Rann woke to the rumble of shelling and the roar of planes passing low overhead. He squinted out of the tent’s opening, the murky daylight hurting his sleep-fogged eyes. There was a constant stream of movement outside. Squads in blue and drab ran past, corralled by shouting officers, all heading in the same direction.
He swore and sat up, rubbing his eyes. The others were groggily rising from their slumber around him. Only Geddan snored on, briefly, before Wace offhandedly thumped him awake.
Clambering out of the tent, hurriedly stretching a night’s worth of aches out of his joints, Rann looked to the north, where the mountain burned. Its green flank was stippled with fire, red and orange inkblots running together. The royal artillery flashed and thundered from the new emplacements in the surrounding forest. After an eerie delay, each booming volley was followed by the distant wave-crash of impacts. Bombers swarmed above the mountain like a cloud of malicious insects, trailing bombs by the thousand. The morning sun looked down blindly from the ruddy western sky.
“Here we go,” Iva yawned, working her boots onto her feet. “Not even time to bloody wash.”
“What would be the point? We’ll be covered in filth again by noon,” Lidaro said as he fastened his helmet into place. He sounded flippant again, even carefree, as if his solemn words the night before had been just another jape. But the hardness in his eyes as he looked up at the mountain told Rann a different story.
They traced the encampment’s network of muddy avenues, dodging overloaded trucks and fast-moving staff cars, to the strip of open ground where the vanguard force was rearming. Their combat load was noticeably heavier than it had been for the landings. Unsmiling quartermasters issued them entrenching tools and bandoliers of spare rifle magazines, braces of canister grenades, gas masks like grey rubber skulls. Their backpacks were weighed down with bedrolls and water canteens. When the quartermasters handed out odd loops of steel wire, with weighted clasps at either end, Rann asked what they were for.
“Cuffs,” he was told. “For taking prisoners.”
“You really think the bastards will let us take them alive?” Wace said scornfully, when he heard that. “Some Salv fuck comes at me shooting, I’m not going to waste time cuffing him.”
“Just take the bloody thing, Wace,” Rann snapped. Wace scowled, before sullenly securing the cuffs to his belt.
Their platoon had lost four men on the beach the day before – two killed, two maimed – but evidently it hadn’t been deemed worth reinforcing. They lined up with Chasck, sweating hard in the close summer heat, as the first tanks rumbled past on their way out of the encampment. The burning mountain glowered down at them from the head of the valley. It drew the eye irresistibly, a hideous and surreal sight in the dawn sunshine.
“I don’t have anything to tell you that you don’t already know,” Chasck told them, her helmet doffed underarm to reveal her gaunt, close-shaven head. “We’re going in with the armour. The Salv are ready to die on that mountain. They’ll try and bleed us every step of the way. But they’ve never stopped us before, and they won’t today. We’re going to split their fortress open and drag them out into the light. We will have justice for what they did to us, for all the cities they burned, all the brothers and sisters we’ve lost. This war ends here. I know you won’t let me down.”
They saluted her as one, and stiffly shouldered their rifles. Rann saw a lot of subtly trembling hands. He did not quite succeed in steadying his own.
The all-terrain trucks carried them out into the valley, close on the heels of the advancing tanks, tyres churning up the marshy earth. The sheer number of vehicles was staggering. Dozens of armoured cars and motorcycle outriders flanked the columns of trucks, while clanking gun-tractors tugged light artillery pieces and rotary cannon. Rann spotted more trucks emerging from the forest behind them, carrying fresh platoons from the other encampments further inland. Up ahead, the tanks formed a rolling wall of steel that pulped the low-growing vegetation under their treads. The oceanic roar of exploding shells grew louder and louder as they moved up, and the sun dimmed behind the smoke rising from the mountain.
The valley floor sloped gently upwards, cut by a shallow, forking river, until it became the mountain’s stony flank. A couple of miles from the encampment, the marshy shrubland gave way to tall evergreens, thickening into a dense forest. Fire was already raging among the trees, the dark slender trunks forming sinister silhouettes against the crackling flames. Shells and air-dropped incendiaries whistled into the foliage by the hundred, blithely feeding the conflagration.
As the slope gradually grew steeper, their progress slowed. This part of the valley was scarred by channels and gulleys, eroded by mountain streams that had dried up centuries before. Craters from misaimed royal ordnance compounded the problem, as did the ever-present threat of Salv landmines. Combat engineers scrambled to lay down temporary bridges and mark off unsafe routes ahead of the motorised columns. The artillery barrage, now deafeningly loud, was only about a mile ahead now. The constant tremor of the impacts was setting off small landslides in the upper valley. Rann watched the tumbling pebbles queasily, wondering how stable those slopes really were.
Lidaro leaned over the side of the truck to peer ahead. His dogtags clinked on the end of their chain as the wheels bumped over a small hillock. “Don’t see any Salv.”
“They’re out there,” Iva said. “Count on it.”
“Burning, I hope,” Wace grunted.
A trio of tankbusters flew over the valley, heavy turboprop planes laden with cannon and armour-piercing bombs. The lead one opened fire, raking the slopes with an extended burst, and the other two followed up with volleys of their own. A big tree toppled in the distance, its burning crown shedding splintered branches.
There was a stuttering flash from somewhere in the trees. Flak stabbed up, as though the forest itself was answering the attack. Rann saw the bolts of tracer spear one of the tankbusters, slicing off a wing and igniting the fuel tank in a fierce orange bloom. The crippled aircraft fell into a terminal spin, inscribing a spiral of black smoke and hot debris behind it, and slammed into the treeline. A fireball rose briefly, hard to see against the inferno beyond.
Whether by accident or design, the shootdown must have served as a signal, because within seconds the valley erupted into chaos. Booming gunfire erupted from a hundred places at once. Mortar shells shrieked down to burst among the laden trucks, spraying mud and shredded greenery into the muggy air. The blazing treeline fizzed madly with muzzle-flashes as concealed gun emplacements spewed bullets and shells at the advancing vanguard. The thuds and clangs of direct hits mingled with human screams, some of them cut brutally short. The lead tanks started up a thunderous volley of return fire.
Rann felt the truck hit something hard, perhaps a buried rock or tree stump. The marines were jolted forward, cursing and clutching for handholds. The driver of the truck behind theirs panicked, failing to brake in time, and rear-ended them with a metallic crunch. A symphony of motor horns and breaking glass spoke of more such collisions taking place all around them, hemming the column in under the Salv barrage. Flames billowed up from exploding petrol tanks where the mortars found their mark.
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Rann wasted no time trying to shout over the noise. He leapt out of the stalled truck, his boots sinking into the sodden earth, then turned to help the others down after him. Chasck jumped down too, pulling along one of the other squad leaders, and the platoon piled out in a frantic rush. Some of the marines dropped their rifles in the confusion, and scrambled to retrieve them from the truck, even as their comrades tried to drag them away.
A mortar shell exploded a few feet above the truck behind theirs, blasting the roof off its cabin and making a splattered red horror of the men in the back. To the front and rear, more trucks were on fire, some of them overturned in the mud or ripped in half by shell impacts. Corpses in marine blue and army drab lay everywhere. The wounded stumbled or crawled through the bloodied muck, wailing piteously. Heavy, oily smoke clouded the valley floor, reducing the stricken vehicles to vague outlines.
“We need to move!” a woman’s voice screamed in Rann’s ear. He wasn’t sure if it was Iva or Chasck. He didn’t look round; he was already moving towards the flashes of gunfire, the clearest point of reference in the murk, like lightning in a stormcloud. Projectiles slashed the air above his helmeted head – shells, tracers, anti-tank rockets like joyless fireworks. The thick mud sucked at his boots. He sensed rather than saw the others following him.
The tanks were speeding up now, grinding across the valley floor towards the treeline, leaving the stranded trucks to their fate. Marines and army regulars chased them in loose groups, squads and platoons intermingling, unit cohesion all but forgotten in the race for cover. Cursing the swampy ground beneath his feet, Rann staggered and stumbled into the wake of a lumbering self-propelled gun, praying the damned thing wouldn’t stall. He looked past its armoured bulk, catching a glimpse of the burning forest ahead. Through the smoke and the plumes of dirt rocketing up from shellbursts, he could just about see the line of earthworks at the edge of the trees. Flat-roofed pillboxes were spaced between low berms of soil and piled rubble, forming two distinct rows behind thick razorwire fences. Armoured emplacements mounting heavier guns were dotted among them. It was dismaying how many were intact, pouring fire on the approaching loyalists even as the valley blazed and boiled around them.
A quick glance around was all Rann needed. The ground behind was a grisly field of craters and flaming wrecks and disassembled bodies. The few trucks that hadn’t been abandoned were limping desperately after the tanks. No turning back, not that it had ever been an option. He was left with one choice; the purest, simplest choice a soldier could make. Advance or die.
So he pushed on, with everything he had. He quickly outpaced the self-propelled gun and moved up behind a faster-moving tank, then risked the open ground to follow after another. He was dimly aware of Lidaro and Iva behind him, and he thought he glimpsed Wace following a gun-tractor upslope. But in that moment, their squad existed only as an abstraction, five people lost in the tumult. He could no more communicate with them than he could sprout wings and fly. They knew which way to run, which was all that mattered.
Closer and closer. The steepening gradient made Rann’s calves ache, and he focused on that honest pain, trying to block out the awful, unending noise. It seemed all the guns in the world were concentrated on the valley, the Salv artillery and their own impossible to distinguish by sound alone. During the brief intervals of safety behind the rolling armour, he dared to look uphill, seeing the enemy positions outlined in fire. The Salv defenders were tiny, doll-like shapes huddling around their weapons.
Above, more tankbusters were executing steep dives, strafing the Salv earthworks with their chattering cannons. Rann saw an enemy flak gun burst apart, the soldiers manning it flung aside by the explosion, dead before they hit the ground. Another gun managed to get a fix on one of the incoming planes, stripping away the wingtips and engine cowling in a hail of shells before finally striking the cockpit. The dying tankbuster plowed into the earth, skipped up wildly shedding fragments, and crashed down again to lie burning just short of the Salv razorwire.
As the distance shrank, the tanks found their range, pinpointing and obliterating strongpoints in the enemy line. Gaping breaches opened up in the earthworks before Rann’s eyes. Already it seemed the Salv fire was weakening, each destroyed gun making it harder for them to maintain their barrage. The marines were too close to be stopped now.
They crossed the final stretch in a howling human wave. Shellfire split the earth around them, craters yawning open in the riven mud. The Salv bullets were a stinging swarm that snatched men and women away in mid-step. But the marines ran on, and on, and on, relentlessly following the tanks up the burning slope.
Rann watched it happen at one remove, like he was simply a passenger in his own body as it stumbled forward with aching muscles and burning lungs. A small pothole hidden in the mud swallowed his foot to the ankle and very nearly tripped him. He dragged his boot free of the filth, as a marine to his left took a bullet to the face and went down nearly headless. Blue-jacketed corpses littered the ground on every side. He had to leap over their outflung limbs, once feeling a sickening crunch of bone underfoot.
For a giddy moment, he imagined he was in some bygone age, a schoolhouse history lesson come parodically to life. The kings of the old dynasties had sent their men-at-arms charging across the open field with mace and longsword. He’d never felt such kinship with those long-dead warriors as he did now. Strange, the places the mind went under fire.
The tanks reached the Salv line and smashed through the tangled wire, silhouetted as abstract black monsters against the roaring forest-fire. Their turrets traversed smoothly while their coaxial machine-guns pumped fire into the entrenched defenders. Ammunition dumps exploded, spewing flame and shrapnel into the Salv dugouts. Moments later, the first marines staggered into the breach, filthy and smoke-blind and screaming.
Rann loped over the shattered earthworks, bounding up a scorched concrete scree and bringing his rifle up. His eyes picked out detail in the firelit landscape ahead, amid the mad lightshow of muzzle-flashes and shellbursts. The trench line beyond the berms was in disarray as the tanks bulled their way towards the trees. Pillboxes and gun emplacements were ablaze all along the front, the Salv struggling to reposition themselves to return fire at such close quarters. Haphazard volleys from their fallback positions were swiftly drowned out by the brutal tank fire. It was a gladdening sight.
“Sergeant!” came a breathless cry from behind him, just close enough to hear through the horrendous racket. The voice was unmistakeable. There was no need to turn around.
Lidaro appeared out of the smoke with his rifle held underarm, Wace and Iva close behind. A bigger form, moving with Geddan’s familiar heavy gait, cursed his way up the earthworks in tow. They were all filthy with mud and soot, coughing and spitting as they caught up. But alive.
“You made it!” Rann shouted at them through the noise.
“Just barely!” Lidaro replied. He looked over his shoulder with wide, almost crazed eyes. “It’s a fucking mess back there. Barlos from Fourth Platoon took a bullet right in front of me, poor bastard!”
“Any of you hurt?”
They all shook their heads. Rann turned to look the way they’d come. The smoke roiled around them, thick as molasses, and even when the smothering darkness shifted, it revealed only mud and corpses, the churned desolation that had been the valley floor. If there were more survivors straggling in, they were too deep in the cloud to see.
“He Above, how many did we lose?” Lidaro said, wiping his brow.
Rann coughed in the tarry smoke and hefted his rifle. “We have to push on while the Salv are scattered, make sure they can’t regroup. Prioritise gunners and spotters, cover each other as far as you can. Move on me!”
The others hesitated, perched there on the scorched mound, shells and rockets ripping over their heads. Iva looked as though she was about to say something. Geddan’s lips moved, muttering something under his breath. Then, willingly or not, they obeyed.
The five of them joined the other marines spilling into the exposed trenches, pounding uphill, adding their rifles to the cacophonous barrage. Rann fought like an automaton, letting instinct and rote training take over, as they had so many times before. His muscles carried out the simple, drilled-in mechanics of aiming, firing, reloading, almost entirely without thought. He hauled himself up onto a trench parapet, knelt on the sandbags and fired down at the Salv scurrying on the duckboards. A twist to the right, to shoot a machine-gunner running for his weapon. Then left, where an officer with a snubnosed revolver was rising from a hatchway. Rann shot him until the rifle clicked on an empty magazine. The Salvator’s riddled corpse watched him move on with sightless, accusing eyes.
The others were close on his heels, weaving through the devastation, low and fast. He knew them by their stride even when the smoke turned them to shadows, knew that it was Lidaro leaping atop a tank-flattened guard post, Iva jumping nimbly across the width of a slit trench. He watched them kneel behind tangles of wreckage to take aim, and saw storm-grey figures fall lifeless where they fired.
He couldn’t help but feel a sense of quiet pride, despite the madness all around. These were his marines, doing what they did best.