Crucible (16 page)

At first, the traitor had screamed in rage and frustration at the news, knowing that, as always his enemy would somehow track him down in his new lair. Track him down and try to kill him, as he had tried to do in the past. The traitor might escape as he had done before, but it would still mean abandoning this new hiding place, wretched as it was, and returning to the even more wretched existence as a wandering fugitive.

He had forced himself to calm down, instructing his suit's med-system to administer an extra-large dosage of narco-fix into his veins. The synthi-morphine mixture floated through his bloodstream and the traitor's thoughts floated with it.

He considered his options. His bargaining power with Nordstadt's soon-to-be new owners was poor, he knew. No one ever trusted a traitor, not even those who had benefited most from his acts of treason. He knew enough about the Nordland mindset to realise that whatever valuable services he had done for them in the past would now count for very little. At best, when he emerged from hiding and announced himself to the victorious Nort forces, he could probably only expect to be given some humiliatingly low-ranking and servile position, a deliberately insulting gesture from his Nort masters to show him just how little use he was to them. At worst, it would be a las-round through the back of the skull, an efficient tidying-up of the last loose end from a now long-ago defunct intelligence operation.

What he needed, he realised, was a proper bargaining chip. Something the Norts must want but were unable to acquire for themselves.

He sat motionless on the scrapheap throne his followers had built for him, brooding. He sat so long that those gathered before him began to stir uneasily, some of them perhaps wondering with a thrill of secret delight if the narco-fix they had seen him administer to himself hadn't actually killed him off.

Eventually, the bravest of them shuffled nervously forward to check if he was still alive, and that was when the figure on the throne moved. Moved and raised his head to smile at them.

Those brave few drew back in fear. They had followed his commands for long enough now to know what such smiles meant. When the man who led them smiled, then death and pain for somebody followed soon afterwards.

"Listen to me carefully," he told them, in his rasping, burn-disfigured voice. "The blue-skinned man who wears no chem-suit, the one the voices on the radio speak about. The one the Southers call the Rogue Trooper and the Norts call the Genetik Infantryman. You know the man I speak of?"

Heads nodded vigorously. Figures shambled forward, eager to carry out the commands of their tribal leader. The traitor smiled again.

"Good. I want you to go out into the city and look for him. You will search for him and you will find him and when you find him, this is what I want you to do..."

FIFTEEN

As Rogue expected, the morning sun cast a heavy pall of low-lying chem-mist over the ruined city. During the night, much of the pollutant material in the air had frozen into a toxic chem-frost that clung to every available surface. Now, in the heat of the rising sun, it melted into a hovering layer of poison mist that offered just as much cover as the shell-shattered buildings and strewn fields of rubble.

"Been listening to the Souther Command daily weather bulletins, Rogue," reported Helm, their appointed squad comedian. "Outlook today, after these mists burn off, is supposed to be clear and sunny, although heavy acid rain downpours are expected later in the evening. The Milli-com weatherman says if you're going out today then to be sure to bring along some hard target headgear and any armoured plasti-skin you might have, since otherwise unexpected showers of random artillery shelling and not-so-random incidents of enemy sniper fire may put a serious crimp in your day-tripper excursion plans."

"In other words, just another ordinary day on Nu Earth," grunted Rogue, not in the mood for Helm's early morning wisecracking.

"Yeah. Synth out, Helm," said Gunnar irritably. "We're here to do a job. We find the traitor, we plug him, we hand ourselves in, we get sent back to Milli-com, we get re-gened and then maybe after that, if you're real lucky, we start paying attention to you and your lame-ass jokes."

"Amen to that," echoed Bagman. "Don't know about you two schmoes, but the first thing I'm gonna do is hit the bars big time and get myself a drink. And I mean a real drink. Been biochipped so long, I can't even remember what a slug of the proper hard stuff tastes like. And then, after that, I'm gonna call in all those bets you three suckers have lost to me over the years, cash myself in and retire out of this chickenshit operation an honest-to-god millionaire, with all you three dopes' backpay in my pocket."

Rogue allowed his team their usual moment of pretend ill-tempered banter. Most of it was pure fantasy, of course. GIs were officially classified as military hardware created and owned by Milli-com, and not as ordinary enlisted soldiers, so all Bagman's talk about retirement and backpay was just knowing make-believe, as was his spiel about going to an enlisted man's bar and getting pissed. When you were a GI, built to withstand the most toxic substances created by man, it was kind of difficult to get drunk on a few shots of synthi-scotch. A GI could probably drink an entire battalion of ordinary soldiers under the table, one man after another, and still get up and walk away sober.

There was one thing that was true, though, and that was the part about getting back to Milli-com and getting Helm, Gunnar and Bagman re-gened. That was the whole point of what they were doing, Rogue knew. Kill the man responsible for the destruction of the GI Regiment, and then get the members of his biochip comrades returned to life. After the traitor was dead, Rogue would quite happily turn himself over to Souther military justice and face however many Milli-com interrogation officers as they wanted to bring in, telling every one of them that it was his decision to desert and go rogue, and that his biochip squad members were always just unwilling accomplices to his many breaches of military regulations. He would do whatever it took and face whatever punishment was coming to him, just as long as it gave his friends a second chance of life, their biochip memories and personalities implanted back into new re-gened GI bodies.

While the others bickered good-naturedly, Rogue crawled out from beneath the upturned slab of rockcrete that had been their home for the night and scanned the surrounding terrain. He knew the biochips' sensor systems would already have checked for signs of danger, but there was still no kind of sensor system invented yet that Rogue trusted better than his own combat experiences and GI augmented eyes.

He saw nothing, but instinctively ducked back into cover as soon as Helm gave an urgent beep of alarm. Rogue hugged rockcrete. A few seconds later, a flight of three low-flying atmocraft zoomed directly overhead, their bomb and missile racks laden with high-explosive death, the sound of their approach masked by their stealth engines and the rubble of artillery duels in the near distance.

"Nice going, domehead," grumbled Gunnar. "You see the markings on the underside of those things? Those were Souther crates you had us hiding from."

"Helm made a good call, Gunnar," interceded Rogue. "We didn't know what they were until they were right on top of us. Could have just as easily have been Norts. And besides, doesn't matter much that they were supposed friendlies. After all, how many times in this war have we found ourselves on the wrong end of a Souther gunsight, either by accident or because some creep at Milli-com wanted us out of the picture for good?"

"Okay, so where do we go from here, Rogue?" asked Bagman as Rogue climbed back out of the cover.

It was a question Rogue was wondering himself. Nordstadt was huge, covering more than two hundred square kilometres of ground. It would take weeks to cover it all on foot, and that was even without the added inconvenience of the major conflict being waged here at the moment, or the equally inconvenient fact that much of that ground was strictly off-limits to him, either in the hands of Norts who would shoot at him on sight, or Southers who would probably just try to arrest him as a wanted deserter.

Still, the traitor was here, alright. Rogue could feel it in his bones, his hunter's instincts telling him at some mysterious, deep-down level that his prey was not too far away. There was nothing on any of the intercepted radio traffic he'd listened into about the traitor or his whereabouts, a fact which didn't surprise Rogue at all. The traitor would stay away from both sides, making his presence as invisible as possible to both of them, as he always had done in the past. He would be lying low somewhere, keeping out of the way of the main battle, waiting for an opportunity to benefit from its outcome. It wouldn't be easy finding him, but that didn't worry Rogue. If need be, he was more than prepared to look under every rubble pile, search every burned-out building and crawl around in every sludge-filled shell crater to find the man who killed his comrades.

There was the crackling sound of las-fire in the near-distance. It came from the direction of the broken but still towering stumps of the steelworks' giant kiln chimneys. Rogue turned, listening to the sounds.

"Small-arms fire, probably no more than squad level or maybe even less. Maybe a three or four-man patrol coming up against something similar," judged Gunnar.

"Maybe. Or maybe not," decided Rogue, his GI instincts pulling him in the direction of the gunfire.

Venner tracked a path through the rubble, alert for any threats around him. He had downloaded the latest tactical reports via a secure S-Three backdoor into Souther Warzone Command's data files, and knew there was a Souther sniper operating in this area, in the district over by the loading yards. Even if he hadn't been warned of his presence, Venner would still have spotted the fool easily enough. This sector wasn't yet seeing even nearly the worst of the Nort attacks now happening elsewhere, thanks to the Rogue Trooper's efforts in blocking the Nort armoured advance yesterday, but Nort infantry units were still infiltrating forward through the ruins, giving the Souther marksman plenty of work.

Venner had heard the man's rifle sound four times in the last few minutes and could tell from the direction of the gunshots that he was barely bothering to move position after each kill. The sniper might be racking up the score of his kill tally, but he also might as well send up a photon flare to mark his position to the enemy. If the situation remained as it was, the Norts would either outflank and kill him, or if they were smarter, pin down his location and call in an artillery strike to take care of him.

Either way, the idiot's fate mattered little to Venner. If he'd had the time, he might have decided to set up a position of his own and give this novice a short, sharp lesson in what it meant to be a real master sniper.

Venner stopped moving, hugging the cover of a nearby wall as he heard the sound of atmocraft engines. He looked up and saw a flight of three low-flying gunships pass by, about half a kilometre or so away, heading east towards the Nort positions. They were Souther craft, but Venner still couldn't risk them spotting him. He was wearing a non-standard chem-suit without any identifying insignia or Souther military markings. To a gunner aboard one of those craft, he would just look like another target of opportunity, something to be freely blasted at on the way to their real mission objective.

He watched as they flew off, satisfying himself that there was no other sign of danger before moving off again. Despite all the excited radio chatter on the Souther airwaves, there had been no other confirmed sightings of the Rogue Trooper since yesterday. Venner was still convinced his target hadn't yet moved out of the area. He was boxed in here now with the Southers taking up strong defensive positions to the west and the Norts sitting in waiting positions to the east and north. Venner didn't doubt the Genetic Infantryman's ability to find a route through the Nort lines almost at any point he wanted, but such action would almost inevitably have resulted in sightings of him being sounded over the Nort comm-channels, and Venner hadn't picked up word of any such thing.

No, he was still here, his hunter's instincts told him. To the south was the river and one of the dockyard sectors. Venner didn't need to listen in to the radio chatter to know that there was heavy fighting going on there. The Souther forces were desperately battling to turn back the attacking Norts and deny the river crossing points to the Nort armoured divisions now massed on the other side of the river.

Venner suspected that this might be the direction his target would be heading. The lure of outnumbered and trapped Souther troops and the chance to make the same kind of difference as he had yesterday might just be too much for the man's genetic programming to resist.

Venner prepared to change course, calling up an updated image on his visor's digi-map facility to check the disposition of the Nort and Souther forces in that direction, looking for natural choke points on the route to the dockyards where he could set up position and lay in wait for the Rogue Trooper's passing.

He was stopped short by the sound of las-fire from nearby. He crouched down for a few moments until he was satisfied that none of it was being directed at him. A few moments later he was scaling up the jagged remains of a collapsed building, lying low on top of it and scanning the terrain with a sniper's practised eye. He saw figures in chem-suits scrabbling across the rubble a few hundred metres away. He raised his rifle's magno-scope to his eye and studied the scene in better detail.

What he saw made him smile. He abandoned any further thoughts about the battle at the dockyard sector and settled in to watch and wait. A hunter's instinct told him that, with luck, he might find exactly what he was looking for right here.

The Nort patrol squad scrabbled across the rubble field, calling out excitedly to each other as they pursued their prey. The targets were faster than them and able to scale rubble heaps and negotiate a route through the ruins with astonishing ease, but luckily they still weren't able to run faster than a las-round.