by Dan Abnett
Dorden took a step towards the cot where Corbec lay half curled in a sleep that the doctor doubted he would ever wake from.
Agun Soric, naked except for a sheet and the heavy wrap of bandages around his bulky torso, was sitting on a stool next to the colonel’s cot, his head on Corbec’s chest. His skin was dimpled with blood-blisters where the drips had been attached, and with the puckered white marks left by the adhesive tape that had held them in place.
Soric raised his head as Dorden approached, and slowly lifted the laspistol so that it was aimed at Dorden’s belly.
“Not another step.”
“Hey now, Agun. Easy. Calm yourself.”
Soric’s one good eye was bleary. He’d been unconscious for many days. Given the extent of his chest wound, Dorden wasn’t sure how he was managing to remain alive divorced from the life support apparatus.
“Doc,” he murmured, as if he was recognising Dorden for the first time.
“It’s me, Agun. What’s with the weapon?”
Soric looked at the laspistol as if he was surprised to find himself holding it. Then some realisation crossed his face.
“Daemons,” he hissed. “Daemons?”
“All around. All around in the air. I had a dream. They’re coming to take Colm. Coming for him. I dreamt it. They’re coming for him. In his bloodstream, chewing like rats. Nnh! Nnh! Nnh!” Soric made a graphic gnawing sound.
“And you’re going to fight them, Agun? With the gun?”
“If I gakking well have to!” Soric said. He swung his head round awkwardly and focused on Corbec. “He’s not ready to die. It’s not his time.”
Dorden hesitated. He remembered, with an unnerving clarity, Sergeant Varl saying the same thing.
“No, he’s not ready, Agun,” Dorden agreed.
“I know. I dreamt it. But the daemon rats. They don’t know. They’re chewing at him.” Soric made the gnawing sound again, and then coughed.
“I’d shoot them if I could,” he added.
“Where the hell did he get a weapon?” murmured someone in the huddle of onlookers.
“Who’s that?” demanded Soric loudly, looking up alertly and raising the gun. “Daemons? More daemons? I dreamt about daemons!”
“No daemons, Agun! No daemons!” placated Dorden.
“Get them out of here,” he hissed at Curth.
“Move! Now!” Curth ordered, herding the bystanders out. She drew the screen behind them and looked back at Dorden.
“How is he still alive?” she whispered.
“Because I’m a tough old bastard, lovely Surgeon Curth,” Soric answered. “Vervun Smeltery One, man and boy, ahh. Hardens you up, it does, smeltery work. She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she, doc? A lovely, lovely girl.”
“I’ve always thought so,” Dorden said calmly. “Why don’t you give me the laspistol, Agun? Maybe I can shoot these daemon rats?”
“Oh no!” Soric said. “That wouldn’t be fair on you, doc. You don’t use guns. Always admired that in you. Life-saver. Not a life-taker.”
“Why don’t I take it then, Agun?” Curth asked gently. “Back in basic PDF training, I was top of my class at small arms. I bet I could nail those rats for you.”
Soric looked at her. With astonishing deftness, he spun the pistol in his paw so that the grip was suddenly pointing at her. “Off you go then,” he said. “Lovely, lovely girl,” he added sidelong to Dorden.
“Oh, I know,” said Dorden, breathing out Curth took the weapon gingerly and tossed it into a laundry bin.
“Let me look you over,” said Curth.
“No, I’m fine,” said the old Verghastite.
“I just want to check the rats aren’t chewing at you too.”
“Hnnh. Okay.” He coughed again, and Dorden saw the spots of blood that speckled the cot sheets. Soric seemed to slump a little.
Curth went behind Soric and did a bimanual exam of his torso.
“Feth! He’s respiring on both lungs! How is that possible?”
“Clearly?” asked Dorden, unconvinced.
“No… there’s a fluid mass.” She took out her stethoscope and pressed the cup to Soric’s back. “But not much. This is amazing.”
“Absolutely,” Dorden whispered.
“Forget me, I’m fine,” said Soric, rousing suddenly and coughing again. “The dream told me I would be fine. The dream made me fine. Said I had to be fine so’s I could get up and keep the daemons away from Colm. They want his soul, doc. They’re chewing in.”
“The dream told you that?”
Soric nodded. “Did I tell you my great grandmother was a witch?”
Curth and Dorden both hesitated. “A witch?” echoed Dorden.
“Had the second sight, most peculiar it was. Earned her keep in the out-habs for years, telling fortunes.”
“Like… a psyker?” Curth asked.
“Gak me, no!” Soric spluttered. “Lovely, girl, but very foolish, eh, doc? My dear Ana, if my sainted old grandma had been a psyker, she’d have been gathered up by the Black Ships, wouldn’t she? Gathered up by the Black Ships or shot as a heretic. No, no… she was a witch. She had a harmless knack of seeing the future. In dreams mostly. My old mam said I’d inherit the talent, being the seventh son of a seventh son, but I’ve not had so much as a twinge of it me whole life.”
“Until now,” he added.
“You dreamed Corbec had daemons chewing at him?” asked Curth. “Clear as you like, that’s what the dream said.”
“In his blood?”
“As you say.”
“And the dream said you’d come back to life so you could prevent that? Prevent the daemons carrying Colm off?”
“Yes, lady.”
Curth looked over at Dorden. “Find Lesp. Have him do a toxicological spread test on Corbec.”
“You’re kidding,” Dorden said.
“Just find Lesp, Tolin.”
“No need. I can do a tox-spread myself.”
“I had other dreams,” Soric said. His voice was distant now, as if he had exhausted himself.
“We need to get you back to bed, Agun,” Curth hushed. “The dream will only heal you if you help it by resting.”
“Okay. Lovely, lovely girl, doc.”
Curth helped Soric to his feet as Dorden stripped sterile wraps off the instruments he was about to use on Corbec. “Bad dreams,” Soric mumbled. “I’m sure they were.”
“I saw Doyl. And Adare. They’re dead. Breaks my heart. Both dead. And the cardinal is in terrible pain.”
“The cardinal?”
“Terrible pain. But tell Gaunt… Mkoll’s not dead.” Curth glanced at Dorden. She saw the look in his eyes. Torn between hope and dismissal. “Come on, Agun,” she said.
“Lovely, lovely girl,” Soric mumbled. He sagged and collapsed. “Lesp! Lesp!” Curth yelled.
By the time Gaunt reached the infirmary, Soric was strapped into a cot and back on life support. “He said what?”
“He said daemons were after Corbec And that he’d dreamed Doyl and Adare were dead, but Mkoll was alive. And he said something about the cardinal being in terrible pain.”
“The who?”
“The cardinal.”
Gaunt stood with Curth in the shadows of a service doorway down the hall from the intensive bay. Curth was trying to light a lho-stick, her hands unsteady.
“Give me that,” Gaunt snapped, and plucked the stick from her mouth. He walked over to a flamer pack that had been dumped amidst a clumsy pile of kit along the corridor wall by crash crews and lit the thing off a blue pilot flame from the nozzle.
He crossed back to Curth and handed her the lho-stick.
“Those things will kill you,” he said.
“Better them than the warp,” she replied, sucking hard.
“His actual words were ‘the cardinal’?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“The Phantine specialist assigned to Adare’s team was called Cardinale,” Gaunt told her. “No crap,” she said simply
.
Dorden approached down the hallway and joined them. Without comment he took the lho-stick from Curth’s hand, took a deep drag, regretted it in a fit of coughing, and handed it back to her.
“Corbec will live,” he said.
Gaunt smiled. “And Soric?”
“Him too. I dread to think what it would take to bring Agun Soric down.”
“You don’t look happy,” Gaunt noted.
Dorden shrugged. “On Ana’s advice I ran a tox-spread. Corbec was in a terminal decline thanks to a nosocomial infection.”
“A what?”
“In his injured state, he had picked up a secondary infection here in the infirmary.”
“Blood poisoning,” said Curth.
“Yes, Ana. Blood poisoning. If I hadn’t shot him up with twenty cc’s of morphomycin and an anticoagulant, he’d probably have been dead by nightfall.”
“Damn,” said Gaunt.
“Daemons in his blood stream, chewing like rats,” Curth said, mimicking Soric’s gnawing sound. “Don’t start with that,” Dorden said. “But you’ve got to admit—” Curth began. “No, I haven’t,” said Dorden.
The Ghosts in the main billet were packing kits and stripping down weapons when Hark brought the punishment detail back in. Trooper Cuu was cuffed and hobbled, and scurried to keep up with the guards. His face was drawn and pale from too many nights in a cell, and it made his jagged scar all the more prominent.
“Stand to!” Hark cried, and the detail slammed to a halt.
“Keys!” demanded Hark.
The nearest trooper handed him a fob of geno-keys and the commissar unlocked Cuu’s restraints.
Cuu stood blinking, rubbing his wrists.
“Do you understand the nature of your transgression and renounce it utterly before the eyes of the God-Emperor?”
“I do, sir.”
“Do you accept your guilt and understand it as a measure of the God-Emperor’s forgiveness?”
“I do that sir.”
“Do you promise to stay right out of my damned way, from now on?” Hark snarled, pushing his face into Cuu’s. “You can count on it”
“Sir?”
“Sir. You can count on it, sir.”
Hark looked away. “Prisoner is dismissed,” he said. The detail turned on their heels and marched out, Hark behind them.
Cuu crossed to his cot. He sat down and looked along the row at Bragg.
“What?” Bragg said, looking up from the half-oiled firing mechanism he was stripping down.
“You,” said Cuu.
“Me what?” Bragg asked, getting up. “Let him be, Bragg,” said Fenix. “He ain’t worth it,” said Lubba.
“No, Cuu wants to say something,” said Bragg. “Cuu, I’m glad Gaunt got you off. I’m glad it wasn’t you. Made me sick to think someone in our regiment could do a thing like that.”
“You thought it was me, Bragg. You told them where to look.”
“Yeah,” said Bragg, turning away. “Those coins… that was your fault.”
“And this is yours,” said Cuu, pulling up his tunic so they could see his narrow back and the bloody welts the lash had made thirty times across his torso.
FOUR
It was a long way down.
The late afternoon was bringing down a glowering weather pattern: low, dark nimbostratus swollen with rain and a stiff westerly wind. In sympathy, the Scald far below was seething up, churning with firestorms and electrochemical flares.
The driving acid rain was heavy enough to reduce Ouranberg to little more than a grey blur against the ominous sky. But it did little to reduce the scale of the yawning gulf beneath him.
Mkoll edged along the top of the pipeline. There was just enough room on the girders of the support cradle for him to put one foot exactly in front of the next, steadying himself with one hand against the side of the pipe itself. The rain was making everything slick: the metal under his feet, the pipe under his touch. There wasn’t much in the way of anything to actually grasp onto except the occasional rivet. It was a matter of steady balance and total concentration.
For the first five hundred metres or so, he’d walked along the top of the great pipe, but then the weather had deteriorated and the rising wind had denied him that option. Walking along the edge of the cradle was much slower going.
He would have preferred not to look down, but it was essential. The girders were scabbed with rust and sticky lichens, and he had to place each step carefully. Below him was a sheer drop down into the toxic depths of Phantine. One slip, one patch of rust or moss, one rain-slick spar, and he would be falling without hope of survival. Mkoll was pretty sure that if he fell, he would collide with one of the span’s cross members on the way, so at least he wouldn’t know much about it.
He’d already had two close shaves. A sudden gust of updraft had nearly swept him off. And he’d accidentally trodden on one of the vile slug-like things that dwelt in this dismal place. Thermovores. Bonin and Milo had told him about them. The thing had squished and his boot had slid right away in the slime. Too close. Too, too close.
Mkoll figured he was about halfway across. The rain was getting heavier, sheeting down diagonally, and barks of thunder shook the air. It was almost twilight, and, apart from a few lights, the city was now utterly invisible.
The rain had brought the slugs out. Mkoll presumed they derived nutrients from the precipitation, or essential fluids, or maybe fed on micro-algae dissolved out of the metal by the rain’s high acidity. Feth, he was no biologist! All he knew for sure was that the metalwork was covered with the disgusting things, ten times the number that had been there at the start of his crossing, before the rain. He tried not to touch them and certainly not to tread on them. The latter was difficult. He had to take long strides regularly to step over writhing piles of them. Twice, he had to use the stock of his lasrifle to sweep particularly large masses out of his way.
The skinwing presumably mistook him for a rival predator. Or perhaps it fancied bigger game. He saw it coming right at the last minute, a scrawny, attenuated rat-like thing with a ragged, two metre wingspan and a whip-thin tail four metres long. It flew into his visored face, trilling ultrasonic squeals frenziedly, and beating its wings at him. Mkoll stumbled, swung at it with a curse, and slipped off the girder.
He caught the girder edge with his left hand. The impact of arrest nearly dislocated his shoulder. Mkoll grunted in pain. His legs pinwheeled, trying to find something to tuck against. As his left fingertips began to slip off, he got his right hand on the girder too. His first grab came away with a handful of thermovores. He shook them off his fingers and got a better grip. His legs were still dangling and his forearms were on fire with the effort of gripping the spar and supporting his weight.
The skinwing came back, attacking him from behind, shrilling so loud his steel helmet vibrated. “Get the feth off!” he yelled.
Teeth clenched, grunting, he got one elbow up on the girder, then the other, then one boot. Finally, he rolled himself up onto the beam and lay, shaking and choking for breath, face down in a mass of crushed slug-vermin.
He lay there for a long time, trying to slow his racing heart, feeling like he was going to die.
He finally moved again when the skinwing landed on his shoulder and started to gnaw at his neck-seal. He jerked round, caught it by the head and held on tight as it thrashed and fought. He kept his grip on it long enough to pull out his knife and kill it.
Mkoll dropped it off the edge and watched it tumble away, wings and long tail trailing, into the depths. Wretched fething thing had nearly killed him.
Just before it vanished into the clouds far below, an indistinct shape, much, much larger than the skinwing and sleekly black, emerged briefly from the Scald and took it gracefully in mid-air before vanishing again.
Mkoll had no idea what he had just glimpsed. But he became suddenly glad it had only been a skinwing that had decided he might make a meal.
He got up, unsteady and
aching, wiped the slime off his tunic front, and resumed his arduous progress.
Nessa placed her hand over Milo’s mouth before she woke him. It seemed unfair to disturb him. He was profoundly sleeping, like a child, it seemed to her.
But it was getting on for 20.00 Imperial, and the dusk cycle was beginning. They had to get moving.
Milo woke and looked up at her. She smiled reassuringly and took her hand away, uncovering an answering smile.
He sat up and rubbed his face with his hands. “You okay?” he whispered.
She didn’t reply. He lowered his hands and repeated the whisper so she could see his lips. “Yes,” she said. Then added, “Too loud?” She had difficulty gauging the volume of her own speech.
“That’s fine,” he said.
Sneaking away from the slave gang they had mingled with to cross the causeway, they had spent the earlier part of the day progressing across the main mill areas and work yards, avoiding the eagerly searching patrols of the enemy. In the middle part of the afternoon, weary from effort and the sustained tension, they had broken into a derelict tenement hab on the outskirts of Alpha dome to steal a few hours’ rest.
Neither of them had mentioned the terrible events of the causeway crossing. Milo hadn’t known Doyl well, but he knew the Ghosts had lost a valuable and gifted scout. Adare’s death affected him on a more direct emotional level. Lhurn Adare; sharp, confident and strong, had been a well-liked Tanith and a personal friend. He had been one of Colonel Corbec’s sacra-drinking cronies, a die-hard carouser who liked to see the dawn come up with the likes of Varl, Derin, Cown, Domor, Bragg and Brostin. Part of the inner circle, the heart and backbone of the Tanith First. Milo had seen plenty of action at Adare’s side, right from the early days. He remembered the relentless practical jokes Adare had played on Baffels and Cluggan. He remembered getting fabulously legless with him the night Adare made sergeant. He remembered Adare’s frequent, sound advice.
Now they were both gone. Adare and Doyl. Dead, Milo was sure. Like all the others. Baffels, on Hagia. Cluggan, long gone on Voltemand. Mkoll, in the skies over Ouranberg.
How much longer, Milo wondered, until all the last pieces of Tanith were worn away?