by Dan Abnett
“I don’t feel right,” says Milo.
Dorden tilts his chair back to upright and takes his feet down off the side of a cot. He folds over the corner of a page to mark his place, and sets his book aside.
“Come in, Milo,” he says.
In the back of the long tent behind Dorden, the medicae orderlies are at work checking supplies and cleaning instruments. The morning has brought the usual round of complaints generated by an army on the move: foot problems, gum problems, and gut problems, along with longer term conditions like venereal infections and wounds healing after the Voltis fight. The orderlies are chattering back and forth. Chayker and Ioskin are play-fencing with forceps as they gather up instruments for cleaning. Lesp, the other orderly, is bantering with them as he prepares his needles. He’s got a sideline as the company inksman. His work is generally held as the best. The ink stains his fingertips permanent blue-black, the dirtiest-looking fingers Dorden’s ever seen on a medical orderly.
“How don’t you feel right?” Dorden asks as Milo comes in. The boy pulls the tent flap shut behind him and shrugs.
“I just don’t,” he says. “I feel light-headed.”
“Light-headed? Faint, you mean?”
“Things seem familiar. Do you know what I mean?”
Dorden shakes his head gently, frowning.
“Like I’m seeing things again for the first time,” says the boy.
Dorden points to a folding stool, which Milo sits down on obediently, and reaches for his pressure cuff.
“You realise this is the third day you’ve come in here saying you don’t feel right?” asks Dorden.
Milo nods.
“You know what I think it is?” asks Dorden.
“What?”
“I think you’re hungry,” says Dorden. “I know you hate the ration stuff they cook up. I don’t blame you. It’s swill. But you’ve got to eat, Brin. That’s why you’re light-headed and weak.”
“It’s not that,” says Milo.
“It might be. You don’t like the food.”
“No, I don’t like the food. I admit it. But it’s not that.”
“What then?”
Milo stares at him.
“I’ve got this feeling. I think I had a bad dream. I’ve got this feeling that—”
“What?”
Milo looks at the ground.
“Listen to me,” says Dorden. “I know you want to stay with us. This man Gaunt is letting you stay. You know he should have sent you away by now. If you get sick on him, if you get sick by refusing to eat properly, he’ll have the excuse he needs. He’ll be able to tell himself he’s sending you away for your own good. And that’ll be it.”
Milo nods.
“So let’s do you a favour,” says Dorden. “Let’s go to the mess tent and get you something to eat. Humour me. Eat it. If you still feel you’re not right, well, then we can have another conversation.”
The lightning leads them. The rain persists. They come up over the wet hills and see the city grave.
Kosdorf is a great expanse of ruins, most of it pale, like sugar icing. As they approach it, coming in from the south-east, the slumped and toppled hab blocks remind Gaunt more than anything of great, multi-tiered cakes, fancy and celebratory, that have been shoved over so that all the frosted levels have crashed down and overlapped one another, breaking and cracking, and shedding palls of dust that have become mire in the rain. A shroud of vapour hangs over the city, the foggy aftermath of destruction.
Overhead, black clouds mark the sky like ink on pale skin. Shafts of lightning, painfully bright, shoot down from the clouds into the dripping ruins, straight down, without a sound. The bars underlight the belly of the clouds, and set off brief, white flashes in amongst the ruins where they hit, like flares. Though the lightning strikes crackle with secondary sparks, like capillaries adjoining a main blood vessel, they are remarkably straight.
The regular strobing makes the daylight seem strange and impermanent. Everything is pinched and blue, caught in a twilight.
“Why can’t we hear it?” one of the men grumbles.
Gaunt has called a stop on a deep embankment so he can check his chart. Tilting, teetering building shells overhang them. Water gurgles out of them.
“Because we can’t, Larks,” Corbec says.
Gaunt looks up from his chart, and sees Larkin, the marksman assigned to the advance. The famous Mad Larkin. Gaunt is still learning names to go with faces, but Larkin has stood out from early on. The man can shoot. He’s also, it seems to Gaunt, one of the least stable individuals ever to pass recruitment screening. Gaunt presumes the former fact had a significant bearing on the latter.
Larkin is a skinny, unhappy-looking soul with a dragon-spiral inked onto his cheek. His long-las rifle is propped over his shoulder in its weather case.
“Altitude,” Gaunt says to him.
“Come again, sir?” Larkin replies.
Gaunt gestures up at the sky behind the bent, blackened girders of the corpse-buildings above them. Larkin looks where he’s pointing, up into the rain.
“The electrical discharge is firing from cloud to cloud up there, and it can reach an intensity of four hundred thousand amps. But we can’t hear the thunder, because it’s so high up.”
“Oh,” says Larkin. Some of the other men murmur.
“You think I’d march anyone into a dead zone without getting a full orbital sweep first?” Gaunt asks.
Larkin looks like he’s going to reply. He looks like he’s about to say something he shouldn’t, something his brain won’t allow his mouth to police.
But he shakes his head instead and smiles.
“Is that so?” he says. “Too high for us to hear. Well, well.”
They move off down the embankment, and then follow the seam of an old river sluice that hugs the route of a highway into the city. There’s a fast stream running down the bed of the drain, dirty rainwater that’s washed down through the city ruin, blackened with ash, and then is running off. It splashes and froths around their toecaps. Its babbling sounds like voices, muttering.
There’s the noise of the falling rain all around, the sound of dripping. Things creak. Tiles and facings and pieces of roof and guttering hang from shredded bulks, and move as the inclination of gravity or the wind takes them. They squeak like crane hoists, like gibbets. Things fall, and flutter softly or land hard, or skitter and bounce like loose rocks in a ravine.
The scouts vanish ahead of the advance, but Mkoll reappears after half an hour, and describes the route ahead to Corbec. Gaunt stands with them, but there is subtle body language, suggesting that the report is meant for Corbec’s benefit, and Gaunt is merely being allowed to listen in. If things turn bad, Mkoll is trusting Corbec to look after the best interests of the men.
“Firestorms have swept through this borough,” he says. “There’s not much of anything left. I suggest we swing east.”
Corbec nods.
“There’s something here,” Mkoll adds.
“A friendly something?” Corbec asks. Mkoll shrugs.
“Hard to say. It won’t let us get a look at it. Could be civilian survivors. They would have learned to stay well out of sight.”
“I would have expected any citizens to flee the city,” says Gaunt. Mkoll and Corbec look at him. “Flight is not always the solution,” says Mkoll.
“Sometimes, you know, people are traumatised,” says Corbec. “They go back to a place, even when they shouldn’t. Even when it’s not safe.” Mkoll shrugs again. “It’s all I’m saying,” says Corbec.
“I haven’t seen bodies,” replies Gaunt. “When you consider the size of this place, the population it must have had. In fact, I haven’t seen any bodies.”
Corbec purses his lips thoughtfully.
“True enough. That is curious.” Corbec looks at Mkoll for confirmation.
“I haven’t seen any,” says Mkoll. “But hungry vermin can disintegrate remains inside a week.”
&nbs
p; They turn to the east, as per Mkoll’s suggestion, and leave the comparative cover of the rockcrete drainage ditch. Buildings have sagged into each other, or fallen into the street in great splashes of rubble and ejecta. Some habs lean on their neighbours for support. All glass has been broken, and the joists and beams and roofs, robbed of tiles or slates, have been turned into dark, barred windows through which to watch the lightning.
The fire has been very great. It has scorched the paving stones of the streets and squares, and the rain has turned the ash into a black paste that sticks to everything, except the heat-transmuted metals and glass from windows and doors. These molten ingots, now solid again, have been washed clean by the rain and lie scattered like iridescent fish on the tarry ground.
Gaunt has seen towns and cities without survivors before. Before Khulan, before the Crusade even began, he’d been with the Hyrkans on Sorsarah. A town there, he forgets the name, an agri-berg, had been under attack, and the town elders had ordered the entire population to shelter in the precincts of the basilica. In doing so, they had become one target.
When Gaunt had come in with the Hyrkans, whole swathes of the town were untouched, intact, preserved, as though the inhabitants would be back at any moment.
The precincts of the basilica formed a crater half a kilometre across.
They stop to rest at the edge of a broad concourse where the wind of Voltemand, brisk and unfriendly, is absent. The rain is relentless still, but the vapour hangs here, a mist that pools around the dismal ruins and broken walls.
They are drawing closer to the grounding lightning. It leaves a bloody stink in their nostrils, like hot wire, and whenever it hits the streets and ruins nearby, it makes a soft but jarring click, part overpressure, part discharge.
An explosive device of considerable magnitude has struck the corner of the concourse and detonated, unseating all the heavy paving slabs with the rippling force of a major earthquake. Gravity has relaid the slabs after the shockwave, but they have come back down to earth misaligned and overlapping, like the scales of a lizard, rather than the seamless, edge-to-edge fit the city fathers had once commissioned.
Larkin sits down on a tumbled block, takes off one boot, and begins to massage his foot. He complains to the men around him in a loud voice. The core of his complaint seems to be the stiff and unyielding quality of the newly-issued Tanith kit.
“Foot sore?” Gaunt asks him.
“These boots don’t give. We’ve walked too far. My toes hurt.”
“Get the medicae to treat your foot when we get back. I don’t want any infections.” Larkin grins up at him.
“I wouldn’t want to make my foot worse. Maybe you should carry me.”
“You’ll manage,” Gaunt tells him.
“But an infection? That sounds nasty. It can get in your blood. You can die of it.”
“You’re right,” Gaunt says. “The only way to be properly sure is to amputate the extremity before infection can spread.” He puts his hand on the pommel of his chainsword. “Is that what you want me to do, Larkin?”
“I’ll be happy to live out me born days without that ever happening, colonel-commissar,” Larkin chuckles.
“Get your boot back on.”
Gaunt wanders over to Corbec. The colonel has produced a short, black cigar and clamped it in his mouth, though he hasn’t lit it. He takes another out of his pocket and offers it to Gaunt, perhaps hoping that if Gaunt accepts it, it’ll give him the latitude to break field statutes and light up. Gaunt refuses the offer.
“Is Larkin taunting me?” Gaunt asks him quietly.
Corbec shakes his head.
“He’s nervous,” Corbec replies. “Larks gets spooked very easily, so this is him dealing with that. Trust me. I’ve known him since we were in the Tanith Magna Militia together.”
Gaunt throws a half shrug, looking around.
“He’s spooked? I’m spooked,” he says.
Corbec smiles so broadly he takes the cigar out of his mouth. “Good to know,” he says.
“Maybe we should head back,” Gaunt says. “Push back in tomorrow with some proper armour support.”
“Best plan you’ve had so far,” says Corbec, “if I may say so.”
The Tanith scout, the tall, thin man with the menacing air, appears suddenly at the top of a ridge of rubble and signals before dropping out of sight.
“What the hell?” Gaunt begins to say. He glances around to have the signal explained by Corbec or one of the men. He is alone on the concourse. The Tanith have vanished.
What the feth is he doing, Caffran wonders? He’s just standing there. He’s just standing there out in the open, when Mkvenner clearly signalled…
He hears a sound like a bundle of sticks being broken, slowly, steadily.
Not sticks, las-shots; the sound echoes around the concourse area. He sees a couple of bolts in the air like luminous birds or lost fragments of lightning.
With a sigh, Caffran launches himself from under the cover of his camo-cloak, and tackles Colonel-Commissar Gaunt to the ground. Further shots fly over them.
“What are you playing at?” Caffran snaps. They struggle to find some cover.
“Where did everyone go?” Gaunt demands, ducking lower as a zipping las-round scorches the edge of his cap.
“Into cover, you feth-wipe!” Caffran replies. “Get your cloak over you! Come on!”
The ingrained, starch-stiff commissar inside Gaunt wants to reprimand the infantryman for his language and his disrespect, but tone of address is hardly the point in the heat of a contact. Perhaps afterwards. Perhaps a few words afterwards.
Gaunt fumbles out his camo-cloak, still folded up and rolled over the top of his belt pouch. He realises the Tanith haven’t vanished at all. At the scout’s signal, they have all simply dropped and concealed themselves with their cloaks. They are still all around him. They have simply become part of the landscape.
He, on the other hand, nonplussed for a second, had remained standing; the lone figure of an Imperial Guard commissar against a bleak, empty background.
The behaviour of a novice. A fool. A… what was it? Feth-wipe? Indeed.
Corbec looks over at him, his face framed between the gunsight of his rifle and the fringe of his cape.
“How many?” Gaunt hisses.
“Ven said seven, maybe eight,” Corbec calls back.
Gaunt pulls out his bolt pistol and racks it.
“Return fire,” he orders.
Corbec relays the order, and the advance company begins to shoot. Volleys of las-shots whip across the concourse. The gunfire coming their way stops. “Cease fire!” Gaunt commands.
He gets up, and scurries forwards over the rubble, keeping low. Corbec calls after him in protest, but nobody shoots at Gaunt. You didn’t have to be a graduate of a fancy military academy, Corbec reflects, to appreciate that was a good sign. He sighs, gets up, and goes after Gaunt. They move forwards together, heads down.
“Look here,” says Corbec.
Two bodies lie on the rubble. They are wearing the armoured uniform of the local PDF, caked with black mud. Their cheeks are shrunken, as if neither of them have eaten a decent plate of anything in a month.
“Damn,” says Gaunt, “was that a mistaken exchange? Have we hit some friendlies? These are Planetary Defence Force.”
“I think you’re right,” says Corbec.
“I am right. Look at the insignia.”
“Poor fething bastards,” says Corbec. “Maybe they’ve been holed up here for so long, they thought we were—”
“No,” says Mkoll.
Gaunt hasn’t seen the scout standing there. Even Corbec seems to start slightly, though Gaunt wonders if this is for comic effect. Corbec is unfailingly cheerful.
The chief scout has manifested even more mysteriously than the Tanith had vanished a few minutes ago.
“There was a group of them,” he says, “a patrol. Mkvenner and I had contact. We challenged them, making the same assum
ption you just did, that they were PDF. There was no mistake.”
“What do you mean?” asks Gaunt.
“I thought maybe they were scared,” says Mkoll, “scared of everything. Survivors in the rubble, afraid that anything they bumped into might be the Archenemy. But this wasn’t scared.”
“How do you know?” asks Gaunt.
“He knows,” says Corbec.
“I’d like him to explain,” says Gaunt.
“You know the difference between scared and crazy, sir?” Mkoll asks him.
“I think so,” says Gaunt.
“These men were crazy. There were speaking in strange tongues. They were ranting. They were using language I’ve never heard before, a language I never much want to hear again.”
“So you think there are Archenemy strengths here in Kosdorf, and they’re using PDF arms and uniforms?”
Mkoll nods. “I heard the tribal forces often use captured Guard kit.”
“That’s true enough,” says Gaunt.
“Where did the others go?” asks Corbec, looking down at the corpses glumly.
“They ran when your first couple of volleys brought these two over,” said Mkoll.
“Let’s circle up and head back,” says Corbec.
There’s a sudden noise, a voice, gunfire. One of the other scouts has reappeared. He is hurrying back across the fish-scale slabs of the square towards them, firing off bursts from the hip. A rain of las-fire answers him. It cracks paving stones, pings pebbles, and spits up plumes of muck.
“Find cover!” the scout yells as he comes towards them. “Find cover!”
They have jammed a stick into the ruins of Kosdorf, and wiggled it around until the nest underneath the city has been thoroughly disturbed.
Hostiles in PDF kit, caked in dirt, looking feral and thin, are assaulting the concourse area through the ruins of an old Ecclesiarchy temple and, to the west of that, the bones of a pauper’s hospital.
They look like ghosts.
They come surging forwards, out of the dripping shadows, through the mist, into the strobing twilight. In their captured kit, they look to Gaunt like war-shocked survivors trying to defend what’s left of their world.