The Quartz Massacre Page 3

  His parents had been so proud, then, when he'd gone to the recruitment office on the veldt and signed himself up; prouder still when the elite Kashan Legion had accepted him to serve alongside his brother. His mother had cried, but she'd told him she'd always known there was more to him than his brother or his father said. He wondered if she would still believe that, if his father would still be proud of him, if they could see him now, losing the battle against the wooden cut-out of the real-life enemy he would soon be facing.

  The Quartz Zone. They had their orders. They were to defend the strategic territory between the Scum Sea and the mountains to the north against the Souther assault, which Nort spies had determined was coming. The Southers, and in particular the monstrous Genetic Infantrymen, would be totally unprepared for the Kashans of which Pietr was the most junior recruit. Their commanding officers had told them it would be a massacre.

  Pietr aimed and fired again, his shot going wide four feet to the left. He was sure the officers were right. He wondered which side it was that would be getting massacred.

  ONE

  QUARTZ ZONE MASSACRE

  Rogue had never really understood the term "hive of activity" before, but, having watched Milli-Com over the last twenty-four hours, he finally got it. The whole place was like a beehive that a child had stirred up with a stick, everyone rushing everywhere and getting in everyone else's way. And here was the honeycomb itself, the drop pods stacked ten high on top of each other, ready to be deployed through the turbo-tubes that would blast them towards the planet's surface below.

  Drop time T-minus seventy.

  The drop pods were tight, claustrophobic little hollows encased in memo-steel to keep out the nuclear heat of re-entry and padded with transplastic to mould itself precisely to the shape of the GI within. It would cushion them from the impact on the planet's surface and make sure that the terminal velocity they reached as they fell didn't mean precisely that.

  The GIs called them coffins. Rogue inspected his: fifth from the left on the second row up. He'd done it ten times already today, although the Dolls were supposed to be responsible for servicing the equipment pre-battle. But they weren't the ones whose lives depended on them, and Rogue had learnt long ago never to trust anyone's judgement but his own. So he flipped the catch on the lid, and it hissed open with a soft whoosh of hydraulics. There was no fusion cell in it, nothing that could implode or explode during the decent through Nu Earth's toxic atmosphere. The whole mechanism was the finest clockwork, a device from another time.

  When the lid had flipped open, Rogue looked down to see a single red rose lying on the transplastic moulding. He lifted it up and frowned at it, trying to work out how it could have got there, which of his buddies was having a joke on him and what exactly it was supposed to mean.

  "Like it, blue?" a husky voice asked from beside his elbow.

  He looked round to see Venus Bluegenes half-smiling at him. She nodded at the rose. "Picked it from the hydro-plant this morning. For my favourite GI."

  For a moment, Rogue didn't know what to say. He couldn't tell if the thing he could see shining out of her pale eyes was mischief or something else. Then, just as he'd opened his mouth to reply, he saw Helm approaching flanked by Bagman and Gunnar.

  He hurriedly slammed shut the drop pod's lid, trapping the rose inside it. "Very funny, Venus," he said gruffly. "But you haven't got time to be wasting on jokes. There's soldiers lives depend on you doing your job now."

  Her smile dropped and she sketched a hurried salute. "Sir, yes, sir!" But there was a mocking tone to her voice, and as she sauntered away, hips swinging, she paused to look back over her shoulder at him.

  Helm noticed. "What's my girl talking to you about, Rogue?" His voice was full of threat, as taut as a wire about to snap. They all were now. It was as if they could already smell the blood - their enemies' and their own.

  "Just telling me to take care of you," Rogue said after only a second's hesitation.

  Bagman laughed and slung his arm over Helm's shoulder. "Ooh, Venus wants Rogue to look after her little baby, hold his little hand," he said. He pouted up his lips and made as if to kiss Helm.

  Helm pushed him away roughly. "Scan out, Bagman!" But his eyes followed Venus as she left the launch chamber, and Rogue saw his face relax slightly.

  Only Gunnar didn't seem tense. He had been filled with an almost manic joy since the mission announcement had been made. He'd barely spent a minute outside of the shooting range, honing skills which were already near perfect. Rogue had performed Gunnar's equipment checks for him, sure that his friend wouldn't remember for himself.

  Suddenly, a voice began to ring out through the room, echoing back to them from the snaking metallic corridors outside. It seemed to be emerging from the whole station. "All GIs... All GIs assemble on the drop-pod deck with weapons and equipment ready. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill."

  Rogue felt every single muscle in his body clench, and relaxed them all with an effort of will. His hand, as if of its own volition, drifted down to check the hilt of his knife at his knee, and the ammo-pouch hanging above it, then across to the butt of his gun before feeling behind him for the weight of his kitbag, which hadn't left his back for the last seven days.

  It didn't feel quite real. They were finally going to war. They'd spent so long preparing for it, and yet now that it had come he wasn't sure he was ready. He saw Bagman swallow once, hard, before checking his own equipment.

  A tech marched past. Not one of the Gene Genies, he was a newbie brought in the last few weeks when the station staff had doubled to prepare for the coming battle. The tech frowned down at his hand-screen, then up at the GIs as if they were just another piece of unreliable equipment.

  "Get moving," he ordered, his voice emerging high and thin from beneath a beaked nose. "Into the drop pods. Now we find out if you freaks are as good as you're supposed to be."

  The man marched off to repeat his orders to the other knots of GIs standing around the chamber. Helm reached up, adjusting the readout monitor on his helmet to bring it closer to his eyes. Rogue saw that his fingers were trembling as he did it, just a little, but with anticipation, not fear. "This is it," he said. "This is what we were created for."

  Gunnar looked down at the stock of his rifle, his finger unconsciously clenching and unclenching on the trigger. "Can't wait to get down there." His voice was hoarse with excitement. "The Norts won't know what's hit 'em!"

  He and Helm grinned at each other. Rogue felt the same excitement, but his own was tempered more by caution. They were as perfect a fighting force as they could be - for a fighting force that had never seen any real action. No number of battlefield exercises or sessions in the sim-suites or wargames could fully prepare them for the real thing. None of them had yet learned what it was like to see one of their comrades die. Rogue was grimly certain that they were about to find out and could only hope that it wouldn't be one of his buddies who provided the lesson.

  Bagman was squatting on his haunches, obsessively checking through the contents of his kitbag as the robot arm pulled them out and packed them back in again. He echoed Rogue's own thoughts. "Just remember, guys, this isn't another training run." Then, mouth twisting in a half-smile, he repeated the mantra they'd been taught again and again in training. "Let's watch each other's backs down there."

  "Always," Gunnar said as he and Helm and Bagman slapped each other on the backs. The call to enter the drop pods continued to blare in the background, filling the huge space with sound like a physical presence, and the air was choked with the peculiar smell of the GIs' sweat.

  After a moment, Helm seemed to realise that Rogue wasn't joining in. He looked across at him, his forehead creased in a curious frown. "What do you say, Rogue?" The others looked too, as Rogue's words really mattered to them. Time and again, in training sessions and outside, he had pulled their bacon out of the fire, and somehow that had given him some authority in their eyes. The responsibility weighed h
eavily on him.

  He wished he really did know what they seemed to think he knew, that he could impart some final words of wisdom that would keep them all safe. But he didn't, so he just shrugged and said, "Let's be careful down there. We were bred to survive on Nu Earth, but that doesn't make us invulnerable." He gave his equipment one last check, then straightened his back. "Good luck. I'll see you on the battlefield."

  Then he turned away and slid nimbly into the drop pod beside him. The transplastic instantly moulded itself to his body, like being hugged too hard by someone you didn't know that well. "Ready," he said to Bagman, and with a quick grin and a thumbs-up Bagman slammed down the lid on the drop pod.

  Rogue found himself shut in darkness, the transplastic pressed right up against his face. He could smell the rubbery scent of it where it squeezed up into his nostrils. And his own heartbeat echoed loudly in his ears, transmitted directly through the material around him. Sealed into my coffin, he thought. He felt a slight jerk, a short acceleration, and then he was falling towards Nu Earth and the Quartz Zone.

  Pietr had heard the name a month ago, the Quartz Zone, when the new recruits to the Kashan Legion had first heard what their mission would be, but he'd never really thought about what it meant until now.

  The whole place was made of crystal. It glittered in the moonlight. Every few seconds his breath would huff out in a gasp of barely suppressed terror, and the field of his vision would fog out for a moment to a diffuse light, the sort of light you were supposed to see after death. But the eye guards were designed to be self-cleaning, so a fraction of a second later the mist would clear and the rainbows would be back, and beyond them the shattered landscape of giant, twenty foot tall crystals towering over the pools of stagnant chem.

  This was it. It was really happening. Until now, he realised, he'd been able to kid himself that it wouldn't. It had been ridiculous, he knew, but some small part of him had always assumed that he'd be sent home before any real fighting began. He just wasn't cut out to be a soldier. He'd realised that within a week of joining up, and surely his commanding officers would realise that too and send him back out of harm's way.

  Except that they hadn't. And the one time he'd tried to bring it up, subtly, with his brother, Jaze had looked at him with such contempt that Pietr had never mentioned it again. It was only the thought that he might yet win his brother's respect that kept him from running away into the chem-blasted wilderness and taking his chances.

  His brother, their squad leader, was to his left, binoculars pointed up at the sky, rock steady, as they had been for the last two hours. Around him the rest of the squad were standing, weapons slung for instant combat readiness, scarlet chem suits bleeding into the darkness. They were laughing and joking and talking about how many of the blue freaks they were going to kill, and whether blue ears counted for more than pink ones when you took them as trophies.

  Into the distance, the thousand men of the Kashan Legion, the best legion in the whole damn Nort army, were all saying exactly the same thing.

  Pietr had tried to join in, but they'd just looked at him in disbelief, as if they knew he didn't mean it, and turned away.

  He wanted to kill Southers, of course he did, they were scum and they deserved to die. He just wasn't sure that they wouldn't kill him first. And if they did, what good would that do for Nordland? His gaze swept over the glittering moonlit landscape, as jagged as a serrated blade. It wouldn't be a good place to die.

  "Visual contact!" his brother suddenly shouted. "We have visual contact!"

  Pietr jumped so hard that his Lazooka fell out of his hands to land with a musical ringing sound against the crystal ground. He fumbled it back as quickly as he could, but his hands were shaking so hard that it took him three tries. By the time he'd got the Lazooka up again and pointed toward the sky, his brother had noticed.

  Pietr couldn't see the contemptuous sneer wrinkling his brother's handsome face beneath the insectile mask of his chem suit, but he could imagine it. "What's the matter, Private Pietr? Scared?" he asked.

  "Don't be stupid," Pietr said, but his voice was shaking even harder than his hands and his helm mic broadcast it round to echo brightly from the crystal rocks.

  Jaze, scenting weakness, moved in for the kill - as he had done since he was seven and Pietr was three. He walked up to his brother and thrust his face as close to his as his chem suit would allow. "Pull yourself together, private!" he shouted. "You're a disgrace to your family and a disgrace to your uniform!"

  Around him, Pietr could hear the other Kashans snickering. He felt himself flushing. As if embarrassment mattered at a time like this. If his brother still despised him, after he'd given up everything to fight for his country, when he was probably about to die for his country, then what had been the point of it all?

  Jaze grabbed Pietr's Lazooka, his muscular arms pulling it from Pietr's leaner frame with nonchalant ease. Then he thrust it back into Pietr's arms sighted straight up at the sky. "The enemy's coming from the sky, not the ground," he said. "Just point it and pull, and if you feel like soiling your suit, try to do it quietly."

  Pietr gripped the weapon as hard as he could and walked back to his own position, trying to straighten his spine and not slink away as the mocking laughter of the other men followed him.

  He did as his brother said, pointed the Lazooka up and rested his finger against the trigger. He had to resist the urge just to pull it down, to let go with a wild stream of fire. He couldn't see anything, though. The sky was pitch black, the moon shining only thinly through the roiling mass of yellow and green chem that was the planet's atmosphere, colours he'd learnt to loath with a passion since coming to Nu Earth.

  "I see 'em," a voice suddenly shouted from his left. Then another from his right. A third said, "Sweet... There are thousands of them!" And at first Pietr couldn't work out what they meant. There was nothing in the sky, just some high black dots and a flock of birds making their way across the blasted landscape. He remembered that no birds ever flew over this land, and he knew that the dots were all men. Every one of them was an enemy who wanted him dead and every second they were getting bigger.

  In the seconds he watched, frozen, they started being the recognisable silver rockets of drop tubes heading for the ground.

  Before he'd even realised what was happening, Pietr's finger tightened on the trigger. With a roar, the Lazooka spat out a shrieking trail of fire towards the sky. By dumb luck, the fire lashed against one of the descending pods.

  The drop pod beside Rogue's burst into a bloom of flame too bright for even his eyes to watch and he knew that another GI had died. The front screen of Rogue's drop pod had cleared for landing, giving him a perfect view of the slaughter all around. His hands strained against the enfolding transplastic, itching to do something, but he was entirely powerless. All he could do was watch as GI after GI died.

  It was like target practice for the Norts below, he thought, the easiest kind of turkey shoot. He wondered bitterly why it hadn't occurred to the Souther high command that if, by any chance, there were Nort forces in the Quartz Zone, the GIs would be entirely unprotected as they came down.

  Didn't quite care enough to worry, he reckoned. The risk to our lives didn't figure into the equation the same way it would have if we were real men.

  To his left, another drop pod went. He wondered with a jolt of fear if it contained Gunnar, or Bagman, or Helm. How could he hope that it didn't? If it wasn't them, it was some other GI. There was no good option, nothing to hope for.

  For too long all he'd been able to see were the green-yellow clouds of the sky lit by an occasional brilliant flash as another drop pod went. His own drop pod tilted and he felt a sharp jerk even through the protective transplastic moulding as its grav-chute deployed. Finally, he could see the land below him, the sharp crystals stabbing upward into the sky like knives ready to cut any surviving GIs to shreds.

  He was only thirty metres above it now. Twenty metres, and there didn't seem
to be any Lazooka fire heading his way, all of it concentrated upward at the GIs still deploying from the tubes. I'm going to make it, he thought, feeling the intense selfish joy of survival.

  Then he didn't have time for thought at all as the drop tube hit the ground with a force that would have pulverised the bones of any normal man. It was rolling so fast that even Rogue felt his head spin and his teeth clatter together, then there was a smaller impact and he felt it come to a stop at the bottom of the gully where he'd landed.

  Rogue's training took over, aided by the self-preservation instinct carried by every life form, even one bred in a tube. He punched the door release button but it didn't shift, the mechanism jammed, so he kicked it open then leapt and rolled, trying to get himself clear of the drop pod in case any enemies had seen it land.

  It was a good thing he did because he was only ten metres clear when a rifle beam shot into the heart of the pod. He saw the outer metal of the pod glow from dull red to white. Rogue only had time to roll himself into a shallow hollow in the quartz before he heard it explode with a muffled boom and a shower of molten metal sprayed out over the crystal rock, hissing and sinking into it as it landed.

  A moment later the Nort marksman seemed to realise that Rogue had already left the pod. The energy beam swung round, hitting a few inches from his head. Rogue had already realised that his targeting computer was fried, both the heads-up display in his helmet and the auto-lock-on in his gun. Probably frizzed by the Nort bombardment as they descended, he thought, maybe by something designed specifically to do so.