He stumped back to the communication trench, as Whiteshields swarmed past their fallen cohorts. Each corpse had been killed by a wound to the front. He was proud of them. It was just how a Cadian should die.

Seventeen

SEVENTEEN

By lunchtime the Whiteshields had cleared the first two lines of enemy trenches. As soon as they had done so, they worked their way sideways along the line, taking out each heavy weapon emplacement one by one, dug-out by dug-out, until the Drookians on the right could finally move up and secure their objectives.

By this time the Rakallion troops had also taken the second trench line, and they held the line against repeated counter-attacks. The fighting did not die down even as night fell.

The Whiteshields crawled through no-man’s-land, bypassing the front trenches and working their way deep into the enemy’s rear where they mounted daring attacks, panicking the traitor troops.

Later that night, the traitors launched a series of counter-attacks. They rose up without warning and came on down the slope with a terrible speed.

‘Fix bayonets,’ Major Luka was shouting along the line. ‘Ready for the counter-attack. Make sure you know who is standing next to you, and who is manning the heavy weapons. If you only have your rifle your job is to aim and fire faster than the trooper standing next to you. Grenades ready! And once they’re in range give them hell!’

Yedrin and Zweden fought together, Yedrin taking out any threats with his lasrifle as Zweden hosed the main body down. The traitors stumbled forward, clothes and hair on fire, some of them shouting curses as they fell on their faces and kept burning long after they were dead.

The two young troopers fought until their promethium canister ran dry. Yedrin found a fresh one in the trench and again the pilot light was hissing gently. All he had to do was let them get into range.

Zweden was almost ecstatic to still be alive. ‘We’ve got to live through this!’ he kept telling Yedrin. ‘We’ve got to survive.’

Yedrin nodded. To be honest, he’d never really thought he’d ever get this far. He’d heard stories from his mother and her comrades of troopers running out of powercells, so he’d scavenged more than he could carry. Even now he had a handful of them lying on a rough rock ledge just before him at hand height. A belt of frag grenades lay beside them.

Throne! If he was going to go down then he was going to go in style.