But there was something in the bottom of the trench, hard, complicated shapes that shattered and broke under him.
Bodies. The trench was lined with bodies. Pirius could see contorted faces, chests and bellies cut open to reveal internal organs, solid, like anatomical models. Their skinsuits sliced open, these fallen troops had frozen where they lay. As Pirius had struggled, he had shattered some of the frozen corpses. But there was no horror for him; the cold and the vacuum had sucked out the last of the humanity from these relics.
The trench had been well-constructed and was evidently deep. He could see some meters to left and right; the trench zigzagged so it couldn’t be cleaned out by a single sweep of raking fire. And as far as he could see it was filled with those frozen, cut-open corpses, a tangle of rigid limbs and guts and skulls, like a ditch full of smashed statues.
Cohl came sailing in and landed as he had, hard on her belly. Bits of smashed bodies flew high; where they sailed above the lip of the trench, starbreaker beams picked them out, vaporizing them, as if playing. Cohl thrashed in shock.
Pirius held Cohl’s shoulders. “Take it easy.”
She subsided, breathing hard, eyes wild. She fixed her gaze on his face. “This is a nightmare.”
“I know.” He glanced around. “They must be lying six, seven deep. We aren’t the first to come this way.”
“We’re going to die here, as they did.”
“We’re not dead yet.” Pirius took a comm post from his back and thrust it into the trench wall. “This is Pirius. 57 Platoon. We made it to a trench. There are two of us here. If you can hear this, triangulate on my signal and assemble here.” He let the message repeat, and ducked his head back down into the deeper safety of the trench.
It took only seconds for the first trooper to come plummeting into the trench, heralded by a burst of starbreaker fire. It was a girl, dark and serious, her face contorted with fear; Pirius didn’t know her name. She had lost her weapons. And when she saw what she had landed in she thrashed in panic as Cohl had.
In the following thirty seconds four more followed. The two Tili sisters were among them, to Pirius’s relief.
And then no more.
Seven of them, in the trench, out of twenty in the two platoons who had been dropped here. He looked around at their faces, the faces of these terrified children lost in this terrible place—all of them looking at him.
He felt a weight pressing on his shoulders, as if his inertial field was malfunctioning. Was this what a galactic war had reduced to—him and Cohl in a scratch in the ground, with five frightened kids?
He set his comm loop to open, linking him to the whole of the force in this area. Maybe somebody else would hear him, could converge on this place. There was only silence. After a few seconds, it occurred to him to cut out the morale filters.
Immediately he was aware of a roar, like a noisy barracks. The voices merged into a mass, a mob cry, but every so often one of them would bubble to the foreground, and he would hear screaming, muttering, gasping, weeping, calls for help, delirious shouts, even a kind of deranged laughter. It was the sound of the wounded, the sound of thousands of voices calling out together from all over the Rock. They made an unearthly, inhuman sound.
He knew that some of the troopers were listening too. Their faces were round with shock. But even as they listened, in those first few minutes, the cries dwindled and faded away, one by one. If you were wounded in vacuum, with your skinsuit broken, you didn’t last long.
And still the bombardment continued, the blinding light overhead matched by the relentless shuddering of the ground. But the shells’ immense footfalls marched away into the distance, leaving them far behind.
He risked glimpses out of the trench.
From here, according to his visor displays, they were only about half a kilometer from the target monopole factory. As far as he could see only a single Xeelee emplacement stood between him and the factory; the shells had evidently taken out the rest. The emplacement looked like a small shack of a silver-gray material. It was probably Xeelee construction material, among the toughest substances known: self-renewing, self-repairing, said to be a living entity in itself. Surrounding the central shack were small pillars, each bearing rings that glowed blue.
He let himself slide back into the trench. The others watched him, six pairs of eyes, large in the shadows of their visors.
He said, “We have to try to get to the factory.”
“No,” said one trooper.
“What’s your name?”
“Bilin.” He was bulky, but just a boy, despite the massive surface-to-surface weapon he carried on his back. He was scared, and right now Pirius was the focus of his resentment. “I say we wait for the pickup.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“We can’t stay here,” Pirius said bluntly.
“We can traverse in the trench—”
“There’s no point. We couldn’t get any closer to the factory that way. Remember the standing orders. The only pickup will be at the factory itself. We can’t go back. And we can’t stay here, in this trench. We’ve nowhere else to go but forward.” Bilin glared at him, but Pirius stared steadily back. “Can’t you see that? We’re not the first here. Look around you. Do you want to die like this?”
The boy dropped his gaze.
Pirius rooted in the grisly bank of frozen body parts beneath him. It didn’t take him long to retrieve a laser rifle. He threw it aside. He kept searching until he found a starbreaker gun; this gravity-wave handgun, essentially a design stolen from the Xeelee, was far more potent. “Search the dead,” he snapped. “If you don’t have a weapon, find one. Take anything else you need: water, med-cloaks.”
Cohl went at it with a will. The privates—cadets until yesterday, Pirius reminded himself—were more reluctant; they had been trained to accept death, but nothing in their upbringing had prepared them for this gruesome grave robbing.
Pirius checked over the starbreaker weapon. It was massive in his hands, reassuring. He’d been given only minimal training in it, but its operation, designed for simplicity and robustness on the battlefield, was obvious. He fired a test shot; pink light snaked out. There was no recoil. The gun anchored itself in spacetime, while sending out lased gravity waves that would rip apart anything material.
After a few minutes they were all equipped.
“All right,” said Pirius. “If you want to live, do as I say.”
He’d expected Bilin to challenge him, and he wasn’t disappointed. “Who appointed you, Service Corps?”
Pirius just stared him down. Again Bilin blinked first.
Pirius sketched in the dirt on the side of the trench, showing the Xeelee emplacement, and behind it the factory that was their target. “We have to take out the emplacement. We’ll break into two sticks. I’ll lead one. Cohl, you take the other. We’ll go right, you go left . . .” They would take it in turns, the two parties leapfrogging, alternately covering each other. This routine fieldwork was very familiar to the troopers; they knew how to do it. They started to relax.
He glanced around at their faces, glowing like red moons by the light of the continuing bombardment overhead. Now that somebody was giving them orders again they almost looked confident, he thought. But Pirius couldn’t unwind the coiled spring inside himself, not a bit.
He split the seven of them into their two groups. In her group of four, Cohl would take the twins, who he wasn’t about to separate. Pirius took the troublemaker Bilin with himself, along with the slim, intense-looking girl, the first to have tumbled into the trench, who as far as he remembered hadn’t said a word. The two teams moved subtly apart.
Pirius readied his starbreaker. “We’ve nothing to gain by waiting. We’ll go first. Give us five seconds’ cover, then follow.”
“See you on the shuttle,” Cohl said.
The troopers shifted their positions, ready to move again. One boy moved stiffly, staring down at the layer of bodies, obviously reluctant.
Pirius barked, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t like treading on their faces.”
Pirius forced himself to yell, “Never mind their faces! Just do it!”
The kid responded with jerky haste.
Pirius held his hand up. “On my mark. Five, four—”
Cohl’s troop put their heads over the lip of the trench and began firing.
“Three, two.” Pirius snapped off his inertial belt and allowed himself one deep breath. “One.”
He launched his body out of the trench and into the fire-laced vacuum once more.
The quiet girl fell before she had even got out of the trench, her visor melted open, her face reduced to char. He had never even known her name. But there was no time to reflect, no time to look back, nothing to do but go on.
Fly, float, scrabble across a hundred meters, less. Fire your weapon if you can, anything to engage the Xeelee guns, and try to ignore the stitching of fire all around you, the way the ground beneath you is constantly raked up by miniature explosions. When you find shelter—a pock-hole in the dirt, a chance heaping—let the inertial belt pull you down as hard as it can. No time to rest. Head above the lip of your cover, start firing again immediately, to cover Cohl’s crew.
This close to the factory, the ground was littered with bodies, tangled up and frozen, a carpet so deep you sometimes couldn’t see the ground at all. Frozen solid, there was no way of knowing how long they might have been there. There was no decomposition here, no smell; it wasn’t even a human enough place for that. Pirius wondered how many had died here, how long this desperate battle for a desolate piece of rock had gone on.
Three, four hops, and he was still alive. Their laser beams were invisible save where they passed through kicked-up dust; the starbreakers glowed with their own light.
At last he found himself in a foxhole fifty meters from the emplacement. The Xeelee structure was a squat, plain box, unbroken by windows. Starbreakers spat from vicious-looking mounts on the roof. Those pale blue rings on their pillars gleamed, set around the structure.
Bilin tumbled after him into the trench, laden by the heavy surface-to-surface weapon.
“Those hoops,” Pirius said. “We’ll take them out.”
“Why?”
“Enemy comms.” It was probably true. The cerulean hoops were another bit of Xeelee technology. They appeared to use spooky quantum-inseparability effects to allow instantaneous communication. No human scientist knew how they worked; you weren’t supposed to be able to use quantum entanglement to pass meaningful data.
Bilin, now that he was in action, had shed his petulance and uncovered a kind of steely doggedness. He could make a good soldier some day, Pirius thought. He nodded and said, “Three, two, one.”
They lunged over the rim of their foxhole and blasted away at the sky-blue hoops. The emplacement’s own starbreaker mounts spat back ferociously, but fire was coming in at the structure from both sides now; the survivors of Cohl’s team were mounting a simultaneous assault.
When the last hoop had exploded, the enemy starbreakers continued to fire, but wildly.
Pirius nudged Bilin. “Take it out.”
With practiced ease, Bilin pulled his surface-to-surface over his shoulder, rested it on the asteroid ground, sighted. When the weapon fired there was no recoil. A bright blue monopole shell shot across the ground, less than a meter above the dirt, tracking a dead straight line.
The shell hit the emplacement. That construction-material wall buckled and broke, like skin bursting. Inside the structure Pirius glimpsed hulking machinery. All the troopers poured their fire through the breach in the wall, until the machines slumped and failed. Still the starbreaker mounts on the roof continued to fire, but they spat erratically, their aim ever more wild.
Bilin stood up and whooped. “Nice work, Service Corps!”
Pirius snapped, “Get down, you idiot!”
Bilin grinned, and the out-of-control Xeelee starbreaker severed his head, clean at the neck.
The bombardment curtain was now far away, and Pirius could see no starbreaker light. But still the ground shook, still that deep shuddering worked into his nerves. It took a lot of courage to cross the last bit of open ground to the Xeelee emplacement.
Cohl and her people were already here. They had taken shelter beneath a wall that seemed to have melted and curled over on itself. On the far side of the wall, away from the huddling humans, the ruined alien machines slumped, as if sleeping.
Of Pirius’s team, only he had survived, but three of Cohl’s team lived: Cohl herself and the two Tilis. So four of the seven who had come to the trench of corpses were left; in the last couple of minutes another three had died.
Cohl had taken a shot to her leg. Her suit had turned rigid and glowed orange as its rudimentary medical facilities tried to stabilize her. There was nothing Pirius could do for her.
Tili One was worse. She had some kind of chest wound. Tili Three cradled her sister’s head on her lap, her mouth round with shock. Pirius saw that to be left alone, to lose
both
her sisters, was literally unimaginable for this triplet.
Pirius took his last comm post from his back, stuck it in the ground, and set up a repeater signal. He said to Cohl, “If anybody’s left, they’ll come here. Make the others wait in the shelter.” Then he stood up, hefting a starbreaker, and peered out of the ruins of the emplacement.
Cohl asked, “Where are you going?”
“To the factory. It’s only two, three hundred meters from here. It’s the pickup point, remember. I’ll leave a marker to lead the stretcher crews here.”
Cohl clearly didn’t want him to go, but just as clearly she saw the necessity. “Be careful.”
He crawled out of the ruins of the emplacement, out into the open. He moved cautiously, as he had been taught. He ducked from ridge to crater to trench to foxhole, no more than ten, twenty meters at a time. It was slow going, and exhausting. The condition of his skinsuit got worse quickly; perhaps it was damaged. The air grew increasingly foul, his faceplate so enclosing he felt as if he was choking, and his mouth and throat grew so dry they were painful.