Las-shots began to hammer into the wagons near Milo. They blew out sections on the wooden sideboarding, and Baffels and Milo were showered with splinters.
The men dropped into cover, spread out through the wagon yard. Curt assessments as to the angle and position of the shooters flicked back and forth through the micro-bead link. Venar fired a few bursts of cannon under the wagon he was sheltering behind, and Milo heard shots ping and ricochet off the ironwork of the bogeys.
The enemy fire increased.
Milo moved them forward. He saw Filain scoot out from between wagons and then duck back into cover as las-fire scooped up the gravel and stone around him. One shot severed a piece of track and the metal section broke with an almost musical chime.
Domor and Neskon also tried to move forward. They skirted back a few trucks and came out around a high-sided freight wagon. Las-shots spanged off the thin metal sides of the wagon. Neskon dropped, but Domor dragged him up and they fell into cover along the next truck line. Neskon wasn’t hit. He had simply stumbled.
Milo and Baffels, with Rhys and Tokar just behind them, were pinned. Milo tried to creep around the end of the nearest wagon, but more firing erupted and he hit the ground, winded.
“You’re hit!” he heard Baffels call.
“No, I’m fine—” Milo said.
“You’re fething hit!” Baffels repeated.
Milo reached around and felt a wet hole in the left shoulder of his tunic. It was sore, but there was no real pain. He had been hit. He hadn’t even felt it.
Milo got to his feet and then paused, lowering himself again and carefully looking out under the wagons. When he had dropped, he’d glimpsed something that his mind was only just identifying.
Three trains away, under the trucks, he could see feet. Armoured, heavy booted feet in distinctive ochre armour.
He waved the others down to look.
A dozen, maybe more.
Zoicans.
The punishing fire that had pinned them slowed. The Zoicans were evidently moving too, pushing in and around the trucks just as the Ghosts were, but from the other side.
Milo counted off the men and sent them wide, using the concealment of the trucks. Few in the Imperial Guard moved as stealthily as the Tanith.
There was a burst of cannon fire twenty metres south of Milo. Then two more, a few answering las-shots. Venar had engaged.
More firing, brief and fierce, came from the next lane of wagons. Over the link, he heard Wheln curse, then laugh.
Baffels crawled ahead of Milo, down the length of a flatbed wagon. The Ghosts were all grey with gravel dust now, and their hands and knees were thick with oil.
Milo heard a dull sound from the body of the truck.
He yelled a warning and swung upwards as the Zoican storm-trooper appeared over the lip of the wagonbed and fired down. Baffels had rolled instinctively in under the side of the truck and slammed against the wheels and the sleepers as the Zoican’s fire exploded the grit where he had been crawling.
Milo fired a burst upwards, punching three las-rounds through the aluminium siding of the wagon and the Zoican behind. The ochre-armoured figure convulsed and toppled clumsily out of the wagon. He landed next to the cowering Baffels, who automatically turned and shot the corpse through the head, point-blank.
Neskon, Rhys and Tokar were firing out between wagons, scoping for Zoicans just the other side of the track. Zoican las-fire and hard rounds came back between and under the wagons and forced Tokar to scramble on his arse back behind a slumped fuel drum. Neskon used the heavy bogey assembly of a wagon as cover and shuddered as persistent fire whipped under the cart-body and slammed into the huge iron wheels against his back.
Rhys rose, a las-round just missing his head, and lobbed a grenade over the wagon so that it fell neatly on the Zoican side of the rolling stock and vaporised them. A cracked Zoican helmet, split across the sneering, emotionless sculpture of the face, tumbled through the air and bounced near to his feet. He thought about taking it as a trophy until he realised there was the best part of a head left in it.
Milo heard Wheln cry out. The man was down. He could hear him moaning just a few paces away on the other side of the wagon.
“My leg… my leg…”
“Shut up!” Milo yelled, then dove over the hook-lock between wagons to roll clear on the other side of the track. Wheln was sprawled in the open between siding tracks, his left leg below the knee a ruin of blood, bone and tattered cloth.
Milo ran low to him, grabbed him under the arms and began to drag him into cover. Shots stitched the gravel around them. Two Zoicans appeared on the top of the next wagon over and another two edged out from between trucks. A las-shot cracked past Milo’s nose, and then two more ripped through the loose folds of his camo-cape.
There was a bark of cannon fire, and the two Zoicans on the truck top came apart and fell. The others dropped back into cover. Milo got Wheln into the shelter of the back end of the wagon, pulling him in between the tracks. There was a group of Zoicans at the other end of the same truck, firing around it. Some fired under, but the shots were deflected by the axles. Milo looked frantically to each side for help. He saw Baffels in position behind a cart on the adjacent train, the one Milo had just scrambled from to reach Wheln. Baffels was too pinned with fire to make a shot.
Milo looked up, trying to ignore Wheln’s moaning, and studied the hook-damp that linked the wagon they were using as cover to the one behind them. It took him a few moments to figure out how to disengage it, his hands slipping on the greased iron.
When it was free, Milo hooked a grenade over a brake cable and pulled the pin. Then he yanked Wheln out from behind the truck and they fell down a slope the other side, Wheln shrieking with pain.
The grenade detonated and the force cannoned the freed truck, all eighteen tonnes of it, down the trackway, crushing the Zoicans sheltering at the far end between it and the next wagon on the rail. The entire length of rolling stock slammed and rattled into itself.
Rhys, Neskon and Baffels crossed over to cover Milo as the boy struggled to tie off Wheln’s ruined limb and stop him bleeding out.
Wheln wouldn’t stop screaming. Milo wanted to call for a medic, but he knew the vox-lines were useless and besides, Wheln had smashed the vox-caster when he fell. That was even supposing there was a medic anywhere near.
Baffels led Venar and the others and proceeded to clear the rest of the yard. A few brief exchanges with retreating Zoicans left more ochre bodies lying on or between the rails.
Milo could hear something else now, over the shooting and Wheln’s shrieking and the constant thunder of the main battle.
Voices. Chanting voices, low and slick and evil.
The ammo-can clacked dry and the autocannon was useless. Corbec threw it aside and pulled his lasrifle off his shoulder, opening up again. His unit was right at the gate now, embroiled in an entirely structureless fight with the main force of the Zoican shock-troops. The fight blasted through the ruined outbuildings of the gatehouse complex and across the rubble-thick ground in the gate-mouth itself.
There were Zoicans everywhere.
Corbec had ceased to be a commander. There was nothing to command. He was simply a man fighting with every iota of strength and stamina left in him. He fought to stay alive and to kill the ochre shapes that drove at him from all sides.
It was the same for all the Ghosts in that engagement. The only thing that slowed the tide of Zoican invasion was the width of the blasted gate. In an open field, the forty or so Ghosts with Corbec would have been overrun long since.
Corbec was bleeding from a dozen light wounds. Those enemies he didn’t kill outright with las-fire he demolished with blows from his rifle-stock and stabs of his bayonet.
Dremmond was suddenly alongside him, swathing the enemy in a wide cone of flames. The flamer pack on his back stuttered. Corbec knew that sound. The tanks were almost dry.
He yelled at Dremmond to wash the gates. What little flame they had left could best be used burning the entrance out.
Dremmond swung around, his spurting fire twisting like a whip. A dozen Zoicans crumpled, armour burning and melting off them. Some became torches that stumbled a few paces before they fell.
Dremmond bought Corbec a moment to think.
Corbec crossed, firing still, towards the wound-peppered wall of an outbuilding, glad he had jammed all the energy clips he could find into his jacket pockets that dawn.
Genx was in cover by the wall. By now the pain was beginning to trickle through and Genx was pale with trauma. Without his hand, he couldn’t handle a lasrifle, although there were several fallen nearby, dropped by dead Zoicans and Tanith alike.