by Dan Abnett
Dalin frowned. “If you say so. What about Aleksa and the hen?”
“That part’s the Imperium too. Feeding you and clothing you and looking out for you for as long as it can.”
“Does everything in your scheme of interpretation represent the Imperium?” Dalin asked.
“Usually” said Merrt. “The Imperium or sex. It makes it easier.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, have you?” Dalin smiled.
“Not a single fething notion.”
They both ducked back from the window as someone, just a dark ragged shadow, ran up the street and vanished into the ruins at the top of the road.
“You know,” said Dalin., “I can’t believe I’ve spent my entire life wishing to be here.”
Merrt snorted.
“So, you going to tell me?” Dalin asked, looking around.
“What?”
“We know how I wound up here. I was so gakking desperate to be a Ghost. What about you? Don’t give me some shit answer this time.”
“Because I was stupid, and desperate,” Merrt said quietly, “because I had it all and it was taken from me and I wanted it back. Oh, and there was a girl involved.”
He turned to face Dalin. “Look at me,” he said. “Take a good luck. I was a gn… gn… good looking bastard once. Maybe not a stud like some, but I did all right. Plus, I had that eye on me! Marksman’s lanyard. That was something. Then I got the wound.”
He looked away. “Took my face off. Took my voice. Took my skill away. I got a shake in the hand I can’t steady and I just can’t settle to aim with this jaw. I ended up at the bottom of life.”
Dalin wasn’t sure what to say.
“A drink helped. No girl’d go near me, though. I worked out that if I could maybe get my hands on some cash, I could fix things. Not completely, you know, but make them better. Gn… gn… get a better prosthetic than this furnace box. Maybe a graft. On the hive worlds, they say you can buy a whole new you, if you’ve got the cash.”
“They do say that,” Dalin agreed.
“But where was I going to get cash? Earn it? No, sir. Steal it? I’m no crook. Only way I could think was to win it. So I started to play the tables.”
“Yeah?”
Merrt made a sound that Dalin realised was a laugh. “Turned out I had the same sort of luck there. I’ve played the tables for years, lost much more than I’ve won. Sooner or later, that swallows you up.”
“What happened?”
“I got in over my head. Got caught in a fight. The commissar saved my life—”
“Gaunt?”
“No, I mean Hark. He saved my life, the merit of which is debatable. But I got a charge. Gambling, affray disreputable conduct. Six weeks RIP. That’s how I got here.”
Dalin nodded.
“Didn’t you see where you were going?” he asked after a while.
“You see where we’re gn… gn… going now?” Merrt asked.
“No.”
“But you know how bad it’s going to be, don’t you?”
Dalin nodded.
“And you can’t stop it. That’s how it was for me. Oh, and there was a gn… gn… girl.”
“A girl?”
“She worked in the gambling parlour I used. A place on the swelter decks. Her name was Sarat. Prettiest thing. Since I took the wound, I’ve looked at girls, of course, but she was the only one ever looked back at me. This face didn’t scare her. She’d talk to me, and see how I was doing. We weren’t together, you understand. She was just… I don’t know, maybe she was doing her job. Pawer paid them to act nice to the gn… gn… punters. She seemed genuine. Got so I’d go there as much to see her as play cards. I started thinking I could make that big killing, raise the cash to get my face fixed up, and she’d—”
He shrugged. “That’s where I thought I was going. Somewhere where I’d have the guts to ask her to be mine, and she wouldn’t laugh at my face.”
VI
A few hours later, night ended and day crept out.
They’d lost all track of time. Since the psyk-flare on the city square, their chrons had been dead or spinning wildly. They couldn’t tell if it was real dawn, or just a change in the wind, clearing the smoke-cover that had been making the world nocturnal.
Dalin had been hoping for light. Wishing for light. Light would make things better.
It didn’t. It just made things different.
The night, real or artificial, had been hard to bear. After the noises in the dark, there had been laughter, high and manic, that had come and gone like the wind in the eaves, and echoed out of empty stairwells and broken plumbing. More than once, they heard shuffling in the street and found no one there. No one visible.
Bonbort, one of the Krassians, ran off in the night. No one saw him go. No one knew why he ran.
The light, when it came, was white and flat. It made the sky over the city appear to hang low, like the ceiling of a theatre not yet dressed with a scene. The light was as thick and lazy as it was colourless. There was a fogginess to the visibility at street level. White dust and ash lay everywhere and, once a breeze had picked up, the dust began to mist the air like smoke.
Dalin and Merrt went outside. The war was still raging, because they could hear its roar, blunt and muffled, from all directions. Fat pillars of black smoke rose into the sky over the rooftops from parts of the inner city still ablaze.
There was a smell in the air of spun sugar.
They ate a little more and drank the last of their water. Firik, the other Krassian, was running a fever from the infections that had set into his amputation. There was nothing they could do to help him.
When they heard whistles blowing in the nearby streets, they gathered Firik with them and moved out. Within a few minutes, they had found a column of Krassians moving up through the fire-blackened streets, collecting up the infantry remnants they encountered. The Krassians took Firik into their care. The officer could tell Dalin and the rest little of what was going on. They’d just been sent into the area to retake control.
The four of them trudged on through the ashy city. Sporadic gunfire coughed and chattered from nearby streets. They found a crashed Imperial Thunderbolt, its matted, crumbled fuselage embedded at the end of a long gouge in the ground. It had died with one wing raised to the sky, like a swimmer breaking the water with a stroking arm.
Then they found Hamir. They didn’t know it was Hamir at first. They saw a lone figure in filthy battle-dress wandering along an empty street, looking up at the flakes of ash floating from the eaves like snowfall.
Wash raised his lasrifle at once, and so did Merrt, but Fourbox suddenly said, “It’s Scholam! Look, it’s Scholam!”
Wash frowned. Dalin saw that Merrt was still ready to fire and knocked his gun muzzle aside. Merrt blinked and looked at him.
“What?”
“You nearly shot him!”
“I didn’t. Gn. I…” Merrt looked down at the old rifle in his dirty hands, his brow furrowed.
Hamir heard them shout and stopped walking. He stared at them as they jogged to him. A dusting of white ash had settled on his shoulders and scalp like icing sugar.
“Hamir!” Dalin called as he came up to him.
Hamir smiled slightly, but acted dazed. He kept blinking as if he was having trouble focusing.
“Holy,” he said. “Holy There you are. Oh, that’s good. Fourbox too.”
“How did you get here?” Merrt asked him.
Hamir sniffed and thought about it. He turned around, hesitated, and then turned back again. He put a grubby finger to his lips pensively.
“I don’t- I don’t remember. I don’t remember which way—” Hamir glanced about again. “The streets look the same. They all look the same.”
Dalin peered at Hamir. There was a crust of dried blood behind his right ear, below an ugly dent in the rim of his helmet. Hamir kept blinking. One of his pupils was a pinprick, the other dilated and black. Dalin wondered if he
should take Hamir’s helmet off. He decided he really didn’t want to.
“Sobile sent me,” Hamir said suddenly.
“That bastard?” growled Wash.
“Sobile sent me,” Hamir repeated.
“Where is he?” asked Merrt.
“He’d gathered up some of the section. With the sergeant. He’d gathered up some of the section, what was left of the section, what he could find of the section—”
“Hamir? Where is he?” Dalin asked.
“Close by” Hamir nodded. “He told us to sweep the streets and see if we could find any other stragglers.”
“He sent you out?” Dalin asked.
“He sent me out to sweep the streets and—”
“He sent you out?” Dalin repeated. “He didn’t get you to a medicae or a corpsman?”
“We should try and find him,” Dalin said. “Why?” Wash asked contemptuously. “You got a better idea?” asked Merrt. “Plenty,” Wash replied.
However he didn’t share any of them, and seemed content to fall into step as they started walking again. Dalin had hoped Hamir might be able to guide them, but it became clear he was following them.
Except, that was, for the many occasions when he stopped dead and looked up at the falling flakes of ash and soot as they descended silently.
“Hamir? Keep up.”
“Yed.”
“You all right?”
“Yed.”
He would start walking again obediently enough, but his words were becoming slurred, as if he had a blocked nose, or all his “d’s and “s’ had become interposed. He remained standing in the middle of a street when a terrible, increasing rumble sent the rest of them scurrying for cover. The droning volume grew steadily, until they could feel the quiver of it.
“Scholam!” Fourbox hissed from cover. “Scholam, get in here!”
There, in the middle of the road, Hamir stared up at the sky. He raised an arm and pointed.
Warplanes went over. They were the source of the deafening drone. Imperial warplanes, Marauder fighter-bombers. They were flying in mass formation at a height of about a thousand metres. Row upon row of their cruciform silhouettes passed overhead, chasing their shadows across the ash-whitened streets, darkening the sky like an immense travelling flock of slowly migrating wildfowl. The combined noise of their engines was so great, the men couldn’t hear one another shout for the duration of the flypast.
It lasted ten minutes. Dalin couldn’t even estimate the number of planes involved. The formation was heading north, coming in over the infamous bulwark and heading for the inner city, the central wards and high-hive of K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir. It was quite a spectacle, all in all, but during his brief yet intense career as a Guardsman, Dalin Criid had witnessed plenty more extraordinary sights.
They came out of cover while the warplanes were still roaring overhead and started walking again. Dalin took Hamir by the sleeve and led him along. Hamir was fascinated by the planes. He kept tripping because he was looking upwards instead of where he was going.
They started moving south, Merrt reasoning that direction was more likely to bring them into Imperial controlled zones, or at least some form of safety. Their boots sifted quietly through the deep, white dust.
They came along a particular street flanked on either side by blackened ruins. Half a dozen men appeared at the far end and turned their way.
“It’s Sobile! It’s Sobile and the others!” Hamir exclaimed, and started to run towards them, waving his hand and calling out.
It wasn’t Sobile. The half-dozen men were big fellows, swathed in ochre clothing and black iron armour. They saw Hamir running towards them, calling cheerfully.
“Hamir! No, no! Hamir!” Dalin cried.
The enemy troopers opened fire.
VII
They fired quick bursts of lasfire. Hamir was still running towards them when they hit him. He crumbled and fell, face down, in the street, one waving arm still outstretched. His body looked especially forlorn, his blood splattered out across the white dust around him.
“Hamir!” Dalin cried. His voice was hoarse. He had unshipped his weapon. By his side, Merrt was taking aim.
The enemy was still firing. They began to advance too, apparently unfazed by the sight of four armed Guardsmen.
“Throne save us,” Fourbox yelped.
Each one of the enemy warriors was massive. Their upper bodies, shoulders and arms were thick with muscle, making them look slightly comical and top heavy. There was nothing comical about the speed or determination with which they were advancing. The bright yellow hue of their battledress contrasted, with an aposematic punch, against the gloss black of their body armour. Emblems of Ruin were welded to their chest plates, and long strings of beads and amulets rattled around them. Their heads were shaved and bare, and stained or dressed with a white pigment over which delicate black designs had been inscribed across the cranium and the brow. Their body armour rose up onto a broad neck guard which concealed their mouths behind a lip fashioned from black iron to resemble a cupping hand, as if they each had a hand placed over their mouths.
There had been enough briefings in the past year for even a no-gooder like Wash to know what they were. There was no doubt at all in Dalin’s mind. These were Sons of Sek.
Las rounds zipped past the four Imperials. Dalin and Fourbox began to fire. Merrt cursed as his gun jammed again. “Get to cover! Cover!” he boomed. Wash was already running.
The notorious Sons of Sek, the briefings said, were a fighting cadre raised by a local Archenemy warlord. They had started out as just a rumour, based on descriptions and warnings brought back from Gereon by Gaunt’s team. Few Imperial forces had yet engaged them in the Sabbat Worlds, but they already possessed the same menacing reputation as the vicious Blood Pact.
Dalin wasn’t sure if he’d managed to hit anything. He hadn’t seen any of the hostiles go down, but the range had been good. He blamed himself. In his panic, he’d been snatching his shots. He, Merrt and Fourbox started to run, breaking off the dusty street through the ruins. Las shots struck the charred doorway and facade of the ruin behind them.
The interior was dark and jumbled with wreckage and charred objects. Everything was black with fire damage and there was no relief with which to judge distances. Merrt and Dalin both tripped and almost fell. They sprinted forwards, crunching over the debris. Wash was well ahead of them, a darting shadow between the heavy pillars.
The first of the Sons of Sek crashed into the building behind them, clawing in through window holes and sections of collapsed wall. They were moving fast too, clambering in and leaping down. Dalin could hear their guttural voices calling to one another. Renewed gunfire tore through the ruin, chasing their heels.
The three Imperial troops came out of the far side of the ruin onto another street where the remains of an iron portico stood. They’d lost sight of Wash. Two burned-out troop carriers sat on one side of the thoroughfare. A large part of the road was covered in rubble from a hab that had been flattened by a bunker-buster bomb. The running footsteps of the enemy came closer, through the ruin behind them. Several more shots whined past.
Lasrifle in hand, Dalin swung back to face the doorway they had emerged from.
“Go!” he said to Merrt and Fourbox. “Go!”
GEREON RESISTS
I
The storm blew up into the night, and they struggled through it into the deep, dead woods.
The storm cured the sky a kind of dark, reptilian green, almost the colour of the world when seen through night scopes. The wind, which had turned the vanes of the mill at Cayfer, grew stronger, and lashed the stands of tall, mummified trees. The brittle branches swished and rattled like bone beads in a shaker. Dry leaf litter and dust swirled up from the soil.
The lightning chased them. White and thready, it sizzled in the sky, leaving brief, fragile traces like the filaments of light bulbs. There was no real thunder, just a pressure of air and a crackling, fizzling
hiss of radiation.
Gaunt’s section trudged along, wrapped in their camo-cloaks, following the resistance fighters into the strobing dark. It was hard going, but Dacre showed no inclination to stop and ride the storm out. Besides, any camp would have been swept away by the gale. They struggled on through blizzards of fossil leaves strewn by the wind.
The storm loaded their weapons and metal kit with static charge. Men jumped and baulked as guns tingled in their hands. Brostin spread a huge grin as he watched a crackling blue thread of electricity wander around the sooty muzzle of his flamer. He turned the torch in his hands slowly, watching the charge dance and jump, as if he was allowing a large insect to crawl around his weapon.
“Move up!” Criid scolded him.
Lambent curds of bright corposant lit distant trees, fuming and glowing, and making closer trees into skeletal silhouettes. The lightning also struck into the woods around them, and split ancient tree trunks like a forester’s axe. Dry boles caught alight, husk branches burned. Sparks billowed up and were carried by the knifing wind.
At the tomb, two hours before, Dacre had refused to be drawn.
“Mkvenner? This is Mkvenner?” Gaunt had demanded. Dacre had shrugged.
“How did he die?” Mkoll had asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know him. He fought with the local cell and the Lectica cell. They thought highly of him. They said whoever came would want to see this, so I did as I was instructed and brought you here.”
“Who told you to?” Gaunt had asked Dacre.
“I’m not going to tell you that,” Dacre had replied. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m Gaunt!”
“So you said. I don’t know that.”
They’d been trekking for three hours when the rains came. There was no warning, just a sudden assault of fast, fat raindrops. Within seconds, they were drenched. Within minutes, the deluge had killed off the dust and the skittering leaves. The thirsty earth became a quagmire. The white, dead trunks of the murdered woodland washed black.
