“Turn! Face the foe!”
The remaining crewmen turned and fled towards the enemy positions. A tank round took them all apart a second later.
Missiles strafed in from the low, cloudlike meteorites and sundered twenty more tanks along the Vervun formation. The explosions were impossibly loud. Kowle was thrown flat in the grass.
He heard the clanking as he rolled over. On the far rise, battletanks and gun platforms painted in the ochre livery of Zoica rolled down towards him.
A thousand or more.
Out of nowhere, just before nightfall, about a half-hour after the klaxons had stopped yelping, the first shells fell, unexpected, hurled by long-range guns beyond the horizon.
Two fell short on the southern outer habs, kicking up plumes of wreckage from the worker homes.
Another six dented the Curtain Wall.
At Hass West, Daur yelled to his men and cranked the guns around. A target… give me a target… he prayed.
Dug-in Zoica armour and artillery, hidden out in the burning grasslands, found their range. Shells began to drop into the hive itself.
A gigantic salvo hit the railhead at Veyveyr Gate and set it ablaze. Several more bracketed the Vervun Primary barracks and atomised over a thousand troopers waiting for deployment.
Another scatter pounded the northern habs along the river. Derricks and quays exploded and shattered into the water. In mid-stream, Folik’s over-laden ferry was showered with burning debris. Folik tried to turn in the current, yelling for Mincer. Another shell fell in the water nearby, drenching the screaming passengers with stinking river water. The ferry wallowed in the blast-wake.
Two more dropped beyond the Magnificat, exploding and sinking the ferry Inscrutable, which was crossing back over the tideway. The Inscrutable
went up in a shockwave that peppered the water with debris. Diesel slicks burned on the choppy surface.
Folik pulled his wheel around and steered out into mid-channel. Mincer was screaming something at him, but the wail of shells drowned him out.
A staggered salvo rippled through the mining district, flattening wheel heads and pulley towers.
Deep below the earth, Gol Kolea tried to dig Trug Vereas out of the rock fall that had cascaded down the main lift chute of Number Seventeen Deep Working. All around, miners were screaming and dying.
Trug was dead, his head mashed.
Gol pulled back, his hands slick with his friend’s blood. Lift cables whipped back down the shaft as cages smashed and fell. The central access had collapsed in on them.
“Livy!” he screamed up into the abyss. “Livy!”
Vor was obliterated by the first shell that came through the roof of Vervun Smeltery One. Agun Soric was thrown flat and a chip of ore flying from the blistering shock took out his left eye forever.
Blood from cuts to the scalp streamed down his face. He rolled over in the wreckage and then was lifted off the floor by another impact that exploded the main conveyor. A piece of oily bracket, whizzing supersonically across the work-floor, decapitated one of the screaming workers nearby and embedded itself in the meat of Soric’s thigh. He howled, but his cry was lost in the tumult and the klaxons as they started again.
Livy Kolea looked around as the glass roof of the transit station fell in explosively and she tried to shield Yoncy and Dalin.
Glass shrapnel ripped her to pieces, her and another sixty civilians. The aftershock of hot air crisped the rest. Dalin was behind a pillar and remained miraculously unscathed. He got up, crunching over the broken glass, calling for his mother.
When he found what was left of her, he fell silent, too stunned for noise.
Tona Criid took him up in her arms.
“S’okay, kid. S’okay.” She pulled over the upturned cart and saw the healthy, beaming face of the baby smiling back at her. Tona took up the infant under one arm and dragged the boy behind her.
They were twenty metres from the south atrium when further shells levelled carriage station C4/a.
* * * * *
Menx and Troor escorted Guilder Worlin through the chaos of the Commercia. Several barter-houses to their west were ablaze and smoke clogged the marketways. The closest carriage station with links to the Main Spine was C4/a, but there was a vast smoke plume in that direction. Menx redirected their route through the abandoned Guild Fayk barter-house and headed instead for C7/d.
