The train west was different from every other train I had taken in this war, and I had taken a considerable number of them by this point, enough to have developed opinions about troop trains the way a man develops opinions about anything he's been forced to spend sufficient time inside.
What made it different was the weight of it. Not physical weight — the same overcrowded carriages, the same smell of wool and tobacco and men who hadn't washed recently enough, the same equipment stacked in every available space. The weight I mean was the other kind, the kind that comes from a very large number of men all carrying the same knowledge in the same direction at the same time. We were going west because Russia had collapsed and the eastern front had dissolved and every division, every battalion, every company that had been holding a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea for four years was now being redirected toward the one front that remained, and we all understood, in the particular way that soldiers understand things without being briefed on them officially, that what was being assembled on the western front right now was the largest thing the Empire had ever attempted, and that it was going to settle something.
I had been promoted to Oberleutnant in Munich, which came with a new uniform I hadn't yet broken in and a set of responsibilities that were mostly the same responsibilities I'd had before with additional paperwork. My company was twenty-two strong, the fullest it had been since Brussels — the Munich replacements bringing us back from four survivors of the Alpine campaign to something resembling a functional unit again. The replacements were young. Younger than the men they were replacing, younger than seemed entirely reasonable for what they were about to be asked to do. The academy had been accelerating its programmes to meet demand, and the young men it was producing were technically competent in the specific ways accelerated programmes produce — they could enchant a round, they could fly a construct, they could hit a target. They had not yet learned the things that can only be learned in the sky above a position that is actively trying to kill you.
I looked at them in the carriages and on the platforms of the stations we passed through and felt nothing in particular, which was its own kind of information about where four years had brought me.
---
Lena was in the seat beside me.
She had been beside me since Munich, which had become, since the tunnel in the Carpathians and since those three days in the city, a different kind of beside me than the tactical proximity of a subordinate officer. What happened in Munich I will not detail here, because some things belong to the two of us rather than to this record. I will say only that those three days had changed the texture of her presence from professional to something that occupied a different category entirely, and that on the train she slept against my shoulder with the unconscious trust of someone who has decided, at some point she hasn't announced, that this is where she belongs, and I had not moved to disturb it.
I looked out at Germany sliding past in the early morning light and let myself think, briefly, about after. About what after looked like with Lena in it. The shape of it was rough and unspecific but it was there, which was more than after had been for most of this war.
Then the train crossed into France and the shape dissolved back into the operational, which was where it needed to be.
---
The staging area was forty kilometres behind the front and what was assembled in it was the largest concentration of military force I had seen in four years of seeing military force.
Division after division stretching as far as the eye could follow, the individual soldier invisible at any elevation, reduced to a texture covering the ground the way weather covers the sky. Artillery in rows that went past the point where individual guns could be distinguished, becoming simply a dark line against the horizon. Mechanised walkers standing in groups, steam venting from their joints in the morning cold. And mage companies — twenty of us, more than I had seen assembled in one place since the war began, brought west from eastern and Alpine assignments and positioned to do what mage companies did at scale.
Vogel briefed us in a tent barely large enough for the assembled company commanders, standing over a map that showed the front in more detail than I'd typically seen in advance of an operation.
"This is the one," he said, without preamble. "Everything from the east is here. Everything that can be moved has been moved. The Republic's line has been holding for four years against portions of our strength. It will not hold against all of it." He looked around the tent. "We go in ahead of the first wave, take out the anti-air capability, suppress the defensive positions, open the lanes. Then we stay on them. Anything that tries to reinforce the breach, anything that tries to close the gap. We don't stop until the order to stop comes."
He paused.
"There will not be an order to stop until it's done."
I looked at the map. For the first time in four years of this war, I believed we were going to win. I noticed the belief with the flat neutrality of a man who has stopped being surprised by his own emotional responses, and I put it aside, and I went back to my company and prepared them for the morning.
---
The offensive began before dawn.
Twenty mage companies rising together from fields that had been empty the day before, the combined hum of our constructs merging into a single sustained chord felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears. Below us, in the darkness, the weight of everything the Empire had assembled was in motion — the first wave crossing toward the Republic line in a scale I had never witnessed from altitude before, a river of men and equipment flowing across ground that was about to become something considerably less hospitable to rivers of anything.
The anti-air came up immediately. More volume than the intelligence had suggested, which was always how it was, the intelligence always suggesting less than the reality. We took two casualties in the first minute — Weiss, one of the Munich replacements, his construct dissolving under a concentrated burst that found him in a gap between his shields, and he dropped screaming for the full distance to the French rear area, his voice thinning with altitude until the ground ended it. Becker, a veteran from the eastern campaigns, took a round through his casting arm that severed it at the elbow in a spray of blood that the wind took immediately, his construct destabilising without the second hand to maintain the enchantment, and he went into an uncontrolled spiral that resolved itself against a farmhouse roof at a speed that left nothing ambiguous about the outcome.
I noted them in the operational sense and kept moving.
---
Below us, the first wave was crossing no man's land, and the Republic's guns found it.
I had seen men killed from altitude before. It was different at this scale. The machine guns — and there were many of them, more than any previous engagement I'd supported, the Republic having understood what was coming and prepared accordingly — swept the advancing infantry in long traversing arcs that didn't so much kill individual men as erase sections of the line as they passed over it. Where the arc crossed, men went down in groups, the living closing over the gap the dead left with a speed that suggested the movement itself had absorbed the loss before any individual could register it. Limbs came off in the sustained fire in ways that looked, from altitude, almost mechanical — the burst finding a man, the man disintegrating in components that the burst distributed across several metres of ground, the next man stepping over or through the components without breaking stride because stopping was not an available option.
The artillery was doing its own work from both directions simultaneously. Republic shells walking backward into the advancing line, throwing men and pieces of men upward in columns of black earth that rained back down across the survivors below. Empire shells walking forward into the Republic positions, the defensive works erupting in fire and stone and whatever the works contained, which included men and included their various components. From altitude it had a quality I had noticed before in large-scale bombardments — an almost aesthetic regularity, the eruptions spaced and rhythmic, that bore no relationship whatsoever to what each eruption meant at ground level but which the eye at altitude processed as pattern before the mind caught up and reminded it what the pattern was made of.
I watched a colonial position — Commonwealth troops, Australian by the look of the kit — take a direct hit from one of our enchanted howitzers and simply cease to be a position in the sense of containing men in any organised capacity. What remained after the blast was a crater and a radius of scattered material that had been men and equipment a half-second before and was now simply matter distributed without pattern across a circle of scorched earth, and the advancing Empire infantry moved over and around it without slowing.
I put an explosive round into a Republic machine-gun nest that had been cutting the infantry below at a rate I could see from altitude by the rate at which the advancing line thinned before it. The nest erupted, the gun barrel spinning clear of the blast in a long arc that caught the morning light before it came down somewhere behind the Republic line, the crew that had been serving it distributed across the surrounding area in fragments that I noted as target destroyed and did not examine further from this altitude or any other.
---
The third wave hit the wire and the wire took a toll that the first and second waves had somehow avoided, the Republic's defenders having saved a defensive capacity they revealed only now, a second layer of machine-gun positions that had been silent through the first two waves and opened simultaneously on the third with the coordinated violence of a trap that had been planned and executed well. The third wave went down in numbers that were not a thinning but an ending — the front rank simply ceasing to be a front rank, the men in it converted from advancing soldiers to obstacles for the men behind them to cross in the space of approximately fifteen seconds of sustained fire.
I watched a soldier reach the wire and begin cutting and take a burst across the chest that opened him in a way that sat him down on the wire with his own cutters still in his hands, the wire holding him half-upright in a posture that looked almost deliberate from altitude, almost like a man pausing to rest, and the men behind him came through the gap he hadn't finished cutting and went past him and the wire held him there, upright and still and indistinguishable from a distance from a man who had chosen to stop.
I put an explosive round into the machine-gun position responsible and moved to the next target because the next target was already firing and the time between identifying a target and addressing it was still measured in fractions of a second regardless of what was happening below.
---
By midmorning the first line had broken in four places, the Republic forces falling back to the second line in the controlled way of soldiers executing a prepared contingency rather than routing, which told me the resistance ahead was going to be the hardest kind — the kind that has planned for exactly this moment and has something left to meet it with.
The second line was Colonial troops. Australian and Canadian divisions that the briefings had flagged as the most difficult of the Commonwealth's forces to move through. I found, flying over them through the middle of the day, that the briefings had been accurate. They fought with the specific quality of soldiers who had chosen to be here from the other side of the world, which gave them a relationship with the ground under their feet that was not ownership but commitment, and commitment proved considerably harder to break than conscription.
They died anyway. Everything dies when enough force is applied to it for long enough. But they made the application expensive in ways that the first line's defenders had not managed, the second line holding against pressure that should have been sufficient to move it and holding again when the pressure increased, and the cost of each metre of their retreat was paid in Empire infantry at a rate that I could see from altitude in the way the advancing line's texture changed after each contact with the Australian and Canadian positions — thinner, more ragged, the gaps closing more slowly than they had in the morning.
A Republic mage rose from a concealed position to engage Lena.
I saw it before she did, the construct lifting fast and already oriented, the hands already lit with the specific cold light of a targeting sequence already running. A good pilot. Fast. Someone who had studied the engagement patterns of attacking mage companies and picked a moment when Lena's attention was committed elsewhere and the window was as clean as it was going to get.
I dove without finishing the thought that had been forming about whether I had a clean angle, the construct bending the aether past comfortable limits, and fired before my targeting was fully aligned because fully aligned was going to be too late. The round went wide enough that it shouldn't have worked and close enough that the Republic mage flinched at the critical moment, the shot going past Lena's position rather than through it, and then I was between them and the Republic mage had a new problem that occupied the next several seconds entirely and did not survive them.
Lena's voice in the speaking tube, entirely level: "Thank you."
"Stay on your targets," I said, which was not what I meant and which she understood.
---
By late afternoon I had lost three more.
Hofer, a Munich replacement, taken by repositioned anti-air that nobody had marked, the round finding him in a gap between coverage zones and taking him through the midsection, his construct carrying him in a wide arc for perhaps thirty seconds before whatever was keeping him conscious stopped keeping him conscious and the construct dissolved with him still in it, the fall from that altitude leaving nothing that required particular description.
Zimmermann, a veteran, caught by a Republic mage's tracking round that bent around the stone building he'd banked behind, detonating against his back with the specific internal violence of enchanted ordnance, his construct shredding instantly and his body continuing forward from the momentum for a moment that was entirely wrong before gravity settled the question definitively.
The third I did not see happen. One moment Kastner was on the right flank and the next moment the right flank had a space where Kastner had been, and the anti-air below was still firing and the calculation was not a difficult one.
I noted all three in the operational sense. The mechanism that converts men into operational data had long since extended itself to cover this stage of the process. I kept flying.
---
The sun was going down behind the smoke when I called the company to regroup at altitude. Seventeen of twenty-two. I looked at what remained of the second line below us in the failing light — still there, still holding, but holding with less of itself than it had been holding with that morning, the reserves feeding into it buying time rather than stability, the Australian and Canadian units giving ground slowly and expensively and still giving it.
The gap between still there and no longer there had narrowed across this single day into something I could feel rather than measure. The quality of a structure approaching its limit. Not failing yet, not broken, but running the final calculation.
Lena came up beside me, her construct settling into formation, her face carrying the stripped, exhausted quality of nine hours at full concentration.
"Tomorrow," she said, looking down at the line.
"Tomorrow," I agreed.
Below us, in the gathering dark, the Empire's infantry was consolidating its gains across ground that was carpeted with its own dead at a density I had not seen in four years of aerial work — the advance having crossed no man's land and the first line and most of the killing ground before the second line and left evidence of its crossing across every metre of that distance, the dark shapes visible from altitude in numbers that the word thousands addressed without capturing, the way a word addresses a thing without ever quite being the thing.
And past the dead, and past the second line that was still holding on the last of what it had, the open country that the briefings had shown on the far side of the Republic's defensive position, the ground that a breakthrough reached.
I had been close to things before. Sector Seven. Brussels. The Cressano pass. I had learned that closeness was not the same as completion.
This was different. This was the weight of four years of everything pressing against a line that had perhaps one day left in it, and I could feel that from seventeen mages at altitude in the failing light the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm — not the storm yet, but the certainty of it, the body registering what the mind was only just catching up to.
Tomorrow.
I turned my construct toward the landing field and my company followed me down through the smoke and the dark, and below us the western front settled into its brief nightly pause, and I thought about what was on the other side of the line, and what winning looked like when you finally arrived there after four years of paying for the ticket.
Almost.