The delay had given Gaunt himself the opportunity to move up with the front. Baffels was almost overjoyed to see him and Hark immediately deferred to the colonel-commissar.
Gaunt approached Baffels’ position as enemy las-fire crisscrossed the night air.
“You’ve done a fine job,” Gaunt told the sergeant. “It’s taken fething ages I’m afraid, sir,” Baffels countered. “It was going to. The Ershul aren’t giving up without a fight.”
“Ershul, sir?”
“A word ayatani Zweil taught me this afternoon. Smell that?”
“I do, sir,” said Baffels, scenting the stink of promethium fuel on the wind. “Let’s go finish it,” Gaunt said.
Supported by the blistering firepower of the Pardus, the Ghosts moved forward towards the depot. Leading one line, Gaunt found himself suddenly face to face with Infardi who had laid low and dug in, now springing out in ambush to the file. His power sword sang and his bolter spat. Around him, Uril, Harjeon, Soric and Lillo, some of the best of the Verghastite new blood, proved themselves worthy Ghosts. It was the first of seventeen separate hand-to-hand engagements the prong would encounter on the way up.
At the fifth, a messy firefight to clear a oil de sac, chance brought Gaunt and Hark up side by side in the mayhem. Hark’s plasma pistol seared into the shadows.
“I’ll say this, Gaunt… you fight a good fight.”
“Whatever. The Emperor protects,” Gaunt murmured, decapitating a charging Infardi with the power sword of House Sondar.
“You still don’t trust me, do you?” Hark said, destroying an enemy stub-nest with a single, volatile beam.
“Are you really very surprised?” Gaunt replied tardy and, without waiting for a response, rallied his Ghosts for the next assault.
Sergeant Bray was the first platoon leader in Baffels’ group to break his men through to the fuel depot proper. He found a row of massive sheds and chubby fuel tanks, guarded by over a hundred dug-in Infardi, supported by three AT70s and a pair of Usurpers.
Bray’s rocket teams got busy. This was the heaviest resistance they’d yet encountered, and the attack had hardly been a picnic up until then. Bray called up for armour support.
Gaunt, Baffels, Soric and Hark clawed in, each driving a solid formation of Ghosts up to the rear of Bray’s position. Gaunt could taste victory, and defeat too, intertwined. Experience told him that this was the moment, the make or break. If they endured and pushed on, they would win the town and destroy the foe. If not…
Shell, las and hard-round fire whipped into his formation. He saw the Pardus go forward, smashing through chain-link fences and across ditches as they breached the depot compound. Strife killed a Usurper, and Death Jester crippled a Reaver. The night sky was underlit by a storm of explosions and tracers.
“Regroup! Regroup!” Baffels was yelling as the shells scourged the air. Soric’s section made gains, charging in through the southern fence, before being driven back by heavy fire from Infardi troops. Hark’s section was backed into a corner.
Gaunt saw the Baneblade before anyone else.
His blood ran cold.
Three hundred tonnes of super-heavy tank, a captured, corrupted Imperial machine. It trundled casually out from behind the depot, its massive turret weapon rising.
A monster. A steel-shod monster from the mouth of hell.
“Baneblade! Enemy Baneblade at 61.78!” Gaunt yelled into his vox. Captain Woll, commanding the Old Strontium, couldn’t believe his ears.
His auspex picked up the behemoth a second before it fired and obliterated the Conqueror Tread Softly.
Woll layed in and fired, but his tank round barely made a dent on the massive machine’s hull.
The Baneblade’s secondary and sponson turrets began to fire on the Imperial positions. The immediate death toll was hideous. Staunch, loyal Ghosts broke in terror and ran as the Baneblade rolled forward.
“Stand true! Stand true, you worthless dogs!” Hark yelled at the fleeing Tanith around him. “This is the Emperor’s work! Stand true or face his wrath at my hand!”
Hark was suddenly jerked backwards as Gaunt seized his wrist tightly and spoiled the threatened aim of his plasma pistol.
“I punish the Ghosts. Me. Not you. Besides, it’s a fething Baneblade, you moron. I’d be running too. Now, help me.”
Soric’s and Bray’s sections hurled anti-tank missiles at the looming giant to no great avail. Death Jester hit it with two blinding shots and still it rolled on. The Infardi armour and infantry advanced behind it.
Gaunt realised he had been right. This had been the moment. The make or break.
And they had broken.
Weapons thumping and spitting, the Infardi Baneblade drove the Tanith First into abject retreat Baffels would not let go. He was still determined to prove Gaunt right in selecting him for command. He was going to win this, he was going to take the target. He was—
As men fled around him, he grabbed a fallen tread-fether, loaded up a rocket and took aim on the monster tank. It was less than twenty metres away now, a giant, fire-spitting dragon that blotted out the stars.
Baffels locked the crosshairs on a slit window near what he assumed was the driver’s position. He held the tube steady and fired.
There was a bright blast of flame and for one jubilant moment, Baffels thought he’d been successful. That he’d become a hero like fething Gol Kolea.
But the Baneblade was barely bruised. One of its secondary coaxial cannons killed Baffels with a brief spurt of shots.
Rawne’s counter punch finally reached the Bhavnager temple at nine thirty-five. It was dark by then, and the town was alive with firestorms and shooting.
Their slow progression through the minefield had sped up when Larkin and Domor had hit upon an improvised plan. Domor’s augmetic eyes could pick out many mines just under the soil surface. He talked Larkin onto them and Larkin and Banda then set them off with pinpoint shots.
The sweepers had advanced another thirty metres and by that time, with the sun gone, Sims’ tank mob had dealt with the opposition armour. Then the tanks rolled in down the channel Domor had cleared, and lowered their combat dozer blades to clear the last few metres now they were no longer under fire.
The temple was a mess. Golden fish-scale tiles trickled off the burst dome of the once glorious stupa. Incendiary shells burned in the main nave. Prayer flags smouldered and twitched in the breeze.
The counter punch drove in at last towards the fuel depot from the east.
Captain Sirus, his tracks now repaired, thundered forward in the Wrath of Pardua. He had heard the strangled, unbelievable transmission from the southern front that they’d met a Baneblade.
If it was true, he wanted a piece of that. Something Woll could never beat.
The Wrath of Pardua came at the enemy Baneblade in the open space of the depot field. Sensing the Wrath by auspex, the Baneblade had begun to rum.
Sims loaded augur shells, armour busters, into his breech, and punched two penetrating holes in the massive enemy tank’s mantlet. Few Pardus tank commanders carried augur shells as a matter of course, because few ever expected to meet something genuinely tougher than themselves. Sims was a philosophically tactical man. He was happy to sacrifice a few valuable places in his magazine for augur shells, just in case.
Now the trick was to target the holes made by the augurs and blow the enemy out from the inside with a hi-ex tank round.
The wounded Baneblade traversed its turret, locked on to the Wrath of Pardua, and destroyed it with a single shot from its main weapon.
Sims was laughing in victory as he was incinerated. An instant. An instant of success all tank masters dream of. He had wounded the beast. He could die now.
The Wrath of Pardua exploded, skipping armour chips out around itself in the blast wake.
Old Strontium purred out from behind the shattered buildings south of the depot. Woll had never carried augur rounds as standard, like Sims. But he was damn well going to
use the advantage. Ignoring his auspex and sighting only by eye, referring to his rangefinder and crosswind indicator, Woll punched a hi-ex shell through one of the profound holes Sirus had made in the Baneblade’s armour. There was a brief pause.
Then the super-heavy tank blew itself to pieces in a titanic eruption of heat and noise and light.
Gaunt and Soric, with the help of Hark and the squad leaders, managed to slow the Ghosts’ panic and bring them around towards the fuel depot. Soric himself led the charge back down the yard towards the depot past the flaming remains of the Baneblade.
By then, Rawne’s counter punch had chased in after the valiant Wrath of Pardua, and was cleaning out the last Infardi in the depot. It was a running gun-battle, and Rawne knew he had time to make up.
He vox-signalled seizure of the depot just before eleven.
Surviving Infardi elements fled north into the rainwoods beyond Bhavnager. The town was now in Imperial hands.
As the medics moved around him in the smoke-stained night Gaunt found ayatani Zweil kneeling over the ruptured corpse of Sergeant Baffels. Sergeant Varl stood attentively nearby, watching.
“Sorry, chief. He insisted. He wanted to be here,” Varl told Gaunt.
Gaunt nodded. “Thanks for looking after him, Varl.” Gaunt walked over to Zweil.
“This man is a special loss,” Zweil said, turning to rise and face Gaunt. “His efforts were crucial here.”
“Did someone tell you that or do you just feel that father?”
“The latter… Am I wrong?”
“No, not at all. Baffels led the way to the depot. He did his duty, beyond his duty. I could not have asked for more.”
Zweil closed Baffels’ clouded eyes.
“I felt as much. Well, it’s over now,” he said. “Sleep well, pilgrim. Your journey’s done.”
ELEVEN
THE RAINWOODS
“Though my tears be as many as the spots of rain Falling in the Hagian woods, One for every fallen soul, loyal to the Throne There would not be enough.”
—Gospel of Saint Sabbat, Psalms II VII.
Under cover of darkness, the sky lit up, over a hundred and fifty kilometres away. Flashes, sudden flares, spits of light, accompanied by the very distant judder of thunder.
Once it had been going on for an hour, they all agreed it wasn’t a storm.
“Full-scale action,” Corbec murmured.
“That’s one feth of a fight,” Bragg agreed.
They stood in the dark, at the edge of the holy river, inserts chorusing around them, as Greer and Daur worked on the engine.
“What I wouldn’t give…” Derin began, and then shut up. “I know what you mean, son,” said Corbec.
“Bhavnager,” said Milo, joining them with a flashlight and an open chart-slate. “Where, boy?”
“Bhavnager. Farming town, in the approach to the foothills.” Milo showed Corbec the area on the chart.
“It was meant to be our second night stop,” he said. “There’s a fuel depot there.”
An especially big flash underlit the clouds.
“Feth!” said Bragg.
“Bad news for some poor bastard,” said Derin. “Let’s hope it was one of theirs,” said Corbec.
Dorden had walked away down to the river, and stood casting stones aimlessly into the inky water.
He started as someone came up beside him in the close dark. It was the esholi, Sanian.
“You are no fighter, I know that,” she said.
“What?”
“I worked with the lady Curth. I saw you. A medic.”
“That’s me, girl,” Dorden smiled.
“You are old.”
“Oh, thanks a bunch!”
“No, you are old. On Hagia, that is a mark of respect.”
“It is?”
“It shows you have wisdom. That, if you haven’t wasted your life, you have used it to collect up learning.”
“I’m pretty sure I haven’t wasted my life, Sanian.”
“I feel like I have.”
He looked round at her. She was a shadow, a silhouette staring down into the river, “What?”
“What am I? A learner? A student? All my life I have studied books and gospels… and now my world ends in ruin and war. The saint doesn’t watch over us. I see men like Corbec, Daur, even a young man like Brin. They scold themselves because all they have learned is the art of war. But war is what matters. Here. On Hagia, now. But for the art of war-making, there is nothing.”
“There’s more to life than—”
“There is not, doctor. The Imperium is great, its wonders are manifold, but what of it would remain but for war? Its people? Its learning? Its culture? Its language? Nothing. War encompasses all. In this time, there is only war.”
Dorden sighed. She was right. After a fashion.
“War has found Bhavnager,” she remarked, looking briefly at the flashes underlighting the distant clouds.
“You know the place?”
“I was born there and raised there. I left there to become esholi and find my way. Now, even if my way in life is revealed to me, there will be nothing for me to return home to, when this is done. Because it will never be done. War is eternal. It is only mankind that is finite.”
“Nothing on the vox,” Vamberfeld said.
Corbec nodded. “You’ve tried all channels?”
“Yes sir. It’s dead. I don’t know if it’s dead because we’re out of range or because the Chimera’s vox-caster is a pile of junk.”
“We’ll never know,” said Derin.
Vamberfeld sat down on a tree stump at the edge of the road. Rain was in the air, and a true storm was gathering in defiance of the man-made one to the west. The wind stirred their hair and the first few spats of rain dropped around them.
Under the raised cowling of the Chimera, Daur and Greer worked at the engines.
Vamberfeld could hear Corbec talking to Milo just a few steps away from where he sat. It would be, he supposed, the easiest thing in the world just to stand up, get the colonel’s attention, and talk to him, man to man.
The easiest thing…
He couldn’t do it.
Even now, he could feel the terror crawling back into him, in through his pores, in through his veins, squirming and slithering down along his gut and up into the recesses of his mind. He began to shake.
It was so unfair. On Verghast in the towering hive he’d enjoyed a quiet life working as Guilder Naslquey’s personal clerk in the commercia, signing dockets, arranging manifests, chasing promissory notes. He’d been good at that. He’d lived in a decent little hab on Spine Low-231, with a promise of status promotion. He’d been very much in love with his fiancée, an apprentice seamstress with Bocider’s.
Then the Zoican War had taken it all away. His job, his little hab, to an artillery shell; his fiancée to…
Well, he didn’t know what. He’d never been able to find out what had happened to his clear, sweet little seamstress.
And that was all terrible. He’d lived through days and nights of fear, of hiding in ruins, of running scared, of starving. But he’d lived through them, and come out sane.
Because of that, he’d decided he was man enough to turn his back on the ruins of his life and join the Imperial Guard when the Act of Consolation made that possible. It had felt like the right thing to do.
He’d known fear during the war, and renewed the acquaintance again. The fear of leaving Verghast, never to return. The anxiety of warp travel in a stinking, confined troop ship. The trepidation of failing during the bone-wearying first week of Fundamental and Preparatory.
The true terror, the unexpected terror had come later. The first time, wriggling and chuckling at the back of his scalp, during the Hagia mass landings. He’d shaken it off. He’d been through hell on Verghast, he told himself. This was just the same kind of hell.
Then it had come again, in the first phase of the assault on the Doctrinopolis. In real fighting, for the first
time, as a real soldier. Men died alongside him or, worse still as it seemed to Vamberfeld, were dismembered or hideously mutilated by war. Those first few days had left him shaking inside. The terror would not now leave him alone. It simply subsided a little between engagements.
Vamberfeld had decided that he needed to kill. To make a kill, as a soldier, to exorcise his terror. The chance had finally come when he’d been with Gaunt as they breached the Universitariat from across the Square of Sublime Tranquillity. To be baptised in war, to be badged in blood. He had been willing, and eager. He had wanted combat. He had wanted relief from the terror-daemon that was by then riding his back all the time.
But it had only made things worse.
He’d come out of that encounter shaking like an idiot, unable to focus or talk. He’d come out a total slave to that daemon.
It was so bloody unfair.
Bragg and Derin had recruited him from the hospital wards for this mission. He could hardly have refused them… he was able-bodied and that made him useful. No one seemed to see the cackling, oil-black terror clinging to him. Bragg and Derin had said Corbec had an important mission, and that was alright. Vamberfeld liked the colonel. It seemed vital. The colonel had talked about holy missions and visions. That was fine too. It had been easy for Vamberfeld to play along with that. Easy to pass off his nervousness and pretend the saint had spoken to him as well, and ear-marked him for the task.
It was all a sham. He was just saying what he thought they wanted to hear. The only thing that really spoke to him was the cackling daemon.
The words of the driver, Greer, had alarmed him. His talk of gold, of complicity with Captain Daur. Vamberfeld wondered if they were all mocking him. He was now pretty sure they were all bastard-mercenaries, breaking orders not because of some lofty, holy ideal but because of a base lust for wealth. And so he felt a fool for acting the part of the dutiful visionary.
His hands shook. He tucked them into his pockets in the hope that no one would see. His body shook. His mind shook. The terror consumed him. He cursed the daemon for fooling him into throwing in with a band of deserters and thieves. He cursed the daemon for making him shake. He cursed the daemon for being there at all.