He considered what had happened there: obviously she had sacrificed a carrier, and ordered the apparent disarray of her forces thereafter, to fool them into thinking they had killed her. An elaborate trap and an effective one: in one stroke she had wiped out a quarter of the force sent against her. That she had destroyed the heavy armour aboard those ships was irrelevant as such, because Aberil suspected she could easily have taken the spaceport before, rendering such armoured vehicles — perhaps the only ones that could have lasted long enough under hand-held attack and put a dent in her forces — completely useless. No matter, right now he had with him thirty thousand well-armed and thoroughly vicious infantry skirmishers, whereas Lellan's forces numbered perhaps one-third of that even including those she had recruited from the crop fields. And she would pay — he had seen to that.

Bombing from landing craft was not an easy option, as they were not really equipped for the task. They had accomplished this by connecting magnetic mines to the undersides of the craft — mines they could disconnect by radio, and detonate by the same means. Only one craft had been lost, when some fool sent the wrong signal first, but overall Aberil's main aim had been achieved: Lellan could not retreat directly back down into her caverns, now he had destroyed all her breakout tunnels.

"Over this night we'll move our soldiers into position, and in the morning we go in on their left flank," he said. "Nothing elaborate: we just hit them hard and drive them back from the spaceport towards the mountains."

"The mountains are easily defended," noted Torthic, the logistics officer.

Aberil studied his fingernails. "And utterly useless to us. We cannot establish crop ponds or colonies there, and they are riddled with caves where traitors can hide."

"Your meaning?" Torthic asked, taking the prompt Aberil sent him over a private aug channel.

Aberil shrugged. "The Witchfire is aptly named. I should think a scattering of ten- and twenty-megatonne devices should take the backbone out of Lellan's army once she considers it safely ensconced in the mountains."

In bright moonlight, they moved out in squads of twenty into the flute grass. Each squad had its own commander with an open aug link to Aberil's logistics staff, its own car carrying either a heavy rail-gun or a mortar, plus supplies. Each soldier was armed with a rail-gun capable of firing anything from single shots to eight hundred a minute, and carried enough of the small iron slugs to maintain ten minutes at that latter rate of fire; a short-stock grenade-launcher; and curve-bladed commando knives for more intimate work.

They had trained all their lives for this kind of action and were ready and willing for it. They eagerly looked forward to their first encounter with the rebels, who at present were ten kilometres away from them. As squad commander Sastol led his men in a brief prayer, he felt his stomach tight with excitement and his head buzzing with the sometimes contradictory instructions that filtered down from First Commander Aberil. Finishing the prayer with a silent 'Amen' over his Gift, he found that nevertheless the central order was unchanged. Advance and destroy the rebellion — in the end it was simplistic.

"We march behind the car for the present. The moment any part of the line hits resistance, we spread out and link up with adjacent squads," said Sastol. Then focusing on his lieutenant, Braden, he went on, "You and two others of your choice get to ride on the car. I want you on the heavy gun at all times as I think that when it starts, it'll start fast."

"Don't you want to ride?" asked Braden, with a touch of irony.

"Not now. I need to loosen up for…" Sastol paused as the order for them to move out came through his aug. He held up his hand for a moment, then raised it above his head, made a circular motion then pointed with two fingers into the flute grass. Hand-signalling — an anachronism from days before the Theocracy had received the Gift from Behemoth — was something many military commanders obdurately continued to practise. The precise technology of aug communication not being entirely understood, these men liked to be prepared for the eventuality of its failure in a battle.

As one, the army of the Theocracy moved into the flute grass, each squad cutting a swathe separated from its neighbours by a hundred metres of vegetation on either side. Sastol watched Braden ensconce himself behind the heavy rail-gun, observed Donch and Sodar clamber up behind him, Donch taking up the simple detachable drive handle to set the car in motion. As the rest of their squad moved in behind the car in a loose double column, Sastol moved in behind them. In truth, he preferred walking because he was so charged with adrenalin that it would be almost painful for him to sit still — experiencing action at last after a lifetime of training for it.

Only action came rather sooner than he expected. A hissing crunching sound to the right snapped Sastol's attention in that direction, whence he saw a sharp-edged yellow hook the size of a man's arm cleaving through the ground towards his men. It was such an odd sight that it took him some time to recognize it for what it was.

"Mud snake!" he bellowed, just as the sliced mat of rhizomes parted and the creature heaved its giant caterpillar body into view, clacking its huge beak with appended slicing hook, and emitting horrible coughing barks. Rail-gun fire slammed into it from both sides, and it was beginning to disintegrate even as it surged forwards. Turning its blind head sideways at the last moment, it clashed its beak shut on Dominon and bore him to the ground. Continued fire separated front end from back and leaking blood like molasses, its rear end sank back into the ground. Immediately the squad fell upon the front end with knives and rail-guns, levering the monster's ragged beak open.

"I'm okay, no need to panic."

Finally, by cutting corded muscle at the base of its beak, they were able to wrench the top half of it back — which unfortunately released human arteries that had been pinched shut.

"Really, I'm okay," Dominon reiterated out loud, then, "Oh."

He died before one of the roving med-squads could reach them, but Sastol thought that perhaps for the best, as Dominon — as athletic and libidinous as the rest of them — would not have wanted to continue living in only the top half of his body.

"Gods protect us all," intoned the medic as he bagged and tagged Dominon to be picked up later.

"Not the first?" asked Sastol.

The man looked at him, his face expressionless behind his tinted visor as he sent the statistics across via a private channel. Mud snakes had already killed eight and injured seventeen sufficiently for them to be out of the fight. A siluroyne, disturbed at the eastern end of the line, had taken out an entire squad of twenty. Three were lost to a heroyne before the creature had been brought down. It had apparently swallowed them whole.

"It's not even night yet," Sastol said gloomily.

"They're certainly all stirred up," said the medic, "but let's hope the enemy will be facing the same problem."

A wide area of flute grass had been flattened around the enemy lander, and that area was now lit by arc lights as troops began pulling equipment out into the open.

"Laser," observed Gant, holding up the ends of some of the laid-over grass for inspection. Discarding them he pointed to a heavy device mounted on a flat tray, with one driving wheel behind. "Only for levelling an area of the grass — not really manoeuvrable enough to be used as a weapon."

"Like they need another weapon?" said Cormac, eyeing the rail-guns and grenade-launchers most of the men carried.