* * *
The Chosen officer’s blue eyes stared unblinking up at the moonlit night sky. It was bright, full moon, the disk nearly as large as the sun to the naked eye and almost too bright to look at, so Jeffrey could see them clearly. Her helmet had rolled away when the bullet went in through the angle of her jaw and out the top of her head; fortunately the shadow hid most of what the soft lead slug had done when it lifted off the top of her skull. Jeffrey was glad of that, and the bit of extra cover the body provided. Bullets thudded into the loam of the little hillock, or keened off stones with a wicka-wicka sound like miniature lead Frisbees.
Every minute or so a shell would burst along the Chosen gunline, stretched back now into a U-shape with the blunt end towards the enemy. The shellbursts were malignant red snaps in the night, a flash of light and the crack on its heels. Every few minutes a Land hand-grenade would explode where the Imperials had gotten close, but the invaders were running short on them. Short on everything.
The night air was colder, damper, and it carried the smell of cordite, gunpowder and the feces-and-copper scent of violent death. Bodies lay scattered out from the line, sometimes two-thick where automatic weapons or concentrated riflefire had caught groups charging forward—the Imperials’ training kept betraying them, making them clump together. The field of the dead seemed to move and heave as wounded men screamed or whimpered or wept, calling for water or their mothers or simply moaned in wordless pain. Through it darted the living, more and more of them filtering in. Their firepower was diffuse compared to the Land’s rapid-fire weapons, but it was huge, and the sheer weight of it was beating down resistance.
Goddamn ironic if I die here, Jeffrey thought. He’d devoted his whole life to the defeat of the Chosen. . . .
“I think the next push may make it this far,” Heinrich said. “You can’t claim our hospitality’s been dull.”
He was chewing the stem of his long-dead pipe as he unbuckled the flap of his sidearm. Most of the surviving command group had armed themselves with the rifles and bayonets of dead Protégé soldiers, those who hadn’t gone out to take charge of units with no officers left alive.
“Damn,” Heinrich went on. “We must have killed or crippled a good third of them. Didn’t think they’d keep it up this long.”
“Here they come again,” someone said quietly.
The forward Imperial positions were no more than a hundred yards away. The firefly twinkling of muzzle flashes sparkled harder, concentrating on the surviving machine guns, and men rose to charge. A bugle sounded, thin and reedy. The machine guns were fewer now, firing in short tapping bursts to conserve ammunition. Jeffrey could feel something shift, a balance in his gut. This time they would make it to close quarters.
Listen, Raj said. Is that—
airship engines, Center said. probability approaching unity. approaching from the southwest, throttled down for concealment; the wind is from that direction. four kilometers and closing.
Heinrich turned his head. A light flashed in the darkness above the ground, a powerful signal-lamp clicking a sequence of four dots and dashes.
* * *
“Damn,” Gerta Hosten said mildly.
The muzzle flashes down below and ahead outlined the Land position as clearly as a map in a war-college kriegspiel session; you could even tell the players, because the Imperials’ black-powder discharges were duller and redder. It was fortunate that dirigibles had proven to be more resistant to fire than expected; punctures in the gas cells tended to leak up, rather than lingering and mixing with oxygen . . . usually.
A night drop—another first. Well, orders were orders, and it was Heinrich down there. She’d really regret losing Heinrich.
“We could do better with a bombing run,” the commander of the dirigible muttered. “And parachuting in the ammunition they need.”
“With a four-thousand-meter error radius, Horst?” Gerta asked absently, tightening a buckle on her harness.
“That’s only an average,” he said defensively. “The Sieg usually does better than that.”