Free Blood Relative by James Swallow

represented time and money that the Souther Armed Forces simply couldn't afford to spend recklessly on the battlefield. The expense and the sheer effort required by the GI programme had almost ended it on dozens of occasions; while Rogue and his compatriots had grown and learned, unknown to them figures in the Confederate government had tried again and again to end the super-soldier project - but there were men in positions of authority with too much invested, financial influences from the gargantuan mega-corporations like Clavel and Steiner-Bisley, power-players who refused to allow the GIs to die in the cradle. The fact that the project was also generating millions in spin-off biotechnology patents and refining the discipline of human cloning was just coincidental. After all, war had always been the greatest spur for the advancement of new science.
     
    Rogue cursed quietly under his breath as Zero's skin peeled away in his hands, revealing the necrotising flesh beneath the hardy, almost rubber-like surface. "There's major internal damage here. More than he would have got from just a beating..." The GI's fingers closed around a grey knot of bone-like material and pulled it free with a sound like tearing cloth. He considered it for a second, then put the object aside and kept working.
    "You think its some sorta infection, a bio-agent?" Helm said urgently. "Like that paralysis toxin from the polar zone?"
    "Negative," Rogue used the las-scalpel to dig deeper. "More like a blood disease, or organ failure."
    "If Zero had a virus, then we all got it now," Bagman grated.
    Rogue's fingers found the metallic edge of the biochip implant in among the soft organic matter. "Don't think so. I'd say it was genetic breakdown." He tuned the beam to a fine, pencil-thin setting and set to work cutting away the filaments that held the chip in place. It was warm, a telltale sign that the matrix within was active.
     
    Those who opposed the GIs saw them as an expensive folly, a "wonder weapon" that would be obsolete before it even saw action. A normal human foot soldier could easily be replaced with just a few forced colonial conscriptions and some hypno-tape conditioning, but the death of a Genetic Infantryman represented a nu-cred cost somewhere close to that of a light strike bomber. All it would take was one lucky Nort sniper and an exorbitant Souther Army investment would be cold meat, so Milli-Com found a way to make their soldiers immortal, a method of life preservation that would sentence the GIs to an eternity of warfare no matter how many times they died. It didn't matter that it was callous, as long as it was cost effective.
    When their bodies matured as the clones reached adolescence, the Genies "tagged" them. One by one, every GI was implanted with a "dog-chip". On the most basic level, the microcircuits served as electronic trooper identity cards, but the full function of the hardware was much more far-reaching. The chips were semi-organic, made from a matrix of complex artificial proteins suspended in an electromagnetic field that emulated the workings of living brain tissue. When death came, as it inevitably would, the biochips were ready. Silent and watchful, the small rectangles of silicon gradually altered their circuits to mimic the neural patterns of their physical hosts, waiting for the moment when they would come to life. By year twenty, as the GI troopers were prepared for final deployment, the chips were webbed into their cerebral cortex with nests of neurofibres.
     
    The hatch to the shuttle's cockpit hissed open and Ferris emerged, his face pale and sweaty, fixed with an expression that was trying and failing to look cocksure and cool. "We're out of the Nort sensor range, I reckon," he began. "I put us on autopilot, programmed a loop-and-evade..." The pilot's voice trailed off as he caught a glimpse of Rogue ministering to Zero's fresh corpse. "What the hell are you doing to him?" Ferris started forward and grabbed at