the refuges and the camps of the Commercia and the other open spaces of the hive, the multitude seethed in panic. They’d seen the Shield fail. They’d fought their way to the security of the hive and now that too was gone.
Stampeding in places, two and a half million refugees began to surge north towards the river, the deluge of their bodies choking the streets. Their vast numbers were quickly swelled by inner hab citizens, worker families and low guilders, who had all, in a brief few seconds, seen their protection from Zoica disappear. In a matter of minutes, the hive was haemorrhaging people, rivers of panicking, screaming civilians, heading in hordes to a river they couldn’t hope to cross.
Lord Heymlik Chass looked up from his scriptorium and gazed out of the ogee window. The stylus dropped from his trembling fingers and made a blot of violet ink on the pages of his journal. He got up, his ornamental chair tumbling over onto its back, and he stumbled across to the window, pressing his hands against the lead glass.
“Oh, Salvador,” he said, tears in his eyes, “what have you done?”
His daughter burst into the room, still dressed in her nightgown, her terrified maids trying to wrap a velvet robe around her. Outside in the hall. House Chass lifeguards were shouting and running to and fro. Lord Chass turned and saw the look of jolted fear and bewilderment in his daughter’s eyes.
He took her in his arms.
“The alarms woke me, father. What—”
“Hush. You will be all right, Merity.” He stroked her hair, holding her head tight to his chest.
“Handmaids?”
The women barely curtsied. They were terrified and half- dressed themselves.
“Take my daughter to Shelter aa/6. Do it now.”
“The chamberlain is preparing the house shelter, lord,” said Maid Wholt.
“Forget the house shelter! Escort her now to aa/6 in the sub- levels!”
“A municipal bunker, lord?” gasped Maid Francer.
“Are you both deaf and stupid? The sublevels! Now!”
The maids scurried around, pulling at Merity. She clung on to her father. She was crying so much she couldn’t speak.
“Go, daughter of Chass. Go now. I will follow shortly. I beg you, go!”
The maids managed to drag the sobbing girl out of the chamber and away towards the Spine elevators.
“Rudrec!” At Lord Chass’ shout, the chief lifeguard appeared in the doorway. He was still buttoning on his ornate body-armour. His weapon was armed and unshrouded. He bowed.
Lord Chass handed him a small, silk satchel. “Go with my daughter. See she is brought safe to the municipal shelter. No other will do—no other is deep enough. Take this for her: a few private family items. Make sure she gets them.”
Rudrec tucked the satchel inside the body of his flak-mail hauberk. “It is my duty to escort you too, lord,
“You are a good man, Rudrec. You have served this house well. Serve it again by doing as I order.”
Rudrec paused, his eyes meeting his lord’s directly for the first and last time in his life.
“Go!”
Alone now, the hall outside thundering with footsteps and voices, Chass put on his ceremonial robes, his bicorn hat, his shot-silk gloves. He was shaking, but most of that was rage. He put his ducal seal in his coat pocket, pushed the heavy code-signet ring onto his gloved finger, and slid a compact, single-shot bolt pistol with inlaid grips into his gown’s inner sleeve. A handful of shells followed it.
Chass strode out into the corridor, stopping three of his lifeguards short. They saluted uncertainly.
“Come with me,” he told them.
Less than five minutes after the Shield vanished, the first Zoican shells began to wound the inner hive. It was as if their artillery, their Earthshakers, their siege mortars, their missile positions had all been ranged ready, waiting.
Wave after wave of shrieking missiles screamed in over the Curtain Wall and hit the central district. Concussive ripples of explosions blew out along block after block, closing arterial routes with rubble, setting fires that blazed through dozens of high-rise habitat structures. Thousands of habbers, either sheltering in their homes or fleeing through the streets, were obliterated or left crippled and helpless.
Siege mortar shells wailed in across Sondar Gate and punctured the stone concourse of the Square of Marshals. Flagstone sections, whizzing like blades, were flung out, decapitating or mashing wall troopers from behind. The distinguished lines of statues edging the square were toppled by the blasts or disintegrated outright.
Mass shelling pounded the manufactories alongside Croe Gate. Swathes of machine shops and warehousing caught fire, and the flames established a firm hold, licking west into the worker habs. Similar shelling, supported by ground-to-ground rockets, began to systematically hammer the habs and manufactories behind Hass West, and the impacts of their fall crept north into the elite sector. Guild holdings and house ordinary estates were flattened and torn apart.
The shelling and the dreadful cutting beams searing Hass East scored a hole a hundred metres wide where the Curtain Wall and the Ontabi Gate had once stood, and as the beams redirected towards the inner habs and the upper stretches of the Curtain, the Zoican armoured column and massed infantry along the Vannick Highway pressed in through the breach. The Zoican land forces made their first entry into Vervunhive proper thirteen minutes after the Shield came down, though the insurgent forces encountered by Sergeant Varl were, by then, well inside the hive.
Long-range shells—some two thousand kilos apiece, launched from railcars drawn up on hasty, makeshift trackways out in the southern grasslands—whistled and whooped as they dropped on the Commercia and the mercantile suburbs. Barter-houses blew out, their rich canopies igniting in sheets of flame as hot as the heart of a star. Shockwaves crumpled others and the massive shells dug vast craters in the rockcrete footing of the hive. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were still pressing to leave the commercial spaces. Most died in the firestorms or were instantly obliterated by the shelling. Some of the craters were five hundred metres across.
Shelling and missile attacks began to hit the vast Main Spine itself. In hundreds of places, the adamantine skin of the city-peak ruptured and holed. Fires burned unchecked through nine or more levels. House Nompherenti, on Level 68, took a direct hit from a massive incendiary rocket and the entire noble lineage was immolated. They died frenzied, tortured deaths amid the furnace of tapestries, furniture and drapes in their exalted court. Lord Nompherenti himself, ablaze from head to foot, ran screaming for a hundred paces and toppled from the raised balcony of his banquet hall. His burning body, streaming a trail of fire like a comet, plunged fifteen hundred metres down onto the roofs of the central district.
General Xance, with a tattered vanguard of seven hundred
