Crucible by Gordon Rennie Page A

to try and bring the rest of his squads back up to strength, he was collapsing the remains of those two units into the others. Hanna's squad was to get Harlech and Marcos who were both fairly well experienced veterans, but that still left her squad three troopers short after this morning's action. The other squads in the company were similarly running under strength.
    She looked up into the sky again, counting contrails; she was sure that there were supposed to be more than she had been seeing. Her gaze went higher into the darkness of falling night, into the heavens above Nu Earth where the generals were, secure in their command satellites, and where orbiting observation posts looked down on everything, sending details of the war's progress back to the strategists at Milli-com. All she could do was hope that someone up there knew what they were doing.
     
    "Roger, Super Six-Two, you are cleared for take-off."
    Halmada hit the ignition on his shuttle's belly thrusters, lifting it off the deck of the underground hanger and sending it floating effortlessly up the wide tunnel shaft, even before the heavy blast doors overhead had finished rumbling open. It was the kind of manoeuvre he had performed countless thousands of times in his life: first as a freelance commercial shuttle pilot working the asteroid mining operations in some of the outer systems, and later, after he was mandatorily drafted in response to the war effort's acute need for experienced aircrew, doing it here on Nu Earth as a pilot for the Souther military.
    He had two sons and a son-in-law in the service with him. Juan, his eldest, had followed in his father's footsteps and was now serving on the spacer crew of the big interstellar armed transports, thank God as he was generally well out of danger. His son-in-law was an artillery officer right here on Nu Earth, but it was the youngest boy, Philippe, whom Halmada worried about the most. He was an infantryman fighting on one of the war worlds in the Karthage system, eighty light years from Nu Earth. Juan had been told by a spacer colleague who had just come back from that sector that the fighting was heavy there, and none of them had heard from Philippe in over three months. Every time Halmada took off in a shuttle like this, with the cargo compartment behind him full of the broken and bleeding bodies of soldiers seriously injured in battle and being evacuated up to an orbital med-base, he thought of his younger son. He and wondered if somewhere on that other war front, he might be lying there wounded, maybe even dying, on the deck of a shuttle just like this one.
    They were out of the shaft now, accelerating rapidly up into the sky before the Nort long-range artillery gunners could draw a bead on them. The ride up into orbit at this speed would be rough on the injured men behind him, but the alternative was to cut speed and increase all their chances of being blown out of the sky by Nort anti-aircraft missiles or any prowling fighters that might be up here waiting for them.
    Normally, after the injured had been unloaded, he and his three-man flight crew would rest for six hours and then do the whole thing again, loading up with troop reinforcements, supplies or ordnance, or sometimes all three at once. They would then fly back down to Nordstadt to deliver their cargo and pick up more wounded for delivery back up into orbit.
    Back and forth, between Nordstadt and the orbital bases. Flying an average of three times a day in and out of the worst combat zone on Nu Earth, with only one day in ten off for some much needed rest and relaxation, and sometimes not even then. You'd have to be insane to calculate the long-term survival odds of the situation, and the picture-covered wall of remembrance in the aircrew mess, plastered with photographs of all their dead or missing comrades, showed just how lethal those odds truly were. Still, day in day out, Halmada and his crew kept on at it, knowing that, until General