by Dan Abnett
Wilder looked at the amasec in his glass, and licked his lips.
‘I’m down here,’ he said, ‘because I was sick of that damn party, and I was looking for something to drink to wash away how much I bloody hate the guts of that bastard Gaunt.’
He paused and looked up at the three men sharply, suddenly aware of what he’d said out loud.
‘Now, you see?’ said Meryn. ‘That’s something else we have in common.’
From the shadows of an adjacent corner in the undercroft, eyes watched the four men in their huddle. Eszrah Ap Niht, known as Ezra Night, warrior of the Gereon Untill, kept himself in the darkness, and listened to them talk.
‘Leaving the party early, sir?’ asked Elodie, passing Gaunt in the doorway of the barrack hall.
Gaunt stopped and saluted her.
‘No, mam,’ he said. ‘I’m just stepping out to clear my head. The band can be…’
He faltered.
‘I can hear what the band can be for myself,’ said Elodie, smiling.
Gaunt nodded.
‘I just need a moment to collect my thoughts. There are a few matters to attend to. You’re looking, if I may be so bold as to say, quite stunning this evening.’
Elodie curtsied playfully. She was very pleased with the fit of her blue dress.
‘Thank you, colonel-commissar,’ she replied. ‘You may be so bold.’
‘You’re looking for Captain Daur, no doubt?’
‘I am. He’s inside, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Gaunt. ‘Go join him, and have a very fine last evening on this world.’
Elodie went into the hall. It was crowded and busy with noise. Music and conversation, laughter and the chink of glasses. There were several hundred people present, not counting the staff. The band was making an enormous sound.
‘Have you seen Captain Daur?’ she asked Corporal Chiria, Domor’s adjutant.
‘I think he’s over there, mam,’ said Chiria. She pointed.
Elodie looked. She caught sight of Daur. He was talking to a woman. They were clearly friends. They were laughing. The woman was very good looking. She was wearing an officer’s uniform.
‘Who’s that he’s talking to?’ asked Elodie.
‘Her?’ answered Chiria. ‘That’s Captain Zhukova. She’s influx, arrived today. From Vervunhive. Turns out she and Captain Daur knew each other really well, back in the old days, at the hive. Funny, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ said Elodie.
‘Are you all right, mam?’ Chiria asked. The corporal was a big woman, with a powerful frame. Her face was famously scarred, and it made her seem threatening, but Elodie knew she was very sweet-natured.
‘Yes,’ said Elodie. ‘Of course. I think I just found out the answer to something.’
Merrt pulled the trigger. It was funny the things you didn’t forget. Basic marksman skills, hunting skills, they never went away. Like how to pull a trigger. You didn’t squeeze or jerk it, you didn’t do anything that would shake or upset the fine balance you’d achieved between the weapon and your stance. Pulling the trigger, that most significant act in the art of shooting, was, at its best, the most minimal. A draw. A slow tightening of the finger during the exhale.
The old rifle cracked. Merrt felt the kick of it. He slotted back the bolt-action to eject the shell case.
‘You missed,’ said Larkin.
‘I gn… gn… gn… know.’
‘But you missed less terribly than you did the last ten shots,’ Larkin grinned. He sat up, lifted his scope and took a look down the makeshift range. They’d set up on stretch of sea wall at the far end of the camp area, looking out down the plascrete shore to the filthy waters, with nothing between them and the far shore of Anzimar City three kilometres away except the toxic tide. There was a little jetty of rusting metal steps that led out from the end of the sea wall to a small stone derrick that was sometimes used as a beacon point. The jetty allowed Larkin to limp out to the stone platform and set up empty bottles and cans for practice. Effective range was about three hundred metres. Add in the strong breeze, the smoke and degrading light, plus the poor quality of the old rifle; it was quite a target to take.
Merrt slotted in another round, clacked back the bolt-action. Larkin took a sip of sacra from a flask. It was getting cold and the water stank.
‘Best make the most of this,’ said Larkin. ‘After tonight, all practice is going to be shipside.’
Merrt sighed.
‘It’s not like I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been able to remember what to do. I didn’t forget how to shoot. I just stopped being gn… gn… gn… able to.’
Merrt had once been a crack shot, some said as good as Mad Larks, though it was impossible to make that assessment after so many years. On Monthax, a bitter lifetime ago, he’d taken a las-round in the mouth during the jungle-fight. The medicaes had rebuilt his lower face, fitting him with a crude and ugly prosthetic jaw. Apart from ruining his life, it had spoiled his aim. Larkin knew Merrt was right: you just had to watch him to see he knew what he was doing. He just couldn’t translate technique into actual results. Throne knows, he’d tried. Merrt had spent years trying to re-qualify for his lanyard and get a longlas back.
‘This trip’s a shooting party,’ said Larkin, taking another sip, ‘so I need the best shooters I can get.’
‘That’s not me,’ said Merrt. ‘Not any more.’
‘But you were, Rhen.’
‘Exactly.’
Larkin sniffed.
‘You know what your trouble is?’ he asked.
Merrt tapped his jaw.
‘Nope,’ said Larkin, and reached out to tap a finger against the top of Merrt’s head.
‘Right,’ said Merrt. ‘It’s gn… gn… gn… psychological.’
The jaw tripped him all the time. Apart from being ugly, it tended to seize and clamp, as if he were fighting the neural links the medicaes had wired it to. On some words, not even difficult ones, Merrt ground his jaw as if he were stuck in verbal quicksand. It got worse when he was edgy.
Larkin was no medicae, but life had given him some insight into head stuff. The stress factor suggested that it wasn’t the physical impediment of the jaw so much as a nerve thing, like a nervous tic. Augmetics, especially bulk-fix battlefield stuff, could do strange things to you. Rhen Merrt, Emperor bless him, saw his problem as simply one of gross impairment. He was busted up, ergo he couldn’t shoot any more. Larkin saw it was finer scale than that. The crude and halting neurodes of his augmetics were a constant reminder to Merrt that he was broken and imperfect, even during that one, serene, perfect moment of firing. He could never achieve full concentration. Result: shot ruined, every time.
That was Larkin’s hunch. Except he couldn’t prove it.
And even if he was able to, what could he do about it? Get them to remove Merrt’s jaw?
‘Take another pop,’ said Larkin.
‘So you gn… gn… gn… can watch me miss again?’
‘No,’ said Larkin. ‘I’m not watching the bottles on the wall. I’m watching you. Take the shot.’
In the hall, Bandmaster Yerolemew had finally ushered the players to stop. It was time for them to break, to case their instruments, and enjoy some of the drink and food on offer. Two Tanith pipers on the opposite side of the hall had taken over entertaining the assembly.
The bandsmen came off stage, some carrying their instruments. Erish, one of the standard bearers, was helping Elway re-attach the drum banner to the frame of his field drum. Erish was a big guy, heavily muscled from carrying the weight of the colours staff. He had a back and shoulders that came out like a tulip bulb. On static parade, he played clash cymbals. Nearby, Ree Perday, one of the leads in the brass section, admired him appreciatively as she cased her brass helicon. Gorus, who played woodwind, was adjusting his reed.
‘I need a drink,’ said Gorus. ‘I thought they were going to keep us playing all night.’
‘Not like they even seemed to enjoy it,
’ replied Perday. She took off her high, crested cap and stroked her pinned-down hair.
‘Who?’ asked Erish, overhearing. He pushed past a pair of bandsmen with fanfare trumpets to join her. ‘Point out a face, and I’ll smack it.’
‘He would, too,’ said Gorus.
‘Did anyone see where Cohran went?’ Perday asked. ‘He’s been looking odd all day.’
‘Odd?’ asked Grous.
‘Like he was sick.’
Bandsman Pol Cohran was less than two dozen metres away from Ree Perday when she asked after him. He had left the stage, and wandered into the latrine block behind the hall.
He was one of the youngest bandsmen, tall and well-made, good looking. He was especially handsome in the immaculate finery of his parade uniform.
The truth of it was that Pol Cohran was actually a kilometre away, floating in a sump-water tunnel under the groundworks of the main landing field, his white and bloating corpse providing a-source of food for the gel-eyed, pin-toothed residents of the lightless ooze.
In the hall latrine, the other Pol Cohran caught his own reflection in the glass of the small window, cast by the lamp. He looked at himself. For a moment, his face rippled. There was a wet click and crack of bone movement as he relaxed the concentrated effort he had been sustaining, and cranial kinesis restored the normal structure of his skull. An entirely different face looked back.
He rested a second, enjoying the slackening of muscles and the loss of tension, then brought Cohran’s face back with a muffled, gristly clack of bone.
Gaunt had been using office quarters across the quad from the barracks hall. The night sky was smog-dark like stained velvet. There was an acrid back-note of pollution in the air.
He left the bright and noisy hall behind him and went up to his lodgings.
The door was unlocked. A lamp was on. Beltayn was the only one with a key, and Gaunt had just seen him in the hall.
He drew his power sword. The steel slid out of the scabbard silently. Peering through the crack in the door, he could see no sign of an intruder.
Gaunt stepped inside, sword ready. He was making no sound at all. A man didn’t fight alongside the likes of Mkoll and Leyr all these years and not learn how to move like a ghost.
The office area was empty. Or had the papers on his bureau been disturbed? The bedchamber, then. Gaunt could feel that someone was there.
He moved around to the doorway. There was the tiniest flash of movement. His sword came around in a defensive block.
Something stopped it. Something parried his blade. It was moving fast and it was very strong. He reprised, a more aggressive blow. The slash was blocked, then something blurred into him. Gaunt sidestepped, but the attacker was too fast. He took a glancing blow across the shoulder and crashed sideways into a small library table which crashed over, spilling its load of books and data-slates.
Off-balance, he swept the sword around, now igniting its energy charge so that the already lethal cutting edge of the old weapon was enhanced by fierce blue fire. His attacker, still less than a blur, executed a handspring over the sizzling blade and landed behind him. One arm clamped his throat and another pinned his sword arm.
He head-butted backwards, then kicked back, smashing himself and the attacker locked to his back into the office wall. Objects fell off shelves. He used his left elbow and the heel of his boot to dislodge the attacker. The grip tightened, clamping the carotid arteries in his neck. He felt himself greying out. Before the chance went, he drove backwards with even more fury and he and his attacker collided with the desk and brought it over onto the floor with him.
He’d dropped his sword, but the throat-grip had gone. Gaunt came up with his bolt pistol aimed at his attacker’s forehead.
She came up with a laspistol aimed at his face.
‘Drop it,’ he said. He didn’t recognise her.
‘You’re Gaunt,’ she said. Clipped accent. What was that?
‘Yes.’
‘Then this is an unfortunate mistake.’
‘So drop the pistol,’ said Gaunt, ‘or I’ll paint the wall behind you with your brains.’
She thought about it, pursed her lips, and then tossed the ornate and expensive laspistol onto the floor beside her.
‘Identify yourself,’ said Gaunt, his aim not flickering from her forehead.
‘This is an unfortunate mistake,’ she repeated.
‘Not as unfortunate as making me repeat an order,’ he replied.
She was lithe and extraordinarily beautiful. Her elegantly sculptural head was shaved to a fine down of hair. She was clad in an armoured bodyglove and the holster at her hip was shrouded with a red cloth.
‘Maddalena Darebeloved,’ she said. Her lips were very red. ‘I am a licensed lifeguard of Imperial House Chass, Vervunhive.’
Gaunt eased his fingers on his gun-grip thoughtfully, but didn’t move his aim.
‘House Chass?’ he repeated.
‘You did not greet us this afternoon,’ she said.
‘I was detained,’ replied Gaunt. ‘Who’s “us”?’
A second person emerged from the bedchamber. He was a young man of no more than fifteen or sixteen years dressed in a plain black bodysuit and boots.
‘You did not come to greet us,’ said the lifeguard. ‘We came to your quarters to wait for you.’
‘The door lock is gene-coded. Only my adjutant has a copy of the bio-key.’
‘Any door can be opened,’ said the woman.
‘This is not how I wanted to meet you,’ said the young man. He had blond hair, and his youth lent him a feminine aspect.
‘This is not how anyone wants to meet me,’ said Gaunt. ‘Who are you?’
‘This,’ said the lifeguard, indicating the slender boy, ‘is Meritous Felyx Chass, of House Chass, grandson of Lord Chass himself. His mother is heir to the House entire. He has come to honour your regiment by joining it as a junior commander.’
‘Really? Just like that?’ asked Gaunt.
‘He is part of the influx. The reinforcement effort provided by Great Vervunhive out of respect for you and your achievements.’
‘All of which I appreciate,’ said Gaunt. ‘I just don’t remember saying that highborns could just invite themselves into the command echelon.’
‘It reflects great honour on both House Chass and this regiment,’ said the lifeguard, ‘if the son of the House serves in the Crusade in this capacity.’
‘It won’t reflect anything at all if he gets killed in the sort of Emperor-forsaken hole the scion of a Royal Verghastite House should never be seen in,’ said Gaunt.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ said the lifeguard.
Gaunt hesitated. He looked at the boy.
‘Your mother. That would be Lady Merity Chass?’
‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘She asked me to convey her warmest greetings to you.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I am seventeen effective,’ he said.
‘I was on Verghast in 769. That’s just twelve years ago. She had no children then. Even allowing for shift dilation–’
‘I said I was seventeen effective,’ replied Meritous Chass. ‘I am eleven standard actual.’
‘As is common with high status heirs and offspring on Verghast,’ said the lifeguard, ‘my charge’s development has been slightly accelerated through juvenat and bio-maturation techniques so that he achieves functional majority as swiftly as possible.’
‘So you were born just after the Vervunhive conflict?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Just after,’ nodded the boy.
Gaunt blinked, and then lowered his pistol.
‘Throne damn you,’ he said, ‘please don’t say what I think you’re about to say.’
‘Colonel-commissar,’ said the lifeguard, ‘Meritous Felyx Chass is your son.’
FIVE
Highness Ser Armaduke
At midnight, local time, a new star woke in the skies above Anzimar. The city’s population was hurrying to attend
the day’s Sabbat Libera Nos service, which had been held in the temples of the Beati every midnight since the Crusade began, in the hope of vouchsafing a brighter tomorrow. Some of the hundreds of thousands of citizens bustling from their homes, or even their beds, or suspending their labour, at that time may have turned their eyes skywards, for since the very origin of the species, mankind has entertained the notion that some ineffable source of providence may look down upon us. The upward glances were vain, involuntary wishes to glimpse the face of salvation.
No one saw the star light up. The smog that night was as thick as rockcrete.
Ship bells rang. At high anchor at the edge of the mesopause, the Imperial Tempest-class frigate Highness Ser Armaduke lit its plasma engines. The drives ignited with a pulsing fibrillation before calming into a less intense, steady glow.
Below the ship lay the troposphere and the stratosphere. The shadow of the terminator lay heavily across Menazoid Sigma, and the smog atmospherics were so dense there were no visible light concentrations from the night-side hives. Part of the world was in sunlight. The foetid clouds, brown and cream, looked like infected brain tissue.
Small ships buzzed around the Armaduke like flies around a carcass. Fleet tenders nestled in close to its flanks. Launches, lighters, cargo boats and shuttles zipped in and out. The Armaduke’s hatches were all wide open, like the beaks of impatient hatchlings. Entire sections of the frigate’s densely armoured hull plate had been peeled back or retracted to permit access. The old ship, ancient and weathered, looked undignified, like a grandam mamzel caught with her skirts hoisted.
Above the ship lay the exosphere. The vacuum was like a clear but imperfect crystal, a window onto the hard blackness of out-system space and the distant glimmer of tiny, malicious stars.
The Highness Ser Armaduke was an old ship. It was an artefact of considerable size. All ships of the fleet were large. The Armaduke measured a kilometre and a half from prow to stern, and a third of that dimension abeam across the fins. Its realspace displacement was six point two megatonnes, and it carried thirty-two thousand, four hundred and eleven lives, including the entire Tanith First and its regimental retinue. It was like a slice cut from a hive, formed into a spearhead shape and mounted on engines.
