Crucible (9 page)

To the men fighting in the Souther armies, he was mostly a myth, the Nu Earth legend of a soldier who not only survived but thrived on the poisoned battlefields, the trooper who had gone renegade to find and kill the traitor responsible for the deaths of his comrades. Many of them doubted his existence, an idea that the Souther military police, the so-called and much detested "Milli-fuzz" were keen to encourage, while at the same time actively hunting for Rogue themselves, desperate to finally get their hands on a soldier who had long ago been classified as a renegade and deserter. To those Souther troops who had encountered him, he must have still seemed fantastical; an eerie, ghostly figure who emerged from out of the chem-mists to give them much-needed support against a Nort ambush or assault. And then, as soon as the battle was over, disappeared back into the mists as mysteriously as he had first appeared.

To the Norts, though, he was something else. A figure of terror and superstition. An inhuman, seemingly indestructible gene-freak creature who prowled the battlefields of Nu Earth, killing Norts wherever he went. Rogue had heard some of the rumours whispered about him in the Nort trenches: about how he drank the blood of his victims, how the very gaze of those blank, inhuman eyes of his could kill, how the Souther genetic scientists had designed their abomination creations to survive by feeding on the flesh of corpses left on the battlefield.

Monster. Renegade. Ghost. Gene-freak. Deserter. Nu Earth urban legend. No one ever said life would be easy as a genetically engineered super-soldier.

Rogue scanned the shape of the closest hopper craft through his rifle's telescopic sights, his expert marksman's eye easily picking out its most vulnerable target points. The pilot's head was clearly visible through the glass of the cockpit. The power feeds to the side-mounted anti-grav thrusters. That under-armoured maintenance hatch in its underbelly, giving him a clear shot straight through into the craft's power core.

The hopper skimmed closer, maintaining a level twenty metres above the ground. Rogue kept it fixed in his sights, waiting for any sign that the Norts aboard had detected his hiding place. Confident that, if need be, he could down it with one well-aimed burst of shots.

The hopper retreated off to the left, moving to rejoin the other craft in the main search area a kilometre away in another section of the battlefield. Satisfied at last that they weren't going to be found, Rogue relaxed and left Gunnar perched in the hatchway of the upended tractor vehicle's driving cab compartment as he slid back down to rejoin Helm and Bagman in the rear cargo hold.

"Okay, Helm. What you got?" he asked, pushing aside the virus-eaten, skeletal remains of one of the vehicle's original crew.

They had picked up the first traces of the radio transmission half a day ago. Helm's comms systems routinely picked up hundreds of such ghost signals every day, and he just as routinely blocked most of them out, bringing to Rogue's attention only those that were of any tactical significance to their immediate situation. This one, however, had been different.

For starters, it had come in on an obscure Souther military command frequency that hadn't been used officially in years. It was the frequency reserved for use in communications between Milli-com and the now dead and destroyed Genetic Infantryman Regiment. Secondly, it had contained enough of the correct GI code signals for Rogue and the others not to automatically dismiss it as bait for another Nort trap. Over the years, the Norts had used various bogus radio signals to try and lure them into carefully prepared ambushes and Rogue and his comrades were well used to such tricks.

This didn't seem to be the case here, however. The signal was badly distorted and heavily code-scrambled and Helm's processors only had limited success in cleaning it up. One word of what little he had been able to make out had still been enough to persuade them to break off from their current route and take a dangerous detour towards the nearest comms-station that Helm's sensors could detect.

Buzzard.

Just one word, but to Rogue and the others, it had all the impact of the dry, deadly crack of a sniper shot.

Now Rogue listened in quiet anticipation as the transmission, cleaned up and filtered through the more powerful equipment they had found in the comms-station, played back through the speech unit of Helm's biochip.

"Guardian Angel to Blueboy, this is Guardian Angel looking to return a solid blue favour to a friend out there on rogue mission walkabout. Have possible fix on Buzzard for you, Blueboy. Buzzard's wings are clipped and he may be on the ground and looking for a new nest. Buzzard's last known location at the following coordinates..."

"You hear that voice, Rogue?" broke in Bagman, excitedly. "And she's calling herself Guardian Angel! You thinking what I'm thinking?"

Rogue chose his next words carefully. Bagman's biochip had been damaged in a firefight several years ago. Ever since then, Bagman's personality matrix had been erratic, to say the least. Still, Bagman was a brother GI who had died saving Rogue's life and Rogue never allowed himself to forget that fact.

"I hear it too, Bagman. It's the voice of that GI Doll, the one we helped out back in the Volg Wastes."

It had been over a year ago. They had gone to the aid of a downed Souther fighter pilot who was on her own against an entire Nort patrol platoon. Rogue had helped even the odds against her, although from what he had seen, she had been more than capable of looking after herself. They had never met face-to-face, communicating only by radio as Rogue gave her the covering fire she needed to dig herself out of trouble. Rogue had vanished back into the mists as soon as he knew she was safe and that her rescue pick-up was on the way, but she was a fellow GI and she must have realised her mystery ally's identity.

And now here she was all this time later, calling herself his guardian angel and returning the debt of gratitude from that day in the Volg Wastes.

"Buzzard? You think it's really him?" asked Helm.

Buzzard was the codename of the man they only knew as the Traitor General, the Nort double agent who had been responsible for the destruction of the GI Regiment at the Quartz Zone Massacre. They had tracked him down to being one of the generals among the staff of an orbiting Souther command satellite called Buzzard-Three, but he had escaped and suffered serious burns in the process. Since then, they had hunted him all over the face of Nu Earth, following up every rumour of his survival, pursuing him from one bolt-hole to another, flushing him out of hiding each time, only to see him slip away out of their grasp yet again. His cover amongst the senior levels of the Souther military had been blown after the destruction of Buzzard-Three and the reported deaths of all aboard it, but in the chaos of the war on Nu Earth, it had been easy for him to find other places to hide, and other identities to hide behind.

The last time they had encountered him, he had been posing as a brutal interrogator called Buzzard in a Nort prisoner of war camp. He had escaped from them there too, and after that they had lost the trail, becoming involved in some of the larger events of the war around them.

But now they had picked up the scent again, and the hunt was maybe on once more. Assuming, Rogue reminded himself, that the information they'd received was genuine.

"She's Genetic Infantry. Solid blue," he said in response to Helm's question. "If there's no one else we can trust, at least we can still trust our own. GIs don't lie to other GIs."

Solid blue. It was the phrase the GIs had always used strictly among themselves, first in the years of harsh training in Milli-com and then during the nightmare carnage of the Quartz Zone Massacre. "Blue-skinned freak" was the most common epithet used against them by their instructor-guards, but the close brotherhood of GIs had typically turned the insult on its head, adopting the intended slur as a badge of pride.

Solid blue. The ultimate guarantee of loyalty from one GI to another. Rogue might have suspected that the message was a trap cleverly laid by the Norts or even the Souther Milli-fuzz, but as soon as he heard those words, he knew it was genuine.

"Bagman, dispense digi-map. Let's see where those coordinates we've just been given-"

"Already there," interrupted Helm. "It's Nordstadt, Rogue. If that info's right, then the Traitor General's gone to ground right in the middle of the biggest clusterfrag on the planet."

Rogue digested the information. Nordstadt was over two thousand kilometres away from their present position, with half a continent and several of the very worst battle sectors on Nu Earth between them and it. To get there would be near impossible. To do it alone and on foot would have to be thought of as certain suicide.

Rogue picked up Helm and hefted Bagman onto his back, scrambling back up the slope of the floor of the tractor wreck to retrieve Gunnar.

"C'mon, guys. Let's go hunt a traitor."

Rafe made her way out of the squadron's comms room, Gabe floating ahead of her and acting as lookout. He had downloaded his personality matrix into a smaller, portable drone-shell from its hardware base aboard her Seraphim fighter, which was now safely parked in a hardened shelter craft bay below ground. His drone body, a small floating orb, looked hardly any different from any of the other kinds of messenger and security drones that were a common sight on any Souther military base, and would hardly have merited a second glance from anyone still about at this hour.

It was just about night cycle now on the base, when the sun went down on this side of Nu Earth and the black hole that was the main objective of the entire war hung high in the night sky, casting its eerie black glow down on the ravaged face of the planet below. No one seemed to know how the superstition had started, but for years Nu Earth combat pilots thought the black hole symbolised bad luck, and when it filled the sky on nights like this, as few night flight missions as possible were conducted. "Black sun rising", they called it, and the tradition seemed to be one observed on the Nort side as well. No one flew a mission if they could help it on nights like this, and so most of the base was locked down and its personnel enjoyed a rare twelve hours of very welcome rest and relaxation.

Rafe, however, had more important things to do than try to join in the drinking, gambling and bull sessions now going on in the pilots' mess.

She had gone looking for Burke, the squadron's signalsman, two hours ago. It hadn't been difficult to find him. He was in the main mess bar, where he usually was when he was off-duty, and it hadn't been difficult to bring him round to her way of thinking. Like everyone else, he would have heard the barracks room jokes and whispers about what special abilities the GI Dolls were supposed to have been trained experts in. He was back in his bunkroom, unconscious from the effects of a potent mixture of alcohol and pills. Rafe had matched him drink for drink in the mess and back in his room when she had produced the bottles of sedative-laced scotch. However, when your enhanced GI constitution allowed you to gargle cyanide and breathe in the most lethal viral agents without any ill-effects, it would take more than two-and-a-half bottles of scotch and a generous handful of med-kit sedatives to put you out of action.

When he woke up tomorrow, Burke would have the king of hangovers. Rafe doubted that he would actually be able to remember anything about what happened - not that anything had, she reminded herself, or not the kind of action Burke had been hoping for - but no doubt his overactive imagination and the need to boast to his buddies would do the rest, and her reputation around the base would plummet even further. The elite combat pilots traditionally didn't fraternise socially with the enlisted personnel, never mind go back to their private quarters with them and engage in whatever unlikely feats of sexual gymnastics that Burke's imagination would later conjure up.

Rafe didn't care. She had got everything she had wanted from the creep after plying him with booze and pills and the once-in-a-lifetime thrilling prospect of bedding a real, live GI Doll. He had told her everything she wanted to know: the entry code to the comms room and the day's signals password. His security passcard to log in and activate the equipment she took from his pocket after he had finally slumped down unconscious onto the bed.

Once they were in there, Gabe had done the rest, connecting into the comms equipment, negotiating his way through the levels of security buffers to access the higher bands of command-reserved communications frequencies. He had found the one they were looking for, one of the long, unused GI Regiment comms channels and used it to send out Rafe's prerecorded message. The whole procedure had been necessarily hasty and clumsy. They had left enough telltale electronic fingerprints all over the comms room database files for any even halfway-rigorous security check to turn up evidence of what they had done, but they had still managed to do everything they had set out to do. The alert message to the Rogue Trooper was out there now, hidden among the mass of other Souther military traffic that was beamed out all across the planet and beyond every day. Protected by the correct code protocols that Gabe had hacked into and used to scramble-encrypt Rafe's words, the message would be authenticated as properly valid by the Souther communication network's security systems and relayed all across Nu Earth.

Using Burke's passcard, she left the restricted comms wing and re-entered the main corridor of the base's admin block. She had done everything she could. Now all she could do was pray that Rogue was still out there somewhere and able to pick up her message.

And hope that there was no one else out there listening in who might try and stop him.

TEN

Venner was getting a feel for the Rogue Trooper's thinking. Just by tracking the GI's movements from afar, he had been able to get a real sense of his target's abilities, and how he was able to put them to such deadly effective use on the battlefields of Nu Earth.

It had been almost two weeks since they had picked up the transmission. Acting on a vague hunch, he had directed the techs to maintain a watch on the old GI comms frequencies. The techs complained that those channels hadn't been used in years, but within a few days, Venner's hunch had paid off and they had intercepted a message intended for the Rogue Trooper. It was more than Venner could ever had hoped for. He didn't much care who sent it, or why. That would be the task of other, lesser servants of the Souther military intelligence machine. All he cared about was that it confirmed that his main mission target was still out there, and gave a possible fix on his location for him; everything depended on what the Rogue Trooper did next and for the last twelve days. Venner had been sifting through the reams of communiqués, field reports, combat zone despatches, intelligence reports and radio-intercept transcripts that flooded daily through S-Three's extensive comm-channels capabilities.