FIFTY

Night was a violet shadow slowly creeping across the sky. The last of the day’s light fell upon a sea of grey stretched out across the muster yard. Volpone soldiers stood in their thousands, regimental banners fluttering in a low breeze. Islands of forest green and grubby tan patched this throng, archipelagos of Fourth Ohrek and 19th Talpa, the remnants of their military strength in Agria. So few of the Slokans remained that the crimson of their battle garb was all but swallowed by the rest, and to the rear was the rugged drab of the Diggers arrayed for war. Tanks of the Tenth Pardus flanked the infantry, lining up in columns, their gun barrels raised in grim salute.

A war host, battered and weary, but resolute.

Only in death… or so went the saying.

Rensaint stood before them, one man facing a tide. His coat caught on the breeze revealing the inner lining, a slash of vibrant red against the black. The hawkish commissar was as potent a symbol of Imperial pre-eminence as the eagle carved into the front of the raised dais upon which he stood, proselytising to the masses.

A vox-caster amplified his voice, the sound of it resonating around the entire muster yard. He spoke of duty, of a hero slain, of the enemy they must overcome. Of victories… and defeats. Rensaint spoke with vigour, determination and the utmost certainty they would prevail, and as his words took hold, a change came over the troops. Hearts hardened, grief sharpened. Despair became vengeance. Fingers tightened around the stocks of rifles, jaws stiffened, backs straightened. Pride was weaponised, edged, forged into something that could be wielded. That could kill.

And the muster yard resounded as the priests gave voice to their sermons.

Praise the Emperor!

Volpone glory!

And as he looked upon the army, the fire he had stoked into being, Rensaint smiled and knew he had been right.

Through a cacophony of noise and fury, a mixed squad of Volpone and Agrians hurried across the rugged earth.

Greiss huffed at the front of the pack, setting the pace for the rest.

‘Move! Move!’

He turned to look over his shoulder, bellowing to the others. His white eyes flashed in a face daubed in night-black camo. The others wore it too, Rake and Dresk hefting one side of the bomb with Greiss; three Agrians built like tree trunks had the other.

Culcis followed behind them. He heard Hanmar’s heavy breathing in his ear, the corpsman lugging the charges they would need to prime the bomb. A voxman and tech-specialist, Kalder, ran at his side. He had a belt of tools strapped across his chest, their metal parts dulled with engine oil and soot. Everything dulled, everything a shadow. Survival depended on not being seen. Once they reached the wall, they would need to be fast.

The last member of the squad was Agrian. Makali grinned at Culcis as they slogged over the pockmarked earth, a crescent of white teeth. Old craters nipped like bear traps underfoot, some of the larger ones like gaping chasms and filled to the brim with dark water.

Rain slashed down in diagonal blades, pattering Makali’s skin and making it glisten. She’d said nothing about the blood-debt for Uzra and Culcis had left it at that. Chances are, he’d die trying to accomplish this idiocy anyway. As they ran headlong towards hell, he considered that grin may have been fatalistic.

An unceasing bombardment hammered the Karcas wall, a barrage of such blistering ferocity that it had the Archonate forces scurrying for their defensive guns. The shields collapsed in several places, overwhelmed and beyond resurrection. Entire swathes of the enemy were swept away, leaving their sections undefended. Explosions rippled where the shield remained, fire and smoke smearing the energy field like paint and blinding those beneath it.

Just like the small band of sappers needed it to.

The Pardus were throwing everything they had at the Pact, every shell and scrap of ordnance. The tanks would be drained in short order, left only with support weapons, their ammo caches denuded. It didn’t matter. They weren’t trying to breach the wall; they were trying to smother it.

A host of infantry moved under the cover of the bombardment, heads down as streaking parabolas of missiles arced overhead, leaving bright contrails in the dark then tearing the night open in ragged fire-red. Culcis saw them in snatches as his head turned one way then another, caught in flashes of hot light. They advanced beneath the mantlets, refractor fields rippling with energy distortion after every stray hit. Two hundred feet from the wall, they braced man-portable mortars and heavy cannons, their barrels cranked to maximum elevation. A staccato flurry of muzzle flash and light flare stuttered across the line then grew sustained. Thudding solid shot merged with shrieking las-discharge, a chorus to the heavier verse of destruction being played out across the Karcas border.

‘Fifty feet!’

Culcis turned back towards the objective at Greiss’ shout. They had to thread a narrow cordon through the destruction and the sergeant sped up, eager to reach their goal. Rake or Dresk – they looked so alike in the dark and camouflage it was hard to tell which from which – slipped. He lost his grip and the bomb fell. It had been painted black, and weighed almost as much as the anvil it resembled.

Rake cursed – it was definitely Rake, he could swear like no man Culcis had ever known – clutching his wrist where he had sprained it.

‘Can’t linger here, Volpone.’

Culcis gave Makali a look but she wasn’t grinning now.

‘Throne, I’m sorry… Rake, your hand.’ Greiss was all concerned officer but when he tried to come over Culcis ordered him back to his post.

‘Stay on the bomb, sergeant. Be ready to move… Hanmar?’

The corpsman had Rake’s wrist in his hand. There was no time to bind it but he had to check the bone wasn’t broken.

‘I can carry on,’ Rake protested. Nearby the Agrians were getting restless. Makali silenced them with a glance.

Hanmar shook his head.

Culcis shrugged off his pack and gave it to Rake. ‘Take it. Don’t lose it.’ Then he took up the trooper’s position at the side of the bomb.

‘Lieutenant, is that wise?’

‘Hanmar, it most assuredly isn’t but we need to move now.’ Culcis looked to Greiss as the six men lifted the bomb. ‘Get us underway, sergeant.’

They got another twenty feet before a sentry saw them. An unlucky explosion, a premature detonation ahead of the wall, lit them up like a Founding Day parade. The Pacter was too far away to hear but he gestured down at them vigorously, alerting his comrades. Makali shot him through the throat with her rifle.

‘More will come now, Volpone. Best be off with that bomb, eh?’

It weighed like three dead men or an anchor dredging the ocean floor but they pushed on. Another five feet gained before gunfire snapped down at them. One of the Agrians took a hit, grunting in pain, but kept going, his shoulder a bloody mess. A second shot caromed off the bomb, scraping the housing, revealing a long silvery scar across the metal.

‘Shit…’ hissed Culcis, sweating, muscles already aching, the wound to his leg like a splinter of fire in his groin.

The flare of the explosion had faded but the Pact could see them now, that streak of silver like a target lock.

Five more feet gained. Kalder got hit. One in the chest, a hot beam coring him through and through. He staggered, instantly falling behind, then his legs folded under him.

Hanmar glanced back. ‘Was that our bloody technician?’

Rake swore again, even more colourfully than the last time.

Culcis snarled through clenched teeth. ‘Keep going!’

The unencumbered runners took potshots at the wall, trying to keep the interested sentries behind its parapet. Only Makali was effective, her rifle like the Hand of Death itself striking down her enemies with eerie precision. She would run ahead, stop, take a braced kneeling position, fire and then move off again. Culcis saw her kill five Pacters that way.

She reached the wall first, shots pinging all around her but lessening as the angle favoured the Imperials.

Greiss looked about ready to collapse when he laid down the bomb. The wounded Agrian did collapse and failed to rise. He’d been shot in the chest too and, pale as milk, breathed his last.

Makali muttered something in her native tongue, it could have been a prayer or a curse for all Culcis knew. His leg burned like a red-hot ember but he crushed the pain down and took the bag of charges from Hanmar. Sheltered in the lee of the wall, they would have a few minutes at least before word got down the line and the Pacters with an enfilading angle started up.

‘We may have a problem, sir.’ Dresk, ashen-faced and panting, regarded the bomb.

Culcis saw it too. A stray shot, maybe something as stupid as a ricochet. The wiring that hooked up the incendiary part of the bomb to the seismic charges was damaged.

He looked back to the way they had come and poor Kalder lying face down in the dirt less than twenty-five feet away.

Makali stepped up, taking the charges from a dumbfounded Culcis.

‘We need to reconnect it.’ Her face darkened. ‘Chrono is skeffed too.’ She set to work, her only tool a knife. ‘It’ll need to be triggered manually now.’

‘Then I’ll do it.’ Culcis reached for the bag but Makali pulled it away. He gave her a hard look. ‘I’m the commanding officer.’

She stopped briefly to glare back at him. ‘Do you know how to wire and prime a seismic charge and then set it off, Volpone?’

Rake’s latest invective spoke for everyone.

The Pardus barrage was fading, Culcis heard it in the marginally longer breaks between salvos. They needed the wall down now. He clutched Makali by the shoulder.

‘Don’t you weep for me, Volpone…’ She flashed him that sickle smile.

‘The Emperor protects, golova.’

‘I fegging well hope He’s watching is all I’m saying. Now get gone.’

A second passed and in it Culcis saw true heroism, unadulterated by pride or glory or honour. None save the small knot of soldiers gathered below the wall would see her sacrifice, no one else would really know.

He nodded, and her eyes conveyed a reply she didn’t need to utter.

Then Culcis led them away, his command squad and the last of the Agrians. They fell back through the dark, striving to get clear, and mercifully the night swallowed them.

After almost a minute, Culcis found a shallow crater and hurled himself into it. Greiss, Hanmar and the others followed. They all needed to see this.

Makali was running with her head down, a hundred feet or so away. She had abandoned her rifle and flung herself forwards as the bomb went off.

A few seconds felt far longer, the moment stretching like grease down a pane of glass. A spit of flame climbed the wall, contained and focused by the simultaneous seismic detonation, expanding into a blazing column as it reached its apex. Then the fissure split, widened, dislodging huge spills of rockcrete and chunks of metal. The column collapsed, as if surrendering to its own weight, and as it touched the earth a blast wave rolled outwards like a tsunami.

Culcis dug his body into the crater. ‘Down!’

Heat and smoke blew out and over. Ash and dust muddied the air, made it thick and murky. Coughing back the clouds of debris, Culcis ducked his head above the lip of the crater.

A crevice wider than six Pardus tanks gaped in the wall.

Culcis hunted the dark and the thinning smoke.

There…

She was moving. Slowly, painfully. Makali limped to her feet. Burns ravaged her arms, her back. Then the ground trembled, stone split. A crack sounded, loud, deep as the earth’s roots, as a damaged piece of the wall slid from its moorings, slow and inevitable like a calving iceberg. A shadow fell across Makali as Culcis cried out for her to run, but she had stopped limping by then and merely stood, chin upraised. Defiant. That sickle smile gleaming right unto the end.

War-horns drowned out a bellow of inchoate grief, the tide of broken rubble unmoved by his anger.

For a moment, though it could have been several, Culcis felt numb, and then the Volpone were running past them, surging towards the breach.

Aramis shot a Pacter lurking in the squall of dust around the shattered wall. Her bright sword gleamed as she raised it.

‘Volpone glory!’

Then she was amongst them and so were her troops, the spearhead to take the breach and hold it. Gannika fought at her side, the commissar a blur of savagery, her chainsword roaring. They cut the heart out of the defenders, tore right through into the courtyard and mounted the wall. Fifty men took one half of the sundered section, another fifty the other, the steps still intact for the most part. Hundreds more followed.

Flamers came up behind the major and she ordered an immediate purge.

‘Cleanse and burn!’

With the breach secure, the Pardus moved up on churning tracks. They had spent their main guns during the bombardment but put secondary weapons to use. Flame tanks followed, the Hellhounds unleashed and eager. Smoke from promethium fire billowed up into the night and the air was ringed with fog and heat.

Elsewhere, the battlements were scaled and taken as section after section capitulated and fell, the breach like a slow but fatal wound haemorrhaging the Pact’s gradually waning resistance.

It could not hold. It would not be retaken.

Retreat was inevitable. The diehards remained, mostly Jaegans, but were quickly overcome.

Skirmishes broke out as order collapsed and the Pact splintered, each tribal warband fighting for its own survival. Aramis watched them play out from her vantage point atop the battlements, the Archonate ranks slowly withdrawing like a recoiling sea. She breathed hard, every exhale an unburdening. Sporadic weapons fire popped and cracked below. Shouts threaded the air, a distant and half-heard refrain, but she sheathed her sword, relieved to be free of its weight in her hand.

‘These are its death throes…’ she said to Fenk. His platoon had helped her take the wall. He said nothing, merely appreciating the view. He didn’t need to.

Agria was theirs, and the war was over.

It would take a little time to round up and destroy all the Pacters but the Volpone and their allies went about the task with methodical brutality. Several of the Agrians were already celebrating, a liberation long promised now delivered, though the cost of it almost beyond count.

The sun had started rising as Aramis strode onto the command section of the wall. A corporal handed her the regimental banner. The gilded gryfon rampant kicked and stamped as it rippled on the breeze.

And beyond the battlefield, in the middle distance, she saw Rakespur already burning.