Blood Relative (11 page)

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."

Ferris saw the green flag in the corner of his helmet visor; full air tanks. He took back control of the ship - as much as he could, anyway - and tried to pull it into a flatter attitude. The mirror-finish of the Quartz Zone's surface made it tough to gauge distance by eye, but he could tell just by the sinking feeling in his gut that they were losing height faster than cash in one of Gog's card games. Ferris gripped the ejector switch and turned it ninety degrees; in reply, the cockpit hatch closed and locked. Explosive bolts all around the strato-shuttle's flight cabin went live.

"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.

He reached over to Ferris. The pilot's breathing was shallow. "We have to get out," said Rogue. "Norts will be vectoring spy-sats into this area to look for downed pilots. They'll mark our landing for sure."

Ferris gave a slow, difficult nod. "Right, right," he managed, unfastening his seat straps with leaden slowness. "I could improve my technique a little, I think..." He stumbled to his feet, dragging a survival kit from a locker that had burst open. "Still, any one you can walk away from, eh?"

"If I had a head," said Bagman, "I'd have a headache."

Rogue saw Ferris recover a snub-nosed slug pistol and stuff it in a suit pocket. "Let's move. You follow me, go where I go and do what I say and you'll keep breathing. Understand?"

Ferris nodded again. "Sure. This is your turf now, right?"

Rogue kicked out the hatch and dropped to the ground, panning Gunnar across the expanse of glassy nothingness. For a long moment there was nothing but silence, the absolute, oppressive quiet of a tomb.

The pilot emerged behind him. The alien landscape gave Ferris the creeps. "Which way?"

None of them wanted to speak, as if daring to utter a word would shatter the miserable stillness and bring black memories rushing back to claim them. At last, Bagman gave a peculiar synthetic cough. "Huh. Nothing's changed."

"We need to find cover," said Rogue in a low, loaded voice.

"Quarter-klick to the north," Helm answered immediately, anticipating the GI's requirements. "A network of crevices. Some shallow nooks in there."

Rogue took off at a jog without looking to see if Ferris was following and the pilot charged after him, giving the pod one last farewell glance. In the distance, in the opposite direction, the plume of smoke from the shuttle coiled up into the clouds, a dark ribbon against an oil-stained sky.

The Quartz Zone was riddled with shallow craters and fissures where the fused surface was cracked and broken, and Rogue's unerring eye for defensive shelter quickly found them a surface cave where they could hide. Ferris sucked plastic-tasting water from a tube in his suit and watched the GI drop his gear.

"Bagman, dispense entrenching tool." The backpack complied and Rogue unfolded a memory-metal spade, walking out to the edge of the crevice. The GI slammed the blade of the tool into the glassy earth and began to dig.

"What's he doing?" Ferris asked.

"Burial detail," replied Helm.

Ferris saw the GI remove Zero's biochip and put it to one side. A sudden, icy realisation struck him. "Skev... This is it, isn't it? This is where you guys... Where you-"

"Died? Bought the farm? Copped it? Got scragged?" Gunnar said. "Yeah, more or less."

The pilot shook his head. "Is there any part of this damn planet that isn't somebody's war grave?"

Helm spoke again. "We're about twenty, maybe thirty klicks from the drop point." The artificial voice seemed distant now. "Mass capsule landing, it was. Seven ships, full compliment of pods. The Norts had been tipped off, see. They were waiting down here with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers."

"Coffin-breakers," Bagman broke in.

"Gunnar... He was hit first," Helm continued, and Ferris felt like the voices from the biochips were not really speaking to him; this was some kind of litany for the dead men, the unwritten memory of their shared trauma.

"I got out, soon as the pod touched down," said the mind in the rifle. "Hammered a hundred of those Kashans. Fed the bastards eighty-eights and gamma grenades like they was goin' out of style." Gunnar was silent for a moment. "Redball and Tagger, they were covering the flank, but then they were gone and I didn't see the Nort with the plasma sphere. Rogue tried to warn me... Next thing I know, I'm bleeding out right there on the glass."

"He put your chip in his rifle," said Ferris.

"My rifle!" Gunnar retorted. "It's my damned rifle." There was another pause. "I was ghosted but Rogue got me out... I wasn't the last, not by a long way."

Bagman began to speak, picking up the thread of the recollection. "We had no choice. We had to fall back, regroup, so anyone who was left formed up into skirmish units and we splintered. Figured we'd have a better chance of making it to pick-up that way."

"We got to the edge of the zone with five of us left in our team," added Helm. "Bag, Rogue and me, plus Joker and Cowboy. Scopes got popped by a buzzsaw mine on the way and there was nothing left of him. Then we ran into the Kashar Legion... They were sweeping up after the ambush, looking for survivors. They pinned us down in a crater and waited for us to use up our ammo. The map called it Strongpoint Siouxie, but it was just a hole in the ground."

"They didn't wait long, though." Bagman's tone was hollow. "They sent a drill probe in after us. I remember the heat... The smell, like overcooked rations. There was a split in my chest, you understand? Big enough to put my fist in." The chip made a low, guttural sound. "Nnnn. Then I woke up, woke up on silicon. Just like that."

Ferris found he couldn't look away from Rogue as the GI carefully placed the inert dog-chip in its tiny, shallow grave. "What... what about you, Helm?"

"He almost made it," said Gunnar, with a hint of sorrow in his words. "Joker finally got through to Milli-Com on the link and they sent down a chem-strike to screen us."

"Rogue and me took the alpha route," Helm began. "I don't know how we did it, but lady luck had us in the palm of her hand that night. We charged right over the Nort line and just kept on runnin'. Two days later we were on the Oxide Shore."

"No one else?"

"Just the two of us," said Helm.

"Four," insisted Bagman. "Four of us."

"Whatever," Helm became terse. "Anyway, long story short, we wade out into the Orange Sea to get to the shuttle and a bunch of Nort foils pop up and missile the boat..." The synth turned angry. "Those sneaky bastards, we never even got a chance to shoot back! Damn it, they knew! Every one of those Nort goons, they knew where we were every step of the way!"

"There was a traitor." Rogue entered the shelter. "A Souther general sold us out."

Ferris nodded. This part of the story he'd heard, the legend of the lone GI searching for vengeance. "You really think you're gonna find some clue, then? You reckon this Delta place has something to do with that guy?"

Rogue fixed him with a look that was razor-sharp and cold with malice. "We need information. We need to know."

SEVEN

HUNTER HUNTED

They travelled under cover of chem storms and nightfall, with Helm plotting erratic courses across the glass to avoid the footprints of orbital satellites. Rogue navigated by the dark disk of the Valhalla wormhole in the sky above them, the baleful black sun like the unblinking eye of an ancient war God. Ferris did his best to keep up, but the pace the GI maintained left him spent and panting. Rogue never chastised him for his unfitness, just stood by and waited for him to catch his breath before they moved off again.

By the end of the second day, Ferris began to wonder why the trooper didn't just leave him out here to fend for himself. If the circumstances were reversed, the pilot would have been hard pressed to find an excuse not to do otherwise. He was slowing the GI to a comparative crawl. Perhaps it was something in him, Ferris wondered, maybe a kind of genetic imperative wired into the soldier's vat-grown brain? Rogue had to have some programmed bias toward preserving the lives of civilian and allies, otherwise he would have left Ferris sitting in the escape pod and headed out alone.

He watched the GI's back as Rogue walked in front of him, the unchanging, almost mechanical gait of his stride the same as it had been all day. Rogue never seemed to tire and his biochip buddies were always awake, certainly. He had no doubt that Bagman's rearward facing sensors knew exactly where Ferris was at any moment.

They were close to cresting a ridge when Rogue came to a sudden halt and uttered a terse command. "Down!"

Ferris sank to his knees as Rogue crouched and crept forward to the lip of the silica bank. "Trouble?"

The pilot flattened himself and crawled up to the lee of a broken, glassy boulder. Laid out below the ridge was a shallow canyon, pitted with impact craters and broken stubs of rubble. This part of the Quartz Zone had been a settlement, back before the thermal bombardments, and there were some remains of the buildings that once stood there. Ferris squinted. He could see something moving, a handful of vague shapes.

"Southers," said Rogue. "Recon patrol by the looks of their gear."

Ferris could barely make out that the blobs were actually people. "You can see that from here? You got eyes like a hawk!"

"There's raptor DNA in us," said Bagman, popping open his manipulator. "A pinch of tiger as well." The arm produced a pair of field glasses. "Here, use these binox."

Ferris took them and studied the party of troops. Five men leapt into definition through the long-range lenses. "They're moving pretty fast. I wonder why?" The body language of the soldiers was tense and anxious.

Rogue scanned the landscape. "They're being chased."

"By who?" asked Ferris. "Can't see anyone else out-" His words caught in his throat as one of the Southern troopers suddenly spun around in place, a gush of blood exploding out of her chest. Seconds later the cracking report of a single las-round reached their ears.

The other troopers panicked and turned away from the direction they had been running in, instead making for the heart of the canyon and the ruins.

"Stupid," murmured Helm. "They're walking right into it."

Rogue answered Ferris's unspoken question. "There's a shooter out there, herding them deeper into the canyon. My guess is there'll be another rifleman waiting on the ridgeline over the ruins. One pushes them in, the other picks them off."

"Where's the shooter?"

Rogue pointed toward a tilted fragment of grey glass. "There, see him?"

Through the binox Ferris saw only the shadows cast by the rock; but then something detached itself from the darkness and moved swiftly forward. It had only gone a few steps when the man-shape paused and looked up. The pilot's heart froze in his chest as the figure looked directly at him.

Instantly, Ferris shrank into the cover of the boulder. "Did he see me?"

Rogue shook his head. "No, he's moving on."

The other man swallowed hard. The expressionless face he'd seen through the binoculars was chilling and alien. "He... he had green skin, no mask. Some kinda helmet over his eyes, his head..."

"Not a helmet," said Gunnar irritably. "It's dermal armour plating, fused to the skull. Thick enough to deflect a hotshot from anything less than close range."

Rogue's eyes narrowed. "It's a Nort Genetik Soldat. Our opposite numbers."

"Huh," added Helm. "Not like any kind I've seen before, though. He looks different, bigger."

"Must be the new improved model..." Bagman said dryly.

"You're not just gonna let those men get killed off one by one, are you?"