In the dull quiet of the audience chamber, Gnide’s corpse was lifted away from the carpet by the slack puppets. The desperate voice of Daur and hundreds of other field commanders bayed unheard from his vox-plug.
Three shells hit Hass West Fort in series. The first ignited the battery munitions. The second vaporised Corporal Bendace and sixteen other troopers. The third, a crippling Shockwave, splintered the tower top and caused a vast chunk of rampart to slump away in a torrent of stone, dust and fire. Captain Daur fell with it, caught in the avalanche of rockcrete and ceramite. Fie had still not received the order to arm from the House Command.
In the Iron Tank, Salvador Sondar, High Master of Vervunhive, drifted and dreamed. The satisfaction he had gained from asserting his mastery over that fool Gnide was ebbing. There was something akin to pain creeping into him across the mind-impulse links that hooked his cortex into the data-tides and production autoledgers of the hive. He rolled over in the warm suspension fluid and accessed the information currents of the Legislature and the guilds. The hive was… under attack.
He retuned his link to confirm. Even when the information was verified, it seemed wrong. There was a discrepancy that his mind could not resolve. Vervunhive was attacked. Yet this should not be.
He needed time to think.
Petulantly, he activated the Shield generators.
AN OCHRE WAVE
—Pius Kowle, Imperial Commissar,
from his public education leaflets
Dusk came early at the end of the first day. The darkening sky was stained darker still by the smoke plumes rising from the hive and its outer districts, and by the great ashen pall looming over the salt grasslands to the south. Thick, fire-swollen, black smoke boiled up from the mining district and the heavy industrial suburbs south of the Curtain Wall, and a murky brown flare of burning fuel rose from ruptured tanks and silos on the Hass docks to the north of the river. Other threads of white, grey and mauve smoke rose from hundreds of smaller, individual fires.
The bombardment continued, even though the Shield had been raised. A vast, translucent umbrella of field-energy extended out from the great Shield Pylon in the central district and unfurled itself in a dome that reached down to anchor substations inside the Curtain Wall. Thousands of shells and missiles burst against it every minute, dimpling the cloudy energy and making it ripple and wobble like green gelatine. From inside the Shield, it looked as if the green sky was blossoming with fire.
Observers on the southern wall, most of them soldiers of Vervun Primary, trained their scopes and magnoculars through the rising smoke and fires in the outer habs and saw the distant grass horizon flickering with a wall of flame seventy kilometres wide. The grass smoke—ash-grey but streaked with black from individual infernos down below the skyline—tarnished the southern sky in the dying light. Bright, brief flashes underlit the horizon smoke, hinting at the fierce armour battle taking place just out of sight. No communications had been received from General Vegolain’s armoured column for two hours.
Now that the Shield was up to cover the main hive, the outer habs, the heavy industry sectors and the mining district south of the wall were taking the worst of it. Unprotected, they were raked mercilessly by long-range artillery, siege mortars and incendiary rockets. As the light faded, the southern out-hive suburb became a dark, mangled mass, busy with thousands of fires, drizzled by fresh rains of explosives. From the Wall, it was possible to see the shock waves radiating from each major strike, gusting the existing fires.
The population of the southern outer habs was in the order of nine million, plus another six million workers who dwelt in the main hive but travelled out to work the industrial district and the mines. They had little shelter. Some hid in cellars or underground storage bays and many died entombed in these places. Penetrator shells dug them out explosively like rats, opening the makeshift shelters to the sky. Others were sealed forever under thousands of tonnes of collapsed masonry.
There were a few deep-seated, hardpoint shelters in the southern habs, reserved for suburban officials and minor area legislators. These shelters had been dug ninety years before during the Trade War and few were in decent working order. One group of hab officials spent two hours trying to find the correct rune-code to let them into their assigned shelter and they were incinerated by a rocket before they could get the vault door open. Another group, a few blocks north, found themselves fighting off a terrified mob that wanted to gain access to a shelter too. A VPHC officer, leading the group, opened fire with his handgun to drive the frantic citizens away while the ranking official, a mill-boss with guild connections, opened the vault.
They sealed themselves in, twenty-three rank-privileged citizens of authority level three or less, in a bunker emplacement designed to shelter two hundred. They all died of suffocation by the following dawn. The air systems, long in need of overhaul and regular maintenance, failed the moment they were switched on.
By nightfall, millions of refugees were clogging the main arterial routes into the hive, bottled up at Sondar Gate, at the Hass West road entry and the ore works cargo route. They were even trying to gain access via the rail-link tunnel at Veyveyr Gate, but the terminal inside had been turned into an inferno in the first wave of bombing and the gate was blocked.
Others still, in desperate, slowly moving lines, many laden with possessions or injured family members, dared the Spoil and the mud flats, and some made it in through the as-yet-undamaged railhead at Croe Gate.
The Hass West Fort was still burning and the top of it was cascading debris down both inside and outside the Wall. However, the Wall and the Hass Gate itself were still firm and streams of refugees made it into the hive via the Hass Road under supervision of Vervun Primary troopers manning the damaged emplacement. But access was still slow and a column of people, two kilometres long and growing, tailed back from the Hass Gate into the dark, vulnerable to the ceaseless onslaught pummelling the outer habs. Thousands died before they could pass into shelter, as shells landed in the thick queue, lust as many, perhaps eight or nine thousand, fled the traffic stream northwest and made progress into the river shores.
The last kinking stretch of shield wall north of Hass West Fort, known as the Dock Wall, reached out into the mid-waters and there was no way through. Some perished in the treacherous mud-flats; others tried to swim the Hass itself and were lost by the hundreds. Most cowered in the stinking slime under the dock wall, wailing plaintively up at the soldiers two hundred metres above them on the wall top, men who could do nothing to help them. Almost two thousand people remained penned in that filthy corner of the Wall through the first days of the conflict, too afraid to try the route back round the wall to Hass Gate. Starvation, disease and despair killed them all within four days.
The Sondar Gate was open and the main tide of refugees sought entry there. The Vervun Primary troops, focussed en masse to control the crowd, admitted the people as quickly as possible, but it was miserably slow going and the column of people stretched three kilometres back into the burning outer habs.
Many of the tail-enders, certain they would be dead before ever reaching the safety of the hive’s Shield, turned around and headed out into the salt grasslands by the hundreds. None were ever seen alive again.
In the Square of Marshals, just inside the Heironymo Sondar
