by Dan Abnett
In the doorway, DaFelbe and Lubba were having an altercation with a tall man dressed in the ornate demi-armour of the local military.
“…just have to get them out of here, then,” she heard the man say as she walked up.
“Problem?” she asked.
The local turned to look at her. He was clad in brown synth-leather and his torso and left arm were cased with segmented steel. Behind him were over a dozen Herodian city troopers with bullnose carbines.
“Are you in charge?” he asked.
“Sergeant Criid, Tanith First,” she answered smoothly. With a flick of her head, she signalled DaFelbe and Lubba to back off. Lubba seemed curiously naked without his trademark flamer pack. Gakking city ordinances.
“Captain Lamm, Civitas Beati. This is an unauthorised use of civil property. Get these lowlifes out of here.”
“No,” said Criid.
The captain bristled. “No?” he said.
“These people,” Criid emphasized the word, “needed shelter. This building was not in use. Derelict in fact. This isn’t unauthorised because I authorised it.”
“Use of property is a matter for the city council to decide. Did you break the lock?”
“Not personally, but I take responsibility. Let’s be nice about this. Captain Lamm. There’s no need for unpleasantness. We’re on the same side.”
From the look on Lamm’s face, he didn’t quite agree. His men shuffled, edgy.
“Get these vagrants out of this building,” Lamm said, slowly and deliberately.
Criid had one of the choicest and most vulgar replies of her life ready to throw back at him, but a sound from beyond the factory interrupted her.
It was the sound of gunfire. “The first shots of the night.”
And it was swiftly followed by the sound of screaming.
“Find a position!” Obel yelled. “Find a position and hold it!” The Ghosts in eleven platoon had started moving the moment they heard the first shots, but they were met by a surge of panicking pilgrims rushing out of the camp area. Two or three guardsmen were knocked off their feet by the moving crush.
The initial bursts of enemy fire had appeared only as flashes of light in the distance behind the press of bodies, but now actual laser bolts were visible, bright and hard, searing over the heads of the crowd. Hot red or hotter white, the lines of shots walked and bent like tracer rounds through the gloom. A series of them struck the warehouse wall behind Obel’s location and blew out thick chunks of plaster and brick. Two loose rounds hit a stylite in the middle distance and knocked him, flailing, off his pillar. Other shots arced down mercilessly into the terrified masses.
“Oh feth!” Obel cursed, down in cover behind a handcart with his vox-officer. The vox-man was shouting to be heard as he relayed the situation in.
“Estimates?” Obel yelled.
“I can’t see a bloody thing, sarge!” Brehenden barked back, trying to push through the disorder.
Larkin had managed to reach a doorway on the other side of the thoroughfare. He narrowed his eyes and watched the light show for a few seconds.
“At least a dozen shooters. Light or standard las,” he called out once he’d assessed the pattern. “But they’ve got something heavier. A grunt cannon or even some kind of plasma cooker.”
That was what was doing the real harm. Potent firepower, auto-cycle, indiscriminate. Dozens of pilgrims were already dead. The heavy had so much kick, it brought down another of the hapless stylites by chopping clean through the pillar he was standing on. Larkin observed with astonishment that the other pillar-dwellers didn’t try to flee or climb down. They simply sank to their knees on the precarious perches and started to pray.
“Can you knock it out?” Obel yelled.
Larkin studied the play of las-bolts in the air, watching for the fat, dull red ones. About two hundred metres north and east.
“I can try,” he said, without enthusiasm.
Obel waved Jajjo and Unkin forward to partner Larkin. Jajjo, dark-skinned and handsome, was eleven’s new scout and the first Vervunhiver to achieve promotion to that elite speciality. Larkin knew Mkoll had high hopes of Jajjo’s abilities.
“Call it, Larks,” Jajjo said. Ordinarily, the scout would take point, but this was now the sniper’s play.
“Left, down there,” Larkin said. The trio pushed across the flow of the screaming crowd and hurried down a short flight of flagstone steps onto an arched walkway that ran along the back of a factory blockhouse. Several dozen pilgrims had elected to hide along here, and cowered into the walls as the three guardsmen ran past.
The walkway reached a corner where it split, continuing on over a stone footbridge into the side of a fabrication mill or descending to the lower service street by a wooden staircase. Pilgrims flooded along the street below. Larkin stood at the top of the steps for a moment and cocked his head. The gunfire sounds had altered slightly, relative to his location.
“Down,” he said and the three of them thumped down the wooden steps and began following the street by hugging the wall as civilians ran past the other way.
They reached a cross street. The flow of pilgrims had ebbed. Bodies sprawled all around on the rutted roadway. A clock shrine lay overturned at the junction.
Larkin darted out and got in cover behind the clock shrine Immediately, the street lit up; light las-fire, hissing like quenched steel, and the heavy, diaphragm-vibrating belch of the cannon. Peppered, the carcass of the clock shrine shook and pieces of wood and plastic splintered off into the air. Shots chopped into the street paving too, or thudded dully into the draped and hunched corpses.
Larkin kept his head down. The fusillade he’d stirred up was so intense there wasn’t a chance of Jajjo or Unkin making it across to join him. They were still pinned around the corner.
Several cannon rounds came right through the twisted clock that sheltered him and missed his head by a short margin. Larkin rolled and pulled his long-las up to his shoulder. Prone, he had a very limited field of view under the shrine’s cart base, but it was enough for him to slide his long-las through and clear the sights.
The street beyond resolved in the cold, green shimmer of his night scope. He had to tweak the visual gain down because the las-flashes swooping his way were testing the limits of the radiance contrast.
Better. A hot spot. Very hot. A superheated muzzle, something big. He looked again, identifying three shadows working a heavy cannon on a tripod behind a parked motor truck forty metres away. More hot spots, smaller, cooler. Men with lasrifles. One in a doorway, another behind a row of fuel drums, another low against a side wall. All of them pumping fire at him.
He reached back and opened his musette bag, pulling a handful of powerclips out and selecting a standard low volt cell. He did it all by touch, reading the difference between the upright and diagonal crosses of tape he’d marked the sides with. He’d have preferred to go with a hot-shot for maximum power, but there were too many targets. A hot-shot was a one-use cell and he didn’t have the time to keep changing between hits.
Larkin popped the hot-shot clip out of the long-las and replaced it with a low volt. He made sure he had a green armed tell-tale showing on the back-sight, and then snuggled in. Feth, but they weren’t letting up. Another minute, no more, and the clock shrine would start falling apart and he might as well be naked in the middle of the street with a target painted on his face and a feather up his arse.
The cannon was the obvious initial target, but the noise it was whooping out would cover him as he picked off the others first. He set on the shooter in the doorway, waited for him to blaze away again to pick him out of the shadows properly, and then fired. The enemy probably didn’t even see his muzzle flash in the confusion.
The one by the side wall now. That’s it, keep shooting. Show me right where you are…
The long-las kicked. The figure by the wall flopped over.
The shooter by the drums suddenly realised that his cronies were down. He started to
run back towards the cannon. That was when Larkin put his third shot through the man’s spine.
The cannon started to crank up and fire right at him instead of hosing the street. No time for chances. Larkin ejected the low volt and slammed a hot-shot home. Each blast of the cannon had many times more power than the long-las, even with a hot-shot in the pipe, and it was cycling them out at a rate of five a second. The clock part of the toppled shrine disintegrated and a wheel went spinning off the cart, dismembered and shedding spokes.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Larkin and fired.
The hot-shot made a growling howl and the stock banged back against the permanent bruise on Larkin’s right shoulder. It hurt. It always did. He liked the pain because he always associated it with a kill-shot.
The gunner’s head vaporised and he pitched forward over the cannon. Sudden silence. Larkin could see the gunner’s two teammates scrambling to pull him aside as the Tanith sniper locked another hot-shot in place.
Power-cell pack, one metre left of the tripod stand, feed cable attached…
Shoulder smack.
The cell pack exploded with the force of several grenades and tossed the whole cannon, tripod and all, into the air, along with all three figures, lifting balletically in a bright bloom of fire.
The tripod carriage bounced twice, making hard, metal clangs. The bodies didn’t bounce.
“Clear!” Larkin yelled, reloading and getting up. Jajjo and Unkin swept out of cover and started running past him, snapping off semi-auto bursts to wash the street. Larkin ran after them, keeping close to the wall.
“Feth me, Larks!” said Unkin, surveying the sniper’s handiwork as he got into a covering position at the next corner, near to where the destruction of the cannon had made a burning crater in the roadway. “You don’t mess about!”
“Pat him on the back later,” said Jajjo. He was crouching beside the truck and had begun firing down the left hand street.
More assaulters were moving up towards them. Lots of them. And Jajjo recognised their blood-red uniforms at once.
Blood Pact. So it was true, Tona Criid thought to herself. Up to a point, at least. The “heretic dissidents” raiding Beati City were actually trained, drilled and seasoned infantry from the archenemy’s elite field corps. What Corbec’s briefing had omitted was the scale. This wasn’t a skirmish raid. This was a full-on assault.
The enemy was pouring out of the wasteland into the Glassworks sector in force, heavily serviced by infantry support weapons and portable shields. By her own estimate, fifty or more pilgrims had been slaughtered in the opening phase, caught between the ruthless shock-fire of the attackers and the virtually helpless Imperials. Now the pilgrims had mostly fled into cover nearby, or en masse up into the inner city, and the battle had opened up, a ferocious street-fight running up through the obsidae, the camps and into the manufactories in the zone. Criid’s platoon, supported by Domor’s, held a three block area, with Obel’s unit not far away to their west. She was reinforced fifteen minutes into the fight by three more platoons transitting in from the east, and by the column of local warriors voxed up by Captain Lamm.
It was ugly, as ugly as anything she’d ever known, and that was saying something. It felt a little like the street war she’d been caught up in back at Vervunhive, but there the enemy had been the well-equipped but drone-like Zoicans. The Blood Pact were a different thing altogether. They knew how to fight the streets. They were as skilled as the Ghosts and more disciplined than any Chaos force she’d ever encountered. It also compared unfavorably with the trench war on Aexe Cardinal that they’d only recently left behind. At the time, she’d believed that to be the benchmark of bad in terms of combat. Trapped — like rats and with rats — in narrow, filthy dugouts, sometimes fighting hand to hand.
But this was a gakking nightmare. The Glassworks was too open, too meandering. Every corner and twist of walkway, every sub-alley and back run, was a death trap. In a trench, you at least knew the enemy was in front of you.
Laughing, she burst off a spray of las-shots and slammed a Blood Pacter backwards through an archway. Two more appeared, and she felled them both as well.
“What the feth is funny?” Lubba shouted at her, blasting with his newly issued lasrifle. It seemed too small for his meaty, tattooed hands. She knew he dearly missed his flamer. Gak, but how useful would a flamer have been right then?
“I caught myself longing for trenches,” she said, re-celling her weapon. “Struck me as laugh-your-brains-out funny.”
“Left! Left!” Subeno was yelling suddenly. A torrent of las-fire whickered down a side street and Criid and Lubba had to dive to find cover. Domor ran past her, with Nehn, Bonin and Milo. They closed down the fresh angle of attack with a heavy sheet of rapid fire Several more Ghosts, led by Chiria and Ezlan, pushed through the gap and drove the fight back down the street. One of the Ghosts lurched and dropped. Criid couldn’t see who it was. But she could see for sure they were dead.
Lamm’s men had the cross street down from them locked up. Every few seconds, Criid could hear the hiss-burp of his sanctioned flamer. Behind them, in the next street block, Herodian PDF were engaged in a running battle with the enemy inside a row of iron-framed tithe barns.
“How’s our back looking?” she called to Lubba. He was covered in plaster dust and looked like he’d been rolled in flour.
“Like I have the remotest fething idea,” he replied.
She got up and ran back down the narrow street, picking her way between the bodies of slaughtered pilgrims. DaFelbe, with nine troops in a good location, had the back end of the street sealed, but was coming under increasingly heavy fire. She saw Posetine and Vulli dragging Mkhef back out of the firing line. He’d been shot through the neck and chest. She doubted he’d see sunrise.
Rounding the corner, she ran right into Captain Daur leading his platoon up through the smoke.
“Report!” he yelled over the shooting.
Criid made a vague gesture around her. “They’re fething well all over us!” she began. “Get back!”
“Cover!” he yelled, and his platoon broke towards the doorways and shattered windows of the barn opposite.
Criid moved the other way into a rubble strewn alley and straight into three Blood Pact troopers coming the other way.
Criid yelped and dropped. A las-round burned across her scalp.
It knocked the sense out of her. She lay face down in the rubble, unable to move, to see…
Something came down off the roof behind the Blood Pacters. A single Ghost, laspistol in one hand, straight silver in the other. In less than two seconds, all three enemy troopers were dead, two shot point-blank, the other slit open.
Breathing hard, Lijah Cuu lowered his hands. He was dripping with blood. He walked over to Criid and crouched down beside her. Figures ran past the end of the alley. Shots whined.
He holstered his pistol, and twitched the combat knife over so it was point-down from his bloody fist. Then he rested the tip of it against the nape of her neck. A drop of dark blood welled up around the razor-sharp point.
With his other hand, he stroked her hair, matted with blood, and then dragged a dirty finger down the slope of her exposed cheek.
“Sure as sure,” he muttered hoarsely. He raised the blade to slam it down.
A big hand closed around his rising wrist and held it dead. Cuu gasped in pain and glanced up.
“Don’ you hurt nobody,” Kolea said.
“Get off me!” Cuu said.
“Don’ you hurt nobody, Lijah-Cuu,” Kolea repeated, rising. Cuu was forced to come up with him, his wrist viced in Kolea’s monumentally strong grasp.
“I was trying to help her! She needs help! Look at her!” Cuu squealed. “Her gas-hood is twisted around her throat! Look! Look, gak it! I was gonna cut it off!”
“You go ’way,” Kolea said. “Go ’way now.”
He released Cuu’s wrist Cuu backed off, staring at Kolea. Kolea returned the gaze, placid.
/> “You help her then,” Cuu said, “you stupid gak-head.” He raised the war knife slightly, then wiped the blood off it on his trouser leg and sheathed it.
“Go ’way!” Kolea said. Cuu vanished into the shadows.
Kolea bent down and rolled Criid over, stripping off her constricting gas-hood. Then he gathered her up in his arms and started to walk.
Out on the street, Lubba saw him coming and felt his heart freeze. He’d been there, on Phantine two years before, and seen this exact thing. Kolea carrying the injured Criid to safety. Seconds later, Kolea had been hit and the man they all knew and loved had disappeared.
Lubba leapt up before it could happen again and pulled Kolea into cover. “Medic!” he shouted. “Medic here now!”
Two streets away, mortar rounds were falling on the sheds and factory spaces. Seething sheets of flame rushed out of doorways and windows, spraying glass into the air and shaking the earth. A roof caved in. Two long assembly shops were ablaze.
Milo cowered in the cover of a half-fallen wall. His ears rang with overpressure. Blood from a shrapnel wound dribbled down his cheek. Bonin lay beside him, trying to tug a sliver of glass out of his palm.
“Well, this is fething nice, isn’t it,” he said over the roar of detonations.
“Indeed,” Milo answered. He was rattled and dazed by the explosions but, beyond that, he had the oddest feeling. Like…
Like on Hagia.
He never had found out what signals had wanted him for.
“Wise up!” Bonin suddenly hissed, and rolled over, bringing his lasrifle up. He cracked off a couple of rounds and Milo joined his efforts. Red-dad figures had just emerged from the bombed-out buildings ahead of them.
They fired with care and precision. Bonin, a hugely able scout, had been trained in warfare by Mkoll, and knew how to shoot and how to wait to shoot. Milo had learned his battle-craft from a variety of sources… Colonel Corbec, Gaunt himself and, most especially, Hlaine Larkin. Milo picked his targets with a huntsman’s expertise.
Between them, they shot down nine Blood Pact attackers as they emerged from the ruins and tried to push down the street.