[Gaunt's Ghosts 07] - Sabbat Martyr

by Dan Abnett

  “Oh my bollocks,” Corbec gasped.

  Just off Latinate Street Soric dropped to his knees, panting. He cursed himself for being too old for this gak, but it didn’t take away the thumping of his heart and the lactic acid burning in his leg muscles.

  They’d had to run. His platoon and Criid’s and Raglon’s and Meryn’s. The lingering infantry fight had suddenly turned on its head, just when they thought they were gaining ground.

  A couple of Reavers, and at least three N20 halftracks with flamer mounts in their pulpits, had come steaming into the street fight, driving the Imperials back. A squad of Herodian PDF had tried to counter strike, and had been cooked and boiled for their efforts.

  Running had turned into the only viable option.

  Soric had tried hailing Gaunt and tac logis to call up armour cover, but the blurting sheet-fire bursts of the enemy ’tracks seemed to be interfering with the signal.

  He crawled into a doorway, sucking air. Men ran past. Vivvo stumbled up and collapsed next to him.

  “All right, son?” Soric asked.

  “I’m sorry, chief,” Vivvo replied.

  “Sorry? Sorry for what?”

  “For speaking about the… the thing. In front of the commissar like that.”

  “Don’t you worry, son. I can look after myself.”

  “I should have thought, chief. I should have realised the commissar was there.”

  Soric shrugged. “Vivvo… can I ask you a question?”

  “O-of course, chief!”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Known what, chief?” Vivvo asked honestly.

  “About me. And the messages I get.”

  Vivvo frowned. “I’ve suspected it since Aexe, tell the truth. But I’ve known since we got here.”

  “Known what?”

  “That the message shell keeps coming back to you with stuff in it.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Data. Info. The gakking truth, chief.”

  Soric nodded. “You told anyone?”

  “No! Well, yeah. Kazel, Venar. Maybe Hefron.”

  “They all sound?”

  “I think so. They wouldn’t go shooting their mouths off about—”

  “About what, son?”

  “About you, sir. You and what you’ve got.”

  Men from Meryn’s platoon thundered past where they were hiding. Behind them, a hundred metres down the street heavy flamers hissed.

  “And what have I got son?” Soric asked.

  He was expecting all sorts of answers. The hidden eye. The oracle. The touch of the warp. The sixth sense. The psyk.

  “The lucky charm,” Vivvo said. The honest simplicity of it almost brought a tear to Soric’s eye. Milo had told him they’d called him that too. That was the truth of things. In this dark galaxy, superstitious soldiers didn’t set up a hue and cry for the execution of their touched ones. They regarded them as lucky charms, touchstones, fate-wards against the entirely luck-free doom that awaited all of Imperial culture.

  “You’re not afraid of me, then?” Soric asked.

  “Afraid of you? Why the gak would I be afraid of you?”

  “Because of what’s in me. Because of… of the warp. A commissar, an inquisitor… they’d have me for buttons because of what I can do.”

  Vivvo blinked away dust and stared into Soric’s lined features. “Everything you do, everything that shell tells you… it’s luck speaking to us, giving us the edge, like with Kazel back there. I believe… really, sir… that it’s the Emperor himself, speaking through you and looking out for us all. So long as you give us the good stuff, chief, I’ll never question where it comes from.”

  “They’ll be on to me sooner or later, son. Best case, the black ships, worst… a bolt-round in the head. People like me, lucky charms or not… we’re liabilities.”

  “They come for you, they’ll have to go through me first.”

  Soric reached out a hand and grabbed Vivvo’s tight. “No. Promise me you won’t get in the way when it comes. Promise me that.”

  “I swear.”

  “You don’t want that kind of trouble,” Soric assured him. He let go of Vivvo’s hand. Almost at once, Vivvo grabbed Soric’s dust-caked fist.

  “Promise me then, chief,” he said. “Everything the shell tells you… share it. Act on it. If I ever find out you’ve been holding stuff back… I dunno. I can’t threaten you, but you must know what I mean. All the while the things it tells you are fit for general consumption, then be our lucky charm. If it tells you shit you don’t share… well, that’s where we start running to the commissar.”

  Soric swallowed. He nodded. “Fair point. Beyond fair, son.”

  “We better move, chief.” The sucking, rushing breath of the flamers was closer now. They could both hear the clanking of the N20 tracks.

  “Go!” Soric said, and Vivvo ran off down the street.

  Soric tugged the message shell from his pocket and opened it.

  What about it, Agun? Vivvo’s right… and very forgiving too. You want to see him shot? Him and Kazel and Hefron and everyone else who knows? Shot for harbouring a piece of warp-filth? You’re not telling everything. You’re betraying them. Be a man. Tell Gaunt. Tell Gaunt about the nine.

  “Nine? What nine are you talking about?” Soric raised the empty shell-case and yelled the words into its hollow body.

  “Nine what?”

  But the N20 was too close now. Soric ran.

  “More armour! I said we need more armour!” Gaunt yelled into the vox-horn, but nothing except static-chopped distortion caterwauled back.

  “What’s wrong with this thing?” he barked at Beltayn. The signals officer was trying to tune the dial of his voxcaster.

  “Something’s awry, sir,” he said, too busy concentrating on his job to form a proper reply.

  “What?”

  “Jamming, most like. Heavy-grade electroference.”

  Gaunt had feared as much. The invaders were adding to their advantages by muzzling the Imperial comms and chain of command. They were probably fething up their own vox-links too, but no doubt the Blood Pact was relying on psykers to coordinate their forces.

  “Pack that up and round up the platoon here,” Gaunt told Beltayn, and then ran off down the dusty street. The air was fall of the sounds of combat from the thoroughfares all around. “Rawne!” he yelled. “Rawne!”

  Rawne’s platoon was holding the end of the narrow street where it joined Tesk Hill Square. The small-arms exchange was fierce. Gaunt saw Feygor in cover behind a garbage drum, snapping off shots. He came up behind him, head low.

  “Feygor!”

  Feygor glanced round. “Little busy, sir.”

  “Where’s Rawne?”

  Feygor shrugged. “Micro-bead’s down.”

  “All vox is down. Where’s Rawne?”

  “Last I saw, up in that hab block. Third floor.”

  Gaunt nodded and sprinted across the debris-littered road to the side door of the hab. A decent kick or two had taken it off its hinges. He went inside.

  The unlit stairwell within led up to all nine of the hab’s levels. There was a scrappy notice panel screwed to the wall facing the door that listed the names of the occupant families next to their hab module numbers.

  Gaunt ran up the stairs two at a time, drawing his laspistol. Fething thing seemed lightweight and inconsequential next to the solid memory of his lost bolt pistol.

  He didn’t bother with the first two floors, and went into the third level through the spring-latched entry.

  “Rawne?”

  A long hallway stretched out before him, scattered with scraps of paper and discarded clothes. On either side, numbered doors identified the separate hab modules. Some were open, and despite the fact the phospha lamps were dead in their brackets, the hall was filled with thin daylight from the open rooms.

  “Rawne?”

  Nothing but the rattle and slam of fighting down below.

  He stepped into
one open module. It was a mess. Furniture was overturned, and shelves cleared. Tape had been put in an X over the main window in the vain hope that it would protect the glass from blast damage. Whoever lived here had left in a hurry. Gaunt hoped they were tucked up safely in a Civitas shelter now.

  He crossed to the window, keeping out of sight, and took a look. Gunfire was being exchanged savagely across the open space of Tesk Hill Square below. There were shell holes in the paving, and a five storey building on the far side of the square was on fire. The massive atmosphere processor in the centre of the open space was dented and budded by countless stray shots. Several bodies lay out in the open. Most, Gaunt noted with satisfaction, were dad in dirty red.

  From his vantage point, Gaunt could see a good way west across the northern sectors of the Civitas. Huge banks of firesmoke were puffing up from the Ironhall sector. Last he’d heard, before the vox went to feth, was that Kaldenbach’s line of defence was taking the worst of it. He hoped to Terra that Kaldenbach was following GAR 3 too. Kaldenbach, so cocksure and confident of his own abilities, had strategic ideas of his own. It would be just like him to ignore Biagi’s fine prep-work and choreograph his own fight.

  If he did, they’d all pay.

  Further off, in the smoggy distance, he saw that enemy landers were still dipping in over the obsidaes. The downpour of drop-pods had all but ceased, but the landers still came on, ferrying men and munitions down, retreating empty, refuelling and repeating the process.

  Gaunt had, for obvious reasons, a basic faith in the Guard being the backbone of the Imperium’s fighting power. He had a healthy respect for the Astartes, for the Titan Legions, for the armoured regiments and the Navy, but the basic fething infantry was, in his book, the four square basis of victory. That’s the way he’d been taught, after all, by his father, by Oktar, by Slaydo… even by Dercius. But right then, like never before, he longed for a squadron of Furies, or Lightnings, or anything air-mobile with a good rate of climb and armour-penetrator ammunition. Those landers were so vulnerable. One well led squadron could exterminate a huge chunk of the enemy strength in transit before it had even made surface-touch. It would be like a gamebird shoot.

  He left the module and tried the next few. “Rawne?” he called as he went.

  Most of the hab flats were like the first one he’d entered — abandoned and untidy. He tried one where the door was locked, and came into a module that was completely empty except for a console table placed oddly in the middle of the floor. There was a book on it. The walls of the room were stripped bare, and there was no carpet or matting, just bare boards. Even the single phospha overhead was missing its shade.

  He paused for a moment. It was very odd. There was a door — closed — off to the left. Why was this room so empty?

  He took a step forward, and then heard the distinctive crack of a hot-shot load from nearby.

  He hustled out into the hallway again, and went down five more doors into another scruffy module.

  As he came through the doorway, Banda swung round from the window and aimed her long-las at him. The target light from her scope glowed on his solar plexus.

  “Sir!” she said, putting up her weapon.

  “Sorry to spook you, Banda. Where’s Rawne?”

  “Right here,” said Rawne, behind him.

  Gaunt turned.

  “Looking for me?”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “Link’s down, so I was trying to get a better picture of what was going on by eyeball. Bastards have us locked. I was looking for an opening.”

  Gaunt nodded. “There’s bad feth going down at Principal III.”

  “Corbec?”

  “Something about a super-heavy tank. I think that’s where the emphasis is switching. This…” Gaunt gestured towards the window and the fighting immediately outside. “This is just a holding pattern.”

  Rawne shrugged. “Tell that to my Ghosts.”

  “Look, I’m taking my squad, and Mailer’s and Raglon’s, and we’re going to head east to see if we can help Corbec. That means you’re in charge of this area. Okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve got GAR 3?”

  Rawne patted the data-slate in his jacket pocket.

  “Use it, Elim. We’ve got no vox to communicate with, but we can hold this together if we’re all singing from the same sheet. Here and Latinate are the hold points. Failing that, back to Armonsfahl Boulevard.”

  “Latinate may already be gone. A runner came through from Soric. Hard push by flamer ’tracks.”

  “Armonsfahl then. Send your own runner and get Soric back into the game. Get him to group the platoons with him and—”

  Gaunt stopped.

  “You know how to run a defence, don’t you?”

  Rawne shrugged slightly.

  “I’m wasting my breath, aren’t I?”

  Rawne nodded.

  “The Emperor protects,” Gaunt said, giving Rawne a quick salute and hurrying out and away down the hall.

  “Gaunt?”

  He paused at the sound of Rawne’s voice, and turned. Rawne stood in the module’s doorway, looking back at him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Good luck hunting that super-heavy. Give it feth. Give ’em all feth.”

  Gaunt nodded, and hit the stairs.

  The spring door banged shut after him. Rawne wandered back into the module. At the window, Banda was lining up her long-las.

  “What’s—”

  “Shhh,” she said. “I’m working. Second floor window. Blood Pact officer with a rocket launcher. Thinks that noooo-body can see him…”

  Her voice was just a soft hiss. Her breathing dropped to a very low rate. The long-las bucked hard as it fired.

  “Got him?” Rawne asked.

  She turned and smiled sardonically at him. “What do you think?”

  He leaned forward and kissed her mouth. It was a brief but hungry kiss.

  “You know what I think,” he said, moving back. “Kill something else for me.”

  “Like what? I could run to a side window and get a decent angle on Gaunt as he ponces off.”

  Rawne smiled, and shook his head. “Thanks, but no. Either the archenemy gets him or I do. No favours.”

  She shrugged, and slapped in a new clip.

  “I appreciate the thought though,” Rawne added.

  “Ah, I couldn’t anyway. Gaunt’s all right. I like him.”

  She saw the look in his eyes and added sweetly, “Not like I like you, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “So,” Banda said, lining up and scoping for a new shot “You’re in charge now. What’s the plan?”

  “We keep killing them until they’re all dead… or we are. Or was that a trick question?”

  “Everyone set?” Gaunt asked. There was a general assent. “Let’s move,” he told them.

  With his own platoon, and Nailer’s and Raglon’s, Gaunt set off away from Tesk Hill, into the middle streets of the Masonae District. The scouts moved ahead — Caober, Mkeller and Preed. Preed was Suth’s replacement in seventeen. An older Tanith, he’d steadfastly remained a regular trooper until Mkoll had urged him to specialise. In his previous life as a gamekeeper, he’d developed great woodcraft, but he’d not joined the scout fraternity because of a lack of confidence. He thought himself too old. Gaunt hoped Preed was not finding his true calling too late.

  Half a kilometre east of Tesk Hill, they ran into trouble. A serious wedge of Blood Pact infantry was biting down around Hisson Street, trying to break through to Principal III. The platoons commanded by Skerral, Folore, Mkendrick and Burone — respectively nineteen, twenty-six, eighteen and seven — were packing a splendid but tight resistance to that attack. But the neighbourhood streets were no go.

  “Suggestions?” Gaunt asked.

  “We go through those buildings there,” Caober said firmly. Haller nodded. Caober consulted his data-slate chart. “Cut through them and we should com
e out on Fancible Street, clear of this mess.”

  The buildings were a manufactory and a hab block. They had been bolted tight and secure by their departing owners. Mkeller las-knifed the padlock on the manufactory’s outer door.

  “What?” Haller asked Gaunt.

  “Let’s go careful. If this is the way through, then you can bet the enemy will have thought of it too.”

  “Coming the other way, you reckon?” asked the tall Veighast.

  “I think so,” said Gaunt.

  The interior of the manufactory was cold and dark. Generally, the air in the Masonae District had become increasingly stale, so much so that many of the Ghosts were wearing their rebreathers. Too many atmosphere processors knocked out of action, Gaunt thought.

  The machine shops and assembly sheds were quiet. As they moved along, they checked every side door and storeroom, just in case.

  They exited the manufactory and crossed via a covered walkway into the worker habitat. The procedure resumed. A careful checking of rooms to cover their backs as they crossed the hab’s lower halls.

  “This one’s locked,” Caober said.

  Gaunt approached, the Ghosts behind him down in cover, weapons raised. He turned the door handle.

  “No, it’s not.”

  Caober furrowed his brow in surprise.

  Gaunt threw the door open and they looked in, guns aimed. Another hab module, standard, except…

  .. this one was entirely bare. No carpet or rugs, no shade on the overhead lamp, walls stripped. A door to one side, closed. A console table drawn up in the centre of the floor, with a book on it.

  “Clear!” said Caober. “Move forward…”

  “Wait!” Gaunt hissed. He had a terribly uneasy feeling. He walked into the bare room, and smelt its musty cool. What was going on? Some kind of coincidence?

  He walked to the small table oddly set in the centre of the room, and reached out to the book lying there. It was old. So very old, it was falling apart and dissolving into dust.

  He opened the cover and read the title page.

  It was a first edition of On The Use of Armies by Marchese.

  Gaunt had his own copy of this obscure work. Tactician Biota had given it to him just before he’d left Aexe Cardinal.