Crucible (23 page)

Yes, all over Nordstadt the story was the same. Meanwhile, in the dark tunnels below the city, one lone Souther soldier was still trapped in his own private crucible.

TWENTY

"Rogue? Wake up, Rogue. C'mon, trooper, don't give up on us now..."

Rogue heard the biochip voice calling to him through the darkness, but did his best to ignore it. The voice was somewhere outside the darkness and Rogue knew there was nothing but pain and despair waiting for him out there.

Better to stay here in the darkness. Better to stay in oblivion and unconsciousness, where the pain couldn't quite reach him.

In the end, the choice wasn't his to make. He felt something wet and cold splash across him, running in trickles down his face and body, shocking him back into consciousness. He instinctively licked a few drops of it from his lips, his GI senses automatically analysing its contents. It was water. The typical Nu Earth version of it, anyway, fouled with various biochemical pollutants and with some trace elements of viral and radioactive contamination. Lethal, or at least extremely hazardous to humans, harmless to him.

So the water wasn't going to kill him, but there were plenty of other things that could and probably would. He stared at the most dangerous of them now. The figure of the Traitor General, standing just a few feet away from him, although he might as well have been on the dark side of Nu Earth's blue moon for all that Rogue could do against him at the moment. The shambling, crippled and malformed figures of the tribe of rubble rats stood around their leader or lurked in the shadows around the sides of the underground chamber. Alerted by Helm's voice, one small group inspected Rogue's biochip gear in eager curiosity, making noises of quiet excitement as they held Rogue's GI rifle, helmet and backpack in their hands, studying the device's unfamiliar design.

Rogue barely spared any of them a second glance. It was the figure sitting hunched at the traitor's feet that caught his attention. The figure of the grinning child hungrily tearing with his teeth into the contents of the ration pack that Rogue had given him. It was the kid whose life Rogue had saved, the feral rubble rat child who had deliberately and happily led him straight into the traitor's trap.

Rogue remembered the circumstances that had brought him here. He had scrambled over the rubble in pursuit of the kid, even his GI speed and stamina pushed to keep up with his guide. He found ways through the ruins that Rogue would never have stumbled upon. He squirmed his way through barrier heaps of collapsed masonry that Rogue had to climb over or bypass and go round.

He instinctively took careful detours round areas of open ground that looked innocuous enough to Rogue's eyes, but which a later scanner check showed to be laden with hidden mines or booby traps. Several times, he had suddenly halted, taking cover and signalling for Rogue to do likewise. Rogue had done as directed, even though he had picked nothing up. Neither had the electronic senses of his biochip equipment. A few moments later each time, though, a Nort or Souther atmocraft flight had passed overhead, their weapons systems hot and searching for any targets of opportunity hiding in the rubble below.

The kid was good, Rogue had to grudgingly admit. His own childhood was almost beyond human comprehension: born out of the Milli-com clone-vats, trained and taught from infancy to be a living weapon of war. These were Rogue's experiences of what had passed for a childhood, but even he couldn't imagine what it must have been like to have been born into a place like Nordstadt.

They had travelled for more than an hour across the rubble landscape before they came to the place the kid had been looking for. At first, it just looked like another deep shell crater, the leftover remnants of some stray bunker-buster shell strike from long ago. A dense, permanent cloud of chem-mist had filled most of the crater, rising from the acidic pool of toxic sludge that had collected at the bottom of it. The stuff was impenetrable to both normal human sight and most battlefield scanning devices, but Rogue's GI eyes could pierce the veil, seeing the vague shadow shape a few metres within the edge of the lurking chem-mist. There was a tunnel entrance hidden down there.

"We're going underground, Rogue?" Bagman had said. "Could be anything waiting for us down there, you know."

"I'm with Bagman," Helm had added. "Maybe we should think about this first."

"You guys got any better leads on finding the traitor, I'm all ears," Rogue had growled. "I wasn't re-gened yesterday. We go in there, we go in alert and with scanners tuned to the max."

They had followed the kid down into the crater, entering the hidden tunnel entrance and passing through a crude but serviceable bubble-seal airlock just beyond.

They were in a tunnel, some kind of old Nordstadt municipal service-way, judging by the lifeless and burned-out power conduits running along its crumbling rockrete walls. The kid had removed his respirator mask as soon as they had passed through the airlock. Rogue had sniffed at the air, analysing it with his GI bio-senses. It was stale and foul-tasting, tainted with various minor contaminants that would almost certainly be hazardous to anyone spending a lot of time down here, but it was still the nearest thing to normal, breathable air they had found yet in Nordstadt.

The kid had given an excited yelp and ran off at speed along the corridor, carrying and lighting a spluttering and nearly spent phosphor torch and beckoning for Rogue to follow.

"Home sweet home, I guess," Rogue had muttered as he warily trudged after him.

They had soon lost sight of the kid, following only the faint afterglow of his torch, the sound of his footfalls and the shouts that carried back to them.

"Blueman, this way! This way!" had come the shout at the junction they had encountered a minute or two later. The original passageway was gone, blocked by tonnes of collapsed rubble. Two other branching tunnels had been crudely created there, laboriously hacked out with whatever materials were available, their uneven and sagging roofs propped up by makeshift supports scavenged from battlefield debris. The kid's voice had come from the tunnel to the left, although there was no visible sign of the voice's owner. Even Rogue's eyes, backed up by his biochips' electronic senses, were unable to penetrate the inky darkness of the tunnel.

"Rogue..." Helm had warned.

"I know," Rogue had responded. "Come this far, too late to back out now. Gunnar?"

"Locked and loaded and ready for trouble," his rifle had confirmed.

He had gone into the tunnel, climbing over the small mound of rubble that partially blocked its entrance. There was no light at all now. Bagman's sensor receptors projected twin beams of IR light, invisibly illuminating the way ahead, allowing Rogue's extra-human vision to pick out valuable details of his surroundings.

They had only gone about thirty metres down the tunnel's length when the ambush came.

They had been waiting for him all along, Rogue realised now. Lying there motionless, to defeat his equipment's scanner senses. Not talking, barely even breathing, to defeat the biochips' sensitive audio receptors. Their bodies smeared with cold mud and filth, so that Rogue's IR vision passed invisibly over them.

They had been waiting for him and when he passed the place where they had been waiting, they attacked. They came out the walls at him, they dropped down from the roof upon him, they came up at him from out of the rubble beneath his feet. Screeching and yelling. Naked and primitive. Hacking and clubbing at him with whatever weapons they had.

They had been everywhere, all over him. Something had smashed out one of Bagman's IR beams, and after that Rogue had fought near-blind. There had been too many of them in the narrow tunnel, and not enough space or light to use Gunnar, so Rogue had matched their savagery with savagery of his own. Something came out of the ground in front of him and Rogue had stamped down upon it, feeling bones break beneath his foot. Something had tried to wrench his rifle from his grasp, and Rogue had smashed the butt into its face, rewarded moments later by the dull sound of a lifeless body hitting the ground.

Something had leapt on his back, stabbing at him with a jagged shard of metal and Rogue had hurled himself backwards against the tunnel wall, using all his strength to crush his unseen attacker. He had felt more bones breaking, and had heard a high-pitched squeal of pain. He had just killed or maimed a woman or child.

The shock of that realisation had been enough to momentarily stop him in his tracks and that moment of hesitation was all his attackers had needed. More hands had pulled Helm away from his head. Another pair of hands had brought a broken lump of rockrete down upon his unprotected skull in a blow that would surely have killed a normal man.

Rogue had fallen into the filth of the tunnel floor, darkness closing in around him. He had been unconscious as hands had reached down do strip away his remaining pieces of equipment. Other hands had taken hold of him and dragged him off to their waiting master.

Rogue raised his head and looked into the face of his enemy. A smile, crueller than any of the other scars and livid burn marks there, cut across that face.

"Awake again? Shall we see how long you can stay conscious this time, Genetic Infantryman?"

Rogue weakly struggled against his chains. He was suspended by his wrists by chains fixed to the low ceiling of the underground chamber. Other chains secured his feet to heavy stone blocks on the floor. Too weak to stand, his weight sagged down, the manacles holding him up cut into the flesh of his wrists. Against his will, his gaze went to the weapon in the traitor's hand. It was a shock-baton, but of a kind far different to the ones wielded by the Souther Milli-fuzz. This was a Nort weapon, the same kind issued to guards and overseers in the Norts' POW camps and notorious gulag work installations and prison factories. The shock points on it were pointed barbs running down the spine of the weapon's haft, designed not merely to stun their victim with blasts of electricity, but also to rip and tear their flesh.

Rogue's back, torso, shoulders and arms were criss-crossed with the evidence of the weapon's most recent use. The filthy water that had been thrown over him to revive him dripped down his body, stinging into the cuts and burns that the traitor had left upon him. This was the third time he had passed out and been brought back round again, and he no longer knew how long the torture had been going on for. His wounds would heal, his superhuman GI stamina and constitution would see to that, as they always did, but Rogue doubted he would ever be allowed to live that long.

The face of his enemy hovered in front of him. The man he had criss-crossed the surface of Nu Earth to find and kill was standing in front of him, less than a metre away, and Rogue was helpless to do anything about it.

"We both know you're going to kill me, so why don't you get your sick fun over with and just finish the job?"

The traitor laughed. "Trust me, my friend, nothing would give me greater pleasure than killing the last of the Genetic Infantrymen and finishing the job I started in the Quartz Zone. You took away everything I had. My rank, my anonymity, my position in Souther High Command. My face, even. Now, though, thanks to you, some of these things will be given back to me and that is why I must keep you alive."

The chamber shook with the faint rumble of explosions from the surface above their heads. Rogue didn't know how long he had been unconscious, but the explosions were definitely getting louder and nearer.

The traitor seemed to read his thoughts. "Yes, Nordstadt will have new masters soon. Imagine how delighted they will be not only to have their precious city back, but also when they receive you as an extra gift to celebrate their victory!"

"Dream on, psycho. The only reward a scumbag like you is going to get from your old Nort buddies is-"

Gunnar's retort was cut off as one of the traitor's tribe of savages switched off his biochip's voice-synth speaker with an angry flick. Disarmed and in the hands of the traitor's followers, Gunnar and the others were helpless bystanders to Rogue's predicament.

"We have time yet before I emerge to begin negotiations with Nordstadt's new owners. How shall we spend it, I wonder?" smiled the traitor, reactivating the shock-baton. The weapon hummed into life in his hand, set on a new and more damaging power level.

"Yes. Your face, I think. You took away my face, so it seems only fair I return the favour. I'm sure your new captors won't mind receiving goods that are only a little spoiled, and there will still be enough of you left for the Nordland gene scientists to work with when they begin their dissection work on you."

The traitor brought the energy-crackling weapon up to begin the next and more damaging round of Rogue's torture. A commotion at one of the tunnel entrances interrupted him. He turned in annoyance as one of his followers entered and shuffled nervously towards him. The hunched, malformed figure grunted a few urgent words in a debased version of the Nort language.

The traitor deactivated the shock-baton with an air of obvious regret and handed it to one of Rogue's guards. "Watch him," he commanded. "Anything happens to him, and you'll all pay the price."

He looked at Rogue, who glared back at him in silent defiance. "It looks like we're both in luck tonight, my friend. The Nort advance is going better than I expected, and the fall of Nordstadt is probably only a few hours away now. There are things I have to do to safeguard this place and to get ready for my negotiations. But don't worry, we'll have plenty of time to continue this later, before I hand you over to my former employers."

He left, taking most of his followers with him, but leaving behind enough of them to ensure his prisoner remained closely guarded. Rogue slumped forward on his chains again, a black wave of despair washing over him.

He wasn't sure if he imagined it, but he thought he heard Helm's voice whispering to him from somewhere nearby.

"Hang in there, Rogue. Something's gonna happen to get us out of here, I know it. Stay solid blue, Rogue, and just keep on hanging in there. Don't quit on us now..."