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  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 mons
ter.

  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.

  The pistol made a coughing sound and suddenly there were dozens of plastic darts embedded in the GI's chest. The trooper, who appeared annoyed with this untimely intrusion, bushed them away with one hand, tossing his bloodstained knife with the other. The blade buried itself in the guard's forehead and he fell away, out of Erno's line of sight. The technician blinked slowly. Peculiar that the Souther soldier had no weapon of his own. Where was his rifle, his headgear or his backpack? The question followed Erno into unconsciousness and faded with him.

  Rogue recovered his combat blade from the guard's corpse with a sucking noise and took up the handgun as an afterthought, then he sprinted away toward the main elevator. The dense Nort datacore thumped against his leg as he ran.

  TWO

  DISPATCHES

  Nu Sealand's command centre was on the platform's largest tower, built inside the shell of a vast gas ventilation chimney. Hidden by thick armourplas baffles, an outside observer would never know of the chaos that was unfolding inside; shrieking alarms blared from all sides of the room as the officer of the watch found three sets of critical alerts screaming for his attention.

  An emergency signal from the computer core was jockeying for attention with anguished shouts from loading bay two where someone had detonated a plasma sphere and a chorus of sporadic gunfire from mid-deck.

  "Voices down here!" a guardsman on the deck was shouting. "Dozens of them, coming from all over the place!"

  The watch officer swore - that particular section of the rig was a perfect conduit for echoes, so for all he knew that dolt was firing at himself - but the grenade? On cue, a pair of dull thumps resonated through the floor plating. "It's an attack!" he snapped, gesturing to his second in command. "Open the blinds!"

  "Kapten. Is that wise?"

  "Do it!" he snapped, the veins in his neck throbbing with anger and frustration.

  The junior officer did as he was ordered and with the flick of a switch the steel shields that covered the windows of the control deck folded away, giving the watch officer an uninterrupted view of the whole rig. But it also made the command crew visible to the triad optics of a GI-issue assault rifle that had been set up on a bipod on a shorter neighbouring tower.

  Automatic mechanisms inside the gun had already shifted its internal balance to that of sniper mode, altering its lens, scope and barrel configuration. Although no finger was on the rifle's trigger and no eye was at its scope, the weapon was live to fire. Its breech held a magazine packed full of high-energy laser round capacitor cartridges, the ultra-dense kind that were usually used for cracking the engine blocks of Nort trucks. With a ripping noise, the rifle tore through the rounds, moderating its own recoil to scatter bolts of coherent light across the deck. Hot streaks of colour punched through the armoured glasseen windows and struck flesh, boiling blood to pink steam wherever they hit their mark.

  For a long moment, nothing moved on the command level. Then the elevator's doors opened and the rifle's owner burst out, flechette gun and knife at the ready. Rogue paused and nodded at the perfect fire pattern with satisfaction. He ignored the moans of the dying and kicked out the remains of one of the shattered windows. The GI leapt from the tower and fell ten feet to the nearby platform where the smoking rifle lay. He had set the gun in place a few hours earlier, before the dawn had illuminated the upper decks with weak yellow light.

  "About time." The rifle's voice was terse. "Dump that sissy gun and let's get out of here. I need ammo."

  Rogue tossed the pistol away and retrieved his weapon, replacing the empty cartridge with a new magazine of shells; his actions were so automatic that it was as natural a reflex to him as breathing. "Nice grouping, Gunnar."

  "Eh?" The word was the synthetic equivalent of a shrug. "Easy meat."

  Rogue slung the rifle over his shoulder and then grasped a trailing cable. With a swift shift of his weight, he came off the platform and began to slide down the long wire. The metallic cable fizzed as it passed through his bare fingers, the heat of the friction raising thin threads of smoke from his skin. Rogue registered the pain as a minor irritation and dismissed it. Below his feet, the mid-deck loomed.

  "I'm telling you, there's someone in here!" bellowed Kawso. "Grenades don't just throw themselves!"

  Furni shook his head, studying the infra-scan. "But there's no body heat traces! If there was an intruder here before, they're gone now... "

  "That's what those Sud bastards want us to think!" Sergeant Kawso spat and stepped over the remains of another Nort soldier. There were five or six dead men in the loading bay - it was tough to make an exact count because of all the scattered body parts - and broad holes in the decking where plasma spheres had rolled out of the dark corners to detonate under their feet. The lethal grenades cast out deadly globes of superheated gas when they exploded, metallic vapour as hot as the surface of a sun, incinerating men and hardware with equal power.

  "Wait," Furni said, pointing at something. "What is that?"

  Kawso took a cautious step closer and saw a rectangular box sitting on the deck. It had a pair of optic sensors on the upper face and straps dangling down from one side.

  "Don't touch it! It could be a booby trap!" Furni warned.

  The Nort sergeant gave him a silencing grimace and gingerly picked up the object, holding it waist high. He turned it over in his hands: one side had a chip slot. "Huh," he made a low chuckle. "It's just a skevving backpack."

  An opening on one face of the pack glinted in the dimness and a synthetic voice replied, "No, I'm not."

  A three-pronged steel claw snapped out of the opening and grabbed a large handful of Kawso's crotch in a vice
-like grip. Furni was startled as the Nort let out a high scream. "Aaaaaaa! Get it off me!"

  He hesitated at the peculiar sight of Kawso dancing about with a pack attached to his genitals, afraid to shoot at the thing for fear he would miss and hit the sergeant. Furni heard swift footsteps behind him and turned, expecting reinforcements; they were, but just not for him.

  "Lights out," said Rogue and his fist came at the Nort trooper like a missile, the punch propelling a GI helmet in his hand like a huge mutant knuckle-duster. The hardhat smashed Furni aside trailing blood, teeth and fragments of jawbone.

  "Hey!" the helmet complained. "What am I now, a boxing glove?"

  Rogue ignored the comment and flipped the armoured gear onto his head, moving to grab Kawso. The claw released its killer grip and the sergeant tumbled backwards. Rogue tugged the off-balance Nort by the shoulder strap of his autogun and before he could react, the GI pitched him into one of the blast holes.

  Sergeant Kawso hit the scummy ocean cursing and screaming as the orange murk gushed in through his open mouth. He drowned in a dilution of foetid poison and his own liquefied organs. Rogue snatched up the backpack and secured it over his shoulders. "Helm, you got the frequency for the charge locked in?"

  A voice issued from a chip bearing a morose skull image and the digit "1" on the brow of his helmet. "Affirmative, Rogue. Give me the word and it's done."

  "Tell me you got it." Another chip, this one slotted in the backpack, spoke aloud. The flat face of the microcircuit had the number three visible on it.

  "He's got it, Bagman," said Gunnar from the number two slot on the rifle. "And he woke up half the damn Nort Army doing it."

  Rogue ignored the chatter, his heightened hearing concentrating on the screams of sirens and the noise of approaching boots on the metal decks. "Blow it, Helm. We're outta here." Without waiting for confirmation, the GI stepped lightly over the edge of the same hole he'd thrown Kawso down. As he struck the water, the drag from his gear flipped Rogue over, just in time for him to see shimmering balls of yellow flame erupt from the centre of the Nu Sealand rig. The C9 detonator charges had been placed in just the right locations, along weak lines of rusted pipe and vital conduits that fed hot gases from the geothermal sink below the ocean floor.