Crucible (6 page)

Despite her resignation, she flinched at the sound of the hissing chatter of las-weapons before she realised it was the sound of las-carbines and that the rest of her squad were all around her, subjecting the Nort droid to a withering hail of covering fire intended to save her life.

The Amok staggered under the impact of multiple lasrounds. Presented with so many different targets, its logic processes damaged and until now long-dormant, the droid wasted a few precious moments in processing this new information and decided on a new course of action. This extra time was a gift Hanna didn't intend on similarly wasting.

"Grenades!" she shouted. "Whatever you've got, use 'em! Sweeney, where's our squad lazooka support?"

She looked round in search of the hapless Sweeney. Specialist First Class Dwayne Sweeney, who bitched and moaned every step of every patrol about the weight of the heavy lazooka weapon he had to carry, who had contrived on three different occasions to accidentally lose the thing, and who had been told by Hanna, only half-jokingly, that she would shoot him the next time it happened. And there he was, kneeling on the ground and expertly taking aim at the Nort droid as Jansen, his loader, fumbled to release the charge setting on the shell-like power cell he was slotting into the back of the lazooka tube.

The Amok was firing again and the air around Hanna and her squad buzzed with the heat of high-velocity las-rounds whipping past them. One of the rounds struck Jansen full in the face, exploding through her chem-suit's helmet visor and she was hurled backwards, dead before she hit the ground. Hanna ran forward to Sweeney's position, knowing the lazooka was their only chance against the mek. More las-bolts whipped past her, one of them painfully scorching the armour plating on her shoulder, and she heard a scream and the sickening sound of las-rounds searing into human flesh, but she didn't have time to see who else in her squad had just been hit.

She was at Sweeney's position now, chaingun fire chewing up the ground around them as she grabbed the fallen power cell and slammed it into the loading breach, twisting the setting ring to full charge and arming the weapon. She rapped hard on Sweeney's shoulder guards, giving him the required double-tap "weapon hot" signal.

It wasn't necessary. Sweeney pulled hard on the firing trigger as soon as he felt the first rumble of pent-up energy pass through the lazooka, and a blast of high-density las-power blasted out to blow the mek's head off.

It stumbled back, blinded, but still not out the fight. Its sensor systems may have been located in the head unit, but its CPU and power cell hearts were housed in the more heavily-armoured chest section. Sweeney targeted that next. His next shot blew away the thick layer of armour and the one after that reduced the entire thing to a burning heap of fused metal.

Hanna rapped on her lazookaman's suit armour again - three taps, "job well done" - and reluctantly turned to survey the remains of her squad. Verns, Jansen and the new kid were all dead and the scream she had heard had come from Singh, who had lost the lower part of his left arm to another hit from that damned chaingun. Mortjik was down too, struck by shrapnel from the exploding droid. He was lying on the ground, writhing and moaning, his hands grasping at the bloody puncture holes in his chem-suit, more in an attempt to protect his exposed flesh from whatever deadly toxins might be in the air than to staunch the flow of blood from his wounds.

Babic and Ludlow were already bending over him. "Get those suit patches on him now!" bellowed Hanna, desperate not to lose another man to this botched encounter.

There was one small blessing to the fighting in Nordstadt; neither side had used chem and virus weapons in anywhere near the same level as they had in other parts of Nu Earth in the earliest years of the war. Therefore the tox-levels in Nordstadt were well below Nu Earth standard. Had this been anywhere else - the Dix-I Front, Nu Sevastopol or any of the battle zones bordering the Scum Seas, then Mortjik would have been a dead man seconds after he was hit.

One thing was clear, though. With more than a third of her squad down, this mission had just been reclassified as an official clusterfrag.

She activated her helmet comm, opening a channel to some rear echelon radio operator sitting safe in a hidden oxy-dome back at Regimental HQ.

"Sundance Sierra Seven reporting. I have casualties: three dead and two wounded requiring immediate med-attention. Requesting permission to scratch mission and return to base."

"Permission granted, Sierra Seven. Bring your people in."

Hanna shut down the comms link - the Norts sometimes used high-flying atmocraft which the Souther troopers called Bigears to track Souther radio comms and then launch homing missiles down upon the signal's source - and turned to her squad, supervising as they began unpacking the two lightweight collapsible stretcher-bags to carry their two wounded comrades back to base.

"Look sharp, people. Mission's over. We're going back home."

She checked the readings on her digi-map, tracking a return route back to their company base in the tunnels beneath an old maglev subway station. Her eyes flicked to the marker that designated their mission objective. They had been about three kilometres distant from it when they had ran into the mek. Three kilometres. It didn't sound far, didn't look far on the screen of her digi-map, but in Nordstadt three kilometres might have well been the distance between you and the dark side of the moon. No way her squad could have covered that distance, not in the shape they were in.

She turned again, looking in the rough direction of the target objective. All she could see was the usual Nordstadt landscape of rubble, bombed-out shells of buildings and the ever-present hazy shimmer of chem-cover. All she could hear through her helmet speakers was the usual Nordstadt ambient drone of the distant crackling of small arms fire and the rumble of artillery.

Hanna sighed and put away her digi-map. Somewhere out there, a shuttle had come down and Hanna and her squad had been sent to find and investigate the crash site. No one seemed very sure if it had been one of theirs or a Nort crate. One thing was sure though; whoever those poor bastards were, they were on their own now.

He had always been a natural born survivor, so it came as little surprise to him that he should have survived this too, falling out of the sky in a blazing wreck, smashing headlong into a rubble landscape of blackened, burned-out ruins.

Naturally, the others who were in the shuttle with him hadn't fared as well as he had, he thought, but then, that was always the way of such things, it seemed.

Two of his bodyguards had died instantly, reduced to shredded meat when a blaze of cannon fire from the attacking fighter had torn through the floor of the rear passenger cabin. The pilot had done well to nurse his crippled craft down in a semblance of a controlled crash landing manoeuvre, but he was dead too. His last useful act had been to engage the emergency auto-grav systems, cushioning the ship from the very worst of the impact as it belly-flopped into the ground, but that hadn't been enough to save his own life as the shuttle had ploughed for another hundred metres or so through the rubble, its journey abruptly ending as it buried itself nose-first into the reinforced rockrete wall of a bunker emplacement. This secondary impact had smashed the shuttle's cockpit section as if it had been made of cordwood, killing anyone still left alive in it. The deaths of the pilots mattered little. They had already served their purpose and that was all that was important to the survivor.

His last remaining bodyguard was dead too, speared through the chest by the metal shaft of a support strut that had shattered free during the initial impact of the landing. His adjutant - a petty, obsequious man who had preyed on his nerves for some time - would follow the rest of the dead crew soon enough.

The adjutant was lying on the buckled metal of the floor of the cabin, still strapped into the acceleration chair that had so singularly failed to protect him. He lay there, crushed between the floor and the crumbled remains of a bulkhead wall that had collapsed in a collision with some obstacle on the shuttle's ploughing course through the rubble.

He was still alive, the inside of his faceplate splattered with coughed-up blood from his crushed lungs. He was making feeble struggling movements, emitting sounds of piteous gratitude as the figure of his commander bent down over him. The survivor could barely contain his contempt for the man; the pitiful fool actually thought he was trying to help him!

The pathetic sounds of gratitude soon changed to noises of shock as the dying man quickly divined the survivor's real purpose. Hands expertly searched the pouches and pockets of the man's chem-suit, stripping him of anything that might be useful to his commander's continued survival. Digi-maps, valuable bars of barter metals, a suit patch kit, ration packs, las-weapon power mags, a wideband communicator, it all went into the survivor's own equipment pouches to join the treasures he had already stripped from the corpses of the bodyguards. Best of all was the man's personal sidearm; a Nevsky-model Nort las-revolver, which the survivor had long ago noticed as being irritatingly superior to his own sidearm.

Satisfied with his haul, the survivor clambered out of the shuttle through a wide gash in the hull, casually ignoring the increasingly feeble sounds of distress from the cabin behind him. Stepping away from the wrecked ship and dismissing the whole crash event from his mind, he activated his helmet systems, scanning the surrounding area for any signs of immediate threat.

He knew he had come down somewhere in Nordstadt, and was familiar with the reputation of the place as a killing zone without equal in the whole of Nu Earth, but even this wasn't enough to cause him any undue concern. He had survived everything else and he was supremely confident in his ability to survive here too. Not just to survive, but-

He winced, a bolt of pain shooting through the raw-fleshed, flame-transformed mask that was all that remained of his face. His suit's med-systems registered the fact and administered the required dosage of medication into his bloodstream. It was enough to dull the pain, but never fully vanquishing it, in keeping with the preset instructions he had fed into the med-applicator unit. The pain of his wounds, the bitterness of the memory of how he had come to lose his face and his hatred of the creature that had caused those wounds, was what gave him the vital edge that had allowed him to survive for so long. Once, he had held real power and position, but now he was little more than a scarred, hunted freak. A wounded animal, fleeing from one bolt-hole to another, pursued by-

There was a warning bleep from his suit systems. He looked up at the scene in front of him, through the infrared vista projected onto the inside of his helmet visor.

He saw them moving forward through the rubble, maybe two dozen or so of them, with presumably a similar number closing in out of sight from behind.

He had been instinctively reaching for his sidearm, but now he relaxed, recognising his would-be attackers for what they were.

Scavengers. Filthy rabble scum, looking to strip the wreck and its occupants, living and dead, of everything they could.

He smiled and raised his hands in the air. This was going to be far easier than he would ever have dared hope.

SIX

"How many shuttle drops you think there's been in the last week?"

"Sarge?"

They were sitting outside the entrance to the company HQ oxy-dome, her and Ludlow, resting and enjoying the sensation of not being shot at. Hanna was staring up into the sky, watching the blazing contrails of the transport and supply shuttles lifting off and landing at the main Souther defence zone twenty kilometres away across the city.

Mortjik and Singh had been handed over to the medics. Mortjik would be back on his feet in a few days time, she had been told, but Singh had already been shipped out by company hopper to the main defence zone, and would probably be on one of those shuttles later today or tomorrow, on his way out of Nordstadt for further med-treatment. His wound would be evaluated and he would either be invalided out of military or, if possible, fitted with a prosthetic arm and redeployed back into frontline service, although probably not Nordstadt. Either way, Hanna didn't think they'd be seeing him again anytime soon.

She pointed up at the contrails. "The shuttle drops. Is it my imagination, or have there been less of them every day for the last week or so?"

Ludlow looked and then shrugged noncommittally. "Couldn't really say, sarge. Everyone knows about General Ghazeleh's tank boys pushing in from the south to open up the land road again and us getting ready to break out and link up with them. If we're gonna do that, then we're gonna need more shuttle drops, not less. Maybe they're shipping the fresh meat in through another safety zone, the one in the north-west quad, maybe."

"Maybe," said Hanna, thinking the exact opposite. If there were extra reinforcements coming into the "Stadt", then they sure as hell weren't seeing any of them here. The company CO had just told her he had no replacements coming through from Regimental HQ to plug the gaps left by the week's toll of casualties. Castle's and Aldubi's squads had taken a heavy beating in a serious firefight with at least half a company's worth of Norts three days ago and, to try and bring the rest of his squads back up to strength, he was collapsing the remains of those two units into the others. Hanna's squad was to get Harlech and Marcos who were both fairly well experienced veterans, but that still left her squad three troopers short after this morning's action. The other squads in the company were similarly running under strength.

She looked up into the sky again, counting contrails; she was sure that there were supposed to be more than she had been seeing. Her gaze went higher into the darkness of falling night, into the heavens above Nu Earth where the generals were, secure in their command satellites, and where orbiting observation posts looked down on everything, sending details of the war's progress back to the strategists at Milli-com. All she could do was hope that someone up there knew what they were doing.