“They’re psicavalry,” said Fevrierson. “They need both hands to operate the carbines in a charge, so each man has a puppeteer, linking him to his steed.”
“An implant? Augmetic?”
“I don’t know those words. A puppeteer’s a little machine. They put them in the men’s heads surgically. The struthid has one grafted in to match. It creates a brain link and lets the man drive the bird.”
Over sixty hussars galloped past and then the infantry returned to the road. Mkoll saw some of the Aexegarian troopers retrieving the odd feather from the mud and fixing them to their coat collars.
“Lucky charms,” Fevrierson said.
After another forty-five minutes, Mkoll realised the track was sloping down, though the landscape around remained spread out in its flat pocked immensity. They were entering the rear portions of the trench network. The horizon had been clear earlier because everything vital had been sunk and dug in.
The workings were of immense size, some as wide as city streets and ten metres deep. Where they extended below the water table, duckboards had been laid down and teams of sappers were manning hand-pumped bilges. Strings of electrical lights ran down the carefully revetted walls and Mkoll could smell the ozone of shield generators. Armoured vehicles and trucks moved down the working line, and when one appeared, they had to stand to in lay-bys cut into the trench wall to allow them past. Troops hurried back and forth, some in greens, some in greys, a few in blues and golds or russets, all locals, all filthy. It was like entering a partially buried city. Some sections of trench were entirely roofed in with wired flakboard, with lighting hanging from the tunnel roofs.
“This is something,” said Baen to Mkoll. “I expected trenches, but not like this.”
“They’ve had forty years to build it,” said Mkoll.
And they’d built it well. Massive, mainstreet-style reserve trenches, often shored up with rockcrete, off which ran barrack dugouts to the west and communication and support trenches to the east, towards the front. Running as they did from sap-heads and deep munition wells, the support trenches were shallower but zig-zagged, or were well provided with solid traverses to protect the vulnerable links and make them easier to defend compartmentally. To the east about a kilometre away by Mkoll’s estimation, lay the line of the fire trenches. To the west rearwards, lay deeper pits accessed by communication trenches laid with narrow-gauge rails.
“The gun-pits,” Fevrierson said. Even the main artillery was dug in subsoil, Mkoll thought The rails were for shell-carts. A few moments later they had to pause to allow barrows of massive wicker-wrapped shells to be heaved across the reserve trench and up the supply channels to the gun-pits. Fevrierson checked his watch. “Readying for the night firing,” he said.
The Genswick Foot halted and stood easy in a firing trench as Fevrierson reported to the sector’s staff blockhouse. He took Mkoll with him.
The blockhouse was a series of armoured rooms buried deep in the ground off the reserve mainway. It had folding shutters and gas curtains at the entrance.
Inside, it was warm and damp and busy. There was a chart room, and a vox-annex where a row of signallers chattered into bulky old-style field sets.
Sheafs of thick vox-line cables ran out along the entrance hall and away through loopholes. Inside the main entrance, sweating, ruddy-faced runners sat on a bench, waiting to be sent out again.
Mkoll waited at a reinforced door while Fevrierson signed in. From his vantage point, the Tanith could see a small command room filled with military aides grouped around a low map table. They were all in shabby but impressive number one uniforms: more blue and gold, more green, some yellow, some grey and some dark red.
Mkoll hadn’t got the hang of the varied insignia or liveries yet. The men in grey tended to be quite dark skinned, and the few in red were pale and red or blond haired.
Fevrierson was reporting to a sallow-faced general whose green uniform seemed loose and ill-fitting. The man’s face was drawn. He’s lost weight since that kit was tailored for him, Mkoll thought.
The general talked to Fevrierson for a while, pointing to items on the map-table, and signed an order sheet. Then Fevrierson said something, and indicated Mkoll.
The general nodded and strode over to where the Tanith scout was waiting. Mkoll snapped a salute that the general gave back.
“We weren’t expecting you for another two days,” said the general.
“We’re not up in force, sir. My commanding officer ordered me forward in advance to assess the field.”
The general nodded and then surprised Mkoll by making the sign of the aquila across his chest and offering his hand.
“It’s good to see you anyway and I thank the Throne you’ve come. I’m Hargunten, CoS, 55th region. Welcome to the Peinforq Line.”
“Sir. Mkoll, Tanith First.”
“What do you need, sergeant?”
“A look at the line and the chance to report back to Rhonforq,” said Mkoll. He produced the papers Gaunt had drawn up for him, countersigned by Buzzel.
General Hargunten looked them over. “Wait here,” he said. “The Genswick are moving forward to station 143, so you might as well go with them.”
He moved off to confer with other staff. As Mkoll waited he saw that one of the red-uniformed officers was looking him up and down. A colonel, by his pins. Mkoll didn’t know the crossed-sabres and heraldic dragon of the man’s insignia.
“Imperial?” he said after a while, his accent new to Mkoll. Thick, glottal, rich.
“Yes, sir.”
“Come to save us all.”
“Come to fight the arch-enemy, sir.”
The colonel snorted. His skin was very pale and slightly freckled and his side-shaved hair was red-gold. “We can win this war,” he said. “I have no doubt.”
“Without your help,” he finished.
“Not for me to say, sir.”
The colonel grunted and turned away. Fevrierson returned, with the general.
“Papers in order, sergeant,” Hargunten said, returning them to Mkoll. “Go with the lieutenant here. See your way around. My compliments to your commander.”
Mkoll tucked the folded papers into his webbing pouch and saluted.
“See the front,” the colonel called out. “See a war like you have never known.”
“I’ve known war, sir,” said Mkoll and, turning, strode out of the blockhouse.
“Schleiq me! I can’t believe you did that!” Fevrierson exclaimed as they came out through the gas curtains into the damp evening air.
“Do what?”
“Smarted him like that!”
“Who was he?”
“Redjacq!”
“Who?”
Fevrierson blinked at Mkoll as if he was mad. “Redjacq… Redjacq Ankre, of Kottmark?”
“Means nothing.”
“The Kottstadt Wyverns?”
“Really, I don’t know. Kottmark is the neighbouring country, isn’t it?”
“Yah… and the other senior partner in the Alliance. We’d be dead now if the Kottmarkers hadn’t joined the war twenty years ago.”
“And this Redjacq… he’s something special?”
“Their finest field commander. Leads the Wyverns. Furies, they are. We’re lucky to have them in this sector.”
“I’m sure you are.”
It was getting dark by then. Fevrierson got his infantry moving, and they went up through a series of zig-zagging communications trenches to the front-line position. There, things were more the way Mkoll had expected. No electrics, just the occasional promethium lamp or brazier. Dirty fire trenches dug in about three metres deep and heavily traversed with cross-spars and earth-filled gabions. A firestep made of stone lintels laid up against the base of the leading wall beneath the breastwork and iron loop holes. Despite the duckboards, the trenches were swilling with liquid mud and alive with vermin.
Wretched soldiers in blue coats stood down and began to retire in slow, weary lines as
the Genswick Foot relieved them and took their places beneath the parapet.
The sky was clouding over and the light seemed to leak out of it. Thunder rumbled somewhere. The trenches stank. Mkoll turned to his men. “Caober, Baen, Bonin… up that way. Mkvenner, Hwlan… back the other. Twenty minutes and back to me. See what you see.”
They moved away, but Mkoll caught Mkvenner’s sleeve and held him back a moment. Unofficially, Mkvenner was Mkoll’s number two in the scouts, totally dedicated and totally ruthless in a way that Mkoll, for all his reputation, could never hope to be. Some Tanith said Mkvenner had been trained in the old martial ways of cwlwhl, the fighting art of the Nalsheen, legendary warriors who had maintained law during Tanith’s troubled feudal days. Mkoll always quashed those rumours, mainly because they were true and he knew how close Mkvenner guarded his background.
“Keep an eye on Hwlan,” Mkoll told him. “Ten platoon is unsettled right now, with Criid taking over. Make sure he’s together.”
Mkvenner nodded and made off. Mkoll watched the tall, lithe figure retreating down the busy trench.
Mkoll joined Fevrierson in the command dugout. It was little more than a shed built into the leading edge of the trench. There was a V-shaped binocular periscope on a tripod stand, and Mkoll took a lookout.
It was his first look at the battleground. In the twilight it was a miserable place, though he was certain it would look even more miserable by day. Torn earth, incomprehensible wreckage, tall piquet fences of dangling wire. A kilometre away, the shattered land dipped a little and spread into a wide flood plain of poisoned water and stagnant pools interspersed with muddy islets and ridge-crests of shell-blown soil.
“A lot of water down there,” he said.
“That’s the river.”
Mkoll looked again. “It’s no river…”
Fevrierson smiled at him. “Oh yah! That’s the beautiful Naeme, proud lifeflow of the borderlands!”
“But it’s just pools and lakes and flooded flats…”
Mkoll’s voice trailed off. He realised a river would look like that if it had been shelled for forty years. The banks, the environs, even the riverbed itself would have been ripped apart and pummelled into ruins. But the water still flowed. Where once it had been a proud, major river meandering through meadows and sleepy villages on its long journey to the sea, it was now cut loose, leaking out across the punished landscape like blood from a wound, its original form and structure lost to the war.
There was a soft “pop” and the area below them was suddenly bathed in chilly white light. A few seconds more and other starshell flares burst, glowing, in the sky. Through the scope now, everything looked bleached and cold, hard shadows shivered as the flares slowly dropped.
“Corpse light,” said Fevrierson, putting on his steel helmet. “Brace yourself,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s time for war.”
Distantly, a whistle blew. A bull-horn wound up and died again, its moan echoing across the front.
The gun-pits of the Peinforq Line woke up.
The sound and light split the darkness and eclipsed the tremulous glow of the starshells. The earth shook. In the deep pits and weapon-dens behind the line’s spinal trenches, large calibre howitzers and mortars hurled munitions up into the gathering dusk. Elevated feldkannone and rocketshargen joined them.
Mkoll looked back at the Alliance lines and watched the thunderous light show. Two kilometres west of him and for twenty kilometres to north and south, the guns blazed and muzzle-fires strobed and danced. Massive, brilliant flashes flickered up and down the artillery line, some of them casting weird, momentary shadows from their pits. Mkoll heard the concussive screech of heavy shells lobbing overhead, the deeper, pneumatic twang of mortars, the huge crump of bombards. Rockets went up and over, squealing in the air and leaving trails of fire.
He’d never seen a bombardment on this scale before. Not even at Vervunhive.
Mkoll looked east, through the scope. A ragged strip of detonations and flame-storms was creeping across the ruined land on the far side of the wounded river. He could smell fyceline and iron in the wind, and then the stench of mud rendered into steam.
Fevrierson seemed content. He sat back and took a tin cup of caffeine from his subaltern.
“Want one?” he asked.
“No,” said Mkoll. The bombardment was shaking his marrow.
“They’ll keep this up for a few hours, then they might signal us to advance.”
“Feth,” said Mkoll.
“You might as well have a cup,” said Fevrierson. “We could be here for a w—”
There was a sudden roar and a Shockwave of heat slammed across the front line from the west. Fevrierson stumbled to his feet. He stared back at the Aexe lines. A white hot cone of fire licked up from the direction of the allied artillery positions.
“Not a misfire, surely…” he began.
There was another colossal bang and a flash and this time it knocked them all over Whistles were blowing. “That’s shellfire,” Mkoll said, getting up. “But they’ve got nothing that—”
A third roar. Then a fourth. Then a dozen heavy impacts along the line to the north-west. Gargantuan fires blazed into the night.
“Schleiq!” Fevrierson cried. “What the hell is that?”
“Something new?” Mkoll asked.
A runner almost fell into the dugout, dripping with perspiration. “Order to repel!” he gasped. “Repel?” Fevrierson said.
Mkoll grabbed the scope. Out in the no-man’s land of the Naeme Valley, phantom shapes were advancing towards them.
“Get your men to stand ready,” he told the young lieutenant. “We’re being assaulted.”
Mkoll hurried out into the fire trench, unslinging his rifle. Men were shouting and running, knocking into each other. They’d panicked.
“Get them under control or we’re dead,” the Tanith hissed at Fevrierson, who started blowing his whistle. Mkoll could hear the jangle of field phones and yelled exchanges begging for order confirmation.
He hadn’t planned on this. He’d come for a little observation, not to get caught up in a storm assault.
He adjusted his micro-bead. “Four! This is four! Sound off!”
“Thirty-two!” That was Bonin.
“Twenty-eight, four!” Caober.
“Thirteen. Moving up with sixty,” Mkvenner responded, accounting for Hwlan too.
“Forty-five, sir,” Baen said.
“Four, got you. Close on me, at the dugout. Double time.”
“Thirty-two, I see contacts closing,” Bonin reported.
“Understood. Close on me. Permission granted to go active if you need to.”
More titanic impacts rocked the ground, and the sky to the west was underlit yellow with fire. The enemy’s massive counter-bombardment had broken the discipline of the Allied barrage. Mkoll felt ultrasonic knocking and then smelled ozone as shields ignited along the Allied command line. In the semi-darkness, he could see the translucent white umbrellas of energy flickering over the main reserves. Still more enemy ordnance hammered down, splashing off the shields in great, deflected air blasts. In one place, a shield fizzled as it was struck and died out.
Mkoll was no artillery expert, but he knew the power and range of the enemy guns must be at least on a par with Imperial super-siege pieces. The front line, this “Peinforq Line”, had clearly been arranged to permit sustained artillery actions across ranges of five or six kilometres. The shells coming in had probably travelled more like fifteen or twenty. Fevrierson’s astonished reaction alone was enough. He’d not seen anything like it. That wasn’t a good sign.
Mkvenner and Hwlan rejoined Mkoll, as did Bonin a moment later. “They’re right on the parapet, less than thirty metres,” Bonin said.
“Why the feth aren’t these idiots in place?” Hwlan said.
Fevrierson had got a few men onto the firestep and Mkoll heard the first dull bangs of trench mortars and the chatter of a
machine cannon.
Almost immediately, as if in answer, the top of the trench’s back wall started to take hits. Boards splintered and scads of earth flew out. Then one of the Genswick privates on the firestep flew backwards into the trench bottom as if he’d been clubbed in the face.
“Bayonets!” Fevrierson yelled. “Stand by to repel!” The gathering mobs of Allied infantry slotted long, bill-tipped blades to their rifles.
“They’ve got to do more than repel,” Mkvenner said quietly. “A few grenades or a well-timed push and the enemy’ll be in the trench. They’ve got to go at them before they make the parapet…”
Mkoll looked round at Fevrierson. “Well? While there’s still time.”
The order was to repel. “Hold and repel…” Fevrierson’s voice trailed off. His eyes were wide and wild in the gloom.
And then it was too late. Multiple explosions tore through the fire trench on the other side of the nearest traverse. Grenades. A second later, a stick bomb went over their heads, flung too hard. It landed on the top of the rear wall and covered them in dirt.
The infantry on the firestep started shooting. Their solid-ammo rifles made boxy, hollow bangs which overlapped with the clatter of the bolts as they were pulled back and forth. Enemy rounds whipped in low over the lip of the parapet. Two more men collapsed off the step, one spun right around by the impact.
“Hold to repel! Hold to repel!” Fevrierson was shouting.
Suddenly, a significant chunk of the facing parapet blew in, ripping panel-boards and brushwood revetting out of the wall and tossing men aside onto the duckboards. The first dements of the enemy wave scrambled down into the trench through the section their grenades had taken out. They wore khaki coats, brown corduroy breeches and slime-slick puttees, and dark green steel helmets over dirty woollen toques or chain-mail splinter masks. Most carried bulky autorifles with ugly saw-edged bayonets, but others had pistols and long-handled wire-cutters. Mkoll saw at least three who were wearing bulky grenadier waistcoats, the multiple canvas pockets stuffed with ball and stick bombs.
Spilling in through the breach, the trench raiders turned their guns and fired down the ditch line into the milling Genswick Foot. Other attackers breasted the parapet and started a rapid-fire enfilade into the heart of the section’s defence.