Blood Relative (26 page)

The sailor's face fell as he met Rogue's wolfish gaze. The Souther looked away, his will to protest vanishing like vapour.

"There's still another hopper out there," Gunnar's synth was clear and direct. "It must have put down somewhere nearby."

"We can find it," added Helm.

"We take out the pilot and the flyer is ours," finished Bagman.

Zeke watched the GI carefully; the clone soldier seemed different now, harder and more focussed. "If we stay low, we could make for allied lines," said the sergeant.

Rogue shook his head. "We're not going to run."

"He's right," said Ferris, flinching as another dart of pain ran through his wound. "This place is laced with sensors. The moment Schrader realises that we've taken the hopper, we'll have a dozen rad-seekers up our tailpipe and boom! Titanium rain. We'd never get out of the test range alive."

"Oh, this I gotta hear," Purcell said. "So what's your suggestion then, Trooper?"

"There's gotta be a hundred or more prisoners of war still in Domain Delta, long-range atmocraft too. We go back and get them out and then everybody leaves."

"And what about the ice queen?" Sanchez said. "Schrader isn't going to let you steal her toys just like that."

"I'll handle Schrader. We got unfinished business."

Zeke gave a slow nod. "I'm in."

"Guess I am too," added Ferris.

"You're out of your mind!" said the sailor. "We go back there, we're dead for sure!"

Zeke rounded on the Souther. "Who's yellow now?" he demanded. "You were in the dome longer than us, you know what it's like in there. You think you'll be able to sleep at night knowing you left the rest of those poor buggers behind?"

The sailor went pale as the sergeant's words hit home. "Ah, shit."

Rogue scanned the motley group. "Gather all the weapons and kit you can find in the wreck and divide them up between you. We're taking out Domain Delta once and for all."

Volks approached the central dais in the command centre with trepidation, clasping the digi-pad in one hand. Kolonel-Doktor Schrader was silent and unmoving, her hands placed flat on her control console, her eyes never leaving the projected wall map of the test range. Numbers and symbols marched across the display as the concealed sensor pods buried in the dirt attempted to provide a coherent picture of the area. Volks could only give out probabilities on what was happening inside the battleground.

Schrader remained rigid, locked in place like a statue as Volks came forward. The kapten knew her moods better than any man in the dome, but even he could not predict the caprice of her nature. He was always on edge around her; she was cold toward him one moment, solicitous the next. Volks hated himself for it, but he feared her as much as he desired her.

He had expected Schrader to explode with rage when the disruption signal reappeared but she had said nothing, watching the flickering blips that may or may not have been the whereabouts of her Soldats and their prey. He cleared his throat self-consciously. "Kolonel, hopper one has returned safely, and the battle computer appears to indicate that hopper three has made a landing." She did not speak or even acknowledge his presence. Volks continued. "The observers report that the second flyer seems to have suffered some kind of malfunction. It crashed in sector five, close to the tangler pits."

"I underestimated him," she said quietly. "That was an error on my part."

Volks glanced at the digi-pad where the raw data from the range sensors was scrolling by. "Audio trackers registered explosions congruent to multiple grenade detonations and sporadic weapons fire in several locations." He paused, fearing her reaction. "The... jamming field prevents an accurate reading of the G-Soldat's med-status locators."

"They're dead," she announced. "He killed them. He truly is the finest of his breed. The ultimate survivor." The woman spoke as if she were giving a soliloquy, speaking alone to an empty room.

The Nort blinked in surprise. "Kolonel, that cannot be. Three units, nine newly decanted G-Soldats against one old-model GI... The odds of the Rogue Trooper's survival are practically zero."

Schrader smiled ruefully. "Now it is you that underestimates him." She turned and Volks saw emotion in her eyes. "You were correct, Johann. I should have listened to you. I should have terminated him when I had the chance." She reached out a hand and tenderly stroked his face. "After all I've done to you, you still put my welfare before yours."

Volks's mouth worked but no words came out. He had no frame of reference to deal with this new aspect of the woman, no way to understand the real Lisle Schrader.

Her hand dropped away. "Rogue is coming here, Johann. He's coming to destroy my work."

"I won't allow-"

"I am going to take steps," Schrader spoke over him, pushing past. "I have allowed myself to become distracted. The time has come to take my work to the next level." She left Volks standing there as she made her way to the elevator bank.

"Kolonel!" he called, suddenly unsure of what he should do.

She granted him a brief, real smile. "You've been very loyal, Johann. I'm sorry it has to end this way... But there's no other alternative, you see?"

The lift doors closed on her and Volks felt a sickening sensation in his stomach. For the first time, the officer truly understood that the woman he loved was utterly and completely insane.

"Unit three to Delta, respond." The Nort pilot tapped the communicator inside his chem-suit, in the vain hope that it might improve his signal reception; nothing but jammer-laden static greeted him. "Domain Delta, do you read? This is hopper three requesting status check, over."

He cursed and returned to the radio, fiddling with the frequency selector, searching fruitlessly for a channel that was less garbled than the others. As his orders had stated, the pilot had put down his aircraft at the edge of the target zone and waited for instructions. He was to await the return of the G-Soldat hunters with the body of the Souther Genetik Infantryman, but the orders never specified how long he had to wait. The grav-engines hummed in standby mode, ready at a moment's notice to lift the hopper back into the sky. The pilot felt cramped and uncomfortable, fidgeting in his seat. To be parked here, as a static target on the ground, was against every bit of his training. Perhaps, if it had been any other commanding officer giving his orders, the Nort might have risked showing a little initiative. He wouldn't dare buck the kolonel-doktor's commands, though... Other men in his unit had done so and found themselves flung into the prison, or worse, the labs.

A glimmer of movement brought his attention from the console and he looked up to see a knot of shabby figures coming out of cover toward the hopper. The Nort pilot's hand reflexively darted towards the G-button but then a laser bolt entered his skull through the middle of his forehead and flash-boiled the meat of his brain.

Ferris ducked reflexively as the whine of the las-round came to his ears, despite the fact that the sound of the beam's passage arrived instants after the shot had been fired; had the bolt been meant for him, he would never have heard it coming. "Whoa," he said, covering his twitch.

Zeke gave an appreciative nod. "He's got a dead eye, I'll say that for the trooper. Put that kill shot right through the cockpit plexi and on the bull."

"That's a GI for you," Purcell gibed. "Best money can buy."

Behind them, Rogue stepped out from behind the broken spar of wreckage he had used for a makeshift firing stand and approached. "Your show now, Ferris. Get us in the air."

"Copy that," said the pilot, flipping open the gull-wing door to the cockpit. The Nort dangled at an odd angle, held in his seat by acceleration straps. Gingerly, Ferris began to unlatch the corpse. The dead man's head lolled like a bag of thick fluid; Rogue's shot had popped open the pilot's skull with internal pressure from the liquefied brain matter.

The Southers piled aboard the hopper in a sullen mob, Sanchez automatically looting the craft's interior for anything of use. Purcell positioned herself near a pop-up pintle gun and checked the ammunition. Ferris took the pilot's position and revved the engines. "Good to go!" he shouted over the sound of the thrusters. Back in the saddle again, it was easier to ignore the slow burn from his leg wound.

Rogue was the last to embark, scanning the ground one last time. He turned his back to step into the hopper cabin and in that second a green shape exploded out from under a concealed pit, a camu-cape flickering as it flew away in the downwash.

Ferris stamped on the rudder, yawing the flyer around, but he was too slow. The G-Soldat slammed into the hull of the ship, striking at the GI with a bloody stump, his intact hand clawing a tear in the metal.

"This creep won't stay dead!" Bagman snarled.

The ground fell away from the aircraft as Ferris poured power to the throttles. For one long moment, Rogue teetered on the lip of the cabin door; the Soldat shouldered its way into the cabin, wrestling with the GI. In the cramped interior, it was like a knife fight inside a phone booth.

He was too close to shoot. Rogue spun in place and brought Gunnar down on the Soldat's face, the butt of the rifle breaking the reinforced bones in its jaw. A gun discharged; Sanchez fired wildly, the bullet ricocheting off the hull. The Soldat's stump hit Rogue again, the club of meat ringing his skull like a bell. Dimly, he heard Ferris shout something over the scream of rushing air.

"Hang on!" The hopper's fuselage moaned as the pilot made a vicious turn, standing the flyer on one stubby wing. Rogue saw the opportunity and took it, one hand gripping a restraint harness to hold him steady. He kicked out with both feet and hit the Soldat in the chest. The Nort GI lost his grip and fell away, tumbling over and over. Rogue watched him drop until he hit the ground in a heap of broken angles.

With effort, Rogue hauled himself into a seat. "Take us in," he ordered.

The man-shapes in the holding cells knew something was wrong; they could tell it from the way that Schrader stalked past them, an unwavering purpose in her eyes. She did not spare them a glance and the scientist passed the biochip chamber and entered the sub-level's main lab. From a concealed flesh-pocket of artificially cultured skin, Schrader removed a needle-like key, protein-chain encoded to her personal DNA profile. The tiny spike fitted into a socket on the lab's central control panel, activating a sequence of remote commands that once given, could not be countermanded.

In a way, it was liberating. Perhaps, after so long down here in the depths of the dome, labouring over microscopes and gene-modules, Schrader had lost sight of what she was truly trying to achieve. It was, after all, only the greatest scientific minds who had the will to take their research beyond the realms of possibility and into rockcrete reality. It was time to redress the balance; time to take the last step.

She glanced at the synthesiser pod where the viral clades were birthing and swarming, hungry for release. "Very soon," she promised them. "First I must discard everything inconsequential."

A prompt on the console offered her a single question. Commit? Yes/No?

"Yes," she told it.

In the cages, Schrader's legions of mistakes howled and moaned as the hatches that held them prisoner dropped away. Glass panels retracted into the wall and shuttered doors that had never been opened yawned. Watery light filtered down from the levels above, beckoning them.

Then it began. The ultrasonic pulses drove the mutants out and up from the sub-levels. The half-human test subjects, the Soldat rejects - the things that defied any kind of classification with their malformed bodies and grotesque faces - all of them took their new freedom with wild fervour; but there was something more they wanted, another motive that forced them forward.

They wanted revenge. They wanted it badly. They took it in bloody screaming ruin from everything they came across.

Volks had seen war; he had seen death and brutality, been close enough to taste the stench of it through his oxy-mask. He had been there the night the GIs died in the Quartz Zone, watched his men rip their lander pods from the sky with rockets. He remembered the indigo slick of blood across the glass. Volks had never admitted it to anyone else, but something inside him had broken there in the shimmering wasteland. Even as his army cut their victory from GI flesh, Volks had tasted a fear of something he had never encountered before. Retribution.

Kapten Volks had known that one day it would come. One day, he would pay for standing there, ankle deep in the dead, turning a traitor's betrayal into a massacre that would live in infamy long after Nu Earth was dust.

His fears were there for him on the monitors of the command centre. Every display from the dome's internal security cameras showed the same thing, Nort soldiers in frantic retreat, guns chattering into shifting hulks of blue-green flesh. Creatures with too many fingers on their hands ripped men into shreds; they took up dead men's guns and destroyed anything that moved. Volks could see that the butcher's bill was being paid in full.

She had brought this to bear. It was so clear, now that it was too late for him to prevent it. He had meant no more to Schrader than the microbes that swarmed in her Petri dishes. Volks, and everyone who served her will in Domain Delta, were nothing but tools and now she was disposing of them, using her errors to do the job for her. He slumped against the panel. In all his life, he had never known a sense of defeat so powerful and so sure as what he felt now. Johann Volks owed this failure to himself, his vanity and his obsession for Schrader.

All about him, men were panicking, some of them fleeing their posts, others watching with frozen horror the unfolding mayhem around the complex. Schrader had been careful to pick senior officers with certain character flaws for her staff; they were so much easier to manipulate. The command centre was a hard point, well protected in comparison with the rest of Delta, but it was not impregnable. Tier by tier, corridor by corridor, the tide of death was closing in.