Crucible (20 page)

"Damn right we are, but not before I teach this bitch a lesson about interfering in official Milli-com business." The second Milli-fuzz man now clambered to his feet and drew his own shock-baton, pointing it in fury towards Hanna.

She knew there was little she could do to stop him since she was lying on a bed with one leg still numb and unresponsive.

He drew his arm back to strike. The sound of an explosion, loud and shocking, from directly outside stopped him in his tracks.

Both Milli-fuzz men gawped in disbelief. Clearly, they'd never been this close to live artillery fire before. Even through the walls of the hospital dome, Hanna could hear the whistling shriek of more incoming shellfire.

"Nort artillery. Everyone get down!" she screamed, ignoring the pain in her injured leg as she threw herself off the bed, instinctively grabbing her would-be executioner and pulling him down with her.

A few seconds later, the Nort artillery fire landed inside the field hospital compound. Two evac hoppers and a supply half-track were destroyed, along with their crews. The most recently arrived wounded and the orderlies attending to them were torn to pieces by shrapnel. A secondary med-dome took three direct hits and collapsed inwards, killing everyone inside, patients and med-staff alike.

The battle for Nordstadt had finally reached the Souther forces' inner city secure zones.

EIGHTEEN

It was just past 16:00 hours when the first storm broke over the city; the winter sun set over Nordstadt for the last time.

A few minutes after that, the second storm broke also.

The first storm was the one predicted by both sides' meteorology experts. Lightning flashed in the chem-cloud skies, setting fire to parts of the heavens above the city as the heat from the electrical blasts ignited the highly combustible contents of some of those same clouds.

Steaming and corrosive acid rain fell all over the city. In those areas where the sky was aflame, it fell as droplets of liquid fire. Troops on both sides cowered in whatever cover was available, or donned special protective capes over their chem-suits. Shell-holes filled with acid water runoff and toxic sludge and became lethal death-traps. Trenches became bubbling, acid-filled ditches. Roadways were transformed into coursing rivers of acid water which flooded out bunkers and defensive positions, forcing their cursing, panicked occupants to seek shelter elsewhere. In some areas of the city, the acid bled down into the blighted soil in the ground, reacting with the toxins already there and causing a vile, poisonous green mist which even the best chem-suits couldn't offer any protection against to seep up into the air.

Interference from the storm and acid rain hampered radio communications and rendered scanner screens blind. Hundreds of troops on both sides died in the downpour. Many, many more than that were to die in what followed next.

The second storm was the crushing weight of the final Nort offensive. Thousands of Nort vehicles and hundreds of thousands of Nort troops moved forward through the rubble, advancing under cover of the storm. The storm and the rains would last for only an hour or so, but the carnage of the final phase of the battle for Nordstadt would go on for many long, bloody hours more than that.

Another great wave of Nort atmocraft swept in low over the battlefields, attacking the rings of carefully prepared defences around the inner secure zones. The Souther air defences there were in position and ready for them. The skies above the secure zones were filled with tracer fire, explosions and the flaring lights of missile and rocket streaks. More than fifty Nort craft were lost in the first ten minutes of the attack of it and six times that number by the.

Whatever glory the Nort ground forces might win tonight, the pilots of the Nordland Air Force would long remember the final commencement of the Battle of Nordstadt as one of the blackest of days. Not even taking into account the losses sustained by the Grendel and Gorgon high-altitude fighter squadrons in the earlier abortive battle, entire squadrons would be lost in tonight's engagement, and many Nort pilots' messes would be bleak, empty places for months to come.

Despite the cost in men and machines, Nort High Command deemed the losses more than acceptable. High above the battlezone, spotter craft and low-orbit surveillance satellites hovered invisibly. They were monitoring everything; calculating levels of enemy firepower and the points of origin of that firepower. Every Nort craft destroyed helped them pinpoint the location of another enemy anti-aircraft battery, another surface-to-air missile squadron.

The target data was fed through to the artillery units behind the main Nort lines. The gun crews waited there impatiently, tonnes of shells or missiles stacked up beside each weapon. At last the remnants of the atmocraft attack wave received the merciful order to withdraw. They fled back to their home bases, many of them damaged and never making it that far. The lucky ones managed to bail out from their stricken craft in time. The unlucky ones found anonymous graves in whatever nameless area of rubble their craft crashed into.

As soon as the atmocraft were clear, the artillery battalions opened fire. They were spread out in lines many kilometres long, arrayed in batteries of fifty or more guns. When they all opened fire simultaneously, it sounded as if Nu Earth itself was cracking wide open.

The artillery barrage hit the Souther positions like the wrath of God. Zeroed in by satellites and spotter planes, the Nort shells struck home by the thousands with devastating accuracy.

More than a dozen Souther AA units were wiped out in the opening salvo, eradicated completely. The others tried to weather the storm, losing more men and guns with every passing second. Rockrete bunkers offered no shelter, their metre-thick roofs succumbing to the relentless hail of shellfire until they collapsed in on the heads of their screaming occupants. The Nort guns kept on firing, even after most of their targets had been reduced to little more than fields of churned mud littered with the scraps of men and the guns they had once manned.

Finally, the barrage ceased, and the gunners stood down from their positions, recalibrating their sights and pouring coolant fluid into overheated gun barrels in readiness for receiving their next firing solutions from the spotter planes. The guns stayed silent for a few minutes. They wouldn't stay silent for long.

In the brief respite, the Norts initiated the next phase of the assault. In staging areas behind the Nort lines, almost an entire division of Nort stormtroopers scrambled aboard ground assault hopper craft. They were airborne in minutes, the hoppers skimming across the rooftops of the smashed city, passing over the heads of the cheering throngs of advancing ground troops. The Souther air defences had been comprehensively smashed by the artillery barrage and these airborne units were able to cross over into Souther-held territory almost at will, taking only a handful of losses from whatever fire could be thrown up from the ground-based enemy infantry positions below.

They landed in waves inside the Souther defensive perimeter. Some had been designated to turn round and assault the Souther positions behind them, coordinating with advancing ground infantry to catch and crush the enemy troops there in a lethal crossfire. The majority pushed on towards the centre of the secure zones, following orders to storm and destroy the vital shuttle landing zones, cutting off all hope of escape or reinforcement for the remaining Souther forces in Nordstadt.

Behind them, the hoppers took off again, returning to the rear echelon staging areas to pick up the second wave of the airborne assault phase of the offensive. Within the hour, another two Nort stormtrooper divisions would be deployed into the interior of the Souther defensive perimeter.

The borders of the inner crucible wavered, but held against the face of the first phase of the Nort assault. This situation was one that wouldn't last much longer.

"Forward! For Nordland. For Nordstadt. For victory!"

Centurion-Kolonel Graff stood at the prow of his assault craft, daring the Souther snipers and machine-gunners on the near shore to try and pick him off.

He and his regiment, the Third Kashan Sturmvulkk, nicknamed the Bulletproofs after their legendary action in attacking and capturing the rebel stronghold of Vasrin during the Fourth Battle of Nu Sevastopol, were assaulting the Souther positions on the north shore of the main river through Nordstadt. It was Graff who had personally climbed to the top of the highest point on Vasrin's main citadel and planted the regimental standard above the burning city, and he had every intention of doing the same thing here. With all the bridges across the river now destroyed, the only way across was by waterborne assault. Waves of troop-laden ships and skimmer craft launched across the river and straight into the face of ferocious fire coming from the Souther defenders dug in on the far shore.

Two enormous waves of assault craft, comprising of two whole divisions and more than twenty thousand men, had tried to make the crossing already. The first hadn't even made it past the halfway mark of the river's eight hundred metre expanse. Their corpses floated in the water all around the boats carrying Graff and his men. A few clung to the burning wreckage of their assault vessels, crying uselessly out for help to the Kashans as their boats sank into the toxic waters of the river.

The second wave had fared a little better, some of the elements of that division even making it to the enemy shore. Wading clumsily ashore, trying to climb the steep and muddy river banks of the river, they had been easy pickings for the enemy infantry lying in wait there. Their corpses and the wreckage of their beached assault boats choked the waters of the shoreline. The survivors, barely a battalion's worth by this point, were pinned down at the water's edge, unable or unwilling to advance any further and still taking horrific casualties from the withering hail of fire from the shore defenders. Scattered and disorganised, most likely with the majority of their officers already dead, Graff knew they would be of little use to him when his troops made it ashore. Still, he was glad of their presence. Every las-round and shell aimed at them was one less aimed at Graff and his precious Kashans.

Graff kept his eyes fixed on the far shoreline, counting off the metres and seconds to their arrival there.

Five hundred and forty metres.

Artillery rounds screamed over his head as the Nort and Souther batteries on each shore traded punishing bouts of shellfire. At least one Souther salvo was aimed at the assault craft. Two boats to his right exploded and sank, taking all hands with them. Another suffered a near miss, overturning in the wake of the shell's explosive splash and spilling everyone aboard into the water. Graff could hear his men's screams above the sounds of the explosions as the weight of their equipment and chem-suits dragged them down into the poisonous water.

Four hundred and fifty metres.

Another flight of Souther gunships flew up the length of the river, strafing and bombing everything in their path and leaving a trail of burning and sinking boats in their wake.

"Lazookas!" ordered Graff, and was rewarded a few moments later by the sight of a hail of lazooka and even lascarbine shots reaching up into the sky in search of their targets. Most missed the fast moving gunships, but one lucky or well-aimed lazooka shot struck true.

One of the gunships fell from the air, trailing flames. Its pilot was a brave and determined man, Graff realised, because he directed his dying craft straight down on top of the assault craft carrying the commander. Gunship and assault boat disappeared into the river together.

Three hundred and eighty metres.

More than halfway there now. By Graff's reckoning, the division had lost roughly a quarter of its strength already, but that still left about seven thousand men still alive, all of them Kashans. More than enough to get the job done, judged Graff, even if they lost another quarter or more before they reached the shore.

Three hundred and ten metres.

An artillery skimmer in front of Graff's boat was suddenly blown out of the water. Graff hadn't seen any of the shore-based fire hit it and guessed it must have struck a floating mine. His guess was confirmed when he saw one of the deadly plastic spheres floating in the water directly ahead of his own craft. A shot from his officer's pistol detonated it while it was still a safe distance away.

"Graff to all vessel commanders," he ordered over the regimental radio net. "Be advised, enemy mines in the water ahead. Get your best marksmen up into the prows of your craft to pick them off."

Two hundred and fifty metres.

The Souther gunships were back making a return sweep over the Kashan assault wave. Graff saw the craft carrying his second-in-command cut in half by a strafing blast of lascannon fire. The man had been a good friend, a comrade since their days together in the Nordland Youth and Graff deeply regretted his death. The time for mourning would have to come later, however, after Nordstadt had finally been liberated.

One hundred and eighty metres.

They were well within range of the guns of the enemy infantry now. Graff was still standing in the open at the prow of the boat, testing his reputation as commander of the Bulletproofs to its very limits. A Souther sniper round whipped past, missing him but hitting and killing one of his men crouching down behind him.

One hundred metres.

The enemy fire intensified. Souther heavy weapon fire raked boats from prow to stern, killing everyone aboard. Individual Souther soldiers picked off their opposite numbers aboard the Nort assault boats with single shots from their las-carbines.

Fifty metres.

Heavy salvos of Nort artillery fire crashed into the Souther-held river bank, seeking to clear a way through the defences for the arrival of the third Nort attack wave. The shellfire collapsed tunnels, gutted bunkers and struck silent heavy weapon emplacements. The fact that it also killed dozens of the survivors of the second attack wave who were still trapped there on the shoreline was of little consequence. They had failed in the task given to them and now had to face the penalty for their failure.