“You got inside information, Soric?”
“Just be careful.”
“Ninety-one, twenty. Careful. Confirmed.”
Soric clicked off the mic and sat back for a moment, gazing up. The sky was dark, fumed with a haze of yellow. There were no stars. He wished there could be stars.
“Finished, sir?” asked Mohr. He was getting anxious. The platoon was leaving them behind.
“Not quite,” said Soric, looking down at the piece of paper clenched in his dirty fist. That line under the first. His wet fingers had blurred the ink. It was just a smudge. He peered at it What the gak did it say? He ought to know. He’d gakking written it.
Or something with handwriting just like his had, anyway.
Something, Soric knew, even if it scared the living gak out of him, he had to trust.
Something something don’t let something… what was that? It looked like “Raglon”. Was it? Shit, what had this said? The first part had been a warning to Tona. Was Raglon going to get into a mess too? God-Emperor, what did it say?
“Next time write it in gakking pencil!” he said.
“Sarge?” Mohr asked nervously.
I said that out loud, thought Soric. He lifted the vox-mic. “Twenty, two-oh-three?”
“Two-oh-three, twenty.” Raglon’s voice came back swiftly, as prompt on the link as any ex-vox man.
“Twenty, two-oh-three… uh, just watch yourself, okay?”
“Say again, Soric?”
“I said watch yourself. Don’t know why, don’t know what. Just… be extra careful, okay?”
“Understood. Two-oh-three out.”
Soric tossed the mic back to Mohr “Let’s go,” he said, and levered his squat frame up. The mud and darkness closed in on all sides. There was no sign of Vivvo or the rest of five platoon.
Soric grabbed Mohr by the arm and started to trudge forward.
There was no landscape out here to read in any proper sense. Just burst earth and wreckage. For all Criid knew, they could be heading back to their own lines. But somehow Hwlan saw the way.
The Tanith scout had the lead, nudging the extended line of ten platoon across the wasteland. At least they had the relief of losing the hoods. How’d Soric known it was clear? A message from the atmossniffers at the line, Criid presumed.
The darkness seemed solid, vicing them in. The odour of death and soiled water was almost suffocating. Criid ducked into a shallow crater with Nessa and Vril, and they found themselves swimming alongside bloated, swollen corpses.
Mkhef splashed in with them a moment later and recoiled in disgust. “Feth!”
“Shut up, for gak’s sake!” Criid whispered. “We must be getting close to the Shadik lines.”
Nessa crawled up the forward edge of the crater and scoped with her long-las.
“Wire, about twenty metres up. No movement.”
“Feth this,” murmured Mkhef, trying to shoo away a gas-distended corpse that kept bobbing towards him.
The link chimed. Criid heard Hwlan’s voice.
“Got some sort of structure, sarge. Nine points west. Looks like… I dunno…”
“Stay put,” said Criid into her micro-bead.
She hand-signalled over to Nessa, Vril and Mkhef. “With me.”
The four of them scrambled up out of the wet slick of the crater and ran west over the pock-marked mud, ducking under an old stretch of rusted wire. They came in behind the jagged, partial boarding of a stretch of fence where Hwlan was hiding in a scrape.
The building beyond was backlit by a yellowish fog rising off the enemy lines. It was a rain, a shell, one wall gone, the remains of a chimney stack rising like a tombstone. The structure lay in a hollow, swimming with creek water, festooned with wire. It looked like some kind of… mill. Some kind of water mill.
Criid had an unpleasant nagging feeling left over from Soric’s last transmission.
She glanced up again at the rain, a blankness against the yellowy dark. Caffran had a great rep for building assaults. What would he do?
The thought stopped her. Caff. Criid felt a terrible ache. Where was he? What was he doing, right now? Was he even alive?
How fething stupid was this, scampering through darkness and mud with a gun in your hand, when some things really mattered?
Caff…
“You okay, sarge?” Mkhef whispered.
“Yeah, why?”
“You looked kind of funny—”
“I’m fine,” she said. She was. She was fine. She was Sergeant Tona Criid, Tanith First-and-fething-Only, the only fern who’d ever made that grade. She wasn’t going to gak it up now. It didn’t matter what she felt about Caff, or Yoncy or Dalin.
She’d chosen to be a soldier, and worked to get the pins. Love was just an anchor she didn’t need. Not right now.
“Kenfeld?” she said quietly into her bead. “Sarge?” the vox link crackled. “Report?”
“I’m east of you, round the front with Mosark, Pozetine and Lubba.”
“See anything?”
“Just a ruin.”
“Okay, send Lubba forward with Pozetine. Cover space. But wait for my word. We’re going to stealth assault from this side.”
“Read you, sarge.”
“Stealth assault,” Criid repeated to her companions, removing her blade from her bayonet lug and slinging her rifle over her shoulder. The others did the same.
“Why the caution, sarge?” Vril asked.
“I’ve got a hunch,” she said. “This could be nasty, but I want it quiet.”
The four of them advanced over the black mud towards the shattered ruin. It was bigger than Criid had first thought. Tall. Thick walls, what was left of them. She snuggled in behind a fallen section of roof, and waved Hwlan through. Vril followed him. Criid dropped in behind them, Mkhef at her heels. Nessa hung back, scope raised.
Inside the mill, it was like a cave. Water dripped in through the open roof, and through the punctured second floor above. The ground was a mess of fractured rockcrete and tumbled girders.
Criid moved forward almost blind through the mess of debris. She climbed up over a slumped girder, tossing her knife into her left hand to brace herself with her right. To her west, Hwlan crawled forward under a slumped beam, and then folded himself through a blast hole in what remained of one of the interior walls.
She waited, then heard two, quick taps click through her micro-bead. It was a standard First non-verbal signal made by gently flicking the mic of your intercom. Two taps… clear.
She edged forward again, trying to fit herself through a narrow gap between rockcrete slabs, but her cape kept getting hung up on some of the twisted reinforcement bars jutting from one of the slabs. She had to back off, and go round.
A single tap. Not clear. She froze.
Two taps. She resumed her crawl, moving through a stagnant pool on her hands and knees and then making her way slowly up a mound of rubble that climbed out of the water, trying hard not to dislodge any loose chunks.
Hwlan was waiting for her at the top in what remained of an old doorway. There was a nondescript dark lump lying in the shadows near his feet. Criid realised it was the corpse of a Shadik sentry.
They waited until Vril and Mkhef caught up with them, and then went through the doorway into the next portion of the mined mill. It was very dark here too, but down at the far end, there was a flickering light, like shadows cast by flames. Then they saw movement. Larger shadows moving against the meagre firelight.
There was a Shadik forward observation post in the far end of the mill. Three, maybe four men in hoods and long, grey coats moved about the end room. They had a fire, for warmth, in an oil can, its light shielded from the outside. Hwlan caught at Criid’s arm and directed her attention upwards. Through missing floorboards, they could see another Shadik up in the remains of the second floor, crouching at a tripod-mounted spotter scope and gazing out over the wasteland to the west.
They’d never get near him without him noticing
them.
Criid signalled the other three to move up, ready to take the Shadik on the ground floor level with their blades. She unslid her rifle, and took careful aim on the dim figure overhead. She’d have to risk one shot. But it had to be a good one.
She waited for Hwlan’s signal. She had a good angle. One shot was worth the risk.
Half a kilometre south of the mill, Sergeant Raglon’s platoon had reached the water-logged remains of an old field trench. There was no sure way of telling which side had constructed it, and certainly no way of knowing why it had been dug east-west. Once upon a time, its orientation had made some kind of tactical sense.
Raglon was sweating hard, more nervous than he dared admit. He’d seen plenty of combat before, and had brevet-led a unit on Phantine, but this was his first formal command in an active operation.
Raglon was a serious, thoughtful man, determined, just like Criid and Arcuda, the other neophyte sergeants, to prove to Gaunt and Hark that they’d made a good choice of promotions. He envied Criid the fact that she’d had a chance to blood her platoon in combat at the line. Then again, he envied Arcuda, who was still waiting in reserve back at the fire trench. Gaunt had made no bones about the hazards of these scouting raids into the waste. And Raglon had learned from the Alliance soldiery he’d met that the Seiberq Pocket had a particularly bad reputation as one of the hardest contested regions of the Peinforq Line.
He signalled his men down into the abandoned trench. At the very least, it offered his platoon a means of pushing east out of sight.
The trench was littered with dead. Old dead. The unidentifiable remains of men who had fallen out here perhaps years before, their bodies never recovered. Brown bones stippled the mud like broken twigs.
Seventeen moved single file, heads down, occasionally having to crawl on their bellies to pass sections where the trench walls had caved and filled the ditch.
Raglon had ordered Lukas, his vox-operator, to rig his set for headphones only, so that the caster wouldn’t suddenly blare into life and give them away. It was a smart move, the sort of thing that another novice team leader might have overlooked. But Raglon had come from signals and knew about these things.
Where Raglon lacked experience, it was in character judgement. Since taking command of seventeen, his primary efforts had been to establish authority. Seventeen had been Lhurn Adare’s platoon, and Raglon was all too aware of the fact he had nothing of the mourned sergeant’s charisma. He’d just never be popular the way Adare had been.
So he’d decided the best way to run seventeen was to let them function the way they had under Adare. He didn’t want to mess around with habits and established routines. If seventeen had evolved field practices they were happy with, who liked to buddy who in fire-teams for instance, he didn’t see the point in changing things. He thought arbitrary changes would make the platoon resent him, and that was true, up to a point. But some habits stemmed from sloppiness.
When they reached the dead trench, the men formed a file automatically, as they saw fit, and Raglon didn’t question it. So it was that they advanced now with Suth, the scout, in the lead, and Costin right behind him. Raglon fell into place about four men back.
It was his first command error.
Suth was a good scout. Costin, his buddy, was a drunk.
Adare had known that Costin drank too much. He’d tried to keep a lid on it. Costin was a nice guy, despite his carousing, and a decent trooper if kept away from the sacra. In a situation like this, Costin would inevitably want to get in beside his friend Suth. Adare would have stopped him, pushed him back down the file, just to be safe.
When Costin moved up eagerly with Suth, Raglon hadn’t thought to object. Everyone knew Costin liked the drink. Raglon didn’t realise how much Costin had been knocking back since Adare’s death.
The abandoned trench had actually been constructed by the Alliance during an early phase of fighting, before the full bulk of the Peinforq Line had been built. The Shadik, to whose lines it was now closest, had never filled it in, because it afforded them excellent cover for raid-teams and wire-cutting parties. Indeed, they had extended its eastern end into the verges of their own fire trench system.
As Raglon’s platoon advanced along it a raiding squad was coming the other way.
Suth stopped, and signalled back down the line for a halt. He’d heard something, and wanted to check it. “I’m coming with,” hissed Costin.
Suth shook his head. He could smell the liquor on Costin’s breath. Stay put, he mouthed. Costin was making too much damn noise.
“Fine!” said Costin, and sat down, glancing back at Azayda, the next man in line with a “what can you do?” shrug.
Angry, Suth took hold of Costin by the jaw and gave him a sharp slap on the cheek. Be quiet! he mouthed, urgently.
Glowering, Costin sat back.
Suth turned, and began to edge forward along the watery swill of the trench pit, then levered himself out of the trench on his belly and started to crawl.
Costin stared after Suth for a moment, his pride wounded. He wiped his hand across his mouth, and then spat the slime he’d inadvertently deposited there. It tasted foul.
He leaned up to see how far Suth had got, but the scout was out of sight.
Costin sniffed, and then took a flask bottle out of his fatigue pocket. He took a swig, but it was virtually empty and he tasted only fumes. So he tipped it back. Tipped it right back to get at the dregs.
The glass bottle flashed as the background light caught it.
Costin wailed as a rifle round exploded his hand and the bottle it was holding. A second later, and another shot tore open his tunic across the right shoulder.
Costin began to whimper as he fell into the bottom of the trench.
Azayda leapt forward, desperate to quieten Costin, and a third round burst the Verghastite’s head like a ripe fruit.
Back down the line, Raglon heard the cries and the sudden shots, and cursed aloud. He tried to push forward, but his men were being driven back by furious sniper fire and quick bursts of semi-automatic shooting. Zemel dropped, killed outright. Tyne took a hit in the knee and another through the arm. Lukas lurched over with a yell as a shot smashed his vox-caster.
Suth was down, alone, out in the open. He could see the glitter of shots cutting up the trench towards his platoon.
He could see the shapes of the raiders as they hurried forward.
He felt the worst possible feeling a Tanith scout can ever feel: that he had led his comrades into danger.
He didn’t hesitate. He got up, and ran the trench from the side, his lasgun blazing, assaulting the stormers from the flank.
He made several kills before their massed firepower cut him down.
To the north, Soric’s platoon froze and dropped as they heard the gunfire start up. Agun Soric heard solid fire, and then las-rounds.
“Gak,” he said, “Some poor bastard’s engaged.”
And though he hated to admit it, he knew for certain who that poor bastard was.
Raglon.
The abrupt gunfire just a half kilometre south startled Criid and made her lower her aim for an instant. She’d been about to take the gakking shot.
She saw the spotter on the second floor of the mill get up and hurry over to the other side of the building, stepping expertly over gaps in the planks. She heard voices in the rear room of the obs post.
Do I wait or do I go for it, she asked herself?
She took aim again.
“Bets are off,” she said into her link and fired.
Her shot punched through a floorboard from below and severed the right shin of the spotter. He screamed out, fell, and came crashing through the rotten planks, bouncing off a jut of girder-post on his way down.
Vril, Mkhef and Hwlan ploughed in, killing the others below with quick, merciless shots.
Criid ran in to join them, ordering the rest of her group to hold position. The sounds of a serious firefight was rolling in from t
he south. Vril and Hwlan stood cover as Criid and Mkhef searched the obs post area. Cooking pots, boxes of ammo for a .45 cannon set up in a broken window, cans of processed meat, a field telephone. A strange, ugly statuette made of painted clay that Criid smashed against the wall the moment she saw it.
“Check around!” she said.
“Here!” Mkhef called.
At the back end of the chamber, corrugated metal sheets roofed in the entrance to a tunnel. They peered in. It was dark, but well shored up with flakboard.
Chances were it ran directly back to the Shadik lines.
“What do we do?” asked Vril.
Criid ignored him. She was looking at the field telephone. The light on top of it was blinking. Feth.
“We can’t stay here. They’ll either close this tunnel when they don’t get an answer or they’ll start coming through in force.”
Away across the no-man’s land they could hear cannons and mortars opening up from the Shadik front.
She looked back at the tunnel mouth. Such a great chance to reach into the enemy lines. But not tonight.
“Fall back!” she ordered, her micro-bead set on the platoon channel. She was last out of the mill. Pausing as she left she tossed a tube-charge into the mouth of the communications tunnel, closing it off in a flurry of mud and earth spoil. If they couldn’t use it neither would the Shadik.
Daylight came early over the Peinforq Line, dirty and hazy. It had begun to rain again, and an early bombardment was thumping to the north.
Gaunt waited in his dugout station, toying with an almost empty cup of caffeine.
The gas curtain was pushed back and Daur came in.
“What’s the story?” Gaunt asked him curtly.
“Five, ten and eleven came back in. Ten just a few minutes ago.”
“Losses?”
Daur shook his head. “They didn’t make much contact, they just dropped back when things got lively.”
“Anything useful?”
“Criid did well. Her gang reconnoitred some old mill structure that isn’t on the maps. Obs post. They picked off the troopers manning it. It had a dugout run back to the enemy line. Criid sealed it”