Exultant (24 page)

And all this in utter silence, broken only by the hiss of air through his suit’s systems.

He had known in abstract what to expect. He had seen such Rocks before, from the comfortable cockpit of his high-flying greenship. But he had not imagined this. The scene was even beautiful, he thought.

But there was no more time. The ground flew up at him.

They had been briefed by Captain Marta.

This was an unusual action, she said, because it was taking place outside the Front.

This Rock—known as Factory Rock—wasn’t an assault platform but a human base, a munitions dump and the site of several monopole factories. Monopoles were defects in spacetime, each a nasty little knot with the mass of a trillion protons. They had been manufactured in the early universe during its period of GUT-driven inflation, and now GUT energy was used to churn them out, to a uniform mass and charge, in the vast numbers required by the human war effort. They were useful weapons; they would cut through Xeelee construction material, or even the spacetime-flaw wings of their ships, like steel through flesh.

Factory Rock was an old establishment. It lay in the hinterland beyond the Galaxy center, a little closer in to the Front than most. In a thousand years of operation, it had had no significant problems save for quagmites, the odd little virus-like critters that were attracted to all GUT engines in factories and ships.

But now the Xeelee had seen a chance to break out of their usual cordon. They had taken this Rock, and had set up well-fortified positions across it. It was a terror tactic. As this Rock went sailing on its own slow orbit behind the human lines, like a rat loose in a barracks, it was causing disruption far out of proportion to its size and direct threat.

So Pirius and his buddies were being dropped to clear the Xeelee emplacements, and if possible to take back the monopole factories.

Captain Marta hadn’t tried to hide the fact that these frontline troopers were raw. Some of them had had only days’ training on their weapons, their laser rifles and starbreaker pistols. But as this target was well behind the main front line, more hardened troops couldn’t be spared.

“Remember, all that matters is that one of you gets through to the objective. And you will make that happen. I know you will all do your duty.” She smiled, her metallized half-face gleaming. “The Coalition has invested a lot in each of you, in giving you life and in your training. Now’s the time to make it worthwhile.”

“Yes,
sir
!”

The dropship didn’t so much land as crash. It just plummeted to the ground, burying its nose in a meter of asteroid dirt.

The hull immediately popped, and the inertial shielding turned off. Following his training, Pirius threw himself out of the ship and into the nearest trench.

The trench was shallow, barely enough to cover him. In fact it was a piece of shit, he thought, surveying it with a now-professional eye; he could dig better in half an hour. But lines of cherry-red light already stitched the air above him, and he pressed himself into the dirt.

The members of his platoon, 57 Platoon, all made it to this crudely dug trench. He saw the corporal, a very young man called Pace, and his sergeant, and Cohl, and the two surviving Tilis in their gaudily customized skinsuits. The Tilis seemed to be functioning, even though it was only three weeks since the death of Two, and Three was still getting used to her prosthetic hand. Many of the troopers were wrestling with their clumsy weapons. But Pirius and Cohl, as Service Corps, were laden with trenching tools, flares, comm posts, med supplies, and other nonlethal essentials.

As the enemy fire intensified above them, they were all pushing themselves into the broken dirt, their gleaming new weapons already scuffed and coated with dust. He wondered if Burden had made it down safely. His platoon had been scheduled to land some distance away.

Corporal Pace whirled a finger, ordering them to switch their comms to the platoon’s dedicated loop. “Listen up,” he said heavily. “We’re down safe. The line’s intact and we’re in a strong section of it. We have Guards to the left, and more to the right, further down the line.” That was good. Guards were pains in the ass on the base, but in action, Guard units were reassuring to have close, protecting your flank. “We’re about two kilometers from our target factory, which is
that
way.” He pointed. “In thirty seconds the artillery barrage will start, and in five minutes we’ll move. Everybody clear? Good.”

And then, to Pirius’s amazement, he snapped his fingers and a Virtual appeared in the air above him, floating over the trench like a multicolored specter.

It was a pep talk. A smiling woman’s face mouthed words—no doubt uplifting Doctrinal propaganda—that Pirius couldn’t hear. They were shown images of field guns, mostly monopole cannon. These were in batteries a couple of kilometers behind Pirius’s position, and he knew there were emplacements of more massive siege guns, “heavies,” further back still. The slanting tubes were oddly graceful, Pirius thought, oddly fragile-looking for such powerful weapons. They were lodged on the ground, sacrificing flexibility of deployment for the shelter of the asteroid’s bulk.

But the first guns were already firing. The heat generated was obvious; the cannon’s breeches were red hot, their inertial-control recoil mounts battered and smoking. In the heat, the gunners had stripped to the waist, though they wore skinsuit helmets. Sweating, their skinny torsos gleaming red in the glare of their red-hot cannon, they swarmed around the guns like rats. Pirius wondered if Enduring Hope was working in some such inferno.

But if the Virtual was meant to boost the infantry’s morale, it wasn’t working. They were supposed to march safely behind the guns’ fire, a tactic in which everything depended on precision and coordination between artillery and infantry. But even in this sanitized image Pirius saw things go wrong, like a recoil mount snapping under the strain.

And the Virtual itself was suddenly stitched through by cherry-red beams. Pace, digging his face into the dirt, shut down the Virtual; it dissipated in a cloud of pixels.

Cohl lifted her head. She was heavily shadowed, but Pirius could see her snarl of contempt. “At least now we know where the Xeelee emplacements are. The trouble is they know where
we
are.”

And then the artillery barrage started for real.

Pirius felt it before he saw it. The ground’s shuddering penetrated the inertial damping of his suit, reaching deep into his belly.

The first shells, piercing electric-blue pinpoints, sailed overhead. Each shed energy as it flew, creating a sparkling contrail of exotic particles. He imagined the rows of guns, the lighter cannon and the tremendous “heavies” behind them, blasting their munitions into the sky, thousands of them along lines that stretched kilometers.

The first shells sailed out of sight, landing somewhere beyond his horizon. He could feel their shuddering impact. Answering fire came from the Xeelee emplacements, he saw. A line of pink-purple beams snaked up as starbreakers sought to shoot down the shells before they had a chance to fall. But more shells followed. Soon there were so many of them that the contrails merged to become a solid glare, and the sky was covered by a curtain of shifting blue. It was a battle of lights in the sky, human blue washing down against defiant Xeelee red.

The violence was immense. It seemed surprising the whole asteroid didn’t simply break apart under the strain. He felt fragile, a mote; he knew that one misstep of the mighty beasts treading the ground around him would result in a death so sudden he wouldn’t have time to know about it.

Burden was wrong, he thought suddenly. No matter what happened in the future, no matter who or what waited at time-like infinity, nothing could ever erase the blunt reality of this moment. This was
real,
this tortured ground, this outpouring energy. This was life and death—this was the war.

And still that relentless pounding went on. Pirius pressed his face into the dirt, but he couldn’t get away from it. It went right through him, working deep into his bones, right into his nerves, until it felt as if he had never known anything else.

Then a piercing whistle filled his ears. It was Pace’s command; they were to leave the trench.

Pirius didn’t let himself think about it. He blipped his inertial belt. Hauling his pack, a bulky med kit and a comm post, he scrabbled at the dirt with one gloved hand, and pulled himself over the lip of the trench.

He floated like a balloon, up into a field of horizontal light beams. All around him other troopers rose; they were all swimming in light.

But the starbreakers cut into them, coming from his left. Bodies burst open and blood spurted into space, instantly freezing. Pirius was falling through a vacuum threaded with fire, an utterly inhuman and lethal environment. It was like a dream of light and carnage. It seemed impossible for him to survive.

He slammed once more into the asteroid dirt, dragged down by his inertial belt, set to two gravities. Now he was in a shallow bowl, perhaps a crater; it might even have been natural, an ancient impact feature. He was astonished he was still alive.

A body fell heavily on top of him. It was Cohl. Even through the thick layers of her rad-hardened suit he could see how she was breathing hard.

He snapped, “How many fell?”

“I don’t know. Four, five?”

Five dead already, in the first instant.

“It could have been us,” she gasped, wondering. “It could have been
me.
It was just chance.”

Pirius said, “Did you see anyone shoot back?”

“No. No, not one.”

They had been trained to expect losses. But the barrage should have cleared the ground before them. It wasn’t supposed to be like
this.

He thought about the pattern of fire he’d glimpsed. “The fire came from the left. It came from an emplacement
behind
where the barrage is landing. Something’s wrong. The barrage should have cleaned that emplacement out.”

Cohl didn’t seem to be listening. She lifted her pack curiously. A hole had been punched clean through it.

“They got the Guards.” That call sounded like one of the Tilis.

“Which unit?” And that was the corporal, Pace; evidently he was still alive.

“To our left. I can see them from here. Every one of them wiped out.”

And now other voices joined in, from Pace’s platoon, and another close by. “To our right, too.” “We’re on our own here.”

It didn’t seem possible to Pirius that Guards—arrogant, elite Guards, with their perfect, unmarred uniforms, their trenches as straight and well-defined as geometric exercises, their unshakeable confidence—that
Guards
had fallen so easily.

Pirius tried to think. The barrage hadn’t worked, then. Perhaps the timing had gone wrong. Perhaps monopole shells were falling out of place, falling harmlessly far beyond the Xeelee emplacements, maybe even coming down on human troops. The hole in the barrage had allowed at least some Xeelee units to survive, and in those moments when the infantry had burst into the open, the enemy had picked targets at will. Now the line was shattered; the survivors were exposed, with no cover to left or right. Everybody knew that an uneven advance was worse than no advance at all, because your flank was exposed.

Pace spoke over the platoon loop. The corporal sounded ragged. “We have to go on,” he said.

Pirius knew the theory. The “creeping barrage” ahead of them was a sweeping curtain, continually progressing at about walking pace. The infantry were to follow, coming in right behind it, to mop up whatever was left before the Xeelee weaponry had a chance to recover. So they had to move on, or the protection of the barrage would soon leave them behind. But everything was wrong.

“Corporal,” Pirius said. “We’d be advancing into fire. It would be suicide.”

“Do your duty, Service Corps. On my mark in three.”

Pirius and Cohl exchanged a glance. They had no choice.

Again that ear-splitting whistle sounded.

Pirius roared, “Shit, shit!” He blipped his inertial field and pulled himself out of the dip.

Again he flew, his armored chest a few centimeters above the ground, his bulky pack an awkward mass behind him. Around him he glimpsed ten, maybe fifteen others, floating like ghosts above the churned-up dirt. Some of them aimed and fired their weapons as they swam.

But cherry-red light flared immediately, threading more bodies which burst and writhed, before they subsided in dreamlike microgravity slowness back to the ground. One of them was Pace, he saw; the corporal, recognizable by his bright command armband, took a hit even before he got out of the trench.

Pirius hit the dirt again. He was breathing hard, his pack bumping at his back, his faceplate pressed to the dirt. Starbreaker light continued to flare over his head, and detonations in the ground sent dirt flying up all around him. He could feel no pain, and was amazed he still hadn’t been hit.

He risked looking up. The barrage still crept forward, smashing its way across the asteroid away from him. Silhouetted before its unearthly light he saw figures moving, troopers trying to work their way from one bit of cover to the next, maybe even trying to advance. But there was no semblance of coordination, and few of them were even firing their weapons. Xeelee starbreakers picked them off with impunity.

He was exposed here; he was on a shallow ridge that actually raised him up above the mean surface. He would last only seconds in this spot.

He saw a line in the ground, a faint shadow a couple of meters ahead. If that was a trench he might live a little longer. If not—if not, he had no choice anyhow.

Again he didn’t allow himself time to think.
Three, two, one.
He blipped his inertial field, and with a single thrust he threw his body through a shallow arc at the shadow in the dirt. He slammed down at three gravities, hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs. It was a trench: worn, its lip broken by the scrabbling of gloved hands, but a trench nonetheless. Starbreaker light flared over him, frustrated, a cherry-red lid over this bit of shelter.