Crucible (21 page)

Twelve metres.

Almost there. Graff's boat ran aground on the submerged wreckage that lined the edge of the shore. He drew his las-sword and leapt into the water, eager to claim the honour of being the first man from the first boat of this assault wave to reach the enemy shore.

He waded through the water, feeling its toxic contents starting to eat into the material of his chem-suit. "For Nordland! For Nordstadt! For victory!" he shouted again, urging his troops onwards, knowing how vital it was to get them out of the water and onto the riverbank before they succumbed to the enemy fire or the effects of the lethal pollutants in the water.

Las-rounds struck the surface of the water around him with a hot sizzle. An explosion behind him blew four men into the air, showering the rest of his platoon with body parts and vile river muck. They charged forward, taking casualties with every metre they went, stepping on and stumbling through the bodies of the dead and dying that floated all along the shoreline.

Zero metres.

They hit the muddy, carnage-churned slopes of the riverbank, feet and hands clawing for purchase, the men behind pushing those in front of them up the steepest parts of the incline, those that made it to the top turning and pulling their comrades up to join them, while others crouched in the blood-soaked mud and began to return fire on the Souther troops dug into the slopes above them.

Although diminished in numbers, they had survived the very worst of everything the Southers had had to throw at them. Now the enemy would learn exactly who it was they were dealing with.

"KASHAN! KASHAAAAAAAN!" screamed Graff, pointing his las-sword at the enemy and leading the charge up the hill. His men followed suit, taking up the cry, their suit communicators amplifying it many times over, until the whole river line seemed to echo with the savage war-cry of the Kashan Legion. Artillery-launched photon flares floated overhead, turning night into day, starkly illuminating all the gruesome details of the battle that followed.

A Souther infantryman reared up out of a foxhole in front of Graff, raising his las-carbine to fire. Graff gunned him down with his pistol. The Souther's foxhole partner was trying to scramble up out of the rear of the hole. Kashans leapt down into the foxhole, bayoneting him through the back.

A Souther machine gun nest sprayed shots into the Kashan line, cutting down ten or more men in an instant. A lazookaman crouched down, took aim and blew the weapon and its crew out of existence.

More las-fire came from a bunker to Graff's right. Two men from his platoon hurled grenades with pinpoint accuracy through the narrow opening of the firing slit. The dual explosions abruptly cut off any more fire from that direction.

Graff ran through a Souther infantry trench, accompanied by a squad of Kashans. Grenades and incendiary bombs were thrown into the entrance of every bunker and dug-out that lined the walls of the trench.

A Souther officer accompanied by a squad of his own infantry appeared out of the gloom ahead of Graff. The Souther paused as he caught sight of the Kashans and their commander and then drew his own las-sword in an unmistakable gesture of challenge. Graff raised his las-pistol and shot the vainglorious fool through the face-visor of his chem-suit.

The Souther troops accompanying the officer, armed with bayonet-fixed rifles and sharp-edged trenching tools, screamed in rage and threw themselves forward at the Kashans. Graff shot one of them, gutted another with a thrust of his las-sword and then decapitated a third with his return blow. The others he left for his men to deal with. Many of their Kashan brethren had died during the river crossing and his men were eager for revenge.

The Kashans surged onwards. Bunkers and dug-outs were cleared out with grenades, bayonets and searing blasts of las-fire. Some Southers remained in position and died where they fought. Others tried to flee and were shot down and bayoneted to death. The Kashan attack was relentless now. Graff could feel victory almost in their grasp.

The regimental standard bearer running beside him stumbled and fell to the ground when he was shot through the chest. Graff reached down and grabbed the haft of the standard, rescuing the precious relic before it was defiled by contact with the bloody, mud-covered ground. The standard accompanied the Third Kashan Sturmvulkk on all their campaigns and had proudly flown over the site of many famous victories. It was the same standard he had planted atop the ruins of Vasrin and now it would soon be flying over Nordstadt too.

Graff shot the Souther that had killed his standard bearer and then dropped his pistol and charged in amongst a group of two other Southers, wielding the standard like a quarterstaff. A flurry of blows from it sent one of them sprawling to the ground. A shout from one of his men warned him of the attack from the other remaining Souther. Graff parried aside the Souther's lunging swing with a trenching tool, breaking the man's right arm in the process. The Souther staggered back and Graff reversed his grip on the haft of the standard, smashing the spear-like point of it straight through the man's face-visor, killing him instantly.

"That one, I want him alive," Graff directed his men, indicating the form of the semi-conscious, last remaining Souther. "Take hold of him and follow me."

The Kashans followed their commander, dragging the weakly struggling Souther with them up the last few metres to the final crest of the slope of the riverbank. There, they pinned the man down to the ground, knowing what was in their commander's mind. They held the terrified Souther down, holding him by his arms and legs as Graff stood over him, holding the standard pole tightly in both hands. He raised it above his head and brought it down, impaling it through the Souther's chest and into the ground beneath.

It had become a tradition among the Kashans, starting with the epic victory on Flavian III, eighteen years ago, when Grand Centurion Militant Horth, the Kashans' founder, had marked his Legion's epic victory on that planet by thrusting his standard into the heart of the commanding general of the defeated Souther garrison.

One of his men played a victory salute on a set of war-pipes as Graff raised his flare gun and fired the preset sequence of photon flares up into the sky. Red-green-red. His men were hunting down Souther stragglers on their section of the riverbank and in the territory behind it, but the mission was over and the objective had been attained. He looked east and west, seeing other colour-coded flare sequences rise up into the sky all along the shoreline, as the other regiments in the attack wave reported similar success in their own target objectives.

The river was theirs, and now the next stage of the Battle of Nordstadt could begin.

With both sides of the river in their hands, the Norts quickly went to work. Heavy lifter hoppers carried massive sections of pontoon bridging over to the newly secured riverbank, while troop carrier hoppers dropped off teams of military engineers. Formed into fifty-man workcrews, the engineers and Kashans started assembling the pontoon sections, dropping each one into place as another hopper delivered the next piece.

Three bridges were being constructed simultaneously on both sides of the river, the ends of each one growing out to meet its twin on the other bank. While the Kashans and engineers sweated and strained to assemble and haul each section into place, impatient officers and NCOs shouting curses and orders at them, Nort gunships prowled overhead, protecting the precious bridges and the vulnerable beachhead on the far bank from enemy aerial attack. Those Kashans not engaged in the bridge building work spread out to form a defensive perimeter, protecting the beachhead from any ground-based counter-attack, even assuming the increasingly beleaguered and disorganised Souther forces could mount such an operation.

Forty minutes after Centurion-Kolonel Graff raised his regiment's standard over the Souther positions, the last rivet was fired into place on the first bridge to be completed, and the columns of Nort armour lined up on the northern bank began to cross the river. They were Nort light and medium tanks, weighing as much as the pontoon bridges would bear, accompanied by even more columns of troop-carrying APCs. Over the next hour, four entire Nort armoured divisions would cross the river, with another nine reserve divisions moving through the Nort-held sections of the city's northern half to join them.

The target of all this armoured might was the enemy's southernmost secure zone, their principal safe haven in Nordstadt, containing the Southers' largest shuttle landing base, as well as their command headquarters. If this zone fell, then the rest of Nordstadt would surely fall soon afterwards.

Facing these thirteen Nort armoured divisions, and the third and fourth reinforcement waves that would come after them, was a mixed Souther force of four under-strength divisions, composed mainly of different units hastily thrown together from the shattered remains of other, larger units already destroyed in the last few days' fighting.

All over Nordstadt, the story was the same. The Norts attacking in overwhelming force, often suffering appalling losses to spirited enemy opposition, but nevertheless pushing relentlessly through to achieve their objectives.

In the steelworks sector, four whole infantry divisions, three Nort and one Souther, were consumed in a few terrible hours of intense, close-quarters fighting. If Sergeant Hanna Coss made it back there now to find the remnants of her squad, she would have to look for them among the piles of dead, where Norts and Southers lay tangled together and almost indistinguishable from each other in the charnel houses of the burned-out remains of the giant steelworks.

In the main financial district sector, a Souther battalion commander, cut off and faced with the crushing weight of the Nort forces now closing in all around him, adopted a desperate scorched earth tactic. Those of his men who could respond to his urgent fallback order did so, pulling out with orders to find any way they could back to the nearest secure zone. The others died where they stood, buried along with their commander and their Nort opponents beneath millions of tonnes of rubble as the commander gave the order for the long-ago positioned demolition charges to be blown. The shattered glass and steel towers of the financial district came tumbling down in one single moment of catastrophe, falling in on the heads of both sides. The Southers lost almost a full battalion, the Norts more than a division.

Even before the dust had started to clear from the scene of the cataclysm, the Nort forces following behind the main assault were pushing forward in search of alternative routes through or around the mass burial site.

All over Nordstadt, the story was the same. The Norts advancing in force. The Southers retreating in disarray or crushed by the weight of the enemy offensive. The final fate of Nordstadt now seemed inevitable. It was, but not in any way any of the combatants could imagine.

Hammerfall was now less than ten hours away.

PART THREE

HAMMERFALL

NINETEEN

"We need more chem-suits! I don't care whether they need patching up or not. If they're good enough to last a couple of hours, then get them on these injured men. Find what weapons you can and issue them to the best of the walking wounded. If we're going out of here on foot, we might need to use them before we get to the secure zone!"

"Sir, what about the critical cases? How are we going to evacuate them out of here?"

Artau looked at the rows of badly injured men lined up in the beds in front of him. Many of them were still hooked up to narco-drips and life enhancer equipment. Disconnecting them would almost certainly mean a death sentence for these men. Even trying to move some of the lesser critical cases - the burn and chest injury cases - would also probably result in death. Artau knew that what he was attempting; the evacuation of an entire field hospital at only a moment's notice. It was an almost impossible task, but the circumstances left him with little other choice. He had to think now of the well-being of all his patients and staff, even if the decisions that policy entailed meant the deaths of so many of the more hopeless cases.

He turned to the group of meds and orderlies gathered around him, waiting on their commanding officer's orders.

"Myles, check the stores again. I'm sure we've still got a few of the old Type Two bubble stretchers in there. If they're even halfway serviceable, get them unpacked and get some of these critical cases into them for immediate evac. Toshiro, assemble a team of your best people and run triage over the critical cases. If you think any of them have even a better than evens chance of surviving the evac, then I want them along for the ride. Garnier, start assembling stretcher carrier parties. Use the least injured of the walking wounded if you have to. Anyone who can't walk out of here on their own two feet gets carried out. That's an order. Karlsen-"

His next words were interrupted by the sound of a fresh salvo of explosions from outside, sounding closer than ever. Medics and patients alike ducked instinctively. Artau waited for the panic to subside. He had assumed the earlier rounds that had hit them and wiped out about a quarter of his field hospital had struck by accident, falling short of their intended target, probably the AA battery situated a few kilometres away in the marble ruins of the museum quarter. The field hospital hadn't come under fire since then, but Nort artillery rounds continued to scream overhead, and the sounds of explosions from the collapsing front line seemed to creep closer with every passing minute. Artau estimated they probably had an hour or less until those sounds arrived at their front door.

He scanned the frightened faces around him, spotting the one he was looking for, that of Lieutenant Karlsen, the unit's communications officer.

"Karlsen, any word yet of any hopper or truck transport to help get our wounded out of here?"

Karlsen grimaced. "Sorry, sir. Whatever Nordstadt Command's transport priorities are, we don't seem to be too high up the list. So far, I haven't even got a reply back from them."