Gate, the hive troopers struggled to manage the overwhelming influx of citizens. Forty percent of the arrivals were injured.
Captain Letro Cargin had been given charge of the operation and inside an hour he was close to despair. He had first tried to contain the refugees in the vast ceremonial square itself, but it quickly became filled to overflowing. Some family groups were climbing the pedestals of the statues around the square to find somewhere to crouch. There was group singing: work anthems of the hive or Imperial hymns. The massed, frail voices—set against the constant thunder of the bombardment and the crackle of the Shield above—unnerved his men.
The Vervun Primary barracks northwest of the square, which had taken hits in the first stage of the attack, was still blazing but under control. Cargin voxed House Command repeatedly until he was granted special permission from the guilds to open the Anko Chemical Plant west of the square and the guild manufactories to the east, to house the overspill. Quickly, these new areas became overfilled too. The guilds had issued particular instructions as to how much of those areas could be used or even entered. Cargin’s men reported fights breaking out as they tried to deny access to certain areas. Shots were fired over the heads of the crowd. Compared to the onslaught they had weathered outside, the small arms of the troops were insignificant and the House Guard found themselves pushed back deeper into the industrial areas, trying to accommodate the intake. Most troopers were profoundly unwilling to shoot at their own citizens. In one instance, an angry junior officer actually fired into the encroaching crowd, killing two. He and his six man squad were torn apart by a pack of smoke-blackened textile workers.
Cargin voxed frantically for supplies and advice. By eight in the evening, new orders were being issued from House Command and the Legislature, designating refugee assembly areas, hastily arranged in the inner worker habs south of the Pylon and the Commercia. Asylum traffic from the Sondar Gate, Hass Gate and, to a lesser extent, the Croe Gate was now choking the southern sectors of the hive. Some of the House Legislature, meeting in extraordinary session in the Main Spine, argued that it was the hive’s duty to house the outer hab population. Others were simply afraid that with the main southern arterials choked, they would never be able to mobilise their armies. Six noble houses also volunteered aid, which began to be shipped by carriage route down to the Square of Marshals and the main city landing field where the refugees from Hass Gate were also congregating.
It was a start, but not enough. Cargin began to wonder if the upper echelon of the hive really understood the scale of the problem. The Imperial mottoes, hive slogans and other messages of calming propaganda flashing up on the public-address plates did little to deaden the general panic. Cargin had angry, frightened citizens by the thousands, most stone-deaf from concussion shock, many burned naked by the blasts, many more dying and stretcher-bound. Short of closing the Gate itself, he had no way to stem the flow. His three thousand men were vastly outnumbered by the mass.
Cargin was voxed to the north corner of the square. There he found a field station had been set up by medics from some inner hab infirmary. Hundreds of the injured had been laid out on the stone paving. Doctors and orderlies dressed in crimson gowns and masks tended to them.
“Are you Cargin?”
Cargin looked round. A gowned and masked figure was addressing him. She pulled off her mask to reveal an appealing, heart-shaped face. The eyes, though, were hard and bewildered.
“Yes… doctor?”
“Surgeon Ana Curth, Inner Hab Collective Medical Hall 67/mv. I’ve been given authority here. We are trying to set up a triage station under the carriage stands over there, but the flow is too great.”
“I’m doing my best, surgeon,” he said flatly. He could see tractor units and trucks lining the barrack road, headlamps blazing and engines gunning, moving in to transport those in need of immediate surgery to the main infirmary facilities in the inner habs and Low Spine.
“Likewise,” said Curth without humour. The air smelled of blood and burned flesh and was full of piteous shrieking. “The medical halls are already full of wounded from the inner city. There were huge casualties from the start of the raid, before the Shield was ignited.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Cargin shrugged. “I’ve followed my orders and allowed the incoming to flow out of the square into adjacent areas. There seems to be no end to them. My observers on the wall-top say the queue outside is still three kilometres long.”
The surgeon looked at the blood-spattered paving for a moment, her hands on her hips. “I…” she began, then paused. “Can you get me a vox link? I’ll try sending to my superiors. The Commercia has been evacuated and there is vast floorspace inside it. I doubt they’ll grant permission, but I’ll do what I can.”
Cargin nodded. He called his vox-officer over and told him to attend the surgeon. “Whatever you can do is better than nothing,” he told her.
The tank roared and bounced over the trampled grass hillocks, heading north at full throttle, its turret reversed to spit shells into the firefields behind it, into the invisible enemy at its heels.
The night sky was ablaze. Scorching trails of rockets and shrieking shells tore overhead, heading for the hive.
Commissar Kowle crouched in the turret of the running tank, shouting orders to fire to the gun-crew in the lit space below him. The vox-link was down. He couldn’t reach House Command. He had forty-two tanks left out of the armoured column of more than four hundred and fifty that had left the Sondar Gate that afternoon. No ranking Vervun Primary armour officer was left alive. Cadet Fosker was also dead.
Kowle had command now. Using the VPHC Commissar Langana as his second officer, he had managed to regroup the shattered remnants of the tank force and swing it back towards the city. It felt like retreat, but Kowle knew it was a sound tactical decision. They were facing an ochre wave out there on the grass-flats, a stupendous Zoica armoured front, pushing in through three salients. Only in his days with the Imperial Guard, during major offensives like Balhaut and Cociaminus, had he seen anything like this scale of assault. And there were infantry regiments behind, thick like locusts, following the armour.
Kowle didn’t even want to think about the size of the opposition just now. It was… unbelievable. It was impossible. An ochre wave—that’s all he could see, the tide of ochre-painted machines rolling over his forces, crushing them.
He tried the vox again, but the enemy was jamming all bands. Shells rained down amongst the retreating Vervun tanks. At least two blew out as munitions ignited, sending tank hulls end-over-end in fireballs, spraying track segments out like shattered teeth.
The driver was calling him over the intercom. “Ahead, sir!”
Kowle swivelled round. Vervunhive was in sight now, the great luminous blister of green energy flickering on the skyline like a giant mushroom cloud, glowing in the night. Kowle grabbed his scope and saw the blackened, burning mass of the outer habs fast approaching. A persistent rain of explosives was still dropping into them.
“Kowle to column!” he spat into his inter-tank vox. “Form up and follow me in down the Southern Highway. We will re-enter the city through the Sondar Gate. Let none shirk, for I will find them wanting and find them!”
He smiled at his last words. Even now, under a storm of fire, he could still turn a good, disciplinarian phrase.
The high-ceilinged, gilt-ornamented Hall of the Legislature, high and secure in the upper sections of the Main Spine, was full of arguing voices.
Lord Heymlik Chass, noble patriarch of House Chass, sat back
