‘Got your tin?’ Gutes asked.

  Larkin looked around and eventually produced his mess tin from a shelf in the revet side. It was full of gruel, the hunk of bread disintegrating into it.

  ‘Ah, Larks, you gotta eat.’

  ‘Not hungry, Piet.’

  ‘You gotta eat, but.’

  Larkin shrugged.

  Gutes picked up the tin. ‘You sure you don’t want this?’

  ‘Yeah. No appetite.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ Gutes left his slop bucket next to Larkin’s firestep and went back down the trench. Melyr accepted the bonus rations with delight. ‘You gotta wash that up yourself and get it back to Larks,’ Gutes told him.

  He went back to his wash bin.

  ‘What you doing, Larks?’ he asked.

  Larkin had been working a screwdriver into the setting of his rifle scope.

  ‘Calibrating,’ he said.

  Every sniper calibrated their scopes. It was a given. An adjustment to the milled ring on the back-sight, a moment to let the sighting scanner read your retina and set up the hairs, but Larkin played around more. He tweaked off the inspection cover and overrode the reader, calibrating his weapon to nuances of windspeed and shot-drop that were too subtle for the scope to set automatically. Gutes had heard him say sometimes that he saw the truth through his scope. The view through the scope was the one reality Larkin trusted.

  ‘You wanna be careful no tech-priest catches you doing that,’ Gutes admonished. ‘They’d have you burned at the stake.’

  ‘So don’t tell ’em,’ said Larkin.

  ‘I won’t,’ said Gutes. Larkin was the best shot in the regiment, and Gutes wasn’t about to tell him his job, even if tinkering with military tech was strictly forbidden. That was the province of the tech-priests, who guarded their secrets jealously. If Larkin had to be a heretic to shoot so well, that was fine with Gutes.

  Gutes pulled up his sloshing bin and trotted on, picking up the last of the mess tins and then heading west up the supply trench.

  ‘Hey, Larks.’

  Larkin looked up from his scope, thinking Piet Gutes had come back for some reason.

  It wasn’t Piet Gutes.

  ‘How you doing?’ said Lijah Cuu.

  ‘What the feth?’ Larkin cowered back into the corner of the firebay, his hand trying to find the hilt of his knife. ‘What the feth are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, now, that’s not nice.’ Cuu crouched on the firestep, elbows resting on his knees. ‘Just dropped by to say hello to a friend. And you’re acting all unfriendly.’

  ‘No,’ mumbled Larkin.

  ‘Yes, you are, sure as sure.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Cuu straightened out his lean legs and sat down on the step with his back to the parapet.

  ‘Like I said, just saying hello.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said Larkin.

  ‘Who’s gonna know, tell me that? I’m meant to be seeing the doc. Who’s gonna miss me? Who’s gonna worry about two buddies chatting together?’

  ‘I’m not your buddy,’ Larkin said bravely. His hand had found the knife now. He kept it behind his back.

  Cuu thought about that. ‘Maybe not. Maybe not.’

  He leaned forward, pushing his scar-split face right up into Larkin’s. ‘Buddies ain’t the right word, is it, Tanith? We got a score, you and me. You sold me out, sold me out to the commissars, back on Phantine. You and that big dumbo.’

  ‘Don’t call him that!’

  ‘Big dumbo? Why the gak shouldn’t I call that big dumbo a big dumbo? He was a big dumbo, sure as sure.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Hey, I’m just being nice and saying hello.’ Cuu’s voice dropped to a raw whisper. ‘We got a score, Tanith. You know it, I know it. It’s gonna get settled. Thanks to you, I got flog-scars on my back. I think about you, most nights. You and that holier-than-thou big dumbo. Sooner or later, you’re gonna pay.’

  Larkin pulled back even further. He knew he had no hope of getting his long-las free from the loop-hole. He wanted to shout out, but there was no one around.

  ‘What do you mean, pay?’

  ‘Sooner or later, sure as sure. War’s a messy thing, Tanith. Confused and all shit like that. Middle of combat, all crap flying this way and that. Who’s gonna notice if I get my payback? You’d just be another body in the count.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare!’

  ‘Oh, wouldn’t I now? You’ll get yours, just like big dumbo got his.’

  Hlaine Larkin was petrified. Ever since Phantine, he’d been guarding his back, waiting for this moment. And now Lijah fething Cuu had just come up on him when he least expected it. But those last few words bit clean through his terror.

  ‘What do you mean, he got his? What the feth does that mean?’

  ‘Terrible shame. Big dumbo buying the farm like that.’

  ‘No… no, that’s not what you meant. Not at all! Feth… feth, you bastard… you killed him!’

  ‘As if,’ smiled Cuu.

  ‘You bastard! I’ll take this to Gaunt–’

  Cuu snapped out a hand and closed it tightly around Larkin’s throat. His eyes went dark, like a cloud had passed across the sun.

  ‘Oh no you won’t, you little gak. Who’d believe you, eh? Where’s your gakking proof? This is just between you and me. You and me. Our little score. And it’ll get settled, sure as sure. You’ll know why. And I’ll know why, and everyone else can take a gakking jump. You’ll pay for the flog-scars I got. You’ll pay with scars of your own.’

  Larkin yanked out his knife. Straight silver, thirty centimetres. Tanith First-and-Only warblade. In simple desperation, he lunged at Cuu.

  Cuu was ready. He blocked Larkin’s wrist with his left fist, turning the knife aside, and tightened his choke hold. Larkin writhed away, but he was penned in and trapped, like an animal, like prey.

  Cuu cuffed him around the temple and, as he swayed, dazed, threw him off the firestep. Larkin landed shoulders first on the duckboards, feeling them squelch underneath him.

  His fingers groped for his warknife.

  It was in Lijah Cuu’s hand.

  Cuu stood over him, raised Larkin’s knife to his mouth and slowly licked the blade. The tiniest drop of blood welled up and fell onto Larkin’s forehead.

  ‘You’re fething crazy!’ Larkin gasped.

  ‘Sure,’ said Cuu, ‘as sure. We’ve come this far. Let’s do it.’

  He flew at Larkin, blade extended. Larkin remembered the combat moves Corbec had told him, and rolled, kicking Cuu’s legs away. Cuu crashed over, ripping the blade sideways and tearing a strip out of Larkin’s trousers. Larkin squealed and kicked out again. But Cuu moved like a snake, wrapping himself over and under Larkin’s jerking limbs.

  The blade was at Larkin’s throat. He felt its edge bite into his skin.

  ‘What the feth is this?’

  Loglas was coming down the trench bay towards them, his hands balled into fists. ‘Cuu? What the feth are you doing?’

  Fighting the pressure at his neck, Larkin screamed. Oddly, his scream sounded like a whistle.

  A whistle. Two more blew. Then another.

  Loglas halted and looked up. The shell hit the back wall of the firebay and went off, kicking mud and slime and pieces of flakboard fifty metres into the air. A twenty-pounder at the very least.

  Larkin saw it, saw the actual shell. The flint-grey casing, the barbed fins, like it was a pict playing in slow motion. He saw the huge flash. He saw one of the fins, a broken chunk of metal twenty centimetres by ten, whizzing out from the impact, turning in the air like a kid’s throw-toy.

  Loglas was reeling back from the concussive force of the blast when the flying fin hit him in the face. In slow motion, Larkin saw the way it made Loglas frown, then grimace, then twist his features into an expression no human face could make while it was alive.

  Loglas’s face caved in nose first, and his forehead tore away from his scalp like a yanked curtain. His head convulsed with the whiplash, his neck shattering as it bowed back. His face vanished, sucked into the hole that was being driven into the front of his head, and then the whirling fin came out the back, strewing skull shards and bloody matter ahead of it.

  ‘Nooo!’ Larkin howled. Then he went deaf as the blast roar hammered him.

  Colm Corbec had emerged from his dugout at station 295 approximately sixty seconds before the first shell landed. He paused on the firestep, frowning, cupping his hands to shield his eyes from the rain.

  ‘Chief?’ asked Rerval, his vox-officer. ‘Something up?’

  Corbec had smelled ammonil wadding on the wind. Batteries loading up for barrage. Rerval watched with horrid fascination as Corbec slowly raised his whistle and blew.

  Rerval grabbed up the vox-horn and started to yell. ‘Incoming barrage!’

  He repeated the cry three times before there was an ominous click which announced that the e-mag pulse of the enemy guns had killed the vox-signal.

  Then the shells started to land.

  They fell in the rain. They fell like rain. They scattered in and out of the leading fire trench of the Peinforq Line’s 55th sector from station 251 right up to 315 and over into 56th sector as far as 349.

  Ten shells a second, heavy gauge from the deep super-siege batteries, and smaller howitzer rounds from the Shadik front. In a space of two minutes, the air was full of mud fog and the atomised steam of debris over a stretch of fifteen kilometres. The ground was quaking.

  Between 293 and 294, Rawne and Domor got their troopers into cover. Amongst three platoon, Wheln and Leclan took shrapnel hits, Torez lost an arm and Famoss was decapitated. Five metres of fire trench and a traverse simply vanished in a blizzard of spraying earth.

  Sergeant Agun Soric slept through the first thirty seconds of the onslaught. The roar and vibration didn’t wake him. It took Trooper Vivvo, shaking him and yelling in his face.

  Soric blinked open his single eye and looked up at Vivvo’s pale face in the halflight of station 292’s dugout.

  ‘What?’ he asked, tersely. But there was a background clamour of thunder and voices, and the little camp table was jarring.

  ‘Gak!’ Soric snorted, and scrambled up. How could he have slept through this?

  Over the constant howl of shells, he could hear debris spattering off the dugout wall. Someone was screaming for a medic.

  Short, stocky, grizzled, possessed of a mighty laugh and a temper corrosive as acid, Soric had been a smeltery boss back on Verghast. In the war there, he’d become a troop leader ad hoc, a resistance fighter. His exploits had left him with scartissue in place of one eye, a limp, and the eternal respect of Vervunhivers. Ibram Gaunt hadn’t thought twice about making Soric a senior platoon leader.

  His ability to sleep was a throwback to the old days, when he’d been able to catch a nap despite the tumult of the smeltery line. Now the knack seemed like a liability.

  He bundled Vivvo outside, pressing a hand down on the younger man’s shoulders to keep him low. The air was full of billowing, opaque fog that made them both choke and gasp violently. They couldn’t see anything except the swirling vapour and fuzzy, bright flashes. The parapet at 292 was particularly low and waterlogged; a wide lake formed against its outside lip. The shells falling into it had raised the dense steam and coiling vapour.

  ‘Gak! Back inside, son!’ Soric coughed, and shoved Vivvo back into the dugout. He stood alone for a moment, though how alone he couldn’t tell. There could be men just a few metres away, Soric thought, and I can’t see them. He tried to shout out, but his mouth filled with mud droplets and he started choking again. Besides, the continuous noise of detonations totally drowned him out.

  Soric staggered back into the dugout. Vivvo was on his hands and knees, his arms wrapped protectively over his head, retching up muddy liquid.

  ‘We’re going to die, boss!’ he hacked.

  ‘Did we die on Verghast?’

  ‘N-no…’

  ‘Then I’m sure as gak not going to die on this arse-wipe world.’ Soric sat down on the canvas stool. Something jabbed into his hip and he discovered a message shell in the pocket of his breeches. He couldn’t remember putting a message shell in his pocket.

  He unscrewed the brass cap and shook out a small fold of blue tissue paper. A sheet from a Guard issue despatch pack. Every sergeant had one, though they were seldom needed because of the vox-link. They were for emergencies, and Soric was sure he hadn’t used his pack since they’d arrived. But when he looked around, he saw it lying on the dugout’s shelf, the paper seal torn off and the top sheet missing.

  Soric unfolded the sheet. The brief message was hand written in pencil. ‘Bombardment for sixteen minutes, then foot assault from the north-east, under cover of the drain outfall.’

  He read it again. His fingers shook a little. There was no mistake about it.

  It was his handwriting.

  A whooping shell struck the third traverse along from station 289, and threw clods of earth and pieces of wood and brick out along the fire trench. Gaunt threw himself flat, dragging Beltayn down with him. The troopers around them were hurled over by the concussion.

  As debris and rain spattered down over them, Gaunt got up. He’d lost his cap. A man was wailing pitifully nearby.

  ‘Beltayn?’

  His adjutant rose slowly.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Feth,’ Beltayn grumbled, fiddling with his left hand. His thumb was dislocated. ‘Something’s awry here…’

  Beltayn’s voice faded off as he saw the corpse of Trooper Sheric on the duckboards at his feet. The blast had mutilated the side of Sheric’s head and jammed a broken plank through his upper torso. It made Beltayn’s dislocated thumb suddenly seem quite insignificant.

  Nearby, two other men from fifteen platoon were trying to field dress Trooper Kell’s torn belly. It was Kell doing the wailing: a feeble, sick-animal sound. Yellowish loops of intestine were spilling from the bright red gashes in his black tunic.

  Sergeant Theiss, the normally cheerful commander of fifteen platoon, ran up with one of his corpsmen. He said something to Gaunt that was inaudible over the shell fall. Gaunt waved him off and pointed to Kell.

  Gaunt had been at station 289, reviewing muster, when the bombardment started. He cursed the sense of displacement. His own platoon, one, was at station 291, with Caober in charge. There was no way he’d be able to rejoin them in this.

  He got up onto the firestep and viewed back down the line through the scope Beltayn handed up to him.

  ‘Throne of Terra…’ he murmured.

  The valley was an inferno for as far as he could see. Banks of smoke, as vast and dense as thunderheads, hung over the fire trenches, obscuring the view. Shell blasts stippled through the smoke, catastrophic and murderous. An immense fire burned down in the vicinity of 256. At 260, it looked as if an entire section had been gutted. The barrage was creeping back into the supply and communication trenches. Shields had come on over the rearline and command sections, but they weren’t the day’s targets. Today, the Shadik guns were striking at the infantry lines. And that could mean only one thing.

  It was the prelude to an offensive.

  A whistle blew. It was Kolea at his spotter scope.

  ‘They’re coming!’ he cried.

  Criid tumbled out of the scrape she’d been sheltering in. Steam and fyceline fumes clogged the trenchway. Station 290 had taken some hits in her post, but nothing like the punishment she’d seen fall on Maroy’s section.

  She blew her own whistle. ‘Fix blades! Stand ready to repel!’ She dearly wanted to check on Maroy’s mob, but there was no time for that. Around her, the troops of nine platoon got up onto the firestep, warknives locked into the lugs of their lasrifles.

  The shells were still falling. It seemed to her impossible that the enemy would advance into this.

  But she trusted Gol Kolea. He’d never lied before and he wouldn’t lie now.

  Crouched on the rain-slick paving slabs of the step, she peered out through a loophole. Through the churning vapour, she saw figures, running forward at a halting pace, weapons swinging. Mkoll had briefed the First. Don’t let them get close enough to deploy grenades. Hand bombs are their way into the line.

  But a spring gun or a pneumatic mortar could throw a lot further than a man.

  ‘Hartwig! Target the slopes, now!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am!’

  In the face of the bombardment, their little answering barrage seemed feeble as it began. Spring guns cracked and mortars drummed. There was a satisfying ripple of light munitions from beyond the parapet.

  ‘Keep it up!’ she yelled. She risked another look and saw the advancing line of Shadik troopers, just blurs in the fog. Many staggered or were thrown up as ball bombs and mortar rounds fell amongst them.

  She glanced down the line. Nine platoon was crouched, ready. She saw Vril spit and shake out his neck. She saw Jajjo drying the grip of his las on his cloak. She saw Nessa, still as a statue at her long-las. Nessa’s hair was still boyishly short from the pre-mission buzz-cut she’d had on Phantine, and from some angles she could be mistaken for one of the younger men. One trooper – Criid thought it was Subeno – was vomiting with nerves, but still holding his place.

  ‘Straight silver!’ Criid bellowed. ‘Step up and fire at will!’ Her first battlefield order to the troops.

  As one, nine platoon rose and rested their lasrifles on the parapet. They started shooting, dropping the nearest Shadik assaulters as support blasts from Hartwig’s gun-dens lofted up over them.

  Criid tried to find a target, but it was like aiming into murky water such was the density of the smoke boiling back off no-man’s land. A raider in a chain-veil helmet suddenly loomed, winding up to hurl a stick bomb, and she squeezed the trigger. By her side, DaFelbe saw him too, and they killed the raider simultaneously. The stick grenade bounced away and blew up.