"Where'd you get that?" Zero asked.
"Salvage from Harpo's Ferry. Thought it might come in useful." The macro-raft unfolded, memory-plastic bladders opening up to full size. The compact brick of flexible material transformed into a small boat, a shallow canoe big enough for two at a pinch. "Come on. We're gonna ride the flood right out of here."
"You thought of everything," Zero grunted.
Rogue hauled himself into the raft and extended a hand. "Tactics, improvisation, execution," he said, recalling the combat litany the Genies had drilled into them the moment they stepped from the breeder tubes. "That's how they made us."
"Right." With effort, Zero scrambled over the gunwale and Rogue grabbed his arm to pull him in. His fingers clamped around Zero's forearm and he felt atrophied, weak flesh there, not the hard muscle of a GI's normal physique. The other trooper almost fell into the boat, face-first. Rogue's eyes automatically caught sight of something anomalous on the back of Zero's neck, a slight distension like a malignant growth on the left side, just under the base of the skull. He hesitated; GIs knew their own physiology as well as any corpsman - there were no medics in the GI platoons, but every one of them had the knowledge to repair even the most serious of wounds and the surgical skill to operate on one another. It was a necessary talent, and along with all his fellow soldiers, Rogue had been trained to use a las-scalpel to open the cerebellum of a dying compatriot and recover the biochip that lay wired into the rubbery meat of a GI cortex. The lump on Zero's neck was in exactly that spot, something flat and bony just beneath the skin.
Helm's words in the cave returned to him. This was a trap; Zero was some sort of Trojan horse, part of a complex scheme to capture the Rogue Trooper. He didn't want to believe that.
Zero turned over and glanced around, meeting Rogue's gaze. "Let's go."
Rogue searched the other trooper's blank yellow eyes for a moment, looking for the merest hint of deception; he found nothing.
"Rogue?" said Helm. "Tide's at the maximum now. The flood's gonna start ebbing from this point onward."
The GI turned away and activated the single-use chemical squirt-jet motor in the raft's keel. "We're going." The inflatable surged forward at high speed, cutting a path into the drowning city. He dropped into a low prone position along the line of the boat and propped Gunnar on the bow. "Bagman, keep a watch on my six."
"Check," came the reply from the biochip. It was only one word, but after so long in each other's company, Rogue knew that Bagman had instantly understood the meaning of the order. If Zero suddenly turned on him, he'd be warned; but what he would do if that happened, he wasn't really sure.
Trager couldn't feel anything below his waist. He slapped at the inert flesh of his legs, but it was like touching raw, dead meat. He swore an oath that dated back to the first Great War and spat. The Brigadier fumbled at a communicator and shouted into it. "The Genetik Infantryman has broken out... There are two! Intercept and terminate them both!"
He listened for a confirmation of his order, but only static replied. Trager discarded the unit and tried to pull himself up. Nearby, the broken chassis of the android reporter was stuttering to itself, some fractured piece of programming repeating a string of words over and over. The simulant was stuttering and singing in a sultry, honeyed synth, dragging itself across the floor to where one of its perfectly-proportioned arms was lying, severed by las-fire in the breakout. "Fuh. Fuh. Falling apart again," she chimed, "Wh-what am I to do?"
Trager's nerve broke. "Be silent, you clockwork moron!" He attempted to push himself off the floor and as his hands touched the ferrocrete he felt a building vibration there, resonating into his bones. "Verkammt..." The Nort officer slid his bulk to the hatch and slammed the heel of his hand on the lock control.
The door juddered open, and in that moment he realised that he had killed himself; the rumbling in the floor was the rush of floodwater thudding against the corridor walls outside. Brigadier Trager screamed as a wall of acid swamped the chamber, submerging him, the robot and the dead troopers in stinking yellow water. Trager's lungs filled with burning, corrosive sulphates, drowning him in the milky fluids as DeeTrick's stammering final performance sang him into oblivion.
"Ferris."
The pilot jerked as the voice growled in his headset. He'd felt the rumble as the floods blew open the roadways just minutes earlier and with growing trepidation Ferris had watched the waters lapping around the landing legs of the strato-shuttle. He was convinced that the GI had done something wrong and got himself killed, and for the fourth time in as many minutes he'd been thinking of cutting his losses and leaving. "Whoa, you made it?"
"We're coming to you. Get the ship warmed up and ready to lift." There was a crackling sound in the background.
"Copy that." The noise came again over the open channel, strident and very close. "You got trouble?"
"Nothing we can't handle. Be ready." The GI's voice cut off sharply.
"Okay," Ferris said to the empty cockpit. "Point of no return, then. Do I fly blue-boy and his talkative gear outta here, or do I cut and run?" His hand hovered over the thruster controls as he turned over the choice in his mind.
Thick anti-vehicle rounds spattered off the surface of the flooded street and rocked the macro-raft from side to side. Rogue coiled a length of pull-cord around one fist and used it to keep himself steady as he fired Gunnar with his other hand, sending arcs of las-fire into the air. His target jinked easily, the beams cutting through empty air. The Nort hopper had come out of nowhere, emerging from behind the top of a housing block like a huge and irate hornet. It ducked and wove along the canyon of the city street, null-grav engines humming with raw power. There were clusters of armour-piercing rockets in fat drums on the hopper's stubby winglets, but the flyer's crew hadn't opted to use them just yet - at such close quarters in the tight confines of the city proper, a miss might strike a derelict tower and send a whole decrepit neighbourhood tumbling down.
The Nort pilot, his hooded face visible though the armourglas cockpit canopy, was hunched forward, urging his ship on after the fleeing dart of the raft. Rogue couldn't see the gunnery crew sequestered behind the pilot's chair, but he knew the model of hopper and guessed where they would be sitting. Even now, they were probably looking right at him through the scopes of the flyer's twin chatterguns, squeezing out bolts of depleted uranium ammo. The AV shells were overkill where the inflatable raft was concerned - one solid hit and the memory-plastic would be ripped to shreds - but subtlety had never been a hallmark of either side in the Nu Earth conflict.
The boat rose out of the water and slapped back down hard as it rode over a couple of floating corpses. For a second, the GI lost his grip on the steering cord and the raft listed dangerously to port, threatening to tip the passengers into the flood.
"Damn it, Rogue!" snapped Helm. "Steer or shoot, you can't do both!"
"Son of a tube!" Zero cursed, working the slide of his stolen enemy rifle. "I got a breech jam... Nort piece of scrap!"
The hopper pilot flared his ailerons and used the down-wash from his engines to batter the boat, trying to force a capsize. Rogue fired again and missed again.
Zero tossed the Nort rifle aside and held out a hand. "Gunnar! Give him to me!" When Rogue hesitated, he shouted over the whine of the jets. "I can swat this fly, brother! Come on!"
"Do it, Rogue!" Gunnar added. "No choice."
"Here!" Rogue flipped the GI rifle over in his grip and shoved it at Zero.
The other infantryman eagerly accepted it and the gun sank into his grip like it was one well-oiled component fitting into another.
"You want a Sammy?" Bagman called.
Zero shook his head. "I got this. Gunnar, give me thermo." The sniper raised the rifle to his cheek just as the hopper unleashed another punishing salvo of rounds.
Rogue rocked the raft from side to side, steering the thing with his body movements. Fragments of shot nicked his bare skin like dull needles.
The
hopper loomed large in Gunnar's scope, moving wildly with the shock from the shots and the rise and fall of the floodwater. Zero took a breath, released half and held the rest. He fired.
Nort Komet-class hoppers used a forward-looking infrared scope mounted in the nose, but the lens that protected it was a notorious weak point. Zero's kill was impeccably placed, piercing the scope's housing and cutting up through the cockpit dashboard to strike the sternum of the pilot. The las-round blew most of his lungs out the back of his chem-suit and the Nort slumped forward on his flight yoke. The hopper veered away wildly and collided with a low bridge, erupting into a fireball.
"Nice shot," said Helm.
Rogue nodded in appreciation as the raft bumped and scraped off the broken roadway. "Floodwater's sinking back, we got nothing under the keel. Time to abandon ship, boys." The GI pulled the inflatable boat to a halt and leapt out. The waters were at his knees now and receding quickly. "Zero, let's go, double-time."
Zero wavered for a moment. "Rogue, I think I gotta..." He turned gently and Gunnar dropped from his fingers. There was a large triangle of shrapnel, probably part of the hopper's fuselage, buried in Zero's chest. Turquoise blood bubbled up around the edges of the wound, streaming down his torso. He fell forward and Rogue caught him.
"No, damn it!" Rogue cursed. "We got you out. You ain't gonna die on me now!"
"We got incoming," said Helm. "I'm picking up track noises from the west. AFVs maybe, or light tanks."
Rogue shook his head, discounting the unspoken thought in all their minds at once. "We're not leaving him behind." The GI gathered up his rifle and drew a walkie-talkie from his belt. "Ferris! Ferris, do you read me? I need a dust-off right now!" Dead static hissed back at him.
"I knew it!" Gunnar snarled. "That worthless pink-skin puke! He's left us twistin' in the wind!"
"Oh ye of little faith," said the radio. From behind the broken fingers of the city towers, the bullet shape of the strato-shuttle appeared, the sudden roar of the ship's vector jets like a tornado. Ferris brought the atmocraft to a hover above the GIs and dropped the boarding ramp. "Someone call for a taxi?"
Rogue bodily threw Zero on to the ramp and pulled himself on board as the Nort armoured vehicles rounded the street corner, pushing waves of water, bodies and debris before them. "Get us out of here!"
A cannon on the lead tank spat smoke and flame, and Ferris flinched as a shell shrieked over the shuttle and demolished a nearby building. "Whoa! That ain't friendly!" He slammed the throttle forward to full burn. "Hang on to something!"
The atmocraft's engine bells threw a sheet of fusion fire out behind them and the ship leapt to supersonic velocity, cracking the sound barrier with a thunderous boom of compacted air. San Diablo flashed past beneath the aircraft's underbelly and then they were in the desert plains, racing away.
Rogue stumbled to where Zero lay. "Steady, brother. You'll make it."
Zero managed a shake of the head. "Ah, no. I won't. I was dying before I got hit, Rogue. I know you saw it. I was... just holding on, see? I knew you were out there... I knew you'd come get me."
Bagman's manipulator unfolded, holding a compact medi-kit. "Rogue," he said in a low voice, "got the las-scalpel here and a chip support frame. We can still save his mind."
"Listen," Zero coughed up foamy azure blood. "Rogue, you gotta know... Domain Delta... You have to stop her..." The GI's eyes fluttered and closed.
"Her? Zero, who do you mean? What do you know about Delta?"
"Rogue, he's a goner," said Helm urgently. "You know the drill, the biochip has absorbed his personality matrix. Sixty seconds, that's all we got!"
"You have to get the chip," Bagman added. "If he knows something about that Nort lab, we can't let it die with him!"
Rogue thumbed the stud on the las-scalpel and a knife-beam glittered into existence. "Swore I was never gonna do this again."
With quick, careful cuts, Rogue began to slice away the pallid blue skin and the dull fleshy matter surrounding Zero's biochip implant.
FIVE
HEART OF GLASS
A soldier is an investment. To train them, feed them, clothe them, to educate them in the myriad ways of weapons and killing takes hundreds of thousands of nu-credits and infinitely more man hours. For the Genetic Infantrymen, that cost was geometrically higher. They were decanted as infants and trained without pause for twenty standard years; every hour of every day of their pre-war lives dedicated to the craft of controlled murder. The clone soldiers represented time and money that the Souther Armed Forces simply couldn't afford to spend recklessly on the battlefield. The expense and the sheer effort required by the GI programme had almost ended it on dozens of occasions; while Rogue and his compatriots had grown and learned, unknown to them figures in the Confederate government had tried again and again to end the super-soldier project - but there were men in positions of authority with too much invested, financial influences from the gargantuan mega-corporations like Clavel and Steiner-Bisley, power-players who refused to allow the GIs to die in the cradle. The fact that the project was also generating millions in spin-off biotechnology patents and refining the discipline of human cloning was just coincidental. After all, war had always been the greatest spur for the advancement of new science.
Rogue cursed quietly under his breath as Zero's skin peeled away in his hands, revealing the necrotising flesh beneath the hardy, almost rubber-like surface. "There's major internal damage here. More than he would have got from just a beating..." The GI's fingers closed around a grey knot of bone-like material and pulled it free with a sound like tearing cloth. He considered it for a second, then put the object aside and kept working.
"You think its some sorta infection, a bio-agent?" Helm said urgently. "Like that paralysis toxin from the polar zone?"
"Negative," Rogue used the las-scalpel to dig deeper. "More like a blood disease, or organ failure."
"If Zero had a virus, then we all got it now," Bagman grated.
Rogue's fingers found the metallic edge of the biochip implant in among the soft organic matter. "Don't think so. I'd say it was genetic breakdown." He tuned the beam to a fine, pencil-thin setting and set to work cutting away the filaments that held the chip in place. It was warm, a telltale sign that the matrix within was active.
Those who opposed the GIs saw them as an expensive folly, a "wonder weapon" that would be obsolete before it even saw action. A normal human foot soldier could easily be replaced with just a few forced colonial conscriptions and some hypno-tape conditioning, but the death of a Genetic Infantryman represented a nu-cred cost somewhere close to that of a light strike bomber. All it would take was one lucky Nort sniper and an exorbitant Souther Army investment would be cold meat, so Milli-Com found a way to make their soldiers immortal, a method of life preservation that would sentence the GIs to an eternity of warfare no matter how many times they died. It didn't matter that it was callous, as long as it was cost effective.
When their bodies matured as the clones reached adolescence, the Genies "tagged" them. One by one, every GI was implanted with a "dog-chip". On the most basic level, the microcircuits served as electronic trooper identity cards, but the full function of the hardware was much more far-reaching. The chips were semi-organic, made from a matrix of complex artificial proteins suspended in an electromagnetic field that emulated the workings of living brain tissue. When death came, as it inevitably would, the biochips were ready. Silent and watchful, the small rectangles of silicon gradually altered their circuits to mimic the neural patterns of their physical hosts, waiting for the moment when they would come to life. By year twenty, as the GI troopers were prepared for final deployment, the chips were webbed into their cerebral cortex with nests of neurofibres.
The hatch to the shuttle's cockpit hissed open and Ferris emerged, his face pale and sweaty, fixed with an expression that was trying and failing to look cocksure and cool. "We're out of the Nort sensor range, I reckon," he began. "I put us on autopilot, programme
d a loop-and-evade..." The pilot's voice trailed off as he caught a glimpse of Rogue ministering to Zero's fresh corpse. "What the hell are you doing to him?" Ferris started forward and grabbed at Rogue's arm.
"Back off, idiot. You're in his light!" Gunnar grated.
"You're cuttin' him open!" Ferris retorted. "You said you wanted to save this guy!"
"He is saving him, pinky. Now get away!"
Ferris's gut flipped over as he realised he was standing in an expanding puddle of sapphire-coloured blood. "Oh shit..."
The laser beam sizzled against dead flesh and sent a wisp of acrid cooked meat odour up and into the cargo bay compartment. "Ah, I've got it." Rogue held out his hand to Bagman's manipulator. "Clips?"
The backpack produced a pair of slender tongs and the GI used them to remove the biochip. The silicon plate came free with a sucking noise. Ferris covered his mouth. "Ugh."
Rogue quickly slipped the chip into a flat unit the size of a digi-pad. "Time?"
"Forty-three seconds," said Helm. "You're getting slow."
"I'm out of practice," Rogue replied, a grim set to his war-mask features.
A fatal wound to the host trooper flooded his bloodstream with an endorphin analogue that set the biochip implant into a rapid scan mode, and in those dying moments the protein circuits copied the GI's mental engrams like a data tape. As they perished, everything that made the soldiers who they were, their skills, their history, their random personality quirks, all of it would be sucked into the implant like a bottled ghost. If a GI fell in battle, his chip could be recovered and returned to Milli-Com for regeneration and in a matter of hours the same soldier could be back in the war, his biochip loaded into a fresh adult "blank". The Genies estimated that the biochips could withstand dozens, perhaps even hundreds of these "relocation trauma" experiences before the GI's consciousness would start to suffer any deleterious psychological effects.
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