Malvery opened his mouth to reply, then didn’t. He harumphed and looked ashamed.
‘Besides,’ she said. ‘Sammies screwed me good. Reckon a few shots up their arse from that anti-aircraft gun is the least I owe them.’
Silo pressed the last of the shells into his shotgun and levered it back and forth to prime it. He remembered how the Cap’n had charged him to bring Malvery and Ashua back safe. But there were more important things than safety.
‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Go! Go! Go!’
The golem roared, and the men yelled and howled, fired up with anticipation and fear. They went scrambling up the rubble slope, the golem in the lead, and Silo went up with them. Rocks shifted beneath his feet; he had to clamber, and was cut. But the slope rolled back, and he reached the crest, and then he was slipping and sliding down the other side, bouncing from foothold to foothold, and the sound of the guns began.
By the time his boots hit solid ground, he was past caring whether anyone was following him. Strength pounded through him, and he was hot with rage. His breath came loud in his ears. He felt powerful, invincible, ready to throw himself into death’s teeth.
Bullets pocked and whined around him. He’d get hit by one, or he wouldn’t. Nothing he could do about it but run.
Ahead of them lay a shallow rise, with a cracked road, scorched grass and little else until it met the stone ring of the anti-aircraft emplacement. Atop the walls, Sentinels aimed and fired with their rifles, and a gatling gun sat on a tripod, waiting for them to come into range. The sky above flashed and boomed as the Samarlans and the Manes traded cannon fire.
The golem led the way. More men caught up with Silo as they came off the rubble slope and on to the rise. They gathered into a charge, picking up momentum as they ran. A thunder of boots, the rasp of uniforms and the clatter of buckles and guns. Each person in their own private world, vision narrowed by adrenaline; each part of the mass, driven on by the crowd, taking strength from their allies. Someone shouted a wild battle-cry. A few soldiers fired at the Awakeners, hopeful shots, wasting ammo. Using their guns to boost their courage.
A man to Silo’s left was cut down, punched through the chest, blood puffing from a hole in his back. He stumbled to a halt, a puzzled look on his face, and pitched over. Silo heard another man fall behind him, screaming, wounded in a limb. The Sentinels’ shots were increasingly accurate now, and though they ran hard enough to burst their lungs, the emplacement seemed to come no nearer.
Then came the sound that each of them had dreaded and none had dared think about. The killing rattle of the gatling gun, spitting bullets down onto them from its position above the gate. Suddenly the scuff and whip of rifle shot became a hail, chopping up the ground, smacking into earth and flesh. Screams came from everywhere, choked gurgles and short yelps, swiftly cut short. Men to either side of Silo went down. Someone lost a finger. The back of one man’s head blew out, and Silo saw shards of white bone among the red.
The chaos overtook him. Silo tripped, running too fast for his own feet; he fell and skidded on his knees. A man behind him grabbed the back of his coat, tried to pull him up. Silo was dragged roughly forward instead, scrabbling to get his feet back under him. Then the man who was dragging him shuddered and fell onto his shoulders. Silo slipped out from underneath, skinning one hand on the road as he pushed himself upright. Somehow he managed to avoid falling flat on his face, and he stumbled on up the rise.
Most of the soldiers had overtaken him. He saw Malvery labouring near the rear of the crowd, too fat and unfit to outpace the others. Ashua was ahead of them both, her mouth stretched in a savage yell, eyes fixed on her destination. The dead were left in their wake, lifeless limbs flopping as they rolled to a halt.
The gatling gun swept across the group ahead of him. The golem sparked and sang as bullets hammered into it, but it charged on through them without pause. The people to either side of it weren’t so lucky. He saw men jerking as they were hit, saw them stagger and collapse. They fell like wheat before a scythe, and Ashua went down with them. She tumbled and hit the ground hard, rolling several times before she came to a stop.
Malvery gave a wordless cry of anguish. He surged forward and ran to her, heedless of the bullets flying around him. She was dragging herself up off the ground as he reached her, slack-eyed, leg-shot, her face lax with shock. He slung an arm round her shoulder, lifted her and propelled her on towards the gate, one foot dragging behind her.
Malvery knew what Silo knew: there was no turning back. Their only hope for survival lay in reaching the emplacement.
But they were too far away. Hope drained from Silo as he saw the distance still left to cover. Ahead of him, the soldiers were falling. So many, and so fast. He saw Eltenby die, red holes appearing in his back as he juddered and clawed at the air. And he knew then that there would be no escape for anybody. Even if they retreated now, they’d be cut down as they fled.
The cold horror of despair sank into him. What had he been thinking? What in damnation had driven him to such folly?
He’d always been a survivor, a man who did what was necessary to look out for himself and his own. Ashua was the same, and so was the Cap’n. Yet somehow they’d all become swept up in this, pushed to acts of foolish bravery by a sense of something bigger than they were. The unity of shared conflict had overwhelmed them, and they’d bought into the game when they should have stayed out of it.
War was a trick. An illusion to make men do things they couldn’t ordinarily do. For all the patriotic talk, all the glorious fervour of a righteous cause, every man and woman faced their deaths alone. It was only when you were staring at the end that you realised all that camaraderie didn’t mean a damn, but by then it was too late to take it back.
You the Ace of Skulls, he heard himself say to the Cap’n. How naïve and stupid it sounded now. If he hadn’t said that, the Ketty Jay would have flown on. He wouldn’t have been here, and he would never have led these soldiers and his friends to their deaths.
Shoulda kept your mouth shut, he thought. What a pitiful epitaph that would make.
Then the sound of the gatling gun changed. No longer was it firing into the front ranks of the attackers, but tipping backwards, sending bullets harmlessly into the air. Now it was spinning to a halt, and Silo looked up through the sweat that stung his eyes and saw that there was nobody manning it any more.
One of the Sentinels on the wall ran over to the gatling, seized its handles and tilted it down towards the road once more. Before he could press the trigger, blood sprayed from the back of his head, and he toppled backwards out of sight. The man to right of him looked across in puzzlement. An instant later, his head snapped back and he slumped forward over the rampart.
Despair turned to fierce exultation as Silo accelerated once again. He overtook Malvery and Ashua, catching up the golem at the head of the charge. If he looked over his shoulder, he’d see nothing but rubble and broken buildings; but then, Zalexa Crome was legendarily hard to spot. Somewhere back there the Century Knight was alive and kicking, her sniper rifle trained on the Awakeners. All of a sudden, they had a chance.
His doubts were thrown aside. A primal yell tore from his throat, a cry of savagery and triumph. He was flooded with new energy, driven by the promise of survival, of getting to grips with his tormentors and exacting revenge upon them for the murder they’d wreaked.
The riflemen fell into disarray as they saw their companions killed by some invisible assailant. They scrambled to get off the wall. More than half the Coalition troops lay dead in the road behind Silo, but the rest of them still lived, and they charged the emplacement with the golem at their head.