Rann sprinted for the dunes like a man on fire. Conscious thought gave way to the simple calculation of putting one foot in front of another. His jacket and pack were soaked through, weighing him down and throwing off his balance. He barely managed to keep his footing. Salv bullets stitched the sand around him, kicking it up in tight grey plumes. Something heavier, maybe a mortar shell, nearly floored him with its shockwave. Diving between a pair of tombstone-like tank traps, he skidded the last few yards to huddle in the lee of a steep dune.
He pulled his rifle close against himself, praying the sand and seawater hadn’t fouled its action, and surveyed the landing site. The morning sun was almost wholly obscured by the thickening shell-smoke, cloaking the beach in funereal shadow. The dark shapes of other marines were dotted across it, running or crawling to cover. He recognised Lidaro and Geddan crouching a little way to his right, and Wace flattening himself against the shoreward side of a tank trap. Iva was nowhere to be seen.
Near the abandoned transport, which was now being joined by its surviving fellows, a pair of blue-jacketed figures lay sprawled on the sand. One of them seemed to be in two pieces. Stragglers who hadn’t run fast enough.
There was a moment of pure, wrenching horror before Rann heard Iva shout through the chattering gunfire. “Sergeant, over here!”
“Where?” he called. A mortar impact further up the beach showered him in sand and pebbles as he looked around for her wildly. He spotted her, kneeling in a small depression that had the telltale raised, blackened rim of a shell crater. She was sighting up the beach with her rifle barrel resting on the crater’s lip, bullets whistling just inches above the peak of her helmet.
Relief flooded Rann, but with it came a dull stab of guilt. His squad was intact, thus far. Some other sergeant hadn’t been so lucky.
Another mortar shell exploded atop a nearby dune. Pressing himself into the ground, Rann tasted sand caked wetly on his lips. He wiped it away and drew in breath to shout. “Iva! Can you make it over here?”
“Waiting for the reload break!” she yelled back. “How’s our back-up looking? Are the tanks here yet?”
Rann risked a glance back at the growing ranks of transports running aground behind him. Some had hit sunken obstacles offshore and were listing heavily into the water while their passengers waded onto the beach. A few had been struck by shellfire, turning them into capsized funeral pyres. It seemed most had made it in one piece, disgorging their human cargo into the teeth of the Salv guns. There were bodies littered among the tank traps, the slow and the unlucky. Fewer than Rann had feared. Far more than he had hoped.
Nonetheless, the landing force was gathering strength. Marines were advancing in ones and twos from cover to cover, combat engineers dragging sleds of equipment, corpsmen hunching busily over the wounded. The heavier armour was yet to come ashore, but Rann’s heart was gladdened to see some small tanks rolling off their transports, raking the Salv fortifications with their autocannons. In the choppy sea beyond, more transports were motoring in to join the fight along the sweep of the bay, and the fleet in the distance was a forest of dark silhouettes alive with cannon-flashes.
“Yeah, we’ve got them!” he shouted to Iva. “Move when you can!”
There was a lull in the incoming gunfire, a marked lessening in intensity as one gun reloaded and another was retargeted at the arriving tanks. Iva timed her sprint impeccably. She bounded to Rann, bent forward to make herself a smaller target, coming to a halt beside him in a spray of kicked-up sand.
She smiled in sardonic greeting. “Did you miss me?”
“I’m bloody glad the Salv did.” Rann gave his rifle a quick checkover, reassuring himself it was unjammed. “We need to move up. See you if you can signal the others over here. I’m going to scope those guns.”
“Watch your head. They’re decent shots.”
Trying not to flinch at the zip and whine of bullets passing over him, Rann crawled to the edge of the dune and peered through the smoke. The Salv strongpoint was an imposing cluster of pillboxes and sheer-walled bunkers, constructed of raw grey concrete on a natural ridge overlooking the beach. It was surrounded by a triple ring of wooden stakes with razorwire strung taut between them, while shrapnel-scarred tank traps lined the shallow approaches beneath the seaward walls. Up on the roof of the tallest bunker, a flak nest pumped tracer fire into the smoky sky. He could see the firing slits and gunports were arranged to give the various structures overlapping fields of fire, so they could subject approaching infantry to a murderous enfilade.
Eyeing those blank walls and the strobing flashes of gunfire, Rann felt a sort of hard, determined contempt. Once, the Salvators had surged unstoppably across the face of Aede, their armies merciless and invincible. But he had seen their might crumble, battle by battle, year by year. Fortresses stronger than these had been razed by the king’s men, and the fanatics within had died with Nilen’s name on their lips. Now Nilen himself was just a bad memory.
The defenders inside that strongpoint were no longer the scourge of the kingdom, conquerors of the world. They were deluded men waving a dead man’s banner. And their time had come.
A tank rattled past the dune, spitting fire in bursts at the shadowed gunports of the pillboxes. The sand churned beneath its treads. Spent shell casings clinked to the ground around it, hot enough to hiss where they landed. Rann dodged back into cover and found his squad clustering behind him in the dune’s lee. He did a split-second mental headcount, a habit so ingrained it was almost below the level of consciousness. All alive, all unhurt. So far.
He knelt facing them and gave them their orders. “We’re going to move up behind the tanks. They’re drawing fire and suppressing the Salv. Once the fleet guns start landing hits on those bunkers, we’ll have breaches to exploit.”
“The fleet guns couldn’t hit a bloody mountain,” Lidaro groused. “Haven’t you seen them knocking lumps out of the island? They’re blasting everything but the Salv.”
“They’re walking their shots, taking out the artillery positions higher up. Give them time, they’ll lob some shells right into those firing slits.”
“We can’t wait here all day. We should circle around, come down on the Salv from behind.”
“We follow the tanks. That’s an order, Lidaro.” Rann saw Lidaro roll his eyes heavenwards, and bit back the impulse to berate the boy. He knew there wasn’t much point. “The engineers are clearing out the traps, so we’ll have more armour coming in. Next one that passes, fall in behind. Keep close and watch your step. You can be damn sure the Salv will have laid mines.”
“Hear that, Geddan? Tread lightly,” Lidaro said.
“Funny lad, aren’t you,” the Forester retorted.
A muffled explosion from behind made them all start. Not a mortar this time; pieces of scorched masonry were raining out of the blast cloud. A row of tank traps had been pulverised. Beyond the settling debris, engineers in bulky padded bombsuits could be seen rising from their foxholes and trudging over the sand to their next target. More tanks were clanking off the transports and lumbering up the cleared stretches of beach, bigger ones with heavier guns. The gunfire from the Salv emplacements was now being met with the brutish crack of exploding shells.
Rann let one of the big tanks ride up and over the dune beside theirs before shepherding the squad into its wake. The stink of its exhaust was eye-watering, but it was no small comfort having sixty tons of steel and ceramic between them and the Salv guns. He had to remind himself not to get complacent. A well-placed mortar strike or hidden shaped mine could turn even the heaviest tank to burning scrap. He’d seen it happen time and time again.
The volume of fire from the bunkers intensified as they crept closer. More gunners were focusing on the tanks, hammering them with heavy-calibre rounds that skipped and pinged relentlessly off their armour. The open ground past the dunes quickly became a no-man’s-land as the Salv sawed back and forth across the beach. The sand was peppered with uncountable bullet holes, where it was not a moonscape of smoking shell craters. The advance slowed to a virtual halt. Beyond a certain point, Rann knew, the tanks couldn’t shield the marines against the bunkers’ higher elevation. The moment the Salv gained line of sight, they could turn the following squads to bloody paste.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Got a fallback plan, sergeant?” Lidaro shouted over the maddening racket. The tanks’ main guns were steadily chipping off slabs of reinforced concrete and turning those ugly grey façades black with soot, seemingly without fazing the Salv inside. “We can’t get any closer without getting smeared all over the beach. Maybe if we double back, move further down the shore...”
“We do that, we become perfect targets,” Rann replied. “Look at how they’ve sited those outer pillboxes – they’re expecting us to pincer them. Trust me, this is the safest place to be.”
“Why’d they land us here? Fifty miles of shoreline, and they have to throw us right into the grinder.”
“We’ve got it easy,” Geddan said, even as a Salv bullet smacked up a plume of sand right beside him. “There’s bigger bunkers north of here. You’d be wishing for a stroll like this.”
“We have to get around them,” Lidaro insisted. “The tanks’ll never chew through all that concrete, and the engineers can’t get close enough to lay charges.”
“They won’t need to,” Iva said. “The battleships are going to find their range soon, and punch some holes.”
“What makes you so bloody sure?”
Iva nodded towards the beached flotilla at the water’s edge. “Because it’s not just tanks coming off those transports. The forward observers will have eyes on the enemy now. They’ll be radioing the fleet exactly where to shoot.”
“Be nice if they’d hurry up about it, before we all get shot to-”
Lidaro’s words were drowned out by a hideous wall of sound, a series of terrific impacts like thousand-ton hammerblows. Churning flame engulfed the beach ahead of them. Jagged chunks of debris – concrete, rebar, long black strands of razorwire – rose on the fireball like flies scattering from a corpse. The squad hunched down behind the tank, cursing and clutching their ears. The Salv machine-gun fire cut off sharply. It did not resume.
Rann raised his head to see the smoke clear. The strongpoint looked as though a giant had stamped on it. The pillboxes were nothing but strewn rubble, while half of the main bunker complex had been smashed away, letting tongues of fire spit forth from its detonating ammunition stores. Landmines buried near its base had been set off by the greater blast, excavating dozens of small black sinkholes. All that remained of the wire perimeter was a few snapped stakes bent at crazy angles. Tiny figures were stumbling out of the ruins, wrapped head to toe in flames, flailing pathetically. Rann watched them sink to the ground one after another, matchsticks in a bonfire.
“Fuck me!” Lidaro exclaimed, rising from his crouch with a toothy grin. “Sailor boys got something right for a change!” He was yelling just a few feet from Rann’s ear, but in the ringing aftermath of the barrage, his voice sounded flat and faraway.
Geddan swept sand and gravel from the sleeves of his sea-drenched jacket. “You can give them a thankyou kiss, when we’re back on the ship.”
“I think that’s our signal,” Rann said, straightening up and stepping out of the tank’s shadow. Other squads were already beginning to run past them, no longer pinned down by the Salv gunners. He thought he could see Chasck leading a motley assortment of riflemen and engineers between the dunes just ahead. “Let’s go raise the colours.”
The marines charged up the beach with rifles raised, fanning out around the destroyed strongpoint, with the tanks rumbling along in tow. Every sign of movement in the rubble was punished with a dozen bullets. There was a smattering of return fire from the ruins of the pillboxes as disoriented survivors crawled out into the light, but few if any found their mark. Without the protection of their bunkers or the firepower of their emplaced weapons, the Salv were outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned.
Just like we used to be, Rann thought.
One Salv loosed a wild volley of submachine-gun fire at Rann from a burning rooftop, missing by yards. Holding his breath to steady his aim, Rann fixed the man in his gunsights and dropped him with a double shot to the chest. Then he spun at the sound of more gunfire nearby, to see Wace and Geddan trading fire with two more Salv who were trying to scramble up the sandy hillside behind the strongpoint. One of the grey-uniformed men tried to prime a baton grenade, and Wace shot him in the shoulder. The Salv screamed, jerking backwards and dropping the grenade into a crevice at his feet. A moment later, he and his compatriot disappeared in a pulse of fire and shrapnel. Something that looked very much like a human forearm flew up and was lost in the spiny bushes further up the hill.
“Good hit!” Rann shouted to Wace.
“Two for one. I’d say that’s a bargain,” came the reply.
They swept the wreckage of the largest bunker, picking their way between fallen girders and twisted steel doorframes, up to where the scorched skeleton of the interior floors had been exposed like a mad architect’s cross-section. There were corpses, and pieces of corpses, sticking out of cairns of shattered concrete, some so crushed and fire-blackened they were close to unrecognisable.
A Salv rifleman made the mistake of firing on Iva from a now-roofless cupola, silhouetting himself against the sky long enough for her to snipe him. “Looks like there’s some rooms intact up there, sergeant,” she said, reloading her smoking rifle and flinging the spent magazine into the rubble. “Bet you a king’s silver there’s more still alive.”
Rann noticed a narrow staircase in the surviving half of the bunker, relatively undamaged, its landings opening onto empty air now that the floors they once joined had been obliterated. “Yeah. I see a way up. Don’t know if I’d trust the stairs, after taking a hit like that.”
As he was speaking, the distinctive rattle of a machine-gun split the air somewhere nearby. He knew instantly it was a Salv weapon, its report deeper and slower than the guns in the royal armouries. Nothing was visible on their side of the ruins; the gunfire was coming from the shoreward face of the bunker. And there were hundreds of marines still on the beach.
Chasck was standing on the hull of a parked tank, trying to pull her squads back together from the massed marines heading uphill. “What the fuck is that? Who’s firing?” she demanded.
“Gunners in the south wing! Third floor!” yelled a thickset corpsman on the margin of the debris field. “They’re putting fire on the transports again. We’ve got wounded back there!”
“Fuck it, we can’t call in fire from the fleet with our lot so close to the bunker! Rann!” Chasck pointed to the innards of the carved-open strongpoint. “Get up there! Take whoever you need, just shut that gun down!”
There was no time for questions, or hesitation. Rann signalled to his squad. “Geddan, Iva, sweep from the ground floor up, as far in as you can get! Lidaro, with me! Wace, cover us from there – you see anyone coming our way, shoot them!”
He beelined for the stairs, Lidaro by his side, leaping over spot fires and jags of broken metal. It wasn’t a long climb, but it was certainly a disorienting one, as lumps of concrete kept falling from the blast-cracked ceilings, and every landing gaped onto a sheer drop to the wreckage below. When they made it to the third floor, they found a live electric cable hanging in their path, snakelike and sparking. The ozone tang in the air assailed Rann’s nostrils. He had to bat the cable aside with the wooden butt of his rifle to keep it from electrocuting him.
They pressed on into the bunker’s battered interior, Rann trying to ignore the way his wet jacket chafed his back and shoulders. He followed the sound of the machine-gun, echoing down the half-collapsed hallways. The visible damage lessened the further in they went, and Rann surmised that the battleships’ shells must have detonated in the heart of the destroyed section behind them, largely sparing this part of the bunker. Though, judging by the number of contorted corpses they had to step over, the overpressure alone had been powerful enough to kill.
They came to a junction of corridors, tracing the gunfire down a passageway so narrow they were forced to proceed in single file. At the end of the passage was a steel door, bent askew by the blast but still on its hinges, yellow flashes of gunfire visible through the cracks. Lidaro caught Rann’s eye, and smiled savagely at him.
Rann shouldered the door open, shoving his way into the tiny, smoky enclosure, sidestepping fast to let Lidaro in behind him. A dim halogen bulb illuminated three men in Salvator black and storm-grey, methodically working a fixed machine-gun from side to side. One fired, one spotted, one fed the insatiable weapon belts of ammunition. Their uniforms were coated with dust from the explosion, but they seemed uninjured. The floor around them was a glinting pool of spent cartridges, into which a dozen more clinked musically each second. Rann wondered how many men and women those three unremarkable fellows had killed today. He brought his rifle to his shoulder.
Engrossed in their work, the Salv noticed the interlopers behind them too late. They abandoned their machine-gun with panicked shouts, fumbling for holstered sidearms.
“Morning, chaps,” Lidaro said pleasantly. He shot the first gunner through the forehead, painting the concrete wall behind the man a rich crimson. The second had his pistol drawn, and got off a single hopelessly unaimed shot, before Rann put three rounds into his chest and sent him down spitting blood. The last gunner’s pistol caught in its holster. He died cursing the leather.
When it was over, Lidaro strode forward, stepping over the bodies, and looked out through the firing slit at the devastated beach. Propping his rifle against the bloodied wall, he extended an arm through the slit and waved to someone out of Rann’s sight. “Hey, laggards! It’s clear! Move up!” he shouted.
Rann grabbed Lidaro’s shoulder and roughly pulled him away from the view. “Don’t be an idiot! They can’t hear you. They might mistake you for a Salv. You want the marksmen to shoot your arm off?”
“I was just letting them know-”
“You were playing around. If this is the shit you’re going to pull, next time I’ll bring Wace instead.”
That shut Lidaro up. He followed Rann sullenly out of the corpse-filled ruins, to where the others waited on the sandy rise behind the strongpoint, watching the ragged columns of marines clambering up the hill. The ground was streaked with the chevroned trackmarks of tanks and gun-tractors, with more arriving by the minute. The morning sky above was full of smoke and embers and vulture-flocks of bombers.
Chasck saw them return and offered the smallest of smiles, a flicker of approval. “Good hunting, sergeant?” she asked Rann laconically.
“Good enough, ma’am.”