Around the cannon emplacement, Xeelee drones still soared and spat. The fire from both sides had churned up the asteroid dirt, and all signs of the earthworks over which generations had labored had been erased in hours.
For a moment the action was washing around to the emplacement’s far side, and Cohl had nothing to fire at. She threw herself into a trench, panting. She lay as still as she could, locked in with the stink of her own shit, piss, sweat, blood, and fear, trying to let the fatigue work out of her limbs, and sucked water and nutrients from nipples in her helmet. Even here, the fire of the continuing battle lit up the furrowed surface of asteroid dirt before her, and glared off the scars on her faceplate.
The morale filters seemed to have been overwhelmed. The comm loops were dominated by wailing now, the massed crying, screaming, pleas for help from thousands of wounded troopers. But the wounded were far outnumbered by the dead. The noise was harrowing and useless.
There were only four left of Cohl’s platoon, four including herself. They had fallen back to a final perimeter just outside the platform on which the monopole cannon stood. She stole a glance over the lip of the trench. The cannon were still firing, but fitfully; Cohl had no idea how many gunners were alive. But still the Xeelee drones swarmed, a cloud of swimming black forms that seemed to grow denser the more you fired into it.
She knew it was only chance that had kept her alive long enough to be seeing this.
Cohl had been sealed up in her suit for four hours already. It was too long, of course. Every soldier knew that if an action took too long it had gone wrong, one way or another. And if the casualty rates inflicted on her own platoon were typical, soon those drones would get through and shut down the cannon for good.
But there was scuttlebutt on the comm loops that worse was to come: that in the angry sky above, the nightfighters were breaking through the picket line of greenships, and were moving in to finish off the Rock altogether.
Blayle was beside her, his face an expressionless mask. “A thousand years,” he murmured. “A thousand years of building — of belief, bloodlines forty generations deep, for nothing but to throw a handful of soldiers into Xeelee fire—”
“Don’t think about it,” Cohl muttered.
“I can’t help it,” he said, almost wistfully. “The more tired I get, the more I think. A thousand years devoted to a single purpose, gone in hours. It defies the imagination. And what is it for?” He craned his neck to peer up at the brilliant blue lamps of IRS 16. “I don’t know if the action is succeeding. Why, I don’t even know what the Xeelee are doing here, let alone why we’re attacking them.”
“We don’t need to know,” Cohl said, falling back on Doctrine. Then, more thoughtfully, she said, “But it’s probably always been that way.” If you were a soldier, war was small scale. All that mattered was what was going on around you — who was shooting at you, which of your buddies was still alive and trying to keep you alive. Whatever you knew of the bigger strategic picture didn’t matter when you were at the sharp end.
And as the enemy’s fist closed around this Rock, she could see no end point but defeat.
She had long burned off her initial adrenaline surge, long gone through her second wind. Now she was like an automaton, going through the motions of fighting and keeping herself alive almost without conscious thought. She had trained for this, been burned hard enough by her instructors on Quin for this strange condition to be familiar. But it was as if she were no longer even in her own head, but was looking down on her own hapless, dust-coated form in its failing skinsuit, scrunched down in a ditch in the dirt, trying to stay alive.
She glanced at the chronometer in the corner of her faceplate display. She’d had five minutes’ break; it felt like thirty seconds.
“It shouldn’t have been me,” Blayle said now.
“What?”
“Why me? Why, after all the generations who lived out fat, comfortable lives in this Lethe-spawned Rock, why is it me who has been pushed out here to fight and die? It should have been those others, who died in their bunks,” he muttered. “It shouldn’t have been me—”
Electric-blue light flared, and asteroid dirt was hurled up before them. Cohl twisted and fired into the blue-tinged fog of dust. She glimpsed Xeelee drones, pressing down on her trench. There was something above her; she felt it before she saw it. She rolled on her back, preparing to fire again.
But the ship was a flitter, small, unarmored. Its door was open and a ladder hung down.
“Cohl!” She recognized the voice; it was Enduring Hope. “Evac!”
“No. The cannon—”
“The Xeelee shot the heart out of it. The Rock is finished. There’s no point dying here.”
“I have to stay.” Of course she did; that was Doctrinal. You weren’t supposed to keep yourself alive, not while there were still enemy to shoot at. “A brief life burns brightly,” she said reflexively.
“Balls,” Hope said with feeling. “Come on, Cohl; I’ve risked my ass to come flying around this Rock looking for you.”
She made a quick decision. Reluctantly she turned to Blayle. “Sergeant…”
He didn’t respond. There was a small scar on Blayle’s faceplate, a puncture almost too small to see. A thousand years of history ends here, she thought. She wished she could close his eyes.
In the end only two of Cohl’s platoon were lifted out with her, two out of the nine she had led out of the trench.
As the flitter lifted, she saw the landscape of the Rock open up. Its whole surface crawled with light as Xeelee drones and human fighters hurled energy at each other, all in utter silence. It was an extraordinary sight. But already the nightfighters were closing in to end this millennial drama for good.
The flitter squirted away. Cohl, still locked in her skinsuit, closed her eyes and tried to control her trembling.
Pirius tried not to watch the chronometer. And he tried not to think about his own fatigue.
He felt as if he had been walking a high-wire for six hours. He tried to concentrate on the moment, to get through the next jump, and the next, and the next. If you didn’t survive the present, after all, future and past didn’t matter; that old earthworm Hama Druz had been right about that much. For all their training and sims, however, they hadn’t realized how exhausting this was going to be, this tightrope walk through the center of the Galaxy. He hoped he would have the physical and mental strength to actually fight at the end of it.
He shut the passage of time out of his mind. So he was surprised when a gentle chime sounded on the comm loops, but he understood its significance immediately.
Ahead, the grav shield was dissolving, and in the sky around him the stars and gas masses of this shining, complex place were swimming back to where they should be.
“No sign of our escort,” Bilson said.
“We got through,” Pirius murmured.
“Yes, sir.” Even Jees’s steady voice betrayed an edge of fatigue now. She should have been spelled by Darc, and Pirius knew that for the last hour she had been nursing one failing system after another.
Still, she had delivered them here, just as the operational plan had dictated, and with no more losses: seven ships had survived, out of ten that had started.
Somebody called, “What’s that?”
It was a star, a hot, bright, blue star, a young one — not part of the IRS 16 cluster, though; they were far from that now. And there seemed to be a cloud around it, a flattened disc, like the shields of rock from which planets formed.
“That,” said Bilson, “is SO-2. We’re exactly where we are supposed to be, sir.”
Engineer Cabel was less clued in. “And SO-2 is—”