He quickly crossed the bridge floor, sweeping into one of the smaller conference rooms there.

  "Gentlemen. If you please..."

  That, and the grey uniform, was all it took to clear the room in moments of the gaggle of young junior officers who had been in there. The air in the small room was heavy with the cloying scent of halo-sticks and many of the men and women had the telltale glassy-eyed look of halo-weed intoxication. They fled the place without even a second glance, probably terrified that the S-Three man would have them all rounded up and sent to the Nu Earth war fronts for possession of an illegal contraband substance.

  Alone in the room, Marckand activated his palm communicator. The voice of Costello, his second-in-command, responded moments later. As with all of the most secure areas aboard Milli-com, the strategy bridge deck was heavily scan-shielded, jamming out all personal communicator frequencies in the interests of military security, but the device Marckand used was S-Three technology, overriding all the standard security buffers.

  Marckand got straight to the point. "The operative, is he in place yet?"

  "We received word from him two hours ago. He's in Nordstadt now. Is there a problem with the timing of this Hammerfall operation, colonel? Do you wish to abort mission and pull our man out of there?"

  Marckand thought about it for a moment and then made his decision. "No, maintain mission status. Operative is to acquire and eliminate primary and secondary targets, as per original mission parameters. And, Costello?"

  "Colonel?"

  "I've just been given to understand that things are going to be getting very hot in Nordstadt very soon. Make sure our operative knows that, no matter what happens, he is to complete his mission. Give him whatever assurances you have that we'll pull him out of there as soon as his task is over."

  There was a slight pause before Costello answered. "Understood, colonel."

  Marckand considered his options on the elevator ride back down to his private quarters. He had been recruited from the regular military into the Southlands Security Service twelve years ago, although he had been a Nort double agent for three years even before that. There had been a small but significant cabal of Nort double agents working at Milli-com then, most of them men like him. Men who, while having some natural sympathies for the racial supremacy doctrines that had propelled the Greater Nordland Territories to such heights in so relatively short a time, had taken a cold-blooded look at the war in its earliest days and come to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that, ultimately, Nordland would be the victor of this war. The Southern Confederacy had the advantage of greater resources of manpower and territories, but it was the Norts who had supremacy in terms of technology and the sheer fanatical will to dominate and destroy.

  Marckand and those others did not think of themselves as traitors. Rather, they saw themselves as mercenaries, selling their loyalty to the side that would inevitably emerge as the stronger of the two. Of course, they would be well rewarded for such loyalty after the war was over, and this was where their so-called treason would serve their fellow Southers well.

  After they had won the war, the Norts would still need reliable and trustworthy servants to act as governors and administrators of their newly conquered Souther territories, and this was where Marckand imagined that he and his fellow collaborators would have a mutually rewarding role to play. Mediating between the Norts and their new Souther subjects, he would be able to protect his fellow Southers from the worst excesses of Nordland barbarities. However, there would have to be sacrifices made amongst those elements of the Souther populations who regrettably remained hostile to Nort rule or who contravened the Norts' most ruthless policies on racial purity. Marckand and his fellow collaborators would have blood on their hands, that couldn't be denied, but they reassured themselves that the carnage would be a lot worse without them being there to negotiate with the Norts on behalf of their defeated fellow Southers.

  But, of course, the war had lasted longer than anyone could have anticipated and the prospect of that early Nort victory had long since faded away. Marckand had cursed his early naivety in those days, but it was too late to go back and change things now. He had been responsible for feeding vital secret information to the Norts for years, and his bloody fingerprints were all over various Souther missions and offensives that had ended in spectacular failure after encountering Nort resistance which was either far greater than expected or, in some instances, where there simply shouldn't have been any Nort forces in the first place.

  He no longer considered himself a Nort agent now. Indeed, over the last few years, he had gained a formidable reputation within S-Three for his single-minded zeal in hunting down and eliminating cells of Nort spies and sympathisers within the Souther military. The fact that many of these Nort agents had been put in place by Marckand in the first instance was not a fact that he chose to share with his fellow spy-hunters.

  Now, almost everyone who had ever known of his double-agent status was dead. Of the original senior collaborator cabal, only himself and one other was still alive. All the others died in a series of freak accidents or mystery assassinations, all of them conducted by Marckand and his pet killer, Venner. Only once had Marckand almost been uncovered, when a rival spy-hunter agency had managed to discover the activities of one of the cabal members and get to them before Marckand. Luckily, he had managed to have his collaborator comrade transferred into S-Three custody. After that, it had been a simple matter to arrange the prisoner's unfortunate escape, although, instead of the hidden shuttlecraft promised by Marckand, it had been the waiting gunsights of Venner's sniper rifle that the prisoner had come running towards.

  And now only one of his old collaborator cabal comrades remained, although it was the one who was the most cunning and ruthless of them all, possibly even more so than Marckand himself. The man was a pale shadow of his former self, though. A nameless and disfigured renegade, on the run on Nu Earth, fleeing from one wretched bolt-hole to another, pursued by his own personal spectre of death. Marckand knew something of the reputation of the blue-skinned killer that pursued his old traitor comrade. It seemed more than likely that this renegade Genetic Infantryman would eventually find and kill his target, but the man he was pursuing was a natural-born survivor and seemed to have a knack for slipping through his pursuer's fingers. Marckand couldn't take the risk that the traitor would ultimately survive the war, or that the Genetic Infantryman, in his endless pursuit of his quarry, might somehow find out about the existence of another high-ranking traitor in Milli-com. That was why Marckand had set Venner on the trail. The assassin was an extra safeguard, sent in to ensure that events transpired in exactly the way Marckand wanted them to.

  And now he had an additional safeguard too. Operation Hammerfall. If the Genetic Infantryman or Venner didn't get their man, then Hammerfall surely would. It would be a pity to lose such a useful tool as Venner, of course. It was rare to find an assassin as skilled and as completely and solely dedicated to the business of killing as Venner was, but ultimately, sacrifices had to be made, just as that fool Daniels had said to him earlier on. And, besides, Venner knew far more about some of the reasons behind the missions Marckand sent him on than was strictly healthy for either of them.

  Which brought Marckand's thoughts round to the subject of Costello. She knew nothing of his past as a double-agent, naturally, and she had served him loyally and competently enough over the last few years, but there had been something in her tone tonight that Marckand hadn't liked. That slight but fatal hesitation before she confirmed his order that Venner was to be lied to and then abandoned to his fate in Nordstadt. An underling who started questioning their superior's orders was an underling who might start looking into the possible reasons behind those orders, and that Marckand couldn't risk at all.

  He had arranged enough tragic accidents for various comrades and underlings over the years. Perhaps it was time to arrange one more for poor and too-curious-for-her-own-good Captain Costello.

  It sat invisibly in a far-flung orbit around Nu Earth, far removed from the normal transport routes and debris fields around which the main action in the orbital war revolved. Hammerfall, protected by dense banks of scan-bafflers and null-shields, undetectable to all but the most probing enemy searches.

  The weapons platform was fully automated, since the designers of Operation Hammerfall put their faith not in weak and fallible human personnel but in the cold, unemotional machine minds of computer programmes and maintenance droids to carry out the appointed task, when the time came.

  The station hung in a fixed position, watching the disc of Nu Earth revolve far beneath it. Its scanners and missile targeters were fixed on one small area of the planet's surface, and every time that area came round towards them during the latest cycle of the planet's orbit, Hammerfall One's machine systems went to work. Range coordinates were rechecked and recalibrated. Atmospheric conditions were assayed and any necessary changes to missile flight systems were programmed in. Targeter systems tracked the target area as it revolved past below them, waiting patiently for the order to launch from Milli-com Command, waiting just as patiently as they watched the target location slide away out of sight, disappearing round into the far, sunward side of the planet.

  It watched and waited, this hidden and most secret of weapons platforms, equipped with a battery of twenty high-speed ballistic missiles that could reach the surface of Nu Earth in a matter of minutes, each of those missiles carrying a nuclear warhead of devastating explosive yield.

  It watched and waited, this angel of death. Waiting for the order to wipe the city of Nordstadt off the face of Nu Earth.

  TWELVE

  "Left fire team, forward! Watch out for Nort fire from those towers just beyond that burned-out smelter. Ludlow, give them covering fire! Goddamn it, Sweeney, why aren't I hearing that lazooka of yours firing already?"

  Intense volleys of las-fire swept back and forth between the buildings, seeking out the men and women sheltering amongst them. Las-rounds cracked off stone and steel, leaving behind fused burn holes and blackened scorch marks. Rockets screamed overhead, followed moments later by a series of shattering explosions fifty metres behind Hanna's position. The Norts had brought up a missile launcher vehicle, one of their infamous "Zell Orchestras", as the Souther troops called them, naming the weapon after one of the Norts' most brutal and ruthless war marshals.

  A building, part of the steelworks' old admin block and already listing badly from damage sustained in some long ago previous engagement, collapsed under the impact, toppling to the ground in a thunderous hail of stone and dust. Vesper and her squad had taken up position there only a few minutes earlier. Hanna hoped to hell they had managed to get out of the place in time.

  The building collapse brought a momentary lull to the firing. A squad of Nort stormtroopers, unmistakable in their black and gold chem-suits, took advantage of the moment, running out into the broadway directly in front of Hanna's position, making for the dense cover of the tangle of thick steel girders on the other side of the street.

  "Kashan Legion bastards!" Hanna yelled to the squad members around her. "Frontal fire! If those scum want to take back their precious sacred soil of Nordstadt that much, then they're going to have to pay for the privilege."

  Her eight squad members opened fire as one, emptying their mags in seconds. Six Norts fell to the ground instantaneously, cut down by a volley of las-fire. The remaining three turned and tried to sprint back into the safety of the cover they had just left.

  One of them almost made it. Hanna picked him off with a single round that sent him sprawling back to rejoin the bodies of his comrades.

  Another of the Norts, injured but alive, started crawling back towards cover, screaming in pain and shouting for help. Babic, the squad's best marksman, put paid to him before he had covered much more than a few metres by exploding his head with a single expertly-aimed las-round.

  Babic grinned in ruthless pleasure. Hanna glanced at him, countenancing the act with a single approving nod. The members of the Kashan Legion, and their brother scum in the Kashar Legion, were special cases. Both elite Nort units prided themselves on never taking prisoners and had been responsible for many notorious war crime incidents during the course of the war on Nu Earth. Souther troops, whenever they found themselves in battle against the Kashans and Kashars, were only too happy to return the favour.

  The other Norts in place in the surrounding cover responded quickly to the deaths of their comrades.

  Rapid fire las-rounds lashed down upon Hanna's position, coming from a Nort heavy weapon team situated in a covered walkway spanning the breadth of the street ahead of them. Hanna and her squad hugged the rusting hulk of the overturned steelworks tractor rig that formed the centrepiece of their makeshift street barricade.

  Las-rounds from the heavy weapon, a tripod-mounted Nort strubber gun capable of pouring out fire at a rate of two thousand rounds a minute, blasted apart the material of the barricade, stripping away layer after layer of cover in search of the Souther infantry troopers cowering behind it.

  Further up the street, Sweeney leaned out of cover of the doorway he had been sheltering inside, bringing his lazooka up to bear. The strubber gunner spotted him, immediately switching away from the barricade target and swinging his aim towards this new danger. Hanna and her squad cringed in fear behind the remains of the barricade as hundreds of las-bolts flew past their heads, ripping up the street behind them by churning up its rockrete surface as they tore a path directly towards Sweeney.

  The lazookaman fired just before the trail of strubber rounds reached him, the walkway and the heavy weapons team it contained disappeared in a molten flash. The remains of it came crashing down into the street. Norts instantly ran out to seize control of this newly-offered piece of cover but Hanna and her troops were ready for them. Fire from three squads beat into the Nort position, driving them back again and leaving more Nort corpses strewn on the ground.

  Repulsed a second time, the remaining Norts still sheltering in the cover of the buildings at the far end of the broadway began to pull back, probably hoping to regroup and try and find another way through or around the Souther strongpoint. Souther las-fire sent them on their way, picking off a few unlucky stragglers.

  Hanna breathed a sigh of relief. The Norts had been probing forward in strength in this sector all day. Radio chatter from other units told her that everyone else was experiencing exactly the same kind of deadly pressure that her platoon had been undergoing, although some of them hadn't withstood it as well as her people had. The Norts had seized the high ground of the giant slag heap mounds west of here, and no one had heard any word from Third Platoon since it went in to join the ongoing battle inside one of the three cavernous smelter sheds that made up the heart of the steelworks.

  For the moment at least, the battle here was over. Maybe now they could get a chance to send their wounded back to company HQ.

  "Sarge? You feel that?"

  She did. A rumbling in the ground beneath their feet. "Probably just the shock waves from an artillery bombardment going on somewhere else," she told Babic. "Let's just hope it's the Norts getting a pummelling and not any of our people."

  But the rumbling grew stronger. A pile of rubble nearby shifted and then tumbled to the ground. Nervous faces behind chem-suit visors looked uncertainly at their squad leader.

  "Earth tremors! It's an earthquake, maybe. Some new kinda Nort weapon!" panicked Shore, one of the new recruits from the remains of Fifth Company who had joined them only last week.

  "Don't be ridiculous," Hanna told him. "The Norts come up with some weird ordnance but even they're not dumb enough to try using something like that."

  The rumbling grew stronger. There was a crash from up the street. Hanna turned to see the steel-reinforced wall of a large storage shed smashing itself to the ground. Panic seized her.

  Jesus, maybe it was an earthquake! Maybe the Norts really would be willing to destroy their precious Nordstadt...

  With a clanking roar of metal and engine gears, the first Nort Blackmare tank smashed its way through the remains of the toppled wall, shrugging off the tonnes of shattered wall sections and steel girders that bounced harmlessly off its front and top armour. A moment later, a second Blackmare bludgeoned a path through the same breach, widening it even further. Nort infantry and smaller armoured vehicles poured through the gap in the wake of the two Blackmares, sheltering in the protective cover of the two leviathan tanks.

  Each Blackmare weighed hundreds of tonnes. They were the most powerful armoured vehicles on Nu Earth, far outclassing anything the Southers had to counter them. One Blackmare alone was more than enough to deal with for an entire armoured company of Carter class Souther tanks.

  The first Blackmare rumbled down the broadway like a mobile earthquake, its massive, metres-wide treads crushing apart and then pulverising to dust even the largest pieces of rubble in its path. The turret, larger and heavier than any whole normal tank, swung slowly round towards the Souther position.

  "Tank shock," they called it. The terror that seized the hearts and minds of infantry of any kind when confronted with the reality of a tank assault. Hanna had faced a Nort armoured attack before and recognised all too well the feelings of panic now welling up within her and her squad. If even their own tank crews were afraid to go up against the monster Blackmares, then what chance did an ordinary infantryman stand, armed with nothing more than a standard las-carbine and a satchel of plasma sphere grenades?

  The tank continued to rumble forward. The turret continued to turn. The ordinary infantry trooper side of her was paralysed with fear, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the thing bearing down on her. The platoon leader side of her, however, knew she had to do something to save the lives of her and the troops under her protection, and quickly.