Nothing is so agonizing in war as the waiting. The subtle vibration of her twin flywheels and the biting cold of the Varangian winter was all she felt, but she saw the Kiserran advance in the mirror Daoka held.
	The guns were suppressed. Kiserre’s heavy four inchers had pounded Shial’s batteries into silence from beyond their range to reply. The infantry mortars hadn’t fared much better. Markha had listened to a Varangian artillerist explain that the Kiserran guns weren’t just bigger - they were also far, far faster to reply to the emergence of new batteries and silence their Coalition counterparts.
	And now the infantry were coming.
	The new, mottled green uniforms the Kiserrans wore did an excellent job of concealing them among bushes and undergrowth, but at the moment the Kiserrans weren’t bothering to hide. They approached in a marching line, rifles at the ready, bayonets gleaming in the harsh morning sun. Some of them, Markha knew, carried shotguns. Kiserran trench fighters were dangerous, easily the equal of Shial’s aerotroopers in skill and ferocity. One of them swiveled and fired. Somewhere off to Markha’s left, a scream echoed - some unlucky soldier had stuck her head over the trench’s rim and suffered the consequences.
	“This is it, Knights,” Gleason said. “You know what to do. Doaka. The banner.”
	Doaka didn’t hesitate, didn’t stutter. The shy, worried girl Markha had briefly known was gone, replaced by a man who raised the Knights’ banner in one hand. It unfurled, a vertical banner showing a gyroscope over crossed lightning bolts. For one beautiful moment, the standard flew alone in the clear blue sky.
	Then Daoka, Markha, and Gleason hurled themselves over the rim of the trench.
First in rank, first to war.
“SHIAL!” Three warriors howled in unison, charging forward, as the dozen Knights of Markha’s First Platoon hauled themselves over the edge. Daoka’s voice drowned the others out - the loudspeakers built into his armor saw to that. But Markha was louder yet - she leveled her shield, and the shotgun built into it boomed. Spreading buckshot swept away three of the Kiserrans. The rest opened fire, and bullets pinged off the trio’s armor like hailstones, and then the trio were upon their victims.
Daoka struck the first blow, the leaf blade atop the standard shearing entirely through a man’s ribcage. Markha was hot on his heels, slamming her axe into a woman’s shoulder. The bearded axe hammered halfway into her chest, and hot blood sprayed on frigid slush as Markha withdrew her weapon. By the time she was ready, not one of the Trench Fighters was still alive.
“Up and at them!” Gleason shouted, turning to point to the Kiserran line with the point of his ancient sword. “Take the trenches! Charge!”
“TAKE THE TRENCHES! CHARGE!” Daoka’s amplified voice thundered across the battlefield, carrying Gleason’s word along the line. For half a mile around them, Shiali and Varangian soldiers climbed out of their trenches, rifles speaking to force the Kiserrans down. At the center of the line, the Knights lead the charge, forty of them clad in steel. Markha knew the effect their appearance must be having on the Kiserrans - their trench raiders eviscerated by mysterious, armored warriors who bent as much to bullets as to a stiff breeze.
They covered the fifty yards to the Kiserran trenches in less than a minute. Markha didn’t run straight - she saw a knot of Kiserran soldiers, coalescing around a woman with a pistol and sword. An officer.
She fell on the knot of soldiers like a thunderbolt, slamming bodily into the first of them as she leapt into the trench, leading with her shield. The mass of Markha and her armor actually crushed the woman against the wooden back wall of the trench. Markha pulled away from the shattered body, lashed out with her axe. Tightly packed as they were, it was hard to miss the Kiserran soldiers, and she felt bone snap as her axe lodged itself in a spinal cord.
Then a rifle butt clattered down on her arm. Lacking armor, it would have shattered one, but as it was, it simply knocked her away. The axe fell, still lodged in a body, and bullets clanged off Markha’s breastplate as the officer unloaded her pistol into her, screaming. Markha stepped back, pulling her shield in front of her - those bullets could kill if they found a joint, or her visor.
Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Markha lunged.
	She didn’t have her axe, but she was hardly less deadly for it. She drove the edge of her shield into one of the three soldiers still standing. Dimly, she saw half a dozen running, but in the hyper-awareness of a fight for her life she was only vaguely aware of the fact. Another Kiserran, or perhaps the same one, drove his rifle butt towards her face. Markha twisted, and the blow glanced off her massive, rounded pauldron. She rose up, her elbow snapping into the man’s face. His jaw flew one way, his head another, brain pulverized by the impact.
	Bodies lay around Markha as she stood, staring at the horrified Kiserran officer who had dropped her pistol and desperately clutched a saber in both hands.
	“Surrender,” Markha demanded, putting a growl into her voice. The woman had a choice to make.
	She drew the saber low and stabbed. Markha’s instincts - honed by years of fencing and a dozen life or death swordfights - told her that the woman was going for her armpit. Essentially unarmored. The best place to stab an armored fighter.
	Markha pulled back, retreating behind her shield, and the sword clanged uselessly against it. The woman stumbled forward.
	Markha grabbed her by the throat.
	Lifted her in one hand.
	Threw her to the ground.
	Stomped.
	Blood spurted from the ground as she ground the Kiserran officer’s life out under her armored heel.