Crucible Read Free Page B

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