At the northern tip of the assault, a detachment of strathid cavalry overran the held position under cover of autocannons, and stormed the main reserve trench. Then a counter-strike of gas shells and nail grenades broke their sturdy advance and left them dead and dying. Hussars, individually untouched, lay twitching and screaming in the foggy dark, sharing through the mind-links the death-throes of their wounded mounts. Alliance troopers advancing through the area started to mercy kill the birds, and then found themselves, in tearful desperation, mercy killing the hussars too. They could not bear the screams.
The Kottstadt Wyverns, under Major Benedice, assaulted, took and held a kilometre stretch of fire trench, and then storm-fought their way back down the communication alleys to secure a line of gun-pits. South of them, a brigade of Mittel Aexe dragoons, the Seventh Ghrennes or “Steeplers”, did likewise, and then tried to spike the guns and destroy their munitions. Ninety-three men were incinerated when a high explosive dump was enthusiastically flamed, blowing a hole in the earth two hundred metres in diameter. The rest of them, along with a fair number of Wyverns, subsequently died in the clouds of toxic gas that spewed from storage pits ruptured by the main blast.
All the while, set far back, the Shadik super-siege guns continued to bombard. Their immense shells broke shield umbrellas on the Peinforq Line, and obliterated an ammunition dump, a command bunker, nineteen artillery stations — including five heavy howitzer mounts — a sector infirmary and a reserve trench full of young, conscripted Fichuans who thought they’d managed to skip the war for a night.
Some of the massive shells even struck Peinforq itself. The Manorial House was destroyed, and the abattoir, along with the burial chapel, two cafes, and a street of billet-housing full of Krassian troopers.
Despite the monumental losses, the Alliance offensive didn’t lose momentum that night, or the day after. Lyntor-Sewq, determined to press for the victory he saw beckoning, deployed greater and greater numbers into the push until it ran out of steam on the fourth day and he conceded defeat.
But for Gaunt’s mission, that was in the unknowable future. By midnight on that first night of offensive, they were a kilometre inside the Shadik lines, following a supply trench.
All hell was breaking loose behind them at the Shadik front, lighting up the sky and filling the valley with smoke fumes.
But they were pushing forward, silent, relentless, into the depths of the enemy fortifications.
Corpse light broke above them, white and pale. More flares. The roar of the battle was distant and muffled. They’d just slaughtered twelve Shadik infantrymen in their fifth skirmish of the night. The First had suffered no losses so far, but Gaunt wondered how much longer they would be able to work with blades alone.
The sound of the siege guns was deafening now, even though they were still several kilometres away. The ground vibrated, not from impacts but from firing.
“I’d say there were six guns at least,” Mkoll told Gaunt. “I’ve been counting the flashes and the rhythm.”
“Seven,” said Bonin. “Definitely seven.”
“If Bonin says seven, seven it is,” said Mkoll. “He’s got an ear for these things.”
“How far?” asked Gaunt.
“Well, it’s not like we can’t find them,” said Mkoll, pointing to the superheated flashes of discharge lighting up the northeastern sky.
“Yes,” said Gaunt, “But there’s no sense of scale. How far?”
“Two, maybe three kilometres.”
Gaunt sighed and looked around. The supply trench system they were in was dark and quiet. Everything had been pushed towards the front.
Once in a while, Shadik personnel appeared, and were knifed to silence by the Ghosts.
But Gaunt knew they’d been lucky. All it would take was for them to meet an advancing brigade head on.
Then it would come down to firepower. Firepower and numbers.
If only they had a decent fix on the guns. Something concrete to take back with them. He’d told them all that locate was the minimum requirement of the mission.
Two or three kilometres to the north-east wasn’t precise enough.
Round the next traverse of the supply trench, they found themselves in a deep ammunition corridor laid with track. It was twice the width of the infantry burrows, and ran northeast, dead straight.
The feeder roads for the big guns. Wide enough to take the girth of the shells on munition trains.
They were dosing on it.
“Fan out and follow,” Gaunt ordered, and dropped his team into the bottom of the wide, man-made gulley.
A rifle cracked, twice. Trooper Sekko convulsed and fell.
Gaunt looked back and saw Shadik elements emerging from the gloom, weapons blazing. The Ghosts returned fire, lasguns cracking. Lubba spat fire down the wide space of the ammunition corridor.
The game was up. They’d been rumbled.
FOURTEEN
THE FIRST STAND
“This one’s for Try.”
—Hlaine Larkin
“What does it mean?” Feygor asked, angry.
“It means trouble,” said Caffran.
“What sort of trouble?” Feygor snapped.
“I don’t know! I agreed the word with Ven before he left. If he found trouble, that was the signal: ‘Comeuppance’. I don’t even know if it was him who sent it or Jajjo.”
“Anything else? Anything more?” Feygor asked. Rerval looked up from the micro-bead set he’d been playing with. “Nothing. Not enough gain. Now, if my main set was working—”
“Feth take your main set,” Feygor replied. He sat down at the kitchen table and drummed his fingers in agitation. “Define trouble,” he said, looking at Caffran.
“Ven wasn’t specific. It could mean they’ve run into enemy scouts, a patrol… maybe brigands… maybe Jajjo’s fallen and broken a leg… or it could be there’s an entire army group moving this way.”
“Next time you agree on a code word, you fether, make sure you know what it means!”
Caffran looked Feygor in the eyes. “At least I bothered to check with him before he left. You just let him walk out of here.”
“Shut your damn mouth,” Feygor growled. He looked round at the others. They were all watching the exchange. “Pack your kits. We’re leaving.”
“What?” cried Caffran.
“You heard me! We’ve no idea what’s coming. There’s eight of us here. What good are we going to do holding a place like this?”
Brostin and Cuu began to head for the door. “I’m not going,” said Caffran. They stopped in their tracks. “I gave you a fething order,” said Feygor, slowly rising to his feet.
“And you can stick it. Mkvenner asked me to secure this place until he got back. So that’s what I’m doing. A strong-point. We’ve been building cover around the back area.”
“Who’s we?” asked Gutes.
“Me, Muril, Rerval and Larks. You lot can split if you want. I’m not going to let Ven and Jajjo down. If they sent the signal, they meant it. And given the range on the beads, they can’t be more than a few kilometres away. So… go if you want to.”
“I gave you an order,” Feygor repeated, malevolently.
“Any notion that you’re actually in charge vanished when you decided to take a holiday here. You’ve hardly been following orders since we arrived, so don’t give me that. We’re staying, at least until Ven gets here or we hear more from him.”
Feygor’s glare moved across their faces. “You all feel this way?”
“Yes,” said Rerval.
“I’m staying,” said Muril.
Larkin just nodded.
“I’m staying too,” said Gutes suddenly. He looked at the old woman huddled in the corner. “I don’t think she’s going anywhere, not if she’s stayed here this long. I ain’t leaving her for the wolves.”
“Feth it!” said Feygor. He looked at Brostin and Cuu.
“I’m with you, Murt, sure as sure,” said Cuu. “J
ust say the word.”
Brostin shrugged. He looked uncomfortable.
Feygor scratched his neck. The idea of running clearly appealed to him but he was considering the consequences. If trouble was that close, they’d stand a better chance of survival here as a group than alone and moving through the forest.
“Okay,” said Feygor, “okay, we stay. For now. Prepare for con-tart. Caffran, get everyone deployed.”
The Ghosts began to ready themselves, Brostin and Cuu hurrying out of the kitchen to gather kit. Feygor turned and faced the Aexe trooper Caffran had found.
“Of course, we haven’t even started with you,” he said. “Get talking.”
The dishevelled young man refused to make eye contact. Feygor hit him and knocked him onto the floor. He was about to hit him again when Caffran grabbed his arm.
“He’s a deserter. That much is obvious, isn’t it? He ran into these woods and he’s been hiding here, probably because it was out of the way and the old lady fed him.”
“Why?”
“Gak it, Feygor,” said Muril, “how dense do you have to be? She must think it’s her son, come home again after all this time.”
“This sounding like the truth to you?” Feygor asked the young man, who was picking himself up.
“Don’t hurt her. Please,” he whispered.
“And don’t hit him again in front of her,” Caffran advised. “If she does think he’s her son, you might find yourself with a bread knife stuck in your back.”
“What’s your name?” Muril asked the young man.
“Private First Class Rufo Peterik, Sixteenth Brunsgatters.”
“How long ago did you… ran?” Caffran asked gently.
“Six months,” said Peterik.
“You been here ever since?”
“Couple of months living rough, then here.”
“Did you disable my vox-caster?” Rerval asked from across the kitchen. It was a blunt but obvious question. It was just the sort of thing a desperate deserter might have done.
“No, sir,” said Peterik straight away. “I did not.”
“We haven’t got time for this,” said Feygor. “Lock him up or tie him to a chair. Or something.”
There was no point objecting. None of them could predict what the youth might do, though Caffran had a hunch they didn’t have to worry about him. Caffran tied him to a chair anyway.
“Piet, Larks… sweep the ground,” said Feygor. His manner was calmer now. Having made the decision to stay, he was eager to reimpose his leadership.
Both Larkin and Gutes looked at Caffran first and only left the kitchen when he nodded.
Outside, the mist had grown heavier, gauzing out the rising sun. There was no wind, but the air had a tang of rain. They still hadn’t quite shaken off that storm.
Larkin and Gutes hurried up the back lawn, following the line of the garden wall, their boots and trouser legs becoming soaked with dew from the wet undergrowth.
It was terribly still, terribly quiet. Birds called intermittently from the woodlands beyond. They reached the tumbledown, overgrown sheds at the edge of the property and crouched down, watching the trees. The softly billowing mists created brief shapes occasionally that made them tense up, but it was just mist.
“You took the circuit, didn’t you?” Gutes said at length.
“What?” Larkin’s tone was short. His skull felt like it was splitting from the blow Cuu had given it, and he could taste one of his migraines creeping in.
“The circuit from Rerval’s vox. You took it, didn’t you? I’ve seen the way you mess with tech-kit. You’re the only person apart from Rerval who’s got the skills.”
“Piet, considering how dumb you like to play, you’re a smart man.”
Gutes grinned. He scanned the woods again.
“Why’d you do it, Larks?” he said after a pause.
“I…” Larkin hesitated. “I wanted to make sure we were left alone for a while.”
“Oh,” said Gutes.
“Then, I think maybe we need that vox again now. I think maybe we’ve been alone long enough.”
“Yeah,” said Larkin.
“You’ll give it back?”
“Yeah.”
“I won’t say nothing, Larks.”
“Thanks, Piet.”
An hour passed, slow and taut. It began to rain, lightly at first and then with greater force. Despite the rain, the mist refused to budge. The light ebbed as it became overcast, and the early morning seemed like wet twilight.
There was no signal on the beads. Caffran began to wonder if he’d imagined it.
All fully kitted and prepped, the members of the detail took station to cover the back of the manse. Caffran was set up in the greenhouse, one of the western most outhouses running off the back yard, with a good angle across the rear lawn, and a decent view left into the patch of kitchen garden behind the pantry. He and Rerval had strengthened the defences in the greenhouse with packing crates, earth-filled sacking and part of an old iron bedstead they’d found on a bonfire heap. They’d carefully knocked out the last of the glass panels.
East of him, across the mouth of the yard area, Cuu was crouching in place at the end of a long barricade Muril and Larkin had built from fence timbers and corrugated iron sheets. They’d had to dismantle several of the lean-tos to cannibalize for material.
Rerval was positioned further along the same barricade, hunched in the corner it made with the stone wall of the old coal bunker.
Brostin was sitting on a chair just inside the half-open kitchen door, his flamer broom across his lap, his tanks beside him. He checked the power cells of the two laspistols — his and Feygof’s — that he carried as small-arms. Feygor, his rifle primed, was a few metres away at the main kitchen window. A thick wall separated him from Gutes, who was in the dining room, dug-in at the rear window overlooking the coal house and the hedges of the side ditch. Larkin was on station on the first floor above them all, using a bedroom window as his fire point.
Muril, insisting she was the closest thing they had to a scout, was up at the top of the rear lawn in the derelict sheds at the end of the garden wall. She knelt, perfectly still, watching the trees.
About twenty minutes earlier, as they’d ran final checks before taking up station, Rerval had found the missing trans-mission circuit on the kitchen table. Assuming that it was Feygor, or one of Feygor’s cronies, who’d left it there for him to find, Rerval made little fuss. They were all in this together now and there was no point racking up the tension any more.
He’d fitted it back into the caster and, after consulting with Feygor, sent a message back to Ins Arbor. Position, situation, the prospect of enemy contact.
Ironically, there had been no reply, apart from a few strangulated whines of static. Rerval didn’t know if it was atmospherics or some slip-up he’d made repairing the vox. There was no time to strip it out and start again. He prayed company command had heard him. He prayed there’d be help coming. Failing help, he hoped that a warning had got through.
In the damp, mouldering back bedroom, Larkin settled himself on the pungent mattress he’d pulled up to lie on, and rested his long-las on the paint-flaked sill. He shook out his neck, tried to ignore the pain clawing into his brain from the top of the spine and across the back of his head, and scoped up.
His swollen face ached as he pushed it against the eyepiece. His cracked rib stung and he had to alter his stance.
He had a good sweep of the entire back lawn. He panned the rifle around, taking distance readings off the various features: the end sheds, the sundial at the centre of the lawn, the coal bunker, Caff’s greenhouse.
Down below him, in the yard, he saw Cuu crouching at the barricade with his back to him.
Larkin turned the rifle down and took aim on Cuu. No more than fifteen metres. Clear. An easy shot. Target-fix. Larkin’s fingers twitched on the trigger.
Not yet. But maybe soon. If there was shooting, if there was a fight, he’d tak
e Cuu and damn the consequences. He’d take Cuu Cuu’s way: in battle, when no one would know. What was it that little bastard had said? War’s a messy thing, Tanith. Confused and all shit like that. Middle of combat, all crap flying this way and that. Who’s gonna notice if I get my payback? You’d just be another body in the count. Good advice, Lijah Cuu. Good advice.
Rainwater dripped from the shed roof and hit Muril’s cheek with a plick. She wiped it away, and then realised it wasn’t the drip that had made the noise.
Her micro-bead had tapped.
“Who goes there?” she said into the mic.
Silence.
She waited. Something moved in the trees, but it seemed likely it was just a bird.
She was about to ask if any of the Ghosts at the house had signalled when a figure tore out of the trees, running towards her position, leaping fallen logs and ripping through undergrowth. Her rifle came up and she had a clear shot.
She froze.
It was Jajjo. Filthy, covered in mud, his uniform ripped, Jajjo was running almost blindly towards her.
“Jajjo!” She called. He skidded to a halt, looking around.
“The wall, man, the wall! Get in here!”
He started forward again and vaulted the low stone wall, then came crawling round on his hands and knees into her shed.
“M-Muril?”
“Gak! Look at you. What happened?”
“En-enemy p-patrol,” Jajjo stammered, so exhausted and out of breath he could barely speak.
“I’ve got Jajjo here,” Muril voxed to the manse. “Stand by.”