Emergency sirens howled across the forty-half-mile trench outer edge, their clockwork wails cutting through the roar of escaping steam and the bone-shaking thump of underground collapses. Crimson floodlights swept back and forth across the low roof walls, lighting up sheets of bitter-salt rain and falling fiery ash that drifted down like gray snow over the Rust-Belt outer edge.
Panic was spreading through the forward trenches like grease on a hot griddle.
Rookie cadets from the third intake class, their faces pale beneath dented composite helmets, were slipping in the knee-deep mud as they hauled heavy crates of standard moving ammunition toward the low roof walls. Every thirty seconds, the ground pitched beneath their boots, throwing men against the stone retaining walls and shaking loose clouds of dark rock dust from the timber braces. Out past the collapsed razor-wire entanglements, the sulfur vents were roaring like jet engines, spitting fountains of sparks and boiling mud into the night.
“Form up! Steady the line, you miserable runts!”
A blistering roar cut through the chaos.
Instructor Valerie Koslov strode along the low roof wall boardwalk, her heavy combat trench coat billowing behind her like iron sails. She carried a three-barrel rotary autocannon slung across her chest on an air-powered recoil harness, the ammunition belt feeding from a five-hundred-round drum on her back. Behind her, two veteran gunners struggled to maneuver a heavy high-pressure tripod through the mud.
