Pirius knew the theory. The “creeping barrage” ahead of them was a sweeping curtain, continually progressing at about walking pace. The infantry were to follow, coming in right behind it, to mop up whatever was left before the Xeelee weaponry had a chance to recover. So they had to move on, or the protection of the barrage would soon leave them behind. But everything was wrong.
“Corporal,” Pirius said. “We’d be advancing into fire. It would be suicide.”
“Do your duty, Service Corps. On my mark in three.”
Pirius and Cohl exchanged a glance. They had no choice. Again that ear-splitting whistle sounded.
Pirius roared, “Shit, shit!” He blipped his inertial field and pulled himself out of the dip.
Again he flew, his armored chest a few centimeters above the ground, his bulky pack an awkward mass behind him. Around him he glimpsed ten, maybe fifteen others, floating like ghosts above the churned-up dirt. Some of them aimed and fired their weapons as they swam.
But cherry-red light flared immediately, threading more bodies which burst and writhed, before they subsided in dreamlike microgravity slowness back to the ground. One of them was Pace, he saw; the corporal, recognizable by his bright command armband, took a hit even before he got out of the trench.
Pirius hit the dirt again. He was breathing hard, his pack bumping at his back, his faceplate pressed to the dirt. Starbreaker light continued to flare over his head, and detonations in the ground sent dirt flying up all around him. He could feel no pain, and was amazed he still hadn’t been hit.
He risked looking up. The barrage still crept forward, smashing its way across the asteroid away from him. Silhouetted before its unearthly light he saw figures moving, troopers trying to work their way from one bit of cover to the next, maybe even trying to advance. But there was no semblance of coordination, and few of them were even firing their weapons. Xeelee starbreakers picked them off with impunity.
He was exposed here; he was on a shallow ridge that actually raised him up above the mean surface. He would last only seconds in this spot.
He saw a line in the ground, a faint shadow a couple of meters ahead. If that was a trench he might live a little longer. If not — if not, he had no choice anyhow.
Again he didn’t allow himself time to think. Three, two, one. He blipped his inertial field, and with a single thrust he threw his body through a shallow arc at the shadow in the dirt. He slammed down at three gravities, hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs. It was a trench: worn, its lip broken by the scrabbling of gloved hands, but a trench nonetheless. Starbreaker light flared over him, frustrated, a cherry-red lid over this bit of shelter.
But there was something in the bottom of the trench, hard, complicated shapes that shattered and broke under him.
Bodies. The trench was lined with bodies. Pirius could see contorted faces, chests and bellies cut open to reveal internal organs, solid, like anatomical models. Their skinsuits sliced open, these fallen troops had frozen where they lay. As Pirius had struggled, he had shattered some of the frozen corpses. But there was no horror for him; the cold and the vacuum had sucked out the last of the humanity from these relics.
The trench had been well-constructed and was evidently deep. He could see some meters to left and right; the trench zigzagged so it couldn’t be cleaned out by a single sweep of raking fire. And as far as he could see it was filled with those frozen, cut-open corpses, a tangle of rigid limbs and guts and skulls, like a ditch full of smashed statues.
Cohl came sailing in and landed as he had, hard on her belly. Bits of smashed bodies flew high; where they sailed above the lip of the trench, starbreaker beams picked them out, vaporizing them, as if playing. Cohl thrashed in shock.
Pirius held Cohl’s shoulders. “Take it easy.”
She subsided, breathing hard, eyes wild. She fixed her gaze on his face. “This is a nightmare.”
“I know.” He glanced around. “They must be lying six, seven deep. We aren’t the first to come this way.”
“We’re going to die here, as they did.”
“We’re not dead yet.” Pirius took a comm post from his back and thrust it into the trench wall. “This is Pirius. 57 Platoon. We made it to a trench. There are two of us here. If you can hear this, triangulate on my signal and assemble here.” He let the message repeat, and ducked his head back down into the deeper safety of the trench.
It took only seconds for the first trooper to come plummeting into the trench, heralded by a burst of starbreaker fire. It was a girl, dark and serious, her face contorted with fear; Pirius didn’t know her name. She had lost her weapons. And when she saw what she had landed in she thrashed in panic as Cohl had.
In the following thirty seconds four more followed. The two Tili sisters were among them, to Pirius’s relief.
And then no more.
Seven of them, in the trench, out of twenty in the two platoons who had been dropped here. He looked around at their faces, the faces of these terrified children lost in this terrible place — all of them looking at him.
He felt a weight pressing on his shoulders, as if his inertial field was malfunctioning. Was this what a galactic war had reduced to — him and Cohl in a scratch in the ground, with five frightened kids?
He set his comm loop to open, linking him to the whole of the force in this area. Maybe somebody else would hear him, could converge on this place. There was only silence. After a few seconds, it occurred to him to cut out the morale filters.
Immediately he was aware of a roar, like a noisy barracks. The voices merged into a mass, a mob cry, but every so often one of them would bubble to the foreground, and he would hear screaming, muttering, gasping, weeping, calls for help, delirious shouts, even a kind of deranged laughter. It was the sound of the wounded, the sound of thousands of voices calling out together from all over the Rock. They made an unearthly, inhuman sound.
He knew that some of the troopers were listening too. Their faces were round with shock. But even as they listened, in those first few minutes, the cries dwindled and faded away, one by one. If you were wounded in vacuum, with your skinsuit broken, you didn’t last long.
And still the bombardment continued, the blinding light overhead matched by the relentless shuddering of the ground. But the shells’ immense footfalls marched away into the distance, leaving them far behind.
He risked glimpses out of the trench.
From here, according to his visor displays, they were only about half a kilometer from the target monopole factory. As far as he could see only a single Xeelee emplacement stood between him and the factory; the shells had evidently taken out the rest. The emplacement looked like a small shack of a silver-gray material. It was probably Xeelee construction material, among the toughest substances known: self-renewing, self-repairing, said to be a living entity in itself. Surrounding the central shack were small pillars, each bearing rings that glowed blue.
He let himself slide back into the trench. The others watched him, six pairs of eyes, large in the shadows of their visors.
He said, “We have to try to get to the factory.”
“No,” said one trooper.
“What’s your name?”
“Bilin.” He was bulky, but just a boy, despite the massive surface-to-surface weapon he carried on his back. He was scared, and right now Pirius was the focus of his resentment. “I say we wait for the pickup.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“We can’t stay here,” Pirius said bluntly.
“We can traverse in the trench—”
“There’s no point. We couldn’t get any closer to the factory that way. Remember the standing orders. The only pickup will be at the factory itself. We can’t go back. And we can’t stay here, in this trench. We’ve nowhere else to go but forward.” Bilin glared at him, but Pirius stared steadily back, “Can’t you see that? We’re not the first here. Look around you. Do you want to die like this?”