dry skulls, with all the tops sawn off
—reduced to dust, like all the other poor bastards who had tried and failed to stay alive on bad rock Jago over the centuries.
Unless Maggs saw her first. Unless he saw her coming, and had enough time and courage to punch a las-round into her appalling meat-wound face.
By his side, Hark fired again and vaporised the legs of a trumpet blower. The man fell, tumbling, his horn still barking out discordant squirts of noise like the cry of an animal in pain.
The curtain behind them raked back so hard it was dragged off its pegs. Ghosts rushed out.
“At last. Make a line!” Arcuda ordered. “Spread out!”
Guardsmen, their rifles coming up to firing positions as they moved, fanned out to meet the oncoming tide.
“Make room,” Seena yelled as she and Arilla carried their .30 out through the hatch. Maggs began to help them bed it down and fix its tripod into the dust. “We can do it,” Arilla told him sharply, fixing the first ammo box expertly against the receiver.
“All right then,” Maggs replied, turning to fire again. “Just make sure you shoot her if you see her.”
“Who?” asked Arilla, snapping the receiver cover shut.
Maggs didn’t reply. He had returned to his position and was busy firing again, and there was too much noise for idle chatter.
The wave of attackers was close now, just ten metres. Hark knew that, despite the number the Ghosts had already picked off, they were about to reach the Crunch.
Arcuda knew it too. “Straight silver!” he ordered.
The .30 opened up. It made a clinking whirr, like a monstrous sewing machine. Its clattering hail cut a swathe through the front rank of the charging enemy. As Arilla fed it, Seena expertly washed the heavy cannon from side to side. It mowed the Blood Pact down. It ripped them apart, mangled limb from mangled limb.
Hark sighed. Fight time. They were on fight time, at last. He’d been expecting it. He’d been waiting for it to begin. Everything in the world seemed to slow down. Las-rounds trembled like leaves of fire, suspended in the air. Blood Pact warriors, struck by Seena’s fire, fell backwards ever so slowly, arms flung wide, fingers clawing at the air as if trying to hold onto it. Blood bloomed like flowers opening lazily in the sun. A grotesk, torn from a face, flipped over and over in the air like a ponderously turning asteroid. Even the swirling dust seemed to slow down and stagnate.
Hark braced himself. He felt curiously content as if, despite the situation, the galaxy was at last behaving the way it was supposed to behave.
At the edges of the line, beyond the .30’s cone of fire, the rushing tide of Blood Pact finally met the Ghost file head on.
This was the Crunch. This was the point at which an assaulting enemy could no longer be fended off by fire alone. This was the point of impact, of body on body and mass on mass.
The wave struck the Ghost line. There was a palpable, shivering clash. Straight silver met chainmail, and trench axes and spears met moulded body plating. Blades struck and dug and stabbed. Bodies were impaled, hacked down or thrown back by the impact of momentous collisions. Not every falling body was a Blood Pact warrior.
Bonin found himself in the thick of it. He speared a Blood Pact soldier on the end of his silver, and then was forced to kick the next one to death because his blade was wedged in the spinal column of the first. Twisting it free at last, he swung it hard, and slashed through a windpipe. Hot blood squirted into his face. He turned again and narrowly avoided a lunging spear. Ducking, he rolled and destroyed knees and shin bones with a burst of fire.
Hark melted a grotesk—and the skull behind it—with a single shot from his potent energy weapon. The tip of a lance plunged through his left arm, but he felt no pain, and flexed his augmetic arm sharply, breaking the spear haft. He turned and finished the business by killing the owner of the broken spear with another single burst of streamed plasma.
For a moment, in the middle of it all, he suddenly thought he could make out a distant melody, like a pipe playing. Some brazen enemy battle pipe, he decided, breaking a man’s neck with a chop of his left hand.
But it wasn’t. It was an old tune, a fragile thing, an Imperial hymn. No, no, a Tanith song…
What the f—
There was no time to ponder it. A gust of heated, tortured air swept into his face, and the two Ghosts beside him went up in fireballs, shrieking as they perished. Hark fell over, flames leaping up the tails and back of his storm coat.
“Flamer! Flamer!” someone yelled.
Hark rolled frantically in the dust, trying to extinguish himself. Somebody landed on top of him, beating out the fire.
It was Arcuda.
“Get up, commissar! They’ve got range with their burners!”
Arcuda heaved Hark to his feet. The commissar was dazed. Fight time had suddenly taken on a strange, unwelcome flavour. He felt dislocated, unready. His back throbbed. He was hurt. He realised he was going into shock.
Hlaine Larkin limped out through the torn curtain of the gate hatch and took a moment to observe the sheer mayhem before him. Then he knelt down and swung his long-las up to his chin, where it belonged. Through his scope, he surveyed the close-quarter fighting in front of him.
“Flamers!” someone was yelling.
Yes, there was one, squirting fire into the Ghost ranks with his long burner lance. Larkin took aim. The long-las bumped against his shoulder.
“One,” muttered Larkin.
He changed clips, one hot shot for another, and panned until he saw another long, burning stave.
He aimed. Headshot. Bump. “Two.”
He reloaded, panned, spotted on a third flamer.
“Tank shot,” he breathed. Bump.
Twenty metres away, a warrior’s backpack tank punctured and exploded, showering the Blood Pact around him with ignited promethium. Blood Pact soldiers fell, writhing and shrieking, wrapped in cocoons of fire.
“Three.”
Larkin reloaded, panned, and aimed. “Trumpet,” he decided, and fired.
A horn blower convulsed as the top of his head blew off. He fell. His trumpet made a strange, half-blown noise.
Nothing like as satisfying as hitting a flamer, Larkin decided, and went back to that sport.
Reload, aim, fire. Five.
Reload, aim, fire. Six.
“Keep “em coming, Larks,” a voice said beside him.
Larkin looked over at the speaker. Try Again Bragg smiled reassuringly at his old friend. “Go on, keep it up,” Bragg said. “Reload, aim, fire. You know the drill.”
Larkin felt his guts knot up tight with fear. He forced himself to look away from the kind, smiling face and into his scope.
“Not now,” he breathed. “Please, not now.”
X
“No one came this way?” asked Rawne.
“No one, sir,” replied Caober.
“I don’t understand it,” said Rawne.
A thin, sharp wind blew along upper east twelve. The wall lights faded softly and then came back.
“Walk it back,” Rawne told Caober. “Walk it back to the next set of stairs. We’ll go back the way we came. Feth, they have to be somewhere.”
“What about—” Caober began.
“What about what?”
“The main gate’s being attacked. From what I hear on the link, it’s pretty intense.”
Rawne stared at Caober. “Scout, if there’s any chance, just so much as the slightest chance, that the Blood Pact is magically inside this place with us, defending the main gate becomes a rather secondary objective, doesn’t it?”
Caober nodded. “Put like that, Major Rawne.”
“Let’s get on with it,” said Rawne.
With Varl at his side and the rest of the fire-team following, Rawne retraced his steps along the draughty hallway. Ludd brought up the rear, supporting Twenzet. Behind them, Caober’s fire-team turned the other way.
They’d been walking for a couple o
f minutes when Varl groaned.
“What?” asked Rawne.
“Where are they?” asked Varl.
“Where are who?”
Varl gestured at the floor. “The four dead bastards we left here,” he said.
Rawne stared at the empty deck. There was no doubting their position, but there was no sign at all of the enemy corpses they had left in their wake.
“This is beginning to feth me off,” Rawne said.
At the back of the group, Twenzet nudged Ludd.
“What’s that smell?” he asked.
“Smell?” replied Ludd, finding it an increasing effort to keep the wounded trooper upright. Ludd wasn’t even sure if Twenzet should be upright.
“Smells like… blood. You smell it too?” Twenzet asked.
Ludd hesitated. He didn’t like to point out that Twenzet was the most likely source of the odour.
“I—” he began.
The Blood Pact warrior made a snuffling noise as he came out of the shadows towards them. His trench axe ploughed down at Ludd, but Ludd fell, letting go of Twenzet, and the jagged blade missed his ear by a very short distance.
Ludd scrabbled frantically to protect himself, and grabbed at Twenzet’s lasrifle, strung awkwardly over his shoulder. He brought it up to defend himself.
The Blood Pact warrior, leaping forward, impaled himself through the neck on the upraised straight silver. His trench axe made a loud thunk as it dropped onto the decking. He gurgled and collapsed on his side. The weight of his body snatched the lasrifle out of Ludd’s hands.
Twenzet, sprawled where Ludd had dropped him, was moaning in pain. Ludd crawled across to him, looking around, bewildered as to why no one had come to aid them.
He realised that everyone else was too busy with their own problems.
Eight Blood Pact warriors had ambushed the fire-team, pouncing out of the shadows with axes and cudgels. Everything had turned into a frenzy of movement that seemed, at the same time, oddly tranquil.
What was it Commissar Hark had called it? Ludd thought as he reached Twenzet’s side. Yeah, fight time.
Rawne gasped in surprise as the first grotesk came out of the darkness at him. Snap instinct alone allowed him to greet it with his rifle, and the fixed blade was swallowed up by the grimacing mouth of the iron mask. Rawne kept pushing until the back of the hostile’s head smacked against the hallway wall.
Varl, reacting as fast as ever, ducked under a swinging spike-mace, and fired two shots, point-blank, into its owner’s belly. The hostile dropped, hard.
Varl started to yell, “They’re on us! They’re on us!” He turned, but far too slowly to block the hanger slashing down at the back of his neck.
There was a sound. A phutt!
The warrior with the hanger suddenly staggered backwards, an iron dart embedded in his left eye slit. He half-turned and then collapsed like a felled tree.
The sound repeated. Phutt! Phutt! Phutt!
The Blood Pact ambusher intent on Kabry suddenly doubled up, a thick dart in his belly. Cant flinched, unable to react in time, then saw the cudgel aimed at his face drop away as the Blood Pact warrior hefting it took a dart through the neck. Cordrun felt a trench axe bite into the body armour encasing his back, and then, abruptly, felt it snatch free again as its Blood Pact owner was hurled over by a dart that transfixed the middle of his grotesk’s forehead.
Rawne and Varl quickly killed the two remaining hostiles with brutal bursts of fire that left their targets splattered against the hallway wall.
“What the holy gak was that?” Varl gasped.
Eszrah ap Niht dropped lightly down in the middle of them, out of nowhere. He was holding his reynbow.
“Where the feth did you come from?” Rawne demanded.
Eszrah pointed up at the cloche dome above them, as if that explained everything.
“Ygane ther, soule,” he said.
XI
Mkoll crouched down behind the two Blood Pact warriors manning the heavy cannon. One was diligently feeding belts of ammunition while the other aimed and fired the antique weapon. Mkoll observed them for a while, admiring their technique and discipline, kneeling down close behind them like a third member of the gun crew.
Then he killed them and the gun fell silent.
The Master of Scouts waited for a moment, huddled down in the position amongst the rock spoil. The sound of guttural voices reached him. A Blood Pact warrior, his filthy uniform stinking of fresh sweat and the stale blood of old rituals, scrambled in along a gully on his hands and knees, arriving to investigate why the cannon had stopped shooting. Mkoll killed him. He killed the second man who came to look for the first. Then he carefully removed a tube-charge from his musette bag, plucked out the det-tape, and tossed it over in the direction of the other cannon, which had begun to chatter again.
The shock of the blast drifted back to him, along with handfuls of loose pebbles that rained down out of the air.
There was a silence that lasted for about a minute, except for wind wafting dust around the place. Mkoll clicked his microbead. “I think we’re all done here,” he said.
Gaunt and Kolea scrambled up the slope towards the cave mouth, where Baskevyl, Criid and the fire-team were waiting for them by the pair of rocks.
“Thanks for that,” said Gaunt.
Baskevyl nodded back. “Sony to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s a hell of a fuss at the main gate,” he said.
“Fuss?” asked Kolea.
“I’m just getting it now. A frontal attack.”
Both Kolea and Gaunt checked their earpieces and listened.
“Feth,” muttered Gaunt after a moment. “So they’re able to come at us from both sides of the objective? What kind of rat-trap has Van Voytz sent us into?”
“The worst kind,” suggested Criid.
“Is there any other?” asked Mkoll, trudging up the slope to join them.
“Good work,” Gaunt told him.
“It was nothing, sir,” Mkoll replied. He was lying. It was everything. From the moment he’d led the way into the gatehouse two days before, Mkoll had been on edge. A daemon had been stalking him, a daemon made of fear and uncertainty, two qualities generally alien to Mkoll’s state of mind. He’d begun to feel himself incapable. He’d actually begun to distrust his own skills. It had been good to get out there and test himself.
“Let’s get inside,” said Gaunt.
“And set charges in this cave to block it?” Kolea asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” Gaunt replied.
XII
In the end, there seemed to be no clarity or determination, no win or lose. The howling tide of the Blood Pact broke and retreated back into the dust clouds that had unleashed it.
And that was that.
Hark panted hard, his plasma pistol slack in his right hand. He was exhausted. Fight time was re-spooling back into real time, and that was always tough, especially as, on this occasion, real time brought the pain of his burns back with it.
The dunes outside the gatehouse were littered with bodies. At a rough estimate, five-sixths of them were enemy corpses. Hark looked around, recognising a few old comrades amongst the dead. He wasn’t quite sure which was worse—seeing the corpse of a man you knew by name, or seeing a corpse so atrociously damaged you couldn’t identify it.
There were both kinds at the gate of Hinzerhaus. Forty Ghosts dead, at least. It had been a hell of a fight for a skirmish, and Viktor Hark knew, in his heart of hearts, that a skirmish was all that it had been: an opening skirmish, a melee, a prelude.
Hinzerhaus would be the death of them all. Holding onto this place, they’d all end up as—
dry skulls in a dusty valley, with all the tops sawn off
—defunct names checked off in the Imperial annals. He shivered.
“Viktor?”
He glanced around. Curth was beside him. The medics were arriving to handle the wounded. Lesp and Chayker hurried past with a man on a stretcher.
“Viktor, you’re hurt. Burned,” Curth said.
He nodded. “Just a second. Arcuda?”
Arcuda looked up from the Ghost he was field dressing. “What, sir?”
“Was somebody playing the pipes?”
“What?”
“Was somebody playing the pipes, Arcuda, during the attack. Tanith pipes?”
“During the attack?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe so, sir.”
Hark turned back to Curth. “I may be going mad,” he told her. “Can you treat that?”
“Let me dress your wounds first,” she said, and led him back towards the hatch.
As he walked back across the blood-mottled dust, Curth’s thin hand pulling at his thick paw, Viktor Hark began to shake. The wind picked up, and drove the dust at them.
“It’s all right,” Curth said. “It’s going to be all right.”
Hark saw Larkin, huddled down beside the hatch, his long-las hugged against his chest, his eyes wide behind his goggles. Hark saw Wes Maggs, standing ready, twitchy, gun in hand, as if watching for something.
“No, Ana,” Hark said. “No, it really isn’t.”
Are we the last ones left alive? Are we?
Someone, anyone, please? Are we? Is there
anybody out there? Are we the last ones left
alive?
(transmission ends)
—Transcript of vox message, fifth month, 778.
EIGHT
Bad Air
I
The voice comes out of nowhere. It betrays no origin or source. It is only a whisper, a dry hiss that seems as old as the house itself. It sounds as if it has been mute for a long time, and is only just now remembering how to speak.
Where is it coming from? Is it in the building’s stonework? Is it imprinted in the very fabric of the house? Has contact disturbed it, woken it up, caused it to play back like an old recording? Or is it leaking into the vox from somewhere else? The past? The present? The future? Whose future?
It is a static murmur, a lisping echo at the back end of the frequency. It fades, and comes back, and fades again, incoherently. It fades and comes back in time with the harsh then soft throb of the house lighting. It pulses in tune with some slow, respiratory rhythm, the pulse of Hinzerhaus.