[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

  “They don’t want anyone sneaking up on them, do they?”

  Mkoll held up his hand, the signal for quiet. They both now detected movement in the trees twenty metres to their right, right on the road itself.

  With Mkvenner a few paces behind him in cover, las raised, Mkoll slid forward silently through the dry undergrowth. He slipped his silver blade from its sheath.

  The man was watching the road from a small culvert under the trees, His back was to Mkoll. The vehicles of the Recon Spear were out of sight beyond the road turn, but he must have heard their engines. Had he sent a signal already or was he waiting to see what came around the bend?

  Mkoll took him out with a fast, sudden lunge. The man didn’t have time to realise he was dead.

  He was dressed in green silk, his filthy skin livid with tattoos.

  Infardi.

  Mkoll checked the corpse and found an old autorifle but no vox set. Tucked into a hand-dug hole in the side of the culvert was a round mirror. Simple but effective signalling, perhaps to another invisible spotter down the road. How many others? Had they already rolled in past some?

  He looked back at the town in time to see sunlight glint and flash off something on the temple balcony. A minute or so later, it repeated.

  An answer? A question? A routine check? Mkoll wondered whether to use the mirror or not. He’d tip them off if he got the signal wrong, but would a lack of response be as bad?

  The flash from the temple came again.

  “Chief?” Mkvenner hissed over the headset vox.

  “Go.”

  “I see flash-signals.”

  “On the temple?”

  “No. Far side of the road from you, about thirty metres, right where the tree-line ends.”

  Mkvenner had a better angle. Mkoll moved back out of the culvert softly and edged down a little way, his stealth cloak pulled around him. He could see the man now, on the far side of the road under a swathe of camo-netting. The man was looking up the highway and seemed not to have made out Mkoll yet.

  Mkoll sheathed his blade and took up his lasrifle. The sound suppressor was screwed in place. He seldom took it off in country.

  He waited for the man to shift around and raise his mirror again and then put a single shot through his ear. The Infardi spotter tumbled back out of sight.

  The scouts headed back to the Recon Spear. Sirus was waiting, with the commander of the other Conqueror.

  “No idea of numbers but the place is held by the enemy,” explained Mkoll. “We picked off a couple of lookouts on the road. They’re watching the approach carefully and they’ve made the south edge of the town clear. I’d prefer to take the time to disperse my troops into the woods here to clear for other spotters and maybe make a crawl approach after dark, but I think the clock’s against us. They’ll notice their spotters are quiet before long, if they haven’t already.”

  “We’ll have the whole bloody convoy bunching up behind us in less than an hour,” said Sirus.

  “Maybe that’s how to play it,” said the other commander, a short man called Farant or Faranter, Mkoll hadn’t quite caught it. “Wait until the main elements arrive and then just go in, full strength.”

  It made sense to Mkoll. They could waste a lot of time here trying to be clever. Maybe this was an occasion where sheer brute force and might were the best course. Simple, direct, emphatic. No messing about.

  “I’ll get on the vox and run it past the boss,” he said, and walked over to his Salamander.

  There was a faint, distant bang, muffled by the dead air of the hot afternoon. A second later, a whooping shriek came down out of the sky.

  “Incoming!” Sirus yelled. All the men broke for cover.

  With a roar, the shell hit the roadline twenty-five metres short of them and blew a screen of trees out onto the track. After a moment, two more exploded in the trees to their left, hurling earth and flames into the cloudless blue.

  Soil drizzled down over them. Both Conquerors came around the Salamanders, the Wrath of Pardua leading the way. More shells now, detonating all around them. The enemy had either done an excellent job of range-finding or had just got very lucky.

  “Hold! Sirus, hold back!” Mkoll yelled into the vox as his Salamander lurched forward. He had to duck as debris from a perilously close shell raided across the hull.

  This was shelling from more than one gun. Multiple points, field guns maybe, large calibre ordnance by the size of the shell strikes. Where the hell were they hiding a battery of artillery?

  Farant’s Conqueror suddenly came apart in a huge fireball. The explosion was so fierce the Shockwave punched Mkoll off his feet. Splintered armour shards rained down. Caober cried out as one ripped his forehead.

  The blazing remains of the Pardus tank filled the centre of the road, turret disintegrated, bodywork fused and twisted, tread segments disengaged and scattered. The Wrath was beyond it, moving down the roadway.

  “Enemy armour! Enemy armour!” Sims bawled over the vox-link.

  Mkoll saw them. Two main battle tanks, painted bright lime green, main guns roaring as they tore their way out through the fruit tree stands and onto the road ahead.

  That was why he’d seen no artillery positions. It wasn’t artillery.

  The Infardi had armoured vehicles. Lots of them.

  TEN

  THE BATTLE OF BHAVNAGER

  “Do not shirk! Do not falter! Give them death in the name of Sabbat!”

  —Saint Sabbat, at the

  gates of Harkalon

  Heedless of the 105mm shells tearing into the highway and trees around him, Sims confronted the Infardi armour head-on. The Wrath of Pardua sped forward with a clank of treads and fired its main gun. The hypervelocity round hit the nearest of the two enemy vehicles, exploding into the rear mantlet of its turret with such force the entire turret mount spun round through two hundred and ten degrees. The tank clearly retained motive power, because it continued to churn along the road, but its traverse system was crippled and the turret and weapon swung around slackly with the motion. The Wrath fired again, mere seconds before a shell from the second tank glanced lengthways along its starboard flank. The hit buckled and tore its track guards and then fragmented off into the trees.

  The Wrath’s second shot had missed. The disarmed Infardi machine was closing to less than forty metres now, and its hull-mounted lascannon began to spit bolts of blue light at Sirus’ Conqueror. The other enemy tank was trying to pull around its wounded colleague for a clearer shot knocking down a row of saplings and small acestus trees as it hauled half its bulk off the highway and through the verge underbrush. Heavy shelling from as yet unseen Infardi units continued to lacerate the position.

  With furious las-fire from the injured tank now splashing off the Wrath of Pardua’s front casing, Sims ordered his layer to address the other tank coming around the first. Re-laying the gun took a vital second. In that time, the second tank fired again and hit the Wrath squarely. The impact was enough to lurch all sixty-two tonnes of armoured machine several metres sideways. But it didn’t penetrate the twenty-centimetre-thick armour skin. Inside, the crew was dazed, and they’d lost most of the forward scopes. Sims bellowed to retask, but the tank was now right on them and looming for the kill.

  A devastating lance of laser fire raked past the Wrath and cut through the assaulting vehicle below the turret. Internally stored munitions went off and the tank exploded with such force that the main body and track assemblies cartwheeled over in a blistering fireball. The blast wake and shrapnel cleared a semicircle of woodland twenty metres in radius.

  The Destroyer Grey Venger had struck.

  From the open cab of his rapidly reversing Salamander, Mkoll saw the long, low Destroyer prowl past, palls of heat discharge spuming from the vent louvres around its massive fixed laser cannon. It nudged aside the burning wreck of Farant’s dead Conqueror and came up alongside the Wrath.

  But the crew of the Wrath of Pardua had recovered their wits and swi
ftly nailed the remaining aggressor hard at short range, blowing out its port track sections and shunting it away lame with the shell impact. It began to burn.

  By then, the trio of scout Salamanders had reversed far enough to be able to turn.

  “Break off and retreat!” Mkoll shouted into the vox. “Fall back to waymark 00.58!”

  LeGuin immediately acknowledged, but Mkoll got nothing from Sims.

  Fething idiot wants to stay in the fight, Mkoll thought. From his machine’s tactical auspex, he counted at least ten good-size targets moving up towards their position from Bhavnager.

  But Sims suddenly appeared out of the Wrath’s top hatch, looking back through the gusting smoke to Mkoll. The last hit had taken out his vox system and intercom. Mkoll made damn sure Sims understood his hand signals.

  The Grey Venger stood its ground and walloped two more incandescent blasts down the road at targets Mkoll couldn’t see. Probably just discouragement tactics, he thought. Who wants to ride an MBT into woodland cover when you know an Imperial Destroyer is waiting for you?

  The Wrath of Pardua reversed hard and swung around to follow the Salamanders, traversing its turret to the rear to cover their backs. Then, as it too began bravura discouragement shelling, the Venger came about and trundled after them all so fast its hull rocked and rose nose up on its well-sprung torsion bar traction.

  Deafened and a little bloodied, the Recon Spear made off down the highway away from the bombardment, which continued for some fifteen minutes after they had withdrawn. There was no sign of pursuit.

  Mkoll voxed the bad news to Gaunt.

  Keeping a weather eye on the northern approaches for signs of the enemy, the Recon Spear waited to rendezvous with the main honour guard strength at waymark 00.58, a west-facing escarpment of grass pasture fifteen kilometres south of Bhavnager.

  The sun was beginning to sink and the intense heat of the day was dissipating. A southerly was blowing cooler air down from the misty shapes of the Sacred Hills, which now could be seen rising above the wide green blanket of the rainwoods on the northern horizon.

  Mkoll got out of his Salamander, passing Bonin who was field stitching the gash in Caober’s face, and walked towards the Wrath of Pardua. He took the time to gaze at the Sacred Hills: dark uplands seventy kilometres away, then behind them, higher peaks fading to an insubstantial grey in the distance. Behind them still, about a hundred kilometres beyond, the majestic jagged summits of the Sacred Hills proper: transparent, icy titans with their heads lost in ribbons of cloud, nine thousand metres above sea level. It was quite a prospect.

  The fact that getting there involved struggling past at least one enemy tank unit dug into their only guaranteed fuel depot, then rainwood jungle, then increasingly high mountains, made it all the more chilling.

  Thunder, the reveille call of a too hot day in summer, crackled around the neighbouring hills. The taste of rain was a promise on the rising breeze. Swells of grey cloud, as mot-tied as Imperial air-camo schemes, rolled in from the north, staining a sky that had otherwise been cloudless and blue since the fogs lifted that morning.

  Small chelons and goat-like herbivores grazed and ruminated in the lush meadows beyond the raised pasture of the waymark point. Their throat bells clanged dully as they moved.

  Sims and his men were running emergency repairs to the great, wounded Wrath of Pardua. They were joking and laughing with their captain, revelling in the details of the recent combat and the fact they had come away alive. No one spoke of the dead crew. There would be due time for recognition later. Mkoll felt sure that once the obstacle of Bhavnager was done with, there would be more than one Conqueror to mourn.

  A figure approached him across the wind-shivered grass. Mkoll knew at once it was the so far unseen LeGuin. He was a short well-made man in his thirties, dressed in tan Pardus fatigues and a fleece-lined leather coat. He unbuttoned his leather skull-guard as he approached, unplugging the wire of his headset. His skin was darker than most of the Pardus men, his eyes glittering blue.

  “Cool head, sergeant,” he said, offering Mkoll his hand.

  “Looked mighty tight there for a minute,” Mkoll replied.

  “It was, but so are the best fights.”

  “I thought Sims might blow it,” Mkoll ventured.

  LeGuin smiled. “Anselm Sims is a bravo and a glory hound. He’s also the best Conqueror boss in the Pardus. Except maybe for Woll. They have a rivalry. Both multi-aces. But permit Sims his heroics. He’s the very best.”

  Mkoll nodded. “I know similar infantrymen. I thought they’d got him there, though. But for you.”

  “My greatest pleasure in life is using my girl’s main mount to effect. I was just doing my job.”

  The Grey Venger lay nearby, hull down in a grassy lea, its massive muzzle pointing north up the road. Mkoll reflected that if he’d ever been schooled into armour, a Destroyer would have been his machine of choice. As far as fifty-plus tonnes of rattling armoured power could be said to be stealthy, it was a silent predator. A hunter. Mkoll had a kinship with hunters. He’d been one all his adult life before the guard and, in truth, he’d been one ever since too.

  Some of the grazers in the meadow below suddenly looked up and began to move away west.

  A minute later, they heard the gathering thunder from the south.

  “Here they come,” said LeGuin.

  The honour guard assembled at the waymark, spreading its strength out in a firm defensive line facing the north. As the tanks took up station, the Hydra batteries behind them, the infantry dismounted and dug in.

  “Now we’ll see fun, sure as sure,” Trooper Cuu informed Larkin as they took position in the grasses.

  “Not too much fun, I hope,” Larkin mumbled back, test-sighting up his long-las.

  As the force secured the position, Gaunt called his operational and section chiefs for a briefing. They assembled around the back of his Salamander: Kleopas, Rawne, Kolea, Hark, Surgeon Curth, tank commanders, squad leaders, platoon sergeants. Some brought dataslates, some charts. Most clutched tin cups of fresh brewed caffeine or smokes.

  “Opinions?” he asked, drawing the briefing to order.

  “We’ve got no more than four hours of light left. Half of that will go getting into position,” Kleopas said. “I take it we’re looking at dawn instead.”

  “That means we’re looking at noon at least to refuel and turn around, provided we can break Bhavnager,” replied Rawne. “That’s half a day chopped off our timetable just like that.”

  “So what?” Kleopas asked cynically. “Are you saying we rush ahead and hit them up tonight, major?”

  Some of the Pardus laughed.

  “Yes,” Rawne answered coldly, as if it was so obvious Kleopas must be a fool to miss it. “Why lose the daylight we have left? Is there another way?”

  “Airstrike,” said Commissar Hark. To a man, the tank soldiers moaned.

  “Oh, please! This is a prime opportunity to engage with armour,” said Sirus. “Leave this to us.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is, captain,” said Gaunt darkly. “This is a prime opportunity to discharge a mission for the God-Emperor as expediently and efficiently as we can. What it’s not is an opportunity to let you heap up glory by forcing a tank fight.”

  “I don’t think that’s what Sirus meant, sir,” said Kleopas as Sirus scowled.

  “I think it’s exactly what he meant,” said Hark lightly.

  “Whatever he meant, I’ve been talking to navy strike command at Ansipar. The air wing is tied up with the evacuation. They wouldn’t tell me more than that. We might get an airstrike if we wait two days. As Major Rawne pointed out, time is not for wasting. We’re going to take Bhavnager ourselves, the hard way.”

  Sirus smiled. There was murmuring.

  Gaunt consulted the assessment reports on-slate. “We know they have at least ten armour units. Non-Imperial MBTs.”

  “At least ten,” repeated Sirus. “I doubt they would have fielded their
entire complement to chase off a raid.”

  “Type and capability?” Gaunt asked, looking up.

  “Urdeshi-made tanks, type AT70s,” said LeGuin. “Indifferent performance and slow on the fire rate. 105-mil guns as standard. They’re common here in this subsector and favoured by the arch-enemy.”

  “They’ve been cranking them out of the manufactories on Urdesh ever since the foe took that world,” said LeTaw, another tank officer.

  “The Reaver model by the look of the ones I saw,” LeGuin went on. “Promethium guzzlers with cheap armour, and loose in the rear on a turn. Our Conquerors outclass them. Unless they have the numbers, of course.”

  “From the hammering we got on the road, I’d say they had a minimum of five self-propelled guns too,” said Sirus.

  “At the very least,” said LeGuin. “But there’s another thing. They continued to shell the roadway for quite a time after we pulled back. I bet that’s because they didn’t know we’d gone. They had an efficient string of spotters and lookouts, but my guess is their onboard scanners are very much lower spec than ours. No auspex. No landscape readers. Until they or their spotters actually see us, they’re blind. We, on the other hand…”

  “Noted,” said Gaunt. “Okay, here’s how we’re going to play it. Head-on assault following the roadline. Tonight. If we think it’s dicey leaving it so close to nightfall, you can bet they won’t expect it. Armour comes out of the woods and spreads. Infantry behind, supporting with anti-tank weapons. I want two full strength troop assaults pushing ahead into the south of the town here. Kolea? Baffels? That’s you. Around the warehouse barns.”

  He pointed to his chart.

  “Here’s the winner. A side thrust. Maybe four or five tanks, in from the east with infantry support and the Salamanders. Objective is the temple and then pushing through to the fuel stores. Hydra batteries will slug down from the roadline here.”