Corpsmen had already carried Meryn away, and Neskon had wandered off somewhere. Dalin felt lost and aimless. He kept looking around for Cullwoe, forgetting he wouldn’t be there any more. Dalin was exhausted.
His hands were shaking and he was having to fight the urge to fold up and collapse in a corner somewhere.
The last of G Company came in through the gate. Heavy fire chased them. The Blood Pact outside were closing in, and they’d had time to bring up support weapons. Machine cannons pummelled the doorway with explosive shells, raising a fog of pulverised stone. The enemy was tearing through ammo box after ammo box. They were evidently not short of supplies.
“Set!” Vivvo called out.
“Clear the chamber!” Daur ordered. “Fall back through, three rooms back at least! That’s the way! Come on!”
The tail-enders, who had been maintaining a steady suppression fire from the doorway to keep the enemy back, picked themselves up and ran for the inner rooms.
Daur stayed until they were all moving and accounted for. “Right the way back!” he yelled, repeatedly sweeping with his arm.
Daur touched his microbead. “Commander, sealing the second gate at this time,” he reported.
“Understood,” Rawne voxed back.
Daur got into cover and nodded to Vivvo, who was clutching the trigger box.
Gunfire squirted in through the doorway, heavy and sustained. A moment later, the first Blood Pact warriors clambered in, scanning the empty chamber with guns ready.
The world blew out from under them in a flash of supernova light, and the mountain fell on their heads.
IV
“Put that away,” Baskevyl said softly.
“Up against the wall. Lose the firearm,” Ludd said. “You too, Merrt.” His aim did not waver.
“I admire your dedication, Ludd,” Baskevyl said, steadfastly not moving, “and I know you have a duty to perform and a lot to prove, but this isn’t the time.”
“That’s enough!” said Ludd. “You left your post, Baskevyl. You ignored a direct order! In the middle of this shit-storm!”
“Listen to me,” Baskevyl said firmly, “we’re going to lose. We’re going to die here unless something fething miraculous happens.”
“And that’s why you came down here? To find yourself a miracle?”
“Maybe,” said Baskevyl. “Perhaps not a miracle, but a long shot, at least. A chance.”
“Gn… gn… gn… listen to him!” Merrt growled.
“That’s enough from you,” said Ludd.
“Look at the book, Ludd. Look at that book there,” Baskevyl pointed. “I found it in the library. I showed it to Domor and he agreed with me. It’s a set of schematics. It’s the operation instructions for the house’s power hub.”
Ludd glanced at the book open on the floor. “It’s gibberish,” he said.
“The text is. But the drawings are what matter. Look… let me show you.”
Ludd hesitated, and then gestured with his pistol. “You’ve got one minute.”
Baskevyl bent down and picked up the book. He held it out to show Ludd. “Look, here. That’s the hub. See? It’s quite clearly this hub. Here, that’s a diagram of the locking mechanism holding the lid down.”
He flipped a page over. “This is a plan of the light trunking systems. That’s a wall light, see? It’s unmistakable.”
“What were you… going to do?” Ludd asked.
“Restart it,” said Baskevyl, “if I could. It’s running on the very last dregs of its reserve. I think most of the systems have long since died, or failed. The lighting ring is running on low-level emergency power.”
“But how were you going to restart it?” asked Ludd.
“It’s a cold fusion plant. It’s pretty much dry. I was going to empty those canteens into it, give it something to start its reaction off.”
Ludd stared at him. He edged to the side of the open kettle and looked in at the labouring rotation of the hoop.
He holstered his pistol.
“Do it,” he said. “You’re not off the hook, Baskevyl, but you’re right. This is worth a try.”
Baskevyl and Merrt hurried to the kit bag and gathered up armfuls of canteens. Ludd watched for a moment and then helped them. Baskevyl emptied the first canteen into the dry cup of the open hub and tossed the flask away. Merrt passed him another, the top already unstoppered.
The kettle took an astonishing quantity without seeming to fill. Eight canteens, and there was just a shallow puddle in the bottom of the basin.
“Keep going,” said Baskevyl.
Baskevyl had brought thirty canteens altogether. There was probably some charge pending for misuse of so much of the precious water ration. He emptied the last one into the kettle. The basin was barely a quarter full.
“Better than nothing,” Baskevyl said.
“Yeah, and nothing is what’s happening,” said Merrt.
Baskevyl peered in again. The hoop actually seemed to be slowing down. “Show me the book again,” he said.
Ludd passed the black-bound book over.
“All right,” said Baskevyl, studying the pages. “Domor said we could expect this. Its probably been set, or has set itself, to conservation running. There’s a…” he paused, turning the book on its side to follow the diagram. “Yeah, there.”
Baskevyl reached into the hub again and adjusted the knurled calibrations on the head of the snake.
The hoop stopped spinning all together.
“No,” Baskevyl breathed. “No, no, come on…”
They stared at it.
The hoop quivered slightly. Mechanisms deep inside the kettle base and its adjoining apparatus whirred and clicked. They made grinding, scratching noises that Baskevyl knew only too well.
The hoop started to turn again. It turned in the opposite direction to before. Its rotations were steady this time, and it gathered speed until it was spinning like a gaming wheel. The water in the bottom of the basin began to froth and gurgle. Then the water turned milky white and started to shine.
“Throne alive,” murmured Ludd.
“The lid,” said Baskevyl. “Help me get the lid back on.”
The three of them manhandled the lid back into place and latched it shut. The kettle was humming quite loudly, and bright white light shone out of the grilled slits in its sides.
“What now?” asked Ludd.
“Well, here’s the piece of this plan that’s really an act of faith on my part. Follow me.”
He paused. “Is that all right, commissar? Will you indulge me one last time? Or do you just want to shoot me now?”
V
They ran up the stairs from the power room and followed the inner hallways in the direction of the newly opened house sections. Outside and above them, the bedlam of the savage battle was quite distinct. Baskevyl faltered for a moment, looking up.
“Feth, you’re right, Ludd. Listen to that. I should never have left my post in this. I was so… obsessed. I—”
Ludd held up his hand. “Look,” he said. “Look at that!”
The slow, mesmeric pulse and fade of the wall lights had stopped. All down the hallway, as far as they could see, the wall-strung lights were growing steadily brighter, replacing the satin brown gloom with a cool, bright radiance.
Merrt started to make a strange noise. Ludd and Baskevyl realised he was laughing. Baskevyl broke into a run and they chased after him.
As they entered the new section of the house, they met Daur’s company pulling back through. Daur had set five squads to watch the vulnerable courtyard, and was despatching the rest up to the main southern overlooks.
Daur’s face was drawn and haggard. “They’re in,” he told Baskevyl. “I just heard it on the vox. They’re in at the main gate, and in some of the lower levels. It’s hand-to hand now. Rawne says all munitions are pretty much spent.”
Baskevyl nodded. He pulled his microbead out of his pocket and plugged it back in. “Did Rawne say anything else?”
br />
“He told us to draw silver and become ghosts, ghosts in the house. Keep in the shadows and kill as many of the bastards as we could.”
“What shadows, captain?” Ludd asked.
Daur was so weary, so deadened by fatigue and the prospect of the final, bloody grind, he hadn’t noticed the lights. The previously amber glimmer of the lighting in the new section had been replaced by a firm, bright white.
“What,” Daur began, “what’s going on?”
Baskevyl pushed past him and entered the armoury.
He opened the lid of one of the bunkers that ran down the middle of the chamber. The pebbles inside were all shining brightly, like tiny stars.
He clicked his microbead. “This is Baskevyl,” he said. “Daur, get the men in here.”
VI
Larkin’s gun dry clicked. The cell was dead. He tossed the useless weapon aside and got up from the gunslot, drawing his blade. There were scaling ladders barely ten metres below the overlook that he could do nothing about, aside from spit at them.
The sound of the battle had changed. Larkin realised that there was virtually no gunfire coming from the casemates. It was all coming at them.
He turned around. There was no Cuu. The presence had remained behind Larkin for some minutes while he meted out the last of his shots, unwilling or unable to strike as it had threatened.
There was no Cuu, but Larkin could still feel him, the wretched essence of him, hanging around him like a mist.
“You don’t frighten me any more,” he said out loud. “You hear me? I’m not scared of you. You’re just a ghost. Sure as fething sure. You want to kill me, you get in line, because there’s a whole bunch of bastards at the gates after my blood.”
There was no answer. It seemed to Larkin that it was much brighter suddenly.
He limped towards the door. “Stay out of my way, Cuu,” he growled at the empty air. “I’ve got to go away and die with the real Ghosts now.”
VII
The Blood Pact warriors were milling around the burning Valkyrie. Some of them were beginning to spread out, searching the immediate area. An officer got up from the turret of one of the captured tanks and shouted some orders.
“Stay down,” Hark whispered to the others. They were flat on their faces on the rock. Hark slowly reached for his bolt pistol.
A whisker of lightning laced the purple sky above the pass. Slow thunder rolled, like mountains grating together. Down below, the enemy soldiers were suddenly agitated. They shouted to one another.
The air temperature had dropped by several degrees.
Twenzet whimpered. “W-what is that?” he whispered.
Hark didn’t answer. He could feel it too, a creeping dread, unfathomable and unnameable, that made his flesh crawl and his ravaged back bleed.
Something terrible, some unutterable horror, was approaching.
Help me
TWENTY-TWO
Only in Death
I
The vox mast, poking up into the enormous night sky, was emitting a string of clicks and beeps into the darkness, like some fidgeting nocturnal insect. The dust-proof tents, pitched in a wide ring, were internally lit by oil lamps and small, portable lights, so they glowed golden like paper lanterns. Braziers had been lit on the outer rim of the camp and brass storm cressets hung from poles. Figures moved about in the fire-lit spaces of the inner encampment. Voices came out of the night, along with the smell of cooking.
Two perimeter sentries, their patrol circuits crossing, paused to exchange a few words, then carried on along their routes, moving away from one another.
One paused and looked around. There was no sign of his comrade. The grey desert flat stretched away, empty into the night.
He began to retrace his path, about to call out, and that became the final action of his life: a foot raised to take a step, his mouth open to call a name.
Mkoll lowered the body into the dust and wiped his knife. He nodded once, though his fellow infiltrator was invisible to him.
Low to the ground, Mkoll scurried forwards, dropping onto his belly for the last stretch where the lamp light extended.
Veiled by the dust-shroud of a tent, Mkoll rose, and stepped carefully over the guy wires. He waited as two thuggish men with scarred faces passed by. They were talking casually. One had a long-necked bottle.
When they’d gone, he slipped between two more of the tents and entered a darker area where the vehicles were parked. Half-tracks and cargo-8 transports made angular blue shadows against the sky. Mkoll dropped down, slid under the first vehicle, and went to work. Feeling, blind, he found the fuel line and cut a slit in it with his warknife. In under three minutes, two other vehicles had been bled in the same way, their fuel loads slowly, quietly pattering away onto the dust beneath them.
Mkoll prised the fuel cap off one of the crippled trucks and packed the pipe with strips of material sliced off the hem of his camo-cloak. Then he poked a strip of det-tape into the wadding with his finger.
He wondered how far Eszrah had got.
Mkoll fixed his warknife to the lug of his rifle and tore the ignition patch off the det-tape.
II
A clammy sensation of evil engulfed them. The night air seemed to bristle with it, like a static charge. Twenzet started to moan, but Criid clamped his mouth shut with her good hand. She looked at Hark. His eyes were wide. A pulse was pounding in his temple.
Below them, the commotion amongst the Blood Pact warriors had died away. They were standing stock still, gazing into the distance with their rifles in their hands. They could feel it too. There was no sound except the idling murmur of the tank engines and the dying crackle of flames as the Valkyrie burned out.
The night wind stirred. The ground, the air, reality itself, seemed to tremble for a second.
They heard howling. It was a pitiful, yowling noise, like an animal in pain, and it appeared to come from all around them. The Blood Pact warriors started, turning, hunting for the source.
They began shouting again as they realised the howling was coming from one of their own. The stricken warrior tore off his helmet and his grotesk. He was shaking, as if experiencing the initial spasms of a seizure. Two of his comrades moved to help him.
He killed them.
His autorifle made a hard, cracking sound in the night air. He kept firing, cutting down two more men who were backing away, waving their arms in protest. Stray shots pinged off the sponson armour of the nearest tank. The tank commander, yelling in rage, stood up in his turret hatch and shot the howling maniac with his pistol. The man flopped over, arched his back, and died.
The officer continued shouting as he climbed down from his machine. Warriors who had ducked for cover when the shooting started slowly began to rise to their feet. The officer strode over to the lunatic’s corpse, fiercely rebuking each cowering soldier as he went by. He stood over the body and put four more rounds into it.
A blinding fork of electrical discharge leapt out of the corpse and struck the officer’s pistol with a shower of sparks. The officer was hurled backwards through the air by the massive shock. He hit the track guards of his tank with such force, his back snapped. The electrical discharge, blue-white like ice and as bright as a las-bolt, lit up the tank’s hull in a crackling, sizzling display of raw voltage. Then it leapt again, striking the nearest warrior in the face.
The warrior bucked and twitched as the power overloaded his central nervous system. The energy let him go and, before his limp body had time to topple over, the forking blue charge had jumped to another victim, then another, then another. Each one died, his last seconds spent as a spastic, dancing puppet.
The commander of the second tank emerged from his hatch and started yelling at the rest of the foot troops to fall back. In the general panic, no one noticed the four, long barrels of the flak tank’s cannon array slowly lowering to the horizontal plane.
The flak tank opened fire with a deafening, prolonged blurt of noise. Its quad autoc
annons were built for anti-aircraft operations, and delivered streams of explosive shells at an extremely high rate of fire. All four guns unloaded into the rear of the nearest tank from a range of about ten metres.
Despite its heavy plating and monumental chassis strength, the larger tank shredded. Its hull ripped like wet paper, and a billion slivers of torn metal flew out in a lethal blizzard. Less than a second after the tank began to disintegrate, auguring flak shells found its magazine.
The sun came out, and everything died.
The overpressure of the gigantic blast knocked Hark and Twenzet off the top of the rock. Criid managed to hold on. An expanding fireball raced out and scorched the air above her, and dust slammed out in a Shockwave wall. Small pieces of debris and rock rained down out of the night sky.
Criid got up. The area below was a litter of fire. All three armoured fighting machines had been obliterated.
“Hark?” she yelled. “Hark?”
He was below her in the shadow of the rock. Twenzet was sprawled beside him. Hark clambered to his feet.
“Are you all right?” he shouted up.
“I can see lights!” she yelled back, pointing to the south. “I can see lights coming this way!”
Hark got up onto a boulder and stared. Vehicles were approaching fast, their lights bobbing as they rode over the dunes and scree on their tracks.
“Throne help us,” Hark murmured, and wondered if his microbead still worked.
III
Rawne could hear the squealing rasp of flamers echoing down the tunnel from the main gate. Ghosts, many of them wounded, were pouring back out of the tunnel into the base chamber all around him.
“Obel!”
Obel limped up the steps to the first landing where Rawne stood. “Main gate’s done for. It was all well and good while we had ammo left, but…” he shrugged and looked at Rawne. “They’re leading in with flamers, sir. We had no choice but to pull back.”