The dozens became hundreds, the hundreds thousands. Criid blinked. He saw regimental banners rise and bugles sound. Androman Regulars, he made out from the gilt thread of one banner, Sixth Regiment. Regular Imperial Guard at battalion strength, swarming in from shore landings. The tide of men flooded the concourse and advanced behind the titan like the train of a cloak. Criid could see the white and yellow tinder strikes of their rifle fire as they aimed up into the blockhouses. Rockets whooped upwards on erratic arches of smoke.
“Get up,” Criid told Boulder. “Get up. Let’s go.”
VI
Their confidence temporarily lifted by the company of so many others, AT 137 moved forwards. Commissar Sobile hardly had to use his whip. They surged out onto a vast yard or parade ground beneath the network of emplacements, following the plodding titan.
The enemy guns were still pounding. All down the coast, for kilometres in either direction, the defences of K’ethdrac ripped into the morning sky, pummelling the air with concussion and echoes of concussion. A shroud of fycelene vapour clung like a sea fog.
The sky seemed, to Criid, to be the greatest casualty of all. It was swollen with smoke and the light from massive fires. Great black and orange mushrooms welled up into it. To the north, thick squadrons of attacking aircraft swirled around like flocks of birds gathering to migrate.
One of the more distant titans, visible over the line of burning roofs, took a direct hit from a super-heavy emplacement. The centre of the torso and the head blew up in a vast fireball that rose, writhing and expanding, and finally separated into a crowning ring of flame that wobbled into the sky. Its structure shorn through, the torso plating failed and the heavy weapon limbs, the titan’s arms, fell away and tore the folding halves of the body with them. The rest of the machine remained standing: locked, frozen legs and a black iron pelvis gutted by fire.
A great moan of dismay rose from the foot troops at the sight. The Androman Regulars began to charge the emplacements, bugles and drums sounding.
Criid was caught in the surge for a moment and was carried along. Men in brown uniforms were all around him and he couldn’t see another shape in the drab grey of his own unit.
“Keep going, boy!” one of the Androman troopers told him. He was a big fellow with sallow skin, as hirsute as the rest of his breed. He grinned at Criid.
“Come on! The Emperor protects!”
Criid wasn’t so sure. He was pretty certain he ought to be linked to his own company. He searched for his comrades, but his foot caught on a slab of rubble and he fell.
The Guardsmen charged past him. Some were yelling battle cries. He tried to get up again, but was knocked over twice by barging men. Some cursed him.
Enemy fire began again. It fell like sleet on the Imperial force from gun nests and strongpoints up on the looming emplacements. The spirit that had driven the men forward en masse left them. The advancing flow recoiled.
Criid got up and started to run. A series of mortar shells planted themselves into the rockcrete not far from him and sprouted into cones of fire and grit. Two or three men were thrown bodily into the air and came down heavily like sacks full of rock. Others were cut down as they turned back, smacked into by whining cannon fire. Each shot wailed for a split second before it arrived and made the thwuck of impact that brought a man down in a mist of blood.
Criid saw the big Androman who had spoken to him. He was staggering about, sneezing, spitting and aspirating blood through a face that had lost its nose, top lip and upper teeth. The man flailed past him and Criid didn’t see what happened to him after that.
Criid ran across the concourse. It was littered with bodies. The Androman Guardsmen were now flooding off to the left, shrinking back from the killing ground below the emplacements. The titan strode on, oblivious to the tidal changes in the infantry around its feet, oblivious to the small-arms fire and mortars pinging off its hull.
Some parts of AT 137 had taken cover in a rockcrete gulley leading to a heavy loading door. The loading door, riveted metal, was shut and had resisted attempts to open it.
Sobile saw Criid approach along with other stragglers, and cracked his whip at them agitatedly.
“Watch the unit and stay together, you worthless morons! Stay together and stay focused! How can we achieve our objectives if we don’t have unit cohesion?”
Criid wanted to answer back. He wanted to ask how they were supposed to achieve their objectives if they didn’t know what their objectives were. He wanted to ask if Sobile had a fething clue what the objectives were himself. Criid had a long list of questions.
One of Sobile’s petulant whip cracks caught him across the right shoulder and the corner of his jaw and he forgot about his questions and his lists. The corded leather sliced right through his jacket and drew blood along his collar bone. It felt like his jaw had been dislocated.
“Get up!” Sobile ordered, generally disinterested in Criid’s plight. The pain was so sharp that Criid could barely move. His eyes filled with hot tears.
“Get up!” Sobile snarled and then turned to the others. “I’ll damn well skin the next moron who forgets to focus. Are we clear?” He coiled up his whip and glanced at Sergeant Kexie. Kexie was rubbing a scratch on his gnarled cheek. The troopers were all gathered in the shadow of the gulley, panting, trying to draw breath. Some were sobbing.
“Sergeant?” Sobile said.
“Break into squads, advance that way across the yard,” Kexie said, indicating with his lasrifle. “Come at the nearest emplacement from the side, see if we can’t storm it and shut it down.”
“Instructions are clear, 137,” Sobile thundered. “Get into position!”
Artillery, a kilometre or so away, was suddenly thumping like the drums of a giant marching band. The skyline lit up with pulsing flashes. Beyond the gulley, the Androman troops were massing for another attempt to get across the parade ground.
Criid got up. Blood was leaking out of the split flesh at the corner of his jaw, and his shoulder throbbed. He could feel the tissue stiffening and swelling. The fingers of his right hand were numb. Getting into position was a joke. Of the two hundred and fifty individuals that made up AT 137, about forty were gathered in that dank gulley. Criid didn’t know if that meant the rest of them were dead, or were simply somewhere else, equally bewildered. Another question for his list. This chunk of AT 137 seemed to qualify as the “main section”, because it happened to have both the commissar and the sergeant with it.
There were barely any surviving vestiges of predetermined fire teams or squads. People just joined up with people they knew into assault teams that had roughly the right number of bodies. Criid got in with Ganiel’s mob, along with Bugears, Socket, Trask and Fourbox. He saw Boulder in another gaggle with Corporal Carvel. Boulder was looking confused and dazed. The cut over his eye had begun to bleed more freely.
“Where is your weapon? Where is your issued weapon, trooper?” Sobile shouted.
Boulder suddenly realised that the commissar was speaking to him. He looked around and blinked. His hands were empty, and they’d been empty for a long time, and he hadn’t noticed. The last time Criid had seen Boulder’s rifle, he’d been busy dropping it in the shell hole. It was probably still there.
“I think I dropped it,” Boulder began. He tried to curl his lips into a smile, but the full, trademark laugh wouldn’t come.
No, no, no, Criid thought. Boulder had no idea what he was heading for. He wasn’t thinking.
You didn’t drop your rifle. You didn’t lose your rifle. A Guardsman protected the rifle issued to him with his life, and vice versa. It was basic and fundamental.
“Gross infringement, article 155,” Sobile said and shot Boulder through the head. Boulder jerked as if he’d been told surprising news. It obviously wasn’t funny news, because he didn’t laugh. He pitched over, slack and heavy, and hit his sagging head against the gulley wall on his way down.
There was a moment when even the artillery seemed silen
t. It was the first ten-ninety Criid had ever witnessed. He felt sick. In a day filled with waste and hopelessness, this was the most obscene thing yet.
“Anyone else?” Sobile asked holstering his pistol.
Everyone looked away. They didn’t want to catch Sobile’s eyes, or look at Boulder.
“Ech, you soft-shit scalps!” Kexie snapped. “You want to be proper bloody Guardsmen, you better show me and the Emperor what you’ve got. On the whistle…”
The sergeant’s whistle blew. They broke from cover and ran, leaving Boulder alone in the shadows with steam gently rising from the wound that had killed him.
VII
Corporal Ganiel’s squad reached the western corner of the large emplacement without incident. They were all out of breath from the dash across the open, and wired from the fear of making that dash. Behind them, smoke wreathed the scattered rubble. A noisy, widespread firefight was raging beyond a row of warehouses, spraying tracers and backflash into the lowering sky, and they could see Corporal Carvel’s team spread out and running for the building’s eastern end. Sporadic, almost tired cannon fire barked lazily from the roof high above, and kicked up dirt around them.
Up close, the building was dead and dark. It was built not from stone but from some synthetic or polymer, faced with pitched wooden boards. Criid could see sections of the chipped resin in places where gunfire had shredded off the wood. On close examination, it looked less like polymer and more like bone or fossilised tissue. There was a smell to it, up close. It was a warm, animal smell, slightly rancid, slightly spicy. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
The sergeant came up behind them, with another of the squads.
“Move up!” he grunted.
“There’s no door, sergeant,” said Ganiel.
A missile squealed overhead and caused a large explosion beyond the ruptured sea wall. Two fighters—Thunderbolts, Criid guessed—swept in past the emplacements at rooftop height and peeled out towards the northern districts of K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir. The cityscape was dense with thousands of columns of smoke like trees in a woodland.
Sobile moved up with another squad. He’d found the pardoner somewhere. The man, unfit and unhealthy, was wheezing as he muttered the words of grace and benediction to a wounded man.
Carvel’s squad moved around the eastern end of the emplacement. They’d been gone about thirty seconds when there was a fizzling crump that tore the air like dry paper, and a flash lit up behind the corner where they’d vanished.
Kexie ordered Ganiel’s team forward to investigate. They had no man-to-man vox. Either there hadn’t been spare micro-bead kit available for issue at AT 137’s sudden advancement to active status, or a rat-tail dreg outfit like AT 137 didn’t deserve such costly luxuries. They had a unit vox-officer with a field set, a Kolstec called Mover, but Criid hadn’t seen him since boarding. He was probably dead along with Major Brundel.
Covering each other with jerky, nervous switches of their lasrifles, Ganiel, Criid and Trask reached the eastern corner. Bugears and Fourbox were close behind.
Around the corner, a wide service lane led up to loading shutters built into the back of the emplacements, access for the heavy carts of the ammunition trains coming up from the silos. The area had been hit comprehensively during the first phase strikes. The Navy bombardment had missed the blockhouse gun emplacements but had expertly flattened a row of empty bunkers behind them. The service lane was littered with debris and rubble from the bunkers. It was quiet back there, just some drifting smoke. The heavy weapons within the emplacement had been silent for some minutes.
“Where’s Carvel?” Ganiel asked.
One patch of the rockcrete roadway was smoking with particular vigour. The smoke rose from a wide, tarry puddle of debris. It was organic debris. Criid smelled burned meat and took a step back.
“Carvel…” he gagged.
The remains of the five men lay in the dark, smoking scorch mark. They’d been incinerated, although some parts of them were still identifiable: skulls, ribcages, long bones, heat-twisted rifles. The bones were black-wet with sticky meat and cooked blood.
“Get back,” Ganiel said.
“Good idea,” Kexie muttered. He’d arrived behind them to take a look. “Ech, get running.”
He said something about a tank that Criid didn’t hear properly because of the sudden roar of a flamer behind them, and a gust of heat singed the back of his neck as he ran.
He never saw the tank, but he heard and smelt it—the deep, grinding rumble of its engines, the clatter of its treads, the stink of its oil. According to Kexie, it had been hull-down in the ruins of the bunkers, guarding the service lane with its hull-mounted flamer.
They ran from it. Disturbed, it roused from its lair and came after them.
“Back up. Back up. Find cover!” Kexie yelled as they rejoined the others. “Bandit armour right behind us!”
Sobile started to run. They all started to run, to scatter, but Sobile ran in a way that suggested to Criid that he no longer cared about his duties and responsibilities, and certainly didn’t care to risk his skin any longer trying to preserve either unit cohesion or the moronic lives of any of the rejects he’d been lumbered with.
Criid heard the flamer roar again as the tank cleared the emplacement. He looked for cover, any cover, spotted a shell hole in the rockcrete and threw himself into it.
He’d been there before. In the oily seepage at the bottom of the hole lay Boulder’s rifle.
VIII
He stayed in the hole for what seemed like a year or two. He wrapped his arms around his head, but they didn’t block out the increasing volume of the clattering tracks and the throbbing motor. The gushing roar of the flamer sounded like an ogre’s wet snarl.
There were screams. There were a lot of screams. Some lasted longer than a scream should decently last.
He tried to block it all out. All he could see was the blood-red sky above, filmed with driving smoke, and the occasional afterglow of a big flash. He kept expecting it to be blocked out by the black, oiled belly of the tank as it rattled over the top of him.
Rolled up like an unborn child, Dalin Criid felt more mortal than he’d ever felt in his life. All the self-deceiving vitality of youth drained from him and left just a silt of pain behind. His needs reduced to an undignified, simple level, and became the sorts of things that grown men scorned as weaknesses in the mess hall or the bar room, and cried out for shame in extremis. In a hole in the ground, in the path of a tank, for instance.
In that moment, he knew with astonishing clarity that this happened, sooner or later, to every man or woman who became an Imperial Guardsman. It was the moment when a person faced up to the fact that everything he’d bragged about wanting—action, glory, battlescars and reputation—was, without exception, chimerical and of no value or reward, and everything he’d disparaged as weak and soft, and cowardly was all that genuinely mattered.
He wanted the noise to stop. He wanted to be elsewhere too, but the noise was the key thing. It was relentless and he needed it to stop. He wanted the pain in his face and shoulder to go away. He wanted to see his ma. He wanted to be eleven years old again, playing paper boats with his baby sister in the deck gutters of a troop ship.
In that hole in the ground, so like a grave, these things acquired a sudden and resonating value that went far beyond comfort or escape. There was something else he yearned for too, something he couldn’t quite resolve. A face, maybe.
He understood that he was experiencing the soldier’s universal epiphany, but he didn’t know what would happen next. Was it fleeting? Was it a mood that came and went, or was his heart now hollowed out, his courage permanently compromised? Had his fighting mettle perished? Was he of no use as a soldier?
What actually happened next was a loud detonation, fierce and visceral, that sounded like two anvils colliding at supersonic velocities. The metallic impact physically hurt, jarring his bones and making his sinuses ache.
Then there was a second explosion, much richer and throatier with the sound of flames than the first.
Criid heard the sergeant’s muffled voice, as if from a long way off. “137! 137, regroup! Regroup!” The whistle blew.
He raised himself up out of the shell hole and saw figures moving through a dense heat-haze. The haze was rippling off a vast bonfire twenty metres away, a huge stack of black material the size of a revel fire, swollen with leaping orange flames.
Criid got out of the hole. He looked at Boulder’s rifle and wondered if he should take it with him. In the end, he decided to pop the power cell and take just that.
He walked through the washing heat towards his regrouping unit. There were bodies on the ground, charred and smouldering. One was the trooper Four-box had given the name Socket. His whole form had been wizened and shrunk by extreme heat, but Criid could tell it was Socket because, mysteriously, Socket’s face had remained untouched, like a mask tied to a pitch-black dummy.
Kexie was drawing the unit together. There was no sign of Sobile, which was the only decent thing that had happened since they’d arrived.
“What happened to the tank?” Criid asked Brick-maker.
The Binar nodded to the big bonfire.
“That’s it?”
It was, apparently, it. No one could say exactly what had killed the tank, but the best guess was “a stray shot from something big a long way off. According to the sergeant, “This kind of shit happens on the battlefield sometimes.”
Commissar Sobile turned up alive a few minutes later, so that kind of shit happened on a battlefield too apparently. He got busy with his whip, and tore two troopers new exits for losing their helmets.
They moved north, up the line of the emplacements, towards an enormous firefight about a kilometre away. The titan, now long gone, had flattened the emplacements on its way past. Most were burning and broken open to the sky. Some had burst, leaking dark, sticky fluid out in wide lakes around their foundations. It was as if the buildings were bleeding. Kexie warned them not to go near the stuff, but no one had the slightest inclination to anyway, and nobody wanted to take a look inside the ruins.