Crucible (8 page)

Names and specific personalities began to develop. Sniper sharpshooters received names like Deadeye, Gunnar, Triggerman and Topgun. Stealth & Infiltration specialists were Pointman, Silencer and Shadow, while demolitions experts became Boomer, Fuseman and Cracker.

There were other names too which were more appropriate to personalities: Eightball, Hardball, Strike, Mainman and Topper.

And Rogue. Above all, there was the one they had quickly come to call Rogue.

He had been one of the first to rise to prominence amongst the GI Regiment trainees, swiftly establishing himself as a natural leader, a soldier to whom the other GIs instinctively deferred. He would have been a natural choice for fire team leader if it hadn't been for the instinctive renegade streak that ran through him, warring constantly with the obedience programming that was coded into his DNA.

It was the overseers who gave him his name and he had done everything possible to live up to it, sending one of his instructors to a two-week stay in med-bay after a dispute on the firing ranges. The penalty for such an offence was literal recycling back into the gene genies' flesh tanks, but the commanding officers in charge of the GI Regiment had made an exception in Rogue's case. Their task had been to create and train a cadre of living weapons and GI 3627218/R2 was a living weapon without equal, even in an entire thousand-strong regiment of such weapons.

The rest of the legend would come later. The Quartz Zone Massacre and the destruction of the entire GI Regiment during their first real baptism of fire. The against-all-odds survival of one sole GI and his quest to find the man who had betrayed them all. His roaming mission across the surface of Nu Earth, searching for the elusive, so-called Traitor General.

It was a legend known to every Souther soldier on Nu Earth whether they believed in it or not. The legend of the solitary, superhuman figure of vengeance who roamed no-man's-land, accompanied by the dead voices of his comrades.

It was the legend of the Rogue Trooper, the last of the Genetic Infantrymen.

EIGHT

Rogue dived for cover, acting on the verbal warning from Helm. A second later, high-velocity lines of las-fire stitched fiery patterns into the ground where he had been crouching. It had taken him more than three hours to cover barely four hundred metres of war-torn terrain, ghosting past a series of hidden detector drones and underground robot sentry posts on the way. He had got far on luck and stealth, but he must have triggered some other hidden auto-guard device that neither his own enhanced senses or Helm's scanner systems had detected in time.

Stealth and intuition might have got him this far, but now it was time to bring his other abilities into play.

"Bagman."

It was a statement, not a question, because he knew Bagman would already be waiting for the cue. Bagman, who was always there to watch his back in the old four-man fire team unit they had been part of, and who was still there now, his personality-encoded biochip slotted into place in the armour-cased equipment pack Rogue wore on his back.

"Got you covered, Rogue," buzzed the voice of his dead comrade from the biochip's speech modulator.

A series of small, flat disc objects flew out from an ejection port just over Rogue's shoulder. Micro mines.

They spread out in a wide arc, detonating in close sequence as soon as they struck the ground and creating a deadly barrier of flame and shrapnel in a crescent shape twenty metres in front of Rogue's position. The limited blast waves and the flying shrapnel would do little to damage the robot sentry guns, but the explosions would be enough to confuse their electronic senses for a few moments and a few moments was all Rogue needed.

"Helm?"

The biochip in his helmet slot was linked into the helmet's compact, but powerful comms and scanner systems had already tracked the necessary target information. In life, Helm had been the team's pointman. In death, or its equivalent in the strange electronic limbo state of a living personality surviving as a memory code recorded onto biochip circuitry, he still fulfilled the same role for Rogue and his other two fire team comrades.

"Target one at ten o'clock, thirty-one metres distant. Target two at three o'clock. Picking up two more of the sentry guns we passed on the way in, now coming online behind us."

"Gunnar?"

The rifle weapon in Rogue's hand loaded with the biochip of the fourth member of the original GI fire team, was waiting for his cue.

"RPG shell in the pipe and ready to go, Rogue."

"And I've got your back," confirmed Bagman, as Rogue heard the whine of his backpack's servo-arm mechanism being activated.

Rogue fired the RPG attachment slung underneath his rifle's main las-barrel, confident that Bagman would take care of the danger behind them. The missile shot away, unerringly finding its target. The closest sentry gun position disappeared in the incandescent flash of a gamma bomb explosion.

Moments later, the sound of the detonation was echoed by a similar blast from somewhere behind him, as the plasma sphere grenade Bagman had hurled out took care of one of the targets. True to his word, Bagman was watching Rogue's back. That was how he had died, during the nightmare of the Quartz Zone Massacre, taking the impact of a lethal blast aimed at Rogue. Even as a memory recording stored on a biochip board, Bagman was still there to watch his clone-brother's back.

Rogue was up and running, on the move, defying the two remaining sentry guns' ability to track and kill him. Designed specifically for Nu Earth combat conditions, the sentry guns' targeting programmes were set to detect and zero in on slow-moving, human targets wearing the bulky, cumbersome armoured chem-suits standard to all Souther front-line infantry. A Genetic Infantryman target, fast moving, unencumbered by any kind of chem-suit protection, his speed and reflexes boosted to para-human levels, was a different proposition entirely.

The sentry guns' twin lascannons chattered loudly, filling the air all around Rogue with noise and the hissing passage of volleys of las-bolts. Their aim was textbook precise, achieving everything their programming parametres demanded, but the blasts of las-fire struck the space where their scanner senses told them their target should have been split-seconds after Rogue had vacated it.

Their target gave them no time to correct their programmers' mistake. He jumped, twisting in midair, firing another rifle-launched missile into the chem-murk behind him, blowing apart a sentry gun. Even before he had hit the ground again, his enhanced GI reflexes and instincts were already going to work on zeroing in on the position of what was now the last remaining enemy target.

He hit the ground, the plasti-flesh material of his skin protecting him from the jagged shards of half-buried shrapnel and rusting war debris that would have spelled instant death to anyone wearing a chem-suit. Las-fire from the sentry gun tore up the ground behind him, tracking remorselessly back to where he now lay. It would be on him in moments and then the benefits of even his toughened GI skin would make little difference. The concentrated fire from the sentry gun's weapon would tear him apart just as it would for any other flesh-and-blood target.

"Zeroed in, Rogue," confirmed the voice of Gunnar as Rogue took aim with the rifle. "Fire capacity now set to max."

In life, Gunnar had been the squad marksman and he was still able to put his skills to good use, figuring out the required range and most effective firepower setting even before Rogue raised the sight scope to his eye.

Alone, his marksmanship skills were lethal. Working in tandem with Rogue's, they were straightforwardly devastating. The GI rifle chattered in Rogue's hands, spent power cartridges flying from its ejection port as it cycled through the magazine clip at a terrifying rate. On its own, one lasround from the weapon would make little impact on the sentry gun unit's armoured housing. Fired together, at a rate of several hundred a minute, their combined effect would be more than enough to get the job done.

Multiple las-rounds smashed like hammer-blows into the sentry unit's rotating turret top, melting and cracking its armour. One drilled through to the unit's sensor core, instantly rendering the weapon blind. Two more struck its power feed, severing it. Robbed of power, the chattering of the sentry gun's rapid-fire auto-las weapon instantly cut out. A moment later, the whole unit exploded as its damaged power core fractured apart.

Satisfied that the threat from the sentry guns was over, Rogue was already up and moving even before the last burning pieces of the destroyed auto-defence unit had struck the ground. He could see his objective buried in the ground ahead of him. To the untrained eye, or the spy-cams of any roving Souther reconnaissance craft or orbiting surveillance satellite, it looked innocuous enough; just another debris heap or mound of shellfire-scooped rubble in a typically Nu Earth battle-scarred scene strewn with such landmarks. It was Helm's sensors that had first picked up the whispering traces of voices in the ether which had eventually led them here, and it was Rogue's combat intuition and enhanced, eerily inhuman GI eyes that had finally picked the object out from amongst the surrounding terrain.

It was a Nort comms-post, camouflaged to blend in almost perfectly with the battlefield environment around it. The airwaves of Nu Earth were filled with radio traffic, much of it deliberately designed to jam out the enemy's own communications transmissions. Add in the interference from the many high-level radiation zones that blighted large areas of the planet's surface and the communications-scrambling effects of the violent storms that constantly raged across one part or another of its upper atmosphere, reliable long-range communications soon became a problem for both sides, even with all the hi-tech means at their disposal.

There were thousands of these comms-stations dotted everywhere across the surface of the planet, gathering in the faint ghost-whispers of damaged communications signals, filtering out the worst of the interference affecting them and then boosting them on towards their intended final destination. Any one of Rogue's endless journeys across the no-man's-land wastes of Nu Earth normally brought him within the telltale electronic footprint of at least one enemy comms-station, but as a rule he generally passed up on the opportunity of hunting down and destroying them. They were low-priority targets in the one-man mission that had taken him from one end of Nu Earth to the other and, as he suspected he was just about to find out, any attempts to attack one carried certain inherent dangers all of its own.

The sensitive comms equipment inside and the crew manning it were protected from the inhospitable exterior environment by a dome-seal; a las-shielded pressurised bubble which offered an atmospheric safe haven, allowing the men inside to work unencumbered by the need for chem-suits. An RPG launched gamma missile would still be enough to blow the dome open, instantly killing everyone inside from the effects of exposure to the lethal Nu Earth atmosphere, but for reasons of his own, Rogue needed to capture the comms-station's facilities intact.

"Dispensing seal-burster, Rogue."

"Read my mind, Bagman," said Rogue, taking the compact missile-like device and slotting in onto the firing attachment at the front of his rifle.

They would now be panicking inside the dome, he knew. Alerted by Rogue's triggering of the auto-defences, they would be scrambling into chem-suits and grabbing weapons and ammo packs.

"Picking up a mayday call, Rogue. The bad news is, they definitely know who's out here knocking at the door," warned Helm.

"Stak! Nain! Genetik Infantryman!" sniggered Gunnar, putting on a stereotypical Nort accent straight out of the very worst kind of Souther propaganda war-viddies.

"Doesn't matter who they try to call for help," growled Rogue, raising and firing his rifle. "By the time anyone gets here, these slugs are going to be history."

The seal-burster shell blasted through the skin of the dome, opening a catastrophic breach in its carefully maintained pressurised environment. Clean, immeasurably precious air rushed out, the lethal toxins and pathogens of Nu Earth's atmosphere seeped in.

By the time Rogue stormed in through the airlock a few seconds later, just about everyone inside the dome was dead. Their corpses lay on the floor in the familiar positions of agonised contortion caused by exposure to the raw poison of Nu Earth's atmosphere.

One of the Norts had been arguably fortunate enough to get his chem-suit on and sealed up in time. He flayed towards Rogue, screaming incoherently in his native tongue, managing to snap off one panicked and poorly-aimed shot with the officer's pistol in his hand.

One shot was all he got. A carefully aimed double blast from Gunnar took him square in the chest and blew him backwards away from the comms equipment. His corpse sprawled on the floor alongside those of his comrades.

Rogue took off his helmet and laid it on the workspace beside one of the comms array units.

"Clock's ticking, Helm. Do your thing and let's get out of here before someone shows up in answer to that mayday call."

NINE

They were in and out of the comms-station in less than two minutes. Another few minutes' of fast cross-terrain movement at GI speed brought them to the half-buried wreck of a giant artillery tractor that they had already selected on their journey in as a good emergency fall back position. It was a few minutes after that they heard the sounds of the airstrike as a flight of Nort atmocraft gunships wiped the comms-station off the face of the earth. Afterwards, when the smoke and heat of the incendiary charges had cleared, a group of Nort hoppers came in and dropped two full platoons of troops into the area. Rogue watched for a few minutes as they nervously spread out their search as the hoppers hovered overhead, circling in a wide concentric pattern and scanning the jumbled terrain below with searchlights and gun targeters.

Rogue knew that the Norts had a whole wing of their military intelligence division dedicated to hunting him down and destroying him. As soon as the men in the comms-station had identified him and got their mayday out, Rogue knew from past experience that the Norts' response would be swift and brutal. That was why he had to get out of there as soon as possible.