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bloodhounds on their trail. And then she suddenly remembered something else.
    "So we gonna do it?" prompted Gabe. "We gonna tell S-Three all about it when we get back to base?"
    Rafe thought about it, a horrible realisation growing inside her. To have come so close, and not have known it at the time...
    "No, Gabe, we're not. We're going to tell somebody something all right, but it's not going to be anyone at S-Three."
    "Babe?" Gabe was getting better and better at the quizzical tone, she noticed.
    "'Buzzard', Gabe. That's what I'm talking about. Search through those big memory banks of yours and then tell me if that word means anything to you."

FOUR
     
    Nordstadt.
    From the air, it seemed to stretch out forever. A vast sea of shell-cratered rubble, dotted with scattered archipelagos of still-standing ruins, which were the bombed-out and artillery scarred remains of vast blocks of buildings. Twenty years after the first shells fell in Nordstadt, they were still fighting for these prizes. At night, from the position of the reconnaissance drones flying kilometres overhead - or from the spy satellites and orbital weapons platforms looking down from space - the flashes of explosions and the flickering choruses of las-fire from endless night attacks looked like angry waves of light lashing against the stony shores of these few remaining island fortresses.
    The fighting never stopped on Nu Earth and nowhere was that more true than here, in Nordstadt, the former capital of the Greater Nordland Territories on Nu Earth.
    Twenty years ago, at the outset of the war, Grand Marshal Hague, a man whose name was now a curse on the lips of Souther troops all over Nu Earth, conceived a daring plan to secure the planet for the Southern Confederacy. His target was Nordstadt, the largest city on Nu Earth, and the key to the Norts' control of the planet's large northern continent. Hague's plan was simple, if audacious; a massive troop drop from orbit right into the seat of Nort power on Nu Earth. At the same time, four entire Souther armies would launch an armoured thrust through the Nort front lines hundreds of kilometres away. They would push deep into the Nordland-held territories and drive hard to reach Nordstadt itself and link up with the tens of thousands of troops there that had dropped down from orbit.
    The plan, which had violently polarised opinion in the command councils at Milli-com, succeeded better than even some of its advocates had secretly hoped or expected. The orbital drop losses were heavy, just as had been privately predicted, but the troops, all veterans, were drawn from the ranks of legendary para-drop regiments like the Red Shells, the Pegasus Guard and the Orbital Eagles. They dug in hard and withstood the Norts' bruising attempts to dislodge them from the several vital areas of the city that they had seized in the opening hours of the offensive. Likewise, the ground attack element of the plan also brought heavy losses, as entire Nort and Souther armoured divisions smashed into each other in clashes of mutually assured destruction. Hague's planning and bloody-minded determination ultimately prevailed however, as the Nort front line collapsed and columns of Souther tanks and troops carriers swept across the Nort heartlands, brutally overwhelming any opposition in their path as they drove relentlessly onwards towards Nordstadt.
    Twenty-two days and an estimated seven hundred thousand Souther lives later, the battered, beleaguered survivors of the orbital drop emerged from their strong-points amongst the rubble to gratefully embrace their colleagues amongst the first Souther armoured reconnaissance units to reach the city, and Nordstadt was officially declared to have been captured.
    If only things had been that simple.
    Despite the propaganda rush to celebrate the bravery of the orbit-drop troops and to hail Hague's plan as a triumph, the Norts still hadn't been entirely dislodged from the city. They still remained in