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  He picked off the one on his left flank with a shredder slug, an easy shot from a range of more than four hundred metres. After playing cat-and-mouse with the young idiot for an hour or so, he had led him to believe that he was hiding amongst the shorn-off stumps of a group of petrified trees in a middle of a mud field some two hundred metres from Venner's actual position. When the bush-beater had crawled out of his own hiding spot to find a better shooting position behind the nearby wreck of an APC, Venner had been ready and waiting for him.

  The shredder slug carried out its designed task, breaking up into a hail of razor-edged micro-missiles which shredded through chem-suit and flesh, incapacitating but not killing its target. His chem-suit ripped in a dozen or more places, the air pipe to his backpack respirator severed, flesh punctured by multiple wounds and his exposed skin blistered as the biochemical agents in the air went to work; the enemy sniper fell to the ground, writhing and screaming. He had an open radio link to the remaining sniper troupe, and his comrades heard every sound of his death agonies. He screamed in pain as his lungs burned away from the poison air he breathed into them; the flesh-destroying biochemical spores burrowed into him and spread like wildfire within the rich warmth of his bloodstream.

  The one on the right flank was the first to break, the screams of his comrade echoing in his chem-suit's radio headset as he came running to his aid. His path took him along a shallow, smooth-walled gully that had probably once been an infantry trench before some kind of heat weapon had scoured through it and melted its walls into blackened glass. Venner had been through it earlier, anticipating that this would be the most direct route the sniper on his right flank would take if provoked into rash incaution, and had seeded the trench with micro-mine booby traps. A short series of shattering explosions from the direction of the trench-gully instantly informed Venner that his plan had paid off.

  The third and last remaining bush-beater was either too scared or more cautious and experienced than his two dead comrades. Dug into a good vantage point on the crest of a large shell crater three hundred and twenty metres away, he had a fix on Venner's position and began peppering it with shots. His fourth shot blew the head off the figure in a chem-suit crouched in the overhang beneath the remains of the chassis of a blown-apart self-propelled gun. The man relaxed, raising his head to get a better look at the body of the enemy that had just killed two of his friends. It was then Venner killed him with a single shot fired from the new position he had fallen back to, even before the booby traps in the trench-gully detonated. The other position he had been happy to abandon, leaving behind a chem-suited corpse of the Souther infantryman that he had set up to look like a sniper lying in wait. Now, with the bush-beaters all disposed of, there was only the master sniper left to take care of.

  Venner fired off a single shot. It ricocheted off the side of the Blackmare's turret, letting the sniper inside know that his enemy had a fix on his location and daring him to try and move.

  Venner himself moved forward, cautiously and carefully, hugging cover, following the series of blind spots that his mental map of the area told him would exist as seen from the vantage point of an observer inside the tank wreck. He figured he could probably get safely within three or four hundred metres of the enemy sniper's location. He then would find a good firing position amongst one of the many tank wrecks strewn around the area, and only then would the real battle, a battle of true patience and bitterly hard-won experience, begin. It would be a battle where the first mistake from either marksman would almost certainly be rewarded with instantaneous death. It was the kind of battle Venner lived for, nothing less than a test of true skill and experience.

  Venner was still about eighty metres short of the closest 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 tank, one that had taken a direct hit from a firebeam weapon, judging by the gaping, smooth-edged wound melted through the armour of its hull. The man had been hit multiple times by the explosive shards, and lay groaning on the ground, his blood bubbling furiously as it bled out through the rips in his chem-suit and reacted fiercely with the toxic elements in the air around him. He would die soon, either from shock and blood loss, or, more likely, from exposure to the leftover remnants of whatever biochemical weapon had once been used on this portion of the battlefield.

  He raised his head groggily, watching as Venner walked towards him. He wore the trademark featureless, spherical black helmet that marked him as one of the so-called "black domers", a master sniper who had more than a thousand confirmed kills to their credit. Venner was delighted. This would be the fourth black domer he had killed.

  The two snipers looked at each other.

  "How many?" asked Venner, shocked at the sound of his own voice. It had been the first time in over a week he had heard it, and it sounded unfamiliar to him, especially when talking in the harsh, guttural language of the enemy.

  "Twelve hundred and fifty-three," answered the Nort sniper, unable to keep the betraying hint of pride out of his voice, even at a time like this.

  "Not bad," grunted Venner. The Nort nodded in acknowledgement, as one equal to another. Then Venner shot him through the heart. The man deserved respect and a quicker, cleaner death than the one he had been facing.

  "But nowhere near good enough," the Souther added, bending down to search his opponent's corpse for some kind of identification. The other kills were strictly small-fry, but to receive a confirmed kill on a black domer he would have to bring back proof of his status and identity. He had to strip off the man's chem-suit to find it, finally managing to take a scan-reading off the barcode tattoo on the back of the corpse's neck.

  An hour later, the atmocraft arrived to pick him up. His real mission over, he hadn't troubled himself to double back and destroy the last listening post, but he had its coordinates precisely mapped. Some petty glory boy in an artillery unit somewhere could proudly claim the credit for its destruction, assuming the Norts hadn't dismantled and moved it on elsewhere in the meantime.

  Sitting back in the pressurised interior of the atmocraft, he checked his suit's own internal chem-count meter twice against the read-outs on the wall panel beside him before breaking the seals on his suit's neck brace and taking off his helmet. He sat back for a moment, breathing deeply and relishing the nearest thing to clean, unfiltered air that he'd tasted in over a week.

  The two other Southers in the cabin with him shifted nervously. One of them, the atmocraft's crew chief, busied himself with some pointless maintenance task, clearly feeling uncomfortable in the presence of the Souther Security Service's most notorious assassin. The other, a young female intelligence officer, did her best to retain an aura of command authority in the face of a man who - no matter what junior rank his service record said he possessed - vastly outclassed her in terms of experience, ability and appetite for death.

  Venner smiled, spotting the data-port in her hand and its winking green light showing that it had information waiting to be downloaded.

  "Another job for me?" he asked, indicating the device in her hand. "Show me."

  "You need to rest," she told him. "Once you're back at base and have been fully debriefed, we'll-"

  "Show me." The smile left his face.

  She handed the device over. Venner pressed his thumb against its small ID plate and tapped in his authority code. The screen blinked into life, information scrolling across it at a rate matching the movement of his eyes as he studied the new mission briefing. A name came up, and then a visual image.

  The smile returned to Venner's face, and he sat back, contentedly 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 was sure to develop a countermeasure or create their own imitation version of the enemy's weapon soon enough. The knowledge that every pilot lost and craft downed would almost invariably be matched by an equivalent loss to the enemy was of little consolation to the pilots on either side.

  The casualty statistics for the air war on Nu Earth were supposed to be a closely-guarded secret, known only to the planners and strategists at Milli-com, but every Souther pilot was intimately acquainted with the cold, hard fact at the heart of those numbers and equations. The average life expectancy for a combat pilot in the Nu Earth theatre of operations was just a little over thirteeen months.

  Rafe had been flying combat missions non-stop for more than three years. When she was in the cockpit, flying search-and-destroy missions, routine combat patrols or whatever other low survivability duties her asshole of a squadron commander had dreamed up for her, she thought about little else than surviving the mission intact - without her and her craft being fragged or vaporised by any of the multitude of forms of instantaneous death on offer in the skies over Nu Earth.

  Every day she returned safely to base to climb back out of the cockpit of her Seraphim fighter was an added bonus, the relief of her continued survival tempered by the knowledge that tomorrow or the next day she would have to climb back into the cockpit and do it all over again.

  There was a soft warning bleep over her helmet intercom, coming from the navigator position in the cockpit space behind her.

  "I see it, Gabe," she told the occupant of that space, flicking on the heads-up sensor display inside her helmet visor. It showed a fiery mass plunging down through the atmosphere many kilometres away. More evidence of the war that raged not just in the skies of Nu Earth or on the ground beneath them, but also in the heavens overhead.

  "What do you think, Gabe? One of ours, or one of theirs?"

  "Difficult to say," buzzed the voice of her copilot/navigator. "It's too far gone into re-entry to be sensor-recognisable, but I'm guessing it's one of theirs. Our killer-sat units have been targeting Nort orbital platforms in this sector for the last few days now. All part of Milli-com's big new push, I guess."

  Rafe watched the sensor display for a few more seconds. The destroyed Nort device, probably one of the small three-man surveillance and orbital bombardment monitoring stations the Norts used more and more frequently these days, was far enough away to be no danger whatsoever to her and her craft, but a couple of dozen tonnes of burning, super-heated wreckage was going to put a serious dent in someone's day when it hit the ground a few minutes from now.

  "Gabe. Track its trajectory and send an impact warning down to-"

  A double-beep, almost smug-sounding, alarmed in her helmet intercom. Typically, her navigator was already at least one step ahead of her.