Blood Relative (21 page)

"You've gone section eight!" Gunnar replied. "There was nothing left after the zone wiped us out!"

Helm sat heavily, massaging his neck. "But what about the Kashar Legion?" He was sweating and his brow was knotted with tension. "There were always rumours that they looted the battlefields..."

"You can bet your dog-chips that the Nort Bio-Directorate wanted every last scrap of GI meat for salvage!" said Rogue. "Schrader's got it all down there and she's using it to breed a better Nort Soldat!"

"Or worse," murmured Ferris. "She's experimenting on the prisoners here, as well."

"You expect us to buy that?" Gunnar shook his head. "Man, I didn't want to believe it, but she was right about you. Schrader warned us that you'd go against us once we were regened. It makes me ill to see you turn on your own kind."

"What the hell?" Rogue demanded. "My own kind? Gunnar, it's me, Rogue! You know me! All of you do, we fought together, we-"

"Died together?" Bagman broke in, frowning. "All of us except you, Rogue. I always thought it was weird that only you made it out of the zone alive."

Gunnar prodded Rogue with a thick finger, menacing him. "None of us ever had a chance to make our own choices before now and the moment we do you're bucking to get us back in a chip slot again! No way, Rogue. No more of that 'skin outranks silicon' skev!"

"No," Rogue said, "that's not it-"

"We never had a vote when we were chipped, but that's changed." Bagman rubbed a hand over his neck. "You were the one who sent us off on that wild goose chase across Nu Earth, Rogue. You made all the decisions for us. All I ever wanted was my life back. You don't know what it is like living like that! Having your soul sucked into a piece of plastic, never resting, reliving the blood and the pain of dying over and over. That ain't a life, its hell! I'm not going back to that!"

Rogue saw Bagman's face tense as he stroked at his neck again; he glanced at Helm, who had fallen silent. Both of them kept reaching for the same spot, as if they were rubbing at an ache. "Bagman, your neck-" Rogue extended a hand, but the other man knocked it away.

"Don't touch me!" Bagman hissed. "Just back off!"

Gunnar unconsciously mimicked the motion as well; each of them was probing the skin above the bio-implant below their skulls.

The GI felt control of the situation slipping away from him. "Guys, focus! Schrader is the enemy here, not me. She just wants you for her experiments." Rogue heard the hatch sliding open even as he spoke and like the starring actress coming on stage as her cue was uttered, the scientist entered with a grim-faced Kapten Volks and a group of Nort troopers at her flanks.

Schrader shook her head sadly. "Oh, Rogue. How little you understand my work. I'm distressed by your suspicion. There was no need for you to kill my men or break into my labs. You only had to ask and I would have given you access. It is important that we have trust in our relationship."

"You're nothing but a Nort quack with delusions of grandeur," Rogue retorted. "You're a jackal preying on the bodies of dead men."

She pouted. "I see we still have a long way to go." From the corner of her eye, the scientist saw Ferris's hand dart toward the stolen pistol in his belt. She gave Gunnar a sharp nod and the soldier struck him with a hard cross that knocked the pilot to the floor. The weapon skittered away across the deck. "Thank you, Gunnar," she added. "Perhaps you can return Mister Ferris to the cell block for me?"

"Sure," said the G-Soldat, eyeing Rogue.

Helm spoke in a quiet, tight voice. "Is what Rogue said true? Have you really got the corpses of our brothers on ice?"

Rogue expected a lie to leap from her lips, but instead Schrader gave a hollow sigh. "Yes, it is true. But I want you all to understand why." She took a breath to steady herself, and Rogue watched her performance with a cold eye. "I used my connections at Nort High Command to have the... the material transferred to Domain Delta where I knew it would be safe. If the Norts kept hold of the bodies, there would be no telling what they could do with them. I know they were trying to develop a pathogen that would destroy GI bio-engrams, based on a fungal form discovered in the Polar Zone. I knew I had to stop them before they wiped out the last of you. Without you, my research will count for nothing."

Rogue covered his surprise at Schrader's last words; at least she was speaking the truth. His suspicions were confirmed; she needed him alive.

She looked directly at him for the first time since she entered the room. "I won't keep anything from you anymore, Rogue. Come with me, and I'll show you the future of Nu Earth."

Rogue watched as Schrader removed a key card from a pocket on her tunic; it was similar in size and shape to the one he had stolen from the guard, but the thin slab of plastic was a featureless black all over. The elevator hissed open and she punched in a code. "No one has visited the heart of my operation before," she told Volks and the GI as they followed her in. "Every aspect of my work is conducted by a crew of auto-teks directly under my control."

"But there are other scientists working here, other geneticists," Volks noted.

She nodded. "Only on the higher tiers. The tasks I give them are low priority, the unimportant matters involving the NexGen development program."

Rogue watched her carefully. "You're not just breeding a new strain of G-Soldats here, are you? I was right."

"Yes," the scientist admitted. "I was foolish to think I could conceal anything from you." Schrader pressed a button and the lift began to sink. It descended past the level Rogue and Ferris had visited, past the highest security lockouts and at last into the deepest core of Domain Delta. The elevator halted and with a chime the doors opened. "Welcome to my vision," Schrader said.

The layout differed little from the upper tiers - Nort military design was hardly the most innovative in the galaxy - with a central corridor extending out to a series of branching laboratory chambers and holding cells. The woman paused at a security door where the deadly glitter of a laser web prevented any access.

"Recognise: Schrader, Lisle," she said to the air. "Password: Prometheus." The net of energy dissipated and the hatch irised open.

Volks was on edge, his right hand never more than a fingertip away from the heavy calibre pistol on his belt. "This level does not appear on any of the dome's security grids," he said carefully.

"Of course not," said the scientist. "I made sure of that. After the base was constructed, I had all record of this tier deleted from every plan and schematic of Domain Delta. The facility's central computer was programmed to conceal the power and atmosphere usage. Like a thirteenth floor, it doesn't exist."

They passed by compartments that resembled zoo cages more than laboratory spaces and Rogue's breath caught in his throat as he saw the misshapen forms that moved within them. Behind thick shields of clear plastisteel there were things that shuffled on malformed limbs, creatures that perhaps had started out as men but now were little more than living organic mutations. Rogue heard Volks curse softly under his breath as some of the man-shapes came out of the depths of the chambers to look at them. In the cells, the GI saw grossly distended forms, warped flesh that might once have been human distorted into death-grey abnormality; mutated grotesques studied him with milky eyes and broken spirits.

"What are these... things?" Volks asked.

"Errors," said Schrader. "I keep them alive to remind me of how far I have come."

"They almost look human," said the officer.

"They were, once upon a time." She glanced at the GI and beckoned him over to a different chamber. "Look here, Rogue. Perhaps you might see a family resemblance."

Inside the other cell there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of hulking, crippled figures and Rogue knew instantly what they were. They sported abnormal, crooked limbs, bloated torsos and monstrous faces. The poor, pathetic creatures looked like some hideous parody of a human body, moulded out of dull green clay by someone with only a vague concept of what a man should look like.

"My first attempts at a new breed of Genetik Soldat," Schrader had a hint of perverse pride in her voice. "Sadly, the mixture of recovered GI DNA and the original Nort Soldat templates had some unfortunate side-effects."

One of the largest of the freakish NexGen pressed up against the glass and studied Rogue, some semblance of confusion on its disfigured face. He realised that the thing recognised him on some bone-deep genetic level and unbidden he raised a hand to touch the glass.

"Keep away!" Schrader barked suddenly. "They are unpredictable."

After a moment, Rogue broke eye contact with the creature and walked on, his mind spinning back to a similar encounter in his twelfth year, when he and Bagman had stumbled upon a collection of similar genetic rejects aboard Milli-Com. He shook off the memory. "How does Zero fit into all this?" he demanded of the scientist.

She nodded to herself. "Ah yes, Bio-Subject GI: 3530972/Z4. My one and only viable decant using recovered material."

"Recovered?" Rogue repeated. "You have his corpse!"

"Yes. I wanted to clone a Souther pattern GI and Zero seemed like the most suitable candidate. His body had been excellently preserved, thanks to the ministrations of the Kashar's salvage operatives. After six attempts to copy him, I was finally able to accelerate a blank adult body for reanimation, although the life span was severely shortened." She shook her head, as if she were perturbed at the outcome. "Despite all the data your traitor provided, I was never able to duplicate the Souther process exactly... And Zero proved far more resourceful than I ever could have anticipated."

"He escaped."

"Yes," Schrader smiled at him, her eyes flashing, "but now I have you."

Rogue ignored the implication and pressed the point. "You may have been able to make a clone of Zero's body, but how did you clone his mind? His biochip was destroyed! After sixty seconds outside a support frame or an organic host, every GI personality matrix becomes useless!"

Schrader threw him a condescending look and halted outside another security hatch. "Oh, my poor, poor Rogue. That is what your creators at Milli-Com told you," she pressed a control and the hatch yawned open, "but you'll find the truth is much different."

The door folded back into the wall to reveal an oval room pulsing with muted energy. On a wide central platform there was a vertical wall of translucent plastic extending to the ceiling; the vast panel was compartmentalised into grids, each separate pocket linked into a network of glowing power nodes. On every node there was a GI biochip, each a twin to the one that lay buried in the soft flesh of Rogue's cerebral cortex.

It was as if he had walked into a war memorial for the troopers who had perished in the Quartz Zone; there were hundreds of chips pulsing in the slots, some of them bearing code letters and numbers from men he had fought and trained with. Rogue approached the panel, his steps leaden. He felt heavy and hollow all at the same time, as if the gravity in the chamber had suddenly increased.

On closer inspection, he could see that most of the dog-chips were ruined, blackened by laser fire or had melted. Some were shattered like broken glass, held together by twisted meshes of fine wire; others were dry remains where their organic protein matrix had been leached away. A cascade of emotions thundered through him; anger, disgust and terrible sorrow.

Volks watched the play across the GI's face and felt a curious surge of empathy for the clone. As a soldier, he understood only too well what Rogue would be feeling as he took in the enormity of Schrader's revelation. On some level, he pitied the trooper; his creators had never granted him the human release of tears.

Schrader's voice was low and reverent, as if she were in a church. "It is true that after one minute the biochip matrix begins an irreversible process of decay, but under certain conditions that decay can be retarded. Even after months, some tiny elements of the original pattern imprint remain. Zero's biochip retained almost thirty per cent of his mental engrams and I was able to enhance the rest using splinters recovered from the other, less well preserved specimens."

"You gave him a patchwork mind," Rogue moaned. "You put him in a body that fell apart."

"I saved him," she insisted and gestured to the chips. "I saved them all, don't you understand that?"

Rogue ran his hand over the panel. "How many of them are still... still aware of themselves?"

"You must understand, none of the personalities stored here are whole," Schrader insisted. "These are just fragments, less than ghosts."

"Show me!" Rogue turned on her, his face thunderous.

With a slow nod, Schrader tapped in a command. Suddenly the room was filled with a chorus of voices, some of them babbling, some screaming, an incoherent flood of pain and anguish.

"Can you hear me?" the GI shouted over the din. "It's Rogue! Do you understand?" The rush of yelling synths grew in volume until he finally shook his head. "Enough!"

Schrader silenced the voices of the dead. "I have had no success in my attempts to recover them, but perhaps with your help, I could do more."

Rogue crossed the distance to Schrader in a flash, his hands tight in hard fists. "Help you? I'm a heartbeat away from killing you!"

She waved Volks away as he went for his gun. "Rogue, please. We want the same thing, you and I. An end to the war and a future for your kind."

"What future?" he demanded bitterly.

"You are unique, Rogue. In the entire galaxy, you are the oldest surviving genetically engineered life form. No other clone has ever come close to you. Perhaps it was by design or some random chance, but you are the most superior artificial being mankind has ever created." She gently touched him. "Within your genetic code, you have the key to a creation that will irrevocably change the face of this planet and this war!" Schrader removed a small canister from her pocket; inside was a vial of clear liquid, swirling with flecks of blue. "This is an early generation of a synthetic retrovirus. It is my life's work. Any human infected with this solution will instantly begin a process of controlled genetic mutation. DNA will be rewritten at the molecular level and a new form will arise!" Her eyes were bright and shining.