Blood Relative (30 page)

Ferris pushed the strato-shuttle's throttle bar to zone five full military power and thumbed the afterburner ignition. The Nort ship exploded from the launch cradle and threw itself into the tainted sky on a column of brilliant white flame. The ground was gone, the dusty glass desert a blink in his peripheral vision, there and then vanished.

G-force pressed into him, a fuzzy blanket of weight squeezing the pilot into the acceleration couch. He felt something pressing into his backside - Ferris hadn't had time to get comfortable and a rumple in his flight suit was digging into his skin. The pressure made his thigh go dead and he gritted his teeth to ride out the numbness. Colour leached from his vision as blood retreated from the veins in his eyes, pooling in his lower body. He strained against the multiple-gravity pressure, his arms like lead where they gripped the flight yoke and throttle. Grey sparkles began to gather at the edges of his sight, forming into cowls, tunnelling his vision.

He was dimly aware of a proximity warning from the console; high-speed targets were descending on his flight path.

"Oh shit." The words were slurred and thick in his mouth.

Ferris reacted, forcing the shuttle into a series of rolls and side-slips. There was no way to avoid the incoming missiles.

The sensor grid screamed as the radar returns for the shuttle and the missiles flickered into a merge and suddenly Ferris was slamming the ship around the cloud of nuclear death, cutting a path through the oncoming aerial traffic. Light flashed through the canopy as rocket thrust plumes blazed close to the shuttle's hull, then they were past, and rising still higher into the thinning atmosphere.

A hammer blow echoed through the fuselage and the launch boosters detached themselves. Ferris rode the ship through the turbulence and eased the throttle down from full power; the weight on his chest decreased and suddenly he was aware of the sweat coating his chest.

On the console the sensor grid went wild as a massive radiation spike flared into life.

The missiles knew their targets; some, those with hardened saw-tooth tips, burrowed into the hard-packed earth or through ferrocrete and plastisteel walls before detonating. Others immolated themselves above the ground, turning the air into a soup of gaseous plasma. Domain Delta and everything in it vanished in a perfectly-timed explosion, a string of tactical nuclear warheads casting loose fireballs as hot as the core of a star. Schrader's corpse joined the flesh of her mutant children, the steel and the rock of her secret facility and everything in a twenty kilometre radius became a radioactive wasteland. The Wildfire screamed out across the ruined landscape, churning up the earth that turned into molten slag. Sand, metals and stone were transformed in the flames, the huge energies unleashed in a single instant, fusing the vista into a plain of atomic glass. Delta dissolved into the Quartz Zone, becoming a new part of the warped mirror-landscape, the dead silent and reclaimed.

The hatch to the cockpit hissed open and Zeke hauled himself into the co-pilot's chair. Ferris gave him a nod, working the console. The rim of the nuclear backwash had grazed the ship, tripping a dozen control circuits with sparks of discharge.

Zeke glanced at the aft monitor screen. A bright bruise of searing yellow was growing from the surface of Nu Earth, a clump of mushroom clouds merging into one. The sergeant felt sick and giddy when he realised just how close he had come to being at the heart of that destruction. "What a nightmare..."

The pilot didn't look up. "Reckon I can get us into a low orbit. If you got a preference where you want to wind up, now's the time to say."

"Right," said Zeke. "I'm not sure I wanna go back to the South right away... What about a Freeport?"

Ferris tapped the radar. "We might be able to reach Lost Angels if we're lucky. Used to be a solar power orbital, but now it's a shanty station. Non-aligned."

"Good enough," he paused, studying the monitor. "You think he made it out?"

Ferris gave him a hooded look. "Nothing could have survived those nukes. Not even the Rogue Trooper." He shook his head. "Just when I was starting to like him, too."

Zeke watched the firestorm and said nothing.

In the foothills to the west the echo of Domain Delta's death was muted and hollow, like the grumble of distant thunder. The broken remnants of a highway lay nearby, a relic of the infrastructure of a colonial civilisation that died in the crib. From a distance, the low blockhouse lying next to the road appeared to be nothing more than an abandoned guard post, a pillbox bunker where guns could train on passing traffic; but there were no guns and there had been no traffic on this highway for a decade.

Something moved in the shadows of the bunker. Puffs of rusty dust coiled in the thick, hot air. A heavy iron hatch, sunk into the metal decking to match seamlessly with its surroundings, twitched. Beneath, strength borne from precision gene-engineering forced the hatch open and a blue-skinned figure emerged from the darkness.

"Nothing," said Helm. "No contacts. Rad count's at the top of the line, but we can take it."

"Affirmative." Rogue hauled himself out of the tunnel, brushing a layer of rock dust off his torso.

"Where are we?" Gunnar demanded. "Wouldn't be surprised if Schrader had us pop up in the middle of Nu Nuremburg."

"Nav-compass says we're on the edge of the Black Desert," noted Bagman, "although all the rads in the air are messing up the sat-fix."

"She thought of everything," Helm noted. "Even down to an escape route."

"Pardon me if I don't want to take that ride again," added Gunnar. "Like being strapped to a rocket!"

Rogue emerged from the bunker, blinking. The sky had a peculiar cast to it, a mottled red-orange like the colour of old, dried blood. He slipped a pair of eighty-eight grenades off his webbing strap and clipped them together, dialling a short fuse on the timer. He pulled the arming pins and threw them into the bunker's doorway before sprinting away. The grenades blew with a flat thunderclap of air and the pillbox roof caved in.

"Just in case," Rogue explained. "Don't want anyone using that railshuttle after us."

"Huh," grunted Helm. "It's not like there's anything left back there but fallout, anyhow!"

"Just in case," repeated the GI. "Bagman, dispense digi-map." The backpack manipulator dropped the datapad into Rogue's hand and he studied the display. "We'll head north-west, towards the chem-jungle."

"So here we are again," Gunnar said in a low voice. "Back to square one and our one big lead to the Traitor cooked in her own nuke barbecue. Nice work, Rogue."

"Synth out, Gunnar," he replied. "Schrader had nothing on the Buzzard, I'm sure of it. She would have given him up if she knew where he was... And that's as much a clue as anything."

"How'd you figure?" asked Helm.

"He's not with the Norts anymore. If he was, Schrader would have known it. The Traitor is out there on his own now."

"Like us?" said Bagman.

Rogue watched the fading fire of the nuclear explosion. "Like me."

The GI turned his back on the Quartz Zone and walked away, into the dying night of a ceaseless war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Swallow has written for the heroes of 2000 AD in the Black Flame novel Judge Dredd: Eclipse and the audio dramas Judge Dredd: Jihad and Judge Dredd: Dreddline. His fiction also includes the Blood Angels novels set in the dark future of Warhammer 40,000 and stories for Inferno! magazine. Swallow's other books include the Sundowners quartet of "steampunk" Westerns (Ghost Town, Underworld, Iron Dragon and Showdown), The Butterfly Effect and the horror anthology Silent Night.

His nonfiction includes Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher and guides to genre television and animation. Swallow's other credits include writing for Star Trek: Voyager and scripts for videogames. He lives in London and is currently working on his next book.