Rann listened to the dull roar of shellfire and the rising whistle of falling bombs. The king’s orchestra, as the barrack-room joke went. It still felt strange not to hear sirens, not to have to run for shelter. Strange, but satisfying. The Salv were now experiencing what they’d so generously inflicted on the rest of Aede. The reaping of a harvest sown nearly a decade before.

He and the others were seated on the hilltop in a restless crowd of marines and army regulars, helmets off, awaiting their ride inland. Their jackets were spread out on the sand to dry in what little sunlight peeked through the smoke-clouds. They glugged water and passed around packs of bitter navy-issue cigarettes. Those with appetites picked at ration tins of watery meat and stale seedbread. Rann tried to eat a few bites himself, and swiftly gave up.

It had been hours since they’d secured the beach. Vanguard armoured units were pushing through the thick forest beyond them, routing the Salv defenders and clearing the way for forward operating bases. The crack of tank fire was almost lost in the ceaseless general rumble of the shore bombardment. The Salv were still trying to shoot back, but their surface defences had taken a thorough beating from the fleet’s guns. Their flak had grown noticeably sparser, bursts of tracers feebly trying to scratch at the unreachable bombers. According to the coded reports that reached the marine radiomen, prefabricated encampments were already being prepared in a dozen places along the curve of the bay. Another wave of transports was riding the waves to shore, bringing all-terrain trucks to convey the landing battalions to their new homes. The kingdom was taking back Delan’s Rock, mile by mile.

Lidaro lounged on a low stack of ammunition boxes, as casually as if it were a deckchair. The stub of a cigarette dangled from his lips, the end dimly aglow. “That was disappointing. They couldn’t even hold out one day.”

Rann gave the boy an exasperated look. “They were never going to waste their best out here in the open. They know how much we outnumber them. Their strongest defences are all inland, up high where they have the advantage.”

Iva took a long swig from her water canteen. “Just like the Salv to dig in on a mountain. I hate fighting uphill.”

“The Blacksands were uphill. We smashed them there,” Lidaro said cheerfully.

Rann’s jaw tightened reflexively as he remembered their time on that glittering volcanic shoreline, during the great offensive of the early spring. Where the beaches of Delan’s Rock were on a gentle incline, the Blacksands had been steep as a cliff. Every step had been treacherous, the ashy sand so soft it was impossible to get a secure footing. Transports had foundered and tanks stuck fast. Nilen’s navy had still been a fighting force back then, and the loyalist battleships had been in constant fear of submarine attack, unable to provide reliable support. Meanwhile, the Salv had laid down a hail of killing fire from what seemed like every direction. Three men of their old platoon had died charging a dug-in gunner’s nest. Only Lidaro could have happy memories of the Blacksands.

“That was just getting onshore. We’ll have to climb for miles here,” Iva said.

Lidaro smiled at her pityingly. “Worried I’ll beat you to the top? Bet there’s a hell of a view. I’ll wave to you.”

“Don’t go rushing ahead, boy,” Geddan said, lighting up a fresh cigarette. “I won’t come drag your arse out of the fire.”

“I don’t rush ahead, you’re just too slow. Too much belly on you.”

The Forester swatted at him half-heartedly with the back of his hand. Lidaro dodged smoothly. “See? Slow,” he laughed.

“He’ll get a hold of you one day, Lidaro,” Iva said drily. “And when he does, the surgeons will need a photograph of your pretty face to work from.”

They watched as the bombardment went on under the late afternoon sky. The massive six-engined bombers droned overhead, raining streamers of flechettes and high-explosives. Rippling chains of fireballs covered the far-off hillsides as the battleships pounded the Salv pillboxes and casemates. Launcher trucks rolled off the transports onto the beach and spat volley after volley of shrieking rockets. Rann felt the percussion of the distant impacts fractionally before the sound reached him. It gave him an oddly queasy feeling, not unlike seasickness. By the time the bulk of the transports had landed, smoke was rising from the battered island in a hundred places. The thick black clouds swelled up like malignant blossoms, shot through with veins of fire.

“They must be hurting now,” Lidaro said, as they boarded an overloaded truck bound for the nearest of the new encampments. “Look how much iron we’re dropping on the fuckers. Enough to bury them.”

“Don’t count on it,” Rann replied. “They’ve had years to dig in here. Everything will be built deep and strong.”

“Those mountains could shield them from an atomic,” Iva agreed. “Bombs alone won’t shift them.”

“Good. I want some left for me,” Wace said, looking up at the undulating pillars of smoke. There was a hard smile on his weatherbeaten face.

Their truck joined the rear of a mechanised convoy, turning off the beach and struggling up a hastily bulldozed ramp. Then they bumped along a rough, tank-cleared track through the lowland evergreens. The headlights of the vehicles made bright pools in the darkening forest. The battleships and bombers were still hammering the higher ground with a steady drumbeat of fire. The noise reached them as a muted rumble, and flakes of grey ash fell through the trees to speckle their uniforms. In scorched meadows and overgrown gulleys, they drove past evidence of recent battle – burnt-out tanks and halftracks, tree stumps shredded by shellfire, uniformed bodies slumped in the undergrowth. The Salv had not surrendered this ground easily.

The floodlights of the new encampment were already lit when the convoy broke the treeline. In a wide clearing on the valley floor, a traffic-jam of trucks and armoured vehicles was forming up around a cheerless newborn city. Tents and prefab huts had been raised in neat rows, while teams of sweating engineers dug shallow trenches and trackways for latrines and electric cables. A radio tower was being assembled in spindly segments. The royal colours fluttered from makeshift flagpoles at the entrances. At the far end of the valley, a low mountain loomed, its craggy peak protruding from a thick green blanket of forest.

A smouldering Salv tank sat capsized by the roadside a hundred or so yards from the encampment’s perimeter. “Evening, friend! How’s your holy war going?” Lidaro called out to the charred corpse of its commander, frozen by death in the act of pulling himself free of the turret hatch. The fire had shrivelled the man’s hands into grotesque claws.

It took more than an hour for them to make their way to the head of the queue and dismount. The smell of their still-damp uniforms, mingled with the sweat and dirt of the landing, was unpleasantly strong in the warm evening air. The five of them were assigned a poky A-frame tent near the motor pool and told to dump their packs for the evening meal. At the open-air mess, the navy cooks served them meat stew and a slop of boiled vegetables in stamped-metal bowls, along with mugs of lukewarm black tea. It was scarcely better than the ration packs, but edible enough. Rann found them a spot where the crowd wasn’t so dense, dragging over a wooden crate for them to use as a table. Lacking chairs, they knelt around it to eat, using strips of tarpaulin to keep the mud off their trousers.

The prevailing winds had blown much of the smoke from the bombardment out to sea. It was a cloudless night, and the moons were out – bright Ilath was high overhead, while smaller, dimmer Thain was closer to the horizon. Rann found it curious how peaceful they looked. They were the same moons he’d wished upon as a child, and kissed country girls under as a youth, and marched to war under as a man grown. By their pale light, he’d seen men kill and die, towers crumble, cities burn. It was all the same to Ilath and Thain.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I heard the Salv put men on the moons,” Lidaro remarked through a mouthful of stew. “A whole army, getting ready to jump down on us in their rocket-ships.” He sounded rather pleased with the idea.

“I heard that one, too. And a lot more besides,” Iva said. “Met an air corps mechanic who swore Nilen escaped to the north pole in a submarine. A petty officer back on the ship said the Salv put atomic bombers up in space, waiting for the signal to crack Aede open like an egg. Oh, and that southron corporal at the Blacksands – Onarle, with the buck-teeth, remember him? He told me the Salv figured out how to breed bulletproof men. He said he heard it on the wireless.” She snorted.

Geddan’s lip curled up in amused contempt. “Killed a lot of Salv. Haven’t seen a bulletproof one yet.”

“Yeah. Nilen wasn’t bulletproof, was he,” Wace said, chewing a gristly bit of meat and glancing up at the moons. His face was calm, his voice cold. “Sometimes wish I could have met him man to man, to hear him beg before I put one through his eye.”

“You know, I miss his broadcasts. He livened up the evenings,” Lidaro said. He twisted his face into a parodic snarl and affected a high-pitched, jabbering whine. “Heretics! Degenerates! Burn them all! Cleanse the world! The Almighty commands it!”

A trace of a smile appeared on Iva’s face. “Not bad, Lidaro. We’ll make a mad prophet of you yet.”

“When I’m First Marshal, you lot can be my Incorruptible,” Lidaro said generously.

They were still eating when Rann noticed Chasck walking through the mess a short distance away. She looked around dispassionately, scanning the crowd of marines and army regulars digging into their drab meals, until she caught sight of him and waved him over. He walked to her with a distinct sinking feeling.

“Lieutenant?”

“Officers’ briefing at the ninth hour, sergeant. I want you with me for that. Command tells me we’re going to be in the vanguard tomorrow.”

Rann had accompanied Chasck to such briefings many times before. He wasn’t sure if it was because she placed particular trust in him, or if she simply liked to share the burden of knowledge. “Who’s briefing us?”

“Dauman.”

Rann frowned. “The fleet commander? He’s on the island?”

“He rode in with the last wave of transports. He wants to oversee the attack on the mountain personally.” Chasck looked past Rann, to where Iva and the others sat finishing their meal. “How are your people?”

“None injured, ma’am.”

“You know that’s not what I meant, sergeant.”

Rann glanced back at them, studying their hunched postures and downcast eyes. “Morale is...fine. They’re ready. They know what to expect.”

“Good. Make sure they get some rest,” she said. “Ninth hour. I’ll see you there.”

That put paid to Rann’s appetite. He let Geddan have the end of his stew – the Forester wolfed down the tasteless stuff without complaint – and paced away from the others to soothe his nerves with a cigarette. The hour hand on his wristwatch ticked with unbearable slowness towards the nine mark.

*

The encampment’s command section was a series of large semicylindrical tents, weighted down with sandbags and crudely joined by canvas-sided tunnels, with low prefab structures clustered alongside. Whether by intention or accident, it had been erected uncomfortably close to the hospital tents. The moans of the wounded could be heard as a constant sorrowful chorus, from which the occasional scream of agony rose like an aria. On his way in with Chasck, Rann tried hard to tune out the sound, to little avail.

Heading into the tents, they passed through an area that had been partitioned into offices with tall wooden dividers. Tired-looking aides clattered away at their typewriters or couriered stacks of bound documents from desk to desk. In one corner, a group of bespectacled technicians busied themselves around a partially-assembled box of machinery the size of a small motorcar. Rann supposed it must be a codebreaker. The newsreels had been crowing about them of late, now they’d been declassified – mechanical brains that could decipher encrypted messages faster than a hundred analysts. Another triumph of Kauln ingenuity.

The briefing was held in the largest of the command tents, which was quite inadequate for the number of officers in attendance. A relief map of the island had been set up on a wooden stand, covered in scrawled annotations and lit by a brace of anglepoise lamps. Marine colonels and lieutenants crowded around it along with their counterparts from the regular army, joined by a few naval officers in plainclothes. Rann was one of a small number of enlisted men present, pressed up against the tent wall by the crowd. It was a humid night; the heavy air in the tent stank of sweat.

Dauman stood before them in his silver braid and epaulettes, a tall slim man with dark hair greying at the temples, his narrow face pinched with tiredness. He carried a simple hardwood cane, which he dangled by one end. He did not bother to introduce himself.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending,” he told the assembled officers. His Standard Kauln was cold and clipped, his pronunciation slightly archaic. No doubt, like most aristocrats, he had been raised speaking High Kauln, the older form of the national language. “I’m going to be level with you. I imagine most of you believe the Salvators are a spent force. You can hardly be blamed for that. At this late hour, with the capital liberated and Nilen dead, even I sometimes find myself tempted to relax.”

He paused significantly before continuing. In the silence, a wounded man screamed from the hospital tents outside. “Believing our enemy to be defeated is a very dangerous form of complacency. Delan’s Rock may be their last major stronghold, but it is folly to think it will fall easily. The mountainous terrain here is a considerable force multiplier, and the Salv have spent immense resources on fortifying the high ground. They are heavily armed and, as we have seen, entirely unwilling to surrender. Do not allow the relative ease of our landing here to lull you into a false sense of security. We must expect extreme resistance going forward. It is imperative we prevail, and quickly.”

“With respect, sir,” a broad-shouldered colonel said from the front row. “We have them surrounded, and they have no hope of resupply. Why don’t we just wait them out? They might not give in, but they’ll starve, sooner or later. We can storm them when they’re at their weakest.”

Dauman gave the man an annoyed look, swinging his cane from one hand to another. He clearly hadn’t been expecting any interruptions. “You’re not the first to suggest that. I truly wish the situation were so simple. The Salv are not merely hiding on this island, waiting to die. We have reason to believe they are constructing atomics.”

A shudder of disquiet passed through the assembly like a ripple in a pond. Rann himself flinched involuntarily at the word. He’d marched through what remained of the city of Indeleon, in the final advance on the capital. It was rumoured that close to a million people had died there, loyalists and Salvators alike, all burned together under the mountainous black pall of the mushroom cloud. He remembered the grey miles of scattered rubble, the bodies charred into twisted black effigies, the human shadows scorched onto the walls near the epicentre. The triage camps outside the city had been crowded to bursting with radiation victims, the life bleeding out of their pores as their hair fell out in clumps. After eight years of war, he’d thought the Salv had run out of hateful new tricks. The atomics had proved there was no limit to Nilen’s madness.

“I thought we captured their reactor?” the colonel asked. “The papers said we took Ocharam Forest months back.”

Dauman nodded tiredly. “Yes, we did. As far as we know, that was their only fully operational atomic facility. But our intelligence suggests some of their scientists made it out alive, and escaped to the Rock shortly before the Crown City fell. Specialists in computation and atomic physics. This is the last holdout big enough and intact enough for that kind of research. We must clear them out before they can complete any more bombs.”

“What if they already have? They’ll wait until we’re in deep enough, then set them off underneath us!” someone said loudly from deep in the crowd. There was a general grumble of assent that led to several shouts for order from the senior officers. When the crowd had quieted again, Dauman went on with exaggerated patience.

“We think if they had functional atomics they would have used them already, in suicide attacks on the fleet, or when we were concentrated on the beaches. Yes, we took a calculated risk,” he added, raising a hand to still the crowd’s shocked murmurs. “Our forces are now sufficiently spread out over the island that no single strike could cripple us, and we have already captured virtually all of their positions in the valleys. So far, we’ve found nothing.”

He pointed at the map, circling a shaded area with the tip of his cane. “The fortifications here guard the entrance to a substantial underground complex. It is the logical place to hide an atomic facility, if that is indeed what the Salv are constructing. Judging by our aerial reconnaissance of their excavation works, they may have dug as deep as a kilometre under the mountain range. None of our ordnance can pierce that much rock, and the conventional approaches to the mountaintop have all been demolished. We will have to fight our way in.”

“Fucking great,” Rann heard Chasck mutter.