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

  Kexie came up short, and lowered his baton slightly. No one had ever invited Saroo’s attention before. That rather took the fun out of it.

  Kexie allowed a grin to tear across his mouth like a slow knife-slit. This was going to be interesting.

  IX

  During transit, the barrack deck chapels conducted their services at all the devotional hours, according to shipboard timekeeping. The principal act of worship was held immediately after the noon watch bell.

  Aboard ship, the noon watch was the axle on which all timings turned. Standing orders were for all horologs and timepieces to be synched with the chime of the watch bell.

  The “bell service” lasted about forty minutes. It was the very least devotion a Guardsman was expected to make, duties permitting. The Ghosts used Drum Chapel, near the aft quarters, a medium-size hold space that had been converted and consecrated. The room was cold and spare, crudely dressed in wood and canvas. Worship was conducted by prefects and celebrants of the Ecclesiarchy using cheap, military issue incense that smelled stale and dusty. There was none of the pomp and regalia of a civilian ceremony, none of the opulence and heady perfume of a high-hive mass. Thin priests in threadbare robes exhorted the congregation to uphold the honour and tradition of the Guard, the glory of the Imperium and the spirit of Man.

  Hark listened without hearing any of the content. From his place at the back, he was scanning the rows of kneeling figures, marking faces. No wonder turnout was so regularly poor. It was dreary. Hark’s own past had been privileged, and he remembered occasions at temple in the cities where he’d grown up. Glory and splendour: ecclesiarchs in billowing silks carried to the podium on golden-legged walking platforms, the choirs singing hymns into the lofty rafters of the cathedrals, the light bursting radiant white through the colossal splinter windows behind the stalls.

  He met up with Ludd outside as the congregation filed away. Ludd had the roll book.

  “Many?” Hark asked.

  “Mostly the same few,” Ludd replied. He showed Hark the book, turning pages and pointing to several names. “Repeat absenters.”

  Hark read and nodded. “We’ll root out the chief miscreants this afternoon, Ludd. Put a rocket up them.”

  Hark looked around and scanned the thinning crowd. “He wasn’t here, was he?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Some example. Leans on us to boost attendance, and then doesn’t bother himself. I didn’t miss him, did I?”

  Ludd shook his head. “That’s the third day in a row. If he… I mean, if he was anybody else, he’d have a red tick beside his name by now.”

  “I should, I think, explain that to him,” Hark said. “Carry on, Ludd.”

  Hark walked the rusting, water-stained half-kilometre of companionway back to the regimental office, a suite of chambers and cabins midship. Most of the staffers were Munitorum officials, or officers from the support battalions and company command. The Commissariat had a presence too. In some of the larger chambers, ranged at folding desks in the low light, commissars and line officers sat written exams on battlefield theory, tactics and discipline, or engaged in simulation tests around chart tables.

  He saw faces he recognised around one of the stations. Ban Daur, Kolosim and Obel were working through a tactical problem with a trio of Kolstec officers. They all straightened as he approached. He glanced at the glowing hololithic projection that covered the console top between them.

  “Line assault?” he asked.

  “Principles and applications of bounding cover,” replied Daur.

  “Intermediate level, lesson three,” added Kolosim snidely.

  Hark chuckled and nodded. The simulation confronting them was complex and demanding. “Time sensitive?”

  “On a real-time clock,” replied Daur.

  “Then I won’t spoil your rate any longer. Have you seen the colonel?”

  Daur checked his wrist-chron. “Won’t he be coming back from bell service?”

  Hark shook his head.

  “I saw him about an hour ago in 22,” said Obel. “I don’t know where he was going, but he had his sword with him.”

  “Thank you,” said Hark. “Good luck with that.”

  Hark found Gaunt ten minutes later in one of the individual practice rooms. Gaunt had signed the chamber out on the chalkboard outside, and added “NOT TO BE DISTURBED”.

  Hark went inside anyway. Just inside the door there were racks of training blunts and some target dummies. Past that, open and dormant, was a mobile practice cage shaped like a clamshell.

  Gaunt was in the main part of the room, duelling with four training drones: multi-legged machines with lashing weapon limbs. They circled him, jabbing and striking. Gaunt was stripped to the waist, sweating hard, ducking and spinning, lashing out with his power-sword. Every clean hit he made to the pressure-sensitive pads on the bellies and heads of the drones shut them down for ten seconds. After each count, they jerked back to life and resumed their attacks.

  Four drones. Four at once. That seemed excessive to Hark. He’d always admired Gaunt’s blade skill, and knew it took a lot of practice to keep such close-combat skills honed. But four…

  He watched for a moment longer. He noticed a mark on Gaunt’s back, low down, just left of the spine. A tattoo, or… ?

  Hark started in surprise. The mark was blood, blood streaming from a deep cut. He realised what he was seeing.

  All the drones had untipped blades. Between them, the four machines were engaging Gaunt with sixteen double-edged, half-metre long blades.

  “Feth!” Hark breathed. “Shut down! Shut down!”

  The rattling machines continued to mill and strike. All Hark had managed to do was distract Gaunt, who glanced around for a moment and was then forced into a frantic, defensive back-step to avoid a slicing blade-arm.

  Hark rushed forward. “Shut down!” he ordered. Vox-control: shut down! Cut! Power out!”

  Sensing his movement, the nearest drone broke away from Gaunt and came for him, skittering its metal legs off the practice mat onto the hard metal deck. Its weapon arms rotated and scissored.

  “Feth!” Hark said again, backing up quickly. “What the feth is this? Shut down!”

  Gaunt let out a curse. He exhaled as he ducked sharply and turned his body in a low spin under the lunging blades of one of the drones. Then he came up clear and parried the weapons of another aside with his sword. He kicked out savagely and sent the deflected drone stumbling backwards. The third was close on him. Gaunt turned and sliced under its guard, drawing the power sword clean across its torso and out through its head unit in a flurry of sparks. The edges of the sheared metal glowed brightly as the head section fell away.

  Gaunt leapt past the dead machine.

  The fourth drone was right in Hark’s face. Hark drew a plasma pistol from under his coat and raised it to fire.

  But Gaunt had reached the cut-off switch on the far wall of the chamber and punched it. The three remaining drones went slack as they made power-down whines.

  Hark lowered his pistol, re-engaged the safety and put it away. He looked across the room at Gaunt. The colonel-commissar was breathing hard. He deactivated his power sword as he reached for a towel to mop his face and chest.

  “Unsafe weapons and a cancelled voice override?” Hark asked.

  “I believe in diligent practice.”

  “A trainee must have a second and a medicae present if he intends to make the practice drones capable of actual injury. Standing order—”

  “57783-3. I’m aware of the rule.”

  “And the punishment?”

  Gaunt glared at Hark.

  “The voice safety is never to be shut off,” Hark said. “You could have been killed.”

  “That was the point.”

  “How was this drill supposed to end, Ibram?”

  “When I’d had enough, I’d break free and hit the wall switch. You pre-empted things, Viktor. What do you want?”

  “I want you alive to
lead the Ghosts when we reach the next zone,” Hark replied.

  “I believe in diligent practice,” Gaunt repeated. “I believe in pushing myself and testing myself.”

  “So do I,” Hark said. “I put time in on the range, run a few sparring sessions and exercise. What you’re doing is tantamount to obsessive.”

  Gaunt shrugged. He threw the damp towel aside and reached for his shirt. “Then let’s just hope you never have to fight me, Viktor,” he said with a wolfish grin. “What do you really want?”

  “You missed bell service.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. It’s regrettable because we’re trying to whip the malingerers back into attendance and, frankly, you’re not setting an example.”

  Gaunt pulled his wrist-chron out of his trouser pocket and looked at it. It was an old, battered thing, the strap long since replaced by a hand-woven bracelet.

  “According to this, it’s another seventeen minutes to noon watch bell.”

  “Then that’s slow,” said Hark. “About sixty-five minutes slow.”

  “It kept good enough time on Gereon.”

  “It’s not keeping good enough time now, Ibram. What? You’re smiling.” .

  Gaunt was strapping the chron to his wrist. “I’ve kept this set and wound since we embarked. Fifteen days’ transit and I’ve not synched it to the noon bell.”

  “So?”

  “Diurnal settings, Viktor.”

  Hark frowned. It was standard Guard practice, during long voyages, to adjust the length of shipboard day/night cycles to match those of the destination world, so that over a mid-to-long duration voyage, the troops would become accustomed to a different circadian rhythm. It helped with acclimatisation. The changes weren’t made in one fell swoop. Time was shaved off or added incrementally over a period of days. Synching to the noon watch kept everyone in step.

  “So you’re running on Ancreon Sextus time?”

  Gaunt nodded. “And the ship’s set to a daylight cycle that’s about an hour shorter.” He walked over to where his coat was hanging from the rail of the practice cage and slid a data-slate out of the pocket. “I consulted a compendium of sector ephemera to check,” he said as he switched the slate on and scrolled through the data, “but I was pretty sure anyway. It was familiar.”

  He showed Hark the screen. Tight-packed data showed tide charts and seasonal daybreak and sunset tables, grouped into geographic regions, for a number of worlds in the local group. One was highlighted.

  “Gereon,” said Hark.

  “Pretty much the confirmation we wanted,” Gaunt said, snapping the slate off and putting it away.

  “That’s why I shut off voice safety, Viktor. We’re going back, and I wanted to remind myself what it was like.”

  X

  The members of RIP who failed the range grade, and that included Dalin and Merrt, got circuit marches for the next three nights.

  A circuit march involved full kit, weighted backpacks and a heavy spar of pig iron as a substitute for a rifle. It involved looping the ship, end to end and back, following outer hull-skin corridors, twenty times. Kexie, who had paced the route, assured RIP that this was the equivalent of fifty kilometres.

  Kexie did not march the whole distance with them. He’d go with them a way, and then cross the ship laterally via transit halls while they were toiling round the prow, or slogging through the low ducts over the enginarium, and meet them coming back up the far side.

  There was a temptation to shave corners off the route, a temptation that Boulder had all but planned, but Kexie had set up a dozen servitors as checkpoints. Miss any one of these way-markers, fail to let one register your tag as you went by, and you got to spend some quality time with Saroo before repeating the march.

  Most of the route wound through scabby metal ducts and long, unpainted, unheated tunnels where few people had any business being. They jogged through the canyons behind the heavy hull skin plates, behind the riveted shield of the dust sheath. They ran through the clear spaces between oily field generators that stank of ozone, and splashed through rusting compartments waterlogged by condensation. They pounded across empty holds where greased chains swung from ceilings invisible in the shadows. They struggled through the stinking chambers of the husbandry and livestock section and the sweaty, marsh-gas fug of hydroponics.

  They’d started out quite up-beat, intending to take the march in their stride and let Kexie suck on it. Boulder had even tried to get a round of call and chorus cadences going to keep the rhythm. Before they’d completed even one circuit, those good intentions had soured. Breathlessness, blistered feet, bruised elbows and knees from impacts with bulkhead obstructions, and, most of all, a sick realisation of exactly how far twenty circuits was, had strung them out into a long, toiling line, grinding its way, dead-eyed and hopeless, around the course.

  Every time he appeared, grinning, at some point in the route, Kexie would wave them by, and tell each straggler in turn precisely how useless he was. He’d learned some new insults for the march, or else had been saving up some particular favourites for this special occasion.

  Dalin didn’t complain about his inclusion. He’d grown up understanding there was a basic strand of unfairness running through a soldier’s life. Soldiering was about the whole, about the unit, and about the way that unit functioned in terms of discipline and coherence. Once an individual got used to the disappointment of being levelled out whether he was right or wrong, he began to function with the unit, and life got easier.

  He also understood the importance of examples.

  Kexie had not beaten Merrt after the range drill. Even his attack dog logic had recognised it was unproductive to beat a man who was asking to be beaten. Such an act would also weaken him in the eyes of the detail. Kexie was determined to remain above these affairs, untouched and unscathed by the numbers his charges pulled. It was possible he thought of himself as inscrutable.

  Kexie put Merrt on the march. Then he told the others that the ten circuit marches they owed for failing to score above thirty were now going to be twenty circuit marches, thanks to what he called Merrt’s “lip”.

  On the third circuit, Dalin dropped into step with Merrt. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to him.

  “I wanted to—” he began.

  “Skip it,” Merrt replied, without looking round.

  “Was it…” Dalin hesitated. “Was it a Ghost thing?”

  That made Merrt glance round, his sunken eyes bright and curious above the awful facial prosthetic. “A gn… gn… Ghost thing?”

  “Because I’m regiment, I mean.”

  Merrt shook his head. “The fether was just wrong. I’d have spoken up no matter who it was.”

  “Oh.”

  They ran on, through a loading hatch and out across the grille floor of a port stowage bay. The mesh rang with their footfalls.

  “How did you end up on RIP?” Dalin asked.

  “The traditional way.”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  Merrt pulled up to a stop and Dalin stopped with him. Bodies clattered past them, slogging onwards.

  Merrt stared at Dalin for a moment, right in the face. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “I—”

  “Do you know me?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I’ll thank you to keep your fething personal questions to yourself. I’m gn… gn… not your friend.”

  “Sorry,” said Dalin. He felt himself blushing, and that made it worse. Merrt turned away and started to pace up to a jog again.

  Suddenly he stopped and looked back at Dalin. “If you must know,” he said, “I raised my head out of gn… gn… cover during a firefight on Monthax.”

  “No, I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. That’s still the answer.” Merrt turned again and began to run.

  After a moment, Dalin followed him.

  XI

  Out on the clear deck beyond the billet cages, a crowd had gathered to
watch a team of Ghosts kick a ball with some troopers from the Kolstec barrack hall. There was a lot of good-natured shouting and cursing.

  Kolea watched the game from one of the upper landings, his arms leant on the railing. Varl was with him, smoking a hand-rolled lho-stick. Every now and then, they exchanged a few philosophical remarks about the relative skills on display, especially Brostin’s reluctance to pass the ball to anyone useful.

  “It’s like he has a disability.”

  “More than the ones we know about.”

  “Right.”

  Down in the crowd, some of the Belladon had begun to thump out a rat-a-tat-tat on some hand drums to urge the Ghosts on. It was a fast, pacy beat. It sounded like the urgent drum march of an execution detail.

  “This place we’re going to—” Kolea began.

  “No one knows for sure where we’re going,” Varl replied.

  “Yeah, but if. What’s it like?”

  Varl had been one of Gaunt’s original mission team to the occupied world of Gereon almost three years before. The fact that any of them had come back alive was a major miracle. A garrulous man ordinarily, Varl had seldom spoken of the matter.

  “It’s a bad place,” he told his friend. “Bad as can be. And I can’t imagine it’s got any better since I was last there.”

  Kolea nodded.

  “I’ll be glad to go back, though,” Varl admitted.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Ven and Doc Curth. We left them both there. Their choice. We all meant to go back for them if we could.”

  “Do you think they’ll still be alive?”

  Varl shrugged. “The Doc? I dunno. But Ven… you imagine anything in this cosmos having the stones to kill Ven?”

  Kolea grinned and shook his head.

  Varl pinched the ash off his lho-stick and slipped the extinguished remainder behind his ear. “I gotta go do something about that game,” he said. “Shoot Brostin, maybe.”

  Kolea had been alone on the landing for a few minutes when Tona Criid came up beside him. He nodded to her, but said nothing for a while.