue and Venus didn't even seem to register the death, never took their eyes from the forest, as if they could see through the darkness to the targets beyond. Maybe they could. Pietr had heard that the Souther freaks had superhuman abilities, bred in the twisted genetic programme which h
ad produced them. Twisted or not, Pietr was glad of them.
Another of Venus's shots found its mark, and Pietr heard her whisper, "Seven-five to me, Rogue," a smile evident in her voice. It amazed him, how easily killing seemed to come to these people, how war seemed to be such a game to them, one whose rules they'd mastered long ago. He couldn't imagine ever feeling that way himself.
But Venus's whisper had been unwise. The snipers might not have superhuman senses, but they had top-of-the-range equipment and something must have picked up on the sound. Two shots rang out from the forest in quick succession and then two more Southers were down, each taken clean through the head.
After that Venus and Rogue were so silent that Pietr often lost track of where they were, following their trail through the forest by blind instinct alone, picking them up again only when they fired, sparingly, hitting their mark nearly every time.
As they crept on and on through the forest, Pietr began to believe that they were going to make it, that these two Southers together really could take on his own side's most elite fighters and win.
He saw the wall of darkness towering ahead of him. It was a gate, closed and far too tall to consider climbing. Wearily, Pietr jogged towards it, not knowing what else he could do. Beside him, the two remaining Souther infantrymen did the same, the expressions through their chem masks as grim as Pietr suspected his own was. Then there was a flash of red, the crack of gunfire, and suddenly there was only one Souther left beside Pietr at the gate.
Quicker than Pietr could follow, Rogue spun and snapped off a shot of his own, taking the sniper out of his tree over two hundred yards away. But the damage had already been done: the Souther troop's eyes stared up at the silver moon, glassy and blank.
"What are we going to do?" the other Souther said, his voice thick with fear. Pietr could see that he was only a boy, no more than eighteen. My own age, Pietr thought, but he'd stopped thinking of himself as a boy the second the shot had taken his brother through the heart.
The Quartz Massacre Page 16