by Dan Abnett
“How do you think they’re doing?” he asked.
Rawne shrugged.
Mkoll found a grip and held it. The impact had all but winded him. The old tiles were rotten, and they shredded under his fingertips. He dug in with his knife and got a good purchase. He looked back.
Gaunt had landed well. Landerson had slipped, and was sliding back down the low roof, scrabbling for a hand-hold.
Gaunt stabbed his own knife home, then threw out the end of his camo-cape to Landerson. The man grabbed it and his slide ceased.
“Help me,” Gaunt grunted.
Mkoll edged back down the roof, and threw his own cape out to Landerson. Between them, Gaunt and Mkoll dragged Landerson up to join them. “My thanks,” he gasped.
“How do we get in?” Gaunt asked.
“Skylight on the far side.”
The building was an old scholam primer. They dropped down into the gloomy interior, and walked past half-sized desks and alphabet murals. Gaunt paused briefly and gazed at the scatter of tiny wooden building blocks and forgotten dolls.
Landerson led them to the back exit, out into a dingy alley that led back along a series of rents and low-habs. Filthy water gurgled down the central gutter.
“Where to?” Gaunt whispered.
“Just shut up and follow me,” Landerson replied.
They chased him through a series of gloomy vacant lots and under the rough timber scaffolding that had been erected to shore up the sagging wall of a manufactory.
At the corner of the aged building they stowed themselves in cover and waited until Mkoll gave them an all clear.
Then they sprinted across the cobbled thoroughfare and ran down the stone steps beside a public water syphon.
The air was dank. Landerson headed on through the dim blue shadows until he reached a chainlink fence.
“We’re blocked,” Gaunt started to say. Landerson shook his head, and took off his coat, wrapping it around his hands so he could grab the filaments of razorwire knotted into the fence without ripping his palms open. He hefted hard and a section lifted away.
“Through. Now!” he barked, and Mkoll and Gaunt ducked under the partition. Landerson followed, and settled the section back in place. He put his coat back on. It had a number of fresh tears.
He beckoned them. They jogged down a low pavement, flanked on either side by the piaster-finished walls of public buildings, and then across a small yard where a dried-up fountain stood forlorn. A left turn, another alley, and then up a flight of worn stone steps to the next street.
Mkoll hushed them back hard.
They clung to the mossy wall and watched the steel-shod feet of an excubitor patrol stride past on the street level.
Mkoll put his silenced pistol away again and nodded them on.
“We have to cross here,” Landerson said.
Mkoll nodded, and took a look out. The side-street, cobbled and shadowed, was empty.
“Go!” Mkoll said.
They darted across the street and into an adjacent alley. Ten metres down from the alley mouth, there was a door of heavy wood, painted red.
Landerson waved the Ghosts back. He knocked once.
A slit opened.
“How is Gereon?” a voice asked from inside.
“Gereon lives,” Landerson replied.
“Even though it dies,” the voice responded.
Landerson stiffened abruptly and turned away from the door. He started walking back towards Gaunt and Mkoll.
“What’s the matter?” asked Gaunt.
“Move. Move,” Landerson whispered urgently. “It’s not safe.”
They began to hurry away.
The red door opened wide and an excubitor stepped out, its las-lock raised to fire.
Mkoll spun around, dropped to one knee and fired three shots with his silenced autopistol. It made a phut! phut! phut! noise.
The excubitor slammed backwards as if it had been yanked back by a rope.
“Run!” said Mkoll.
FIVE
Gaunt started to run, but heard Mkoll’s weapon spit again. He looked back. Another excubitor had fallen awkwardly away from the red door, its las-lock clattering onto the flagstones.
“Come on!” Gaunt shouted.
Mkoll raced to join him. Landerson was already heading out onto the side street.
“Which way?” Gaunt hissed.
“Down here…” Landerson began. He shut up quickly. They heard the squeaking clatter of vehicle treads, and a half-track swung into view at one end of the street. Dark figures leapt out, long coats flying. Gaunt heard challenges shouted through augmetic voice boxes.
They turned immediately, but three excubitors were emerging from the alley they had just left. Gaunt wrenched out his auto. Mkoll was already firing.
One excubitor keeled over, speaker box blown out in a spurt of acrid sparks and synthesised howls. Gaunt’s auto bucked as he put three muted shots through the hip and ribs of a second, punching holes in the grey-scale armour coat and spattering the wall behind with gore. The third got its long, ornate weapon up to fire but Mkoll crashed into it, bearing the excubitor down onto the cobbles under him. The silencer of Mkoll’s auto pressed against the excubitor’s sternum and he executed it with two quick rounds before it could get up.
Then the three of them started to run down the street away from the half-track and the oncoming patrol. Landerson led the way, sprinting, his autorifle bumping against his hip. Gaunt and Mkoll followed him. Gaunt presumed Landerson had some sort of plan, that he was working on local knowledge.
Then again, maybe he was just fleeing in blind panic.
He heard a shot. The hyphenated zzt-foff of a las-lock firing. The bolt blew stones and brick chips out of a wall. Gaunt glanced back. The gang of excubitors was closing fast. They seemed like figures from a nightmare: their armour coats billowing out behind them, their grotesquely long, thin legs carrying them in huge, headlong strides. Gaunt fired a couple of shots in their direction then pounded on after Mkoll and Landerson.
The street opened out into a wide yard with a pillared stone colonnade along one side. On the far side of the yard, the mouth of the adjoining street was blocked by a battered troop transporter. The excubitors lined up in front of it swept their weapons to their shoulders.
“Feth!” Gaunt cried. The three men hurled themselves into the scant cover of the colonnade as the las-locks started to blast. Bolts smacked off the old pillars, or flew between them and detonated against the colonnade’s inner wall. Mkoll got his back to a pillar, and Landerson scrambled on hands and knees for cover. Gaunt threw himself down behind another stone column. His nostrils burned with cooked stone and burn-dust. The las-lock fusillade sounded like whipcracks. They were pinned, and in a second they were going to be outflanked. For in a second, the foot patrol was going to round the corner, with a clear field of fire down the shadowed colonnade.
Gaunt pressed his back against the pillar, his leather jacket scratching on the rough stone. He pulled out his bolt pistol so he had a weapon in each hand.
“I’ve got our backs! Take them!” he yelled.
Landerson heard the shout. He was still on his hands and knees, shielding his head from the lock-fire. What the Throne did Gaunt mean by “take them”? There were just three of them, cornered like rats, and the excubitors were everywhere.
“Use that fething weapon!” Mkoll snapped at him. The scout had holstered his pistol and was swinging the las-rifle off his shoulder. He didn’t even bother extending the wire stock. He leaned out from behind the pillar and let off a burst of las-fire, rapid auto. The line of excubitors by the transport on the far side of the yard scattered for cover. Mkoll chuckled at the sight of it, and raked them again, cutting two down in a flurry of sizzling bolts.
“Come on!” he shouted.
Landerson struggled up onto his knees, and started firing his autorifle. The shots coming out of the suppressed muzzle sounded like wet kisses. He saw a row of raw metal holes punch in
to the side of the transport and raised his aim, knocking an excubitor off the back of the truck.
The patrol ran into view, shouting. Gaunt stepped out of his partial cover behind the pillar and opened fire with both handguns. The first three figures jerked and fell backwards. The clip of his auto out, Gaunt aimed the boltgun steadily and boomed out four more loud reports. Another dark shape folded violently, as if struck by a sledgehammer.
Gaunt ducked back behind the pillar, reloading. Las-lock rounds squealed down the colonnade. Behind him.
he heard the furious crackle of Mkoll’s las, and the splutter of the resistance fighter’s old rifle. Gaunt peered out to the left of the pillar and fired his bolt pistol, then jerked back as las-locks answered him, before popping out to the right to fire his autopistol. The hard rounds smacked an excubitor in the face and forehead and walloped it onto its back. Then he leaned out to the left side again, and fired a bolt shell that pulped the chest of another excubitor who was trying to make a dash down the colonnade.
“Moving,” he heard Mkoll yell. The air around the colonnade was thick with dust and gunsmoke. Gaunt fired a few last bright flashes into the pall and turned to run after his chief scout.
Mkoll and Landerson had emerged from cover, firing their weapons from the hip as they ran across the yard. Their hammer-fire was forcing the second excubitor squad to cower behind walls and ragged heaps of trash and masonry. Gaunt caught up with Landerson. Mkoll had spotted a boarded door in the far wall of the yard. He reached it, kicked it savagely several times until it splintered open and then knelt down to deliver wholesale blasts across the yard with his lasrifle as Landerson and Gaunt charged in through the gaping doorway. As soon as they were inside, he barked off a final burst and plunged after them.
It was some kind of storage shed, unlit apart from the daylight slanting in through holes in the tiled roof. Old furniture was piled up against the walls. Gaunt edged his way in, with Landerson close behind. Mkoll paused in the doorway and pulled a tube-charge from his pack. He wedged it on one side of the splintered door, tied a length of monofilament wire to the det-tape, and then played the almost invisible wire out taut across the doorway at shin height, wrapping it off around a broken hinge on the other side.
Then he hurried after Gaunt.
“Know this place?” Gaunt whispered to Landerson. Outside they could heard guttural shouts and the occasional shot as the relentless patrols regrouped.
“Tillage Street bunkers. They lead into the manufactory district.” Landerson peered around in the gloom. “Let’s go that way. We want to come out on the south side of Rubenda.” Landerson sounded a little frantic, and Gaunt had a feeling it wasn’t only the fun and games they’d just experienced.
“Where do we head for—” he began.
“Shut up. Please,” Landerson said. This is really bad. Really bad. We’re not doing anything right now except finding a place to hide.”
“Of course,” said Gaunt.
“You don’t understand,” Landerson said.
“What the feth is that?” Mkoll said behind them. They froze, listening. They could still make out the noises of the excubitors in the yard outside, but there was something else now. Horns were blowing, harsh and strident. And behind them, a rustling, like a gathering wind. A moaning that threatened to become a howl.
“Is it just me, or is that a sound no one wants to hear?” Mkoll whispered.
“Wirewolves,” said Landerson. “Oh Throne. We’ve woken the whole place up.”
“What are—” Gaunt started to ask and then stopped. He didn’t want to know. “Your call, Landerson. A place to hide, you said.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Landerson.
They found another door on the south side of the store, pulling broken tables aside to clear it. It let out into a dingy alley that was running with sewage from a broken drain. The moaning in the air had become a howl now. A keening.
Mkoll had slung his lasrifle again, and was leading the way with his silenced pistol raised. Behind them, in the store, they heard a dull, reverbarative crump, and a good deal of augmetic shrieking. An excubitor’s shin had snagged Mkoll’s tripwire.
They sloshed away through the muck. On a nearby street, transports rumbled by, their badly maintained engines raiding and coughing. Another booming note echoed from the city horns. More keening howls shrilled in the damp air. Gaunt felt his skin prickle. He could smell the unholy magic loosed on the wind.
Mkoll gestured with his pistol to a dark alley to their left.
“No,” Landerson said, without breaking stride. That’s a dead end. This way.”
They turned right up a steep cobbled street and then Landerson immediately darted left into a covered alley between two boarded premises. The alley led through into a ramshackle clutch of overgrown walled gardens behind the tenement row. Only then did Landerson slow down.
“How did you know?” Gaunt asked.
Landerson beckoned the Ghosts after him. They followed a weed-infested path behind a row of broken cold frames and cultivator shacks, and into a yard piled with hemp sacks full of nitrate fertiliser.
“How did you know?” Gaunt repeated. “Back at the red door.”
“They gave the wrong response. The warning response. The excubitors must have had them at gunpoint.”
“They knew you were coming,” said Mkoll.
“They knew someone was coming. That house was a key contact point. We’ll have to use another. If there are any left they haven’t found.” Landerson slid the bar on the rotting wooden door of a workshop and they went in. It was dirty, and piled with junk and machine parts.
“What’s here?” Gaunt said.
“Nothing. It’s a way through. We have to keep off the streets.”
Landerson led them to the far end of the workshop and moved some old cans of paint and sheets of fibre-plank so he could pull a section of the flakboard wall aside. The dust he disturbed spilled up into bars of pale light slanting in through the windows and made mote galaxies.
They ducked through and came out into a stone shed that, judging from the promethium stains on the floor, had been used until recently to garage vehicles. Landerson
checked the street door.
Outside, the sound of howling had risen a notch. The air was charged. Gaunt felt nauseous. In the corner of the shed, an old engine block rested on a wooden pallet.
“Help me with this,” Landerson said. With Mkoll’s aid, Landerson shifted the pallet load and exposed a trapdoor. He yanked it open and dropped down into the darkness.
Mkoll and Gaunt followed. Landerson closed the hatch with a rope-pull and they were plunged into darkness. Mkoll lit his lamp pack. By the light of it, they moved on through a series of cellars. The brick walls were mildewed and rotten. Clumps of black fungus sprouted from the mortar. Vermin scuttled from the wavering light beam.
They reached a flight of dank steps, and edged down into a narrow tunnel that was flooded knee-deep with cold, noxious water. Landerson sloshed ahead, and located a set of iron rungs fixed into the tunnel’s brickwork. Dripping, they clambered up it into a dry, vaulted cellar where the roof was so low they couldn’t stand up straight. By the light of Mkoll’s lamp, Gaunt could see there was a pile of old equipment crates and sacks of dried provisions heaped against one wall.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“The undercroft of the Ineuron flour mill. It’s one of the bolt-holes the cell uses.”
“Are we safe here?” Gaunt asked.
Landerson laughed. “Of course not. But it’s safer than other places. Safer than out on the streets. Pray to your Emperor that it’ll be safe enough.”
“The Emperor protects,” Mkoll whispered.
“He’s your Emperor too,” Gaunt said.
“What?”
“Pray to your Emperor, you said. As if he wasn’t yours.”
Landerson shrugged. “This is my world, Colonel-Commissar Gaunt. And I love it dearly. My family line dates back to
the original colonist-founders. Landerson. Sons of the First Landers here. I am true to the God-Emperor of Mankind, but honestly… do you think I trust him to protect me any more? Where was he when doom came to Gereon?”
“I can’t answer that,” said Gaunt.
“How long must we stay here?” Mkoll asked.
“Until it’s safe to show our faces,” said Landerson.
“Which means—”
“Later tonight at the earliest. When things have calmed down.” Landerson leaned his rifle against the undercroft wall and sat down. Then, maybe, we can start trying to hook up with the underground again. If we’re not found in the meantime.”
The sun was setting. In the dry, starchy air of the silos outside the town, the rest of the insertion team waited fitfully.
“You hear that?” Bonin asked.
Larkin nodded. He was drooped as if asleep over his long-las. “Been hearing it now for a good few minutes.”
“What the feth is it?”
Larkin didn’t like to say. It was a distant howling sound, murmuring from the town below them. It sounded just like his worst nightmares. It made the noise of his migraines, the chatter of his darkest thoughts.
“I say we try the link,” announced Tona Criid, rising to her feet.
Beltayn shook his head. “Nothing like range. Not with micro-beads. My set won’t pick them up.”
“We wait,” said Rawne, emphatically. That was what his orders were.”
“I hear that,” said Feygor.
Varl looked as if he was about to say something then just shook his head.
Mkvenner paced into the silo, just finishing his latest sweep. He stood in the doorway, backlit by the sinking sunlight. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
“We figured that much,” Bonin replied.
“Have you heard the noises?” Mkvenner asked.
“Yes, I have,” said Rawne. “Worst case scenario, our beloved leader has run into seriously shitty trouble and is either dead or about to be.”
“Right. Best case, major?” Ana Curth asked.