Lesp, the field medic attending the trench, scrambled over to Feygor, leaving a gut-shot Volpone who was beyond his help.
“Is he okay?” Bragg yelled.
Lesp fought with the struggling Feygor, clamping wet dressings around the scorched and melted flesh of his neck and trying to clear an airway.
“His trachea is fused! Feth! Help me hold him!”
Bragg fired a last burst or two and then dropped from the stub-nest and ran to Feygor and the slender medic. It took all of his gargantuan strength to hold Feygor down as Lesp worked. The las-hit had cauterised the wound, so there was precious little blood, but the heat had melted the larynx and the windpipe into a gristly knot and Feygor was suffocating.
His eyes were white with pain and fear, and his mouth clacked as he screamed silent curses.
“Feth!” Lesp threw the small, plastic-handled scalpel away in disgust and pulled out his long, silver Tanith knife. He stuck it into Feygor’s throat under the blackened mass of the scorched wound and opened a slot in the windpipe big enough to feed a chest-tube down.
Feygor began breathing again, rattling and gurgling through the tube.
Lesp yelled something up at Bragg that a nearby shell-fall drowned out.
“What?”
“We have to get him clear!”
Bragg hoisted Feygor up in his arms without question and began to run with him, back down the lines.
The Tanith units that had held Veyveyr two nights before pushed south from their temporary mustering yard as soon as the Shield failed. Corbec led them and Sergeant Baffels’ platoon was amongst them.
Lacking orders from House Command, Corbec had agreed to move west while Colonel Bulwar’s NorthCol forces moved east, hoping to reinforce the Veyveyr and Croe positions.
In tight manufactory enclaves behind the once-proud Veyveyr rail terminal, Corbec’s deployment encountered crossfire from the west. Corbec realised in horror that while Veyveyr might be sound, the enemy were pouring in through Sondar Gate unstaunched. He set up a scarifying resistance in a factory structure called Guild Githran Agricultural and he tried to vox his situation to Rawne or Corday.
Corday eventually responded. It took a while for Corbec to convince him that enemy forces, already in the inner hive, were in danger of encircling the solid Veyveyr defence.
They chose a window each, coughing in the dust that the bombardment was shaking up from the old floor boards.
Milo saw las-rounds punching through the fibre-board sidings of the broken building, and he heard the grunt-gasp of flamers. The enemy was right outside.
From the windows, under Baffels’ direction, they fired at will. It was difficult to see what they were hitting. Filain and Tokar both yowled out victory whoops as they guessed they brought Zoicans down.
Rhys, one window down from Milo, stopped firing and sagged as if very tired.
Milo pulled round and called out to him, stopping short when he saw the bloodless las-hole in Rhys’ forehead.
A falling shell blew out a silo nearby and the building shook.
Colonel Corbec’s voice came over the microbead link, calm and stern.
“This is the one, boys. Do it right, or die here.”
Milo loaded a fresh cell and joined his platoon in blasting from the chewed window holes.
More than three hundred Tanith were still resting, off-guard, in their makeshift chem-plant billet when the Shield came down and the onslaught began. Sergeant Bray, the ranking officer, had them all dress and arm at once, and he voxed House Command for instructions.
House Command was dead. Bray found he couldn’t reach Corbec, Rawne or Gaunt—or any military authorities. What vox-links were still live were awash with mindless panic or the insidious chatter broadcasts of the enemy.
Bray made a command decision, the biggest he’d ever made in his career. He pulled the Tanith under his charge back from the billets and had them dig in amongst the rubble wastelands behind, wastelands created in the first bombardment at the start of the war.
It was an informed, judicious command. Gaunt had taught tactics thoroughly and Bray had listened. A move forward, towards Sondar Gate and the Square of Marshals three kilometres south, would have been foolhardy given the lack of solid intelligence. Staying put would have left them in a wide, warehouse sector difficult to secure or defend.
The rubble wastes played directly to the Ghosts’ strengths. Here they could dig in, cover themselves and form a solid front.
As if to confirm Bray’s decision, mortar fire levelled the chem-plant billets twenty minutes after the Tanith had withdrawn. Advance storm-units of Zoican infantry crossed into the wasteland half an hour later and were cut down by the well-defended Ghosts. In the following hours, Bray’s men engaged and held off over two thousand ochre-clad troops and began to form a line of resistance that stymied the Zoican push in from Sondar Gate.
Then Zoican tanks began to arrive, trundling up through the blasted arterial roads adjoining the Square of Marshals. They were light, fast machines built for infantry support, ochre-drab and covered with netting, with turrets set back on the main hull, mounting pairs of small-calibre cannons. Bray had thoughtfully removed all the rocket grenades and launchers from the billet stockpile, and his men began to hunt tanks in the jagged piles of the wasteland, leaving their lasrifles in foxholes so they could carry, aim and load the rocket tubes. In three hours of intense fighting, they destroyed twenty machines. The slipways off the arterials were ablaze with crackling tank hulls by the time heavier armour units—massive main battle-tanks and super-heavy self-propelled guns—began to roll and clank up into the chem-district.
Caffran braced against the kick of the rocket launcher and banged off a projectile grenade that he swore went directly down the fat barrel of an approaching siege tank, blowing the turret clean off. Dust and debris winnowed back over his position, and he scrambled around to reach another foxhole, Trooper Trygg running with him with the belt of rockets.
Caffran could hear Bray yelling commands nearby.
He slipped into a drain culvert and sloshed along through the ankle-deep muck. Trygg was saying something behind him, but Caffran wasn’t really listening.
It was beginning to rain. With the Shield down, the inner habs were exposed to the downpour. The wasteland became a quagmire of oily mud in under a quarter of an hour. Caffran reached the ruins of a habitat and searched for a good firing point. A hundred metres away, Tanith launchers barked and spat rockets at the rumbling Zoican advance. Every few moments, there would be a plangent thump and another tank round would scream overhead.
Caffran was wet through. The rainfall was cutting visibility to
