[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

  “Come forward, come forward, you bastard…” Kolea urged the ’track, under his breath.

  “Confirmed foot targets!” the vox hiss came in his ear. Marksman Rilke, dug into cover close by Kolea, had seen movement down by the burning mill. He’d challenged by vox using the day’s code word, in case it was some of their own out of position and crossing the line of battle. No identifiers came back. Rilke lined up his long-las and began firing.

  Others in Kolea’s formation joined in: Ezlan and Mkoyn over a broken wall near Rilke; Livara, Viwo and Loglas from the windows of a livery; the loom-girls Seena and Arilla from a fox hole to Kolea’s right. Las and auto fire began to ripple down the street at them. Platoon-strength opposition at least.

  Seena and Arilla formed, respectively, the gunner and loader of a heavy stubber team. They’d learned the skills in the Vervun war, as part of one of the many “scratch” companies of the resistance. Seena was a plump, twenty-five year old girl who wore a black slouch cap to keep her luxuriant bangs out of her eyes; Arilla was skinny, barely eighteen.

  Somehow it looked wrong for the frailer, shorter girl to always be the one lugging the hollow plasteel yoke laden with ammo hoppers. But they were an excellent team. Their matt-black stubber was packed into the lip of the foxhole tightly to prevent the tripod skating out during sustained fire. Those old-pattern stubbers could buck like a riled auroch. Seena was squirting out tight bursts, interspersing them with longer salvoes that she sluiced from side to side on the gunstand’s oiled gimbal.

  Ezlan and Mkoyn tossed out a few tube-charges that detonated with satisfying thumps and collapsed the street facade of a farrier’s shop.

  Kolea got a few shots off himself, moving along the defence line. Another anti-tank round screamed low overhead. Kolea hoped the infantry clash would bring the halftrack up in support of its troops. He got Loglas and Viwo to prep their missile tube.

  “Nine, seventeen?”

  “Seventeen,” Meryn answered over the link. “What have you got?”

  “Access to the next street. Looks quiet. Advancing.”

  “Steady does it. Keep in vox-touch.”

  A particularly heavy spray of las-fire stippled the wall behind him, and Kolea ducked flat. He heard the stubber barking out in response.

  “Nine, thirty-two?”

  “Reading you, nine.”

  “Any luck with that halftrack yet, Bonin?”

  “We’re crossing the wasteground. Can’t find a route back onto the street to come in behind them. We… Hold on.”

  Kolea tensed as he heard fierce shooting distorted by the vox.

  “Thirty-two? Thirty-two?”

  “…vy fire! Heavy fire in this area! Feth! We’ve got m—” Bonin’s response came back, chopped by the vox-bounce off the buildings.

  “Nine, thirty-two. Say again! Nine, thirty-two!”

  The channel just bled white noise. Kolea could hear staccato crossfire from behind the structures to his right. Bonin’s fire-team needed help. More particularly, if they were overrun, Kolea needed to make sure the gap to his flank was plugged.

  “Nine, I require fire support here! Map-mark 51.33!”

  Within two minutes, a platoon had moved up from the warehouses along the route his team had already cleared. Kolea’s old friend Sergeant Haller was at the head of it. Kolea quickly outlined the situation and the suspected position of the N20 to Haller and then grouped up a fire-team of Livara, Ezlan, Mkoyn and, from Haller’s detail, Trooper Surch and the flamer-man Lubba.

  “Take over here,” Kolea told Haller, and immediately led his ready-team right, down through the breezeway and onto the open ground beyond.

  As if it had been waiting for the Verghastite hero to go, the halftrack suddenly clanked forward through the pungent brown smoke and fired its main mount at the Ghost line. Two of Haller’s new arrivals were killed and Loglas was wounded by flying debris. Haller ran head-down through the rain of burning ash, and scooped up the missile tube as Viwo got the dazed Loglas into cover.

  “Loaded?” Haller yelled at Viwo.

  “Hell, yes sir!” Viwo confirmed.

  Haller sighted up. He put the crosshairs on the box-armoured view-slits of the N20’s cab. “Ease!”

  The rocket tore open the halftrack’s cab armour like a can-opener, and exploded out with enough force to spin the entire anti-tank mount around. Seena and Arilla hosed the stricken machine with stub-fire.

  There was a ragged ripple of cheers from the Ghosts.

  “Load me up again,” Haller told Viwo. “I want to make certain and kill it twice.”

  Bonin’s advance team had run into ferocious and extraordinary opposition centring on a shell-damaged building at the edge of the wasteground. More than twenty Infardi weapons had fired on them and then, incredibly, dozens of green-clad warriors had charged out brandishing cleavers, pikes and rifle bayonets.

  The five Ghosts reacted with extreme levels of improvisation. Fenix had been winged in the initial fire, but he was still fit to fight, and dropped to his knees, presenting a smaller target as he fired at the mob rushing them. Wheln and Venar had already fixed bayonets and countered directly, uttering blood-chilling yells as they drove forward, slashing and impaling.

  Bonin sprayed his lasgun on full auto, draining out the powercell swiftly but harvesting the opposition. Jajjo was carrying the loaded tread-fether and decided not to waste the stopping power. Yelling “Ease!” he shouldered the tube and fired the anti-tank round into the face of the building the Infardi had charged out of. The back-blast took out several of the skirmishers and collapsed a section of the wall. Then Jajjo tossed his tube aside and leapt into the close fighting, his silver blade in his hand.

  His powercell depleted, Bonin joined in the hand to hand too, dubbing with his gunstock. The Imperials, trained by the likes of Feygor and Mkoll at this sort of fighting, out-classed the cultists, despite the latter’s superior numbers and bigger, slashing blades. But the Infardi had frenzy in them, and that made them lethal opponents.

  Bonin broke a jaw with a swing of his lasgun, and then smacked the muzzle of his weapon into the solar plexus of another attacker. What the feth had made them charge out like this, he wondered? It was bizarre, even by the unpredictable standards of the Chaos-polluted foe. They had cover and they clearly had guns. They could have taken Bonin’s intruder unit in the open.

  The brutal melee lasted for four minutes and only ended when the last of the Infardi were dead or unconscious. Bonin’s team were all splashed with the enemy’s gore and the wasteground was soaked. Corpses sprawled all around. The Ghosts had all sustained cuts and contusions: Bonin had a particularly deep laceration across his left upper arm and Jajjo had a broken wrist.

  “What the hell was that about?” Venar groaned, stooping over, out of breath.

  Bonin could feel the adrenalin surging through his body, the rushing beat of his own heart. He knew his team must be feeling the same way too, and wanted to use it before they ebbed out of that intense combat edge. He slammed a fresh powercell into his weapon.

  “Don’t know but I want to know,” he told Venar. “Let’s get in there and secure the damn place fast. Jajjo, use your pistol. Wheln, carry the tread-fether.”

  Fenix suddenly switched round at movement behind them, but it was Kolea’s support section.

  “Gak me!” said Kolea, looking at the bloody evidence of the fight. “They charge you?”

  “Like fething maniacs, sir,” Bonin said, pausing to put a las-round through the head of a stirring Infardi.

  “From there?”

  Bonin nodded.

  “Protecting something?” Ezlan suggested. “Let’s find out,” said Kolea.

  “Fenix, get yourself and Jajjo back to the rear and find medics. Bonin, Lubba, you’ve got point.”

  The nine men advanced into the min through the hole Jajjo’s rocket had made.

  Lubba’s flamer stuttered and then surged cones of fire into the dark spaces.

  They
found the Infardi troop leader sprawled unconscious amid the blast damage. His personal force shield had been overwhelmed by the rocket blast, and the portable generator pack lay shattered nearby.

  He’d sent his men out in a suicidal charge to cover his own escape.

  Kolea looked down at the unconscious man. Tall, wiry, with a shaved head and a pot belly, his unhealthy skin was covered with unholy symbols. Bonin was about to finish him with his silver blade but Kolea stopped him. “Vox the chief. Ask him if he wants a prisoner.”

  In the next street over, Meryn’s unit had caught up with Mkoll’s scout section and they moved forward together. The sounds of close fighting rolled in from the neighbouring street, but Haller had informed Meryn that the N20 had been killed and advised him to press on.

  Night was now falling fast, and the darkening sky was lit all around by firelight, the flashes of explosions and the glimmer of tracers. By Mkoll’s guess, the fight was not yet even half done. The Tanith were still a long way from taking Bhavnager or securing their primary objective, the fuel depot.

  Strangely, the street they advanced down, a narrow lane lined with empty dwellings and plundered trading posts, was untouched by the fighting, intact, almost peaceful.

  Mkoll wished urgently for full darkness. This phase of the day when light turned into night was murder on the eyes. Night vision refused to settle in. The bright moons were up, shrouded by palls of rising smoke that turned them blood red.

  Meryn suddenly made a movement and fired. Swiftly, all the Ghosts opened up, moving into secure cover. Odd bursts of gunfire came back at them, chipping the bricks and stucco walls of the commonplace buildings.

  Then something made a whooping bang and a building to Meryn’s left dissolved in a fireball that took two Ghosts with it.

  “Armour! Armour!”

  Squat and ominous like a brooding toad, the AT70 crumpled a fence as it rolled out onto the road, traversing its turret to fire down on them again. The blast destroyed another house.

  “Missile tube to order!” Meryn yelled as brick chips drizzled down over him.

  “Firing jam! Firing jam!”

  “Feth!” Meryn growled. The one tool they had that might make a dent in the tank was down. They were caught cold.

  Infardi troops streamed in behind the Reaver, blasting away. A serious small arms firefight developed, lighting up the dim street with its strobing brilliance.

  The tank rolled on, crashing heedlessly over the dead or wounded forms of its own foot troops. Meryn shuddered. It would soon be doing the same to his boys.

  From his position, he could hear Mkoll urgently talking over the vox. He waited until Mkoll broke off before patching in. “Seventeen, four. Do we fall back?”

  “Four, seventeen. See if we can hold out a few minutes more. We can’t let these infantry numbers in at our flank.”

  “Understood. What about the tank?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  Easy for Mkoll to say, Meryn thought. The tank was barely seventy metres away now, its 105-mil barrel lowered to maximum declension. It fired again, putting a crater in the road, and its coaxial weapon began chattering. Meryn heard two Ghosts cry out as they were hit by the spray of bolter rounds. The Infardi troops were moving up all around. This was turning into a full-on counter thrust Meryn wondered what the feth Mkoll intended to do about the tank. He hoped it wasn’t some insane, suicidal ran with a satchel of tube-charges. Even Mkoll wouldn’t be that crazy, would he? Then again, he hoped Mkoll had something up his guard-issue sleeve. The AT70 was going to be all over them in a moment.

  His vox crackled. “Infantry units, brace and cover for support.”

  What the feth…?

  A horizontal column of light, as thick as Meryn’s own thigh, raked down the narrow street from the rear. It was so bright its afterimage seared Meryn’s retinas for minutes afterwards. There was a stink of ozone.

  The AT70 blew up.

  Its turret and main gun, spinning like a child’s discarded rattle, separated from the hull in the fireball and demolished the upper storey of a house. The hull itself split open like a roasting nalnut shell in a campfire and showered flames and metal fragments everywhere.

  “Feth me!” Meryn stammered.

  “Moving up, stand aside,” the vox said.

  LeGuin’s Grey Venger rolled up the street a dark predatory shape, unlit.

  “Drinks are on me,” Meryn heard Mkoll vox to the tank. “Hold you to that. Form up and follow me in. Let’s get this finished.”

  The Ghosts moved out of cover and ran up behind the advancing tank destroyer, firing suppression bursts into the surrounding houses. The Venger crunched over the remains of the Reaver. The Infardi were in flight.

  Meryn smiled. In a second, the flow of battle had completely reversed. Now they were the ones advancing with a tank.

  Half a kilometre away, the Heart of Destruction and the P48J finally broke through into the market place. Their steady advance had been delayed for a while by a trio of N20s, and the Heart’s hull carried the blackened scars of that clash.

  Kleopas looked away from the prismatic up-scope for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Load?” he asked.

  “Down to the last twenty,” his gun layer said after checking the shells left in the water-jacketted magazine.

  Small arms fire began to rattle off the mantlet. Kleopas scoped around and identified at least three fire-teams of Infardi troops on the northern side of the market place. The two Conquerors smashed forward through the empty wooden market stalls, shattering them and tearing off the canvas awnings. P48J dragged one like a pennant.

  The Heart’s gun-team loaded and layed at one of the enemy fire-teams.

  “Don’t waste a shell on soft targets, we’re low on ammo,” Kleopas growled. He pulled open a fire-control lever and aimed up the coaxial bolter. The heavy cannon destroyed one Infardi position in a blizzard of dust. The P48J followed suit — she must be running low on shells too, Kleopas decided darkly — and between them, the armoured pair pulverised the outclassed foot troops.

  Kleopas’ auspex suddenly showed two fast-moving blips. A pair of Urdeshi-made light tanks, SteG 4s, each bouncing along on three pairs of massive tyres, sped into the square, headlamps blazing. Their tiny turrets mounted only sticklike 40-mil cannons, but if they had tungsten-cored ammo, or discarding sabots, they might still hurt the hefty Imperial machines.

  “Lay up on that one,” said Kleopas, indicating his backlit target screen as he checked the up-scope. “Now we use our muscle.”

  Sergeant Baffels felt he was under intense pressure to perform. He was sweating profusely and he felt sick. The ferocious combat was bad enough, but he’d seen plenty of that before. It was the command responsibility that troubled him.

  His eastern prong of the infantry assault had pushed up through Bhavnager far enough to cross the main highway. Now, with the temple on their right, they fought through the streets north of the market towards the fuel depot. Gaunt himself had charged Baffels with clearing the route to the depot. He would not fail, Baffels told himself.

  The colonel-commissar had given him squad command on Verghast. He didn’t want it much, but he appreciated the honour of it every waking moment. Now Gaunt had tasked him with the battle’s crucial phase. It was an almost impossibly heavy burden to carry.

  Almost a thousand Ghosts were pouring into the town behind him, platoon supporting platoon. The original plan had been that they, and a similar number under Kolea, would drive open, parallel wounds into Bhavnager’s defences and crack the place wide, while Rawne took the northern depot. Now with both Kolea and Rawne basically bogged down, it was down to him.

  Baffels thought about Kolea a lot, usually with envy tingeing his mood. Kolea, the great war hero, took to command so effortlessly. The troops loved him. They would do anything for him. To be fair, Baffels had never seen a trooper disobey one of his own orders, but he felt unworthy. Until Vervunhive, he’d been a common dog-sold
ier too. Why the feth should they do as he told them?

  He thought about Milo too. Milo, his friend, his squad buddy. Milo should have had this command, he often thought.

  Baffels’ brigade had struggled up through the streets cast of the market, winning every metre hard. Baffels had Commissar Hark with him, but he wasn’t sure Hark helped much. The men were afraid of him, and suspected him of all sorts of dreadful motives. It was good to have a healthy fear of commissars, Baffels knew that much. That’s what commissars were there for. And the regiment’s new commissar, give him his due, was doing his job and doing it well. As he had proved the day before during the ambush, Hark was almost unflappable and he had a confident and agile grasp of field tactics. Not only was he urging the rear portions of Baffel’s group on, he was directing and focussing their efforts in a way that entirely complemented the sergeant’s lead.

  But Baffels could tell that the men despised Hark. Despised what he stood for. Baffels knew this because it was how he felt himself. Hark was Lugo’s agent. He was here to orchestrate Gaunt’s demise.

  The leading edge of Baffels’ assault had run into especially fierce fighting at an intersection between the abandoned halls of an esholi school and the market’s livestock pens. Despite monumental efforts by Soric’s platoon, they had lodged tight, coming under heavy fire from N20 halftracks and several curious, six-wheeled light tanks.

  Hark, picking out a squad of Nehn, Mkendrick, Raess, Vulli, Muril, Tokar, Cown and Garond, had attempted to leap-frog Soric’s unit and break the deadlock. They found themselves pinned down almost immediately.

  Then, more by luck than plan, Pardus armour tore up through the eastern roadway to support them — the Executioner Strife, the Conquerors Tread Softly and Old Strontium, the Destroyer Death Jester. Between them, they made a terrific mess of the north-eastern streets and left burning tank and light tank carcasses in their wake. Baffels moved his forces in behind them as they made the last push to the depot, just a few streets away. It had been bloody and slow, but Baffels had done what Gaunt had asked of him.