Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  Chapter Eight

  Bastiel Silverstein slotted the last round into the chamber. The thought crossed his mind to save the last shot for himself. But he was too stubborn. With an almost weary resignation, Silverstein raised his weapon and fired his last shot.

  The bullet hissed down from the minaret fifty metres above street level, cutting diagonally over the jostle of tenement roofs. It traced towards the blockade of Ironclad that had sectioned off the city block and found its mark on an Archenemy raider hunched down behind the flank of his patrol vehicle. The round entered his forehead. With an explosive spray it exited out the back of his skull, his iron headpiece opening up like a flower in bloom.

  Silverstein ducked back under the balcony of the prayer tower. The expected volley of return fire clattered overhead in fierce reprisal. Placing down his empty autorifle, he sat his back against the smooth red clay of the balcony and sighed.

  ‘Anyone have any rounds left?’ he asked.

  The six resistance fighters around him shook their heads. They had emptied their canvas pouches and webbing. They were tired and spent. It was early morning, but the Medina suns were already searing the city with intense shimmering heat. Dehydration and latent heat exhaustion were beginning to set in.

  The siege itself had already taken the better part of five hours since the group had splintered away to run decoy. It had been a tight run and they had lost three on the way. At one point, it seemed like there were dogs and patrols waiting them for them around every bend. They had fled into the highest prayer tower in commercial Buraghand and there they had held the Archenemy at bay. To their dismay, the accuracy of their fire had driven the Archenemy into a protracted siege, cordoning off the block and gathering nearby patrol units.

  For the last hour, as ammunition had run low, they had resorted to simply giving up their spare rounds and allowing the huntsman to snipe away at the encircling foe. They guessed that Silverstein had fired at least two hundred rounds in that time. Many of them had been kill shots.

  They waited a while. The enemy fired no more shots as if testing, no, taunting them into firing back. But they had nothing left and it would not be long before the Archenemy realised that.

  ‘How long do you think it will be before they roll up a tank to flatten this whole thing?’ asked Goa, a foundry worker in his late sixties. Sunstroke had affected him the worst and he spoke with his eyes closed, his head lolling.

  ‘Death by artillery would be lucky. They won’t give us that luxury,’ Silverstein replied matter-of-factly.

  As if on cue, they heard the gate at the base of the tower being breached with some sort of a piston ram. Voices began shouting harsh words in the dark tongue.

  ‘Here they come,’ shrugged Silverstein. The six others began to fumble for their spike bayonets but Silverstein sat without a sound, hands on knees.

  The huntsman was feeling strangely morose and eerily complacent. He wished he could feel the same motivating fear that the others felt, but he couldn’t. The sounds of the Archenemy ascending the spiral staircase of the shaft should have elicited some panic if not terror, but he didn’t feel either. Perhaps his three decades of Inquisitorial service had deadened his nerves. Perhaps his adolescent years as a ‘beater’, driving out large carnivores for his senior huntsmen on his home world of Veskipine, had hardened him. Boys tended to mature fast when they spent their youth flushing tusked lupines from their dens with little more than a switch cane. Most things just didn’t affect him. Instead he popped the ivory button of his top coat pocket and drew a rolled stick of tabac. He ran it under his nose, wishing he had time to smoke one more.

  The Ironclad thundered up the upper gallery landing. They surged out from the stairwell, baying and snorting for blood. For the first time, Silverstein saw them in the daylight. They were wild, bestial men roughly shod in a disarray of hauberks, breastplates, jack plate, brigandine or splint. Some brandished machine pistols, others lasguns. Silverstein even spotted a flak-musket somewhere.

  They crashed onto the balcony. Silverstein closed his eyes, unwilling to examine them so close with his bioptics. He didn’t want the last thing he saw to be a statistical analysis of the Archenemy.

  ‘Tung etai!’

  The killing blow did not come. A voice had barked them to a halt. Silverstein had coordinated enough times with the Imperial Guard to recognise an officer’s authority when he heard it. Slowly, the huntsman opened his eyes.

  The Archenemy stood at bay within arm’s reach. They towered around him like a curtain of iron. Silverstein was not sure why, but his bioptics flickered and washed with static. His augmetics had never failed before, almost as if the circuitry could not bear to siphon such insidious visual imagery into his brain.

  Staring into the eyes of Chaos, the six Canticans dropped their rifles and sank to their knees. Without the adrenaline of battle to fortify them, their nervous systems just gave out. It was just all too much.

  ‘Kehmor avul, Kehmor eshek avul,’ ordered the Chaos officer in a strangely lilting, free-flowing dark tongue. The minor warlord was a monstrous creature. Tall and sinuous, he was clad in a cuirass of nailed splint that tapered down into an armoured apron, giving him the frame of a rearing viper. Unlike his subordinates, the metal banding of the skull-piece that enclosed his head was patterned. It formed a symmetrical braid that ran down the centre of his head, some sort of rank, Silverstein surmised, that placed him as leader of this raiding party.

  The underlord leaned in to examine them, tilting his head curiously. Without warning he lunged forwards and gripped Goa’s throat. The elderly resistance fighter didn’t react, even as he was dragged up to his feet. With one swift overhand motion the Ironclad hurled the man over the balcony.

  Silverstein stood up. He did not want to die sitting down. The commander turned on him. He snagged the huntsman up by the lapels of his leather coat and forced Silverstein’s torso over the balcony railing. Silverstein looked down at the fifty-metre drop. On the pavement below, Goa was laid open in a halo of blood.

  But the Ironclad did not throw him. Instead, he paused, running his thumb along the collar of Silverstein’s coat. The Inquisitorial service badge, a delicate little pin of silver, winked under the sunlight.

  ‘You are a watchdog of the dead Emperor?’ the Ironclad leader slithered in Low Gothic.

  Silverstein clenched his jaw and said nothing.

  ‘Orday anghiari inquiszt’, the underlord said to his men. Judging by the crestfallen reactions, Silverstein surmised that they had just been denied the privilege of summary execution.

  ‘I am Naik Ishkibal. Naik is my rank. Ishkibal is my blood name. You may not call me by either. To do so is sacrilege and I will have to kill you. I tell you this because I do not want to kill you yet. Understand?’ His voice had a metallic resonance that carried the threat well.

  ‘Stick your fist up your own rear,’ spat Silverstein.

  ‘Good. Good. You learn quickly, watchdog. Let’s see how long we can keep you around for. I think my warlords may want to have a word with you.’

  ‘I’m not an inquisitor. I’m a game hunter,’ replied Silverstein.

  ‘All the same. You wear the pin, you have the answers,’ chuckled the underlord. He turned to his subordinates and rattled off a series of orders in the dark tongue.

  The Ironclad seized up the resistance fighters, laying in with punches and kicks as they did so. With heavy hands they began to bind hands and feet with wire cord.

  ‘Amel buriash!’ snapped the underlord. ‘I need them in one piece for interrogation. I will eat the face of anyone who bleeds them without my permission.’

  It was the third night they had spent in hiding. Roth was laced in blood, some of it his own, most of it not. Brick dust, grit and grime coated his armour in chalky enamel the colour of filthy teeth. Exhaustion had exceeded his physical limits, his tendons felt disconnected and his mu
scles throbbed.

  Of his whereabouts, Roth was also vague. He guessed that he was hiding in the ventilation shaft of some semi-demolished tenement in Upper Buraghand. He couldn’t even be sure of that, as they had dared not stay in any one location for too long. The roving murder squads were thorough in their patrols. Once, on the second day, they had nearly been caught. Desperately hungry, they had ventured into a semi-demolished granary processing plant in search of provisions. Instead they walked straight into an Ironclad patrol. They had barely escaped. Roth had canine bite-marks on his greaves to prove it.

  Yet his suffering was purely physical. Roth’s mind was still reeling from the system shock of his past seventy-two hours. Within that time he had lost Bastiel Silverstein, his unit of Cantican guerrillas had been decimated and now he was hiding in the crawl-space of a tenement basement, hoping he would not be discovered and shot. To add venom to his laments, he could not fathom who would hire the Orphratean Purebred to orchestrate such a premeditated ambush. He had been down every cognitive path, trying to piece together an answer, but nothing logical or even remotely rational could be gleaned. The only plausible explanation was betrayal. Betrayal from within his own cadre. In Roth’s current state, that didn’t bear thinking about.

  Through the pandemonium of his thoughts, the only clear decision was that he could not flee Cantica aboard his lander. Although Celeminé had been adamant about withdrawal, Roth had refused to leave the planet, thoroughly defeated and no closer to the truth than when he started. Roth was stubborn when he wanted to be, and the Task Group was under his command. They had stayed, if only to salvage some semblance of a mission objective.

  ‘I’ve brought you some soup to share,’ said Celeminé. She was crawling along the tunnel towards him, one hand running along the overhead drainage pipes for balance. In her other hand she proffered a steaming cup canteen. ‘It’s only dehyd but it’s cold tonight.’

  Roth nodded his thanks and cradled the cup. He sipped it and rested his head back. The warm metal felt so good in his frost-numbed hands. The soup, despite being Guard ration, was not bad either. Thick and salty, it just reminded him of a rich grox consommé. But only just.

  Celeminé settled next to Roth, wedging her boots against the opposite wall as she rested her back against the cramped confines. Perhaps it was his fatigue, but under the phosphorescent glow of gas burners she looked especially beautiful. The chemical lighting made the profile of her face positively porcelain. Even the ring in the centre of her lip, something Roth had never been fond of, gave her mouth a particularly innocent pout. Roth didn’t even realise he was staring.

  ‘We can’t stay like this, you know,’ Celeminé urged.

  ‘Twelve more hours. If Silverstein hasn’t voxed us by then…’ Roth trailed off.

  ‘Roth. We can’t stay here. I’m sick of running and hiding. We have no food, we’re low on water. We transit back to the Carthage and allow the Conclave to decrypt Delahunt’s signet. It’s reasonable and it makes sense.’

  ‘In any other time or place, I would be inclined to agree with you, madame. But with so much at stake, we cannot leave Cantica until we are certain that the Old Kings will not fall into Archenemy hands. We haven’t done enough here.’

  Roth was not sure how much of his reply was false bravado and how much of it was simply his stubborn streak. But he just could not allow it. His mentor, the late Inquisitor Liszt Vandevern, had disparaged Roth as being too impetuous and far too possessed by emotion. Initially, Roth’s lack of the rhythmic rationality so common amongst inquisitors almost cost him his sponsorship to full inquisitor. But throughout the years, Roth’s gut instinct had stood him in good stead. Now his instincts told him he could not flee back to the Conclave with his tail between his legs, on account of two demoralising gunfights. Infiltrating a Chaos-held world, Roth had expected to be shot at. Indeed, it was part of his Inquisitorial duty to be shot at. Or maybe he just wasn’t thinking straight.

  ‘Roth, this is idiocy. I’m sorry but it is and I won’t tell it any other way. At the very least, we have to move because we can’t stay here,’ Celeminé protested.

  Roth noticed that when she was upset, she could not look Roth in the eyes. Instead she looked away and bit the tips of her fingers.

  ‘I promised Silverstein I would wait for his vox in the tenement district. I can’t move out of vox range.’

  ‘Roth. Please. You said it yourself, we haven’t done enough here. As much as it pains me to say it, this can’t be about Silverstein. The Conclave has ordered us to establish whether the relics exist on Cantica.’

  At her words, Roth expelled a ragged breath. She was right, and Roth knew it. They could leave now, or push on with the original mission. Roth could not leave, so that left him with only one option. ‘We’ll go,’ he relented.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve said that, because Captain Pradal has a wonderful plan!’

  Roth laughed for the first time in four days. ‘Please, do tell.’

  ‘Have you heard artillery in the past few days?’

  ‘No,’ Roth admitted.

  ‘Well I have. And so has the good captain. Which meant the Archenemy were still fighting. Evidently this would suggest Imperial forces are still active in the region. Captain Pradal risked raising vox contact on an Imperial frequency. He’s very clever with comms and I don’t think the Archenemy were able to tag on our location for long enough to get a fix. Unless we want them to.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he made contact. There is a battalion of Cantican Guardsmen, fighting hard about twenty kilometres north-west of Buraghand city.’

  ‘So we proceed on foot for twenty kilometres through enemy territory?’

  ‘No. Here’s where the plan gets good.’

  The murder squad thundered down the empty street, predatory machines roaring from brute engines of diesel. Two trucks painted off-white, escorted by two fighting patrol vehicles growling with throaty exhaust. The FPVs were squat, hog-nosed four-wheelers with an open passenger side chassis. A side-mounted heavy stubber panned out from the exposed opening, the gunner hunched down behind a mantlet. Since the Atrocities, the distinctive shuddering scream of an FPV engine was the most feared sound of the night. Resistance fighters and refugees were right in coining them ‘preds and prowlers’.

  Ripping down the war-torn streets of tenement quarter nine, the vehicles rolled to a juddering halt outside a tenement stack. The whole frontal façade of the building had sagged away from its structural frame like wet paper, exposing girders and twisted struts.

  Someone had been broadcasting a distress signal on an Imperial frequency. A frequency that had been compromised since the Ironclad had overrun CantiCol forces. The signal had been pin-pointed to that very building.

  The murder squads dismounted from their vehicles, checking weapons and cinching ammo belts the moment their boots hit the ground. The full complement of two squads, twenty killers in total, sprinted up the short stoop of steps towards the front entrance. Ironically, even though the wall around it had been demolished, the door in its door frame stood intact and alone. The squad leader – a Naik – bashed off the lock with his mace-gauntlet and the others formed a tactical column after him, weapons raised.

  Inside, shafts of moonlight lanced in between the puncture wounds of masonry. A third of the tenement had fallen away like a cross-section cut. On the seventh storey, a child’s bassinet balanced off a jagged edge of flooring, one wrought iron leg suspended over empty space.

  The Naik homed in on the signal with auspex in hand. The signal was vibrant and clear, no more than a fifty metre radius away. Soon, he expected another dissident cell would learn the error of sustained broadcasts in an enemy zone. The Naik trained a heavy-calibre machine pistol into the geometric shadows ahead.

  The murder squad sloshed down a communal corridor. Somewhere, a drainage pipe had ruptured, filling the bottom level
with ankle-deep water, a soupy mixture of ash and sewerage. Most of the tenement doors had been torn off their hinges, the insides thoroughly ransacked. Furniture spilled out into the hallway, soggy, brittle wood crunching underfoot.

  The auspex’s chirping reached a shrill crescendo. Ahead, a locked utility door barred the way into the tenement’s boiler basement. The vox beacon was broadcasting from within there, of that they were certain.

  A piston ram, thirty kilograms of solid metal, was brought up from the rear of the line. The murder squads made final weapons checks. They were hungry for the kill, so much so that agitated clicking sounds came from behind their face bindings. An Ironclad swung the battering ram back with both hands and drove it into the door. The wood gave way like crunching bone.

  The murder squad stormed the boiler room. The Naik entered first, swinging his pistol back and forth for a target. But the second he stepped into the room he noticed two things.

  One, the room was empty except for a single military vox set. It was planted underneath a pool of moonlight, chattering away on the highest vox channel setting. Two, the door had been rigged up to a rudimentary pulley trap. A thread of wire fastened to the door had been hooked up to an overhead cinch, which in turn pulled taut on a brace of grenades. The stoved-in door, which now lay a good ten metres away, had snapped the pin loose with an audible clink.

  By the time the Naik noticed, it was already far too late. He didn’t bother to call out a warning, he just turned on his heels and tried to push his way back out through the door. He was nowhere near fast enough.

  The grenades exploded with the sound of clapping concrete. Sixty thousand anti-personnel ball bearings shredded the boiler room. In an instant the plastered walls eroded into a perforated sponge. Of the Archenemy who had stormed the room, most were caught in a solid curtain of expanding shrapnel. The after-shock blew out every window of the tenement block that had not already been broken, and the windows of tenements several streets way.