Blood Relative (7 page)

The Diablo Springs ran on geological clockwork, regular surge tides of hot, metallic waters bubbling up and then receding as Nu Earth's tectonic plates were massaged by the gravity tides of its moons and the distant energies of the Valhalla wormhole. Trager had known the tidal pattern and used it against the Souther sappers; now Rogue returned the favour, but with a new twist.

The water rose, lapping up at the walls of the dead sub-train tunnels, filling the tubeways with yellowed liquid. Soon, acrid moisture licked at the tip of a hydro sensor salvaged from a broken geoscanner module and a switch was tripped. The thin detonator rod spat sparks into the firing charge, chain-reacting. The block of C9 explosive flashed, puncturing the tank; suddenly the volatile shuttle fuel - a thick, tarry slurry in its inert state - was burning in one brilliant instant. Everything in its vicinity was instantly reduced to a ball of gas, stone and metal, vaporising and collapsing dozens of the ferrocrete pylons that were the foundations of the city stadium.

Tonnes of earth sank into the sulphurous floodwaters, displacing and choking the smaller tributary tunnels, and with nowhere else to go, the boiling surge from the toxic springs blew upward into San Diablo's streets, punching through the basements of buildings and ripping open the stadium plaza.

Gushes of murky liquid burst forth and engulfed Nort soldiers and vehicles alike, knocking them over and flattening them with caustic waves. Troopers used to the protection of their chem-suits from Nu Earth's toxins found the thin plastimesh to be no match for the boiling acids and they were cooked inside their war gear. Streams of the floodwater cut into the sealed corridors of the stadium interior, spurting out of fresh cracks in the ferrocrete like liquid knives. The water rose and chaos came with it.

Rogue forced his way through the rising tide in big, splashing steps, sparing only the occasional las-round for Nort troopers who were able enough to defend themselves. The majority of the enemy were far too occupied with more important things, like trying to breathe, to concern themselves with the two GIs in their midst.

Zero was having difficulty matching Rogue's pace, so the infantryman kept stopping to bring his fellow soldier along, guiding him through corridors choked with corpses floating in chest-high water. "Come on, brother. Just a little further."

Zero gave a laboured nod and Rogue frowned; he couldn't begin to imagine the hell that the other GI had been through at the hands of his Nort interrogators, and he felt a sting of guilt. In a way, he was responsible - the enemy believed that Zero was Rogue and undoubtedly they had tried to tear a confession from him for all the Norts that he had sent to their graves. He imagined Zero in that cramped cell, suffering intolerable agony as they beat and burned him, unable to answer the demands of his captors.

There was a distant, higher part of Rogue's tactical mind that still marvelled at the sight of another living, breathing Genetic Infantryman. It had been so long since the killings at the Quartz Zone - somewhere along the way he had become used to the idea that he was the last of his kind - the sole survivor of an artificially created species. If Zero was still alive, could there be more? What if there were other survivors out there, other Rogues?

He shook the thought away with a sharp turn of his head. No time to think about that now, he told himself. They still had to make it to the shuttle.

The entrance atrium had been turned into a seething pool of coarse, bubbling water, and the infantrymen half-swam, half-waded across the open area and into the flooded city streets. There were corpses as far they could see as well as great floating drifts of debris. Men were desperately scaling the exteriors of abandoned towers to escape the churn of the corrosive rivers. Shots cut into the torrents around the two troopers, slicing down from a rifleman in a high vantage point.

"Shooter, three o'clock high!" called Helm.

"Mark him," Rogue replied, and turned, bringing Gunnar to bear. Through the GI rifle's optics, Rogue saw the outlined heat-blob of a man on the thermographic scope. He squeezed the trigger and a red-orange laser light shot across the brickwork to flush the Nort out. The rifleman bolted from his cover, a blur through the sight scope, and abruptly came apart in a storm of crimson. Rogue's gaze flicked to his side to see that Zero had taken the kill shot himself, ripping into the Nort with the very same make of weapon that the enemy trooper had used on them. The rifleman's shredded corpse fell out of his sniper nest and landed in the water with a heavy splash.

Zero took a laboured breath. The effort of the escape was getting to him and they were a long way short. He caught Rogue looking at him and managed a quizzical jut of the chin. "Your show, Rogue. Where now?"

"Bagman, dispense macro-raft."

With a click, the backpack's servo arm extended, clasping a fat grey packet. "Uh, Rogue. This thing's Nort-issue junk. You sure it's gonna work?"

The GI grabbed the plastic pack and tore it open, revealing a striped pull-cord. "Unless you got a couple of surfboards in there, this is the only option." Rogue gave the cord a tug, and the packet hissed back at him, inflating.

"Where'd you get that?" Zero asked.

"Salvage from Harpo's Ferry. Thought it might come in useful." The macro-raft unfolded, memory-plastic bladders opening up to full size. The compact brick of flexible material transformed into a small boat, a shallow canoe big enough for two at a pinch. "Come on. We're gonna ride the flood right out of here."

"You thought of everything," Zero grunted.

Rogue hauled himself into the raft and extended a hand. "Tactics, improvisation, execution," he said, recalling the combat litany the Genies had drilled into them the moment they stepped from the breeder tubes. "That's how they made us."

"Right." With effort, Zero scrambled over the gunwale and Rogue grabbed his arm to pull him in. His fingers clamped around Zero's forearm and he felt atrophied, weak flesh there, not the hard muscle of a GI's normal physique. The other trooper almost fell into the boat, face-first. Rogue's eyes automatically caught sight of something anomalous on the back of Zero's neck, a slight distension like a malignant growth on the left side, just under the base of the skull. He hesitated; GIs knew their own physiology as well as any corpsman - there were no medics in the GI platoons, but every one of them had the knowledge to repair even the most serious of wounds and the surgical skill to operate on one another. It was a necessary talent, and along with all his fellow soldiers, Rogue had been trained to use a las-scalpel to open the cerebellum of a dying compatriot and recover the biochip that lay wired into the rubbery meat of a GI cortex. The lump on Zero's neck was in exactly that spot, something flat and bony just beneath the skin.

Helm's words in the cave returned to him. This was a trap; Zero was some sort of Trojan horse, part of a complex scheme to capture the Rogue Trooper. He didn't want to believe that.

Zero turned over and glanced around, meeting Rogue's gaze. "Let's go."

Rogue searched the other trooper's blank yellow eyes for a moment, looking for the merest hint of deception; he found nothing.

"Rogue?" said Helm. "Tide's at the maximum now. The flood's gonna start ebbing from this point onward."

The GI turned away and activated the single-use chemical squirt-jet motor in the raft's keel. "We're going." The inflatable surged forward at high speed, cutting a path into the drowning city. He dropped into a low prone position along the line of the boat and propped Gunnar on the bow. "Bagman, keep a watch on my six."

"Check," came the reply from the biochip. It was only one word, but after so long in each other's company, Rogue knew that Bagman had instantly understood the meaning of the order. If Zero suddenly turned on him, he'd be warned; but what he would do if that happened, he wasn't really sure.

Trager couldn't feel anything below his waist. He slapped at the inert flesh of his legs, but it was like touching raw, dead meat. He swore an oath that dated back to the first Great War and spat. The Brigadier fumbled at a communicator and shouted into it. "The Genetik Infantryman has broken out... There are two! Intercept and terminate them both!"

He listened for a confirmation of his order, but only static replied. Trager discarded the unit and tried to pull himself up. Nearby, the broken chassis of the android reporter was stuttering to itself, some fractured piece of programming repeating a string of words over and over. The simulant was stuttering and singing in a sultry, honeyed synth, dragging itself across the floor to where one of its perfectly-proportioned arms was lying, severed by las-fire in the breakout. "Fuh. Fuh. Falling apart again," she chimed, "Wh-what am I to do?"

Trager's nerve broke. "Be silent, you clockwork moron!" He attempted to push himself off the floor and as his hands touched the ferrocrete he felt a building vibration there, resonating into his bones. "Verkammt..." The Nort officer slid his bulk to the hatch and slammed the heel of his hand on the lock control.

The door juddered open, and in that moment he realised that he had killed himself; the rumbling in the floor was the rush of floodwater thudding against the corridor walls outside. Brigadier Trager screamed as a wall of acid swamped the chamber, submerging him, the robot and the dead troopers in stinking yellow water. Trager's lungs filled with burning, corrosive sulphates, drowning him in the milky fluids as DeeTrick's stammering final performance sang him into oblivion.

"Ferris."

The pilot jerked as the voice growled in his headset. He'd felt the rumble as the floods blew open the roadways just minutes earlier and with growing trepidation Ferris had watched the waters lapping around the landing legs of the strato-shuttle. He was convinced that the GI had done something wrong and got himself killed, and for the fourth time in as many minutes he'd been thinking of cutting his losses and leaving. "Whoa, you made it?"

"We're coming to you. Get the ship warmed up and ready to lift." There was a crackling sound in the background.

"Copy that." The noise came again over the open channel, strident and very close. "You got trouble?"

"Nothing we can't handle. Be ready." The GI's voice cut off sharply.

"Okay," Ferris said to the empty cockpit. "Point of no return, then. Do I fly blue-boy and his talkative gear outta here, or do I cut and run?" His hand hovered over the thruster controls as he turned over the choice in his mind.

Thick anti-vehicle rounds spattered off the surface of the flooded street and rocked the macro-raft from side to side. Rogue coiled a length of pull-cord around one fist and used it to keep himself steady as he fired Gunnar with his other hand, sending arcs of las-fire into the air. His target jinked easily, the beams cutting through empty air. The Nort hopper had come out of nowhere, emerging from behind the top of a housing block like a huge and irate hornet. It ducked and wove along the canyon of the city street, null-grav engines humming with raw power. There were clusters of armour-piercing rockets in fat drums on the hopper's stubby winglets, but the flyer's crew hadn't opted to use them just yet - at such close quarters in the tight confines of the city proper, a miss might strike a derelict tower and send a whole decrepit neighbourhood tumbling down.

The Nort pilot, his hooded face visible though the armourglas cockpit canopy, was hunched forward, urging his ship on after the fleeing dart of the raft. Rogue couldn't see the gunnery crew sequestered behind the pilot's chair, but he knew the model of hopper and guessed where they would be sitting. Even now, they were probably looking right at him through the scopes of the flyer's twin chatterguns, squeezing out bolts of depleted uranium ammo. The AV shells were overkill where the inflatable raft was concerned - one solid hit and the memory-plastic would be ripped to shreds - but subtlety had never been a hallmark of either side in the Nu Earth conflict.

The boat rose out of the water and slapped back down hard as it rode over a couple of floating corpses. For a second, the GI lost his grip on the steering cord and the raft listed dangerously to port, threatening to tip the passengers into the flood.

"Damn it, Rogue!" snapped Helm. "Steer or shoot, you can't do both!"

"Son of a tube!" Zero cursed, working the slide of his stolen enemy rifle. "I got a breech jam... Nort piece of scrap!"

The hopper pilot flared his ailerons and used the down-wash from his engines to batter the boat, trying to force a capsize. Rogue fired again and missed again.

Zero tossed the Nort rifle aside and held out a hand. "Gunnar! Give him to me!" When Rogue hesitated, he shouted over the whine of the jets. "I can swat this fly, brother! Come on!"

"Do it, Rogue!" Gunnar added. "No choice."

"Here!" Rogue flipped the GI rifle over in his grip and shoved it at Zero.

The other infantryman eagerly accepted it and the gun sank into his grip like it was one well-oiled component fitting into another.

"You want a Sammy?" Bagman called.

Zero shook his head. "I got this. Gunnar, give me thermo." The sniper raised the rifle to his cheek just as the hopper unleashed another punishing salvo of rounds.

Rogue rocked the raft from side to side, steering the thing with his body movements. Fragments of shot nicked his bare skin like dull needles.

The hopper loomed large in Gunnar's scope, moving wildly with the shock from the shots and the rise and fall of the floodwater. Zero took a breath, released half and held the rest. He fired.

Nort Komet-class hoppers used a forward-looking infrared scope mounted in the nose, but the lens that protected it was a notorious weak point. Zero's kill was impeccably placed, piercing the scope's housing and cutting up through the cockpit dashboard to strike the sternum of the pilot. The las-round blew most of his lungs out the back of his chem-suit and the Nort slumped forward on his flight yoke. The hopper veered away wildly and collided with a low bridge, erupting into a fireball.

"Nice shot," said Helm.