They found the pathfinders crouched and waiting outside, on the verge of bursting in with guns blazing.

“We thought we heard a ruckus,” Tooms said, straightening up, “There a problem, skipper?”

“It’s been resolved,” Deschane said, and that was that.

“Here,” Pretty Boy tossed the quicktimer at Beans, who caught it and began admiring its fine polish, “Try this on for size.”

The serjeant-major rounded up the troops in short order, though not without suffering their complaints; the troopers had been very much enjoying themselves at the range. But once Deschane told them of what had happened to the regiment at Shogun Creek, their attitude changed at once.

“We gonna be lugging the usual kit? Hexiomatics for the sharpshooters, muskets for everyone else?” Pretty Boy asked Deschane.

“No. This isn’t a pathfinding mission,” replied the navigator, “This is a reconnaissance-in-force, with emphasis on the force. Let’s take the good commissioner up on his offer—equip yourselves with whatever small arms you think will be effective. But I want at least half of you carrying Suppressors. Cooly, Sierck, I want both of you manning your shoulder cannons.”

“Music to mine ears,” said Cooly, rubbing his hands together.

“Sir, I also thought the quicktimer performed well today,” Ven opined, “But unlike the Sharpstones, they aren’t proven in actual combat. Should we really be adopting these metal cartridges so soon? It’s not what we’re accustomed to.”

“I like them,” Tooms said with a shrug.

“We know,” Harmer rolled her eyes. The first sergeant had taken her rapid promotion well in stride. Ven heartily approved of Pretty Boy’s choice of first sergeant, though as to Pretty Boy’s own commission the corporal still had some reservations.

“I can’t believe he made you sergeant-major of all people,” Beans whined, “Maybe I should let Deschane kick me in a nards once in a while, give myself a leg up in the world.”

“Stow it, fatty,” Pretty Boy said, indignant, “Your betters is conversating.”

“From the sound of things, Colonel Leelan deployed 2nd Battalion as part of a screening force for the main columns,” Deschane told Ven, “That means they were probably equipped with the standard kit. Obviously, it didn’t quite get the job done. We come heavy, or not at all.”

Ven saw what he was getting at. During set-piece battles, pathfinders acted as skirmishers that prioritized mobility above all else. Their task was to find and harass the Amit formations, working in concert with the cavalry to pick off isolated warrior-brood before falling back towards the main gunlines, luring the bulk of the horde after them. Their kit was different than that of other infantrymen, eschewing armour, extra ammunition and most mobile artillery in favour of a stripped-down version of the Sharpstone. Even their sealant suits were designed to be as lightweight as possible.

For this mission, however, Deschane wanted to swap their loadout and risk taking on the additional weight of the new guns, sacrificing speed for firepower. If the eradicator came for them, he intended to face it head-on with as much ordinance as the platoon could carry.

Ven wasn’t sure if it was the right call. Innovation was all well and good, but the jungle had a way of turning the best inventions into so much useless crap. The corporal decided to defer to Deschane’s experience and held her tongue.

The pathfinders eagerly availed themselves of the experimental weaponry, their excitement only increasing when Tooms found a plywood case full of cap-and-ball cycler pistols identical to the one Deschane carried. Ven saw the commissioner wincing as each pathfinder claimed a pair of cyclers apiece—Ven knew that just one of those novelty firearms could set an officer back a whole three month’s wages. Deschane helped himself to an additional pistol and a cycler carbine with a wire stock, all of which shared the same ammunition.

As for their long arms, most of the pathfinders had been persuaded by Tooms’ exhibition and went with a Suppressor. Like Harmer, Ven still had her reservations about quicktimers. The test had proven their impressive rate of fire without a doubt, but Ven suspected that their accuracy dropped sharply at extended ranges. They also seemed to lack the sheer wallop of the Sharpstone’s heftier 14.7 mm ball.

“Aren’t you going to ante up like the rest of us?” Cooly asked Ven as he and the other muscular mobile artillerist named Sierck cleaned the barrels of their shoulder cannons.

“Don’t fix what ain’t broken, as my mother used to say,” Ven replied, slinging her battered service rifle onto her shoulder. She still stuck one of the cycler pistols through her belt, however. A bit of extra oomph never hurt. Deschane gave them all extra time to familiarize themselves with their new weapons with last-minute practice at the range until he was confident they could all load and fire.

Nong came out to see them off. He was leading a hornblower by its reigns, the hopping arthropod crooning its evening mating song with its vibrating legs. Nong approached and presented the steed to Deschane, asking:

“Can your people ride?”

“Well enough. It’s part of basic training.”

“Good. We can provide steeds for you all,” Nong gestured to the corral where the rest of the hornblowers were busy trying to mount each other, their annoyed handlers keeping them apart with spiked goads.

“The offer is appreciated,” Deschane said stiffly, “Respectfully, I must decline.”

“I see,” Nong said, pursing his lips. Ven sensed the lingering hostility between them and felt that she had to smooth things over.

“Hornblowers are no good on long patrols,” she explained on Deschane’s behalf, “They tire easily, make too much noise.”

“Useless things,” Pretty Boy said disdainfully, “All they’re good for is feeding Amits.”

“I wonder what our dashing cavalrymen would think of that opinion,” Nong replied, his mouth twitching at the corners.

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“I won’t tell if you don’t,” she replied, offering her hand. Nong shook it warmly. His palms were one large mass of callouses; the commissioner had the casual, bone-grinding grip of a miner. Ven found herself wondering who this man truly was and the kind of life he had led before clawing his way up to his present status.

“Navigator, I have one last request,” Nong snapped his fingers. A technician came running up with a pile of black synthmesh bags and thick glass vials, “Try to take the creature alive if at all possible. Or at the very least collect samples of its corpse before anyone else can get their hands on it. Head, limbs, exoskeleton, haemolymph, organs—whatever you can get us. We must understand what we are up against if we hope to prevail.”

We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t start collecting us, Ven thought privately. What sort of creature kills seven dozen men unassisted?

“I’ll see what I can salvage,” Deschane said, accepting the sample bags and distributing it among the rucksacks of the troopers, “Platoon, fall in. Forward, quick…march!”

They filed out of the depot and into the foot trails at a brisk walk. As they crested the first of many hills to come, Ven dropped to the rear, sorely winded.

“Been eating one too many cassava cakes, have we?” Tooms teased.

Ven didn’t have the energy to come up with a smart retort, and settled for flipping him off. Then she concentrated on the fire in her lungs and pumping legs, turning the pain into a rhythm that could be endured.

Tooms was right—she was embarrassingly out of shape. Ven hadn’t been in the field since the Tallahammock campaign last year. Just thinking about that time gave her the jitters. But perhaps there was something useful she could extract from that experience and apply to the mission at hand. Ven forced herself to recall the details, unpleasant as they were, more to distract herself from the gruelling pace of the march than anything else.

The campaign had taken place in the eponymous river valley east of Mound Shakka. There the Amits had dug an abundance of nurseries from which they launched daring daytime raids against the surface greenhouses, carrying off crops and livestock to feed their young, not to mention the farmers and their families, too.

The Fleet’s retribution was swift, clumsy and disastrous. Once more the dubious honour of leading the attack had gone to the pathfinders. They went in to uncover and mark out the hidden entrances, only to discover that most of the nurseries were right underneath their feet, a series of shallow tunnels whose ceilings were held up only by a thin layer of copromite. This was a cement composed of dirt, gravel and faeces excreted only by worker-broods, a caste of Amits who normally were never seen outside of their mounds.

But there was nothing normal about Tallahammock. The Fleet had never before encountered such vast, interconnected nurseries before, and certainly not ones with defensive positions like that. According to her ex-boyfriend Wain in the Biological Division, nurseries themselves were emergency structures that the Amits created in times of acute overcrowding to prevent cannibalization and the spread of infant diseases. Or so his theory went—Ven had learned not to put too much stock in that idiot’s ideas.

The enemy waited until the advancing columns were nicely bottled up in the valleys before erupting onto the surface from all sides.

Surprise was total, the losses immense. Workers and nursemaids tore into the loose formations of the pathfinders, making up for their lack of size with a suicidal devotion to their infants. Caught in the forefront of the bloodiest action since Assail were the men and women of the 2nd Battalion. Forming an infantry square with the surviving line regiments, they fought a stubborn rearguard action that allowed the rest of the column to escape, crossing back across the Amit assault trenches over bridges made from the bodies of friend and foe alike.

Ven’s own battalion, the 9th, was spared from most of the early fighting thanks to being assigned to the rear echelon. But as the battles raged on, they too were thrown in to make up for the decimated formations, which had to be rotated out quickly before they lost all combat capability. To this day the casualty lists from Tallahammock were kept top secret to avoid public hysteria. Nevertheless, things got so bad that even support personnel like Ven were used to plug in the gaps. Clerks and cooks and accountants with barely a day’s worth of refresher training put on the line to replace the real infantry—the end result could only ever be horrendous.

For as bad as the first days had been, the worst was yet to come. Soon the campaign dragged into the Amit mating season and the juveniles from both worker and warrior broods reached maturity. Among the newly generated reinforcements were members of the reproductive caste, colossal bull males with broad digger claws and vestigial arms sporting flat, chitinous growths shaped like buckler shields.

In one engagement Ven had stood quivering in her boots as Amit bulls three and a half meters tall charged at her position. Eight hundred kilograms of armoured muscle bearing down on you like a locomotive with a full head of steam and swinging clubs made from whole tree trunks, well, that was enough to make any raw recruit bug out and scatter. Ven knew she nearly had. She would never forget how the bulls demolished the first rank with long sweeps of their greatclubs, the head of the woman directly in front of her disintegrating in a thick slurry of red matter.

But the soldiers of 2nd Battalion had been anything but raw. They had stood their ground and put those big bastards down with point-blank shots from their shoulder cannons, cracking the sonsofbitches open before they could wreak further carnage.

Which was why Ven found the report that had come down the wire so unbelievable. A bull was the only type of Amit she knew could do that kind of damage, and the veterans of 2nd Battalion knew exactly how to deal with that situation. Even if they had gone in light and left their mobile artillery behind, a volley of disciplined rifle fire would have done for the monster anyway. A company of pathfinders could unleash three hundred bullets per minute at the minimum. Nothing on this earth could survive that wall of lead. Nothing that she knew of, at least.

Ven found herself reconsidering her ex-boyfriend’s hypothesis. The Fleet was advancing further every day, liberating Amit mounds at a record pace while their weapons and strategies improved.

At Tallahammock, for instance, the Amit trenches had proved impervious to all direct fire artillery. The cannonballs just sailed harmlessly over the enemy’s heads, killing nothing but dirt. Massed infantry assaults on these positions were also thrown back by torrents of acid or showers of stone flechettes hurled by primitive torsion catapults made from vines and bent saplings.

Ultimately the deadlock was only broken by the introduction of flamespewer units. These were wagon-mounted tanks of jellified canefuel drawn by teams of myropods and serviced by a crew of three firemen. The infantry advanced in line formation, pouring down suppressing fire on the trenches while the firemen slowly trundled forward, carrying with them a hose with a blue pilot light flickering on the end of the nozzle.

Ven could still remember the smell of cooking flesh as the trenches filled with streams of greedy flame, the burning Amits both large and small running out and throwing themselves upon the ground to die in silent agony. As much as Ven hated the gourd-heads, it was an awful way to go. Humanity never seemed to run out of new ways to kill things.

But the enemy was changing as well, perhaps as a direct response to human successes. The Fleet was driving the Amits further and further past the horizon. The remaining enemy mounds in the northern hinterlands formed a broad crescent in front of the advancing expeditionary forces, a formidable barrier that was nevertheless thinning with every victory. Within the scientific circles that Wain frequented, there was even speculation that this formation of mounds, which they codenamed the Iron Crescent, was the only thing standing between humanity and a vast, virgin territory untouched by human hands.

If they were right, then this meant that the Amits were rapidly running out of living space. The pressure on their societies would only increase as time went on. Who knew what kind of devilish innovations the enemy would come up with in their desperation? Maybe this new lifeform was just another step up the ladder of escalation, a special caste bred by the Amits as a final solution to the human problem.

Ven was still ruminating over these theories as daylight faded and the platoon came within sight of Mound 13.