Corporal Pace whirled a finger, ordering them to switch their comms to the platoon’s dedicated loop. “Listen up,” he said heavily. “We’re down safe. The line’s intact and we’re in a strong section of it. We have Guards to the left, and more to the right, further down the line.” That was good. Guards were pains in the ass on the base, but in action, Guard units were reassuring to have close, protecting your flank. “We’re about two kilometers from our target factory, which is that way.” He pointed. “In thirty seconds the artillery barrage will start, and in five minutes we’ll move. Everybody clear? Good.”
And then, to Pirius’s amazement, he snapped his fingers and a Virtual appeared in the air above him, floating over the trench like a multicolored specter.
It was a pep talk. A smiling woman’s face mouthed words — no doubt uplifting Doctrinal propaganda — that Pirius couldn’t hear. They were shown images of field guns, mostly monopole cannon. These were in batteries a couple of kilometers behind Pirius’s position, and he knew there were emplacements of more massive siege guns, “heavies,” further back still. The slanting tubes were oddly graceful, Pirius thought, oddly fragile-looking for such powerful weapons. They were lodged on the ground, sacrificing flexibility of deployment for the shelter of the asteroid’s bulk.
But the first guns were already firing. The heat generated was obvious; the cannon’s breeches were red hot, their inertial-control recoil mounts battered and smoking. In the heat, the gunners had stripped to the waist, though they wore skinsuit helmets. Sweating, their skinny torsos gleaming red in the glare of their red-hot cannon, they swarmed around the guns like rats. Pirius wondered if Enduring Hope was working in some such inferno.
But if the Virtual was meant to boost the infantry’s morale, it wasn’t working. They were supposed to march safely behind the guns’ fire, a tactic in which everything depended on precision and coordination between artillery and infantry. But even in this sanitized image Pirius saw things go wrong, like a recoil mount snapping under the strain.
And the Virtual itself was suddenly stitched through by cherry-red beams. Pace, digging his face into the dirt, shut down the Virtual; it dissipated in a cloud of pixels.
Cohl lifted her head. She was heavily shadowed, but Pirius could see her snarl of contempt. “At least now we know where the Xeelee emplacements are. The trouble is they know where we are.”
And then the artillery barrage started for real.
Pirius felt it before he saw it. The ground’s shuddering penetrated the inertial damping of his suit, reaching deep into his belly.
The first shells, piercing electric-blue pinpoints, sailed overhead. Each shed energy as it flew, creating a sparkling contrail of exotic particles. He imagined the rows of guns, the lighter cannon and the tremendous “heavies” behind them, blasting their munitions into the sky, thousands of them along lines that stretched kilometers.
The first shells sailed out of sight, landing somewhere beyond his horizon. He could feel their shuddering impact. Answering fire came from the Xeelee emplacements, he saw. A line of pink- purple beams snaked up as starbreakers sought to shoot down the shells before they had a chance to fall. But more shells followed. Soon there were so many of them that the contrails merged to become a solid glare, and the sky was covered by a curtain of shifting blue. It was a battle of lights in the sky, human blue washing down against defiant Xeelee red.
The violence was immense. It seemed surprising the whole asteroid didn’t simply break apart under the strain. He felt fragile, a mote; he knew that one misstep of the mighty beasts treading the ground around him would result in a death so sudden he wouldn’t have time to know about it.
Burden was wrong, he thought suddenly. No matter what happened in the future, no matter who or what waited at time-like infinity, nothing could ever erase the blunt reality of this moment. This was real, this tortured ground, this outpouring energy. This was life and death — this was the war.
And still that relentless pounding went on. Pirius pressed his face into the dirt, but he couldn’t get away from it. It went right through him, working deep into his bones, right into his nerves, until it felt as if he had never known anything else.
Then a piercing whistle filled his ears. It was Pace’s command; they were to leave the trench.
Pirius didn’t let himself think about it. He blipped his inertial belt. Hauling his pack, a bulky med kit and a comm post, he scrabbled at the dirt with one gloved hand, and pulled himself over the lip of the trench.
He floated like a balloon, up into a field of horizontal light beams. All around him other troopers rose; they were all swimming in light.
But the starbreakers cut into them, coming from his left. Bodies burst open and blood spurted into space, instantly freezing. Pirius was falling through a vacuum threaded with fire, an utterly inhuman and lethal environment. It was like a dream of light and carnage. It seemed impossible for him to survive.
He slammed once more into the asteroid dirt, dragged down by his inertial belt, set to two gravities. Now he was in a shallow bowl, perhaps a crater; it might even have been natural, an ancient impact feature. He was astonished he was still alive.
A body fell heavily on top of him. It was Cohl. Even through the thick layers of her rad-hardened suit he could see how she was breathing hard.
He snapped, “How many fell?”
“I don’t know. Four, five?”
Five dead already, in the first instant.
“It could have been us,” she gasped, wondering. “It could have been me. It was just chance.”
Pirius said, “Did you see anyone shoot back?”
“No. No, not one.”
They had been trained to expect losses. But the barrage should have cleared the ground before them.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
He thought about the pattern of fire he’d glimpsed. “The fire came from the left. It came from an emplacement behind where the barrage is landing. Something’s wrong. The barrage should have cleaned that emplacement out.”
Cohl didn’t seem to be listening. She lifted her pack curiously. A hole had been punched clean through it.
“They got the Guards.” That call sounded like one of the Tilis.
“Which unit?” And that was the corporal, Pace; evidently he was still alive.
“To our left. I can see them from here. Every one of them wiped out.”
And now other voices joined in, from Pace’s platoon, and another close by. “To our right, too.”
“We’re on our own here.”
It didn’t seem possible to Pirius that Guards — arrogant, elite Guards, with their perfect, unmarred uniforms, their trenches as straight and well-defined as geometric exercises, their unshakeable confidence — that Guards had fallen so easily.
Pirius tried to think. The barrage hadn’t worked, then. Perhaps the timing had gone wrong. Perhaps monopole shells were falling out of place, falling harmlessly far beyond the Xeelee emplacements, maybe even coming down on human troops. The hole in the barrage had allowed at least some Xeelee units to survive, and in those moments when the infantry had burst into the open, the enemy had picked targets at will. Now the line was shattered; the survivors were exposed, with no cover to left or right. Everybody knew that an uneven advance was worse than no advance at all, because your flank was exposed.
Pace spoke over the platoon loop. The corporal sounded ragged. “We have to go on,” he said.