[Gaunt's Ghosts 10] - The Armour of Contempt

by Dan Abnett

  A clear voice was speaking the Sixtieth Prayer. “God-Emperor, in whose grace I persist and in whose light I flourish, I beseech thee to lend me the strength to endure this hour…”

  He realised it was his own voice.

  Sobile, the commissar, sat silently in his restraint harness, watching the rows of troopers from the end of the cabin. He looked like he was attending a particularly tedious dinner.

  Beside the commissar, Kexie—Sergeant Kexie, as he was now—listened to his intercom and then reached up and yanked on the bell-cord vigorously. Kexie was in charge. Major Brundel, their newly appointed CO, was riding in another lander.

  “Company, stand up!” Kexie bellowed over the row.

  Zeedon, the trooper two seats down from Criid, bowed forward and spewed watery sick onto the steel floor between his boots.

  “Ech, I said stand up, not throw up,” Kexie barked.

  Criid released his restraint and took hold of his las-rifle.

  Thirty seconds.

  He saw Commissar Sobile take something out of his pack and lay it, ready, across his lap. It was something he’d never seen Gaunt carry, or even heard of him using.

  It was a whip.

  III

  Zeedon was the first to die. The first Criid saw, anyway. Fourbox told him later that a Kolstec called Fibrodder had got scragged while they were still in the lander. A piece of white-hot debris, probably a piece off another drop vehicle, had punched through the hull wall two seconds before the hatch opened. Flat, sharp and rotating, the object struck Fibrodder in the back of the head with an effect similar to a circular saw, and opened his skull in a line level with the tops of his ears.

  The screaming and retching of the blood-drenched troopers strapped in around Fibrodder’s corpse was lost in the tortured hammer blow of landing. The landing was so brutal that Criid felt like his bones were shaking free of their tendons, his teeth flying loose from his gums. His jaw flapped and made him bite his tongue.

  His mouth filled with blood, but the pain kept him sharp: the preposterous, tiny, impertinent pain, the indignation. I’ve got enough to worry about and now I’ve bitten my fething tongue?

  Kexie and the other officers were blowing whistles. The air was hot, and it filled entirely with acrid yellow smoke as soon as the hatch opened. Noise blasted in from outside. It was gunfire, mostly; the unrestrained, unstinting chatter of an autocannon mowing at the sky.

  Criid got out into cold air, felt grit beneath his boots, solid ground. The smoke was thick, and big, deep thumps of overpressure kept dulling his hearing. Head down, they were all running, weapons across their chests. There was a loud pock-pock-pock sound, and the patter of pebbles pinging off nearby metal plating. Not pebbles, not pebbles…

  Criid didn’t know if he was running the right way or not. He didn’t know how they could tell which way to run. The smoke had swallowed both Kexie and the sound of his whistle. They were in some kind of rockcrete canyon. Slabby grey-green towers rose up on either side.

  He looked back. The lander lay like the carcass of an animal kill. In its final few seconds of flight it had barged through a fortified wall and augured into the yard behind it. Criid didn’t know if this could be reckoned a good landing or a bad one.

  He realised there was an awful lot of things he didn’t know. He was starting to form a list.

  He spat out the blood he’d been holding in his mouth since he’d bitten his tongue. He heard Sobile’s voice, barking about “cover spread”.

  He looked up.

  Through a roof of moving smoke, he could see the sky. It was full of fire, choked with giant feathers of yellow and amber flame. For as far as he could see, the sky was blistering with explosions, big and small: airbursts, shells, tracers, rockets. It seemed random and bewildering.

  There were black dots visible in the sky—other ships, other aircraft. Two more landers, flying in formation, suddenly swept low overhead, crossing the fortified wall, and disappeared around the far side of the towers. The downwash roar of their engines was painful. Far more painful was the bombardment that opened up from the top of the towers, and swept around chasing them.

  Soot flakes ambled through the smoke. Criid took his eyes off the sky and tried to get some sense of the deployment. Given how many hours they had spent in the Basement learning the rudiments of unit cohesion, there was precious little sign of it now.

  Commissar Sobile appeared from the smoke about a hundred metres away. He was pointing urgently with one hand and cracking his whip with the other. A gaggle of troopers rushed past him, preferring, it seemed to Criid, to dive blindly into the drifting smoke than stay anywhere near his lash.

  Criid started to follow them. They were heading towards the base of one of the towers. As he turned, the air shivered and another lander screamed in low overhead. He looked up involuntarily.

  The lander was much lower than the previous two. Criid could see the detail of its underside and landing gear. Its tail section was on fire. He looked at it with a sick fascination, knowing exactly what was going to happen, while simultaneously knowing that there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  The lander rushed over him. It was thirty metres up, but it made him duck anyway. It hit the side of the nearest tower, the one he and the other troopers had been running towards.

  It hit with annihilating force. One moment there was the moving bulk of the lander and the immobile face of the grey-green tower; then there was a huge and spreading fireball, a bulging fiery cloud that swallowed the lander as if it was drawing it into the tower’s interior. Debris—huge pieces of stone, mortar and reinforcement girders—scattered outwards, trailing dribbles of smoke and fire.

  The troopers who’d reached the base of the tower ahead of him turned and ran back. He saw the nearest of them clearly. It was Zeedon. There was still a speckle of puke on his chin. He was shouting “Get back, get back!”

  Huge chunks of masonry and burning sections of the demolished lander—one of them, a whole engine pod, clearly still running—came down in a torrent. The avalanche caught the running troopers and enveloped them in a bow wave of dust.

  Zeedon was ten metres from Criid and still running towards him when the stone block landed on him. It was a large block of ouslite, bigger than two men could have lifted between them. One face was still caked in grey-green plaster. Zeedon didn’t fall beneath it or even fold up. It simply flattened him in the most total and abrupt way He was there and then he was gone, and all that was left behind was a block of stone with a man’s leg stuck out flat on one side, and another stuck out on the other. The force of violent compression had sent a powerful and curiously directional jet of blood out more than twenty metres. It left a dark red, glittering trail, like gemstones, on the dust for a moment. Then more dust filmed and tarnished the red beads, covering them over.

  IV

  Beyond the towers, that particular sector of the fortress of K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir was a wilderness of fire and rubble. Kexie and Sobile gathered up the squads and managed to link up with some of the company from the second AT 137 lander, which had come down inside the perimeter wall. There was no sign of Major Brundel.

  They were closer to some of the area’s major gun emplacements, and subjected to the side-effects of their bombardment.

  The emplacements, mainly anti-air and long range anti-orbit weapons, were firing at full rate. Their flashing concussions tore the sky overhead, and the ground shook continuously. It overcame the senses. It was too loud for the ears, too bright for the eyes and no voice could penetrate it. Criid tried to find cover. In the open, the bombardment was as crude a sensory experience as having a high power lamp pack pressed against each eye socket and then switched on and off rapidly. Even with his eyes closed, the flashes came through white and traced with capillary threads.

  Criid half-jumped, half-fell into a rockcrete drainage trench, a culvert running along the edge of the yard. Rubble littered its dry bed. He passed the body of a Guard trooper, curle
d up in the culvert as if he was asleep, but not even the deepest sleep relaxed a body that much.

  At the end of the culvert, he caught up with a squad led by Ganiel, a Hauberkan who Kexie had made corporal. Boulder was amongst the troopers. They crossed a smoke-washed concourse and came up towards what Criid was certain were the munitions silos for two of the thundering emplacements. Somewhere along the way, Kexie joined them. He took them as far as a low wall, and then got them down into cover.

  Criid wasn’t sure why at first. Then he saw puffs of stone dust lifting off the top of the wall, and realised that they were under ferocious small-arms fire, the noise of it lost in the bombardment. Lip, a Kolstec girl on RIP for arguing with a superior, was slow getting down. She walloped over onto the ground and lay there with her legs kicking furiously for a few seconds. Then her limbs went slack.

  When the firing became sporadic, Kexie led them over the wall. He did this with a simple gesture and a certain look on his face. It seemed clear from both that ignoring him was a more dangerous proposition than breaking cover into a fire zone.

  Criid started to run, leading Boulder, Ganiel and a Binar called Brickmaker. Criid felt the movement of air against his face as rounds tore past.

  They reached the cover of an upturned slab of rockcrete that a rocket had scooped out of the yard, got down, and started firing. It felt satisfying, somehow, to be firing back at last. His first shots in anger, although he couldn’t see where he was shooting.

  Kexie got to the cover of a mangle of engine debris five metres away. Socket, Trask and Bugears slithered up behind him. Three others weren’t so fortunate. Landslide was cut up messily by lasfire the moment he left cover. His broken body lay on the ground, the jacket on fire. Likely, a diligent little Binar who had been, with Criid and Hamir, one of the few ‘I’ candidates in RIP, had covered half the distance when he was hit in the knee and went sprawling. He rolled over, clutched his ruined knee, and was immediately shot in the same knee a second time. This shot had to pass through his clutching left hand to do so and blew off three fingers.

  Likely screamed in pain. Bardene stopped and turned to help him, and was killed outright by a bolt round to the base of the spine that left him spread-eagled on his face. A second later, cannon fire put Likely out of his torment.

  Criid reloaded. Stone dust and fycelene stung his eyes. A horn sounded, deep and long and loud, like a manufactory hooter.

  “Ech, look at that,” Kexie bawled.

  Criid turned to look. Behind them, the god-machines were moving in.

  V

  Against a sky ragged with fire, titans were coming in off the shore to raze K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir. Criid had seen them before—in books and picts, and also for real at several victory parades. He’d once nursed an ambition to be a princeps when he grew up, until the honest aspiration to be a Guardsman took over.

  At that second, he could no longer recall why he’d made that choice. If nothing else, being a princeps high up in an armoured thing like that would have been a lot safer.

  Criid knew titans were big; he was just utterly unprepared for the scale of their violence. It was the way they strode along, demolishing walls and roofs without effort, and the way their weapon limbs unleashed apocalyptic doom at targets great distances ahead.

  There were two assaulting the fortress wall about a kilometre to Criid’s left, but his attention was transfixed by the third one, the nearest, coming in through the walls behind him.

  It was matt khaki, its flanks inscribed with big white numerals. Its movements were ponderous and arthritic, like a heavy old man shambling after his grandchildren. Its head and torso rocked backwards and forwards gently on its hips as it took each step. There was a sound of gears, of giant hydraulics, of creaking metal. The volcano cannon, its right arm, tracked slowly, fired out salvos of rapid, shrieking shots, and then tracked again and repeated. Criid saw tiny lights high up under the beetle brow, and felt as if he’d glimpsed the thing’s soul, even though it was surely only the cockpit lights.

  It was on his side, but it terrified him, and it terrified the men around him. It was a war machine, and this was its natural habitat. Criid felt he had no business being anywhere near it. For a start, how would it know that the screaming dots around its feet were loyal soldiers of the Imperium? How could it make that subtle differentiation when each blundering step it made brought curtain walls tumbling down in cascades of bricks or ripped through razorwire fences like they were long grass? Criid believed that if he was a princeps, commanding that power, he would trample over everything in his way and, afterwards, if he was told he’d crushed friends on his way to the foe, he’d say “But we have a victory, that’s what counts.” It was preposterous to think that a titan should be bothered with the details of what lay under its feet. You unleashed it, and then you got out of its way.

  The sergeant had clearly arrived at a similar opinion. At the top of his parade ground voice, he was yelling at the squads to move clear, to move right. Small-arms fire was still raining down on them like summer drizzle, but the titan at their backs was approaching like a tidal wave. Another barrier wall came down around its shins, filling the air with the clopping sound of loose blocks tumbling together, filling their nostrils with the fresh, dry stink of masonry dust. The volcano cannon ululated again, shredding the air above them with fizzling javelins of light. Criid felt his skin prickle and the hairs on his arms lift as the close energy blasts altered the ionisation of the air.

  He could smell ozone and oil, and hot metal. Steel plates shrieked, dry and unlubricated, as they took another shuddering step forward. A horn blared. The manufactory hooter noise was the thing’s voice, its warning, not to the foe but to its own kind. Out of my way, I’m walking here. Out of my way, or die.

  They started to run, to the right, as Kexie had instructed. The sergeant was running too. Again, Criid felt the stinging breeze of rounds cutting the air beside him. He saw las bolts soar and flicker past. A flying pebble hit him in the leg. He saw a trooper running a few paces ahead twist and fall over. He got down in a shell hole.

  The ground trembled with the tread of the titan as it passed. Down in the shell hole, small rocks and sand trickled down with each quiver.

  A body fell into the hole on top of him. It was Boulder. He kicked and struggled to get the right way up and dropped his rifle more than once.

  “Holy?” he said, realising who he’d fallen in on. That made him laugh, although Criid couldn’t hear it above the titan’s horn. Haw-haw-haw, went Boulder’s mouth. He had a cut over one eye, and his left cheek was covered with soot. Criid signed to ask if he was all right, but Boulder didn’t understand. Caff had taught Criid how to sign. It was a stealth thing, a Ghost thing.

  The reminder made Criid wince. There was nothing heroic or exciting about the situation he found himself him, nothing even remotely sensible or purposeful. It was a mad, ragged scramble, full of fear and shocking glimpses of mutilation, and with no clear purpose. He had dreamed of a Guardsman’s life, wanted a Guardsman’s life, and if this was it, it was wretched and idiotic. He felt cheated, as if Caff and his ma and Varl and all the others had been lying to him all these years. No one would want this. No one would choose this.

  Except, maybe, if he had been going through this as a Ghost, instead of as a member of the arse-wipe detail AT 137, maybe all those qualities would have been there… the excitement, the heroism, the purpose.

  “What do we do?” Boulder was yelling, his manner part whining, part sarcastic. What do we do? Can we go home now, haw-haw-haw?”

  Criid took a look up out of the hole. He looked for Kexie, or the commissar. He saw Ganiel in a ditch nearby with Fourbox, Socket and Brickmaker. He saw a body, out on the open rockcrete, half-turned on its back, leaking blood into the dust. Who was that? Did it matter?

  Criid didn’t know which way to go, or what to do if he got there. He could discern no value whatsoever in the Imperial Guard’s investment in bringing him and his comr
ades to this place.

  “You’ve been shot,” Boulder shouted.

  Criid looked. The calf of his fatigue pants was holed and bloody. It hadn’t been a pebble that had bounced off his leg. He’d been shot and hadn’t realised it.

  The titan passed by fifty paces to their left. Its shadow, cast by the seething fireball of a burning fuel tank, had slid over them. The ground continued to tremble with each step, and the air was still rent with the horn, the shriek of metal plating and the squealing of the cannon.

  Criid craned around to see it. It was tearing into the inner yards, passing the munition silos on its advance towards the main emplacements. It was trailing part of an electrified wire fence from one ankle, like a shackle, and the bouncing, jangling wires sparked and fizzled. Criid was suddenly struck by what the titan really reminded him of. The bear.

  Years ago, with the followers on the strength of another transport, there had been a dancing bear, a big black ursid from some backwater world that one of the regiments had kept as a mascot. It was shackled to a post by one of its rear feet, and the handler would stab it with a goad to make it rear up and dance to tunes played on a tin whistle. The bear could shuffle about well enough. It reared tall and huge, forearms bent at its sides, rocking from side to side in a manner that amusingly mimicked a man, but it was no biped. As soon as it was able, it would stop pretending to be human and drop back down onto all fours to become a big, simple beast again.

  That’s what the titan reminded him of: a wild beast, a giant carnivore, taught to roar and shamble on two legs, plodding slowly, uncomfortably, yearning to drop back into its natural stance.

  Boulder tugged at his sleeve.

  “What?

  “See that?” Boulder pointed. Sobile had reappeared, leading twenty members of the company in across the smouldering rubble. There were more troops too. Several dozen figures in brown battledress were clambering into the compound through the gap that the titan had made in the outer wall.