Crucible (2 page)
They would move forward, scout out the terrain, try to draw the target - him - out of hiding, trying to trick him into revealing his position. Depending on the situation and the responses of their prey, they would try either of two strategies. The first would be to pin him down, bracketing his position with pinpoint accurate sniper fire and forcing him to engage in a deadly long-range sniper duel. Meanwhile, their victim's attention and return fire was fixed on them, the leader of the troupe, the master sniper, would be moving round behind him somewhere, looking for the perfect spot from which to make his kill shot.
The other strategy, which often depended on a panicked response from a less experienced target, was for the snipers to aggressively go on the attack in precise, set patterns, flushing the target out of hiding and herding them straight into the sights of the waiting master sniper. Both strategies were equally valid. Venner knew both of them intimately, both as a bush-beater and master sniper team leader, and knew dozens of ways to circumvent either of them. For this situation, he presented himself to his hunters as the panicked quarry, allowing them to adopt the second of the two strategies.
They had hunted him across the battlefield for a day and a half, with Venner careful never to slip entirely from his pursuers' perception, even on several occasions giving away his location long enough to allow two of them to take speculative shots at him. On another three occasions they had launched seeker-bots to find him. The small anti-grav drone devices buzzed across the face of the battlefield, bathing mud-filled craters, abandoned trenches and the jagged remains of bombed-out ruins and fortifications with probing scanner fields from their multiple target-detection systems.
Venner had evaded the drones with contemptuous ease. The material of his lightweight chem-suit, fabricated in research labs on a world many light years from here, baffled many of the drones' systems, blocking out his body heat signature and defying most of the normal methods of life sign detection. Using breath exercises that would have been familiar to snipers centuries ago, he was careful to control his breathing. On the few occasions the drones' search paths brought them drifting past his position, Venner knew that they were equipped with scanners that could detect the presence of human breath exhaled though a respirator out into the toxin-filled atmosphere of Nu Earth. At one point, one of the drones passed almost within touching range of Venner, but he kept his position, fighting the urge to reach out and smash the irritating, buzzing little thing out of the air - his contempt for an enemy who would dare to try and use such toys against him going up a few more notches and further feeding his growing kill-hunger.
He had killed the first of his pursuers a few hours later, finally tiring of the game he had been playing with them.
By this point, he had worked out their patterns of movement as they closed in on where they foolishly and mistakenly believed him to be; even more foolishly believing that they were driving him forward into the prepared killzone where their master sniper controller patiently lay in wait. Venner had allowed himself to be driven back in that direction, recrossing territory that he had first travelled across in his journey towards the listening post. Venner had mentally mapped out the area here the first time he had travelled across it, instinctively looking for danger areas and vantage points - his sniper's instincts automatically reducing the confused battle-scarred landscape to what it had now become - a hunting zone where cover, position and angles of fire were all that mattered.
He had a fairly shrewd idea where the master sniper would be: in the turret of the gutted giant Nordland Blackmare tank that lay in the centre of a wreckage field of a years-old battle between opposing forces of armoured assault vehicles. That was where he would have situated himself, in a protected position with a commanding view of the surrounding terrain, and he wasn't foolish enough not to credit a skilled, experienced opponent with any less intelligence than he believed he had himself. The bush-beaters were another matter, however. Younger and less experienced than their team leader, lured into a sense of false security by their prey's apparent unwillingness to stand and fight - and secretly eager to make the killshot for themselves and rob their team leader of his prize - they had willingly allowed themselves to be duped, and Venner intended to make them pay the full price for their fatal error.
He picked off the one on his left flank with a shredder slug, an easy shot from a range of more than four hundred metres. After playing cat-and-mouse with the young idiot for an hour or so, he had led him to believe that he was hiding amongst the shorn-off stumps of a group of petrified trees in a middle of a mud field some two hundred metres from Venner's actual position. When the bush-beater had crawled out of his own hiding spot to find a better shooting position behind the nearby wreck of an APC, Venner had been ready and waiting for him.
The shredder slug carried out its designed task, breaking up into a hail of razor-edged micro-missiles which shredded through chem-suit and flesh, incapacitating but not killing its target. His chem-suit ripped in a dozen or more places, the air pipe to his backpack respirator severed, flesh punctured by multiple wounds and his exposed skin blistered as the biochemical agents in the air went to work; the enemy sniper fell to the ground, writhing and screaming. He had an open radio link to the remaining sniper troupe, and his comrades heard every sound of his death agonies. He screamed in pain as his lungs burned away from the poison air he breathed into them; the flesh-destroying biochemical spores burrowed into him and spread like wildfire within the rich warmth of his bloodstream.
The one on the right flank was the first to break, the screams of his comrade echoing in his chem-suit's radio headset as he came running to his aid. His path took him along a shallow, smooth-walled gully that had probably once been an infantry trench before some kind of heat weapon had scoured through it and melted its walls into blackened glass. Venner had been through it earlier, anticipating that this would be the most direct route the sniper on his right flank would take if provoked into rash incaution, and had seeded the trench with micro-mine booby traps. A short series of shattering explosions from the direction of the trench-gully instantly informed Venner that his plan had paid off.
The third and last remaining bush-beater was either too scared or more cautious and experienced than his two dead comrades. Dug into a good vantage point on the crest of a large shell crater three hundred and twenty metres away, he had a fix on Venner's position and began peppering it with shots. His fourth shot blew the head off the figure in a chem-suit crouched in the overhang beneath the remains of the chassis of a blown-apart self-propelled gun. The man relaxed, raising his head to get a better look at the body of the enemy that had just killed two of his friends. It was then Venner killed him with a single shot fired from the new position he had fallen back to, even before the booby traps in the trench-gully detonated. The other position he had been happy to abandon, leaving behind a chem-suited corpse of the Souther infantryman that he had set up to look like a sniper lying in wait. Now, with the bush-beaters all disposed of, there was only the master sniper left to take care of.
Venner fired off a single shot. It ricocheted off the side of the Blackmare's turret, letting the sniper inside know that his enemy had a fix on his location and daring him to try and move.
Venner himself moved forward, cautiously and carefully, hugging cover, following the series of blind spots that his mental map of the area told him would exist as seen from the vantage point of an observer inside the tank wreck. He figured he could probably get safely within three or four hundred metres of the enemy sniper's location. He then would find a good firing position amongst one of the many tank wrecks strewn around the area, and only then would the real battle, a battle of true patience and bitterly hard-won experience, begin. It would be a battle where the first mistake from either marksman would almost certainly be rewarded with instantaneous death. It was the kind of battle Venner lived for, nothing less than a test of true skill and experience.
Venner was still about eighty metres short of the closest tank wreck when he felt the touch of death upon him. The material of his chem-suit - lightweight, more like a second skin than the crude, bulky outfits worn by most of the participants of the war on Nu Earth - was run through with thousands of strands of delicate monofilament wiring. Sensitive to infrared or electronic scanning, such as the kind cast out by the hi-tech precision scopes on a sniper rifle, they gave the wearer an instant warning that an electronically-sighted weapon was being aimed at him. Venner received that warning now - a burning sensation pierced his heart as the network within his bodysuit detected an infrared targeting beam playing across the front of his chest - the monofilament wiring instantly heating up in reaction.
Venner threw himself aside as he heard the crack of a rifle shot from somewhere off to his left. The shot whizzed past him, blowing apart the semi-petrified remains of a Souther infantryman corpse that lay half-buried in the ground behind him.
The enemy sniper was close, he realised, probably within thirty metres or so. Too close for Venner to even begin to think about running for cover or raising his own rifle and returning fire. Before he'd moved a few metres or even spotted a target to return fire on, his opponent would have compensated for his first miss and nailed him with his second shot. He had been tricked, he knew. His opponent had foreseen Venner's assumption that he would have sought shelter in the Blackmare's turret and moved position once Venner started picking off the rest of the troupe. If indeed he had ever been in the Blackmare in the first place, Venner thought bitterly.
Venner was a man who valued skill, who valued finesse, who valued a challenge and the thrill of the hunt. More than anything, though, he was a man who valued his own life. Abandoning any further claim to skill and finesse, he reached for the pistol-like weapon that hung from his equipment-laden belt. He raised and fired it in the general direction the sniper's shot had come from, just as he imagined the enemy marksman would be drawing a bead on him to take that second and surely fatal follow-up shot.
The ugly, blunt-nosed pistol weapon in Venner's hand exploded, firing out a hail of deadly missiles which buzzed through the polluted air, seeking out the telltale heat signature from the hidden sniper's body and carbon dioxide traces from their respirator-filtered breathing. The weapon was crude and imprecise, critically short-ranged and liable to malfunction under the notoriously variable atmospheric and temperature conditions of Nu Earth. It didn't need to be deadly accurate, though. Each buzzing missile was proximity reactive, programmed to explode into a hail of flesh-tearing shards whenever its simple target systems detected it was close enough to something that may or may not have been its intended target.
Venner dived for cover, his weight crunching through the frozen chemical frost that coated the ground on this segment of no-man's-land, as he sought to evade both the sniper's shot and the blast effects of his own weapon.
His chem-suit's advanced sound filters protected him from the worst of the series of short, roaring explosions that followed. When the explosions faded away, those same filters immediately picked up a sound that they had been pre-programmed to detect and amplify: the sound of a human being in pain, calling for help.
Venner quickly retrieved his rifle and stalked towards the source of the sounds, wary of a trap. As a sniper, he himself had used autobot drones to broadcast similar sounds in the past, luring in enemy troops to capture or finish off what they thought was an injured enemy. The analysers in his chem-suit's micro-processor systems informed him that the moans sounded authentically human, with no sign of any electronic origin. A few seconds later, the evidence of Venner's own eyes confirmed it.
The enemy master sniper lay in the shadow of an upturned Souther light tank, one that had taken a direct hit from a firebeam weapon, judging by the gaping, smooth-edged wound melted through the armour of its hull. The man had been hit multiple times by the explosive shards, and lay groaning on the ground, his blood bubbling furiously as it bled out through the rips in his chem-suit and reacted fiercely with the toxic elements in the air around him. He would die soon, either from shock and blood loss, or, more likely, from exposure to the leftover remnants of whatever biochemical weapon had once been used on this portion of the battlefield.
He raised his head groggily, watching as Venner walked towards him. He wore the trademark featureless, spherical black helmet that marked him as one of the so-called "black domers", a master sniper who had more than a thousand confirmed kills to their credit. Venner was delighted. This would be the fourth black domer he had killed.
The two snipers looked at each other.
"How many?" asked Venner, shocked at the sound of his own voice. It had been the first time in over a week he had heard it, and it sounded unfamiliar to him, especially when talking in the harsh, guttural language of the enemy.
"Twelve hundred and fifty-three," answered the Nort sniper, unable to keep the betraying hint of pride out of his voice, even at a time like this.
"Not bad," grunted Venner. The Nort nodded in acknowledgement, as one equal to another. Then Venner shot him through the heart. The man deserved respect and a quicker, cleaner death than the one he had been facing.
"But nowhere near good enough," the Souther added, bending down to search his opponent's corpse for some kind of identification. The other kills were strictly small-fry, but to receive a confirmed kill on a black domer he would have to bring back proof of his status and identity. He had to strip off the man's chem-suit to find it, finally managing to take a scan-reading off the barcode tattoo on the back of the corpse's neck.