Cohl went at it with a will. The privates—cadets until yesterday, Pirius reminded himself—were more reluctant; they had been trained to accept death, but nothing in their upbringing had prepared them for this gruesome grave robbing.

Pirius checked over the starbreaker weapon. It was massive in his hands, reassuring. He’d been given only minimal training in it, but its operation, designed for simplicity and robustness on the battlefield, was obvious. He fired a test shot; pink light snaked out. There was no recoil. The gun anchored itself in spacetime, while sending out lased gravity waves that would rip apart anything material.

After a few minutes they were all equipped.

“All right,” said Pirius. “If you want to live, do as I say.”

He’d expected Bilin to challenge him, and he wasn’t disappointed. “Who appointed you, Service Corps?”

Pirius just stared him down. Again Bilin blinked first.

Pirius sketched in the dirt on the side of the trench, showing the Xeelee emplacement, and behind it the factory that was their target. “We have to take out the emplacement. We’ll break into two sticks. I’ll lead one. Cohl, you take the other. We’ll go right, you go left . . .” They would take it in turns, the two parties leapfrogging, alternately covering each other. This routine fieldwork was very familiar to the troopers; they knew how to do it. They started to relax.

He glanced around at their faces, glowing like red moons by the light of the continuing bombardment overhead. Now that somebody was giving them orders again they almost looked confident, he thought. But Pirius couldn’t unwind the coiled spring inside himself, not a bit.

He split the seven of them into their two groups. In her group of four, Cohl would take the twins, who he wasn’t about to separate. Pirius took the troublemaker Bilin with himself, along with the slim, intense-looking girl, the first to have tumbled into the trench, who as far as he remembered hadn’t said a word. The two teams moved subtly apart.

Pirius readied his starbreaker. “We’ve nothing to gain by waiting. We’ll go first. Give us five seconds’ cover, then follow.”

“See you on the shuttle,” Cohl said.

The troopers shifted their positions, ready to move again. One boy moved stiffly, staring down at the layer of bodies, obviously reluctant.

Pirius barked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t like treading on their faces.”

Pirius forced himself to yell, “Never mind their faces! Just do it!”

The kid responded with jerky haste.

Pirius held his hand up. “On my mark. Five, four—”

Cohl’s troop put their heads over the lip of the trench and began firing.

“Three, two.” Pirius snapped off his inertial belt and allowed himself one deep breath. “One.”

He launched his body out of the trench and into the fire-laced vacuum once more.

The quiet girl fell before she had even got out of the trench, her visor melted open, her face reduced to char. He had never even known her name. But there was no time to reflect, no time to look back, nothing to do but go on.