‘Meaning?’
Maggs shrugged.
‘The batteries have the road locked tight. We are apparently to expect a demonstration of Urdeshi artillery at its finest.’
Rawne glanced at the massive batteries that loomed behind them. He could hear the distant whine of munition hoists and loading mechanisms. Artillery was a principal weapon of ground warfare, and could be decisive. But for all its might, it was cumbersome and unwieldy. If the tide of a fight moved against it, artillery could be found wanting. It lacked the agility to compensate fast and counter-respond. It was a superb instrument of destruction, but it was not adaptable.
And war, Rawne knew too well, flowed like quicksilver.
‘I wish the Urdeshi commander success,’ Rawne said. ‘May the Emperor protect him. Because if He doesn’t, we’ll be doing it.’
As if hurt by the thinly veiled cynicism in Rawne’s voice, the Tulkar Batteries spoke. There was a searing light-blink, and then a shock wave boom that hurt their ears and made them all wince. Two dozen Medusas and Basilisks had fired almost simultaneously. The ground shook, and windows rattled in the buildings around them.
‘Ow,’ said Varl.
The batteries fired again, hurling shells directly over them. This time, past a hand raised to shield against the glare, Rawne saw the huge cones of muzzle flash scorch out of the gun slots. He heard a more distant thunder, the staggered detonations of the shells falling a mile or so away.
‘Positions!’ he yelled, and ran for the nearest building, kicking in the access shutter. Oysten, Ludd and Maggs followed him through the old packing plant, up the stairs and out onto the low roof.
The batteries continued to fire overhead. They could hear the almost musical whizz of shells punching the air above them. Fyceline smoke descended like a mist across the streets, welling out of the batteries’ venting ports. It had a hard, acrid stink, familiar from a hundred battlefields.
The concussion pulse from the bombardment made Rawne shake. He could feel each punch in his diaphragm. He kept his mouth open to stop his eardrums bursting, and took out his field glasses with fingers that tingled with the repeated shock.
In the distance, two kilometres away, the shells were dropping on the mill complexes and the western head of the sea road. Each flash was blurred and dimpled by the shock-force it was kicking out. Rawne saw buildings flattened, outer walls cascading away in avalanches of burning stone. Some buildings just evaporated in fireballs. Others seemed to lift whole, as though cut loose from their foundations and gusted up on boiling clouds of fire-mass before disintegrating. He saw vast steel girders spinning into the sky like twigs.
There were tanks on the sea road. Urdeshi-made AT70s, rolling hard, lifting fans of grit, thumping shells from their main guns as they ran. They were emerging from the firezone of the mills in the Clave district. SteG 4 light tanks scurried among them. A fast armoured push right down the artery. Just what Rawne had predicted.
That’s what had woken the batteries up.
He kept watching. Artillery shelling continued to drop on the mill complexes. Some hit the sea road too. He saw an AT70 light off like a mine. He saw two more annihilated by direct hits. He saw a fourth get hit as it was running, the blast lifting the entire machine end over end and dropping it, turret down, on a speeding SteG 4. Munition loads inside the wrecked vehicles cooked and blew.
‘It’s not enough,’ he said. No one could hear him over the thunder of the bombardment. He looked at Maggs, Oysten and Ludd, and signed instead, Verghast-style.
Not enough. They’re moving too fast.
The enemy armour was taking brutal losses. They were driving through a hellish rain of heavy, high-explosive shells. But they had an open roadway, and they were pushing hard, as fast as their drives could manage. A dozen tank wrecks burned on the ruptured highway, but the majority of shells were falling behind the heels of the leading machines. The Urdeshi commander was traversing and adjusting range rapidly to stop the armour force moving in under his fire-field, but the distance was closing. How short could the long-range guns drop their shells? How far around to the north west could they traverse? It was a simple matter of angles. There would come a point at which the gun slots of the massive battery fortress would simply not be wide enough to allow a main gun to range the road and sea wall to its extreme right.
That moment was coming. By risking the open highway, and accepting brutal losses, the enemy armour had forgone safety in favour of speed.
Maggs grabbed Rawne’s sleeve and pointed. Less than a kilometre away to the south west, SteG 4s and stalk-tanks were breaking out of Millgate quarter onto the sea road. Smaller and faster than the main battle tanks, these war machines had moved up under cover through the streets of the district. The big tanks of the main road assault had been a misdirection. The lighter machines were already onto the open highway, and were coming in under even the shortest drop of the batteries’ cone of fire.
Pasha, Rawne signed to Oysten.
At the roadblock line, Major Petrushkevskaya had already spotted the sleight of hand. SteGs and stalk-tanks were rushing her position. She, Elam and Kolosim had got their tread fethers un-crated and in position, and crew-served weapons were set up along the roadside and among the line of trucks.
‘Steady!’ she ordered calmly over her link. The weapon mounts of the advancing enemy had greater range than her infantry support weapons. She wanted no wastage, even if that meant they had to take their licks first.
Shells from the .40 cal cannons of the SteG 4s began to bark their way. Some went over, others blew craters out of the road surface short of the line. The light tanks were rolling at maximum speed to reach their target, and that made them unstable, imprecise platforms. The stalk-tanks, scurrying like metal spiders, were spitting las-fire from their belly-mounts. Shots struck the line of trucks, puncturing metal and blowing out wheels. A round from a SteG 4 howled in, and blew the cab off a transport in a cloud of shredded metal.
Men went down, hurt by shrapnel. Pasha took her eyes off the road to shout for medics, but Curth and Kolding were already on the ground.
‘Do you need help?’ Pasha called to Curth.
‘Free a few bodies from the line to help us carry these men clear, please!’ Curth shouted back.
‘Squad two!’ Pasha yelled. ‘Work as corpsmen! Take instruction from Doctor Curth!’
Her troopers slung their lasguns over their shoulders and hurried to help Curth. The medicae officers started pulling the injured clear with the help of troopers seconded as corpsmen. Pasha looked back at the approaching armour.
‘Hold steady,’ Pasha said.
‘Sixty metres,’ Kolosim voxed.
‘Understood,’ she nodded. Another few seconds…
She raised her hand. At her side, her adjutant Konjic was watching as if hypnotised, his thumb on the vox-tap switch.
Another shell tore at them, and flipped one of the trucks, scattering debris. Two more shells ripped in, punching clean through the bodywork of barricade transports, killing Ghosts sheltering in their lee.
Pasha dropped her hand. Konjic sent the tap command.
At the left-hand end of the barricade line, Captain Spetnin led two teams out of the roadside culvert. He had shouldered a tread fether himself. Trooper Balthus had the other. Kneeling, they lined up and fired. Each tube weapon gasped a suck-whoosh, and anti-tank rockets spat out across the road. Spetnin blew one of the leading stalk-tanks apart. Balthus stopped a SteG 4 dead in its tracks. It slewed aside, on fire, a gaping hole under its engine case. A SteG directly behind it tried to steer out and cannoned into the wreck, shunting it forwards and twisting its own chassis violently.