Crucible (25 page)

Gabe's personality matrix programming was getting better all the time, thought Rafe. His voice was filled with an over-excited tone. She was more wary.

"Authentication?"

"It's solid blue, babe. Sounds like Soldier Blue's in trouble and in need of help, fast."

"Good work, Gabe. Once you get them, feed the location coordinates into this crate's nav systems. Hey, this crate of yours got boosters?"

The last question was directed to Brass and Bland. Brass nodded in response.

Rafe casually pointed the pistol in his direction. "Then let's see them in action. There's a friend of mine there who needs our help."

TWENTY-TWO

Venner spotted the two hidden watchers guarding the crater mouth easily enough. They were hidden in a small tumble of ruins overlooking the entrance. Both of them were armed with las-carbines, although Venner doubted the marksmanship of either would be much threat. There had been several others with them, but they had departed an hour or so earlier, following the Rogue Trooper into the crater.

Venner had followed his target at a distance, hanging well back and out of sight, but able to keep track of the Genetic Infantryman's progress through his lock on the biochip equipment he carried. The triple-pulse signal had faded out, but not dropped away entirely. Venner had cautiously circled the area, suspecting his target had literally gone to ground. It didn't take him long to realise that the crater almost certainly contained a hidden underground entrance, or to spot that same entrance's hidden surface watchers. Now it was time to make his move.

He crouched low in the ruins, taking care to choose a firing position that wouldn't leave him silhouetted against the flashes and explosions of the battle now taking place on the near-horizon all around them. At least one of his targets was not so careful, crouching and believing himself to be invisible in the gathering darkness, not realising his upper body silhouette and occasional shifting movements were perfectly visible against the flickering battle light behind him. Even without that, Venner would still have found them. His helmet's ambient light IR vision and spectrogram systems picked them out with ease, their crude and poorly-maintained chem-suits and respirator rigs bleeding heat signature traces and telltale oxygen-exchange elements out into the air around them.

Venner took aim, waiting for the next rumble of explosions to mask the sound of his shot. He didn't have to wait long. A series of flickering blasts lit up the horizon. Venner expertly counted down the seconds until the sound of those explosions reached them and then fired just as the dull roar of the artillery strike rolled over them.

The first target dropped out of sight, its silhouette shape suddenly altered as the sniper bullet blew away most of its skull. Dumbly aware that something significant had just happened, the second guard began turning. Venner shifted aim and fired again, killing him before the last echo of the explosion had died away, and before the man had even finished turning around.

Venner slipped out of his hiding place and climbed down into the crater, looking for the tunnel entrance he now knew was there.

His progress through the underground network of passageways he found was both swift and deadly.

He bypassed the airlock and its primitive alarm device with ease. He travelled at speed along the lightless tunnels, using his suit's sensor systems to find his way. The lock-on signal was much stronger down here, now that he was at the same underground level as the biochips, and he had little difficulty tracking them back to their current location.

He had to kill on two different occasions during his progress through the place. The first time was when he heard the sound of human footsteps running along the tunnel towards him. There was nowhere to hide and nowhere to retreat back to, so he struck as the creature turned the bend. A quick chop to the throat, to silence its surprised squawk of alarm, and then a brutal wrenching of the neck bones and the task was done. He went to work quickly after that, breaking more bones, folding the corpse up and jamming its resized remains into a narrow alcove in the tunnel wall where it would remain undiscovered long enough for Venner to do what he came here to do.

The second time was when he came across two more of the inhabitants of this place blocking the way ahead in the tunnel he was travelling along. They were standing isolated in a pocket of light created by the phosphor torch one of them was carrying, both engaged in some mundane and mostly futile maintenance task on one of the tunnel's sagging roof supports. The assassin advanced confidently and silently forward until he was standing just beyond the edge of the pool of light. It was a simple pair of shots, contemptuously easy, and he barely even bothered aiming, choosing to fire his rifle from a hip-held position. One of the scavengers sensed something, looking up and took off running just before Venner squeezed the trigger.

Venner cursed and switched his aim to the other one, dropping it with one shot. The other one fled up the tunnel, screaming in panic. Venner dropped to a kneeling position and fired, sending a second silencer shell through the back of its head.

He remained there for several minutes, waiting to see if the sounds had alerted any others. Either the noise hadn't carried, he surmised, or the sounds of panicked screams were the norm down here in this dismal place. Whatever the truth of the matter, no one seemed to be coming to investigate the disturbance.

Venner continued along the tunnel, still following the lock-on signal from the biochip emissions. He was close now, he saw. Just a few hundred metres short of at least two of the pieces of GI equipment, if the readings he was getting from his suit systems were at all accurate.

Not long now. Just a little further, just a little more time, and the end of his mission would be in sight.

Unheard by the guards, Helm's voice started to whisper to him again. "Someone coming, Rogue. The tunnel at seven o'clock, behind your left shoulder. Whoever it is, its not one of the traitor's people. I'm picking up traces of electronic emissions from a whole bunch of fancy stuff they've got with them. They're scanning this place we're in right now. Could be Guardian Angel, maybe."

Rogue listened, still feigning semi-consciousness for the benefit of the watching guards. If it was that female GI pilot, then she was outnumbered. She was a GI, and she was undoubtedly armed, but Rogue still figured she might need some help. A distraction, maybe, to allow her to make whatever move she had planned.

Deliberately, Rogue pretended to stir to life, opening his eyes and shouting over to his guards in rough Nort.

"Hey, you guys found the secret compartment in my backpack yet? The one with all my best tech in it?" They looked up at him, eyes glaring in suspicion and surprise. A moment later, several of those same pairs of eyes flickered towards the discarded shape of Bagman, and that was when Rogue knew he had them.

"Guess you haven't then, seeing as how we're all still here and in one piece." One of the scavengers reached out to pick up Bagman and then hastily snatched his hand back at what Rogue said next. "It's booby-trapped, with a couple of sticks of C-10, just to give it a little extra protection."

They glared at him, angry now. He kept on talking. "I'll tell you how to disarm it, though, if you let me go. You won't believe the stuff I've got hidden in there. The Norts that are coming here soon would probably be extremely grateful to whoever gave them all this extra GI tech that no one knows anything about. It's all yours, if you let me go. What do you say?"

The scavengers muttered quickly amongst themselves. Then, just as Rogue had hoped, one of them climbed to his feet and advanced on Rogue, the shock-baton held in his hand. The scavengers had thought of a much better way to get the information out of him about Bagman's non-existent secret compartment.

Which was all fine by Rogue, since it put at least one of his enemies exactly where he wanted him to be.

The scavenger activated the weapon, looking to start with a little light body work to help loosen Rogue's turn. He drew his arm back to swing the baton into Rogue's ribs, and that was when Rogue drew up all the material he had been storing in the back of his throat and spat it out full into the man's face.

A GI's body had several extra organs, in comparison to a normal human being. These were mostly to allow them to survive the lethal climate of Nu Earth, to breathe its air and to drink its water. Nu Earth's toxins, poisons and viruses were filtered away by these organs, rendered harmless by a GI's natural immunity system, broken down and then expelled in the normal human way. One of these organs was in Rogue's throat, and its job was to store various samples of of these pollutants, so that Rogue's GI biochemistry could analyse them and, if necessary, manufacture the relevant enzymes and anti-bodies to give him extra immunity to them.

This was the organ Rogue was emptying out now, spitting a stream of acidic tox-sludge straight into the guard's unprotected face. The man screamed, his hands going to his face as the stuff Rogue spat went to work on him, eating into his eyes and skin. At the same time, Rogue hauled hard on his manacles, pulling down with all his weight, grunting in pain as he deliberately dislocated the thumb of his right hand, allowing that hand to bloodily scrape free of the manacle holding it. Dangling by one hand, he reached out to grab the screaming, blinded guard, pulling him towards him, partly to use him as a human shield and partly to get at the pistol belt the man was wearing.

It wasn't easy drawing and firing a pistol with a dislocated thumb, but somehow Rogue managed it. He hit two of the guards, only one of them fatally. The others were on their feet now and firing back at him in panic. Las-rounds hit the body of the guard Rogue was using as a shield, abruptly cutting off his agonised screams.

Just as Rogue prayed, more gunfire sounded from the tunnel entrance behind him. Rifle fire, it sounded like. A series of calm, perfectly-spaced, perfectly-taken shots, each of them unerringly finding their target and sending a scavenger guard falling to the ground.

In a few brief seconds, the battle was over. Rogue dropped the body he had been holding and, still dangling by his one manacled hand, twisted his body round to face the figure standing there in the tunnel mouth. Whatever he was expecting, this wasn't it.

It was a man, wearing a state of the art black chem-suit free of any kind of identifying insignia. His face, covered by a blank helmet visor, added to his anonymity. He carried a slug-thrower rifle and Rogue could tell his profession and his expertise just by the look of his weapon and the way he held it. His rescuer was a sniper, and a skilled one, if Rogue was any good judge of a fellow expert killer.

There was a chill stillness about the man, an air of lethal intent that made Rogue tighten his grip on the pistol in his hand. One part of Rogue's mind made the necessary computations about his chances of raising and firing the pistol before the sniper could respond. Rogue knew how good his own speed and aim were, but the answer he got to the equation his mind had just run through wasn't much to his liking.

The two killers stared at each other, both holding guns in their hands. Rogue broke the silence.

"Guardian Angel send you? Where is she?"

"She sent me on ahead. She thought you might need some help. Looks like she was right," answered Venner, studying his target's face for any sign that the GI knew he was bluffing.

Whoever or whatever Guardian Angel was, Venner's quick thinking reply seemed to satisfy the GI.

"I need to get out of these chains. There's a las-cutter somewhere over there," said Rogue, indicating the sprawled corpses of the scavengers and the litter of Bagman's equipment lying around them.

"Got one here," said Venner, reaching for an item on his suit belt. A few moments work and Rogue was free of the manacles on his ankles and other hand.

Rogue massaged his hand, popping his dislocated thumb back into place with only the merest grunt of pain. Tough son of a bitch, thought Venner, with more than a hint of grudging admiration. It would almost be a pity to pull the trigger on him, once he'd done what he came here to do.

He watched as the GI retrieved his biochip helmet and backpack, reactivating their speech facility before gathering up and repacking his backpack's equipment. Venner kept a careful watch on the other tunnel mouths opening out into the chamber. The noise of the gun battle had not gone unnoticed by the others down here and it wouldn't be long before they had company.

"So how'd you find me so quick?" asked Rogue, gathering up the last of his equipment.

Venner showed him the tracker system attached to his rifle. "It's keyed to detect biochip energy signatures. The range is pretty limited, but as you can see, it gets the job done."

Rogue studied the device, his eyes narrowing as he recognised its design. "You're S-Three?"

"Guilty as charged," said Venner, putting as much friendly levity into his voice as he could muster. "Hey, we're not all soulless spooks and Milli-com ass kissers. There's still a few of us left who want to win this war and aren't afraid to put our heads on the block to try and make that happen."

"Good to know," said Rogue, retrieving the best of the lascarbines from the hands of one of the dead scavengers. "We're not ready to leave yet, Not while we're still a man short. Gunnar's still down here somewhere. The traitor, or one of his goons has got him."

"The Traitor General, he's here too?" said Venner, careful to inject a note of surprised disbelief into his voice.

"You bet he is, and we're not leaving until we find Gunnar and do what we came here to do."

"Copy that," replied Venner, smiling behind his mask. This was going to be easier than he thought. He could pull the trigger on the GI and accomplish the secondary part of his mission right now, but there were a lot of unknown variables down here and two guns were always better than one. Besides, he thought, other than himself, the Rogue Trooper was probably the most expert killer on Nu Earth and he welcomed the chance to study the Genetic Infantryman in action. It was always good to study another professional's moves, and Venner was interested to see if the GI really was as good as his reputation suggested.