by Dan Abnett
“Gladly. What can you give me?”
“Nine units. Your own carriers. I’ll signal the marshal and get him to send reinforcements up.”
“He needs to do more than that, sir,” said Captain Lamm. “He needs to extend his forces along the Guild Slope, or we might as well give up now.”
Kaldenbach nodded. “Get out there, Lamm,” he ordered. “Vox officer… to me!”
The night air was bitter and dry. Lamm moved his units forward through the emptied city streets towards the swell of fire light that marked the archenemy advance. They had all switched to rebreathers. Too many processors had been choked and destroyed in the invasion.
Fanning out his overstretched forces reached Principal II and some of them engaged. Lamm broke into a hab unit and went up to the top floor with a vox man and three of his officers to get a good overview.
Lamm knelt at the sill of an upper floor window and swung his field glasses over the burning, dying Civitas below. Fires and explosions showed up as points of white light so bright they baffled the instrument’s filters. “There,” said Lamm. “There on the walkway. Bring a unit in there now.”
The vox-man didn’t reply.
Lamm looked round, blinking to adjust his sight to the gloomy room. There was no sign of Forbes, his vox-man. Or of his three fellow officers.
Lamm rose, bemused.
“What…?”he began.
He heard something stir in the apartment’s adjoining bathroom.
“This is out of order, you idiots!” he barked, drawing his pistol all the same. “Where the hell are you? Forbes? This is no time for a joke!”
“Respond!”
The crackly voice made Lamm jump. It came from the vox-caster. It was leaning against the wall, straps dangling. There was no sign of the vox-man who had been carrying it.
There was another noise from the bathroom. Lamm raised his pistol and fired at the door. The las-round punched a hole in the fibre-board. Light shone through it. With the snout of his pistol, he pushed the bathroom door open.
The overhead light was on, shade-less, bright, harsh.
Lamm found Forbes and his three officers. They were in the moulded plastic bathtub.
They had been stripped of their clothes and their skins and of all semblance of articulation. The tub was full to the brim with a thick, gleaming bouillabaisse of blood and meat and bones and organs. Blood trickled down the side onto the tiled floor.
Lamm gasped in disbelief then fell to his knees and vomited.
He heard a swish behind him, in the dark. It was the swish of a cloak. A cloak of wet, human skin.
Lamm rolled and fired, blasting shot after shot against the far wall of the room.
He stopped firing and rose, gun clenched in a shaking hand. His own breath rasped in his ears. He swung the gun round, left and right. Had he killed it? Had he?
Lamm’s chest suddenly felt warm. He blinked and raised his hand. His chest was awash with thick, hot blood.
His hand went up to his throat and two of his fingers unexpectedly went in through a slit in the flesh that hadn’t been there ten seconds before. His fingertips nudged his exposed larynx, neck tendons and oesophagus. His throat had been cut. He felt no real pain, just enormous surprise.
Skarwael finished his artistry. His boline, double-bladed, each edge mono-molecular sharp, punched into Lamm’s teetering, choking form. He revealed the length of the spine while the man was still standing upright, and cut down through his kidneys and lumbar muscles.
Blood squirted out under pressure. Skarwael opened his mouth and stuck out his long, grey tongue as it spattered over him.
Lamm fell over onto his face.
Skarwael smeared the blood on his cheeks up and around his deep eye sockets. It made them seem even blacker and deeper against his stretched, white flesh.
He sighed. He would not be so patient and merciful with the Beati.
Pater Sin hushed his eyeless charges and cuddled them to his sides. They were walking down the middle of Principal I in the dark, fires around them, and the runt psykers were skittish. They were right in the middle of the wide highway.
Figures emerged from cover ahead of them. Imperial men. Their lasguns were raised. They shouted challenges, certain no enemy would approach so brazenly and out in the open. A shell-shocked pilgrim and his children, in desperate need of help, wandering blind… that’s who they were…
Sin leant down and whispered into the ears of his runts and they trembled. They opened their wet, slit mouths wide. A deep buzzing filled the air.
The Imperial troopers came to a halt and turned to look at one another dimly. Then they opened fire. Within five seconds they were all dead, comrade killed by comrade.
The little malformed creatures closed their mouths and Sin used the hem of his silk robes to dab the spittle away from the corners of their mouths. Then he took them by the hands, one on each side, and led them on past the scattered bodies. The psykers stumbled, reluctant, like very young children. One began to open and close its mouth in a soft, agitated manner. The other had his free arm up and crooked, and was waving his hand back and forth next to his ear.
“We’re almost there,” Sin crooned over and over to his runts. “Almost there…”
Viktor Hark crept forward through the firelit rubble of the Masonae. His plasma pistol was drawn.
“Mkendrick?” he voxed impatiently. “Mkendrick? Where the feth are you?”
There was no response from eighteen platoon. They had been holding the cross street at Armonsfahl Boulevard West, but they hadn’t answered standard vox in fifteen minutes.
Hark didn’t need this delay. His mind was on Soric. He wasn’t sure how to break it to Gaunt, but his duty was clear. Soric had to die. He was a liability. A psyk-stain. He was a danger. Meryn had been right Even Soric’s own men, people like Vivvo, couldn’t hide him any longer.
Hark felt sad about it. Soric was a good man and the Verghastite Ghosts loved him. But that didn’t hide the truth that Soric was too lethal to live. Far, far too lethal. He needed a round in the head before it came to anything worse.
That was a commissar’s job. In simple terms. In black and white. That was the duty. And Hark was nothing if not a slave to duty.
Hark tripped and fell flat on his face. His pistol bounced away into the street shadows. He cursed his stupid self and looked back at what he’d fallen over.
Hark froze.
He’d tripped over Mkendrick. The Tanith was dead, exploded, ripped apart In the street around. Hark slowly resolved the other bodies in the darkness. Lentrim, Mkauley, Dill, Commo… all the men and women of eighteen platoon. All dead.
“Oh Holy Terra…” Hark mumbled and reached for his micro-bead. Then he froze again. Above the smell of soot and blood, he could suddenly detect a stink like crushed mint, and rancid milk.
He glanced up and saw them.
Sliding their clammy grey hides against one another, the triplets slithered down the street. Though three, they moved sinuously as one. Their weapon frames clacked as they reloaded.
Hark reached for his fallen plasma pistol, but it was too far away. Rolling, he wrenched out his back-up, a snub-nose Hostec Livery hard-slug revolver.
He fired it. The cut-nose round smacked into the greasy flank of one of the loxatl, and it began to hiss and whistle like a kettle on a burner ring.
Its two brethren fired their flechette cannons.
Hark rocked, as if caught in the slipstream of some large, fast-moving vehicle that had passed close by. But he did not fall, nor did he feel any pain. He looked round slowly. Three metres away from him, he saw his left arm, cleanly severed, lying in a widening pool of arterial blood. He couldn’t see out of his left eye either.
With an angry, helpless cry, Hark slumped over onto his back and began the swift and involuntary job of bleeding to death.
TEN
THE SECOND DAY
“Our high and mighty Lord General Lugo says ‘victory or death!’ �
�
“What gives him the idea we’re being offered a choice?”
—Rawne
A few minutes before sunrise on the second day, from his command post high in the hives, Lugo sent out the order to withdraw.
With the north-western suburbs of the Civitas wide open, the Ironhall district came under increasing pressure during the second half of the night, and Kaldenbach had finally, reluctantly, signalled that his forces could no longer hold onto it.
When the order reached Gaunt, he cursed even though he saw the sense of it. If Kaldenbach fell back, the Masonae would be left alone, a salient vulnerable to the pincer of the archenemy forces flowing in around it.
The northern Civitas sectors had to be given up.
Fortunately, Kaldenbach was a sound leader and a man of method. He did not simply throw his overstretched forces into flight. He knew the vital importance of a measured retreat, knew that ground must be given only for tactical consolidation. He coordinated with Gaunt so that the entire line could be withdrawn as cleanly as possible, supplying mutual cover and support.
It was a tough and bloody process, and it took five hours. On more than a dozen occasions, it nearly failed. Twice, PDF armour on the Glassworks flank retreated too fast, without provisioning cover for the infantry sections north of it, and created gaps that Kaldenbach managed to plug through the narrowest of luck. Then a charge of enemy AFVs against Kaldenbach’s own command section almost managed a coup de grace which was only held off by an improvised counter-strike by men of the Regiment Civitas. Gaunt’s withdrawing sections were harried by airstrikes, three of which damaged the line badly and led to precarious moments of redeployment as invader units tried to capitalise on the weaknesses. Then Daur’s units were sent east along Farkindle Street to take the pressure off a brace of platoons trying to withdraw under fire, but found their route impossibly blocked by a street-wide firestorm. Raglon’s platoon, already backed into a certain measure of safety, extemporised courageously, and pushed forward again, in time to provide the cover Daur had been prevented from supplying.
Any one of these near-disasters might have cut a hole in the retreating Guard line, and that would have quickly ensured a miserable doom for every soldier in the withdrawing forces.
In the hour before noon, under a pale sky leaden with the smoke of the burning outer city, the last of Gaunt’s and Kaldenbach’s forces reached the defences of the Guild Slope and were absorbed into the second line. To their north, at their heels, the monstrous regiments of the archenemy surged down through the abandoned suburbs to begin the concentrated assault of the Guild Slope.
The second phase of the battle for the Civitas Beati had begun.
Shells and other ranged munitions were now falling on the inner city, and striking the hive towers too. The explosions dotting the vast faces of the soaring hives seemed like match-sparks on the slopes of mountains, but the damage was progressive. Heavier artillery was advanced from the obsidaes to positions inside the captured north up-city. The enemy’s airpower also began to concentrate its attacks on the hive superstructures. Anti-fighter batteries on the roofs and upper levels of all four hive towers, most of them hastily erected during the previous days, set up brusque resistance. From the Guild Slope, the display was intense, even if smoke cover frequently obscured it: the attack craft, zipping and circling like flies through air striped and fretted with tracer and laser fire and the blossom of detonations.
Other sounds rolled in across the Civitas too: ghastly sounds. Filthy proclamations of warp-texts were flooding the vox channels, or being broadcast from the speakers of advancing armour at high volume.
The fallen prayer horn, Gorgonaught, was set back on its shot-up tower and directed at the hives. Through it, obscenity was blasted, often the amplified screams of Imperial troops, citizens or pilgrims captured during the first phase. The aural assault chilled and unsettled the already rattled and weary defenders, life company commissars — the Keetle twins especially — were kept busy chastening, by execution, those soldiers whose mettle broke under the psychological torment.
For it became hard to think. It became hard to want to be alive. By the early afternoon, though the effects of the noise bombardment had yet to fully penetrate the interior of the hive towers, all those in the open Guild Slope and mid-city, including the bulk of the defenders, were sweating and sick. Nerves were frayed, stomachs acid and swilling. Even so, they had to fight on. The death-brigades assaulted the Guild Slope from north-east and north-west. At the barricades, defence lines and strong points. Imperial troopers fought and died with tears in their eyes, driven to anguish by the sputtering, hissing sounds of evil incarnate.
Soric had stopped reading the message shell notes that came to him. The writing had become increasingly spidery and frantic, and where it was legible, it was simply abuse. He was a weak fool. He was a coward. He was gakking scum. The author, whatever it was, whatever part of him it might be, had become incoherent and desperate.
He rested his platoon for fifteen minutes between artillery barrages, and sat on his own in a doorway, hunched up, hands twitching, smoking a lho-stick. There was a taste of bile in his mouth that would not go away, and his eye kept watering. He kept looking for Hark. Hark knew.
Soric had been a brave man all his life. For all the sickness and fear he felt, now more than ever he knew Milo had been right. Soric just had to be brave enough now to do it the right way.
If it wasn’t already too late.
“Mohr!” Soric shouted as he got up and squashed the stub underfoot. His unit’s vox-officer ran up smartly.
“Find Gaunt for me, if you please.”
Mohr nodded, set his caster down, and started to speak into the horn as he adjusted the tuning dials.
“Heading for the field station on Tarif Street, chief.”
Soric checked his chart. Tarif Street was close.
“He’s been summoned to see Commissar Hark, chief,” Mohr added.
Soric’s face darkened. Too late, too late, too late…
“Vivvo!” he yelled.
“Chief?”
“You have platoon command here for the duration, lad. Listen to orders and make a good job of it.”
“Chief? Where are you going? Chief?”
But Soric was already thumping away down the street.
Filmy grey smoke from tank shelling wafted down the narrow roadway in the Guild Slope. Ornate guild-owned warehouses stood on either side of the cobbled lane, and to the south, up the gentle incline, the colossal masses of the hive towers rose above the rooftops.
There was little, Varl considered, that distinguished this particular street from the one immediately north of it, or the one directly south. They were all part of the mid-city maze, all shell-pummelled and smoke-choked.
This street, however, marked the second line, the defensive ring around the mid-city to which all Imperial forces had withdrawn. More particularly, this street was the assigned part of the second line that was his platoon’s duty to hold. A block away to the west was a company of PDF riflemen. A block to the east, Varl had it on good authority — well, tac logis at least — was a quartet of life company tanks. He hadn’t seen them, but he trusted they were there.
Since noon, it had been quiet in his immediate neighbourhood, apart from the echoing torment of the archenemy’s broadcasts and a single push-assault from a Blood Pact death-brigade that his men had discouraged with their excellently positioned enfilade.
Varl took a squint down the street where the men of number nine platoon were all in cover, waiting. He saw Baen, his platoon’s scout, hurrying back to him from a foray down to the crossroads.
Pater Sin and his two charges were walking in step behind Baen.
Varl slid a lho-stick out of his jacket pocket and held it out to Brostin, in cover beside him. Brostin obligingly singed the tip of his sergeant’s smoke with the hot-blue pilot light of his flamer.
Drawing deep and exhaling, Varl nodded to Baen as he drew close
. The Pater and the psykers were virtually at Baen’s heels.
“Anything?” Varl asked.
Baen shook his head. “Not a fething sign. I checked the crossroads and just over. They’re shelling Katz Street for all they’re worth, poor PDF bastards. But nothing. Except—”
“Except what?”
Baen shrugged. Sin placed his massive hands firmly on the shoulders of his two runts and walked them forward. All three passed between Varl and Baen.
“Got this funny feeling we’re being watched,” said Baen.
Varl smiled. “It’s nothing. Just edge. We all feel it.”
Sin paused, and kept his psykers huddled close to him as he stepped back and gazed into Varl’s face. He recognised the man’s uniform. Tanith. These men were Ghosts. The ones who had robbed him of his victory on Hagia. He’d come so close there, and had only escaped with his life thanks to a warning from his guide psykers. Very few of his breed had escaped Hagia alive.
Resentment and vengeance simmered inside him. Sin’s lips curled back from his implanted steel fangs. These were the wretches who had denied him. This one, a sergeant by his markings, slovenly, casual, disfigured by an augmetic shoulder. A worthless little bastard who—
For a moment, Sin almost let the psyk-cloak drop so they could see him. He could kill them all, slaughter them, turning their own guns on them.
But patience and devotion to his sworn duty kept him true He’d over-taxed his children already, and he wanted them strong and refreshed for the work ahead. They were tired, and that made them harder to control. One of them persisted in waving his hand. Masking was easier than goading, otherwise he’d have turned this street into a charnel place to make passage.
Besides, his revenge on the Tanith would be total when his work was complete These men would all be dead soon. Better still, they would die stripped of all hope and faith.