by Dan Abnett
What the hell…? What gross coincidence was this? Gaunt felt a rising sense of panic and fear. Warp magic was around him. He looked at the closed side door. What was beyond that? What?
He stepped towards it, and turned the handle. The door opened gently. Gaunt smelled fresh, clean air. There were plants in the doorway. Climbers and shrubs. This side room was obviously some kind of indoor herbarium, an agri-room for—
“Hostiles!” Caober yelled from the doorway, and started to fire.
Gaunt slammed the door shut and ran to join him.
A Blood Pact platoon was coming to meet them down the hab hallway, using doorways for cover and firing their lasrifles and solid-slug weapons.
It took ten minutes of brutal fighting to kill them.
By the time the fight was over, Gaunt was at the east exit of the hab. He thought for a second about going back to that strange, bare room, but it didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. His blood was up. He’d just impaled a Blood Pact officer on his power sword. And by the time the three platoon group was out and into Fancible Street, he’d forgotten entirely about the old book and the bare room.
Gol Kolea dropped down out of the hab window onto the slip-road beneath and ran forty metres, fast, towards the rear wall of the dingy store-barn facing him. Every black, glass-less window along the road staring down on him seemed to hold the threat of hidden shooters, but no fire came his way. He was breathing hard by the time he crunched against the gritty wall and slid down, but he could still hear the clattering rattle of a belt-fed weapon nearby.
DaFelbe was trying to raise him on the vox, demanding to know his position. The link was very bad, very chopped. Kolea could only just make DaFelbe out. Kolea flicked the mic of his comm-link twice in quick succession, the nonverbal acknowledgement, the can’t talk now.
He crawled to the end of the store-barn’s retaining wall and then quickly swung up over the low barrier, firing from the chest. Two Blood Pact troopers, their backs to him at the next wall line, toppled over, taken completely by surprise.
He ducked back down. More belt-fed rattling. Some shouting now. A couple of shots whined over him.
Chancing it, he took a dash towards the looming doorway of the barn and threw himself into cover. Renewed shouts, in a harsh language that made him cringe.
He worked his way down the inside wall in the gloom, up onto a loading dock, and across to a shell hole in the wall. The fractured puncture gave him a view out into the freight yard behind the barn. From there, he could see the two-man team with the belt-fed cannon, nestled behind a stack of prefab rockcrete sheets. He could see them, but the firing angle was lousy.
He needed to be higher…
A metal ladder, secured to the wall on brackets, led up from the loading dock to a first floor stowage platform. Slinging his lasgun over his shoulder, he went up the ladder.
He was just climbing off onto the stowage decking when he realised he wasn’t alone. He threw himself forward as the figure came for him out of the dark, and they tumbled over together, grunting and thrashing. His opponent was quick, and Kolea got a warning glimpse of a bared blade. A flash of steel in the dimness. Gak to that. Kolea put all his upper body strength into a hooking punch and slammed the figure away onto its back.
He darted forward to finish the business scratch-company style, with his bare hands, and pulled up.
It was Cuu.
Cuu was writhing on the deck, cursing and clutching his bloody mouth.
“You!” Cuu hissed.
Kolea shrugged. “Didn’t you recognise me?”
Cuu shook his head. “Thought you were one of them…”
That, disturbingly, didn’t ring true to Kolea at all. Cuu had been up on the platform before Kolea, so his eyes would have had longer to adjust to the gloom. Surely, he should have been able to tell…
Unless he’d chosen not to. A quick slash with a warknife, and who’d have known better?
Kolea shook himself. Lijah Cuu was a scumbag, but he wasn’t that much of a scumbag…
“Get up,” said Kolea. As Cuu rose, oathing and hawking bloody phlegm, Kolea crossed to the ventilator window in the wall, levered open the metal louvres, and looked out. Down below, at a steeper but better angle, he saw the gun-nest. He slid the barrel of his lasrifle through the louvres and took aim, even though he was going to fire on auto.
His shots rained down over the gun-position. The gunner himself flopped back dead at once. His loader turned, twitched as he was winged, and walloped over onto his back.
“The cannon’s dead. Way’s clear,” Kolea voxed to DaFelbe, hoping that the essence of his message would get through the fierce interference.
He turned to Cuu. “Come on,” he said.
The platoon was moving up through the freight yard when they got down.
“Did I do that?” Criid asked Cuu as she brushed past him, glancing at his bloodied nose and mouth.
“No, sarge.”
She shrugged. “Must be losing my touch.” Criid clicked her fingers and pointed, and Hwlan took the point men forward.
“Nice work,” Criid told Kolea with a smile. He nodded. He was still getting used to the odd looks his old friends and comrades were giving him, but there was something particular about Criid’s manner. She’d been fine at first but now there was a wary reserve What was that about?
“Criid okay?” he asked Lubba.
Lubba was adjusting the feeder pipe of his flamer’s P-tanks. “Sure. Why?”
“Keeps looking at me.”
“Probably thinks your gonna get your rank back off her.”
Kolea shook his head. “I told her…”
“She’s gonna worry. That’s all it is.”
“Flamer here!” Criid’s order echoed down the concourse. They hurried to join her.
It was a false alarm. Vari’s platoon was coming in from the next street over. Baen, Vari’s scout, had picked up an enemy grouping at the nearby crossroads.
“About thirty of them,” Baen reported. “And they seem to have a stalk-tank… but it’s not active.”
“Not active?” Criid asked.
Baen hunched his shoulders in a ‘what can I tell you?’ gesture “Looks like they’re guarding it.”
“We set up a holding fire here to keep ’em busy,” Varl proposed, “then we could sneak a fire-team round the side. Through there—” he pointed.
“I’ll take it,” said Kolea. Criid looked at him. Again, that strange tension.
“Fine by me,” Varl grinned. He’d missed his old sparring partner Kolea. “So long as you don’t feth it up.”
“Okay,” Criid said, reluctantly. “Nessa, Hwlan, Baen… with Kolea.”
The four of them ran off to the left into the twilight of a narrow, tall sidestreet as the combined platoons laid in. Kolea could hear the crackle of las-arms and the hiss of flamers.
The scouts led the way, followed by Nessa with her long-las. Kolea brought up the back. There were worse places to be in the galaxy than directly behind Nessa Bourah when she ran, he considered.
A sort of realisation hit him. He felt — at a gentle, normal, human level — desire. Appreciation of a sexy female’s well-made backside. Gak, but it had been a long, long time since he’d registered anything like that.
Since he’d registered anything like anything.
It really did feel like this was the first day of his life and he was seeing everything new. Like he’d woken up from a deep, numb slumber. How had he described it to Curth? like surfacing from deep water.
I’m alive again, he thought. Thanks be the Beati.
Baen and Hwlan led them off the street, through the cluttered, ransacked ground floor classrooms of a hab-district scholam, and up onto the first floor of a Munitorum laundry. The air was stale and damp from the water stagnating in the big steel wash-presses. Vermin gnawed and scurried in the mounds of wet overalls. Soap crystals littered the floorboards and lint clogged the grilles of the overhead ducts.
T
hey reached a row of windows that a shell fall had blown in. The stalk-tank was below them, crouching against the side wall of a suburban chapel. Baen had been right — the enemy troopers down there were holding the street as if defending the machine.
Nessa took a look through her scope.
Something’s not right, she signed.
“May I?” Kolea asked. Nessa handed him her long-las.
He spotted down, letting the auto-settings of the scope adjust to his eyeball.
The stalk-tank wasn’t standard. It was lacking weapon pods and fore-turrets. Instead, its underslung body compartments were fat and distended, like a swollen belly. Within the gross, glassteel bubble, Kolea could see a human figure in front of the driver. The figure was leaning back, twitching and spasming. Hundreds of plug-wires snaked from its body into the guts of the tank’s body assembly.
“Psyker,” he said, handing the long-las back to Nessa.
“Psyk-weapon?” Hwlan asked.
“No,” said Kolea. “I reckon it’s that… and things like it… that are fething up our comm-links.”
Do the honours, Baen signed to Nessa.
She took aim, her breathing slowing. She fired.
The hot-shot round ruptured the belly-bubble and blew the psyker’s head and shoulders into meat shrapnel. The stalk-tank itself shuddered and then started to burn. A nonverbal scream shrilled into the air and made them all recoil and gasp.
Kolea, Baen and Hwlan got back up to the window and began firing down on the rapidly breaking Blood Pact units. Criid and Varl took advantage of the confusion and pressed in.
In under five minutes, they had the street cleared.
The crimson Baneblade was a horrifying thing, terror made into physical form. Corbec doubted the fething Archon himself, Urlock wassissname, would have more presence in person.
The sound it made was enough. Not a growl, not a rumble, not a roar. A profoundly deep, almost infrasonic howl that vibrated the diaphragm and narrowed the soul. Someone — Daur maybe, or Ana Curth — had once told Corbec that infra-sound noise, down around the 18Hz level, triggered a primaeval fear-response in humans. It was as old as caves and darkness and the first fire The infrasonic rumble in the snarls of Old Terra hunter-fields made humans freeze with terror. It was a base response, inherited from the primates.
When it fired its main gun, or its hull-mounted Demolisher cannon, it was worse. The ground quaked. Shells seared away into the mid-city and fireballs bloomed up over the roofline. There was nothing he could do against that. Nothing any lone human could do.
“Come on! Come on!” Milo was dragging at his sleeve desperately. His assault team was ready to flee into the eastern streets. The Baneblade crunched over the mangled wreck of the Demands With Menaces.
“Okay!” Corbec started, and struggled to his feet.
“What the gak is that?” China asked.
Corbec turned to look.
A figure was striding out onto the highway in front of the super-heavy tank. She was dad in golden armour and a sword glittered in her hand.
NINE
THE JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
“Stand with me, for as long as you are able.
A day, a week, a year, a minute. Whatever you can give,
however long you can stand, I welcome that.”
—Sabbat, epistles
It was her.
“Oh, feth me! The Beati!” Corbec whispered.
Milo stared. He had not yet got over the shock of the pilgrim girl’s death. He could see her still, in his mind’s eye, running out in front of the tank, waving her arms to distract it. This seemed too much like history repeating itself.
“Brin!” Corbec yelled, but Milo was already running out of cover.
“You’ll be the death of me, boy!” Corbec added, as he shook off Chiria’s hands and went after him.
Milo ran out onto the highway. The Beati didn’t seem to see him. God-Emperor, but she looked so beautiful in her gilded, engraved armour.
He cried out. A second later, Corbec crashed into him and brought him down with a flying tackle. They both bruised hard on the road surface.
The Baneblade’s coaxial sub-weapons swung to target the golden figure ahead of it and blazed away, but the Saint was no longer there. The vacant stretch of roadway ripped up in a messy blitz.
With a single leap, she had come up onto the fore-hull of the huge vehicle, behind the squat Demolisher mount and beside the main weapon. Her sword scythed in her hand.
The massive main barrel severed, the cut length of it crashing onto the hull before rolling off onto the ground. The sliced edges of the barrel stump crackled with discharging blue energy.
“Dear God-Emperor…” Corbec stammered in disbelief.
The Beati swung her sword up, grabbed the hilt with both hands and plunged it down, blade-first, between her well-planted feet, deep into the body of the tank’s main hull.
It slewed to a stop. She had pin-pointed and executed the driver.
The top-hatch popped and a crew commander scrambled up, grabbing the yokes of the pintle-mounted bolter. She leapt again, somersaulting, and landed on her feet on the turret-top behind his hatch. Her purring blade cut through neck and pintle mount alike.
“Corbec… Corbec, did you see…?” Milo gasped, watching.
“The Emperor surely protects, lad,” muttered Corbec.
The Beati unclasped a golden tube-charge from her belt, thumbed off the spring and dropped it down into the open hatch. Then she dived headlong off the top of the tank.
Milo and Corbec started running for cover.
The Baneblade did not explode, but fire gusted through its heart, and blew off several hatches. One crewman staggered out, burning, and fell onto the highway.
Sword hanging low from her right hand, the Beati walked towards them, gleaming in her armour, backlit by the burning tank.
Milo and Corbec turned to face her.
“Well met, brothers,” she said.
They both found themselves smiling.
“That was astonishing. Holiness,” Milo said.
“Holiness?” she admonished. “Is that how you greet a friend? I am Sabbat. Call me that if you must call me anything.”
Corbec glanced at Milo. He was amazed. The boy really didn’t see it. This was Sanian, a girl Milo had spent years dreaming about. But he didn’t recognise her, face to face.
But, when he came to think of it, Corbec realised he wouldn’t have recognised her either. He only knew it was Sanian because Gaunt had told him so. This woman, this creature, was nothing like the esholi he’d met on Hagia. Sanian had been quiet, modest, restrained. This female blazed with confidence, power and drive.
And, while Sanian had been a treat for the eyes, the woman before them was beautiful. So beautiful it hurt. She was luminous. Beyond sex, beyond desire. A divine incarnation of beauty.
And she’d just killed a super-heavy tank outright in single combat.
Corbec suddenly felt awkward and pathetic.
“Nothing like the feats of valour you’ve performed in your time, Colm,” she said to him, as if reading his thoughts.
“You’re too kind,” he mumbled.
Milo started to say something and then brought his lasrifle up rapidly, aiming — so it appeared — right at her head.
He fired, and the shot went over her left shoulder. The Baneblade crewman, bolt pistol raised, was half-out of the dead tank’s side hatch, his weapon levelled at the Beati’s back. Milo’s shot hit him in the throat and he fell down on his face, the gun clattering to the deck.
The Beati flinched and looked round. When she turned back to look at Milo, she was smiling broadly.
“You see?” she said. “You see? Without you, I am nothing. The Emperor, blessed be His divine grace, has given me strength and speed and power beyond the scope of man. But I can’t fight the enemy alone. Alone, I will be overwhelmed. To live, and to be victorious, I rely on you… on you, Milo, and you Colm, on the brave men and wom
en of the Imperial Guard, on all my fellow warriors… a fact that Milo has just demonstrated very clearly.”
“We only serve, Beati,” mumbled Corbec.
“We all only serve, Colm,” she assured him, placing her hand on his forehead. A raging headache he had not even begun to acknowledge, the after-effects of the Baneblade’s awful infrasound, faded and vanished. He felt good. Feth! He felt twenty-one again!
“All of us, together, on the journey into night. I may be something… something… I don’t know what. A figurehead, at least. A rallying point. A leader. But I am nothing without you. A leader is nothing if she has no one to lead.”
She looked at them both.
“Do you understand? I feel like I’m rambling…”
“N-no!” Corbec assured her.
“We understand,” said Milo.
“This is not about me,” she said. “This is about all of us. Imperial souls, banding together to see off the dark.”
“We understand,” Milo repeated. She turned to look at him and smiled again.
“I knew you would, Milo. It is set, as a fact, in the warp. You will stay with me now. Now, until this is done. You will protect me. Gaunt has promised as much.”
“I will, lady,” Milo said.
“You’re not scared, are you?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I would be,” she told him.
Gaunt and his force arrived on Principal III a few minutes later. Gaunt stared in amazement at the ruined super-heavy.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The Beati happened,” Corbec said.
“Where is she now?”
“Advancing. Domor’s platoon went with her. Milo too.”
“Milo?”
“Looked to me like he’d been seconded. As her personal sidekick.”
Gaunt frowned. “You look tired,” he said to Corbec.
“Been a long day, sir.”
And it would be longer, and without end. The Imperials had barely held back the archenemy’s first wave, and the second was coming hard on its heels. There would be no break in this fight The enemy would assault the Civitas until it fell.