Then a piercing whistle filled his ears. It was Pace’s command; they were to leave the trench.

Pirius didn’t let himself think about it. He blipped his inertial belt. Hauling his pack, a bulky med kit and a comm post, he scrabbled at the dirt with one gloved hand, and pulled himself over the lip of the trench.

He floated like a balloon, up into a field of horizontal light beams. All around him other troopers rose; they were all swimming in light.

But the starbreakers cut into them, coming from his left. Bodies burst open and blood spurted into space, instantly freezing. Pirius was falling through a vacuum threaded with fire, an utterly inhuman and lethal environment. It was like a dream of light and carnage. It seemed impossible for him to survive.

He slammed once more into the asteroid dirt, dragged down by his inertial belt, set to two gravities. Now he was in a shallow bowl, perhaps a crater; it might even have been natural, an ancient impact feature. He was astonished he was still alive.

A body fell heavily on top of him. It was Cohl. Even through the thick layers of her rad-hardened suit he could see how she was breathing hard.

He snapped, “How many fell?”

“I don’t know. Four, five?”

Five dead already, in the first instant.

“It could have been us,” she gasped, wondering. “It could have been me. It was just chance.”

Pirius said, “Did you see anyone shoot back?”

“No. No, not one.”

They had been trained to expect losses. But the barrage should have cleared the ground before them. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

He thought about the pattern of fire he’d glimpsed. “The fire came from the left. It came from an emplacement behind where the barrage is landing. Something’s wrong. The barrage should have cleaned that emplacement out.”

Cohl didn’t seem to be listening. She lifted her pack curiously. A hole had been punched clean through it.

“They got the Guards.” That call sounded like one of the Tilis.

“Which unit?” And that was the corporal, Pace; evidently he was still alive.

“To our left. I can see them from here. Every one of them wiped out.”

And now other voices joined in, from Pace’s platoon, and another close by. “To our right, too.” “We’re on our own here.”

It didn’t seem possible to Pirius that Guards—arrogant, elite Guards, with their perfect, unmarred uniforms, their trenches as straight and well-defined as geometric exercises, their unshakeable confidence—that Guards had fallen so easily.

Pirius tried to think. The barrage hadn’t worked, then. Perhaps the timing had gone wrong. Perhaps monopole shells were falling out of place, falling harmlessly far beyond the Xeelee emplacements, maybe even coming down on human troops. The hole in the barrage had allowed at least some Xeelee units to survive, and in those moments when the infantry had burst into the open, the enemy had picked targets at will. Now the line was shattered; the survivors were exposed, with no cover to left or right. Everybody knew that an uneven advance was worse than no advance at all, because your flank was exposed.