by Dan Abnett
Dorden shook his head. “I can’t start that now,” he said.
Upstairs, the old ruin was quiet. It seemed as if the storm and the assault had abated together for the moment. Dorden edged into the vacated long hall and tried his micro-bead but it was dead. The ceiling lamps swung and loose debris fluttered down. Tree of bodies, the stinking cots looked pitiful and sadly spoiled. Dorden stepped over pools of blood and shreds of discarded clothing.
He strode into the outer kitchen, looking once at the stained table where he had excised a part of Regara’s leg. He saw the old fireplace for the first time. Black iron, just like the one he had sat before at home on Tanith. He and his wife, at the end of a long night, with a book and a glass of something warming, before the grate-light.
Along the mantle, small blocks of what looked like chalk sat in a row. He moved over and took one in his hand. A tusk. The small, shed tusk of a pig. The inhabitants of this manor, whoever they were, had raised swine, cared for them enough to treasure the trophies of their growth and development. Pig teeth, each marked in a delicate hand with a name… Emperor, Sire, His lordship… and dates.
This touch of frugal humanity, the day-to-day chronicle of a farmstead, affected him deeply. It wasn’t mawkish, it mattered somehow. Why pigs? Who had lived here, raised the swine, toiled in the fens, brought up a family?
A sound from the long hall brought him up to the surface of his thoughts. He moved back to meet a gaggle of men as they limped and blundered in through the hall doors from the outside. The Volpone substitutes and the Ghosts, all except Corbec. They were shell-shocked and dazed, weary on their feet.
Dorden found Mkoll at the rear of the group.
“They’ve fallen back,” Mkoll said. “It’s dead quiet out there. That can mean only one thing…”
“I’m a medic, not a soldier, Mkoll! What does it mean?”
Mkoll sighed as Dorden attended to the splinter wounds in his face. They’ve failed with a physical assault. “They’re drawing back so they can bring up artillery.”
Dorden nodded. “Get below, into the undercroft, all of you. Foskin — Lesp will help you cook up some food for all. Do it! Artillery or not, I want everyone sustained.”
The men filed away towards the steps into the cellar. Dorden was alone again in the hall.
Corbec entered, covered in blood and fire-soot. He dropped Brostin’s empty flamer onto one cot and threw Tamard’s spent lasgun the other way.
“Time’s trickling away, Doc,” he said. “We held them — feth but we held them!—but they’re gonna hammer us now. I scoped movement over the fens, big guns being wheeled into place. An hour, if we’re lucky, and then they’ll level us from a distance.”
“Colm… I thank you for all you and the men have done tonight. I hope it was worth it.”
“It’s always worth it, Doc.”
“So what do we do now? Bury ourselves in the cellar?”
Corbec shrugged. “That won’t save us from their shells. Don’t know about you, but I’m going to do the only thing I can think of at a time like this?”
“Which is?”
“Pray to the Emperor. Mkoll said there was an old shrine out back of this place. Prayers are all we have left.”
Together, Corbec and Dorden pulled their way through a litter of rubble and debris and broken furniture into the little room at the back of the farmhouse. It had lost its roof and the stars twinkled above them.
Corbec had brought a lamp. He played its light over the rear walls, picking up the flaking painted image on the ornamental screen Mkoll had mentioned. It showed the Divine Emperor subduing the Heretics, and smaller figures of a man, a woman, and three small children, shown in obeisance to the central figure of the God-emperor of Man.
“There’s an inscription here,” Dorden said, scraping the dirt away from the wall with his cuff pulled up over the ball of his hand.
“A pig! What is this?”
Corbec raised the lamp and read off the inscription. “Here’s irony for you, Doc: this was a trophy world. A New Tanith. The master of this hall was a Parens Cloker, of the Imperial Guard, Hogskull Regiment. The Hogskulls won this world during the first advance into the Sabbat one hundred and ninety years ago Winning it, they were awarded settlement rights. Cloker was a corporal in the Guard, and he took his rights gladly. Settled here, made a family, raised swine in honour of the mascot beast of his old regiment. His kin have honoured that ever since.”
Corbec faltered, something like sadness in his eyes. “Feth! To get there, to win it, to take the trophy world… and still it comes down to this?”
“Not for all. How many trophy worlds are there out there where the soldiers of the Guard have retired and lived out their days?”
“I don’t know. This is all too real. To fight for your lifetime, get the prize you wanted, and then this?”
Corbec and Dorden sank down together in the debris-strewn chapel.
“You asked me why I stayed with you, Doc. I’ll tell you now as we’re dead and we have nothing to live for.” With that last remark, Corbec flung his hand towards the reredos’ inscription.
“Well?”
“You were the doctor for Pryze County for twenty years.”
“Twenty-seven. And Beldane.”
Corbec nodded. “I was raised in Pryze. My family were wood workers there. I was born out of wedlock and so I took my father’s name, when I knew him. My mother now… I was a difficult birth.”
Dorden stiffened, knowing somehow what must come next.
“She’d have died in labour, had it not been for the young medic who charged out in the night and saw to her. Landa Meroc. Remember her?”
“She would have died if I hadn’t—”
“Thank you, Doctor Dorden.”
Dorden looked round at Corbec in wonder. “I delivered you? Feth! Fething feth! Am I that old?!”
They laughed together until they were choking. And until the thump of artillery began, blasting the quiet of the night away.
The Imperial Guard drove the enemy back with their shelling and Gaunt was on the foremost half-track as they ploughed back into the fenlands in the early light of dawn. They caught the enemy almost unawares, and were blasting the Chaos artillery and infantry even as the enemy wheeled their own blasphemous guns around into position in the dark.
The farmhouse, and its shattered defence of horseshoe fences, was almost unrecognisable. Mud, burnt flak-board and shattered corpses lay piled amidst the devastated ruins. He ordered the vehicle to stop, and it spun wheels on the fenland muck as it slid to a halt.
Trooper Lesp was on duty at the gateway. He saluted the colonel-commissar as he passed in. Dorden and Corbec were waiting for him in the littered yard.
“Medical evac is coming,” Gaunt told them. “We’ll get the Volpone wounded out of here.”
“And our own too?” Dorden asked, thinking of Tremard, and Mkoll’s lacerated face.
“All of the wounded. So, you’ve had an adventure out here, it seems?”
“Nothing to speak of, sir,” Corbec said.
Gaunt nodded and moved off into the manor house ruin.
Corbec turned to Dorden and showed him the pig’s tooth he had clutched in his hand. “I won’t forget this,” he said. “It may not have worked here on Nacedon for this guardsman, but by this tooth, I’ll trust it will work for us Ghosts. A trophy world, brighter and better than you can imagine.”
Dorden’s hand held a pig-tooth too, marked “The Emperor”.
“I trust you to do that, Colm. Do it. Doctor’s orders.”
Swing, address, stab, return… swing, address, stab, return…
In the shade of the cycads at the edge of the Tanith encampment on Monthax, Trooper Caffran was practising bayonet discipline. Stripped to the waist, his powerful young shoulders glistening with sweat, he whirled his lasgun in time to his rhythmic chant, snapping it round, clutching it horizontally, lunging forward and killing the bole of one of the trees over and again. A
fter each strike, he tugged it free with effort, and repeated the drill. The trunk was slashed and puckered, oozing orange sap from the wounds left by his nimble work.
“Good skill,” Gaunt said from behind him. Caffran snapped around, realising he was being watched. He shook sweat from his brow and began a salute.
“At ease,” Gaunt said. “I’m just walking the lines. Everything alright with you? The men in your platoon?”
Caffran felt tongue-tied, as he always did when Gaunt addressed him directly. He still, after all this time, had mixed feelings about the commissar who had both saved them and made them Ghosts in the same action.
“We’re all waiting for the word,” he said at last. “Itching for action. This waiting…”
“It’s the worst part, I know.” Gaunt sat down on a nearby log. “Until the killing starts and you realise the waiting wasn’t all that bad after all.”
Caffran caught the smile in Gaunt’s eyes and grinned as well, unable to stop himself.
Gaunt was pleased. He was very aware of the stiffness Caffran always manifested around him. A good soldier, one of the youngest, but so very nearly one of Rawne’s malcontents.
“Go again,” Gaunt suggested.
Self-consciously, Caffran turned and repeated his drill. Swing, address, stab, return… It took a moment to pull his blade free from the thick bark.
“Slide it,” Gaunt said. “It’ll come out easier if you slide it laterally before pulling.”
Caffran did so. It was true.
Gaunt got up, moving on with his circuit. “Not long now, Caffran,” Gaunt said as he moved away.
Caffran sighed. No, not long. Not long before the frenzy and the madness would start.
Swing, address, stab, slide, return… Swing, address, stab, slide, return…
NINE
A SIMPLE PLAN
Engines screaming, the imperial troop carriers fell upon the ocean world, Sapiencia.
Like swarms of fat, black beetles shrilling in over the edges of a pond, they assaulted the Bay of Belano. Their combined down-draughts boiled the choppy surface water into foam mist, an embankment of steam three kilometres long and two hundred metres high that stormed forward across the beach rocks and blinded the island’s outer defences.
It entirely hid the merciless wall of solid water driven up under the spray by the concussive force, and this tidal wave exploded across the western sea-fall emplacements of Oskray Island twenty seconds after the steam cloud choked them. Rock and metal and flesh were pulverised, blasted into the air, then sucked back into the basin of the bay as pressures equalised and hydraulic action righted itself. A spume haze hung over the island, clogging the beaches and masking the final, slow approach of the gargantuan troop-ships.
The heavy emplacements higher on the cliffs of Oskray spat fierce salvos down into the mist, or up into the striated clouds where further formations of troop-ships were beginning their final approaches to the island shore. The fire from the batteries, blue and flickering, danced like luminous damsel flies amongst the beetle-like ships. Some craft burst as they were touched, and burned; some dropped, bleeding smoke and trailing lines of debris.
The twenty kilometres of Oskray Island was only partly rock. It was, in point of fact, a cluster of islets, linked as one by the massive industrial fortification built up upon the shoulders of submarine mountains. Behind ocean-blocking walls of stone a hundred metres thick, pump structures, drill towers, flame-belching waste stacks and pylons rose against the sky. The primary target, the great refinery hive of Oskray Island One.
Red hazard lights flashed and hooters started their deafening caterwaul as the jaw-hatch locks of troop-ship Lambda disengaged with a massive leaden thump. Dim light began to pour in from outside as the jaw-sections hinged open. Caffran, tensed tight and ready, knew they were assaulting a sea-bound target, and that the way in for the infantry was up the beach That was the plan. But as the troop-hatch opened, he believed for a moment they had come in too low and it was translucent torrents of water that were spurting into the dispersal deck. He gulped in his breath, held it, but it was only steam and pale light that rushed over him.
The yells of men, of boots racing on metal decking, and of the hooters, were overwhelming. With fifty others, lasguns raised, he charged out of the hatch mouth, for a second, on the ramp, the dispersal deck noises were swamped by the greater volume of the thundering drop-ships all around. Caffran could see nothing beyond the men closest to him and the solid atmosphere of mist and smoke. He could smell salt and ozone, oil and thermite.
Then nothing. Rushing silence, roaring dullness, a coldness all over him, enveloping him, dark grey blurs in his eyes.
He was underwater, floundering in the chilly, muffled dark of the sea, writhing black bodies struggling and flailing around him, each one bejewelled with trapped baubles of silver air.
The troop-ship had come up short of the beach slope, and all the men dropping blind off the ramp were falling into thirty metres of ocean where the island shelved steeply away.
Caffran couldn’t swim. He’d been born and raised in a forest a thousand kilometres from any open water. He’d never seen the ocean, any ocean, though he’d heard others, like the medic-fisherman Lesp, speak of it. He was going to do the last thing he had ever expected to do: drown.
Momentarily, he realised he had not yet released the deep breath he had instinctively sealed into his lungs when he thought the dispersal deck was going to flood, and he almost laughed, almost releasing the air.
Instead, he held on to it, felt it burning and exhausting inside him as he rose slowly to what seemed the surface. It saved his life, where others had gone screaming and exhaling off the ramp.
Sinking, blundering, black shapes thrashed around him: Tanith combat dress, dark as dry blood, faces pale like phantoms or ghouls. A body sank beside him, arms frozen in claws, mouth open to emit a dribble of bubbles, eyes glazed. Caffran kicked upwards again.
Something struck him stunningly hard on the back of the neck and he lost his precious saved breath in a blurt of silvery air pebbles. Men were still coming off the ramp-end above, falling on those Ghosts now coming up from below. A boot had hit him. The man it belonged to was inverted in the water behind him, panicking, dying. Caffran kicked away, trying to rise and not breathe in to ease his emptied, screaming lungs. He saw men explode into the grey, dreamy world from above, fighting the water as they hit and sank. But that at least told him the surface was only a few metres away.
The man who had kicked him on his way down had become entangled with another by the slings of their lasguns. One of them fired his lasgun in desperation, twice, three times. The water boiled around each slicing minnow of orange light. Caffran’s ears throbbed as they heard the fizzing report of the underwater shots. One of the las-rounds punctured a drifting corpse nearby; another punched through the leg of a desperate swimmer next to Caffran. Blood fogged the water. Caffran heard the distant voices of his ancestors in his ears, muffled by pressure and fluid and distance and time.
He surfaced in a gasping explosion, retching, treading water, blood streaming from his nose. He looked around to see Ghosts surfacing all around, kicking towards the shore or just panicking. Some were floating in the surge, lifeless, already lost. Noise rushed back to him, the momentous noise of combat now unfiltered by the deadness of the sea. Screaming, the whicker of lasguns, the roar of troop-ship downwash. He could smell blood, water and smoke, but was thankful, because that meant he was breathing. Behind him, las-rounds punched up out of the water into the fog as other unfortunates lost their grip on everything but their triggers as they drowned.
Caffran paddled forward, hacking up each and every slop of sea-water he accidentally swallowed. The pall of smoke and fog cut visibility at the surface to ten metres. For a moment, he heard the voices of his ancestors again — then realised that wasn’t what he’d heard at all. It was his micro-bead intercom, crackling with staccato traffic, screeching into his ear-plug. Underwater, it
had been the tinny whisper of ghosts.
Caffran felt gravel or sand under his boots, a slope. He felt weight and momentum return to him as he churned up through shallower and still shallower water, falling twice and choking. Bolt rounds and las-fire whipped and stitched the breakers around him, cutting down the Ghost beaching next to him. The man fell face-down, his body lifted and pulled back, lifted and pulled back again by the choppy waves.
Caffran fell again as a las-round scorched across the top of his left shoulder, dropping him to his knees. His shins scraped on the stony gravel, shredding his fatigue pants from the knee down. He felt his lasgun grow heavier and flop away. The shot had cut his gun-strap across the shoulder.
Hands pulled him up as he grabbed hold of his weapon.
“Caffran!”
It was Domor, the squad’s sweeper. He was laden down with the heavy backpack of the sweeper unit and its long handled sensor-broom. Domor had lost his eyes — and almost his life — in that final push on Menazoid Epsilon six months before. They had been there together for that fatal time, in the thick of it as they were here. Domor’s metal-irised artificial implants shuttered and whined as they adjusted to look down at Caffran. The sweeper’s cybernetic implants looked like truncated binocular scopes crudely sutured into the scar tissue of his eye-sockets.
“We can make the beach!” Domor yelled, pulling the young trooper to his feet. They ran, blundering through the breakers. Others charged or staggered in with them, a ragged line of Ghosts making landfall on the fog-washed shore, some falling over submerged barricade crosses or entangling themselves on rolls of rusting razor-wire. The fire-storm fell amongst them and some dropped silently, or screaming, or in minced pieces.
Now, the flinty shingle slope of the beach. They crashed up it, pebbles flying from each footfall. Twenty metres up, they ducked below the lichen-fronded line of an old wooden groyne, black as tar. Las-fire slammed into its weighty bulk.