by Dan Abnett
“I am an Imperial Guardsman, sir,” Rawne said. “War will get me killed. That is a matter of fact.”
“But Gaunt will get you killed worthlessly, over some idiotic point of morality.”
“I spent a long time wanting to kill him myself,” said Rawne. “Dying along with him over some idiotic point of morality sounds like a death I would be happy to choose.”
He turned to go, then paused. “You speak of my commander as if you expect to hear from him,” he said.
“Contact has been made with his section,” Sydona said, matter-of-factly.
“I wasn’t informed. I’ve been trying to reach him for hours.”
“The weather has impaired vox traffic,” replied the interrogator. “But I have it as a fact that my inquisitor has made contact with him in the Untill.”
“Who is your inquisitor?” Rawne asked. “My lord Welt,” said Sydona. “Ah,” said Rawne, nodding. “Him.”
IV
Street twenty-six was a commercial thoroughfare that began at the north end of Cantible’s main market square and ran west around the lower edge of the town’s central hill. The roadway was cobbled, though many of the cobblestones had been displaced. A main sewer had been ruptured by a tank shell, and the gutters had become stinking channels of waste.
The habs on either side were washed out and grey. Flamer teams had been along already, burning off the worst of the heathen scrawl that the enemy had written on the walls. Most of the windows had been broken or blown out years before. Several buildings had been flattened by shelling from the Dev Hetra armour in the last two days. On the street corner, a pyre had been made of the bodies of the enemy recovered from that stretch of street. It burned lazily, as if the immolation was some kind of cruel torture, or as if the intention had been to slow burn charcoal from the corpses. Caffran’s section pulled their capes up around their noses as they went by.
They passed Domor and his squad, heading in to one of the habs, and wished them luck. Then, a few buildings down, they encountered Kolea and Varl with a ten-man unit.
Kolea nodded to Caffran.
“We’re going to take the buildings at the end of the road,” Caffran told him.
“Watch how you go,” Varl advised. “We’ve smoked three excubitors out of the basements along here already this morning.”
“One was wired. Packet bombs,” said Kolea, lightly.
“What did you do?” asked Caffran.
“Shot him before he could detonate. Why, what would you have done?”
Caffran smiled.
“What’s the priest for?” asked Varl.
“Decoration,” replied Zweil.
“This is no place for a—” Kolea began.
“I’ve read him the rules,” Caffran interrupted.
“All right then,” said Kolea. “Good luck.”
“The Emperor protects,” said Zweil.
Caffran moved his section on. He had eight men, plus the priest. Osket, Wheln, Harjeon, Leyr, Neskon, Raess, Leclan and Vadim. They spread out through the weed-engulfed rubble. Caffran kept having to stop to help the aged priest. He already regretted allowing the old man to come along.
They entered the portico of an abandoned hab. Someone had been using it as a latrine. The doors were broken, and all the tiles on the atrium floor had been prised up as if they were something someone wanted to collect. The word PLEASE had been written on one wall in whitewash. For some reason, Caffran found that especially chilling.
“Let me go first,” Zweil suggested.
Leclan and Leyr glanced at Caffran. Caffran paused and then nodded. Zweil limped along ahead of them, down the hallway. The building had skylights, but the shutters were broken and swinging limply in the wind, making the light in the hallway come and go, as if clouds were racing by overhead. Patches of grey and white light shifted uneasily around one another across the scabby walls and the ruined floor. Halfway down the hallway, they found a human collar bone lying on its own.
“Don’t touch it!” hissed Caffran, seeing Zweil about to stoop.
“Poor soul,” whispered Zweil, recoiling.
“Poor soul my fething foot,” muttered Leyr.
Something banged somewhere far off in the empty hab. A loose door on its hinges, tugged by the wind, Caffran guessed. It banged again, and they jumped a second time.
“Hello?” Zweil called.
“Don’t fething speak!” Wheln exploded. They’ll know we’re coming!”
“I want them to know we’re coming,” said Zweil, tapping his nose. “Trust me.” There was virtually nothing about the ragged old priest that seemed remotely trustworthy.
“Please be careful, father,” Caffran whispered, fiddling with his rifle. The word PLEASE on the wall behind him echoed uncomfortably in his mind.
Osket and Neskon pushed open some doors and found hab apartments in terrible states of ruin. The stink was appalling. There was debris on the floors that might have once been body parts. The skeleton of a large grox had been patiently and carefully reassembled in one hab room, the bones threaded onto wire.
“Why?” asked Leclan.
“If I knew why,” Caffran replied, “I’d be insane.”
“Hello!” Zweil shouted. “I am an ayatani of the Holy Creed. I’ve come here to help you. Show yourselves. Everything will be all right.”
“As if,” murmured Neskon.
Raess suddenly raised his long-las and aimed it, sweeping.
“What?” Caffran barked.
“Saw something. Down the end.” Raess kept his aim steady. “Something moved.”
They moved on slowly.
“I am an ayatani of the Holy Creed—” Zweil began to repeat.
Something moved. Caffran saw it this time. Something skittered through the shadows twenty metres ahead.
“Feth!” Raess exclaimed.
“Did you see that?” asked Caffran quickly. “What do you th—”
Distantly, they all heard the crack-crack-crack of a lasrifle firing. They all tensed.
“What—” Zweil started.
“Shhhh!” Caffran hissed.
The link pipped. They could all hear a voice in their ear-pieces.
“—love of the Throne, feth… he just came at me… for the goodly love of the Throne—”
The channel went dead.
“That was Varl,” said Vadim. “Shit, that was Varl.”
“Section eight, this is section five,” Caffran sent. “Signal back. Kolea? Varl?”
There was a long pause.
Caffran waited and then began again. “Section eight, this is—”
“Caff, it’s Kolea,” the link suddenly crackled. The priest with you still?”
“Yes.”
“Feth’s sake, Caff. Bring him here, would you?”
V
Caffran’s section left the hab and hurried back to the block that Kolea’s squad had been sweeping. Zweil, old and infirm, moved so slowly that Neskon finally stopped in frustration and, with Leclan, made a chair of their arms to carry him.
Kolea and several of his men were waiting in the atrium of the hab block.
“Down here,” Kolea said bluntly.
The rest of his section was thirty metres down inside the desolate shell, grouped around something on the floor. Varl was nearby, standing alone, clearly very angry or upset.
“He just came out of nowhere,” Varl growled. “Out of the shadows. Feth. Feth! The stupid bastard!”
Caffran pushed his way through the huddle of Kolea’s men. A man lay on the tiles, bleeding out from a ghastly las wound through the gut. He’d once been a fine figure of a man, an agricultural worker or a smith, some trade that had put bulk into his shoulders. He was dressed in rags, and weighed no more than half his proper bodyweight.
He was still alive.
“Black cross,” said Kolea simply. “Varl got caught out. It’s a bad thing.”
“The stupid fether came out of nowhere!” Varl yelled behind them.
�
��It’s okay,” Kolea told him. “It’s not your fault.”
“Except I shot him!”
“It’s not your fault, Ceg,” Kolea murmured. “It’s just a bad thing.”
Leclan had dropped to his knees beside the man, binding the bloody wounds, entry and exit. He worked fast, with a corpsman’s practiced skill, struggling to stop the man’s life from leaking away. He threw aside three or four field dressing packs as they became saturated with blood. The sodden bundles of lint packing splatted into the pond of blood on the floor and pattered drops up the wall.
His hands red and wet, Leclan looked up at Caffran and shook his head.
“Father?” Caffran called.
Zweil stepped forwards and touched Leclan on the shoulder, signalling him to step out. He knelt in the blood pooling around the civilian that Varl had accidentally killed, and cradled the man’s head.
“I am an ayatani of the Holy Creed,” he said softly. “Be calm now, my friend, for the God-Emperor of Mankind is rushing here to present you with the gift of peace you crave. Is there anything you wish to confess at this hour?”
The man made a gurgling noise. Blood bubbled around his drawn lips.
“I hear and understand those sins as you have confessed them to me,” Zweil said, “and I absolve you of them, as I absolve you of all other sins you cannot enumerate. It is in my power to do this thing, for I am an ayatani of the Holy Creed. The winds have blown your sins away, and the beati has blessed you and, though there is pain, it will end, as all pain ends, and you will ascend without the pain of the mortal world to the place the God-Emperor of Mankind has set aside for you at the train of the Golden Throne of Terra. These last rites I give you freely and in good faith. Be at peace, Imperial soul, and may—”
Zweil stopped. Very slowly, he let the man’s head rest back onto the tiled floor.
“He’s gone,” he said.
VI
Welt’s forces cleared the partisan camp. Drawn by signal buoys, drop ships landed in the clearing that the soldiers of the Inquisition had made in the canopy. More troops dismounted: troops, and interrogators, and sundry other agents of the Holy Inquisition.
Perched in the branches of a tree across from the camp, Mkoll watched. The order and authority of the Imperium was being restored. He understood that the process of that restoration would be fraught and uncomfortable, but this was a curious triumph. It felt as if some honourable compact had been betrayed. He could hear Landerson shouting, protesting.
He looked away.
A white moth fluttered around him, and came to rest on the back of his right hand. It stayed there for a moment, lifting and closing its furry wings.
“Gereon resists,” he whispered.
It flew away at the touch of his breath.
Mkoll waited a few minutes more, putting off returning to the camp. His senses were sharp. The sharpest. Only Bonin and Caober came close to his degree of skill in stealthing. Only one man had ever bettered it.
And that man was dead.
Mkoll looked around. Something had stirred, some slight sound, off to his right. He made no sound himself, but turned slowly in the crook of the branch.
The undergrowth of the Untill behind him was immobile and secret. The only movement was the flutter of the moths. He caught a scent, a very faint trace. He knew it, nevertheless.
“You’re there, aren’t you?” he called.
There was no reply.
“I don’t expect you to answer. But you’re there. You’re out there, aren’t you?”
There was still no answer. The scent had gone. Perhaps he had imagined it.
Mkoll dropped out of the tree and waded back towards the camp.
“Cirk?” Gaunt said.
“Ibram.”
He sat down beside her on the edge of the platform stage. Cirk had picked the most faraway part of the camp to sit, all alone in the edges of the swamp dark.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded. He could see that she had been weeping.
“You’re not all right,” he said.
“I never meant this to happen.”
“This?”
“All of this. I cut a deal with Balshin and Welt.”
“When?”
Cirk shrugged. “When we got back. On Ancreon Sextus, after the tribunal. I did it for your sake.”
“Oh, don’t give me that.”
Cirk stared at him. “You bastard. I did. I really did. You and the others had done so much for us and you were facing execution. I stepped up, and sold what little I had.”
“What exactly did you sell, Cirk?”
“The myth of our survival,” she replied with a sad smile. “I told them that they had to liberate Gereon, because they’d find a way to proof themselves against Chaos. They found the idea deeply attractive. The mystery of how you came out of Gereon without taint infuriated them. And now, here we all are.”
“Here we all are,” Gaunt nodded. “This isn’t the way you thought it would go, though, is it?”
“Throne, not at all.”
She drew her feet up onto the edge of the platform stage and hugged her knees. “Gereon’s going to keep suffering. We suffered under the Archenemy, and now we’ll suffer under the Imperium, as they take the planet apart looking for something that isn’t there.”
“I take it you don’t believe?”
Cirk began to laugh so hard that Gaunt almost had to steady her to prevent her from falling off the platform’s edge.
“Sorry, sorry…” she sighed at length. “I believe all right. I mean, we came through unscathed. But I think it’s in here—”
She tapped her temple with a finger.
“It’s in here. It’s not something you can analyse and manufacture and stick in a pot. The very idea is so funny. But Welt and Balshin just seized on it. Those bastards. Such simple minds.”
She stared at her boots. “It’s such a bloody mess, isn’t it, Ibram?”
“It’s not exactly as I imagined it. I thought I’d be proud. I’m not proud of this. High Command didn’t initiate this operation for the benefit of the people of Gereon. They’re only bothering with Gereon because they think there’s something valuable here.”
“I wanted them to rescue my world so much, I’d have told them anything. I never thought what the consequences might be.”
“Me neither,” Gaunt admitted. “Be careful what you wish for… that’s the lesson, isn’t it?”
Cirk nodded.
“It’s ironic, don’t you think?” she asked, “to want to save your world so much you end up killing it?”
Brostin took out a crumpled pack of lho-sticks and wedged one in Larkin’s mouth. He took one himself. He lit them both off his flamer.
Larkin sat back in the small cot. He was the only patient in the camp’s small, makeshift infirmary.
“It’s not so bad,” Brostin said. “You could have been dead. The colonel did you a favour.”
“Cut my fething foot off.”
“Well, there is that.”
Curth appeared through a tent drape. She was carrying something bundled in rags.
“That’s bad for your health,” she said, taking the lho-stick out of Larkin’s mouth and clamping it between her own lips.
“Throne, it’s been a long time,” she sighed, exhaling.
“I thought you said it’s bad for your health?” said Larkin.
“It is.”
“So are power swords, I’ve discovered,” Larkin scowled.
“Not as bad for you as being killed by a tank, so shut up,” said Brostin.
“I’ve got something,” said Curth, putting the bundle down on the cot.
“What?” Larkin asked.
“Good medicine. It’ll make you feel better.” Inside the rags, broken down into its component parts, was Larkin’s old long-las, the nalwood-stocked rifle that Larkin had brought all the way from Tanith and had finally abandoned on Gereon for lack of ammo.
“Hol
y fething Throne…” Larkin whispered. “You kept it.”
“I knew you’d need a reason to come back,” said Curth. She watched as Larkin began to fit the weapon back together.
“Get me some gun oil, Bros,” he said. Brostin nodded and got up. He passed Gaunt on his way out of the infirmary.
“Ana?”
She turned away from Larkin, who was lost in the act of rebuilding his precious gun, and walked with Gaunt into a small side room.
“How is he?”
“I think I’ve taken his mind off the injury.”
“That’s good. I wish there had been some other way.”
She started cleaning some medical instruments.
“Ana,” he began, “if I’d known the Inquisition—”
“Were you about to apologise?” she asked, glancing at him. “There’s no need. I’ve been expecting this.”
“You have?”
“Living and working with the resistance, you do tend to dream about the day of liberation. A reassuring fantasy. I happened to imagine what the reality would be like. Gereon will never be the same. It will continue to suffer. That’s the way of things. The Imperium is a blunt instrument, Ibram, and Chaos is too dangerous a quality to take chances with.”
“The Inquisition believes there is a… a secret here in the Untill. That’s why they moved in with such speed.”
“What secret would that be?” she asked.
“When I and the others got out, no one could understand why we hadn’t been tainted. They think there’s something here that protects against taint.”
“Something in the Untill?” she asked. “Is that what this is all about? They’d have left us to rot, except there’s something in it for them?”
“I’m afraid I think that’s exactly what’s happened. I think they’re going to spend years, decades maybe, picking over Gereon, taking it apart, trying to find this secret thing.”
