by Dan Abnett
“I’m here to brief you, Gaunt, and supply you with your specific orders. The armada’s objective—”
“—is Gereon.”
Balshin allowed herself a tiny, mocking smile. “Of course. You will have worked that out.”
“Commissar-general, if I hadn’t been certain before now, your arrival would have been all the confirmation I needed. You’ll have a special objective for the Ghosts, no doubt?”
“Indeed.”
“Due to their skill specialisations, and to my prior knowledge of the target world?”
“Invaluable prior knowledge, Gaunt.”
“You flatter me.”
“Not my intention, sir,” she said. “Gaunt, you are uniquely placed to perform a great service to the God-Emperor.”
“May He protect us all,” one of the commissars at her side muttered. Gaunt glanced at him and recognised the man as Balshin’s efficient but unctuous lackey Faragut.
“May He protect us all indeed,” Gaunt echoed.
“There is a chance here,” Balshin said. “A chance to make a quick breakthrough. I will not allow that opportunity to be missed. Months of planning, Gaunt. I think it’s time you got up to speed.”
She looked around the air gate. “Is there somewhere private we can discuss this?”
Gaunt nodded. “If you’d care to follow me?”
Balshin turned and looked over her shoulder. “This way!” she snarled back at the open side-hatch of the lander.
A figure emerged and came to join them through the thinning steam.
It was Sabbatine Cirk.
* * * * *
XV
In full battledress, the Ghosts came to order in company blocks. As he walked out to inspect them, setting his cap on his head brim-first, Gaunt could hear Rawne and Hark yelling commands to dress the outer ranks, but such instructions were purely cosmetic. There was a background whine of loading hoists, and muted fanfares and drum-play from the nearby Kolstec barrack hall.
Gaunt came to a halt at the head of the ranks, took a salute from Rawne, and turned on his heel to face the troops. He cleared his throat.
“We’ve walked the road,” he announced, “now glory’s just another step away.”
There was a robust murmur of approval. Some of the Ghosts beat their hands against the furniture of their rifles.
Gaunt raised his own hand for quiet. “In two hours and fifty minutes, we will board drop ships for descent. Descent will be five hours’ duration. Planetfall will be into a hot zone. You are to expect serious opposition from the moment you disembark. Stay in your company groups after this to receive briefing specifics.”
He ran his gaze along the ranks. Stock still, not a man wavering.
“Target world is Gereon,” he called out. “I told you I’d show you around one day. Dirtside objective is the market town of Cantible. I won’t tell you what I expect of you, because you know what I expect of you.” He paused. “Soldiers of the Imperium,” he cried, consciously altering a phrase that had once begun “Men of Tanith…”, “do you want to live forever?”
There was a huge cheer. Gaunt nodded, and made the sign of the aquila. “The Emperor protects!” he yelled. “Dismissed!”
The ranks broke up into company groups for discrete briefings. Gaunt saw some of the section leaders—Obel, Domor, Meryn, Varaine, Daur and Kolosim—drawing their commands into huddles and opening map cases.
Dorden approached him, medical pack slung around his body.
“Doctor?”
“Would you talk to him, please?” Dorden asked, gesturing to Ayatani Zweil. The old priest, in his full regalia, was kneeling down to tie the laces of a pair of oversized—and evidently borrowed—Guard boots. A rood topped with an eagle lay on the deck to his right, a golden censer to his left, its swinging chain slack.
Gaunt nodded. “Father—” he began.
“Stick it up your arse,” Zweil said.
“I beg your pardon?”
The laces lashed in place, Zweil rose to his feet, hauling his bony self up by the haft of the rood. He shook out the skirts of his blue robes to cover his gnarled knees and scrawny shanks.
“Your suggestion, Gaunt. Up your arse with it.”
“That’s very ecumenical of you, father. Now what suggestion would that be?”
“The same one as Dorden made, of course. That I should bless the men and do my ‘holy, holy’ schtick and then wave farewell to you all and stay here.”
“And you don’t want to do that?”
Zweil pouted and tugged at his long, white beard. “Don’t want to, don’t intend to. Dorden says I’m too old. Says I’m ‘medically’ too old, as if that is a completely different kind of too old. I’m as fit as a Tembarong grox, I am! I’m as fit as a man half my age!”
“Even so,” Dorden put in, “a man half your age would need to have his food mashed up for him.”
“Shut your fething trap, sawbones,” Zweil returned, and stamped his feet. “I’m coming with you, that’s the up and down of it, and the side to side. I’m coming with you to minister to the needs of the regiment.”
“Father—” Gaunt tried to interject.
“I’ve got boots, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Zweil said, raising his skirts to prove it.
“It wasn’t,” said Gaunt.
“I’m coming with you,” Zweil hissed, seizing Gaunt’s sleeve with his claw-like fingers. “That place we’re headed for, that poor place… it’s been unholy for too long. Perhaps it’s past redemption, but I have to try. I happen to think it needs a man of the cloth like me more than it needs a soldier like you, Ibram, but I accept there are gunfire issues to consider.”
Gaunt held his stare for a few seconds. Then he looked at Dorden. “Ayatani Zweil will be accompanying us.”
Dorden shrugged and rolled his eyes skywards.
“Sir?”
Hark had joined them. Criid and Caffran were with him. Their eyes were hard, hurt. Gaunt breathed deeply. He had been dreading this moment.
“Can they have a word?” Hark asked.
“Of course. Carry on, doctor. You too, father.”
Gaunt led Criid and Caffran away to the edge of the assembly area.
“Is it true?” Criid asked.
“About the reserve activation, you mean?” Gaunt asked. “Yes, I’m afraid it is true.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Caffran asked.
Gaunt shook his head. “I’ve been trying to fix it myself, but I’m not getting any joy.”
“It’s not right,” said Criid. Gaunt had never seen her quite so brittle.
“No, it’s not, but reserve activation is standard military practice. It’s one of the Warmaster’s regular tactics when manpower is needed, and Throne knows it’s needed here. Departmento Tacticae and the Commissariat both approve. I will keep trying, until the moment we make the drop. After that too, if necessary. But you’ve got to accept right now that the Guard is a huge and grinding mechanism, and it rolls blindly on over individual requests and objections. It loves expediency and mass effect and hates exceptions. What I’m saying is, we may not be able to affect this decision.”
“It’s not right, Criid said again.
“He should have been a Ghost,” said Caffran.
“Yes,” said Gaunt. “He should.”
XVI
He felt as if he had been hit somewhere between the head and gut with the flat edge of Saroo. He was numb, almost dazed. His eyes were hot. He looked around and saw the same hurt and surprise in the faces of others.
Strange. He had been so sure today was going to be the best day of his life: passing out of Basic Indoctrination, becoming a Guardsman, taking ownership of his rifle from the armourer. Getting his trooper pin, his aquila, his sew-on patches…
…becoming a Ghost.
The gun in his hands felt like a dead weight. No thrill of pride came from gripping it.
“What’s going to become of us, Holy?” Fourbox asked.
A sour-looking, middle-aged commissar named Sobile had come to share the news with them just before they’d been issued with their kit and weapons. He stood up before them under the Basement’s lights, and took half an age to unfold the notice.
“Hereby order given this day of 777.M41 that to meet the imperative drive for able troops in the coming theatre, High Command has committed to the activation of all reserve units, including punishment details, whereby they are to retain formation, be given designation, and be fielded as battlefield regulars. No individual currently on reserve status, be it for reasons of punishment, retraining or indoctrination, is to return to, or join, any other tactical element. For the present purposes, this detail will be afforded the name Activated Tactical 137, that is AT 137. Section details will follow. May the God-Emperor protect you. That is all.”
“Gol?”
Gol Kolea didn’t look up.
“Gol? Shift your arse, the buzzer’s gone.” Varl came down the walkway between the empty billet cages. Down below, the assembled Ghosts were emptying out of the barrack hall like water draining from a tank.
“Gol? Hark’ll have your knackers if you don’t move,” Varl said. Both men were bulked up with full webbing and battlegear, packs on their backs, helmets slung from their belts. Both carried their rifles in their right hands.
“I’m coming,” Kolea said. “I was going to give him this. I meant to give it to him before, but today seemed like the right day.”
He looked at Varl, and held out his left hand. A Tanith cap badge, deliberately dulled with soot, lay cupped in the palm.
“Come on,” Varl said.
Kolea nodded. He slipped the cap badge into his breast pocket.
“It’s like Tona warned me,” he said. “I left it too late.”
PLANETFALL
I
They didn’t wait for daybreak. They didn’t wait for clement weather, or a favourable turn in the tides. They didn’t wait because they were greater than the weather and more powerful than the tides. They were brighter than the daybreak.
Along the west coast, down the line of seaboard towns and cities that had been linked and fortified into one long snake of battlements called K’ethdrac, or K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir, the sky went white. It was off-white, a sour white, and the whiteness pressed down on the high roofs and machicolations. Hot, dry clouds rolled in off the sea, and pooled wire-rough fog in the lower parts of K’ethdrac, as if the ocean were evaporating.
There was no wind, and everything was hushed. Visible static charges gathered like ivy around the raised barrels of the weapon assemblies standing ready all along the seventy-kilometre long fortress.
A door opened out to the west, out over the ocean, and cool air rushed in. In seconds, it had grown into a gale, a blistering, eastward-rushing belt of wind that lashed across the ramparts of the city-fort, and blew soldiers off the battlements, bent the stands of coastal trees into trembling right-angles, and stacked the sea up, white-top wave upon white-top wave, before driving it at the rockcrete footings of K’ethdrac.
As the huge wind reared up over the coast, the earth below shook, as if a terrible iron weight had been dropped upon it, and there was a noise, the loudest noise any man has ever heard and it not kill him. It was the sound of the atmosphere caving in as billions of tonnes of metal fell into it like rocks into a pool.
Less than a minute later, the first strikes seared into K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir. They were not pretty things, not the lusty, romantic blooms of fire a man might see delineated on a triumphal fresco; they produced no halo of purifying light, no magnificence to backlight a noble hero-saint of the Imperium.
The first strikes were like rods of molten glass, blue-hot, there and gone again in a nano-second. The cloud cover they came through was left wounded and suppurating light. Where they touched, the ground vapourised into craters thirty metres wide. Bulwarks, armoured towers, thick barriers of metal and stone all vanished, and with them, the gun batteries and crews that had been stationed there. Nothing was left but fused glass, lignite ash and deep cups of rock so hot they glowed pink. Each strike was accompanied by a vicious atmospheric decompression that sucked in debris like a bomb-blast running backwards.
The strikes came from the batteries of giant warships hanging above the tropopause. Their ornate hulls glowed gold and bronze in the pearly light of the climbing sun, and their great crimson prows parted the wispy tulle of the high, cold clouds, so that they resembled fleets of sea galleys from the myths of legend. So thin and peaceful was that realm of high altitude, their massive weapons systems blinked out the rods of visible heat with barely an audible gasp.
Other vessels, bulk carriers, had emptied themselves into the sky, like swollen insectoid queens birthing millions of eggs. Their offspring fell in blizzards from the scorched and punctured clouds, and were picked up and carried by the hurricane winds slicing in from the sea. Countless assault ships spurted like shoals of dull fish. Clouds of drop-pods billowed like grain scattered from a sower’s hand.
The defenders of K’ethdrac began to fire, although their efforts were merely feeble spits of light against the deluge. Then heavier emplacements woke up, and sprawling air-burst detonations went off above the coast. At last, substantial orange flames began to splash the sky, twisted into streamers by the monstrous gales. Bars of black smoke streaked the air like a thousand dirty finger marks.
To its occupants, K’ethdrac had always seemed horizontally inclined: the long parapets and curtain walls running for kilometres, bending and twisting around the curves of the coast, with the flatness of the tidal mud beyond, the hinterlands of marsh and breeze-fluttered grasses and the undulating plane of the grey sea. It was a place of wide angles and vistas, of breadth.
In five minutes, that inclination had changed. It became a vertical place, where that verticality was emphatically inscribed down the sky by the beams and stripes of glaring energy jabbing out of the clouds. The sky became tall and lofty, illuminated by inner fire. The fortified blocks of K’ethdrac were reduced to just a trimming of silhouette at the bottom of the world, as the towering sky lit up above it, like some vision of the ascent to heaven, or the soaring staircase that leads up to the foot of the Golden Throne.
Shafts of light, so pure and white they seemed to own the quality of holiness, shone down from an invisible godhead above the sky, and turned the clouds to polished gilt and the smoke to grey silk.
The blizzard of crenellated assault ships fell upon K’ethdrac’s burning lines. They came in droning like plagues of crop-devouring insects, and struck like spread buckshot. Furious scribbles of light and pops of colour lit up the seventy kilometres of wall in an effort to repel them. Thousands of tracer patterns strung the air like necklaces. Sooty rockets whooped up in angry arcs, trailing hot dirt. Rotating cannons drummed and pumped like pistons and turned the sky into a leopard skin of black flak smoke.
In the steep fortress wall, gunports oozed with light like infected wounds as energy weapons recharged and then sprayed out their ribbons of light.
Drop-ships burned in mid-air. Some melted like falling snowflakes in sudden sunlight and some blew out in noisy, brittle flashes and pelted the battlements with metal hail. Some fell into the sea, trailing plaintive smoke, or buried themselves like tracer rounds in the towers and tuberous spires of K’ethdrac. One great tower, at the southern end of the city region, half collapsed after such a collision, and left just a part of itself standing above the billowing dust, a finger of stone with a broadening crest like the trochanters of a giant thigh bone rammed into the ground.
Some drop-ships made it to the ground intact.
II
Dalin Criid saw nothing of this.
He suffered the
awful turbulence of descent, rattled like a bead in the bare-metal casket of the lander. He heard the shrill whine of the engines, like spirits screaming to be freed. He smelled and tasted the fear: acid sweat, rank breath, bile, shit.
Fear made some men weep like babies, and others as silent as marble. The company pardoner, a flat-faced, gone-to-seed fellow called Pinzer, was reciting the Sixtieth Prayer, the I beseech. Many of the troopers were saying it along with him, some gabbling fast and loud, as if they were anxious that they wouldn’t get to the end before they died, or before they forgot how it went. Others spoke it like they meant it, meant every word with every fibre of their wills;
while others said it like a charm, a superstitious rhyme you recited to bring you luck. They spoke it carelessly, as if the words themselves were meaningless and the act of saying it was all that mattered.
Others just murmured the lines, probably not even knowing what they were saying, just fastening their scalded minds to something other than mad panic.
Criid saw a dead look in Fourbox’s eyes, in Hamir’s too. It was a sunken look, and it showed how totally hope had left them, and how deeply their personalities had withdrawn to hide in the very kernels of their heads. All around him, there were eyes that looked the same. Criid was sure his own eyes shared that dead look too.
The turbulence was unimaginably violent. There was simply no let-up in the shake and slam, the jump and rattle, and no relief from the howl of the engines. At particularly catastrophic lurches, some of the company would shriek, assuming the sudden death they had been anticipating.
The shrieks made Pinzer forget his words. He kept having to go back and pick up. He didn’t seem scared—unlike the scalps of AT 137, he’d done this before. But Criid could tell it was an effort for the pardoner to keep expression from his face. This didn’t come easy, no matter how many times you did it.
The shaking and lurching became so intense that Criid could no longer bear it. There was no escape, no exit from it, and he became so desperate that he thought he might rip open the deployment hatch and step out, and let the thundering windshear snatch him away.