More moments passed. The traitor was gone, disappearing at the first sniper shot. Every passing moment took him further away, Rogue knew, further into the darkness and the cover of the ruins. Further away from any chance of immediate retribution.

  Helm's inbuilt comm-link crackled into life. "Heads up, GI unit. You got friendlies in the area. Just bagged ourselves some kind of fancy Nort sniper looking to make a name for himself by killing the R-"

  "No names over this frequency, Souther girl," said Rogue. "Come on in. I'll cover you."

  Rogue dragged himself over to where Gunnar lay, picking him up, checking he was undamaged and then reactivating his biochip functions. Gunnar's circuits and speech synthesiser hummed back into life.

  "Rogue! The traitor, he-"

  "Forget about it, Gunnar. He got away from us."

  Rogue stared out into the darkness, his night vision seeing no sign of the man they had come here to find and kill.

  "No luck this time. But there'll be other times, and one of those times he won't be so lucky."

  A minute later, the shuttle came down to pick them up.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  "Landing's got us noticed by the locals, Rafe. We've got two Nort hopper gunships heading this way."

  "Copy, Gabe. We're out of here as soon as our people are aboard."

  The shuttle stood on a patch of open ground, its engines and landing thrusters still rumbling, ready to take off again at a second's notice. Rafe leapt down from the open side hatch, running forward to help the three figures stumbling through the ruins towards the shuttle.

  "Good to meet you at last, Blueboy," she told Rogue, grabbing one of his arms and helping the female infantry sergeant who was supporting the weight of the wounded GI.

  "Likewise, Air Force. Good to know that solid blue still counts for something, even here."

  They ran back towards the shuttle. Rafe turned, hearing the telltale whine of the engines of the approaching Nort hoppers. She saw their searchbeams sweeping across the rubble field and knew she wasn't going to make it back to the shuttle in time, not with a wounded GI and two slower-moving humans in chem-suits in tow.

  Rogue heard them too. "Bagman, dispense a Sammy. I'll cover the rest of you while you get to the shuttle."

  "The shape you're in? Not a chance," answered Rafe, noticing for the first time the med-flashes on the other figure's chem-suit. "The doc and me will carry you. The sarge here can do the honours."

  Rafe handed Gunnar to Hanna. "Think you can handle this thing?"

  Hanna took the weapon, testing its weight, studying its workings. "Guess I can figure it out."

  "No worries, sarge. I'll give you all the help you need," Gunnar told her.

  Hanna loaded the Sammy following Gunnar's instructions. She'd never fired a weapon like this before, but then again, she'd never handled a weapon that talked to her either.

  The hoppers were in sight, coming in low-level across the rubblescape at them, spitting out lines of las-fire. She raised the rifle and took aim, ignoring the dual tracks of lascannon fire chewing up the ground in front of her as they raced in on her position. They would reach her in a few more seconds, blowing her to shreds, before moving on to target and destroy the shuttle.

  "Range three hundred metres and closing," Gunnar told her. "Okay, I'm zeroed in... You're doing fine, sarge. Just keep me locked in and pull the trigger when I say."

  The las-fire tracks raced closer. Hanna fought down the urge to throw the gun away and hurl herself out of their path. At last, after moments that seemed to last minutes, the biochip gave her the order she was waiting for.

  "Fire!"

  The Sammy struck the cockpit of one of the hoppers, blowing it out of the sky. The other hopper peeled away in panic, breaking off its attack run. Hanna heard the rising scream of the shuttle engine from behind her. She turned and ran, leaping aboard the shuttle just as it lifted off the ground.

  There were more surprises for her once she was aboard. Artau was bent over the prone figure of the Rogue Trooper, applying med-patches to his wounds as the craft lurched upwards in emergency take-off. The female GI was in the cockpit, piloting the shuttle. Some kind of autobot drone hovered nearby, talking to her. Hanna thought her helmet's audio-syms must have taken a knock when she jumped aboard because she could have sworn she heard the drone using the word "sweetcheeks" to the GI pilot.

  Two other slightly comical-looking figures were there too. A tall, thin, fussy looking man, and his shorter, fatter companion. They oddly both wore bowler hats on top of their matching, expensive and civilian-issue chem-suits. They both seemed to be staring in a strangely avaricious way at the Rogue Trooper and his equipment.

  "Friends of yours?" she asked, giving the GI his rifle back.

  "Not exactly," growled Rogue, staring back at the two salvage dealers with undisguised hostility. "Let's just say we've crossed paths before and leave it at that."

  "Hang on back there," warned Rafe from up in the cockpit. "We're not out of the hotzone yet." She looked at Brass and Bland.

  "This crate of yours got any offensive capability?"

  "Certainly not," answered Bland, sniffly. "We're unarmed non-combatants; strictly neutral bystanders in this war."

  "Great. Then you'd better get on the radio and tell that to the Nort gunship still on our tail."

  Rafe desperately jinked the controls, dodging the shuttle through the hail of las-fire from the pursuing Nort gunship hopper. Her only hope was to keep on climbing, outrunning the vengeful Nort craft to reach a higher altitude where its limited anti-grav systems couldn't operate.

  A craft-shaking impact from the rear section of the shuttle's underbelly put paid to that idea. Rafe saw the power levels on her console read-outs drop away instantaneously.

  "Main power system hit," reported Gabe, plugged into the craft's compu-controls. "Switching to auxiliary back-up. We just developed a serious juice problem, hon."

  The shuttle dropped back down towards the city. Rafe fought to keep the shock descent from becoming a full-on crash into the Nordstadt rubble.

  "Mayday, mayday. This is Bluegirl looking for some friendly listeners. Bluegirl evac shuttle's got a hostile on her tail and she's in need of some friendly assistance."

  "Friendly ears listening, Bluegirl. This is Happy Trails. I'm two thousand metres above you and incoming on your six. Friendly assistance is on its way."

  Something streaked down out of the chem-clouds above. There was a blur of fire and the Nort hopper disappeared off Rafe's radar screen. The equally blurred shape of a Seraphim fighter shot across the view from the shuttle's cockpit, rolling once to wave its wings in acknowledgement before arcing back upwards into the chem-clouds.

  "Thanks for that, Happy Trails. Bluegirl's got a berth over at the 77nd Air Attack. If she's still got a job there tomorrow, then you've got an open tab waiting for you there in the pilots' mess."

  Rafe brought the shuttle up level and, at a reduced altitude, piloted it southwards on a heading out of Nordstadt at as much speed as she could nurse out of its damaged power systems.

  "Still got a juice problem, Gabe. I can probably get a couple of hundred kays out of this crate before I have to put it down on the ground. What safe landing zones can you find within that range?"

  Gabe patched through using the sophisticated comms systems carried by the salvage dealers' craft, into the Souther satellites above the planet, searching through the latest comms traffic and observation data. It didn't take him long to find what Rafe was looking for.

  "Got something here, Rafe. Three Souther armoured divisions due south of us, just within juice distance. They're rolling out the welcome mat to us and anyone else evacing out of Nordstadt."

  "Sounds good enough, Gabe. We got ourselves a landing zone."

  The last Souther evac shuttle took off from Nordstadt some two hours after Rogue and the others had left the city. Nordstadt was wiped off the face of Nu Earth about twenty minutes after that, just before dawn.

  Hammerfall activated exactly on time, twelve minutes before then, all twenty of the Hammerfall platform's missiles launching towards their target, which was now swinging round into range on Nu Earth's sunward side. The missiles, with drives more akin to those found on deep-space craft than any normal rocketry engine, sped towards Nu Earth, crossing the tens of thousands of intervening kilometres in minutes. Alerted by Gabe's earlier all-frequencies warning, a host of Nort killer-sats and the gun batteries of heavy weapons orbital platforms were waiting for them.

  Hammerfall's planners had allowed for the possibility that the Norts' space defences might destroy some of the missiles before they reached Nu Earth. The hundreds of simulations the Milli-com strategists had run suggested that four was the most likely number of losses they would probably suffer. Pre-warned about Nordstadt's fate, the Norts managed to destroy eleven of the missiles before they entered Nu Earth's atmosphere. In the event, nine warheads would still be enough to totally destroy Nordstadt, even if the field of effect extending to cover the Nort forces surrounding the outer fringes of the city was just about half of what was expected. Daniels's precious Nort casualty statistics, upon which the whole success of Hammerfall depended, fell, and then fell again.

  The missiles detonated in a mixture of medium-altitude airbursts and direct ground impacts in various different locations around the city. Nordstadt disappeared in nine simultaneous flashes of blinding light that banished the fading pre-dawn gloom from the battlefields of Nu Earth for hundreds of kilometres in all directions.

  Hundreds of thousands of lives, Nort and Souther alike, disappeared in an instant. Tens of thousands more Nort troops, on the outer fringes of the city and retreating in panic away from Nordstadt, were consumed by the firestorm that swept out from the heart of the nine combined nuclear blasts. The blasts and the firestorms reached up into the skies, knocking down dozens of atmocraft, shuttles and fighters that had lingered over the city for too long.

  The shockwave of Nordstadt's destruction was felt all over the planet. It appeared as a flash on the horizon thousands of kilometres away, causing troops on both sides to look up in fear and wonder at it. Communications were disrupted for a few minutes almost planet-wide, as massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation pulsed outwards from the centre of the blast, creating invisible energy storms all across the planet's ether.

  Just about everyone on Nu Earth felt, saw or somehow detected some sign of Nordstadt's destruction and all of them knew exactly what it meant. Hammerfall's planners had long ago prepared their cover story: that the destruction of Nordstadt was the work of the Norts, who with their assault stopped dead by the city's heroic Souther defenders, had fallen back on this most final and brutal of scorched earth tactics. Now these carefully prepared propaganda lies would never be believed by their own troops, not since Gabe's warning had been heard all over Nu Earth. Now, with their plan revealed, Hammerfall's architects would not even have the benefit of Daniels's precious Nort kill tally to defend their actions with. An estimated less than three hundred thousand enemy troops had been caught and destroyed within the crucible. It was undeniably a grievous loss to the Nort forces on Nu Earth, but it still fell far short of the million plus casualties that had been confidently predicted. Souther losses were calculated at some ninety-four thousand. The last-minute, unofficial evac operation had brought almost nine thousand troops out of the crucible in the few confused and danger-fraught hours before Nordstadt's destruction, an act that was hastily declared to be a triumphant act of heroism by Milli-com's propaganda experts.

  In private conference, however, Milli-com's masters pronounced quite a different verdict on Operation Hammerfall and its aftermath. Grand Marshal Cohen was allowed to resign in disgrace, citing unexpected health problems for his decision to leave the Souther military and retire to his extensive estates on Nu Sussex. From there he was able to dwell on the alleged achievements of an otherwise glittering military career.

  His underlings were not allowed the same privilege. For them, there was only career-ending ignominy and a large number of demotions, courts martials and official courts of enquiry.

  Most Souther military historians didn't trouble themselves to record the fate of these lesser players in the Nordstadt disaster. However, a careful checking of Milli-com records would have revealed the fact that, less than a year after the destruction of Nordstadt, a Captain Daniels, recently demoted and transferred out of Milli-com, was listed as killed in action in the latest outbreak of front line fighting in the Karthage campaign.

  All this was still to come, however. For the present moment, there were other matters yet to be settled.

  TWENTY-SIX

  "You can't leave yet," shouted Artau, angrily. "For God's sake, man. You're wounded. Your injuries need time to heal."

  "I'm Genetic Infantry, doc," Rogue told him, standing up and gathering his equipment. "They built us to be low med-maintenance and fast to heal, and there's plenty of others here who need you a lot more than I do."

  Rogue was right. It was chaos in the landing zone. Every few minutes, another flight of shuttles came in to land, each of them disgorging another group of shell-shocked survivors from the crucible, many of them carrying some kind of wound, others hungry and exhausted and just needing a hot meal and a place to sleep and recover from the ordeal they'd just barely survived. Every med available in all three of General Ghazeleh's divisions had been brought in to help, but the number of casualties passing through the encampment was still overwhelming. The general's tank forces were drawn into a wide protective circle, old-fashioned wagon train style, forming a solid barrier of steel around the makeshift landing zone. Flights of Souther fighters made continual low-level passes overhead, protecting the encampment from aerial attack and flying escort for the next wave of incoming shuttles and their human cargos of more Nordstadt survivors.

  Rogue shrugged off the surgeon-officer's objections and made his way to the med-dome's airlock, meeting Ghazeleh and a group of his most senior officers on the way. One of them pointed in sudden agitation at Rogue.

  "There he is, general. He's a notorious deserter and renegade. I demand he be placed under arrest straight away."

  Ghazeleh stared at the Rogue, seeming to look right through him and seeing nothing but empty space. "Are you sure, Colonel Garr? If there was any blue-skinned super-soldier in here, I'm sure I would be able to spot him."

  Garr turned almost crimson with rage. "General Ghazeleh, you know as well as I do that Milli-com has issued specific orders that this deserter be arrested on sight. As a senior officer in the Souther army, it's your duty to carry out Milli-com's commands."

  Ghazeleh turned in apparent puzzlement to one of his other staffers. "Captain Vickers, do you see any deserters here?"

  "Not at all, sir," answered the officer, with a grin. "Perhaps the stress of battle is affecting the colonel's eyesight. A soldier with blue skin, who doesn't need a chem-suit? I must admit, it does sound all rather fantastical."

  "Agreed, captain," said Ghazeleh, turning back to his executive officer. "Colonel Garr, you're relieved of your duties and confined to your quarters, pending a psychiatric report on your current state of mind."

  A pair of large, burly sergeants stepped forward and dragged Garr out of the med-dome. Ghazeleh turned back to Rogue, looking in approval at him.

  "Good work, trooper, and good to know you're still with us. If I had a few more like you under my command, we'd probably have won this bastard war years ago. I suggest you get out of here, though, before the Milli-fuzz get here, and the rest of us have to start suffering the same hallucinations as poor Colonel Garr."

  "Understood, sir. Before I go, here's something you might find useful." Rogue handed Ghazeleh a data-disc. "It's a recording of something the Traitor General told me, about an S-Three officer called Marckand. I thought you'd know the right people to get it to."

  "I'm sure I'll be able to come up with some reason about how it came into my care, without making up stories about blue-skinned figments of my imagination."

  Rogue was outside, walking away towards the edge of the encampment and the chem-mists beyond, when he heard the shout from behind him.

  "Rogue!"

  He turned, seeing Rafe hurrying towards him. They stood together, sharing a moment of awkward silence. Rafe was the first to break it. "You could stay here, you know. General Ghazeleh's supposed to be a good man. He could protect you from Milli-com."

  Rogue shook his head. "Got a friendly warning that Milli-com will be here any minute. The general's a good man, and we need more like him. That's why I can't give Milli-com the excuse they might be looking for to replace him. Besides, I've still got a mission to finish."

  "The traitor's dead, Rogue. He died back in Nordstadt."

  Rogue wasn't so sure. He looked at the barely-diminished radioactive glow on the northern horizon, which was now all that remained of Nordstadt. "We got out, didn't we? Maybe he did too. Been hunting him for too long to know better than to take anything for granted when it comes to that scumbag. Until I find out different, we stay rogue and keep on looking for him."

  Rafe offered him her hand. Rogue hesitated for a moment and then took it. "Not many of us left, Rogue. Us GIs, we've got to stick together, got to stay solid blue. You ever need any help again, you know who to call."

  "I'll bear it in mind, Air Force. Count on it."

  He turned and walked away. She watched him go, following him with her eyes until the chem-mists had finally swallowed up the last vestige of him.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Marckand was still in his office when they came for him. The hidden warning devices in the corridor outside had told him of their approach; a full squad of Milli-fuzz, armed with pistols and las-carbines, and wearing full body armour.