“And our angles have been cut and blinded since that thing fell in,” Mochran added in a tired voice.
The “thing” he referred to was the gigantic wreck of the spider siege engine which the NorthCol batteries had brought down during the First Storm three days before. Its massive bulk, slumped across the gatemouth barricades, half blocked the entrance and had proved impossible to shift, despite the efforts of pioneer teams and sappers with dozers and heavy lifters.
Corbec saw the trooper was right. Enemy infantry could come worming in around the bulk and be inside before they were visible. The war machine gave the enemy a bridge right in through the tangled, rusting hulks of the gate barricade.
Corbec told them something reassuring and light that made them both laugh.
Afterwards, though he tried, he could not recall what it was.
He sauntered southwards, skirting through a trenchline and entered the rubble scarps closer to the gate. He had eleven heavy weapon teams tied in here at intervals behind flakboards and bagging. Six heavy stubbers on tripod mounts, two autoguns on bipods with ammo feeders sprawled on their bellies next to the gunners, and three missile launchers. Between the weapon positions, Tanith troopers were spread in lines along the embrasures. Walking amongst them, Corbec sensed their vulnerability. There was nothing to their rear and east flank but the ruined smelteries and the Spoil. They had to trust the abilities of the unseen “Spoilers” to keep them from surprises.
Corbec opened his vox-link and called up three flamer-parties from the reserves behind the engine sheds. Now he was out here, with dawn upon them, he could see how raw and open the scene was, and he wanted it secured.
He found Larkin in a foxhole close to the gates. The wiry sniper was breaking down his specialised lasgun and cleaning it.
“Any movement, Larks?”
“Not a fething hint.” Larkin clacked a fresh, reinforced barrel into place and then stroked a film of gun-oil off the exchanger before sliding one of the hefty charge packs into its slot.
Corbec sat down beside Larkin and took a moment to check his own lasgun. Standard issue, with a skeleton metal stock, it was shorter and rougher than the sniper’s gun and lacked the polished nalwood grips and shoulder block.
“Gotta get myself one of those one day,” said Corbec lightly, nodding at Larkin’s precious gun.
Larkin snorted and clicked his scope gently into place on the top of the weapon. “They only give sniper-pattern M-G’s to men who can shoot. You wouldn’t know how to use it.”
Corbec had a retort ready to go when his vox-link chirped.
“Modile to all sections. Observers on the Curtain Wall have detected movement in the rain. Could be nothing, but go to standby.”
Corbec acknowledged. He looked up at the huge wall and the towering top of the gatehouse. He often forgot that they had men and positions up there, thousands of them, a hundred metres up, blessed with oversight and a commanding position of fire.
He nodded across at Larkin, who slid the long flash-suppresser onto his muzzle with a hollow clack.
“Ready?”
“Never. But that’s usual. Bring ’em on. I’m tired of waiting.”
“That’s the spirit,” Corbec said.
That was what his mouth said, anyway. The sound was utterly stolen by a marrow-pulping impact of shells and las-fire that bracketed the gatehouse and shook the wall. Billows of flame belched in over the ruined death machine and the barricade and swirled up above the railyard. Parts of the barricade, sections of rolling stock, fifty tonnes apiece, shredded and blew inwards.
Corbec dropped. Billions of zinging shards of shrapnel, many white-hot, whickered down over the Tanith lines. Already, he could hear urgent calls over his link for medics coming from the Vervun Primary positions in the centre of the yard. He swung round and saw shells falling in the Spoil behind the Tanith position, blowing up fierce spumes of rock-waste. The Second Storm had started.
Ferrozoica changed tactics for its second assault. The First Storm had been an all-out, comprehensive attack along the southern Curtain Wall. This time they began a sustained bombardment of the wall length to keep Vervunhive reeling and they focussed their invasion to three point-assaults. One, an armoured formation led by two of the fearsome “flat-crabs,” hit Sondar Gate and pummelled at it for over two hours before being driven back by the wall-guns. Another slid west along the eastern rail-lines and struck at Croe Gate and the railhead behind it with battalion-strength force. The fighting in that sector, fronted by Vervun Primary and Roane Deeper regiments, lasted until the early afternoon.
The third attack went straight in for the vulnerable Veyveyr Gate.
In the first ten minutes of the Second Storm, flat-crabs and other heavy artillery siege-crackers brought down the barricade and blasted apart the corpse of the spider. The first flat-crab rolled right in through the gate, squashing metal and splintering rubble, driving down into the Vervun Primary positions in the main yard. Further artillery obliterated all defences along the bastions of the gateway and the walls nearby, and Veyveyr found itself shorn of its precious raised gunnery positions.
There were a few, desperate minutes of confusion as Colonel Modile tried to rally his splintered ground forces in the main area of the yard. They were falling back in droves before the armour attack, stampeding down the trenchways to escape the insurmountable power of the Zoican death machine. A second flat-crab began to grind in behind the first, searing shells to the right into the Tanith positions.
Modile fabricated a clumsy counter-assault and withdrew his infantry in a V-shape, allowing the NorthCol armour to press forward to meet the siege engines. The railhead air was full of clanking tracks and whinnying shells as the formations moved in. NorthCol tanks were blown apart by the heavy dorsal cannons of the flat-crabs, and other tanks and Chimeras were crushed flat under the siege engine’s tracks.
All the infantry, Ghosts included, could do little but cower in the face of this monumental clash. The noise level was physically painful and the ground trembled.
There was a vast detonation and a cheer went up all along the infantry lines. Sustained fire from three dozen NorthCol tanks had finally crippled the first flat-crab and blown it apart. The second, grinding through the gate, was blocked by the wreck.
Corbec scurried round in his cover and started to break towards the flank of the second crab.
Larkin caught him by the arm.
“What the feth are you doing, Colm?”
“We have to hit that thing! Maybe a man on foot can get close enough to st—”
A close shell blast threw them into the ash-cover.
“You’re mad!” cried Larkin, getting up. He found the brim of the defence and trained his gun out.
“Let the fething armour worry about the crabs! Here’s our problem!”
Corbec crawled up alongside him.
Zoican infantry, hundreds of them, were charging through the breach the flat-crabs had gouged, pouring through Veyveyr Gate itself.
Corbec began to fire. The thin crack of his lasgun was quickly joined by the heavier whine of Larkin’s sniper weapon. The support weapons along the Tanith lines opened up behind them.
Missiles from the heavy weapon positions hissed above his head as Brin Milo bellied forward through the rubble and began to scope for enemy infantry. Colonel Corbec’s hasty orders were crackling over the vox-link. Hell was erupting around them.
Milo saw a few ochre shapes clambering across the dead zone in the gate mouth and took aim. His first shot went wide, but he adjusted and dropped a Zoican with his second and his third.
Trooper Baffels and Trooper Yarch flung themselves down beside him and started firing too. Las-fire slashed back and forth across the railyard, flickering in multicoloured, searing lines. Someone a few metres away was screaming.
Milo tried to shut it out. He aimed his weapon as Larkin had taught him, kept his breathing slow, squeezed. A blurt of las-fire. An ochre warrior spun off his feet.
Yarch crawled up to the lip of the embrasure and primed a grenade. He tossed it and a crumping vortex of wind blew grit back onto them.
“If we—” Yarch began.
Milo and Baffels never found out what Yarch was planning. A las-round entered his skull though his nose-bone, blowing out the back of his head. As he rose weightlessly and jerked back, two more lasrounds hit him, one through the throat and the other through the eye. He tumbled down the rubble. Another lost man lost.
Baffels, a bearded man in his early forties with a barrel chest and a blue tattoo claw that lined his cheek, pulled Milo back into cover as tremendous las-fire exploded along their trench top.
Together, they crawled down into the trench bottom and found Fulch, MkFeyd and Dremmond trying to edge round south.
A light-storm of las-fire drummed around them. A ricochet hit Fulch in the buttock and dropped him to his knees. MkFeyd tried to rise to the fire step, but las-fire walked along its edge, exploding the fore-grip of his weapon and taking off the tops of two fingers of his left hand. He fell back, cursing his luck and jetting the others with bright, red blood.
Milo started to bind MkFeyd’s fingers with strips of field bandage, keeping his head low. Baffels was trying to patch the oozing wound in Fulch’s hindquarters and was calling for a medic over his vox-link.
Dremmond, who was bringing one of the flamers Corbec had requested forward, crawled up to the lip and sent withering blasts of incendiary death over the top. He was already boasting a flamer-tan from the First Storm, in which he had fought at Hass West.
More troopers battled along to join them. Some, led by Sergeant Fols, went ahead down the zag in the trench line to create an enfilade.
Milo looked up from his work with MkFeyd’s hand, his face smeared and dripping with blood, as a trooper nearby was cut in two. Dremmond kept firing with his flamer and three more Ghosts joined him at the firestep, opening up with their lasguns.
“Best I can do!” Milo said to the injured man, then crawled up to take his place at the firestep too. MkFeyd was working on pure adrenaline now and he crawled up alongside the boy. He managed to brace his gun with his bandaged hand and began firing. The line of Ghost lasguns barked and flashed down the length of the eastern position.
MkVenner moved his team out of the engine shed just as shelling from the second flat-crab blew it out. Mochran was already dead, punctured apart by a series of stub-rounds that had perforated the shed wall.
MkVenner had ordered his unit to fix bayonets — the long silver daggers of the Tanith — at some point early in the assault, and now he was glad of it. Zoican infantry, their faces hidden by those sculpted ochre masks, were pouring into the Tanith trench lines from the south. With no more than fifteen men around him, MkVenner engaged them, stabbing and slicing, firing weapons point-blank. The Zoicans were overrunning them. There seemed no end to the numbers of ochre enemy. As fast as MkVenner could kill them, there were more. It was like fighting the ocean tide.
Major Racine, of the Vervun Primary, had been out inspecting the forward arrays of his Veyveyr positions when the storm came down. He had tried to control the retreat and he debated fiercely with Colonel Modile about how best to counter the Zoican push. After a few bitter returns over the vox-line, it had gone dead. Modile clearly didn’t want to argue with his subaltern anymore.
Racine had five hundred men behind a glacis of rubble in the main yard, facing the encroachment of the second flat-crab. He called up his bombardier and took three satchels full of mine charges and grenades.
Then he hauled himself over the lip and ran towards the siege engine.
A raging storm of las — and bolt-rounds whipped around him. Not one touched him. All that saw it regarded it as a miracle. Racine was ten metres from the vast supertank, with its grinding segmented armour, when a las-round went through his ear into his brain and killed him. He dropped.
There was a dreadful hiss of wronged valour and injustice from his watching troops. He had got so close.
The flat-crab ground forward, crushing Racine’s corpse into the ash.
The pressure set off the charges looped around him.
The vast cannonade of explosions flipped the crab up and over on its rear end. Quick-thinking gunners in the NorthCol armour hit its exposed belly hard. One shell touched off its magazine and it vaporised in a colossal jet of fire that blew out the top of Veyveyr Gate itself.
The Vervun Primary troops, wilting and shattered in the aftershock, swore that Racine would be remembered.
The Zoican troops were all over them. Corbec edged down a gully that had once been a side street in the railyard, the walls still standing, scarred and crater-peppered, around him. He had sixteen men with him, including Larkin and Trooper Genx, who carried a bipod autocannon.
Corbec’s first thought was to order his men to hug the walls, but the streets seemed to funnel and corral the enemy fire, and las — and bolt-rounds ricocheted along them. He’d already lost three men who had kept to the walls and been blown down by the fire sliding down them. It was safer to stand out in the middle of the street.
They pushed ahead and met a detachment of Zoican storm troops, at least fifty of them, pouring into the eastern positions. Fire walloped back at them and Corbec marvelled at the way the las-rounds kissed and followed the stone walls. Trooper Fanck dropped, his chest gone. Trooper Manik was hit in the groin and his screams echoed around them.
Genx opened fire and his heavy cannon made a distinctive “whuk-whuk-whuk” in the closed space. An enemy round took off his hand at the wrist and Corbec scooped up the autocannon and fired it himself. Genx, his stump instantly cauterised by the las-fire, got up without comment and began to feed his colonel’s weapon.
Larkin took his targets as they came, blowing off heads or blowing out chests with the powerful kick of his sniper gun. The las-fire of the normal weapons was superhot but lacked stopping power. Larkin blanched as men beside him hit enemy troops who kept going despite precise hits which had passed through them cleanly. Only Larkin’s sniper gun and Corbec’s autocannon were actually dropping the foe first time so they wouldn’t get up again.
The NorthCol were almost overrun. Colonel Bulwar called to Colonel Modine, but the Vervun Primary officer had apparently shut his vox link down.
“Anvil!” Bulwar signalled to Corbec, the only officer in this hell-fight he trusted. “Anvil!”
Morning itself was rising above it all, unnoticed. At Sondar Gate, after more than two hours of intense fighting, the Zoican attack was driven off. Grizmund’s Narmenian tanks had assembled in the Square of Marshals just inside the gate ready to face any force that broke in. They stood in rumbling lines just like Vegolain’s had done in the first hours of the war, over a month before.
When the push at Sondar was repulsed, House Command signalled Grizmund to pull out and deploy along the southern manufactory highway to reinforce Veyveyr Gate. Two regiments of Vervun Primary Mechanised and a Volpone battlegroup were also directed to support Veyveyr, but the orders, handed down by Vice Marshal Anko, were imprecise and the reinforcement elements became throttled in queues on the arterial routes. Grizmund, frustrated and unable to get clear direction from House Command, moved his armour column off the highway and tried to approach Veyveyr via stock yards behind the manufactories. Proper authorisation for this was impossible as the vox-links were jammed with chatter from the chaos at the railhead. Grizmund had gone about two kilometres, forcing his tanks through chainlink fences and razorwire barricades, when VPHC units bellowing curses and orders through loudhailers headed them off and demanded they return to the highway.
The confrontation grew ugly. Grizmund himself descended from his tank and approached the VPHC troops directly, arguing that his unorthodox route was necessary. Tempers flew and when one of the VPHC commissars drew a pistol, Grizmund knocked him down. There was a brief brawl and the astonished Grizmund found himself and four of his senior commanders arrested at gunpoint. The VPHC dragged them off
to House Command, leaving the Narmenian tank force leaderless and stymied, under the close watch of a growing force of VPHC.
The lack of concerted direction from House Command caused other disasters that made a bad day worse. The Vervun Primary and Volpone reinforcements were stalled all along the southern access. One group of Vervun motor-troops riding half-tracks with Hydra batteries mounted on the flatbeds were trapped in a side transit rout. In their agitation, they mistook a unit of Volpone Chimeras advancing behind them for an enemy force. By that stage, with nothing coming over the vox-links but undisciplined terror and panic from Veyveyr Gate, there was a general impression that the Zoicans had forced entry into the Hive and were sacking the southern quarters. The Hydra batteries opened fire, briefly, until the mistake was discovered. By then, thirteen Volpone troops were dead.
The Second Storm was showing up a great weakness in the Vervunhive command structure. Vervun Primary, House Command and the VHPC had communication protocols and designated channels which worked efficiently during peace time or practice drills, but which were incapable of handling the sudden spikes in vox-traffic that accompanied heavy fighting. Worse still, the House Command vox-system, modelled on Imperial standard, used the same channel bands as the Imperial Guard and the NorthCol. Within an hour of the assault starting, it was virtually impossible for any unit commander to talk long range to his troops or for any order signals from House Command to reach the ground. It was even impossible to vox House Command for clarification. Only short-range vox-links between troops and officers in the field ground were still functioning. Some commanders tried to switch channels, hoping their men would have the same idea, but there was little chance of officers and men guessing the same new channel simultaneously.
At Croe Gate, General Nash had a measure of success. He switched to a wideband his Roane Deepers had famously been forced to use once on Kroxis and his vox-staffers on the ground had the same idea. For most of the day, Nash was the only senior commander in the field to have a direct open link to his forces.