Larkin yanked out his knife. Straight silver, thirty centimetres. Tanith First-and-Only warblade. In simple desperation, he lunged at Cuu.
Cuu was ready. He blocked Larkin’s wrist with his left fist, turning the knife aside, and tightened his choke hold. Larkin writhed away, but he was penned in and trapped, like an animal, like prey.
Cuu cuffed him around the temple and, as he swayed, dazed, threw him off the firestep. Larkin landed shoulders first on the duckboards, feeling them squelch underneath him.
His fingers groped for his warknife. It was in Lijah Cuu’s hand.
Cuu stood over him, raised Larkin’s knife to his mouth and slowly licked the blade. The tiniest drop of blood welled up and fell onto Larkin’s forehead.
“You’re fething crazy!” Larkin gasped.
“Sure,” said Cuu, “as sure. We’ve come this far Let’s do it.”
He flew at Larkin, blade extended. Larkin remembered the combat moves Corbec had told him, and rolled, kicking Cuu’s legs away. Cuu crashed over, ripping the blade sideways and tearing a strip out of Larkin’s trousers. Larkin squealed and kicked out again. But Cuu moved like a snake, wrapping himself over and under Larkin’s jerking limbs.
The blade was at Larkin’s throat. He felt its edge bite into his skin.
“What the feth is this?”
Loglas was coming down the trench bay towards them, his hands balled into fists. “Cuu? What the feth are you doing?”
Fighting the pressure at his neck, Larkin screamed. Oddly, his scream sounded like a whistle.
A whistle. Two more blew. Then another.
Loglas halted and looked up. The shell hit the back wall of the firebay and went off, kicking mud and slime and pieces of flakboard fifty metres into the air. A twenty-pounder at the very least.
Larkin saw it, saw the actual shell. The flint-grey casing, the barbed fins, like it was a piet playing in slow motion. He saw the huge flash. He saw one of the fins, a broken chunk of metal twenty centimetres by ten, whizzing out from the impact, turning in the air like a kid’s throw-toy.
Loglas was reeling back from the concussive force of the blast when the flying fin hit him in the face. In slow motion, Larkin saw the way it made Loglas frown, then grimace, then twist his features into an expression no human face could make while it was alive.
Loglas’ face caved in nose first, and his forehead tore away from his scalp like a yanked curtain. His head convulsed with the whiplash, his neck shattering as it bowed back. His face vanished, sucked into the hole that was being driven into the front of his head, and then the whirling fin came out the back, strewing skull shards and bloody matter ahead of it.
“Nooo!” Larkin howled. Then he went deaf as the blast roar hammered him.
Colm Corbec had emerged from his dugout at station 295 approximately sixty seconds before the first shell landed. He paused on the firestep, frowning, cupping his hands to shield his eyes from the rain.
“Chief?” asked Rerval, his vox-officer. “Something up?”
Corbec had smelled ammonil wadding on the wind. Batteries loading up for barrage. Rerval watched with horrid fascination as Corbec slowly raised his whistle and blew.
Rerval grabbed up the vox-horn and started to yell. “Incoming barrage!”
He repeated the cry three times before there was an ominous click which announced that the e-mag pulse of the enemy guns had killed the vox-signal.
Then the shells started to land.
They fell in the rain. They fell like rain. They scattered in and out of the leading fire trench of the Peinforq Line’s 55th sector from station 251 right up to 315 and over into 56th sector as far as 349.
Ten shells a second, heavy gauge from the deep super-siege batteries, and smaller howitzer rounds from the Shadik front. In a space of two minutes, the air was full of mud fog and the atomised steam of debris over a stretch of fifteen kilometres. The ground was quaking.
Between 293 and 294, Rawne and Domor got their troopers into cover. Amongst three platoon, Wheln and Leclan took shrapnel hits, Torez lost an arm and Famoss was decapitated. Five metres of fire trench and a traverse simply vanished in a blizzard of spraying earth.
Sergeant Agun Soric slept through the first thirty seconds of the onslaught. The roar and vibration didn’t wake him. It took Trooper Vivvo, shaking him and yelling in his face.
Soric blinked open his single eye and looked up at Vivvo’s pale face in the halflight of station 292’s dugout.
“What?” he asked, tersely. But there was a background clamour of thunder and voices, and the little camp table was jarring.
“Gak!” Soric snorted, and scrambled up. How could he have slept through this?
Over the constant howl of shells, he could hear debris spattering off the dugout wall. Someone was screaming for a medic.
Short, stocky, grizzled, possessed of a mighty laugh and a temper corrosive as acid, Soric had been a smeltery boss back on Verghast. In the war there, he’d become a troop leader ad hoc, a resistance fighter. His exploits had left him with scar-tissue in place of one eye, a limp, and the eternal respect of Vervunhivers. Ibram Gaunt hadn’t thought twice about making Soric a senior platoon leader.
His ability to sleep was a throwback to the old days, when he’d been able to catch a nap despite the tumult of the smeltery line. Now the knack seemed like a liability.
He bundled Vivvo outside, pressing a hand down on the younger man’s shoulders to keep him low. The air was full of billowing, opaque fog that made them both choke and gasp violently. They couldn’t see anything except the swirling vapour and fuzzy, bright flashes. The parapet at 292 was particularly low and waterlogged; a wide lake formed against its outside lip. The shells falling into it had raised the dense steam and coiling vapour.
“Gak! Back inside, son!” Soric coughed, and shoved Vivvo back into the dugout. He stood alone for a moment, though how alone he couldn’t tell. There could be men just a few metres away, Soric thought, and I can’t see them. He tried to shout out, but his mouth filled with mud droplets and he started choking again. Besides, the continuous noise of detonations totally drowned him out.
Soric staggered back into the dugout. Vivvo was on his hands and knees, his arms wrapped protectively over his head, retching up muddy liquid.
“We’re going to die, boss!” he hacked.
“Did we die on Verghast?”
“N-no…”
“Then I’m sure as gak not going to die on this arse-wipe world.” Soric sat down on the canvas stool. Something jabbed into his hip and he discovered a message shell in the pocket of his breeches. He couldn’t remember putting a message shell in his pocket.
He unscrewed the brass cap and shook out a small fold of blue tissue paper. A sheet from a Guard issue despatch pack. Every sergeant had one, though they were seldom needed because of the vox-link. They were for emergencies, and Soric was sure he hadn’t used his pack since they’d arrived. But when he looked around, he saw it lying on the dugout’s shelf, the paper seal torn off and the top sheet missing.
Soric unfolded the sheet. The brief message was hand written in pencil. “Bombardment for sixteen minutes, then foot assault from the north-east, under cover of the drain outfall.”
He read it again. His fingers shook a little. There was no mistake about it. It was his handwriting.
A whooping shell struck the third traverse along from station 289, and threw clods of earth and pieces of wood and brick out along the fire trench. Gaunt threw himself flat, dragging Beltayn down with him. The troopers around them were hurled over by the concussion.
As debris and rain spattered down over them, Gaunt got up. He’d lost his cap. A man was wailing pitifully nearby.
“Beltayn?”
His adjutant rose slowly. “You all right?”
“Feth,” Beltayn grumbled, fiddling with his left hand. His thumb was dislocated. “Something’s awry here…”
Beltayn’s voice faded off as he saw the corpse of Trooper Sheric on
the duckboards at his feet. The blast had mutilated the side of Sheric’s head and jammed a broken plank through his upper torso. It made Beltayn’s dislocated thumb suddenly seem quite insignificant.
Nearby, two other men from fifteen platoon were trying to field dress Trooper Kell’s torn belly. It was Kell doing the wailing: a feeble, sick-animal sound. Yellowish loops of intestine were spilling from the bright red gashes in his black tunic.
Sergeant Theiss, the normally cheerful commander of fifteen platoon, ran up with one of his corpsmen. He said something to Gaunt that was inaudible over the shell fall. Gaunt waved him off and pointed to Kell.
Gaunt had been at station 289, reviewing muster, when the bombardment started. He cursed the sense of displacement. His own platoon, one, was at station 291, with Caober in charge. There was no way he’d be able to rejoin them in this.
He got up onto the firestep and viewed back down the line through the scope Beltayn handed up to him.
“Throne of Terra…” he murmured.
The valley was an inferno for as far as he could see. Banks of smoke, as vast and dense as thunderheads, hung over the fire trenches, obscuring the view. Shell blasts stippled through the smoke, catastrophic and murderous. An immense fire burned down in the vicinity of 256. At 260, it looked as if an entire section had been gutted. The barrage was creeping back into the supply and communication trenches. Shields had come on over the rearline and command sections, but they weren’t the day’s targets. Today, the Shadik guns were striking at the infantry lines. And that could mean only one thing. It was the prelude to an offensive.
A whistle blew. It was Kolea at his spotter scope. “They’re coming!” he cried.
Criid tumbled out of the scrape she’d been sheltering in. Steam and fyceline fumes clogged the trenchway. Station 290 had taken some hits in her post, but nothing like the punishment she’d seen fall on Maroy’s section.
She blew her own whistle. “Fix blades! Stand ready to repel!” She dearly wanted to check on Maroy’s mob, but there was no time for that. Around her, the troops of nine platoon got up onto the firestep, warknives locked into the lugs of their lasrifles.
The shells were still falling. It seemed to her impossible that the enemy would advance into this.
But she trusted Gol Kolea. He’d never lied before and he wouldn’t lie now.
Crouched on the rain-slick paving slabs of the step, she peered out through a loophole. Through the churning vapour, she saw figures, running forward at a halting pace, weapons swinging. Mkoll had briefed the First. Don’t let them get close enough to deploy grenades. Hand bombs are their way into the line.
But a spring gun or a pneumatic mortar could throw a lot further than a man.
“Hartwig! Target the slopes, now!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
In the face of the bombardment, their little answering barrage seemed feeble as it began. Spring guns cracked and mortars drummed. There was a satisfying ripple of light munitions from beyond the parapet.
“Keep it up!” she yelled. She risked another look and saw the advancing line of Shadik troopers, just blurs in the fog.
Many staggered or were thrown up as ball bombs and mortar rounds fell amongst them.
She glanced down the line. Nine platoon was crouched, ready. She saw Vril spit and shake out his neck. She saw Jajjo drying the grip of his las on his cloak. She saw Nessa, still as a statue at her long-las. Nessa’s hair was still boyishly short from the pre-mission buzz-cut she’d had on Phantine, and from some angles she could be mistaken for one of the younger men. One trooper — Criid thought it was Subeno — was vomiting with nerves, but still holding his place.
“Straight silver!” Criid bellowed. “Step up and fire at will!” Her first battlefield order to the troops.
As one, nine platoon rose and rested their lasrifles on the parapet. They started shooting, dropping the nearest Shadik assaulters as support blasts from Hartwig’s gun-dens lofted up over them.
Criid tried to find a target, but it was like aiming into murky water such was the density of the smoke boiling back off no-man’s land. A raider in a chain-veil helmet suddenly loomed, winding up to hurl a stick bomb, and she squeezed the trigger. By her side, DaFelbe saw him too, and they killed the raider simultaneously. The stick grenade bounced away and blew up.
Now there were more, and they were running for the line. Some moved in groups, carrying makeshift storm-shields made of overlapped flakboard. Criid slammed off five shots at one shield, but it didn’t slow down. It was just six metres from the parapet when a spray of fluid fire washed across it and turned it into a squealing mass of flames and thrashing human torches.
Lubba fired again, hosing the immediate vicinity with his flamer. Criid could distinctly hear his tanks knocking and spluttering despite the fury of the shells. Tracer shots began stitching across the muddy slope from the platoon’s support weapon. Figures danced and jerked. Some hung in the wire.
Hand bombs started to bounce in at them. Criid had to duck fast as one went off right under the parapet. DaFelbe toppled off the step, clutching his right cheek where a hunk of shrapnel had punched into his jaw.
“Medic!” Criid yelled. She started firing again. They were so damn close now, and despite everything, there were so damn many.
Brin Milo, the youngest Ghost of all, was right beside his platoon sergeant when the raiders came leaping in. One went right over Milo’s head and fell down as he landed awkwardly on the duckboards. Sergeant Domor turned and shot him dead where he lay.
They’d been swarmed. Sheer numbers had flung themselves at 293 and 294 and made it over the parapet. Now three and twelve platoon faced the very worst that trench warfare had to offer. Hand-to-hand in the narrow trench gully.
The raiders wore khaki and brown, and most had gas-hoods and heavy helmets damped over their heads. They carried old-pattern autorifles, pistols and curved hangers.
The world became very, very small. Just a tight space between earthen walls, deafened by shells, full of jostling bodies. Milo slashed and jabbed with his bayonet staggering back a step as blood gouted over him, and then fired point-blank at a khaki figure clawing at him.
For a while — longer than most of the Ghosts had been comfortable about to be truthful — Milo had been the only civilian to escape the fall of Tanith. Gaunt had rescued him, though sometimes Milo liked to explain it had been the other way around. Because of that, he’d been seen by all as one part mascot, one part lucky charm… and his skill with the Tanith pipes had come in handy.
Milo had made trooper as soon as he was old enough. According to Corbec, Varl, Larkin, Bragg — God-Emperor rest him — Milo had received more combat experience by the time he sewed on his first cap badge than many Guardsmen did in five years.
That was how it went when you were one of Gaunt’s chosen. At his own request, Milo had been placed in Domor’s platoon. He knew a spot in one, Gaunt’s own, was likely, but he wanted to distance himself a little from his “saviour”. And from the notion that he was Gaunt’s lucky mascot.
Brin Milo was no mascot. He was twenty-one years old standard, tall and strong, and he’d take no feth from anyone now. Despite his age, the Ghosts — especially the Tanith — took him quite seriously. Though Milo only suspected it, both Gaunt and Corbec considered him squad leader material.
Brin Milo had something to prove. It would be his destiny to have something to prove until the day he died.
Barely twenty metres north of Milo, Rawne’s platoon was fending off an assault too. The trench was packed with wrestling, stinking, sweaty bodies. Rawne couldn’t see more than a few metres in any direction. He fired his laspistol, and slashed out with his warknife.
Feygor, soaked in blood, appeared alongside him, and together they smashed a little way into the khaki bodies bottled in the trench. They were treading over the wounded and the dead of both sides alike. Melwid was with them, and, briefly, Caffran and Leyr.
“Crush them against the traverse!
” Rawne shouted. “Where’s Neskon? Where the feth is Neskon?”
The squad’s flame trooper was nowhere to be seen. Nothing was anywhere to be seen, except the churning, stabbing figures of the enemy.
Then a pistol banged, its noise muffled by the close-packed bodies. Rawne saw Melwid fall, clutching his belly. He felt a dull ache in his own midriff. Feygor yelled something and impaled the owner of the pistol on his bayonet.
Rawne fell over. He didn’t mean to, but his legs had gone numb. He slumped sideways and hit his head on the revetment. Sounds had become dull and distant.
What a fething stupid way to fight a war, Rawne thought.
“A fething stupid what?” said a voice behind him.
He struggled over and looked up. He dearly wished his legs would work. Jessi Banda, the platoon sniper, was curled into a scrape in the trench wall behind him.
“What?” said Rawne.
“A fething stupid what did you say?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“Way to fight a war,” he replied. “Did I say that out loud then?”
“More kinda screamed it,” she said.
Someone stood on his legs and he yelped. Banda reached down and dragged him up into her scrape, holding him tightly so he wouldn’t slip back into the base of the trench.
“You’ll be okay,” Banda said.
“Of course!” Rawne snapped. He paused. “Why?”
She didn’t reply. He looked down and saw the blood soaking his lower tunic and his breeches. He saw how limp and lifeless his legs were.
“Oh feth!” he barked. That wasn’t right. Not right at all.
He turned his head, angry now, and looked at Banda. “Why the feth aren’t you fighting, woman? I thought you females were meant to be tough!”
“Oh, I’d love to,” she said. A shell went off overhead, and Rawne flinched into her. When he did, it made her cough. She aspirated blood out over her chin.