They reached a main thoroughfare that thrust east up through the gloomy city. A river of Imperial tanks and light armour was flowing inland, heading towards the gourd-shaped super-towers at K’ethdrac’s heart. Vs of fighter aircraft skimmed up the line above the tanks. The city district on the far side of the thoroughfare, a region of dark towers and strange, crested structures the colour of tungsten, was being pummelled into extinction by pinpoint orbital fire. The ribbons of light, eye-wateringly bright, jabbed down through the stained cloud cover and, with chest-quaking concussion, reduced habitation blocks to swirling storms of ash.
Back the way they had come, more titans stalked the burning skyline, visible from the waist up behind the roofscape as if they were wading a river. They were booming silhouettes against the amber twilight, their hands flickering luminously with laser discharge.
To Criid, it seemed like the entire city was on fire.
Another wave of drop ships began pouring in overhead.
On the debris-Strewn pavements, AT 137 encountered a fast-moving stream of Guardsmen, a Kolstec regiment, pushing inland behind the armour thrust. There were hundreds of Kolstec, all regular troops moving quickly and urgently, with drilled precision and fixed, unruffled faces. Kexie and Sobile spoke briefly to their white-haired commander, who indicated something on a hand chart.
“Listen up!” Sobile shouted as they returned. “Listen to your sergeant. He speaks with the voice of the Emperor!”
Criid wasn’t sure Driller Kexie did speak with the voice of the Emperor. From the look Kexie gave Sobile, Kexie wasn’t sold on the idea either.
“Moving in support,” Kexie drawled, pitching his voice above the factory clatter of the tanks. The enemy is thick in this district, so we’re going in with the Kolstecs to clear it. By squads, now. Watch closely for my signals, and watch the Kolstec officers too. I don’t want no soft-shit fraghead mistakes from you morons.”
The sergeant had adopted Sobile’s generic term for them which, while unflattering, was one step up from “scalps’, the lowest of the low, the newest of the new, heads fresh shaved by the Munitorum barber.
The sergeant did a time check, and they moved off. Criid was sure his chron was broken, because there was something wrong with the time check, but there was no pause to adjust it. Halfway down the next cross street, gunfire lit up from a towering grey building that was already extensively ablaze. Flames gushed from the upper storey window slits. Multiple cannon fire ripped across the street and mowed down the front ranks of the Kolstec advance. Everybody scrambled for cover. Fire was returned, but too many Kolstecs were caught out in the open, and were simply scythed down like corn.
Criid got into cover as the full force of the street fight got going. The Guard sections opened up with everything they had, and the hidden enemy seemed to increase its rate of fire to match. Criid took a shot or two, but was forced down by a series of close impacts that chopped deep grooves in the stone wall above him. He could feel the fear rising in him again, the trapped, pinned terror that had found him in the shell hole.
It was at that point it started to rain bodies.
It was so horrific, so unreal, he didn’t believe it at first. The living bodies of men in full kit were dropping out of the sky and hitting the street or cracking off the faces of buildings. Each impact was shockingly solid: a writhing, living man struck flagstones and instantly became a splattered mass of gore wrapped in split cloth. There were screams, cut short.
Only when Criid understood what he was witnessing did he believe it. An incoming drop ship had been hit by enemy fire and the side of its fuselage torn off. As it shrieked down on its swan dive, the troops inside were wrenched out by the slipstream and showered across the streets.
Criid saw the stricken drop ship for a second before it hit a tower and vapourised. Some of the men falling from it seemed to be jumping.
The bodies rained down, striking like bundles of ripe fruit. Several Kolstecs on the ground were hit and killed by falling bodies. There was an abominable stink of raw meat and excrement. A fog of blood steamed off the street.
It made Criid gag.
He bent low and rubbed at his face, feeling the sharp pain of the whip-cut on his jaw. He began to murmur the I Beseech again and took a look at his chron. It wasn’t wrong after all. The time check hadn’t been wrong at all.
His mind refused to accommodate it, but he’d only been a Guardsman for an hour. It didn’t fit. It seemed like days—vile, barbaric days—had passed, but just an hour before, he’d been clean and tidy, riding the platform hoist up through the two metre-thick carrier deck with the rest of AT 137, while the military bands played and the dropships lit their engines.
One hour. One hour of insanity and blood. One hour more savagely extreme than all the other hours of his life added together.
And he hadn’t even seen the enemy yet.
ENEMY COUNTRY
I
Even at a distance, they could hear the fetch-hounds baying in the pens inside the town. The dogs could smell them coming. They shivered the pale daylight with their yowling.
“Dogs,” remarked Ludd, crunching across the dry moorland grasses.
“Big dogs,” Varl corrected with an unhappy look. “Fething big dogs.”
Ludd looked over at Gaunt. “Have they got our scent, sir?”
“Oh, I’m sure they have,” Gaunt said, “but it’s more than that.” He nodded in the direction of the horizon. Far away, across the rolling moors, there was a tremble of light in the west, a fluttering wash of radiance brighter and whiter than the wan daylight and the overcast sky. It was as if a giant mirror was being waggled just behind the horizon to catch and dance the sun.
It was coming from the coast, four hundred kilometres away. It was coming from a place that Navy Intel had named K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir, one of the eighteen primary objectives earmarked on Gereon.
“That’s one feth of a song and dance,” Varl murmured, looking at the light show.
Cantible was not one of the eighteen primary objectives. It wasn’t even one of the six hundred and thirty secondary objectives, or one of the five thousand and seventeen second phase objectives. On High Command’s complex logistical diagrams, it appeared amongst a list labelled Tertiary/recon. Light scout, reconnaissance and intruder regiments were being dropped forward of the main assaults to secure bridgeheads and clear lines of advancement. Cantible, the municipal and administrative hub for an agri-belt province called Lowensa, defended one of the main west-east running corridors between K’ethdrac and the Lectica heartlands.
But even that wasn’t the main reason they had been sent there.
Gaunt took a look left and right. The entire strength of the Tanith First was advancing in a wide spread across the rolling grassland from their drop-site higher in the moors. Supporting light armour was chugging to meet them along a pasture route to the south.
There were woods ahead, then broad stretches of farmland, and then the town itself. Gaunt could see the chubby finger of the guildhall tower above the trees.
He’d always vowed to return. He’d always vowed to come back and deliver what the resistance and the people of Gereon had deserved from day one, from the very first Day of Pain. He had no idea what Day of Pain it was now, though he estimated somewhere in the low two thousands. Far too long. Far too late, perhaps.
Gaunt hadn’t visited this part of the country on his previous stay, so he couldn’t compare directly, but it seemed like everything had fallen into dismal ruin. Everything was spoiled somehow, stained, contaminated. The sky, the ground, the vegetation, the weather. The noxious imprint of the invaders permeated everything.
It was early spring in this part of Gereon, but the sky was hot and frowzy. The moorland grasses were yellow and parched. There was a dull, persistent crackle in the air as if the sun was sizzling. Radiation was spiking. Vox links were wandering and full of squeals and phantom voices.
The woods ahead looked like they consisted of eshel
and talix, but they had grown wrong and sickly, sprouting deformed limbs out of true. Leaf cover looked autumnal, in its shades of red and yellow. The seasons of the world had been unravelled.
The farmland was also corrupted. Vile black crops, the product of intensive xenoculture, covered the far side of the valley. Gaunt could smell the maturing fruit. Other patches, overworked and rendered barren by chemicals, lay scorched and brown in the sun.
Rusty pink crusts of nitrate scummed the edges of the blighted acreage. The fallow fields and dead land had a stink to them too.
“Untillable,” Cirk murmured as she gazed at the fields. Her heavy flak coat was pulled in around her. They bleed us dry and make it all Untill.”
Gaunt nodded, although he was still not comfortable having her around. He’d told Faragut to keep “specialist” Cirk with the rear echelons, but both she and Faragut had wandered out to the front of the line the moment the drop ships emptied.
“We’ll have to burn it all,” Gaunt told Rawne.
“The farm land?”
“The crops. All of it.”
“Brostin will be pleased. Presumably you want this to happen once we’ve taken the town? The fields catching fire will be a bit of a giveaway that we’re here.”
Gaunt gestured into the breeze, as if he could catch hold of the travelling sound. “Listen to the dogs, Eli. They know we’re here.”
II
So this, Caffran thought, is the famous Gereon at last. The site of the one big Ghost operation most of the Ghosts hadn’t taken part in. The ones who had gone, and come back alive, had spoken of it afterwards in secretive, reverential tones, as if it was a dark mystery they wished to forget.
It wasn’t all that. Just another place that the Archenemy had fethed up. Of course, it must have been hard digging in here, hiding with the resistance on an occupied world for all that time. Caffran didn’t doubt that. Maybe that was why Rawne, Varl and the rest spoke about it as if it was some exclusive trial or initiation that they had gone through and no one else had managed. The members of the Sturm mission still kept themselves a little bit aloof.
No, Caffran didn’t doubt it had been a tough tour, but other things in the cosmos were tough too. Missing Tona for all that time, for example, and friends like Bonin, Varl and Larks. Thinking they were dead and never coming back. Thinking Gaunt was dead. Command had taken the Ghosts apart because of that, and only put them back together again when he returned like a…
“Ghost,” Caffran said aloud, softly. The woodland around him was quiet. Dry leaves rustled in a slight breeze and cold, watery sunlight filtered through the canopy. He held his lasrifle across his chest and stopped walking.
In the distance, he could hear and smell the burning fields. As the wind changed every few minutes, soot and ash blew back through the trees. It was pungent. Something bad was burning.
The advancing troops were almost silent. There was no way to guess the scale of the infantry force closing on Cantible.
This place had a lot to answer for. Things had not been the same since Gaunt and the others had come here the first time, and they hadn’t been the same since they had come back. It wasn’t just the forced influx of the Belladon leftovers. They were good men and the fit was fine, as good as the fit between the Tanith and the Verghastites had been after the hive war. In fact, Caffran missed Colonel Wilder, and regretted his loss on Ancreon Sextus.
The differences that really mattered weren’t the big things. It was the small stuff. It was months spent getting over Gaunt’s death only to find out that he was back. It was like reverse grief. Caffran almost resented it, and he wasn’t the only one.
Tona and he hadn’t been as close since Gereon. Things had got a little better of late, but it still wasn’t the same. She was withdrawn from him, altered. He had wondered at first if it was some kind of Chaos taint, but it wasn’t that. She had just changed. She’d seen stuff that he hadn’t. He wasn’t someone she could talk to any more, not about the things that mattered to her anyway.
Well, that would change, starting from right now. He was going to taste the infamous Gereon for himself. He was going to know it like she knew it, and that would help him lift its shadow off the two of them. They’d exorcise Gereon together, and get back to where they had been.
Caffran knew others had experienced the same thing. Varl and Kolea had been close for ever, and Varl was the biggest mouth in the company, but since Varl had come back, even Kolea hadn’t managed to get him to open up about Gereon.
Ghosts moved up past him. Caffran realised he was slowing the line. He started forward through the dappled sunlight.
“All right there, trooper?” Hark asked, moving by.
“Yes, sir,” Caffran said, getting back in the game.
Hark looked at him with an almost sympathetic expression. “I know what you’re thinking about,” he said.
Caffran blinked. He did? About Tona and Gereon and resenting Gaunt and—
“He will be all right,” Hark nodded, and headed on.
Caffran cursed himself, guiltily and silently. Hark had been wrong, because Caffran, so lost in thought, had not had his mind in the right place at all. Not at all.
Dalin. Feth!
Fifty metres away through the woodland, Eszrah ap Niht paused, slowly removed his sunshades and blinked at the light. He touched the fingers of his left hand against the bark of a tree.
Gaunt had told him this was Gereon, that they were going back to Gereon, but this wasn’t Gereon. It was a dead place. He could smell the death-stink in it, as surely as a man could smell the death-stink from another man raddled with disease.
If this was Gereon…
Eszrah put his sunshades back on, and loaded his reynbow.
III
“Rerval?” Gaunt asked quietly.
Kolea’s adjutant listened to his voxcaster for a moment longer, then slipped the earphones down.
“Whipcord reports they’ll be in position in another ten minutes, sir,” he said.
“And when they say position, we can confirm we’re both talking about the same place?”
“I’m cross-checking their coordinates now,” Rerval said.
“All right then,” Gaunt nodded. “Bel?
Nearby, his vox caster leaning against a gnarled tree bole, Gaunt’s own adjutant Beltayn was delicately adjusting the set’s dial. Retrofitted with a bulky additional power cell and an S-shaped low frequency transmitter, his vox was decidedly non-standard.
“Beltayn?”
Beltayn shook his head. “Nothing, sir.”
“Still nothing?”
“I’ve tried Daystar and Mothlamp. Nothing.”
“Keep trying, please. Stay here and keep trying.”
Beltayn nodded.
Gaunt waved up Captain Meryn of E Company. “He’s your responsibility, Meryn,” Gaunt said. “Stick a guard around him. Six men at all times.”
“Sir,” said Meryn.
Gaunt turned and walked a few paces to the edge of the clearing. Baskevyl handed him his scope.
“There could be all sorts of reasons why they’re not transmitting,” Baskevyl said.
“I know,” Gaunt said, panning the scope round for a good view of the town.
“And not just bad ones,” Baskevyl went on. “Power failure. Vox breakdown. Atmospherics...'
“I know. We’ll pick them up soon enough. Are we set?”
Baskevyl nodded. “I’ve had taps from Rawne, Kolea, Daur and Kolosim. Varaine, Kamori, Domor and Obel are on the facing slopes. Arcuda’s mob’s covering the ford.”
“Mkoll?”
“Since when was Mkoll not in position?”
“A good point.”
The sky south of them was a haze of smoke from the blazing fields. The town, a wide cluster of grey-green blocks and towers behind a wall at the hill crest, was quiet. The dogs had fallen silent.
Ludd and Hark came up through the woodland behind Gaunt and Baskevyl, and stood with them.
?
??Set?” Hark asked mildly.
“Whipcord’s position confirmed,” Rerval called.
Gaunt pursed his lips. Whipcord was the operational call-sign for the Dev Hetra light armour supporting them.
“Tell them to load and stand by. They don’t fire without a direct order from me.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Make sure they do.”
“Whipcord,” Hark mused. “You know, Ludd, in some theatres, it is still common for commissars to carry lashes.”
“For purposes of encouragement, sir?” Ludd asked.
“Naturally. What other purpose would there be?”
Ludd shrugged. “Spiritual mortification?” he suggested.
Hark sniffed. “You’ve far too much time for thinking, Ludd.”
Gaunt looked at them both. “If it’s all right by you, can I commence the attack?”
“Of course. Sorry,” Hark said. “I was just telling the boy. A commissar with a whip—”
“Had better not show up when I’m around,” Gaunt said. “This isn’t the Dark Ages.”
“Oh,” smiled Hark blithely, “I rather think it is.”
Gaunt thumbed his micro-bead.
“Mkoll?
“At your service.”
“Go.”
“Gone.”
Gaunt turned and drew his power sword. Activating it was all the signal Baskevyl required. He pointed to Rerval, who immediately sent the code for advance.
Across the tangled field and brush in front of the woods, the first rows of Ghosts got up, weapons aimed, hunched low, and began to scurry towards the town.
IV
The most ghostly of the Ghosts melted through the sunlight towards the foot of the town wall. They made no sound, and their signing was so understated that even their hands were whispering.
Without haste or rush, Mkoll, master of scouts, stepped from one shadow to another, pouring himself out of one dark space and into the next. He had a good view of the wall. Guard post, two guards in sight. He raised his hand, twitched his fingers and spread the information.