Larana was propelled to her feet by the mass of men debarking from the truck and fell to the hard-packed ground. Black smoke billowed upwards from scores of wrecked vehicles, their twisted hulks broken by the detonation of mines. Bodies lay strewn about and the screams of the wounded were ignored as the prisoners were clubbed forward. The spike adorned Rhinos ground to a halt behind the smoking wrecks and, with practiced ease, the iron giants who had brought them to this slaughter emerged, weapons at the ready.

A terrified man, his eyes wild, stumbled past her, heading in the opposite direction. Larana watched as one of the giant warriors casually gunned him down, a single bolt from his weapon blasting the man's entire torso away. Larana rose to her feet, dazed and blinded by dust and pain. Smoke stung her eyes and she could no longer feel her arm. She stumbled in the direction everyone else was running. Was it to safety? She couldn't tell.

Howls of pain and confusion tore at her ears and she gripped the barrel of her impotent lasgun, vowing that she would use it to crash an enemy's skull before the day was out. More gunfire sounded behind her. A body, gory holes torn in its flesh, fell into her and streaks of bullets whipped by her head.

She pushed the body away and ran into the smoke.

Dervlan Chu pressed the firing stud on the armament panel and closed his eyes as the Basilisk fired. The massive barrel's recoil pushed almost its entire length into the track unit, the crack of the shell's discharge easily penetrating the ear protectors he wore. Despite the bolted locking clamps, the track unit rocked under the force of the recoil. Even as the first shell arced through the air, his loading team was ejecting the spent casing and unlimbering a fresh shell from the gurney beside the gun.

He pressed his eye to the gunsight, checking to see how much the recoil had caused the barrel to drift from its aiming position. Not much, he saw, spinning the correction wheel, bringing the aiming reticle back to centre, and adjusting fire for the next shot.

'Loader alpha ready!' came the shout from below.

'Up!' answered the breechman.

Chu smiled. Their first shell hadn't even impacted yet and they were ready to fire again. He and his crew had trained hard for just this kind of fight and now that training was paying off.

He centred the aiming reticle on a smoking track with scores of men milling in confusion around it and pressed the firing stud again.

Even over the screaming and confusion, Larana Utorian could hear the shriek of the incoming shell and recognised it for what it was. She hurled herself flat, screaming as her arms jarred on the hard earth. The ground whipped upwards, tossing her through the air as the first Basilisk shell impacted, blasting a crater fifteen metres across and obliterating a dozen men in an instant. Shrieks sounded as further shells struck the ground with thunderous hammer blows. Huge chunks of rock and dust were blasted skyward as the first volley hit. Larana slammed back to the ground, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. She rolled over, across the lip of a crater, and flopped to its smoking base.

Scraps of flesh and bone spattered the interior surface of the crater, the stench of scorched human meat and burning propellant filling her nostrils. Another prisoner sheltered in the crater. His mouth was open, stretched wide as he screamed in terror, but Larana could not hear him, her skull filled with an all-encompassing ringing.

She felt wetness seep from her ears.

The man sheltering in the crater stumbled over to her, his mouth working soundlessly up and down, but Larana ignored him, crawling to the lip of the crater, clutching her lasgun like some kind of protective talisman. The man was insistent though and clawed at her uniform. Larana pushed him away, shouting something incoherent over the whoosh of displaced air as another volley of shells screamed in. The man rolled into a foetal ball, rocking back and forth in terror.

Larana buried her head in the ground as she felt the awful vibrations of the shell impacts hammer the ground. With her good arm she clutched the soil. Dust filled her mouth and the Shockwaves from the explosions threatened to pulp her bones to jelly.

She knew she couldn't stay here. She had to get back. But which direction to go? One place was as likely to take a hit as another and the smoke and disorientation had made a mockery of her sense of direction.

She scrambled to the weeping man at the crater's base, and dragged him by the collar towards the rear edge of the crater.

'Come on! We have to get back!' she yelled.

The man shook his head, fighting Larana's grip with the strength of a madman and pulling free of her grasp.

'You'll die if you stay here!' she shouted. The man shook his head and Larana was unsure whether he'd even heard her or she'd made any kind of sense. She'd tried her best, but if the idiot didn't want to move, there was nothing she could do to make him. She dropped flat as another thunderous detonation rocked the ground, the impact throwing her from the crater.

She landed on something soft and yielding, and rolled clear with a terrified cry as she saw that she was lying on shredded flesh and mangled limbs. Shapes ran through the smoke, but where they were going or who they were, she couldn't tell. She could see nothing more than a few metres away, the drifting smoke and dust rendering everything beyond invisible.

A smoking wreck lay on its side, belching black clouds just at the edge of her vision and she began crawling towards it over torn-open corpses and crying men with no legs or arms. One man was on his knees, vainly trying to gather up his looped entrails and push them back into his raptured belly. Another stuffed his severed arm into his jacket, beside a man vomiting thick ropes of red gore. Each few paces brought fresh horrors and Larana wept as the ground continued to shake as though in the grip of the most violent of earthquakes.

She reached the blazing track, weeping and laughing hysterically at this small victory. A blackened corpse lay under the shattered cab of the vehicle, severed through the torso by the track's fall. Larana could see the corpse wore the crimson overalls of their captors and felt a burning hatred light in her belly. She snarled in fear and anger, pounding her rifle butt against the corpse's skull, smashing it to destruction, fresh sobs bursting from her lips with every blow. She threw aside the bloody weapon and took what shelter she could from the burning truck. Tyre tracks from the vehicle led back through the smoke towards the place where - presumably - this insane venture had begun. Taking a deep breath she waited until another barrage of shells landed.

Knowing that there was no way she could survive, but unwilling to give up, Larana Utorian set off to find a way out of this hell.

Acrid propellant filled Kane bastion, but Dervlan Chu was exultant despite the sting in his eyes and the ringing in his ears. The attack had been stopped in its tracks before it had covered even half the distance to the Christo. They had comprehensively bracketed the enemy force within their fire zones and put their entire load on target. He knew for a fact that his crew had laid more shells on target and in a faster time than Jephen, and looked forward to receiving his bottle of amasec in the mess hall tonight.

Night was drawing in and drifting smoke obscured much of the shattered battle line of what had once been hundreds of vehicles. Major Tedeski had called a halt to the barrage until the smoke cleared, unwilling to waste ordnance on a foe that was already destroyed.

He sat back on the railings of the gun platform and pulled out a silver case of cheroots, lighting one and tossing the case down to his loader and breechman.