The Quartz Massacre Read online

  Rogue told himself that it didn't matter. He didn't need any computer to tell him how to find an enemy. After twenty years of training, his mind was its own targeting reticule. He continued his roll to take him out of that hollow and into the next and in the same movement he brought his gun round and let off one round. Even over the din of battle he heard the muffled cry as his shot hit home.

  He didn't hang around to enjoy the kill. Even in the one brief look he'd taken to find his mark, he'd seen that they were hopelessly outnumbered. The battlefield was a seething mass of chem-suited Norts clustered around lone, desperate blue figures like white blood cells congregating to eliminate an unwelcome infection.

  As soon as his drop pod had landed, he'd begun to acquire his own clot of enemies. They were closing in fast. Their rifles let off such a continuous stream of fire that even through Rogue was managing to dodge the individual beams, the air was heating so fast around him that he could feel it scorching his lungs and singing the thin brush of hair on his head.

  But the advantage wasn't always with the numbers. Rogue had been told that often enough and now he could see why. The Norts were too close together. They were encircling him completely and soon they'd be unable to fire at him without firing at each other. As he dodged and weaved and let out seemingly random shots that actually had a tight pattern, he saw a few of the Norts realise this and start to back away. But the others were still advancing and all that accomplished was more confusion for the enemy. Some of them stopped firing altogether, frightened they'd be taking out their own side. Others continued and did kill their own men.

  Soon it was utter chaos. Rogue continued weaving and shooting, until he'd finally achieved his aim. He'd cleared a zigzag path through the encircling force of Norts, and by the time the Norts had realised what he'd done, he'd already taken it. Some swung their rifles to follow him, but Rogue was gone before they fired and all they did was shoot their own men.

  But though he was out, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and Rogue's blue skin stood out like a convenient target in the bleak crystalline landscape around him. Another mistake the Gene Genies made, he thought. They were so proud of their creations that they made us stand out rather than blend in.

  He'd broken through one circle only to find himself still surrounded by enemies, the shattered quartz of the battlefield stretching as far as the eye could see and the legions of Nordlanders stretching with it.

  There were fewer blue forms among the white now, and there'd been few enough to begin with. Most of the GIs had died in the air. Died without firing a shot. Their bodies would never even have a grave. They'd lie on the cold stone of this hellish battlefield until eventually even their altered flesh would rot and fall away, and all that would remain would be chem-scoured bones, finally, in death, indistinguishable from normal men.

  Rogue put all that from his mind and for a while did what he'd spent his life preparing for. He fought. It became a routine, almost a mantra: aim, dodge, fire, reload. Aim, dodge, fire, reload. Sometimes it felt like there was a haze hovering over his mind, but every time it descended he fought it off. One nanosecond of distraction and they would have him and there would just be one more blue corpse without a name on the battlefield.

  Then, when he really wasn't sure that he could go on any longer, he saw a blue form ahead of him. It took him a moment to recognise the face, screwed up into a grin of manic battle rage.

  "Gunnar!" Rogue shouted, surprised to find his voice still strong and clear.

  Gunnar's head snapped round, and in that moment of inattention a Nort machine gun locked on, but Rogue was quicker and the Nort died with a strangled gasp before he could fire.

  "Rogue! Hey - over here!" Gunnar shouted. "I think I see a path through."

  Rogue leapt the mound of quartz in front of him. This time it was Gunnar who saved him, taking a Nort sniper in the shoulder before he could get a clean shot. Then they were together, back to back, and though there were only two of them Rogue felt ten times better than he had before.

  He scanned the horizon, but all he could see was an unchecked mass of Nort troops and a few, a very few, GIs fighting a desperate battle for survival among them.

  "Don't see any way out from here," Rogue said.

  Even with his back to Gunnar, Rogue knew that his mouth was stretching in the over-wide smile he always wore when he was being most dangerous, the smile that made him look a little mad. "Yeah, well, we might have to kill a few Norts first," Gunnar said. "That a problem for you?"

  From the edge of the battle, the soldiers looked like toys carelessly knocked over by a bored child. Well, they are my toys in a way, thought Bland, mine and Brass's private little sandpit. And when everything's finished we'll sweep up the pieces and see what we can make of them.

  "Care to take a wager, Mr Bland?" his partner asked, gently stroking his moustache through his chem suit as he surveyed the carnage beneath them.

  "I'm always amenable to a little flutter, Mr Brass," Bland said. "I assume you don't intend it to concern the outcome of this particular conflict."

  Brass tipped his bowler hat lower to shade his eyes from the glare of the midday sun. Beneath the hat he was wearing a customised chem suit, skin-tight and nearly invisible. They'd designed it a month after they'd first joined forces, to allow them to wear their own suits below, which were so much more elegant than the military issue suits the soldiers wore. And besides, when you were innocent merchants plying your trade in a war zone, it was extremely beneficial not to look too much like you belonged to either side. It paid to appear harmless, too, and perhaps a little absurd. One didn't want to look like a threat.

  "The outcome is, of course, a foregone conclusion," Brass said. The screams of the dying only drifted thinly up here, like the distant cries of birds, but it was clear which side most of them were coming from. "I was referring to the profit we are likely to make from this little contretemps. I personally believe that we'll find richer pickings here than after the Dixie Offensive."

  "Ah, happy days," Bland replied. He remembered that time very well. The Norts had been developing their new Hell Cannon. They'd cut down the Souther forces like wheat. Then an accident had happened: an overheating fusion cell had exploded in the centre of the Nort ranks, and at the end of the battle there was no one left alive but Bland and Brass themselves. They'd pried the Hell Cannons from the clawed, scorched hand bones of the Nort soldiers and sold them to the Souther High Command for enough to let them take a five-month holiday away from Nu Earth. "I very much doubt we'll be seeing that kind of money, Mr Brass," Bland said.

  "Now, now, when have my instincts ever been wrong?" Brass said. "There's a pricking in my thumbs that always means money. I shall forgive your doubts, however, as we're likely to find out for certain very soon. It seems to me the battle is reaching its conclusion."

  Bland looked back down and saw that Brass was right. There were only a very few specks of blue in the sea of green and red. The intelligence which had led them here, telling them via their extensive spy networks that the Norts had a surprise in store for the Southers, had clearly been spot on. "I suppose then that it is time we showed our true colours," he said, turning reluctantly from the spectacle of the battlefield to their vehicle.

  It sat five metres away, a great, squat, dark crab of a machine. It had never, Bland thought, been terribly aesthetic, but alas matters of aesthetics sometimes had to be set aside when lives were at stake, especially their own. The metal fortress, bristling with armour and guns, had kept them safe in the middle of many a firefight.

  He pressed his eye against the aft door, pausing a second for the retinal scan, then stepped back to allow the door to heave open. Once inside, he slipped with comfortable ease into his co-pilot's chair and pressed the button marked "Nordland".

  He could just barely hear the strains of the Nordland national anthem beginning to blare from the speakers at the four corners of the vehicle. He couldn't see the Nordland flag run up the pole at t
he front, but he knew it was there.

  "All set, Mr Brass," he said. "Now we must simply wait for those strange new Souther troops to hurry up and finish dying."

  Rogue was beginning to believe that Gunnar really might have seen a way through. With two of them fighting together it was much easier. The years of training had fused them into a fluid fighting unit, almost like two bodies with one mind.

  When Gunnar twisted to his left, Rogue knew that he should fire into the sudden gap, taking out the Nort trooper behind Gunnar, at the same time twisting to his left so that Gunnar could do the same for him. For the first time, he started to imagine fear in the faces of the Norts behind the masks of their chem suits.

  When it happened, neither of them was prepared for it. The drill probe burst out of the ground right between them, a great churning lethal knife of a thing. They backed hurriedly away from its whirling, diamond-sharp blades - Rogue going in one direction and Gunnar the other.

  Gunnar recovered himself quickly, turning to run round the thing and bring himself shoulder to shoulder with Rogue. He turned - and found himself face-to-face with a Nort. In the microsecond it took Gunnar to bring up and target his weapon, he saw only a shadowy impression of the man's eyes, hidden behind his insectile chem mask. They were blue, pale and cold, filled with the cruelty of someone who has never experienced weakness and can't forgive it in others. They didn't blink once.

  These are the eyes of the man who's going to kill me, Gunnar thought. Because my gun isn't ready, and his is. The energy beam went clean through his head. Rogue emerged from the behind the drill probe just in time to see Gunnar crumple to his knees. He couldn't see the face of the Nort who'd shot him, but he didn't really care. His gun was up and he took the Nort trooper straight through the heart. The man let out a choked, gasping scream.

  Rogue didn't bother to watch him finish dying. He rushed to Gunnar's side, glad at least that the drill probe gave him enough time to tend to his comrade. But Gunnar was already fading. "I was slow, Rogue," he said, his once powerful voice little more than a whisper. "Too damn slow. I..." Then he was gone. The light in his white eyes faded till they were the colour of pearls, blank and lifeless.

  Rogue couldn't allow himself to feel anything. "Don't worry, you'll get another chance," he said to the fallen body of his comrade. "We're Genetic Infantrymen. Even when we're dead we don't escape from war."

  Rogue knew what he had to do, and that he only had seconds to do it. For the first time in the battle he felt a brief shudder of nausea, which he suppressed quickly . He rolled Gunnar's body over roughly. It flopped like a rag doll. Then he snatched his knife from his knee and applied it to the back of Gunnar's head. A fountain of blue blood shot up, some of it splashing in Rogue's face. He ignored it and dug deeper, twisting the knife around to find his target.

  He felt his palms grow sweaty as the knife found nothing but Gunnar's flesh. Finally he felt it, a metallic resistance against his blade. He twisted the knife around till it was underneath the obstacle, then flicked it up. The little microchip, buried deep in Gunnar's head, shot into his hand, slick with blood and the spongy remnants of his friend's physical brain, but though Gunnar's brain was gone, his mind remained. Stored in the chip, ready to be re-gened in a force-grown clone body when they returned to Milli-Com. The Gene Genies had planned for every contingency. Not that they were concerned about GI fatalities, Rogue thought bitterly. They just didn't want to see their eighteen years of training go to waste.

  "Sixty seconds, Rogue," a voice said from the tiny chip. It was tinny and mechanical, nothing like Gunnar's, but something in the inflection identified it as his. "Install me into my rifle before my biochip expires," Gunnar said urgently.

  Rogue snatched the rifle from the ground, yanking it to release the straps from beneath his friend's corpse. The hole was easy to spot, just beside the clip for the magazines. He slotted the biochip into place, taking what time he could, terrified that he might damage it and deny his friend this second chance at life. Then, as soon as he felt it snap home, he flicked the clear cover over it and slung the rifle over his shoulder, flinging his own to the side after he'd liberated all the remaining ammo.

  "You okay?" he asked gruffly.

  There was a brief, heart-stopping pause. Then Gunnar's voice sounded out, more resonant now that it was emerging from the metal of the rifle. "Apart from being dead, you mean? C'mon, let's go find some Norts."

  Rogue couldn't argue with that.

  Cowering behind a rock, Pietr had watched as Jaze crumpled to the ground.

  I should do something, he thought. I should...

  But he didn't know what he should do. He couldn't imagine taking on the blue monster that'd killed his brother. The monster that now seemed to be talking to his gun. He just remained, crouched in his hiding hole, the back of his hand pressed against his mouth through the thick material of his chem suit.

  Even though Gunnar was still with him, Rogue felt exposed again, lonely without the physical body of his friend beside him. And the Nort scum had stepped up their assault since Gunnar had died, as if the taste of blue blood had got them baying for more. Up ahead, Rogue saw a cannon emplacement that was decimating a group of GIs below.

  "Gun's causing a lot of damage, Rogue," Gunnar said. "We should take it over."

  Still working as a team, Rogue thought. He turned to the cannon, cleared the Norts clustered around it and used it on the rest of them. And with Gunnar in his weapon, he suddenly had a full heads-up-display, all the feedback that had been frazzled on his old gun. Once the cannon was used and discarded, he headed higher, not letting the Nort drill probe and the four Norts it discharged stop him, more determined than ever to get himself out of the battle in one piece now that Gunnar's life depended on it too, and less sure than ever that it was possible.

  Then Rogue saw a cluster of blue bodies only a hundred metres ahead of him - long after he'd thought there were no more to come - and he was filled with renewed hope.

  His hope burned even brighter when he saw the familiar figure of Bagman take out three Nort troopers before Rogue had crossed half the distance towards him.

  Bagman was showing his crooked grin when he saw Rogue and sketched a salute. "Damn good to see you, Rogue!" he said. "What the hell's going on? How did they know we were coming? Something's wrong, very wrong."

  "I know," Rogue said. Bagman's words had crystallised his own unspoken fears, that there was more than bad luck or bad timing to the Nort presence at their exact landing site.

  "Any sign of the others?" Bagman suddenly asked, as if he'd read something in Rogue's expression.

  "I'm right here, old buddy," Gunnar's strange new mechanical voice said.

  It took Bagman only a second to work out what that meant. Rogue saw his expression twist into one of anger and grief. "Damn this war."

  Another second, and Bagman was all business again. He nodded towards a Nort bunker ahead of them, the heavily fortified point where their underground network of tunnels broke through to the surface. "We've got to take that stronghold," he said to Rogue. "They'll keep on rolling reinforcements through it until we do."

  Rogue looked around at Bagman and the other GIs, Fisher, Tank and Twitch, and he felt confident that it wouldn't be a problem.

  It wasn't, but it wasn't easy either. There were Kashans inside the bunker, lots of them, and by the time they'd cleared it out and mined it back into the dust, Tank was down and Fisher was injured. Then the Blackmare tank came. Huge, vast and dark, it seemed to blot out half of the sky behind its bulk. A fist shot from its front cannon and shook the ground like an earthquake, but the artillery man had aimed wide, and instead of taking out the GIs, it opened an escape route for them, a bolthole in the crystal rock ahead. Without any prompting, the GIs headed straight for it, and the Norts followed them, determined not to let their prey get away.

  By the time Rogue and Bagman were through the quartz tunnel and safely out the other side, there were no more GIs left with them. N
either of them said anything - they both knew what they were thinking. And looking at the field of battle below, it was clear that it was far from over.

  There were bunkers everywhere, heavily fortified with gun emplacements. The individual Norts they could take out, one damn soldier at a time, but the big guns were another matter. They needed to be put out of commission.

  By unspoken consent, Bagman and Rogue headed for the nearest bunker. If they could destroy this one they might just have a narrow corridor outside the firing range of the others through which they could escape.

  "Wait here, Rogue," Bagman said. "I'll take this one out." Before Rogue could protest, he'd pulled a micro-mine from his kitbag and was loping across to the thick compcrete wall of the bunker. "Cover me," he snapped out to Rogue over his shoulder.

  Rogue didn't need to be asked. Trusting Bagman to cover any forward fire, he concentrated on protecting the flanks and rear. The Norts must have realised what they intended because they were coming thick and fast, a great red swarm of them.

  Rogue didn't care. More Norts meant easier pickings for his rifle and with Gunnar in place, the targeting system was back with a vengeance. He didn't miss a single shot, and every one was a headshot, as if Gunnar was getting a vicarious pleasure from visiting his own death on all these enemies. Rogue was so intent on the fight that for a second he didn't see it. What happened to Bagman was only a blurry event at the periphery of his vision, something that shouldn't distract him from the task at hand.

  But there was something about the colour, about the blue spray spreading in every direction that told Rogue this was something he should pay attention to. So he spun round in time for the final act, as the drill probe's blades sliced round through Bagman's flesh one final time, leaving him nothing more than a scattered heap of flesh and bone.

  Rogue snapped. Gunnar, he could take. The whole damn situation he could cope with. It was war. Drek happened. But Bagman too, the one Rogue had always somehow felt it was his duty to protect... Was he really going to end this day with all his friends dead?