The troop train rattled east through the night, the wheels keeping a rhythm against the rails that after enough hours stopped sounding mechanical and started sounding almost organic, like something with a pulse rather than a schedule. I sat in the officers' compartment with Lena Schmitt across from me, the rest of my company and three full battalions of ground troops packed into the cars behind us. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and boot leather and, underneath both, the faint mineral tang of ozone drifting from the arcane crates secured in the freight section — a smell I'd long since stopped noticing except when I deliberately went looking for it.
We were being rushed east because the Russians had clawed back ground in Galicia, deep inside territory that wasn't supposed to be theirs to reclaim. The Front was bleeding again, and high command wanted mages in the sky to close the wound before it widened any further.
Lena had been like this the entire ride — leaning forward, elbows on her knees, eyes catching the lantern light with that same bright, eager quality I'd noticed in her since the day Vogel brought her into my tent. The portable radio crackled on the small table between us, and she leaned in toward it like a woman expecting good news from a doctor.
"...confirmed reports from the southern front: the Kingdom of Sarbiane has formally surrendered. All remaining Sarb forces have laid down arms. The country is now under joint Bulgarian and Germano-Hungry occupation until the final peace is signed. Belgrade has fallen. The southern threat is ended."
Lena's whole face opened up, the way a child's does at exactly the news it's been hoping for. "Did you hear that, Captain? The Sarbs are finished." She shifted along the bench, closer than the space strictly required, her knee finding mine without any apparent awareness that it had. "It's almost romantic, isn't it. The Empire taking its rightful place across the whole of Europa." Her voice dropped, softened into something a new recruit had no real business sounding like. "I could listen to victories like that all night. Especially with you explaining the parts I don't understand."
She tilted her head, a loose strand of blonde hair falling across one eye, and the smile she gave me afterward was small and deliberate in a way that had nothing to do with strategy briefings. I felt the particular heat of being looked at like that, and it was not unwelcome exactly, but it carried a weight I wasn't certain I wanted to be responsible for. I cleared my throat and turned my attention to the window instead.
Outside, the dark countryside was broken at intervals by campfires and long marching columns. Then I saw them properly — a ragged line of prisoners shuffling along the trackside under guard, grey Russian greatcoats and fur hats, but the faces underneath were wrong for the uniforms in a way I recognised immediately. Poles. Ethnic Poles who'd been pressed into the Front's service, now walking west as prisoners of their own former command. Some still wore the red armbands of the Russian army. Others had torn theirs off the moment surrender became survivable. Their eyes had the particular hollowness of men who have spent the last several weeks being told they were fighting for a homeland that has, in this same period, been fought over by everyone except the men actually living in it.
I watched them pass and wondered, without much hope of ever knowing, how many of those same faces had been across from us at Konin.
---
The train hissed to a stop at a forward railhead just before dawn.
"Out! Form up!"
My company spilled onto the gravel platform, boots crunching in the half-light. Lena fell in at my shoulder almost before I'd finished the order, close enough that our arms nearly touched. "Wherever you lead, Captain," she said, quiet enough that it was meant only for me. "I'm right behind you."
We marched the last few kilometres under a flat grey sky, the ground trembling faintly underfoot with artillery that hadn't yet announced itself by sound. At the staging area, my company summoned their constructs — ethereal wings unfolding out of nothing in soft cascades of light, the air briefly thick with the smell of ozone and something sweeter underneath it that I'd never been able to name. Lena's machine materialised beside mine, clean and perfect, and she saluted with the same grin she'd worn since Brussels.
"Ready for Warsaw, sir."
"Support the ground advance," I told the company. "We break the Russian hold on the city. The Poles are already rising against their occupiers. We help them finish it."
---
We lifted off in formation and climbed over a landscape that had stopped pretending to be farmland some kilometres back. German infantry columns snaked forward below us, mechanised walkers striding alongside them on jointed steel legs, steam venting from their joints in long pale plumes. Warsaw rose ahead on the horizon, smoke already curling from several of its spires, the streets visibly alive with movement even from this height.
The rebellion was unmistakable as we closed in. Polish civilians and improvised militia swarmed the Russian positions below — barricades being torn down by hand, red flags ripped from buildings and trampled in the streets, the whole city heaving with the particular chaos of an occupation collapsing from the inside. Russian troops were falling back in poor order, firing without much aim, the discipline of an army that has just understood it's lost the argument.
"Tracking rounds. Free fire on Russian uniforms."
The rifles sang. Enchanted rounds streaked down and curved through the air with that small, deliberate wrongness I'd long since stopped finding strange. A Russian officer on a rooftop was trying to rally a handful of men around him, voice carrying even up to where we flew — my round bent toward him mid-flight, found his chest, and detonated inside him in a burst that opened him from within and showered the men he'd been trying to organise with what remained, the rooftop afterward less a position than a stain with a few figures still standing confused at its edges.
Lena's shots were just as precise, and I watched her work an alley with the same cool economy she'd shown over Brussels — a runner caught mid-stride, the round correcting around a doorway he'd ducked behind, detonating against his back and dropping him in pieces across the cobblestones; a second man cut down attempting to drag a wounded comrade to cover, both of them taken by a single round that found the gap between them and erupted with enough force to end the question of rescue entirely.
We swept street after street like this, leaving Russian dead twisted among the rubble in postures that owed nothing to how a body is meant to rest, while below us Polish fighters cheered and waved up at the source of their sudden, violent deliverance, weeks of occupation ending in minutes under our fire.
I found one Russian position holding out in a half-collapsed apothecary, three men firing from the shattered shopfront with more discipline than most of their comrades had managed that morning. I put a tracking round through the window itself — it threaded the gap with an unnatural precision, found the nearest man, and the detonation inside that confined space did to all three of them at once what open ground usually only managed to one. The shopfront's remaining glass blew outward in a fine bright spray, and what came with it onto the street below I made myself not examine too closely from the air, the same way I'd been not examining things too closely since Delta-Four.
---
Only when the first German ground columns marched into the city squares did I give the order to descend. Our constructs dissolved into wisp as we touched down on a shattered boulevard, boots finding purchase on broken glass and the scattered brass of spent casings. Warsaw was falling, properly now, the Poles briefly and violently free of one occupier in the act of acquiring another, and the Empire's flag would be flying over the Vistula again within the hour.
Lena landed beside me, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with something that had moved past simple battle-excitement into a register I recognised but hadn't yet decided what to do about.
"We did it, Hans." Her voice had dropped the rank entirely now, his first name arriving easy and deliberate in a way that told me she'd been waiting for the right moment to use it. "Together."
I looked at her standing there amid the broken glass and the dead, glowing with the particular light of someone who has just discovered they're good at something terrible and hasn't yet had time to be troubled by it, and I thought, not for the first time that month, that I genuinely did not know whether what was growing between us was something I should be encouraging or something I should already be afraid of.
I said nothing. I only nodded, and let her walk beside me as we moved deeper into the falling city.