Blood Relative (29 page)

Schrader watched, her thin, purple lips pulling back into a cold smile.

SEVENTEEN

IMPACT

"Come on, come on!" Ferris said to the air. "What am I running here, a pleasure cruise?"

The pilot's hands danced across the controls of the Nort transport shuttle and he was rewarded with green lights on all systems. Just like every incident of Ferris's perverse luck, after they'd ditched the short-range hopper Purcell had found a fully fuelled and flight-ready strato-bird on its launch cradle. He suspected that some senior officer on the base had ordered the auto-teks to prep the thing for launch when everything started going wrong, but the poor bastard had never made it through the legions of freaks turning Delta into an abattoir.

The shuttle's cargo bay had a staff car and some skimmers on board, and Ferris wasted no time in releasing them through the drop ramp to make some space. Even as he ran the power-up sequence he could see figures approaching from the prison levels. He'd almost turned the automatic guns on them before Zeke had called out "Friendlies!"

Ferris's hand dropped to the throttle and he toggled the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, Freedom Spaceways flight one-oh-one is ready for blast-off!"

"Wait," Purcell's voice crackled, ignoring his flippant comment. "We're still packin' them in."

He glanced at the ship's sensor grid and saw blurry readings emanating from the upper atmosphere that looked suspiciously like missile re-entry tracks. "I hate to be pushy, but how much longer? I see incoming warheads, closing fast."

He heard Zeke yell over the noise of the idling engines. "We go when we're full and not before!"

The floor of the chamber came up to meet him and Rogue sprawled there, his combat knife lost to his nerveless fingers. His head was full of barbed wire, burning razors slashing at the inside of his skull. The GI tried to reach a hand toward the wall of salvaged biochips above him, as if his long-dead brethren might help him. The keening throb of the electromag pulse underscored everything, wailing like a siren made of blades.

The slivers of silicon and protein matrix in the life support web were coming apart, catching fire and sparking. From the speakers of every synth came a death scream, a chorus of absolute agony as the minds of the dead men were overloaded with radiation. What little of their personalities remained intact from the massacre, the tiny broken fragments of self that still inhabited the darkest corners of the dog-chips, were boiled in a sea of radiation. Naked against the punishing onslaught, Rogue's comrades died by horrific, tortured degrees, their consciousness bleeding out.

"Killing... them..." He forced the words out of his mouth. "Stop..."

Schrader cocked her head to watch Rogue writhing on the floor, the thin streams of drool seeping from his mouth, the sapphire blood tricking from his nostrils. "How does it feel to die like this, trooper?" For a moment, she was her old self again, the analytical and calculating scientist. "I took care to ensure that the electromagnetic pulse frequency was exactly tuned to affect biochip circuitry. But you won't perish anywhere near as quickly as your old friends here," Schrader indicated the ruined chips. "Your engram matrix is buried deep inside the cortex, still wired into your primitive grey matter. Your death will be much more painful." She brushed a lock of blonde hair from her eyes and it fell out in a clump, showing a patch of blue-white scalp below; the woman was still mutating and changing. With every moment that passed she was less human and more hybrid. "I've seen your kind a thousand times," she whispered, "on Ararat, Ixion, Horst, Tango Urilla... And all of you eventually learn the same lesson; you are all fodder for the cannon."

Rogue's muscles convulsed as conflicting signals from his brain sent shocks through his torso, his limbs. At so close a range and so large a dosage, the energy pulse induced an epileptic state in the GI. The Southers called such weapons "Haywire" bombs.

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 body 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.