Blood Relative

by James Swallow

  "Won't be able to get by with a disguise this time," whispered Helm, guessing Rogue's thoughts.

  On the screens, the vidiganda broadcast Bagman had picked from the datacore was playing a loop from the announcement earlier in the day. DeeTrick's flawless metallic face was grinning out at them, to the wolf-whistles and catcalls of the Norts on the street. "Don't forget to tune in, folks!" she said. "We'll be live across Nu Earth to say bye-bye to blue-boy!" Then the image flickered and changed; now there was a "live broadcast" logo in the bottom corner and the simulant was shaking hands with a stocky, hard-eyed man in a commander's dress uniform.

  "I'm here with Brigadier Trager," said DeeTrick silkily. "San Diablo's most senior - and certainly one of the most handsome - officers!"

  "Oh please," said Bagman quietly. "That guy's got a face like a bucket of smashed crabs."

  Trager began to talk about how difficult it had been to capture the "Rogue Trooper" and of the awesome responsibility that his command placed upon him. The GI watched his face, three storeys high on the side of the building, examining the Nort with a predator's eye. Trager had the stuffed-shirt pomposity that was virtually a trademark of the old school Nordland officer corps; it had to be something that was drilled into them, Rogue assumed, along with battle tactics and that typical arrogance that always made them underestimate Souther ingenuity. "And to think," he sneered to the simulant interviewer, "the pathetic creature actually tried to suggest that we'd captured the wrong person!" He gave a rough chug of laughter. "As if there's more than one of these blue freaks walking around!"

  DeeTrick winked at the camera. "Our brave boys in the Kashan Legion made sure that wasn't so, right?"

  "Bitch," Gunnar growled, voicing the thoughts of his three squad-mates.

  Rogue replaced the binox and removed his helmet. "Okay, here's how it's going to go down." He dipped his hands in some muddy run-off and smeared it across his chest and face. "We can't bust our way in and we can't sneak our way in. So that leaves us one option."

  "This is going to be good," Bagman was sarcastic. "We're going to walk in through the front door? And how will we do that exactly?"

  "Easy," said Rogue. "We're going to let the Norts capture us."

  "And, of course, although some officers might find the idea of a static posting to be unchallenging, I have found my command here to be most satisfactory."

  DeeTrick nodded; where Trager's dull monotone and self-aggrandising manner might have put off a human interviewer, the android was positively enraptured by the brigadier's answers. The simulant had no choice in the matter - it was the way the Nordland Overt Media Apparat had programmed her to be. She hung on his every word, occasionally casting the odd saucy smile to her hovercam and flashing come-hither eyes that were modelled on starlets from more than four centuries of history. "So, if I might ask," she interjected, "who will have the honour of terminating the Rogue Trooper?"

  "I've personally selected a group of eight-" Trager's words were suddenly drowned out by the shrill cry of an alert siren. The brigadier shot to his feet and crossed the room to a console. "Report!" he demanded.

  "Patrol Three-Alfa is at the lower lock," came the instant reply. "They captured the Genetik Infantryman!"

  "Captured him? What the hell do you mean? We already..." Trager glanced at DeeTrick, suddenly aware that the unfolding events were being caught on vid. "I'm on my way!"

  The simulant followed him as he raced for the door. "Oh, brigadier," her voice had a singsong cadence. "Our interview isn't over yet!"

  Line troopers and junior officers alike saw the thunderous look on Trager's face as he swept down the stadium corridors, and they parted like a bow wave. Two steps behind him, DeeTrick blew kisses to the soldiers as she passed, the elliptical hovercam trailing behind her like a toy balloon.

  Trager punched his command code into the hatchlock and shoved the sliding door open to enter the holding area. There were four men waiting inside and they snapped to parade ground attention as he strode in. The brigadier's angry gaze ranged the room and came across the sight of a blue-skinned man slumped on the floor. He swore a gutter oath, forgetting the camera's eye upon him.

  "What is this?" he roared, grabbing the GI's chin, then casting him away. He stabbed a finger at the nearest soldier, a twitchy korporal. "Explain!"

  "Sir, we spotted the creature in an alley off the boulevard. It was making for the warehouse district." He hesitated. "It, uh, appeared to be injured..."

  Trager rounded on the duty officer in the holding area and the man blanched. "It escaped?" he bellowed, stabbing a finger at the slumped GI. "This unholy abortion of a thing escaped from its cell and you knew nothing about it?"

  "But brigadier," the officer faltered, "the confinement cell is a sealed ferrocrete cube with a solid plastisteel door!" He jerked his thumb at the thick circular hatch behind him. "The vent shafts are no bigger than a credi-card, there's no way out!" He togged a screen, and the display showed a lone, blue-skinned figure slumped in a featureless grey cell. "This is a live feed from the monitor in there!"

  Trager's temper fractured and he cuffed the officer about the head. "Dolt! The camera has obviously been tampered with!" The commander glanced at the korporal. "Fortunate for you that this observant trooper was able to apprehend the freak before it could go to ground."

  "Sir, I-" the officer spoke again, "let me just-" He worked the console, beginning the unlocking sequence that would open the cell.

  "You are a disgrace!" Trager snapped, and in one swift motion, he drew his pistol and shot the officer between the eyes. "I will not have incompetents in my command!"

  "Yes sir!" snapped the korporal. He gestured to one of the other troopers, who clutched a peculiar-looking rifle and backpack. "It was carrying some unfamiliar equipment, brigadier..."

  As the cell door yawned open, something in Trager's mind rang a wrong note. He'd seen the weapon before, on briefing files about the GI - but the one they captured in the desert had been carrying looted Nort gear, not GI-issue hardware. "Wait, where did he get-"

  "Oh my," simpered DeeTrick, pointing into the cell. "That can't be right."

  Trager looked at the GI on the floor, and then at the other GI in the cell. "Two?" he managed.

  "Surprise," said the prone infantryman.

  FOUR

  ZERO SUM

  Everything happened at once. The GI on the floor - the second one, Trager realised with surprise - flashed across the room in a streak of blue, slamming into the trooper holding the backpack. At the same moment, the peculiar rifle cradled in a lazy grip by the other soldier clattered and charged into life. On full autofire, las-rounds roared through the confines of the holding area and tore the third member of Patrol Three-Alfa to pieces. The man grasping the gun had two choices and he made the wrong one; instead of dropping the weapon instantly, he tried to hold it down, like a rider dealing with a troublesome mount. The rifle rose on its own recoil, past the falling corpse of the third trooper and marched energy bolts up the seamless silver torso of DeeTrick.

  The feminine simulant did not scream; she wasn't programmed to. Instead, she twittered and babbled as the shots tore though the logic centres in her midriff. The robot crashed to the floor, her velvet voice now a shower of gibberish.

  All of this in seconds. The GI they had brought before Trager, broken and sickly, had exhibited none of this power. The new arrival was a whirlwind. The Nort with the backpack in his hand was already dead, neck broken in an instant when Trager's mind had been elsewhere. Abruptly, the brigadier became aware of the pistol in his hand, its barrel still hot from where he had exercised his displeasure on the duty officer. He brought it to bear on the GI, but the soldier with the rifle was in front of his intended target. Trager shot him; he had to regain control of the situation quickly and the hapless fool was in his way.

  Throughout the unfolding melee, DeeTrick's hovercam was continuing to broadcast the live vid to screens all over the city. There might be quick-witted Norts
on the way to assist him, but Trager had no way of knowing - just as he had no way of seeing the other GI in the cell stirring, getting to his feet, coming at him. Trager had enjoyed himself with the prisoner before DeeTrick had been allowed to compose her vidiganda footage. By a quirk of fate, the Nort officer's unit had been replaced by the 7th Kashan Legion on the eve of the ambush that both sides would later call the Quartz Zone Massacre, and on some level, Trager had always resented the fact that he had never been able to kill some of the Souther genetic freaks. Trager was a strict Church of Sekunda zealot - the approved religion of the Nordland party - and his personal faith looked upon gene-manipulation as unholy and inhuman. The lucky turn of events that had landed him with the prisoner had given him the chance to work through some of his issues on that matter, taking a sap glove to the creature's dull, blue-grey skin. Payback now came to Trager tenfold.

  Rogue saw the injured GI slam an iron-hard fist into the small of the brigadier's back and a couple of vital vertebrae came apart with a sharp crack. The other infantryman followed up with two more punishing strikes, not for any reasons of efficiency, but for the sheer violence of it.

  "Rogue, the hovercam!" snapped Bagman, and in answer the GI dragged the machine out of the air, servos whining, and battered it against the wall. Surrounded by dead and dying Norts, Rogue took his first good look at his fellow soldier. "You know me?" he asked.

  The other GI looked in bad shape and it wasn't just the after-effects of the beatings. His skin lacked the dark, near-midnight hue of Rogue's - it was pale and in places the cultured plastiflesh was broken. Welts and unpleasant lesions of black blood matter marred his arms and torso.

  "Who...?" His voice was hoarse. "Who you with?"

  "Battalion M-C Five," Rogue replied automatically.

  "Rogue... You're the Rogue... I found you!"

  Gunnar made a low noise. "Synth me! I know him! That you, Zero?"

  "Zero?" Rogue repeated, helping the GI to walk. Like all the nicknames the GIs used, his was one that the Milli-Com genetic engineers had coined, half joking, for each of their vat-grown killers-in-training. Rogue had never served directly with Zero, but he knew of him. He'd been in top percentile on the roster boards after they were decanted and noted as an exceptional sniper.

  To any observer, the faces of the two GIs would have looked virtually identical - and that fact was what had made Rogue's daring plan work - but to the troopers themselves, subtle differences made them as individual as any pure-bred human.

  "Zero, man. How did you make it out of the zone alive?" said Gunnar.

  "Time for that later," snapped Rogue, recovering Helm from a compartment in the backpack. He snatched up a weapon from one of the dead Norts and tossed it to Zero. "Can you make it, brother?"

  Zero managed a shaky smile. "I'm tactical, Rogue. Solid blue."

  "We got incoming," said Helm. "I'm picking up human heat signatures through the walls."

  "Let's go." Rogue grabbed his gear and beckoned Zero toward the hatch. "We're on the clock."

  Zero gave a weary nod. "How... we gonna get out of this place?"

  "Helm, how long we got?" said Rogue.

  "Five mikes, give or take."

  Rogue gave Zero a nod. "Can you swim?"

  As any general worth his stars would tell you, the problem with developing a new military tactic was that the moment you used it, the enemy would be able to use it against you. Trager's brutal flooding of the San Diablo sub-train network had made him a war criminal in the eyes of Souther Command and his callous actions were now a part of the training briefs that upper echelon officer-cadets received in Milli-Com's battle schools. His actions were also documented in the war books of Souther line troopers; on the hundreds of cold and lonely nights that Rogue had spent on Nu Earth's wasted landscape, the GI had pored over salvaged digi-texts, learning all he needed to know about Trager's callous strategy and how to turn it against him.

  Ferris had complained loudly when Rogue helped himself to one of the hyper-densified fuel canisters in the strato-shuttle's stores, but the infantryman simply tapped a finger on the upward-thrusting arrow on the casing, the symbol of the Souther Forces. Reminded of where he stole them from, the pilot opted for silence, and Rogue took the container with him into the tunnel network. The GI made short work of his improvised munition, wiring the last of the C9 detonator charges to the connector nozzle on the fuel tank before taking the jury-rigged bomb and positioning it in the optimum location. The overseer-teachers, the men the GIs called the "Genies", had taught their creations well, instilling in them the skills to innovate weapons from scraps of hardware and battlefield leftovers; Rogue could do everything from carving flint arrowheads to operating a piece of field artillery, if the need arose.

  The Diablo Springs ran on geological clockwork, regular surge tides of hot, metallic waters bubbling up and then receding as Nu Earth's tectonic plates were massaged by the gravity tides of its moons and the distant energies of the Valhalla wormhole. Trager had known the tidal pattern and used it against the Souther sappers; now Rogue returned the favour, but with a new twist.

  The water rose, lapping up at the walls of the dead sub-train tunnels, filling the tubeways with yellowed liquid. Soon, acrid moisture licked at the tip of a hydro sensor salvaged from a broken geoscanner module and a switch was tripped. The thin detonator rod spat sparks into the firing charge, chain-reacting. The block of C9 explosive flashed, puncturing the tank; suddenly the volatile shuttle fuel - a thick, tarry slurry in its inert state - was burning in one brilliant instant. Everything in its vicinity was instantly reduced to a ball of gas, stone and metal, vaporising and collapsing dozens of the ferrocrete pylons that were the foundations of the city stadium.

  Tonnes of earth sank into the sulphurous floodwaters, displacing and choking the smaller tributary tunnels, and with nowhere else to go, the boiling surge from the toxic springs blew upward into San Diablo's streets, punching through the basements of buildings and ripping open the stadium plaza.

  Gushes of murky liquid burst forth and engulfed Nort soldiers and vehicles alike, knocking them over and flattening them with caustic waves. Troopers used to the protection of their chem-suits from Nu Earth's toxins found the thin plastimesh to be no match for the boiling acids and they were cooked inside their war gear. Streams of the floodwater cut into the sealed corridors of the stadium interior, spurting out of fresh cracks in the ferrocrete like liquid knives. The water rose and chaos came with it.

  Rogue forced his way through the rising tide in big, splashing steps, sparing only the occasional las-round for Nort troopers who were able enough to defend themselves. The majority of the enemy were far too occupied with more important things, like trying to breathe, to concern themselves with the two GIs in their midst.

  Zero was having difficulty matching Rogue's pace, so the infantryman kept stopping to bring his fellow soldier along, guiding him through corridors choked with corpses floating in chest-high water. "Come on, brother. Just a little further."

  Zero gave a laboured nod and Rogue frowned; he couldn't begin to imagine the hell that the other GI had been through at the hands of his Nort interrogators, and he felt a sting of guilt. In a way, he was responsible - the enemy believed that Zero was Rogue and undoubtedly they had tried to tear a confession from him for all the Norts that he had sent to their graves. He imagined Zero in that cramped cell, suffering intolerable agony as they beat and burned him, unable to answer the demands of his captors.

  There was a distant, higher part of Rogue's tactical mind that still marvelled at the sight of another living, breathing Genetic Infantryman. It had been so long since the killings at the Quartz Zone - somewhere along the way he had become used to the idea that he was the last of his kind - the sole survivor of an artificially created species. If Zero was still alive, could there be more? What if there were other survivors out there, other Rogues?

  He shook the thought away with a sharp turn of his head. No time to think about that now, he t
old himself. They still had to make it to the shuttle.

  The entrance atrium had been turned into a seething pool of coarse, bubbling water, and the infantrymen half-swam, half-waded across the open area and into the flooded city streets. There were corpses as far they could see as well as great floating drifts of debris. Men were desperately scaling the exteriors of abandoned towers to escape the churn of the corrosive rivers. Shots cut into the torrents around the two troopers, slicing down from a rifleman in a high vantage point.

  "Shooter, three o'clock high!" called Helm.

  "Mark him," Rogue replied, and turned, bringing Gunnar to bear. Through the GI rifle's optics, Rogue saw the outlined heat-blob of a man on the thermographic scope. He squeezed the trigger and a red-orange laser light shot across the brickwork to flush the Nort out. The rifleman bolted from his cover, a blur through the sight scope, and abruptly came apart in a storm of crimson. Rogue's gaze flicked to his side to see that Zero had taken the kill shot himself, ripping into the Nort with the very same make of weapon that the enemy trooper had used on them. The rifleman's shredded corpse fell out of his sniper nest and landed in the water with a heavy splash.

  Zero took a laboured breath. The effort of the escape was getting to him and they were a long way short. He caught Rogue looking at him and managed a quizzical jut of the chin. "Your show, Rogue. Where now?"

  "Bagman, dispense macro-raft."

  With a click, the backpack's servo arm extended, clasping a fat grey packet. "Uh, Rogue. This thing's Nort-issue junk. You sure it's gonna work?"

  The GI grabbed the plastic pack and tore it open, revealing a striped pull-cord. "Unless you got a couple of surfboards in there, this is the only option." Rogue gave the cord a tug, and the packet hissed back at him, inflating.