[Gaunt's Ghosts 10] - The Armour of Contempt

  Bonin moved forwards five metres to his left. Their skills were identical, but their methods of silence were totally different. It was an odd detail that only real recon experts would pick up, but each Tanith scout had his own “flavour” of silent movement. Mkoll flowed like liquid, running through the levels of darkness. Bonin had a dry drift to him, like a shadow moving with the sun.

  Caober, for his part, seemed always in the periphery of vision, always there until a second before you looked. Caober, who’d been a scout since the Founding, had held the regimental specialty together while Mkoll, Bonin and MkVenner had been away on the Gereon expedition. He’d done a good job, and brought on several newcomers. Mkoll owed him a good deal.

  Jajjo was one of those newcomers, elevated to scout operations after Aexe Cardinal, the first Verghastite in the specialty. His hard-learned skills were more industrial and mechanical than those of the Tanith-born. He would never have their instinctive grace, but Jajjo was all concentration. It was as if he stayed silent and unseen by force of will.

  What appeared to be market gardens or allotments covered the slopes outside the town wall. The patches had gown wild with weeds and grox-eye daisies. Vermin scurried under the dry nets of foliage. Jajjo ducked under a broken gate, and crossed between a row of wooden lean-tos and an overgrown cultivator. He was low, twenty metres down and right of Mkoll. He spotted, and marked, five more guards on the run of town wall above him. He signed it to Mkoll.

  Right of Jajjo’s position, there were patches of scrub and a bone-dry paddock littered with the mummified carcasses of livestock. Hwlan, who moved like smoke, took up a spot by the gate and held cover as Maggs and Leyr crossed up the paddock to a woody clump of wintergorse. Leyr was Tanith, and moved as secretly as slow thawing ice.

  Wes Maggs was Belladon, one of the Eighty-First’s primary recon specialists. Immensely good at what he did, he’d had to learn the rules from scratch to keep up with the Tanith experts. He was still a little in awe of Mkoll, and that respect tended to blind him to his own abilities.

  Maggs was short and broad-shouldered, and had a scar that dropped vertically from the corner of his left eye. Off duty, his mouth could give Varl’s a decent race. He had his own style too. It was “try damn hard not to get seen and killed”.

  He came up into the gorse on his belly, rolled into a dry dirt cavity around the dead root, and peered out. Clear, he signed to Leyr, who relayed that down the line.

  Maggs worked his shoulders round for a different look. The town wall was made of stone, dressed in some kind of planking, a grey-green material. There was a door ten metres away from him. Not the main gate or even a minor one, some sort of sluice or storm hatch. Maybe a waste outlet.

  Too much to sign. He sent “minor entry” and its position.

  Mkoll nodded this.

  Maggs made the dash as soon as the nod came back to him. A second out in the sunlight, and then down in the cool shadow at the foot of the wall, pressed in close to the cold, smelly boards. He edged along. The town was awfully quiet. The place had to be on alert because of what had hit from space that morning.

  The hounds had whined, the fields had burned, but the place was quiet.

  He arrived at the door. It was a wooden hatch, half-height for a man, badly built into the wall covering. It was bolted shut and the bolt secured with an ancient padlock, but the wood was damp and fibrous. Maggs began to work it with his warknife, levering the bolt away from the soft board.

  Back from him, in the gorse, Leyr saw the guard coming. A single enemy trooper in dirty green combat armour strolled through the overgrown ditches around the wall, running a sight-check of culverts and drains.

  Leyr tapped his earpiece and Maggs looked up and saw the guard approaching. Recommended practice at that moment would have been for Maggs to curl up and hide where he was and let Leyr nail the guard from behind.

  Maggs had other ideas. He rapped the blade of his warknife against the rusty door bolt, clinking it like a little metalwork hammer.

  What the feth, Maggs? Leyr blinked, toggling off to make the shot he was certain would be called for.

  The guard heard the clinking, and headed right over to the source. As he came down the ditch to the door, Maggs just got to his feet to meet him in one smooth motion and buried the blade through his neck. Maggs caught him in an embrace and pulled his body back down into cover with him. A blink of an eye and they were both out of sight again.

  Maggs forced back the bolt and gently flopped the door open. He kept having to prop the guard’s limp body up out of the way now they were sharing the same ditch. He peered inside.

  It was the soak away of a stream or sewer outflow built to run out under the wall and into the ditch. The door was simply a lid over a much smaller cavity, a sump under the wall base blocked, along its course, by three heavy wrought iron grates. Even without the bars, the soak away was far too small to allow a man to crawl through.

  The ground, however, was parched and dry. The soak away had shrivelled and enlarged in the months without rain, and become a dusty, desiccated hole, pulling away from the underpinning of the stone wall like a diseased gum from a tooth. Maggs could easily reach in and wiggled the nearest iron grate free.

  He signed to Leyr. Tell Mkoll. We’re in.

  V

  Ten more minutes ticked by. At Baskevyl’s instruction, the first wave of Ghosts advanced again, closer to the wall slope, keeping low and using the brittle, dead undergrowth for cover.

  One of the wall guards finally noticed them, or at least noticed movement in the lower scarps and terraces below the wall. There was a shout, and then an ancient stubber began spitting slow, desultory shots down the slopes. The shells tore into the brambles and dried leaves, showering up papery fragments. The shots made high pitched buzzing hums as they flicked through the ground cover. In a moment, a second gun had opened up, then a third. Las-locks cracked from the wall platforms. Then the spring-coil tunk! tunk! of mortars started up, lobbing shells over from the yards behind the wall. The mortar bombs dropped short into the allotment patches and kicked up hot, gritty spumes of smoke and soil, each one with a rasping fiery heart, each one turning to thready smoke that wafted away down the hill.

  The mortar rate increased.

  “Permission to engage?” Baskevyl asked Gaunt.

  “Granted,” Gaunt said.

  The Ghosts fanning out on the slopes below the town began to fire. Las shots rained off the wall tops. The range was bad, but the effort was more to suppress the enemy shooters. The light support teams, bedded in ahead of the woodline, opened up. Seena and Arilla, Surch and Loell, Belker and Finz, Melyr and Caill, gunners and feeders. Their large calibre cannons began their tukka-tukka-tukka rattling, like giant sewing machines, the heavy fire festooned the main gate with thousands of little curls of smoke.

  “Start making it personal,” Gaunt voxed, moving forwards.

  The regiment’s marksmen had been waiting for that nod. All were bedded down and all had selected targets. Jessi Banda was watching the heads of the enemy sentries on the wall top through her sniper scope.

  “Like tin cans on a stump,” she murmured as she lined one up.

  The head popped in a puff of red. Banda blinked to make sure she’d seen it right.

  Close by, Nessa Bourah looked up from her long-las. “Like tin cans on a stump,” she grinned, speaking the words with the slightly nasal flatness of the profoundly deaf.

  The snipers set up a steady rate of fire, notching every figure fool enough to appear on the walls. Larkin’s rate was the highest of all. Five kills in three minutes. He left one target draped forwards over the parapet.

  Something considerable exploded behind the wall and the mortars shut up. The scouts were plying their trade inside.

  Behind the walls, the old market town was a sick, dishevelled place. Filth littered the streets, and the buildings were all in miserable repair, though many, like the town walls, had been refitted or converted using a patchwork of
unpleasant materials that weren’t immediately identifiable. There was a grey-green sheeting that was halfway between flakboard and tin, and odd, resin-like substances. Walls had been reinforced with struts and beams of iron that had begun to rust, and many roofs had fallen in. Civic statues had been smashed and, in places, stretches of wall were pock-marked from old gunfire. The occupiers had decorated the place with lurid scrawlings in their own, hideous script, sickening graffiti that unsettled the mind.

  There was an odour in the air, cloying close and sickly, and human remains—most of it bone—scattered everywhere. It was as if, rather than taking the town over and occupying it, the Arch-enemy had nested in it.

  Working in silently from the entry point Maggs had provided, the scouts set to work. Jajjo and Caober threaded the shadows in a series of side streets until they emerged at the edge of a wide cobbled yard under the walls, where eight mortars had been set up on flakboard pallets. Tall servants of Chaos were crewing the weapons. They were rancid creatures in grey scale armour, the high brass collars of mechanical speech boxes covering their mouths and noses. Most had implants sutured into their eye sockets. Some were using goads and lashes on a team of half-naked, emaciated human wretches—skin and bone and rags—forcing them to ferry shells from a supply stack to feed the weapons. The wretches were prisoners, captives, grotesquely malnourished and abused, the stigma rune branded on their faces.

  Caober signed to Jajjo to draw attention with a little gunfire and get the slaves clear while he moved in with tube-charges to blow the weapons.

  Jajjo nodded, and moved forward, skirting some iron scaffolding, into the open yard. Without any hesitation he opened fired, squirting bursts of las fire into the mortar crews. Two of the armoured creatures dropped. The others turned, scattering, reaching for las-locks. Jajjo fired some more and blew another off his feet. The slaves, halfway through their plod between ammo dump and weapons, stopped in their tracks and just stared at the Ghost.

  “Come on! Come on!” Jajjo called, firing his lasrifle one-handed from the hip as he gestured wildly with his other hand. “This way!”

  None of them moved. They simply stared, dull-eyed, blank. Some still clutched mortar bombs in their arms like babies.

  Caober readied his tube-charges and hurried around to the side. He was concerned that the human captives weren’t moving. They were still well inside the blast radius that he was about to lay down.

  “Come on!” Jajjo yelled again.

  More blank looks.

  Cursing, Jajjo moved towards them, firing between a pair of them at one of the crew who had got hold of a las-lock. Grey scales flew up from the being’s broken armour as Jajjo’s laser bolts sliced through him and knocked him onto his back.

  “Come on. Move!”

  Two more of the enemy crew had seized weapons and returned fire. One las-lock shot skimmed over Jajjo’s head. The other, hasty, struck one of the motionless slaves in the back. The man, elderly it seemed, though the abuse he had suffered may have aged him mercilessly, toppled forwards dead. The mortar bomb he had been clutching rolled free and ran, clinking, across the cobbles.

  The slaves remained stationary. They didn’t run forwards to his aid, they didn’t scatter for cover in fear. They turned their heads slowly and looked blankly at the body for a moment.

  Jajjo ran right up amongst them, still snatching off shots at the enemy.

  “Come on!” he shouted, pulling at reluctant arms and limp shoulders. “Move, for gak’s sake! Move yourselves!”

  This close, he could smell them. The stench made him gag. The filth caking them was unbelievable. He could see the lice and the ticks. Their skin felt like cotton, thin and loose on frames where all body fat had gone.

  “Move!”

  Another las-lock blast blew out the skull of the woman he was pulling at. Her body had been masking his. As she fell, wordlessly, Jajjo brought his lasrifle up to his shoulder and furiously belted full auto across the mortar stand, raking all the enemy creatures he could see. Two fell back, spread-eagled. One spiralled sideways, knocking an entire mortar off its tripod with a dull clang.

  Jajjo backed away, squeezing off more shots. There was no more time. No more time for compassion.

  “Do it!” he yelled, desperately.

  Caober plucked off the strip of det tape and bowled the bundle of charges over arm into the midst of the weapons. He and Jajjo dived for cover.

  When they got up, in the billowing smoke, the mortars were trashed. The slaves were all on the ground, flattened by the blast.

  “I w—” Jajjo began. Caober grabbed him and pulled him back. There was no point checking if any were alive. The effort would be as futile as trying to save them in the first place. They had to keep moving.

  There was still work to be done.

  Mkoll heard and felt the blast that gagged the mortar fire. He was two streets from the yard, with Hwlan, heading for the gate. He’d expected to encounter more resistance inside the town. The place was half-empty. They saw a few of the enemy guardsmen, the scale-armoured spectres that Mkoll had learned to call excubitors on his last visit to the occupied world, and kept out of their way. The excubitors were hurrying towards the walls, summoned to face the external attack that had broken out five minutes earlier.

  There were enemy troopers too, men dressed in polished green combat armour. They were double-timing in squads, under the command of excubitors or sirdar officers. Some rode on battered trucks or wheezing steam engines. Cantible was mobilising its defences, but where were the people? Most of the dwellings and commercial properties the scouts darted past were empty and abandoned.

  It occurred to Mkoll that there were no people because, like any resource, they had been used up. He’d seen the process half-done before he left the first time. The occupation had progressively exploited and consumed Gereon’s raw materials: manufacturing, minerals, crops, water, flesh. Vast swathes of the country had been turned over to xeno-culture producing gene-altered or warp-tainted crops that depleted the land by strip-mining the soil of its nutrients. The crops fed the occupying forces, but were harvested in such gross abundance that they could be transported off-world to supply the ravenous armies of the Archon. For a few years, until the process killed its fertility, Gereon would be one of the Archenemy’s breadbasket worlds in this region. Fuel and metal reserves went the same way. With his own amazed eyes, Mkoll had witnessed two jehgenesh, warp beasts deliberately unleashed into Gereon’s water supply by the occupiers. These… things drank lakes, seas and reservoirs, and excreted the water via the warp to distant, arid worlds in the Archenemy’s domain. He had helped to kill both of them.

  Flesh was just another commodity. Those of Gereon’s human population who had not become proselytes and converted to the new faith had been made slaves, robbed of all rights and dignities. More literally, others had been fed to the meat foundries, where the flesh of their bodies had been cut apart to supply the enemy with a source of spare parts and transplants. The dead, the useless and the unviable were fed into the ahenum furnaces which powered much of Gereon’s abominable new industries and lit the sky red at dusk. Ultimately, the furnaces awaited everyone.

  In the long months and days of pain since he had last been there, Mkoll realised, the human supply, like all finite resources, had begun to dwindle. Gereon was close to exhaustion. As Gaunt had feared, and privately confided to Mkoll, they were bringing liberation far too late.

  Mkoll and Hwlan scurried through the dry, dead husks of homes and workplaces. Every room contained a warm, stale atmosphere and a yellowed cast of neglect. Everything had shrivelled and flaked. Window glass, where it still existed, was stained the colour of amasec. Dust mould and a virulent fungus, violet and blotchy, were endemic across walls and ceilings. Heaps of dead blowflies, like handfuls of coal dust, lined every windowsill.

  They came up through a tomb-like building that must once have been a butcher’s shop. In the workshop, the gouged wooden counters were stained dark brown, an
d traces of dried meat clung to the iron hooks that swayed slowly on their long black chains.

  Hwlan reached the back door and checked outside.

  Main gate, he signed, sixty metres.

  Mkoll nodded. He pulled the canvas satchel he had been carrying off his shoulder and put it on one of the chopping blocks. One by one he took out the tube-charges, checked each one, and laid them out side by side. Twenty, and one, Rawne had put it, “for luck”. Major Rawne, who knew about these things thanks to what he described as a “misspent youth”, had built the detonator himself. It had a simple switch, triggered by mercury in a gravity bottle, a glass phial the size of Mkoll’s little finger. Dislodged by impact or a change in attitude, the mercury would flow down the phial and make the connection.

  Mkoll bound the tubes into a bundle and taped the switch to them, twisting together the wires that ran from the switch to the tubes’ detonation caps. Only a little slip of labelled parchment, wedged between the trigger phial and the feeder reservoir full of quicksilver, kept the weapon safe.

  The shooting war outside had picked up pace. To Mkoll’s experienced ear, they had about ten minutes left before the wild card of a stealth intrusion ceased to have any value. Ten minutes to achieve their goal and prove the tactical worth of the scouts.

  “Vehicle,” he said.

  Hwlan, down at the back door, looked at him in surprise. It was the first time either of them had spoken aloud in twenty-five minutes.

  “We need a vehicle,” Mkoll expanded. He’d been expecting to commandeer a truck, a traction engine or something similar. Now they were there, inside, he saw how limited resources were.

  Hwlan moved to the butcher’s side door. There was a yard out the back, adjoining several sheds that he presumed had been used for smoking or salting meat. What appeared to be a handcart was visible in one of them.