“You can’t be a general though, I’m afraid,” said Bulwar. Soric was already pulling his makeshift rank pins off.
“Take a brevet rank, Soric. State-of-emergency field promotion. You’re a sergeant now and you’ll answer to me. Designate one man in every twenty a corporal, and fix a chain of command. You choose them; you know them.”
Soric nodded again, lost for words with pride.
Explosions thundered across the station, throwing some of the men to the ground. One of Soric’s freedom fighters was yelling out. “Enemy tanks! Enemy tanks!”
Bulwar and Soric scrambled over to the station’s east entrance to see. The huge shapes of Zoican storm-tanks, long-barrelled and heavily armoured, were scything in towards the station and the surrounding habs. Others, including fast-moving light assault tanks and squat, super- heavy flamer platforms, were pushing round onto the transit streets leading to the Commercia and the Shield Pylon.
“We have explosives, sir,” said Soric, saluting again for good measure. “Mining charges we lifted from the stores behind the smelteries.”
“Static charges with no launchers… against tanks?”
“It’s how we’ve been doing it so far, sir: a man takes a wrap of charges and runs with it, anchors it to the tank hull—”
“Suicide!”
Soric frowned. “Duty, sir. What other way is there?”
“How many tanks have you taken out with that method?”
“Twenty-four, I think.”
“How many men has it cost you?”
Soric shrugged. “Twenty-four, of course.”
Bulwar wiped his mouth on the back of his glove. Incredible. The devotion, the determination. The sacrifice. The workers of Vervunhive, who had built this place with their sweat, were now buying it back with their blood. It was an object lesson in loyalty and devotion that even the finest Imperial Guard regiment could admire.
The tanks were closing now, hammering the station, blowing sections of the overhead trackway down. Sheets of fire leapt through the terminus hall.
“Throne of Earth!” Soric gasped, pointing.
Mustard-drab battle tanks, moving at full power across the rubble scarps, some of them bursting through sections of wall, were thundering forward from the west. They were firing freely, with huge accuracy, maintaining a cycle rate of fire that the Zoican armour, turning to the flank to greet them, couldn’t even begin to match.
Neither Bulwar nor Soric had ever seen a mass armour charge before, certainly not one undertaken by a crack Imperial tank brigade like the Narmenians. They opened their mouths in awe, and nothing but wild cheers came out.
Grizmund called it “Operation Dercius.” He’d sent his sentinel recon units and foot-troop spotter units forward towards Croe Gate as he composed his tank brigade in the Commercia. The spotters couldn’t fix the position of the moving Zoican armour, but they could assess its force and direction. Grizmund had compiled the data and sent his main columns first south into the habs and then turned them east at full speed, to catch the enemy’s flank. Grizmund truly understood the power of armoured vehicles, not just the physical power, but the psychological strength. If a tank was a threatening thing then a tank moving fast, and firing accurately and repeatedly, was a nightmare. The tank strike was his forte and he only admitted into the Narmenian cadre drivers who could handle thirty-plus tonnes of armour at speed, and gunners and layers who could fire fast, repeatedly and make kills each time.
In the command chair
Grizmund’s driver, Wolsh, was one of the finest and he kept them moving even when firing. He had a master’s eye for terrain and seemed to know exactly what to ram and what to steer around, what to drive over and what to avoid. The Narmenians joked that Wolsh could smell a mine a kilometre off.
Operation Dercius threw forty fast-moving Narmenian heavy tanks down through fg/567 and cut through the neck of the Zoican column spread. Grizmund’s forces had killed or crippled seventy-two enemy vehicles by the time they doubled back, swinging around without breaking speed to re-engage the shattered Zoican armour from the other side. By then, the Zoican armour was milling and fracturing in confusion.
Now came the part that required true skill, a manoeuvre Grizmund had dubbed The Scissors’. As his tanks came around to re-engage, another fifty under Brigadier Nachin charged the enemy from the other side, from the direction of Grizmund’s original strike. A textbook disaster in the hands of less able commanders, but at the turn, Grizmund’s forces had begun to send identifying vox beacons to distinguish them from the enemy, and Nachin’s forces did the same. The rule was anything caught between their charges that didn’t broadcast the correct beacon was a target. Grizmund had used this tactic nine times before and never lost a tank to his own fire.
That fine record was maintained at Vervunhive. Like the jaws of some vast beast, the opposing Narmenian armour charges tore in towards each other, crushing and destroying everything between them. Grizmund and Nachin’s speeding tanks passed through each other’s ranks, some vehicles missing others at full speed by only a hull’s span.
And they had just begun. In the course of the thirty-fifth afternoon, the Narmenian divisions executed three more precision scissor manouvres, looping back and forth onto each other, slowly chewing the head, neck and shoulders off the vast Zoican incursion.
By four o’clock, the Zoicans had lost nearly two hundred tanks and armoured battle-hulks. The Narmenians had lost only two.
By nightfall, the Narmenians had driven the Zoican armour back into the inner habs, less than ten kilometres from Croe Gate, and cut a slice down the spearhead from Ontabi. With the routes behind them clear of enemy armour, efforts to resupply the Imperial ground troops were now no longer suicidal. Labour forces of the Administratum, the cargo guilds and Vervun Primary spread out in convoys and brought fresh ammunition to the dug-in infantry forces. Many, like Bulwar’s, now resupplied with rockets, launchers and grenades, followed the Narmenian thrust out towards the great eastern gates, killing every Zoican tank the Guard armour had missed.
Rising from his seat at the font-desk in the baptistry, Gaunt took the data-slate Petro held out to him and smiled a weary smile as he read the reports of Grizmund’s sally. He felt… justified: justified in his faith in the general, justified in fighting for him in the stockade, and justified in his tactical plans to hold the hive.
Towards Sondar Gate and Veyveyr, the position was less heartening. The NorthCol armour lacked the genius of leadership or the combat-experienced skill that shone in the Narmenians. Major Clodel, commanding the NorthCol units, had done little more than grind his tanks into a slugfest with the Zoican armour penetrating the hive from the south. He had stopped them, though, halting them at the edge of the southern manufactories, and for that he would get Gaunt’s commendation. But now a blistering, static tank-war raged through the southern skirts, and there was no possibility of driving the invaders back and out or of
