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control of several large areas of it, and now, like the Souther paratroops before them, they dug in and prepared to hold out for as long as they could.
    Hague's plan depended on the Norts' resolve breaking after the collapse of their main front line and the capture of their showpiece city. Now, though, Nordland propaganda made all it could of the bravery and tenacity of the defence forces in Nordstadt, and Nort resolve stiffened rather than weakened, aided by the off-world reinforcements arriving on Nu Earth far sooner than the Milli-com planners had expected.
    Hague's plan, its shortcomings exposed, swiftly began to fall apart.
    The Norts continued to hold out in Nordstadt. Better than that, they managed to retake entire parts of the city in an orbit-drop ironically almost identical to the one first carried out by Hague. Worse still, from the Souther point of view, Nort counter-attacks began to apply immense pressure on the corridor that the Souther armoured forces had driven through enemy territory - the same corridor which the Souther forces in Nordstadt now depended on for reinforcements and resupplying.
    Desperate to regain the advantage, the Souther generals realised that Hague's plan had failed and looked to other ideas. The generals requested other prize objectives and to deliver the knock-out victory blow that had seemed so tantalisingly possible in those early stages of the war. Nordstadt was just the first entry in a litany of names that would soon become grimly familiar to any student of Nu Earth warfare.
    The Dix-I Front. The Magno Line. Tambuk. Nu-Krimea. Fort Neuropa. The Quartz Zone. Sevastipolitan. The Neverglades. The Battle of the Kashan Gates.
    Untold millions of dead. Years of waste. Reworked versions of short-sighted strategies that had already failed in previous actions. All the evidence of a conflict sinking into a crushing war of bloody attrition, with both sides increasingly willing to feed entire armies into the meat grinder in a frantic search to open up the slightest advantage over the enemy.
    Over the intervening years, there were other battles, other conflicts flaring up all over Nu Earth, new fronts to consume the attentions of the strategy planners on both sides of the war. Throughout it all, however, Nordstadt remained, a festering sore for Norts and Southers alike; an open, raw wound, consuming men and materials at a truly terrifying rate.
    The lines of battle changed and then changed again. The besiegers became the besieged and found themselves the besiegers once again. One side and then the other launched yearly fresh offensives to finally drive the enemy from the city and raise their own victory flags over what little remained of Nu Earth's largest and proudest city.
    Its tallest towers and spires were shattered by artillery bombardments. Its parks and gardens were churned into mud fields by shell fire and the heavy treads of armoured vehicles. Its wide boulevards were left choked with the rubble heaps of collapsed buildings and the burned-out wrecks of columns of military vehicles. Its giant factory complexes were gutted by infantry battles that raged for weeks on end, and its suburbs and sprawling patterns of worker habs were levelled by waves of bomber attacks and orbital missile strikes.
    Nordstadt, the city, had been destroyed a dozen times over, but Nordstadt, the target objective, remained intact in the minds of the military planners of both sides, long after it had ceased to hold any remaining strategic worth as the main struggle for Nu Earth moved on to other prizes and other killing fields.
    With Nordstadt, however, too many lives had already been expended for either side to admit that it was no longer an objective worth fighting for. To the Norts, it held deep significance as a symbol of their national defiance, their first foothold on the one-time paradise of Nu Earth, a city now reduced to ruins but still holding out against the treacherous Souther enemy. To the Southers, it