Crucible (15 page)

"Ten seconds till boom time, Rogue."

Now Hanna knew she was spacing out from breathing in too much chem-cloud air, because that voice definitely came from the helmet on the Genetic Infantryman's head.

Rogue cleared the two metre high barrier of the secondary barricade with a single vault, shouting out in warning to the Souther troops gathered there.

"Fire in the hole! Heads down, Southside."

He laid the semi-conscious form of Hanna down in front of an astonished company medic. "Her left leg's broken and her chem-suit's leaking in at least two places. Get some suit patches on her and give her a shot of whatever anti-pathogens you've got in your med-kit."

A second later, the Blackmare exploded in a titanic blast that put paid to the remaining Norts and sealed off the broadway once and for all. The Souther troops behind the barricade cowered in shock as the roaring blast wave rode over the top of them.

When the dust cleared and they dared to look up again, Rogue was long gone.

THIRTEEN

The news was soon all over Nordstadt. The unofficial radio chatter between one Souther unit and another was full of it.

"...swear to god, I saw him with my own eyes. The Rogue Trooper. Three metres tall he was, with skin that deflected las-rounds like they was light summer rain."

"Took out almost a whole Kashan armoured division, I heard. Blew up six Blackmares in a row with that fancy GI super-rifle of his and left a Nort general strangled to death with the air pipes of his own chem-suit..."

"...a sign of god, I tell ya. Now that the Rogue Trooper's here, there ain't no way the Norts are ever going to take this place. They might as well pack up and head for home right now..."

"...been given some kinda special amnesty by the top brass at Milli-com, that's what some guy at Divisional HQ told me. They orbit-dropped him in to raise hell behind the Nort lines and this is just the start of it. Yeah, now Rogue's here, you know that the rest of our reinforcements can't be too far behind..."

The radio chatter filled the Souther airwaves, the news leaping from one unit to the other. Even just knowing that the Rogue Trooper was there with them, and that he had already made his presence felt among the Norts, was enough to give the hard-pressed Souther forces fresh hope. The Norts had pushed in to seize several of the city's outlying sectors, but once word spread of what happened in the steelworks sector, the Southers started fighting back with renewed vigour. The Nort advances into the north-west hab district and the harbour sector were stopped dead in their tracks, while a counter-attack by the remains of the 161st Souther Light Infantry Division, with armoured support from the Third Barbary Zone Rangers, actually succeeded in completely driving them back out of the territory they had seized that day in the flattened ruins of the southern factory sector. The Nort advance faltered and then stopped altogether as Nort High Command deemed that any further losses of the scale they were now starting to suffer were unacceptable at this opening stage of the offensive.

A glance at the map of Nordstadt confirmed their thinking. Despite the setbacks, they had still succeeded in seizing over seventy per cent of the intended target territory, and their grip around the centre of the city was now measurably greater. They listened in to the chatter on the Souther radio frequencies, hearing the excited whoops and hollers of the Souther troops as they celebrated the day's victories.

Let them have their moment of celebration, the Nort generals smiled to themselves. Let them think their precious Genetic Infantryman will be enough to turn back the tide of men and machines that will soon come sweeping over the Souther positions and take back Nordstadt for good. They would all learn differently soon enough.

Others were listening in too, and what they learned was exactly what they wanted to hear.

Venner sat in the sixtieth floor of one of the smashed glass towers of what had once been Nordstadt's main financial district. The building had doubtlessly once been far taller, possibly as high as two hundred storeys or more, but twenty years of unrelenting warfare had been more than enough to reduce it to its present height.

As it was, it was still probably one of the highest points in the city, no doubt prized by both sides and changed hands dozens of times over the course of the conflict so far. The corpses of the building's most recent occupants, the half dozen members of a Nort observation unit, lay scattered about him. Venner had scaled one of the building's elevator shafts, easily bypassing the booby trap devices set in place there long ago by one side or the other. The Norts hadn't even known he was there until he struck with pistol and knife, and he had killed them all before they could send out a warning.

Venner scanned the terrain and easily picked out details of the day's battles. As night fell over Nordstadt, Nort and Souther artillery batteries traded retaliatory bombardments. The Souther rounds fell on the territory lost to the Norts in today's assaults, while the Nort guns pummelled the retreating Souther forces as they dug into their new defensive positions. One whole manufacturing sector on the other side of the river was ablaze, torched by retreating Souther troops to block the enemy's advance through it. Souther incendiary shells continued to fall, feeding the blaze even further and frustrating any Nort attempts to negotiate a safe route through the heart of the inferno.

Atmocraft from both sides buzzed through the night skies above the city. Low-flying bombers made attack runs over troop positions and higher-flying spotter craft directed in fire for the artillery batteries. Fighters flew amongst them, picking off targets almost at will. In the few minutes that Venner had been watching, he had seen eight flights end either in flaring midair fireballs or as blazing comets sent crashing earthwards into the rubble below. The Norts seemed to be getting the worst of it, and any of their bomber squadrons attempting to fly over the Southers' inner defence perimeter were met with intensive barrages of anti-aircraft fire from which few managed to escape.

After months of relative inactivity, at least by Nordstadt standards, the battle for control had flared back into life with a vengeance.

As Venner watched, he listened into the radio communications of both sides, his assassin's instincts sifting through the mass of chattering voices for the information he was looking for. It didn't take him long to find it.

Swiftly, he tapped out a short message on his wrist communicator keyboard, sending up a code-protected transmission to a null-shielded S-Three comms-satellite in orbit overhead. The satellite, which appeared on no official roster and which the generals in Milli-com knew nothing about, intercepted the transmission and beamed it on to its ultimate destination, adding several more impenetrable layers of S-Three cipher encryption to further protect the contents of the message. A few hours from now, his patron in Milli-com would be reading the decoded message on his desktop screen.

"Secondary target's presence in Nordstadt confirmed. Acquisition and neutralisation of primary and secondary targets imminent. Estimate twenty-four to forty-eight hours for successful completion of mission. Require final confirmation of secure extraction operation from Nordstadt once mission has been completed."

Venner bedded down for the night after first assuring himself that the booby traps and security remotes he had set in place to guard all the approaches to his personal little eyrie were all functioning as they should be. Tomorrow, the hunt would begin in earnest, starting in the steelworks sector.

Outside, the sounds of gunfire and explosions would rumble on all through the night. Like every other living soul in Nordstadt, Venner didn't know that tomorrow's dawn would be the last one to ever rise over the city. The Hammerfall was now less than twenty-four hours away.

FOURTEEN

He didn't have a name, not really. The name he had been born with he had left behind long ago along with the face that went with it. He had lost both in the burned-out wreck of a crashed life-pod somewhere out there in no-man's-land, after his near fatal escape from the destruction of Buzzard Three. Since then, he had taken on other names and other faces and identities, many of them stolen from dead men. Beneath them all, however, was the fire-ravaged features of his real face, and the new name that went with it, the name that marked him as an outcast pariah no matter where he tried to hide on this miserable, god-forsaken planet.

The Traitor General. That was what they called him now and, in time, that was the only name that really mattered.

The Traitor General: the man responsible for the destruction of the Genetic Infantry Regiment, the man who planted the seeds of the trap that ultimately saw them wiped out almost to the last man in the infamous Quartz Zone Massacre.

The Traitor General: the faceless, nameless double-agent inside Milli-com who had been secretly feeding information to the Norts for years, all the time working behind a facade of loyalty to the Souther cause to ensure that victory ultimately went to the Nordland enemy.

The Traitor General, a name that was as much a well-known myth in the minds of most Souther soldiers on Nu Earth as that of the blue-skinned genetic freak that so relentlessly pursued him across the planet's many different warzones.

For maybe the thousandth time, the traitor cursed the events that brought him to this lowly fate. Once he had been a high-ranking officer in the Southlands military forces, a favoured son of Milli-com on the promotion fast-track and no doubt destined for great things. The fact that he was also a Nort double-agent gave him the assurance that no matter which side won the war, his future prosperity was still secure. And then the Rogue Trooper had appeared, tracking back through the sequence of events behind the Quartz Zone Massacre with a relentless and superhuman patience to find the man responsible for the deaths of his fellow genetic freaks. Buzzard-Three had been destroyed, and the traitor had been cast down from his lofty position, cast down into the living hell of the war on Nu Earth.

Cast down to hide and dwell in hellholes like this, thought the traitor, looking at his present surroundings.

It was dark in the underground shelter, the place lit only by a few flickering glow-lamps from the pack's supply of scavenged equipment. Figures moved in the semi-darkness, many of them crippled or deformed, dressed in the ragged, patched remains of chem-suits and armour stripped from the dead and wounded on the battlefield above. These chem-suits, patched and then repatched again, often crudely put together from pieces of Nort and Souther equipment alike, offered little real protection from the long-term effects of Nu Earth's toxic atmosphere, and many of the figures before the traitor showed the telltale symptoms of chem-poisoning: weeping sores on hands and faces, limbs twisted by the effects of rad-disease and viral mutation, eyes blinded by cataracts, breathing ragged and laboured from lungs hopelessly damaged by tox-inhalation.

He looked at the crippled, diseased forms of his followers, and laughed bitterly to himself. Perhaps he had found his rightful role after all; a disfigured outcast, leading a pack of similar freaks.

It hadn't been difficult to assume a position of natural leadership over them in the short time he had been in Nordstadt. Most of them came from the pitiful remnants of the city's original civilian population. Deformed and diseased, their minds shell-shocked beyond repair by more than two decades of continuous warfare, reduced to a feral state of existence from scavenging for survival among the ruins of their former homes, they were easy to manipulate and dominate for a man of his abilities. It was the others amongst them who had predictably proved to be the real challenge; the mercenaries and deserters who had formed the leadership of the scavenger tribe.

The
previous
leadership, the traitor reminded himself, with a smile. The coup d'etat had been brief, but bloody. The tribe's leader and his inner core of followers had been set upon and hacked apart by his own followers in a few hours of violence that the tunnels in which they sheltered filled with the sounds of shrieks and screams. In a show of ruthless force designed to dispel any further dissent in the ranks, the survivors of the previous regime had been rounded up on his orders and crucified out in no-man's-land. The victims had been arranged in a circle, each one of them with a time-set plasma sphere grenade hung round their necks. The fuse settings had been staggered, so that each man watched the others around him explode, knowing that, in a few minutes or even seconds, his turn would be next.

The lesson had not been lost on the rest of the group. No, thought the traitor, he did not think there would be any dissent against the new regime anytime soon.

Most of the tribe had been sheltering down here in the tunnels while the battles and artillery bombardments raged above. It was obvious to the traitor that a major offensive was just beginning, possibly one that would deliver Nordstadt back into the hands of its original owners for good. The traitor's followers had collected enough information in their scavenging forays to the surface to make it abundantly clear that the Souther forces in Nordstadt were now seriously under-strength. It had been the traitor's plan to sit the worst of the battle out, emerging only near the end to join in the battle on the victor's side, callously and casually expending the lives of his rabble of followers in the process. Afterwards, he would reveal his presence to the city's new masters and seek some kind of position among them. Even after its final conquest, Nordstadt would still be a lawless and alien place that bore no resemblance to the city the Norts had originally built, and surely the Norts would welcome the aid of an ally who had an army of rubble scouts and scavengers at his command.

Now, however, the latest news that his followers had brought back from the surface had caused him to rethink that plan. The Rogue Trooper was here in Nordstadt.

Of course, it was no coincidence that his pursuer was here in Nordstadt so soon after his own arrival in the city. Somehow, in some way the traitor couldn't understand, the Genetic Infantryman must have learned of his presence here and come to Nordstadt to continue his relentless hunt.