Gaunt looked at him. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Gereon requires liberation, sir. We’re dying. I don’t know what your intentions are here, sir, but whatever they are, it’s not what we want or need. I’d like you to reconsider your mission, perhaps even withdraw if necessary. I’d like you to contact your forces and coordinate a full counter-invasion.”
“I know you would,” Gaunt said. “We’ve been over this. Last night, I thought you understood—”
Landerson reached into his shabby jacket and produced an envelope. “I’m authorised to give you this, sir.”
“What is it?” asked Gaunt.
“An incentive, sir. An incentive to get you to aid us in the way we need aid. Right now.”
Gaunt opened the envelope. There were twenty hand-drawn paper bills inside, each one notarised and issued to the value of one hundred thousand crowns. War money. Bonds that promised to pay the bearer the full stated amount once Imperial rule and monetary systems had been re-established.
Gaunt put the bills back in their envelope.
“I wouldn’t for a moment describe this as a bribe, Landerson. I know we’re not talking in those terms. But I can’t accept this. There are three reasons. One: I have no way of withdrawing now or making contact with my superiors. I can’t coordinate any kind of deal. Two: even if I could, there is no deal to coordinate. At this time, my lord general, who I am privileged to serve, has no means or manpower to orchestrate the sort of mass operation you’re talking about. There will be no liberation, because there are no liberators to achieve it. Three—and this is the one I need you to truly understand—my work here is more important than that. More important, it pains me to tell you, than the lives of every citizen currently enslaved on this world. And that’s the up and down of it.”
Gaunt handed the envelope back to Landerson. Landerson looked as if he’d been slapped.
“Put them away, and let’s not speak of it again. Now, I’d like you to get my team into the town and get us face to face with your cell leader.”
A few metres away, in the treecover, Feygor glanced round at Brostin.
“You see that?” he whispered.
Brostin nodded.
“The bonds, I mean?”
Brostin nodded again. “I ain’t blind, Murt.”
“Did you see how much he just turned down?”
“A real lot,” said Brostin quietly.
“Feth yes! A real lot.”
Brostin shrugged. “So what?”
Feygor looked back at the envelope Landerson was tucking away in his jacket.
“I’m just saying, is all,” he muttered.
A filmy sheen of sunlight filled the air. Through the mists, they made their way along the limits of the woodland into the dykes and ditches of the Shedowtonland pastures. The day seemed opaque. Gereon’s parent star was hot and white, but the atmosphere was dirty with ash and particulates, and it deadened the pure light down to a tarnished amber.
Landerson had told Gaunt that the town was about two hours’ walk away by road, but the roadways were not an option. He mentioned patrols, and other hazards that Gaunt made a mental note to quiz Landerson about when the opportunity came. So they stuck to the watercourses and the overgrown embankments of the agricultural landscape. The going was slow, because the ditches were choked with weed. Horrors lurked there too in the foetid, slippery ooze. Vermin, again in great profusion, and wildly swarming insects. On two occasions, they were forced to turn back and find a new route because the dyke path ahead was blocked by a buzzing mass of insects, the overhanging vegetation bent over by the weight of their molten, dripping numbers. It had been common for farmers in this region to use entomo-culture techniques. Specially reared and hybridised swarms were employed seasonally to pollinate the field systems. Unmanaged since the invasion, these hive populations now roamed feral.
There were other horrors too. Rat-gnawed skulls bobbed and rocked in the pools, yellowed bones jutted from the mire. War dead had been dumped here, or refugees had fled here and died lingering, famished deaths as they hid from the patrols.
They walked for three hours, in virtual silence except for the occasional verbal or manual instruction. The mists began to burn off as the heat of the day increased, but the sky above, glimpsed through the overhanging brambles and gorseweed, slowly set into an arid, baked strata of yellow and ochre cloud, like the ribbed sands of an open desert. It was as if the touch of Chaos had caused the atmosphere to clot and fossilise.
Mkoll held up his hand and everyone stopped dead. A moment’s pause.
He looked back at Gaunt.
“Did you hear that?”
Gaunt shook his head.
“A horn of some kind. Not close, but clear.”
“That’s the town,” Landerson whispered. The carnyx sounding a labour change. We’re close. Within a kilometre.”
They continued for another ten minutes, down a particularly dark and overhung stretch of marshy ditch. Then Mkoll signalled again, this time adding the gesture that ushered them low. Everyone hunkered down, Beltayn pulling down Lefivre, who seemed slow to understand.
Mkoll, a shadow in the gloom, signed to Gaunt and indicated Bonin. Gaunt signed affirmative. The two scouts slipped away ahead of the group.
They waited for five minutes. Six. Seven. Gaunt distinctly thought he caught the sound of a combustion engine, a passing vehicle.
Then he heard two flicks on the vox-channel.
Gaunt waved the group on slowly. Their boots were sticking in the sucking black muck, and it was hard to walk without slopping the water. Landerson and his comrades seemed particularly inept. Gaunt saw Rawne’s look. He shook his head.
Mkoll and Bonin were waiting for them at the end of the ditch, where it opened out into an overgrown morass, some kind of pen or farming yard. The broken, peeling shapes of four large bunker silos faced them, festooned with climbing ivy and brightly flowered merrymach. Beyond the silos, a stand of trees followed the line of a track.
“There was a patrol,” whispered Mkoll. “But it’s gone by now.”
“Let’s get out of sight,” said Gaunt, and they hurried across the squelching morass into the nearest of the silos. It was dark and dusty inside, with a noxious, yeasty smell. The grain reserves heaped up against the backboards were rotten, and they all tried to ignore the weevils writhing through the mass. Mkoll sent Mkvenner and Bonin outside to cover the approach, and Larkin up onto the grain mound to take a firing position from the open slot of the feeder chute.
“feu know where we are?” Gaunt asked Landerson.
“Parcelson’s agri-plex. West of the town. This is where I should leave you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You want me to make contact for you? Then I have to get into the town and make arrangements. You stay here and—”
“No, we won’t,” said Gaunt flatly.
Landerson glanced away in frustration. “Do you want my help or don’t you?”
“It would be good.”
“Then listen to me. I can’t get a dozen people into Ineuron without having somewhere to hide them at the other end. It doesn’t work like that. I have to slip in, make contact, and then bring you all in.”
Gaunt thought about it. “Fine, but you’re not going alone. Mkoll and I are coming with you.” Something in Gaunt’s face made Landerson realise there was no room for negotiation.
“All right,” he sighed.
“How long will this take?”
“We should be back by tomorrow. Arrangements take time. Things will need to be checked. Remember, you’re asking me to make contact with people who don’t want to be found.”
Gaunt nodded. He called Mkoll and Rawne over to him and took them to one side. “I’m going with Landerson to arrange a handshake. Mkoll, you’ll be with me. Rawne, you’re in charge here. Keep everyone low and contained. Move only if you have to.”
“Got it.”
“Landerson’s guys are
in your care. If they’re not still breathing by the time I come back, you’d better have a feth of a good reason that can be vouched for by Mkvenner and Curth.”
“Understood,” said Rawne.
“If we’re not back by this time tomorrow, figure us as dead and move on. The mission will be yours then.”
“Rawne. Don’t come looking for us. Get out and get it running, try and establish contact of your own. I suggest you use Landerson’s men to get you to another town and try somewhere fresh. If Mkoll and I don’t come back, Ineuron’s probably a dead end.”
Rawne nodded. “Codes?” he asked.
“Code positive… ‘Silver’. Code negative… How about ‘Bragg’?”
“Works for me.”
“Go tell the others,” Gaunt said, and Rawne moved off.
“Sir—”
Mkoll began.
“Save it, old friend,” Gaunt smiled.
“Save what? You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“You were about to tell me that this was a job for the scouts, and that I should stay here.”
Mkoll almost grinned. He nodded.
“This is not the normal order of things,” said Gaunt. We’re all front-line here. Right?”
“Sir.”
“Unless you have some concerns about my abilities?”
“None whatsoever, colonel-commissar. But if this is a stealth insertion, I’m calling the play. Ditch your kit. Bare minimum. And switch one of your bolt pistols for the auto I gave you.”
“Agreed,” Gaunt said.
Gaunt took off his pack and went through it, transferring a few essential items into his uniform pockets. He took one of the bolt pistols out of his holster rig and slipped it, along with half his bolt-ammo allowance, into the pack. Then he gave the pack to Beltayn’s safekeeping.
Except for Larkin, none of the team was armed with their usual weapons. Ordinarily, the Tanith Ghosts carried mk III lasrifles, finished with solid nalwood stocks and sleeves, with a standard laspistol and silver warknife as back-up. For this mission, it had been decided they needed to be light and compact. They’d swapped their rifles for hand-modified versions of the so-called “Gak” issue weapon: wire-stocked mk III’s supplied to the Verghastites in the regiment. The wire stocks made the weapons lighter, and could be folded back to make them significantly shorter. The special modifications had also shortened the muzzle length, strengthened the barrel, and increased the capacity of the energy clip. These were insurgence weapons, tooled for commando work, with the power and range of a standard lasrifle but about a third less overall length. The Ghosts had kept their trademark warknives, of course, but the laspistols had also been ditched in favour of compact autopistols. These pistols lacked the stopping power of a lasweapon, but a lasweapon was hard to keep muffled and it was impossible to keep flash suppressed. Each autopistol had a fat drum silencer screwed to the muzzle.
Gaunt checked the fit of the suppressor on his auto, slipped four spare clips onto his coat pocket, then cinched the weapon into the adjustable holster he’d taken the bolter from.
One item remained for consideration: the long, flat object, wrapped in camo-cloth, that Gaunt had strapped across his shoulder blades. Reluctantly, he removed it and handed it to his adjutant.
“Look after this,” he told Beltayn.
“I certainly will, sir.”
“If I don’t come back, give it to Rawne.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gaunt, Mkoll and Landerson left the silos, and followed the rutted track down to the edge of the trees, turning west through the thickets and saplings that had flourished along the edge of the road. It was hot and dusty, and the sunlight had a strange, twisted quality that unsettled Gaunt. So many worlds he’d been to in his career, some Imperial, some wild, some touched by the archenemy of man. But he had never been to a world before where the archenemy held total sway. It was more distressing than any battle zone, any fire field or bombarded plain. More distressing than the pandemonium of Balhaut or Verghast or Fortis.
Here, he suspected everything. The mud on the path, the starving birds in the silent trees, the wild flowers glittering along the verges. He noticed the way the hedges and thickets were browning and dying, slain by the atmospheric dust. He noticed the pustular livestock shuddering in spare fields. The twitching vermin in every gulley and ditch. The very perfume of the place.
Gereon was not a world that could be trusted in any detail. It was not a world where Chaos could be fought back or displaced. Chaos owned every shred of it.
And how long, Gaunt wondered, before it owned him and his men too? He’d read his Ravenor, his Czevak, his Blandishments of Hand. He’d read a double-dozen treatises from the Inquisitorial ordos as recommended by the Commissariat. Chaos always tainted. Fact. It infected. It stained. Even into the most sturdy and centred, it seeped osmotically and corrupted. That was an ever-present danger on the battlefield. But here… here on what was by any measure a Chaos world… how long would it take?
Before departure, Gaunt had spoken to Tactician Biota, a man he trusted. Biota had reckoned—in consultation with the Ordo Malleus—that Gaunt’s men had about a month.
After that, no matter what they felt or thought about themselves, they would most likely be corrupted beyond salvation.
The thought made Gaunt wonder again about Gerome Landerson.
They hugged the roadside thickets as traffic approached. Motorised transports, growling in towards the town. An excubitor patrol that left them cowering in a foul-smelling gutter for fifteen minutes. A convoy of traders, and a line of high-sided carriers laden with grain drawn by puffing traction engines.
“Vittalers,” Landerson said of these last. “Food supplies from the midland bocage. They’ve maintained crop production up there, because the land is easily harvested. Grain is needed to supply the cookshops. The working population must be fed.”
Ineuron Town now lay below them, a pattern of habs and derelict mills, towers, ruined stacks and snail-horned temples that, Gaunt knew without asking, had been desecrated and reordained to god-things whose very murmured name would make him weep.
They faced the western palisades, a towering shield wall that circuited the western hem of the town. There were two gates, well guarded, accessed by metal-frame bridges that spanned the deep, murky ditch at the foot of the wall. In cover, in the leached undergrowth, Gaunt took out his scope and played it over the scene. The palisade was solid, but in poor repair, patched after the invasion. Excubitor teams sentried the gates. On the fighting platforms of the wall itself, he could make out troopers of the occupying force, glinting in the dead light like beetles as the weary sun caught their polished, form-fitting green combat armour.
Beyond the wall, inside the town, he saw distant manufactories, pumping black smoke into the air.
“What are those?” he asked.
“The meat foundries,” Landerson replied.
“Where they—?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right,” said Gaunt, and stowed his scope. “How do we get in?”
“The same way I got out,” said Landerson. “The vittalers.”
Landerson and his comrades had hopped on an empty, outbound wagon the night before. Now they had to stow away on a laden one.
The excubitors helped them. At the wall gate, the sinister guardians were checking tariff papers, stigmas and imagos carefully, and the long convoy of high-sided carriers had come to a standstill, tractors panting. Mkoll led them down to the roadway and, after checking both ways, hurried them over to the tail gate of the rear wagon. They monkeyed up the tailboards and dropped over into the grain piles.
“Bury yourselves!” Mkoll snapped, and they wriggled down into the moving mass of loose grain, spading it over their backs with open hands.
The carrier started to roll forward again, its traction engine puffing. Another halt. Steam hissed. More checks ahead. Then they were shunting forward again, and the shadow of the gate-mouth fell across
them.
Choking in loose grain, Gaunt listened hard. A challenge, an exchange of voices. The gurgling rasp of the excubitor voices. Questions.
Then a rattling of chains and the sniffling whine of hounds.
More orders, shouted.
They’re searching the carriers, Gaunt realised. They’re looking for scents. The hounds. The fetch-hounds.
His hand closed around the grip of his holstered autopistol and he thumbed the safety off. There were loose kernels of grain and chaff in his nostrils now. He felt a sneeze building.
Gaunt clamped his mouth shut. His throat constricted with the pressure. His eyes teared up. He tried not to breathe. Dust tickled his larynx.
A shouted order. A sudden jolt. They were moving again.
The panting chuff of the tractor was so loud that Gaunt risked a cough. Across the grain heap, Mkoll raised his head and glared at him.
They were in. Feth, they were in!
Landerson was already getting to his feet, the grain pouring off him like sand in a glass.
“What are you doing?” Mkoll hissed. “Get the feth down!”
“No time!” said Landerson. “Trust me, we can’t wait until we roll into the market. There’s only one section of roof low enough to exit on and it’s coming up fast!”
They scrambled up and got to the left-hand side of the carrier. Below, narrow low-hab streets hurtled by. Gaunt looked back. On the palisade, the guards were visible… looking outwards.
“Where?” Mkoll asked.
“Here! Quickly! It’s coming up!” Landerson urged. He pointed. A low roof section, two metres lower than the wagon’s side, badly-tiled.
“There! That or nothing else!”
They swung their legs over the edge of the wagon’s side, hands gripped to the lip. The street, five metres below, rushed past. Certain, broken death: a mis-jump, a glancing fall against the gutterwork…
“Now!” Landerson cried.
They jumped.
It was almost balmy now. The amber sunlight baked the soil, and clouds of drowsy insects murmured around the silos.
Rawne slithered down from his check on Larkin. Varl, sitting in a corner, looked at him.