“Not today though, I think,” she said.
“Feth! Where are you hit?”
“Worry about yourself, not me,” she answered.
“Banda! Trooper Banda! Where are you hit?”
She didn’t reply. She’d passed out. Rawne found the broken chunk of Shadik bayonet still sticking out of her rib cage.
Banda was so limp, she nearly toppled into the fire trench. Rawne clawed onto her and held her in place, helpless himself, trying to stop the both of them getting trampled in the vicious, endless welter of close combat seething along the trench.
“Medic! Medic!” he cried. No one was listening. Her head nodded down. Rawne tried to support her. “You’ll be okay,” he told her. “I fething order you to be okay…”
Head low, Colm Corbec scurried down the zig-zag defence trench that joined his dugout to the main front facing of 295. The fury of the long range Shadik artillery was still smashing up the day, but it seemed eerily still in his part of the line. There was nobody coming at them.
He came up along the step, patting Surch, Orrin, Irvinn and Cown reassuringly on their shoulders as he came by. Each one was crouched at the parapet with his gun slotted into a loophole or bracket.
Corbec dropped in beside Muril. She was training her long-las back and forth, her eye pressed to the rubber gusset of her scope.
“Care to guess where the feth the enemy is today?” he asked.
She chuckled. That dirty laugh he liked so much.
They don’t seem to be interested in us, chief.
“You making anything?” he wondered.
Muril shook her head. “I thought I saw a wire-cutting party out there at the fifty-metre mark a few minutes ago. But it wasn’t. Just bodies on the wire, stirred by the blasts. Nothing else.”
“May I?” he asked. She slid her long-las out of the loop and passed it to him. He set it to his shoulder and rose slowly to the top of the parapet.
“Chief!” she hissed.
He knew he was taking a risk, but this total lack of activity was driving him spare. Corbec peered into the scope, adjusting the setting ring, waiting a second as the optic scanner read his retina and automatically recalibrated for his eyesight.
There was nothing out front but mud, wire tangles, twisted piquets, craters and streams of white and grey smoke driven almost horizontal by the crosswind.
He looked to his right. Just five hundred metres south, at 294 and 293, he could see a hellish trenchfight tearing through the positions occupied by Rawne and Domor. Swarms of khaki-clad troopers were pushing up from the mire and assaulting the main line. To his left, again no more than half a kilometre away, the defences held by their Krassian allies were swamped with raiders. Corbec could hear the frantic crackle of small-arms and the bang of grenades.
He dropped back down. “This is fething… peculiar,” he said, passing the sniper weapon back to Muril with a grateful nod. “Why the feth aren’t they coming at us?”
“They know the great Colonel Corbec is here and they don’t want to risk it?” Muril suggested.
“You’re a sweet girl, and obviously correct, but there has to be more than that.”
Muril deftly calibrated her gunsight back to her own requirements and sat back on the step, straightening her right leg and flexing it. Maintaining the firing crouch clearly caused her discomfort in her freshly rebuilt pelvis.
“Maybe put yourself in their place?” she said.
“Like what?”
“If you were ordered to take this line, what would you do?”
“I’d attack under the barrage,” he said simply. “And go for the weakest point,” said Cown from his place behind Muril. “Well, feth… yes!” Corbec said.
He jumped off the step and planted a kiss on Muril’s dirty brow. “Thank you for your suggestion!” he declared. She was nonplussed. Then he put a smacker on Cown’s forehead too. “And thank you for your insight!”
“What, chief?”
“Imagine! You’re going for a line. Frontal assault. But before you get there, the units either side of you break through into their areas. Why lose men pressing home at an unbroken line? Any field commander worth his water would divert towards one of the holes already kicked in. You can bet the bastards intended for us are in support at 294 or 296 right now. Text book. Secure and hold and then hit us from the sides, along the trench. Vox-man!”
Rerval ran up. “Sir?”
“We got links again yet?”
“No sir.”
“Okay… here’s what we do. Every second man, stand down from the step. Those still on station, hold and stay vigilant. Irvinn, you’ve got fire command here on the step. First sign of action, set up will-fire response and blow your fething whistle.”
“Yes, chief.”
“The rest split into two groups. Where’s Bewl?”
“Chief?”
“Take half. Move south. Support Domor’s mob. Hold the trench lengthways.”
Bewl nodded, and moved off to communicate the instruction to the troops along the south end of the line section.
“The rest with me,” Corbec said.
The rest were Rerval, Cown, Mkvenner, Sillo, Veddekin and Ponore. Detowine, two platoon’s new flamer man made the cut too, but Corbec sent him back to the step. If an assault did come late, he’d need the flamer on the line, along with Surch and Loell’s .30 support.
Corbec double-timed the six men up along the trench, moving north. Every Ghost still on the firestep wished them the God-Emperor’s grace as they went by.
The attack had been going on for seventeen minutes according to Corbec’s timepiece. The smoke and steam kicked up by the immense barrage had now become so chronic, someone, presumably in the support lines, had started to fire off starshells to light the field. The flares served no good purpose except to turn everything into a white haze.
Corbec’s team ran on, pausing and flinching every few metres as yet another shell went in over them, shook the ground, and anointed them with a rain of loose earth. By the time they reached the armoured traverse that marked the edge of station 295, Corbec realised he was out of breath.
“You okay, chief?” Mkvenner asked him quietly, so the others couldn’t hear.
“My bones are too fething old, son, and they’ve seen too much war.” Corbec paused a moment and coughed. He’d always led from the front, and that had cost him. He’d lost the little finger of his left hand at Voltis City. That had been the start of it. The start of the tally. Menazoid had hurt him hard. Hagia worse. On Phantine, he’d been lucky to come out alive. Deep wounds to the body and leg, taken during the Cirenholm feth-for-all, followed up with a nosocomial dose of blood-poisoning.
It was a wonder he wasn’t made up of augmetic prosthetics.
It was a wonder his luck had lasted this long.
A Verghastite trooper named Androby occupied the last slot before the traverse.
“Lot of noise, these last few minutes,” he reported. “Not much to see.” He’d been using a battered artillery scope borrowed from the mortar teams to keep a watch round the blind end of the traverse.
“Hold here, and stand ready to relay an alarm shout back down the line,” Corbec told him.
They moved around the traverse. For the second time in a week, Mkvenner was advancing around a defence-divide into what could well be an enemy-stormed trench. Corbec knew that. He’d heard Mkoll’s debrief about the fight at station 143.
Mkvenner didn’t show any nerves at all. He was quiet, expressionless, his camo-cape draped over him. He led the way with his lasrifle up against his shoulder so that everywhere he looked, his gun pointed. He was so silent Corbec couldn’t tell he was there unless he could see him.
Corbec followed him, laspistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. The pin was already out and Corbec was holding the spoon tightly in place with his big, hairy fist.
Behind Corbec were Sillo and Cown. Both had rifles with warknives fixed. Sillo had been a dye-cutter on Verghast,
and he was quick and dependable. Cown, good old Cown, was one of the Tanith die-hards, who’d been at the front of just about everything since the awful day they’d first shipped out. He was still getting used to the augmetic bicep and collarbone he’d won at Cirenholm.
To their rear came Ponore and Veddekin, both Verghastites. Ponore was a young, lank prematurely bald fellow who complained incessantly, and Corbec didn’t like him much. Veddekin was taller, buck-toothed and younger. Both of them knew how to use a lasgun, and both had seen action, most particularly on Phantine. Corbec wondered if either of them had killed yet. He didn’t know, and it was too late to ask.
Rerval brought up the back. He’d left his vox-set with Androby, and carried an extra bag of field dressings. Corbec knew Rerval was a solid fighter. It was easy to forget the war-skills of the vox-troopers. Corbec hoped Raglon would change that conception now he’d been promoted from vox ops to platoon leader. Besides his rifle, Rerval carried a Pharos-pattern flare pistol so they could signal back if things started to cook.
The trench seemed empty. The light was bad and the air was misty with ordnance fumes. Corbec could smell wet soil, promethium, the raw stink of the untreated timber used for the duckboards.
This section of fire trench ran for ten metres, curving slightly north-west, and ended in another solid traverse. There was an opening in the back wall four metres in that went through to a gun-den. Mkvenner checked it, and reported it was empty. A pneumo-mortar and shells, but no gunners.
“This is gakking w—” Ponore began.
Mkvenner put a finger to his lips and the Verghastite shut up.
They crocodiled along, squad members hugging alternate walls.
Here was a discarded lasrifle. Here, the broken haft of an entrenching tool. Items of personal kit were visible in the scrapes. Musette bags, picts of loved ones, igniters and smokes, respirator masks, vacuum-packed ration bricks, bed rolls, balled-up woollen vests.
Like they’d left in a hurry, Corbec thought.
They reached the second traverse. Mkvenner held up a hand. He pointed to the flakboarded back wall of the trench. There was a clotted splatter of blood, matted with strands of hair.
Mkvenner made a signal, one hand over the other, and dropped onto his belly. Corbec stepped aside and let Cown through. Cown and Mkvenner edged round the end of the sturdy earthwork divide, Mkvenner on his front, Cown crouched over him so that two lasguns, stacked, would greet whatever was round there.
“Ahead,” Cown whispered.
Corbec led the others around.
The next fire-bay was empty too, of the living at least.
Fresh corpses virtually filled the trench bottom. Slaughtered Krassian troopers, dead Shadik raiders, all twisted and wrapped under and over each other in an orgiastic celebration of feral murder. Smoke plumes drifted out from some las-punctures where uniform fabric had started to burn. Fountains of blood had splashed up the wall and step in some places. In others, grenades had rendered bodies down into abattoir chunks, and scorched the earth walls black with soot. Where they stepped, the duckboards sank and bright pools of blood welled up through the slats.
The smell was truly nauseating. Blood, cordite, offal, sweat, fyceline, faeces.
All the Ghosts had seen war before, to a greater or lesser extent, but this sight stung them. So many bodies, packed in so tight, into such a Hide space.
“Gak…” said Ponore.
“Shut up,” Corbec told him. He tried to walk forward, but there was nowhere except bodies to step on. Corpses groaned and sighed, burped and farted as he put his weight on them, squeezing lungs and guts. He was trying to make his way to the mouth of the communications trench that opened into this strand of fire trench halfway along.
It was hard balancing on the dead. Corbec reached his hands out to brace himself against the sides of the trenchway. He spat a disgusted curse as his weight caused a little geyser of blood to squirt from a Krassian’s chest wound.
Veddekin suddenly swivelled, and the movement startled Corbec. Veddekin’s lasrifle banged and a bright bolt of energy whickered across the width of the trench and punched through the face of a Shadik raider who had just appeared at the parapet.
The raider jerked with whiplash and then toppled head first onto the firestep before falling over, back and feet first, into the bottom of the defence. Corbec had jumped so much at the shot he’d lost his footing and fallen over amongst the heaped dead.
“Sharp eyes,” Mkvenner growled in approval to Veddekin. The scout leapt onto the step, and swung his weapon up, shooting dead the next two Shadik who loomed up at the parapet.
The Ghosts rushed the step then, joining Mkvenner and firing down into the smoke-thickened reaches of no-man’s land at the assault party that was trying to get in.
“Gak! There’s too many of them!” Ponore yelled.
“Aim. Fire. Repeat,” Mkvenner urged.
Corbec looked up at the backs of his boys on the step and struggled to rise out of the warm layers of bodies. He got his left hand on a timber support and—
He froze. The grenade spoon tumbled from his clawing hand.
He’d dropped the fething bomb.
He looked down, looked down into twisted limbs and staring faces and spools of steaming guts. It was down there somewhere.
If he cried out a warning, he knew his squad would break and the assaulters would be all over them. If he didn’t he and most likely two or three of his team would be killed.
“Sacred feth!” Corbec howled, lunging his hand down into the sticky mess of burst viscera, exposed bone and burnt fabric beneath him. He groped for the grenade. Of all the stupid fething ways of dying. How long had the fuse been set to? Ten seconds? Fifteen?
How long had he been scrabbling for it?
His fingers closed on the bomb. It felt red-hot, toxic, and he wanted to let it go.
But he daren’t. He yanked it up and threw it. Threw it as hard as his big, tired, old arm could manage. Threw it up and out hoping it would fly all the way to the Republic of Shadik and never come back. Threw it as desperately as he’d thrown the sewn-leather batter-balls that had come his way across the rec-field at Pryze County Ground when he’d been just eleven and detesting his forced participation in the County Scholam Tournament.
He’d hated batter-ball. He’d never been able to catch. Never been able to field. He’d been doomed, as a kid, to be the last boy picked for teams.
“Feth!” he screamed, and threw. Threw hard. The best throw of his life.
The hurtling bomb went off in the air, three metres up, as it spun into no-man’s land. Shrapnel from the airburst caught five of the raiders at the heart of the attacking platoon.
They broke and fell back, shots from Mkvenner, Cown, Veddekin and Rerval punishing them further. Veddekin hit one in the back as he ran away and ignited the poor bastard’s ammo web. The retreating figure caught fire in a flash and carried on running, burning, jolting erratically over shell holes and mud-ridges until he dropped out of sight.
“Are we clear?” Corbec asked, on his feet again. His voice was hoarse with stress. He prayed to every pantheon imaginable that no one had noticed how fething close he’d come to screwing up. Especially Mkvenner. Corbec was meant to be top dog. Mkvenner would never have screwed up like that, not in a million years. And Mkvenner would most certainly have picked Corbec last for his ball team. Old and tired and slow, Colm Corbec, old and tired and slow.
“We’re clear,” said Cown.
“Should we stay here?” asked Rerval.
“They won’t come back any time soon if they think the line’s secure,” said Mkvenner, wisely.
Corbec beckoned them after him and advanced up the jink-cut communications trench. He led the way now, his officer’s pistol holstered and his rifle pulled off his back. He’d fixed his bayonet.
There were more bodies up the communications cut, Krassians most of them, distinguished by their copper-coloured coats and grey helmets. Rerval recognised a face
or two from Ouranberg. Poor fething bastards. They’d fought to hold every miserable centimetre of this arbitrary hole in the ground. The way some of them had died beggared belief. The suffering, the indignity…
They were four zags down when Corbec stopped them. Small-arms fire was whizzing back and forth along the next angled stretch.
“Way I see it,” Corbec told them quietly, “the enemy got in and overran the line, killing the Krassys or driving them back up the communications. Probably lost a lot themselves on the way. So we’re coming in behind them. Let’s make it count.”
The Ghosts nodded and checked weapons.
“Three abreast,” Corbec instructed. “Me, Ven and Veddey. There’s no more room than that. Sillo, Cown, get some tube bombs ready and lob them over the divide as we go. Lob them far — you hear me, you fethers?”
They did.
“And get in behind us,” Corbec said to Ponore and Rerval. “If we go down, fill our spots. Cown, Sillo, you too, after them. Let’s show them how it’s done.”
On Corbec’s signal, they came round the zag-end and onto the backs of a pack of Shadik raiders clustered in at the next turn. Some of the enemy troopers began to turn as the first las-rounds sliced into them.
“First-and-Only!” Corbec yelled, firing on full auto, smacking las-shots into khaki backs.
Veddekin fell back, his weapon jammed.
Rerval pushed past him, and maintained the tight line. Tube-charges wobbled through the air above them, hurled by Sillo and Cown from behind the trench turn. The blasts filled the narrow defile.
“Straight silver!” Corbec shouted, and, without further warning, charged the enemy. He’d charged because he’d spotted that their angle wasn’t secure. Not by a long way. A secondary trench, probably a munitions track, intersected with their stretch from the right on a dog-leg. If there were more Shadik up there…
There were.
Corbec crunched his bayonet into the ribs of one of the Shadik, then kicked the man off the blade as he turned to shoot another raider behind the first. Somehow the first Shadik managed to wrench Corbec’s blade off his gun as he went down. As a third came in, swinging a trench club with an iron head, Corbec speared him with his lasrifle anyway. For all he bemoaned his age and diminishing strength, Corbec was still one of the biggest, strongest men in the First. Bayonet or no bayonet, you didn’t get up again if Colm Corbec put his weight behind the steel muzzle of a lasgun and rammed it into your sternum.