by Dan Abnett
In Remembrance
A Gaunt's Ghosts Story
by
Dan Abnett
TO TELL YOU the truth, it was a long time ago and I didn't really spend much time with them. It's pushing it to say I knew them at all, really. It was just a job, you see. A well paid commission between my more serious works. I never expected it to become... well, the thing I am most famous for.
I doubt any of them remember me. I honestly doubt any of them are alive any more. It's been sixty years since the hive war on Verghast, and Imperial Guardsman is not a career with long-term prospects.
No, they're probably all long dead by now. If so, may the Emperor of Mankind rest them, every one. I had a friend who worked in the Munitorium at NorthCol who was kind enough to pass me copies of Imperial dispatches so I could follow their movements and fortunes. For a few years, it pleased me to keep track of them. When I read of their successes on Hagia and Phantine, I poured a glass of joiliq and sat in my studio, toasting their name.
But I stopped after a while. Sooner or later, I knew, the news would be bad. I have my memories, and they're enough.
I was a young man then. Just twenty-eight, I actually trained, would you believe it, in the Scholam Lapidae in Ferrozoica. Zoica, off all places! But by the time of the war I had been living and working in NorthCol for about seven years. I'd visited Vervunhive half a dozen times, usually in regard of a commission, twice to consult with a fine toolmaker whose tungsten-nosed chisels I favoured. He died during the siege. A loss to my profession.
I well remember arriving in Vervunhive in the first days after the conflict. I barely recognised the place. War had smashed the majesty out of it and left it crumpled and deformed. It reminded me of nothing so much as a toppled statue; brought down, shattered, its scattered debris hinting at its former grace. You could trace what it had been from the wreckage but you could never put it back together again.
And they never did.
I remember getting off the transport in the gusting smoke and thinking that it didn't much look like a victory.
No matter where you went, there was smoke. Ash caked every surface, inside and out. Sooty flakes of it billowed in the air. The great bulk of the Main Spine was miserably buckled and punctured, and wept smoke from more holes than I could count. The sky was black. So very black. They said the smoke-storms rolling from Vervunhive could be seen from space.
I was utterly lost for a second. It had expected it to be bad, but this...
A voice started me out of my reverie. It said something like, 'What are you standing there for you gakking fool?' Something like that, only more colourful. I found a VPHC officer glowering at me and realised I was standing in the middle of the transit concourse with floods of people moving around me, along with loaders, transports, troop trucks. I was pretty much in the way, gawping there like that, though to tell the truth only the VPHC staffer seemed to care. I showed him my papers.
He seemed contemptuous. I think he actually laughed at my explanation of why I was there. Then he pointed me over to the far side of the concourse, through the crowds, to where men were loading a grimy truck under a shrapnel-puckered awning.
'They're the one's you want,' he said,
I picked up my bag and walked across to them. My throat was already dry with the omnipresent smoke. Six men were working as a human chain to sling crates into the flatbed. They were all dressed in matt-black fatigues which were patched and ragged and in desperate need of boil washing. The men were uniformly black haired and pale skinned. Most had tattoos on their cheeks, brows or forearms, and silver studs in their ears. The biggest of them was a hairy brute with a fabulously tangled beard and huge arms like tree limbs. Blue spirals wound up through the black hair on those massive forearms. He was whistling a jaunty tune, but his lips were so dry and cracked, the noise was more like the whine of a weary dog.
His name was Colm Corbec, and he was, incredibly, the colonel.
'Who're you?' he said, hardly pausing in his work.
'Thoru. Jeshua Thoru. The... uh... artist.'
'Never heard of you.'
'Well,' I began, 'I'm not famous, as such... I never supposed you would have... '
He stopped his work suddenly and looked at me. The men behind him thumped to a halt, straining with boxes. 'I'm sure you're very good.' he said kindly, 'I meant no offence. Me and fine art, we're not, you know, close. I wouldn't know an oil painting if it came and bit me on the arse. You a painter?'
'No, I'm a sculptor'
A sculptor, eh?' he nodded at that, as if impressed, and resumed his labour, catching a carton and humping it off onto the truck. 'A sculptor. Fancy. You do statues, then?'
'Uh, yes. Actually, I specialise in bas-relief friezes and installations, but I... ' I realised I was losing him fast. 'Yes, I do statues'
'Good for you.'
'I've been commissioned' I said.
'Me too, lad. I'm a colonel'
'No, I... ' I paused. The other men were looking at me like I was a madman. One of them, a good-looking, sharp-eyed man younger and smaller than his commander, flexed an augmetic shoulder and eyed me cautiously.
'I think he means artistically commissioned, chief,' he said.
'Does he now? said Corbec.
'Yes,' I said. 'House Chass has paid me to produce a monument in honour of this... event.'
'What event?'
'The victory of Vervunhive,' I said.'
'Ah,' said Corbec. He looked around, as if seeing for the first time the mutilated, burning city 'So that's what this is!'
'My papers are official and up to date,' I said, producing them. He wasn't interested in looking. 'I've been granted permission to interview the Tanith First in order to... uhm... plan my work.'
'Us?' said the younger man with the augmetic shoulder
'Yes.' I replied, 'Lady Chass was most specific. She wanted the Tanith First especially to be commemorated.'
'I've never been commemorated before,' said the younger man, a sergeant as it seemed from what was left of his rank pins.
'Keep working at that pace, Varl,' said Corbec. 'and I'll commemorate you myself. With the toe of me boot.'
They finished loading the truck and climbed aboard. I hesitated, not sure what to do. Corbec looked down from the cab at me.
'Well, lad,' he said. 'You'd better come with us, hadn't you?'
THE GUARD transport truck had clearly been wounded in the suspension during the fighting. We rattled down one street and the next, bone-shaken. I rode in the cab, squeezed in between Corbec and the sergeant. After a few minutes, the latter sniffed.
'Funny smell,' he said. 'Sweet, scenty.'
'Yeah,' said Corbec, also sniffing. I couldn't smell anything except the rank odour of unwashed bodies, old sweat and smoke. 'Have you had a bath today?' he asked me.
'Yes!' I said indignantly
'That'd be it. then,' said Corbec.
'Lucky bastard,' said the other, Varl.
We joined a main arterial, slowing to skirt around burnt-out vehicles and sags of shelled rubble where building fronts had collapsed out over the roadway. Ahead, habbers were queuing for food and basic humanitarian supplies at a relief station set up in an old assembly plant. The arterial was almost a kilometre long, and the ragged queue lined it from end to end.
Corbec stared at them from the truck's filthy window as we drove by. The homeless, the bereaved, the hungry the sick. Thin people with hollow fates and broken hopes, their eyes blank and sunken. Their skin was uniformly white, their clothing grey with ash and black with dirt. It was as if the world had become monochrome. He seemed fascinated.
'What is it? I asked.
'They... they look like the old photopicts of me grandparents and kin,' he replied with surprising h
onesty. There was a terrible sadness in his tone. 'We had this great nalwood mantle over the kitchen hearth back home in County Pryze. Me mam stood the photopicts there, each one in a little frame. Uncles, aunts, distant cousins, weddings, baptisms. I always thought they looked so stiff and awkward, so soulless, you know? Black and white faces, like those out there.'
His words were mournful, and quite unlike anything I had ever expected to hear coming from such a hairy brute of a warrior. Lady Chass had asked me to try and capture the soul of the Tanith, and here, unexpectedly and without much searching, I seemed to have glimpsed it.
'Sometimes,' Curbec added, clearing his throat, 'and now would be one of those times, I wished I'd stuffed a few of those ragged old picts into me kitbag the morning I left home for the Founding Helds. They'd meant much to me, just relatives I'd barely met. Never met. Folks whose lives I knew nothing about. But now, if only I had them, they'd be like lifeline back to Tanith.'
'Where is Tanith? I made the mistake of asking.
'Nowhere, Mister Artist, sir,' Corbec said, suddenly rousing out of his despond, 'It's dead and it's gone and we're all that's left. That's what makes us ghosts, you see!
The long line of miserable faces continued to flicker past the cab windows.
'Let me get this straight... . we won here, right, chief?' asked Sergeant Varl snidely. Varl was driving the truck, a contraband Iho stick dangling from his lips. The heady fumes filled the cab and made my eyes water, but Corbec seemed content to let it pass.
'Yeah, we won. Behold and marvel, this is what winning looks like.'
VARL PULLED the truck into the loading dock of Medical Hall 67/mv.
'Stay here,' Corbec told him, climbing down from the cab. 'You can come with me, it you like,' he said to me as an afterthought and strode off towards the front steps of the battered building. I ran to catch up. Almost immediately, we were surrounded by children. Hab-urchins, refugees, all smeared in filth.
I didn't know what to do. Corbec had handed out the last of his dry rations and calorie packs days ago. The children mobbed him, pulling at his hands, tugging at his fatigues, ignoring his repeated murmur of apology.
The truck horn sounded. The kids looked round.
'Hey!' called Varl. 'Hey, over here! C'mon! Cake-bars!' He held up some of the foil-wrapped bars and waggled them.
The flock of children pulled away from us and swarmed around the truck, leaping to catch the cakes as Varl tossed them out from the carton on the seat.
Corbec watched for a moment and smiled. 'Varl and me scored the cake rations from a collapsed Munitorium storehouse. We'd intended them to be a treat for the Ghosts.' I realised he thought Varl had made a good call. This was more important.
We entered the Medical Hall. Inside the doorway was a stack of leaking sacks full of medical waste that lent the entrance a ghastly, pervasive fragrance. Beyond that was a train of linen carts, piled with soiled bedding. Two medics were fast asleep on the stacks of discoloured sheets. Even the roar of the incoming liberation warships hadn't woken them. They had worked until they had dropped. Someone had probably put them there.
Corbec knew the route to the room. He been visiting every day for over two weeks now, he said. He was looking for someone called Dorden.
'Doc? Doc?'
'He's sleeping,' said a woman quietly, coming in behind us.
Her name was Curth, Corbec told me later. He'd met her before a few times, but didn't know her at all well. A Verghastite local, a chief surgeon. Fething pretty, he said, if you liked small, well-made women with heart-shaped faces, and Corbec clearly did. But, he said emphatically, as if I was in any doubt, fancying Curth was like fancying the wife of a Sector Governor. He was a lowly spitball colonel and she was a senior civilian medic. Doc Darden had the highest respect for her, and that was enough for a simple soul like Corbec. She'd proved herself here at Vervunhive. Corbec didn't think much of the idea of women in combat zones, but Curth was somebody the Ghosts could really use. He wondered if she'd heard about Warmaster Macaroth's Act of Consolation. Probably she had. There wasn't a chance in feth she'd take it up, in his opinion.
'Act of Consolation?' I had asked.
'A recruitment drive,' he had explained. 'A chance for brave Vervunhivers to become Ghosts like me.'
Anyway she had appeared behind us, like a ghost herself.
'Is he alright?'
'He's stable, colonel,' said Curth.
'I meant the Doc, actually.'
'Oh.' She smiled. It was a damn fine smile, and I could tell Corbec enioyed it. 'Yes, he's fine. Tired. He pulled three shifts straight and wasn't going to sleep even then. So I... I spiked his caffeine with aeldramol.'
She looked guilty, particularly with me there. Corbec sniggered.
'You zonked him out?'
'It was... ahm... medically necessary.'
'Excellent work, Surgeon Curth. My compliments. Dorden is a bugger when it comes to taking care of himself, Don't fret, I won't write you up!'
'Thank you, colonel!'
'Seeing as how you're not service, I think you can call me Colm.'
'Okay. You've come to see the patient, I presume?'
'I have. By the way. this is Mister Thoru. He's an artist, so he is.'
'An artist?' she said. 'Wait a minute.. Thoru? The sculptor?'
'Yes,' I said, infinitely pleased.
'You did the frieze over the portico of the Imperial Hospice in NorthCol.'
'I did. Last year'
'It was very good. I have friends on the hospice acquisition committee. They were very pleased with the work'
'That's gratifying. Thank you'
Curth pulled back the plastic tent screening the door and led us through into the intensive care room. Guided by some instinct, I held back and let Corbec go in ahead.
The patient lay on a hydraulic cot, tented in clear plastic. His body was laced with bio-feeds and life-support tubes. A chrome respirator puffed and wheezed beside the cot and a resuscitrex cart stood ready.
'Give me a minute, Mister Thoru, surgeon!'
'It's Ana, Colm!'
'Is it so?' Corbec smiled. 'Well, Ana. A moment, if you'd be so kind.'
'Of course.'
We backed off out and she slithered the plastic curtain back into place.
'Who is that?' I whispered to Curth.
'Ibram Gaunt. Colonel-commissar of the Tanith First-and-Only.'
The House Chass savants had briefed me about Gaunt. The hero of Vervunhive, they were calling him.
Gaunt had taken his wound destroying the abomination known as Heritor Asphodel. He'd been at the gates of death for three weeks, without regaining consciousness. I peered through the curtain. The sutures of his most recent thoracic surgery stood stark against his pale, tight flesh.
'So why are you here?' Curth asked me.
'I've been commissioned to create a memorial for the war. House Chass has hired me. They want something suitable and noble, and they arranged for me to tour with the Tanith for appropriate inspiration.'
'Good luck,' she said.
'Why? Am I looking in the wrong place?'
Curth shook her head. 'I just don't think there's very much nobility to be found in this misery. What little there is belongs to the Tanith Ghosts, and I doubt very much you could capture that.'
'Why?'
'Because it's very particular' she said and walked away.
I looked back through the gap in the screen curtain.
'Hey, boss. It's Corbec. Just checking in.' Corbec sat himself down next to the out.
'What's to tell? Well, it's a mess, basically. The hive is a mess. But you know what victory looks like, huh? The men are holding together. That old Tanith spirit. Varl asked me to ask you, if you die, can he have your coat? Heh! How about that? I think Baffels is shaping up well as a squad leader, but he needs a bit of a boost, confidence wise. Maybe you could take him on one side, when you're up and about again?'
The respirator puffed and sighed.
'The liberation is kicking off. The war-machines went through the outhabs yesterday afternoon, ready to head out into the salt grasslands, hunting the last of the Zoicans. Feth me! Those Titans! They say there's Adeptus Astartes inbound too - Iron Snakes and Imperial Fists. The Warmaster ain't taking no chances!'
The vitals monitor continued to ping.
'They miss you, Ibram. The men. Me too. You gave us this victory and it's only right you share it. Don't go dying on us, you hear me?'
Corhec fell silent for a moment and stared down at the floor.
'You know, it's not fething fair' he said finally. 'We won, but there are millions of civilians dying out there. Habbers, outhabbers, spiners. I saw some on my way in. It breaks my fething heart. You know what I thought? Well, I'll tell you, seeing as I have your undivided attention. I thought of Tanith. Yeah, Tanith. I thought of the millions we lost. My kin. My kind. My fething world. I looked at those pinched, fethed-up faces and I thought... Tanith. The folks of Tanith might have looked like this if we'd stayed and fought and won. Driven out the enemy. And you know what?'
The respirator thumped slowly.
'I'm glad. That's what. I'm glad it was all over and done with like that. Your call, Ibram, good call. I never really said it to you before, and I'm only saying it now because, feth knows, you can't hear me. But I'm glad we did what we did. Seeing this. I'd far rather that Tanith died quick and clean that suffer this kind of victory. My people deserved it. Not dying, I mean. But dying cleanly. This... this... crap, they wouldn't have deserved this. Better Tanith died, quick and complete. than... '
Corbec paused.
'You know what I mean. You've put troopers out of their pain too, I know it. It's better when it's quick. Better than this.'
Corbec got to his feet.
'Well, that's me for today. I've said my bit. You come back to us, you hear me? Come back to us.'
WE WENT BACK out to the waiting truck and drove down to the billet where the Ghosts were stowed. Corbec seemed flat and quiet after his visit to the Medical Hall, and told me he was going to catch some rest. He put me into the care of massive trooper called Bragg.