‘Gunfire, harbour-side. Gunfire, Lachtel Rise. Gunfire, Shelter Slope.’
‘Vox activity, tight band, tight chatter, region of Kaline Quarter. Chatter reads as Sekkite.’
‘Detonations in Plade Parish and adjoining arterial. Habs ablaze.’
‘Movement reported, Millgate and surrounds. No confirmation of hostiles, but no ID tagging and no call response.’
‘Coordinate response primary!’ Van Voytz bellowed. ‘Marshal, tracking now. I want target solutions for the city batteries.’
‘At once!’ Tzara replied.
‘Air cover, up!’ Van Voytz shouted, turning to station two. ‘Call it in, call it in! Suppression and containment! Support divisions mobilise in five minutes or I’ll have heads on sticks!’
He looked at Urienz.
‘Get Macaroth out,’ he said.
‘You’re going with the evac?’
‘This isn’t a damn coincidence, Vitus. Get a bird ready to take him out of the city.’
Urienz nodded and made off across the floor. Van Voytz turned back to his station. ‘I want direct vox with Grizmund, Kelso and Bulledin in three! Advisory signals to Cybon and Blackwood. Tell them to stand by for instruction. And find me Lugo!’
He reached for the keypad. His screen flickered and went dark.
‘What the hell? Technical here!’
He looked up. There was a thump and a dying moan of power as the strategium nearest to him shut down. The holomaps it was displaying shivered and vanished. One by one, the strategiums around the war room floor blinked, sighed and shut down. As the tables failed, the main screens went dark in rapid succession.
Then the overhead lights strobed and went out.
‘Power down! Power down!’ an adept yelled.
‘No shit!’ barked Van Voytz above the tumult of voices. ‘Auxiliary power now!’
‘Switching,’ the adept replied. ‘No automatic. Re-trying… Auxiliary, failure! Back-up generators, failure!’
‘They can’t fail,’ Van Voytz snarled. ‘Re-initialise and re-start! Fire them up!’
‘Technical reports… the reserve batteries have drained,’ the adept said. ‘Support generation systems are experiencing a critical loss of capacity. No power to palace systems. No power to core-vox. No power to war room reserve and safety. Auspex is down. Detection grid is down. Fire control is down.’
She looked at Van Voytz in the half-light.
‘Void shields are down,’ she said.
‘Holy shitting Throne,’ whispered Van Voytz.
Ferdy Kolosim put the unlit lho-stick to his mouth and clasped it between his teeth, grimacing. A night this dark, he couldn’t light it in the open.
The sky was a huge swathe of reddish black cloud, low and menacing. It spread out across the unlit city like a shroud. Kolosim could barely make out the outline of Eltath. Blackout conditions were still in force. He located a few spots of light; the twinkle of a pylon beacon, small building lights like distant stars, a floodlight washing something to the southwest, the brief vent flare of a gas plume at Millgate.
The rain had stopped. There was a smell of wet soil in the darkness. A slight breeze had lifted, stirring litter in the waste ground to his left. The breeze felt like the prelude to something stronger, maybe a big storm that would roll in from the bay by dawn.
Heat lightning growled in the low cloud. There wasn’t much spark to it, but the mumbling sheet-flashes let him see the city for a fraction of a second every few minutes, the climbing skyline rising to the east, a key-tooth silhouette of spires and habs.
Sergeant Bray approached, effortlessly making no sound on the rough scree.
‘Are we set?’ Kolosim asked.
‘Oh yeah. All four companies, left and right of the approach road. Wire’s cut back. We’ve got support teams set up, decent, broad field with a focus on the road. Fire positions in a string off that way for about a kilometre.’
‘Transports?’
‘All off the road. Got them side-on, in case we need fall back cover. Scouts out on both flanks. It’s mostly bomb-site ruins on both sides for five kilometres.’
Kolosim turned and looked back up the approach road towards EM 14. It was the only vaguely lit thing around. He could see the glow of the gatehouse lights. The road was dark. The steel fenceposts stood out starkly where they hadn’t been pulled down. The oblong shadows of some of the transports were just about visible, rolled back on the rough slip.
‘Quiet order?’ Kolosim asked.
‘Everyone’s behaving,’ replied Bray. ‘Pretty decent alert level, actually.’
‘An active purpose refines the mind,’ said Kolosim.
Bray nodded at the Mechanicore complex.
‘Taking a while,’ he said.
‘Red tape. Reluctance,’ said Kolosim. ‘The priests don’t like to cooperate. Pasha’s probably reading them the riot act.’
His micro-bead pipped.
‘Kolosim, go.’
‘Caober. You pick that up?’
‘Be more specific.’
‘Uh, mortars. Mortar fire. South-west.’
Kolosim glanced at Bray.
‘Nothing here,’ he said into the link. ‘Crossing to you.’
They moved down the shallow slope and jogged across the road into the waste scree on the other side. Kolosim could see Ghosts hunched around him, the folds of their capes making them blend with the stone heaps and slabs of broken rockcrete they were using as cover. He and Bray moved along behind the outer line of them. Caober emerged from the darkness.
‘Mortars?’ asked Kolosim.
‘Sounded like,’ Caober told the big red-head.
They listened for a moment, and heard nothing except the breeze stirring litter. There was a faint flash of heat lightning.
A second later, a slow, soft peal of thunder.
‘Not mortars,’ said Bray.
Caober shook his head. ‘It wasn’t thunder just now. More punctuated. A little trickle of thumps. I’d put money on mortars.’
‘Well, that could be coming up from the line,’ said Kolosim. ‘It’s active beyond Tulkar.’
‘We wouldn’t hear it,’ said Caober. ‘Not at this distance, in these conditions. It was closer.’
Bray frowned. ‘Listen,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Kolosim.
Bray raised a finger, his head tilted to hear.
Pop-pop-pop.
‘That’s not mortars either,’ said Kolosim.
Pop-pop-pop.
‘That’s fething small arms,’ said Bray. ‘Autogun.’
Kolosim reached for his bead.
‘Stand ready,’ he said.
The distant popping stopped. About a minute passed, and they started to hear much louder cracks, like branches snapping.
‘Las,’ said Bray.
‘Definitely,’ said Caober.
‘What do you think?’ asked Vadim from his position nearby. ‘Insurgents?’
‘Must be,’ said Kolosim. ‘Can’t be Sek packs this deep in.’ He hoped he was right. The city edge was far from secure, but they were well inside the inner ring. If it was a company strength of the Sons, someone somewhere had made a big tactical error. Insurgents were bad enough. The small raid-cells were still pocketed throughout Eltath, lying quiet. They’d found that out to their cost at the Low Keen billet.
They couldn’t see the first few shots. Then a ripple of bright bolts flashed in high, looping into the scrub behind them. Two or three at first, then a sudden riot of them, incoming from a dozen sources. They flashed and zipped across the highway bank, hitting rocks, raising tufts of dust from the edge of the slip, and spraying pebbles off the front portion of the scree. A volley stitched across the mouth of the approach road, and Kolosim heard a sharp twang as a fence pole was cut in half.