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"Oh, hell! Get down!" Sergeant Jeremiah Thomas bawled at his squad as the newest earth-shaking bombardment began in the distance.

He heard odd gurgling noises as some of the rounds flew overhead. "Shit! Gas! Get your masks on, get your masks on!" He began hammering on the side of a shell casing with a small hammer as he pulled his own rubber mask up over his face, cursing under his breath and then repeating the cry.

Once he figured he had done his duty, he dived into the nearest foxhole where most of his men were at. He studied them all, recognising them simply by the set of their shoulders or the customisation on their rifles and uniforms.

There was Peterson, Specs Peterson, whose ugly, bulky gas mask hid his long, lean face and glasses and perpetual cold smirk. His ratty greatcoat was the same one he had been issued when he had first joined the war, almost seven years before. His son was in the battle now, wasn't he? Thomas wondered if Peterson's son would join up with the Aces like his father. The sword-and-shield icon of Tarengara was smudged and worn, almost washed out from too-many delousings. Similarly, his gas mask and rifle were the same old-pattern issues he had received - an older mask similar to the ones now used by the opposing Republic, unlike the skeletal, ghost-like gas helmets now used by the Tarengarans, and his rifle was an ancient Mark II that had seen better days - the grey paint that had been applied all of those years was now flaking and half-eroded, its surface scratched with endless rows of tally marks, one for each of the men Specs had blown into oblivion, and its original sights had been replaced with a hand-tooled scope that wasn't much more accurate than the old sights had been, and an enhanced bayonet lug had been added. The bayonet itself was a much more brutal model than the clean, short knives commonly carried by Tarengaran soldiers, with a double-edged, serrated blade.

Then there was Arnold Hariiwitz, a soldier of four years, with a newly-issued greatcoat covered in mud from the days in the trenches. He was the second-in-command of the squad, a corporal. He had adorned his new uniform with the same accoutrements as his older versions - skulls. His helmet bore a skull in the centre, and the symbols on his greatcoat - national symbol and rank markings alike - had been painted over with a white skull on the grey fabric, with a jagged red lightning bolt signifying the company he was in - The Devil's Aces. He carried three weapons - the first was his standard Mark III bolt-action rifle, with a lengthened barrel for increased accuracy and an extended magazine for more capacity. The second was the standard Tarengaran-make semi-automatic pistol, one of the great advances in military sidearms recently. He had apparently acquired the fancy weapon from a mangled communications officer. The third weapon was a fancy revolver, of enemy make - it looked to be an officer's weapon, ornately painted lacquered black with gold stenciling. He had never said anything about where he found it, though that was rather obvious - Thomas had been surprised. An officer actually led his men? What a surprise. His battered mask hid his strong, lantern-jawed features - unlike Peterson, he had the standard model, which was purported to be more effective at keeping out the gas than the old one, though Peterson hadn't been killed yet. Was that luck or had the boys with the slide rules simply made a mistake about the efficiency of the ancient masks? He didn't know and didn't care. As long as it kept him alive - which, of course, was never a sure thing, not in this war - he would keep up with whatever the high foreheads put up for use.

Next up was Henniker - Tarvin Henniker. The smug, crazy little bastard was probably smiling behind his mask, figuring that the enemy would send in more soldiers right after the bombardment was over - and he was probably right. Henniker was always looking to slaughter more of the Republic's men, all day every day. He was a cold-blooded killer, or maybe not so cold-blooded, since he laughed like a maniac when he fought. He wore a standard-issue greatcoat, undecorated in any manner apart from his rank markings, the Tarengaran sigil, and his regimental insignia. His helmet was similarly - spectacularly - undecorated as well. His shovel was not standard issue, longer than the common entrenching tool, and sharpened to a deadly edge. His weapon of choice was also decidedly non-standard, an altered submachine gun taken from a dead Tarengaran engineer, fitted with a silencer and a bayonet lug - which held Henniker's long, thin-bladed dagger - and an enhanced action for easier reloading and cocking. Thomas, being a rather conservative man, still didn't trust submachine guns. They were too prone to jamming, too short ranged, and didn't have the stopping power of a good rifle. If someone were to make a rifle that wasn't bolt action, now...

But that was a decision for another day. He looked over at Ellar Baartiiz. Baartiiz was something of a genius in the company, constantly coming up with new ideas. He was surprisingly mellow, for a soldier in the trenches, and was prone to fits of emotion, something that would've disqualified him as a soldier if not for his great skill in the trade. He was also something of a sniper, carrying a meticulously tooled rifle - a Mark IV, something most of the Aces didn't have even with their elite status - that had been equipped with a special flash suppressor and massive night scope. He had dyed his greatcoat in various random colours and attached leaves and branches to it in order to hide himself better than the standard grey uniform - he had done the same thing, going so far as to put netting over it to help secure the branches and leaves in place. Thomas was dubious about the ability to hide the man, but it didn't hurt, and hadn't gotten him killed yet, and so was not inclined to say anything, positive or negative, about the setup.

He shook his head slightly as he surveyed the men under his command. They were tough bastards, one and all, and survived years of combat. If that didn't speak for their combat prowess, nothing in the whole wide world would. He was proud of these soldiers, proud to have them in his squad, one and all.

That didn't change the fact that they were, of course, under an immense artillery barrage.

Eventually, after what seemed like days but was probably more along the lines of ten minutes, the barrage ended. Thomas, figuring that the cease in firing might be a ploy to draw troops out and then smash them with another bombardment, sent Henniker out to check the no-man's-land.

"Oh, hell! Here they come!" Henniker bawled from the firing step as he opened up with his submachine gun - the silencer made his weapon snort like a pressure cooker, the barrel rattling unhealthily.

Thomas lead the other four men in his under-strength squad out into their designated length of trench, throwing himself up onto the firing step and raising his rifle in order to get a better idea of what exactly was going on with this particular attack.

Henniker hadn't been kidding. Good. If he had been, Thomas would've felt the inspiring urge to strangle him, and then duck back into cover.

Of course, a new attack wasn't nearly as good as Henniker's recitation of the truth.

As far as Thomas could tell, there was at least a company-sized force here, bent on assaulting his platoon's section of the trench line. Almost all of them carried their standard rifles - they fired at about the same rate as the Mark III, carried ammunition in ten round magazines as opposed to the five-round clip that the Mark III used, but their weapons packed less of a punch. Over all, Thomas noted to himself, they were about equal. But not all of them were carrying rifles.

An officer - a Captain - led his men into the fray, carrying a revolver and a sabre. He was accompanied by a medic, who also carried a revolver, and an engineer with a submachine gun, who worked to cut through the thick strands of barbed wire protecting the trenches. Then there was a grenadier, laden with belts and bandoliers of his little explosive surprises and also carrying a revolver as he loped from cover to cover. Assault infantry, low and bulky with hefty shotguns followed him with heavy, plodding steps. Then, there was a machine gun team, setting up its deadly weapon in the cover of a newly-created shell hole.

He found himself wondering why the hell the Tarengaran machine gun didn't open up on the advancing soldiers, and he glanced over towards the sandbagged position where the local gun was supposed to be and grimaced.

An unlucky artillery shell had hit it directly, obliterating the sandbags and netting and the gun and leaving the crew as nothing other than bloody rags of flesh mixed in with shredded organs and strips of once-grey uniforms, splattered haphazardly around the area.

No matter how many times he saw it, he would never get used to the horrible wounds that artillery had the nasty tendency to produce even without a direct hit. He had seen several men decapitated or disemboweled by parts of the shell casing that had scattered from the impact zone. He had also seen one of his squad - old Marcus Endival - lose most of his groin and the essential parts lying there to shrapnel. He winced in horror at the very idea of a terrible, terrible wound like that.

He banished all of these unsavoury thoughts from his mind and opened up with his good old bolt-action rifle. His first couple of shots left an enemy corporal sprawled face down at the edge of a crater he had been headed towards, bleeding down into it from several bullet holes in his upper chest and head.

Henniker blazed away at the engineer, who was unable to dodge thanks to his careful work, and simply tried to huddle up and make himself a smaller target for the well-trained soldier.

Baartiiz lined up a shot at the grenadier's explosives as he ducked out from behind his precious cover, escorted towards the trench itself by the burly assault squad. Taking a steadying breath, he fired.

The well-aimed sniper round punched into the grenade his target was holding while he prepared to throw it into the trench to clear it out. It detonated almost instantly, and set off the other grenades at once in a horrible chain reaction, resulting in a massive explosion that left a new crater in the already-brutalised landscape.

When the smoke cleared, it became clear how much damage had been done.

The grenadier and one of the assault soldiers had disappeared almost completely, leaving only scorched bits of meat and cloth scattered bloodily over the immediate area of the crater. The other men in the squad had not been so luckily favoured with a quick death.

One of them got off relatively easy, with only chunks of stone, bone, and dirt having harmed him - apart from half of a shovel that had been propelled halfway through his stomach. As his body registered the wound, he slumped over to the ground with a groan muffled by his gas mask.

The second man wasn't nearly so lucky. Both of his thighs had been almost completely stripped of flesh - the bones were showing - by the explosive force of the dozen grenades, he had a gaping wound in his belly through which his intestines hung like bloated garland, most of his right forearm was missing, and the other half of the broken shovel had impaled his throat. His horrific gurgles indicated he wasn't quite dead yet, but the amount of blood he was losing insisted he soon would be.

The third man was almost certainly dead. Both of his legs were gone below the knee, and his right arm was missing from the shoulder down. His stomach had been completely and utterly eviscerated as well, leaving his spine bloodily exposed. He lay very still, not even seeming to breathe. He probably wasn't.

In the time it had taken for the young, brilliant sniper to line up the lucky - or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it - shot and fire it, the battle had continued for the rest of the squad.

Peterson had raised his older rifle, looked through the scope, and spotted what he supposed to be enemy movement. Acting on sheer impulse and killer instinct, he fired, and his battered rifle's bullet evacuated another enemy soldier's braincase in a brief shower of blood and grey matter.

Hariiwitz had lined up another enemy rifleman, blowing a few holes in his chest and sending him flopping backwards, gasping for air through his gas mask like a dying fish - quite like a dying fish, in fact.

Henniker's wild shooting, meanwhile, had finally plugged the unlucky engineer, who toppled over like a toy dropped by a child as a light round punched through his heart and exited through his back.

Another squad of the dangerous Aces - third squad, as the little green dot on their collars testified - arrived in the trench and threw themselves up onto the firing step. Six of the men carried standard rifles, while a seventh carried one of the new light machine guns - infantry support guns, they were being called - that the factories were finally starting to churn out for the war. Thomas highly approved of the almost rifle-like design of this particular weapon.

Faced with horrific casualties - another round from one of the other squads in the area had put the captain flat on his back with no chance of ever getting back to his feet again - and complete lack of leadership, the enemy soldiers fell back in a disorganized rabble, panicked by the short, bloody battle.