05:15.
Just before dawn, No Man’s Land was completely submerged in gray fog thick with the smell of blood and dampness. The bombardment that had raged through the night, and even the shots of enemy snipers, had stopped as if they had never existed. The only sounds filling the air were rainwater dripping through gaps in the tin roof and clumps of earth crumbling down the trench walls.
But this silence was not peace. It was the suffocating pressure of the instant before a sharp blade touched the throat of an animal led to slaughter, pressing down upon the entire trench line so heavily that no one could even breathe.
And what ground me down even more cruelly than that pressure was the extreme lack of sleep and fatigue pushed to its limit.
I crouched on the damp wooden duckboards at the bottom of the trench, my lasgun resting across my knees.
My eyelids weighed a thousand pounds. Since being crammed into a transport from the lower levels of Castigar, I had not had one moment of proper sleep. My mouth was parched and rough inside my gas mask, while my toes had long since gone numb from the chill of mud inside my wet boots. My fingertips were frozen, no longer feeling like my own flesh, and whenever I lowered my head even a little, a distant dizziness swept over me, as though my brains might spill straight into the mud.
The chills and exhaustion that weighed upon my entire body gnawed at my joints far more heavily than when I had worked thirty-six straight hours of overtime in the hive city’s lower-factory levels. The smell of ozone and blood filtering in through my gas mask, even the hot breath I exhaled inside it, felt unbearable. A strange urge to slam my head into the cold mud and sleep came crashing over me with maddening force. A dangerous thought invaded my mind: if I closed my eyes here, whether it was a sniper’s round or a Commissar’s bolt shell, I would not have to suffer anymore.
"If I close my eyes here, it’s over. I’ll become a real corpse."
I bit down hard on the inside of my lip.
Drip.
The salty taste of blood spread across my tongue, and a sharp flash of pain pierced my mind. My consciousness, which had been drifting away, barely returned. Forcing down the blood that seeped between my teeth, I absently wiped the fog from my gas mask lenses with my uniform sleeve.
There had been silences like this in the maintenance yards of the hive city’s lower levels. That chilling quiet which spread through the whole line just before a massive hydraulic pipe burst, or when a large compressor shut down before beginning its violent vibrations. Back then, if a machine blew, all I had to do was leave the factory. Now, there was nowhere to go except this mud pit. Whether I had been a machine part in the hive world’s factories or was now being expended on the trigger of an Imperial lasgun in the Emperor’s army, my life weighed exactly the same.
I shoved my trembling hand into my coat. My fingertips caught on Dorn’s power cell in my pocket.
The blood had already dried into a black crust, and its cold metal casing seemed to suck away my body heat. It had belonged to someone who had been breathing and trembling beside me only a few hours ago. The living swallowed the supplies of the dead and waited for the next death. That was the only law in this mud. As I turned Dorn’s power cell over in my hand, I was certain that my own death would likewise be dealt with in this trench with utter indifference.
In the darkness, I drew the bayonet hanging at my side. The tip of its blade, stained with black gunpowder, gleamed strangely. To force the sleep away, and to prepare for the close-quarters fighting that might soon come, I had to keep stimulating the feeling in my fingertips. If I let my fingers stiffen, then when the enemy came over the trench lip, I would be slaughtered without even managing to pull the trigger.
I slowly slid the bayonet into the mounting groove beneath my lasgun’s barrel.
Click.
The smooth, cold sound of metal locking into place rang softly through the silent trench. Once the bayonet was fixed, the lasgun’s weight pressed down on my wrist even more heavily. In the darkness, the black blade affixed to it seemed to radiate a chilling killing intent.
Breathing hard, I pulled the lasgun’s stock tight against my chest. My shoulders trembled faintly from exhaustion, but the solid feel of the mounted bayonet alone reminded me that I was still alive.
"Rookie."
Lazar’s low voice came from beside me. With his dented tin helmet pushed slightly back, he was rolling sticky mud between his fingertips into a ball. Dark circles lay heavily beneath Lazar’s eyes as well, showing that even a veteran was no match for sleepiness and fatigue.
"Keep working your finger joints. Once daylight fully breaks, most men don’t die because they can’t pull the trigger. They die because their fingers stiffen up, or they’re too slow to react from drowsiness and get their heads blown off."
Lazar casually threw the lump of mud at the trench wall. Splat. Watching it flatten against the earthen wall, he added,
"They won’t start with artillery when they come. Their sniper got hit during the night, so they’ll be testing how much strength we have left. The real start is the moment this fog lifts."
As Lazar said, I repeatedly forced my twitching finger joints to clench and unclench.
These were the fingers that had picked defective parts off the line in the hive factories. Now they were just another expendable part, meant to pull the trigger of this standard-issue lasgun quickly.
A short distance away, Brix leaned his heavy body against the wall, breathing hard as he swallowed a mouthful of lukewarm recaf from a dented metal can. Bitter, ozone-scented recaf steam leaked out between his gas mask filters. It was a potent caffeinated drink meant to hide fatigue, but it was not enough to warm his frozen body.
"Hey, Brix. Got any sugar in that?"
With a faint snicker, Lazar asked the question. Brix did not answer. He tossed the can onto the ground. The rusted tin sank into the mud, spilling its black liquid.
"Tastes like rust water. Makes me want to wring the necks of the bastards at the supply depot for calling this drinkable."
After Brix’s low, dull mutter, silence returned to the trench. No one spoke of hope or home. Here, recalling the past was no different from defeatism that invited death. The only reality was keeping feeling in our cold fingers and tightening the straps of our dented flak armor.
05:50.
The wind began to shift. The thick fog that had pressed down on the trench line slowly scattered on the breeze, and the horrific reality of No Man’s Land began to reveal itself.
The massive iron wreckage of the destroyed Chimera armored vehicle, the bloodied corpses of friend and foe scattered everywhere, and shell craters filled with stagnant sewage.
"Everyone, to firing positions."
Sergeant Yakov, leader of Second Squad, gave the brief order.
We forced our sleep-heavy bodies upright and rested the muzzles of our lasguns on the trench lip. Brix spat thickly as he took up his heavy weapon firing position, while I braced the barrel of my bayonet-mounted lasgun tightly against the parapet.
Like the ticking second hand of a clock, hundreds of harsh footsteps and the grotesque scrape of chains began to sound from the far edge of No Man’s Land beyond the fog.
Grrrrrr...
Beyond the rebel positions, the dull acceleration of heavy machinery engines rumbled low.
"They’re coming."
Lazar murmured under his breath.
The smell of rotten blood and sulphur gas wafted back on the wind. Above the ashen sky, the enemy’s first anti-air illumination flares and the screaming shells that would shatter the silence were just about to come.
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