There was a thick mob of Alliance men between Mkoll and the raiders, most of them trying to run or find cover. He could hear the whinnying smack of the enemy bullets thumping into the jostling bodies, punching through worsted and flannel, through canvas and leather, through flesh. Hit, some men convulsed but were held upright by the press. Others screamed because they were hit or because they were desperate not to be. One man was yanked up out of the mob by the force of an enfilading shot to the neck, his body cartwheeling over on top of the others. A ball bomb, round and black with a fizzing paper fuse, bounced off another man’s shoulder and then blew the front of the command dugout into the air in a shower of planks.
There was general uproar from the Genswick troopers as they tried to flee from the breach and the crossfire. The bulk of them were penned in by their own confusion like animals in a slaughterhouse channel. Fevrierson and some of the men up on the firestep managed to return fire over the heads of the mob, and Mkoll counted at least two raiders go down. He thrust his way forward against the tide of panicking men.
“Feth this! Turn! Turn and fight! Come on!” he snapped.
Mkvenner and Hwlan got up onto the firestep and opened up sidelong down the trench. The sudden bursts of laser shots stunned the Genswick boys. Like they’ve never seen lasweapons before, Hwlan thought.
“Get down! Get down!” Mkoll yelled at the men in the trench and as they ducked and cowered, he and Bonin fired a storm of full auto-shots over their heads in support of the sideswiping fire of Mkvenner and Hwlan.
The raiders fell back under the hail of energy rounds. The front three or four were cut straight down, and fell onto the men behind them, tripping a few of them. Mkoll waded through the huddled Genswick soldiers in the trench base and opened up a field of fire on the raiders coming over the broken parapet, punishing their enfilade. He felt a rifle round thump into his chest armour, and others pass close by into the earthen wall, but he kept firing.
Fevrierson blew his whistle. “Come on! Come on! The Imperials have got them on the turn!” Bolt-action rifles now began to volley at the intruding force. Bonin drew his lasrifle up to his shoulder and took a swift aim, snapping a single shot that dropped an enemy grenadier in the middle of the raider group. The ball bomb in his hand exploded and touched off the contents of his waistcoat. Channelled by the trench, the combined blast surged flame, shrapnel and broken pieces of duckboard in both directions.
“Go!” Mkoll yelled, storming forward with Bonin. The raided section had been effectively cleared by the blast. The air was full of soil dust fine like flour, and it was settling across everything, making dark sticky patches where it mixed with spilled blood. The bodies of raiders, scorched black and twisted, lay across the firestep and the trench floor. One hung upside down from the parapet wire. Mkoll, Bonin and five of the Genswick Foot rushed the firestep at the broken section of the trench in time to intercept the next raiding party as it came over the parapet.
There was a savage flurry of point-blank shooting that knocked three of the raiders back out of the trench and one of the Genswickers off the step. Then it was hand-to-hand, brutal, blind. Mkoll used his rifle butt to deflect a bayonet that jabbed down at him, and then dubbed the attacker in the kneecap with it. One of the Genswick lads bayoneted an attacker through the belly and hoisted him up into the air like a labourer pitchforking a straw bale. Bonin, who’d had time to fix his silver Tanith warknife to his rifle’s bayonet lug, killed one man outright and then slashed the thigh of another, cracking the man’s head with his lasgun’s butt as he fell. A pistol fired twice in Mkoll’s ear and the Alliance private next to him screamed and fell, clutching his face. Mkoll fired his rifle and shot out the throat of the grenadier with the autopistol. The man slipped off the parapet where he had been standing, and ended up sitting, dead, on the firestep with his back to the trench wall.
Another few seconds of maniacal punching and clubbing, and the last of the raiders dropped back, denied.
Bonin and two Genswickers stood up at the parapet and started firing down into the dark to drive the raiders back out into the war-waste. Along the trench, Fevrierson and his men were now laying down a serious rifle fusillade from the step, the chatter of their solid round shots punctuated by the cracks of Mkvenner’s and Hwlan’s lasguns.
Mkoll crouched on the firestep and started to plunder the bombs from the dead grenadier’s waistcoat. The balls had friction fuses that lit when a paper twist was yanked out. He fired them one by one, tossing them up and out over the parapet. The stick grenades had long wooden grips like brush handles with loops of linen dangling from pins in their bases. Mkoll realised you put your hand through the loops before swinging the grenades out. As each one sailed off, its pin was left hanging from his wrist on the loop. One of Fevrierson’s men, wounded in the arm, came up and helped him lob the bombs out into the night.
The Tanith sergeant switched round the moment he heard las-fire from his left. Caober and Baen, along with three Alliance soldiers, came around the next traverse, shooting into the space behind. “Flank attack!” yelled one of the Alliance men. “Raiders in the fire trench!”
“Hold this wall!” Mkoll yelled to Bonin, and jumped down off the firestep, running along the trench to support Caober and Baen. Mkvenner was running with him, along with a handful of Fevrierson’s men.
The traverse shielded them all from the raiders in the next section, but also denied them aim. Baen hugged the end of the traverse and snapped off shots round the corner as often as he dared. A stick bomb came tumbling end over end across the traverse. Almost too fast to see, Mkvenner caught it in mid-air and slung it back. The blast curled smoke out round the end of the traverse.
“They’ll be reeling! Rush them!” one of the Genswickers declared, and charged round the end of the defensive fortification with two of his comrades. All three were riddled with rifle shots and slammed back against the revetment wall. They hung there for a millisecond and then flopped onto their faces.
Mkoll glanced at Mkvenner.
“Topside, flank and down,” said the tall, grim scout.
Mkoll nodded. He waved Caober with them and pointed Baen to hold the corner of the traverse.
The three Ghosts threw out their camo-cloaks, and sheeted them over their shoulders, draping them expertly so that one hem-fold formed a hood over their heads.
Then they went up the back wall of the fire trench and over the top.
The surface behind the fire trench was packed earth and pools of mud. It was essentially dark, but the heavy barrage continued to strobe the entire line with fierce flashes. In the heat of the brutish trench fight, Mkoll had almost forgotten about the bombardment. It was still going on: the superheavy long range shells plastering the command and supply trench areas of the entire Peinforq Line as far as he could see. Some shields still held, but only a half-hearted sporadic barrage answered the enemy thunder.
Mkoll, Caober and Mkvenner crawled forward, shrouded by their capes, hugging the mud. They’d sheathed their warknives and had slung their lasrifles over their shoulders under the capes so they wouldn’t jar against stones or metal fragments on the ground. They slithered, feeling their way. Every time the light of a shell-blast lit the sky they froze.
Down in the trench to their right they could hear Baen and the Genswick boys duelling patchily with the raiders, squeezing off shots around the traverse. Mkoll could hear the raiders shouting to each other in a language he didn’t understand. But there was no mistaking the order “Grenadze! Grenadze!”
They were just short of the rear lip now. Mkvenner undid a hoop of stiff but malleable wire from around his waist, straightened it, and pushed it out ahead of him until the tip just poked over the back edge of the fire trench. The wire had a strand of fibre optic cable wrapped around it. The tip was a tiny optical cell and at Mkvenner’s end was a little pin-plug that he attached to his scope. Gently, he moved the wire around and studied the poor resolution images the cell was sending back down the cable t
o his scope’s eyepiece.
He raised his hand just high enough for Mkoll and Caober to see. Five fingers, then three. Eight raiders. He moved his hand laterally, indicating four at the traverse corner, two below them and two more to the left.
Mkoll nodded, and reached back to slide a tube-charge from his webbing pouch. All three of them took off their las-rifles and laid them on the mud. This was going to be too tight, too constrained for rifle work. They drew out their pistols and warknives. Mkoll and Caober had standard pattern laspistols and Mkvenner had a .38 calibre auto with a twelve shot clip that he’d acquired on Nacedon. Caober and Mkvenner armed their pistols and lay face down with hand guns in their right hands and warknives in their left. Mkoll lay his laspistol on the mud beside his right hand and clamped his warknife between his teeth. Then he ripped the det-tape off the tube-charge and hurled it down into the corner of the traverse.
The blast threw the shredded form of one of the raiders right up out of the fire trench. His burning corpse bounced over the parapet and rolled into no-man’s land.
By then, the three Ghosts had thrown off their cloaks and leapt down into the trench.
Mkoll landed awkwardly but squarely enough to coil into a firing crouch. He aimed right, and put las-rounds through the backs of two raiders stumbling blindly out of the blast smoke.
Mkvenner came down like a feline between the two raiders directly under their position. He headshot one point-blank, and as the man spasmed away, spun round and broke the neck of the other with a powerful sideways kick.
Caober’s leap brought him down hard on top of the other two and all three collapsed in a writhing scrum on the floor of the trench. Fighting to rise, one of the raiders stood on Caober’s ankle and wrenched it badly. The Tanith yowled and shot him through the pelvis. The raider went over again, screaming and hammering with his arms like a broken toy. The other raider rolled clear and slashed at Caober with his bayonet. Straight-armed, Caober blocked the spearing blade with his warknife and shot at the man, but missed. The raider drove on and Caober lost his pistol in his frantic effort to dodge.
The laspistol lay close by on the duckboards, but Caober didn’t waste time trying for it. He grabbed the barrel of the raider’s rifle with his now free hand and tugged it past him, stabbing the bayonet into the trench wall under his armpit and dragging the enemy’s throat onto his extended knife blade. Blood squirted across Caober’s chest. In his earbead, he heard Mkvenner say, “drop,” and he did so, falling even as the corpse fell.
Five more raiders were hurtling down the trench onto them. Mkvenner ignored the rifle rounds whizzing past him and strode towards them, firing his pistol. The first and second raiders lurched backwards as if they’d been pole-axed. The third slumped on his face. The fourth was straggling with a jammed bolt when Mkvenner’s shot snapped his head round and blew out his cheek. The fifth got off a shot that knocked Mkvenner sideways, blood gouting from his head.
“Ven!” Caober screamed, and threw himself at the raider, slamming him down hard. Caober pinned the soldier with his right forearm and expertly rotated his warknife in his left hand, switching the blade from tip up to tip down. Once it was down, Caober thumped the blade repeatedly into the raider’s chest.
Mkoll had finished off the raiders half-killed by the tube-charge and came running back down the fire trench with Baen and the Genswick troopers on his heels. Still more raiders, including a grenadier, were behind the second five.
Mkoll’s pistol toppled one, and then Baen was firing on full auto with his lasgun. The Alliance troopers beside him supported with fire from their rifles.
Mkoll moved forward over the crumpled bodies. “You two! Ahead and secure the trench!” he ordered and a pair of infantry men ran ahead. “You others, up on the firestep!” The rest clambered up onto the step and began shooting into the night.
“Trench secure!” one of the Genswickers shouted back. He’d linked up with members of his own platoon pushing out from behind the next traverse.
“Onto the step, then!” Mkoll urged. “See them off!”
Caober struggled up and ran to where Baen was kneeling over Mkvenner. There was an appalling spill of blood.
“Sacred Feth!” Caober stammered. “Ven!”
“Oh, shut up,” growled Mkvenner tersely. He had a nub of doth jammed to his ear and when he took it away, blood squirted from his ear. “It took my ear lobe off. That’s all.”
“Feth!” Caober gasped with such relief Baen and Mkvenner both started to laugh.
There were no more raids against station 143 that night, though Fevrierson’s men stood to on the firestep at alert drill. Word filtered back that stations 129, 131, 146 and 147 had been intruded with serious losses, though by midnight only 146 was still the scene of fighting as Alliance troops doggedly drove the raiders out. Unconfirmed reports said that an entire section had been overrun between stations 287 and 311, and from the noise of combat washing down the line, Mkoll could believe it.
The enemy barrage ended, abruptly, at midnight, leaving just a dismal fog of ash vapour and fyceline smoke drifting down over the allied lines. At 01.00, the Alliance gun-dens commenced a counter-bombardment that mercilessly whipped the Shadik front-line positions across the Naeme until dawn.
At 02.15, with the punitive artillery searing the sky behind them, Mkoll assembled his team and bade farewell to Fevrierson. The young lieutenant saluted and shook Mkoll’s hand, and many of his weary company clapped and cheered.
“You’re going back?” Fevrierson asked.
“Should have been back long since. We’ve a reconnoitre to report.”
“Thanks,” said Fevrierson. “Thank you. Emperor bless you.”
“These are good men,” said Mkoll, nodding to the mud-spattered infantry all around them. “Keep them tight and you’ll keep them alive.”
“I hope I never see you again,” said Fevrierson. “I’d never wish this shit-hole on anybody, especially not for a second time.”
Mkoll nodded. Bonin grinned.
“What will you tell this commander of yours?” Fevrierson asked.
“The truth,” said Mkoll. “The front’s everything he was afraid it would be.”
THREE
A.S. HQ RHONFORQ
“…and to the general disposition of auxiliary support elements, officers of said elements are to answer to (I) the primary commander of their given area/sector, and (II) the ranking Alliance officer in their specific line subdivision.”
—Aexe Alliance General Order Book, 772th edition, section 45f,
paragraph iv, “Command Protocol.”
From Rhonforq, you could see the massive smoke spume rising from the Peinforq Line ten kilometres away to the east. During the night, the old chafstone buildings of the town had vibrated to the distant symphony of the guns.
Dawn was at 04.37 Imperial. The sun rose, dull and veiled, over the woods towards Ongche, and mist fumed over the strand meadows and market gardens west of the town. The Tanith First had slept for about five hours in poor billets on the southern edge of the town, but most of their motor pool staff and armourers had been up all night. They’d laid off from the trains at 21.00 the previous evening, along with two companies of Krassians and a motorised battalion of Seqgewehr coming up from Seronne.
Gaunt rose at 05.00, stiff and sour. All night, despatch riders and material transports had raided by down the street under his window. He’d been billeted in a pension off the town square. Daur and Rawne occupied rooms there too, along with five of the Krassian officers and a number of Aexe Alliance staffers. Corbec had elected to billet with the Ghosts.
Gaunt’s room was small and spare, with low, sloped ceilings and a window that wouldn’t close properly. Beltayn knocked and brought him a canister of caffeine and a bowl of lukewarm water.
“Mkoll back yet?” Gaunt asked, attempting to shave using the tepid water. Beltayn was laying out Gaunt’s service uniform on the bed.
“On his way, sir.”
“Delayed?”
“Something was awry.”
“For instance?”
“You heard the shelling, sir. The whole place is buzzing with it. New super-siege guns. The line took a pasting last night.”
“I thought as much,” said Gaunt. “I wo-oow!”
Beltayn looked up. “Sir?”
“Nicked myself,” said Gaunt, raising his chin to study the razor wound on his throat in the mirror. “This water’s almost cold, Beltayn.”
“That water’s as warm as it gets unless it decides to be caffeine,” Beltayn said. He brushed the crown of Gaunt’s cap and set it on the bed. Then he came over to Gaunt and peered at his cut. “You’ve had worse,” he said.
Gaunt smiled. “Thank you for that.”
“What you want is a needle,” said Beltayn.
“A needle?”
“Old family trick. A needle. Excellent when it comes to shaving nicks.”
“How does it work?”
“When you cut yourself with the razor, you take the needle and poke it into your gums.”
“That works?”
Beltayn winked. “Sure as feth blots out the pain of the nick.”
Dressed, and with a tab of Beltayn’s cigarette paper stuck to his shaving wound, Gaunt took his caffeine outside. The day was clear and promisingly warm, though the stink of fyceline was everywhere. He stopped on the pension’s terrace to chat with a Krassian major and two officers from the Seqgewehr, and saw Rawne and Feygor demolishing a fried breakfast in the small dining room.
A column of tanks clanked past through the square. Gaunt finished his drink, put the empty cup on one of the terrace tables, and walked across the road to the Chapel St. Avigns where the Allied staff headquarters was sited.
Rhonforq was one of the Octal Burgs — eight high church municipalities that sustained the authority of the Sea of Ghrennes through Mittel Aexe. Its church and cloister had been built in 502, ten years after the first colony footing at Samonparliane, and before the war its chief activities had been wool-carding, button manufacture and cheese making. Visitors were invited to throw a coin into the fountain of Beati Hagia or, if they were sound of limb, take in the hike to the Sheffurd Hills to view the birthplace of Governor-General Daner Fep Kvelsteen, whose autograph and seal were included in the famous four at the bottom of the Great Aexe Declaration of Sovereignty.