“Now then, lad,” Varl said, turning to him and putting a heavy bionic arm around his shoulders paternally. “Be good now and play along so that the nice gentlemen here can enjoy a simple game.” Unseen to all others present, he winked at Milo. Milo fought the fiercest battle of his life not to laugh.
“O-okay,” he said.
“The boy will play in my place!” Varl said, turning back to the crowd and raising his arms. There was cheers and applause in reply.
They set to it. A larger crowd gathered. Paper markers were handed out and coin produced. Gilbear decided to play, as did two Roane Deepers and three of the Slammabadden. In the crowd, secondary bets were laid on winners and losers. Varl opened the censer and took up his jar.
Gilbear plucked it from his hand, opened it and dropped the lice out onto the deck, crunching them all underfoot. He held it out to one of his men. “Raballe! Go fetch fresh lice from the silos!”
“Sir!”
“What is this?” Varl gasped, dropping to his knees and wiping away what seemed to Milo a real tear as he surveyed his crushed insects. “Do you not even trust my lice, Major Gilbear, Blueblood, sir?”
“I don’t trust anything I can crush with my boot,” Gilbear replied, looking down and apparently dangerously close to stamping on Varl too. A tidal change swept through the secondary betting, some of it in sympathy with the damaged Ghost and his crushed pets, some sensing trickery was routed and heaping money on the Blueblood major.
“You could have drugged them, overfed them — they seemed docile. You could place your money on the lower holes so that the sluggish things simply fell from the bottom as gravity pulled.” Gilbear smiled at his deduction and his men growled approval. So did several of the wily Slammabadden, and Milo was afraid the mood might turn ugly.
“I’ll tell you what,” Varl said to the major as he got up. The Blueblood’s second was returning with a jar packed full of agitated lice and semi-digested meal where he had scooped it from the dank silos. “We’ll use your pick of the bugs…and you can set the censer whichever way up you like.” Varl pulled a cargo hook from the crates behind him to use as a makeshift base. “Happy?”
Gilbear nodded.
They made ready. The gamblers, Milo included, prepared to make their guess on the paper slips provided. Varl flexed his good shoulder, as if easing out an old hurt. A signal, the next guile.
“I’ll play this too,” Caffran said, pushing forward through the huddle. He seemed to sway and he stank of sacra. Many gave him a wide berth.
“Cafy, no… you’re not up to it…” Varl murmured.
Caffran was pulling out a weight of coins, rolls of thick, high-issue disks.
“Give me the paper… Hike a bet,” Caffran mumbled, slurring.
“Let your Ghost play,” Gilbear growled with a smirk as Varl began to protest.
It looked to all present like the Tanith showman had lost control of his simple game, and if there had been any trickery in it, any guile, then all of it was ruined now.
The first lice went in. Gilbear spun the censer and set it down. Markers were overturned. A Slammabadden came closest, closest to guessing the exit by three holes. Milo was nowhere near and seemed to whimper. Caffran raged as his money was scooped away. He produced more.
A Deeper won the next, the winner of the last round given the honour of placing the censer. He was no closer than five holes, but the others were grouped and very wrong. Milo begged Varl to let him stop but Varl shook him off, glancing sidelong at the glowering Gilbear.
Gilbear won the next by guessing within two. He collected a massive pile of coins and one of the Deepers dropped out in disgust. The level of the bets — and off-game bets — had risen considerably and now real money was at stake. Cash was changing hands all around. The Bluebloods were jubilant and so were others. Others still bemoaned their losses. Two more Slammabadden and another Deeper stepped up to play, their bets bolstered by whip-rounds amongst their friends. No Blueblood dared to play against Gilbear. Flushed with success, Gilbear placed his won pot again, and doubled it. Some of the guardsmen present, especially the Deepers and the watching Ghosts, had never seen so much ready cash in their lives Caffran made a fuss and swigged from a bottle of sacra, imploring his friend Brostin for a sub which was eventually, reluctantly, given.
The next round. Gilbear and a Deeper, each three holes away from the winning aperture, split the now considerable pot.
The next round. Playing was Gilbear, three of the Slammabadden, two Deepers, Caffran (now subbing from a worried-looking Raglon, Brostin having exited in a convincing rage) and Milo. A huge pile of wagers.
Caffran came out two off the mark, a Slammabadden was one off. Gilbear was on the other side of the censer. Milo was spot on.
Howls, anger, jubilation, tumult.
“He was just lucky,” Varl said, collecting up the winnings. “Are we done?”
“The boy got a fluke,” Gilbear said, ordering his subalterns to empty their pockets. Another big wager was assembled. The Deepers had dropped out, and so had Caffran, leaving the chamber with Raglon. The Slammabadden mustered their strengths into one wager.
Milo turned the censer and set it down.
Silence.
The bug ticked and bounced against the inside of the metal ball. It emerged.
Milo had it again, spot on.
Pandemonium. It seemed like a riot would overturn the troop bay. Varl collected the winnings and the censer and pulled Milo out of the chamber by the scruff of his tunic. Men were shouting, milling around, and a fight had begun over the outcome of one of the side-bets.
In the companionway that led back to the Tanith troop deck, Varl and Milo rejoined Caffran, Raglon and Brostin. They were all laughing, and Caffran seemed suddenly sober. He would have to wash his tunic to get the stink of sacra out of it, of course.
Varl grinned at them and held up the bulky pouch containing their winnings. “Spoils to be divided, my friends!” he announced to them, slapping Milo across the back with his bionic arm. He had never got used to its strength and Milo nearly fell.
Caffran uttered a warning. Dark shapes loomed down the companionway behind them. It was Gilbear and four of his men.
“You’ll pay for that trickery, whore’s-son,” Gilbear told Varl.
“It was a fair game,” began Varl, but realised at once that his silver tongue was useless now.
There were five on each side, but each of the Bluebloods towered over Brostin, the largest of the Tanith present. In a close-quarter brawl, the Ghosts might score, draw even perhaps, but it would be bloody.
“Is there a problem?” asked the sixth member of the Tanith scam team. Bragg pulled his vast bulk into the light behind his comrades, squinting in a relaxed way down at the five Bluebloods. He seemed to fill the corridor.
The Ghosts parted to let Bragg lumber through. He adopted the slow gait Varl had trained him in, to emphasise his power. “Go away, little Bluebloods. Don’t make me hurt you,” he said, repeating the cue Varl had also given him. It came out stilted and false, but the Bluebloods were too amazed at his size to notice.
They turned. With a final scowl, Gilbear followed them. The Ghosts began to laugh so hard, they wept.
Below him, Monthax, green, impenetrable.
Gaunt gazed down through the arched viewports of the hexathedral Sanctity, studying the distant surface of the planet that, within a week, his forces would be assaulting, from time to time, he referred to a data-slate map in his hand, checking off geographical details. The dense jungle cover was the biggest problem they faced. They had no idea of the hidden enemy’s strength.
Advance reports suggested a vast force of Chaos filth had retreated from a recent engagement at Piolitus and dug in here. Warmaster Macaroth was taking no chances. Around the huge bulk of the orbiting hexathedral, a colossal towered platform designed as a mustering point for the invasion forces, great legions massed. Over a dozen huge troop-ships were already docked around the crenellated rim
of the hexathedral’s skirt platform, like fat swine at the teats of their obese mother, and tugs were easing another in now to join them. More were due. Further away, Imperial battlecruisers and escort ships, including the frigate Navarre on which Gaunt and the Ghosts had been stationed for a while, sat at high orbit anchor, occasionally buzzing out clouds of attack squadrons heading off for surface runs or patrol sweeps.
Gaunt turned from the windows and stepped down a short flight into the cool, echoing vastness of one of the Sanctity’s main tactical chapels, the Orrery. A vast circular dial was set flush in the centre of the chamber’s floor, thirty metres across and made of intricate, interlocking, moving parts of brass and gold, like a giant timepiece. As it whirred and cycled, the three dimensional globe of coloured light it projected upwards altered and spun, advancing data, chart runes, bars of information across the luminous surface.
Trim uniformed Guard officers, robed members of the Ecclesiarch and the Munitorium, Navy commanders in their Segmentum Pacificus deck dress, and the hooded deaconal staff of the hexathedral itself, prowled the edges of the great fight Orrery, consulting the data and conferring in small groups. Skeletal servitors, emaciated, wired into the machine banks via cables from their eyes, spines, mouths and hands, hunkered in booth-cribs, murmuring and chattering. Around the sides of the great chamber, under cloistered roofing, great chart tables were arranged at intervals, each showing different sections of Monthax. Staff groups stood around every table, engaged in more specific and detailed planning sessions. The air chimed with announcements and updates, some of these overlapping and chattering with data noise. The Orrery turned, whirring, and new details and deployments appeared.
Gaunt walked a circuit of the chamber, nodding to those fellow officers he knew, saluting his seniors. The whole place had an exceptional, expectant hush, like a great hunting animal, breathless, coiled to pounce.
The commissar decided it was time he took a walk down to the Ghosts’ troop-ship. The men would be restless, awaiting news of debarkation and deployment, and Gaunt knew well that trouble was always likely to brew when guardsmen were cramped together in transportation, idle and nervous.
And bored. That was the worst of it. In any Guard regiment, disciplinary matters rose in number during such times, and he and the other commissars, the political enforcers of the Imperial Guard, would be busy. There would be brawls, thefts, feuds, drunkenness, even murder in some of the more barbaric regiments, and such disorder quickly spread without the proper control.
Across the chamber, Gaunt saw General Sturm, the commander of the Volpone 50th and some of his senior aides. Sturm did not seem to see him, or chose not to acknowledge Gaunt if he did, and Gaunt made no effort to salute. The crime of Voltemand was still raw in his mind, despite the interval of months. When he learned that the Volpone Bluebloods and the Ghosts would encounter each other again at Monthax, for the first time since Voltemand, he had been apprehensive. The action on Menazoid Epsilon had shown him personally what a long-standing feud between regiments could do. But there was no chance of redeployment, and Gaunt comforted himself that it was only Sturm and his senior staff he had a problem with. The rank and file of the Ghosts and the Bluebloods had no reason for animosity. He would keep a careful watch, but he was sure they could billet side by side safely enough until the assault sent them their separate ways.
And, unlike on Voltemand, Sturm wasn’t in charge here. The Monthax offensive was under the supreme command of Lord Militant General Bulledin.
Gaunt saw Commissar Volovoi, serving with the Roane Deepers, and stopped to talk with him. It was mostly inconsequential chat, though Volovoi had heard some word that Bulledin had consulted the Astropathicus. Rumours of psyker witchery on the planet below had started to spread. There was talk that auguries and the Tarot had been consulted to deter mine the truth of the situation.
“Last thing we need,” muttered Volovoi to Gaunt. “Last thing I need. The Roane are the very devil to keep in line. Good fighters, yes, when they’re roused to it, but damned idle for the most part. A few weeks of transportation confinement like this, and I’ll have to kick each and every one of their arses to get them down the drop-ship ramp. Languid, lazy — and this makes it worse: they’re superstitious, more than any band of men I’ve ever known. The rumours of witchcraft will get them spooked and that will make my work twice as hard.”
“I sympathise,” Gaunt said. He did. His old regiment, the Hyrkans, were tough as deck plate, but there had been times when the thought of psyker madness had balked them in their tracks.
“What of you, Gaunt?” Volovoi asked. “I hear you’re taken up with a low-tech rabble now. Don’t you miss the Hyrkan discipline?”
Gaunt shook his head. “The Tanith are sound, quietly disciplined in their way.”
“And you have actual command of them too, is that right? Unusual. For a commissar.”
“A gift of the late Slaydo, may the Emperor watch his rest. I resented it at first, but I’ve grown to like it.”
“You’ve done well with them, so I hear. I read the reports on that campaign in the Menazoid Clasp last year, and they say your men turned the key that opened the door at Bucephalon too.”
“We’ve had our moments.”
Gaunt realised Volovoi was studying something over Gaunt’s shoulder.
“Don’t turn, Gaunt,” Volovoi went on, without changing the timbre of volume of his talk. “Are your ears burning? Someone’s talking about you.”
“How so?”
“The Blueblood general. Sturm, is it? Arrogant piece of yak flop. One of his officers just came on deck and is bending his ear. And they’re looking this way.”
Gaunt didn’t turn. “Let me guess: the newcomer is a big ox with hooded eyes?”
“Aren’t they all?”
“This one’s a piece of work even by the Volpone standards of breeding. A major.”
“That’s what his rank pins say. You know him?”
“Not particularly, though even that is more than I’d care for. Name’s Gilbear. He and I and Sturm had a… difference of opinion on Voltemand eighteen months ago.”
“What sort of difference?”
“They cost me several hundred men.”
Volovoi whistled. “You’d think it would be you whispering about them!”
Gaunt smiled, though it was dark. “We are, aren’t we, Volovoi?”
Gaunt made to leave. Crossing the Orrery deck, he was afforded a better view of the Volpone staff. Gilbear was stood alone now, staring at Gaunt with a burning look that did not flinch. Sturm, escorted by his aides, was heading up the long flight of steps to the Lord Militant General’s private chambers in the spire above.
Walking the troop decks with Gaunt, Corbec brought his commander up to speed.
“Quiet really. There was a fight over some rations, but it was nothing and I broke it up. Costin and two of his pals got falling down tipsy inhaling paint thinners in the armour shops and Costin then fell down for real, breaking his shin.”
“I’ve warned the armouries to lock that sort of material up…”
“They did, but Costin has a way with locks, sir, if you get me.”
“Put him and the others on report and punishment detail.”
“I’d say Costin’s paid for his ill-gotten—” Corbec began.
“I won’t stand for it. They’ve got rations of grog and sacra. I can’t use men with fume-ruined heads.”
Corbec scratched his chin. “Point there, sir. But the men get bored. And some of them use their sacra rations up in the first few days.”
Gaunt turned to his second, anger flickering in his eyes. “Let it be known, Colm: the Emperor grants them recreational liquor and smokes. If they abuse that privilege, I’ll take it away. From all of them. Understand?”
Corbec nodded. They stopped at the rail and looked down into the vast troop bay. The air was laced with smoke and rank sweat. Below them, bench cots by the hundred in rows, men by the hundred, sleeping, dicin
g, chatting, praying, some just staring into nothing. Priests walked the rows, dispensing solace and benediction where it was requested or simply needed.
“Is there something on your mind, sir?” Corbec asked.
“I think trouble’s brewing,” Gaunt said. “I’m not sure what yet, but I don’t like it.”
There was someone moving in the outer room.
Gaunt awoke. It was night cycle on the troop-ship and the wall lamps had been doused by the automatic control. He had fallen asleep on his cot with a weight of data sheets and slates on his chest.
Movement from the ante-room beyond his bed quarter had roused him.
Gaunt rose silently, placing the data sheets on a wall shelf. His boltgun and chainsword were slung over a wooden statue in the outer room, but he pulled a compact laspistol from his foot locker and slid it into the back of his waistband. He was dressed in his boots, trousers, braces and an undershirt, He thought for a moment about re-donning his jacket and cap, but cast the idea aside.
The cot-room door was ajar. The light of a tight-beam flash light stabbed the darkness beyond. Someone was going through his things.
He moved in an instant, kicking open the door and grabbing the intruder from behind, turning him, twisting his arms, and slamming him face first into the round observation port of the outer room. The man — robed, struggling — protested until the moment of impact. His nose broke against the glass and he lolled unconscious.
The lights went on. Gaunt sensed there were two others behind him. He heard the whine of charging las-packs.
He spun and threw his unconscious prey at the nearest, who tumbled under the weight. The other tried to take a bead with his gun, but Gaunt dropped, slid sideways, and broke his jaw with a heavy blow. Only then, a few seconds after the whole thing had begun, did he see the man he had dropped was a security trooper dressed in the brown armour of the hexathedral. His comrade, scrambling up from under the weight of the fallen robed man, lunged forward, and Gaunt turned, catching his probing hands, breaking an elbow with a deft twist and then flooring him with a straight punch to the bridge of the nose.