Blood Relative (12 page)

Rogue dropped into cover. "Bagman, gimme the walkie-talkie." The GI passed the hand-held radio to Ferris. "Take this. Sing out if things start to get hairy."

"Wh-what are you gonna do?" the pilot stammered.

The GI pointed. "I'll double-time it around the lip of the canyon, see if I can't get behind the second shooter and take him out. Reckon he's in the busted tower to the west."

"How can you be sure?"

"It's where I would be, the best vantage point, good fields of fire. You head down the ridge, follow that Nort GI, but stay out of his way."

"Copy..." Ferris gulped.

"Eh," grunted Gunnar. "We just gonna leave flyboy alone? If tall, green and handsome down there gets hold of him, he'll sing like a synthi-vox!"

Rogue shoved his rifle into Ferris's hands. "Which is why you're going to keep him out of trouble." Before Gunnar could protest, Rogue was sprinting away, vanishing into the dark.

Ferris watched him go, staggered by the GI's speed at a full run. He gingerly raised the rifle. "Uh... So, where's your safety catch?"

"Inside the barrel," Gunnar growled. "Why don't you take a look down it and see?"

"Never mind," said the pilot, and he carefully turned the gun's muzzle away before moving off over the ridge.

"A ghost," said Johnson. "It's a ghost! Those Godless abortions, they're phantoms!" In his exertion, the Souther soldier was steaming up the inside of his faceplate.

To his right, Zeke threw him a sharp look. "Knock it off, son. You're wasting oxy panicking."

"Yeah, the sarge is right," added Ruiz, hefting the Blowpipe launcher in his hands. "You keep babblin' and you'll end up ventilated like Taylor back there!"

"She owed me money, skev it!" Purcell said in a snarl. "This is number ten."

Zeke raised a balled fist, halting them all. "Quiet, all of you!" The veteran paused, scanning the canyon. "We gotta find high ground before these Norty freaks flank us."

"Maybe... maybe they already did..." mumbled Johnson.

Purcell stepped closer to Zeke and lowered her voice. "Sarge, this don't feel right. We're walking into an ambush, I can taste it."

The woman's words made the sergeant hesitate; Purcell was a good soldier with excellent instincts, which was what had kept her alive on Nu Earth so far. He glanced around. The wind moaned through the canyon, disturbing drifts of mirror-bright fines where they pooled around the ruins. Zeke's heart hammered in his chest. It seemed like they had been running for days, but it was only hours since things had started to fall apart. The patrol was supposed to have taken them up and away from their unit for a standard reconnaissance sweep, but then the las-fire had come out of nowhere and killed three men in as many seconds, the lieutenant among them. Taylor had only survived because the radio backpack had absorbed the shot meant for her, but now she was gone too and with no communications and not a damn clue as to where they were, the remnants of Zeke's squad were running out of luck. They needed to hole up, try to find their location on the digi-map and return to their unit; but those green monstrosities that had jumped them never slowed. He gave an involuntary shudder. The dead eyes, that bony mask for a face... Whatever the Norts had bred out here, it was a walking horror show.

"Sarge?" Purcell repeated, shaking him out of his reverie.

He pointed to a long, flat piece of wall. "There. Get up and dig in. That's an order!"

She gave him a disgusted look, but obeyed.

G-Soldat NG/442-Sigma had not moved for the past twenty minutes. He was well concealed in the ring of smashed bricks that at one time had been a church's bell tower. The barrel of his weapon, a Mowzer K-Type Stalker, protruded slightly from the cover of his ash-coloured camu-cape. The mimetic camouflage threads in the flexible material matched perfectly to the optical register of the surrounding stones, and with the thickness of his plastiform epidermis hiding 442-Sigma's body heat, there was nothing to alert the Souther prey to his presence. Sigma's designated squad mate for this mission, G-Soldat NG/181-Beta, had already scored two kills on this training sortie and he was eager to claim some for himself.

There was little room for any other kind of emotion inside Sigma's mind. Almost everything but hate and fear had been excised from his intellect; what could be deducted by selective gene-engineering, invasive brain surgery and impulse response blocks was cut away, the rest suppressed and manipulated by chemo-psychological conditioning. G-Soldat NG/442-Sigma understood that he was a weapon, an intelligent field munition with one mission: to kill the enemy.

And yet, deep, deep inside the regimented, programmed core of the Nort GI's psyche there was a tiny, bone-deep centre of aggression and need that craved violence. Had such a thing been part of his make-up, Sigma might have recognised the almost sexual anticipation of murder bubbling away under his iron façade.

The four remaining Southers were well inside his kill zone now and they bobbed up the shallow hill toward him, awkward and afraid as they looked desperately for any signs of enemy activity. Sigma understood fear; it ruled him. Fear of her. Fear that he would earn her displeasure and fail, fear that an error on his part would return him once more to the debriefing chambers where additional, painful programming was provided to the Soldats who did not meet the Kolonel-Doktor's stringent mandates. He elected to wait a little longer, so that the Souther troopers would not be able to scatter too far when the moment came to fire. He flexed the finger on the Mowzer's trigger in preparation, then he heard the crunch of boots on glass behind him.

G-Soldat NG/181-Beta would not have dared to approach from the rear, which left only one possibility. The Nort Genetik Soldat tensed and with a grimace of annoyance, he exploded out of cover. The camu-cape fluttered away as he turned to face his new adversary.

Rogue hadn't expected the Nort GI to be so fast - the last ones he fought had been sluggish in comparison - and it almost took him off guard. He leapt without thinking, colliding bodily with the enemy soldier. The fractal-edged combat knife in his right hand sank into the G-Soldat's breast to the hilt as they came together, but the Nort seemed utterly unaware of the wound. The dull white crest of bone on his armoured skull nodded forward and butted Rogue hard on the helmet.

"ZZzzt!" spat Helm, the impact rattling his circuitry.

Sigma recognised the form of the Southern gene-trooper automatically; the profiles of this inferior example of his kind had been given to him among the endless indoctrination sessions of his in-vitro training. The prospect of killing a GI kindled the murder-lust in him a little higher and Sigma forgot about the human soldiers for a moment. They were locked for long seconds, the Stalker rifle held between them like a quarterstaff, blue and green hands gripping it, struggling for command of the weapon. Rogue gave a savage tug and in return Sigma pulled the trigger. The shot blazed past Rogue's face, but the nictitating membranes over his eyes cut away any hope of dazzling him.

Down in the canyon, the laser blast echoed through the air and Zeke shouted out an order. "Scatter!"

Ruiz rolled into cover, popping up with the blunt muzzle of the Blowpipe at the ready. "Where? Anyone see the flash?"

"Above..." began Johnson, waving his hand. "I think I saw something."

"In front and behind?" said Purcell, her head whipping back and forth. "Skev! I told you this was a set-up, Sarge!"

Zeke frowned, and as if to underline his mistake and prove Purcell right, a couple of las-rounds streaked through the air from the opposite direction. The Nort who had killed Taylor was still with them, dogging them into the canyon. The sergeant would have spat in self-disgust if he hadn't had a hood on; how could he have been so damned stupid? He'd led his men right into a meat grinder.

Grimly, Zeke worked the battery-cartridge slide on his gun and checked the charge. "Pop smoke! Let's make this bugger work for it!"

G-Soldat NG/181-Beta recognised the report of the Mowzer and halted. Something wasn't running according to their tactical plan; it was too soon for 442-Sigma to start shooting the Southers. Sighting through the tele-optics of his own weapon, Beta considered the possibilities. Clearly, there was a third factor in this skirmish that neither of them had accounted for. The Nort gene-trooper reconsidered the moment as he had moved from cover after killing the woman. For just the smallest of instants, 181-Beta had seen what appeared to be movement at the top of the ridgeline. Had there been a third Soldat in their unit, he would have directed him to investigate, but with only Sigma and himself there had been no opportunity. Beta decided that the motion was likely starlight twinkling off glass fragments and nothing more; now he revised his conclusion and weighed the options. If Sigma had engaged a new target, Beta was potentially exposed. That was not an acceptable outcome.

The clone soldier peered into the rolling wall of smoke emerging from the handful of grenades tossed out by the Southers, looking for something to kill. The metallic mist was excellent for baffling automatic sensors, but the organic brain of a living sniper could interpret things no machine ever could. Beta saw a shape change aspect through the smoke and opened fire.

Half-out of his cover, Ruiz yelled in fright as a beam passed within a hand-span of his helmet and another one shrieked off the barrel of the Blowpipe. He dropped to a crouch, the heavy launcher knocked from his fingers.

Beta had his range now, even if he couldn't see him exactly, and his gunsight mind began to estimate the position and angle that the Souther would most likely adopt. He fired a few more probing rounds into the murk. The Soldat did not need to see his target to kill it.

"Do you even know how to use a weapon?" Gunnar asked angrily. "It's a simple interface, pinky, just point and click. Got it?"

"Quit calling me names," Ferris replied in a blunt whisper. "I'm new to this footslogger stuff."

"I'll say. Hold up here and bring me to eye-level."

The pilot did as the gun demanded. "What am I looking for?"

"Muzzle flash." The overlaid multi-spectral display from the rifle's triad optics showed cold stony rubble and grey swathes of smoke, then suddenly a flickering jag of yellow lightning to the right of the picture. "There!" Gunnar growled. "Hold me steady."

Ferris let the barrel dip toward the ground. "Wait, you don't know if that's a Nort or a Souther-"

"Aim me!" Gunnar snapped. "You ain't making the choice here, pal!"

"My finger's on the trigger!" he replied.

"No, it ain't," said the rifle.

Ferris let out a yelp of shock as Gunnar unleashed a full-auto surge of fire into the distance, the las-beams skipping off the glass and hissing through the air. The recoil of the rounds set him back on his heels. "Holy crap."

Out in the smoke, there was the distinctive sizzle of cooking meat as a shot struck bare flesh.

Rogue fought to keep the Nort GI from choking the life out of him; the G-Soldat was as strong as a mek-bull. Automatically he fell into pre-determined combat patterns drilled into him from his youth; Rogue struck out with steely fingers, performing nerve strikes that would have crippled a normal human. The enemy trooper let out painful grunts but gave no other signs of injury. The Nort GI's plastiflesh skin felt uncannily like Rogue's own. The armoured dome of bone-like matter over the Nort's head loomed, filling Rogue's vision; this new variety of Soldat was a lot tougher than he looked.

The GI's hand flapped over the hilt of his combat knife where it remained buried in the Nort's chest and Rogue grabbed on to it. He gave the blade a forceful twist, letting the weapon open up the enemy soldier's wound. Somewhere in the Soldat's chest cavity were the decentralised chambers of his heart, much as they were in Rogue's, and he slashed the knife in drastic arcs as emerald blood shot out like small geysers. The Nort bio-engineers had done their work well; the G-Soldats had ribcages like a tight hex-grid, protecting the more vulnerable organs within.

Sigma felt no agony from the savage wound. A neural shunt conditioned by his creators instantly diverted all impulses from pain receptors, flooding his brain with combat strength endorphins. In such a state, he would be able to march for days on bloody stumps, or beat someone to death with his own severed limb before the eventual fluid loss wore him down.

Rogue saw the green-skinned warrior's eyes widen with the flush of the neurochemicals; he knew the sensation from personal experience. Vision fogging, he tried a last ditch attack and went for the soldat's throat. The GI's teeth bit into the Nort's flesh and tore a lump of muscle away with them.

Sigma dropped Rogue as he clasped at his neck, trying to hold onto the ragged flap of skin, and as he did so, the infantryman spun away and landed hard on the ground. Sigma spat out a mouthful of thick, glutinous fluids. Dimly, Rogue was aware of Helm and Bagman speaking, but their voices shot out like hollow echoes. He shook off the sluggish effects of the soldat's attack. Bagman's arm was pressing something into his hand, a pistol-shaped device.

"Get him!" Bagman cried. "Head shot!"

Rogue realised what the object was just as the enemy GI dived at him, an animal roar escaping from its lips. He brought up the device and caught the Nort in the face. Rogue pressed the coiled flexsteel bit of the hand-drill into the only weak spot on the soldat's head - its eyes - and forced the delicate optical jelly into the Nort's forebrain. Instantly, Sigma tried to pull back, but Rogue caught him in a death grip and rammed the drill deep into his skull.

The enemy trooper made a peculiar, juddering cry and went slack, limbs jerking and twisting as its brain misfired. Rogue let the Soldat slip to the ground and watched carefully as it slowly died.

"A drill?" Helm was sour. "Way to improvise, Bag."

"First thing that came to hand," said the backpack biochip.

"Quiet, both of you." Rogue removed the tool with a pop of wet flesh and then recovered his combat knife. He gave the G-Soldat a brief once-over, then made a couple of quick, deep cuts that severed the Nort's main arteries in its neck. In seconds, G-Soldat NG/442-Sigma had ceased to function, lying in shallow pool of its own synthetic blood.