Crucible (10 page)

It was a daunting mass of information, but through experience and a hunter's intuition for the signs of his prey, Venner soon found what he was looking for.

In Bullrun Sector, a roving Souther infantry company probing forward into Nort territory found a Nort bunker complex with all the enemy troops dead or missing. One of the company scouts reported glimpsing what he reported later to be a "figure not wearing a chem-suit" walking off into the chem-mists.

Two days later, a Souther listening post intercepted an emergency signal from a Nort supply depot. The signal was garbled, comprised mainly of the voice of a panicked Nort radio operator with the jumbled sound of gunfire and explosions in the background. The voice was abruptly cut off by the sound of gunshots. Venner had heard the sound of that distinctive brand of gunfire before, in tapes in the S-Three records library. It was the sound of the unique make of rifle that had been issued only to the Genetic Infantry Regiment and, as far as Venner knew, there was only one man on Nu Earth still using that very special kind of weapon.

The techs hadn't been able to trace the source of the transmission, but the information kept on seeping in, and soon enough the course of the Rogue Trooper's journey became readily apparent.

More Nort radio intercepts and spy-sat visual data confirmed the trail of hit-and-run destruction he left in his wake as he travelled across the Nort-held terrain of Kursk, Romstein and Tannhauser Sectors. He had crossed into Souther territory three days ago in Vanguard Sector, helping to repulse a Nort armoured attack on a section of the frontline. A battalion commander attempted to arrest him as a listed deserter after the battle but was prevented from doing so by his own men. In the confusion, the Rogue Trooper disappeared as usual into the banks of chem-mist.

There were suspicions afterwards that the Rogue Trooper had crossed the Scum Sea aboard a Souther military transport, reaching the planet's main northern continent and covering almost a thousand kilometres distance in a matter of hours. A Souther atmocraft pilot was still under interrogation over the issue and had insisted he didn't know anything about the renegade stowaway his transporter had been carrying. Venner had seen the man's record and thought otherwise. The pilot had fought and been wounded in the notorious Dix-I Front campaign, where it was said that it was only the Rogue Trooper's actions in various areas of the battle-front which prevented that defeat from becoming a full-scale military disaster for the Southers.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the Rogue Trooper was confirmed as being positively sighted on Souther territory on this side of the Scum Sea yesterday when a Souther halftrack patrol spotted him twenty kilometres into no-man's-land. They duly reported the sighting only after they had returned to base. Reading between the lines of their subsequent report, Venner had quickly spotted why they had been so slow in reporting the encounter; the Rogue Trooper had almost certainly saved them from a Nort lazooka squad that had been waiting out there in ambush for them.

Their unit's exasperated commander had sent more patrols out into no-man's-land to find the renegade. Predictably, of course, none of them found anything, assuming they had actually tried looking.

By this point, Venner himself was on the ground, on the Genetic Infantryman's trail. Which was what had brought him here, to the burnt-out ruin of a Nort watch station on the banks of a wide stretch of toxic, irradiated sludge that had once been a fast-flowing river a couple of kilometres in on the wrong side of the no-man's-land divide.

The men with him were uneasy, nervous at being on the ground this long in Nort-held territory. Or maybe, Venner smiled to himself, they were just afraid at being around him.

"Headcount?" he asked the young captain who had dutifully come trotting up to him with the results of his squad's search of the area.

"Twenty-seven so far, sir," the young man answered nervously. "Most of them like these ones here."

Venner looked dispassionately down at the Nort corpses lying sprawled at his feet, admiring the skill involved in their killing with the grudging respect of one professional appraising the handiwork of another.

Most of them had been killed at extremely close range, their respirator tubes severed or their chem-masks ripped off. Their deaths would have been almost instantaneous, caused by exposure to the virus-laden air around them. One had been killed by a single vibro-knife thrust through the heart. Venner doubted if any of them would even have had the time to realise who or what had killed them.

He turned round, looking at the river behind him. The Rogue Trooper could have crossed the river at far safer, less well-monitored points than this, but Venner had seen the files on GI psychology and knew the Genetic Infantryman was genetically programmed to principally do two things; take Nort lives and whenever possible save Souther ones. Venner now had proof that this programming still held true, and he filed the information away for later use. An enemy, no matter how skilful and lethal, who followed certain preset and predictable patterns of behaviour, was an enemy with a built-in weakness.

He studied the scene, imagining how the assault would have happened. The Rogue Trooper would have waited until sunrise to make the crossing. The rays of the newly risen sun would have reacted with the chemicals in the water, creating a dense, early morning tox-mist from the river that would have covered his approach. The toxins and acids in the water would have been no problem to a soldier with chem-resistant skin and any sentries on the riverbank would have been dealt with swiftly and silently as soon as he waded ashore. The two-man crew of the watchtower would have been dispatched with two almost instantaneous shots from that ingenious rifle of his, and after that he would have been in among the rest of the Norts before they even knew he was there.

Venner studied the scene before him, his mind painting in the bloody details of the brief, relentlessly brutal battle that would have followed. A plasma sphere grenade hurled into the first of the bunker shelters instantly incinerated the Nort troops who were probably still sleeping inside. A long, ripping blast from his rifle would have taken care of the Nort bodies that came spilling out of the second bunker and the occupants of the third bunker, the ones lying on the ground around Venner, he killed with his bare hands or with a vibro-knife.

Again Venner remembered the information in those files that had been beamed through to him from his patrons in Milli-com. A Genetic Infantryman was the deadliest close-combat killer on the face of Nu Earth, his reactions and killing speed far outclassing any mere human opponent in a bulky and cumbersome chem-suit. Venner shifted his stance, feeling the reassuring weight of the sniper rifle slung across his shoulder. He didn't care how dangerous the Rogue Trooper was since he didn't have any intention of allowing the blue-skinned gene-freak to get within anywhere near striking range of him.

"Captain."

"Sir?" The reply was immediate. Again, Venner smiled. Technically, the young officer outranked him, but Venner was the top assassin of S-Three's much-feared Special Executive Branch, and in such matters, rank insignia counted for very little indeed.

"Gather up your men, captain. We're leaving."

The young officer was hesitant. "Sir, my mission briefing was to help you gather intelligence on where the Genetic Infantryman deserter was heading next. I-I'm not sure we've done that yet, sir."

Venner favoured the man with one of his glances. The officer looked away quickly, unwilling to meet the gaze of the sniper's dead, grey eyes.

"I've known all along where he was going, captain."

The master sniper's gaze passed on towards the edge of the horizon. He couldn't see it, but he knew it was there, exactly one hundred and sixty-three kilometres to the north.

"He's going to Nordstadt, captain, and so am I."

PART TWO

CRUCIBLE

ELEVEN

Milli-com.

Hidden in a secret hyperspace location, deep in the very heart of Souther-controlled space. Three whole fleets of Southern Confederacy Navy battlecruisers patrolled its approaches and the firepower of the station's own defences was enough to make even the most determined enemy think twice about attempting a direct assault. Early warning stations monitored every hyperspace gateway leading to it, and most of these pathways were sown with minefields, the safe routes through them known only to the most trusted pilots of the ships of the Confederacy Navy. In more than twenty years of unremitting warfare with the forces of the Greater Nordland Territories, it was the proud boast of the men and women of the Southern Confederacy military that the enemy had never once mounted a successful attack on Milli-com.

For the crews of Souther ships on final docking approach, their first glimpse of the station as it loomed massively out of the shifting depths of hyperspace was always an awe-inspiring sight. It appeared as a giant artificial moon, orbited by rings of sub-satellite docking platforms and defence stations bristling with gun turrets and weapon batteries. Hundreds of craft came and went every day, arriving from and departing to points throughout the galaxy, and the station's enormous size dwarfed even the largest of the Navy's mightiest battleships and troop transports.

More than a thousand decks, they said. The largest man-made object ever constructed, containing more than a million personnel. Planners, strategists, propaganda experts, military intelligence officers, weapons designers and research scientists, all of them engaged in the deadly business of a war that had grown to engulf the entire known galaxy.

Information flowed ceaselessly into Milli-com from hundreds of different war fronts. There, it was dissected and disseminated, filed away and compared with other reports. Staffs of thousands of data assimilators studied and assessed all this information, forwarding the most relevant of it to those further up the chain of command. Eventually, the information was transmuted back into orders which flowed back out to the hundreds of war-torn worlds in the galaxy beyond. There, Milli-com's commands would be put into action, and the results of those actions would see more information flowing back into Milli-com, starting the whole process again, and sending countless more hundreds of thousands of Souther troops into battle to fight and possibly die. Safely insulated from the carnage happening on the war fronts, the staff of Milli-com viewed the struggle only as lists of casualty figures and reports of the latest territories gained or lost that appeared daily across their info-screens.

Of the long-term engagements being fought on hundreds of worlds, few merited more than one Strategy & Planning deck on Milli-com. The vast majority shared deck space and resources with the command staff of at least one other battlefront. There were several decks from where dozens of minor engagements, dismissively termed as "bush wars" by Milli-com's upper command staff cadre were being supervised at the same time.

One war zone was different, however. Unique in the set-up of Souther military command, nine entire decks of Milli-com were solely dedicated to the task of winning the war on Nu Earth.

No one could remember the last time the sound of the popping of champagne corks had been heard on the main strategy bridge of Milli-com's Battle Sector Nu Earth command decks. Certainly, there had been precious little to celebrate in the last twenty years, as the war degenerated into a bloody stalemate punctuated by a series of even bloodier failed attempts to break that stalemate.

White-jacketed mess orderlies circulated through the assembly of several hundred command level staff officers, dispensing glasses of champagne and trays of delicately spiced canapés. The noise in the main strategy bridge, normally no more than a low hum of whispered conversations and the quiet crackle of hundreds of incoming radio communiqués, had now risen to an excited hubbub of self-congratulatory chatter, punctuated by an increasing number of loud, barking laughs. Laughter too was generally an unknown sound in this place, since the war on Nu Earth and the endless casualty figures and battle reports that filtered through these decks had given scant cause for any light-heartedness over the years.

But now all that was going to change, Daniels thought, helping himself to yet another glass of champagne from the tray of a passing orderly. He sipped it thoughtfully, scanning the surrounding crowd for any sign of the foxy little brunette signals lieutenant from Deck 375. He had sent her an invitation to the party, dressing it as a friendly gesture from one Milli-com comrade to another, but both of them knew what it really meant. Consequently, he had rearranged his duty shifts several times to ensure that they "accidentally" bumped into each other in the officers' commissary.

The resulting lunches they had shared together had been a pleasing distraction from the business of winning the war, and had increasingly left Daniels in little doubt about where the relationship might ultimately be heading. Inter-rank fraternisation of the kind he had in mind was officially frowned upon by Milli-com Command, but the rigours of this war surely drained on a man's spirit, Daniels reminded himself, and sometimes a fellow needed a little extra-curricular R&R. Especially when his wife and family were safely more than two hundred light years away...

Then he saw her, coming out of one of the elevator exits and showing both her holocard invitation and personal ID disc to one of the black-uniformed Milli-com security agents stationed there. The security man scanned both items with a handheld checker, comparing their contents with the confidential information now scrolling across the inside of his helmet's data visor. Grudgingly satisfied that she wasn't a Nort assassin or - even worse - an uninvited gatecrasher from the lower ranks, he stepped aside and allowed her to pass.

She walked down the steps that led onto the main bridge floor, looking around her with a slightly questioning smile, no doubt searching for any sign of the dashing Strategy Division colonel at this prestigious gathering.