“Yes, sir!” Schultz said. He looked around the havoc within the courtyard a bit blankly, then seemed to be struck by an idea. He muttered something to the stone and hurled it up to fall onto the flat stone roof of the barn. A few seconds later, there was a loud hissing sound, and brilliant blue-white light blazed from the flare.

“Fine,” Fidelias said. “Get a detail to the bottom of that ramp.”

“Aye, First Spear,” Schultz said, and began bawling assignments to his men.

Fidelias watched it happen and shook his head. “Never rains but it pours.”

Between the mopping-up combat in the courtyard, the ongoing trumpet cries to attack, and the sound of the bloody flare all but burning a hole into the flat stone roof of the barn, Fidelias didn’t hear the approaching windstream until Princeps Octavian had all but slammed into him. Flying backward and upside down, Octavian was hauling Kitai through the air, her back against his chest as he came in to land in the courtyard. His heels struck first, digging a furrow in the hard soil, then slipped out from beneath him. He slid across the ground on his back until he fetched up against the inner side of the steadholt’s wall with a grunt.

“Marcus!” Octavian bellowed. “She’s hurt! Get a medico over here, now!” He thrashed his way a bit awkwardly to his feet, lowering Kitai gently to the ground as he went. He spun and threw his right arm up, dragging with it a sheet of earth and stone more than a foot thick, raising it up into a shielding dome just as a flash of green-white lighting ripped out of the mists. It struck the improvised wall and shattered it, but when the debris settled, Octavian remained standing over the wounded Marat woman. “Bloody crows, Marcus!” he bellowed. “I’m a little busy here!”

Marcus kicked a team of singulares and a Prime Cohort medico to rush over to Kitai. As soon as Octavian saw that, he took two steps and leapt off the ground and into flight, vanishing into the mists. A second windstream, far larger and more violent, swept over the courtyard, clearly in pursuit.

“Marcus!” bellowed Araris in an iron voice from within the barn. “I need more men here!”

“First Spear, First Spear!” said a young legionare frantically. He made a series of frantic gestures.

“Bloody crows, boy, I’m standing right here!” Marcus snapped. “Tell me!”

“Enemy infantry,” the boy panted. “At least thirty thousand, here in two minutes. Enemy airborne troops have been delayed by the Knights Pisces, and will arrive at the same time, approximately seven thousand. Sir, what do we do?”

Two minutes?

Two minutes?

Nearly forty thousand vord were inbound—and his own troops were scattered all over the terrain, out of sight of each other in the fog. They would be swallowed whole in detail.

Bloody crows, what had Octavian gotten him into?