Blood Relative (3 page)

The pistol made a coughing sound and suddenly there were dozens of plastic darts embedded in the GI's chest. The trooper, who appeared annoyed with this untimely intrusion, bushed them away with one hand, tossing his bloodstained knife with the other. The blade buried itself in the guard's forehead and he fell away, out of Erno's line of sight. The technician blinked slowly. Peculiar that the Souther soldier had no weapon of his own. Where was his rifle, his headgear or his backpack? The question followed Erno into unconsciousness and faded with him.

Rogue recovered his combat blade from the guard's corpse with a sucking noise and took up the handgun as an afterthought, then he sprinted away toward the main elevator. The dense Nort datacore thumped against his leg as he ran.

TWO

DISPATCHES

Nu Sealand's command centre was on the platform's largest tower, built inside the shell of a vast gas ventilation chimney. Hidden by thick armourplas baffles, an outside observer would never know of the chaos that was unfolding inside; shrieking alarms blared from all sides of the room as the officer of the watch found three sets of critical alerts screaming for his attention.

An emergency signal from the computer core was jockeying for attention with anguished shouts from loading bay two where someone had detonated a plasma sphere and a chorus of sporadic gunfire from mid-deck.

"Voices down here!" a guardsman on the deck was shouting. "Dozens of them, coming from all over the place!"

The watch officer swore - that particular section of the rig was a perfect conduit for echoes, so for all he knew that dolt was firing at himself - but the grenade? On cue, a pair of dull thumps resonated through the floor plating. "It's an attack!" he snapped, gesturing to his second in command. "Open the blinds!"

"Kapten. Is that wise?"

"Do it!" he snapped, the veins in his neck throbbing with anger and frustration.

The junior officer did as he was ordered and with the flick of a switch the steel shields that covered the windows of the control deck folded away, giving the watch officer an uninterrupted view of the whole rig. But it also made the command crew visible to the triad optics of a GI-issue assault rifle that had been set up on a bipod on a shorter neighbouring tower.

Automatic mechanisms inside the gun had already shifted its internal balance to that of sniper mode, altering its lens, scope and barrel configuration. Although no finger was on the rifle's trigger and no eye was at its scope, the weapon was live to fire. Its breech held a magazine packed full of high-energy laser round capacitor cartridges, the ultra-dense kind that were usually used for cracking the engine blocks of Nort trucks. With a ripping noise, the rifle tore through the rounds, moderating its own recoil to scatter bolts of coherent light across the deck. Hot streaks of colour punched through the armoured glasseen windows and struck flesh, boiling blood to pink steam wherever they hit their mark.

For a long moment, nothing moved on the command level. Then the elevator's doors opened and the rifle's owner burst out, flechette gun and knife at the ready. Rogue paused and nodded at the perfect fire pattern with satisfaction. He ignored the moans of the dying and kicked out the remains of one of the shattered windows. The GI leapt from the tower and fell ten feet to the nearby platform where the smoking rifle lay. He had set the gun in place a few hours earlier, before the dawn had illuminated the upper decks with weak yellow light.

"About time." The rifle's voice was terse. "Dump that sissy gun and let's get out of here. I need ammo."

Rogue tossed the pistol away and retrieved his weapon, replacing the empty cartridge with a new magazine of shells; his actions were so automatic that it was as natural a reflex to him as breathing. "Nice grouping, Gunnar."

"Eh?" The word was the synthetic equivalent of a shrug. "Easy meat."

Rogue slung the rifle over his shoulder and then grasped a trailing cable. With a swift shift of his weight, he came off the platform and began to slide down the long wire. The metallic cable fizzed as it passed through his bare fingers, the heat of the friction raising thin threads of smoke from his skin. Rogue registered the pain as a minor irritation and dismissed it. Below his feet, the mid-deck loomed.

"I'm telling you, there's someone in here!" bellowed Kawso. "Grenades don't just throw themselves!"

Furni shook his head, studying the infra-scan. "But there's no body heat traces! If there was an intruder here before, they're gone now... "

"That's what those Sud bastards want us to think!" Sergeant Kawso spat and stepped over the remains of another Nort soldier. There were five or six dead men in the loading bay - it was tough to make an exact count because of all the scattered body parts - and broad holes in the decking where plasma spheres had rolled out of the dark corners to detonate under their feet. The lethal grenades cast out deadly globes of superheated gas when they exploded, metallic vapour as hot as the surface of a sun, incinerating men and hardware with equal power.

"Wait," Furni said, pointing at something. "What is that?"

Kawso took a cautious step closer and saw a rectangular box sitting on the deck. It had a pair of optic sensors on the upper face and straps dangling down from one side.

"Don't touch it! It could be a booby trap!" Furni warned.

The Nort sergeant gave him a silencing grimace and gingerly picked up the object, holding it waist high. He turned it over in his hands: one side had a chip slot. "Huh," he made a low chuckle. "It's just a skevving backpack."

An opening on one face of the pack glinted in the dimness and a synthetic voice replied, "No, I'm not."

A three-pronged steel claw snapped out of the opening and grabbed a large handful of Kawso's crotch in a vice-like grip. Furni was startled as the Nort let out a high scream. "Aaaaaaa! Get it off me!"

He hesitated at the peculiar sight of Kawso dancing about with a pack attached to his genitals, afraid to shoot at the thing for fear he would miss and hit the sergeant. Furni heard swift footsteps behind him and turned, expecting reinforcements; they were, but just not for him.

"Lights out," said Rogue and his fist came at the Nort trooper like a missile, the punch propelling a GI helmet in his hand like a huge mutant knuckle-duster. The hardhat smashed Furni aside trailing blood, teeth and fragments of jawbone.

"Hey!" the helmet complained. "What am I now, a boxing glove?"

Rogue ignored the comment and flipped the armoured gear onto his head, moving to grab Kawso. The claw released its killer grip and the sergeant tumbled backwards. Rogue tugged the off-balance Nort by the shoulder strap of his autogun and before he could react, the GI pitched him into one of the blast holes.

Sergeant Kawso hit the scummy ocean cursing and screaming as the orange murk gushed in through his open mouth. He drowned in a dilution of foetid poison and his own liquefied organs. Rogue snatched up the backpack and secured it over his shoulders. "Helm, you got the frequency for the charge locked in?"

A voice issued from a chip bearing a morose skull image and the digit "1" on the brow of his helmet. "Affirmative, Rogue. Give me the word and it's done."

"Tell me you got it." Another chip, this one slotted in the backpack, spoke aloud. The flat face of the microcircuit had the number three visible on it.

"He's got it, Bagman," said Gunnar from the number two slot on the rifle. "And he woke up half the damn Nort Army doing it."

Rogue ignored the chatter, his heightened hearing concentrating on the screams of sirens and the noise of approaching boots on the metal decks. "Blow it, Helm. We're outta here." Without waiting for confirmation, the GI stepped lightly over the edge of the same hole he'd thrown Kawso down. As he struck the water, the drag from his gear flipped Rogue over, just in time for him to see shimmering balls of yellow flame erupt from the centre of the Nu Sealand rig. The C9 detonator charges had been placed in just the right locations, along weak lines of rusted pipe and vital conduits that fed hot gases from the geothermal sink below the ocean floor.

He hovered under the waterline for a moment, as the first chunks of metal and plastic began to fall away past him into the depths below. The acidic embrace of the Orange Sea was already burning into his bare skin and stinging the protective nictitating membranes over his eyes. Rogue turned from his target and struck out in a hard, measured pace, swimming down and away.

Nu Sealand became a torch, vomiting flames and black smoke up into the air, adding a little more toxic matter and poison to the planet's ruined atmosphere.

They said Pitt City was a Freeport, but in truth there was absolutely nothing free about it. If you didn't have money in Pitt City, you might as well be dead. As Ferris saw it, it was all about degrees of how rich you were. Nobody here was too rich, because if they had that many nu-credits, the first thing they would do would be to buy a ride off the chem-infested rock. There were a few folks who were just rich enough - like Gog here, the alien dealer-fixer-pimp-whatever sitting across from Ferris in all his insectile glory - and they stayed in Pitt City because they were too greedy to leave. Gog and his kind cut up the Freeport like a pie, paying bribes to the Souther Divisional Command that technically had jurisdiction over the settlement, running their own pieces of the city as little empires. Guys like Ferris, who were forever looking for a big score and were never rich enough, were always scrabbling for enough bluebacks to pay for fuel and grub as well as getting into scrapes that inevitably ended up emptying their pockets.

And then there were the folks at the bottom, the ones who worked as "rentals" for soldiers on liberty, or who hovered on the edges of malnutrition, living on what they could beg or steal. Money was exactly the reason why Ferris was in Gog's nightclub, and money was why Ferris had accepted the alien's commission to fly a cargo of "tractor parts" to Kyro. He'd caught some Nort flak on the return leg and lost a drive baffle. He now needed the cash more than ever, and not just because he owed hundreds in dock fees from here to the Rockies-2.

The alien looked like the unpleasant result of crossbreeding a cockroach and a mantis, all five feet and six legs of him squatting on a broad cushion like some Old Earth Arabian prince. There weren't a lot of XT species on Nu Earth, as most of them had been smart enough to get going when the colony had turned into a war zone, but the insect had earned itself a nice piece of the action and showed no intentions of leaving.

"F-f-f-Ferris," Gog chattered. "Nice work-k-k. I saw the hole in your thruster. Kik-kik. Other pilot wouldn't have been able to land that. Other pilot would have landed in the Pitt-t-t."

"Hey," his reply was languid and full of studied cool. "Some guys got the skills, some guys don't." Ferris wasn't about to admit to the bug that he'd almost lost it on the touchdown, barely keeping his strato-shuttle from nose-diving into the vast crater that gave Pitt City its name.

Gog's head bobbed. "Kik. Kyro connection was very satisfied with the merchandise."

"Right." Ferris nodded. His jaw hardened as he thought about the boxes as they'd been hauled off the shuttle, the white armourplas containers with their stasis units. He thought about the noises the boxes had made. People noises. Scared people noises. Ferris forced the memory away; what Gog had made him carry was none of his damn business. He had to have the nu-creds, or else he'd lose his ship, his lifeline and probably a few internal organs if the syndicate's muscle boys caught up with him. Ferris couldn't help but feel sick inside as he asked, "So, my payment, then?"

"Aaaaah," the insect wheezed. "Kik. Small problem."

Dread, cold and sudden, flooded Ferris's chest. "Problem?" he repeated. "What kinda problem?" He let his hand drop to where the vibro-dagger he habitually carried was holstered.

Gog made an airy gesture with two of his claws. "K-k-cash flow. I don't think I can pay you."

Ferris's eyes narrowed. Cash flow? The damned bug was sitting next to a gold hookah and planting his scaly ass on a Nibian silk pillow, both of which were worth more than the pilot made in a year. "If not now, then when?" he demanded.

"No," said Gog. "Not now. Not ever." It made a clicking sound that was the alien's equivalent of a laugh. "Perils of being a freelancer, F-f-Ferris. Kik."

The pilot surged to his feet, the vibro-dag humming into his hand. "You son of a roach, where's my damn money?"

"Gaaah!" Gog's legs came up defensively. "Thought you might take it badly, kik. Made a call in k-k-case."

Ferris hesitated, and in that moment he heard the rising-falling hoots of an approaching military police siren. "What did you do?"

"Remember those fuel rods you boosted from the T-t-Twentieth Mobilised last month? Kik-kik? T-told the MPs where to find you. Be here any second."

"Ah, sneck." Just like that, the money, the paid-off debts, all the problems Gog's fee would have solved slammed back into Ferris like a hammer blow. The humming knife in his hand was hot and ready, and for a second the pilot thought about ramming it into Gog's big compound eye, but he could hear the squeal of tyres as the Milli-Fuzz cruiser skidded to a halt outside the building and the gruff shouts of army cops as they kicked in the door. Ferris had been on the wrong end of Souther military justice before and he'd pissed blood for a week afterwards; he really didn't have much of a choice. He would be executed for stealing combat supplies, there was no question.

"Bastard!" Ferris kicked over the hookah and broke it, sending Gog into a hissing, clacking fit of insect swearing, and then he ran for the exit and staircase that would take him to the roof. From there, he could climb up to the underside of the port's dome and make a run for it. Hopefully. Ferris was now officially broke, and in Pitt City that was a death sentence.

The black sand crunched under Rogue's boots as he walked lightly across the flat expanse of beach. The cold air over his bare arms helped the anti-tox aerosol to soothe the inflammation of his tough, rubbery skin; although Rogue and his kind were built to weather the worst extremes of Nu Earth's murderous environment, swimming for hours in water like battery acid was hard even on him. The breeze moaned through the curls of obsidian sandstone that bordered the seashore. The soft black rock looked like frozen waves where the winds had cut and shaped it. The GI held his rifle shoulder high, tracing the horizon through its optical sights. At the edge of the visual acuity, a quick, stubby shape was crossing the stagnant waters.