Immediately he was aware of a roar, like a noisy barracks. The voices merged into a mass, a mob cry, but every so often one of them would bubble to the foreground, and he would hear screaming, muttering, gasping, weeping, calls for help, delirious shouts, even a kind of deranged laughter. It was the sound of the wounded, the sound of thousands of voices calling out together from all over the Rock. They made an unearthly, inhuman sound.

He knew that some of the troopers were listening too. Their faces were round with shock. But even as they listened, in those first few minutes, the cries dwindled and faded away, one by one. If you were wounded in vacuum, with your skinsuit broken, you didn’t last long.

And still the bombardment continued, the blinding light overhead matched by the relentless shuddering of the ground. But the shells’ immense footfalls marched away into the distance, leaving them far behind.

He risked glimpses out of the trench.

From here, according to his visor displays, they were only about half a kilometer from the target monopole factory. As far as he could see only a single Xeelee emplacement stood between him and the factory; the shells had evidently taken out the rest. The emplacement looked like a small shack of a silver-gray material. It was probably Xeelee construction material, among the toughest substances known: self-renewing, self-repairing, said to be a living entity in itself. Surrounding the central shack were small pillars, each bearing rings that glowed blue.

He let himself slide back into the trench. The others watched him, six pairs of eyes, large in the shadows of their visors.

He said, “We have to try to get to the factory.”

“No,” said one trooper.

“What’s your name?”

“Bilin.” He was bulky, but just a boy, despite the massive surface-to-surface weapon he carried on his back. He was scared, and right now Pirius was the focus of his resentment. “I say we wait for the pickup.”

There was a murmur of agreement.

“We can’t stay here,” Pirius said bluntly.

“We can traverse in the trench—”

“There’s no point. We couldn’t get any closer to the factory that way. Remember the standing orders. The only pickup will be at the factory itself. We can’t go back. And we can’t stay here, in this trench. We’ve nowhere else to go but forward.” Bilin glared at him, but Pirius stared steadily back. “Can’t you see that? We’re not the first here. Look around you. Do you want to die like this?”

The boy dropped his gaze.

Pirius rooted in the grisly bank of frozen body parts beneath him. It didn’t take him long to retrieve a laser rifle. He threw it aside. He kept searching until he found a starbreaker gun; this gravity-wave handgun, essentially a design stolen from the Xeelee, was far more potent. “Search the dead,” he snapped. “If you don’t have a weapon, find one. Take anything else you need: water, med-cloaks.”