The last time the Cadian 101st had undertaken an amphibious assault was eighty years before. That had been a limited water landing on the flooded world of Thuja, part of a combined air assault that had been launched in conjunction with the Elysian 74th. But that had been on nothing like this scale.

No, to find the last time the whole regiment had been committed to a water attack the savants had to go back five hundred years to the Ettan Crusade, when they were involved in the largest battles on the swamp world of Tuqiri. Unfortunately, that attempt had been a disaster.

The Chimeras’ engines had become clogged in the fine mud, and once stuck they had been sitting ducks for the enemy forces. Regimental tomes of fine vellum reported it all in neat, painful detail. The Cadians had been trapped. Squads that tried to dismount and attack were either sucked down into the mud or unable to move.

The archives reported that it had taken twenty years for them to return the regiment to full strength. A century to wipe away the shame.

Colonel Baytov had the salient points distributed to each company for further dissemination. Each of them felt the shame of that ­ancient defeat.

‘Shame never killed a man,’ Colonel Baytov declared. ‘It will serve as a goad. I want us to outdo our forefathers in this at least.’

The truth was that the conditions, and dangers, for this landing were very different to those on Tuqiri. Here the Cadians would be crossing a wider and more treacherous body of water, and once landed it would be hard for the Cadians to be resupplied.

That meant they could not afford to be bogged down. This would be an attack that would rely on the Cadians’ famous esprit de corps. They would have to take the island within a matter of days, or risk being exposed on the beaches and headlands, and so massacred.

The difficulty of the task did not intimidate the Cadians. It excited them, and drew on their martial spirit. Ever since they had landed, the Cadians had been preparing relentlessly for this.

Throughout the planning process, Colonel Baytov and his senior aides studied all the material that Bendikt’s office had supplied to them. Command staff rehearsed every possible setback and mis­fortune. Picts were analysed. Scenarios planned. Possibilities assessed. Factuals and counterfactuals were run through calculators.

There were seven suitable moments when the tides were low and when climatic conditions were within the acceptable range of danger. Bendikt picked the first and issued the necessary orders, and within minutes the well-oiled wheels began to turn.