The artillery bombardment resumed twenty minutes after the Acid-Stalker Matriarch fell. He walked heavy high-explosive shells in a creeping, careful pattern along the outer stone retaining walls of Trench Sector Three.
Cold, greasy rain turned the cratered earth into a freezing soup of gray dark rock mud, crushed bone, and black sulfur ash. Shrapnel whined through the gloom like swarms of angry hornets, shearing splintered railroad ties from the low roof walls and showering the comms trenches with jagged, smoking iron splinters.
Arthur Vance knelt in the bottom of a four-foot-deep crater, his boots sunk in six inches of murky water, his hands deep in the belly cavity of Private Miller. Miller, a twenty-year-old commoner rifleman, had taken a backup shell fragment through his right lower side when an artillery shell struck the sandbag low roof wall fifteen yards away.
Beside the crater wall, Sergeant Corvo and another infantryman were desperately holding down an Ashen scout hound named Kestrel. A jagged shard of armor plate had pierced the dog’s right chest wall, producing a sucking chest wound that hissed with frothy, bright red blood with every shallow, painful gasp.
“Arthur!” Corvo yelled over the roar of another blast fifty yards down the line, throwing his weight over the thrashing hound. “We can’t carry them back to Dugout Seven! The main comms trench collapsed near the mortar pit! The mud is up to a man’s waist. The shrapnel is cutting everything above the low roof wall to ribbons! We’re pinned in…
