Blood Relative (22 page)

"What do you mean, a new form?" said Rogue.

"Like you," she smiled. "It will change a normal person into a NexGen, a mixture of human and GI!"

"Nain..." Volks shook his head, unable to comprehend the scope of Schrader's vision.

"Think of it," Schrader whispered. "An army of enhanced soldiers unfettered by toxins and human weakness! Nu Earth would fall beneath their heels in weeks!"

"You are insane," said Volks. "This is monstrous!"

She sneered at the officer. "Your fear disgusts me, Johann. This is the chance for greatness, the chance to become more than human! I will begin the next stage in our evolution and this planet will be the first step in a campaign that will shake the stars! Your petty human concerns are worthless in comparison."

Schrader turned to the GI and ran her hand over the rough plastiflesh of his hairless chest, enjoying the sensuous thrill of the contact. "I need you, Rogue. And there is so much I can do for you in return."

THIRTEEN

WAR GAME

Schrader's heart was racing; she felt giddy at the prospect of what was about to happen and unfamiliar, uncontrolled emotions welled up inside her. She leaned into Rogue; he was so close now that she could taste his scent on her lips. It wasn't the dry musk of a human male nor the poor perfume of a weak, ordinary man like Volks, but something darker, more reptilian. She felt the undeniable thrill of primal and animalistic sexual arousal.

With perfect clarity, Lisle suddenly understood that everything in her life had been leading up to this very moment, preparing and moulding her. The child of a career military family, Schrader's youth in Nordland's Niebelung protectorate had been a clinical affair. She saw little of her parents, both of them serving on different fronts in the colonial wars, their contacts limited to brusque vid-messages on her birthdays, rare visits and more often than not, severe letters to underline their disappointments when she performed poorly in the Youth Cadre. Despite the expectations of her parents, it was clear from the start that Lisle would never be a soldier, but her intellect grasped the rudiments of biochemistry with the ferocity of a steel trap and the ever-watchful party instructors selected her for the science directorate. If her childhood had given her anything, it was a loathing for the weakness of emotion in any form and Lisle went into her new life determined to never give any of herself to anyone ever again.

In the hothouse climate of genius she excelled. Where other students dickered over insignificant concerns like morality and ethics, Kadet Schrader used her talents to conceive of horrific new methods for the Norts to kill their enemies. She opened up avenues of research in gene-manipulation, striving to find ways to excise the deficiencies of men through the application of controlled mutation. When other students got in her way, she found it easy to arrange fatal accidents for them in the laboratories. Her ruthlessness earned her an officer commission on graduation and the army took her to Nu Earth, the playground of a billion bio-weapons and man-made toxins. By then, Lisle's mother was dead, killed in a sortie on Horst, but her father had risen to a division command and with pride she contacted the old man to tell him of her accomplishment. General Kurno Schrader, a man to whom only cold steel and the absence of mercy were weapons, suggested instead that his daughter stop toying with her silly test tubes and become a real soldier, perhaps on the frontlines where her life might have some actual value to the Fatherland.

Lisle hated herself in that moment, hated her own weakness, her pathetic need for his approval - but she hated the old bastard even more, so she carefully organised the delivery of an untraceable packet of the agent magenta nerve bane to his private quarters.

Then she was free, but with her parents dead and buried she found herself adrift. Without her hate, her need, Lisle's life had no focus. Like Nu Earth itself, forever tidally locked into orbit around the Valhalla singularity, Schrader craved a dark star of obsession to hold her in place. Her work began to suffer and eventually High Command shifted her sideways into what most of the science directorate considered a dead-end posting; the costly and unproductive G-Soldat program.

It was there that she first saw Rogue, his cerulean face staring up at her from a grainy security vid-feed. He was frozen in the middle of a kill, ripping the mask from a soldier in some nameless Hellstreak bunker. She studied the picture for hours, examining every line on his countenance, absorbing the controlled energy of his personality she glimpsed there, daring to wonder how it would be to touch him. All her life, Lisle had been searching for a way to expunge the fragility that she saw in herself, in her species, her nation - and she found it in the Rogue Trooper.

The GI was the perfect embodiment of her ideals; heartless and inimical, bred for strength, trained to feel no pity or remorse. An organic machine designed only for killing and superiority. Lisle found a new goal in Rogue's eyes. She wanted to possess him, and even more, she wanted to become him.

And now he was here, in her grasp, ready for her. Schrader ran her hand over Rogue's chest. The skin was cool and dry like a snake and beneath there wasn't an inch of wasted flesh, not a single pocket of useless flab. He was all hard muscle, a statue cut from blue steel. The scientist licked her lips, savouring her excitement. Schrader allowed herself a tiny gasp of delight as she toyed with the idea of engaging in other activities with the GI...

She cocked her head to kiss Rogue, to touch her perfect azure icon, and with a look of utter loathing and disgust, he turned away. "Don't ever touch me again," he said in low tones loaded with antipathy.

"What?" she choked, an abrupt heat rising on her cheeks. "What did you say to me?" Her eyes fluttered, she must have misheard. She and Rogue were alike, couldn't he see that? He would never, ever reject her... "You must-"

This time he forced her away with the flat of his hand. "Get away from me, you demented witch! You're out of your mind!"

For the first time since her childhood, tears sprang to Schrader's eyes. "No, no. You don't understand! You and I, we will be gods, mother and father to a new order-"

"You're insane if you think I'd ever help you unleash something like that," he stabbed a finger at the retrovirus vial, "on the galaxy!"

Anger flooded into her, a brilliant, searing hate hotter than anything she'd ever felt before. "Fool! You cannot defy me!"

Schrader grabbed Rogue's arm and then he did the unthinkable. The GI slapped her across the face. He pulled the blow, but it was still hard enough to send her tumbling to the ground. Volks, the pistol still in his hand, watched the pair of them. The moment seemed unreal, disconnected from reality.

The scientist came to her feet, ignoring the trickle of blood that seeped from the corner of her lips. Schrader's whole body was tense with a white-hot fury, every muscle in her body vibrating like a struck chord. "You worthless blue bastard!" she bellowed. "You have betrayed me like everyone else! How could I ever have loved you? You're just like every other man. You're wretched, useless!" She spat at him. "I don't need you! I've taken what I want from your flesh, raped you while you slept!" Tears streamed down her face. "I could have given you immortality, but instead I'll watch you die screaming!"

Volks's hand tensed around the gun. The Nort wasn't sure which of the two people in the room represented the greatest danger.

With trembling hands, Schrader wiped at her face, making a vague attempt to regain her composure. Black kohl smeared over her cheekbones. "Take... take him to the test range!" she snarled at Volks. "We'll see how well he can survive against his three friends!"

Rogue shook his head. "I won't fight them."

"You will!" she shouted, her hand jerking an electrostunner from a pocket in her coat. "They will give you no choice, trooper! I control them now, it is my conditioning that drives them!"

"The implants..." he breathed.

"I will watch you die!" Schrader cried, her voice breaking. "The myth of the Rogue Trooper perishes here! I will build a new world from your ashes!"

Too late, the GI saw the bright blue flash of discharge from the teeth of the taser. The scientist buried the stun rod in his chest and triggered a massive surge of electrical energy. Darkness rose up around him.

Rogue floated in a foggy, blood-warm nothingness, images and sensations passing through his mind like light through a warped lens. He saw the faces of his fellow GIs melting and changing, distorting into the mutant forms glimpsed in Schrader's hidden laboratory. He saw Ferris, Zeke and Volks with blue skin and yellow eyes, all of them reaching out to him in some terrible agony.

He heard a voice calling his name, over and over and over.

"Rogue? Rogue! Snap out of it, trooper!"

The clone soldier opened his eyes and felt a fuzzy pressure all across his skull. "Who...?"

A hand gripped his arm and pulled him to a sitting position. "It's me, Ferris. You okay?"

There was a constant humming in the GI's skull. "What's that sound?" He blinked; they were inside some kind of moving vehicle.

Ferris jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "We're in a Nort cargo hopper. They just chucked us in here and set off."

"Us?" Rogue looked around and saw a ragged handful of figures in Souther chem-suits, Zeke and the others among them. "Schrader said something about a test..."

"Aye," Sanchez nodded, "the test range. It's the ice queen's little playground for her green toy-boys, comprende? They say if you can find a way out, you can go free."

"Has anybody ever done that?" Ferris asked quickly.

The soldier shrugged. "Nobody has ever come back from the range, if that's what you mean."

Rogue felt a change in the speed of the flyer and glanced around the enclosed cabin. The Nort guards watching them from the far side of the bay readied their guns. "We're slowing down."

Zeke pulled Ruiz to his feet. "Here we go." The other soldier looked pallid and weak behind his breath mask, but he managed a vague nod.

The hopper dropped into a hover mode and the rear door of the cabin opened. Rogue saw broken ground outside.

"Get out!" snapped one of the Norts, waving his gun to underline the point. When the prisoners hesitated, he let off a three-round burst into the chest of a kneeling Souther, killing him instantly. "Die here or die out there, it's your choice!"

They needed no encouragement and with a disordered rush the troopers jumped out the door. The ground was several metres below the ramp and some of the Southers landed badly; a second man died, impaling himself on a tank-trap projecting out of the earth.

Rogue dropped into a cat-like stance as his boots hit the dirt. Like everyone else, he was unarmed, stripped down to just his battle fatigues. Then a flurry of objects fell from the hopper, tossed out by the Norts and the GI instinctively rolled into cover.

Ferris cowered as a kit bag flopped into the mud at his feet. "Whoa! What the hell is this thing?" A dozen bags, one for each of the prisoners, lay scattered on the ground.

With a shriek of jet noise, the hopper vectored away and was gone.

Purcell examined the dead man's body and found a packet of suit patches in a pocket. She tore it open and distributed them among the others as far as they would go. "Don't touch that sack, flyboy," she began. "You've got no clue what's in it."

Sanchez dropped into a crouch and began to rip open one of the bags. "No, no. It's part of the game, see? To make it sporting."

Ferris gingerly opened the pouch at his feet and found a pair of Nort-issue binox. "Huh? I was hoping for a mini-nuke, at least."

"The ice queen, she gives everyone a piece of kit," Sanchez continued. "Up to you how you use it."

Rogue accepted this with a nod and found a bag, ripping it down the seam. Inside was a revolver with a couple of extra reloads. He glanced at Sanchez; the prisoner had an assault rifle gripped in his trembling hands. "Here," Rogue offered him the pistol. "Trade with me."

"Nuh, I'll keep this," said the other man.

Rogue shook his head slowly. "I wasn't asking you."

After a moment Sanchez nodded and took the revolver in exchange. "Aye. Guess you'd be a better shot with those GI peepers of yours, right?"

The clone soldier gave the Nort rifle a quick once-over. Satisfied, he studied the lay of the land around them. Where the Quartz Zone proper was a maze of razor-cracked glass crevasses, spires of fused rock and plains of silicon, the test range had been bombarded so many times that it resembled more the crater-pocked surface of Nu Earth's airless moons. Burnt-out frames of dead tanks sprouted from pits of thick grey mud, trenches snaked back and forth with no obvious pattern, and broken porta-domes lay cracked open all across the barren landscape. Once more, Rogue was in his element.

"What do we have?" said Zeke, studying the bandoleer of grenades he held. "We need to pool all the kit, maybe figure out who would be best with what-"

"You ain't the sarge no more!" snapped another prisoner, who sat cross-legged on the dirt, fumbling at the collar of another bag. "This ain't some exercise, bucko, this is every man for himself!" Something made a clicking noise and the sack gave an explosive splutter. The Souther tumbled backwards, a fleshy knot of red skin and white bone where his head had been.

"Griswold grenade," said Rogue grimly, recognising the telltale discharge of the fist-sized anti-personnel weapon. "Better watch the rest of those sacks."

Sanchez nodded in agreement. "She usually booby-traps one piece of kit each time."

Zeke gave him a hard look. "Thanks for mentioning that in advance! Is there anything else we should know?"

The prisoner shrugged and opened his arms to take in the whole vista of the test range. "We'll probably get a five, maybe ten minute start on the Soldats."

Ruiz eyed Sanchez. "You seem to know a lot about this set-up, pal. How do we know you ain't in it with the Norts? A spy in the ranks?"

Rogue watched the interplay between the two men carefully. Sanchez seemed unconcerned. "You wanna tear me?" The prisoner nodded at the combat knife in Ruiz's hand. "Go ahead. Now or later, here or there, I'll be dead. You too. I watched this happen a hundred times from the cellblock."