Kowle sat up in the turret, looking ahead, taking in the sea of milling bodies before them.
Shells fell to the west and lit up the night.
Kowle dropped into the turret and said, “Drive through.”
The driver looked back at him in amazement.
“But commissar—”
“Are you denying a direct order?” Kowle snapped.
“No, sir, commissar, sir, but—”
Kowle shot him through the throat and dragged his twitching body out of the driver’s seat.
He settled into the blood-slick metal chair and keyed the intercom. “Armour column. Follow me.”
Just outhab wretches… worthless, he decided, as he drove the tank down through the masses, crushing a path to the distant gates of Vervunhive.
THREE
A MIDNIGHT SUN
“After this, all battles will be easy, all victories simple, all glories hollow.”
—General Noches Sturm,
after his victory on Grimoyr
The bombardment continued, both day and night, for two and a half weeks. By the close of the twelfth day, day and night were barely distinguishable, so great was the atmospheric smoke-haze hanging around Vervunhive. The Shield held firm, but the southern outhabs and manufactories became a fire-blown wasteland, fifty kilometres square. Some shelling had also been deliberately ranged over the Shield, catastrophically wounding the unprotected northern districts and large sections of the Hass docklands.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, Marshal Edric Croe, the Legislature’s appointed successor to Gnide, ordered the closing of the southern hive gates. The new marshal, brother of Lord Croe of that noble house, had been a serving major-colonel in Vervun Primary and his election was ratified by seven of the nine noble houses. Noble House Anko — who were sponsoring their own General, Heskith Anko, for the post — voted to deny. Noble House Chass abstained.
Marshal Croe was a pale, white-haired giant, well over two metres tall. His fierce black eyes and hard gaze were the subject of barrack legend, but he was personally calm, quiet and inspirational, judicious in leadership and popular with the men. The majority vote of the noble houses reflected their confidence in him — and the fact they felt he would remain answerable to them in all circumstances. Heskith Anko, a plump, swarthy brute who approached war politically rather than tactically, was appointed Croe’s chief of staff to appease House Anko. The two did not get on and their furious arguments in House Command became notorious.
Croe’s decision to close the gates — at this stage there were still some half a million refugees streaming in from the southern districts seeking sanctuary at Hass West, Sondar and Croe Gates — surprised the houses and the Legislature as a whole. Many believed Croe had bowed to Anko’s persistent pressure. House Chass, House Rodyin and seven houses ordinary raised a bill of disapproval and railed against the cruelty of the action. Half a million, left to die, the gates sealed against them. “It defies humanity,” Lord Rodyin stated in the Hall of the Legislature.
In fact, Marshal Croe’s decision had been far more deeply affected by the advice of Commissar Kowle, who had returned from the frontline with the tattered remnants of the tank divisions on the second night. Despite the losses suffered by Vegolain’s forces, Kowle was hailed by many as a hero. He had single-handedly rallied more than thirty vehicles and crews and pulled them back, bringing first-hand details of the enemy home to the hive. The public-address plates spoke freely of his heroism and loyalty. His name was chanted in the refugee camps and in all gatherings of citizens and workers. The title “People’s Hero” was coined and stuck. It was popularly believed he would be decorated for his actions and many in the low classes saw him as a folk hero and a •better choice for marshal than Croe. When, on the ninth day, food, water and energy rationing was imposed hive-wide by the Legislature, a speech by Kowle was published on the address plates, stating how he would not only be observing rationing strictly, but also rationing his rations. This astute piece of propaganda was Kowle’s idea and the hive population almost universally embraced the restrictions, wishing to be “true to the People’s Hero and his selfless behaviour.”
Croe realised quickly that he should not underestimate Kowle’s power as a popular figure. But that also meant he couldn’t ignore Kowle’s tactical suggestions out of hand.
Croe, Anko and the assembled officer elite spent most of the fifth day in conference. They filled the briefing hall of House Command in the Main Spine to capacity. An expectant hush fell on the assembled soldiers when Croe asked Kowle to give his assessment of the opposition. Kowle rose to his feet, the shrapnel wound in his forehead clearly and crudely sutured (another carefully judged move on Kowle’s part).
“I cannot overstate the magnitude of the enemy,” Kowle said, his calm voice carried around the vast, domed hall by hovering drones. “I have seldom seen a military force of such scale. Eighty or ninety thousand armoured vehicles, thousands of gun batteries and an infantry force behind them of several million.”
The hall was deadly quiet.
Marshal Croe asked the commissar to confirm what he had just said. During the Trade War, ninety years before, Vervunhive had faced a Zoican army of 900,000 and barely survived.
“Millions,” Kowle repeated simply. “In all the confusion, I had little opportunity to make a head count, of course—”
General laughter welled from the officer cadre.
“But I am sure, by disposition alone, that at least five million troops were embarked in file behind the armour advance. And those were only the ones I could see.”
“Preposterous!” Vice Marshal Anko barked. “Vervunhive supports over forty million inhabs and from that we raise half a million troops! Zoica is a third our size! How could they conceivably field five or more million troops?”
“I repeat only what I saw, general.” There was hubbub and murmuring in the officer ranks.
Croe had requested orbital pictures prior to the meeting, pictures he had hoped would confirm or deny these outlandish claims. But the smoke patterns from the continued bombardment were blanketing the continent and nothing was discernible. He had to trust Kowle’s estimation, an estimation supported by many of the armour crews he had brought back with him.
Croe also had to consider the political and popular suicide of contradicting the People’s Hero.
Croe cleared his throat and his dark eyes fixed the commissar across the central chart table. “Your recommendations, commissar?”
“The south gates to the hive must be closed. Sooner or later, the bombardment will stop. Then the Zoican legions will descend on us in unprecedented force. Already they may be approaching, cloaked by the barrage, entering the southern districts. We must make ourselves secure.”
Croe was silent. His gate officers had brought him updates on the refugee intake, the miserable statistics of the dispossessed and wounded still pressing for entry after five days. But Kowle’s assessment was inarguable.
“The southern gates will close tomorrow at nine.” Croe hoped he would not live to regret this callous act. As a matter of record, he would not.
While the magnitude of this decision soaked into the stunned officers, Colonel Modile requested that the Wall Artillery be raised and armed. At the first alarm, the rampart defences had been manned and raised, but more potent heavy guns, dormant since the Trade War, were still muzzled in deployment silos in the Curtain Wall itself. Vice Marshal Anko reported that this work was already underway. The hive’s main firepower would be ready in two more days and at last the city would have long range artillery to answer the bombardment.
“What of the reinforcements High Master Sondar promised?” asked an artillery officer on the front bench.
“Ten regiments of auxiliaries are moving south to us from the Northern Foundry Collectives as we speak. Vannick Hive has promised us nine regiments within a week.”
“And the request to the Imperium?” asked Commissar Tarrian, head of the VPHC.
Croe smi
led. “The will of the Emperor is with us. Warmaster Macaroth has already responded to our needs. Ordinarily, his forces would be months away, but luck is on our side. A troop convoy from Monthax, regrouping to reinforce the warmaster’s main crusade assault into the Cabal system, is just nine days away. It has been rerouted. Six regiments of Guard Infantry and three armour groups are moving to us directly.”
There was general noise and some cheers.
Croe rose and hushed them all. “But that is still nine days away. We must be strong, we must be fast, we must be secure well before then. The south gates close at nine tomorrow.”
A pitiful semblance of dawn was ebbing through the smoke cover when the Heironymo Sondar Gate shut the next morning. Dozens of refugees scrambled through in the last few moments. Dozens more were crushed by the slamming hydraulics. At West Hass and Croe Gates, the story was repeated. Veyveyr Gate had been immobilised by the first night’s shelling, although the railhead fires were now out. Vervun Primary battalions, supervised by the VPHC, erected blockades of metal wreckage to close the gate, the commissariat officers ordering the troops to fire on any refugees still trying to gain access.
The piteous screaming and wailing of those shut outside was more than some Vervun Primary troopers could bear. Many wrote in letters or journals that it was the worst part of the whole campaign for them. Soldiers who had overseen the closing of the gates at the start of the sixth day, and who survived the entire ordeal, never forgot that moment. Years after, men woke in the night, or at grey daybreak, sweating and screaming, echoing the noises they heard from outside the walls. It was the most merciless act of the conflict so far and it would only be matched when the gates fell open again, over a month later.
* * *
The Vervunhive Wall Artillery began firing just before noon on the eighth day. The massive silos opened their ceramite shutters and volleyed shells back into the salt-grass hinterland where the enemy forces were massing. The salvoes were answered with redoubled bombardment from the still-unseen foe.
On the morning of the eleventh day, troop convoys began to thread down the motor routes north of the Hass. Twenty thousand men and nearly five thousand war machines sent out from the Northern Collectives to reinforce Vervunhive or, more particularly, the Hass crossing which protected them from the Zoican advance. Kicking dust, the troop carriers and tanks rumbled through the bombed outer habs and damaged manufactories, braving the bombardment that still fell across the river from far away. Thousands of citizens had fled across the river by ferry, some trying to reach their homes in the northern outer habs, many more seeking sanctuary in the Northern Collectives. In places, the mass of people on the roadways slowed the NorthCol advance, but VPHC details were sent across the river by Vice Marshal Anko to clear the way.
By the afternoon, the NorthCol regiments were moving freely down to the waiting ferries at the docks, all refugee columns driven into the roadside fields to allow the convoys to pass. Some three hundred refugees had been executed by the VPHC to force them to make way. The refugees jeered the NorthCol columns as they roared past. General Xance of the NorthCol 2nd Enforcers later wrote, “This humiliating greeting did more to burn out the NorthCol morale than a month of bitter resistance at the Wall.”
Such was the size of the NorthCol deployment and such was the capacity of the ferries that estimates suggested it would take four days to cross them over the Hass into Vervunhive. When told of this, Marshal Croe ordered the Hass Viaduct reopened so that rail links could resume. The rail route had been closed at the start of the bombardment. Bypassing the ferry route, NorthCol got its forces into the hive in just under two days. Many tanks and armoured personnel carriers actually crossed the viaduct under their own power, trundling along the rail tracks. Two divisions of the NorthCol infantry also marched across the viaduct in a break between trains.
So far, nothing had been heard of the promised reinforcements from Vannick Hive, the great refinery collective three thousand kilometres away to the east. Vannick had undertaken to provide nine regiments, but thus far the only thing that had come from them was the continued fuel-oil supplies carried by the eastern pipeline. Many in Vervunhive wondered if the forces of Zoica had reached them too.
* * *
At dawn on the fourteenth day, lights were seen in the upper atmosphere. Flaring their braking jets, Imperial Guard dropships descended, diverted to the main lift-port at Kannak in the Northern Collective Hives. With the Shield erected, Vervunhive’s central landing field could accept no ships.
The Imperial Guard disembarked at Kannak and then marched south on the tail of the NorthCol forces. The simple sight of their high-orbit adjustments and blazing descents lifted the morale of the battered hive. The Guard was coming.
The Royal Volpone 1st, 2nd and 4th deployed south from Kannak Port swiftly, using the rail link to bring themselves deep into the hive. Marshal Croe personally greeted General Noches Sturm, the decorated victor of Grimoyr, on the rockcrete platform of the North Spine Terminus. A large crowd of politically approved citizens cheered them, under the watchful eyes of the VPHC.
Dressed in shimmering blue gowns, daughters of the noble houses — Merity Chass, Alina Anko, Iona Gavunda and Murdith Croe amongst them — were sent forward to decorate Sturm and his second officers, Colonels Gilbear and Corday, with silk floral wreathes.
Sturm was also greeted by the famous Commissar Kowle. The image of their smiling handshake was repeated on a million public-address plates across the hive.
The 5th and 7th regiments of the Roane Deepers, under General Nash, arrived by rail later that afternoon, amid more pantomime celebrations. Vice Marshal Anko was there to greet Nash and brass bands pomped and trumpeted the arrival. Amid the jubilation, Nash was able to confirm that three full regiments of Narmenian Armour were off-loading from carriers at the Kannak Port landing fields and would be en route south by dawn. The crowd rose, cheering the news, hailing the honoured Guard arrivals like they had already won the war.
The Tanith First-and-Only arrived by road, almost unnoticed, two nights later.
More than eighty matt-black troop trucks rumbled down the NorthCol highway through the northern outhabs of Vervunhive. The canvas tilts had been removed and around thirty Tanith troopers rode in each, crouched down with their weapons, webbing, haversacks, musette bags and bedrolls gathered to them. The bouncing trucks — six-wheelers with large, snarling front grills and pop-eye headlamps — bore the quadruple chevron cab-marks of NorthCol Utility Transport Division Three. Jerry cans and spare wheels were slung to their sides on sponson fittings.
A dozen outriders astride black-drab motorcycles ran along their flanks, and behind the main column came thirty more high-cabbed eight-wheelers laden with ammunition crates and regimental supplies, as well as the numerous cooks, armourers, mechanics, servitors and other attendant hangers-on that followed a Guard regiment on the move. These freighters were dull yellow, the livery of the Kannak Port Cargo Union, and netting was draped over their payloads. NorthCol soldiers in pale blue overalls and forage caps drove all the trucks, but the outriders were Tanith, in their distinctive dark battledress. Twelve kilometres short of Vervunhive, they paused to trickle through a checkpoint on the highway and they gained a vanguard of two dark-blue staff cars crewed by VPHC officers to lead them in.
All the headlamps in the convoy were blazing. Night had fallen sometime, unnoticed in the thick wallow of smoke. The only sights were the battered districts to either side, the fuzzy green glow of the hive itself — partly obscured by the smoke — and the occasional flash and flare of long-range shells falling into the outer habs they raced through.
Brin Milo, the youngest Ghost, rode with the rest of number one platoon in the lead truck. A slender, pale youth just now filling out with adult bulk, he had been the only non-soldier saved from the ruins of Tanith when their homeworld was overrun and destroyed four years earlier. The commissar himself had saved his life and dragged him from the fires that burned Tanith away. r />
For a long while, he had been “The Boy,” the company mascot, the piper, a little piece of Tanith innocence saved from hell, a reminder to all of the men of the place they had lost. But six months before, during the battle for Monthax, he had finally become a soldier too. He was proud of his issued equipment and lasgun, and he kept his pack in better order than any of the seasoned Tanith troopers.
He sat huddled in the cramped rear-bay of the rattling truck and polished the regimental crest on his black beret with a rag of gun-cloth.
“Milo.”
Brin looked up at Trooper Larkin opposite him. A wiry, taut-skinned man in his early fifties, Larkin was as well-known for his neurotic personality as his skill as the regiment’s most able sniper. The long, specialised shape of his marksman’s lasgun was sheathed in a canvas roll at his feet. Larkin had produced his gun-scope and was training it like a spyglass out of the truck. Larkin had once told Milo that he didn’t trust anything he hadn’t seen first through his beloved scope.
“Larkin?”
Larkin grinned and looked back, handing the delicate brass instrument to the youth, gently. From the tiny runes glowing on the setting dial, Milo noticed it was fixed to heat-see.
“Take a look. That way.”
Milo squinted into the scope, resting the rubberised cup to his eye-socket. He saw radiance and bewildering crosshair markers of floating red.
“What am I looking at?”
“The hive, boy, the hive.”
Milo looked again. He realised the radiance was the yellow dome of the Shield, a vast energy field that enveloped the unseen city-hive ahead.
“Looks big enough and ugly enough to look after itself,” he suggested.
“The same is said for so many of us,” Colonel Corbec said, holding on to the truck’s iron tilt-hoops as he edged down to Milo and Larkin. “Velvethive is in a pretty fix, so they say.”