Blood Relative (2 page)
Like all the polluted waters of Nu Earth, the foetid stench of the Orange Sea's marine microclimate was enough to keep the virulent chem-clouds at bay; so while the air around Nu Sealand was breathable, it was a cocktail of the most repellent scents imaginable. Ivar's commander had once described it as being similar to "a boiling pot of excrement, vomit and caustic soda". Still, you got used to it after a while, and it meant that the Norts on the platform could go about barefaced, at least when there weren't any acid storms in the vicinity.
Ivar took a long drag on the kaff-stick. He couldn't stand the idea of being sealed into a chem-suit, maybe for days on end, incapable of having even the briefest of smokes. Sure, this place smelled like puke and if he fell over the side, the toxins in the water would turn him into meaty slurry in a matter of minutes, but at least he could light up.
He cast a lazy eye over the poisoned ocean, but Ivar didn't expect to see anything of interest. Since the Norts had taken Dix-I, the only thing coming over the horizon were broadcasts from the Nordland forces simulant sweetheart DeeTrick, her synth singing bawdy tunes about her exploits in Nu Atlanta. Ivar sighed. He hoped that the fall of Dix-I wouldn't mean the end of Nu Sealand's usefulness to High Command, because that would mean reassignment, and maybe some actual exposure to warfare.
Little of the kaff-stick remained and Ivar began the return leg of his patrol to the post where Lindquist would be waiting; newly promoted to sergeant and one pay grade above Korporal Ivar, Lindquist would probably be polishing his rank pins again. Ivar rounded a stanchion and saw the sergeant leaning over the guardrail, staring down at the russet froth around the stilt legs. It wasn't until he got closer that Ivar started to become concerned. It seemed like Lindquist wasn't breathing.
"Hoi!" he said around the cigarette, reaching for the other man's shoulder, "Are you-"
Ivar took a handful of Lindquist's jacket and pulled him up from his crooked stance. He almost swallowed the kaff-stick in surprise. "Stak!" Protruding from the sergeant's pale neck were three small knives made from a dull, matte plastic. The blades of the little weapons had swelled up after they penetrated his skin, thickening enough to choke the soldier to death. Every detail of the silent murder imprinted itself on the Nort's eyes.
Korporal Ivar felt the onset of loosening bowels as he imagined where the knives might have come from - had they been thrown? Not from the sea, no, too far. Not from above... That meant the killer was on the same deck! Ivar went cold as he realised that he'd walked right past a pool of shadows cast by the stanchion, large enough to conceal a man. He clutched his rifle, brought it up and fumbled at the safety catch.
The length of chain was connected at one end to a pulley mechanism that had served some forgotten purpose during the rig's construction; the other end was wrapped around a balled fist belonging to a figure that stood, not in the shadows, but directly behind Korporal Ivar. With brutal economy of movement, the grimy line of metal links looped over Ivar's head and coiled around his neck. The chain bit into his throat and tightened inexorably. Ivar had the brief impression that the figure behind him was bare-chested, but the lack of air in his lungs seemed to be playing tricks on his eyesight, warping his sense of colour. The Nort soldier let the gun drop and clawed at his neck, tearing his skin as he tried to lever the makeshift garrotte from its deadly embrace. However, his trachea collapsed under the pressure and the lifeless body slumped to the ground.
As he exhaled a final puff of air, the smouldering kaff-stick dropped from Ivar's mouth and was sent tumbling over the rail. His assassin, with the speed and deadly grace of a coiled cobra, snapped at the falling cigarette and caught it before it could fall down below; the chance was slight, but a burning cigarette butt could ignite a pool of flammable tox-sludge. The killer ground the butt into the palm of his hand, ignoring the faint sizzle as it snuffed out - the hot tip left no marks on the vat-grown plastiform flesh. He threw the dead korporal a blank look. "These things will kill you." The voice was low but intense.
Satisfied, Ivar's murderer moved silently to Lindquist's corpse and recovered the three D-Daggers in his neck, collapsing them back to their original throwing mode. He made sure that there were no other observers in sight and then pitched the two men into the sea. If anything remained of them once the chem-sludge had done its work, there might be a few meaty morsels for the slug-sharks.
Powerful fingers dug into lips of rusted metal, revealing where epoxy seals had been placed to hold a wide ventilator grid closed. Silently, the killer marshalled the musculature of his arms and chest, and with a sharp squeak, the grid came away. He slipped into the vent shaft and pulled the grille back with him. Inside the conduit, the air was hot and thin streams of burning steam coiled upward; the heat would have blinded a normal man, but he would be unaffected for quite a while. The biological machine of his body was far more efficient than the crude design made by human evolution - he was a finely tooled organic instrument that had never been subject to the random whims of nature.
Gently, the killer made his way downward, searching for the branch shafts that led to his target.
Data fell through the computers like sand through a sieve; trillions of bits of information, terabytes of code, voices, images, all of it ceaseless and unstoppable. The work of making sense of the "catch", as the technicians liked to call it, belonged to Nu Sealand's most important team member. Vok-IV was one of hundreds of similar units scattered in bases across Nu Earth, a dedicated artificial intelligence that could trace its lineage back to the primitive smart machines of the twentieth century, devices with names like "Echelon" and "Zagadka".
Vok-IV's sole purpose was to listen and parse communications traffic into discreet packets of intel for Nort High Command's cryptography and logistics battalions. Every three hours, it would squirt a compressed stream of lexicode to a secure transmitter and pass along another million lines of battle plans from the Southern lines. Both sides rotated their code keys on a daily basis - some of the more sensitive units did it on a hourly basis - so a lot of what Vok-IV handled was unreadable, given classification through point of origin or destination rather than content. However, there were some Souther ciphers that the Norts had torn wide open and their text streamed across the screens of the monitor techs, giving them something to do in between the checking of the AI's coolant systems.
Tek-Specialist Erno was on desk duty shift, and he cocked his head to watch the clear data stream race past him. The other technicians passed the time by placing bets on the content of certain messages or reading the enemy soldiers' letters home; such activity would have been grounds for serious charges if the unit's political officer knew of it, of course. Erno stifled a yawn. A solboat convoy in the Western Sea was calling for rescue from a wolf pack of Nort Mantas; Private First Class Taylor of the 151st Rangers was getting a "Dear Joan" letter from her lover; a neutron missile had hit a railhead in Nu Dakota; an outbreak of black rictus was being reported in Toxville. Another uneventful afternoon in this small corner of the galaxy's longest running war.
Of course, Vok-IV didn't just listen to the enemy. The wide-band scanners tuned in to frequencies used by the scattered independents and Freeport zones across the planet, looking out for information from battlefield looters and profiteers. And unbeknownst to all but a select group of staff (of which Erno was one), Nu Sealand also eavesdropped on its own side. A special section of Vok-IV's operational memory was devoted exclusively to checking the parity and content of Nort communications, looking for any signs of duplicity, treachery or malfeasance. After all, there were traitors and opportunists on both sides of the Nu Earth war.
Erno frowned at this thought, remembering the lengthy series of loyalty tests and biometric checks he'd had to undergo before being stationed here. High Command ensured that everyone with direct access to Vok-IV was a staunch Nordland party member; anyone who came up short by their stringent standards swiftly found themselves posted to front-line operations like Nu Paree's endless street fights or the lethal Morrok Combat Zone.
Such a "reassignment" had happened quite recently - one of the scanalysists from F-Sector had made a few impertinent comments about Grand Marshal Von Gort, only to be escorted on to the next jumpshuttle out, bound for what the base commander called "a more challenging appointment". The errant technician's shuttle had never made it to whatever meat grinder it was destined for, though. A day later Erno had noticed comm traffic from a search and rescue unit as it passed through the datastream, reporting that the transport ship had been shot down by a Souther orbital lancer. If Erno ever entertained the idea of even thinking something disloyal, he would remind himself of the stills of that crashed flyer, reduced to a ball of indistinct wreckage somewhere on the Dix-I plains.
He glanced around the room. Erno was alone. He could see the shape of a guard through the frosted glass of the core chamber's hatch, but he was behind five centimetres of plastisteel; Erno could shout obscenities at the trooper and never be heard. Erno gave his chair an experimental spin. As he turned in place, his eyes ranged over the banks of consoles, the ducting from the power core and then the central frame of the Vok unit itself. Big, like the magazine from some giant's pistol, Vok-IV was a block of machined aluminium riddled with tubes carrying pinkish coolants. At this angle, Erno could see the heart of the machine, the oval module of the datacore. He watched a blinking green light turn red on its surface; the unit had just fired off another databurst. In three hours time, the greedy little code-monkeys at crypto would be ready for another helping. The core was such a small thing really, no bigger than a handball, and yet it was the very reason for Nu Sealand's continued existence; had the listening post not been here, the Norts would have reduced the rusting rig to slag years ago. Erno's commander was fond of telling his men that the Vok-IV was much more important than any of them. In the balance of things, the officer often said, the lives of all the technicians combined were worth less than the least expensive component inside the datacore. How this knowledge was supposed to motivate them, Erno wasn't sure. They were glorified watchmen, really, observers looking over the machine's shoulder on the million-to-one chance that the unit might suffer a breakdown. It was dull work, but at least it was safe.
Erno spun on his chair again, quicker this time. He saw monitors, ducts, Vok-IV, more monitors, the wall. Another spin. Monitors, ducts, a blue man, Vok-IV, more monitors.
The Nort fell off the chair in surprise when his brain caught up with the images from his eyes. "Buh," he managed, attempting to force himself back up from the floor. The intruder crossed the room in quick, lightning-fast steps, snatching at Erno's tunic. The technician drew in a breath to scream - not that it would have mattered - but then found it impossible as the swift figure pressed a serrated combat knife to his lips.
"Quiet," he was told.
Erno looked into inhuman eyes, greenish-yellow without a trace of pupil, eyes that regarded him with clinical, detached precision. The face they were set in was a strong, sculpted mask, hard and much abused like that of a prize-fighter, but also curiously smooth. The technician suddenly thought of the classical sculptures looted from old Earth in the museums on Norta Sekunda.
Erno had spent his entire tour on this planet reading Souther comm signals, so he knew exactly who and what had walked into the computer chamber. There was a legend in the room with him, a blue-skinned ghost conjured up by the worst of battlefield science. A freak. A monster.
A Rogue.
"Key," it said.
Erno blinked. He had never really believed the stories that the Genetic Infantrymen actually existed, instead considering them to be some weird piece of Souther misinformation and propaganda set out to encourage tall tales among the war zones. And for long moments he found it hard to connect the creature holding him by his throat to that abstract idea.
"Your key," repeated the GI.
Dutifully, Erno produced the beam-key from its loop on his belt and handed it over, thumb and forefinger extending. It wasn't like the enemy soldier would be able to use it, anyhow. Erno had to be in direct physical contact for it to work, so the bio-lock could read his DNA pattern.
The Rogue Trooper gave Tek-Soldat Erno the smallest of smiles. "Thanks," he added, and then with a single stroke of his knife, he cut the technician's thumb and forefinger clean off.
As pain and shock shot throughout his body, Erno fell back into his chair, screaming. Rogue crossed to the Vok-IV and squeezed the severed digits and the key into the right slots on the module, absently wiping blood off his broad chest. The computer core flowered open and offered him the datacore like a gift. Rogue reached into the rain of vaporous sub-zero liquids that kept the AI just above freezing and tore the unit out, ignoring the rime of frost that snapped and crackled over his fingers.
Erno skittered backwards on his chair's castors, kicking and flailing, and a trail of blood marking a dot-dash path after him. He could now see where the vent shaft had been opened from the inside, the marks in the metal where bare hands hard as iron had pulled and tore it. With the most total physical exertion of his life, Erno forced away the blazing pain from his injury and used his off-hand to slam a circular button on the desk. Instantly, a siren began to wail.
The GI ignored him, unhurried in his task, and placed the datacore in one of two blocky pannier packs strapped to the thighs of his fatigue trousers. Erno's vision began to tunnel from shock and the sound in the chamber was becoming woolly and indistinct. He saw the hatch slide open and a guard barrel in, a heavy flechette pistol in his grip; standard firearms were not permitted inside the computer chamber, for fear that an accidental discharge could strike a vital component. The frangible micro-arrows the guard's weapon fired could make a red ruin of flesh but would bounce harmlessly off any solid surface.