Crucible (18 page)
"Not to worry, Mister Brass," said Bland, leaning forward and flicking a switch on the console in front of him. "That's why I insisted we install this little device, remember?"
A few moments later, the scanner screen readings showed the Souther fighter breaking off from its pursuit and disengaging its targeting systems. Thanks to the alien cloaking device he had just switched on, their shuttle would now have a completely different transponder signal and target profile to hide its real identity. To any inquisitive Norts, it would appear to be a Kashan Legion command craft, carrying a high-ranking member of the Norts' most elite and notorious fighting unit. To the pilot of that Souther fighter, it would have looked as if he was mistakenly about to blow a Souther med-shuttle out of the air. Whatever each side saw on their target scanners, the device's abilities still more or less guaranteed Brass and Bland a safe journey through the hazardous skies of Nu Earth.
Bland tutted to himself in satisfaction, not able to resist a brief bit of point scoring with his partner. "Hmmm, and to think someone didn't want to buy the thing in the first place, because they said the price was too high."
"And I still think so. Twenty thousand creds and a whole consignment of undamaged chem-suits? I still think I could have bargained that alien ruffian down to half that price, if you hadn't insisted on handling the negotiations yourself," sniffed Brass.
"Well, be my guest this time then, Mister Brass," responded Bland. "Let's see if you can get as good a price out of our next customer as I did last time we did business with him."
Their destination, via a route that would now take them well away from any active warzones, was a Souther airbase. There was an extremely accommodating squadron commander there who was not only willing to purchase recovered Souther aircraft salvage from the two body looters, but was equally happy to sell them whatever they needed from his squadron's own supplies. There were many such obliging and corrupt souls amongst the personnel of both sides, and Brass and Bland were always delighted to do business with any of them. It was considerably safer than salvaging war materials from the battlefields, and this way you got them in pristine condition, without having to go to the expense and inconvenience of repairing them before selling them onto another buyer.
Nevertheless, Brand couldn't resist a final, lingering look at the image of Nordstadt as it faded away into the distance. So much lovely, valuable scrap and salvage material down there, he thought to himself, just waiting for someone to come and find it all. What a pity they were never going to see any of it. Sometimes, Brass reminded himself, this war and all its events could be a serious inconvenience when it came to keeping up your profit margins.
"Break off, Rafe. It's one of ours, a Type IV med-shuttle. Registry ID and transponder codes check out, even if it has strayed kinda far off the safe conduct flight paths."
"Check on that, Gabe. Could have sworn a few moments ago it looked like one of the old Nort Magyar-pattern cargo crates."
A thought struck Rafe. "Gabe, open up a comm-channel to them and ask them if they want an escort up into safe orbit. The skies anywhere near Nordstadt aren't a good place for an unarmed med-shuttle to be wandering about on its own today."
"Cancel that order, Bluegirl," broke in the voice of her flight commander. "You go glory hunting in your own time. Right now, we've got a mission to carry out. Return to formation and resume original course. That's an order. Those med-boys want to go joyriding about up here, then that's their lookout."
Rafe cursed off-mic, but did as ordered, swinging her Seraphim around on a heading that would bring it back over the rapidly shrinking, Souther-held portion of Nordstadt.
"Roger that, Flight One. Bluegirl returning to formation."
The Seraphim cut through the upper layers of chem-cloud like a shark cruising for prey. Rafe looked down with her fighter's targeting sensors and saw plenty of prey on offer down there at ground level. Waves of Nort bomber and gunship atmocraft were making low-level sweeps over the city, pounding the Souther ground forces dug into the rubble down there. Secondary waves of hopper and atmocraft troop carriers followed in behind them, dropping Nort stormtrooper units right down into the midst of the Souther survivors of the bombing raids. The Souther anti-aircraft artillery units were taking a fair toll of the Norts - as she watched, Rafe saw several enemy atmocraft target icons blip out of existence - but it was still a turkey shoot going on down there and so far the battle was still going the Norts' way.
Meanwhile, she and dozens of other Souther fighters were carrying enough firepower to blow half those Nort atmocraft tin crates out of the sky. And what were they doing? Flying in a protective circle around the main Souther drop-zones in Nordstadt, holding open a corridor for some big, secret shuttle drop-op that Milli-com had ordered.
Something big was on, that was for sure. "Operation Hammerfall"; that was the name she and the other pilots had been told, although no other details had been forthcoming. Their orders were simply to maintain position and wait for the shuttle drop to commence, while all the time watching as mere interested observers as thousands of Souther troops on the ground were bombed and strafed out of existence.
The other Souther fighter pilots might have been happy with this state of affairs, but Rafe certainly wasn't.
"Gabe, check the feed intake levels on the starboard wing engine. I'm picking up a power drop on that one. Feels kinda sluggish, like maybe we're taking in too much ionised dust from these chem-clouds."
"You sure, toots? I don't detect anything... Oh wait, now I see what you mean. Yeah, definite signs of dust clogging in that starboard engine. As your navigator and onboard flight computer, I recommend we take immediate remedial action before it becomes a real problem."
Rafe grinned. Yeah, Gabe was definitely starting to learn a thing or two about the noble human arts of lying and talking bullshit.
"Bluegirl to Flight One. Got a dust-clog problem in my starboard engine. Taking it down out of these chem-clouds and closer to the ground to allow engine systems to effect auto-clearout."
The reply was both immediate and strident. "Request denied, Bluegirl. Return to main formation and reassume previous position. Say again, request denied. Get your ass back here now."
"Can't copy, Flight One. Chem-cloud interference is disrupting radio comms. Taking it down now, Flight One. I'll see you later."
Gabe cut off the comms-link and the flight leader's outraged response with a suitably noisy burst of static. Rafe then sent her fighter plunging down through the chem-clouds towards the nearest formation of enemy atmocraft.
The Nort atmocraft didn't even knew what hit them. Rafe came diving down out of the chem-clouds, picking off two fat troop carriers with Hellstreak missiles. Two platoons or more of Nort stormtroopers died instantly as their carriers blew apart in midair. The third troop carrier and its gunship escort desperately tried to peel away. Rafe gave them no chance and opened up with her nose cannons. The gunship exploded under the hail of cannon fire. The carrier, riddled from cockpit to stern, died a slower death, keeling over and falling out of the sky to crash and explode in the ruins below.
Rafe cut her speed to the minimum necessary to keep the roaring fighter aloft and flew lower, zooming down over the heads of the Nort troops on the ground in a lethal strafing attack. Her keen GI eyes picked out targets moments before they flashed by below.
Cannon fire scattered through lines of advancing Nort infantry, blowing apart a dozen or more of them and sending the others diving for cover.
She spotted a Nort artillery observation post on top of a bombed-out ruin and took out the whole building with another Hellstreak. It crashed to the ground, burying the Nort infantry squad sheltering there.
She spotted a Nort command vehicle and tracked it with twin lines of cannon fire, cutting it in half and detonating its fuel tanks.
A massive Loki-class siege platform, a mobile artillery unit built on the chassis of a Blackmare tank, ground a path through the ruins. The anti-aircraft gunners on it pointed at her in alarm and frantically brought their lascannon turrets round to bear. Rafe launched another Hellstreak at it and then peeled away just before it struck. The explosion destroyed not just the Loki, but also touched off the stack of hundred kilo shells carried by a nearby ammunition limber vehicle. The Loki and its fleet of support vehicles and infantry escorts disappeared in an expanding cloud of flame and blast-hurled rubble that made those watching kilometres away assume the Southers were now using mini tac-nuke ordnance on them.
And then Rafe was gone, opening up with the after-burners and vanishing back up into the cover of the overhead chem-clouds seconds before anyone on the ground could get a lock on her with their weapons.
"Bluegirl to Flight One," she cheerfully reported into her radio. "Comms interference and that dust-clog problem now taken care of. Returning to formation, as ordered."
Flight One's reply was a stream of angry profanities, punctuated by several repeated promises of court martial investigations. Rafe didn't care. She knew the damage she had just inflicted on the Norts was really little more than a pinprick in comparison to the total size of the offensive now being mounted, but it was better than doing nothing, she judged. If what she had just done gave even one Souther soldier in Nordstadt a better fighting chance of survival, then she was happy to face whatever consequences awaited her back at base.
She thought about the battle going on in the city below and the tens of thousands of Souther troops now trapped there and fighting for their lives. She thought of one soldier in particular.
The Rogue Trooper. The man she had sent into the crucible with that radio message of hers. Now it didn't seem like such a bright idea, not when Nordstadt was in its death-throws and an excursion into the crucible looked more and more like a one-way death trip.
"Solid blue", she had promised him, not knowing then what she was sending him into. The comms reports from Nordstadt of the sightings of the Rogue Trooper hadn't surprised her at all. If anyone could have made it solo through into the crucible, it would be him. Something bothered her though, her GI intuition setting off alarm bells in her head about Operation Hammerfall and its implications. She didn't know what Milli-com was planning, but she felt sure it meant nothing good for the ordinary grunt on the ground.
"Need another favour from you, Gabe. You still got those bypass codes from when we hacked into Milli-com's secure comm-channels to send out that message on the old GI frequencies?"
"You even have to ask, conchita? What's up?"
"As soon as we get back to base, Gabe, I want you to start sneaking around the Milli-com data channels and find out whatever you can about this Hammerfall op."
A minute later, they rejoined the main shield formation that was circling in a wide holding pattern above the Souther drop-zones. A minute after that, the first wave of shuttles dropped down from orbit, heading into the besieged city.
The shuttles came in four waves, with eight or ten shuttles to a wave. Each wave was directed in to one of the four remaining main landing zones still in Souther hands.
Flights of Nort Grendel and Gorgon fighters prowled the skies, lurking at the far fringes of the Souther fighter screen's scanner range. At the first sight of the descending shuttles, they opened up their afterburners and darted in to attack.
They were destroyed in droves. Almost every remaining Souther anti-aircraft unit - the same guns that might have done something to stop the waves of Nort atmocraft attacks still pounding the Souther positions in the city's outlying districts - had been pulled back to defend the landing zones and put up a barrage of covering fire for the incoming shuttles. Those Nort fighters that weren't destroyed or beaten back by the fire from the ground were eagerly claimed by the squadrons of patrolling Seraphims. In the space of a few minutes' furious aerial dogfighting, twenty-eight Nort fighters were downed, nineteen of them falling to the guns and missiles of the Seraphims, against a loss of five Souther craft. Outgunned and outnumbered, the surviving Norts retreated to lick their wounds.
Not one of them made it through the Souther fighter barrier, and every shuttle made it into its landing point unscathed.
The Seraphim pilots and anti-aircraft gunners all assumed the shuttles were bringing in much-needed reinforcements for the ground troops in Nordstadt, perhaps the vanguard force for the mysterious but much-heralded Operation Hammerfall. Thirty-seven shuttles, each one carrying a maximum of sixty troops, couldn't be bringing in much more than two battalions of troops, but two battalions of troops was better than nothing, and everyone assumed this was just the start of something much bigger.
They were right at least in thinking that much. What they didn't know - since Milli-com had gone to great pains to conceal the fact - was that every one of those shuttles was virtually empty.
"You believe this shit?" Halmada growled to Matthews, his copilot. The man just shrugged, knowing better than to comment on Milli-com strategy when there was a full squad of Milli-fuzz military police riding in the shuttle's passenger compartment behind them.
The military police, several hundred of them in total, had boarded the shuttles just before departure from the orbital bases. They were heading for Nordstadt, but they didn't look like they were planning on staying there very long, not judging by the scant amount of equipment they were taking with them. Halmada and his copilot had exchanged looks but said nothing, sensing another Milli-com black bag operation at work.
"Still," grunted Halmada, "even Milli-fuzz has got to be better than that chilly son-of-a-bitch we took down the other day."
This elicited more of a response from Matthews. Both of them remembered the silent, grim-faced sniper operative who had travelled down with them the last time they had dropped down into Nordstadt. Both of them had looked at the other and had come to the same conclusion. Their passenger was S-Three, for sure, which meant it was in both their interests not to even wonder anything else about him. Halmada was glad when the man had disembarked without a word to them, and the temperature inside the shuttle seemed to rise a few more degrees in the absence of his cold, grey presence. Halmada didn't know who the man was or why he was being sent into Nordstadt, but he dearly hoped never to encounter him again.