Free Crucible by Gordon Rennie Page B

going to be history."
    The seal-burster shell blasted through the skin of the dome, opening a catastrophic breach in its carefully maintained pressurised environment. Clean, immeasurably precious air rushed out, the lethal toxins and pathogens of Nu Earth's atmosphere seeped in.
    By the time Rogue stormed in through the airlock a few seconds later, just about everyone inside the dome was dead. Their corpses lay on the floor in the familiar positions of agonised contortion caused by exposure to the raw poison of Nu Earth's atmosphere.
    One of the Norts had been arguably fortunate enough to get his chem-suit on and sealed up in time. He flayed towards Rogue, screaming incoherently in his native tongue, managing to snap off one panicked and poorly-aimed shot with the officer's pistol in his hand.
    One shot was all he got. A carefully aimed double blast from Gunnar took him square in the chest and blew him backwards away from the comms equipment. His corpse sprawled on the floor alongside those of his comrades.
    Rogue took off his helmet and laid it on the workspace beside one of the comms array units.
    "Clock's ticking, Helm. Do your thing and let's get out of here before someone shows up in answer to that mayday call."

NINE
     
    They were in and out of the comms-station in less than two minutes. Another few minutes' of fast cross-terrain movement at GI speed brought them to the half-buried wreck of a giant artillery tractor that they had already selected on their journey in as a good emergency fall back position. It was a few minutes after that they heard the sounds of the airstrike as a flight of Nort atmocraft gunships wiped the comms-station off the face of the earth. Afterwards, when the smoke and heat of the incendiary charges had cleared, a group of Nort hoppers came in and dropped two full platoons of troops into the area. Rogue watched for a few minutes as they nervously spread out their search as the hoppers hovered overhead, circling in a wide concentric pattern and scanning the jumbled terrain below with searchlights and gun targeters.
    Rogue knew that the Norts had a whole wing of their military intelligence division dedicated to hunting him down and destroying him. As soon as the men in the comms-station had identified him and got their mayday out, Rogue knew from past experience that the Norts' response would be swift and brutal. That was why he had to get out of there as soon as possible.
    To the men fighting in the Souther armies, he was mostly a myth, the Nu Earth legend of a soldier who not only survived but thrived on the poisoned battlefields, the trooper who had gone renegade to find and kill the traitor responsible for the deaths of his comrades. Many of them doubted his existence, an idea that the Souther military police, the so-called and much detested "Milli-fuzz" were keen to encourage, while at the same time actively hunting for Rogue themselves, desperate to finally get their hands on a soldier who had long ago been classified as a renegade and deserter. To those Souther troops who had encountered him, he must have still seemed fantastical; an eerie, ghostly figure who emerged from out of the chem-mists to give them much-needed support against a Nort ambush or assault. And then, as soon as the battle was over, disappeared back into the mists as mysteriously as he had first appeared.
    To the Norts, though, he was something else. A figure of terror and superstition. An inhuman, seemingly indestructible gene-freak creature who prowled the battlefields of Nu Earth, killing Norts wherever he went. Rogue had heard some of the rumours whispered about him in the Nort trenches: about how he drank the blood of his victims, how the very gaze of those blank, inhuman eyes of his could kill, how the Souther genetic scientists had designed their abomination creations to survive by feeding on the flesh of corpses left on the battlefield.
    Monster. Renegade. Ghost. Gene-freak. Deserter. Nu Earth urban legend. No one