But there was something in the bottom of the trench, hard, complicated shapes that shattered and broke under him.

Bodies. The trench was lined with bodies. Pirius could see contorted faces, chests and bellies cut open to reveal internal organs, solid, like anatomical models. Their skinsuits sliced open, these fallen troops had frozen where they lay. As Pirius had struggled, he had shattered some of the frozen corpses. But there was no horror for him; the cold and the vacuum had sucked out the last of the humanity from these relics.

The trench had been well-constructed and was evidently deep. He could see some meters to left and right; the trench zigzagged so it couldn’t be cleaned out by a single sweep of raking fire. And as far as he could see it was filled with those frozen, cut-open corpses, a tangle of rigid limbs and guts and skulls, like a ditch full of smashed statues.

Cohl came sailing in and landed as he had, hard on her belly. Bits of smashed bodies flew high; where they sailed above the lip of the trench, starbreaker beams picked them out, vaporizing them, as if playing. Cohl thrashed in shock.

Pirius held Cohl’s shoulders. “Take it easy.”

She subsided, breathing hard, eyes wild. She fixed her gaze on his face. “This is a nightmare.”

“I know.” He glanced around. “They must be lying six, seven deep. We aren’t the first to come this way.”

“We’re going to die here, as they did.”

“We’re not dead yet.” Pirius took a comm post from his back and thrust it into the trench wall. “This is Pirius. 57 Platoon. We made it to a trench. There are two of us here. If you can hear this, triangulate on my signal and assemble here.” He let the message repeat, and ducked his head back down into the deeper safety of the trench.

It took only seconds for the first trooper to come plummeting into the trench, heralded by a burst of starbreaker fire. It was a girl, dark and serious, her face contorted with fear; Pirius didn’t know her name. She had lost her weapons. And when she saw what she had landed in she thrashed in panic as Cohl had.

In the following thirty seconds four more followed. The two Tili sisters were among them, to Pirius’s relief.

And then no more.

Seven of them, in the trench, out of twenty in the two platoons who had been dropped here. He looked around at their faces, the faces of these terrified children lost in this terrible place—all of them looking at him.

He felt a weight pressing on his shoulders, as if his inertial field was malfunctioning. Was this what a galactic war had reduced to—him and Cohl in a scratch in the ground, with five frightened kids?

He set his comm loop to open, linking him to the whole of the force in this area. Maybe somebody else would hear him, could converge on this place. There was only silence. After a few seconds, it occurred to him to cut out the morale filters.