[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

by Dan Abnett

  He wanted to get up and tell Corbec about his terror, but he was shaking so much he couldn’t.

  And even if he could, he knew they’d most likely laugh in his face and shoot him in the bushes.

  “Drink?”

  “What?” Vamberfeld snapped around.

  “Fancy a drink?” Bragg ask, offering him an open flask of the Tanith’s powerful sacra.

  “No.”

  “You look like you could use some, Vambs,” Bragg said genially.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” said Bragg, taking a sip himself and smacking his lips in relish.

  Vamberfeld realised the rain was falling hard now, bouncing off his face and shoulders.

  “You should get in,” Bragg observed. “It’s coming down in buckets.”

  “I will. In a minute. I’m okay.”

  “Okay,” said the big Tanith, moving away.

  Warm rainwater began to leak down Vamberfeld’s neckline and over his wrists. He turned his face up to look into the downpour, wishing that it would wash the terror away.

  “Something’s up with the hive-boy, chief,” Bragg said to Corbec, passing him the flask.

  Corbec took a deep swig of the biting liquor and used it to swallow a handful more painkillers. He was sucking in way too many of them, he knew. He hurt so, he needed them. Corbec followed Bragg’s gesture and looked across the rain-pelted road at the figure seated with its back to them. “I know, Bragg,” he said. “Do me a favour. Keep an eye on him for me, would you?”

  “So… How much?” whispered Greer, tightening a piston nut.

  “How much what?” replied Daur. He was soaked by the rain now.

  “Don’t make me say it, Verghast… The gold!”

  “Oh, that. Keep your voice down. We don’t want the others hearing.”

  “But it’s a lot, right? You promised a lot.”

  “You can’t imagine the amount.”

  Greer smiled, and wiped the rain off his face with a cuff that stained the streaks of water running down his brow with machine oil.

  “You haven’t told the rest, then?”

  “Ah… Just enough to get them interested.”

  “You gonna cut them out when the time comes?”

  “Well, I’m considering it.”

  “You can count on me, Verghast, time comes… If I can count on you, that is.”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course. But look for my signal before you do anything.”

  “Got it.”

  “Greer, you will wait for my signal, won’t you?” Greer grinned. “Absolutely, cap. This is your monkey-show. You call the play.”

  “Slow down, girl, slow down!” Corbec smiled, sheltering from the rain under the open hatch of the Chimera. Her hand signs were too quick for him as usual.

  Is the saint really calling to you? Nessa signed, more slowly this time.

  “Feth, I don’t know! Something is…” Corbec had still not truly mastered the sign codes used by the Verghastites, though he’d tried hard. He knew his clumsy gestures only conveyed the pigeon-essence of his words.

  Captain Daur says he has heard her, she signed expressively. He says you and the doctor have too.

  “Maybe, Nessa.”

  Are we wrong?

  “I’m sorry, what? Are we wrong?”

  Yes. She looked up at him, her face running with rainwater, her eyes bright.

  “Wrong in what way?”

  To be here. To be doing this.

  “No, we’re not. Believe that much at least.”

  Only his hand shook now. His left hand. By force of will, Vamberfeld had focused all the terror and the shakes down into that one extremity. He could breathe again. He was controlling it.

  Down the track, through the heavy rain, he saw something stir in the darkness. He knew he should reach for his weapon or cry out, but he didn’t dare in case it let the shaking spill out through him again.

  The movement resolved and became visible for a second. Two yearling chelon calves, no higher than a man’s knee, waddling down the muddy track towards them.

  And then a girl, aged twelve or thirteen, dressed in the dingy robes of the peasant caste, rounding the calves in with her crook.

  She pulled them back before they came too close to the parked Imperial transport. Just a smudge in the rainy night. A peasant girl, bringing in her herd, trying not to risk contact with the soldiers driving through her pastures.

  Vamberfeld stared at her in fascination. Her eyes came up and found his.

  So young. So very grimy and spattered with mud. Her eyes piercing and…

  The Chimera roared into life, engines turning and racing and spitting exhaust. Vapour streamed up into the rainfall in thick geysers of steam. The main lamps and headlights burst into life.

  “Mount up! Mount up!” Corbec yelled, calling them all back to the repaired transport.

  Vamberfeld woke up suddenly, finding himself lying on his side in the rain-pounded mud. He’d passed out and fallen from the tree stump. He got to his feet weak and shivering, fumbled for his gun and ran back towards the brightly lit transport.

  He cast a final look back into the dark trees. The girl and her chelons had vanished.

  But the daemon was still there.

  Pulling his shaking hand into his jacket to hide it, he climbed into the Chimera.

  Daybreak, streaming rain in lament over the smoking battleground, came up on Bhavnager.

  Waking early in his tent, Gaunt leapt up suddenly and then remembered the battle was done. He sat back on the tan canvas seat of his folding stool and sighed. A half-empty bottle of amasec sat on the map table nearby. He began to reach for it and then decided not to.

  Beyond his tent, he heard the grumble of tank engines being overhauled by the tech-priests. He heard the clank of the fuel bowsers as they replenished the transports. He heard the whine of hoists as tank magazines were reloaded from the Chimeras. He heard the moan of the wounded in Curth’s makeshift infirmary.

  Vox-officer Beltayn stuck his head in through the tent flap cautiously. “Oh five hundred, sir,” he said.

  Gaunt nodded distractedly. He got up, pulling off his blood-, soot- and oil-streaked vest replacing it with a fresh one from his kit The braces of his uniform pants dangling loose around his hips, he washed his face with handfuls of water from the jug and then slipped the braces up, putting on a shirt and his black dolman jacket with its rows of gold buttons and froggjng.

  Bhavnager. What a victory. What a loss.

  He was still shaking from the combat, from the ebbing adrenalin and the weariness.

  He had slept for about three hours, and that fitfully. Mad dreams, confused dreams, dreams spawned by extreme fatigue and the memories of what he had been through.

  He had seen himself on a narrow shelf of ice, with the world far below, clinging on, about to fall, hurricanes of fire falling around him.

  Sergeant Baffels had appeared, alive and whole. He’d been on the lip of ice, and had reached over to grab Gaunt’s hands. He’d pulled Gaunt up, onto solid ground.

  “Baffels…” he’d managed to gasp out, frozen to the marrow.

  Baffels had smiled, just before he’d vanished.

  “Sabbat Martyr,” he’d said.

  Gaunt grabbed the bottle and poured a deep measure into his dirty shot glass. He swigged it down.

  “Now the ghosts of Ghosts are haunting me,” he murmured to himself.

  Under Kolea’s instruction, the honour guard buried their dead — almost two hundred of them — in a mass grave beside the temple at Bhavnager. The Trojans could have dug the pit but the Pardus Conquerors Old Strontium, Beat the Retreat, P48J and Heart of Destruction did the honours with their dozer blades, even though their crews were half dead with fatigue. Ayatani Zweil was prevailed upon to make the service of the dead. The Ghosts dutifully staked small crosses cut from ghylum wood in rows across the turned earth, one for each of the dead who slept beneath.

  The day came up, warm, muggy and blight
ed with heavy rain. Gaunt knew it would take weeks for a unit to recover from the shock of an action as fundamentally brutal as Bhavnager, but he didn’t have weeks. He barely had days.

  At nine in the morning, he called the honour guard to order for an hour’s prep and sent the Recon Spear out in advance into the rainwoods above the town. Though tired, the men in his command seemed generally to be in good spirits. A solid victory, and against such odds, would do that, despite the losses. The Pardus were more sombre than the Ghosts: they seemed more to be mourning the beloved machines they’d lost rather than the men.

  Gaunt crossed the town square and stopped by a small timber store where Troopers Cocoer, Waed and Garond were guarding the Infardi officer Bonin’s squad had taken the night before. No other Infardi troops had been taken alive. Gaunt presumed that was because the Infardi took their wounded with them or killed them.

  The vile, tattooed thing was chained up like a canid at the back of the shed. “Anything from him?”

  “No sir,” said Waed.

  Rawne and Feygor had made a preliminary attempt at interrogation the previous night, after the fight, but the prisoner hadn’t responded.

  “Get him ready for shipping. We’ll take him with us.”

  Gaunt walked up towards the depot. Major Kleopas, Captain Woll and Lieutenant Pauk stood on the sooty apron of the machine sheds as the unit’s Trojans towed in the Drum Roll and the Fancy Klara. Both tanks could be repaired, Gaunt had been told. The Drum Roll’s damaged starboard track section was a buckled, dragging mess, and the crew, led by Captain Hancot, rode on the turret of their wounded steed. Though immobilised early in the fight, they had continued to fire and make kills effectively.

  But for an oddly neat hole punched into the plating of its turret, the Klara seemed intact. Only her driver had survived. Shutting off the electrics, tech-priests and sappers had disarmed the unexploded enemy shell that had, both directly and indirectly, killed LeTaw and his gun crew. Once it had been extracted safely from the ruptured magazine, and the magazine picked over for damaged munitions, the Klara was towed into Bhavnager for turret repairs. A replacement crew was assembled from survivors of slain tanks.

  Gaunt crossed to the watching tank officers and properly congratulated the Pardus commander for his part in the victory. Kleopas looked tired and pale, but he gladly shook Gaunt’s hand.

  “One for the casebooks in the Armour Academy on Pardua,” Gaunt said. “I imagine so.”

  “I have a… a question, I suppose, colonel-commissar,” said Kleopas.

  “Voice it, sir,” said Gaunt.

  “You and I… all of us were briefed that while Infardi forces were still at large in the hinterlands, their numbers were minimal. The opposition they raised here at Bhavnager was huge in scale, well organised and well supplied. Not the sort of show you’d expect from a broken, running enemy.”

  “I agree completely.”

  “Damn it, Gaunt, we moved in on this target expecting a hard fight, but not an all-out battle. My machines faced numerical odds greater than they’ve ever known. Don’t get me wrong, there was great glory here and I live to serve, the Emperor protects.”

  “The Emperor protects,” echoed Gaunt Woll and Pauk.

  “But this isn’t what they told us was out here. Can you… comment at least?”

  Gaunt looked at his boots thoughtfully for a moment. “When I was with Slaydo, just before the start of the crusade, we fell upon Khulen in winter time. I served with the Hyrkans then. Brave soldiers all. The enemy had vast numbers dug into the three main cities. It was snow-season and hellish cold. Two months it took, and we drove them out. Victory was ours. Slaydo told us to maintain vigil, and none of the command echelon knew why. Slaydo was a wily old goat of course. He’d seen enough in his long career to have insight. His instincts proved correct. Within a month, three times as many enemy units fell upon our positions. Three times as many as we had driven out in the first place. They’d given up, you see? They’d abandoned the cities and fallen back before we’d had time to rob them of their full strength, regrouped in the wilderness, and come back in vast numbers.”

  “What happened?” asked Pauk, fascinated.

  “Slaydo happened, lieutenant,” smiled Gaunt and they all laughed.

  “We took Khulen. A liberation effort turned into an all-out war. It lasted six months. We destroyed them. Now, consider this, a year later at the start of this crusade, liberating Ashek II. Formidable enemy strengths in the hives and the trade-towns of the archipelago. Three months’ hard fighting and we were masters of the world, but the Imperial tacticians warned that the lava hills might provide excellent natural defences in which the enemy could regroup. We battened down, ready for the counter sweep. It never came. After a lot of recon we discovered that the enemy hadn’t fallen back at all. They’d fought to the last man in the hives and we’d vanquished them entirely on the first phase. They hadn’t even thought to use the landscape that so favoured them.”

  “I’m beginning to feel like a child in tactica class,” smiled Woll.

  “I’m sorry,” said Gaunt. “I was simply illustrating a number of points.”

  “That any enemy twisted by Chaos is always unpredictable?” suggested Kleopas. “That, for one thing.”

  “That because the enemy is so unpredictable, we might as well hang all the Imperial tacticians now?” chuckled Woll.

  “Exactly, Woll, for two.”

  “That this is what’s occurring here?” asked Kleopas.

  Gaunt nodded. “You all know I have no love of Lugo. I have personal reason to object to the man.”

  “Make no apologies for him,” Kleopas said. “He’s a new minted upstart with no experience.”

  “Well, you said it, not me,” grinned Gaunt. “The point is… whatever our lord general’s failings… the spawn of Chaos is never predictable, never logical. You can’t out-think them. To try would be madness. You can only prepare for any event. My clumsy examples were meant to illustrate that. If I failed at all at the Doctrinopolis, it was that I didn’t cover every possibility.”

  “I was with you. Gaunt. You were given orders that prevented you from using your experience.”

  “Gracious. Thank you. That’s what I feel we have here A misguided expectation on the part of Lugo that the enemy will behave like an Imperial army. He thinks it will hold the cities until it is beaten. It will not. He thinks that only defeated remnants will flee after the battle. Not true again. I believe that the Infardi gave up the cities when they realised we had the upper hand, and purposefully backed up their main strengths into the outlying territories. Hence the weight of numbers at Bhavnager.”

  “Lugo be damned,” said Woll.

  “Lugo ought to listen to his officers, that’s all,” said Gaunt. “That’s what made Slaydo Slaydo… or Solon Solon… the ability to listen. I fear that’s lacking from the crusade’s senior ranks now, even lacking in Macaroth.”

  The Pardus officers shuffled uneasily.

  “I’ll blaspheme no more, gentlemen,” Gaunt said and drew smiles from them all. “My advice is simply this. Prepare. Expert the unexpected. The arch-enemy is not a logical or predictable foe, but he has his own agenda. We can’t imagine it, but we can suffer all too well when it takes effect.”

  He stepped back as Rawne, Kolea, Varl, Hark and Surgeon Curth approached across the rockcrete apron to join them, and an impromptu operations meeting came to order. Curth handed a personnel review to the colonel-commissar.

  They had two hundred and twenty-four wounded, of whom seventy-three were serious. Curth told Gaunt frankly that although they could move all the wounded with them, at least eighteen would not survive the transit more than a day. Nine would not survive the transit period.

  “Your recommendations, surgeon?”

  “Simple, sir. None of them travel.”

  Rawne shook his head with a dry laugh. “What do we do? Leave them here?”

  Kolea suggested they establish a stronghold at Bhavna
ger, where the injured might be tended in a field hospital. Though it meant leaving a reduced force at the town, vulnerable to the roaming Infardi, it might be the only hope of survival for the casualties. Besides, the honour guard would need Bhavnager’s fuel resources for the return trip.

  Gaunt conceded the merit of this idea. He would leave one hundred Ghosts and a supporting armoured force at Bhavnager to guard the fuel dump and the wounded while he pushed on into the Sacred Hills. Curth immediately insisted on staying, and Gaunt allowed that, selecting Lesp as the ongoing mission’s chief medic. Captain Woll volunteered to command the armour guard of the Bhavnager fastness. Gaunt and Kleopas arranged to leave the Death Jester, Xenophobe and the mid-repairs Drum Roll and Fancy Klara under his command. Gaunt chose Kolea to command the position, with Sergeant Varl as his second.

  Kolea accepted the task obediently, and went off to gather up the platoons under his immediate command. Varl was rather more against the choice, and as the meeting broke up, took Gaunt quietly to one side and begged to be allowed to join him on this final mission.

  “It’s not my final mission, sergeant,” Gaunt said.

  “But sir—”

  “Have you ever disobeyed an order, Varl?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t do it now. This is important. I trust you. Do this for me.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “For Tanith, like I know you remember her, Varl.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For Tanith.”

  Then Gaunt roused up the main force and pushed on into the rainwoods, leaving the lowlands and Bhavnager behind in their dust.

  Knots of Ghost and Pardus personnel watched the convoy depart. Varl stood watching for a long time after the last vehicle had vanished from sight and only dust clouds showed their progress.

  “Sergeant?”

  He swung around out of his reverie. Kolea and Woll had grouped squad leaders and tank chiefs around a chart table on the steps of the battered town hall.