Crucible (29 page)

The traitor's strength was phenomenal. Both men were wounded, but even with the shock and pain of the las-shot wound in his side, Rogue should still have been able to overcome any ordinary human in hand-to-hand combat. That wasn't the case here, however. One look at his opponent's glazed and bloodshot eyes told Rogue where the traitor's inhuman strength was coming from. He was hyped out on narco-stims. Rogue would probably have to break half the bones in the traitor's body before the man would start to feel anything.

If that was what it was going to take, then that was what Rogue was going to do. The traitor's hands clawed at his face, going for Rogue's eyes. Rogue grabbed one of those hands and violently wrenched it round, breaking the wrist. Then he head-butted his opponent, trying to smash the glassteel face-plate of his chem-suit with the rim of his GI helmet. The traitor's visor cracked, though it didn't break, but the blow was still enough to send him staggering back. Rogue reached out, trying to grab and tear out the air pipes on the traitor's chem-suit, but his enemy saw the move coming and managed to block it in time. Rogue's successful ruse allowed him to lash out with the heel of his boot, fracturing the traitor's left kneecap.

The traitor felt that one even through the narco-stim haze. He threw himself forward at Rogue again, his face beneath the cracked chem-visor a mask of rage and hate. With one leg crippled, the traitor's attack was stumbling and clumsy. Rogue caught him and threw him into the nearby rubble, hoping the impact would cause some damage to his opponent's chem-suit.

No such luck. The traitor rose to his feet again, wielding a jagged shard of rockcrete like a dagger. Rogue wearily prepared to meet the attack, the pain and damage from the gunshot wound in his side really starting to kick in now.

Venner looked through his target scope, seeing both targets in sight together at last. They were both injured; both easy kills. He picked his first target, training his sights on the Rogue Trooper, and pulled the trigger.

Bagman's sensors detected the targeter beam of the rifle as it invisibly touched the back of Rogue's head. "Rogue! Get down!" he shouted in warning, just as the sound of the sniper shot echoed off the rockrete surfaces around them.

Venner cursed, seeing his target move just as he pulled the trigger. He thought he had at least still managed to wing the Genetic Infantryman, if not succeed in killing him outright. That left one target down and the other one still up. Venner shifted aim, switching targets to the figure of the traitor, who was already starting to turn to run as soon as he heard the sniper shot. Venner smiled. He would kill the traitor and then return his aim to pick off the wounded Rogue Trooper.

"Rogue! Get down!"

Hanna heard the shout from the ruins over to her left, just a moment before she heard the sound of the sniper shot coming from nearby. She recognised the voice as belonging to one of the Rogue Trooper's pieces of talking equipment and knew instantly what that voice and the answering rifle shot meant; the Rogue Trooper was trapped in those ruins, pinned down by a sniper hiding somewhere near her own position.

Hanna dropped to her knees bringing her rifle up to bear, using what light she had to scan for the hidden marksman. She saw nothing but a jumble of shadows and rubble as vital moments ticked away while the sniper lined up his next shot. There was a flash on the horizon behind her from the battle going on there and, fleetingly, the scene in front of her was starkly if briefly illuminated. She saw something, or thought she saw something, lying amongst the shadows she had scanned over just a few moments ago. She tracked back on it, going more on memory of what she had thought she had seen rather than what she might have actually glimpsed. It could have been the shape of a man crouched in the ruins, or it could have been a briefly-glimpsed piece of rock or just a misleading pattern of shadows.

She didn't have time to dwell on the possibilities and fired the las-carbine, sending a stream of shots out into the darkness.

Venner drew his crosshairs dead centre on the back of the fleeing figure of the traitor. Two shots, he decided, right through the target's back, severing his spine, destroying his lungs and heart, blowing apart his ribcage as they punched out through the front of him. The traitor would be dead before his body hit the ground. His finger started to squeeze the trigger, just as he saw a flare of light somewhere nearby and to his right.

The trigger was never pulled. Hanna's burst of las-fire caught him full in the arms and head, blowing apart his rifle, sending his headless corpse sliding down the rubble pile he had been sheltering behind.

Rogue crouched, bleeding heavily from the deep score the bullet had gouged through his shoulder as he twisted around to avoid the sniper's shot. He lay there, bleeding, breathing heavily, waiting for the sniper's next shot. It never came. Instead, a few moments later, he heard a hissing burst of las-fire from somewhere off to his right where he estimated the sniper's position to be.

More moments passed. The traitor was gone, disappearing at the first sniper shot. Every passing moment took him further away, Rogue knew, further into the darkness and the cover of the ruins. Further away from any chance of immediate retribution.

Helm's inbuilt comm-link crackled into life. "Heads up, GI unit. You got friendlies in the area. Just bagged ourselves some kind of fancy Nort sniper looking to make a name for himself by killing the R-"

"No names over this frequency, Souther girl," said Rogue. "Come on in. I'll cover you."

Rogue dragged himself over to where Gunnar lay, picking him up, checking he was undamaged and then reactivating his biochip functions. Gunnar's circuits and speech synthesiser hummed back into life.

"Rogue! The traitor, he-"

"Forget about it, Gunnar. He got away from us."

Rogue stared out into the darkness, his night vision seeing no sign of the man they had come here to find and kill.

"No luck this time. But there'll be other times, and one of those times he won't be so lucky."

A minute later, the shuttle came down to pick them up.

TWENTY-FIVE

"Landing's got us noticed by the locals, Rafe. We've got two Nort hopper gunships heading this way."

"Copy, Gabe. We're out of here as soon as our people are aboard."

The shuttle stood on a patch of open ground, its engines and landing thrusters still rumbling, ready to take off again at a second's notice. Rafe leapt down from the open side hatch, running forward to help the three figures stumbling through the ruins towards the shuttle.

"Good to meet you at last, Blueboy," she told Rogue, grabbing one of his arms and helping the female infantry sergeant who was supporting the weight of the wounded GI.

"Likewise, Air Force. Good to know that solid blue still counts for something, even here."

They ran back towards the shuttle. Rafe turned, hearing the telltale whine of the engines of the approaching Nort hoppers. She saw their searchbeams sweeping across the rubble field and knew she wasn't going to make it back to the shuttle in time, not with a wounded GI and two slower-moving humans in chem-suits in tow.

Rogue heard them too. "Bagman, dispense a Sammy. I'll cover the rest of you while you get to the shuttle."

"The shape you're in? Not a chance," answered Rafe, noticing for the first time the med-flashes on the other figure's chem-suit. "The doc and me will carry you. The sarge here can do the honours."

Rafe handed Gunnar to Hanna. "Think you can handle this thing?"

Hanna took the weapon, testing its weight, studying its workings. "Guess I can figure it out."

"No worries, sarge. I'll give you all the help you need," Gunnar told her.

Hanna loaded the Sammy following Gunnar's instructions. She'd never fired a weapon like this before, but then again, she'd never handled a weapon that talked to her either.

The hoppers were in sight, coming in low-level across the rubblescape at them, spitting out lines of las-fire. She raised the rifle and took aim, ignoring the dual tracks of lascannon fire chewing up the ground in front of her as they raced in on her position. They would reach her in a few more seconds, blowing her to shreds, before moving on to target and destroy the shuttle.

"Range three hundred metres and closing," Gunnar told her. "Okay, I'm zeroed in... You're doing fine, sarge. Just keep me locked in and pull the trigger when I say."

The las-fire tracks raced closer. Hanna fought down the urge to throw the gun away and hurl herself out of their path. At last, after moments that seemed to last minutes, the biochip gave her the order she was waiting for.

"Fire!"

The Sammy struck the cockpit of one of the hoppers, blowing it out of the sky. The other hopper peeled away in panic, breaking off its attack run. Hanna heard the rising scream of the shuttle engine from behind her. She turned and ran, leaping aboard the shuttle just as it lifted off the ground.

There were more surprises for her once she was aboard. Artau was bent over the prone figure of the Rogue Trooper, applying med-patches to his wounds as the craft lurched upwards in emergency take-off. The female GI was in the cockpit, piloting the shuttle. Some kind of autobot drone hovered nearby, talking to her. Hanna thought her helmet's audio-syms must have taken a knock when she jumped aboard because she could have sworn she heard the drone using the word "sweetcheeks" to the GI pilot.

Two other slightly comical-looking figures were there too. A tall, thin, fussy looking man, and his shorter, fatter companion. They oddly both wore bowler hats on top of their matching, expensive and civilian-issue chem-suits. They both seemed to be staring in a strangely avaricious way at the Rogue Trooper and his equipment.

"Friends of yours?" she asked, giving the GI his rifle back.

"Not exactly," growled Rogue, staring back at the two salvage dealers with undisguised hostility. "Let's just say we've crossed paths before and leave it at that."

"Hang on back there," warned Rafe from up in the cockpit. "We're not out of the hotzone yet." She looked at Brass and Bland.

"This crate of yours got any offensive capability?"

"Certainly not," answered Bland, sniffly. "We're unarmed non-combatants; strictly neutral bystanders in this war."

"Great. Then you'd better get on the radio and tell that to the Nort gunship still on our tail."

Rafe desperately jinked the controls, dodging the shuttle through the hail of las-fire from the pursuing Nort gunship hopper. Her only hope was to keep on climbing, outrunning the vengeful Nort craft to reach a higher altitude where its limited anti-grav systems couldn't operate.

A craft-shaking impact from the rear section of the shuttle's underbelly put paid to that idea. Rafe saw the power levels on her console read-outs drop away instantaneously.

"Main power system hit," reported Gabe, plugged into the craft's compu-controls. "Switching to auxiliary back-up. We just developed a serious juice problem, hon."

The shuttle dropped back down towards the city. Rafe fought to keep the shock descent from becoming a full-on crash into the Nordstadt rubble.

"Mayday, mayday. This is Bluegirl looking for some friendly listeners. Bluegirl evac shuttle's got a hostile on her tail and she's in need of some friendly assistance."

"Friendly ears listening, Bluegirl. This is Happy Trails. I'm two thousand metres above you and incoming on your six. Friendly assistance is on its way."

Something streaked down out of the chem-clouds above. There was a blur of fire and the Nort hopper disappeared off Rafe's radar screen. The equally blurred shape of a Seraphim fighter shot across the view from the shuttle's cockpit, rolling once to wave its wings in acknowledgement before arcing back upwards into the chem-clouds.

"Thanks for that, Happy Trails. Bluegirl's got a berth over at the 77nd Air Attack. If she's still got a job there tomorrow, then you've got an open tab waiting for you there in the pilots' mess."

Rafe brought the shuttle up level and, at a reduced altitude, piloted it southwards on a heading out of Nordstadt at as much speed as she could nurse out of its damaged power systems.

"Still got a juice problem, Gabe. I can probably get a couple of hundred kays out of this crate before I have to put it down on the ground. What safe landing zones can you find within that range?"

Gabe patched through using the sophisticated comms systems carried by the salvage dealers' craft, into the Souther satellites above the planet, searching through the latest comms traffic and observation data. It didn't take him long to find what Rafe was looking for.

"Got something here, Rafe. Three Souther armoured divisions due south of us, just within juice distance. They're rolling out the welcome mat to us and anyone else evacing out of Nordstadt."

"Sounds good enough, Gabe. We got ourselves a landing zone."

The last Souther evac shuttle took off from Nordstadt some two hours after Rogue and the others had left the city. Nordstadt was wiped off the face of Nu Earth about twenty minutes after that, just before dawn.

Hammerfall activated exactly on time, twelve minutes before then, all twenty of the Hammerfall platform's missiles launching towards their target, which was now swinging round into range on Nu Earth's sunward side. The missiles, with drives more akin to those found on deep-space craft than any normal rocketry engine, sped towards Nu Earth, crossing the tens of thousands of intervening kilometres in minutes. Alerted by Gabe's earlier all-frequencies warning, a host of Nort killer-sats and the gun batteries of heavy weapons orbital platforms were waiting for them.

Hammerfall's planners had allowed for the possibility that the Norts' space defences might destroy some of the missiles before they reached Nu Earth. The hundreds of simulations the Milli-com strategists had run suggested that four was the most likely number of losses they would probably suffer. Pre-warned about Nordstadt's fate, the Norts managed to destroy eleven of the missiles before they entered Nu Earth's atmosphere. In the event, nine warheads would still be enough to totally destroy Nordstadt, even if the field of effect extending to cover the Nort forces surrounding the outer fringes of the city was just about half of what was expected. Daniels's precious Nort casualty statistics, upon which the whole success of Hammerfall depended, fell, and then fell again.