Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

– Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Day was breaking when Rann first caught sight of the island. The sea was a dark choppy blue, the wavetips dappled red-pink by the rising sun, like blood in the water. The wind kicked up a hard spray against the tall grey flank of the battleship. Leaning over the bow with his elbows on the railing, he saw a low silhouette appear against the brightening horizon. A black sliver of land, its outline ragged with mountains.

He drew in a deep breath of chilly salt air. It was a cold morning, for midsummer. They were a long way north of the equator, three days’ steam from the nearest port. He’d heard icebergs from the pole sometimes floated down into these waters. He suppressed a shiver, drawing his faded blue jacket tighter around himself. The decking beneath his boots thrummed with the steady rhythm of the engines.

There were a couple of other sightseers on the foredeck, early risers like himself in marine blue, outnumbered by the dawn-watch ratings in their grimy white uniforms. The sailors were usually a noisy lot, bellowing and cursing and braying their laughter. Today, they were subdued as they tightened guywires and strapped down loose gear. They knew what was coming.

Rann hadn’t been properly seasick in years; it had been shaken out of him by a hundred storm-tossed sea journeys. So the faint churn in his gut, the quickening of his heart, could only be fear. Fear and, after eight long years, a kind of disbelief. He’d never expected to be here at the end, when so many others had not lived to see it. He leaned back, one hand on the railing, as Delan’s Rock grew slowly but inexorably larger in the distance.

A pair of reconnaissance planes buzzed low overhead, launched from one of the fleet carriers miles behind. The rising sun printed their wide shadows across the deck momentarily before they raced on towards the island, outpacing the destroyer escorts leading the battleships. Rann shaded his eyes as he watched them out of sight. He wondered how the island looked from up there.

“Catching the sunrise, sergeant?”

Rann started at the voice and turned his head. Lidaro had snuck up on him at the railing, his footsteps masked by the sound of the planes. The tall, rake-thin kid looked far too bright and fresh for such an early hour. The sea wind ruffled his sandy blond hair, worn impudently longer than the regulation cut, and blew the tails of his unbuttoned jacket out behind him. He smiled a broad, gap-toothed smile.

“You’re supposed to be below decks,” Rann said.

Lidaro shrugged. “So are you. Anyway, the midshipmen didn’t stop me.”

“I could order you back down there. You should be getting some sleep, while you still have the chance.”

“I can’t sleep down there. Too noisy. You know how Geddan snores.” Lidaro squinted out to the horizon. “Doesn’t look like much of a fortress.”

“Wait till we’re up close. There’s ten thousand Salvators dug in on that rock, and they aren’t going peacefully.”

“So? We have ten times that many. And they never go peacefully. That’s the fun part.” Lidaro’s tone was cheery as a spring morning.

A hoarse shout of “Heave!” came from behind. Teams of ratings were dragging the heavy waterproof covers off the ship’s massive turreted guns. The blank muzzles were revealed, one after another, like gaping black mouths. Rann imagined the racks of giant shells waiting in the magazine decks below, cordite charges neatly lined up, gunners climbing from their bunks and trudging bleary-eyed to their posts. The same routine would be playing out aboard a hundred other warships. Men preparing to kill other men from ten miles away, men whose faces they would never see.

A klaxon sounded, low and mournful. General quarters. The activity of the ratings abruptly gained a harried new energy, hatches clanging open and electric winches whirring. “Clear the deck!” someone yelled over the klaxon’s wail.

“Time to go,” Rann told Lidaro, pushing himself away from the railing.

The boy’s lips pursed in a mock pout. “Can’t we stay for the first shot?”

“Not unless you want to be struck deaf. The muzzle blast would knock your teeth out from a hundred feet away.”

“Deaf and toothless, like an old man.” Lidaro wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know how you stand it, sergeant.”

“Easy. I think about how I’m still better-looking than you.”

They jogged upship, past the turrets, to the grey castle of the forward superstructure. From there it was a long, winding journey down cramped corridors thronged with frantic sailors, through hatchways apparently built for much shorter men, and down level after level of scuffed steel ladders. The emergency lighting bathed the ship’s interior a sickly red, and the blare of the alarm was interspersed with indistinct orders relayed over the crackling loudspeaker. The smell of sweat and machine-oil hung heavy in the stale air, growing stronger the deeper they went. It was such a familiar smell to Rann, almost comforting.

Halfway to the staging deck, they heard the speaker screech “Brace!” Rann grabbed instinctively for a hatchway handle. Lidaro, smirking, kept running. Then the ship rocked mightily, as if cresting a sudden storm-wave. The recoil of the guns shuddered through the decking like a monstrous heartbeat. Lidaro stumbled and swore, scrabbling for a handhold.

“When they say brace, it’s not a suggestion,” Rann said, over the ringing in his ears.

“If they’d give us five more bloody seconds of warning-”

“You’d still ignore them. Come on, before Chasck sends the midshipmen looking for us.”

The main battery had fired half a dozen times more by the time they made it to the teeming hive of the staging deck. Marines were being mustered by platoons, streaming from their bunkrooms into the wide, low-ceilinged assembly hall. Most looked like they’d only just awoken, some still struggling into their uniform jackets. Officers and surly-eyed midshipmen prowled up and down the deck inspecting the throng, taking headcounts and barking at the stragglers. The alarm, quieter down here but still grating, continued its idiot moan. Every time the guns fired up above, the deck quaked and a thousand marines flinched.

Rann and Lidaro skirted around the patrolling midshipmen and found their platoon forming up in the sweating scrum. It was largely a new outfit – after the heavy losses taken in the final push on the capital, half the battalion was fresh recruits – but Rann’s squad was an exception. Three faces, almost as familiar to him as his own, turned to greet him as he pushed through the crowd towards them.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“We were getting worried, sergeant,” Iva called through the noise, making room for Rann to fall into line beside her. She was a lean, narrow-faced woman of thirty, her light brown hair shaven close to her skull and tired circles showing beneath her hazel eyes. The corners of her mouth twitched with the beginnings of a smile. She spoke Standard Kauln with a slight burr, the accent of the kingdom’s heartland provinces.

“The sergeant was watching the sunrise,” Lidaro snickered. “It’s very pretty up there. He got lost in the colours.”

Iva turned her gaze to the boy, unimpressed. “And what were you doing? Flirting with the sailors again?”

“Just taking a look at the place we’re going to burn to the ground.”

“I was about to go find you,” Geddan said. He was a Forester, one of the nomad folk from the wooded mountains of Kauln’s far west, smoothly bald and big as a bull. His jacket was buttoned tightly over his heavy belly. His skin was a deep ruddy bronze, looking bloodstained under the emergency lights. He was the oldest of them, perhaps forty-five. In their three years as squadmates, Rann had never asked his exact age, and Geddan had never volunteered it.

“Was your bunk cold without me, Gedd?” Lidaro asked innocently.

“I was wondering where your stink had gone. The air in the bunkroom smelt fresher all of a sudden.”

“Alright, quiet. Eyes forward,” Rann told them. He glanced at their fifth man, Wace, who acknowledged him with a wordless nod. In his middle thirties – a little older than Rann himself – Wace was from Esuloa, the sprawling island chain north of continental Kauln. He was a rangy, sinewy man, with hardly an ounce of fat on him. An old shrapnel scar split his chin and lower lip, the tissue much paler than the surrounding skin. He looked oddly tranquil in the heat and noise of the muster, as though this was right where he wanted to be.

The lieutenant in command of their platoon, a tall scowling woman named Chasck, checked off their numbers while her fellow officers struggled to get their marines in line. “We have orders to launch when ready,” she announced, her eyes darting beadily between Rann and the platoon’s other sergeants. “Transports are fuelled and surface conditions are favourable, for now. The enemy has nothing with enough range to hit the fleet out here. Skies are clear and our bombers are on approach. We are to load up by squads and make our way down to the launch bay. Landing loadout only – I don’t want to see any of you drown because the transport foundered and you tried swimming ashore with a full pack. Heavy gear will follow behind us. Let’s get boots on that beach.”

Nobody wasted time saluting; Chasck had already turned on her heel. The platoon followed, joining the columns of marines now jostling out of the hall, Rann’s squad bringing up the rear. There was a palpable change in the ship’s inertia, underneath the steady hammering of the guns. Bulkheads creaked and groaned discordantly. Fifty thousand tons of steel were slowing to a halt.

The armoury was between the assembly hall and the launch bay, designed as a series of wide corridors lined with numbered gun racks and lockers. The arrangement was nearly universal aboard the king’s fleet, and where the muster had been chaos, gearing up was achieved with quick, practiced efficiency. Rann led the others to their allotted rack. His rifle, oiled and glinting dully, waited for him like an old friend. His canvas pack was stowed in the adjacent locker, readied the night before. When he heaved it onto his shoulder, the familiar weight of it soothed the skip of his heart. For a moment.

He watched the others load and check their rifles, their movements showing the ease and confidence of long experience. Lidaro, young though he was, had the fastest hands of all. He shouldered his pack, belted it into place and strapped his helmet on with a flourish. Rann almost expected him to bow.

“Faster,” Lidaro cajoled Geddan and Wace. “You’re like crones knitting blankets.”

“When your gun jams up on that beach, you’ll thank us for checking ours over proper,” Geddan said, without looking at the boy. The rifle looked small in his great, red, work-roughened hands. His helmet was a tight fit over his head, the leather chinstrap digging into his thick neck. The Forester folk were always tall, but Geddan had to be a giant even by their standards.

“Check it all you like. You still can’t shoot straight. It’s painful watching you on the range.”

“And you’re the best shot on Aede, are you?”

“Better than you. Shouldn’t be surprised, mind. Shooting’s a young man’s game.”

“Lidaro, enough,” Iva said warningly. She’d been a schoolteacher before the war, and it showed in the timbre of her voice. Lidaro was nineteen and taller than her by a head, but Iva’s glare made him shut up like a grammar-schooler told off for backtalk.

Rann knew it should have been him scolding Lidaro, asserting his authority as sergeant. It wasn’t something that came naturally. He’d never needed to discipline a soldier before the kid joined the squad.

Lidaro could fight, there was no question of that; the marines had little room for those who couldn’t. What he lacked was deference. He was from a landowning family who’d had to flee their estate when the Salv purges began. Rann had grown up in the same rolling open country, and he’d long known the type – scions of minor aristocracy, primed from birth for a place in the officer corps or one of the capital’s merchant houses. Lidaro was far less of a snob than most, but he still clearly struggled with the notion of following orders, especially at sea. The constant sweaty proximity of the bunkrooms made them all restless. It was a small miracle he hadn’t gotten himself punched, with all the needling remarks he liked to fling around.

At least the voyage itself had been uneventful. The Salv navy was no more, its towering battleships sent to the bottom or captured at anchor. The bombers of the dreaded Air Legion had met a similar fate. Nearly a month had passed since the Crown City’s fall. First Marshal Nilen’s staunchest believers had died defending the ruins, while his exhausted conscript armies surrendered in droves. For the first time in eight bloody years, the king’s colours flew over the Dawn Palace, and the royal fleets could sail unchallenged. No more terror-filled races from port to port, zigzagging between the islands, wondering if today would be the day a Salv torpedo added you to the missing lists.

Trying to shake away such cheery memories, Rann holstered his pistol, slotting spare magazines into the belt pouches of his pack. He slung his rifle onto his shoulder and led the others to their regathering platoon. He did his best to listen to Chasck’s terse final instructions through the yowling of the klaxon and the muffled cannonfire from above. Sweat made his jacket cling to the small of his back, a discomfort that was more than physical. Heat-sweat and fear-sweat were damnably hard to tell apart.

It was almost a relief when they were ushered through to the launch bay. A large section of the ship had been gutted and extended in dry-dock to make room for the bay, which plunged four or five decks to an angled slipway. The walls followed the slope of the hull, wrapped with railed gantries and overlooks. The platoons swarmed onto the gantries, which creaked unsettlingly under their weight. The bay was floodlit a harsh white, which hurt Rann’s eyes after the deep red of the emergency lighting. It seemed the alarm had finally been silenced, or was simply inaudible in this part of the ship, because he heard it no more. That struck him as a very small mercy indeed.

The transports waiting in the bay were angular, graceless contraptions, like cattle trucks crudely hybridised with motorboats. Most were smallish affairs, made to carry a few squads of infantry, but a handful of larger ones had tanks or gun-tractors chained to their flat steel decks. Barking, gesticulating petty officers harried the marines aboard, and shirtless ratings used powered davit cranes to lower the transports onto the slipway. Navy helmsmen leapt nimbly onto the descending transports and took up their positions in the open-topped pilot cabins.

While they waited their turn to board, Rann studied the faces of the men and women around him. Old faces and new faces, some with their veterancy written in livid scars and dour, tight-lipped expressions. Others, especially the younger ones, had fidgety hands and nervous, darting eyes. Few spoke.

On the other end of the gantry, a bearded chaplain stood in the middle of a knot of marines, loudly reading them a benediction from a leatherbound prayer book. “Almighty, Father-to-All, guide and keep these men and these women. Let Your sacraments be the mark of their devotion, indelible unto death. Grant them courage, grant them fortitude, grant them brotherhood. Shield them from the artifice of the enemy. Steel their souls against the hardships to come.” The ship shook mightily with another broadside, making them all sway on their feet. The chaplain recovered his footing and went on haltingly. “And if they should fall, I pray You, welcome them into the deathless glory of Your embrace, as Your faithful sons and daughters. Praised be Your name.” He made the sign of devotion, palm flat over his heart.

“Praised be Your name,” the marines echoed. The ship rattled again.

“Don’t the Salv use the same testament?” Lidaro muttered. “I bet they’re saying that exact prayer out on the island, right now.”

“Maybe so, but I’d say the Almighty has made it pretty clear whose side He’s on,” Iva said archly.

Lidaro grinned. “I hope Nilen’s watching, down in perdition. We’re about to send him a whole lot of company.”