After riding for hours they began to hear the rumble of distant gunfire above the noise of the engine. Very soon, they could see a pall of smoke along the horizon and they knew that they were entering the battle zone.
At a fork in the road an Uruk appeared to be directing traffic. Billy pressed his face to the window and shouted.
‘Hill 471?’
‘Hill what? Hill what?’
‘4-7-1’
The Uruk stared at the ground frowning, and then jerked an arm towards the right.
‘Straight down. Can’t miss it.’
The Rainman swung the fighting machine down the right-hand fork.
After a series of false trails and a dozen wrong turnings, they finally pulled up at a low hill that was crisscrossed with trenches and coils of barbed wire. One side of the hill was honeycombed with foxholes and bunkers. The Shirik were swarming over it like a colony of burrowing ants. Billy spotted an Uruk who was standing over a squad of Shirik labouring on a trench. Every so often he encouraged them with a knotted rope.
‘Hey! Hey you! Uruk. This Hill 471?’
‘Who wants to know?’
Billy pushed his pistol through the slit.
‘We want to know, shiteater.’
The Uruk responded happily to threat and abuse.
‘Sure, sure. This 471.’
‘Where do we find the Free Corps command post?’
The Uruk pointed.
‘Down that way.’
The Rainman put the machine in motion and swung it down a deeply rutted track. They were now in the heart of the Dur Shanzag lines. The snouts of light cannon and mortars poked from foxholes. Shell craters dotted the landscape, and all round them squads of Shirik sappers sweated with picks and shovels enlarging the foxholes and dugouts.
They passed a Shirik stripped of his uniform, suspended by his hands from a wooden frame that had been erected beside the track. He was obviously undergoing some kind of punishment. Around his neck hung a placard on which was a single word in the strange script they had seen used throughout Dur Shanzag.
A ditch ran for some distance along the side of the track, and every so often Billy noticed huddled shapes, the bodies of men and mules that lay half in and half out of the muddy water, where they had been pushed off the road and left to rot. They rolled past crisscrossings of tangled barbed wire and Billy saw to his horror that in the middle of a particularly thick section, a skeleton was hanging with shreds of clothing still adhering to it. It seemed as though the war had crossed this area and moved on.
Eventually they found what they were looking for. A huge dugout where a collection of olive green tents huddled under the protection of sandbagged ramparts. In front of the tents and tunnel entrances, a group of humans lounged round a huge black field piece. Three fighting machines, similar to their own, were parked beside it.
The Rainman pulled in beside the other machines, and the three of them climbed down and walked over to the men squatting round the cannon. They were all unshaven and filthy, and wore a motley assortment of combat suits and work clothes. At their belts they carried a vicious array of knives and side arms. None of them looked up as Reave, Billy and the Rainman approached. They seemed totally to lack interest in anything that went on around them. Billy stopped and cleared his throat.
‘Where can we find whoever’s in charge?’
A big man with blond hair and a black eye patch spat a stream of tobacco juice in the dust.
‘I am, I’m Axmann, M of W for this section. You replacements?’
Billy nodded, and gave him the envelope.
‘These are our orders.’
Axmann seemed to have no interest in opening them.
‘You better get settled in.’
He glanced back at the men beside the gun.
‘You, Duck. Show these replacements where to bunk, and explain the facts of life to them.’
A little bald man with a rodent’s face and extremely short legs scrambled to his feet. Axmann turned back to Billy, Reave and the Rainman.
‘Duck will show you round. Oh, just one thing. You boys don’t plan to be heroes, do you?’
‘It’s not our greatest ambition.’
‘Good. The last thing we need is heroes.’
Duck led them inside the bunker. It stretched way back inside the hill, and housed the command post, stores and sleeping quarters. The roof was low, scarcely four feet high in places, and they had to move in a half crouch. The walls of the excavation were shored up with an assortment of scrap timber and here and there someone had stuck a pin-up. These served to highlight rather than disguise the appalling squalor. Duck pointed at three empty wooden bunks.
‘You can take them three. The guys they belonged to took a direct hit. They won’t be needing them any more.’
They dumped their gear on the beds, and Duck led them out of the bunker and up the hill a little way.
‘If you keep your heads down you’ll be okay. You can see the whole battle zone from here.’
The plain beneath them was gouged with craters and scarred by trenches. At irregular intervals a boom and an eruption of dust would mark a shell landing. Small figures would scamper out of a trench, and rush into the section of no man’s land that ran between the lines of either side. Inevitably, before they’d gone very far, the figures would fall and lie still. Overhead, off in the distance, two clumsy flying machines, cigar-shaped objects with a collection of umbrella-like repulsors on their top sides, circled each other warily. One carried the eye and flames markings of Dur Shanzag, while the other bore the seven-pointed star of Harod. Billy watched in appalled fascination.
‘How long has this been going on?’
Duck shrugged.
‘Who knows? Maybe a generation. Maybe more.’
‘But I thought the Presence was winning.’
‘Sure he’s winning, We’ve gained maybe a hundred yards this year. I guess another twenty years will see us at the gates of Harod.’
‘Twenty years.’
Duck dug the heel of his boot into the dirt.
‘Twenty, maybe twenty-five. Attrition’s the name of the game. The only thing that could prevent it was if the Shirik stopped breeding. The Shirik do most of the fighting. They’re sent up the line. They rush the enemy, most of them get slaughtered, but they keep coming, and we keep gaining little bits of ground. If they start losing too many of them, we have to take our tin cans in and sort it out. Beyond that we try and keep out of the fighting and stay healthy.’
‘Doesn’t anyone want to fight?’
Duck scowled.
‘Who needs it? Except the Shirik, who can’t get enough. Occasionally one of our boys goes kill crazy, but when that happens they usually start on the Shirik, and we have to go down and fuse them before they do too much damage. Beyond that, it’s like I said, we do our best to keep out of it. We all hate this goddamn war.’
Billy scratched his head.’
‘I don’t see why any of us go on with it.’
Duck looked at Billy in contempt.
‘Did you ask to come here?’
‘Nah, we were in jail. We didn’t have no choice.’
‘Neither did anyone else, sonny boy. Get stuck inside of Dur Shanzag and you wind up at the front before you know it’
‘What are the enemy like?’
‘I ain’t seen ‘em close to ‘cept maybe a few times. They looked like regular guys to me. Just like us, ‘cept they’re fighting for their lives. You’ll get called out soon enough, and then you’ll see for yourselves.’
***
A.A. Catto came home from the party in another artificial sunrise. Once again, she was bored. Juno Meltzer had done her best, but when A.A. Catto finally came down to it, nothing new really happened. It was yet another party where she had finished up with her brother. It was an indictment of the lack of stimuli that someone like Valdo was superior to most of the other available men.