Free Crucible by Gordon Rennie Page A

like hammer-blows into the sentry unit's rotating turret top, melting and cracking its armour. One drilled through to the unit's sensor core, instantly rendering the weapon blind. Two more struck its power feed, severing it. Robbed of power, the chattering of the sentry gun's rapid-fire auto-las weapon instantly cut out. A moment later, the whole unit exploded as its damaged power core fractured apart.
    Satisfied that the threat from the sentry guns was over, Rogue was already up and moving even before the last burning pieces of the destroyed auto-defence unit had struck the ground. He could see his objective buried in the ground ahead of him. To the untrained eye, or the spy-cams of any roving Souther reconnaissance craft or orbiting surveillance satellite, it looked innocuous enough; just another debris heap or mound of shellfire-scooped rubble in a typically Nu Earth battle-scarred scene strewn with such landmarks. It was Helm's sensors that had first picked up the whispering traces of voices in the ether which had eventually led them here, and it was Rogue's combat intuition and enhanced, eerily inhuman GI eyes that had finally picked the object out from amongst the surrounding terrain.
    It was a Nort comms-post, camouflaged to blend in almost perfectly with the battlefield environment around it. The airwaves of Nu Earth were filled with radio traffic, much of it deliberately designed to jam out the enemy's own communications transmissions. Add in the interference from the many high-level radiation zones that blighted large areas of the planet's surface and the communications-scrambling effects of the violent storms that constantly raged across one part or another of its upper atmosphere, reliable long-range communications soon became a problem for both sides, even with all the hi-tech means at their disposal.
    There were thousands of these comms-stations dotted everywhere across the surface of the planet, gathering in the faint ghost-whispers of damaged communications signals, filtering out the worst of the interference affecting them and then boosting them on towards their intended final destination. Any one of Rogue's endless journeys across the no-man's-land wastes of Nu Earth normally brought him within the telltale electronic footprint of at least one enemy comms-station, but as a rule he generally passed up on the opportunity of hunting down and destroying them. They were low-priority targets in the one-man mission that had taken him from one end of Nu Earth to the other and, as he suspected he was just about to find out, any attempts to attack one carried certain inherent dangers all of its own.
    The sensitive comms equipment inside and the crew manning it were protected from the inhospitable exterior environment by a dome-seal; a las-shielded pressurised bubble which offered an atmospheric safe haven, allowing the men inside to work unencumbered by the need for chem-suits. An RPG launched gamma missile would still be enough to blow the dome open, instantly killing everyone inside from the effects of exposure to the lethal Nu Earth atmosphere, but for reasons of his own, Rogue needed to capture the comms-station's facilities intact.
    "Dispensing seal-burster, Rogue."
    "Read my mind, Bagman," said Rogue, taking the compact missile-like device and slotting in onto the firing attachment at the front of his rifle.
    They would now be panicking inside the dome, he knew. Alerted by Rogue's triggering of the auto-defences, they would be scrambling into chem-suits and grabbing weapons and ammo packs.
    "Picking up a mayday call, Rogue. The bad news is, they definitely know who's out here knocking at the door," warned Helm.
    "Stak! Nain! Genetik Infantryman!" sniggered Gunnar, putting on a stereotypical Nort accent straight out of the very worst kind of Souther propaganda war-viddies.
    "Doesn't matter who they try to call for help," growled Rogue, raising and firing his rifle. "By the time anyone gets here, these slugs are