But neither snipers nor machine guns deterred the Archduke’s golems. They thundered forward into the square, ploughing towards the barricades. Gatling guns pocked their armour, and bullets sparked on stone. Dynamite was thrown from behind the Awakener barricades. It cost one of the golems a foot and sent another one reeling.
Silo heard a percussive thwip-thwip-thwip noise from above. He looked up, and caught a momentary glimpse of a slender, dark figure on the rooftops. She was clad in armour that covered her whole body, moulded tight to her form, and was carrying a long-barrelled rifle of exquisite design. He spotted her only for an instant, and then lost her again: the colours of her armour shifted with the background, camouflaging her, making her indistinct.
That was all he saw of Zalexa Crome, the Century Knights’ infamous assassin. But where there had been Awakener snipers before, men lay limp with their arms hanging over the sills.
The soldiers ran in after the golems. With them went Graniel Thrate, looking half golem himself in his massive suit of thralled armour, a black metal sledgehammer in one hand and an enormous gun in the other. Bullets whipped back and forth across the square as the Coalition soldiers attempted to storm the enemy positions.
Then there was a low rumble, and the pebbles on the barricade under Silo’s nose began to jitter and dance. With a growl of engines, an armoured vehicle burst into the square, shunting a slide of rubble before it. It was squat and boxy, with a short, wide cannon turret on its humped back, and it ran on enormous metal tracks.
‘Oh, shit!’ said Ashua. ‘A Crawler! The militia used to set them on us in Rabban when things got really bad!’
She was drowned out by the explosion as the Crawler fired its cannon. They covered their heads and crushed themselves down as chips of stone peppered them. Silo’s ears were ringing when he came back up again. Through the dust, he saw the mangled wreckage of a golem lying in the centre of the square, surrounded by the bodies of soldiers.
The Crawler pushed onward, its tracks crushing the dead beneath it. Bullets pinged off its armour as the cannon turret swivelled. Coalition soldiers scattered in frantic retreat. Then the cannon boomed again, and the soldiers went flying, some in pieces.
The Awakeners rallied, spraying the square with bullets. The Coalition forces fell back before the armoured Crawler. Silo and the others helped cover their retreat, shooting at the enemy to keep them occupied.
‘We gotta get to the other side of that square!’ Malvery cried. ‘The anti-aircraft gun’s right over there! Used to get the tram past it on the way to my surgery.’
‘Ain’t goin’ anywhere with that Crawler there,’ Silo said, but then he saw someone come lunging out of cover. Graniel Thrate, his head made tiny his enormous armour, sprinting across the square towards the Crawler. It swivelled its cannon, but too slow. He shoulder-charged it in the side with the force of a steam train, and to Silo’s amazement he drove a great dent into it, collapsing its wheel assembly. The tracks on that side dragged uselessly as the Crawler was pushed back, skidding across the flagstones. It crashed into a low wall and tipped a little, its tracks lifting off the ground. Thrate got his hands under it and, with neck muscles straining, he hauled it upward. It rolled over the wall and crashed down onto its turret with calamitous screech of metal, and there it lay still.
Ashua stared open-mouthed. Even Silo looked amazed. It was hard to imagine, with warriors like that, how the Coalition had let itself get into such a desperate position.
‘That,’ said Malvery, adjusting his glasses, ‘was impressive.’
‘Attack!’ shouted one of the Coalition commanders, and his troops surged forward again. This time Silo, Malvery and Ashua joined the charge.
Now it was the Awakeners’ turn to retreat. They turned tail and fled as the remaining golems smashed through their barricades. Graniel Thrate was among them, swinging his sledgehammer left and right, broken men flying like rag dolls. Others dropped dead from neat headshots, the work of the invisible Zalexa Crome, somewhere up on the rooftops.
Silo, Ashua and Malvery ran with them, picking targets where they could. Silo saw a bearded merc, caught up in the suicidal desperation of a last stand, come running out from cover with his guns blazing. He wanted to die. Silo gave him his wish.
In a flurry, it was over, and the square was clear. They took a moment to breathe, to survey the carnage and destruction that surrounded them. All around, once beautiful buildings were scorched and shattered. The elegance of this great city had been lost in blood and fire. Silo saw the hurt in Malvery’s eyes. This had been his home for most of his life.
The Coalition troops were pursuing the Awakeners out of the square, in the direction of the anti-aircraft gun. Malvery turned his attention to the men lying on the ground, searching for wounded.
‘Later, Doc,’ Silo said, motioning towards to the retreating troops. ‘We need your gun now.’
‘There’s people here I can help. .’ Malvery said, though his protest was weak.
‘Can’t save everyone,’ said Silo.
Then Ashua screamed.
Silo knew it was bad before he even saw it. Ashua wasn’t one to scream. He looked round, and the world decelerated, everything moving in slow motion.
Not just bad. Worse than that.
He’d been so caught up in the battle on the ground that he’d virtually forgotten about the fight overhead. But now the sound of engines was suddenly loud in his ears. Looming in his vision, filling up the sky, the blazing prow of a frigate rushed down towards them, trailing fire. Like a colossal meteor, like the fist of a god.
It crashed into the city a dozen streets away, hitting at a shallow angle. Flame blasted up into the air. It ploughed through stone and steel, carving a vast trench through the buildings, getting louder and louder as it bore down on Silo. A gargantuan beast of smoke and dust and screaming metal and crashing stone, charging him.
Too massive for any of them to avoid. Too fast to do anything about it. All they could do was stand there, locked in a single moment of terror and resignation.
Mother, he thought. I’m comin’ home.
His thoughts were lost in a deafening hurricane of wind and sound, and a wave of heat and force hit him.
After that, nothing.
The dark metal corridors of the Delirium Trigger rang with the shouts of men and the sound of combat. Frey pushed through the press of soldiers, his face a grim mask lit starkly by the muzzle flash of his pistol as he fired. There was momentum in him now. His bridges had burned. Going back would be pointless. There was nothing to go back to.
Sammies. Manes. Awakeners. Treason. All the rack and ruin of his life. And one chance to set things right.
It was too close down here for golems. The Delirium Trigger’s upper decks were a maze of narrow passageways, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast. The air was stifling, and it reeked of cordite and sweat and blood and the shit in dead men’s pants. Frey shot a pirate through the lung as he came running out of a doorway, and stepped over his gurgling body without even looking down.
He pulled open a sliding door, thrust his gun inside and found only silence. Soldiers shoved past him down the corridor. He stepped inside to get out of the way. His ears had been hammered by the reports of shotguns and pistols; this was a place of relative peace, with the distant detonations and the screams of the wounded muffled by thick bulkheads.
It was Trinica’s cabin, where he’d been heading all along. Once he’d thought it oppressive, with its dark wood panels, brass and iron fixtures and overwrought frowning sconces. A grave and serious room. Now he drank it in with his eyes. In all the world, this was the only place she’d put her mark on. The only place that bore anything of her spirit.