[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

  “If you’d care to join us?” Kolea smiled. “Let’s figure out how best to get this place defended.”

  From Bhavnager, the wide road made a sharp incline for five or six kilometres as it ran north. Gaunt noticed that already the land to either side of the road was becoming less open. Field systems and cultivated areas began to disappear, except for a few well-watered paddocks and meadows, where lush stands of woodland began to flourish. Cycads and a larger variant of acestus predominated, often lush with sphagnum moss or skeins of a dark epiphyte known locally as priest’s beard. Luminously coloured flowers dotted the thickets, some unusually large.

  The air became increasingly humid. The woods to either side grew thicker and taller. Within the first hour after departure, sunlight began to flicker down on the travelling convoy, slanting through the ladder of the trees.

  After three hours, the track levelled out and became damp sand and mud rather than dust. The air was heated and still, and clothing began to stick and cling with the airborne moisture. Every now and then, without warning or overture, heavy, warm rain began to fall, straight down, sometimes so hard visibility dropped to a few metres and headlamps went on. Then, just as abruptly, the rain would stop, as if it had never been there. Ground mist would well up almost immediately. Thunder rambled in the heat-swollen air.

  Past noon, they stopped, circulating rations and rotating driving teams. The rainwoods to either side of the trail were mysterious realms of green shadow, and a sweetly pungent vegetable smell permeated everything. Between the showers, the place was alive with wildlife: whirring beetles with wings like rabies, rivers of colonial mites, arachnids and grotesquely large shelled gastropods that left trails of glistening glue on the barks of the trees. There were many birds too: not the riverine forkbills, but shoals of tiny, coloured fliers that buzzed as they hovered and darted. Their tiny forms were small enough to be clenched in a man’s fist, except their long, thin down-curved beaks which were almost thirty centimetres long.

  Standing by his Salamander as he drank water and ate a ration bar, Gaunt saw eight-limbed lizards, their scaled flesh as golden as the stupa of Bhavnager’s temple, flickering through the undergrowth. The whoops, whistles and cries of larger, unseen animals echoed intermittently from the woods.

  “It surprises me you left Kolea at the town,” Hark said, appearing beside Gaunt. Hark had slipped off his heavy coat and jacket and stood, in shirt sleeves and a silver-frogged waistcoat, mopping sweat from his brow with a white kerchief. Gaunt hadn’t heard him approach, and Harks conversations tended to start like that, in the middle, without any hail or hello.

  “Why is that, commissar?”

  “He’s one of the regiment’s best officers. Ferociously loyal and obedient.”

  “I know.” Gaunt took a swig of water. “Who better to leave in charge of an independent operation?”

  “I’d have kept him close by. Rawne is the one I’d leave behind.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s a good enough soldier, but he fights from the head, not the heart. And there’s no missing the fact he has issues with you.”

  “Major Rawne and I have an understanding. He — and many other Ghosts — blame me for the death of their world. Time was, I think, Rawne would have killed me to avenge Tanith. But he’s grown into command. Now, I think, he accepts that we just simply don’t like each other and gets on with it.”

  “I’ve studied his files and, over the last few days, I’ve studied the man. He’s a cynic and a malcontent. I don’t think his issues with you have subsided at all. His knife still itches for your back. The time will come. He’s just become very good at waiting.”

  “There was a saying Slaydo used to like: ‘Keep your friends close…’ ”

  “ ‘…and your enemies closer.’ I am familiar with that notion, Gaunt. Sometimes it does not work well at all.”

  The cry went down the convoy to remount. “Why don’t you travel the next part in my carrier?” Gaunt asked Hark. He hoped none of the remark’s irony would be lost.

  Forty minutes north of the main convoy, the Recon Spearhead was slowing to a crawl. Rawne had chosen to accompany Mkoll’s forward unit. For this, the third day, the spear comprised two scout Salamanders, a Hydra flak tractor, the Destroyer Grey Venger and the Conqueror Say Your Prayers.

  The track was narrowing right down, so tight that the tree cover was beginning to meet overhead and the hulls of the big tanks brushed the foliage.

  Mkoll kept checking the chart-slates to make sure they weren’t off course.

  “There was no other track or road,” said Rawne.

  “I know, and the locator co-ordinates are right. I just didn’t expert things to close down so tightly so fast. I keep feeling like we must have missed the main way and come off onto a herding trail.”

  They both had to duck as a sheath of low-hanging rubbery green leaves brushed over the crewbay.

  “Looks like fast-growing stuff,” said Rawne. “You know what tropical flora can be like. This stuff may have come up in the last month’s wet season.”

  Mkoll looked over the side of the Salamander at the condition of the track itself. The rainwoods were packed into the spur gorges of the foothills, and that meant there was a slight gradient against them. The centre of the trackway was eroded into a channel down which a stream ran, and heavier flood-aways had brought down mud, rock and plant materials. The Salamanders were managing fine, and so was the Hydra, but the two big tanks were beginning to slip occasionally. Worse still, the track was beginning to disintegrate under their weight. Mkoll thought darkly about the weight of machines behind them, particularly the fifty-plus long-body troop trucks, which had nothing like the power or traction of the tracked vehicles.

  Scintillating beetles sawed through the air between scout leader and major. Rawne kept one eye on the auspex. Both he and Mkoll knew considerable elements of Infardi had fled north into these woodlands after the battle, but no trace whatever had been found of them on the track. Somehow they’d got troops and fighting vehicles out of sight.

  A cry came up from ahead and the spearhead stopped. Standing the scout troops and the armour to ready watch, Rawne and Mkoll went forward on foot. The lead Salamander had rounded a slow bend in the trail to find a massive cycad slumped across the track. The mass of rotting wood weighed many tonnes.

  “Can you ram it aside?” Rawne asked the Salamander driver.

  “Not enough purchase on this incline,” the driver replied. “We’ll need chains to pull it out.”

  “Couldn’t we cut it up or blast it?” asked Trooper Caober.

  Mkoll had moved round to the uplifted rootball of the fallen trunk, which was sticky with peat-black soil and wormy loam. There were streaks of a dry, reddish oxide deposit on some of the root fingers. He sniffed it.

  “Maybe we could get the Conqueror past. Lay in with its dozer blade,” Brostin was saying.

  “Down! Down!” Mkoll yelled.

  He’d barely uttered the words when las-fire stung out of the undergrowth alongside them. Rounds spanged off the vehicle hulls or tore overhanging leaves. The driver of the lead Salamander was hit in the neck and fell back into his machine’s crewbay with a shriek.

  Mkoll dived into cover behind the cycad trunk next to Rawne.

  “How did you know?” Rawne asked.

  “Fyceline traces on the tree roots. They used a charge to bring it over and block us.”

  “Sitting fething target…” Rawne cursed.

  The Ghosts were firing back now, but they could see nothing to aim at. Even Lillo, who happened to be in the crewbay of the lead Salamander and therefore had an auspex to refer to, could find no target. The auspex gave back nothing except a flat reading off the hot dense mass of foliage.

  “Cannons!” Rawne ordered, over his vox.

  The coaxial and pintle mounts of the machines stuttered into life, raking the leaf canopy to shreds with heavy washes of fire. A moment later, Sergeant Horkan’s Hydra drowned the
m all out as it commenced firing. The four, long barrelled autocannons of its anti-aircraft mount swivelled around and blasted simultaneous streams of illuminator rounds into the woodlands at head height, cropping trees, shredding bushes, pulverising ferns, liquidising foliage. A stinking mist of vaporised plant matter and aspirated sap filled the trackway, making the troops choke and retch.

  After thirty seconds’ auto-fire, the Hydra ceased. Apart from the drizzle of canopy moisture, the collapse of destroyed plants and the clicking of the Hydra’s autoloader as it cycled, there was silence. The Hydra was designed to bring down combat aircraft at long range. Point-blank, against a soft target of vegetation, it had cut a clearing in the rainwood fifty metres deep and thirty across. A few denuded, broken trunks stood up amid the leaf-pulp.

  Mkoll and Caober moved forward to check the area. The partially disintegrated remains of two Infardi lay amid the green destruction.

  There was no sign of further attack.

  Just a little ambush; just a little harrying, delaying tactic.

  “Get chains round that tree!” Rawne ordered. At this rate, if the damn Infardi dropped a tree every few kilometres, it was going to take weeks to cross these rainwoods.

  About a hundred and twenty kilometres south of the rainwoods, a lone Chimera coughed its way down the dusty highway through an empty, abandoned village called Mukret. Since the dawn-stop that morning, it had borne the name “the Wounded Wagon” on its flank, daubed in orange anti-rust lacquer by a hasty, imprecise hand.

  The day was glaring hot, and Greer kept a close eye on the temp-gauges. The old heap’s panting turbine was red-lining regularly, and twice now they’d had to stop, dump the boiling water-mix in the coolant system and replace it with water drawn from the river in jerry cans. Now they were out of coolant chemicals, and the mix in the flushed out system was so dilute it was essentially running on river water alone.

  Greer pulled the vehicle to the roadside under the shade of a row of tree-ferns before the needles went past the point of no return.

  “Fifteen minute break,” he called back into the cargo space. He needed to stretch his legs anyway, and maybe there would be time to show Daur a little more of the skills needed to drive the machine. An ability to swap drivers meant they would be able to keep going longer without rest stops.

  Corbec’s team dismounted into the sunlight and the dry air, seeking shelter at once under the ferns. The cabin fans and recirculators in the Chimera weren’t working either, so it was like going on a long journey in an oven.

  Corbec, Daur and Milo consulted the chart. “We should get to Nusera Crossing by dark. That would be good. If they’re in the rainwoods now, it means their rate of speed will have dropped, so we might just start catching them,” said Corbec. He turned aside, unpopped his water flask and knocked down a pill or two.

  “The far side of the river bothers me,” Daur was saying. “Seems likely that’s where the mass of Infardi are concentrated. Things could get hotter for us too once we make the crossing.”

  “Noted,” said Corbec. “What are these here?”

  Milo peered. The colonel was indicating a network of faint lines that followed the river north when it forked that way at Nusera. They radiated up into the Sacred Hills, echoing, though not precisely, the branches of the holy river’s head waters. “I don’t know. It says ‘sooka’ on the key. I’ll ask Sanian.”

  Nearby, at the river’s edge, Vamberfeld stood in the shallows skipping stones out over the flat water between the reed beds. A slight breeze stirred the feathery rushes on the far bank, which were starkly ash-white against the baked, blue sky.

  He made one skip four times. Concentrating on simple actions like that helped him to control the shaking in his hand. The water was soothingly cool against his legs.

  He skipped another. Just before it made its fifth bounce, a much larger stone flew out over his head and fell with a dull splash into the river. Vamberfeld looked round.

  On the bank, Bragg grinned at him sheepishly.

  “Never could do that.”

  “So I see,” said Vamberfeld.

  Bragg gingerly stepped out into the shallows, steering his clumsy bulk unsteadily over the loose stones of the bed. “Maybe you could teach me?”

  Vamberfeld thought for a moment. He took another couple of flat stones from his pants pocket and handed one to the big Tanith.

  “Hold it like this.”

  “Like this?” Bragg’s meaty fingers dwarfed Vamberfeld’s.

  “No, like this. Flat to the water. Now, it’s in the wrist. Make it spin as you release. Just so.”

  Three neat splashes. Paff-paff-paff.

  “Nice,” said Bragg, and tried. The stone hit the water and disappeared.

  Vamberfeld fetched out two more stones. “Try again, Bragg,” he said, and when the big man laughed he realised he had unwittingly made a joke.

  Vamberfeld skipped a few more, and slowly, Bragg managed it too. One throw where Vamberfeld made four or five. The Verghastite suddenly, joyfully, realised that he was relaxed for the first time in recent memory. Just to be here, calm, in the sunlight, casually teaching a likeably gentle man to do something pointless like skip stones. It reminded him of his childhood, taking vacations up on the River Hass with his brothers. For a moment, the shaking almost stopped. Bragg’s attention was fixed entirely on Vamberfeld’s hands and demonstrations.

  From the corner of his eye Vamberfeld saw the white rushes on the far side of the river sway in the breeze again. Except there was no breeze.

  He didn’t want to look.

  “Hold it a little tighter, like that.”

  “I think I’m getting it. Feth me! Two bounces!”

  “You are getting it. Try another.”

  Don’t look. Don’t look and it won’t be there. Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look. “Yes! Three! Ha ha!”

  Ignore the green shapes in amongst the rushes. Ignore them and they won’t be there. And this moment won’t end. And the terror won’t come back. Ignore them. Don’t look.

  “Good shot! Five there! Can you do six?”

  Don’t look. Don’t say anything. Ignore that urge to shout out: you know it will just start you shaking again. Bragg hasn’t noticed. No one has to know. It’ll go away. It’ll go away because it isn’t even there.

  “Try again, Bragg.”

  “Sure. Hey, Vambs… Why’s your hand shaking?”

  “What?”

  It isn’t. Don’t look.

  “Your hand’s really starring to shake, pal. You okay? You look kinda sick. Vambs?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s not shaking. Not. Try again. Try again.”

  “Vambs?”

  No. No. No no no no.

  Shockingly loud, a lasrifle fired right behind them, the echo of the snap-roar rolling across the wide river. Bragg reeled round and saw Nessa crouched in a braced position on the bank, her long-las resting across a twist of roots. She fired again, out across the water.

  “What the feth?” Bragg cried. His vox-link came alive.

  “Who’s shooting? Who’s shooting?”

  Bragg looked round. He saw the green shapes in the rushes over the river. There were silent flashes of light and suddenly las rounds were skipping like well-thrown stones in the water around him.

  “Feth!” he cried again. Nessa fired a third, then a fourth shot. Derin appeared, scrambling down the bank behind her, lasgun in hand.

  “Infardi! Infardi on the far shore!” Derin was yelling into his link.

  Las-fire was punching up and churning the water right across the shallows. Bragg turned to Vamberfeld and saw to his horror the man was frozen, his eyes rolled back, his entire body spasming and vibrating. Blood and froth coated his chin. He’d bitten through his tongue.

  “Vambs! Ah, feth it!”

  Bragg grabbed the convulsing Verghastite and threw him over his shoulder. His wound screamed out in protest but he didn’t care. He started struggling his way towards the shore. Derin w
as now firing on auto with his assault las in support of Nessa’s hot-shots. Enemy rounds cut through the trunk and branches of the old trees above them with a peculiar, brittle sound.

  Corbec, Daur and Milo appeared at the top of the bank, weapons raised. Dorden came bouncing and scrambling down the shady bank on his arse, and splashed out into the water, reaching for the lumbering Bragg.

  “Pass him here! Pass him here, Bragg! Is he hit?”

  “I don’t think so, doc!”

  A las-shot grazed Bragg’s left buttock and he yowled. Another missed Dorden’s head by a hand’s breadth and a third hit the doctor’s medikit and blew it open.

  Dorden and Bragg manhandled Vamberfeld ashore and then dragged him up the bank into the cover of the roadwall. The five Ghosts behind them unleashed a steady salvo of fire at the far bank. Glancing back, Bragg saw at least one raft of green silk floating in the water.

  Greer ran up from the Chimera, clutching Bragg’s auto-cannon. Sanian followed him, a stricken look of fear on her face.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Greer asked, gazing in sick horror at the weirdly vibrating Vamberfeld. Vamberfeld’s shaking hands were twisted into claw-shapes by the extreme muscular spasm. He’d wet himself too.

  “Ah, feth. The nutter’s lost it,” Greer said.

  “Shut the feth up and help me!” Dorden snarled. “Hold his head! Hold his head, Greer! Now! Make sure he doesn’t smash it into anything!”

  Bragg snatched the autocannon from Greer and ran back to the bank, locking in a drum-mag. The enemy fire was still heavy. Ten or twelve shooters, Bragg estimated. As he settled down to fire, he saw another Infardi tumble into the river, hit by Nessa. Clouds of downy white fibre were rising like wheat chaff from the rushes where the Imperial firepower was mashing it.

  Bragg opened fire. His initial burst chopped into the river in a row of tall splashes. He adjusted his aim and began to reap through the rush stands, chopping them down, exposing and killing three or four green-clad figures.