They ended up crammed into the back of a transport that had surely been built for half the number it carried. The davit crane lowered them to their launch position in a series of stomach-churning drops, leaving them sandwiched between a pair of tank transports with just a few feet of clearance. Chasck was in the transport with them, along with two of her other squad leaders, but the rest of the complement were from other platoons. This came as no surprise to Rann. In his experience, deployment plans looked pretty on paper, and were swiftly forgotten once the first shots were fired.

“All hands, stand by!” one of the petty officers shouted from a walkway above. Electric motors whirred into action somewhere nearby. Enormous sea-doors swung ponderously open in the walls of the bay, flaring out from the flanks of the ship like stubby wings. Seawater rushed in and foamed eagerly up the slipway. The transports rose with the sudden tide and bobbed there for a moment, before their engines coughed to life.

“All good?” Chasck asked the mongrel platoon, glancing back over her shoulder. Her eyes were hard, but not without sympathy.

“Yes, ma’am,” they answered dutifully.

Brassy morning light and a crowded sea greeted the transports as they chugged out of the launch bay in a fog of diesel fumes. From sea level, the fleet seemed to fill the ocean from horizon to horizon. The king’s vengeance made manifest; a floating city of steel and funnelsmoke. Rann picked out the hulking silhouettes of battleships and carriers, the smaller profiles of destroyers and oilers, and countless tiny grey shapes that turned out to be more transports, pouring out of the capital ships by the dozen.

The helmsman of their transport was a one-eyed Forester nearly as big as Geddan. He leaned on the tiller, veering them hard towards Delan’s Rock. The transport, shallow-bellied and already barely above the waterline, creaked as it struggled to stay upright. The battleship receded aft of them at a quickening pace. Its guns had fallen silent, the bombardment paused to allow the fragile transports to launch safely. Rann craned his neck to watch it fall behind, a grey steel mountain shrinking by the second. He supposed there was a fair chance he would never see it again.

Then he turned his eyes forward, to the island rising to welcome him. Detail was beginning to resolve itself out of the haze of distance. Broad cliffs and peaks, green swathes of forest covering wavelike hills. The bombardment had raised black drifts of smoke on the shoreline.

He tried to remember the ordnance charts they’d been shown in the shipboard briefings. The Rock was an elongated comma, its great western bay fifty miles across. The interior was heavily forested, slashed by long valleys and crisscrossed by braided tangles of rivers. A range of low mountains followed the curve of the island, rising out of the forests like the spine of some dead giant. Ten thousand places to hide.

They’d been told very little in the briefings, only that the island was heavily fortified and swarming with enemy diehards. The Salv had been on the Rock for years, paving its hills with ferroconcrete and razorwire, filling its valleys with ammunition dumps and anti-air emplacements. They’d built deep-water harbours, too, but those had now all been sabotaged or mined to the point of uselessness. There was no chance of breakout or reinforcement; Nilen’s last devotees would die here, as surely as the sun rose in the west. It was simply a question of how many loyalists they would take with them.

The drone of faraway propellers reached Rann’s ears. He glanced up. High in the pale morning sky, a loose flock of black cruciforms was passing over the bay. Heavy bombers, flying in from the Crown City a thousand miles to the west. The smaller shapes of fighter escorts buzzed protectively around them, though the Salv had nothing left to contest the skies. Rann could remember the nightmare days of the early war, when every cloud seemed to conceal a squadron of Nilen’s strafe-bombers. The sound of plane engines still made him tense up.

“Looks like home,” Wace said from behind him. “If I squint.” It was the first thing he’d said in hours.

“It’s pretty,” Rann replied. He’d never visited Esuloa, but he’d seen newsreels before the war of the maze of channels and lagoons inhabited by Wace’s people. Drystone cottages nestled in steep inlets, colourful fishing smacks moored to long wooden wharves. It had looked pleasant, in an austere sort of way.

“It’ll be prettier when we’ve wiped the Salv off it. Maybe I’ll hang a few of them from the trees, to lighten the place up.” Wace spat on the steel deck of the transport.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

“Cheerful sort of decoration,” Lidaro smirked.

“It’s what the Salv did, when they came visiting,” Wace said flatly. “A noose for every man, a bullet for every woman, that was their rule. High time someone returned them the favour.”

Lidaro winced, looking down at his boots. Rann almost felt sorry for him. The boy might have fancied himself a smooth talker, but he was a master at getting his foot stuck in his mouth.

“You’ll get your chance, Wace,” Rann said, as the transport thumped over a cresting wave. “They’ve got nowhere to run.”

The battleships opened fire again with a suddenness that elicited a flurry of fearful curses from the close-packed marines. The shattering sound of it echoed across the water, the drumroll of a god. Ahead, fresh fireballs bubbled up across the sweep of the shoreline. Volcanoes of sand and dirt erupted from the grey beaches. The bombers must have reached their targets around the same time, because a second wave of fire ignited moments after the first, outlining the bay’s contours and escarpments in roiling orange flame.

Then small flecks of light, like distant camera flashbulbs, began to dapple the forested slopes, cutting through the thickening smoke. Too small to be shell impacts.

“Counterfire! Brace!” shouted the helmsman.

This time, Rann was pleased to see even Lidaro ducked his head in good time. The Salv defence batteries were smaller than the battleships’ guns, but more numerous, hidden in a hundred pillboxes and sunken casemates. The choppy sea erupted on every side with impact splashes. Freezing spray rose in thick white plumes. One shell burst underwater not thirty yards from their transport, making it bounce sickeningly upwards, right into the diffusing spray-cloud. It was like being enveloped by a winter rainstorm. The marines coughed and spat seawater, trying to shield their eyes from the stinging salt. The transport rocked, stabilised, plowed onwards.

The shriek of descending shells and the hiss-roar of them striking the sea, the growl of the transport’s engines and the crash of the waves, the burble of circling bombers and the rolling thunder of the fleet’s gunfire, all blended into an endless numbing cacophony. This was not Rann’s first shore assault, not the first time he’d heard such hell; not even the tenth. That didn’t make it any easier. He kept his helmet jammed onto his head with both hands, thumbs pressed into his ears. His face was soaked with spray. Seawater was drizzling down his collar under his sodden jacket.

The beach was now perhaps two miles away, a pale grey strip under a titanic pall of smoke. Jets from the carrier squadrons whipped over it on precision bombing runs. The ungodly things had become a commonplace sight during the final push on the Crown City, mopping up the collapsing Salv air forces. With their entire fuselage a single broad delta wing, they looked like nothing so much as enormous chromed moths. They were too fast for the eye to follow. A silver flash, then gone. It was impossible to tell what they were targeting amid the bedlam.

The Salv anti-air was belching clouds of flak now, bright lines of tracer shells spiking up against the grey backdrop of rising smoke, like a meteor shower in reverse. The tracers burst in black puffs, dotting the sky in their hundreds before being snatched away by the wind. Again, though, the enemy were outranged. The heavy bombers flew at too high an altitude to be at risk from ground fire, and Rann doubted the flak guns could traverse fast enough to target the jets.

“When we hit that beach, clear the ramp fast and disperse immediately!” Chasck yelled. “Stay low and maintain your spacing! No heroics, you understand me?”

Before anyone could answer, the transport nearest to them took a direct hit. One moment it was riding the waves a hundred yards to port, the next it was thrown skywards in flaming pieces. Shrapnel whipped over their cowering heads and clattered off the armoured side of their transport. Chasck yelled a curse. Lidaro yelled several. Rann saw fragmentary things drop smoking into the sea; things that had been humans seconds before.

Iva raised her head, seawater dripping off her helmet, and met Rann’s eyes. “Could have been us,” she said grimly. He found he had no reply for her.

Standing unbowed in his cabin behind them, the helmsman shouted something indistinct and gunned the transport’s throttle. They raced the last mile towards the beach, weaving between the shell-splashes. As they got closer, smaller impacts began to pock the water’s surface around them. Machine-gun fire. Rann could make out more of the defences now. Tank-stopping concrete blocks half-buried at the water’s edge, angled steel rails jutting out from among the rippling sand dunes, hedgehogs of crossed spikes. And beyond them, the squat dark shapes of pillboxes, their firing slits ablaze with flaring muzzles. None of them seemed especially damaged, at least not on this stretch of the shore. The shells from the battleships were landing too far inland, gouging craters in the hillsides while leaving the fortifications unhurt.

“Those’ll be bastards to take,” Geddan shouted in Rann’s ear, in the final moments before they hit the sand.

“We’ll take them. Just stick to cover, keep out of their line of sight. You know the drill.”

“Aye. Let the bugger in front die first.” There was a dogged smile on the Forester’s big bronze face.

The transport ran itself aground hard, juddering and grinding up onto the beach. The ramp dropped open with a clatter. “Go!” Chasck screamed.

Heads down and dripping with sea-spray, the marines scattered onto the wet grey sand of Delan’s Rock.