[Gaunt's Ghosts 05] - The Guns of Tanith

by Dan Abnett

  They hurried west crossing a walkway over a storage vat full of oily water with a surface sheen like rainbows. Nearby, a cluster of bare metal flues breathed burning gases into the sky.

  The vox crackled. Bonin thought it might be Varl and the others, and retuned to get a clearer signal. What he heard then was guttural and nothing like Low Gothic.

  He pulled Jagdea into cover just as three Blood Pact troopers in full hostile environment armour appeared on their tail, running up to the far end of the walkway over the vat. Their bobbing crimson bowl-helms reflected brightly in the dark fluid.

  One had already seen them, and squeezed off a burst from his lascarbine. The shots thumped into the ducting they were crouched behind.

  Bonin took aim. He fired a snap shot that winged the first Blood Pact trooper and checked the advance of the others. They all started shooting, making the ducting ring with the rapid hits.

  The trooper he had winged tried to sprint across the walkway as the others covered him. Bonin put a las-round through his shoulder and then another into his iron-masked face. The trooper fell off the walkway loose-limbed and splashed into the vat, throwing up a heavy surge in the viscous liquid.

  Bonin grabbed the pilot by the hand and they ran back down the length of the roof towards a row of large heat-exchangers that sprouted from the galvanised panels like dove-cotes. Las-bolts licked through the air around them.

  As soon as they were down behind one of the exchangers, Bonin fired again. Two more Blood Pact had appeared on an adjacent roof, firing down from a chain-fenced walkbridge. It wouldn’t take long for the four Chaos soldiers to coordinate a crossfire.

  Shots spanked into the metal housing of the exchanger. Bonin fired low and hit one of the troopers on the walkbridge in the chest. The man collapsed and hung where his webbing had caught on the chain rail.

  Another flurry of rounds slammed into the exchanger, and the entire top casing, a dome of thin metal, was wrenched off. Jagdea fired her pistol, but her aim wasn’t great.

  A shot ripped past near to Bonin’s shoulder. The second man on the walkbridge had moved up, and was close to having the drop on them. There was nowhere to run without risking the steady firing of the advancing pair on their level.

  The Blood Pact trooper on the bridge suddenly lurched forward so hard his body snapped the chain rail and he tumbled into the void.

  “What the feth…?” Bonin began.

  The two on the roof glanced around for a second, puzzled, and in that time a single, fierce las-shot exploded the head of the nearest.

  Bonin snatched up his las and fired a burst on auto at the remaining foe. The Blood Pact trooper ducked down again behind a stanchion and didn’t reappear.

  “Hold your fire, Bonin,” a voice said over the link.

  Varl appeared from behind the stanchion, sheathing his warknife.

  “We’re clear. Banda?”

  “Nothing from up here, sarge.”

  “Vadim?”

  “Clear.”

  “Unterrio?”

  “Clear also. No movement.”

  Varl hurried across to Bonin and Jagdea.

  “Gotta move. Come on. Thought we’d lost you.” They ran after him, up a fire-stair onto an upper roof overlooking the walkbridge. “How didn’t you?” Bonin asked.

  “We heard your calls, and followed the signal. The bastards have got men up on the roof. Not because of us, I don’t think. They brought down a lot of planes in the raid, and they’re checking for ditched air-crew.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “No,” said Varl.

  Banda rose from cover on the upper roof as they clambered up. Bonin was sure her long-las had taken out two of the enemy. “Nice shooting,” he said.

  “S’what they give the shiny medals for,” she returned. She nodded at Jagdea. “I see you brought a friend,” she remarked ironically.

  “Jagdea got us here alive, Banda. Least I could do was return the favour.”

  “Gak! Down boy! I was only saying.”

  Vadim and Unterrio came up a side-ladder and joined them.

  “Good,” said Varl. “Maybe now we’re all finally here, we can get on. Roofscape’s crawling with bad guys. I suggest we get inside.”

  “You found a way in?” asked Bonin.

  Varl looked at him, his eyes staring sarcastically through his visor. “No we haven’t — a) because we were looking for your sorry arse, I don’t recall why, and b) because isn’t that your job, Mister Scout?”

  “Point,” admitted Bonin.

  “Can we do it soon?” said Banda. “This air-bottle’s choking me up.”

  “Okay, follow Bonin’s lead, fireteam cover!” Varl ordered.

  Jagdea caught Varl by the sleeve. “Sergeant. I know I’m… not meant to be here. I think it’s best if I stay put and give myself up.”

  “No!” said Bonin.

  “Like Boney said, commander: no,” Varl agreed. “I appreciate the loyalty, but I’m not infantry trained, and certainly not covert-skilled like you. I’m dead weight. You should ditch me now. I understood the importance of this mission when I volunteered. I don’t want to compromise it.”

  “You’re coming with us. End of debate,” Varl said.

  “I’ll take my chances, sergeant—”

  “No!” said Varl.

  “Commander Jagdea has a point, sergeant,” said Unterrio. “We will be quicker and safer without her. This operation is too vital to risk. And like me, the commander is a Phantine. We care about the liberation of this world more than we care about our own lives.”

  “Listen to Unterrio, sergeant,” said Jagdea. “You’ve just killed a search party up here. Leave me for the Blood Pact to find, and I’ll tell them it was me. Just a downed pilot. All they’re expecting. It’ll cover your presence.”

  Varl tightened the strap on his U90 thoughtfully. “I said no, I meant no. For one thing, they’d know you didn’t do it unless we leave you with a long-las and a warknife, which I’m not prepared to do, because it would make them ask even more questions. For another… I’m not taking you out of kindness. Have you any idea how savage their interrogations would be? You wouldn’t last. None of us would. Your ‘downed pilot’ story would collapse so fething quickly you’d be selling us and your planet and your family. No, commander. No. You’re coming. For our sake, not yours.”

  For Larisel 2, entry was easy. Huge sections of Beta dome were left punctured and shattered by the raid, and significant parts of it were still on fire. Gathering near the mast array at the dome’s apex, the five-member team crossed onto the western side, and roped down to a collapsed roof section that was still issuing flame and smoke.

  With Larkin covering them, Mkvenner and Meryn clambered down into the gash and secured the interior space. It was a habitat chamber, totally scorched through. Mkvenner picked his way across toasted carpet and found a door melted into its frame by the heat of the detonation that had blown out the room.

  Sergeant Meryn kicked his way through smouldering ply-board and opened a side room that had also been gutted by the blast. A bomb had splintered straight through the floor here and gone off in the level beneath. There was a jagged hole in the flooring next to the atomised remains of a bed or a couch.

  “Move down and form up,” Meryn voxed.

  Kersherin, Larkin and Kuren dropped down through the roof, and Mkvenner led them through to Meryn. They looked down through the floor hole. Distant sirens were wailing, set off by the multiple breaches to the dome’s pressurised shell.

  “Nothing for the next two floors,” Mkvenner commented. The bomb had indeed demolished everything beneath them for two floors, partly through its impact and partly through its blast. Larkin glanced up and saw a standard dining fork impaled through a wall beam. The blast had turned even everyday objects into lethal shrapnel.

  “Let’s rope it,” Meryn decided. Mkvenner secured one end of his line-loop and lowered himself through the smouldering hole in the floor.

&nb
sp; They swung down one level. Larkin tried to look away from the two blackened corpses that the detonation had crushed into the wall. The surviving shreds of the floor supported half a bureau, a litter of debris, the scattered pages of a book, and a miraculously unbroken vase.

  Another level down and there was a floor again. The surface had been stripped off by extreme heat, and they balanced on the joists. One half of the room, a bed chamber, was eerily untouched. There was a tethwood chair, a shelf with drinking glasses and ornaments, and a good quality carpet that ended suddenly in a singed line where the floor had burned out. Discarded clothes hung over the chair. The only sign of damage in that half of the room was a slight blistering of the paint on the walls.

  Mkvenner crossed to the door and opened it a slit. There was a corridor outside, plunged into emergency lighting.

  “Let’s go!” he voxed, and they followed him out into the hall in a fireteam spread.

  Larkin was shaking. It was partly the trauma of the drop, partly combat tension, but mostly the shock of the news that Mkoll hadn’t made it. He felt one of his migraine headaches pumping horror into his skull. He’d had the foresight to bring his tablets. Daur, Gaunt and Meryn had all insisted.

  But with his visor down and working off his air-bottle, he couldn’t take one.

  They’d got about ten metres down the hallway when a three man emergency crew appeared, dressed in flame retardant white overalls and rebreathers. They panicked at the sight of the troopers and turned to flee.

  “Oh, feth. Take them.” Meryn’s order was terse but necessary.

  Kuren and Kersherin opened fire and cut down the trio. It didn’t feel right Kuren thought. It didn’t feel right at all, but they had to preserve their secrecy. Another emergency worker appeared and started running towards the elevator at the end of the hall. He had abandoned a blast victim who lolled on a stretcher in the open doorway of a room.

  Mkvenner fired and the worker slammed over against the wall, slid down, and lay for a moment drumming his feet against the deck before he died.

  “Feth,” said Mkvenner with distaste.

  “We have to blow this hall,” Meryn said. “They find shot bodies, they’ll know we’re here as good as if we left these poor fethers to talk. Blow it, and it’ll look like a delayed fuse bomb going off.”

  Mkvenner nodded and pulled out a couple of tube charges from his musette. Larkin watched, still shaking. This ruthlessness was a side of Corporal Meryn he hadn’t seen before. Meryn, one of the younger Ghosts, was an able and reliable soldier. His service record was excellent, but Gaunt had not yet advanced him. Rawne, however, had recently taken Meryn under his wing. Now, it seemed, he was aiming to prove himself, taking no chances that might vitiate successes for the mission. He was doing things the way his hard-arsed mentor Rawne would do them. It wasn’t the Meryn Larkin knew. He didn’t like it, even though he knew it was the smart way to go.

  “Larkin! Come on! We’re leaving!” said Meryn, and they hurried down into the stairwell next to the elevator as tube charge blasts blew the hall out of the side of the dome above them.

  Gaunt took the data-slate from his adjutant Beltayn and looked it over.

  “Is this confirmed?”

  “The data came via Admiral Ornoff.”

  As far as the admiral could report, two of the Larisel craft had been destroyed before they had reached the target. Larisel 2 and Larisel 3 had landed. Ornoff believed from pilot reports that some if not all of Larisel 1 had dropped before their Marauder had gone down.

  That was something.

  Larisel 4 had exploded outright well short of the city. No survivors. No chutes. “Oh dear God-Emperor,” Gaunt sighed. “Mkoll.”

  TWO

  Five hundred air-horns simultaneously rasped out a long, blearing note, and workers started to shuffle around Ouranberg’s secondary vapour mill in their thousands. It was a shift change, but there would be no rest for the gangs coming off station. Grim tannoy announcements ordered them to collect meal pails from their designated canteens and then assemble at the main bascule. There they would be broken into work details and sent across the causeway to Ouranberg itself, to assist in the rebuild and recovery.

  “Failure to report will result in reprisal punishment of all members of an individual’s work gang,” the tannoy emphasised over and over. The voice, already distorted by the bass-heavy vox-repeater, had a thick, hard accent and spoke in a monotone as if reading the words without understanding them. “Reprisal punishment will be immediate. No excuses. Report to the assembly yard of the main bascule in twenty minutes.”

  The long, expressionless declaration repeated itself several times, the delays and echoes of the capacious turbine halls turning it into a tuneless canon of overlaps.

  No one complained. No one dared. The workers trudged from their posts and filed silently into the wire-caged walks that led away from the mill, while others hobbled in the opposite direction down parallel cage-ways to take their places. The air was thick with dust, and smelled like it was rotting, a byproduct of the ozone and pollutants generated by the mill. Yellowish light glared from mesh-basket lamps, flickered by the turning rotors of the soot-heavy ceiling fans.

  Blood Pact personnel, armed with pain-goads and synapse disrupters, walked above the cage-ways on grilled platforms. Some of them, stripped down to black leather bib-overalls and iron masks, restrained leashed packs of snarling cyber-mastiffs with sweat-slick, corded arms and shouted abuse at stragglers. These were brutes from Warlord Slaith’s slaver force, a specialised unit of the Blood Pact which enforced the Chaos army’s occupation. Their cruel, relentless methods ensured that the captured workforce maintained output and serviced the industries Slaith had conquered. On Gigar, the slavers had worked the captive locals, night and day, for eight weeks, setting their canines on twenty individuals every time one slackened or collapsed. At the end of eight weeks, the wells of Gigar had produced enough promethium to fuel sixty Blood Part motorised regiments for a year. And the hate-dogs were fat.

  The workers of Ouranberg had been reduced to an almost zombie-like state, deprived of sleep, of decent food, of enough fluids. Distinctions of sex and age had vanished. All were swaddled in overalls and rag bandages stiff with grey dust. Coarse canvas hoods or shawls, similarly grey, draped them like monks. They were hunched and submissive. Battered rebreathers and work gauntlets dangled beneath the edges of their shrouds. Raw, black-bandaged feet left limping trails of blood on the dusty floor.

  Though Ornoff’s persistent bombing campaign might have been hurting Slaith’s forces, it was turning the lives of the slave workers from a living hell to something indescribably worse. Every waking hour had to be spent on repair and rebuild work.

  Slaith knew an invasion was coming, and he intended to throw it back by making Ouranberg a fortress. It was believed that the slavers were lacing the workers’ meagre rations with stimulants to force them into twenty-four hour activity. Already, many had died of convulsive fits, or gone berserk and thrown themselves at the Blood Part guns.

  The air-horns blared again. The tannoy repeated its monotone order. A work crew from the mill’s ninth level channeled down the narrow cage-way towards the stair flights that would take them to the assembly yard.

  Just inside the mouth of the caged walk, a worker stumbled and fell against the chain-fence. A Blood Pact guard on the overhead platform jabbed down with his pain-goad, but the crumpled worker was out of reach. His fellow workers just hurried past him, not wanting to get involved. The slavers pushed their way into the cage, shoving aside the workers who were too slow-moving. The hate-dogs bayed.

  “Don’t,” hissed Adare, squeezing Milo’s arm as they shuffled forward.

  Screams echoed down the chamber. One of the Blood Pact started shooting into the crowd.

  “Just keep going, for feth’s sake,” Adare whispered.

  Milo fought back the urge to throw off his filthy shawl and open fire with the U90 lashed tight under his right armpit. Th
e screams were unbearable.

  “We’re dead if you even think about it,” Adare mumbled.

  The members of Larisel 3 moved on with the trudging mob. All of them were shrouded with stolen rags, grey dust rubbed liberally into their hands and kit. Doyl had swathed their boots and lower legs with bandage wraps, and dirt had been rubbed in there too. They walked with shoulders bent.

  More shots rang out behind them.

  Milo choked back his rage. Peering out from under his hood, he saw a slaver standing just the other side of the chain fence, watching them all file past. Milo was close enough to smell the bastard’s rancid body odour, and see the ritual scars on his misshapen hands, the eight-pointed brand of Chaos on his bare sternum. The slaver’s iron grotesque seemed to be staring right at him.

  Milo tensed his hand around the heavy cannon’s trigger grip.

  And then they were out, clanging down the metal stairs towards the assembly yard.

  The secondary vapour mill was built into a volcanic plug, a sister peak to the main outcrop on which Ouranberg was constructed. It was linked to the main city by a two kilometre long cantilever causeway suspended between the two peaks. From the vast, dirt-filmed windows of the assembly yard, they could see out across the majestic causeway to the monumental, domed bulk of the dry. Through cloud-haze, a thousand lights pulsed on masts and stacks and a million more glowed from ribbon windows and observation decks.

  The yard was thronging with slave workers. Larisel 3 laced in amongst them. Milo stuck close to Nessa in case she missed a signal from Adare.

  “Worship Slaith!” boomed the tannoy suddenly. “Worship him for he is the overlord!” The Blood Pact cheered throatily, and the workers dutifully raised a suitable moan. “Worship Slaith, and through your toil and blood, embrace the truth of Khorne!”

  The very name made some workers wail and sob. Someone screamed. Whips cracked into the crowd. Milo felt his gorge rise and gooseflesh quiver across his hands and arms. That word. That foul, foul word, that name of darkness, an animal cry from the warp. It reeked with evil, far more than the simple combination of letters and sounds could convey. It was like a noise, pitched on a certain frequency, that triggered involuntary fear and revulsion.