Schrader shook her head, blinking away a dart of pain. Even without a sensitive biochip in her brainstem, even with her glorious new flesh, the pulse was still agonising for her to endure. She submitted to the hurt with the knowledge that Rogue's pain would be a thousand times worse; his biochip was a floodgate for the crackling power that would eviscerate his mind.
Rogue crawled forward on his hands and knees. The GI's trembling fingers touched the hilt of his knife where the weapon had fallen and he tried to grasp the blade. Schrader saw what he was doing and kicked the knife away. With a smirk of amusement, she planted another boot in the GI's gut and he crumpled.
Rogue's strength was leaking out of him, dripping onto the plastisteel floor like the droplets of blood raining from his nose, his eyes and his ears. "Nuh... Bagman... Helm... Gunnar..."
"Oh, don't worry. I'll deal with them soon enough." The scientist gave him a look of mock concern. "Don't be upset, Rogue. You always believed you were the last survivor of the Quartz Zone. Now you know for sure." She ran a hand over his twitching torso, as if she were stroking an injured animal. "Soon, you'll be as dead as all the others," Schrader smiled, displaying too many teeth. "The last GI dies at the hand of the next generation. Fitting, yes?"
The strato-shuttle's cargo bay was a mass of bodies, men and women pressing together in desperation. Zeke threw Purcell a worried look. Both of them had rifles at the ready, threatening ragged prisoners who demanded to board the ship and escape from the bloody inferno. There were even some Norts among them, but for the moment no one seemed to care about nationality; everyone in Delta was fleeing the army of Schrader's mutants. They were everywhere -- hundreds of them wreaking havoc throughout the dome - but there were other threats as well.
Sanchez grabbed the sergeant's arm. "Can't you hear the sirens out there? That's an air raid warning! Skev the rest of them, we don't go now, we'll never get away!"
"Shut up," Zeke told him. "We got time-"
Gunfire interrupted from the drop ramp, pistol shots cracking the air. From the dome proper the Souther sailor appeared with a handful of men at his heels and charged across the landing pad toward them. "We got company!" he yelled.
Zeke raised his rifle as blue-green things emerged behind the prisoners, howling and hooting. Purcell and Zeke put shots into the mutants, but it seemed liked nothing short of decapitation could stop the stronger ones. As he watched, a prisoner fell and the freaks were on him; ripping and tearing him apart as if he was a rag doll. Within seconds, limbs and internal organs were thrown into the air as if it was macabre confetti for the dead.
"Those things get aboard, we're dead! Tell Ferris to lift off!" Sanchez snapped.
"I'm not leaving anyone behind!" Zeke snarled.
Sanchez turned and fired; his shot struck the Scum Sailor in the chest and he dropped - the prisoners with him faltered and broke apart in shock.
"You cold-blooded son of a bitch!" Purcell screamed.
Sanchez ignored her and slammed the ramp control button. The cargo doors began to slide closed.
"I can't believe you did that..." gasped Zeke.
"What you gonna do about it?" Sanchez was cocksure and angry. "Blue-boy ain't here now to watch your back, sergeant." He made the rank an insult. "You're weak, man. You ain't got the guts to make the hard calls."
"Get off." Zeke said in a low voice, grabbing Sanchez's arm.
"What?" Purcell snatched the revolver from his hand before he could react.
"I said, get off!" Zeke shoved Sanchez at the closing ramp and the prisoner lost his footing. He stumbled and slipped, flailing as he dropped down to the ferrocrete landing pad below.
"No!" Sanchez tumbled over the lip of the ramp and disappeared into the melee clustered around the shuttle's landing gear. The mutants crowed as he fell into their grasp.
The hatch slammed shut with a grim finality and Zeke nodded to Purcell. "We're going."
The soldier nodded and tapped the intercom. "Ferris, lift this pig."
"What about Rogue?" said the voice from the cockpit. "Is he on board?"
"Just go," snapped Zeke, as the sound of deformed fists ringing on the hull echoed through the decking. "Wherever the GI is, he's on his own now."
He teetered on the lip of the abyss, clinging to his last moments of life, sparks of pure agony flashing like arc lightning into his mind. His thoughts became fluid, slipping away, fast as mercury, dragging glassy shards of memory from the depths of his psyche. The recollections were chaotic and jumbled.
Trading fire with a sniper in the ruins of Nordstadt...
Serpents and spiders the size of battle tanks...
Rogue had often heard human soldiers talk about death. On Nu Earth, the shadow of it was so constant a companion that no man who fought there could deny his end was only a heartbeat away at any moment. Ordinary men had ways to deal with death. Some of them had beliefs in powers that would pluck them from the void and take their souls to a paradise. Others were afraid that their ghosts would walk the ruins and battlefields forever. To a GI, dwelling on such things was a waste of energy and effort; you're hit, you're dead. That was the end of it.
Ten year-old hands shaking as they hold a loaded rifle for the first time...
Lights of a laser display on the faces of a thousand enraptured Norts...
There was no eternal reward for a Genetic Infantryman, only the promise of permanent servitude in a succession of new bodies, perhaps in another war, on and on until one day there came the shot that left your dog-chip unrecoverable. "Real death", the Genies had called it, as if the other kind wasn't bad enough.
The taste of real air and the chill of the wind over the Oxark Mountains...
Backwash of heat as the sea-shuttle explodes...
Rogue would have no recovery; no one stood by to burrow into his corpse to retrieve his consciousness encoded on plastic. Brain death would occur and the sixty second clock would start to tick, the inexorable fall into nothingness marching closer and closer.
A synthetic scream echoing through an ashen wasteland...
Ghost of a smile on the lips of a blue angel...
A face danced there before him, the image blurred and indistinct. "This is the end, Rogue. Time to go," it told him, the voice it gave distant and muffled. "Die now."
He saw Gunnar, skull streaked with blood, slack with death; Hoffa, choking on poison; Kransky, soulless and empty; Venus, her eyes dancing with promise; Sister Sledge, blonde tresses framing a face made for deceit; and then a shadow, deep and forbidding, a face that was no face, the mask of the Traitor.
Screaming melting plastic torched skin burning up falling and falling...
Light flashing off the Quartz death reaching up with glass fingers...
"Can't... die... Traitor... must find..." The effort to speak was intense.
A hand caressed his cheek, smearing his blood across the skin. "Poor little GI. Your vengeance will never be satisfied."
"NO!" Some last storehouse of will broke open inside Rogue and his hand flicked up like a striking cobra, snaring Schrader's wrist. He crushed bone and tissue and the wrist-comm unit into a mess of plastic and skin.
The Nort screamed in torment, her voice matching the fading whine from the electromag generators as they suddenly cut out.
Rogue shook away the miasma of memory and saw Schrader kneeling over him, struggling to break free of his steely grip. He grabbed her throat with his other hand and squeezed the life from her.
Schrader's fingers were iron rods, ripping and punching into Rogue's flesh. She raked talon-like nails across his arms and chest. "You can't live!" she gurgled, purple blood filling her lungs, spilling from her mouth. "You're nothing! An abortion! A synthetic freak!"
The GI forced himself to his feet, dragging Schrader with him. She shook wildly in his hands, out of control and consumed with her own madness. Rogue pitched Schrader off her feet and threw the woman across the room, into the scorched plastic panel of the biochip support frame. Her bod
y collided with the glass screen in a glittering burst of electric discharge and the screen shattered into wicked shards and shreds of silicon shrapnel.
Beating back the cascade of pain from all over his body, Rogue limped to where the scientist had fallen. Her body was bent at unnatural angles, her head twisted on a broken neck. Clear daggers of plexisteel protruded from her chest like jagged icicles and he saw where smashed pieces of biochip had impaled Schrader's frost-blue skin. Rogue found his combat knife and balled it in his fist to deliver the killing blow, but then she spoke.
"Rogue...?" she coughed, her eyes open but not seeing him. "Father...? I wanted... I wanted you to understand... I did this for you... I wanted you to love me..."
The GI stood back and let her die.
Heat coruscating from their dark nose cones, the Nort missiles fell into the embrace of Nu Earth's gravity. The friction of re-entry glowed cherry red along the leading edges of the weapons, matching the spears of orange chemical fire propelling them toward the ground. The combat computers mounted in the warheads knew of the presence of their brethren and with blink-fast flashes from laser communicators, they chattered amongst themselves as they fell. Battle orders were compared in nanoseconds and a consensus was reached; smart plastics in the steering vanes of the missiles expanded and contracted, spreading out the pattern of the weapons, each one of them drifting into an assigned vector.
They passed the abort point and entered their terminal decent phase. Spent boosters were ejected, exploding into knots of chaff to disorient enemy anti-missile lasers. Triggers were armed, the nuclear cores inside the ground-penetrators and air-burst war shots unlocked.
Then, with the grace of an opening orchid, each of the missiles shed its outer faring like a fan of discarded petals. Inside, every weapon revealed a fist of sub-munitions, smaller but no less deadly rockets tipped with atomic fire. Eight missiles became sixteen, became thirty-two.
Death rained down on Domain Delta.
Ferris pushed the strato-shuttle's throttle bar to zone five full military power and thumbed the afterburner ignition. The Nort ship exploded from the launch cradle and threw itself into the tainted sky on a column of brilliant white flame. The ground was gone, the dusty glass desert a blink in his peripheral vision, there and then vanished.
G-force pressed into him, a fuzzy blanket of weight squeezing the pilot into the acceleration couch. He felt something pressing into his backside - Ferris hadn't had time to get comfortable and a rumple in his flight suit was digging into his skin. The pressure made his thigh go dead and he gritted his teeth to ride out the numbness. Colour leached from his vision as blood retreated from the veins in his eyes, pooling in his lower body. He strained against the multiple-gravity pressure, his arms like lead where they gripped the flight yoke and throttle. Grey sparkles began to gather at the edges of his sight, forming into cowls, tunnelling his vision.
He was dimly aware of a proximity warning from the console; high-speed targets were descending on his flight path.
"Oh shit." The words were slurred and thick in his mouth.
Ferris reacted, forcing the shuttle into a series of rolls and side-slips. There was no way to avoid the incoming missiles.
The sensor grid screamed as the radar returns for the shuttle and the missiles flickered into a merge and suddenly Ferris was slamming the ship around the cloud of nuclear death, cutting a path through the oncoming aerial traffic. Light flashed through the canopy as rocket thrust plumes blazed close to the shuttle's hull, then they were past, and rising still higher into the thinning atmosphere.
A hammer blow echoed through the fuselage and the launch boosters detached themselves. Ferris rode the ship through the turbulence and eased the throttle down from full power; the weight on his chest decreased and suddenly he was aware of the sweat coating his chest.
On the console the sensor grid went wild as a massive radiation spike flared into life.
The missiles knew their targets; some, those with hardened saw-tooth tips, burrowed into the hard-packed earth or through ferrocrete and plastisteel walls before detonating. Others immolated themselves above the ground, turning the air into a soup of gaseous plasma. Domain Delta and everything in it vanished in a perfectly-timed explosion, a string of tactical nuclear warheads casting loose fireballs as hot as the core of a star. Schrader's corpse joined the flesh of her mutant children, the steel and the rock of her secret facility and everything in a twenty kilometre radius became a radioactive wasteland. The Wildfire screamed out across the ruined landscape, churning up the earth that turned into molten slag. Sand, metals and stone were transformed in the flames, the huge energies unleashed in a single instant, fusing the vista into a plain of atomic glass. Delta dissolved into the Quartz Zone, becoming a new part of the warped mirror-landscape, the dead silent and reclaimed.
The hatch to the cockpit hissed open and Zeke hauled himself into the co-pilot's chair. Ferris gave him a nod, working the console. The rim of the nuclear backwash had grazed the ship, tripping a dozen control circuits with sparks of discharge.
Zeke glanced at the aft monitor screen. A bright bruise of searing yellow was growing from the surface of Nu Earth, a clump of mushroom clouds merging into one. The sergeant felt sick and giddy when he realised just how close he had come to being at the heart of that destruction. "What a nightmare..."
The pilot didn't look up. "Reckon I can get us into a low orbit. If you got a preference where you want to wind up, now's the time to say."
"Right," said Zeke. "I'm not sure I wanna go back to the South right away... What about a Freeport?"
Ferris tapped the radar. "We might be able to reach Lost Angels if we're lucky. Used to be a solar power orbital, but now it's a shanty station. Non-aligned."
"Good enough," he paused, studying the monitor. "You think he made it out?"
Ferris gave him a hooded look. "Nothing could have survived those nukes. Not even the Rogue Trooper." He shook his head. "Just when I was starting to like him, too."
Zeke watched the firestorm and said nothing.
In the foothills to the west the echo of Domain Delta's death was muted and hollow, like the grumble of distant thunder. The broken remnants of a highway lay nearby, a relic of the infrastructure of a colonial civilisation that died in the crib. From a distance, the low blockhouse lying next to the road appeared to be nothing more than an abandoned guard post, a pillbox bunker where guns could train on passing traffic; but there were no guns and there had been no traffic on this highway for a decade.
Something moved in the shadows of the bunker. Puffs of rusty dust coiled in the thick, hot air. A heavy iron hatch, sunk into the metal decking to match seamlessly with its surroundings, twitched. Beneath, strength borne from precision gene-engineering forced the hatch open and a blue-skinned figure emerged from the darkness.
"Nothing," said Helm. "No contacts. Rad count's at the top of the line, but we can take it."
"Affirmative." Rogue hauled himself out of the tunnel, brushing a layer of rock dust off his torso.
"Where are we?" Gunnar demanded. "Wouldn't be surprised if Schrader had us pop up in the middle of Nu Nuremburg."
"Nav-compass says we're on the edge of the Black Desert," noted Bagman, "although all the rads in the air are messing up the sat-fix."
"She thought of everything," Helm noted. "Even down to an escape route."
"Pardon me if I don't want to take that ride again," added Gunnar. "Like being strapped to a rocket!"
Rogue emerged from the bunker, blinking. The sky had a peculiar cast to it, a mottled red-orange like the colour of old, dried blood. He slipped a pair of eighty-eight grenades off his webbing strap and clipped them together, dialling a short fuse on the timer. He pulled the arming pins and threw them into the bunker's doorway before sprinting away. The grenades blew with a flat thunderclap of air and the pillbox roof caved in.
"Just in case," Rogue explained. "Don't want anyone using that railshuttle after us."
"Hu
h," grunted Helm. "It's not like there's anything left back there but fallout, anyhow!"
"Just in case," repeated the GI. "Bagman, dispense digi-map." The backpack manipulator dropped the datapad into Rogue's hand and he studied the display. "We'll head north-west, towards the chem-jungle."
"So here we are again," Gunnar said in a low voice. "Back to square one and our one big lead to the Traitor cooked in her own nuke barbecue. Nice work, Rogue."
"Synth out, Gunnar," he replied. "Schrader had nothing on the Buzzard, I'm sure of it. She would have given him up if she knew where he was... And that's as much a clue as anything."
"How'd you figure?" asked Helm.
"He's not with the Norts anymore. If he was, Schrader would have known it. The Traitor is out there on his own now."
"Like us?" said Bagman.
Rogue watched the fading fire of the nuclear explosion. "Like me."
The GI turned his back on the Quartz Zone and walked away, into the dying night of a ceaseless war.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Swallow has written for the heroes of 2000 AD in the Black Flame novel Judge Dredd: Eclipse and the audio dramas Judge Dredd: Jihad and Judge Dredd: Dreddline. His fiction also includes the Blood Angels novels set in the dark future of Warhammer 40,000 and stories for Inferno! magazine. Swallow's other books include the Sundowners quartet of "steampunk" Westerns (Ghost Town, Underworld, Iron Dragon and Showdown), The Butterfly Effect and the horror anthology Silent Night.
His nonfiction includes Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher and guides to genre television and animation. Swallow's other credits include writing for Star Trek: Voyager and scripts for videogames. He lives in London and is currently working on his next book.
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