The Quartz Massacre Read online

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  #2: BLOOD RELATIVE - James Swallow

  #3: THE QUARTZ MASSACRE - Rebecca Levene

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  #2: PROPHET MARGIN - Simon Spurrier

  #3: RUTHLESS - Jonathan Clements

  #4: DAY OF THE DOGS - Andrew Cartmel

  #5: A FISTFUL OF STRONTIUM - Jaspre Bark and Steve Lyons

  DURHAM RED

  -Peter J Evans-

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE

  #2: THE OMEGA SOLUTION

  #3: THE ENCODED HEART

  #4: MANTICORE REBORN

  #5: BLACK DAWN

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  #2: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES - Mike Wild

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  JUDGE DREDD FROM 2000 AD BOOKS

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  CABALLISTICS, INC

  -Mike Wild-

  #1: HELL ON EARTH

  #2: BETTER THE DEVIL

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  To Alan Trewartha for the help and Magnus Anderson for the enthusiasm - thanks!

  Rogue Trooper created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons.

  A 2000 AD Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Ben Flynn and Mark Harrison.

  Copyright © 2006 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Rogue Trooper" is a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions"2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-077-8

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-118-8

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  ROGUE TROOPER

  THE QUARTZ MASSACRE

  Rebecca Levene

  THE LEGEND OF THE ROGUE TROOPER

  Nu Earth is a hellish, nightmare planet ravaged by war. The planet's atmosphere is devoid of life, poisoned by repeated chemical attacks and deadly to inhale. But the planet is close to a vital wormhole in space, a fact which has dragged its two rival factions - the Norts and the Southers - into a never-ending war. Now Nu Earth is a toxic, hell-blasted rock, where millions of soldiers in bio-suits wage bloody battles and die in their millions. Nu Earth is too important to lose. Not an inch of ground can be lost!

  Here is where the legend of Rogue Trooper was born. Created by Souther forces, Rogue Trooper is the sole surviving example of the Genetic Infantrymen: a regiment of soldiers grown in vats and bio-engineered to be the perfect killing machine. Complete with protective blue skin and the ability to breathe the venomous atmosphere, the Genetic Infantrymen became renowned figures on both sides of the conflict. Moreover, the mind and soul of the GI could be downloaded onto a silicon chip in case of a mortal wound on the battlefield. Once downloaded, the dog-chip could then be slotted into special equipment and preserved until the soldier could grace a newly grown body.

  Betrayed by a general in their own high command, almost the entire regiment of GIs were wiped out in the Quartz Zone Massacre. The sole survivor managed to save just three chips from his former comrades and slot them into his gun, helmet and backpack. Now he is a loner, with just the disembodied personalities of his comrades for company, roaming the chemical wasteland in search of revenge: the Rogue Trooper.

  PROLOGUE

  Rogue's first memory was of battle. The combatants were only two weeks out of the artificial wombs, barely five years old by normal standards, but they fought with all the ferocity and relentless will to win of real soldiers.

  The Gene Genies, the genetic engineers who were the only parents Rogue had ever known, had divided the batch of children into two. They'd given Rogue's group red bands to wear around their heads, and the other group was given green. Then the little boys received sticks and were told that if any of the other group was left standing at the end of the game, they'd be going without supper that evening. "Pretend they're Norts," the Gene Genies said.

  Standing at the side of the limb-flailing, squealing free-for-all that followed, one of the nutritionists assigned to the youngsters by Souther High Command said, "Oh, they're so cute, aren't they?"

  Beside her, the Gene Genie in charge of training frowned and tugged at the hem of his long white coat. "We didn't design them to be cute. We designed them to kill."

  Rogue didn't know what he was called back then, or what made him and his brothers so special, but he knew that the Gene Genie was right. He'd been born to fight.

  By the time Rogue's body resembled that of a twelve year-old human - apart from the blue skin, which marked him out forever as something else - Rogue knew exactly what he was. He was a Genetic Infantryman, a GI, and he'd been designed as a secret weapon by the South Side, the good side, in their ongoing war against the evil, untrustworthy, cruel and cowardly Norts.

  Rogue leaned against the cold metal of the bulwark and stared at the blue-green mass of the planet below. This space station, Milli-Com, was the only world he'd ever known. He'd never known what it was like to feel real earth beneath his feet, or real grass; he'd never basked in the sun under a wide blue sky, or listened to the cheeps and rustles and roars of a land filled with life. And he never would. When his training was complete, he wouldn't be sent down to the world below. He'd be sent to Nu Earth, the most important theatre of the whole vast war, the world guarding the black hole which was the central nexus of the subspace shipping routes.

  He had never set foot on Nu Earth, either, but he knew that there was no grass there. The sky wasn't blue. It roiled yellow with the chem clouds that killed anyone who breathed them; anyone besides him and his fellow GIs. That was one of the many things that made them so special. Rogue peered down at the jewel-like planet one last time and wished for a moment that he was less special and more normal.

  "You're supposed to be at weapons practice," a voice interrupted his thoughts. It was the trainee that the Gene Genies called Trooper B12, and whom Rogue and his fellow GIs had nicknamed Bagman.

  "So should you," Rogue said.

  Bagman grinned. "Old Kinsey's running the session. He never takes roll call. And it's not like he can tell us apart. Advantage of being clones."

  "So what
are you sneaking off for?" Rogue asked. "Need some extra time to pack your kit?"

  Bagman rolled his eyes at a joke he'd heard many times before. It was how he'd got his nickname: his disproportionate attachment to the semi-automated kitbag that all the GIs had been issued when they were ten. The rest of them hated the things, the extra weight they had to carry from then on through every training drill. But Bagman spent endless hours sorting through his, making sure everything was there in the right order, that the auto-dispensing arm was oiled and fully functioning, the nano-manufacturer fully charged. "These things are great," he would say. "They don't just carry equipment, they make it. Feed 'em battlefield scrap and they can make you a micro-mine or a med kit or even a Sammie out of it." The others always sighed - they knew this already - and rolled their eyes whenever Bagman finished, as he always did, "A GI's best friend is his bag."

  "It'll be your only friend if you carry on that way," Gunnar usually muttered, but Bagman didn't mind.

  Bagman looked at Rogue, as if wondering whether he could be trusted, then seemed to decide that he could. He lowered his voice to a soft hiss which drifted sibilantly down the echoing metal corridors of the station. "It's that door."

  Rogue frowned. "The emergency airlock?"

  Bagman lowered his voice even further, leaning right in until his mouth was nearly against Rogue's ear, his eyes darting nervously to left and right. "They say it's an airlock. But if it's just an airlock, why won't they let us anywhere near it?"

  Rogue said loud enough to make Bagman wince, "Because if we go outside it we'll be in a vacuum, and even we can't survive that."

  Bagman smiled pityingly at him. "You go on believing that, Rogue, if it makes you happy."

  Training carried on.

  They'd started guns at year ten, and now they were on to heavy armaments, the Sammies, which could take out a Nort Hoppa from a hundred yards (if the Hoppa hadn't taken you out first). Gunnar found his name, and a place right at the peak of the GIs hierarchy, when he proved to be an almost preternaturally accurate marksman.

  Trooper H14 excelled at hacking, infiltration, all the skills the others disdained. "A trooper's most important asset is under his helmet," he told them when they laughed at him for sitting hunched for hours over his terminal during downtime, learning the intricacies of Nort technical specs. They started calling him Helm, of course.

  Rogue wasn't a specialist like Gunnar or Bagman, but as a tactician he was second to none, the trooper who could lead a battle simulation and win it every time. Bagman went on polishing his kit, and staring at the emergency airlock door, wondering.

  The Gene Genies began to mutter, when they thought the GIs couldn't hear, that something must have gone wrong with the cloning programme, that some element of individuality had crept in that was never meant to be there. They refused to use the names the troopers had given themselves, sticking resolutely to G12, or I04, or R13, and punishing any GI who was caught calling themselves anything else. The GIs didn't care. They carried on using their names anyway, when they were on their own. And they continued to grow more different, more individual, as if nature's evolutionary urge was working with all its might against the homogenising force of the cloning programme.

  Only Rogue felt like he didn't have an identity yet. He had a name, but he was never quite sure why the others had given it to him. He felt like he still had to grow into it, to earn it - just as Gunnar had striven ever harder to master his weapons training once that was what he was known for, the one thing which made him unique.

  Then one night, long after curfew, Rogue heard one of the other GIs stirring in his sleep, twisting round in his steel bunk bed, then climbing out and creeping out of the sleeping chamber. On an impulse he couldn't quite explain, he chose not to report him to the Gene Genies as he should have, nor to ignore him and go back to sleep, as any of the other GIs would have, but to get up and follow.

  Rogue paused a minute at the door to look back at the others, checking that they hadn't been disturbed, and for a moment he was struck by how orderly they looked, row after row on top of each other in their metal beds like pupae in a honeycomb.

  Outside the room, the corridor was deserted, the dark form of the GI Rogue was following only visible as a black blot in the dim red nighttime lighting. Rogue didn't have any trouble recognising him. The slight swagger in his shoulder, the looseness with which he swung his legs, told Rogue that it was Bagman.

  So he wasn't surprised when the other GI stopped in front of the emergency airlock door. Nor was he surprised when Bagman turned around and said, "You can stop creeping, Rogue. I know you're there."

  "What are you doing, Bagman?" Rogue asked, drawing level with the other GI at the airlock.

  Bagman folded his arms over his chest, stubbornly, as if he expected resistance. "I'm going in," he said.

  "You know that's a bad idea, right?" Rogue asked, glancing into the darkness at the ends of the corridor, seeking any sign that they'd been observed. He didn't find any. Something about the quality of the air, the gentle hum of machinery idling in neutral, told him that they were the only beings awake on the station.

  Bagman shrugged. "What's the worst they can do?" Before Rogue could tell him that they could throw them both in the brig, maybe even flunk them out of the whole GI programme, Bagman twisted the big metal wheel on the front of the door and flung it open.

  It wasn't an airlock. Bagman had been right about that. For a moment, they couldn't see exactly what it was, their view of the room behind the door obscured by the thick green-yellow fog which filled it from floor to ceiling. Rogue hesitated, reluctant to walk on blindly, but Bagman strode straight into the fog as if finding this strange hidden chamber was the most normal thing in the world. Rogue walked after him. His eyes squinted into the fog, but the swirling mass of it deceived him, making him see solid shapes where there was nothing but air.

  Except, he realised, some of the shapes were solid. And they were moving closer.

  It's just the Gene Genies, Rogue told himself. This is probably some sort of test, and we've just failed it.

  But whatever the figures were, they weren't Gene Genies. Their skin was nearly the same colour as the fog from which they were emerging, a toxic green that looked far more unnatural than Rogue's own blue. Their faces were bubbled and boiled away, great folds of flesh on one side and bare bone on the other.

  They looked like the victims of some horrible industrial accident, but on top of their heads was the same thin strip of white hair that sat atop Rogue's own.

  "They're GIs!" said Bagman, his voice thick with revulsion.

  "Yeah," Rogue said softly. "Genetic rejects. I guess the Gene Genies didn't manage to make us straight off. They had to experiment first."

  Bagman couldn't tear his eyes away from the freaks. The mutant GIs seemed equally fascinated with them. One of them stepped forward, head tipped to the side so that its good eye was almost level with Rogue's. "Brudder?" it said hesitantly. "Thought we only GIs. Waiting here. Waiting to be used. But now you here, you GIs too." Its voice was mushy and awkward, as if its mouth wasn't made quite right on the inside.

  "Yeah," Rogue said, grabbing Bagman's arm and dragging him backwards towards the airlock door. "We're GIs too, just like you."

  The mutant smiled, the expression distorting its face still further till it looked hardly human at all.

  Another mutant, larger than the first, stepped up beside it. "But so different," it said. "Why you so different to we?"

  Subtly, the atmosphere changed, and the creatures which had seemed so pitiable a moment ago suddenly seemed threatening, dangerous. Rogue became uncomfortably aware that the mutants were nearly twice the size of him and Bagman, and that neither of them had thought to bring their weapons, an unforgivable oversight for a GI. Rogue knew that they had to get out of there.

  But it was too late. The lead mutant's face lit with sudden, angry understanding. "They normal, like creators!" it said. "They replace us, brudders!"
>
  "No!" the other mutant shouted. "We only GIs! We still needed! You not take our place!"

  An arm lashed out, faster than Rogue would have believed possible, to catch Bagman across the side of his face, and the other GI went down with nothing more than a soft grunt of pain.

  Rogue saw Bagman's death, and his own, in the mutant's one good eye.

  The Gene Genies would have been proud of him. Without thought or hesitation, he lashed out at his enemy, aiming instinctively for its most vulnerable area. His thumb hookied into its eye socket, reached in and gouged out.

  The mutant gave a terrible, high-pitched scream of agony, and while it was still reeling from the shock, Rogue slung Bagman over his shoulder and ran.