Crucible Read Free

tank wreck when he felt the touch of death upon him. The material of his chem-suit - lightweight, more like a second skin than the crude, bulky outfits worn by most of the participants of the war on Nu Earth - was run through with thousands of strands of delicate monofilament wiring. Sensitive to infrared or electronic scanning, such as the kind cast out by the hi-tech precision scopes on a sniper rifle, they gave the wearer an instant warning that an electronically-sighted weapon was being aimed at him. Venner received that warning now - a burning sensation pierced his heart as the network within his bodysuit detected an infrared targeting beam playing across the front of his chest - the monofilament wiring instantly heating up in reaction.
    Venner threw himself aside as he heard the crack of a rifle shot from somewhere off to his left. The shot whizzed past him, blowing apart the semi-petrified remains of a Souther infantryman corpse that lay half-buried in the ground behind him.
    The enemy sniper was close, he realised, probably within thirty metres or so. Too close for Venner to even begin to think about running for cover or raising his own rifle and returning fire. Before he'd moved a few metres or even spotted a target to return fire on, his opponent would have compensated for his first miss and nailed him with his second shot. He had been tricked, he knew. His opponent had foreseen Venner's assumption that he would have sought shelter in the Blackmare's turret and moved position once Venner started picking off the rest of the troupe. If indeed he had ever been in the Blackmare in the first place, Venner thought bitterly.
    Venner was a man who valued skill, who valued finesse, who valued a challenge and the thrill of the hunt. More than anything, though, he was a man who valued his own life. Abandoning any further claim to skill and finesse, he reached for the pistol-like weapon that hung from his equipment-laden belt. He raised and fired it in the general direction the sniper's shot had come from, just as he imagined the enemy marksman would be drawing a bead on him to take that second and surely fatal follow-up shot.
    The ugly, blunt-nosed pistol weapon in Venner's hand exploded, firing out a hail of deadly missiles which buzzed through the polluted air, seeking out the telltale heat signature from the hidden sniper's body and carbon dioxide traces from their respirator-filtered breathing. The weapon was crude and imprecise, critically short-ranged and liable to malfunction under the notoriously variable atmospheric and temperature conditions of Nu Earth. It didn't need to be deadly accurate, though. Each buzzing missile was proximity reactive, programmed to explode into a hail of flesh-tearing shards whenever its simple target systems detected it was close enough to something that may or may not have been its intended target.
    Venner dived for cover, his weight crunching through the frozen chemical frost that coated the ground on this segment of no-man's-land, as he sought to evade both the sniper's shot and the blast effects of his own weapon.
    His chem-suit's advanced sound filters protected him from the worst of the series of short, roaring explosions that followed. When the explosions faded away, those same filters immediately picked up a sound that they had been pre-programmed to detect and amplify: the sound of a human being in pain, calling for help.
    Venner quickly retrieved his rifle and stalked towards the source of the sounds, wary of a trap. As a sniper, he himself had used autobot drones to broadcast similar sounds in the past, luring in enemy troops to capture or finish off what they thought was an injured enemy. The analysers in his chem-suit's micro-processor systems informed him that the moans sounded authentically human, with no sign of any electronic origin. A few seconds later, the evidence of Venner's own eyes confirmed it.
    The enemy master sniper lay in the shadow of an upturned Souther light