by Dan Abnett
The drogue Skyro, supported by Marauder gunships, manoeuvred in over Beta dome and roped Phantine and Urdeshi troops down onto the main vapour mill. A brigade personally led by Major Fazalur took and held the main mill complex against bitter resistance until Gaunt broke through Ourangate and moved Tanith and Urdeshi elements to relieve him.
To the east, the secondary assault poured into the city’s main drome. For about an hour, the fighting there was the most intense and furious of the whole battle. The Krassians were driven back twice until the resolve of the Blood Pact finally snapped. After that it was a rout.
The cost was high. Nearly two thousand Imperial Guardsmen were killed, the majority of them Krassian and Urdeshi. Forty aircraft were lost. The drogue Aeolus, heroically staying on station to ensure that the Krassian units could get enough troops down for their third and final push into the dome, was hammered by Ouranberg’s western batteries and eventually listed, rudderless and on fire, towards Gamma dome where it foundered and exploded. The entire crew perished. The colossal explosion shot a vast doughnut of burning gas up into the air and scorched the west face of Gamma dome black.
But Imperial victory was pretty much guaranteed from the moment that word of Slaith’s death began to spread through the enemy forces. The Blood Pact kept fighting, and in many ways became more savage. They were lost, and that made them suicidally vengeful.
Slaith’s demise certainly did not rob them of their courage. But their coordination and discipline were gone. Without Slaith, they were like a brain-dead body, still twitching with involuntary responses.
Van Voytz had known all along that Ouranberg would be hard to capture, nigh on impossible, in fact, if he was to keep the vital vapour mills intact. As fighting raged through the hab-domes of the city, and report after report came in of losses and casualties, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it could have been a hundred times worse. His gamble with Operation Larisel had paid off. If Slaith had still been alive at the start of the assault, chances were the date 226.771 M41 would have been remembered as a tragic Imperial defeat.
It didn’t feel like victory on the ground in the streets of Alpha dome. Fierce fighting continued until well into the evening. Whole hab-blocks were on fire, and in places the roadways had collapsed through into lower dome levels.
Gaunt led from the front, directly deploying his units into the heart of the dome. Squads under Bray, Burone, Theiss and Daur had secured a vital inner bascule and overrun a string of well-made Blood Pact emplacements. There were rumours that inside the domes the citizens of Ouranberg were rising up against their oppressors. Gaunt saw nothing of that, only hundreds of terrified civilians fleeing the main centres of fighting.
His primary concern was not the overall victory. Van Voytz could worry about that. As soon as he was within range, he made repeated efforts to contact the Larisel elements and was heartened to find that some of them at least were still alive. Beltayn relayed broken transmissions from Meryn’s team, which had linked up with the survivors from Varl’s Larisel 1 and were now besieged in the refectory of Ouranberg’s Scholam Progenium near the Imperial concourse.
Gaunt swore to them he would break through and secure them. He pushed Rawne’s elements to his left flank, supported by Urdeshi armour, and sent Haller, Maroy and Ewler’s units to the right.
The right flank approach was hopeless. Maroy reported heavy resistance in the eastern market area. Rawne fared little better. His forces — the sections commanded by Kolea, Obel and Mkfin and a brigade of Urdeshi under young Shenko— ran foul of the loxad and got caught up in a period of ugly street-fighting that lasted over two hours.
Gaunt himself managed to cut through eventually, leading the platoons of Domor, Skerral and Mkendrick along with forty-five Urdeshi pioneers and the units that had, until Cirenholm, been led by Corbec and Soric. These last two were temporarily commanded by Raglon and Arcuda, and Gaunt kept the inexperienced leaders close. He needn’t have worried. Arcuda displayed a tactical gift that made Gaunt wish he’d advanced the man sooner, and Raglon was as confident and assured as he might have hoped. Raglon had come a long way from junior vox-carrier.
They broke through a half-defended line of buildings and saw off a loxad counter-attack with their flamers. Dremmond and Lyse led the flamer repulse against the vile xenos mercenaries. They had a fantastic resistance to laser rounds, but fled moaning from the flames. With Nittori from his own platoon still injured, Gaunt had allowed Lyse to take his role. She was the first female flame-trooper in the regiment another notable achievement for the Verghastites.
Just after 14.00 Imperial, Gaunt’s force caught Blood Pact elements on the Imperial concourse from the side, put them to flight and relieved the besieged Ghosts in the scholam. Despite the fighting that continued to rattle outside as the Urdeshi stormed the main palace, Gaunt took the time to greet them all personally, and thank them for their bravery and determination.
Of the sixteen Ghosts and their four Urdeshi Specialists who had gone in as Operation Larisel, they appeared to be the only survivors. Banda, with a shattered wrist Scout-trooper Bonin and Sergeant Varl, both wounded badly in the mayhem of fighting that had followed Slaith’s death. Vadim, seriously concussed from the truck crash. Larkin, crying quietly with the pain of the migraine that had finally conquered him. Mkvenner, Kuren and Sergeant Meryn, all battered but miraculously intact. Specialist Kersherin, the only Skyborne who had survived. Commander Jagdea, who praised in particular Bonin’s efforts to free and protect the captives during the running firefight, including a pilot named Viltry and Specialist Cardinale.
Cardinale, Gaunt learned, had perished from his terrible wounds during the siege.
Gaunt called up immediate medicae support for them and tried not to think about the ones who hadn’t made it. Rilke, Cocoer, Nour, Doyl, Adare Nessa, Mkoll… Milo.
Fifteen minutes later, Arcuda voxed Gaunt to say his men had found Milo and Nessa alive on the roof of the Ministry of Vapour Export. Gaunt closed his eyes. The Emperor protects.
Almost as an afterthought, he turned back to the survivors and asked, “By the way… who made the shot in the end? Larkin?”
“None of us did,” said Meryn. “Larkin hit the bastard several times, and so did Nessa I think. But he was shielded.”
“Then how the feth—?”
Gaunt’s unfinished question was finally answered late that afternoon, when Urdeshi units searching the ruins of the palace found a lone Tanith scout unconscious in the rubble.
His tags said his name was Mkoll.
Rawne’s forces were being hammered by the loxad in the palatial habs west of the Alpha dome heartland. The aliens were using some kind of heavy fragmentation mortar, perhaps a larger-scale version of their signature flechette blasters. Obel had pressed his unit forward, and Bragg had managed to hose one loxad position with cannonfire, but the deadly shells were still whooping down.
With Troopers Lubba and Jajjo, Gol Kolea had broken through the back wall of a ransacked kitchen into some kind of service tunnel that allowed them to advance right up to flank the main loxad dug-outs. Emerging from the tunnel, hunched low, Kolea could hear the regular punk-shiff! of the loxad mortars, and a human voice screaming for a medic.
The trio ran low across debris-littered rockcrete and scooted behind an exploded water main that was weeping frothy water into the road.
Caffran was lying on his back in a nearby shell-hole. His leg was lacerated with loxatl barb shrapnel.
“Don’t be daft, sarge!” Lubba yelped, but Kolea was already running.
Flechette shot winnowed the air around him and he threw himself into the shell-hole. “How’s it going, Caff?” he asked.
“Kolea. Feth, it hurts. The fething alien freaks have got the end of the roadway locked up.”
Kolea looked at the wounds. “Nasty, but the medicae are on the way. You’ll live, Caffran.”
“I don’t care about that!” Caffran said. “I care about Tona!”
�
��What?”
“Rawne sent us all forward. I got caught here, she went on with Alio and Jenk. I think they were hit too. I can’t reach her on the vox.”
“Oh gak,” Kolea said, peering out of the shell-hole. “Stay here,” he said, as if Caffran was in any state to move. “Sarge!”
“What?”
Caffran swallowed back his pain. “Why… why did you come to me when I was anested? You were acting so… so strange. When Tona came to visit me she gave me hell for getting into such a stupid fix. But I knew she was just frightened. You, though… it was like you were really afraid I’d actually done that stuff to that poor woman. What was that about?”
Kolea smiled at him. “Caff, it must be the parent in me. I’ll tell you when I get back.” He jumped out of the shell-hole and started to run.
Allo and Jenk were dead. Criid was sprawled beside their remains, wounded in the arm and side. Enemy fire wailed around them.
Kolea half-fell into her foxhole, banging his knee against a broken pipe.
“Hold tight, Tona,” he said. “Caff’s missing you.”
He scooped her up in his arms, ignoring her moans of pain and started to run back the way he had come.
“You’re crazy!” she wailed as flechette shot exploded around them.
“Not the first time I’ve been accused of that,” he said, struggling. “You and Varl ought to form a gakking dub.”
He reached the edge of the shattered buildings and almost threw Criid into Jajjo’s arms as he fell down.
He was smiling, and only when he fell did they see the bloody mess where the back of his skull had been.
“Sarge!” Lubba yelled, risking his own life to drag Kolea’s body into cover from the crossfire. “Sarge! Sergeant Kolea! Please! Don’t be dead! Don’t be dead!”
Bragg looked over at Caill. “Last box?” he asked.
“We’ve got two more,” said his loader.
Bragg sighed. He looked out of the nearest hole in the wall and shook his head. Loxad flechette fire was sweeping the street outside. “Not going to be enough to get through that. I’ll stay put and lay down some cover fire. You run back down the line and get us some more, eh?”
Caill nodded. “I’ll be two minutes,” he said. “Don’t leave without me.”
Caill hurried away. Bragg looked over at the other Ghosts in the shelled out basement: Tokar, Fenix, Cuu and Hwlan. “Any bright ideas?” he said.
“You give me a good spread of protective fire with that land-hammer,” Hwlan said, “and I reckon I can get a group into that block opposite.”
“You’re on,” said Bragg and hefted the big support weapon into place.
“On three,” he said. “One, two—”
The cannon exploded into life, strafing the street with a devastating rain of shots.
Hwlan, Fenix and Tokar surged out, running the gauntlet of fire.
The cannon clicked dry.
“Need another box?” Cuu asked.
“Yeah,” said Bragg. “That would be—”
The corner of the ammo box cracked into the side of Bragg’s head. He slumped to the side, and passed out for a second.
“What the feth?” he spluttered, coming round. “Cuu? What the feth was that?” Bragg felt blood pouring out of his scalp. He was dizzy and sick.
Lijah Cuu was standing, staring at him.
“You sold me out,” he said.
“Oh feth, Cuu! This isn’t the time to settle some stupid feud!”
“No? When would be a better time, Tanith? I don’t know, sure as sure.”
Bragg tried to get up. “You really have lost it, Cuu. Gaunt got you off. You just got lashes. You were lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“I mean… feth, I don’t know what I mean. Feth, you’re scum. Gaunt will have you shot for this and—”
“He ain’t gonna know, is he?” said Cuu. “Is he, you big dumbo?” In Cuu’s right hand glittered thirty centimetres of silver Tanith warknife.
“Cuu? What the feth are you—”
Cuu plunged his straight silver into Bragg’s heart.
Bragg’s eyes widened. His lips gasped for a second, like a fish.
Cuu wrenched the dagger out and leaned forward so his mouth was right next to the dying Tanith’s ear. “Just so’s you know… it was me. I did her. And it was beautiful. She fought oh how she fought. Not like you, you big dumbo.”
Bragg suddenly lurched up and swung the autocannon around by the barrel like a club. If it had connected with the lean Verghastite it would surely have crippled him. But Cuu had jerked out of the way.
“Try again, Bragg,” he said, and stabbed the blade down again. And again. And again.
EPILOGUE:
THE GUNS OF TANITH
PHANTINE, 227.771, M41
“I don’t believe I had ever found a senior officer who appreciated the Ghosts’ particular skills before. Now I have, I don’t really think I’m any happier.”
—Ibram Gaunt, C-in-C, Tanith First
The drogue had docked just a few minutes before, but already the children were running out and playing.
The Ghosts’ entourage had reached Ouranberg as part of the mass reinforcement wave. Surly wharf masters oversaw the unloading of cargo freight, while men who would soon become jugglers, mimes, fire-eaters and knife-sharpeners haggled with them over the safe deposition of their worldly goods.
And the children were loose. Laughing, chanting, scampering around the docking bay. Yoncy tottered forward and half-threw a ball that Dalin went scampering after.
“Kids, huh?” said the woman behind Curth. The surgeon looked round.
“Kids,” said Aleksa scornfully. “The battle’s won, the dead are dead, and now the kids arrive to make us all soft and sad. Well, I’m not gakking sad. Life sucks. Get a bloody helmet.”
“Agreed,” said Curth, taking a lho-stick from her pack and offering the box to Aleksa. The blousy older woman with her boudoir finery took one and lit them both from a chased silver igniter.
“Dalin! Careful with your sister now, you hear me?” she shouted. She dropped her voice and added, “You’re the one he told, aren’t you?”
“The one he told?”
“Kolea said to me the only other person who knew was the lady doctor. That’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Curth sighed.
After a while, Aleksa asked, “How’s Gol?”
“He’s alive,” said Curth. “But what?”
“His primary functions are intact. He’s conscious. But the damage to his brain was considerable. He has total sociotypal memory loss. I mean total. He doesn’t even know his own name. Or that he has kids. Nothing…”
Aleksa smiled. “So that solves a lot, really.”
“No,” said Curth, taking out the sealed letter and staring at it. “Gol Kolea came back… but he didn’t come back. I… I don’t know what to do.”
“Honey,” said Aleksa, pressing the letter back into Curth’s coat, “take my advice. Thank the Emperor and walk away.”
Curth folded up the letter and slowly wandered back up the docking ramp into the city.
Van Voytz had been effusive in his praise. He was full of talk of commendations and decorations. He spoke about petitioning Macaroth to officially change the Tanith First’s regimental designation to reflect its specialist stealth and infiltration strengths.
“The next time the guns of Tanith sound, I want it to be in support of my advances,” Van Voytz had declared, pouring large snifters of amasec for his assembled officers.
Gaunt hadn’t really been listening. The arch-enemy had been deprived of Phantine. A significant heretic leader had been eliminated.
The Crusade force would now benefit from the planet’s massive vapour mill output.
And he had kept alive as many men as possible in the pursuit of those goals.
It was a victory, and duty had been done. Gaunt just didn’t share Van Voytz’s desire to toast the living and the dead and talk about it
all night. He walked alone through the Imperial concourse. Clearance teams were still searching the surrounding buildings for enemy survivors.
Gaunt supposed that the curse of mid-ranking officers like himself was that they were still close enough to the sharp end to feel the loss. The Gaunts and Rawnes and Fazalurs of this galaxy were the ones who got to cope with the bloody aftermath of victory. The lord generals got to celebrate each triumph because, to them, the dead were just names on data-slates. The chain of rank insulated them from the emotional consequence. It made a generally decent man like Van Voytz seem just as heartless as some of the callous bastards Gaunt had been forced to follow in his time.
At least the perceived rift between the Tanith and the Verghastite that Hark and Zweil had chided him about appeared to be easing. During the fight for Ouranberg, the regiment had seemed much more of a single, integrated whole.
Maybe sticking up for Cuu had sent the right message.
Gaunt returned to his section and had Beltayn transmit his respectful thanks to all Tanith and Verghastites alike via all section leaders, along with the order for the regiment to pull out. Urdeshi and Krassian reinforcements from Cirenholm were coming in to supervise the occupation.
The guns of Tanith could fall silent for a while, and rest.
“Order and signal of thanks sent, sir,” said Beltayn.
“That’ll do,” said Ibram Gaunt.
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