Most eyes couldn’t but Mkoll’s were sharper than any in the regiment. And Domor’s field specialisation was in landmines.
“Want me to sweep?”
“Might be an idea. Unship your kit, but don’t advance until I say.”
Domor went over to his Salamander with troopers Caober and Uril to unpack the sweeper sets.
Mkoll fanned fire-teams out into the acestus groves on either side of the roadway, Mkvenner to the left and Bonin to the right, each with three men.
Within seconds of entering the dappled shadows of the fruit trees, the men were invisible, their stealth cloaks absorbing the patterns around them.
“What’s the delay?” asked Captain Sims from behind. Mkoll turned. Sirus had dismounted from his waiting Conqueror, the Wrath of Pardua, and had come forward to see for himself. He was a robust man in his early fifties, with the characteristic olive skin and beak nose of the Pardus. He seemed a little gung-ho to Mkoll, and the scout sergeant had been disappointed when Kleopas had appointed him to Mkoll’s spearhead company.
“We’ve got road mines in a tight field there. And maybe beyond.” Mkoll gestured. “And the place is too quiet for my liking.”
“Tactics?” Sirus asked briefly.
“Send my sweepers forward to clear the road for you and infiltrate the village from the sides with my troops.”
Sims nodded sagely. “I can tell you’re infantry, sergeant. Bloody good at it too, so I hear, but you haven’t the armour experience. You want that place taken, my Wrath can take it.”
Mkoll’s heart sank. “How?”
“That’s what the Adeptus Mechanicus made dozer blades for. Give the word and I’ll show you how the Pardus work.”
Mkoll turned away and walked back to his Salamander. This wasn’t his approach to recon patrols. He certainly didn’t want the Pardus heavies lighting up the hill for all to see with their heavy guns. He could take Limata his way, by stealth, he was sure. But Gaunt had urged him to co-operate with the armour allies.
He reached into the Salamander and pulled out the long-gain vox mic. “Recon Spear to one.”
“One, go ahead.”
“We’ve got possible obstruction here at Limata. Certainly a minefield. Request permission for Captain Sims to go in armoured and loud.”
“Is it necessary?”
“You said to play nice.”
“So I did. Permission granted.”
Mkoll hung up the mic and called to Domor’s group. “Pack it away. It’s the Pardus’ turn.”
Griping, they began to disassemble the sweeper brooms.
“Captain?” Mkoll looked over to Sims. “It’s all yours.”
Sims looked immensely pleased. He ran back to his revving tank.
At his urging, riding high in the open hatch of his turret, the two Conquerors clanked past the waiting Salamanders and headed down the highway. The grim Destroyer waited behind them, turbines barely murmuring.
The two battle tanks lowered their hefty dozer blades as they came up on the mined area and dug in, driving forward.
Captain Sims’ mine clearance methods were as brutal as they were deafening. The massive dozer blades ploughed the hardpan of the road and kicked up the buried munitions which triggered and detonated before them. Clouds of flame and debris swirled up around the advancing tanks. If the mines had been triggered under a passing vehicle, they would have crippled or destroyed it, but churned out like the seeds of a waterapple or flints turned up by a farrier’s plough, they exploded harmlessly, barely scorching the thrusting dozer blades.
It was an impressive display, Mkoll had to admit.
Smoke and dust drifted back down the road over Mkoll and the waiting Salamanders. Mkoll shielded his eyes and purposely kept his off-road fire-teams in position.
In less than six minutes, the Wrath of Pardua and its sister tank Lion of Pardua were rolling into Limata, the road buckled and burning behind them.
Mkoll got up on the fender of his Salamander and ordered all three light tanks to move forward after them.
He looked round. The Destroyer had disappeared.
“What the feth?” How did something that big and heavy and ugly disappear?
“Recon Spear command to Destroyer! Where the feth are you?”
“Destroyer to command. Sorry to startle you. Standard regimental deployment. I pulled off-road to lie low. Frontal assaults are the Conquerors’ job, and Sirus knows what he’s doing.”
“Read that, Destroyer.” Mkoll, who was generally inexperienced when it came to tank warfare, had already noted the clear differences between the Conqueror battle tanks and the low-bodied Destroyers. Where the Conquerors were high and proud, stately almost, with their massive gun turrets, the Destroyers were long-hulled and sleek, their one primary weapon not turret-mounted but fixed out forward from their humped backs. The Destroyers were predators, tank hunters, armed with a single, colossal laser cannon. They were, it seemed to Mkoll, the tank equivalent of an infantry sniper. Accurate, cunning, hard-hitting, stealthy.
The Destroyer appointed to the Recon Spear was called the Grey Venger. Its commander was a Captain LeGuin. Mkoll had never seen LeGuin face to face. He just knew him by his tank.
Through the rising pall of smoke, Mkoll saw the Conquerors were in the village now. They were kicking up dust. Abrupt small arms fire rained against their armoured bodies from the left.
The Wrath of Pardua traversed its turret and blew a house apart with a single shell. Its partner began shelling the right flank of the town’s main drag. Stilt houses disintegrated or combusted. The sponson-mounted flamers on both Conquerors rippled through the close-packed buildings and turned them into torched ruins.
Captain Sirus’ whoops of triumph came over the vox. Mkoll could see him in his turret, supporting his main weapon’s blasts with rakes from the pintle mount.
“That’s just showing off,” Domor said beside him.
“Tank boys,” murmured Caober. “Always wanting to show who’s boss.”
Advancing, they found the bloody, burnt remnants of maybe three dozen Infardi in the ruins Sims had flattened, Limata was taken. Mkoll signalled the news to Gaunt and advanced the spearhead, bringing his fire-teams in and reforming the force with the Salamanders at the front. The Destroyer trundled out of hiding and joined the back of the column.
“Next stop Bhavnager!” Sirus warbled enthusiastically from his Conqueror.
“Move out,” ordered Mkoll.
Well over a day behind them, Corbec’s thrown-together team rolled past the site of the ambush, skirting around the wrecks of the Salamanders and the Chimera that the task-force’s Trojans had pushed to the roadside verges.
Corbec called a halt. The Chimera’s turbine was overheating anyway, and the troopers dismounted for a rest Corbec, Derin and Bragg wandered over to the roadside where a plot of dark earth and rows of fresh-cut stakes marked the graves of the fallen.
“One we missed,” said Derin.
Corbec nodded. This site marked the first Ghosts action that he hadn’t been a part of. Not properly. All the way from Tanith he’d come, to be with his men. Here, they’d fought and died while he had been lying in his bed miles away.
His chest hurt. He swallowed a couple more pain-pills with a swig of tepid water from his flask.
Greer had dismounted from the Chimera on the road and had yanked back its side cowlings to vent greasy black smoke. He reached in with a wrench, trying to soothe its ailing systems.
Milo thought he’d talk to Sanian, but the esholi had wandered down to the water’s edge with Nessa. It looked like the Verghastite girl was teaching the student the rudiments of sign language.
“She likes to learn, doesn’t she?”
Milo looked round and met Captain Daur’s smile. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m glad you found her, Brin. I don’t think we’d last long without a decent guide.”
Milo sat himself down on a roadside stump and Daur sat next to him, cautiously nursing hi
s wounded body down.
“What do you know, sir?” Milo asked.
“About what?”
“About this mission. Corbec said you knew as much as him. That you — uh—felt the same way.”
“I can’t offer you an explanation, if that’s what you’re asking for. I just have this urge in my head…”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. And I know you don’t. And I love you like a brother for daring to come this far in such ignorance.”
“I trust the colonel.”
“So do I. Have you not had dreams? Visions?”
“No, sir. All I have is my loyalty to Corbec. To you. To Gaunt. To the God-Emperor of mankind…”
“The Emperor protects,” Daur put in dutifully.
“That’s all. Loyalty. To the Ghosts. That’s all I know. For now, that’s all I need.”
“But you delivered to us our guide,” a calm, frail voice said suddenly.
“I did what?”
Daur paused and blinked.
“What?” he asked Milo, who was looking at him mistrustfully.
“You said ‘but you delivered to us our guide’, just then. Your voice was strange.”
“Did I? Was it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I meant Sanian…”
“I know you did, but that was a pretty odd way of saying it.”
“I don’t remember… Gak, I don’t remember saying that at all.”
Milo looked at Daur dubiously. “With all respect, captain, you’re weirding me out here.”
“Milo, I think I’m weirding myself out,” he said.
“Doc.”
“Corbec.”
They stood in the groves overlooking the burial place. It was the first chance they’d got to talk alone since leaving the Doctrinopolis.
“Your son, you say? Mikal?”
“My son.”
“In your dreams?”
“For days now. I think it started when I was looking for you in Old Town, you old bastard.”
“You haven’t dreamt of Mikal before?”
Mikal Dorden had died on Verghast. He had been the only Ghost to escape the destruction of Tanith with a blood relative alive. Trooper Mikal Dorden. Chief Medic Tolin Dorden. Ghosts together, father and son, until… Vervunhive and Veyveyr Gate.
“Of course. Every night. But not like that. This was like Mikal wanted me to know something, to be somewhere. All he said was ‘sabbat martyr’. When you said the words too, I realised.”
“It’s going to be hard,” said Corbec softly, “getting up there.” He pointed up towards the Sacred Hills, which lingered distantly, partly obscured by the smudge of a rainstorm over the woods.
“I’m ready, Colm,” Dorden smiled. “I think the others are too. But keep your eye on Trooper Vamberfeld. His first taste of combat hasn’t gone down well. Shock trauma. He may get past it naturally, but some don’t. I don’t think he should be here.”
“In truth, none of us should. I took what I could get. But point taken. I’ll be watching him.”
“I respect you.”
“I’m sure you do, buddy,” said Greer, nursing the old Chimera’s engines back to health. “But I do, I respect you,” repeated Trooper Vamberfeld.
“And what’s that?” asked Greer off-hand as he unclamped a fuel pipe.
“To join this pilgrimage. It’s so holy. So, so holy.”
“Oh, it’s so holy sure enough,” growled Greer. “Did the spirit of the saint speak to you?” Vamberfeld asked.
Greer looked round at him with a cynical eyebrow cocked. “Did she speak to you?”
“Of course she did! She was triumphant and sublime!”
“That’s great. Right now, I’ve got an engine to fix.”
“The saint will guide your work…”
“Will she crap! The moment Saint Sabbat manifests here and helps me flush out the intercooler, then I’ll believe.”
Vamberfeld looked a little crestfallen. “Then why do you come?”
“The gold, naturally,” Greer said, over-stressing each word as one would to a child. “What gold?”
“The gold. In the mountains. Daur must’ve told you about it?”
“N-no…”
“Only reason I’m here! The gold ingots. My kind of come-on.”
“But there is no treasure. Nothing physical. Just faith and love.”
“Whatever you reckon.”
“The captain wouldn’t lie.”
“Of course he wouldn’t.”
“He loves us all.”
“Of course he does. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
Vamberfeld nodded and walked away obediently. Greer shook his head to himself and returned to work. He didn’t get these Tanith, too intense for his liking. And ever since he’d arrived on Hagia he’d heard men rambling on and on about faith and miracles. So, it was a shrineworld. So what? Greer didn’t hold with that sort of stuff much. You lived, you died, end of story. Sometimes you got lucky and lived well. Sometimes you got unlucky and died badly. God and saints and flicking angels and stuff was the sort of nonsense men filled their with heads with when bad luck came calling.
He wiped his hands on a rag, and cinched the hose clamp tighter. This mob of losers was a crazy lot. The colonel and the doctor and that complete sad-case Vamberfeld were mooning on about visions and saints, clearly all out of their heads. The deaf girl he didn’t get. The big guy was an idiot. The boy Milo was way too up himself, and only here because he had the hots for that local girl, who was incidentally a nutjob in Greer’s humble opinion. Derin was the only one who seemed remotely okay. Greer was sure that was because Derin was along for the gold too. Daur must have persuaded the rest of the lunatics to sign on by buying into their saint fixations.
Daur was a hard case. He looked all clean-cut and stalwart, the very model of a young, well-bred officer. But under the surface ticked the heart of a conniving bastard. Greer knew his type. Greer hadn’t liked Daur since the moment they’d met in the prayer yard. Dressing him down in front of his men like that. Greer had only ended up wounded because he’d been going balls-out in the fight to prove his mettle and win back his rep. But Daur had needed a driver, and he’d cut Greer in on the loot. Temple gold, stacks of ingots, taken secretly from the Doctrinopolis treasury to a place of hiding when the Infardi invaded. That’s what Daur had told him. He’d got the inside track from a dying ayatani. Worth deserting for in Greer’s book.
He wouldn’t be surprised if Daur intended to waste the others once they were home and dry. Greer would be watching his back when the time came. He’d get in first if he had to. For now though, he knew he was safe. Daur needed him more than any of the others.
Vamberfeld was the one he worried about most. Daur had recruited everyone except Sanian and Milo from the hospital, from amongst the injured, and they all had bandaged wounds to prove it. Except Vamberfeld. He was a psych case, Greer knew. The timid behaviour, the thousand-metre stare. He’d seen that before in men who were on the way to snapping. War fever.
Greer didn’t want to be around when the snap came.
He closed the engine cowling. “She’s running! Let’s go if we’re going!”
The company moved back to rejoin the Chimera. For the umpteenth time that day, Corbec wondered what he had got himself into. Sometimes it felt so decisively right, but the rest of the time the doubts plagued him. He’d broken orders, and persuaded eight other guardsmen to do the same. And now he was heading into enemy country. He wondered what would happen if they got into a situation. Milo was sound and able bodied, but the doc and Sanian were non-combatants. Nessa was strapped up with a healing las-wound in her belly, Bragg’s shoulder was useless, Daur and Derin had chest wounds that slowed them down badly, Greer had a head-wound, and Vamberfeld was teetering on the edge of nervous collapse. Not to mention his own, aching wounds.
Hardly the most able and fit fire-team in the history of guard actions. Nor the best equipped. Each trooper had a
lasrifle — in Nessa’s case a long-las sniper model — and Bragg had his big autocannon. They had a box of tube-charges but were otherwise short on ammo. As far as he knew they had only half a dozen drums for the cannon. The Chimera had a storm bolter on its pintle, but given its performance so far, Corbec wasn’t sure how much longer it would be before they were all walking.
He wondered what Gaunt would do in this situation. He was pretty sure he knew. Have them all shot.
Through the trees, thick roadside glades of acestus and slim-trunked vipirium, they began to see the outlines of Bhavnager.
It was late afternoon, the sun was infernally bright and hot, and the heat haze was distorting every distance. The Recon Spear had made excellent time, and word on the vox was that the main convoy was only seventy minutes behind them.
Mkoll pulled them to a halt and headed out into the groves with Mkvenner to do a little scouting. They crouched in the slanting shadows of the wild fruit trees and panned their magnoculars around. The air was still and breathless, as dry and hot as baked sand. Insects ticked like chronometers in the gorse thickets.
Mkoll compared what he saw with the town plan on his map. Bhavnager was a large place, dominated by a large white-washed temple with a golden stupa to the east and a massive row of brick-built produce barns to the south-west. Prayer kites and flags dangled limply from the golden dome in the breeze-less air. The road they were following entered in the south-eastern corner, ran in south of the temple to what looked like a triangular market place which roughly denoted the town centre, and then appeared again north of large buildings on the far outskirts that Mkoll took to be machine shops. A streetplan of smaller roads radiated out from the market, lined with shops and dwellings.
“Looks quiet,” said Mkvenner.
“But alive this time. Figures there, in the market.”
“I see them.”
“And two up there, on the lower balcony of the temple.”
“Lookouts.”
“Yeah.”
The pair moved forward and down a little, parallel to the highway. Once the road came out of the fruit groves it was open and unprotected for over fifteen hundred metres right down to the edge of the town. Trees had been felled and brush cleared.