by Dan Abnett
They would kill as many as they could. In the name of the Emperor, there was no more they could do.
Data-pulses told him the fighting was intense, bestial. But it was so very far away. It came to him only as unemphatic bursts of information, unemotional cascades of facts.
Salvador Sondar drifted in his Iron Tank. He was becoming increasingly disinterested in the trials of the hive soldiers. What was happening at Croe Gate and, more vitally, at Veyveyr was an inconsequential dream to him.
All that really mattered now to the High Master of Vervunhive was the chatter.
A rocket cremated Trooper Feax and threw Larkin into the air. He came down hard amid the rubble and the bodies, ears dead, vision swimming and his beloved rifle nowhere in sight.
He clambered up. He had been with Corbec's unit at the gate. That was the last thing he remembered.
His hearing began to return. He heard the wretched chanting of the Zoican advance as from underwater. He saw the las-fire and banner poles as dancing bright colours in the smoke.
A Zoican was right on top of him, glaring down out of that fearsome mask-visor, stabbing with his bayonet.
Larkin lurched aside and fell off a length of wall, two metres down to a bed of debris below. Ignoring his spasming back, he yanked out his silver Tanith knife and leapt at the Zoican the moment he reappeared over the gully-lip.
The Zoican bayonet cut through Larkin's sleeve. He slammed the brute back over into the rubble and pushed his blade in, trying to find a space between the ochre armour plating.
It went in, just below the neck seal of the battle-suit. Foul-smelling blood began to spurt out over Larkin's arm and hand, and it stung like acid.
The Zoican thrashed and spasmed. Larkin fought back, clawing, kicking and wrenching on his blade's grip.
He and the Zoican rolled twenty metres down the rubble slope. At the foot, Larkin's frantic efforts ripped the Zoican's helmet off.
He was the first person in Vervunhive to see the face of the enemy, square on, naked, shorn of armour or mask or visor.
Larkin screamed.
And then stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.
A torrent of las-fire cut across the gate from the west. Zoicans crumpled, falling on their banner poles, loudspeakers exploding as they died. Corbec and his men, amazed, pushed around to support, hammering into the halted storm force with renewed vigour.
Nine platoons of Vervun Primary troops funnelled in across the open gate from the west with Commissar Kowle at the head.
Kowle had headed for Veyveyr Gate from House Command the moment the action began at dawn and it had taken him until now almost noon to reach the front. Unable to reach Modile or any Vervun command group, he had grabbed Vervun troops by force of authority and personality alone and led them towards the gate flanked by Bulwar's men and armour.
Kowle was singing an Imperial hymn at the top of his lungs and firing with a storm bolter.
Bulwar's NorthCol units pressed in behind, and Bulwar had the sense to spread them east to reinforce the failing Tanith line.
Corbec couldn't believe his eyes. At last, a co-ordinated effort. He rallied his remaining men and scoured the eastern flank of the gate for signs of Zoicans. His support helped Kowle reach the gate itself, a gate that had been held by the Tanith alone for more than an hour.
The three prongs Tanith, Vervun and NorthCol pushed the Zoicans back out into the outer habs and the torrential rain. Kowle moved his units aside to allow Bulwar's armour to finish the job and block the gate, though not before the commissar had posed for propaganda shots that were quickly relayed across the entire public-address system of the hive: Kowle, victorious in the blasted mouth of Veyveyr; Kowle, blasting at the enemy; Kowle, holding the Vervun banner aloft on a heap of rubble as Vervun Primary troops mobbed to help him plant the flag-spike in the ground.
By early afternoon, the gate was held fast by fifty tanks of the NorthCol armoured. Kowle was once more the People's Hero. The battle for Veyveyr Gate was over.
At Croe Gate, as news of the overturn reached the Zoican elements, the fighting diminished. Nash sighed in relief as the enemy withdrew from the smouldering gate-hatches. He ordered the wall guns to punish them anyway.
None of the victorious public-address messages mentioned the losses: 440 Vervun Primary and 200 Roane Deepers at Croe Gate, 500 Vervun Spoilers along the Spoil, 3,500 Vervun Primary, 900 NorthCol and almost a hundred Tanith at Veyveyr. They had a victory and a hero, and that was all that mattered.
Gaunt and his small reinforcement group reached Veyveyr just as the battle was ending. Gaunt was hot with anger and determination.
Daur led him down a trench to the Vervun Primary Command post where Colonel Modile was rallying men and directing vox-links.
Modile looked around as Gaunt strode into the culvert shelter, stony-faced.
The battle is over. We have won. Vervunhive is victorious, Modile said blankly into Gaunt's face.
I've been listening to the vox. I know what occurred here. You balked, Modile. You lost control. You hid. You shut down the vox-channels when you didn't like what you heard.
Modile shrugged vacuously at Gaunt. But we won
The Tanith troops stepped into the command post around Gaunt. Even Daur, grim-faced, had a weapon drawn.
Round up all the officers and detain them. I want a transcript of all vox-traffic, Gaunt ordered. The Ghosts fanned out to do so and the Vervun Primary staffers blinked in confusion as they were jostled around.
What are you doing? Modile asked haughtily. This is my gakking command area!
And you've commanded what, exactly? A bloodbath. You dismay me, Modile. Men were shrieking for orders and support, and you ignored them. I heard it all.
It was a difficult incident, Modile said.
I have a reputation, Modile, Gaunt said, a reputation as a fair, honest man who treats his soldiers well and supports them in the face of darkness. Potentially, that reputation makes me soft. It seems I understand failure and forgive it.
Some, like Kowle, believe me to be a weak commissar, not prepared to take the action my rank demands. Not prepared to enforce field discipline where I see it failing.
Gaunt removed his cap and handed it to Daur. He stared at Modile, who still wasn't sure what was going on.
I am an Imperial commissar. I will enflame the weak, support the wavering, guide the lost. I will be all things to all men who need me. But I will also punish without hesitation the incompetent, the cowardly and the treasonous.
Gaunt, I Modile began.
Commissar Gaunt. Do not speak further. You have cost lives this day.
Modile backed away, suddenly, horribly realising what was happening.
Gaunt took his bolt pistol from his holster. For courtesy, choose: a firing squad of your own men or a summary execution.
Modile stammered, lost control of his bowels and turned to run.
Gaunt shot him through the head.
Have it your own way, he said sadly.
TEN
CASUALTIES
There came a point, a few years into my career, when I knew I had seen enough. Since then, I have seen a lot more, but I have Mocked it out. The soul stands only so much.
Surgeon Master Goleca, after the
Exsanguination of Augustus IX
From the sound of it, there was a hell of a brawl going on at Veyveyr Gate. The sky under the Shield blazed up at intervals with explosive light, and sound drummed across the hive. It had been going on since daybreak.
The baby, Yoncy, was crying plaintively and making sobbing, sucking noises. It had been doing it all night. Tona wasn't sure what to do. Dalin was sullen and quiet, and he slept in the back of the trash-cave most of the time.
Tona crawled forward out of her dugout and looked across the shell-ruined slopes. Below, half a kilometre away, lay the fenced and razor-wired troop billet of Gavunda Chem Plant Storebarns/Southwest.
That was where the off-world soldiers lived, the pale-ski
nned, dark-haired ones with their black costumes and blue tattoos. Tona wondered if they came from a hiveworld too, if the blue tats were gang badges or rank marks.
She dreamed of their food. There was a banquet fit for the Emperor secured down there in the back sheds. She'd sent Dalin in to scrounge and steal a few times, but it was getting dangerous.
Tona knew it was up to her now. The baby was weak and crying. She needed milk powder and basic nutrient paste.
There were over a thousand other refugees hiding in the trash slopes and crater-plains in the shell-flattened manufactories near to her, but she never thought to ask any for help. Everyone in Vervunhive was on their own now.
A particularly fierce airburst cracked the sky above Veyveyr, and Tona turned to look. She'd been to Veyveyr railhead a few times and had stood in the glass hall of the main station, now long gone, watching the snooty up-Spine travellers move to and fro from platforms. Her twice-uncle Rika had run a snack-stall there, and she'd also been a part of a pocket-prey team for a few months.
The Grand Terminus had awed her, even as she worked it. It had seemed to her a doorway to anywhere. If she'd had the credit, she'd have jumped a train south to the tropical hives, to the archipelago, maybe even to Verghast Badport where, so they said, it was possible to buy a route to anywhere, including off-world.
Veyveyr Gate had always seemed to her a way off this rock. A possible future. A promise.
Now it was dead and burned out, and callous, off-world soldiers dirtied it with brutal war.
The baby was squalling again. Tona edged out of her bunker and looked back at Dalin. Stay with her. I'll be back soon with food.
Tona slid down the rubble stacks and moved towards the wire fence of the troop compound.
Tona crossed the ruinscape of the manufactories, industrial areas that had been levelled on that first day before the Shield lit up. Shattered rockcrete buildings flanked the lips of craters twenty metres across or more. Ruptured metal sheeting and snapped pipes poked from the brick dust. Unrecognisable pieces of burnt machinery scattered the ground.
Bodies lay where they had fallen and after a month these were nothing more than loose husks of shrivelled bone and ragged clothing. The rescue teams had taken away most of the wounded in the initial recovery and habbers had carried their own dead out. But still bodies remained, crumpled and half-buried in the wide ruin. Carrion-dogs, lean, diseased and mangy, haunted the rubble, scavenging what they could like her, she supposed, though unlike the hounds, she drew the line at feeding off corpses. There was a stagnant, rotten smell to the place and sickness lingered. Thousands like her, mostly low-caste or the dispossessed from the outer habs, had made this place a temporary home when the main refuge camps had over-spilled. Tona Criid, like many of Vervunhive's base-level citizens, avoided the refuges, for though they offered food and medical rations, they also represented authority and prejudice. The VPHC controlled most refuges brutally.
She saw others prowling the ruins. Adults mostly, a few children, all thin and dark with filth, their clothes wretched and ragged. Some stared at her as she passed; some ignored her. None spoke.
She passed a store block where parts of the side windows were intact and she saw her own reflection. It shocked her. A straggly, pale thing with dirty clothes and sunken eyes looked back at her. She had expected to see the bright-eyed, cocky hab-girl with the flashy piercings and snarling smile.
Seeing the leanness of her own face, she realised how hungry she was. She'd been blocking the feeling. Her empty belly knotted and ached with such sudden fury that she dropped to the ground for a moment, sitting on a cinder block until the pain eased enough for her to stand without cramps or wooziness.
She took the flask from her belt and sipped a few, precious mouthfuls from the drink-spout. Half full, it was the last of a box of electrolyte fluid bottles she'd recovered from a mining store near Vervun Smeltery One. She was sure that the fluid-packs were the main reason she'd kept herself and the children alive for the last month.
She hooked the flask back onto her belt and then took out her blade. The back fence of the military compound was just a few metres away now. It seemed deserted. Maybe they were all fighting at the gate. It sounded like it.
Her brother Nake had given her the blade on her tenth year-day, just a few weeks before he was killed in a gangfight in Down-Reach under the Main Spine. Nake Criid had been a member of the Verves, one of the key under-gangs, and the knife's handle was decorated with a carefully carved Verve crest: a laughing skull resting in the dip of a gothic V Tona sported a few gang badges herself an ear-stud, a buckle, a small snake-tat on her shoulder but she'd never been properly blooded into any gang to speak of. She had run with a few gang crowds and known a boy or two who'd been gang-blooded. While she was with them, they'd each tried to induct her, but she'd resisted. The one thing Tona Criid had always known, ever since Nake had died of stab wounds in an unlit, Down-Reach sewer seven years ago, was that ganger life was dumb and pointless and short. She'd make her own way in life, be her own master, or get nowhere at all.
The blade was a compact chain-form: a thick, decorated grip with an extending blade of steel fifteen centimetres long. A flick of the rubberised stud on the index-finger ridge activated an internal power-cell that made the blade-edge vibrate so fast it looked still. But, gak, could it cut!
She touched the stud and the blade purred. She switched it off and crawled towards the flak-board fence.
The supply barn was dark and as stacked with supplies as she remembered it. She couldn't read many of the labels on the crate stacks, so it was a matter of cutting them open and sampling them. The first she tried was full of small flat boxes packed with bootlaces.
The second had cartons of stoppered metal tubes. Hoping they might be food-paste, she squeezed a coil of black matter out into her palm and licked it.
She spat, retching. If this is what the off-world fighters ate, they were truly from another world. She moved on, leaving the half-squeezed tube of camo-paint on the floor behind her.
Ear-pieces with wires and plugs. Powercells. Rolls of gauze in paper wraps that smelled of disinfectant.
In the next crate-stack, foil-packs of freeze-dried buckwheat porridge. Better. She dropped half a dozen into her bag, then added a handful more. She'd eat them dry if she couldn't find water. Then she found chemical blocks for firelighting and a pile went into her bag. Next, metal beakers. She prised one out of its packing, then another. Dalin would want his own.
In the next row, pay dirt: corn crackers in long, plastic tubes, soya bars in vacuum-packets. She pushed a dozen or more into her bag and bladed one open, cramming the soft, wet food into her mouth and gulping it down, brine dribbling down her chin and pattering on the floor.
Tona froze, mid-swallow, her cheeks bulging, her stomach gnawing at her with the sudden input of food. A noise, behind her, to the right, a noise her wolfish chewing had half-hidden. She ducked into cover.
A flashlight flickered between supply stacks, three rows away. She willed herself invisible and huddled behind a tower of mess-tin crates, the blade in her hand. The beam of light jiggled around and she heard a voice, uttering a snarl. The sudden crack and flash of a lasweapon made her jump out of her boots. A carrion-dog went racing past her, yelping and trailing a burned hind leg.
She relaxed a little. The voice said something in an accent she couldn't work out. The flashlight wavered, then moved off and away.
She darted across the aisle into the next bank of crates. A few slices of her knife, all the while listening to the darkness around her. Nutrient packs for first aid. Tins of soup that heated themselves when the foil strip was pulled out. Jars of air-dried vegetables in oil. Small, flat cans of preserved fish. Cartons of heat-treated milk.
She took a handful of them all. Her pack was heavy now and she was pushing her luck. Time to go.
Light jabbed down into her face, making her cry out, and a hand grabbed her shoulder.
Tona Criid had
been taught to fight by her brothers, all of them gangers. Instinctively, she pivoted back into the grip and shoulder-threw the owner of the hand. The flashlight bounced away across the rockcrete barn floor and the heavy male form bounced after it, barking out an oath and most of its breath.
But it had her still, and even as it went over her, it twisted her round in combat-trained hands and threw her sideways into the crate stack.
The impact stunned her. She tried to rise, hearing the other moving too. A few more oaths, a harsh question she didn't understand.
She rose and delivered a spin-kick into the darkness. It would be the VPHC, she was sure. She braced for the las-shot, the bolt-round, the mindset that would treat her no better than a carrion-dog.
Her spinning foot connected and the figure went down with a bone-crack. More rampant cursing.
Tona ran for the crack in the barn wall.
A much larger form tackled her from behind in the dark and brought her down on her belly on the rockcrete floor. She was frantic now, kicking and thrashing.
Her assailant had her pinned by way of superior strength and technique. His weight slumped on top of her and the flashlight winked on again, probing down at her wincing eyes.
It's all right, it's all right, said a hoarse voice in tunefully accented Low Gothic. Don't fight me.
She looked up, fighting still. She saw the face of the off-world soldier, the young one, the man who had chased Dalin out of the barn weeks before.
The blade purred in her hand and she sliced it upwards.
Caffran saw the vibro-blade coming and threw himself aside, releasing his captive. It was the gang girl, the beautiful one he had glimpsed across the rubble when he had gone chasing the boy.
She was on her feet now, menacing with the buzzing blade, head down. Knife-combat stance, thought Caffran, good enough to be a Ghost.
Put it down, he said carefully. I can help you.
She turned and ran, heading for the slit in the fibre-board back wall of the barn.
