Apollonius is a good enough commander to know what’s about to happen to his precious personal legion. You push other legions around like blocks, but your own you use as a sacred scalpel, delicate and sharp and fast, to find the arteries of the enemy. His precious scalpel is about to be shoved into a woodchipper along with us peaches.
A great roar comes from the man as he tries once more at the door before abandoning the lost cause and pushing himself to face the nearest breach. “Stack on breaches. Divide by cohort. Rank by heavy shields, triarii, velites. Crows and Peerless stack in pods for melee. Coriolanus, front cohort. Vorkian, rear. You have the prisoners. I have center.”
Phalanxes form before the breaches. A bulwark of energy shields, a hedge of glinting, armor-boring spears backed by a forest of rifles.
The Obsidians drag us through the legionnaires to the rear. They’re still manhandling us back around the curve of the hall when we pass the mouth of the last breach. I see down its molten throat all the way to the Carthii leechCraft where metal figures gather behind a glowing shield. A lone berserker, released before the rest, sprints down the throat toward us. In the heat-warped air, he is a mirage of terror. Naked, heavily tattooed with the eel-green ink of the Carthii gladiatorial clans, and raving mad. Vorkian stops, aims her rifle into the breach’s throat, and fires a single, perfect shot. It takes the Obsidian between the eyes. He falls short of the breach.
Such is the heat, he catches fire.
A sacrifice to the gods of death. Then the shield at the Carthii leechCraft winks out and the metal stacked behind it begins to move. RamLads, delirious with pharmaceutical courage, armored thick as rhinoceroses, rush down the throat with an oceanic roar. Vorkian and our Obsidian handlers drag us on as the Grays open fire.
I twist to see a ramLad stumble out the mouth of a breach into the hall. Bent forward like a golem trudging into a storm, he soaks up the fire, takes one last step, and collapses in a rent heap. In his wake come berserkers. This wave of genetically enhanced killing machines crashes upon the wall of stony Gray veterans and turns to red foam. The second wave breaks from torpedo rounds that turn them to human pyres. But their momentum, added with that of the unnatural delirium in the beasts behind them and the Carthii tolerance for high casualties, creates a surge of mass that cannot be denied.
Expensive Obsidian slaveknights in cerulean armor, heavy shields, and short spears form the third wave. Trampling over the corpses of their spent brethren, they crush into the first Grays and hack at the shield line as the spears of the second line impale them. With a cry nearly inaudible amongst the explosions and shrieking, Apollonius and his heavy Gold infantry charge into the Obsidian flanks at each breach. The corridor fills with smoke and noise and death.
My eardrums ache. Bullets hiss. Shrapnel pings off Vorkian’s helmet, slashes across the bridge of my nose, and peppers the armor of the Obsidian handler behind me. Cassius ducks. Down the hall, the battle takes on the sound of hundreds of spoons caught in an industrial fan. Something slams into the wall next to my head and ricochets, taking along a chunk of my scalp before embedding itself in the eyehole of one of my Obsidian handlers. His grip slackens. Before the second Obsidian sees his fellow teeter down, I slam my shoulder into the warrior. Off balance, he stumbles into the smoke.
I crouch, coughing, eyes burning. I can’t see Cassius. I can’t see anything but indistinct shapes and flashes through thick smoke. I go lower to find clear air for my lungs. A hand grazes my head and, finding no hair to grab, slides off. The dilation collar tightens. I can’t breathe. Blood sluices down my neck as the collar cuts into my skin. An Obsidian body lies on the ground nearby. I crawl to it and grope behind my back for his boot knife. I find the blade at the price of a few cut fingers. Fumbling, choking, I saw at the dilation bindings on my wrists until they come apart. My hands are free. Wheezing, I cut through my collar and suck down air.
Nauseated, vision swimming, I stay as low as I can in the smoke and search for Cassius. I see two figures staggering in an embrace, like lovers. One is Cassius. The other Vorkian. He’s headbutting her repeatedly. Unfortunately for him, she wears a helmet, and all Cassius does is knock himself out. He falls down into the smoke, but he bought us enough time. Vorkian reaches for the dilation-collar controller on the ground and I lunge up through the smoke to bury the Obsidian knife under her left armpit. I slam her against the wall and kick the controller away. I grab at her waist and come away with Bad Lass and Cassius’s razor before she disappears in the smoke and press of bodies.
I duck down as high-caliber rounds buzz overhead. Bodies fall and tangle and climb and hack. I find Cassius on the ground and cut off his bindings. His collar tightened and nearly nipped an artery. I slap his face until his eyes open. He hacks for air. Blood leaks from his ears.
My hearing is shot. Everything is muffled, chaotic. Sounds come as if through water. I push his razor into his hand and signal him to stay low and follow me away from the breaches toward the closed bulkhead at the rear of Apollonius’s column. Crouching, razors in hand, we set off into the smoke.
Men have disintegrated into singular actions. An arm holding a razor rises and falls. A rifle flares. A helmet caves in from a powered boot. From the smoke, a Gold appears and points his pulseFist at me. Before he can fire, another man stumbles back into him. Then an Obsidian war-spear comes through his neck. I lunge forward and rob the dying Gold of his aegis.
I take point, aegis up, razor straight and on its rim, Cassius stacked behind me. We push toward the bulkhead like hoplites. Identity is lost amongst the chaos, the smoke, the screams. Two Grays fire at us. I take the slugs on the aegis. The Grays shift their aim toward my unprotected feet. Cassius lunges over my shoulder with his razor. He spears the first Gray through the eye socket and ducks back behind the shield. I take the second between the clavicle and neck with Bad Lass then bowl him over with the shield. We push through the smoke, stabbing out from the cover of the aegis as we go until we’re stopped by the bulkhead at the rear of the Rath formation. It’s still sealed. Terrified men already hack at it with their weapons. More crush in behind us, pinning us to the bulkhead. Still more on their way, tripping, scrambling, desperate to escape the Carthii killers. My legs give out and I swoon in the press. I lose the aegis and my hands are so slippery with blood I almost drop Bad Lass. Cassius throws his shoulders into men until he’s able to pull me back up and shield me with his body.
Down the hall comes a muffled cheer. “Carthii! Carthii!”
They must have secured the breaches. According to Carthii doctrine, that means one thing: the Golds will be coming. Over the crush of dented helmets and bloody Grays I see the fear in Cassius’s eyes. Then the pressure releases forward as the bulkhead opens.
Pushed by the mass of men behind us, we spill forward. I fall. Metal heels stampede over my back. Something massive stomps toward me from the opposite direction. I look up to see the clawed feet of a starShell. The weight is swept off my back. A half dozen Grays slide down the left wall, their bones broken like kindling by the sweep of the starShell’s arm.
The starShell towers over me. It stands alone in the corridor, its canopy and shoulders crudely reduced to fit the tight confines. Its clawed metal foot stomps down to my right, then my left, until it straddles Cassius and me like a beast protecting its cubs.