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 any more.
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.
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
