He glanced left and right, surveying his lines. The Jokers had done him every credit. Despite the extremity of the moment, and the haste with which they’d been obliged to assemble, the company had formed up perfectly. They were ready, pikes and carbines held at their shoulders.
Bronzi was prepared to bet that the Jokers were going to be the first Army unit to meet the enemy assault that morning with any kind of coordination or discipline. How the Jokers gave account of themselves in the next thirty minutes would therefore be critical. There was no possibility of the geno company men defeating the assault, but if they delayed it, or slowed it down, it would most likely decide how the rest of that damnable day would go.
A full company of Outremar regulars, flying the Samarkand banner, had rushed up into position on the Jokers’ right flank, taking up a line across the billet road and a broad valley to the south that faced the desert. A second Outremar unit, smaller, but armed with weapon servitors, was moving up behind them, and the vox said that a Sixth Torrent armour unit with infantry support was a minute or two behind the Jokers.
The Jokers’ left flank was the earthwork wall. Skilful placing by Bronzi and his trusted bashaws had spread the Jokers along the higher banks and mounds of the uneven terrain in the billet grounds. They were getting decent tactical instruction over the vox, and the ’cept was with them. Bronzi could see how his men were tightening and adjusting their structures slightly as Mu’s wisdom touched them.
Bronzi nodded to himself. His company was as ready as it would ever be. He raised his sabre and held it aloft. There was a sharp crackle of gunlocks releasing.
The tidal wave of enemy warriors was less than a quarter of a kilometre away, the dust storm rolling with it. Dozens of Outremar soldiers fled before it, chased out of their overrun position. They ran frantically towards the geno line, past rows of abandoned tents and empty dug outs. The poor fools were doomed, Bronzi realised. They were in the line of fire, and he could not afford to stay his men for long enough to allow the Outremars to reach safety.
War forced choices on a man, unpleasant choices. At Tel Utan, the Alpha Legion had demonstrated how clinically such choices should be made. Compassion was a liberal folly that spared a life so that a hundred others might die as a consequence.
Bronzi looked up at the company banner, hanging limp and heavy in the dry air. He studied the figure on the banner, the cosmic joker, the trickster god Trisumagister, capering in his motley, a belled wand in one hand, a spillglass in the other. The Joker god knew all too well how wanton and feckless fortune could be, and how quickly time ran out for those who dallied with her affections. Bronzi believed he knew Dame Fortune just as well. You paid for her time, and took her service, and knew that she would be with another man the moment the fancy took her.
The sky overhead had darkened so much that it had turned the colour of arterial blood.
‘Geno!’ he yelled.
Full-throated, the men echoed the word. The time was on them.
Bronzi rotated his sabre in the air, making quick, cutting sweeps. The first signal.
On the low ridge to his right, the company mortar teams began to drop shells into their angled tubes and step back, heads turned aside. A plosive, hollow plunk-plunk racket began. Mortar bombs whizzed up and over onto the enemy formation, expertly ranged. Bronzi observed the thumps and flashes as they struck with a nod of satisfaction. Each blast cast up white smoke and flailing bodies.
He sawed his raised sabre back and forth. The second signal.
The tripod-mounted cannons and crew-served weapons began to chatter and pulse tracer and blinding las at the oncoming foe. Sections of the leading ranks were demolished. Smoke and bloody steam furled back across the Nurthene press and chunks of shredded meat rained down on them. Bronzi saw echvehnurth elite judder and disintegrate as the heavy fire ripped through them. He saw a galloping monitor tumble over, disembowelled, crushing its rider under its rolling back.
Bronzi chopped his sabre straight down. The third signal.
The rifle lines opened fire. The lingering peal of muzzle cracks sounded like snapping twigs. Firing row by row, coordinated by the yelling bashaws and Mu’s ’cept, the ranks of riflemen aimed, fired, re-aimed, fired.
The effect was devastating. Five hundred Anatolian lascarbines, hefty pulse repeaters developed from the ubiquitous Urak-1020 combat gun that had been the workhorse of every Strife-Age warlord’s army, trained and fired by professional soldiers drilled to perfection, blazed at the Nurthene. The Jokers were especially famed for the quality of their marksmanship, a fact that Bronzi took a great deal of personal pride in. Every Joker rifleman was a crack shot by Army standards. There wasn’t a damn one amongst them who couldn’t hit a moving gamebird at nine hundred metres. Bronzi regularly fielded requests from other regiments asking for the loan of a rifleman or two to conduct training programmes. He bitterly regretted that Giano Faben and Zerico Munzer, his two best marksmen, were not at his side that morning. He’d loaned them as tutors to a Gedrosian regiment on Salkizor fifteen months earlier. The last he’d heard, they were en route back to him by pack ship, training tour over.
Giano and Rico were missing all of the fun, the lucky bastards.
The fusillades expertly slaughtered the first eight ranks of the Nurthene host, bringing down infantry and reptile riders alike. Though a handful of the fleeing Outremars had been clipped too, Bronzi was gratified to see that his men’s vaunted skill had spared most. Frantic Outremar survivors were dashing into the geno lines, weeping and screaming for sanctuary. Tche looked at his het.
‘Keep them firing,’ Bronzi mouthed over the din. ‘Sustain order until there is no distance left.’ Tche nodded.
Bronzi lifted his sabre and held it out straight in front of him at head height. The fourth signal.
The pikemen, laced in between the rows of rifles, took a step forwards with their left feet, and declined their weapons into a murderous fence. Strengthened by sheathes of gravimetric force, the telescopic pikes extended until each one was ten metres long. The pike-men kept the arches of their right feet braced over the grav counterweights in the spikes at the bases of their hafts.
The las-spines on the tips of the pike blades began to sizzle with cising power.
Run onto that, you bastards, Bronzi thought, then you’ll discover how badly a geno company can maul you.
As if obeying his will, the Nurthene host did exactly that.
The front edge of the vast blight swarm spilled across the last few metres of open ground, losing men to the sustained rifle volleys at every step. Ten metres, five, two, and still they came, despite their losses. For every Nurthene casualty, there were two more men behind to take his place, and die in turn, and be replaced by four.
The Nurthene reached the pike fence.
The first of them were split apart, sectioned and chopped. The next waves became impaled, bodies skewering onto pike blades like living souvlaki. The geno pikemen leaned into the weight and multiple impacts, some grunting as their elongated poles hoisted whole bodies off the ground, writhing like speared fish, others struggling and collapsing as the crude mass of corpses pulled their pikes down. Gravitic counterweights shorted out under the demands put on them, and hafts splintered as the gravimetric sheathes supporting their outlandish lengths evaporated. Pikemen started to use broken sections of their weapons to jab and flay at the pressing tide.
Now we’re in it, Bronzi thought.
The concussion of the Nurthene charge meeting the geno line sent a ripple of shock back through Bronzi’s ordered files. For a moment, the Jokers held, like a dam before floodwaters, but the pressure built rapidly. The Nurthene piled in, hundreds upon hundreds of them, packing tighter and tighter against the geno barrier. In the gaps where the pike fence had broken, Nurthene warriors lunged and shoved and stabbed. Jokers fell down, cut open by whirring falxes, or toppled against the rows behind them. Carbines fired, point blank and scattershot. Pressed back by the layer of the dead and dyin
g in the buffer of the front ranks, the lokers tried to maintain structure. The dead of both sides formed a ghastly ridge, which the Nurthene urgently scrambled over.
‘Blades, blades!’ Bronzi yelled.
Bashaw Fho, one of his senior men, turned to relay the order. An iron dart punctured his head and he dropped on his face. Nurthene arrows were suddenly coming down like torrential rain. Every man in Bronzi’s field of vision was struck by a dart. Bronzi felt one slice his right thigh and another embed itself in his left boot.
He roared and threw himself forwards, sabre in one hand, Parthian revolver in the other.
Sense departed. Instinct took over. He fired his pistol, and saw an echvehnurth’s head spray apart. He stroked with his sword, and took the top off a skull. Something hit him in the gut. Winded, he wheeled, and eviscerated a Nurthene with his blade. He shouldered another aside with his bulk, and shot the devil in the head to make it count. Turning, he stabbed another through the chest, and had to twist hard to pull his sword free.
Twenty seconds in and his gun was out. He threw it at a Nurthene and snorted as it bounced off the man’s skull. He drew his other sidearm, a shot-loaded backup piece with a pepperpot snout of six barrels.
The Nurthene cavalry came crashing through the dense forest of fighting bodies with an indiscriminate momentum that trampled both Nurthene and Imperial underfoot. The reptile riders bucked and lurched above the heads of the infantry, like horsemen driving their steeds across a swollen river. Pikes caught some, hooking them out of their saddles, and the riderless beasts ploughed on, snapping and thrashing. More iron darts whizzed down out of the haze, dropping men by the dozen. The churned soil bristled with embedded arrows as if it was sprouting some strange new crop.
The first of the monstrous caimans lumbered into view out of the swirling vapour. Bronzi had never seen animals so enormous: dull-eyed heads the size of ground speeders, bodies the bulk of Imperial tanks. Their tails seemed to go on forever. From the ornate howdahs and fighting platforms on their massive backs, Nurthene archers in blue silks and silver mail fired salvo after salvo of iron darts from small, double-curved bows.
The caimans were inexorable. Their black scales shrugged off small-arms fire and snapped pike hafts, and they simply ran over anything that got in their way.
Bronzi sheathed his sabre, and took aim with his pepperpot. The clothes on his back felt heavy, and he knew it was due to the weight of the blood soaking into them. He lined up on the howdah of the nearest crocodilian, and discharged all six barrels at once.
Bronzi made up his own cartridges, tight packing them with twists of monofilament wire, adamantium shot and pebbles of xygnite putty. Six of them were enough to explode and shred the howdah and everything in it. Flying shot and wire injured the animal too. It rocked, and shifted its slow bulk in a slovenly pain response. Bronzi broke open his pepperpot, the smoking cases ejecting automatically, and rammed in six more with shaking fingers.
The caiman was turning towards him, flicking men into the air with its vast snout. Bronzi clacked the stockless weapon shut and re-aimed, the ball of his right thumb wedged into his cheek. He fired again, and the tiny, lethal debris of his rounds blew out the creature’s throat and right shoulder in a shower of meat and blood. It crashed over, its snout gouging into the ground like a ploughshare and its hindquarters kicked out in spasm. The tail whipped around and three dozen bodies, caught in its stroke, flew into the air.
He was about to reload, but there was no opportunity. Two echvehnurth came at him with their falxes. He managed to block the first swipe with his spent weapon and then let go of it to wrestle with the Nurthene. The man was screaming at him, but Bronzi had hold of his falx, and jerked him close to dish out a head butt that crushed the man’s nose. The Nurthene became more pliant and Bronzi used his grip on the falx to heave the warrior around as a shield. The other echvehnurth had committed a swing of his falx at Bronzi, and the blade cut through his kin’s back instead.
The falx belonged to Bronzi suddenly. He pulled it out of the dead fingers, rotated it, and thrust it at the second echvehnurth. The long blade plunged in through the man’s left cheek, and the tip came out of the back of his head. Bronzi jerked the unfamiliar weapon free, and slashed wildly at a third echvehnurth who was closing to his left. The blow missed, but the echvehnurth toppled over dead anyway.
Tche grabbed Bronzi by the shoulder. His pistol shot had slain the enemy warrior.
‘Back, het!’ Tche yelled. “We have to get back!’
Bronzi knew Tche was right. It was turmoil. All semblance of row and order had vanished, and the Jokers were being broken up into melee units as the Nurthene poured in. The mortar positions had been abandoned and overrun, and over to the right flank, the Outremars seemed to have collapsed entirely.
The rolling wall of dust that came in with the Nurthene like a shroud was washing softly in across the Jokers’ stand.
They had done all they could. It felt to Hurtado Bronzi that they had been fighting for thirty or forty minutes, but in fact it had been little more than ten. The ’cept was urging the geno fighting men to fall back and reposition.
‘Do it!’ Bronzi yelled to his bashaw. ‘Disengage and fall back!’ He was nursing a fancy that his men could pull away and regroup as skirmishers to harry the Nurthene flanks.
But the dust was enveloping them, and there were Nurthene warriors everywhere. He realised that they would be lucky to get away alive.
THERE WAS NO sign at all of Lord Namatjira’s infamous rage. He patiently studied the minute by minute reports Tactical was providing in a composed, reflective manner. It was a curious trait, one that had undoubtedly contributed positively to Namatjira’s ascent to the highest military rank. In the grip of a genuine crisis, a glacial calm surrounded him. Lord Namatjira had no time or energy to waste on tirades or recriminations. Those would come later, after the fact. In the heat of open war, a cold, analytical focus was required.
‘Our first line of resistance, which included the Jokers geno company, has been smothered,’ Major General Dev told him. ‘Outremar 234, Outremar 3667 and the Hort Eighteenth have all been lost or put to rout.’
Namatjira nodded. Major General Dev and the senior offices waited for him to speak. From all sides came the low murmur of the adepts and the hum of cogitators.
‘The Titans?’ Namatjira asked.
‘Six minutes from contact,’ Lord Wilde replied. ‘They should turn this around.’
Namatjira turned and strode out of the chamber. His retinue followed him. Chayne paused, and nodded to Dev, indicating that he should follow.
Bounding with the vitality of a much younger man, Namatjira took the stairs up to the observation deck two at a time, holding up the skirts of his rakematiz robes. His Lucifers jogged double time to keep up.
They came out into the open air, into the curdled dawn. A large, low-walled terrace in the upper part of the palace precinct had been turned over to distance observation. Heavy scopes and detection grids had been erected along the parapet, and tall clusters of vox masts stood like pollarded trees in the centre of the terrace area. The observation crews made respectful namastes as the Lord Commander appeared.
‘Carry on’, he told them, with a solemn nod that seemed almost respectful. He walked across to the east-facing section of the parapet, and two adepts bowed and stood aside from a high-gain optical scope mounted on a tripod servitor.
‘I wanted to see for myself,’ Namatjira said quietly as Dev joined him.
‘Yes, lord.’
Namatjira peered into the scope’s viewer, and carefully adjusted the resonance as he turned it slowly from left to right.
The crest of the earthwork rampart filled the skyline to the north-east. To the south, in the broad road gully that Imperial pioneers had constructed beyond the palace walls, a steady line of transports and tanks were churning east along the track, heading into the incoming storm. A flock of Jackals whined overhead in tight formation, and turned south-east
to begin strafing passes. Despite the scope’s powerful resolution, Namatjira couldn’t see the enemy, but he could see the vast veil of rolling vapour that mantled them and filled the sky.
‘Extraordinary,’ said Namatjira, straightening up. He looked at Dev. His eyes were bright, almost excited.
‘When a man finds war commonplace, it is time for him to retire from service,’ said Namatjira. ‘This reminds me why I am content to serve the Emperor for a while longer.’
‘Sir?’ asked Dev. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because it’s a challenge, Dev, a revelation. The enemy has done the unexpected, and that tests us. In all of the predictive scenarios, did we ever consider that the enemy might launch a full-scale counter-offensive?’
‘No, sir. Petty raids and line assaults, perhaps, harrying attacks along our picket, but nothing like this. We didn’t realise they had the manpower left.’
‘They have taught us a lesson about expectation,’ said Namatjira. ‘We have them besieged, we have them outnumbered, and we hold a clear advantage in technology. Yet they have invaded us.’
‘An act of desperation,’ suggested Dev. ‘We are about to take their world from them. This is a last stand, perhaps, a last effort to drive us out.’
‘And a brave one,’ Namatjira replied, ‘yet it plays to our advantage.’
Dev hesitated. ‘Our advantage, sir?’
‘They have broken the siege. They have come out into the open and demanded a pitched battle. We will give them that. We will annihilate them. Nurth will be an Imperial dominion by nightfall. After months of grinding, nuisance war, they have handed us a swift and comprehensive final victory.’
Dev nodded.
Namatjira glanced up at the slow-turning sky. ‘It’s almost as if that is their intention,’ he mused. ‘For all the losses we may take, initially, to their brute assault, they must know our superior firepower will ultimately slaughter them. It is almost as if they are committing suicide as a race. It is almost as if they want to die, in one last firestorm, rather than linger on to ignominious defeat.’