The field began to resolve into shape.
Reports moved through the command net in clipped fragments, each one stripped of panic by the same cold pressure that held the Imperial line together. Vorn's right flank had reached the eastern drainage line. Enemy observation along that side was degraded. Jessen's mercenaries had brought the Geonosian weapon into range. The sonic cannon answered a moment later, and even through the smoke and blaster fire, its violence was unmistakable.
The sound was not an explosion in the ordinary sense. It was a distortion that struck the air first and the walls second. Timber screamed apart. Old duracrete cracked beneath stresses it had never been meant to endure. The left-side bunkers shuddered under the impact, one of them collapsing into itself as the forward trench vanished beneath a spray of mud, stone, and splintered supports.
Tiber Fel watched the effect through his display and through the battlefield itself. The enemy was no longer merely reacting. They were being torn open by competing necessities. Riflemen abandoned the eastern parapet to answer the cannon. Others left the gatehouse firing slits to reinforce the left trench. A few officers, or men pretending to be officers, tried to restore order by force of voice alone, shouting commands over alarms, screaming for reserves that were already committed elsewhere. The deserters still fought. Some fought well. But the shape of their defence had become brittle.
"
Jessen's pressure is forming a breach in the outer works," Bastonn reported.
"
Hold the centre," Fel replied. "
Do not let the gatehouse reinforce her."
The 501st shifted without breaking its advance. The heavy repeater raked the parapet above the main entrance in controlled, punishing bursts, dragging enemy attention back to the centre whenever it threatened to consolidate against the mercenaries. Fireteams Aurek and Cresh angled their shots toward the corridors of movement between the gatehouse and the left trenchline, forcing any deserter attempting to cross that exposed ground to choose between speed and survival. Neither served them well.
Another report came from the right. Vorn was in position to continue.
Fel's visor turned toward the eastern wall. "
Bastonn. Second echelon, smoke eastward. Give Vorn her next approach."
"
Second echelon, smoke eastward," Bastonn repeated over the Legion channel.
Canisters arced through the air and struck the mud between the eastern drainage line and the wall, vomiting fresh cover across the right approach. The 501st did not flood that flank or claim its work for themselves. They opened the way, fired into the slits that threatened it, and kept the central pressure hard enough that the defenders could not afford to turn fully against her. The Legion became the hinge between the two advances, binding noise and discipline into a single assault.
The soft battle meditation still ran through the Imperials like a submerged current. It steadied the rhythm of the advance, dulled the instinct to rush, and sharpened the instinct to act. Men moved when the line required movement. They stopped when cover mattered more than speed. They fired not at every shadow, but at the shadows that threatened the whole. The old 501st and its offshoots, veterans and volunteers, cold professionals and hard-eyed idealists, moved with a coherence they had not yet earned by history. Fel gave it to them for now. Later, they would have to keep it.
The defenders at the main entrance sensed the change too late. The gatehouse crew tried to bring its heavier weapon back toward the central approach, but every time they exposed the barrel, blue fire forced them down. A pair of deserters dragged a crate of grenades toward the upper firing platform, only for one to fall under a precise shot from the forward line. The other abandoned the crate and ran. Inside the entrance, silhouettes moved in frantic bursts as the garrison attempted to stack bodies behind the gate and prepare for a breach they had known was coming, but had failed to prevent.
Fel raised his blade slightly. "
Missile team. Gatehouse hinge. On my mark."
The launcher team settled behind the broken permacrete, one trooper bracing the tube while another fed targeting data from a wrist display. The smoke thinned, thickened, then tore open in strips as wind and fire pulled at it. For three seconds, the main entrance stood visible through the haze: reinforced doors, scarred supports, old weld-lines, neglected armour plating, and frightened movement behind the firing slits above.
"
Mark."
The missile streaked forward, a brief spear of light swallowed by impact. The hinge-side support erupted inward. Almost at once, the sonic cannon struck again from the left, its pressure wave battering the already-weakened structure. The gate did not vanish cleanly. It buckled, screamed, split down one side, and sagged from its frame in a shower of sparks and broken metal.
"
Forward," Fel ordered.
The 501st rose into motion.
The first echelon moved through the last of the smoke in hard bounds, rifles high, shoulders low, crossing the killing ground before the defenders could recover a clean field of fire. The repeater kept the upper parapet blind. The second echelon fed shots into every firing point that flared red. A stormtrooper at the front took a bolt across the shoulder plate and spun down into the mud; the pair behind him closed the gap without hesitation, one dragging him aside while the other continued firing into the gatehouse slit. The line bent, corrected, and pushed on.
The deserters answered with everything still within reach. Blaster fire hammered from the entrance hall. Grenades bounced through the smoke and detonated in the mud short of the advance. Men shouted for the gate to be held, for reserves, for someone to kill the black-armoured figure walking at the centre of the Imperial push. Some fired at Fel. Others fired around him, trying to break the stormtroopers instead. It changed nothing. Bolts struck the ground before him, hissed past his armour, vanished into the red of his blade when they came too close.
At twenty meters, Fel quickened his pace.
Not a charge. Not yet. A controlled acceleration, enough to carry the center with him. His lightsaber came up once, cutting aside a bolt meant for the lead section. His left hand extended a heartbeat later, and a ruined slab of gate plating wrenched free from its half-collapsed mount, twisting aside with a shriek of tortured metal. The opening widened.
"
Grenades through. Then enter."
Two stormtroopers stepped forward and threw. The blasts inside the entrance swallowed the defenders' muzzle flashes in dust and pressure. The first echelon followed immediately, breaching in pairs, rifles snapping left and right as they cleared the threshold. Close-range fire filled the gatehouse interior, harsh and brief. The deserters within had the advantage of cover and familiarity, but the breach had come before they could reform into a proper defence. Some held and died in place. Some fell back deeper into the compound. Some threw down broken weapons and stumbled away from the entrance, seeking any corridor that was not filled with white armour and red light.
Fel entered last among the first wave, not from caution, but because the line needed him visible at the moment it crossed. His blade carved through a dangling strip of durasteel that still blocked part of the way, sending it crashing into the mud beside him. Smoke curled around his armour. The red glow bled across the broken gate, across the scorched walls, across the stormtroopers taking positions just inside and around the entry.
"
Hold the breach," he commanded. "
Left element, keep pressure off the mercenaries. Right element, maintain the eastern lane for Vorn. No collapse inward until both flanks are ready."
The 501st settled into the wound they had opened. Some stormtroopers faced into the compound, pinning the next defensive line. Others turned outward along the wall, firing into positions that threatened the mercenary trench push and the eastern approach. The breach did not become a rush for glory. It became a junction. A hard Imperial anchor driven into the enemy's front, holding the passage open for the force around it.
Tiber Fel stood at the broken main entrance with the 501st around him, red blade low at his side, black armour framed by smoke, fire, and the torn metal of the gate. Behind him, the mud field still burned with movement. To the left, the mercenaries had their violence and their cannon. To the right, Vorn's Imperials had their opening. At the center, the Legion held.
The outpost had been opened.
Now it would be taken.
Tibera Jessen
::
