by Dan Abnett
“What the feth is—” Meryn yelled.
Guheen and Coreas dropped flat about a half-second before a tank shell slammed through the side wall of the laundry they were passing. The wall blew out and showered bricks in all directions. The shell, shrieking and leaving an eddying vapour-trail in the still settling white dust went over their heads and hit the corner of a shuttered cafe. The blast deafened them all and collapsed the cafe frontage in a welter of flame and flying stone chips.
Everyone was down, dazed and bewildered.
Except Soric. Panting, he ran through the rubble until he had a clear view down the side of what had to be the cabinet maker’s shop. There was the tank, a hefty mid-sized model painted crimson and daubed with markings that flopped Soric’s stomach. A flayed human hide was stapled across the front of its hull. Its fat turret was traversing. Soric could hear the dank of the chain drive.
With his trick leg there would be no kneeling down to soften the recoil… or hide. He stood his ground as the heavy-gauge barrel tracked round towards him and sat the missile tube he had wrenched from Hefron’s grip onto his broad shoulder.
“Hello, gakkers,” he hissed and squeezed the trigger-spoon. The rocket banged away, kicking smoke out of the tube’s back end with such fury it threw Soric over. The missile flamed across the rubble and hit the tank just under the edge of the waist plating. There was a loud explosion, and pieces of shrapnel zinged through the air, hot and hard as las-rounds.
When Soric looked up, the tank was gutted with fire.
He got to his feet and turned to his men, arms raised and brandishing the launcher. “Who’s the chief? Who’s the gakking chief?”
They cheered him vigorously.
Meryn crossed to him, pausing to check on Guheen and Coreas, who were temporarily deaf but otherwise unhurt.
“How the feth did you know?” he asked Soric.
“Lucky guess,” Soric replied.
The vox clicked, and another Ghost platoon closed in on them out of the dust. It was two platoon, Corbec’s mob, or at least what was left of it. Mkvenner was in charge, with Rerval at his side.
The tall, lean scout had still not properly recovered from the serious wounding he had taken on Aexe Cardinal. Mkvenner’s long face was gripped by swallowed pain.
“Ven!” cried Soric. “Where are the rest of your boys?”
Mkvenner shrugged. “We came under fire Tank fire Three or four units. Got out all I could. I think—”
“What?”
“I think Corbec might have bought it. We can’t find him anywhere.”
Soric looked away, blinking hard. “Gak, that’s… that’s not good.” He looked at Rerval. The young signals officer was trying hard not to cry.
“You tried the channels?” Soric asked.
Rerval nodded.
“Try ’em again,” Soric said.
Two closed up with five and fourteen. Vivvo hurried over to Soric and handed him a brass shell.
“What’s this?”
“Found it in the rubble, sir,” Vivvo said.
Soric took it. He didn’t even have to check now. It was his message shell, like a bad penny…
He unscrewed the cap and knocked out the fold of flimsy blue paper inside.
It read: Colm’s alive, but he’s pinned down by cannon fire. Ven will be dead in two days unless you get him help. Two stalk-tanks south of you, well hidden. Be wary… a lot more Blood Pact are about to hit.
Soric breathed out hard. “Corbec’s alive,” he told Mkvenner.
“How the feth do you know that?”
“Call it a hunch. Let’s fan west. Rockets to the front. There are a couple of stalk-tanks out there, hulls down, if I know anything. But we can do this.”
Mkvenner nodded and wiped blood away from the corner of his mouth with his cuff. Why in the name of the God-Emperor hadn’t he sat back and let himself heal? What sort of internal damage was he doing to his body?
“Get to a field hospital, Ven,” Soric said.
“I’m fine.”
Soric faced him, brows furrowed. Tall and lean and deadly, Mkvenner was about the most frightening man in the Ghosts, and that was before you knew anything about him. No one ever chose to confront him. Life wasn’t worth that much hurt. But Soric persisted.
“That’s an order, Mkvenner. Find Dorden or Curth and find them now,” said Soric.
Mkvenner stared at the thick-set, older man and finally nodded. “Sure,” he said, and shambled away through the enclosing smoke.
“Move it up! You heard me!” Soric yelled. “Two platoon, you answer to me now!”
“Jumped up runt,” Meryn said, watching Soric rally the troops around him. They loved him, the fools.
“Sir?” said Fargher, approaching Meryn. He held out a crumpled ball of flimsy blue paper.
“What’s this?” Meryn demanded.
“Chief Soric was looking at it before… before he took out the tank, sir. I thought you’d like to see it.”
Meryn unballed the paper and read it: Guheen’s going to get himself pulped if he goes that way. The tank is behind the cabinet maker’s shop.
“What is this… warpcraft?” he whispered.
“Sir?” asked Fargher.
“Never mind, Fargher,” Meryn said as he folded the paper carefully and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “Just thinking out loud…”
For the fourth time in twenty minutes, third platoon attempted to get around the same street corner without dying. They were bunched up in a little access terrace behind an oil and gas separation plant in the Ironhall district. The terrace joined the main street at right angles, and something down that thoroughfare had them pinned with heavy fire.
With the bulk of his unit huddled low in the terrace way behind him, Rawne cautiously approached the junction with his platoon scout, Leyr, and Troopers Caffran and Feygor. If they stayed put much longer, they’d be swamped by the advancing enemy ground troops, and the terrace was no place for a firefight.
Most of the Tanith scouts had their own signature trick for looking round blind corners. Leyr’s was a sweet little pocket periscope, a precision brass instrument that he’d picked up on Aexe Cardinal. “I got it from an Aexegarian colonel,” Leyr told anyone who asked, “who stood when he should have ducked. He had no use for it anymore. Likewise, he had no use for his spectacles, his moustache comb or his hat.” The periscope was powerful but small enough to slip into the chart-pocket of his fatigues. He slid the business end round the fractured brick corner and took a squint. Fifty metres down the rubble-strewn main street, a stalk-tank sat in the centre of the roadway, its weapon pods pointing in their direction.
“You were right,” Leyr whispered. “Scuttle-armour.”
Rawne curled his lip in annoyance. “Any AT rockets left?” he asked, already knowing the likely answer.
“No, sir,” said Caffran. “We’re out. The tread fethers are dry.”
“Suggestions?”
“How far down is it?” Feygor asked Leyr.
“Forty, maybe fifty,” Leyr replied, looking again. “Too far for even the strongest of them to throw a tube-charge. We better think of something quick,” he added. “There are troops moving up.”
“I don’t think we’ve got much choice,” Rawne said. “We’ll have to pull back, maybe reform a position a few streets that way.”
The men nodded. No one liked giving ground, but no one liked dying needlessly either.
Feygor relayed the orders with a series of quick, clear gestures, and the platoon began pulling back down the terrace.
The terrace led along to an iron walkway over a chemical drain trench, and then down into a wide, paved concourse from the centre of which rose the aluminium tubes and flanges of an atmosphere processor. Units like it, fed by ducts from the main hive structures, were dotted throughout the outer city, pumping air to maintain the thin, local atmosphere of the Civitas.
The platoon came to a sudden halt. Rawne hurried up to the front keeping low.
Banda, the platoon’s sniper, had brought them to a standstill. She was huddled in beside a low wall, long-las raised. Rawne, a spectacularly unreconstructed Imperial male, had been dead against the admission of women troopers from the outset, and Banda — oozing self-confidence and physical appeal — had long been a particular thorn in his side But in the trench hell of Aexe they had been wounded together, and had helped each other through, and in the process had reached an understanding. Rawne relied on Banda’s good counsel now as much as he did that of Feygor or Caffran. Some even rumoured that Rawne and Banda were lovers, but no one dared ask either of them to confirm it.
“Movement,” she reported.
“Identity?”
“Can’t tell.”
Rawne hand-signalled “ready to engage” back down the file. “Head shot as soon as you see a head,” he told the girl.
She took aim, and waited until something bobbed into sight in her scope. At the last moment, she relaxed her finger from the trigger.
“Friendlies,” she said.
A ramshackle squad of Civitas Beati guards was moving warily into the concourse. Rawne got on the vox and hailed them. Their leader was Udol, the major he had met during their unorthodox arrival on Herodor just the day before.
“No going that way,” Udol said, gesturing in the direction he and his men had approached from. “They’re pasting the area with mortars mounted on tractor units.” Rawne had already heard the distant, persistent whoop-crump echoing in their direction.
“It’s as bad behind us,” he said simply. “Blood Pact ground troops advancing, with at least one stalk-tank. They’ve got the up-street locked.”
“Blood Pact?” Udol asked. “We weren’t told anything about Blood Pact. Tac logis says its heretic raiders.”
“With respect,” Rawne replied, clearly expressing none at all, “your tac logis is voxing out of its arse. It’s Blood Pact all right. Trained, tight, well-supported and systematic. Their handiwork identifies them. Besides, I’ve met them before.”
“What do we do?” Udol asked, hoping the tremble in his voice wasn’t too obvious.
“Do?” sneered Rawne. “I don’t think we’ve a great many options.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when their meagre options fizzled away dramatically. The peeling energy rounds of a stalk-tank’s cannons splashed across the concourse area, blasting sections of paving up into the air. Several more punched through the metal duct-work of the processor and it began emitting an eerie, wounded moan as air escaped from the holes.
The troops — Tanith and Civitas alike — scattered for cover. Several troopers fell, cut down.
The options had been reduced to two.
Fight, or die.
A kilometre-long stretch of the wide Principal I, from the tower of the prayer horn Gorgonaught back through Hazgul Square towards Beati Plaza, was then the scene of a major armour battle Twenty-nine vehicles of the archenemy’s main force were driving south, countered by twelve Civitas Beati light tanks, and six Vanquishers from Lugo’s life company.
The broad, and once majestic, boulevard was littered with burning wrecks and dimpled with shell-craters. Most of the Chaos armour was stalk-tanks or light standards, but they had at least one super-heavy, a crimson monster that annihilated all before it.
Gaunt’s platoon held position in the ground floor of a glassblower’s fabricatory on the west side of Hazgul Square. They had exhausted their anti-tank munitions long since, and could do precious little about the armour. They concentrated their efforts on the enemy ground troops instead. But it wouldn’t be long before their continued harassment of the infantry drew the attention of a Chaos battle tank.
Keeping low to avoid the occasional stray shot that whined in through the holes in the brickwork, Gaunt moved along his platoon’s position, distributing encouraging remarks and quiet comments. In a fight-zone like this, he would have normally gone up a gear or two, maybe resorting to one of his favourite quotations or an ad hoc speech to rally the mood.
But this mood was flatter than any he’d known. Had he become so transparent that his men instantly saw in him the looming prospect of failure? Now he knew the painful truth about the “Saint”, Gaunt could hardly swallow the rage and disappointment he felt Without that one spark of light and hope, the fight here on Herodor seemed no better than suicide.
Strangely, it was as if the whole city sensed that too. As if its heart had been torn out, as if it felt as lost and despairing as he did himself. Gaunt couldn’t forget the look on Colm Corbec’s face just before they’d deployed an hour before. “Did you not just feel that? Did you runt just feel that?”
Corbec hadn’t been able to explain it, but Gaunt had seen other troopers in the vicinity similarly upset for no apparent reason at the very same moment. And the vox traffic had been abruptly flooded with anguished calls of dismay. That had been the moment the mood had truly crashed.
Corbec had pulled himself together, and they’d pressed into the zone. The last time Gaunt had seen his number two, Corbec was shaken and uneasy, leading his platoon off down a smoke-hazed sidestreet.
Everything shook as two tank rounds hit home nearby. The fabricatory rocked and dust spattered down from the ceiling. Gaunt checked the box-mag of his bolt pistol, and clambered across the rubble to where troopers Lyse and Derin were guarding a doorway. They were both pinking the occasional shot out of the broken entrance with their lasrifles.
“How are you holding?” Gaunt whispered, crouching behind them.
Lyse raised a dusty hand and indicated some features of the fire-lit battlefield outside for her commander’s benefit. “They’ve got foot units moving up behind that wall there, and behind the dead truck,” she said. “We can’t get a clear shot.”
“But you’d have ’em finished by now with your torch, right?” he asked. Lyse nodded. On Phantine, she’d become the first female trooper to become squad flamer, and was proud of that role. A tough, broad-shouldered Verghastite in her late thirties, Lyse preferred to wear her black vest top to show off arms that were as well muscled as any male’s. Like all the Tanith flame-troopers, she missed her speciality weapon, and so did Gaunt. A few spurts of an Imperial standard man-portable flamer Mk VIII would have cooked the Blood Pact now edging up to their position in the blindside of the building.
Beside them, Derin started firing more urgently. A few figures in red-brown battledress had emerged from behind the burning vehicle wreck outside and were attempting to rush the side wall. Lyse began shooting too, and Gaunt scrunched forward on his knees and added his own firepower to the repulse. Lasrifle shots and bolt rounds rattled out from the doorway. One of the figures simply fell over and vanished in the rubble Another jerked back dramatically in mid-stride. The rest ran back for cover.
“Right,” said Gaunt, about to move on. “Keep sharp and do that every time they try something.”
“It’s like she’s abandoned us, sir,” said Derin suddenly. Gaunt stopped. For a second, he assumed Derin was talking about Lyse, which made no sense. Then he looked into Derin’s face and realised that wasn’t what he’d meant at all.
“The Saint, sir. It feels like we’ve come all this way for her and now she’s abandoned us.”
Gaunt remembered that Derin had been one of the misfit band Corbec had led on his private mission back on Hagia. Derin had not shown the same signs of beatific inspiration at the time as the likes of Corbec and Daur and Dorden — he’d simply joined Corbec’s endeavour out of loyalty to the old man — but the experience had clearly affected him.
“She hasn’t,” Gaunt said simply. “She’s here with us. She always is.”
“H-have you met her?” Derin asked.
“Yes, soldier, I have,” Gaunt said, trying not to say anything that was an outright lie.
“It doesn’t feel like she’s here. Not anymore. It did when we first got here. It was like there was something in the air. But it’s gone now. Just gone.”
“The Beati Sabb
at is right here still, Derin. She will not abandon the defenders of her shrine. And never forget… the Emperor protects.”
Derin was comforted slightly, but the troubled look didn’t completely leave his face.
Gaunt was called to the rear of the hab, where his platoon scout Caober had just slipped back inside from a run down through the shelled street to their left.
“We’re gonna have to start moving, sir,” he said. “Three or four of the enemy tanks have turned west, and they’re coming round the back. We’re gonna get pinned if we stay in here.”
“Where do you suggest?” Gaunt asked.
Caober shrugged. “I linked up with Sergeant Mkoll’s platoon and Captain Daur’s, sir. They’ve both already been forced back across the intersection into those habs there.”
“Retreat in other words?”
“Sir, back is the only operative direction. There’s no forward anymore.”
Gaunt nodded. “Any sign of Corbec?”
“No, sir.”
“Let’s peel out odds then evens, through those blast holes in the back. Caober, find us a hab to take position in and show the Ghosts the way as they come through. Beltayn?”
His adjutant hurried over.
“Odds and evens, out that way. Caober has point. Spread the word and let’s make it snappy.”
Beltayn turned to distribute instructions when the hab was struck squarely by a shell that blew a section of wall in on them and killed two members of first platoon. A shrieking whoop, a blitzing, gritty fireburst and then everyone still alive was picking themselves up in the choking smoke.
Gaunt could hear heavy assault fire from outside. Over the micro-bead he heard Derin.
“They’re coming in! They’re charging us! They’re coming in!”
Gaunt knew there’d be no retreating now. He drew his power sword and ignited it. “Ghosts of Tanith!” he shouted. “In the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind… give them hell!”
“What are you doing here, chief?” asked Domor in surprise. Corbec, his fatigues and pack layered with grey dust had just scrambled into the manufactory basement where Domor’s platoon was guarding the wounded. Above ground, the district was ablaze for the most part, and artillery was pounding it. There was no hope of carrying injured troopers out.