Blood Relative (19 page)

"It was Nu Hamelin," said Bagman. "You jacked me and Helm into the computer and we took it out from the inside."

"You convinced now," Gunnar demanded, prodding Rogue in the chest, "or do you wanna play 'pop quiz' some more?"

"I had to be sure. You would have done the same."

Helm glowered. "Thought you'd be pleased to see us whole."

"I am," he said, not really believing himself, "but it's a little hard to take." He eyed Helm's biceps; like all the G-Soldats, he had the faint tattoo of an ident code and a Nort symbol there.

Bagman saw what he was looking at. "That don't mean nothing, Rogue. It's what's inside that counts." He smiled. "We're a real team again!"

"Yeah..." Rogue breathed. "But where do we go from here?"

"Schrader knows about the Traitor," began Gunnar. "She's willing to spill what she's got about him. Reckon we could use her connections to track him down and pinpoint the creep."

Rogue sneered. "She's real generous. That's a new wrinkle for a Nort."

"You heard what she said," Helm shook his head. "Schrader's out for herself now, just like us. The Norts want her head on a spike."

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," added Bagman.

"We don't have any friends," Rogue broke in. "Sounds like you guys are sweet on this ice queen."

"Grateful, maybe," admitted Gunnar, "but that's all."

"She says she's got a way to end this war. I reckon we should hear her out. It's the least we can do." Helm sat and began lifting a set of weights again.

"No, the least we could do is walk outta here," Rogue replied. "And don't forget she's holding Ferris and those Southers down below somewhere." The GI's wariness wasn't receding; if anything, the alarm bells ringing in his mind were getting louder as his team mates talked.

"That ain't gonna matter if the war is over." Gunnar said. "Schrader says she can do it and I believe her."

"They didn't just make us to fight, Rogue," added Bagman. "They made us to win. If she can bring peace to Nu Earth, it's our duty to help her."

Helm nodded his agreement. "This could be the biggest thing we've ever done. No more run-and-gun, no more hiding in the chem scavenging for scraps of intel..."

"What is she planning?" the GI demanded.

"It's big, Rogue," said Gunnar. "Real big."

Bagman laid a hand on Rogue's shoulder and the contact made him go rigid. He felt the strength of the G-Soldat's grip, even at rest. "She could upgrade you too, Rogue. It wouldn't be hard to get Schrader to remove your biochip and implant it in a new body like ours."

"I like the skin I got just fine," said the GI. The thought of surrendering himself to the kolonel-doktor's mercies on an operating table made Rogue's blood run cold.

"Are you in or out?" Bagman finished.

Rogue's mind raced and his eyes caught something familiar as Helm glanced away. There, on the back of his neck just below the skull, there was a slight distension in the flesh. A bony object was lying underneath the skin, in exactly the same place as the device he had pulled from Zero's corpse.

He heard himself say, "I need to think about it. It's a lot to take in."

Gunnar nodded. "Make your mind up quick, Rogue. We're decided already. We're gonna see where Schrader's plan takes us."

Bagman smiled. "We want you with us, buddy. The four of us. The whole team."

Helm looked up at him. "You want to be on the winning side, right? Forget the Southers or the Norts, this is it."

"Right." Rogue gave a wary nod and left them behind. His expression did not change as the guards shadowed him down the corridors, but behind his war-mask face, the GI was divided.

Bagman. Helm. Gunnar. They had fought alongside each other for so long that he knew them as well as himself, and he had no doubt that the intelligences inside the G-Soldat forms were those of his friends; but their words, their manners and ticks of personality were warped somehow, off-kilter. It was crystal clear to him; Schrader hadn't simply given them new bodies - she had twisted their loyalties as easily as she altered the DNA of the NexGen.

He couldn't be sure what kind of game Schrader was playing. Perhaps she was relying on his innate pack instinct to bring him into line with the others, or perhaps this was some kind of warning to him, a display of what the scientist was capable of. Whatever Schrader was intending to do, the ante had just been raised. Rogue stood silently in the quarters assigned to him and wondered. With cold clarity, he found himself more alone than he had ever been before. The GI was unarmed, in the heart of enemy territory, with no one to watch his back.

Rogue stood sentinel by the plastibubble window and watched the sky turn dark as the night approached; gradually, tactics revealed themselves and a plan began to form in his mind.

In his fitful sleep, Ruiz moaned and tensed. Ferris eyed his cellmate from across the enclosed, cage-like space. The sparse pallets on which they lay were little more than plastic benches, cushioned only by thick, coarse blankets that stank of stale sweat and fear. The pilot wasn't sure how much sleep he had got; he drifted off into moments of mental deadness but never seemed to actually go under. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw the man in the yard and the strange ways his bones and skin had been moving, just before the Norts shot him dead. He watched Ruiz twitching, favouring his wound. Ferris wondered if the soldier would last another day; the Souther was tough, but even he would have his limits. Perhaps, he thought, it would be a mercy if Ruiz quietly died there; better to perish in the depths of a feverish sleep than to expose yourself to whatever was waiting in the experimentation chambers below.

Sanchez was a talkative fellow. Once it was clear that none of the new arrivals were going to roust him, the trooper laid out the pattern of life in the camp for them. He talked about the tests, over and over, as if speaking their name would ward them off like some arcane demon. Ferris saw the burn marks all over him and shuddered. A humourless smirk came to his lips as he thought of Pitt City with something approaching fondness; suddenly, running from the Milli-Fuzz and crossing swords with Gog didn't seem so bad.

He heard the Norts before he saw them, their heavy boots ringing on the punched metal stairs as they ascended to Ferris's level. He drew the ragged blanket up to his neck in an unconscious gesture of protection that harked back to childhood, pressing himself into the wall as the guards approached. Some of the prisoners awakened by the intrusion made catcalls and kicked at the bars and in return the Norts hammered back with stun-rods.

The pilot's heart leapt into his throat when three dark figures crowded outside his cell. Wide-eyed with terror, Ferris met the gaze of the ugly guard who had taken a shine to Purcell and the Nort showed him a smile of blunt teeth. "Here," said the guard, and spoke into a collar microphone. "Open twenty-three."

Ferris scooted along his bunk until the corner of the cell was at his back. There was nowhere for him to hide in the tiny metal cage.

The guard shouldered into the room and gave Ferris a sneering once-over, then turned to Ruiz. The Souther trooper was awake and trying to prop himself up without success. "Whuh?" His voice was thick with fatigue.

Ferris hated himself for the relief he felt when he heard the guard's next sentence. "Take this Sud down for testing." One of the other Norts reached for Ruiz and the soldier made a weak attempt at resisting.

The words spilled out of Ferris before he was even aware of them. "Leave him alone!" The ugly guard rounded on him, his tattoos dark and demonic in the half-light. A voice in Ferris's head screamed at him to be silent, to let Ruiz be taken instead of him, but his mouth was working on its own accord. "He's hurt!"

A Nort yanked open Ruiz's uniform shirt and peered at his injury, considering the livid purple and yellow spreading across his arm. "Is true," said the Nort.

The ugly guard nodded. "Can't have that." His hand shot out and grabbed a handful of Ferris's shoulder-length hair. "This one, then."

"No, no!" The pilot's skull burned with pain as he was dragged out across the metal decking. A boot stuck him in the kidneys and he coughed up thin, watery bile.

"Get him out of here," the Nort said, and Ferris's vision blurred and swam.

Domain Delta was a complicated creation. The dome had teeth and claws in its missile batteries and roving robo-gunners. It had myriad eyes and ears in its monitors, and like the animals that had once lived on the desert plains where it now stood, Delta had a protective camouflage. By day, the photoreceptive cells in the dome's outer skin adopted the colouration of dusty grey glass of the Quartz Zone, and when night fell, the hemisphere became a featureless black pearl concealed in a landscape of shadows. Only in the deep core sections did the facility never sleep; in the reinforced bunker levels, Kolonel-Doktor Schrader's experiments progressed regardless of Nu Earth's day-night cycle.

The darkness was like a second skin to the Rogue Trooper; he made short work of the soldier covering his door, putting a nerve punch in the Nort's spine that would leave him unconscious but still erect, propped up in an alcove across from Rogue's quarters. Judging by the guard's body mass, the GI would have ten, perhaps twenty minutes before he came to. Plenty of time for what he had in mind.

He slipped through the places where the guards didn't look, the puddles of unlit ground between the security sensors and the gaps in the camera footprints. Rogue had the measure of the men stationed at Delta; they hated the posting, partly because it was remote and dull, but mostly because they were afraid of Schrader. The Norts here would be more concerned about their own safety than that of Domain Delta and that bred a climate of negligence he could exploit.

The labs were split over several levels of the dome and it appeared that the more sensitive the work, the deeper underground they were. Rogue nodded to himself. It made sense; the protected lower levels would be far more likely to survive any assault that would wipe out the upper dome.

The Genetic Infantryman was no stranger to brutality; he'd been born into it, and the innumerable faces of the war dead he'd seen blurred into one soulless barrage of ruined corpses and empty eyes. But in the chambers he passed as he progressed through the labs, he glimpsed things that turned his stomach. Outwardly, Schrader's base was clean, pristine and clinical - but inside, the flawless white plastisteel rooms held horrors that no soldier would ever dare to imagine. There was little screaming; most of the subjects opened to the mercies of the auto-teks were already dead.

Rogue faded into a shadow as an elevator deposited three Norts and a struggling figure. The guards each had a limb, dragging the man toward an open door where another operating table lay waiting. Metal probes sprouted from the sides like the legs of an inverted steel spider.

The prisoner planted a hard kick in the crotch of the largest of the Norts. The big man recoiled and barked out a string of swear words. The other guards returned the defiance with a beating of their own and Rogue caught a glimpse of the captive's face as he went down.

Ferris.

The GI evaluated the situation in a nanosecond. For stealth's sake, it was in Rogue's best interests to let the Norts take Ferris to his tortures and avoid any confrontation that might raise the alarm, but the genetic imperative in his brain flared with a hot surge of adrenaline. A civilian was in danger and Rogue was duty-bound to save his life.

The injured guard, the big one, was recovering from his pain, and in one hand the Nort had drawn a vibro-dagger with intent to cut some good manners into Ferris. Rogue exploded from his hiding place. His first punch landed in the small of the Nort's back, shattering vertebrae, even as his other arm snaked around the guard's neck and twisted it. The dagger skittered away from nerveless fingers. A second crack of bone announced his death, and Rogue was on the next guard even as the first sank to the floor. His reflexes firing at speeds that even the most highly trained human couldn't hope to match, Rogue struck the second guard and propelled him into the waiting room. The Nort fell face first on to the operating tabled, and the robotic device instantly locked him in place with thick flexmetal straps. A series of arrow-sharp manipulators fell on the guard, cutting into him though chem-suit and flesh.

"Get off me!" Ferris was shouting, his flailing hands finding the combat blade by sheer chance. The pilot tore the vibro-dagger around in a punishing arc and buried it to the hilt in the last Nort's chest, stabbing him again and again in mechanical fury.

"Ferris!" Rogue barked, arresting his arm. "Stop it!" When the young pilot didn't respond at once, Rogue slapped him.

Ferris staggered under the blow, the manic flash in his eyes suddenly fading. He let the blade drop to the floor. "Oh shit." The pilot felt his gut clench.

Rogue gathered up the guard's corpse and tossed it into the room. "Help me with this one." Ferris, pale and shaken, took the legs of the ugly Nort and dragged the other body into the chamber. He glanced up; the man on the table was already dead, a forest of needles bored into his back.

The GI ripped an identity card from the senior guard's uniform and examined it. The pass key encoded into the card's memory was enough to get into the next level of the labs, but not high enough to access all the areas; it was a start, though. He looked over at Ferris; the pilot was wiping blood from his hands and he looked as if he were about to throw up. "Hey," he snapped, grabbing a pistol. "With me."

Ferris sealed the door behind them as they returned to the corridor, pinning his hopes on no one checking inside the torture chambers until he and Rogue were long gone. He spoke in a rush. "There's gotta be a hopper or something on the pads upstairs. We get there, I can fly out of this death-trap before they know we're gone..." Ferris wasn't thinking about Ruiz, Purcell or any of the others now - he just wanted out. "Come on!" he urged, blinking away fear sweat.

Rogue coolly worked the code lock in the elevator. "No. I have to find out what Schrader's doing in this place. I can't leave without getting into the labs."