by Dan Abnett
'Where's Doyl's group?' Milo asked.
'Dug in, under fire. They're pinned,' said Baffels. 'Where the feth is this heat coming from now?'
'To the left! There!' Feygor growled.
Bragg yanked his aim around and twisted the heavy cannon on its stand. Mktag tried to move with him. They were already onto their third drum of ammo.
Bragg fired in the direction Feygor had indicated.
'Try again, Bragg!' Feygor and Mktag cried out in unison. Now I understood the darkly ironic nickname.
Bragg fired another burst and then the belt ran out and Mktag was a few seconds late lining up the next box. Bragg shot a look in my direction. He smiled at me, trying to look reassuring. Try again, Bragg, I thought. Enemy fire was whipping all around him, and he just sat there, grinning a half-arsed grin that was supposed to perk me up and make me feel all right. Colonel Corbec had told him to look after me and he didn't want to let me down.
'It'll be okay,' he said. 'We'll be through this in a minute.'
Even today sixty years later, I have a lasting memory of Trooper Bragg at that moment. His simplicity and his genuine sense of optimism. Simply his courage. I have no way of knowing what became of Trooper Bragg. I hope fate was kind to him.
'We need that flamer!' Baffels yelled, firing his weapon alongside Milo now. The heavy cannon opened up once more.
Brostin said something incomprehensible and tried to poke a cleaning rod down the mouth of the burner.
I crawled over to him. Though it was much bigger and heavier, the flamer resembled in principle the sort of heat-gun we sometimes used to work metals and ductile plastics. On a commission for House Anko two years before, I had been plagued by a heat-gun that had regularly refused to light.
'It's not the nozzle,' I said.
'It is so the fething nozzle!' spat Brostin. 'It's dust in the fething nozzle! Get the feth out of my face! You shouldn't even be here!'
'It's not the nozzle,' I repeated firmly 'It's the secondary igniter. The fuel pipe is twisted or blocked and nothing's getting through to light the pilot'
'Feth off and away with you!'
Ignoring him, I reached out and yanked the secondary fuel pipe out of its plug. Liquid fuel dribbled out over my hands.
'Get off it! Get him off me!' Brostin yelled. I was sure he was about to hit me.
I grabbed a cleaning rod and inserted it into the pipe, dragging out a fat plug of fuel-soaked matter. 'Now try it!'
Brostin looked murderously at me and reconnected the pipe. He squeezed the burner's heavy trigger bar and a small fireball coughed out ot the nozzle. The igniter flame suddenly lit up; a hard, blue finger of heat.
'Feth me!' said Brostin.
'Don't mention it,' I said.
Brostin swung round with the active weapon and fired it over the barricade. Spurts of ferocious yellow fire swished over the rubble. I heard screams.
With the flamer firing, Milo, Feygor and Baffels dropped back into cover and fitted long, silver blades to their weapons.
'Is it going to come to that?' I asked the boy Milo.
'Who knows?' he said.
Baffels called out. Apparently there was now crossfire from Doyl's wing. The flamer had broken the deadlock. For all I could tell, the Emperor himself might just have arrived on a goat. I had no idea how they could read the chaotic situation like that, even with comlinks. It was just madness. Rocks and dust and flying jags of lethal, coherent light.
'Go!' said Baffels. I didn't know what 'go' meant, but suddenly Feygor, Milo, Brostin and Baffels were gone. They leapt up and charged into the smoke. I could hear furious cracking, and the breathy hush of the flamer.
Then Mktag rose from his prone position like he had been jerked up from behind by his webbing. He twisted and fell over. For a moment, I didn't understand what was happening. It seemed as if Mktag was just behaving stupidly mucking around, kicking with his legs.
But Mktag had been shot. Right there in front of me. He fell at my feet, his heels drumming the ground, his hands spasming. A tiny plume of smoke spiraled up from the little black hole a las-round had made in his forehead. There was no blood. The shot had cauterised the entry wound and it didn't have enough power to exit his skull. Its heat and force had been expended getting into his cranium and incinerating his brain.
It was quite simply the most awful thing I have ever seen. His body thrashing, trying to live, the brain extinguished. I think if there had been more blood, more obvious physical damage, I could have coped better.
But it was just such a tiny hole.
And then he was utterly still, and that was the worst part of all.
I was still staring at Mktag when the others retumed. Bragg had laid his cape over the corpse, and Larkin was crouched beside it, brokenly reading a rite of grace from the back pages of his Imperial lnfantryman's Uplifting Primer. The battle was done, the pocket of Zoican resistance wiped out.
I never did see even a glimpse of the enemy.
IT WAS DUSK when we returned to the city. Doyl and Baffels carried Mktag all the way. Bragg and Brostin tried to buck me up, claiming my improvisation with the faulty flamer had saved the day. By the time we reached the curtain wall, their version of events had me as the hero, winning the entire encounter They were generous souls, these Ghosts. Brostin in particular had no reason to admit I'd been right. They realised, I suppose, that I was a civilian and they'd taken me too far. They felt sorry for me, I'd survived their rite of passage and acquitted myself well.
I suppose I should have been flattered by the inclusion. Honoured to earn the respect of such warriors.
But Mktag's death had unsettled me profoundly. The memory of it had burned into my brain so deeply that I was sure it had left a little, smoking hole in my skull. I was no soldier despite what Brostin and Bragg cheerfully said. I had no basis of experience with which to deal with this shock, no inoculation, no Fundamental Training brutalisation to take the sting away.
I was an artist, for the God-Emperor's sake! A soft, protected artist from a secure world where death happened behind closed doors or drawn curtains. For all I tried to make my work contain such eternal concepts as truth and grace, nobility and humanity they were empty gestures. My work was empty. I despised every thing I had ever done, all the artistic triumphs I had been so pleased with. They were nothing, barren, vapid. Devoid of any real human truth.
Real truth was out there in the shattered outhabs of Vervunhive. Real truth was waiting and silence, courage and stealth. Real truth was the ability to function in extremes. To fire a cannon and miss and try again. To fix a silver blade to the end of a las·weapon and leap from safety into a shroud of smoke, prepared as you did so to really use that makeshift spear.
Real truth was as real as a tiny hole in a man's forehead.
I had not been scared during the patrol. I had been bored, horrified, perplexed, impatient. But at no point had I actually succumbed to terror. Once we were back, fear consumed me. I shook I could barely speak.
I sat, swathed in Bragg's camo-cape, in the doorway of the billet. Troopers moved around me, getting on with their work. I wondered why they didn't seem scared. If they were scared, and they were still just getting on with it, that was truly terrifying.
I saw Bragg talking with Corbec and pointing in my direction. Corbec disappeared, but a few moments later the young trooper, Milo, came to find me.
'Colonel Corbec wants me to take you to the Medical Hall.'
'I'm fine.'
'I know. But he wants the medics to check you out. You've had quite a day, Mister Thuro.'
WE WALKED through the battered streets as night fell. The stars came out, fighting to shine through the smoke. High above, moonlight glinted on the hulls of the vast warships in low orbit.
'How do you do it?' I asked the boy.
'Do what, sir?'
'Shut it out? The fear? The trauma? Did they beat it out of you in basic training?'
Milo looked at me strangely. 'Who ever said
we shut it out?' he asked.
'But you can't... ' I began. 'You can't live like that. Continue to live, I mean, day in, day out, with that kind of stress, that kind of fear. You must cope somehow. Shut it out.'
He shook his head. 'I'm scared every minute of my life.'
'But how do you keep going?'
Milo shrugged. 'I've never thought about it. It's just what we do. What we're asked to do. We're Imperial Guard.'
I have never forgotten those words.
I HAD TO wait an hour or so in the Medical Hall until I was seen. A kindly old doctor, the man Dorden that Corbec had been looking for, got to me eventually and pronounced me fit. He offered me something to calm me, but I turned him down. I asked after Gaunt, and he told me I could go and see for myself.
He led me through the wards of the Medical Hall. We passed the beds of soldiers, many of them Ghosts, wounded in the war. Dorden stopped frequently to check on them. He told me names - Mkoll, Bonin, Wheln, so many I forgot - and recounted the circumstances of their injuries.
I wanted to see Gaunt again before he died. I wanted to see him now I had seen the kind of men he had bred.
A group of men and women were waiting in the dim hallway outside his chamber when we arrived. A few Ghosts, but mostly Vervunhivers. Dorden knew them all. There was a big, grim-looking miner that Dorden called Mister Kolea; a one-eyed factory boss in declining years who introduced himself as Agun Soric; a badly wounded Vervun Primary Captain called Daur; a fierce-looking gang-girl called Criid who was accompanied by a young Tanith trooper
'Why are they here?' I asked Dorden.
'They want to see Gaunt.'
'Why?'
'Because they've all accepted the Act of Consolation, them and hundreds like them,' Dorden whispered. 'They'll be joining our regiment and coming with us, God-Emperor help them.'
'Why have they come here?'
'To be close to Gaunt. He's the reason most of them have signed up. They want to be here if he lives... or if he dies. They've signed their lives to his cause. It matters to them.'
The motley band keeping the vigil outside Gaunt's room seemed content to wait there, but I went forward and slipped into his room. No one stopped me. The plastic drapes were drawn, and I was about to sweep them aside when I realised the beloved colonel-commissar already had company.
I paused in the doorway, peering in through the curtain. A lean, dangerous-looking man in black Tanith fatigues was sitting at Gaunt's bedside in the blue gloom. He was a major. Major Rawne, as I found out later.
I knew I shouldn't be there. I'd felt awkward that morning eavesdropping on Corbec, but this was far more invasive.
Still, I couldn't draw myself away.
I listened.
'You dare die,' Rawne was muttering at Gaunt. 'You dare die on me, you fething bastard. Die now and I'll never forgive you. It can't be this way I won't let it.'
I started to back away, realising I had heard too much.
'If you're going to die, it's got to be me that kills you. Me, you hear you bastard? Me. Otherwise, it isn't fair. I've got to be the one. I need to be the one. Not some Chaos bullet. You live, you bastard. You wake up and live so that I can kill you properly.'
He suddenly looked up and saw I was there. He rose and thundered towards me. 'What the feth are you doing?'
I back off. He'd balled his fists and his face was readably furious despite the half-light. He was going to hurt me.
'Who the feth are you?' he snarled, slamming me against the wall.
'Great God-Emperor!' I stammered. 'Look-'
He turned, He saw what I saw.
Ibram Gaunt's eyes were open.
I NEVER GOT to speak with Gaunt. Once he was well enough, they moved him to a medical frigate, And I barely saw any of the Tanith after that either My transport back to NorthCol had been arranged, and a message from House Chass urged me to start on my work.
I missed three deadlines, and risked the wrath of Lady Chass. I scrapped five working models, and destroyed two works in the very last stages. They weren't right.
Eventually, the piece was cast in steel. I wasn't much satisfied with that either. To me, it had no truth, no real truth. But House Chass couldn't be denied any longer.
It stands today in the centre of what was once Vervunhive's Commercia. The hive has been levelled, and most of the land turned back to pasture and grassland. Shards of rock, bits of bone and spent shell cases can still be found on the windy slopes amongst the grasses.
It's become my most famous work. There's irony. To say I was really, truly pleased with it, I'd have to raise a hand, like Feygor. I've done so much since that seems to me more important. But you can't chose what you leave behind.
A single Imperial Guardsman, cast in steel rendered down from the broken weapons left in the ruins of the hive. It's not even specifically a Tanith Ghost, and it has no special likeness. One fist is raised, not in victory but in determination, a gesture like the one Baffels made. There is a set to the shoulders that resembles Colonel Corbec's relaxed stance, a set to the head that always reminds me of Trooper Bragg's reassuring backwards glance. There's Milo's honesty in it, I like to think, and Rawne's venom. It has, like all statues, Mktag's awful stillness.
It's called the Chass Memorial, and on the plinth it announces in large chiselled letters that House Chass paid for its construction in memory of the fallen of Vervunhive. In very much smaller letters, it says it is a work by Thuro of NorthCol. It stands on a grassy slope, guarding the necropolis that was once called Vervunhive. It may stand forever.
There's nothing of Gaunt himself in it, because I never knew him, Like I said, I never knew any of them, not really. But his men are in it, so I suppose he is too.
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