“Very good!” The Endless Sun glinted from Razitshakra’s round wire-rimmed spectacles and from the peaked brim of her cap. Her lateral-pointing ears twitched. She removed a small notepad from her greatcoat pocket and scribbled a few words. “Tell me more about command responsibility.”
The dwarf rapped out, “The commander is always right!”
“And?”
“The commander is always right,” Balan Orcsbane added smartly. “Even when he’s wrong.”
“Well done.” Razitshakra pointed at the next dwarf in the line. “You. Owaine Elfhunter. Name a test to determine whether a recruit is fit to become a marine.”
The dwarf scratched her trimmed beard. “The recruit is tied—” she hastily corrected herself “—the recruit volunteers to be tied to a sabre-toothed tiger and shut up in its cave. If the recruit comes out, she passed. If the tiger comes out, she failed. If she comes out riding the sabre-toothed tiger, make her a corporal.”
“Excellent.” Razitshakra’s unorcishly golden eyes gleamed. “Now—”
“Commissar, ma’am!” The centaur Coms officer galloped up, ice and snow spraying from his hooves, and thrust the radio handset towards Razitshakra. “It’s Alpha Squad. Commissar, you have to hear this!”
“That is not approved radio procedure. Barzoi! Take over the dwarf squad.” Razitshakra stepped aside, in the shadow of the glossy-coated centaur’s heaving flanks. The rasp of distant gunfire was plainly audible over the radio link. “Bootcamp Base to Squad Alpha—who authorised a live ammo exercise in that area?”
The reply crackled back:
“Squad Alpha to Bootcamp, this is not an exercise. Repeat, this is not an exercise.” Orc Corporal Zakkad’s gruff voice shook with urgency. “Ma’am, order all your recruits on full armed alert. There are hostiles coming out of the walls here! Species not seen. Weapons not recognised. Numbers unknown. They’re not stopping to talk, they’re just piling into us!”
“Zakkad!” Razitshakra barked resonantly into the mouthpiece. “Don’t lose your grip, orc! What weapons are you facing?”
“Unknown, ma’am. Could be mage-work—but it’s getting through to us! I’m out here with a squad of untrained dickheads, ma’am; it’s all I can do to manage a fighting retreat; we need urgent support—”
The line hissed. No further voice sounded.
“Sierra and Foxtrot squads reinforce the perimeter guard,” the orc commissar yelled, shambling through the camp at the double. “Barzoi, get the 483rd and the cold-drake to overfly map reference 098-756! Tango Platoon, gear up, you’re coming out with me. Move, move, move!”
The cyclopean ruins of an ancient city lay half buried in a glacier two miles to the south, at 098-756, its spires and ramps and towers long gone, leaving only a maze of broken masonry walls. Razitshakra had been in the habit of using it for a training ground for Fighting in Built-Up Areas.
The 483rd Airborne Division took off to fly air support.
“Hai-yaaaahh, yo!”
“Hai-yahhhh, yo!”
Winged white horses took off and wheeled in the air above the jagged mountain peaks. The brilliant Antarctic sun gleamed through the pinions of the tactical pegasi, shining on the heat-seeker fire-and-forget missiles carried under each wing.
“Hai-yah, yo!”
The airborne riders whooped and yelled. Frost sparkled on their mail-shirts, cinched in tight over their swelling breasts with wide leather swordbelts. Their long braids hung down. Fur leggings protected the riders’ shapely limbs; fur wristbands hugged their otherwise bare hands. Their horned steel helms glinted in the Endless Day.
One valkyrie marine reined her winged horse’s head up. “Missile away!”
BOOOMM!
The Hellfire missile zipped into the icefield several miles away, throwing up debris and steam.
“Damn you!” Razitshakra bawled over the com. “I want reconnaissance, not fire support! There are some of our own out there!”
The Valkyrie Marines wheeled their winged mounts above the plain, soaring through the sky. Passing close, one rider held out her hand, palm up; the other slapped it with her own palm and gave soprano voice to the marine recognition signaclass="underline"
“YO!”
“No movement visible at map reference 098-756, ma’am,” an advance valkyrie marine radioed back. “Nothing at all…”
The advance by bounds on Alpha Squad’s last position took time. Commissar Razitshakra cuffed and kicked and bit, when necessary, to spur the raw recruits into battle. Pondering the wisdom of taking a recruit platoon into an attack (and indeed of leaving two-thirds of another recruit platoon to guard the base), the orc commissar cursed volubly.
“If it’s magery, you’ve got nothing to fear!” she snarled. “If it’s conventional weapons, remember you’re marines now. Are we marines?”
The dwarf squad, advancing almost tactically towards the cyclopean ruins marking the beginning of the Antarctic’s true Icelands, muttered in their braided beards.
“I said, Are we marines?, you political subversives!” Razitshakra raised her fist and brought it down on the back of one of the dwarf grunts. The dwarf fell to his knees, staggered up as Razitshakra booted him, and moved reluctantly on under the weight of a seventy-pound infantry pack.
The platoon determinedly continued to treat the orc commissar’s question as rhetorical.
“There’ll be an inquiry held after this,” Razitshakra promised. “Now clear the area through. Go! There may be some of our lads still alive in there.”
The dwarf recruit squads advanced more in a cluster than by fire and movement. Razitshakra, in the rear with the reserve ursoid squad for command and control, bellowed orders. No shot, no spell, no hostile sound broke the silence.
“Area clear!” the dwarf recruit Balan Orcsbane called.
“It had better be, marine. Secure the perimeter!”
The snow-covered glacier was dotted with prone lumps, leaking fluids. Even in the Antarctic chill, the area stank. Razitshakra’s orcish nostrils flared, identifying the blood and feces and urine of dwarves and orcs; all of it stinking of the fear, rather than the joy, of combat. Alpha Squad being the least trained, and the least exposed to Dagurashibanipal’s geas, she was not surprised to find that most of their weapons had not fired.
She prowled among the bodies for quite a while, under the Endless Sun’s radiance, tossing aside severed dwarf limbs ragged with blood, and heads from which the eyes had been sucked. A wind began to blow from the Icelands. The cold-drake, patrolling the skies, reported no hostile movement of any kind. The Endless Day wore on.
When she found him—his dead eyes staring up at her—orc corporal Zakkad of the marine training cadre lay in two parts; his arms, head, and torso in the cover of an ancient masonry wall, and his lower torso, legs, and genitalia in the open ground beyond.
One gnarled fist still grasped his rifle and exhausted magazine. Rags of his combat fatigues, stained with stiffening green blood, dotted the ground. Pale intestines shrivelled in the sun. Judging by the recruits around him, he had been trying to assault his way out through the enemy’s position. It is not an infallible technique, merely the least worst of options.
Nullity talismans on body and weapon were intact.
Squatting over the half-body, Razitshakra prized the powerful, low-slung jaws open. The fangs and tusks of the orc corporal were blackly discoloured. A black, conelike object blocked his throat, with teeth marks where the orc had bitten it off. Razitshakra poked at it with one talon. It echoed with a metallic sound.