[Gaunt's Ghosts 11] - Only in Death

by Dan Abnett

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  Eszrah suddenly rose, his reynbow up and aimed. Gaunt and Dorden looked around.

  Rawne entered.

  “It’s just Rawne,” Gaunt told Eszrah. The partisan didn’t lower his bow.

  “What’s up?” Gaunt asked Rawne.

  “Criid reckons she’s found something,” Rawne said.

  III

  The warm stink of energy greeted Baskevyl as he entered the power room.

  The chamber was long and rectangular, with sloping ceilings. It was dominated by the bulk of the power hub, an iron kettle the size of a drop-pod. Power feeds ran off the kettle up into a broad roof socket, and grilled slits in the kettle’s sides throbbed with a slow glow that matched the gentle rhythm of the house lighting. Baskevyl could feel the pulsing warmth. It made no sound. Whatever generative reaction was going on inside, it was a curiously silent one.

  The fire-team assigned to guard the power room had been playing cards in a huddle at the foot of the entry steps. They stood when he came up, but he waved them back to their game with a smile.

  “How are things here?” he asked Captain Domor.

  Shoggy Domor was in charge of the fire-team detail. He walked over to the kettle with Baskevyl as the troopers resumed their quiet game. His bulbous augmetic eyes whirred quietly as they sharpened focus on the major.

  “I can’t really say, sir.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know what this is. It’s just running. It’s been running for a long, long time, and it continues to run. I have no idea what the operating process is.”

  “No idea?” Baskevyl frowned. If anyone in the Ghosts knew engineering systems, it was Shoggy.

  “I think it’s chemical, but I’m not sure.” Domor nodded at the pulsing, glowing kettle in front of them. “I doubt the chief would thank me if I tried opening it up to find out.”

  “There’s no feed? No fuel supply?” Baskevyl asked.

  “None, sir.”

  “We need a tech out here, a tech-adept,” Baskevyl muttered to himself. He pressed his hands against the fat belly of the kettle, then took them away. The iron had throbbed under his touch, as if it was alive.

  He looked around at Domor. “Look, just keep watch on it, as per orders. We may not know how it works, but at least it does, and it’s giving us lights. I’ll get a detail down here to relieve you in… shall we say three hours?”

  Domor nodded. “What about the, er, noises, sir?”

  “You too, eh?” asked Baskevyl. “I think this place has some weird acoustic qualities. Sound carries. Just try not to let it spook you.”

  Domor seemed less than convinced.

  “What?” Baskevyl asked.

  Domor tilted his head to indicate they should take a walk. Casually, they skirted around the throbbing kettle together and put its bulk between them and the huddle of troopers by the steps. Domor dropped his voice so his boys wouldn’t hear.

  “Footsteps and voices, right?” he asked softly.

  “I’ve heard both. Like I said, I think sound ca—”

  “What about the other noise?” asked Domor.

  “What other noise?”

  Domor shrugged. “It comes and goes. A sort of grinding, scraping sound.”

  “I haven’t heard anything like that,” said Baskevyl.

  “Come with me,” said Domor quietly. He stepped aside and called out to his troop. “Chiria? You’re in charge. I’m going to show Major B. the workshops.”

  “Right you are, Shoggy,” she called back.

  There was a door in the rear wall of the power room. Domor drew back the rusted bolts. He led Baskevyl into a series of four, small stone rooms that had once been workshops. The air within was much colder than it had been in the main hub room. It was chilly and stale, like an old pantry. Old wooden benches lined the walls, their surfaces worn. Wall racks had once held tools, but the tools had long gone. The sooty outlines of saws, pliers and wrenches hung under the old pegs.

  Baskevyl peered along the row of workshop rooms. They were linked by stone arches. Domor pulled the door shut behind them.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” replied Baskevyl.

  “Listen,” Domor insisted.

  IV

  Gaunt followed Rawne up a long, rickety wooden staircase into the very summit of the house. They came up into a room shaped like a belfry: a circular, domed chamber into which the wind shrilled through partially open metal shutters. The wind whined like-dry skulls in a dusty valley

  —a scolded dog.

  “Can’t we close them?” Gaunt asked, raising his voice above the sound.

  “No,” Criid called back. “The mechanisms are jammed.”

  Gaunt looked around. The base of the roof dome had eight large shutters around its circumference, all of them operated by brass winders. Years of dust had choked the gears. The shutters were frozen in various positions, like the half-closed eyelids of dying men. Eddies and scoots of dust billowed in around the sills and covered the floor like powdered snow.

  “What is this?” Gaunt called.

  “Criid called it a windcote,” Rawne cried back. “Look.”

  The centre of the chamber was dominated by a huge perch: a rusted metal tree of fat iron rods where things had once roosted. There was bird lime on the floor, and the remains of food baskets.

  “I think they kept birds here, sir,” Criid called out, holding her cloak hem up over her mouth and nose. “Messenger birds. You know, for flying messages.”

  “I grasp the concept,” said Gaunt. He looked at the size of the shutters, imagining them wound back and fully open. “Big birds,” he muttered.

  He went over to the nearest shutter and bent down, trying to peer out of the wedged open slit. Windborne dust gusted into his face.

  Coughing, he pulled back. “This’d make a great look out, if it wasn’t for that fething wind.”

  Rawne nodded. He’d thought the same thing.

  “That wasn’t what I wanted you to see,” Criid called out to them.

  “Then what?”

  She pointed upwards. Something was hanging from the uppermost branch of the roosting perch.

  “That,” shouted Criid.

  It was a black iron face mask, swinging gently by its head straps in the swirling wind. The mask had a hooked nose and a snarling expression.

  It was a Blood Pact grotesk.

  Gaunt said something.

  “What?” Rawne asked, against the scream of the wind.

  “I said there’s that trouble you were on about,” said Gaunt.

  V

  Baskevyl turned in a small slow circle, gazing up at the ceiling of the workshop.

  “You heard that, right?” Domor whispered.

  Baskevyl nodded. His mouth was dry, and it wasn’t entirely due to the short-rationed water. He’d heard the noise quite clearly, a grinding scrape, just like Shoggy Domor had described. It had sounded like… well Baskevyl wasn’t sure he could honestly say what it had sounded like, but the moment he’d heard it, an image had filled his mind, an image he hadn’t really wanted. It was the image of something vast and clammy, snake-like, all damp bone and glistening tissue, like a gigantic spinal chord, scraping and slithering along some deep, rough, rock-cut tunnel far below them, like a daemon-worm in the earth.

  Lucien Wilder, in days long gone, had always said Baskevyl had been born with an imagination he’d have been better off without.

  “What does it sound like to you?” asked Domor quietly.

  Baskevyl didn’t reply. Urgently, he tried to banish the image from his head. He walked under the stone arch into the next workshop, then into the next, until he was standing in the end chamber. The walls were panelled, like everywhere else, in that satin brown material.

  The noise came again. Gnarled vertebrae sleeved in wet, grey sinew, dragged across ragged stone. It slipped along rapidly, fluidly, like a desert snake. Baskevyl could hear loose
pebbles and grit skittering out in its wake.

  There was cold sweat on his back. The noise died away.

  “Well?” Domor asked.

  “Vermin?” asked Baskevyl. Domor stared at him. His augmetic eyes whirred and clicked, as if widening in scorn.

  “Vermin?” he replied. “Have you seen any vermin?”

  Baskevyl shook his head.

  “The place is dry and dead,” said Domor. “There’s no vermin here, no insects, no scraps of food. If there were ever any vermin here, Major B, they’ve long since given up on the place.”

  He was right. Baskevyl felt stupid for even suggesting it. There was no point trying to fob off smart men like Shoggy Domor with patent lies.

  He heard the noise again, briefly, a wriggling scratch that faded away almost instantaneously. Baskevyl stepped towards the wall, and reached out. The satin brown panelling felt warm and organic to his touch. He tapped at it, at first hearing the dead reply of the stone wall behind it.

  Then, as he moved his hand along, he got a hollow noise.

  He glanced back at Domor, who was watching him.

  “There’s nothing behind this panel,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There’s nothing behind this panel. Listen.”

  He tapped again. A hollow dullness. “Get your team in here,” Baskevyl began. The noise came back again. Baskevyl stiffened. Throne, but he could not help visualising the awful, clammy spine-thing, snaking through the dark.

  “Shoggy, would y—” he started to say.

  He heard another sound suddenly: a brief, leaden pop, like someone cracking a knuckle. How odd. Baskevyl looked up and down, studying the sheened brown patina of the wall panel.

  There was a hole in the wall at chest height just to his right, a small hole, half a centimetre in diameter, that had certainly not been there before. The edges of the hole were smouldering slightly.

  “Shoggy?” he said, and then registered a sudden, sharp sensation of pain. He glanced down at his right arm. A flesh wound was scorched right across the outside of his upper arm. It had burned through his jacket and shirt, and into the skin beneath, leaving a gouge of cooked, black blood.

  “Oh shit!” he announced, stepping backwards. “Shoggy! I think I’ve just been shot.”

  He turned around, slightly head-sick with shock. The las-round had come clean through the wall, sliced across the side of his right arm, and…

  Domor was leaning back against the workbench behind them in a slightly awkward pose. He was staring at Baskevyl with his big, artificial eyes, which whirred and turned, unable to focus. He was trying to say something, but all he was managing to do was aspirate blood.

  There was a black, bloody puncture in the middle of his chest.

  “Oh, Throne. Shoggy?” Baskevyl cried, and stumbled towards him.

  Domor, lolling sideways, finally managed to find a word and speak it. The word was, “down.” It came out of his lips in a ghastly mist of blood.

  Baskevyl grabbed Domor and dragged him over onto the workshop floor.

  A second later, more holes began to appear in the satin brown panel: two, three, a dozen, twenty, forty.

  On the other side of the wall panel, someone had just opened up with a las-weapon on full auto.

  Elikon M.P., Elikon M.P., this is Nalwood,

  this is Nalwood. Hostile contact! Repeat

  hostile contact at this time!

  Nalwood out. (transmission ends)

  —Transcript of vox message, fifth month, 778.

  FIVE

  Vermin

  I

  It suddenly got very noisy indeed in the tiny end workshop. Bright daggers of las-fire punched through the wall panel, zipped across the shop and hammered into the opposite wall, blowing apart the empty racks and obliterating forever the smudged outlines of hanging tools.

  Baskevyl tried to drag Domor in under the heavy workbench. He fumbled for his laspistol. His arm hurt like fire. Domor had gone limp, dead limp.

  “Shoggy!” Baskevyl yelled.

  More shots tore through the wall, shredding holes through the rims of previous holes, filling the close air with the stink of las-fire and singed fibres. Baskevyl started shooting back, one-handed, his other arm pulling at Domor’s dead-weight. He wondered if he should risk reaching for Domor’s lasrifle, which was lying nearby on the floor. Bad idea, he decided. He fired again, making his own holes in the wall.

  “Contact! Contact! Hostiles!” he yelled into his microbead. The interlink went crazy, voices gabbling and yelling over one another.

  The outer door to the workshops burst open and Domor’s fire-team scrambled in, led by the redoubtable Corporal Chiria. The old battle scars across her face had long ago put paid to any looks she’d ever been proud of, but now she looked especially unlovely. Surprise and alarm, in equal amounts, had twisted her damaged features into a pink grimace.

  “What the feth—?” she began.

  “Help me!” Baskevyl yelled at her. He was intending for her to come and help him drag Domor out of the way.

  Chiria had other ideas. She swung her lasrifle up to her shoulder and hosed the punctured wall, pricking the gloom with barbs of full-auto light.

  “Get Shoggy up. Drag him back!” she yelled as she lit off. Domor was dead, she knew that much. One glimpse had been all she’d needed to know. A round to the body, heart shot.

  Those bastards would pay.

  Ezlan was beside her, Nehn and Brennan too. Their four lasrifles blasted furiously into the splintered panelling. They made a dull, echoing crack, like a length of cane being smacked repeatedly against a stone floor.

  “Hold it, hold it! Hold fire!” Chiria yelled.

  The Ghosts around her stopped shooting.

  “What?” Nehn asked.

  “Wait…” said Chiria.

  Nothing, no return of fire, just a gusty moan of wind weeping through the hundreds of holes in the smoking, shot-up wall panel.

  “Help me with him,” Baskevyl said, trying to get up and pull Domor clear. Nehn and Chiria hurried over. Ezlan and Brennan kept their weapons aimed at the perforated wall.

  Baskevyl’s hands were slick with Domor’s blood. He’d been trying to compress the wound.

  “Guard this,” he told Chiria. “Anything stirs, you nail it. I’ll carry Shoggy—”

  “You guard this,” said Chiria, bluntly. “I’ll carry Shoggy. Nehn, get his feet.”

  She handed her lasrifle to Baskevyl. He didn’t argue. Sometimes, Major Baskevyl was wise enough to recognise, when it came to loyalty and bonding, orders sat better if they ran against the chain of command. It was right Chiria should carry Shoggy Domor.

  Moving fast, Chiria and Nehn carted Domor’s limp body out of the workshop. Baskevyl adjusted China’s weapon, and checked the clip. The air was full of dust, scorched and burned dust. The wall was a cratered mess of holes, like the backboard at the end of a practice range.

  Baskevyl looked at Ezlan and Brennan.

  “Either of you got a grenade? A tube-charge, maybe?”

  “Why?” asked Ezlan nervously. “Just asking,” said Baskevyl.

  II

  “Here. Over here. Set him down!” cried Ana Curth.

  She’d been drawn out of the field station by sounds of commotion in time to see Chiria and Nehn struggle into the base chamber with what appeared to be the corpse of Shoggy Domor. Chiria and Nehn laid Domor down on the decking by the stairs, as instructed. Curth knelt over him.

  “What happened?” she demanded as she stripped Domor’s shirt and tunic off with scissors from her field satchel.

  “Hostile contact,” replied Chiria, leaning on the banister and panting hard. She’d carried her captain’s body a considerable way at speed. She could barely talk.

  “Make sense please,” Curth snapped. “From the top, corporal.”

  “They were in the walls,” Chiria replied, gasping, her voice hoarse. “In the walls like vermin.” She looked at Curth. “He’s dead, isn�
��t he?”

  Curth was too busy to answer. In the absence of a bone saw, she’d reached up and helped herself to Nehn’s warknife. Nehn hadn’t had time to object. He winced at the sight of Curth carving into Domor with his blade. Curth’s hands were slippery with blood. There was an ugly crack as she sectioned the sternum. “Chayker! Lesp! Where are you?” she shouted. “We’re going to have to get him into the field station right now!”

  Chayker and Lesp, the orderlies, ran into the base chamber, lugging a stretcher and a surgical kit. Dorden materialised behind them, puzzled and half asleep.

  “What’s going on?” Dorden asked, groggily He woke up very quickly. “Sacred feth, is that Shoggy?”

  “Upper torso puncture,” replied Curth as she worked frantically, tossing aside Nehn’s warknife and trying to insert rib-spreaders from the kit Lesp had passed to her. “Swabs! Forget moving him. I need swabs. Lots more of them!” she called out.

  Dorden elbowed his way in beside Curth and sank to his knees.

  “Oh, that’s a mess…”

  “You can clamp that shut with your fingers or you can get the feth out of my way!” Curth barked at him as she hastily prepped the tissue weaver from the kit.

  Dorden snapped on a glove, reached in and clamped. “There’s a secondary hole in the aorta,” he began, peering down.

  “Thank you for stating the obvious,” Curth replied, ripping the backing-pack off a field swab. “These aren’t going to be enough!” She looked up. “I said I need more! More! Counterseptic too!”

  Lesp took off towards the field station.

  “Losing rhythm,” Dorden muttered.

  “I’ve nearly got it!” spat Curth, trying to aim the tissue weaver.

  “Auto patch it there. There, woman!” Dorden barked.

  “Move your fingers, then!” Curth leaned into the bloody cavity with the buzzing surgical tool.

  Calmly holding Domor’s barely beating heart together as Curth heat-bonded its punctures shut, Dorden looked up at Chiria.

  “How did this happen?”