If Pietr was going to kill him - and Pietr had to kill him, or everything everyone had ever said about him would be true - then he had to do it face to face, with honesty. Which meant that he had to get away from Rogue as soon as possible.
The opportunity presented itself sooner than he'd expected. The ravine they were walking through grew shallower, but soon other ravines branched off it and before long they were walking through a maze-work of grey-brown cliffs which only Helm's sat-linked map function allowed them to navigate through.
Slowly, Pietr allowed Rogue, Venus and Sledge to draw ahead of him. They didn't notice. He was supposed to be covering the rear anyway, and Sledge and Rogue were too wrapped up in taking care of Venus, who was back on her feet and on the mend but still not able to walk without assistance. When the next left-branching corridor of rock approached, he took his chance.
As soon as he was out of sight, he pushed his heels into the ground and ran. For a few minutes, all he could listen for was the sound of pursuit, straining to hear over the hissing of his chem suit's air vents. None came, and ten minutes later, he slowed down.
He found, ridiculously, that he was almost hurt that no one had come after him. He shook his head and started looking around for a way out of the ravine. The rock was jagged, sharp enough to tear through the material of his suit, and he didn't want to risk an attempt to climb the sides, not with the suit itself to weigh him down. Overhead, the sky was only a thin slice of yellow, barely pouring enough light down to brighten the rock's colour from black to grey-brown. Up ahead and to his right he thought that the yellow sliver of sky might be broadening. He ran off in that direction, and found that the ravine was finally sloping back up to meet the surface of the mountain plain.
The territory he came back up into was different from the one he'd left, more hilly, as if the mountains were trying to reassert their dominance over the plain. It was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards in any direction, the view blocked by the gently curved mounds of the hills, their surfaces scattered with a sprinkle of hardy high-altitude plants.
Pietr hunkered down and pulled out the Nort radio he'd kept hidden inside the utility pouch of the chem suit he'd stolen from the Souther on the train. He discovered that thinking about that dead Souther filled him with more guilt and self-loathing than any memory of the Norts he'd killed, but he ruthlessly suppressed the thought. He'd made a mistake, but now he was going to rectify it.
Very carefully, he began to cycle the radio through all the base transmission frequencies he knew. It only took a few minutes to home in on a signal from a small contingent of Norts, camped no more than a kilometre from where he was sitting.
Pietr set his jaw and pushed himself to his feet. He would find these Norts, rejoin them, put himself back in Nort uniform where he belonged. Then he would come back and face Rogue like a man.
It wasn't until they faced their first minor battle, a group of Norts camped out at the end of the ravine, that Rogue realised Peter was gone. The battle itself was short, brutal and a foregone conclusion, ending with the Norts lying in a steaming heap beside the field radio they hadn't even had time to use. At first, Rogue thought Peter must have been hit in the battle, but there was no sign of his body anywhere in the vicinity.
"Picking up any trace of him, Bagman?" he asked.
"Nothing at all, Rogue," Bagman said. "No life signs nearby except us."
Venus looked around, a frown on her face. "What the hell's happened to him?"
Sister Sledge looked round too, but briefly. "I don't like to say this, but I don't think you've got time to look for him."
"Probably fell down a hole ten kilometres back," Helm suggested.
Rogue didn't like the idea of leaving the boy all on his own, but Helm was right; he was probably lying dead somewhere and if they looked all they'd find would be a corpse. While he'd liked the kid well enough in the brief time he'd known him, Bagman, Gunnar and Helm came first. "Fine," he said, "we go on. How long till we connect with the mobile med-unit, Sledge?"
She looked at the digi-map in her hand. "Shouldn't be more than a kilometre now, Rogue. If there were fewer hills, we'd be able to see it from here."
The landscape was easy going, just scrubby little mounds of dry earth, but the hills left plenty of cover for a potential ambush, so Rogue took it slow, shielding Venus with his body when he thought a possible sniper might have a good line of sight. There was nothing, though, an almost surprising lack of resistance to their progress.
"I don't like this, Rogue," Venus said. "The Norts should be after us in force by now. They've had plenty of time to regroup from the hydroplant."
Rogue shrugged. "Maybe they just don't think we're that much of a threat."
Venus didn't say anything, just raised a sarcastic eyebrow. Rogue might have said more, might even have admitted that she had a point and that despite the urgency maybe they needed to stop and reconsider what they were doing, but just before he could, Sister Sledge shouted out and began to wave her arms.
Ahead of Rogue, he could finally see what she'd been leading them towards. It didn't look very much like any field hospital he'd seen. The vehicle was big and blocky, and armoured like some kind of hybrid Blackmare tank, but it was playing the Souther national anthem, and the Souther flag was flapping merrily above it in the light breeze.
Sister Sledge ran eagerly towards the vehicle, and two dark figures - one tall, one short - walked out to meet her. When they drew near enough, Rogue saw that they were both, incongruously, wearing bowler hats under their chem suits.
As soon as he saw Rogue and Venus, the taller one turned to the shorter. "Well, Mr Bland," he said. "It appears that our patients have arrived."
As Pietr approached the blip on his digi-map that marked the position of the Nort troop, his steps slowed. He told himself that it was because he had to be careful. He was wearing Souther uniform and if his own side saw him in it they were most likely to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Or maybe it was because he knew that even if they believed he was one of them, they'd soon find out that he was a deserter too, and then they'd shoot him anyway, or send him to a court-martial and let the court-martial do it for them.
Whatever the reason, Pietr found himself creeping up towards the small field camp as if it belonged to an enemy. He took a moment to learn the sentry's routine, then waited until he was in the other half of his circuit, and dodged inside his perimeter, still keeping hidden in the lee of some rocks. He realised as he did how much broader a field of view the Souther chem suits gave, with their clear face plates. The insectile Nort suits narrowed vision down to two tunnels, keeping the whole world at a distance. Thanks to that, the sentry didn't see him, and he was able to get himself to within five metres of the rest of the troop, gathered unprotected round their small stove unit.
They looked so relaxed and so happy that he decided he really had nothing to lose by throwing himself on their mercy.
Then he saw what it was that had them in such a good mood. They had a prisoner, a Souther, and they'd clearly decided that he wasn't worth taking into headquarters, being too low-ranking to have anything of interest to the brass. So instead they'd decided to have some fun.
As Pietr watched, two of the Norts drew back their feet and kicked them into the prone body of the Souther, bound helplessly on the ground in front of them in a tangle of razor wire. The impact was so hard that the prisoner's body actually flew into the air. Pietr heard his cry of pain and fear at the triple impact, two from the Norts' boots and once from the ground on his way back down. But the loudest noise was the laughter of the other troopers.
Pietr carried on watching as they each took a turn, and when they grew bored of that, one of them casually reached back and pulled off the prisoner's chem suit mask. Pietr watched with them as his face turned first red, then yellow, and finally black, as the toxic atmosphere ate him away from the inside. He screamed the whole time, a helpless high keening that sounded more like an animal t
han a man.
Once the Souther prisoner had finished dying, Pietr turned on his heel and walked away from the camp.
The inside of the vessel looked a little more like a field hospital, but not much. Rogue took a moment to scan it, eyes taking in everything, the racks of electronic equipment, the cases of guns - slightly out of place, but then you needed to be armed if you were going into a war zone - and most of all the three tanks, filled with a dense blue liquid, in which his three friends would be reborn. The two Souther medics, still wearing their strange chem suits over their strange uniforms, were staring at him impassively.
"Are you satisfied with our arrangements, Mr Rogue?" the taller one, Brass, asked. His voice was soft and cultured, nothing like the harsh, emotionless voices of the Gene Genies.
Rogue shrugged, then looked at Sister Sledge. "Look in order to you?"
She nodded. "This is the most up-to-date equipment there is." She turned to Venus, who was leaning wearily against a wall, her eyes flat with tiredness and pain. "Lie down over there. I can fix you up properly now."
Venus hesitated a moment, glancing at Rogue, but he nodded to her and she let herself sink down onto the slick metal surface behind her. "I'll give you something for the pain first," the chem nurse said to her.
Rogue saw Venus's eyes drift shut as the other woman pressed a med-dispenser against her arm. Rogue watched her for a moment longer, but Sledge seemed to be taking good care of her, gently pulling aside the material of her trousers to expose the still healing edges of her wound. "Guess it all looks fine," he said to Brass.
"You have the... the biochips on you?" Bland, smaller and fatter, asked.
Rogue took off his helmet and kitbag and set them down on a small work surface, pushing aside an assortment of scalpels and las-knives to make room for them. After only a second's hesitation, he put Gunnar down beside them.
"You ready guys?" he said.
"Bring it on," Gunnar said. "I'm lookin' forward to holding a gun again, instead of being one."
"Ready as I'll ever be," Bagman added, sounding a lot less sure. It occurred to Rogue that of all of them, he seemed to mind his disembodied state the least. But then Bagman had always lived his life more inside his head than out of it.
"Where are the bodies?" Helm said. "I thought we were gonna be put into blank-minded force-grown clones, but those vats are empty."
Rogue realised that Helm was right. He turned to Bland and Brass with a frown. "They haven't got much time. No time for you to grow bodies from scratch. I thought Milli-Com would have sent you what you needed."
Bland shook his head. "Alas, there was no time, Mr Rogue. But never fear. We have an alternative solution."
"We have you, Mr Rogue," Brass said.
Rogue looked at them through narrowed eyes. "Me?"
Bland moved aside, and Rogue saw that he had been standing in front of a chair festooned with medical equipment, syringes, read-outs - and restraints. "Indeed," he said. "We can use the template of your body to recreate bodies for your... comrades. All we need to do is extract some information from it, genetic and hormonal, and the re-gening vats will be able to use the amino soup inside them to build your friends' bodies in a matter of minutes." He gestured at the pile of equipment containing the biochips, and then at the chair behind him. "If you would just... release your friends, then take your place in the chair, we can begin."
Rogue looked at him, at the blank expression on his face, and he hesitated. It didn't take a genius to see that Bland and Brass weren't too on the level. Sledge trusted them, but then Sledge wasn't on the run from her own side, she didn't need to be paranoid; Rogue did and he was and he knew a chem rat long before he could smell it.
"What are you waiting for, Rogue?" Gunnar said. "Time's ticking away and we're ticking away with it."
"He's right," Helm said, after a moment's hesitation that told Rogue he was having some doubts of his own. "What choice do we got?"
And he was right, of course. There was no choice to be weighed up, not when the danger of his buddies losing their lives tipped the scales so completely one way. He thought he knew what Bland and Brass's game was. They hadn't mentioned Rogue's desertion, hadn't said anything to him about returning to Milli-Com, and that in itself was suspicious. If he let them tie him down in that chair, he doubted they'd be releasing him again, at least not until the Milli-Fuz had turned up to take him away.
Well, it was a small price to pay. Whatever happened, he wouldn't give up on tracking down the traitor general - Kovert would probably find a way to help him - and his buddies would be alive again, properly alive, to help him do it.
Rogue reached out to the gun, helmet and kitbag beside him and carefully snapped the biochips out of their casings before tossing them to Brass. "Here are my boys," he said. "Make them into men." Then he strode to the chair behind Bland and sat down in it, resting his head delicately against the cold metal of the headpiece.
With startling speed, Bland snapped the restraints into place around Rogue's wrists and ankles, and last of all around his chest and forehead. Only when they were all in place, and he'd checked them twice, did he allow himself to exchange a small, satisfied smile with Brass.
Pietr was lost. Metaphorically, definitely and physically. When he'd walked away from the Nort camp, ghosting out as silent and unnoticed as he'd arrived, he hadn't really had any idea where he was going. Now he realised that even if he did he wouldn't know how to get there. The great plain above the mountains was vast and featureless and without Bagman's digi-map to guide him he knew that he could wander it for days, or more likely hours, because his oxygen was running low again and he knew that after what he'd seen back at the camp he wouldn't allow himself to run so low that he ended up breathing chem. He might not be much of a shot, but even he couldn't miss his own head.
Maybe that's what he should do anyway. Just end it. It wasn't like he'd done anything useful from the moment that he'd landed on Nu Earth, or even before that. He hadn't done one consequential thing in his whole life.
With trembling fingers, he pulled out his energy gun and held it to his head. His finger squeezed gently on the trigger, then a little more.
He had a very clear mental image of his brother laughing at him, his head thrown back and his whole body shaking with it. Laughing with a joy he only seemed to display when he was tormenting Pietr. Then Jaze's face was replaced with that of Schulz, of all the other troops who had laughed at him and mocked him because he couldn't be like them.
Very slowly, he lowered the gun from his temple. Pietr realised that he was wrong, that he had done something, or at least had started to do something. It just hadn't been the thing he'd thought he was doing. Now, he knew what he had to do. He had to finish it.
He re-holstered his gun and pulled out his radio. It had, he'd remembered now that his mind was clearer, a nav-satellite uplink implanted in it. He could find exactly where he wanted to go now that he knew where it was.
As soon as Bland and Brass started laughing, Rogue knew that he'd made a very big mistake. "Venus!" he shouted, but her eyes barely flicked open and he saw that Sister Sledge had strapped her down as securely as him. He caught the chem nurse's eye.
"Going to tell me what's going on?" he asked.
She shrugged, her face so devoid of any human feeling that it didn't look pretty at all. "Just business, GI, sorry. They made me an offer too good to refuse, good enough to get me off this scumhole for life."
"What the hell's she talking about?" Gunnar's voice grated, high-pitched, from the palm of Brass's hand.
"It was a set-up, you moron," Helm answered from right beside him. "Rogue, I'm sorry."
Rogue would have shaken his head, but the restraints wouldn't let him. He kept on talking, delaying, using every second of the time to figure a way out of this. "The guys never were in any danger, were they?" he said to Sledge. "That deterioration you were talking about - you were just playing them."
She laughed nastily. "Pretty easy
to do, I've got to say. Your buddies may be loyal, Rogue, but they sure aren't bright."
Rogue knew that her gloating tone was meant to bait him, but he ignored her. Scum like her were for killing, not for getting worked-up about. He turned his attention back to Bland and Brass. "So who are you working for? The Norts?"
Bland shuddered theatrically. "My dear boy, we work only for ourselves. We shall be selling you to the Norts, of course, provided they can muster sufficient funds."
"Which shouldn't prove a problem, Mr Bland," Brass added, "now that we have the rather comely form of this female GI to add to the package on offer."
"You touch a hair of Venus's head and you'll wish you were never born!" Helm snapped from Bland's hand.
Bland just laughed at him. "If we had the inclination, or indeed the ability, to actually re-gene you, perhaps that threat might have some substance. As it is, I'm afraid you'll be going to the Norts exactly as you are - so unless you plan to electrocute me to death, I'm afraid your threat is a little empty." As if he'd suddenly realised something, his face paled, and he dropped the biochips hurriedly onto a table beside him. "They can't electrocute me, can they?" he asked his partner.
"Better safe than sorry," Brass replied, and handed him a pair of delicate metal pincers. Then he turned to their radio. "I suppose I had better contact Nort High Command."
At that point, three things happened at once.
Bland reached forward with the pincers and took the chip which contained the personality of Helm between the small metal clamps. And Helm, who'd realised that he actually could reroute the current keeping him alive to deliver at least a mild electric shock, did exactly that. The charge passed up the metal pincers and straight into Bland's hand. He cried out - more in shock than in pain - and dropped Helm to the ground.
The Quartz Massacre Page 19