SIX
REQUIEM IN BLUE
The borders on the map of Nu Earth were never permanent. In places like Nu Kassel or Doomsday Valley, Nort and Souther frontlines moved back and forth on a daily basis. The skies above the planet were worse, with flight corridors seeded by flitter mines and storm generators. Up above, there was no high ground to hold, no places to dig in and fortify. In the footless halls of chem-tainted air, there was nothing but certain death for the inexperienced pilot.
Ferris was anything but that. He had been flying before he could write his own name, and as much as he hated the contaminated world that wheeled below him, Nu Earth's skies were his element. The pilot wrangled the strato-shuttle around the edge of a volcanic plume from the Dust Zones and set it on a sub-orbital hop across the continent.
Rogue glanced at Ferris at the controls, peering through the open hatchway into the cockpit. The man liked to talk to himself as he flew, the GI noted, asking the shuttle questions out loud as if that would somehow make it perform a little better.
Gunnar sensed his scrutiny. "I don't like him."
"Huh," said Helm. "You made that clear enough."
"Synth out, Gunnar. He saved our asses back there," Rogue replied, turning his attention elsewhere. "Like it or not, we're passengers for now."
A low electronic noise like a snort came from the rifle where it lay next to his backpack on the deck.
The GI leaned in closer to the irregular knot of bone-like material on the console in front of him. A set of manipulators looted from a torched medical transport lay spread out near it. Rogue blinked, the muscles around his eyes gently contracting the organic lenses within for close-up work. The surface of the object became clearer to him and he selected a probe to pick at it.
"What is that?" asked Helm. "Looks weird."
Rogue nodded to Bagman. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Affirmative," said Bagman, his optics clicking. "Check it out." The backpack dispensed a digi-pad. The display showed a similar object in cutaway. "It's a bionomic regulator implant, but there's no pattern match in the database."
"In English?" said Gunnar.
"Did you sleep through the medical lectures the Genies gave us?" said Rogue.
"I was awake for the ones where they told us how to kill people."
Rogue frowned. "These things were part of the GI development programme, like an organic monitor unit. The first generation clones couldn't keep their bio-systems in check without them - their bodies would overheat without the implant."
"So what?" Gunnar snorted. "Old tech, old news. GIs like us never needed them. They're obsolete."
"Which begs the question, why did Zero have one?" retorted Bagman.
"We know the Norts had a Genetic Infantry project of their own," added Rogue, "but they didn't have the know-how. Nort GIs use an implant like this."
"Zero wasn't a Nort!" said Gunnar hotly. "He was one of us, blue to the core!"
Rogue shook his head. "That's not in doubt, but you heard what he said. He was regened and his biochip was put into a new body."
"By the Norts?" Bagman was incredulous. "I hate to pop your seal, Rogue, but there's two big holes in your theory. First, why the skev would the enemy regenerate a lethal Souther soldier? And second, if Zero got hit in the Quartz Zone Massacre all that time ago, his chip should have been blank."
"Good point," said Helm. "Sixty seconds after brain death and pfft. Gone forever."
The GI rubbed his eyes. Fatigue was setting in. "Guys, I don't have all the answers, I'm just trying to fit the facts."
"We're going a long way off-book for this." Gunnar's voice held a blunt edge. "That trip to the rig, to San Diablo and now back to the Zone... You said after Dix-I we'd concentrate on finding the Traitor."
Rogue gave the rifle a sharp look. "And you said yourself, Zero was one of us. If there's even the remotest chance there were other survivors from the massacre, we have to know!"
"Maybe we should vote on it," said Helm.
"This isn't a democracy," Rogue growled. "We're gonna find Domain Delta."
"Who died and made you major?" retorted Gunnar, before he realised the irony of his words. "Well, what I meant was-"
"Skin outranks silicon," said Bagman. "You don't have to like it, but-"
Without warning, the deck of the strato-shuttle suddenly tipped at a steep angle and Rogue's gear tumbled off the console. "What the hell?"
"Grendels!" Ferris shouted from the cockpit. "They're right on us!"
From the starboard vu-ports a flash of yellow lit the inside of the cargo bay with a brief, brilliant sunburst. The shuttle dropped sharply as it fell into a pocket of turbulent air.
The Nort flyers were part of the Nordland Aerospace Force's LangJager squadron, pilots trained to operate their Grendel superiority fighters on long, circuitous missions over the edges of occupied sectors. In military parlance it was called CAP duty - combat air patrol - the airborne equivalent of walking a sentry pattern, searching for interlopers idiotic enough to run the blockade. They were on the return leg now, over the glassy plains of the Quartz Zone.
The Grendels themselves were ugly to the eye; fat missiles with stubby winglets, an opaque cockpit on the fuselage like a black bruise. Little more than an engine with weapons, they were still quite stealthy thanks to clever electronic countermeasures circuits wired into their hulls. Sensors on a civilian transporter like the strato-shuttle looked straight through them. The three rocket-fuelled raptors dropped out of cloud cover and tore through the sky towards Ferris's ship.
The lead Grendel had a profile on the shuttle streaming from its onboard war book even as it devoured the kilometres between them. A non-aligned Bravo class sub-orbital, the combat computer told its pilot, a minimal threat; but then a flash alert message from Air Division at San Diablo said something different. "Fugitive aircraft," the advisory screamed. "Terminate on sight."
"He's made us!" Ferris yelled. "That first shot was just a warning, but I'm getting a lidar tone - he's going for missile lock!"
Rogue forced his way into the cockpit. "You got countermeasures? Flares, chaff?"
Ferris jerked his head at the co-pilot console, all his attention on the flight yoke as he desperately tried to jink the shuttle out of the Nort's sights. "Red switch with a white stripe."
The GI tugged the control and a dull thud echoed through the hull as drums of metal tinsel and hot signal flares cascaded into the air behind the shuttle.
In the lead Grendel's cockpit, the Nort pilot swore as his lock-on screen turned into a storm of static. His wingmen were quick to avoid the chaff and accelerated, diving at the ship. The number two aircraft slipped forward, the under-wing railgun humming to life.
Ferris didn't so much see the enemy approaching as feel it; what made him such a talented pilot was an instinct for the three-dimensional environment of the air. The acute spatial awareness of his mind's eye told him where the Nort would come from and he slammed his foot into the rudder pedal, making the shuttle groan as it turned sharply. Rogue stumbled against the console.
The railgun shells blasted out of the gunpod and hammered holes in the cargo bay, punching right through the metal and out the other side. Wounded electrics spat fat sparks and a siren sounded. "Chem alarm!" Ferris snapped. "Hull breach!" The second Grendel flashed past the canopy as he cut the throttles and let it fly by.
"Where's your hood?" Rogue asked.
"No time!" Ferris replied. "Get back in the bay. I'll seal myself up here."
"There's three of them," Rogue saw the blips on the sensor holo. "Don't you have any guns on this crate? All the fancy flying in the world won't stop those creeps."
"Hatch in the deck!" said the pilot. "There's a turret on the ventral hull!"
"Got it." Rogue vaulted through the cockpit door and slammed it shut behind him.
The trailing Grendel's pilot matched the speed of the ugly strato-shuttle and kept his aim carefully on the fuselage, tracking as it turned
. He hadn't fired a single shot, waiting for the right moment to present itself. The fighter dipped below the ship's midline and the Grendel's war book made a negative sound; something in the shuttle's configuration didn't match the factory specifications of the standard Bravo class. The pilot saw an irregular glass hemisphere, aft of the cargo ramp. A blurry blue shape moved inside it.
Rogue sprinted down the inclined hull and spun the wheel on the hatch in the floor. The disc slid open to reveal a metal chair with a gunner console dangling over it. The GI slipped easily into the seat and grasped the firing controls. It was cramped, but the weapon was already live.
"There's a wireless interface here," said Helm. "I'm gonna link my sensors to the gun scope."
"Good call," said Rogue, flipping the trigger from "safe" to "arm".
The Grendel pilot realised his mistake as the beam lasers extended from the base of the turret and pulled to port. Rogue saw the ailerons bite into the wind seconds before the turn and fired. The shots went wide, streaks of light narrowly missing the fighter's fuselage.
Helm let out a strident beep. "Two degrees right, elevation four!"
"Firing." Rogue jerked the trigger and the lasers found their mark, shearing off a stabilator. The Grendel wobbled as the pilot tried to get out of the turret's fire corridor.
"Five left and two!" said Helm, but Rogue held back, guiding the cannons on to the fleeing fighter. "I said five left and two! Rogue, hit him!"
"Not yet." He hesitated a heartbeat longer, then unleashed the guns. "Now!" The energy bolts marched up the Grendel's fuselage and tore open the black glass canopy. Rogue watched the Nort flyer flip over and tumble away into the chem-cloud. "Ferris, copy me?" he called into an intercom. "Splash one."
Ferris didn't respond; he had other concerns. Even the few seconds of exposure to the acrid atmosphere that had passed into the ship were enough to make his lungs feel like they had been scrubbed with wire wool. He had a de-chem canister in the shuttle's medi-kit, but that was just out of reach on the wall and there was no way he was going to let go of the yoke with two fighters dogging him.
He wasn't surprised that the GI had aced a Grendel so fast. The guy was bred for combat after all, and the Nort pilots wouldn't have been expecting a dead-eye like his to be behind the las-cannons, but they had just used up their one and only advantage. The remaining ships wouldn't be so easy to mark.
The proximity warning light blinked in the corner of his vision and once again Ferris feathered the shuttle's retrojets, cutting a haphazard course through the sky. Flying this airborne boxcar against the agile Norts was like a mek-bull running from cybertigers; they were faster, more manoeuvrable and bristled with ordnance, and it was only a matter of time before one made the killing shot. A flash of silvery light blinked up at him from a gap in the clouds. They were crossing into the glass zone now, over the wide expanses of earth fused into brilliant silica plains by repeated heat bomb attacks.
Ferris risked a look at the sensor holo and instantly wished he hadn't. The Grendels were looping around for a strafing pass. Logically, they should have extended out of the engagement and used missiles to bring him down, but Ferris knew the Norts would take the loss of one of their own personally, especially at the hands of a cargo hauler. The Grendel pilots wanted to come up close and tear him apart, so that every moment of his death would be captured on their gun cameras.
The lead fighter turned inbound and came high, avoiding the belly turret and lancing red fire through the chem-clouds. More warning lights bloomed on the console as stray hits found vital components. "Rogue!" Ferris shouted into the intercom. "Hold on!"
He waited a fraction of a second longer than he needed to and then Ferris did something that violated every safety regulation in the strato-shuttle's flight manual. Yanking the steering yoke back to his chest, he slammed open the brake flaps and toggled the retros; the shuttle's fuselage moaned like a wounded animal as its airspeed suddenly bled away. Alert call-outs on Ferris's head-up display went mad with panic as the ship threw itself into a violent stall. Instantly, the shuttle flipped up like the head of an enraged snake, standing on the plume of exhaust flaring out of its engines. The Grendel pilot panicked and veered away, almost colliding with the ship as he passed. The insane manoeuvre bared the underside of the shuttle to the fleeing rear of the Nort fighter and put it squarely in Rogue's sights.
Ferris didn't see the beams track the target, but it was impossible to ignore the sudden and bright yellow explosion off the port as the Grendel was cut open.
"Splash two." The GI's voice was gruff; he probably hadn't appreciated having his head bounced off the canopy by Ferris's sudden cobra stall.
The pilot let the ship fall back into the pull of gravity and the wind kissed the wings, buffeting the shuttle as it clawed back precious lift to keep it airborne. A grin blossomed on Ferris's face; two down, one left! He started to allow himself to think that they might actually get through this alive; but when the third and final Grendel shrieked over the canopy in a tight reversal, he almost died of fright.
"Oh, shit!" He pumped the rudder pedals, but the strato-shuttle was lethargic. Perhaps one of those strafing hits from the second fighter had cut some hydraulic lines or his crazed stall had busted loose a flap, but whatever the cause, the hefty atmocraft was wallowing like a bloated ox. The shuttle flew like a brick on the best of days, but now she was howling with every input from the stick, fighting him for each snatch of air beneath her wings. The pilot couldn't see it from his vantage point, but thin grey streams of fluid were spitting out of ragged holes in the dorsal hull. The ship was bleeding to death.
Behind his air mask, the remaining Nort was red with rage, snarling a continuous stream of hard-edged and inventive curses about the shuttle pilot's parentage in gutter Nordsprache. He made a yo-yo turn that brought the shape of the crippled ship into his gun cues and turned his las-cannons to maximum yield. With a savage grunt, he pressed the trigger-switch and watched coherent light flay the rear of the shuttle, cutting great divots of hull metal with reckless abandon. Twists of smoke and steel shavings raced past his canopy.
He was bore-sighted on the enemy, his entire world shrinking to the tunnel of sky between the muzzles of his guns and the fuselage of the strato-shuttle. The Nort saw nothing else but his kill and his mouth flooded with saliva at the anticipation of it. The civilian ship would be ripped to bits by his salvoes.
In that second, the Grendel pilot was distracted enough to miss the flicker of his collision warning monitor; a bright white flare came off the shuttle's hull and brought with it a knife of metal the length of a man. The Nort had only a second to register it, to understand that he had brought his own end upon himself, before the steel spar lanced through the armoured glass of his cockpit at the speed of sound. It ran him through, pinning him to his ejector seat through the solar plexus like a bloody butterfly. The Grendel, its pilot choking on dark arterial crimson, dropped away towards a final impact in the glass below.
Ferris should have been elated, but the wall of flashing red alerts from the flight computer dominated his attention. If there was a system on the shuttle that was still intact, the pilot couldn't find it.
"Trooper!" he yelled, his throat raw. "Still with me?"
"Copy." Rogue replied, matter-of-factly. "Should I be concerned by the fact that the ship's on fire?"
"Get up to the cockpit and bring your buddies. I'm gonna eject!" He didn't expect a reply and for the first time since the engagement had begun, Ferris let the flight yoke go, scrambling around for the hood of his chem-suit. He had the neck latches closed just as the cockpit hatch opened to allow Rogue inside. A heavy plug of cold, hard air came with him, battering every loose object in the cabin into a tornado of paper, pieces of stale food and plastic fragments.
The GI fell into the co-pilot's chair and secured his gear in a webbing sling under the seat. "Hull's like a sieve," he jerked his thumb at the ruined cargo bay. "It's only the rust keeping it together."
"Fasten your seatbelt," said Ferris in his best starliner captain voice, "and please extinguish all smoking materials."
"Just do it already!" Helm protested.
Ferris gave the switch another quarter-turn, and the G-force hit them like a fist. The spherical cockpit module blew out from the hull of the atmocraft and tumbled away. Robbed of any semblance of control, the remains of Strato-Shuttle 1138 dived straight towards the ground. It struck the glass with such force that cracks radiated out for kilometres in every direction, jagged fissures appearing to point like arrows back at the point of impact.
The flight pod automatically deployed a parachute ballute, but the ejection height had been far below the recommended minimum. The metal ovoid bounced off the ground, landed, bounced again, landed and then screeched across the fields of fused silica, dragged by the chutes. Rogue slapped at the controls and the balloon detached, allowing the pod to roll to a tottering halt.
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