[Gaunt's Ghosts 09] - His Last Command

by Dan Abnett

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Mkoll’s in trouble,” Feygor rasped, his voice issuing flat and bald out of his metal throat-box.

  “How the feth can you know that?” Meryn asked. “Come on, Tanith. We’re meant to be setting in at the top of this fething hill and—”

  “Mkoll’s in trouble,” Rawne repeated. He stared at Meryn. “Beltayn tells me so. How much more do you need?”

  Meryn squared up to the major. “I need to know,” he said, “why you think that. I need to know the details. Don’t push me around, sir, I still have command here.”

  Rawne gestured towards Beltayn. “I’m getting static shunts, pulse, three after one,” Beltayn said, adjusting his set.

  “It’s just the atmospherics,” Meryn said. “Wilder just warned us about that. Solar radiation. It’s just futzing the link.”

  “No, sir,” Beltayn said. “It’s a signal.”

  “Oh, come on now, please, we’ve—”

  Meryn shut up quickly as Rawne grabbed him by the lapels. “Listen to him, you little jumped-up feth-wipe,” Rawne snarled. “It’s a signal we learned on Gereon.”

  “What?”

  “Pulse three after one. That was our signal for trouble. Back on Gereon, my young friend, we often didn’t have full gain vox. We had to improvise. Pulsing static, shunting vox burps. Three after one was the signal for trouble.”

  Meryn pulled himself away from Rawne. “Is that true, Beltayn?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s true,” the vox officer replied.

  “All right, all right,” Meryn said. “Maybe I can spare a couple of troops to head east. Maybe.”

  “Do it quick, or I’ll tell Banda you let the chief hang out to dry,” Rawne said.

  “You bastard.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

  “It’s coming again,” Beltayn called, working his set.

  Three pulses, then one. It was hard to manage on the run. Mkoll had torn off his microbead and split the plastek casing open so that he could trigger the vox-send key manually. Finger and thumb.

  Three, then one. Just the way they had done back on Gereon. Improvisation. It created a hell of a lot of interference, binding out the main vox channels, but Mkoll knew it was worth it.

  Three, then one.

  The recon team scattered through the undergrowth of the basin. Buckren was already dead, and Hwlan had been hit so badly he was limping and falling behind.

  Into the dense vegetation, the Blood Pact chasing them, weapons firing. Clinking and clanking, the stalk-tanks scurried in pursuit, their gun-mounts blasting into the thickets, spraying out leaves and charred bark.

  Three, then one.

  Three, then one.

  “Colonel Wilder?” vox officer Keshlan said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m getting reports, sir.”

  “Of what?”

  “I’m not sure, sir… Uh, it seems that C and E companies have turned east.”

  “They’ve what?”

  Keshlan shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not sure, sir. They seem to have turned east, both of them.”

  “They realise that they’re supposed to be on that hill right now?” Wilder asked.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve spoken to both Kolea and Meryn. They apologise. But they’re heading east.”

  Wilder held out his right hand and slapped the fingers against the palm repeatedly. “Give me that vox horn, mister. Give it to me right now.”

  EIGHTEEN

  06.59 hrs, 197.776.M41

  Fifth Compartment

  Sparshad Mons, Ancreon Sextus

  The recon team ran clear of the gloomy basin into the pale, misty daylight. The ground ahead was barren, a flinty slope of sedge and thin gorse. Blazing las-bolts followed them out of the thickets, whining in the cold air.

  “Cover would be good,” Kolosim said, almost casually.

  Mkoll pointed. Five hundred metres up the open slope, the land levelled slightly, and there were what appeared to be boulders or part of a wall.

  “That’ll do!” Kolosim agreed. They started running. Hwlan fell behind again, limping and stumbling. Mkoll tossed his rigged microbead to Bonin. “Keep sending!” he ordered, and ran back to the wounded scout. Hwlan was a good deal taller and heavier than Mkoll, but the Tanith chief scout didn’t hesitate. He stooped, grabbed Hwlan around one thigh with his left hand, and hoisted him up over his shoulders. Then he started running towards the promised cover.

  “Ditch me…” Hwlan gasped.

  “Shut up,” Mkoll grunted, taking quick, short steps, trying not to fall. Several powerful las-bolts hit the dirt nearby, coughing up powder ash and dust. A couple more hissed past.

  Kolosim and Bonin had reached the litter of rocks. It proved to be the ruin of one of the Mons’ curious house structures. This particular relic was beyond the hope of reconstruction: little more than a plan of the walls that had once stood there, sketched out in rubble amid the patchy grass. In places, enough of the walls remained for them to kneel behind. Kolosim and Bonin leapt the ragged stones and took position, firing back down the slope to cover the others. Maggs joined them, then Caober. Mkoll and his burden were still a little way back.

  “Come on!” Kolosim yelled. “Come on!”

  The first of the pursuers had broken from the dense undergrowth behind them. At least a dozen Blood Pact troopers, their heavy kit and battle plating rattling as they ran up the slope, began firing their weapons from the hip.

  “Pick ’em off!” Kolosim roared.

  The four scouts in cover started blasting single shots. Las-bolts whickered up and down the slope, crosshatching the air. Caober hit one of the Blood Part in the chest and walloped him heavily down on his back, then immediately hit a second of the enemy number in the head. The shot exploded the trooper’s leering black iron mask and sent pieces of it spinning away as the man toppled onto his front. Kolosim got another, who fell down in a sitting position, clutching his throat, before he slumped over backwards. Maggs and Bonin managed to kill the same target.

  “There’s a waste,” said Maggs grimly, resighting and blasting again.

  Bonin made no reply. He tapped another pulse on the microbead, then took up his weapon again and dropped two more of the enemy troopers.

  Mkoll reached the ruin. Kolosim and Maggs threw down their rifles and grabbed him and Hwlan, hauling them in over the wall. Shots smacked into the stones.

  Hwlan cried out in pain as he landed. He’d been shot in the right hip, and in the side of the torso just above it.

  “I’ve got him!” Maggs yelled, his head low as he went to work. Kolosim and Mkoll joined Bonin and Caober at the wall, and started firing. A great deal more Blood Pact infantry had begun to spill out of the undergrowth behind the front runners. Three, four dozen, perhaps more. Some ran forward, others dropped to their knees, or onto their bellies, and started loosing aimed shots. Las-bolts filled the air like sleet.

  Maggs yanked open one of his webbing pouches and pulled out his field kit, spilling paper-wrapped dressing wads onto the ground.

  “Hold on, you hear me?” he murmured at Hwlan. Hwlan, on his back and going into hypovolemic shock, nodded weakly, his face drawn and pale with pain.

  Maggs ripped open the leg of Hwlan’s fatigue trousers and loosened the scout’s webbing belts. The wounds were messy. The flesh had burned and cauterised, the usual consequence of super-hot energy hits, but the concussive impact had ruptured the flesh and caused severe secondary bleeding. Hwlan’s skin was sickly white and beginning to bruise. Maggs’ hands became slick with blood.

  “Hold on,” Maggs said again. “Hwlan? Hwlan! Don’t you grey out on me! Hwlan!”

  “I’m here, I’m here!” Hwlan insisted, snapping back awake. “Feth, Wes, it hurts.”

  “No, really?” Maggs was washing the wounds with counterseptic gel. “Come on, stay with me. Talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  “Tell me something. Anything. Tell me about your first ti
me.”

  “What, getting shot?”

  “No, you dipstick. Your first time with a girl.” Maggs had packed adhesive dressing across both injuries, and was now using Hwlan’s belt to tourniquet his leg around the groin.

  “Hwlan?”

  “What?”

  “Your first girl.”

  “Oh. Her name was Seba.”

  “Sabre? Like a sword?”

  “No. No. Seba. Feth, she was sweet. Oww!”

  “Sorry. It’s got to be tight.” Maggs wiped his hands on his jacket and pulled the cap off a single-use plastek syringe.

  “Seba, eh? Was she any good?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. I was only sixteen. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Maggs stabbed the needle into the meat of Hwlan’s thigh. “Story of my life,” he said. “Hwlan?”

  “Uhn. Yeah.”

  “The shot should take the edge off the pain, but you might get a little woozy. I’ve got another shot if you need it.” Each of them carried a field kit with two doses of painkiller, but the medicaes never advised using more than one at a time.

  “I feel better already.”

  “Good. I got to get to it now. You lie here and don’t move.”

  “Prop me up by the wall. I can fire my weapon.”

  “Oh, be quiet. You a hero now, too? Shut up and lie there.”

  Maggs crawled back to the wall. “What did I miss?” he asked.

  “Just another highlight of life in the poor fething Guard,” Caober said, snapping off shots.

  Maggs looked down the slope at the distressingly large number of enemy troopers massing there. Between them, the scouts had killed more than twenty, littering the patchy soil with the jumbled bodies. But more than a hundred were now shooting their way up the slope towards the ruin. The density of las and hard rounds flying up at the scouts was frightening.

  “How’s Hwlan?” Mkoll asked, between shots.

  “Stable,” Maggs replied. “At this rate, he’ll outlive us.”

  An explosion just beyond the wall line tossed grit and soil into the air. The Blood Pact warriors were starting to hurl stick grenades, though they were falling short. Kolosim saw one Blood Pact trooper rise, arm back to throw, and put a las-round into his chest. The warrior fell, and a second later the four or five troopers around him were knocked flat by the blast of his grenade. Two more grenades dropped in front of the wall and flung dirt and flame up.

  Bonin grunted as a las-round sawed across his right shoulder.

  “Mach?” Caober called.

  “I’m all right. Just scratched me,” Bonin replied, though in truth his shoulder throbbed like it had been struck by a red-hot sledgehammer.

  Another shot, a hard slug, exploded part of the wall top and ricocheted off into Kolosim’s face. He staggered backwards, blood pouring from his mouth. The deformed bullet had torn his upper lip and philtrum. Spitting out blood, he continued shooting.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Bonin said suddenly. Maggs cocked his head. “No, me neither,” he agreed.

  The first stalk-tank lumbered out of the undergrowth, trailing vines and brambles from its spidery legs. Behind it came a second one. The Blood Pact sent up a fierce cheer.

  The sound of the cheer roused Hwlan from his stupor. “Are we winning?” he asked.

  Maggs and Caober laughed. Even Bonin cracked a grin.

  “No,” said Mkoll sadly. “I don’t think we are, this time.”

  Striding forward, the stalk-tanks began to fire.

  “Baskevyl!” Wilder shouted into the vox. “You’ve got command, you hear me?”

  “Reading you, Eighty leader.”

  “Form up the defence here and get this hill secure. Don’t take any shit from anyone.”

  “Understood. What’s going on? Where are you?”

  “No time to explain. Get on with it.”

  Wilder tossed the speaker horn back to his vox-man. “Follow me,” he ordered, and set off down the slope, heading east. “And patch me to Meryn, Kolea or Rawne. Any of them. Immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The pair of them were running cross-country, against the tide of advancing men. “Keep moving up the hill! Keep moving!” Wilder yelled at the troops as he pushed through. “Novobazky!”

  The commissar, marshalling squads near the foot of the hill, turned at the sound of his name.

  “Yes, colonel.”

  “Come with me.”

  Novobazky hurried over and ran along with Wilder and Keshlan. “What’s going on?”

  “In a nutshell, Rawne. We’ve got two companies breaking formation and heading east.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Like I said, I think this is Rawne’s doing. Why the hell did he have to come back?”

  “I wasn’t going to mention it, sir, but he gave me some crap first thing this morning.”

  “Then you’ve got my permission to shoot the bastard.”

  The three of them were out in the empty scrub land now, pressing away from the Guardsmen deployed on the hillside. Wilder had to slow down to let the heavily-laden vox-man keep up.

  “Major Rawne, sir,” Keshlan reported, panting. The three men stopped and Wilder took the horn.

  “Rawne? This is Wilder. What the hell is going on?”

  “We’ve got a situation, sir,” Rawne’s voice came back. “Contact from the missing recon unit. They’ve run into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Can’t say. The contact was non-verbal.”

  “It was what?”

  “Emergency pulse code, improvised. I know it’s Mkoll. I know the code.”

  “Rawne, I’m fit to choke you with your own genitals. What the hell happened to chain of command? Why in the name of the Golden Throne did you not run this by me?”

  “No time, sir. This was priority.”

  Wilder lowered the horn from his mouth for a second. “That bastard’s going to be the death of me,” he told Novobazky. “I can just about imagine him pushing Meryn into this, but what the frig is up with Kolea? I thought that man was sound.”

  “Old loyalties,” Novobazky said. “This Mkoll, he’s a pretty big deal to the Ghosts. Almost as big a deal as Gaunt, as I understand it.”

  “And what am I? Dried rations? This is no way to run an army. I’ll have them all up on charges. You’ll have them all up on charges. Things are hard enough without these idiots…” He trailed off, shut his eyes, and cursed.

  “Rawne?” he said, trying to inject a little calm and control into his voice as he raised the speaker horn again. “Where are you?”

  “Moving south-east of Hill 55, towards Ridge 19.”

  “Find it,” Wilder told Novobazky, who pulled out his chart and began examining it.

  “And where do you think the recon unit is?”

  “Somewhere near the ridge. There’s a lowland ahead. We can hear shooting. Heavy gunfire.”

  “Rawne, I’m heading to join you. When you know anything for certain, tell me. And do not, repeat do not engage without my express permission. Wilder out.”

  “Come on,” he said to Novobazky and the vox-officer. They had to run to keep pace with him.

  Rawne passed the vox horn back to Beltayn.

  “What did he say?” Feygor asked.

  “He’s coming to join us,” Rawne said.

  “What else did he say?” Meryn asked.

  Rawne shrugged. “I really don’t remember. Atmospherics kept cutting him off.”

  “You’re lying,” Meryn said.

  “Yes, but I outrank you, so live with it.”

  They were moving as they talked. E Company was slogging double-time across the rough scrub. The body of C Company was about fifteen minutes behind them, to the north.

  “Lot of shooting ahead,” Caffran called out. “Down under the ridge, about half a kilometre. Serious exchanges.”

  Rawne came to a halt. “Give me a scope, someone.” One of the Belladon sergeant
s, Razele, handed Rawne a set of magnoculars. Rawne played them left and right.

  “Feth,” he said. The swell of the land was obscuring much of the view, but Rawne could see a shroud of gun smoke leaking up into the sky, and serious back-flashes of lasfire. “Caff wasn’t kidding. Someone’s started a little war down there in private.”

  He handed the scope back. “Line advance!” he shouted. “Straight silver! Weapons live!”

  There was an answering clatter as the company fixed their bayonets.

  “I thought Wilder said we weren’t to engage?” Meryn said.

  “Meryn, if you know what he said, why the feth do you keep asking me?”

  “Company ready, sir,” Feygor said.

  “Let’s get busy,” Rawne yelled. “Company advance! For the Emperor and for Tanith!”

  “What about Belladon?” Razele demanded.

  “Screw Belladon,” Rawne told him. This is a family thing.”

  The devastating fire of the advancing stalk-tanks disintegrated another section of the ruined wall. Flame and stone debris showered into the sky. Crouching down, Mkoll, Kolosim and Bonin crawled back from what remained of the wall cover, still firing. Caober and Maggs dragged Hwlan between them.

  A third stalk-tank had now emerged from the undergrowth. This one had an oversized head turret, like a deformity, and appeared to be armed with a plasma weapon or a multi-laser. With that in play, the game really would be done. Cheering and howling, the Blood Pact, now two hundred-strong, was on its feet, advancing at the pace of the rattling tanks. Two minutes, and they’d be at the wall.

  “You’re a piece of work,” Maggs said to Mkoll. “I’ve known you about twenty-four hours and you get me into this shit.”

  “Just think what I could do if I was really trying,” said Mkoll.

  Another salvo hit the feeble barrier of stones, blowing a stretch of it onto them in a spray of stones and chipped fragments. Then the lead stalk-tank rose into view over the ruined wall, its gun-pod head lifted high on greasy hydraulics, smoke gusting from the exhaust vents of the heavy cannon.

  There was a loud, sucking woosh of air and something screamed in low over the heads of the cowering scouts. It struck the stalk-tank squarely between the gimbal-joints of its front pair of legs and exploded. The entire forward section of the stalk-tank vapourised in a blinding orange blur. Concussive overpressure flattened the scouts into the soil.