Crucible (5 page)

"It's Nordstadt, Rafe. Those poor suckers are going to come down right in the middle of hell. There's something else too, hon..."

"Spit it out, Gabe."

"The command codes in the shuttle's distress signal. Like I said, they were kinda old, but they still checked out as valid. I've dug further in to the files and those codes are coming up as flagged. Restricted, under S-Three authorisation. We're supposed to report in any contact with any craft identifying itself by those code protocols."

Rafe swore. If going down over Nordstadt wasn't bad enough, then now whoever was in that shuttle also had the S-Three bloodhounds on their trail. And then she suddenly remembered something else.

"So we gonna do it?" prompted Gabe. "We gonna tell S-Three all about it when we get back to base?"

Rafe thought about it, a horrible realisation growing inside her. To have come so close, and not have known it at the time...

"No, Gabe, we're not. We're going to tell somebody something all right, but it's not going to be anyone at S-Three."

"Babe?" Gabe was getting better and better at the quizzical tone, she noticed.

"'Buzzard', Gabe. That's what I'm talking about. Search through those big memory banks of yours and then tell me if that word means anything to you."

FOUR

Nordstadt.

From the air, it seemed to stretch out forever. A vast sea of shell-cratered rubble, dotted with scattered archipelagos of still-standing ruins, which were the bombed-out and artillery scarred remains of vast blocks of buildings. Twenty years after the first shells fell in Nordstadt, they were still fighting for these prizes. At night, from the position of the reconnaissance drones flying kilometres overhead - or from the spy satellites and orbital weapons platforms looking down from space - the flashes of explosions and the flickering choruses of las-fire from endless night attacks looked like angry waves of light lashing against the stony shores of these few remaining island fortresses.

The fighting never stopped on Nu Earth and nowhere was that more true than here, in Nordstadt, the former capital of the Greater Nordland Territories on Nu Earth.

Twenty years ago, at the outset of the war, Grand Marshal Hague, a man whose name was now a curse on the lips of Souther troops all over Nu Earth, conceived a daring plan to secure the planet for the Southern Confederacy. His target was Nordstadt, the largest city on Nu Earth, and the key to the Norts' control of the planet's large northern continent. Hague's plan was simple, if audacious; a massive troop drop from orbit right into the seat of Nort power on Nu Earth. At the same time, four entire Souther armies would launch an armoured thrust through the Nort front lines hundreds of kilometres away. They would push deep into the Nordland-held territories and drive hard to reach Nordstadt itself and link up with the tens of thousands of troops there that had dropped down from orbit.

The plan, which had violently polarised opinion in the command councils at Milli-com, succeeded better than even some of its advocates had secretly hoped or expected. The orbital drop losses were heavy, just as had been privately predicted, but the troops, all veterans, were drawn from the ranks of legendary para-drop regiments like the Red Shells, the Pegasus Guard and the Orbital Eagles. They dug in hard and withstood the Norts' bruising attempts to dislodge them from the several vital areas of the city that they had seized in the opening hours of the offensive. Likewise, the ground attack element of the plan also brought heavy losses, as entire Nort and Souther armoured divisions smashed into each other in clashes of mutually assured destruction. Hague's planning and bloody-minded determination ultimately prevailed however, as the Nort front line collapsed and columns of Souther tanks and troops carriers swept across the Nort heartlands, brutally overwhelming any opposition in their path as they drove relentlessly onwards towards Nordstadt.

Twenty-two days and an estimated seven hundred thousand Souther lives later, the battered, beleaguered survivors of the orbital drop emerged from their strong-points amongst the rubble to gratefully embrace their colleagues amongst the first Souther armoured reconnaissance units to reach the city, and Nordstadt was officially declared to have been captured.

If only things had been that simple.

Despite the propaganda rush to celebrate the bravery of the orbit-drop troops and to hail Hague's plan as a triumph, the Norts still hadn't been entirely dislodged from the city. They still remained in control of several large areas of it, and now, like the Souther paratroops before them, they dug in and prepared to hold out for as long as they could.

Hague's plan depended on the Norts' resolve breaking after the collapse of their main front line and the capture of their showpiece city. Now, though, Nordland propaganda made all it could of the bravery and tenacity of the defence forces in Nordstadt, and Nort resolve stiffened rather than weakened, aided by the off-world reinforcements arriving on Nu Earth far sooner than the Milli-com planners had expected.

Hague's plan, its shortcomings exposed, swiftly began to fall apart.

The Norts continued to hold out in Nordstadt. Better than that, they managed to retake entire parts of the city in an orbit-drop ironically almost identical to the one first carried out by Hague. Worse still, from the Souther point of view, Nort counter-attacks began to apply immense pressure on the corridor that the Souther armoured forces had driven through enemy territory - the same corridor which the Souther forces in Nordstadt now depended on for reinforcements and resupplying.

Desperate to regain the advantage, the Souther generals realised that Hague's plan had failed and looked to other ideas. The generals requested other prize objectives and to deliver the knock-out victory blow that had seemed so tantalisingly possible in those early stages of the war. Nordstadt was just the first entry in a litany of names that would soon become grimly familiar to any student of Nu Earth warfare.

The Dix-I Front. The Magno Line. Tambuk. Nu-Krimea. Fort Neuropa. The Quartz Zone. Sevastipolitan. The Neverglades. The Battle of the Kashan Gates.

Untold millions of dead. Years of waste. Reworked versions of short-sighted strategies that had already failed in previous actions. All the evidence of a conflict sinking into a crushing war of bloody attrition, with both sides increasingly willing to feed entire armies into the meat grinder in a frantic search to open up the slightest advantage over the enemy.

Over the intervening years, there were other battles, other conflicts flaring up all over Nu Earth, new fronts to consume the attentions of the strategy planners on both sides of the war. Throughout it all, however, Nordstadt remained, a festering sore for Norts and Southers alike; an open, raw wound, consuming men and materials at a truly terrifying rate.

The lines of battle changed and then changed again. The besiegers became the besieged and found themselves the besiegers once again. One side and then the other launched yearly fresh offensives to finally drive the enemy from the city and raise their own victory flags over what little remained of Nu Earth's largest and proudest city.

Its tallest towers and spires were shattered by artillery bombardments. Its parks and gardens were churned into mud fields by shell fire and the heavy treads of armoured vehicles. Its wide boulevards were left choked with the rubble heaps of collapsed buildings and the burned-out wrecks of columns of military vehicles. Its giant factory complexes were gutted by infantry battles that raged for weeks on end, and its suburbs and sprawling patterns of worker habs were levelled by waves of bomber attacks and orbital missile strikes.

Nordstadt, the city, had been destroyed a dozen times over, but Nordstadt, the target objective, remained intact in the minds of the military planners of both sides, long after it had ceased to hold any remaining strategic worth as the main struggle for Nu Earth moved on to other prizes and other killing fields.

With Nordstadt, however, too many lives had already been expended for either side to admit that it was no longer an objective worth fighting for. To the Norts, it held deep significance as a symbol of their national defiance, their first foothold on the one-time paradise of Nu Earth, a city now reduced to ruins but still holding out against the treacherous Souther enemy. To the Southers, it was also a symbol, a reminder of how close they had come to outright victory in those earliest days of the war. The Norts would never willingly give up one inch of the bloodstained earth their city stood on. And there were many on the planning staff at Milli-com who saw the ravaged metropolis as a crucible, a place where Nort forces could be endlessly drawn in and destroyed in a particularly brutal microcosm example of the relentless war of attrition that was now being waged all across the galaxy.

Nordstadt must be held at all costs and the invaders driven once and for all from its sacred soil, Nort propaganda had preached for the last twenty years.

Take Nordstadt for good, the Souther strategists believed, and Hague's plan would finally be validated. The Norts had attached such mythic significance to the place that their resolve would break at last and victory on Nu Earth, and on many of the other battle planets in the galaxy beyond, would swiftly follow the city's final fall.

And so the gruesome stalemate had continued for two decades, with every year bringing a new Nordstadt "Final Victory" offensive which would consign hundreds of thousands of more human lives to their fate in the slaughterhouse the city had become. Despite the propaganda boasts, none of the generals and planners could see an ultimate end to the carnage. No one could see the much-heralded final victory that would once and for all drive the enemy out of their hiding places and bolt-holes amongst the rubble of Nordstadt.

All this, however, was about to change. The strategists on one side conceived a plan that would indeed finally end the battle for Nordstadt, in a level of callous mass butchery that had never before been contemplated.

FIVE

"Clear!"

Sergeant Hanna Coss lowered her binox-scanner, satisfied after several minutes of careful searching that there were no unexpected nasty surprises waiting out there for her and her squad. No human heat signatures or the telltale oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange traces from a chem-suit breathing apparatus that would signal the hidden presence of a Nort sniper or ambush patrol.

At her command, the first two members of the squad stepped warily out of cover and began the dangerous journey across the open ground of the street in that familiar half-jogging, half-crouching gait that had come to be called the "Nordstadt Two-Step". They reached the comparative safety of a shattered doorway on the other side of the street, its stone surround scorched and pockmarked with the impact burns of multiple las-rounds. They gratefully crouched in the cover it offered, using their las-carbines to scan the surrounding terrain for signs of danger.

It was only after a further thirty seconds, when one of them - Mckenna, who, at the age of twenty-three and with two years of combat experience under his belt, qualified as a grizzled old Nordstadt veteran - signalled the all-clear, that Hanna allowed herself to partially relax. She signalled for the next two members of her squad to cross: Verns, and the kid who had only joined the unit last week. She'd detailed Verns to nursemaid the kid until he'd learned at least some of the moves he would need to have a half-decent chance of surviving his Nordstadt tour of duty.

Hanna was annoyed because she could never remember the kid's name, confusing him with the other rookie they got sent last month, the one who tripped that Nort plasma-mine over in the ruins of the Chancellery building. The blast had vaporised the rookie along with Handley and Lindermann and there hadn't been enough human remains to fill an ammo satchel.

Hanna wouldn't have time to familiarise herself with the new kid's name because he and Verns were still only halfway across the street when the Nort mek struck.

It was an Amok, a Nort battle droid, and it came rearing up out of a rubble pile on the other side of the street. It had been months since the Norts had last been reported using any meks in Nordstadt. Hanna guessed it must have been lying dormant for at least that long, its power cells slowly running down, its systems damaged by the weight of the falling masonry that had buried it in some previous battle. Dozens of Souther patrols had probably passed through this area in that time, so Hanna guessed it was just her squad's dumbass luck to have inadvertently triggered something in the droid's failing detector systems.

It rose from the rubble heap, its motive gears growling and roaring as it shrugged off the weight of a tonne or so of fallen stonework. It raised and fired the chaingun weapon built into its left arm and Verns and the rookie disappeared in a sudden red splash, shredded into pieces by the impact of hundreds of high-velocity las-rounds. After that, it turned its attention to the other two troopers sheltering in the once comforting shelter of the doorway.

One of them, Hassey, the less experienced of the pair, took aim at the machine with her carbine, but her wiser partner simply grabbed her and hurled them both backwards into the room behind them. A second later, the doorway and the area around it were obliterated by another furious volley of chaingun fire.

The mek started stalking towards their new hiding place but then stopped in its tracks as several las-rounds ricocheted harmlessly off the back of its armoured head. It turned, its gears growling in anger, seeking the source of this new annoyance and it was only then that Hanna looked dumbly at the rifle in her hands, realising with some degree of incredulity that she had been the one who had fired. Like the trooper on the other side of the street, she had known that the standard Souther infantryman's las-carbine was as good as useless against an armoured Amok battle droid, but that hadn't stopped her from instinctively trying to save the lives of the soldiers under her command.

She watched, dumbly, with almost a sense of resigned detachment, as the mek drew a bead on her and raised its chaingun arm to fire. At least with a chaingun duel her death would be pretty much instantaneous; even if there were only a few more body parts left to ship home than that of the kid who stepped on the plasma-mine.