‘We’re still waiting for orbital appraisal,’ the senior adept replied. ‘There is an atmospheric peculiarity that—’
‘I’m not waiting for orbitals,’ said Dev sharply. ‘Someone give me a decent assessment!’
‘A major incursion has breached the earthwork in an eleven-kilometre line between CR88 and CR96, Wadi Ghez, so-called the Little Sink,’ said Sri Vedt, the Uxor Primus, tracing her finger across the hololithic chart. ‘I cannot appreciate precise numbers, but it feels like tens of thousands.’
‘I would concur with the Primus,’ said Uxor Bhaneja. ‘Their forces struck eight minutes ago, and overwhelmed the earthwork by sheer dint of numbers.’
‘And took us by surprise?’ asked Dev. ‘A force that size? They just sneaked up a division of warriors and dropped them on us? Doesn’t that seem unlikely?’
‘They are cloaked by a vapour cloud,’ said Uxor Sanzi. ‘That must surely be more than the dust produced by their movements. The cloud struck the earthwork first, with a kinetic force akin to a tsunami.’
‘More air magick?’ suggested a Torrent officer.
‘Do not,’ said Dev, raising a finger to him, ‘do not let the Lord Commander hear you utter those words.’
The Torrent officer made a quick namaste and backed away.
Dev glanced towards the uxors around the table. ‘Thank you for your frank appraisal, uxors. How accurate should I consider them to be?’
‘Our ’cepts are sharp,’ said Uxor Sanzi.
‘We feel this,’ added Uxor Bhaneja. ‘I have a Company at CR90, the Jacks. I ’cept that they are already dead.’
Dev nodded. ‘I am sorry for your loss, Uxor Bhaneja.’
Bhaneja nodded back and, tearful, accepted Sri Vedt’s consoling embrace. ‘Everyone will be mourning losses before the day is out sir,’ said Sri Vedt.
‘We are mobilising the armoured cavalry at CR713,’ Dynast Kheel of the Thorns announced, ‘and the Outremar reserves at Tel Sherak.’
‘Sri Vedt has directed four geno companies to move along the line to support the forces at CR88,’ said Honen Mu. ‘More are needed, in my opinion.’
‘Provided they bring their armour support,’ put in a Hort officer. ‘Armour’s what we need—’
‘Armour will not suffice,’ Mu responded. ‘A muscular infantry riposte will be quicker to deliver. These are low tech warriors with blades and black powder bombs, and—’
‘Stop wasting time with debate!’ Kheel growled, rounding on the tiny uxor. ‘This is a shambles! There is no unification of command!’
Honen Mu looked Kheel straight in the eyes, or at least what she could see of them beneath the bulging thorns of his visor.
‘I believe, Dynast,’ she said levelly, ‘that Major General Dev is in charge.’
‘That was my understanding too, Kheel, so stand down and bite your tongue,’ said Dev with a brush of his hand. ‘Senior, where are the nearest Titans?’
‘Princeps Jeveth has already ordered the three Titans closest to the incursion forward to engage,’ the senior adept replied.
‘Bless that old goat for not waiting for an order,’ Dev nodded. ‘We need to bring the weight of the Hort and Torrent forces in to dam this flood.’
He began to track deployment lines across the glowing chart, conferring with the adepts and officers. Sri Vedt watched, approving of his decisions, gently correcting any detail she ’cepted as unwise.
Mu wondered if it was complacency that had cost them. Besieging forces often suffered from that flaw. The expedition had bested an entire world, and driven the last of its resistance back into one city to die. No one had expected the Nurthene to go back on the offensive.
No, it wasn’t complacency, she decided. She reminded herself that the Nurthene did not think the way Imperial humans did. Their actions were determined by values quite alien to Mu and her kind. Driven to the brink of defeat, the Nurthene had not resigned themselves to an inevitable fate.
They had fought back, the way any cornered beast would.
We have underestimated the creatures of this world too many times in this campaign already, Mu thought. Please, let us not be about to do that again.
T
HE STINK OF
wormwood was oppressively strong, and the roar of the approaching host had become so great that Bronzi could no longer hear the voices of the men around him raised in prayer.
He glanced left and right, surveying his lines. The Jokers had done him every credit. Despite the extremity of the moment, and the haste with which they’d been obliged to assemble, the company had formed up perfectly. They were ready, pikes and carbines held at their shoulders.
Bronzi was prepared to bet that the Jokers were going to be the first Army unit to meet the enemy assault that morning with any kind of coordination or discipline. How the Jokers gave account of themselves in the next thirty minutes would therefore be critical. There was no possibility of the geno company men defeating the assault, but if they delayed it, or slowed it down, it would most likely decide how the rest of that damnable day would go.
A full company of Outremar regulars, flying the Samarkand banner, had rushed up into position on the Jokers’ right flank, taking up a line across the billet road and a broad valley to the south that faced the desert. A second Outremar unit, smaller, but armed with weapon servitors, was moving up behind them, and the vox said that a Sixth Torrent armour unit with infantry support was a minute or two behind the Jokers.
The Jokers’ left flank was the earthwork wall. Skilful placing by Bronzi and his trusted bashaws had spread the Jokers along the higher banks and mounds of the uneven terrain in the billet grounds. They were getting decent tactical instruction over the vox, and the ’cept was with them. Bronzi could see how his men were tightening and adjusting their structures slightly as Mu’s wisdom touched them.
Bronzi nodded to himself. His company was as ready as it would ever be. He raised his sabre and held it aloft. There was a sharp crackle of gunlocks releasing.
The tidal wave of enemy warriors was less than a quarter of a kilometre away, the dust storm rolling with it. Dozens of Outremar soldiers fled before it, chased out of their overrun position. They ran frantically towards the geno line, past rows of abandoned tents and empty dug outs. The poor fools were doomed, Bronzi realised. They were in the line of fire, and he could not afford to stay his men for long enough to allow the Outremars to reach safety.
War forced choices on a man, unpleasant choices. At Tel Utan, the Alpha Legion had demonstrated how clinically such choices should be made. Compassion was a liberal folly that spared a life so that a hundred others might die as a consequence.
Bronzi looked up at the company banner, hanging limp and heavy in the dry air. He studied the figure on the banner, the cosmic joker, the trickster god Trisumagister, capering in his motley, a belled wand in one hand, a spillglass in the other. The Joker god knew all too well how wanton and feckless fortune could be, and how quickly time ran out for those who dallied with her affections. Bronzi believed he knew Dame Fortune just as well. You paid for her time, and took her service, and knew that she would be with another man the moment the fancy took her.
The sky overhead had darkened so much that it had turned the colour of arterial blood.
‘Geno!’ he yelled.
Full-throated, the men echoed the word. The time was on them.
Bronzi rotated his sabre in the air, making quick, cutting sweeps. The first signal.
On the low ridge to his right, the company mortar teams began to drop shells into their angled tubes and step back, heads turned aside. A plosive, hollow
plunk-plunk
racket began. Mortar bombs whizzed up and over onto the enemy formation, expertly ranged. Bronzi observed the thumps and flashes as they struck with a nod of satisfaction. Each blast cast up white smoke and flailing bodies.
He sawed his raised sabre back and forth. The second signal.
The tripod-mounted cannons and crew-served weapons began to chatter and pulse tracer and blinding las at the oncoming foe. Sections of the leading ranks were demolished. Smoke and bloody steam furled back across the Nurthene press and chunks of shredded meat rained down on them. Bronzi saw echvehnurth elite judder and disintegrate as the heavy fire ripped through them. He saw a galloping monitor tumble over, disembowelled, crushing its rider under its rolling back.
Bronzi chopped his sabre straight down. The third signal.
The rifle lines opened fire. The lingering peal of muzzle cracks sounded like snapping twigs. Firing row by row, coordinated by the yelling bashaws and Mu’s ’cept, the ranks of riflemen aimed, fired, re-aimed, fired.
The effect was devastating. Five hundred Anatolian lascarbines, hefty pulse repeaters developed from the ubiquitous Urak-1020 combat gun that had been the workhorse of every Strife-Age warlord’s army, trained and fired by professional soldiers drilled to perfection, blazed at the Nurthene. The Jokers were especially famed for the quality of their marksmanship, a fact that Bronzi took a great deal of personal pride in. Every Joker rifleman was a crack shot by Army standards. There wasn’t a damn one amongst them who couldn’t hit a moving gamebird at nine hundred metres. Bronzi regularly fielded requests from other regiments asking for the loan of a rifleman or two to conduct training programmes. He bitterly regretted that Giano Faben and Zerico Munzer, his two best marksmen, were not at his side that morning. He’d loaned them as tutors to a Gedrosian regiment on Salkizor fifteen months earlier. The last he’d heard, they were en route back to him by pack ship, training tour over.
Giano and Rico were missing all of the fun, the lucky bastards.
The fusillades expertly slaughtered the first eight ranks of the Nurthene host, bringing down infantry and reptile riders alike. Though a handful of the fleeing Outremars had been clipped too, Bronzi was gratified to see that his men’s vaunted skill had spared most. Frantic Outremar survivors were dashing into the geno lines, weeping and screaming for sanctuary. Tche looked at his het.
‘Keep them firing,’ Bronzi mouthed over the din. ‘Sustain order until there is no distance left.’ Tche nodded.
Bronzi lifted his sabre and held it out straight in front of him at head height. The fourth signal.
The pikemen, laced in between the rows of rifles, took a step forwards with their left feet, and declined their weapons into a murderous fence. Strengthened by sheathes of gravimetric force, the telescopic pikes extended until each one was ten metres long. The pike-men kept the arches of their right feet braced over the grav counterweights in the spikes at the bases of their hafts.
The las-spines on the tips of the pike blades began to sizzle with cising power.
Run onto that, you bastards, Bronzi thought, then you’ll discover how badly a geno company can maul you.
As if obeying his will, the Nurthene host did exactly that.
The front edge of the vast blight swarm spilled across the last few metres of open ground, losing men to the sustained rifle volleys at every step. Ten metres, five, two, and still they came, despite their losses. For every Nurthene casualty, there were two more men behind to take his place, and die in turn, and be replaced by four.
The Nurthene reached the pike fence.
The first of them were split apart, sectioned and chopped. The next waves became impaled, bodies skewering onto pike blades like living souvlaki. The geno pikemen leaned into the weight and multiple impacts, some grunting as their elongated poles hoisted whole bodies off the ground, writhing like speared fish, others struggling and collapsing as the crude mass of corpses pulled their pikes down. Gravitic counterweights shorted out under the demands put on them, and hafts splintered as the gravimetric sheathes supporting their outlandish lengths evaporated. Pikemen started to use broken sections of their weapons to jab and flay at the pressing tide.
Now we’re in it, Bronzi thought.
The concussion of the Nurthene charge meeting the geno line sent a ripple of shock back through Bronzi’s ordered files. For a moment, the Jokers held, like a dam before floodwaters, but the pressure built rapidly. The Nurthene piled in, hundreds upon hundreds of them, packing tighter and tighter against the geno barrier. In the gaps where the pike fence had broken, Nurthene warriors lunged and shoved and stabbed. Jokers fell down, cut open by whirring falxes, or toppled against the rows behind them. Carbines fired, point blank and scattershot. Pressed back by the layer of the dead and dying in the buffer of the front ranks, the lokers tried to maintain structure. The dead of both sides formed a ghastly ridge, which the Nurthene urgently scrambled over.
‘Blades, blades!’ Bronzi yelled.
Bashaw Fho, one of his senior men, turned to relay the order. An iron dart punctured his head and he dropped on his face. Nurthene arrows were suddenly coming down like torrential rain. Every man in Bronzi’s field of vision was struck by a dart. Bronzi felt one slice his right thigh and another embed itself in his left boot.
He roared and threw himself forwards, sabre in one hand, Parthian revolver in the other.
Sense departed. Instinct took over. He fired his pistol, and saw an echvehnurth’s head spray apart. He stroked with his sword, and took the top off a skull. Something hit him in the gut. Winded, he wheeled, and eviscerated a Nurthene with his blade. He shouldered another aside with his bulk, and shot the devil in the head to make it count. Turning, he stabbed another through the chest, and had to twist hard to pull his sword free.
Twenty seconds in and his gun was out. He threw it at a Nurthene and snorted as it bounced off the man’s skull. He drew his other sidearm, a shot-loaded backup piece with a pepperpot snout of six barrels.
The Nurthene cavalry came crashing through the dense forest of fighting bodies with an indiscriminate momentum that trampled both Nurthene and Imperial underfoot. The reptile riders bucked and lurched above the heads of the infantry, like horsemen driving their steeds across a swollen river. Pikes caught some, hooking them out of their saddles, and the riderless beasts ploughed on, snapping and thrashing. More iron darts whizzed down out of the haze, dropping men by the dozen. The churned soil bristled with embedded arrows as if it was sprouting some strange new crop.