Mkoll had warned him about this. Lots of livestock and three harmless herdsmen, he’d said, though he’d seemed certain they’d be off the road before the convoy met them.
“One to convoy elements,” Gaunt said into his vox on the all-channel band. “Drop your speed and pull over to the extreme left. We’ve got livestock on the road. Show courtesy and pass well clear of them.”
The drivers and crews snapped back responses over the link. The convoy slowed to a crawl and began to creep along past the straggled line of lowing, shambling beasts. Gaunt cursed this fresh delay. It would be a good ten minutes until they were clear of the obstruction.
He looked out at the big shell-backs as they went by close enough to lean out and touch. Their animal odour was strong and earthy, and Gaunt could hear the creak of their leathery armour skin and the gurgle of their multi-chambered stomachs. They broke noxious wind, or groaned and snuffled. Blunt muzzles chewed regurgitated cuds. He saw the drovers too. Large labourers in the coarse off-white robes of the agrarian caste, urging the beasts on with taps of their jiddi-sticks, their hoods and face-veils pulled up against the dust. A few nodded apologetically to him as they passed. Most didn’t spare the Imperials a look. Religious war and sacred desecration ravages their world and for them, it’s business as usual, thought Gaunt. Some lives in this lethal galaxy were enviably simple…
Lots of livestock and three harmless herdsmen. He remembered Mkoll’s report with abrupt clarity. Three harmless herdsmen.
Now he was level with them, he counted at least nine. “One! This is one! Be advised, this could be—” His words were cut off by the bang-shriek of a shoulder-launched missile. Two vehicles back, a command Salamander slewed wildly and vomited a fierce cone of flame and debris out of its crew-space. Metal fragments rained down out of the air, tinking off his own vehicle’s bodywork.
The vox-link went mad. Gaunt could hear sustained bursts of las-fire and auto weapons. Herdsmen, suddenly several dozen in number, were surging out from the cover of their agitated animals. They had weapons. As their robes fell away, he saw body art and green silk.
He grabbed his bolt pistol.
The Infardi were all over them.
SEVEN
DEATH ON THE ROAD
“Let me rest, now the battle’s done.”
—Imperial Guard song
His drover’s disguise flapping about him, an Infardi gunman clambered up the mudguard of the command Salamander and raised his autopistol, a yowl of rabid triumph issuing from his scabby lips. He stank of fermented fruit liquor and his eyes were wild-white with intoxicated frenzy.
Gaunt’s bolt round hit him point-blank in the right cheek and disintegrated his head in a puff of liquidised tissue.
“One to honour guard units! Infardi ambush to the right! Turn and repel!”
Gaunt could hear further missile impacts and lots of small arms lire. The chelons, viced in by the road edge on one side and the Imperial armour on the other, were whinnying with agitation and banging the edges of their shells up against vehicle hulls. “Turn us! Turn us around!” Gaunt yelled at his driver.
“No room, sir!” the Pardus replied desperately. A brace of hard-slug shots sparked and danced off the Salamander’s cowling.
“Damn it!” Gaunt bellowed. He rose in the back of the tank and fired into the charging enemy, killing one Infardi and crippling a mature chelon. The beast shrieked and slumped over, crushing two more of the ambushers before rolling hard into the Chimera behind. It began to writhe, baying, shoving the tank into the verge.
Gaunt swore and grabbed the firing grips of the pintle-mounted storm bolter. Infardi were appearing in the road ahead and he raked the hardpan, dropping several. Some had swarmed over the leading scout tank ahead and were murdering the crew. The vehicle slewed to a drunken, sidelong halt.
A tank round roared off close behind him. He heard the hot detonation of superheating gas, the grinding clank of the recoiling weapon, the whoosh of the shell. It fell in the ditchfield to the right of the road and kicked up a huge spout of liquid muck. More tanks now fired their main guns, and turret-mounted bolters chattered and sprayed. Another big chelon, hit dead centre by a tank shell, exploded wholesale and a big, stinking cloud of blood mist and intestinal gas billowed down the convoy.
Gaunt knew they had the upper hand in terms of strength, but the ambushers had been canny. They’d slowed the convoy down with the livestock and pinned it against the road wall so it couldn’t manoeuvre.
He fired the weapon mount again, chopping through an Infardi running up to position a missile launcher. Dead fingers convulsed anyway and the missile fired and immediately dropped, blowing a deep crater in the road.
Something grabbed Gaunt from behind and pulled him off the storm bolter. He fell back into the tank’s crewbay, kicking and fighting for his life.
The first third of the honour guard convoy was under hard assault, jammed and slowed to such an extent by the herd that the trailing portion of the convoy, straggled back to a more than four kilometre spread now, couldn’t move up to successfully support.
Larkin found himself next to Cuu, firing down from their troop truck body into the weeds as Infardi swarmed up out of the waterline, shooting as they came. Cuu was giggling gleefully as he killed. An anti-tank rocket wailed over their heads, and las-fire exploded around them, killing a trooper nearby and blowing out the windows of the truck cab.
“Disperse! Engage!” Sergeant Kolea yelled, and the Tanith leapt from the trucks en masse, charging the attackers with fixed bayonets and blazing las-fire.
Criid and Caffran charged together, hitting the first of the Infardi hand to hand, clubbing and gutting them. Caffran dropped for a wide shot that sent another ambusher tumbling back down the ditch into the field. Criid fell, got up, and laced las-blasts into the shins of the Infardi stampeding towards them. A Pardus tank roared nearby, blindly shelling the herd.
Rawne’s track, further down the line, was mobbed by Infardi. The cargo bed rocked as bodies piled onto it. Rawne fired his lasgun into the thick press, and saw Feygor rip an enemy’s throat out with his silver Tanith knife. The darkening evening air was crisscrossed by painfully bright las-fire. A second later, gusting flames surged down the roadside gulley. From Varl’s track, Trooper Brostin was washing the roadline with bursts from his flamer.
Major Kleopas tried to turn his Conqueror, but a massive chelon, bucking and hooting, slammed into his bull-bars and shunted the entire tank around. For a full five seconds, the tank’s racing tracks dragged at thin air as the weight of the bull chelon drove its nose into the road.
Then the tracks grabbed purchase again. Kleopas’ tank lurched forward.
“Ram it!” Kleopas ordered.
“Sir?”
“Screw you! Full power! Ram it!” Kleopas barked down at his driver.
The Conqueror battle tank, named Heart of Destruction according to the hand-painted hull logo, scrambled sideways in a vast spray of dust and then drove its bulldozer blade into the legs of the big bull chelon. Kleopas’ tank maimed the animal and rammed it off the highway, though the Conqueror dented its hull plating against the chelon’s shell in the process.
Squealing, the chelon fell down into the waterfield ditch and rolled over on its back, squashing eight Infardi troopers in the irrigation gulley.
The Heart of Destruction dipped off the roadside and down into the waterbed, tracks churning. As his main gunner and gun layer pumped shells into the breaks of trees beyond the road, Kleopas manned the bolter hardpoint and blasted tracer shots across the irrigation ditches.
His manoeuvre began to break the deadlock. Three tanks followed him through the gap he’d cut and rattled round into the tree-line off the road, wasting the dug-in Infardi with turret bolters and flamers.
In the closed track carrying the medical supplies, Ana Curth flinched as stray shots punched through the hardskin and her racks of bottled pharmaceuticals. Glass debris spat in all directions. Lesp stumbled to his
knees, a dark line of blood welling across his cheek from a sliver of flying glass.
Two Infardi clambered up the rear gate of the track. Curth kicked one away with a boot in the face, and then dragged out a laspistol Soric had given her and fired twice. The second Infardi attacker fell off the track.
Curth turned to see if Lesp was all right. She saw the alarm in his face, half-heard the warning shout coming from his mouth, and then felt herself grabbed and pulled bodily out of the track.
Her world spun. Terror viced her. She was jerked upside down, held carelessly by the legs, her face in the dirt. The Infardi were all over her, clawing and tearing. She could smell their wretched sweat-stink. All she could see was a jumble of green silk and tattooed flesh.
There was a sudden glare of hard blue light and a sizzling sound. Hot liquid sprayed over her, and she realised, with professional detachment, that it was blood. She swung as the grip on her half-released.
The blur of blue light carved the air again and something yelped. She collapsed onto the road, flat on her belly, and rolled up in time to see Ibram Gaunt raking his glowing power sword around in an expert figure-six swing that felled an Infardi like a tree. Gaunt had lost his cap and his clothes were torn. There was an unnerving look of unquenchable fury in his eyes. He wielded the sacred blade of her home-hive two-handed now, like a champion of antique myth. Dismembered bodies piled around him and the gritty sand of the road was soaked with gore for metres in every direction.
A hero, she thought abruptly, realising it truly in her mind for the first time. Damn Lugo and his disdain! This man is an Imperial hero!
Lesp, his face running with blood, appeared suddenly behind the commissar in the back gatehatch of the medical truck and began laying down support fire with his lasgun. Gaunt staked his power sword tip-down in the road and knelt next to it, scooping up a fallen Infardi lasrifle. His short, clipped bursts of fire joined Lesp’s, stinging across the road and into the mob of Infardi. Green-clad bodies tumbled onto the road or slithered back down the trench into the field.
Curth scrambled over to Gaunt on her hands and knees. Once she was safely beside him, she too knelt and began firing with a purloined Infardi weapon. She had none of the Commissar’s trained skill with an assault las, nor as much as Trooper Lesp, but she made a good account of herself with the unfamiliar weapon nevertheless. Gaunt, grim and driven, handled his firing pattern with an assured expertise that would have shamed even a well-drilled infantryman.
“You didn’t scream,” Gaunt said to her suddenly, firing steadily. “What?”
“You didn’t scream when they grabbed you.”
“And that’s good — why?”
“Waste of energy, of dignity. If they’d killed you, they’d have taken no satisfaction in it.”
“Oh,” she said, nonplussed, not sure if she should be flattered.
“Never give the enemy anything, Ana. They take what they take and that’s more than enough as it is.”
“Live by that do you?” she asked sourly, twitching off another burst of unsteady but enthusiastic shots.
“Yes,” he replied, as if he was surprised she should ask. Sensing that, she felt surprised too. At herself, for her own stupidity. It was obvious and she’d known it all along if she’d but recognised it. That was Gaunt’s way. Gaunt the Imperial hero. Give nothing. Never. Ever. Never let your guard down, never allow the enemy the slightest edge. Stay firm and die hard. Nothing else would do.
It wasn’t just the commissar in him. It was the warrior, Curth realised. It was Gaunt’s fundamental philosophy. It had brought him here and would carry him on to whatever death, kind or cruel, the fates had in store for him. It made him what he was: the relentless soldier, the celebrated leader, the terrifying slayer.
She felt unbearably sad for him and in awe of him all in the same moment.
Ana Curth had heard about the disgrace awaiting Gaunt at the end of this mission. That made her saddest of all. She realised he was going to be absolutely true to his duty and his calling right to the end, no matter the shadow of dishonour hanging over him. He would not falter.
Gaunt would be Gaunt until death claimed him.
Fifty metres away, Captain Herodas fell out of a burning Salamander a few moments before a second anti-tank rocket whooshed out of the roadside trees and blew it apart.
Almost immediately, a hard-slug tore through his left knee and threw him into the dust. He blacked out in pain for a second and then fought back, trying to crawl. The Pardus trooper next to him was face down in a pool of blood.
“Lezink! Lezink!”
Herodas tried to rum the man over, but the limbs were loose and the body was hollow and empty. Herodas looked down and saw the horror of blown-out meat and bone shards that was all that remained of his own leg joint. Las-shots zinged over his head. He reached for his pistol but his holster was flapping open.
There were tears in his eyes. The dull pain was rising to overwhelm him. From all around came the sounds of screaming, shooting, killing.
The ground shook. Herodas looked up in disbelief at the cow chelon that was stampeding towards him from the trapped, terrified herd. It was a third the size of the big bulls, but still weighed in at over two tonnes.
He closed his eyes tight and braced for the bone-splintering impact that was about to come.
A thin beam of hot red energy stabbed across the road and hit the hurtling brute with such force it was blown sideways off its feet. The shot disintegrated a huge hole in the chelon and left it a smouldering husk, dripping fatty mush.
Plasma fire! thought Herodas. Thrice-damned gods! That was plasma fire!
He saw the stocky shape of Commissar Hark striding down the roadway, dark in the rising dust and evening light, his long coat rippling around him. Hark was calling out commands and pointing as he directed the units of sprinting Tanith infantry down the road and into the enemy flank. He held an ancient plasma pistol in his right hand.
Hark halted and sent three more troop units on past him as they ran up, forking them wide to disperse them into the roadside gutter. He turned and waved two Pardus Conquerors forward off the road with quick, confident gestures.
Then he spun round abruptly, brought up his weapon, and cremated an Infardi who had risen from the roadside weeds with a rifle.
Hark crossed to Herodas.
“Stay still, help’s on the way.”
“Get me up, and I’ll fight!” Herodas complained.
Hark smiled. “Your courage does you credit captain, but believe me, you’re not going anywhere but to a medic cot Your leg’s a mess. Stay still.”
He turned and fired his plasma gun into the trees again at a target Herodas couldn’t even see.
“They’re all over us,” Herodas said.
“No, they’re breaking. We’ve got them running,” Hark told him, bolstering his plasma gun and kneeling down to apply a tourniquet to Herodas’ thigh.
“The fight’s out of them,” he reassured the captain, but Herodas had blacked out again.
The fight was indeed out of them. Overmatched and repulsed, leaving two-thirds of their number dead, the Infardi ambushers fled away into the off-road woodland, hunted by the Pardus shelling and the staccato thrash of the Hydra batteries.
The front section of the convoy was a mess: two scout Salamanders and a command Salamander ruined and burning, a supply Chimera overturned and blown out, two trucks ablaze. Twenty-two Pardus dead, fifteen Ghosts, six Munitorium crewmen. Six Ghosts and three Pardus severely injured and over eighty light wounds sustained by various personnel.
Listening to the roll call of deaths and injuries on his microbead, Gaunt strode back to his vehicle, retrieving his cap, and exchanging his torn storm coat for a short leather bomber jacket.
He sat on the rear fender of his Salamander as sweating troopers carried out the bodies of his driver and navigator.
Smoke and blood-fumes lingered over the scene. Infardi bodies were strewn everywhere, as well as the st
ricken chelon, some dead, some mortally hurt. The rest of the herd had broken into the waterfield and were disappearing as they moved away in the diminishing light. Gaunt could hear the snap of las-fire and the grumble of tanks as they cleared the low lying woods.
During the course of the fight, the sun had gone down, and the sky was now a smooth, luminous violet. Night breezes came up from the river and shivered the trees. They were badly behind schedule, a long way short of the planned night stop. It would be well after full dark before they reached Mukret now.
Gaunt heard someone approach and looked up. It was Intendant Elthan, wearing the stiff grey robes of the Munitorium, and a look of disdain.
“This is unacceptable, colonel-commissar,” he said briefly.
“What is?”
“The losses, the attack.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, intendant. War isn’t ‘unacceptable’. It’s dirty and tragic and terrifying and often senseless, but it’s also a fact of life.”
“This attack!” Elthan hissed, his lips tight around his yellowed teeth. “You were warned! Your scout detail warned you of the enemy presence. I heard it myself on the vox-link. This should never have happened!”
“What are you suggesting, intendant? That I’m somehow culpable for these deaths?”
“That is exactly what I’m suggesting! You ignored your recon advice. You pressed on—”
“That’s enough,” said Gaunt, getting to his feet. “I’m prepared to put your comments down to shock and inexperience. We should just forget this exchange happened.”
“I will not!” Elthan relied. “We all know the mess you made of the Doctrinopolis liberation. That shoddy leadership has cost you your career! And now you—”
“Menazoid Epsilon. Fortis Binary. Vervunhive. Monthax. Sapiencia. Nacedon.”
They both looked around. Hark stood watching them.
“Other examples of shoddy leadership, in your opinion, intendant?”