Crucible (22 page)

Artau wasn't surprised. He'd listened in to the near-hysterical radio chatter now filling the Souther comm-channels in a futile attempt to use the authority of his rank to get some kind of priority status for his transport request. The Souther airwaves were full of panicked news of the battles now raging all round the borders of the crucible. Frontline units everywhere were radioing in reports of heavy Nort attack.

Many were requesting permission to fall back and regroup in the face of the overwhelming odds against them. Others were reporting that they had already retreated, or had been pushed back, and were urgently requesting new orders. Others still were reporting that they had been surrounded and cut off and were calling in to make one final report on their imminent extinction. By far the most common talk on the dozens of radio channels, besides the ever-mounting toll of reported casualty figures, was the urgent request for reinforcements, or artillery or air support coming in from the front line units. What was most frightening about these was the fact that there was little to no response to any of them coming back from Nordstadt Command. Artau thought of the number of names of high-ranking command personnel he had seen on that list on the Milli-fuzz compu-device, and wondered if there was even any command staff left in the crucible. Maybe they were all gone already, safely evacuated away and leaving everyone else here to die, trapped and leaderless.

The Milli-fuzz men were gone too, disappearing in the immediate aftermath of the artillery strike on the field hospital. Artau wasn't surprised, but cursed the military policemen for their cowardice. Authority like theirs, backed up by everyone's instinctive fear of the Milli-fuzz, was exactly something he could have used now, to help get this evacuation underway.

"Orderly Seath?"

The pale-faced, frightened-looking medical orderly snapped to attention at the sound of her commanding officer's voice. "Sir?"

"Look around and see if you can't find me some kind of sidearm. Any kind of pistol will do and as many ammo clips as can be spared."

"A sidearm, sir?" asked Seath, doubtfully. Everyone knew how much the surgeon hated weapons of any kind, and no one had ever seen him wearing a pistol and holster, even when regulations required him to do so.

"Yes. A sidearm, sergeant. I'll be staying here to look after the patients who are too badly injured to be moved. Since the fighting seems to be heading in this direction, it's perhaps best that I'm prepared for whatever might happen. At least until transport can be found to come back here and pick up the rest of the wounded. In the meantime, while I remain here, Major Jacks will be leading the evac column back to the secure zone."

Seath and the other medics stared at him, aghast. All of them knew, just as Artau did, that there wouldn't be any extra transport coming back and what they were hearing was a man calmly pronouncing his own death sentence. The Nort advance was coming this way, apparently led by units of the infamous Kashan Legion and the Kashans weren't well known for their humane treatment of enemy wounded.

"Sir, with all respect, I think you should reconsider-" began Seath, before Artau cut her off.

"You've all got your orders, and I've got a duty to do as well. I worked for days to keep some of these men alive. I'm not going to give up on them now."

"Permission requested to stay behind with you, sir?"

Artau turned in surprise, seeing the figure of Hanna Coss standing there. She was wearing a patched-up chem-suit and had scrounged up an infantryman's las-carbine from somewhere.

Artau smiled. "Sergeant Coss, I don't remember giving you your medical discharge orders yet."

She returned the show of grim humour. "I told you I wanted to get back to the front, sir. Since that couldn't happen, this seems convenient. At least now the front line has to come to me, instead of the other way around."

"Permission denied, sergeant," Artau told her. "You're still under my medical supervision and that means you're also still under my orders. You'll do more good elsewhere than here, so-"

He was interrupted by the sound of explosions from outside. Coming from nearby. Too nearby for it to be sounds from the front line, no matter how few kilometres away the fighting there might he now.

It was followed seconds later by the hissing chatter of las-fire, and an answering chorus of screams from the people outside the hospital dome.

Hanna then heard another sound, a distinctive dry, coughing sound that every soldier on Nu Earth knew and feared. Something struck the outside wall of the med-dome with a sickening boom and harmlessly ricocheted off its shielded surface.

A misaimed hit. Hanna knew they wouldn't be so lucky with the next shot.

"Seal-bursters!" she shouted in warning, pulling down the visor of her chem-helmet. "Get your visors down and respirators on!"

More seal-burster shots struck the exterior of the dome. This time, as Hanna had feared, the other Nort snipers' marksmanship was lethally on target.

The med-dome was catastrophically breached in at least four places. Environmental hazard alarms instantly went off, their screaming alerts sounding over the screams of the people inside the dome as the poison air from outside rushed in.

More las-fire sounded from outside. More screams, more sounds of death. The main airlock of the dome blew inwards. Chem-clouds swirled in, adding to the rapidly changing poison atmosphere inside. Hanna saw figures bearing guns and wearing chem-suits inside the chem-mist. She recognised the silhouette shapes of their suits.

Kashans. She didn't know where they had come from or how they had already got this far behind the front line, but it was brutally clear what their task here was. Las-fire shot out through the spreading chem-mist, cutting down men and women already choking to death on the vapour from outside the breached dome. The wounded were shot or bayoneted where they lay, lined up for the slaughter in row after row of beds. Grenades were hurled into the room through one of the holes opened up by a seal-burster hit, the detonations further adding to the chaos and carnage inside.

A female orderly in front of Hanna, one of the few who'd reacted in time to her shouted warning and managed to secure her chem-visor in place, pitched over backwards, shot through the chest by a las-round. More rounds sprayed through the air, whipping through the air around Hanna. One struck Artau and he too fell to the ground. Hanna crouched down beside him, seeing that he had taken a glancing hit to the side of his chem-helmet. The armoured material of the helmet was scorched and dented, with a but otherwise intact. The real problem was the air-tube that had been sliced into by the same shot. The surgeon was thrashing about in panic as he felt, or at least imagined, the poison stuff of Nu Earth's atmosphere leaking into his suit. Hanna grabbed his hands, pinning them to his sides, and stared at the terrified face beneath the suit's chem-visor.

"Don't panic," she told him, her two years of hard-won combat experience more than making up for his decades of medical knowledge. "Your tube's cut, but its not that serious. I'll patch it up as we get out of here. Until then, I've disconnected your respirator so you'll have to use your suit's emergency air supply. It's only good for a few minutes so take shallow breaths."

A few minutes, she thought to herself. They'd either be dead or out of here long before then.

More las-rounds cut through the air above where she was crouching. The Kashans were advancing methodically through the large ward room, killing everything in their path. The nearest one was only a few beds away and would spot them any second. Desperately, she looked around her for a weapon. Her eyes instinctively went to Artau's belt, looking for the customary officer's sidearm that should have been there, but there was nothing. Nothing, except...

"Stak!"

She heard the Nort's shout as he spotted her and Artau. He came at them with his bayonet fixed, clearly intending to finish them both off. She grabbed the med-tool from Artau's belt, activating it with a flick of her thumb. She'd seen the things used before, but had never actually held one. She'd never seen one used as a weapon before, either, except maybe in spy drama propaganda vid-flicks, where dashing and resourceful Souther intelligence operatives routinely despatched legions of Nort fifth columnists and agent provocateurs with any kind of weapon that came to hand.

She thumbed the power setting up to maximum power and beyond, hoping for the best. The las-scalpel buzzed into life in her hand, its bright cutting blade extending to the length of about thirty centimetres. What was intended to be a finely balanced and delicate tool for making surgical incisions into human flesh and bone had now been transformed into a lethal weapon. She slashed out with it, evading the Kashan's bayonet lunge. The las-scalpel's beam blade cut through the Nort's air-tubes and then effortlessly into the meat of his neck. The Kashan died just a second or two before the burned-out power cell of the las-scalpel did. His body fell one way, his head fell another.

She grabbed the las-carbine out of the hands of the headless corpse, turning it on the other Kashans. It was on full auto. Hanna, unfamiliar with the design of the thing and not having time to remedy that situation, just kept her finger on the trigger, directing a furious stream of fire into the body of the nearest enemy. He jerked backwards, struck by round after round. The Nort las-carbine, more powerful but with a stronger recoil than the Souther equivalent, kicked in her hands, throwing off her aim off, forcing her to choose quantity of firepower over quality of marksmanship. Fire enough shots, she reasoned, and you would eventually probably hit what you were aiming for in the first place.

She was right. Half a cycle into the Nort carbine's ammo clip, a las-round struck and touched off the pack of plasma grenades strapped to the corpse's belt. The explosion caught three more of the Kashans who were at that moment rushing forward to deal with the tenacious Souther sergeant.

By the time the smoke cleared and the surviving Kashans pushed forward to avenge the deaths of their comrades, their prey was long gone.

Hanna pushed the stumbling figure of Artau ahead of her, pushing harder every time it looked like he was thinking about stopping to help any of the choking, dying figures on the floors of the wards or in the corridor outside it. Without chem-suit protection, there was nothing that could be done for any of these poor bastards when the seal-bursters struck.

Then they were through the building's rear airlock, ducking behind the wreckage of a burning med-vehicle to avoid a squad of Kashans milling around in the compound outside. As soon as the coast was clear, Hanna pushed the surgeon on, making for the cover of the surrounding rubble. The older man was hyperventilating now, drawing heavily on his suit's limited air supply. Hanna hoped it would last long enough for them to get a safe distance away from the remains of the field hospital and the enemy troops now crawling all over it.

She hoped she would last long enough too. Before she put on the chem-suit, she had injected half a stick of stim-tabs into her injured leg. The remaining pain had gone away almost instantly, giving her the strength to do everything she had done in the last few minutes, but she had no idea how long the effects would last.

Only once the sounds of las-fire from behind them, as the Kashans finished off any remaining survivors in the field hospital, faded into the distance did Hanna relent and allow them to stop and rest in the cover of a broken pedestal that had once borne the long-destroyed statue of some Nordland martial hero.

"Sit down and take it easy. Your air gauge is almost in the red so start taking shallow breaths," she commanded the senior officer. If either of them noticed that their positions of doctor and patient, of commander and commanded, had been suddenly reversed, neither of them chose to comment on it.

She reached into the large flap on the front of her chem-suit, pulling out the sealant patch kit that was always kept there by all Souther troops. She opened it up and expertly went to work, splicing in a new length of air-tubing to replace the damaged section, which she then closed up with patches and fast-bonding sealant spray. She checked the damage to Artau's helmet, saw that it was negligible, and then gave him the thumbs-up, signalling that it was safe for him to start using his respirator rig again.

The old man gratefully gulped in a lungful of respirator-filtered and purified air. "The... the field hospital," he croaked, still gasping for breath. "There were still people back there..."

"Forget them," Hanna told him matter-of-factly. "They're all dead by now. They were dead as soon as those seal-busters hit. You can't do anything for them anymore."

She reached down, offering her hand, and then pulling him to his feet. She looked around, scanning the horizon of nighttime Nordstadt. The whole horizon, fully three hundred and sixty degrees all around them, was lit up with the flashes of explosions and gunfire. The whole breadth of the borders of the crucible was evident from where they stood, its lines marked out in light and fire. The extent of those borders was now frighteningly small.

"C'mon," she said, gesturing back in the direction of the destroyed field hospital. "We can't do any good back there, so let's go find someplace where we still can."

All over Nordstadt, the story was the same. Front line Souther forces were smashed by the weight of the Nort advance. Retreating or routed Souther forces were harried by artillery fire or strafed and bombed from the air as Nort power was allowed free rein in the skies over the city. Dropped in by waves of hoppers, Kashan stormtroopers and Nort commando squads ran riot behind the front line, ambushing columns of retreating Southers, attacking divisional HQs and rear echelon supply bases, sowing panic and confusion everywhere they struck.

The northernmost secure zone was the first to fall. Nort light armour, following a path opened up by the trademark brutalities of the Kashans, stormed through the last line of defences, breaking through into the field of landing bays just as the last evac shuttles there were touching off. One of the shuttles barely made it off the ground and was shot out of the air before its pilot could hit the afterburners. The others rocketed skywards, climbing hundreds of metres in seconds, racing to reach the safety of the high-altitude fighter screen that still circled invisibly above the city, waiting impatiently to escort the shuttles to the orbital bases. Aboard the shuttles were those lucky few whom Milli-com had deemed worthy of rescue. Left behind them in the burning ruins of Nordstadt were the still tens of thousands of ordinary soldiers whose lives had been deemed as surplus to requirements by the dictates of Operation Hammerfall.