Crucible (3 page)

An hour later, the atmocraft arrived to pick him up. His real mission over, he hadn't troubled himself to double back and destroy the last listening post, but he had its coordinates precisely mapped. Some petty glory boy in an artillery unit somewhere could proudly claim the credit for its destruction, assuming the Norts hadn't dismantled and moved it on elsewhere in the meantime.

Sitting back in the pressurised interior of the atmocraft, he checked his suit's own internal chem-count meter twice against the read-outs on the wall panel beside him before breaking the seals on his suit's neck brace and taking off his helmet. He sat back for a moment, breathing deeply and relishing the nearest thing to clean, unfiltered air that he'd tasted in over a week.

The two other Southers in the cabin with him shifted nervously. One of them, the atmocraft's crew chief, busied himself with some pointless maintenance task, clearly feeling uncomfortable in the presence of the Souther Security Service's most notorious assassin. The other, a young female intelligence officer, did her best to retain an aura of command authority in the face of a man who - no matter what junior rank his service record said he possessed - vastly outclassed her in terms of experience, ability and appetite for death.

Venner smiled, spotting the data-port in her hand and its winking green light showing that it had information waiting to be downloaded.

"Another job for me?" he asked, indicating the device in her hand. "Show me."

"You need to rest," she told him. "Once you're back at base and have been fully debriefed, we'll-"

"Show me." The smile left his face.

She handed the device over. Venner pressed his thumb against its small ID plate and tapped in his authority code. The screen blinked into life, information scrolling across it at a rate matching the movement of his eyes as he studied the new mission briefing. A name came up, and then a visual image.

The smile returned to Venner's face, and he sat back, contentedly resting his head against the panel behind him. Someone at Milli-com wanted someone here on Nu Earth dead, and, since they had given the job to Venner, then that was exactly what was going to happen. Venner knew the target's rep. He was a notoriously tricky bastard, this one, and had been reported dead several times before, but somehow always managed to survive. Milli-com didn't have any leads on his current whereabouts, and so Venner would have to rely on his own skills and resources to track him down, at least to start with.

Yes, this one was going to be a real challenge, Venner thought, returning his attention to the screen, thinking of everything he had heard about the target's history. And besides, he reminded himself, this particular piece of renegade scum had had it coming to him for a long time.

TWO

Rafe rode the caustic jet streams, guiding her fighter craft through the gauntlet of ice fragments, chem-vapour, acid rain squalls and hurricane-force winds that ran rampant up here, twenty kilometres above the surface of Nu Earth. The damage done to the face of the planet - entire mountain ranges levelled by early nuclear exchanges, forests destroyed, vast swathes of land burned into sterile desert, seas reduced to tideless lakes of toxic sludge - had caused huge and disastrous climactic changes to the environment, and not just on the planet's surface.

If the grunts on the ground thought they had it bad, Rafe considered, then they should try waging a war up here, in a poisoned, shifting void where sudden extremes of temperature could shatter the metal of your wings or grill you alive in your cockpit. Clashing chem-clouds sometimes spontaneously combusted into sheets of flame and violent atmospheric storms could unleash barrages of craft-destroying lightning blasts more deadly and accurate than any kind of enemy anti-aircraft fire.

And that was just some of the natural hazards Souther combat pilots had to face up here. Added to that were the Norts, and their determined efforts to sweep the skies of Nu Earth clear of any Souther presence.

From the ground, radar-directed missile and lascannon batteries looked upwards and scanned the thick, blanketing veil of chem-cloud cover in search of enemy targets. Up here, among those same clouds, Nort patrols of ugly, lethal, stub-winged Grendel and Gorgon fighters hunted remorselessly for Souther air vessels, while every bank of polluted chem-cloud might conceal a hidden field of aerial mines, or one of the much-feared Barrakuda missile-drones that the Norts released in their thousands into the upper atmosphere of Nu Earth. Stealth-equipped, notoriously difficult to detect and kept aloft by a compact but powerful anti-grav motor, they drifted among the highest banks of chem-cloud, programmed to home in on the radar and energy signatures of Souther craft.

Higher still, many kilometres overhead in low orbit, where the outermost fringes of the atmospheric envelope ended and true space began, the hunter-killer satellites lay in wait. Endless series of them, strung out in variable, ever-changing orbits, encircling the planet in deadly, looping patterns. From up there, they looked down on the world below, probing the thick belts of chem-clouds with questing scanner beams, searching for aerial targets. Every Souther pilot lived in terror of them, waiting for the screaming, electronic alert sound in their helmet earphones that would tell them their craft had blundered into the detection cone of one of these orbital weapons, and then waiting for the hail of radar-guided missiles that seconds later would be unleashed down upon them.

The Nort pilots ran the same gauntlet, Rafe knew. For every piece of ordnance the Norts deployed against Rafe and her comrades, the Souther weapons designers had something to match. For years now, the war on Nu Earth had degenerated into nothing more than a brutal and bloody war of attrition. For every new weapon or tactic devised by one side, the other was sure to develop a countermeasure or create their own imitation version of the enemy's weapon soon enough. The knowledge that every pilot lost and craft downed would almost invariably be matched by an equivalent loss to the enemy was of little consolation to the pilots on either side.

The casualty statistics for the air war on Nu Earth were supposed to be a closely-guarded secret, known only to the planners and strategists at Milli-com, but every Souther pilot was intimately acquainted with the cold, hard fact at the heart of those numbers and equations. The average life expectancy for a combat pilot in the Nu Earth theatre of operations was just a little over thirteeen months.

Rafe had been flying combat missions non-stop for more than three years. When she was in the cockpit, flying search-and-destroy missions, routine combat patrols or whatever other low survivability duties her asshole of a squadron commander had dreamed up for her, she thought about little else than surviving the mission intact - without her and her craft being fragged or vaporised by any of the multitude of forms of instantaneous death on offer in the skies over Nu Earth.

Every day she returned safely to base to climb back out of the cockpit of her Seraphim fighter was an added bonus, the relief of her continued survival tempered by the knowledge that tomorrow or the next day she would have to climb back into the cockpit and do it all over again.

There was a soft warning
bleep
over her helmet intercom, coming from the navigator position in the cockpit space behind her.

"I see it, Gabe," she told the occupant of that space, flicking on the heads-up sensor display inside her helmet visor. It showed a fiery mass plunging down through the atmosphere many kilometres away. More evidence of the war that raged not just in the skies of Nu Earth or on the ground beneath them, but also in the heavens overhead.

"What do you think, Gabe? One of ours, or one of theirs?"

"Difficult to say," buzzed the voice of her copilot/navigator. "It's too far gone into re-entry to be sensor-recognisable, but I'm guessing it's one of theirs. Our killer-sat units have been targeting Nort orbital platforms in this sector for the last few days now. All part of Milli-com's big new push, I guess."

Rafe watched the sensor display for a few more seconds. The destroyed Nort device, probably one of the small three-man surveillance and orbital bombardment monitoring stations the Norts used more and more frequently these days, was far enough away to be no danger whatsoever to her and her craft, but a couple of dozen tonnes of burning, super-heated wreckage was going to put a serious dent in someone's day when it hit the ground a few minutes from now.

"Gabe. Track its trajectory and send an impact warning down to-"

A double-
beep
, almost smug-sounding, alarmed in her helmet intercom. Typically, her navigator was already at least one step ahead of her.

She sighed to herself. "What would I do without you, Gabe?"

"Beats me," buzzed the voice from the empty seat behind her. "There'd be no one here to look out for your cute blue ass, so I guess you'd really be deep in the tox-sludge without a chem-suit."

Gabe - or the Wachowski-Linder Industries GABRIEL-302 auto-drone flight unit, as his manufacturers called him - was a prototype sentient copilot/navigator programme specifically designed for use with the Seraphim fighter. He and Combat Flight Pilot Second Rank Rafaela Blue made a perfect combo, everyone agreed. None of the other pilots in the squadron could be persuaded to fly with some box of chips and wires sitting there as their copilot and, equally, none of the navigators wanted to share a cockpit with a blue-skinned genetic freak like Rafe.

Correction, she reminded herself: a blue-skinned
female
genetic freak.

"GI Dolls." That's what they had called her and the others, and probably still did, behind her back. "Milli-com bed warmers." "Command staff stress release units." "R&R Commandos." Those were favourites too, homing in on the generally-held suspicions about why exactly the Milli-com top brass had wanted female as well as male Genetic Infantryman beings created, and what exactly the female version's non-combat duties at Milli-com had entailed.

Rafe had heard them all, all the sniggering jokes and comments, and tended not to react too well to them.

Which was why she was flying solo now, and dumped with every shitcan mission that came across her squadron commander's desk. That was what happened, she reminded herself, when you put three of your supposed comrades into the base infirmary - one of them a flight commander nursing a broken arm and fractured jaw - after a forthright exchange of views one night in the pilots' mess.

She half-smiled at the memory. One thing was for sure after that little incident, she remembered. It was the last time anyone ever called her any of those names. At least to her face. The fact that it had happened the day after she had been officially confirmed as the highest-scoring Souther ace pilot in this whole campaign sector had only made things all the sweeter.

It was also the reason, she had to ruefully remind herself, why her enraged squadron commander simply hadn't been able to have her recycled all the way back to Milli-com.

After the destruction of the entire genetic infantryman regiment at what had infamously come to be known as the Quartz Zone Massacre, the GI program had been deemed an official failure; the plug had been pulled on any future attempts to use genetic science to create armies of super-soldiers purpose-designed to wage war in the unique combat conditions on the surface of Nu Earth. That left just the so-called GI Dolls - and one last remaining and particularly resilient example of the male of the species, she reminded herself - and no one seemed quite sure what to do with the contingent of female GIs that had been created in the gene genies' bio labs at Milli-com. The near-critical level of mounting losses to the war had finally forced the military planners' hand, however, and the female GIs had been individually assessed and reassigned to regular duties throughout every branch of the Souther armed forces.

Like many of her gene-sisters, Rafe's assessment scores showed an almost preternatural level of intuitive ability and aptitude for machine interface and information categorisation. However, while most of the others found useful roles serving in the vast pools of data assimilators and battle strategy assessors that made up a great part of the million-strong command staff of Milli-com, further testing had revealed Rafe to be almost uniquely qualified for one particular job...

"Yessir," she breathed to herself. "Flying the friendly skies of Nu Earth. Working nine-to-five in the most hazardous combat environment on the most dangerous war world in an entire galaxy full of people busy shooting at each other! Why, it's just about everything a gal grown in a test-tube ever dreamed of!"

There was a querying
bleep
on her helmet comm.

"Nothing, Gabe," she replied. "Just thinking aloud."

Her copilot's designers might have equipped their creation with a personality matrix that seemed to have stuck on a default setting marked "love-struck lecher", but an understanding of good old-fashioned human irony seemed to be have been beyond even their programming abilities.

Another comms alert lit up on her visor display, calling for her attention. "What you got for me, Gabe?"

"Radio intercept," chimed the reply. "An aerial distress call, coming from right in our neighbourhood."

She checked the radar display, unsurprised to see nothing there. The high-level chem-clouds were so dense in some parts of Nu Earth, and contained so much radiation, sensor-scrambling or radar-blocking trace elements, that on occasion the first warning you had that you might not be alone in the skies was when you came cruising out of a cloud bank and suddenly had to take emergency evasive action to avoid a midair collision with a patrol of enemy fighters. Or alternatively, a flight of your own side's troop landers that someone forgot to tell you would be flying in your vacinity on the same day.

Just another extra little thrill that added to the general excitement of flying the friendly skies above Nu Earth, she reminded herself.

"One of ours, Gabe?"

There was a brief pause in response to her question. The airwaves of Nu Earth were awash with coded signal traffic from both sides, much of it designed to jam out the communications frequencies of the other side. It could take a highly-trained human operator years to get to grips with the complexities of the invisible landscape of Nu Earth's radio-wave environment.