As the red flare climbed to its highest point over Riga, men all along the Russian line turned to look.
In the city, soldiers stumbled awake in barracks and guardrooms, pushing aside blankets, dragging on boots, stepping out into alleys and courtyards with rifles in hand. They stared upward at the bloody light hanging over the castle district.
Farther south, beyond the Western Dvina, the same red glow touched the trenches.
Men looked up from dugouts and rough shelters cut into the muddy earth. Others woke in confusion beneath damp blankets, blinking at a night that had suddenly turned red. Those already awake—men sharpening bayonets, checking rifle bolts, whispering prayers, smoking carefully with hands cupped around the glow—fell silent and stared.
"What is that?"
"A signal?"
"From the city?"
No one knew, because none of them had ever seen a red flare over Riga before.
For a few seconds, the whole Russian line seemed to pause beneath it.
Then the south answered.
At first it sounded like thunder. One deep boom rolled across the dark, then another, then many more.
Within seconds the whole southern darkness was alive with guns. Over three hundred German artillery pieces opened fire in three great concentrations, their voices merging into a single rolling iron thunder that tore the silence of the night apart. The sound came so deep and heavy that men felt it through the mud before they fully understood what they were hearing.
The earth trembled beneath the Russian trenches. Birds burst up from the distant woods. Men flinched and turned south.
Then they saw the lights.
White points rose from the darkness beyond the German line.
At first only dozens.
Then scores.
Then whole swarms.
Shells climbed into the sky trailing white fire from their tails, each one a bright point with a streaming spark behind it, as though the Germans had hurled burning stars upward from the earth. Three broad clusters rose at once, spread across the front like glowing nets cast into heaven, a small invention of Oskar.
The men in the trenches stared.
Some crossed themselves.
Some whispered, "Dear God…"
Others only watched with open mouths as the shells rose higher and higher, turning the black sky into a pale dome of white arcs.
For one terrible second, it was almost beautiful.
Then, before the first swarm had even reached the top of its arc, a second wave rose behind it.
And a third behind that.
The older soldiers understood first. The lights were not stars, they were shells.
Artillery tracer shells.
"Down!" a sergeant screamed. "Down, you fools!"
His voice was swallowed by the growing shriek above them.
The first shells vanished into the low clouds as their tracer glow burned out. For an instant there was only darkness again.
Then the screaming truly began.
It came from above, thin at first, then multiplying into hundreds of descending howls as the shells dropped through the night toward the Russian line. Men threw themselves flat. Others fell to their knees, clutching caps and heads, pressing themselves into the mud and praying that the earth would hide them.
The first impacts struck the tree lines and hidden trenches in a rolling wave of flame.
Earth leapt upward.
Trees shattered.
Mud, timber, rifles, blankets, and men were thrown into the air together. Shells punched into the ground and vanished into the black wet soil for one impossible heartbeat before their fuses burned out and the earth erupted around them.
Then the second wave fell.
And the third.
And with that, the quiet of the night was murdered completely.
The Russian trenches became a world of flashes, thunder, smoke, and screaming. Men curled in on themselves, hands over ears, eyes squeezed shut as dirt rained down over their backs. The explosions hit not only the air but the body, deep enough to shake teeth, ribs, stomach, and soul. Every blast seemed to lift the ground beneath them.
Some opened their eyes only to find blood sprayed across their faces. Or to see a man beside them without a head. Another blown apart into meat and cloth. A soldier crawling through the mud as if still trying to reach cover, not yet understanding that half his body was gone.
Men died everywhere. Some vanished beneath collapsing trench walls. Some were hurled upward and came down broken across tree branches and roots. Others lost their nerve entirely and ran from the trenches into the open, only to be caught by the next wave and flung into fields, tree trunks, and darkness.
A father threw himself over his son.
A brother dragged another brother by the collar until a shell took both of them.
A grey-bearded militiaman tried to stand and shout courage into the line, and then shrapnel cut him open from chest to throat. He sat back down as if tired, his rifle still across his knees.
Here and there, brave men tried to answer.
Russian gun crews rushed from cover toward artillery positions hidden under branches and netting. They tore away shrubbery with shaking hands, dragged shells into place, and fired blindly south into the darkness. Their guns cracked in defiance, flashes briefly lighting their strained faces.
In response, not far away the Germans answered with mortars, and thus a different sound joined the storm, loud Thumps and shrieks.
Mortar bombs rose from the German forward positions and began falling among the Russian guns. Gun crews vanished in close, savage bursts. Wheels splintered. Caissons exploded. Men were thrown over the trails of their own pieces. One gun leapt sideways as if kicked by a giant and crushed two men beneath it.
After that, few tried to rise.
Most hid in whatever holes the earth had given them.
The bombardment was meant to last only five minutes.
To the men beneath it, it felt like five minutes of hell stretched into eternity.
Then the sea lit up.
Far beyond the river mouth, hidden by darkness, fog, and distance, Prince Heinrich's Baltic Fleet opened fire.
The old battleships spoke first.
Fourteen heavy hulls, led by Heinrich aboard the old Armoured Cruiser SMS Friedrich Carl, threw flame across the Gulf of Riga. Eight light cruisers joined them, their guns flashing through the mist, while smaller craft pushed through the dark water in disciplined streams. Some screened the larger ships. Some guided the landing lanes. Others carried German marines toward the northern coast of the city, where the first black-clad sniper teams had already begun clearing the shore in silence.
The sea became thunder.
Muzzle flashes bloomed over the black water, brief and violent, lighting the fog like sheet lightning. Seconds later, shells began falling among Riga's coastal batteries. Earth and concrete leapt upward. Gun pits vanished in smoke. Searchlight positions shattered. Men who had been watching the sky now turned toward the sea and found death coming from there as well.
South of the city, the artillery hammered the trench line.
Westward, from the Gulf of Riga, naval shells tore into the coastal defenses.
North of Riga, German marines were already moving toward the beaches and designated landing points. The first fast boats came knifing through the shallows, their bows crashing into sand and mud as men jumped over the sides and charged forward to secure the ground. Rifles cracked in the darkness. Small Russian coastal detachments—men who had expected perhaps smugglers, perhaps patrol craft, perhaps nothing at all—were cut down or driven back before they could form a proper defensive line.
Behind those first boats came the larger metallic landing craft, squat and ugly things shaped almost like armored bathtubs, their engines churning black water into white foam. Each carried men packed shoulder to shoulder beneath the low rim of steel. At the rear of several craft, machine gunners fired over the heads of the marines, stitching the shore with bursts of covering fire. When the boats struck the shallows, their forward ramps dropped with heavy metallic slams, and men surged down them into the surf.
The landing craft were not fully an original invention.
Very few of Oskar's best ideas truly were.
They were memories taken from another life, another world, another century of war, dragged backward through time and hammered into shape by German steel, German workers, and his own relentless will.
Now they were real.
And in Riga, beneath the fading red flare, the city returned to darkness broken only by muzzle flashes, burning windows, shell bursts, and the cold pulse of battle.
Oskar saw it all.
He had climbed Saint Saviour's Church, not by stair or ladder, but by brute strength. His black gauntlets had bitten into stone. His armored boots had scraped across ledges and cracks no ordinary man would have trusted with his weight. Now he hung from the upper crown of the church tower, one black-armored hand wrapped around the iron cross at the very top, his red cape shifting in the wind like a torn banner of blood.
Below him lay Riga Castle, the bridge, the river, the narrow streets, the rooftops, the empty windows, the burning tower, the German perimeter spreading like an iron ring around the heart of the city.
Beyond that, farther south, the artillery still spoke.
Beyond that, westward, the fleet thundered from the gulf.
And farther north, so distant that most men would have seen only darkness, Oskar's eyes picked out the shapes of the landing craft and the movement of marines securing the shore. His eyesight had always been unnaturally sharp in this body. Tonight, it seemed almost cruelly perfect.
He saw the operation unfolding, the Castle, the Bridge, the Southern trenches, the Coastal batteries, and the Northern landing beaches.
Each piece moved where it was meant to move. Each blow landed where it was meant to land. Soon, the armored and infantry strength of XVII Corps and the 1st Armored Division would crash forward into the opening. Aircraft would follow. The Russians would be forced to weaken other parts of their line to reinforce Riga, or watch the city break in front of them.
For one brief moment beneath the skull helm, Oskar smiled.
All was going according to plan.
Then the smile faded.
Because he also saw the suffering.
Each burst of fire in the southern darkness was not merely an explosion. It was a life ending, or a body breaking, or a man losing his courage forever. Each naval shell falling on the coastal defenses might tear apart a gun pit, yes—but also the men who had been ordered to stand there. Each falling bomb, each rifle crack, each machine-gun burst meant fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, boys who had once cried in their mother's arms.
And the civilians were gone.
That almost made the streets worse.
Riga's people had fled weeks earlier, driven east by fear, orders, rumor, and the heavy machinery of war. Oskar knew what that meant. They were not safe simply because they were no longer under the guns. Somewhere in the vast Russian interior, they were probably crowded into barracks, barns, stations, camps, churches, roadside settlements—families sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, waiting for news that might never come.
People could survive hunger for a time. They could survive cold for a time. But uncertainty ate something deeper.
Men wanted safety.
Women wanted certainty.
Children needed both.
Without them, peace was only a word written by men far from the mud.