Blood Relative (8 page)

Rogue nodded in appreciation as the raft bumped and scraped off the broken roadway. "Floodwater's sinking back, we got nothing under the keel. Time to abandon ship, boys." The GI pulled the inflatable boat to a halt and leapt out. The waters were at his knees now and receding quickly. "Zero, let's go, double-time."

Zero wavered for a moment. "Rogue, I think I gotta..." He turned gently and Gunnar dropped from his fingers. There was a large triangle of shrapnel, probably part of the hopper's fuselage, buried in Zero's chest. Turquoise blood bubbled up around the edges of the wound, streaming down his torso. He fell forward and Rogue caught him.

"No, damn it!" Rogue cursed. "We got you out. You ain't gonna die on me now!"

"We got incoming," said Helm. "I'm picking up track noises from the west. AFVs maybe, or light tanks."

Rogue shook his head, discounting the unspoken thought in all their minds at once. "We're not leaving him behind." The GI gathered up his rifle and drew a walkie-talkie from his belt. "Ferris! Ferris, do you read me? I need a dust-off right now!" Dead static hissed back at him.

"I knew it!" Gunnar snarled. "That worthless pink-skin puke! He's left us twistin' in the wind!"

"Oh ye of little faith," said the radio. From behind the broken fingers of the city towers, the bullet shape of the strato-shuttle appeared, the sudden roar of the ship's vector jets like a tornado. Ferris brought the atmocraft to a hover above the GIs and dropped the boarding ramp. "Someone call for a taxi?"

Rogue bodily threw Zero on to the ramp and pulled himself on board as the Nort armoured vehicles rounded the street corner, pushing waves of water, bodies and debris before them. "Get us out of here!"

A cannon on the lead tank spat smoke and flame, and Ferris flinched as a shell shrieked over the shuttle and demolished a nearby building. "Whoa! That ain't friendly!" He slammed the throttle forward to full burn. "Hang on to something!"

The atmocraft's engine bells threw a sheet of fusion fire out behind them and the ship leapt to supersonic velocity, cracking the sound barrier with a thunderous boom of compacted air. San Diablo flashed past beneath the aircraft's underbelly and then they were in the desert plains, racing away.

Rogue stumbled to where Zero lay. "Steady, brother. You'll make it."

Zero managed a shake of the head. "Ah, no. I won't. I was dying before I got hit, Rogue. I know you saw it. I was... just holding on, see? I knew you were out there... I knew you'd come get me."

Bagman's manipulator unfolded, holding a compact medi-kit. "Rogue," he said in a low voice, "got the las-scalpel here and a chip support frame. We can still save his mind."

"Listen," Zero coughed up foamy azure blood. "Rogue, you gotta know... Domain Delta... You have to stop her..." The GI's eyes fluttered and closed.

"Her? Zero, who do you mean? What do you know about Delta?"

"Rogue, he's a goner," said Helm urgently. "You know the drill, the biochip has absorbed his personality matrix. Sixty seconds, that's all we got!"

"You have to get the chip," Bagman added. "If he knows something about that Nort lab, we can't let it die with him!"

Rogue thumbed the stud on the las-scalpel and a knife-beam glittered into existence. "Swore I was never gonna do this again."

With quick, careful cuts, Rogue began to slice away the pallid blue skin and the dull fleshy matter surrounding Zero's biochip implant.

FIVE

HEART OF GLASS

A soldier is an investment. To train them, feed them, clothe them, to educate them in the myriad ways of weapons and killing takes hundreds of thousands of nu-credits and infinitely more man hours. For the Genetic Infantrymen, that cost was geometrically higher. They were decanted as infants and trained without pause for twenty standard years; every hour of every day of their pre-war lives dedicated to the craft of controlled murder. The clone soldiers represented time and money that the Souther Armed Forces simply couldn't afford to spend recklessly on the battlefield. The expense and the sheer effort required by the GI programme had almost ended it on dozens of occasions; while Rogue and his compatriots had grown and learned, unknown to them figures in the Confederate government had tried again and again to end the super-soldier project - but there were men in positions of authority with too much invested, financial influences from the gargantuan mega-corporations like Clavel and Steiner-Bisley, power-players who refused to allow the GIs to die in the cradle. The fact that the project was also generating millions in spin-off biotechnology patents and refining the discipline of human cloning was just coincidental. After all, war had always been the greatest spur for the advancement of new science.

Rogue cursed quietly under his breath as Zero's skin peeled away in his hands, revealing the necrotising flesh beneath the hardy, almost rubber-like surface. "There's major internal damage here. More than he would have got from just a beating..." The GI's fingers closed around a grey knot of bone-like material and pulled it free with a sound like tearing cloth. He considered it for a second, then put the object aside and kept working.

"You think its some sorta infection, a bio-agent?" Helm said urgently. "Like that paralysis toxin from the polar zone?"

"Negative," Rogue used the las-scalpel to dig deeper. "More like a blood disease, or organ failure."

"If Zero had a virus, then we all got it now," Bagman grated.

Rogue's fingers found the metallic edge of the biochip implant in among the soft organic matter. "Don't think so. I'd say it was genetic breakdown." He tuned the beam to a fine, pencil-thin setting and set to work cutting away the filaments that held the chip in place. It was warm, a telltale sign that the matrix within was active.

Those who opposed the GIs saw them as an expensive folly, a "wonder weapon" that would be obsolete before it even saw action. A normal human foot soldier could easily be replaced with just a few forced colonial conscriptions and some hypno-tape conditioning, but the death of a Genetic Infantryman represented a nu-cred cost somewhere close to that of a light strike bomber. All it would take was one lucky Nort sniper and an exorbitant Souther Army investment would be cold meat, so Milli-Com found a way to make their soldiers immortal, a method of life preservation that would sentence the GIs to an eternity of warfare no matter how many times they died. It didn't matter that it was callous, as long as it was cost effective.

When their bodies matured as the clones reached adolescence, the Genies "tagged" them. One by one, every GI was implanted with a "dog-chip". On the most basic level, the microcircuits served as electronic trooper identity cards, but the full function of the hardware was much more far-reaching. The chips were semi-organic, made from a matrix of complex artificial proteins suspended in an electromagnetic field that emulated the workings of living brain tissue. When death came, as it inevitably would, the biochips were ready. Silent and watchful, the small rectangles of silicon gradually altered their circuits to mimic the neural patterns of their physical hosts, waiting for the moment when they would come to life. By year twenty, as the GI troopers were prepared for final deployment, the chips were webbed into their cerebral cortex with nests of neurofibres.

The hatch to the shuttle's cockpit hissed open and Ferris emerged, his face pale and sweaty, fixed with an expression that was trying and failing to look cocksure and cool. "We're out of the Nort sensor range, I reckon," he began. "I put us on autopilot, programmed a loop-and-evade..." The pilot's voice trailed off as he caught a glimpse of Rogue ministering to Zero's fresh corpse. "What the hell are you doing to him?" Ferris started forward and grabbed at Rogue's arm.

"Back off, idiot. You're in his light!" Gunnar grated.

"You're cuttin' him open!" Ferris retorted. "You said you wanted to save this guy!"

"He is saving him, pinky. Now get away!"

Ferris's gut flipped over as he realised he was standing in an expanding puddle of sapphire-coloured blood. "Oh shit..."

The laser beam sizzled against dead flesh and sent a wisp of acrid cooked meat odour up and into the cargo bay compartment. "Ah, I've got it." Rogue held out his hand to Bagman's manipulator. "Clips?"

The backpack produced a pair of slender tongs and the GI used them to remove the biochip. The silicon plate came free with a sucking noise. Ferris covered his mouth. "Ugh."

Rogue quickly slipped the chip into a flat unit the size of a digi-pad. "Time?"

"Forty-three seconds," said Helm. "You're getting slow."

"I'm out of practice," Rogue replied, a grim set to his war-mask features.

A fatal wound to the host trooper flooded his bloodstream with an endorphin analogue that set the biochip implant into a rapid scan mode, and in those dying moments the protein circuits copied the GI's mental engrams like a data tape. As they perished, everything that made the soldiers who they were, their skills, their history, their random personality quirks, all of it would be sucked into the implant like a bottled ghost. If a GI fell in battle, his chip could be recovered and returned to Milli-Com for regeneration and in a matter of hours the same soldier could be back in the war, his biochip loaded into a fresh adult "blank". The Genies estimated that the biochips could withstand dozens, perhaps even hundreds of these "relocation trauma" experiences before the GI's consciousness would start to suffer any deleterious psychological effects.

There was just one drawback. The protein circuits could only exist for a maximum of sixty seconds outside of an organic host before they began to degrade, bleeding off memory and intellect with every passing moment; they required a constant power source to maintain an active matrix. Ever inventive, Milli-Com's tek-division supplied the troopers with chip support units and added energised slots to every major item of GI-issue hardware: to rifles, backpacks, helmets, pistols - and so dead men could survive and accompany their squad mates, staying out in the field for days or weeks before returning to be regened, synthetic souls inhabiting their war gear like possessive spirits.

The biochips would serve the will of the officers in command even when their bodies were destroyed; that was the plan. But the Quartz Zone changed all that. Some said it was a turncoat inside Souther Command, others talked about a conspiracy of corporate and military interests opposed to the GI programme, or even a combination of both. However it happened, the first mass capsule drop into enemy territory by Genetic Infantrymen was a descent into hell. The Norts were waiting and they wiped out the clone soldiers. When the massacre ended, the GI programme was scrapped, a costly failure that had wasted billions of nu-creds and almost three decades of research. Nothing remained; nothing but one man.

Ferris watched, forcing his gut to stay down, as Rogue quickly patted Zero's body, looking for any gear that might be of use to him. The dead GI had nothing but a pair of ripped fatigue trousers and Ferris noticed for the first time that the other man hadn't been wearing any boots.

"Hey, uh, Rogue," he nodded at the body. "I got some tarps, if you wanna wrap him up-"

"Where are we now?" The piercing yellow eyes cut into him like lasers.

"Crossing over a chem-swamp."

"Good enough." Rogue hit the hatch control and pushed Zero's corpse into the airlock.

"Don't you want to, I dunno, bury him or something?"

"What would be the point?" The GI pushed another button and the lock opened, venting Zero out into the air. The body tumbled away from the shuttle, falling toward the toxic marshes. Rogue nodded at the chip frame. "It's not like he's dead."

"Don't be so sure," said Bagman carefully. The backpack's diagnostic cables were connected to the unit holding Zero's biochip. "We got a situation here."

"Let's hear it."

Ferris heard the hesitation in the synthetic voice. "Rogue, I'm running a chip-check through the internal sensors on the frame and I'm coming up with some bad numbers. Zero's dog-chip has got some serious degradation, I'm talking major loss of deep memory and engram failure across the board."

"What the hell are you saying, Bag?" Gunnar demanded.

"I'm saying that we're looking at a matrix failure."

Rogue drew a sharp breath. Those last two words were a death sentence for a Genetic Infantryman; the spectre of physical trauma resulting in organic termination was almost an occupational hazard for the GI corps. The Genies had trained them not to fear death as the end to their existence it was for normal soldiers, but the corruption of their biochips held the very same terror that "real" termination did for a human. Matrix failure was quite simply the death of a GI mind, total and unrecoverable.

"Can you patch him into your synth?"

"I can try," Bagman said. "Wait one."

There was a sharp crackle of static from the pack's chip slot and then a thin, ghostly mimic of Zero's voice emerged. "Rogue? NNNnnnnnhear me?"

"We hear you, pal," Gunnar broke in. "Hang in there."

"Aaaagain!" The word was a cry of pain. "Dead again! Rogue, help meeee."

"Zero!" Rogue snapped. "I need you to focus! We don't have much time."

"I nnnnnnknow. Leaking like rrrrrain. Losing myself. Self. Self."

Ferris swallowed hard. "Can't you do something for him?"

Helm answered for all of them. "No."

Rogue knelt close to the synth pickup, as if that would make the strength of his words all the more urgent. "You were at the Quartz Zone with the rest of us, Zero. Gunnar, Bagman, Helm, everyone else, they were killed... How did you survive? Where have you been all this time?"

"Dead," came the flat, toneless reply. "Died in the glassssss."

"But he was alive..." Ferris gave an involuntary glance at the pool of blood.

"Rrrrrreborn, Rogue. Reborn where I fell. Dddddddomain Delta. She did it."

"Who, Zero? Who did it?" hissed Rogue.

"I'm losing him," said Bagman. "He's cracking up on me."

"Got away. Came looking for youuuuuuu." Violent crackles and barks of static punctuated every one of Zero's words. "Get her-zzzzzt. Ssssstop her. Delta. Ddddelta."