by Dan Abnett
You lost family?
A wife, two children. I don't know they're dead, but gak! What are the chances? Gaunt shrugged.
How many did you lose coming here? Kolea asked. Troops?
Kolea shook his head. Family.
I didn't have any to lose. I don't know which of us is luckier. Kolea smiled, but without any light or laughter in his face. Neither one, commissar. And that's the tragedy.
I don't know about the girls, Larkin muttered as they moved through the scorched-out, rain-pelted ruins. Bragg, his missile launcher and autocannon slung over his shoulders, raised his eyebrows and made no reply. There were eight females in Kolea's scratch company, none older than twenty-five. Each held a captured Zoican lasgun or a Vervun Primary autorifle and carried an equipment pack over their ragged work fatigues. Most of them, like the men, wore salvaged military boots wadded with socks and wrapped tight with puttees made of cargo tape to keep them fast. The women moved as silently and as surely as their male comrades. A month of intense guerrilla war in the outhabs had trained them well. Those that had not learned had not made it.
Women can fight, Rilke murmured, holding his sniper rifle with the stock high in his armpit and the long barrel pointing downwards. My sister, Loril, used to hold her own against the rowdies when it got to chucking-out time in my father's tavern back home. Feth, but she could throw a punch!
That's not what I meant, growled Larkin, rain dripping off his thin nose. It doesn't seem right, sending women in like this, all gussied up in combat gear and waving lasguns. I mean, they're just girls. This is gonna get nasty. No place for women.
Keep it down! Dremmond hissed, lugging his flamer with its weighty, refilled tanks. They'll hear you, Larks!
You heard what that big, bastard miner said. They're all shell-deaf! I can speak my mind without insulting no one! They can't hear me!
But we can read lips, Tanith, Banda said, moving past the chief sniper with a smirk. Some of the other scratches nearby laughed.
I I didn't mean nothing by it, Larkin began, moving his mouth over-emphatically to make sure she could hear. Banda looked back at him, a mocking expression on her dirty face.
And anyway, I'm not deaf. Neither's Muril. And neither are the Zoicans. So why don't you clamp it and do us all a favour?
They moved on, the eighty-strong assault group splashing down a damp, debris-strewn side road.
That told you, Dremmond whispered to Larkin.
Shut up, Larkin replied.
MkVenner scouted ahead as part of Mkoll's recon deployment. In his immediate field of vision was Scout Bonin and the scratch company guides: a girl called Nessa and a Vervun Primary sergeant named Haller, who was second in command of Kolea's makeshift group. Haller was one of nine Vervun Primary survivors to have found their way into the scratch company, though with his dirty, patched uniform and the woollen cap he wore in place of his spiked helmet, he didn't look much like a Primary infantryman any more. He seemed content to be commanded by a miner rather than a military officer. MkVenner knew the members of the scratch company had weathered the very worst of the war, and he couldn't begin to understand their loyalties or the circumstances that had brought them together.
Nessa guided them through a series of torched manufactories, covering the ground quickly, keeping low and making curt, direct gestures they could read easily. They crossed an arterial highway where the rockcrete was crumpled by a series of shell-holes, and they skirted the wrecks of two Zoican battletanks and an infantry carrier that had been flipped over onto its back.
Across the highway, they fanned through textile mills where the constant rain trickled in through the holed roofs and rows of iron-framed looms stood silent and shattered. The loose ends from hundreds of bales of twine rippled in the breeze. MkVenner stopped in a doorway and scanned around. He watched with idle fascination as droplets of rainwater crept down taut feed-threads over one loom, glinting like diamonds and thickening before dripping off the hanging brass bobbin onto the weaving frames beneath.
MkVenner realised he'd lost sight of the woman. Haller appeared behind him.
You have to watch her, Haller mouthed, signing at the same time. He knew full well MkVenner could hear, but the practise was now instinctive.
Bonin joined them and they edged down the length of the mill, until they found Nessa in an open loading dock at the far end, crouched behind an overturned bale-lifter. Outside, in the bright, thin light of the cargo yard, a quintet of Zoican flamer tanks grumbled by, heading north. The foot soldiers could smell the coarse stench of the promethium lapping in the tanks' heavy bowsers.
Once the tanks had passed, Nessa made a punching motion in the air and the troops hurried on, across the open yard and into the razorwire-edged enclosure of a guild's freight haulage plant. The rusting bulks of overhead cranes and hoists creaked in the wind above them. Rainwater had formed wide, shallow lakes across the rockcrete apron. They moved past rows of plasteel cargo crates and produce hoppers flaking paint. Near the haulage site office, a small Imperial chapel built for the workers had been desecrated by the advancing Zoicans. They'd shot out the windows and soiled the walls with excrement. A dozen site workers had been crucified along the front porch on gibbets made from rail sleepers. The bodies were little more than ghastly, stringy carcasses now. They'd been nailed up three weeks before, and the steady rain and the carrion birds had done their best to erode the flesh.
Haller's boot clipped an empty bottle and the noise of it tinkling away across the ground startled the birds, who rose in cawing, raucous mobs, revealing the gristly horrors beneath. Some of the birds were fat, glossy-black scavengers, the others dirty-white seabirds from the estuary with clacking pincer-bills. Black and white, the birds made a brief checker pattern in the air before flocking west to the haulage barn roof and settling. The open ground was peppered and sticky with their droppings.
There was a break in the fence behind the chapel. MkVenner held position long enough to check, via microbead, that the main force was within range behind them. Gaunt and the column were just entering the haulage site.
The land south of the freight-holding was a mass of chalky rubble and sprouting weeds. There were dark driver holes in the ground at intervals and the area was littered with thousands of gleaming, brass shell cases. In an earlier stage of the war, massive Zoican field pieces had been braced here, trained at the Wall. MkVenner was about to move on, but Nessa stopped him.
He made the gesture for question, and she signed and mouthed back at him.
In our experience, the Zoicans trap-wire their sites when they move on.
MkVenner nodded. He signalled back and Gaunt sent Domor forward. Haller helped Domor lock his sweeper set together, and then the Ghost began to creep away from them, playing the head of the broom back and forth over the dirt. Domor liked to do this work by sound and MkVenner smiled to see him dosing the shutters of his bionic ocular implants by hand. The time when Domor could simply close his eyelids was long passed, way back on Menazoid Epsilon.
Domor had a path cleared in under five minutes, playing out a fibre-cord to mark its zigzag path. By the time he had finished, the assault force had caught up with them and were waiting with MkVenner, Haller, Nessa and Bonin at the fence.
He found nothing? asked Haller, pointing over at Domor on the far side of the area.
No, he found plenty, but we're not here to mine-lift. Follow the cord, replied MkVenner.
Single file, the eighty soldiers crossed the ex-artillery emplacement and moved down along a reinforced walkway that crossed one of the hive's main drainage gullies. Swollen by the heavy rains, the gully was in full flood. It was partially dammed in places by slews of debris rubbish and bundles of corpses.
Up the other side, they climbed the chute slope by a metal stairway and hurried in small packs across another highway. The ruined remains of bodies littering the road stretched as far as the eye could see. Most tried not to look. Larkin stared in horrified fascination as he crossed
the road. Nothing more than bundles of rags, the bodies were those of workers and habbers slaughtered as they had tried to flee inwards towards Vervunhive. They had fallen weeks before, and no one had touched or moved them, except tire mashing tracks of Zoican war machines heading north towards their target.
Gaunt called a halt-period in the broken habitats on the far side of the highway. His motley brigade set up defence watches all around as he climbed to the third storey of a hab block with Kolea and Gilbear.
I smell smoke, Gilbear said suddenly. He moved ahead, down the dirty, dank hallway, his weapon raised, and kicked open the rotting door of a worker flat.
Gaunt and Kolea, weapons ready, moved in behind him. All three stopped short.
The flat was thick with trash and overrun with vermin. The smoke issued from a small fire set in a tar bucket over which swung a metal pot on a wire frame that had once been a clothes hanger. The five inhabitants of the room, a mother with three children and a much older woman, cowered in the far corner. They were emaciated and filthy, just terrified skin and bone clad in dirty tatters. The old woman whined like a caged animal and two of the children cried silently The mother, her eyes bright and fierce in her soot-black face, held out a shank of metal, sharpened to a point.
Back off! Now! Gaunt told Kolea and Gilbear, though Kolea needed no urging.
It's all right I'm sorry Gaunt told the mother, his hands raised, open. The shank remained pointing at him.
Leave them, Kolea said. He pulled a wad of ration cakes from his pack and went over, dropping them on the floor in front of the group when the mother refused to take them.
They went back out into the hallway and Kolea pulled the door back into place.
Throne of Earth Gaunt hissed, shaking his head.
Quite, joined Gilbear. What a waste of rations.
Gaunt looked round at him, began to speak, and then just shook his head. Explaining the real nature of his horror to Gilbear might take a lifetime.
And that time, however it could be measured, was all Gaunt had left to do something far more important than drum compassion into an aristocratic warrior like the Blueblood colonel.
Kolea had heard Gilbear's remark and he glowered at the man with utter disdain. Kolea doubted even the colonel-commissar understood what it was like to claw and scrape for survival in the shelled ruins of your home, day after day. Gol Kolea had seen enough of that misery since the Zoicans came, enough to last a hundred lifetimes. There were thousands of hab families out here still, slowly dying from starvation, disease and cold.
The trio of officers climbed out onto a fire escape at the eastern end of the hab block, and Gaunt and Gilbear pulled out their scopes.
Five kilometres south, across the ruins, through the smoke and rain, rose the bulk of the Spike. It was moving at a slow crawl, up towards the main hive. Gaunt swung his scope around and looked back at the vast, glinting dome of the Shield and the massive Spine and hab structures within.
Gaunt offered his scope to Kolea, but the man wasn't interested. Gilbear gestured, suddenly and sharply, to them both and pointed down at the highway below, the one they had just crossed. A host of Zoican troopers, escorted by a vanguard of carriers and light tanks, was advancing towards them. Chaos banners flopped lankly in the rain and the light shone off the wet, ochre-coloured armour.
Gilbear raised his hellgun, about to turn, but Gaunt stopped him. We're not here to fight them. Our fight is elsewhere.
The commissar keyed his microbead. Mass enemy formation approaching along the highway outside. Stay low and stay silent.
Rawne voxed back an acknowledgement.
It took half an hour for the Zoican column to go by. Gaunt estimated there were a little over two thousand foot troops and sixty armoured vehicles reserves, advancing to bolster the assault. He wished to the Emperor himself he had reserves of such numbers to call upon. Feth, he wished he had such strengths in his active units!
Once the column was safely past and clear, the Operation Heironymo assault cadre left the habitats and moved on through rain-swilled ruins, towards the Spike.
The closer they got, the bigger it grew, dwarfing all the building structures around. Larkin bit back deep unease it was big, so fething big! How in the name of feth were eighty souls going to take on a thing that size?
They were cowering in rubble. Larkin raised his head and saw Banda grinning back at him.
Scared yet, Tanith? she hissed.
Larkin shook his head and looked away.
Mkoll, MkVenner and Gaunt moved forward with Kolea, Rawne and Haller in a line behind them. Now they could hear the throbbing grind of the Spike's enormous track sections, the deep growl of its engines. Gaunt noticed dust and ash trickling down the rubble around him in sharp, rhythmic blurts. He realised the vast machine, still a kilometre distant, was vibrating the earth itself with its weight and motivation.
The rain grew suddenly heavier. An incessant patter filled the air around them, accompanied by a regular, tinking chime. It came from a broken bottle wedged in a spill of bricks, sounding every time a raindrop hit its broken neck.
Gaunt wiped water droplets from the end of his scope and studied the Spike.
How do we do this? he asked Mkoll.
Mkoll frowned. From above. Let's get ahead and find a suitable habitat overlook unless it changes course.
Gaunt took the group across the wide, pulverised trail behind the advancing Spike, a half-kilometre strip of soil and ash compressed by the vehicle's weight into glinting carbon. The Spike didn't steer around buildings. It flattened them, making its own path.
The Imperial strikeforce overtook the great war machine on the right flank and pressed ahead, hugging the ruins and the rubble. Mkoll indicated a pair of worker hab blocks ahead of them that promised to intersect the Spike's course. Gaunt detailed his troopers into two units and sent one ahead under Gilbear, leading the other himself.
Gaunt's troop was climbing up the stairwell of the nearer hab, five hundred paces ahead of the crawling target, when the Spike fired again. Its awesome spinal weapon, the cutting beams, howled vast energies above and past them at some target in the main hive. The sound was louder than their ears could manage. The hab shuddered thoroughly, and a harsh light-flash penetrated every crevice and opening in the stairwell for a moment. A second later there was a pop of pressure, a wall of dissipating heat and the stink of plasma.
Gaunt and his troop exchanged glances. It had been like standing too near a star for a millisecond. Their eyes ached and the energised stench burned their sinuses. Gaunt wiped a thread of blood from his lip.
There was no time to waste, however. Gaunt and Mkoll led the party up to the fifth floor, to the flats at the far end. The Spike was almost on them. Half a dozen ragged habbers fled past them, running like beaten dogs from their hideaways.
Gaunt got a signal from Gilbear in the other block. The second unit was in position. He looked out of the end window, glassless and burned, and saw how close the massive machine now was.
Its lower slopes swiped the edge of the hab block and tore it away, rubble cascading down under the tracks. Gaunt moved his soldiers back as the passing armour wall tore the end off the room they waited in. Then they moved.
In pairs and trios they leapt clear of the ripped-open building and dropped seven metres onto the sloping sides of the Spike. Most slid down the ochre-painted hull before managing to cling fast to moulding projections, rivets or weld-seams. Gaunt landed hard, slid for a moment, then braced against a row of cold-punched bolt-heads. He heard a cry from above and looked up to see Larkin slithering down the armoured slope, his hands clawing uselessly at the tarnished metal. Gaunt snagged the sniper by his stealth cape and arrested his slide, nearly throttling him with the taut fabric. Larkin found purchase and crawled up beside Gaunt.
Saving my arse again, Ibram? Larkin stammered in relief.
Gaunt grinned. At a time like this, he hardly minded Mad Larkin's informality.
You're welc
ome. It's my job.
Ten metres down the Spike's side, Haller also lost his grip. He slid, barking out a helpless curse and slammed into Dremmond, who was barely holding on himself. The two of them tore away and started to slide much more swiftly down the flank, thrashing for handholds.
Bragg drew his Tanith blade, punched it into the Spike's plating to provide a firm anchor point, and caught them as they tumbled past. He captured Dremmond by the harness of his flamer, and Dremmond held tight to Haller. By then, they had barrelled into Muril one of the scratch company loom girls too, and Haller held on to her. Secured by one meaty fist around the hilt of his knife, Bragg supported three dangling humans.
Feth! he grunted, his arm shaking under the weight. Get a grip! Get a grip! I can't hold on much longer!
Muril swung around and grabbed the edge of an armour plate, digging her fingertips into the seam. As soon as she was secure, Haller let go and slid down beside her. Bragg heaved the kicking Dremmond up next to him by the man's flamer's straps.
Good fething catch, Dremmond gasped, gripping tightly, trying to slow his anxious breathing.
I don't always miss, replied Bragg. He didn't dare voice his relief. For a moment, he had been close to dropping them or being pulled away with them.
Gaunt's unit, forty bodies, clung to the sloping side of the gigantic Zoican war machine and slowly began to climb up it. The Spike's pyramid form was punctuated by shelflike terraces, like some step-temples of antiquity Gaunt had once seen on Fychis Dolorous. The soldiers crawled up over the lip and made themselves fast on the nearest horizontal shelf.
The progressing Spike, oblivious to the human lice now adhering to its hide, moved on and slammed over and through the hab block where Gilbear's team was waiting. Gaunt watched in horror as the metal slopes demolished a large chunk of the hab's lower storeys.
Then he saw Gilbear and his team leaping down from a far higher level. They'd clearly moved up a floor or two when the impact of the Spike's course had become evident.