Crucible (7 page)

"Roger, Super Six-Two, you are cleared for take-off."

Halmada hit the ignition on his shuttle's belly thrusters, lifting it off the deck of the underground hanger and sending it floating effortlessly up the wide tunnel shaft, even before the heavy blast doors overhead had finished rumbling open. It was the kind of manoeuvre he had performed countless thousands of times in his life: first as a freelance commercial shuttle pilot working the asteroid mining operations in some of the outer systems, and later, after he was mandatorily drafted in response to the war effort's acute need for experienced aircrew, doing it here on Nu Earth as a pilot for the Souther military.

He had two sons and a son-in-law in the service with him. Juan, his eldest, had followed in his father's footsteps and was now serving on the spacer crew of the big interstellar armed transports, thank God as he was generally well out of danger. His son-in-law was an artillery officer right here on Nu Earth, but it was the youngest boy, Philippe, whom Halmada worried about the most. He was an infantryman fighting on one of the war worlds in the Karthage system, eighty light years from Nu Earth. Juan had been told by a spacer colleague who had just come back from that sector that the fighting was heavy there, and none of them had heard from Philippe in over three months. Every time Halmada took off in a shuttle like this, with the cargo compartment behind him full of the broken and bleeding bodies of soldiers seriously injured in battle and being evacuated up to an orbital med-base, he thought of his younger son. He and wondered if somewhere on that other war front, he might be lying there wounded, maybe even dying, on the deck of a shuttle just like this one.

They were out of the shaft now, accelerating rapidly up into the sky before the Nort long-range artillery gunners could draw a bead on them. The ride up into orbit at this speed would be rough on the injured men behind him, but the alternative was to cut speed and increase all their chances of being blown out of the sky by Nort anti-aircraft missiles or any prowling fighters that might be up here waiting for them.

Normally, after the injured had been unloaded, he and his three-man flight crew would rest for six hours and then do the whole thing again, loading up with troop reinforcements, supplies or ordnance, or sometimes all three at once. They would then fly back down to Nordstadt to deliver their cargo and pick up more wounded for delivery back up into orbit.

Back and forth, between Nordstadt and the orbital bases. Flying an average of three times a day in and out of the worst combat zone on Nu Earth, with only one day in ten off for some much needed rest and relaxation, and sometimes not even then. You'd have to be insane to calculate the long-term survival odds of the situation, and the picture-covered wall of remembrance in the aircrew mess, plastered with photographs of all their dead or missing comrades, showed just how lethal those odds truly were. Still, day in day out, Halmada and his crew kept on at it, knowing that, until General Ghazeleh's armoured divisions could make the crucial breakthrough past the ring of Nort ground forces around Nordstadt, these shuttle flights were the only link between the outside world and the Souther forces cornered inside the besieged city.

Except even this final link seemed to be slipping for reasons Halmada and his comrades didn't understand. They were flying only twice a day now, and carrying a lot less troops and supplies down each time. Hell, a couple of times this week, they had even flown down with their holds completely empty.

Troop reinforcements. Ammunition. Food and med supplies. These things were the lifeblood of the Souther army in Nordstadt and these were the things it was now secretly being apparently starved of. All of the aircrews realised this and none of them were happy about it, but the hanger decks of the orbital bases were swarming with armed, grim-faced military policemen and, far more significantly, nameless, ever-watchful officers whose uniforms bore no unit or divisional insignia. The shuttle crews knew when to keep their thoughts to themselves. There didn't have to be any insignia on those uniforms for anyone to know those wearing them belonged to S-Three, the Souther military's secretive and much-feared intelligence and covert ops service.

There was a black bag operation in motion. A state of permanent martial law had been declared years ago for all personnel serving in the Nu Earth theatre of military operations, and summary executions weren't unknown. Halmada and the others knew enough to just carry out the orders they were given, fly their shuttles and not ask any questions. Which was exactly what the spooks from S-Three wanted.

They were at the atmospheric envelope now, the point where Nu Earth ended and the blackness of true space began. Nordstadt and its attendant horrors were far below them, lost beneath the impenetrable murk of the chem-cloud cover. Halmada thought of his son Philippe, maybe fighting in a hellhole just like the one down there, and then he thought of all the other tens of thousands of Souther troops trapped in Nordstadt. He prayed that the generals who consigned them all to fight and die in these places knew what they were doing.

General Fyalla Ghazeleh raised his binox and watched the entire might of his three divisions' mobile artillery batteries fall on the Nort positions. Giant plasma-bomb shells exploded like starbursts, turning night to day and incinerating everything within a three hundred metre radius of their point of impact. Howitzer-launched seeker missiles buzzed angrily through the air, searching out Nort tanks dug in hull deep into carefully prepared defensive positions. Waves of incendiary shells turned lines of trenchworks into rivers of fire, while volley after volley of high-explosive rockets blew apart bunkers and hard shelter blockhouses.

Ghazeleh was a general of the old school. "Blood and Guts Ghazeleh" they called him at Milli-com, while his own troops took pride in being led by the man they had nicknamed "Fighting Fyalla". Ghazeleh was happy to lay claim to either title. Yes, he pushed his boys hard - and girls, he reminded himself, although the idea of sending women into combat had never rested easy in the mind of this particular old warhorse - but they went into battle knowing their commander would never willingly throw their lives away for nothing.

If only other Souther commanders thought as he did, he angrily thought to himself. Especially those vainglorious jackasses at Milli-com.

"Beg your pardon, sir?"

It was the voice of his executive officer Colonel Garr, standing beside him on the hull of his command tank. With a start, Ghazeleh realised he must have said that last thought aloud in his trademark blunt growl.

He chose to ignore the man for a moment, preferring to concentrate on the far more pleasing spectacle taking place in the view through the imaging sights of his binox. The Norts had pulled back to their prepared defensive positions almost on the edge of the horizon, but that wouldn't save the slimy bastards from one final pasting courtesy of old Blood and Guts Ghazeleh. Normally, the spectacle of Norts dying by the hundreds would be more than enough to warm the old veteran Nu Earth warrior's heart, but tonight it wasn't even enough to take the edge off the cold, bitter anger that now filled him.

"Beg your pardon, sir," continued the executive officer, "but how long do you intend to keep the bombardment going?"

Ghazeleh lowered the binox, favouring the man with the kind of contemptuous glance that was another Blood and Guts Ghazeleh trademark.

"Until we've not got one bastard shell or rocket left to fire," he growled. "We've hauled the whole bastard lot of it this far with us, so we might as well let the Norts have it all before we turn tail and run back in the direction we came from."

The orders had come through from Milli-com an hour ago. Executive command priority: Abandon advance immediately. Break off all contact with the enemy and fall back to rejoin main Souther front line at original start-up position.

Just thinking about the meaning behind this sudden communiqué only further fed Ghazeleh's anger. His original orders were to forge a path through the territory the Norts had retaken in their last offensive and break the enemy's grip around Nordstadt, relieving the besieged Souther forces currently trapped there. It had been a daunting order, some might have said near impossible, but achieving the near impossible had been a career speciality for Fighting Fyalla, and now his armoured columns stood within fifty kilometres of the outskirts of Nordstadt. The Norts were mobilising reinforcements to resecure their weakening stranglehold round the city, but one final lightning push now, Ghazeleh was convinced, would be enough to smash through and link up with the encircled Souther army in Nordstadt.

Now, as far as Ghazeleh was concerned, the communiqué he had received from Milli-com was nothing less than an execution order served on every Souther soldier still fighting in the city.

The executive officer beside him shifted uneasily and nervously cleared his throat. Ghazeleh had known for months that the man was an S-Three undercover operative, no doubt put in place to report on the latest heretical utterances of the politically suspect old veteran. He imagined tonight would give the little toad enough material to open up a whole new dossier on him.

"Beg pardon again, sir, but our orders from Milli-com were quite explicit. We are to break off contact with the enemy immediately and withdraw back to the main lines."

Ghazeleh didn't lower his binox as he replied, trying hard to keep his legendary temper under control. "I read them too, colonel. But tell me, why are we here? What is the purpose of everything we're doing?"

"Sir?"

The man's tone was half-puzzled, half-humouring. He probably thinks I'm starting to go senile too, thought Ghazeleh. Another exciting new chapter to be added into that dossier of his.

"Why are we fighting this war, man?" This time Ghazeleh didn't try to hide the anger and impatience in his voice.

The man's answer was textbook perfect, straight out of the lecture halls of the military academies on the main Souther homeworlds.

"Sir, to defeat the enemy and drive them off the surface of Nu Earth. If we control Nu Earth, then we control the interstellar transit routes through this system's black hole warp gate. By possessing those routes and denying their use to the enemy, we will have gained an immeasurably significant advantage over the enemy elsewhere throughout the galaxy."

"Exactly, colonel. We're here to beat the crap out of the Norts and the best way I know how to do that is by killing as many of the bastards as I can, while making sure they don't do the same thing back in return. Trust me, colonel, when I tell you that in almost twenty years of fighting this bastard war on this bastard planet, I've discovered that doing the best thing possible to win this war and following explicit orders from those stupid pricks in Milli-com aren't necessarily the same thing."

The executive officer blanched and hastily withdrew. Probably memorising every word of what I just said, thought Ghazeleh, so he can get it all down word-perfect in the report he's going to write on me tonight.

"Keep firing," he told his artillery officers. "If we have to withdraw, then I want the Norts to at least get a taste of what would have happened to them if Fighting Fyalla and his boys had been able to stick around to give them a proper fight."

The artillerymen grinned in pleasure at their general's words and hurried off to make sure his orders were carried out. Ghazeleh refocused the settings on his binox, zooming in past the artillery bombardment still raining down on the Nort positions and instead looking beyond towards the darkness behind the Nort positions. He could see the dim glow of it just over the edge of the horizon, highlighted intermittently by the flashes of artillery duels probably just as fearsome as this one. The darkness of the sky above it was broken by flickering lines of light from anti-aircraft and rocket batteries.

It was Nordstadt, the glow of the battles going on there clearly visible to the naked eye, and it was only fifty kilometres away.

He lowered the binox and mumbled a silent prayer to himself. If he couldn't do anything to help the poor bastards trapped there, he prayed to the merciful god of his desert nomad ancestors that there was still someone else out there who could.

SEVEN

He didn't have a name - not really. His designation, the serial code that marked him as just another piece of military hardware and was branded even into his cellular structure, was Bio-Subject GI 3627218/R2. That had been his given name even before he had emerged as an infant clone from the gene genies' flesh tanks. It had been the only name he had been allowed to answer to in those first formative years in the testing labs and barrack levels of Milli-com where he and his clone-brothers began the process of being forged into living weapons.

And it was there, formed up into four-man fire teams under the watchful supervision of overseers who were part military training instructors and part prison guards, that he and his clone-brothers began to give themselves names of their own.

As clones, they were supposed to be indistinguishable from each other. Physically, that remained true. They all had the same weirdly unnatural blue skin tone that was a factor of the natural immunity their genetically-enhanced systems equipped them with to combat the toxic environmental conditions they would encounter on Nu Earth. They all had the same, harsh war-mask facial features and they all had the same blank, pupil-less eyes that allowed them to see through dense banks of chem-mist and which so unnerved many of the ordinary human personnel they came into contact with during their years of training.

It was psychologically, however, that they differed from each other.

It was a development their creators hadn't foreseen, but in training it quickly became apparent that no two of their creations were as exactly alike as had been expected. Some showed distinct personality quirks while others showed a marked aptitude for certain specialist skills and abilities.

Their overseers picked up on this and to amuse themselves, started assigning pet names to some of their charges in the same way hunters would give names to particular favourites amongst a pack of hunting dogs. The Genetic Infantrymen, with an attitude of perverse pride, claimed these joke names for themselves, turning the insult against their custodians.