Crucible (17 page)

The patrol squad fired off potshots as they ran, forcing their targets to duck for cover among the rubble. Karl, a corporal in the Tenth Nu-Sevastopol Infantry, paused on top of the wreck of a Souther armoured car, taking careful aim with his AK-477 las-carbine. He'd already expended more than half a clip in taking potshots at the piece of rubble rat scum he had been chasing, and now considered it a matter of personal honour to bring the little shit down once and for all.

These rubble rat scavengers had been raiding his company's supplies for days now, stealing ration packs, med-boxes and anything else they could get their sub-human thieving hands on, and now he and his comrades finally had them in their sights.

Karl knew that the rubble rats were supposed to be the Nordland citizens, the remains of the original inhabitants of this miserable, god-forsaken heap of ruins, but their company political officer had assured them that they had willingly reduced themselves to the status of sub-human refuse, and so could no longer be considered part of the glorious Greater Nordland race. Extermination, the political officer had patiently explained, was the only fate they now deserved. The sacred soil of Nordstadt must be cleansed free of the contaminating presence of Southers and sub-human scum alike.

Such a licence to kill only added to the Nort troopers' bloodlust. The failure of yesterday's armoured advance into this sector had caused Nordland Command to order Karl's division to remain in position until the required breakthroughs were made in neighbouring sectors. Karl and his comrades had been forced to sit back and watch as other divisions marched off into battle to grab their share of glory in the final taking of Nordstadt.

And so Karl pulled the trigger of his las-carbine with a free conscience, watching in satisfaction as his shot struck its target in the lower back, felling him and sending him tumbling down the slope of the rubble heap he had almost reached the top of.

"I got one!" Karl called excitedly, listening to the answered whoops of congratulations over his helmet comm-link.

The sub-human was still alive, thrashing feebly and helplessly at the bottom of the rubble heap. Karl ran forward to finish him off, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and drawing his dagger from its sheath. He rolled the body of his victim over on to its front, severing the air-tubes of its crude, scratch-built chem-suit with a single sweep of the dagger blade. The sub-human's eyes rolled white in toxic shock, the inside of its helmet visor splattering with blood as it took its first gasping, lung-destroying breath of Nu Earth air.

Karl abandoned the sub-human to its death throws, eager to claim further kills while there were still more targets available. There was the crack of a las-carbine, followed moments later by another excited shout over his helmet radio.

"I got one too, Karl. A clean kill. One shot, that's all it took, not like yours."

Karl cursed. It was Feydya, the squad blowhard. If Karl didn't at least match his marksmanship, he would never hear the end of it.

He leaped on top of a rubble platform, taking aim at the last remaining target. It was a child, judging by its size. Difficult to hit, smaller than the others, moving fast, dodging in and out of the cover of the surrounding rubble.

Karl took aim, competing with the other members of his squad for the thrill of the last kill. They opened fire almost simultaneously, someone - not Karl - clipping the sub-human with their shot. The sub-human fell with a squeal of pain. Karl was too fast with his follow-up shot, missing the target by a good two metres. Feydya cackled with glee and lined up his own kill-shot. A burst of las-rounds rang out and Feydya's head vaporised in a red spray.

Karl swung his aim round and saw a blue-skinned figure without a chem-suit standing on a rubble heap fifty metres away and calmly gunning down the members of his squad, one man after another.

Venner saw the GI gun down the five-man Nort squad in a matter of seconds. Tight controlled bursts, fired without panic or malice into each of the enemy soldiers' heads and chests, killing them all instantly. One managed to get a shot off, but it went wide and the Nort was sprawled on the ground dead before he ever had a chance to correct his aim.

The Rogue Trooper stood for a moment, gun at the ready as he scanned for any more enemies. Satisfied there were none, he slung his rifle on his shoulder and advanced slowly towards the injured rubble rat child, holding his hands up to show the terrified child that he meant no harm.

Venner saw all this through the scope of his rifle, tracking his target's every move. He smiled in satisfaction, pleased that his hunch had played out correctly. The Genetic Trooper was biologically and psychologically conditioned to take Nort lives and save Souther ones, but again, some rogue element seemed to have entered into the behaviour of this particular GI. Study of his past exploits had quickly shown Venner that the target showed a tendency to needlessly risk his own life and jeopardise his mission in order to go to the aid of the injured and helpless, especially if they were non-combatants. It was a weakness in his character, one that was now going to cost him dear.

Venner took careful aim, capturing the figure of the GI dead centre in the crosshairs of his rifle's magno-scope.

Rogue flinched and turned suddenly, scanning the ruins to his left. He paused for a moment, his eyes narrowing in suspicion, his gaze looking for signs of anything out of the ordinary.

"Something wrong, Rogue?"

"Not sure, Helm. Could have sworn I just sensed something out there for a moment. You picking up anything?"

"Nothing on my sensors," confirmed Gunnar.

"Nada here," reported Helm.

"I got zip too," said Bagman.

"Must just be getting jumpy," said Rogue, placing Gunnar on the lip of a shattered wall. "Guard duty, Gunnar. Set scanners to max and watch my back."

"Gotcha, Rogue."

"Bagman, dispense suit patches and med-kit and let's get this kid fixed up."

Rogue worked quickly and efficiently, patching up the lasround tear in the boy's chem-suit and applying anti-burn salve to the skin beneath. The kid's chem-suit was a wreck even before the Nort round tore into it, with slow leaks in about a dozen different places, and the filter mask was a joke. Rogue could only guess at what kinds of poisons it had been failing to protect the kid from, and all he could do was give the kid whatever anti-tox tabs he had remaining in his med-kit.

Rogue didn't have much experience with children. The only ones he'd ever known were his clone-brothers in the GI Regiment, all of them growing up at the same time back on Milli-com. He guessed the one he had here now was about thirteen, and he guessed that the kid probably wouldn't survive into adulthood, not running around Nu Earth in a chem-suit like the one he was wearing.

The kid's face was marked with the signs of disease and chem-poisoning, and he looked half-starved. If he was thirteen, then Nordstadt and the horrors of its war was the only existence he had ever known. Rogue was born to wage war on Nu Earth, but even he couldn't imagine what it must have been like to grow up as a child in a place like this, and what it must have taken for the kid to survive this long.

He was feral, more animal than human. He had whimpered and snarled while Rogue fitted the suit patch and tended to his injury, even snapping his teeth savagely at Rogue's fingers when he had applied the stinging anti-burn salve to his wound. Now he crouched there, staring at Rogue in undisguised awe.

Never mind the blue skin, thought Rogue, what's got to be really freaking him out is the fact that I'm not wearing a chem-suit or using a breathing mask. He's spent his entire life in this hell-hole. He's never seen a human being walking about in the open without a chem-suit.

"Bagman, dispense a couple of ration packs."

Rogue offered them to the kid and they disappeared into the pouches and pockets of his rag-tag chem-suit just a few moments after the kid had eagerly grabbed them from Rogue's hand. Rubble rats; that was what the Nort and Souther troops here called survivors like him, and the name wasn't so insulting. Rats were good survivors and smart, as well. Suddenly a thought struck Rogue.

"Bagman, dispense hand-compu."

Rogue activated the device, calling up an image from the compu's memory files. He showed it to the kid, immediately registering the look of frightened recognition on the kid's face. The image on the hand-compu's screen was that of the scarred and burn-ravaged face of the Traitor General, as he had looked the last time Rogue had encountered him.

"You've seen this man, haven't you?"

The kid nodded vigorously, snarling at the face on the screen.

"Good kid. Bagman, dispense more ration packs."

These too disappeared into the hidden folds of the chem-suit as quickly as the first one had. Rogue looked at the kid, tapping the image on the compu-screen.

"Okay, now comes the million cred question. Can you show or tell me where he is? Him?"

More vigorous nods, the kid pointing urgently off towards the west. He rose to go, indicating just as urgently for Rogue to follow.

"Hope you got plenty more of those ration packs, Bagman," said Rogue, standing up and gathering up his equipment. "If this kid can take us to the Traitor General, then he's going to get every last thing you got in there that's even halfway edible."

A safe distance away, Venner settled down and checked the display on his visor plate. He had got what he wanted; a lock on the unique electronic emissions from the GI's biochip equipment. Now he could track the target anywhere it went.

He'd done what he wanted to do, and now the mission was already as good as halfway over. All he had to do now was follow the Rogue Trooper and let him do all the footwork in tracking down the primary target. After that, Venner would move in, kill them both, and complete his mission.

SIXTEEN

"A lovely lot of fireworks going off in Nordstadt today, Mister Bland. Lots of lovely pickings for the likes of us, I shouldn't wonder."

"Indubitably, Mister Brass. More's the pity that we won't be able to get our hands on any of it, not after the Norts finally take control of the blasted place."

They were flying high above the surface of Nu Earth, their route skirting the edges of the Nordstadt warzone, and allowing them a good look at the carnage taking place below.

Messrs Bland & Brass: "war suppliers to the galaxy", as it said on their business holo-cards. Vultures. Scavengers. War profiteers. Body looters. That was what others called them. They were professional freelance salvage operators, looting the battlefields of Nu Earth for abandoned Nort and Souther hardware which they would then recover, repair and usually sell back to its original owner, or failing that, the next highest bidder.

Body looters were universally despised by both sides of the war, but were also equally employed by both sides too. Body looters went out into the very worst warzone areas, where the Norts' and Southers' own salvage units were unable or unwilling to go, and had an unerring knack for tracking down and recovering the most valuable pieces of military technology. Many body looters sold not just salvage, but also information too, which they collected in their roaming travels across the battlefields.

Some of these body looters got greedy and tried to be clever, selling information to both sides simultaneously. Some of them even becoming paid agents of either the Nort or Souther intelligence services, or sometimes even both at the same time. These body looters rarely lasted long, and their fates usually resulted in a brief but bloody back-alley assassination on one of the lawless neutral free-zones that sprung up around the main warzones, or in a longer and far more painful final resolution in the interrogation chambers of the Nort or Souther intelligence services.

Morrie Brass and Augustus Bland despised such shoddy amateurism and prided themselves on their uniformly professional approach to their work. They were strictly independent operators, favouring neither one side nor the other and happy to do business with anyone, be they Nort or Souther, human or alien, just as long as the money was there on the table at the end of the day.

Morrie Brass had been a Nort computer expert during his time in the service of the Greater Nordland military forces, while Augustus Bland had worked in the pay corps of the Souther army. They had met in one of the free-zones. Brass was there to find a buyer for the thousands of scraps of classified information he had been steadily stealing for years from the computer records of Nordland High Command, while Bland was there laying low and living off the proceeds of the hundreds of thousands of creds he had embezzled from the army pay corps. Their partnership, business and otherwise, had been mutually rewarding for both of them. Brass's computer skills had been put to good use erasing all trace of Bland's crimes from the Souther central records, while Bland's money had bought them both new faces and identities, and provided all the start-up finance they needed to set themselves up in the freelance battlefield salvage business.

The years they had spent together since then had been happy and extremely profitable ones. Nu Earth wasn't exactly to everyone's taste, but for a pair of smart and careful operators with a sharp eye for money-making opportunities and a necessarily keen sense of self-preservation, it was a highly lucrative place to do business. All you had to do, they had once agreed with each other during a short but extremely enjoyable break together on the pleasure-world of Nu-Martinique, was to understand everything about how many ways there were to be killed on Nu Earth, and be ready with ways to avoid all such unpleasantness.

Like now, for instance.

"One of those Souther Seraphims coming in at us, Mister Brass," reported Bland, looking at the readings on their scanner screen. "Heavens, just look at the speed and manoeuvrability of the thing! What I wouldn't give to have one of those things listed in our next price catalogue."

"Never mind the profit margins for once, Mister Bland," said Brass, irritably. "What about our own personal survival? In case you hadn't noticed, your precious Seraphim appears to have locked onto us with its targeting systems, and no doubt we can expect to be blown out of the air any moment now."