Sabbat Worlds

by Dan Abnett

  Bragg frowns.

  “I thought,” he starts to say.

  “What?” asks Gaunt.

  “I thought that’s what you were trying to do,” says Bragg. “With us. I thought you were trying to make something good out of what was left of Tanith.”

  “With respect, trooper, you’re the only man in the regiment who thinks that. Also, with respect to the fighting merits of the Tanith, I’m an Imperial Guard commander, not a miracle worker. I’ve got a few men, a handful in the great scheme of things. We’re never going to accomplish much. We’re going to be a line of code in the middle of a Munitorum levy report, if that.”

  “Oh, you never know,” says Bragg. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if we don’t. All that matters is you do right by the men.”

  “I do right by them?”

  “That’s all we want,” says Bragg with a smile. “We’re Tanith. We’re used to knowing where we’re going. We’re used to finding our way. We’re lost now. All we want from you is for you to find a path for us and set us on it.”

  Someone nearby says something. Corbec holds up a hand, makes a gesture. Pattering rain. Otherwise, silence. Everyone’s listening. Gaunt pats the big man on the arm and goes over to join Corbec. “What is it?” he asks.

  “Beltayn says he heard something,” Corbec replies. The boy is settled in beside Corbec, the wounded arm packed and taped. He looks at Gaunt.

  He says, “Something’s awry.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Gaunt.

  Corbec indicates he should listen. Gaunt cranes his neck.

  The Kosdorfers are moving. They’re talking again. Their whispers are breathing out of the ruins to reach the Tanith position.

  Gaunt looks sharply at Corbec.

  “I think I can understand the words,” he says.

  “Me too,” Corbec nods.

  Gaunt swallows hard. He’s got a sick feeling, and he’s not sure where it’s coming from. The feeling is telling him that he’s not suddenly comprehending the Kosdorfers because they are speaking Low Gothic.

  He’s understanding them because he’s learned their language.

  The boy wakes up with a start.

  “Go back to sleep,” Dorden tells him. “You need your sleep.”

  Dorden’s standing in the doorway of the tent, watching the evening coming in.

  Milo gets up.

  “Are they back yet?” he asks. Dorden shakes his head.

  “Someone needs to go and look for them,” the boy says flatly. “I had another dream. A really unpleasant one. Someone needs to go and look for them.”

  “Just go back to sleep,” Dorden insists. The boy slumps a little, and turns back to his cot.

  “You dreamed they were in trouble, did you?” Dorden asks, trying to humour the boy.

  “No,” replies the boy, sitting down on the cot and looking back at the medicae. “That’s not why I have the feeling they’re in trouble. I didn’t dream it, that’s just common sense. They’re overdue. My bad dream, it was just a dream about numbers. Like last night and the night before.”

  “Numbers?” asks Dorden.

  Milo nods. “Just some numbers. In my dream, I’m trying to write these numbers down, over and over, but my stylus won’t work, and for some reason that’s not a pleasant dream to have.”

  Dorden looks at the boy. He asks, “So what are the numbers, Brin?”, still humouring him.

  The boy reels the numbers off.

  “When did he tell you that?” Dorden asks.

  “Who?”

  “Gaunt.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” says the boy. “He certainly didn’t tell me those numbers. I just told you, they were in my dream. I dreamed about them.”

  “Are you lying to me, Brin?”

  “No, sir.”

  Dorden keeps staring at the boy a minute more, as if a lie will suddenly give itself away, like the moon coming out from behind a cloud. “Why do those numbers matter?” the boy asks. “They’re Gaunt’s command code,” says Dorden.

  “Explain yourself,” the voice demands. It comes out like an echo, from the ruins, the ghost of a voice. “Explain yourself. We don’t understand why.”

  The voice tunes in and out, like a vox that’s getting interference. “We’re hungry,” it adds.

  Corbec looks at Gaunt. He wants to reply, Gaunt can see it on his face. Gaunt shakes his head.

  “You left us here,” the voice says. It’s two or three voices now, all speaking at once, like two or three vox sets tuned to the same signal, their speakers slightly out of sync. “Why did you leave us here? We don’t understand why you left us behind.”

  “Feth’s sake is that?” Corbec mutters to Gaunt. All good humour has gone from him. He’s looking pinched and scared.

  “You left us behind, and we’re hungry,” the voices plead.

  “I don’t know,” says Gaunt. “A trick.”

  He says it, but he doesn’t believe it. It’s an uglier thing than that. The voices don’t really sound like voices when you listen hard, or vox transmits either. They sound like… like other noises that have been carefully mixed up and glued together to make voice sounds. All the noises of the dead city have been harvested: the scatter of pebbles, the slump of masonry, the splinter and smash of glass, the creak of rebar, the crack of tiles, the spatter of rain. All those things and millions more besides, blended into a sound mosaic that almost perfectly imitates the sound of human speech.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Almost human, but not human enough.

  “You left us behind, and we’re hungry. Explain yourself. We don’t understand why you left us. We don’t understand why you didn’t come.”

  The Tanith are all up, all disturbed. Knuckles are white where hands grip weapons. Everyone’s soaking wet. Everyone’s watching the dripping shadows. Gaunt needs them to keep it together. He knows they can all hear it. The inhuman imperfection in the voices.

  “I know what that is,” says Larkin.

  “Steady, Larks,” growls Corbec.

  “I know what that is. I know, I know what that is,” the marksman says. “I know it. It’s Tanith.”

  “Shut up, Larks.”

  “It’s Tanith. It’s dead Tanith calling to us! It’s Tanith calling to us, calling us back!”

  “Shut up please, Larks!”

  “Larkin, shut your mouth!” Gaunt barks.

  Larkin makes a sound, a mewling sob. Fear’s inside him, deep as a bayonet.

  The voices are out there in the dark and the rain. The words seem to move from one speaker to the next. Dead speakers. Broken throats.

  “We don’t understand why you didn’t come. We don’t understand. We don’t know who we are anymore. We don’t know where we belong.”

  Gaunt looks at Corbec.

  “We getting out?” he asks.

  “Through the back way?”

  “Whatever way we can find.”

  “What happened to holding this place until reinforcements arrive?” asks Corbec.

  “No one’s coming this way that we want to meet,” says Gaunt. Corbec turns to the advance force. “Get ready to move,” he orders.

  The voice pleads, “Where do we belong? We don’t know where we belong.”

  “It’s Tanith!” Larkin cries out. “It’s the old place calling out to us!” Gaunt grabs him, and pushes him against a wall.

  “Listen to me,” he says. “Larkin? Larkin? Listen to me! Get yourself under control! Something worse than death happened here, something much worse!”

  “What?” Larkin whines, wanting to know and not wanting to know.

  “Something Tanith was spared, do you understand me?”

  Larkin makes the sobbing sound again. Gaunt lets him go, lets him sag against the wall. He turns, and the men are all around him. Mkoll’s right there, Mkvenner too, looking as if they’re going to step in and pull Gaunt and Larkin apart. The Tanith men are all staring at him. No one’s looking away.

>   “Do you understand?” Gaunt asks them. “All of you? Any of you?”

  “We understand what you did,” one of them says.

  “Oh, this isn’t helping anything, lads!” Corbec rumbles.

  Gaunt ignores Corbec and laughs a brutal laugh. “I’m a destroyer of worlds, am I? You credit me with too much power. Indecent amounts of it. And anyway, I don’t much care what you think of me.”

  “Let’s go! Let’s go now,” says Corbec.

  “There’s only one thing I want you to understand,” Gaunt says. “What’s that?” asks Larkin, his mouth trembling. “The worst thing you can imagine,” says Gaunt, “is not the worst thing. Not by a long way.”

  In the open, the rain is heavy, like a curtain. Caffran knows he’s never going to make it. The straggly figures hunting him are closing in, and they’ve been calling to him for the last ten minutes, using the voices of people he used to know, twisted by bad vox reception.

  “We don’t know why you left us,” the voices plead. “Where do we belong? We don’t know where we belong.”

  Caffran’s feet are sore. He’s got the pistol in his hand. Its clip is empty. He’s killed three more men on his way out of the ruins.

  The voices call out, “We’ve forgotten what we’re supposed to be.”

  He’s reached the ramparts of the hills, with the city grave at his back. He kneels down. The Imperial camp is somewhere ahead, below and far away. He can’t see it, because rain and night shadows are filling the valley, but he knows it must be there. Too far, too far.

  There are signal flares in his message satchel. He’s pulling them out as the heavy raindrops bounce off his shoulders and his scalp. Does he need to find higher ground? There’ll be obs positions looking this way, won’t there? Spotters and look-outs?

  The voices call to him.

  He stands and fires a flare. It makes a hollow bang and soars up into the wet air, a white phosphor star with a gauzy tail, like a drawing of a comet in an old manuscript. It maxes altitude, and then starts to descend, slow, trembling, drifting.

  Caffran’s watching it, the other flare in his hand ready to fire. He knows there’s no point.

  The flare looks too much like the silent lightning.

  There are figures on the hillside around him. They come towards him.

  They call out to him.

  Bonin locates the remains of a depository entrance in the south-western corner of the data library, and they exit, via the basement stacks. They make their break out from there.

  The basement is flooded, up to their hips. They have to cannibalise an RPG shell to make a charge to blow the hatch open. Then they’re out into the street, into the rain, and they’re drawing heavy fire right from the start.

  Gaunt orders bounding cover, and they push along a street from position to position. They stay in good formation, despite the level of fire coming at them. No one switches back to full auto, despite the temptation.

  Even so, the advance is pushing the limits of the ammo supplies it’s packing.

  They begin to string out into a longer and longer line. They make it to the circus where two dead boulevards cross, and pick their way through the underwalks of the crippled tramway shelters to achieve the far side. Volleys of shots rain off the crumpled metal roofs of the shelters. The objective is the arterial route that joins the eastern boulevard. Gaunt and Corbec tell Blane to push ahead and edge back to bring the rear of the line up.

  The advance is halfway across the circus when it’s rushed by enemy ambushers. The ambushers come out of one of the underwalks that looked like it was choked with rubble. They’re armed like trench raiders with clubs and mauls and butcher hooks. They hit the Tanith advance in the midsection of its bounding spread. They rush Gaunt as he’s trying to direct the force forwards.

  Gaunt goes down and his head strikes something. He’s too stunned to know what’s happened. A raider swings a hook to split his head and finish him.

  Mkoll intercepts the raider, and guts him with his silver warknife. He meets the next one head-on, somehow evades a wide swing from a spiked mace, and rams the knife up through the throat so the point exits the apex of the skull.

  Corbec’s also been caught in the initial rush. He takes his attacker over with him, and breaks his neck using body weight and a wrestling hold he’d learned watching his old dad compete at the County Pryze fair.

  He looks up in time to see Mkoll pull the knife out. Blood ribbons up in a semicircle, like a red streamer in the rain, and the raider curves backwards in the opposite direction. Through the sheeting rain, Corbec can see more raiders coming out of the underwalk at Mkoll. Corbec’s lasrifle is wedged under the corpse of the man he just killed. He yells Mkoll’s name. He yells idiot and feth too, for good measure. Mkoll’s las is strapped over his shoulder. He’s facing three men with just his knife.

  There’s the whine of a small but powerful fusion motor, the unmistakable whir of a chainsword firing up. Gaunt comes in beside the scout. Gaunt’s got blood down the side of his face and his cap’s gone missing. The three raiders are too close to Mkoll for Gaunt to risk a shot with his rifle or his bolter.

  He takes a head clean off with his chainsword. The neck parts in a bloodmist venting from the blade’s moving edge. Corbec can see from Gaunt’s stance and the way he presents that he’s been trained in sword work to the highest degree. Covered in dust and blood, on a slope of rubble, fighting feral ghouls, he still looks like a duelling master.

  Gaunt lunges and puts the chainsword through the torso of a second raider, freeing Mkoll enough to tackle the last of the group in quick order. More are running in from the underwalk. Gaunt rotates, extending, and slices the chainsword around in a wide, straight-armed arc that neatly removes the top of a skull like a lid.

  Corbec’s on his feet. He pulls his lasrifle in against his gut and flips the toggle over. Then he rakes the mouth of the underwalk. Full auto flash lights up the rubble. Figures twist and jerk. He exhausts a power clip, and then lobs his last grenade down the underwalk to take care of any stragglers.

  Gaunt looks around for his cap.

  “Why didn’t you do that?” he asks Mkoll.

  “You wanted to conserve ammo,” says Mkoll.

  “In all fairness, he probably could have taken them all with his knife,” says Corbec.

  From up ahead, towards the east boulevard, they hear lasrifles starting to cut loose on full auto. The chatter is unmistakable. “Ah. I’ve set a bad example,” says Corbec.

  Gaunt moves forward, shouting orders. He heads towards the front of the advance force, trying to restore firing discipline. Right away, he realises how badly broken their formation is. The ambush to the midsection of the spread has almost cut the advance in two. It’s the beginning of the end. The enemy is exploiting their flaws, breaking them down, cutting them into manageable parts, reducing them. He knows the signs. It’s exactly what he’d do. It’ll be over in minutes.

  The back of the party is lagging too far behind. Gaunt tries to get the forward section to drop back and rejoin it, or at least hold position and not extend the break. It’s still pushing ahead to try to reach the arterial route. Corbec’s hollering at men, calling them by their first names, names Gaunt’s never heard, let alone learned. Full auto fire is clattering away up ahead. Some PDFers loom over the rubble line, and Gaunt drops them with support fire from Domor and Guheen.

  “Single shots! Single shot fire!” he’s yelling.

  He sees the Tanith fanning towards him, firing on full auto. At least one of his orders has got through, he thinks. At least they’ve swung back to keep the unit whole.

  Then he’s eyes-on, properly. These Tanith aren’t members of the advance.

  Rawne rakes a couple of bursts into the rubble line, and then approaches Gaunt as reinforcements pour in behind him. “Major?”

  “Sir.”

  “Surprised to see you.”

  “We ran into Caffran,” Rawne says.

  “You ran into him?
”

  “We saw his flare. He was heading home, but we were already on our way out.”

  “Why is that, major?” Gaunt asks.

  “Concern was expressed to me by the medical chief that the advance was overdue. A support mission seemed prudent, before it got dark and out of the question.”

  “It’s appreciated, Rawne. As you can see, things are a little lively.”

  Rawne keeps looking at his timepiece.

  “Let’s keep falling back apace,” he says. “Let’s not outstay our welcome.” Gaunt nods. “Lead the way.”

  Rawne turns and yells out to the men running his flanking units. Varl and Feygor get their fireteams to interlock firing patterns. They lay down a kill zone of las-fire that moves with the Tanith like a shadow. It burns through ammo, but it covers the retreat off the east boulevard and onto the main arterial route. They leave spent munition clips behind them, and the pathetic corpses of the enemy.

  Adare and Meryn distribute ammo to Blane and the forward portion of the advance. Gaunt sees Caffran with Varl’s squad. He tosses his rifle and his musette bag back to him. Caffran catches them and nods.

  Rawne’s still glancing at his timepiece.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he shouts. It’s really getting dark. The fluttering, stammering barrage of the gun battle is lighting up the whole city block.

  “We’re going as fast as we can,” Gaunt says to Rawne.

  Rawne looks at him, and sucks in a breath between clenched teeth that suggests that there’s no such thing as too fast.

  Gaunt hears a noise, a swift, loud, rushing hiss, the sound of a descent, of a plunge, of an angelic fall from grace. It ends in a noise shock that quakes the ground and nearly knocks him down. It feels like the lightning has found its voice at last.

  Then it happens again and again.

  Light blinds them. Bright detonations rip through the eastern boroughs of Kosdorf, some as close as a block or two away from their position. Blast overlaps blast, detonation touches detonation. It’s precision wrath. It’s bespoke annihilation.