Eastern Osmea, 8 hours into the offensive.


Major Aster leaned over the operator's shoulder, watching the scanning line circle the radar display. "Does anyone respond to query?" the major asked.

"Major, sir." the man said, with weary exasperation in his voice, "I register responses. But it's all so cluttered that they intermingle. I can barely sort targets with this interference."

Aster told the man to keep on trying. He was beginning to feel like a commissar in his struggle to maintain a positive collective outlook in the control staff. He had begun the morning by shouting when things went wrong, but he had soon shouted himself out. There were so many unanticipated problems that he quickly realised he was only making the work harder. Now he simply did what he could to keep the entire air-defense sector from collapsing into anarchy. He turned away from the kid at the console. He knew the lad was trying, that he sincerely wanted to do what was right. The officers manning scopes and target allocation systems were doing no better. The traitor aircraft were using the same air corridor in sector as those of the Loyalists, and the new IFF transponders which were supposed to distinguish between the two were prone to breaking. It was a hopeless mess. Out on the ground, the batteries were operating mostly by visual identification.

Aster had no doubt that aircraft were being knocked out of the sky. He had over a dozen reported kills. But he was less certain about who was being shot down.

"Sir." a vox operator called to him from his many banks of communication devices. "The commander of Number Five Battery wishes to report."

"Take his report, then."

"He wishes to report to you personally, Sir." Aster stepped over to the communications area and took the receiver from the specialist. "Watcher-four command. Go ahead."

"This is Watcher-four-Five. I have two systems down. Enemy air-to-surface missiles, I think. We got the bastard, though."

"All right,"

Aster said, although he was far from happy with the news. What could you do, order your subordinates to go back and start from the beginning and not lose the systems next time?

"How are you receiving your encoded instructions?"

There was a momentary silence on the other end. "This is Watcher-four-Five," the voice returned. "I haven't received any for the last hour." Aster felt his self-control drain away.

"Damn it, man! this isn't an exercise. We've been sending constantly. Check your battery consoles."

"Checking it now."

"And next time don't wait until you have to call me and tell me you've lost the rest of your battery."

"Understood." But the voice shook. "Listen, Sir… we're running low on missiles."

"You can't possibly have fired everything on your transporters."

"Maj—I mean, Watcher-Four-Command, I haven't seen the trucks all day. The Munitorum attache became separated from the unit. You wouldn't believe what the roads are like out here."

"You find those damned trucks. If you have to walk to Caria. Better yet—you walk to the front! Send somebody else to the rear. What good are you without missiles? You ought to be court-martialed."

"Respectfully, Sir, you don't know what it's like out here."


Captain Cyril finally heard from the missing combat reconnaissance patrol. They had run into enemy opposition and had slipped off further to the south of the city of Revell. On Cyril's map, the patrol had moved outside of the unit's assigned boundary. But the good news was that they had seized a crossing site on canal seventeen.

Cyril had gotten his battlegroup on the move again, and the minefield and the lieutenant's sacrifice lay several kilometers to the rear. Cyril felt as though he would need to perform very well to make up for his earlier lapse. He wondered what his other officers thought of him now.

He tried to reach Regimental HQ on the vox, and, when that failed, he attempted to reach the advance guard that was somewhere on his trail. He needed someone in a position of authority to make a decision on further violation of the unit boundary, he didn't want his head to be the one taking a bolter round for this.

But his vanguard's route led through low ground now, and all he could hear was static and faint strains of strange music. He was not sure whether his vox was being jammed or if the nets had simply gotten out of control. Earlier, some voices had come up on his internal net, having a conversation. Cyril desperately wanted to report the seizure of the crossing site. He suspected that, under the circumstances, HQ would order him to hurry to the support of the tiny patrol, despite the boundary problem.

The lieutenant who led the patrol reported that they had come up on an east-west underpass, wide enough for tanks, where the elevated canal passed over a supply road. The tunnel had been guarded only by a few hooded cultists with lasguns, and the patrol surprised them. Now the lieutenant was crying out for support. Cyril tried both stations again. Nothing.

He halted his column, then called for his senior artillery officer and the Navy air officer who had been a liason for the vanguard to meet him by the air officer's easily recognizable vehicle, a modified Chimera in Imperial Navy standard paint. The forward air controller was positioned closely behind Cyril, but the artilleryman was to the rear, leading the guns but prepared to come up to join the commander as soon as they were deployed.

Cyril stood in the slow rain, waving for the artillery captain to hurry. "Can either of you talk with your superiors?" The artillery captain shrugged.

"I'm monitoring all right. I haven't tried to talk."

"I have a link back to Regimental HQ and navy central command," Captain Sylvia, the air force officer, stated, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Listen," Cyril said, "I want both of you to raise any stations you can. Then give my call sign and tell them my direct links aren't working. Listen carefully."

Cyril unfolded his map, trying to protect it as much as possible against the fine drizzle that refused to come to an end.

"We're changing our route of advance. We're going further south. To right there. The combat reconnaissance patrol has a crossing, but they won't be able to hold it for five minutes once they get hit."

The artillery captain, Lichmann, looked at Cyril as though the commander was crazy. "That's out of our sector. I won't be able to call up any fire support."

"That's what your battery's for. Look, our mission is to find a passage to the west. We've gotten this far, and it seems as if the enemy's plan has come apart. But the hardest part is getting across that damned canal. And now we have a crossing. I'm not going to pass it up just because it's a few kilometers out of sector. But you have to call back and tell higher what we're doing."

"What you're doing," the artilleryman said. "You have no authorization to cross a sector boundary. That site may even be one of the targets scheduled in our neighbor's fire plan."

Cyril wanted to shake the artilleryman, who had articulated Cyril's own doubts and fears. He realized that no one would share this responsibility with him. But he thought again of his earlier failure to act when confronted with the minefield, and of the lieutenant who had been so much braver and clearer-thinking than his commander. Now there was another lieutenant waiting for help who had managed to find a way across the canal.

Cyril looked at the artilleryman in disgust, seeing himself and a hundred other officers he knew.

"Correct," Cyril said. "It's on my shoulders. Now let's get moving."

Time pressed harder on Cyril's mind than it ever had before. The patrol commander reported incoming artillery on his position. Cyril realized that he might well get away with his decision as long as he proved successful in holding onto the crossing site. After all, that conformed to the essential mission. But if he had taken the wrong decision, and if the crossing site was lost and he had no results, he would answer to the commissars. He lost radio contact with the patrol. Cyril spurred his element on as fast as it could go. He felt oddly lucky now that he had lost his engineers, since their big lumbering vehicles would never have been able to keep up with the increased speed of the march column. When one of his vehicles broke down, he left it for the advance guard to collect. The Hammerheads were the slowest in the column, gripping the wet road with their whirring tracks as their engines strained to keep up with the added weight of the conqueror cannon and its ammo. At a crossroads, Cyril sensed that the enemy had lost control of the battle now, and that his own location was not known to them. He wondered if, perhaps, his group had already penetrated the enemy's main defenses. It was impossible to tell. Unlike the exercises to which Cyril was accustomed, where you knew generally how it was all laid out and usually received tip-off information so the unit would look good, real war seemed ridiculously confusing. Cyril had expected battle to have more formality to it, for combat to be more structured and to make better sense.

When an enemy heavy mortar cannon battery appeared under drooping camouflage nets at the edge of an orchard, Cyril ordered his column to shoot it up from the march without deploying. He did not want to get bogged down. It was critical to maintain a single focus, and to act with speed.

The column crested a low hill, and Cyril saw the monumental line of the canal running north and south. He could not understand why the low ground had not been inundated. In a marvelous piece of engineering, the canal passed smoothly over a local farm trail, built up like a dark age fortress wall with a great open gate. Under the stout concrete tunnel, a single Chimerax covered the near bank. While the addition of the quad stubbers to the turret seemed like overkill at the time, Cyril was now glad he had several of these in his column. Cyril could not understand why the enemy had not blown the overpass immediately.

He hastily got on his radio and ordered the artillery to deploy in the open hollow off to the left on the near bank. One platoon of PDF shock troops would secure the near side of the crossing and protect the guns. Everyone else was to follow Cyril to the far side of the canal. As he finished his transmissions the enemy artillery came again. The rounds exploded along the ridge on the far bank that paralleled the canal. The patrol's vehicles had been well-concealed, and it appeared as though the enemy was simply delivering area fires, attempting to flush the loyalist scouts into the open. A stout, walled farm complex, just to the right of the road as it wove up onto the crest of the ridge, provided an obvious focus for the efforts of both sides.

Cyril pulled his vehicle out of the line and personally took the lead. He raced down into the low ground, skidding to a stop beside the guardian vehicle at the mouth of the tunnel. In the watery field beside the road, the bodies of four enemy cultists had been laid in a row. They were little more than armed civilians, and would have looked harmless if it wasn't for their sinister looking hoods and expressions. Their faces and bodies seemed inhuman, and their expressions were frozen into an intense rage, as if they were angry they couldn't kill more.

A senior sergeant greeted Cyril, wincing at the still-distant artillery blasts. "Glad to see you, Sir!" he shouted, "the lieutenant's up in those farm buildings."

Cyril nodded and ran back into his vehicle.

"Move out," he ordered the driver. "Up the road. To the farmyard." On the far side of the tunnel, a blasted enemy Chimerax lay like an animal carcass where it had been taken by surprise. Cyril spit into his vox.

"Hammerhead platoon to the treeline straddling the crest. Second infantry platoon, north of the road. Third platoon, cover the south side. Establish a hasty defense. Lascannon platoon, disperse to cover the entire perimeter. All other vehicles shelter behind the farm buildings. Quickly."

Through the random eruptions of incoming enemy artillery, Cyril could now see Chimera's drawn up on a small plateau beside the farmyard walls. One had tucked in behind a fertiliser mound, and the other had found a sunken position between two trees.

Cyril told his driver to halt fifty meters to the rear of the vehicles, in a low section of the road. As he dismounted a soldier waved him into the cluster of buildings. Cyril ran, carrying his soggy map and his las-pistol. He could feel the power of the artillery rounds as the enemy gunners reached toward the canal itself. Inside the neat little courtyard, a private lowered his weapon at Cyril, then suddenly pulled it away in fear.

"In here, Sir. Up the stairs." Cyril vaulted through the doorway. The hallway of the house was littered with glass and smashed potted plants, the aftermath of the nearby artillery strikes. He jumped the stairs two at a time. A lieutenant knelt low behind a broken-out window on a landing just below the second floor. He gazed through a pair of binoculars, vox operator at his side with the antenna angled out through the window frame. He looked around suddenly.

"Sir, you're here!" The boy's voice sounded as though he had met the emperor himself.

Loaded with complex emotions and thoughts, Cyril sensed that his arrival, in the lieutenant's mind, had meant salvation, an end to all troubles. Yet Cyril could only feel how little help he had brought to the scene. Now they would need to hold out until the rest of the regiment arrived. If they were coming.

"Look," the lieutenant said. "You can see them across the valley, by those woods. Check the lone house. They're getting ready to come at us."

He held the binoculars out to Cyril. One quick look. Hammerheads, bastardized and adorned with unfamiliar markings. The Barn itself had some soldiers milling about, stepping over several trails of blood which led into the barn. Crazed civilians seemed to be amassing as well, some carrying spikes or simply looted equipment. Most had some sort of body part, ears, fingers, anything strung around them like decrepit trophies. Approximately thirty-five hundred meters out.

The artillery came back, shaking the farmhouse.

"They spotted us maybe twenty minutes ago," the lieutenant shouted. "They came screaming up the road like lunatics. We had to open up to keep them away from the tunnel. A few minutes after that, the artillery started."

Cyril looked at the baby-faced lieutenant. He touched the boy on the shoulder.

"Good work. Good work, Lieutenant. Now let me see what I can do about those tanks." The concussion of a nearby artillery blast almost knocked him off his feet. Someone screamed.

"In the barn," the lieutenant said. "The civilians. The family. They were still here, hiding. I didn't know what to do." It had never really come home to Cyril before that this could happen. He thought for a long moment.

"They can take care of themselves," Cyril said, turning away to organize his battle. Cyril called the artillery battery commander, ordering him to either come up and act as a forward observer the way he was supposed to, or send someone else. He was prepared for another argument, but the artillery officer's attitude had undergone a distinct change. He was excited now, too. He had contacted HQ, reporting that Cyril's battlegroup had reached the crossing site. The Major General of artillery had personally informed the Regimental commander. He had approved Cyril's decision, and the advance guard from Cyril's regiment was on the way.

"How far back?" Cyril asked.

"Didn't say."

"Find out. We have enemy tanks coming for a visit. They want us out of here."

He passed the grid where the enemy tanks were forming up. Then he hastened to the navy liason officer's control vehicle. The hatches were sealed, and Cyril had to bang on the metal with the stock of his lasgun. Sylvia, the forward air controller, opened the hatch one-handed, holding an open rations tin in the other.

"Taking a break," she said between mouthfuls. Cyril almost gave up. At the same time he realized, jealously, that he had eaten nothing since the previous night. But there would be time, he consoled himself. Later. If they were still alive.

"Have you informed your control post of our situation?" Cyril demanded. The air force officer nodded, taking another bite. "Listen," Cyril said, "we're going to need air support. If you want to be alive at sundown, you'd better get some Avengers or Thunderbolts in here. The valley just beyond the ridge is filled with enemy forces." Sylvia finished chewing and swallowed.

"I'll see what I can do. But if they can't give me something that's going up now, it won't help."

"Try. And get out where you can see what's going on. Up there by the apple trees. Anywhere."

Cyril jumped back down off the vehicle, splashing in the mud. His uniform had been soaking wet since before dawn, but the discomfort had disappeared in his current excitement. He raced for the tank platoon, instinctively running low, even though the enemy artillery had lifted for the moment. The tank platoon had a problem. The platoon commander could not find any suitable firing positions along the ridgeline, any firing positions were too open.

"All right," Cyril said. "I have a better idea. Pull back onto that low hill over there, just north of the road we took to come up here. There. See it? Hide where you can watch the approaches to the tunnel. Counterattack any enemy armor that gets through. Don't wait for orders. Just hit them. We'll try to hold around the farm buildings. Do your best."

The lieutenant saluted and immediately began barking orders to his crew. The Hammerheads belched into readiness. Cyril hurried back toward his own vehicle. But before he was halfway, the sounds of combat came back, changed. His APCs and support vehicles were engaging. The enemy was on the way. Cyril looked back across the canal. Still no sign of movement. Cyril cursed the artillery officer, wondering what was keeping him. He needed someone to call shots. Otherwise, they would be overrun before the guns did any good. His tank platoon rolled powerfully down a small depression and veered toward their new position. Cyril felt confident that they would do their job. The lieutenant had had a crisp professionalism about him. One of the anti tank APCs had profiled too high on the ridgeline. Now it caught a round in the bow and lifted over on its back, throwing scraps of metal upward and outward in a fountain. Cyril felt a sting on his shoulder, as though he had been bitten by an oversized insect. He almost tripped but managed to keep running. The nearest platoon of riflemen had dismounted,- but their officer had not properly positioned them. They were simply lying in a close line with their lasguns, heavy stubber, and lascannon team, protected only by the small rises and falls of the ground. Cyril shouted at the officer in charge.

"Are you crazy? Get these men into the buildings. It's too late to do anything else now. Hurry." The lieutenant stared at him as though he understood nothing at all. Suddenly, Cyril went cold inside at the thought of what the situation was probably like in the platoon that had lost its lieutenant in the minefield. He felt overwhelmed by the need to do everything himself. He ignored the lieutenant now, grabbing the first soldier he could reach, a stubber operator. "You. Get inside the buildings. Take your pals. Fight from there."

Cyril ran along the line. Where the lieutenant had positioned the men, they would have been not only hopelessly vulnerable, but useless. They had no vision. Cyril could not believe he had failed so thoroughly to train his officers and soldiers. He had complied with every redundant imperial regulation, and his training sessions usually had gone well, with the company receiving mostly A ratings. Now it all seemed meaningless, as though they had all merely been going through the motions, without really learning. And now it was too late. They would have to fight in the state in which war had found them.

"All of you. Get up," he shouted, rasping to be heard above the chaotic battle noise. One of the machine gunners had opened fire, and firing began to spread along the line, although some soldiers simply lay still on the ground. "Stop it! Stop! They're still out of range." Even on his feet, Cyril could not see the enemy from the position of the firing soldiers. "Get into the buildings and get ready to fight. This isn't a country outing. Stop your firing." Then he saw the Valkyries. Approaching from the wrong side. "Come on! "he shouted, voice already cracking. He ran for the cover of the buildings, with the riflemen all around him. Behind them, a Chimerax positioned in the orchard sent off a volley of autocannon shots. "Where's the air defense team?" Cyril wondered out loud. The Valjyries throbbed over the trees, ugly, bulbous creatures with dark weaponry on their mounts and those strange symbols on the fuselages. The markings confused Cyril, who had no idea what they represented. He stopped to fire his lasgun at the aircraft, and a few others fired as well. The aircraft, four of them, screamed overhead without firing. Cyril felt relief at their passing. But a moment later, he heard the roar of their guns.

The artillery, Cyril remembered. The battery was sitting out in the open. Cyril watched helplessly as the enemy attack craft banked playfully above the landscape, teasing the desperate gunners on the ground, destroying the self-propelled pieces one after the other. Why didn't the air defense troops fire? Cyril wondered.

In less than a minute, the Valkyries peeled off to the south, leaving the wrecked battery in a veil of smoke pierced now and then by the flash of secondary explosions. Cyril made a hurried stop at his own command chimera. It had moved nearer to the crest, and its stubber fired into the distance. He leaned into the turret, grabbing the gunner by the sleeve, shouting to be heard.

"Back into the courtyard. Get behind the walls. I need the radios." The gunner stared up at him. "Captain. You're bleeding." Cyril followed the gunner's eyes down to his shoulder, then over his chest and sleeve. Much of the uniform was shockingly dark, much darker than the rain alone could have made it. At the sight, Cyril felt a momentary faintness.

"Hurry up," he said, almost gagging. "Get into the courtyard." But he suddenly felt weaker, as if his realising that he had been wounded had unleashed the wound's effect. He remembered the little sting. It seemed impossible that it could have done this. He was not even aware of any pain. He trotted beside his vehicle, guiding it through the gates as the direct-fire battle increased in intensity. But the forward air-control vehicle had blocked the courtyard, taking up more than its share of the space. Cyril ran to make the air force officer move out of the way just as the artillery came thumping back.

The barn roof collapsed. The concussion of the blast knocked several of the men in the courtyard to the ground. One soldier had blood draining from his ears, and Cyril felt deafened. But he still had enough hearing to recognize the sound of a tank gun closer than expected. In the misery of the courtyard, soldiers screamed for aid and choked on the dust of the smashed barn. Then the rain abruptly increased in intensity, as if the enemy controlled that, too.

"Everybody into the buildings," Cyril shouted. "Don't just stand around." But the soldiers were hesitant. After watching the roof of the barn cave in, Cyril could hardly blame them. Nonetheless, the remaining buildings provided better protection than the open courtyard. And it was impossible for all of the men to fight effectively from the courtyard. "Move, you idiots!" But they were already scrambling to obey him. It was only that they had been stunned into a slowed reaction by the confusion that seemed to worsen with every minute. Now those who didn't hear Cyril simply followed their peers. The sounds of moving tanks crowded in with the noises of missile back-blasts and automatic weapons. Cyril bounded back into the house and up the stairs, crunching glass underfoot. The lieutenant remained at his post. But he didn't need his binoculars anymore.

"Those tanks," he told Cyril, "at least a company. Working up along the treelines. We got two of them." A round smashed into the wall of the house, shaking it to its foundation. But the building was old and strong, built of masonry. The lieutenant noticed Cyril's bloody tunic. Cyril held up his hand.

"No real damage done," he said, hoping he was correct. He couldn't understand where the pain was hiding. The arm still worked, if stiffly.

"One of the officers went up on the roof with a radio," the lieutenant said. "She looked like she was from the navy."

"Where is she?"

"On the roof. There's an attic stairway back there. The roof has dormer windows." The enemy tanks had closed to within a thousand meters. Cyril watched them for a moment, catching a glimpse of dark metal now and then through the local smokescreens the enemy vehicles laid down with their smoke grenades. Their movement struck him as very clever, very disciplined, but slow. They seemed to move in cautious bounds. Cyril watched one of his own Lascannon rounds stream toward the enemy tanks, but going right between two of them, plunging into a meadow. He turned away in disgust.

Cyril followed the directions toward the attic. He felt unusually light, almost as though he were floating, yet it was a hard climb going up the narrow stairs. He began to feel as though his torso could fly but his feet were weighted down with irons. When he reached the attic, he found it cluttered with forgotten property, stinking with mildew. The trash of generations troubled his course, barring his feet with old framed pictures and antique household machinery, all strewn with ragged fabric. The roof windows had been shattered. Cyril leaned out through the nearest, which opened toward the canal. Sylvia lay sprawled on her belly on the roof tiles, talking into a radio set, with a satchel of gear open beside her. Cyril could not understand a single word the air force officer said. The level of noise was incredible, maddening. It seemed to give the air a tangible thickness, as though you could stir it with your hand. Cyril tugged at Sylvia's leg. The air force officer held up a finger. Wait. She rolled onto her back, scanning the gray sky. Cyril followed Sylvia's line of sight but could see nothing. Nonetheless, Sylvia reached into her satchel, retrieving a flare pistol and two explosive canisters of colored smoke. She spoke once into her voxcaster, then rose to her knees on the slick tile, just high enough to peer over the roofbeam. With a sure motion, Sylvia threw a smoke canister to the right, then quickly hurled another to the left, marking the line of friendly troops. She fumbled briefly at the flare pistol, then fired two green flares in succession in the direction of the enemy. Sylvia threw her satchel at Cyril, knocking him back into the attic. The air force officer followed the bag, quick as a cat, dragging her radio after her. Without a look at Cyril, Sylvia flattened onto the floor, hands over her ears. Cyril swiftly imitated her. A powerful rush of prometheum engines seemed to pass right through the room, shaking the floor even more powerfully than had the artillery blasts. The passage was closely followed by small blasts, then by enormous booms that seemed to tear several seconds out of their lives. The air itself drew tighter.

"Marauders!" Sylvia shouted. "Amazing machines, eh?"

"Good work," Cyril shouted back.

"Count on the navy." Sylvia told him. "We serve the Emperor and all that."

"How did you get the sorties?"

Sylvia looked at him in honest surprise.

"We've got top priority. I've got more on the way." Sylvia methodically began to gather her spilled tools, checking her voxcaster, a technician of the sky. In her own little world of airplanes, Sylvia had not noticed—or, at any rate, had said nothing about—Cyril's wound. But Cyril felt changes coming over his body now. He was losing strength fast. He needed to have a look at the wound, yet he was afraid that the sight of his damaged flesh, of his own blood on his own skin, might paralyze him. And he was determined to hang on, no matter what happened. Cyril slowly raised himself and worked his way back down the stairs to the lieutenant's observation post.

The lieutenant's torso lay smashed against a wall, head and limbs twisted out of any skeletal sense, eyes bulging. From behind another wall, a machine gun fired. Cyril peered out of the battered window frame. The valley had filled with black smoke. Then he saw the first enemy tank in close. The Marauders had missed at least a platoon. Four enemy tanks came over the crest, one after another. One tank trailed fire off its deck, resembling a flaming beast. They drove beside the farm complex, leaving Cyril's field of vision. He hurried back down the stairs to the accompaniment of blasts and rapid fires. Men shouted in a contest of complaints and commands. From the doorway, the farmyard appeared chaotic. Cyril watched as his own vehicle attempted to pull off, only to explode in the entrance gateway. The heat of the blast reached into the foyer of the house, rinsing Cyril with a wave of unnatural warmth.

Above the billows of smoke, he saw two more aircraft appear. But these were from his side, Vendetta gunships, loaded with weaponry. They flew an orientation pass. Cyril wanted to get into the fight, to ensure that his tank platoon had moved to intercept the enemy tanks that had broken through. But flames blocked the gateway.

He searched hurriedly through the ground floor of the house, hunting for a side door. Nothing in the building seemed to be left whole. In the kitchen, he found two soldiers casually sitting against a cupboard, as though they were on an authorized rest period. "Come with me," Cyril shouted, heading for the open space where a door had been ripped from its hinges.

Outside, the black smoke covered the landscape between the farm buildings and the original positions of the enemy tanks. The amount of firing that continued seemed incredible, first because it seemed as though all of the ammunition should have been used up already, and, second, because it was hard to believe so many survivors remained. But Cyril felt reassured that so many of his men continued to engage the enemy. He heard the roar of the Loyalist gunships returning. And the battle noises clearly revealed a tank fight going on down toward the canal. The two riflemen followed Cyril obediently, simply waiting for his instructions. Cyril hustled around a corner. One of his Chimera's sat in perfect condition, scanning for targets, even as the battle had passed it by. Cyril let it stand as a sentry. Growing weaker and dizzier by the moment, he worked along the wall of the ruined barn, weapon ready, seeking a view back toward the canal. He came up behind a rain barrel, and, taking a chance, he raised his head. The finest, most welcome sight of his life awaited him. The twin ridgeline on the eastern side of the canal streamed with Imperial vehicles. Hydra air-defense vehicles raced across the high fields to find positions, and the self-propelled guns bristled their barrels at the sky. In the valley bottom, the enemy tanks that had penetrated Cyril's thin line burned away like lamps to light the rainy day. PDF vehicles roared through the tunnel, blooming out into a long, beautiful line and heading straight for Cyril's position. Cyril collapsed against the wall of the barn, letting go at last.