Straight Silver, page 12
The raider jerked with whiplash and then toppled head first onto the firestep before falling over, back and feet first, into the bottom of the defence. Corbec had jumped so much at the shot he’d lost his footing and fallen over amongst the heaped dead.
‘Sharp eyes,’ Mkvenner growled in approval to Veddekin. The scout leapt onto the step, and swung his weapon up, shooting dead the next two Shadik who loomed up at the parapet.
The Ghosts rushed the step then, joining Mkvenner and firing down into the smoke-thickened reaches of no-man’s land at the assault party that was trying to get in.
‘Gak! There’s too many of them!’ Ponore yelled.
‘Aim. Fire. Repeat,’ Mkvenner urged.
Corbec looked up at the backs of his boys on the step and struggled to rise out of the warm layers of bodies. He got his left hand on a timber support and–
He froze. The grenade spoon tumbled from his clawing hand.
He’d dropped the fething bomb.
He looked down, looked down into twisted limbs and staring faces and spools of steaming guts. It was down there somewhere.
If he cried out a warning, he knew his squad would break and the assaulters would be all over them. If he didn’t, he and most likely two or three of his team would be killed.
‘Sacred feth!’ Corbec howled, lunging his hand down into the sticky mess of burst viscera, exposed bone and burnt fabric beneath him. He groped for the grenade. Of all the stupid fething ways of dying. How long had the fuse been set to? Ten seconds? Fifteen?
How long had he been scrabbling for it?
His fingers closed on the bomb. It felt red-hot, toxic, and he wanted to let it go.
But he daren’t. He yanked it up and threw it. Threw it as hard as his big, tired, old arm could manage. Threw it up and out, hoping it would fly all the way to the Republic of Shadik and never come back. Threw it as desperately as he’d thrown the sewn-leather batter-balls that had come his way across the rec-field at Pryze County Ground when he’d been just eleven and detesting his forced participation in the County Scholam Tournament.
He’d hated batter-ball. He’d never been able to catch. Never been able to field. He’d been doomed, as a kid, to be the last boy picked for teams.
‘Feth!’ he screamed, and threw. Threw hard. The best throw of his life.
The hurtling bomb went off in the air, three metres up, as it spun into no-man’s land. Shrapnel from the airburst caught five of the raiders at the heart of the attacking platoon.
They broke and fell back, shots from Mkvenner, Cown, Veddekin and Rerval punishing them further. Veddekin hit one in the back as he ran away and ignited the poor bastard’s ammo web. The retreating figure caught fire in a flash and carried on running, burning, jolting erratically over shell holes and mud-ridges until he dropped out of sight.
‘Are we clear?’ Corbec asked, on his feet again. His voice was hoarse with stress. He prayed to every pantheon imaginable that no one had noticed how fething close he’d come to screwing up. Especially Mkvenner. Corbec was meant to be top dog. Mkvenner would never have screwed up like that, not in a million years. And Mkvenner would most certainly have picked Corbec last for his ball team. Old and tired and slow, Colm Corbec, old and tired and slow.
‘We’re clear,’ said Cown.
‘Should we stay here?’ asked Rerval.
‘They won’t come back any time soon if they think the line’s secure,’ said Mkvenner, wisely.
Corbec beckoned them after him and advanced up the jink-cut communications trench. He led the way now, his officer’s pistol holstered and his rifle pulled off his back. He’d fixed his bayonet.
There were more bodies up the communications cut, Krassians most of them, distinguished by their copper-coloured coats and grey helmets. Rerval recognised a face or two from Ouranberg. Poor fething bastards. They’d fought to hold every miserable centimetre of this arbitrary hole in the ground. The way some of them had died beggared belief. The suffering, the indignity…
They were four zags down when Corbec stopped them. Small-arms fire was whizzing back and forth along the next angled stretch.
‘Way I see it,’ Corbec told them quietly, ‘the enemy got in and overran the line, killing the Krassys or driving them back up the communications. Probably lost a lot themselves on the way. So we’re coming in behind them. Let’s make it count.’
The Ghosts nodded and checked weapons.
‘Three abreast,’ Corbec instructed. ‘Me, Ven and Veddey. There’s no more room than that. Sillo, Cown, get some tube bombs ready and lob them over the divide as we go. Lob them far – you hear me, you fethers?’
They did.
‘And get in behind us,’ Corbec said to Ponore and Rerval. ‘If we go down, fill our spots. Cown, Sillo, you too, after them. Let’s show them how it’s done.’
On Corbec’s signal, they came round the zag-end and onto the backs of a pack of Shadik raiders clustered in at the next turn. Some of the enemy troopers began to turn as the first las-rounds sliced into them.
‘First-and-Only!’ Corbec yelled, firing on full auto, smacking las-shots into khaki backs.
Veddekin fell back, his weapon jammed.
Rerval pushed past him, and maintained the tight line. Tube-charges wobbled through the air above them, hurled by Sillo and Cown from behind the trench turn. The blasts filled the narrow defile.
‘Straight silver!’ Corbec shouted, and, without further warning, charged the enemy. He’d charged because he’d spotted that their angle wasn’t secure. Not by a long way. A secondary trench, probably a munitions track, intersected with their stretch from the right on a dog-leg. If there were more Shadik up there…
There were.
Corbec crunched his bayonet into the ribs of one of the Shadik, then kicked the man off the blade as he turned to shoot another raider behind the first. Somehow the first Shadik managed to wrench Corbec’s blade off his gun as he went down. As a third came in, swinging a trench club with an iron head, Corbec speared him with his lasrifle anyway. For all he bemoaned his age and diminishing strength, Corbec was still one of the biggest, strongest men in the First. Bayonet or no bayonet, you didn’t get up again if Colm Corbec put his weight behind the steel muzzle of a lasgun and rammed it into your sternum.
Now Corbec had an angle into the secondary trench. It was narrow and well-boarded, and sloped away from him downhill in a slight incline. He dropped to his knees and fired down it. His shots hit two of the enemy bunched up fifteen metres away, then a third. A fourth returned fire with a compact sub-autogun, a little bull-nosed slugger with a hooked magazine obviously designed with trench-war in mind.
The burst of small-calibre bullets ripped into the support palings of the trench gabion behind Corbec, showering out splinters. Corbec fired twice, unruffled, and knocked the shooter off his feet and sideways into the revetment. The man slithered down and rolled over.
There were other figures deeper in the secondary trench, veiled by the shadows and the smoke. Corbec fired on them a couple more times, and then ducked back into cover as a ball bomb landed near the mouth of the secondary and threw mud and broken duckboards into the air.
Corbec took stock. He, Mkvenner and Rerval were on one side of the secondary’s opening, the rest still back at the start of the zag. Cown tried to dart across to them, but jerked back when rifle rounds and what seemed to be buckshot came stinging up the munitions track.
Corbec looked up the zag. His squad had cleared out the raiders right up to the next turn, about ten metres away.
‘Check ahead,’ he told Mkvenner. ‘I’m hoping there’s Krassians round that bend. Don’t let ’em shoot you.’
Mkvenner nodded and grinned. He got to the end and peered round. Serious las-fire made him dip back at once.
‘Guard! We’re Guard!’ he hollered. More las-shots. The Krassians, a new outfit with comparatively little battlefield experience, had taken a pounding in the last forty-five minutes. They were spooked and angry and shooting at anything.
Rerval joined Mkvenner.
‘They’re not taking the chance we’re not Shadik,’ Mkvenner said.
‘We better get their attention,’ Rerval said. He pulled out his flare pistol, broke it open, and began sorting through his satchel of smoke and colour pellets. ‘What’s today’s recognition colour?’ he asked.
‘Blue,’ said Mkvenner. He knew full well Rerval knew that. Rerval was vox-ops, up there with Beltayn and Rafflan as one of the best signals specialists in the regiment. The question had been Rerval’s way of stress management. A coping strategy. A chance to find out what Mkvenner thought of the idea without actually asking it.
‘Blue. Right,’ said Rerval. He slid a colour-coded cartridge into the flare pistol, snapped it shut, cocked it, and said, ‘Look away.’
They both averted their eyes. Rerval fired the signal gun round the corner of the zag so that the flare embedded itself in the muddy wall beyond. It began to burn with phosphorescent white light, tinged blue by the smoke it was spilling out. The light was fierce and harsh. It threw off long, inky shadows and made everything look cold.
The las-fire stopped.
‘Guard! We’re Guard here!’ Mkvenner tried again. ‘You Krassian up there?’
A pause. An answering shout.
‘Krassian?’ Mkvenner called again.
‘Aye! What’s the day code?’
‘Alpha blue pentacost!’ Rerval called.
‘Blue eleven salutant!’ came the correct answer.
‘I’m coming out,’ called Mkvenner. ‘Hold fire!’
He walked slowly into a trench still lit by the brilliant glare of the fizzling signal round. Blue smoke wafted around him. It was a theatrical entrance, and Rerval was rather proud of it.
Krassian troopers came down the trench to meet them. Their weapons were still raised, and they all looked edgy and scared. Young, a lot of them. Faces white against the copper worsted of their coats.
‘Where the hell did you come from?’ asked the officer in charge.
‘The nalwoods west of Attica,’ replied Mkvenner with typical inscrutability. The officer looked puzzled.
‘We’re Tanith First-and-Only,’ said Rerval. ‘We pushed in from the south.’
‘Tanith?’ echoed the officer. Two or three of his younger men had tears in their eyes. Relief, Mkvenner presumed.
‘They hit us bad, so bad,’ said the officer. ‘Are they gone? Did you get them?’
‘Not yet,’ said Mkvenner.
Fifteen metres back around the zag, Corbec was negotiating the clearance of the secondary trench. Along with Cown, Veddekin and Ponore, he’d been squirting off shots down the length of it on a regular basis, but the response was firm. The worst part of it was that at least one of the raiders had a shotgun, probably a sawn-off, an ideal weapon for trench fights. Ducking in and risking a bullet was one thing, and Murten Feygor would probably give you odds on it. But a shotgun blanketed the space.
Sillo had found that out. Ponore had dragged him back from the junction and dressed his wound, but Corbec knew a scatter-shot hit like that was gangrene waiting to happen, even if the enemy hadn’t treated their lead with bacterials as he’d known to be the tactics amongst the arch-enemy.
Sillo had been hit in the left thigh with such force it had shredded his trouser-leg off, broken his belt, and gouged the flesh so deeply Corbec had seen yellow fat and bone. Sillo had screamed, passed out, then woken again screaming. He shut up when Ponore stuck him in the buttock with a one-shot disposable full of morphosia.
‘Might be another way round,’ Veddekin suggested, his back to the wall by the junction.
‘Might be. Who knows?’ Corbec grumbled. ‘If we had a fething map…’
He did have a fething map. All XOs had been given one when they checked in at 55th sector HQ on their way up the line. The map was deficient in three particulars. First, it showed only the immediate locale of the XO’s posting, which meant Corbec’s finished at station 295. Second, it showed no minor detail of supply trenches, communication lines, munition tracks or ops centres, because Aexe Alliance Command feared that a map showing such detail would be too sensitive to risk it being captured. So even if Corbec had possessed a map of 296 and northwards, it wouldn’t have shown him this track anyway.
Third, perhaps most importantly, it looked like it had been made by a hallucinating, ink-dipped cockroach that had been allowed to run across a piece of used latrine paper.
‘We could go over the top,’ Cown said, thinking aloud. ‘That’s what the scouts did at 143 the other night.’
Well, they were fething scouts, the best of our best, half a century younger than me and tough enough to crack nalnuts in their armpits, Corbec wanted to say. But he bit it back. Cown was only trying to help.
‘I’d wager they’re expecting that, pal,’ Corbec said. He picked up a Shadik helmet, hung it on the nose of his las and hefted it up above the revet.
He only had to wiggle it for a second before a rifle round cracked it and sent it spinning away into the air.
Cown smiled at Corbec feebly, and shrugged.
Ponore was looking around. ‘Holy gak!’ he began. ‘We’re lucky we didn’t go up like bonfires when we started fire-fighting down this!’
More complaints. Corbec wasn’t really interested in what Ponore had to say any more. He’d march over and slap him quiet if it wasn’t for fact he’d have to get in line of shot to do it.
Ponore wouldn’t shut up. He’d crossed to the other side of the zag and yanked up a tarpaulin. As was the case with many supply trenches, funk-holes had been dug out of the sides to make space for storage and then veiled with canvas curtains. Ponore was revealing stacked bags of dressings, tins of vegetable soup, muslin bags of candles, and three or four drums of lamp oil.
‘If a shot had hit this,’ Ponore moaned, ‘whoomff! That’d been us.’
Corbec suddenly grinned. ‘Ponore?’
‘Yes sir, chief?’
‘I could kiss you.’
‘He does that,’ Cown warned earnestly.
‘Get those drums out. Careful, mind.’
Veddekin and Ponore manhandled the first one up to the junction.
Corbec peered around the corner again. He saw what he’d seen the first time he’d looked down the munitions track. Back then, he’d been too busy killing Shadik to pay attention.
The secondary trench sloped away from them. Not much, barely, in fact. But enough. That’s why the duckboarding was good. Water drained away down this side trench.
‘What now?’ asked Veddekin.
‘We need a tube or something,’ Corbec improvised. ‘Cown? There must be a syphon or a funnel or something in there.’
Cown searched the funk hole store, cursing every time the curtain fell back, blocking him in darkness. Ponore went over and held the tarp back for him. Cown emerged with a tin jug.
‘What about this?’
‘Toss it over.’
Cown threw the jug across the junction and Corbec caught it by the handle. Four or five shots whined up the secondary at the movement.
Corbec recovered his warknife from the ribs of the raider who’d somehow managed to rip it off. He mumbled an apology to the knife for what he was about to do.
It took him about a minute of chopping and levering to bend out the base of the jug and cut it lengthways. He ended up bracing it against a trench post and ripping the curled-away half off by hand.
He’d made a little trough. Not the best trough in the world, but a little trough all the same, with a spout end and everything. His machinesmith father would have been proud.
He flipped it back to Cown. More shots.
‘Dig it into the earth there,’ he instructed. ‘No, at the corner so the spout hangs over the edge. That’s it. Keep the back end in cover. That’s the lad. Dig it in if you have to. Make it stable.’
Cown raked the earth away with the head of his nine seventy and made the trough stable.
‘Fine and lovely,’ approved Corbec. ‘Now start pouring the oil down it.’
Ponore unplugged the first drum and then tipped it over with Veddekin’s help. Clear, sweet-smelling lamp oil glugged out, swirling down the makeshift trough. It began to run down the secondary, gurgling under the duckboards.
‘And the rest,’ urged Corbec, as Cown and Ponore rolled the first drum away, empty, and Veddekin tipped the second. Corbec realised he was fidgeting from foot to foot. He so wanted to be on the other side of the junction, mucking in with the work, but he could only stand and issue instructions.
A sudden thought hit him. An epiphany. That’s what it was called. He’d heard Captain Daur talk about epiphanies. Daur was an educated lad. He understood these fine, subtle things.
A moment of unexpected clarity. That’s what Corbec believed it to mean. A sudden revelatory instant of comprehension.
He should never have become an officer. Never. Not even a sergeant, let alone XO of the Tanith regiment. Sure, he had the presence and the charisma, so he was told. He was a personality, and the men rallied round him. That was what Gaunt had seen in him, first time they’d met. Must’ve been. And Corbec was happy to serve.
But there it was. Gaunt had made him colonel. He’d not asked for it. He’d not chased for it. He wasn’t a career man, like Daur or, Emperor protect them all, Rawne. He had no ambition.
What was it they all said about him? That compliment? He led from the front. Just so. He was never happier than when he was at the very workface of fighting, confronting the practicals.
He was the big, strong son of a machinesmith from County Pryze. He should have been a trooper, a dog-grunt, fething well mucking in. Mucking in over there, in fact. Not standing this side of the junction, yakking out orders.
