Free Blood Relative by James Swallow Page A

Rogue's arm.
    "Back off, idiot. You're in his light!" Gunnar grated.
    "You're cuttin' him open!" Ferris retorted. "You said you wanted to save this guy!"
    "He is saving him, pinky. Now get away!"
    Ferris's gut flipped over as he realised he was standing in an expanding puddle of sapphire-coloured blood. "Oh shit..."
    The laser beam sizzled against dead flesh and sent a wisp of acrid cooked meat odour up and into the cargo bay compartment. "Ah, I've got it." Rogue held out his hand to Bagman's manipulator. "Clips?"
    The backpack produced a pair of slender tongs and the GI used them to remove the biochip. The silicon plate came free with a sucking noise. Ferris covered his mouth. "Ugh."
    Rogue quickly slipped the chip into a flat unit the size of a digi-pad. "Time?"
    "Forty-three seconds," said Helm. "You're getting slow."
    "I'm out of practice," Rogue replied, a grim set to his war-mask features.
     
    A fatal wound to the host trooper flooded his bloodstream with an endorphin analogue that set the biochip implant into a rapid scan mode, and in those dying moments the protein circuits copied the GI's mental engrams like a data tape. As they perished, everything that made the soldiers who they were, their skills, their history, their random personality quirks, all of it would be sucked into the implant like a bottled ghost. If a GI fell in battle, his chip could be recovered and returned to Milli-Com for regeneration and in a matter of hours the same soldier could be back in the war, his biochip loaded into a fresh adult "blank". The Genies estimated that the biochips could withstand dozens, perhaps even hundreds of these "relocation trauma" experiences before the GI's consciousness would start to suffer any deleterious psychological effects.
    There was just one drawback. The protein circuits could only exist for a maximum of sixty seconds outside of an organic host before they began to degrade, bleeding off memory and intellect with every passing moment; they required a constant power source to maintain an active matrix. Ever inventive, Milli-Com's tek-division supplied the troopers with chip support units and added energised slots to every major item of GI-issue hardware: to rifles, backpacks, helmets, pistols - and so dead men could survive and accompany their squad mates, staying out in the field for days or weeks before returning to be regened, synthetic souls inhabiting their war gear like possessive spirits.
    The biochips would serve the will of the officers in command even when their bodies were destroyed; that was the plan. But the Quartz Zone changed all that. Some said it was a turncoat inside Souther Command, others talked about a conspiracy of corporate and military interests opposed to the GI programme, or even a combination of both. However it happened, the first mass capsule drop into enemy territory by Genetic Infantrymen was a descent into hell. The Norts were waiting and they wiped out the clone soldiers. When the massacre ended, the GI programme was scrapped, a costly failure that had wasted billions of nu-creds and almost three decades of research. Nothing remained; nothing but one man.
     
    Ferris watched, forcing his gut to stay down, as Rogue quickly patted Zero's body, looking for any gear that might be of use to him. The dead GI had nothing but a pair of ripped fatigue trousers and Ferris noticed for the first time that the other man hadn't been wearing any boots.
    "Hey, uh, Rogue," he nodded at the body. "I got some tarps, if you wanna wrap him up-"
    "Where are we now?" The piercing yellow eyes cut into him like lasers.
    "Crossing over a chem-swamp."
    "Good enough." Rogue hit the hatch control and pushed Zero's corpse into the airlock.
    "Don't you want to, I dunno, bury him or something?"
    "What would be the point?" The GI pushed another button and the lock opened, venting Zero out into the air. The body tumbled away from the shuttle, falling toward the toxic marshes. Rogue nodded at the chip frame.