[Gaunt's Ghosts 06] - Straight Silver

  Now Corbec had an angle into the secondary trench. It was narrow and well-boarded, and sloped away from him downhill in a slight incline. He dropped to his knees and fired down it. His shots hit two of the enemy bunched up fifteen metres away, then a third. A fourth returned fire with a compact sub-autogun, a little bull-nosed slugger with a hooked magazine obviously designed with trench-war in mind.

  The burst of small-calibre bullets ripped into the support palings of the trench gabion behind Corbec, showering out splinters. Corbec fired twice, unruffled, and knocked the shooter off his feet and sideways into the revetment. The man slithered down and rolled over.

  There were other figures deeper in the secondary trench, veiled by the shadows and the smoke. Corbec fired on them a couple more times, and then ducked back into cover as a ball bomb landed near the mouth of the secondary and threw mud and broken duckboards into the air.

  Corbec took stock. He, Mkvenner and Rerval were on one side of the secondary’s opening, the rest still back at the start of the zag. Cown tried to dart across to them, but jerked back when rifle rounds and what seemed to be buckshot came stinging up the munitions track.

  Corbec looked up the zag. His squad had cleared out the raiders right up to the next rum, about ten metres away.

  “Check ahead,” he told Mkvenner. “I’m hoping there’s Krassians round that bend. Don’t let ’em shoot you.”

  Mkvenner nodded and grinned. He got to the end and peered round. Serious las-fire made him dip back at once.

  “Guard! We’re Guard!” he hollered. More las-shots. The Krassians, a new outfit with comparatively Hide battlefield experience, had taken a pounding in the last forty-five minutes. They were spooked and angry and shooting at anything.

  Rerval joined Mkvenner.

  “They’re not taking the chance we’re not Shadik,” Mkvenner said.

  “We better get their attention,” Rerval said. He pulled out his flare pistol, broke it open, and began sorting through his satchel of smoke and colour pellets. “What’s today’s recognition colour?” he asked.

  “Blue,” said Mkvenner. He knew full well Rerval knew that. Rerval was vox-ops, up there with Beltayn and Rafflan as one of the best signals specialists in the regiment. The question had been Rerval’s way of stress management. A coping strategy. A chance to find out what Mkvenner thought of the idea without actually asking it.

  “Blue. Right” said Rerval. He slid a colour-coded cartridge into the flare pistol, snapped it shut, cocked it, and said, “Look away.”

  They both averted their eyes. Rerval fired the signal gun round the corner of the zag so that the flare embedded itself in the muddy wall beyond. It began to burn with phosphorescent white light, tinged blue by the smoke it was spilling out. The light was fierce and harsh. It threw off long, inky shadows and made everything look cold. The las-fire stopped.

  “Guard! We’re Guard here!” Mkvenner tried again. “You Krassian up there?”

  A pause. An answering shout.

  “Krassian?” Mkvenner called again.

  “Aye! What’s the day code?”

  “Alpha blue pentacost!” Rerval called.

  “Blue eleven salutant!” came the correct answer.

  “I’m coming out,” called Mkvenner. “Hold fire!”

  He walked slowly into a trench still lit by the brilliant glare of the fizzling signal round. Blue smoke wafted around him. It was a theatrical entrance, and Rerval was rather proud of it.

  Krassian troopers came down the trench to meet them. Their weapons were still raised, and they all looked edgy and scared. Young, a lot of them. Faces white against the copper worsted of their coats.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” asked the officer in charge.

  “The nalwoods west of Attica,” replied Mkvenner with typical inscrutability. The officer looked puzzled.

  “We’re Tanith First-and-Only,” said Rerval. “We pushed in from the south.”

  “Tanith?” echoed the officer. Two or three of his younger men had tears in their eyes. Relief, Mkvenner presumed.

  “They hit us bad, so bad,” said the officer. “Are they gone? Did you get them?”

  “Not yet,” said Mkvenner.

  Fifteen metres back around the zag, Corbec was negotiating the clearance of the secondary trench. Along with Cown, Veddekin and Ponore, he’d been squirting off shots down the length of it on a regular basis, but the response was firm. The worst part of it was that at least one of the raiders had a shotgun, probably a sawn-off, an ideal weapon for trench fights. Ducking in and risking a bullet was one thing, and Murten.

  Feygor would probably give you odds on it. But a shotgun blanketed the space.

  Sillo had found that out. Ponore had dragged him back from the junction and dressed his wound, but Corbec knew a scatter-shot hit like that was gangrene waiting to happen, even if the enemy hadn’t treated their lead with bacterials as he’d known to be the tactics amongst the arch-enemy.

  Sillo had been hit in the left thigh with such force it had shredded his trouser-leg off, broken his belt, and gouged the flesh so deeply Corbec had seen yellow fat and bone. Sillo had screamed, passed out, then woken again screaming. He shut up when Ponore stuck him in the buttock with a one-shot disposable full of morphosia.

  “Might be another way round,” Veddekin suggested, his back to the wall by the junction.

  “Might be. Who knows?” Corbec grumbled. “If we had a fething map…”

  He did have a fething map. All XOs had been given one when they checked in at 55th sector HQ on their way up the line. The map was deficient in three particulars. First, it showed only the immediate locale of the XO’s posting, which meant Corbec’s finished at station 295. Second, it showed no minor detail of supply trenches, communication lines, munition tracks or ops centres, because Aexe Alliance Command feared that a map showing such detail would be too sensitive to risk it being captured. So even if Corbec had possessed a map of 296 and northwards, it wouldn’t have shown him this track anyway.

  Third, perhaps most importantly, it looked like it had been made by a hallucinating, ink-dipped cockroach that had been allowed to run across a piece of used latrine paper.

  “We could go over the top,” Cown said, thinking aloud. “That’s what the scouts did at 143 the other night.”

  Well, they were fething scouts, the best of our best, half a century younger than me and tough enough to crack nalnuts in their armpits, Corbec wanted to say. But he bit it back. Cown was only trying to help.

  “I’d wager they’re expecting that, pal,” Corbec said. He picked up a Shadik helmet, hung it on the nose of his las and hefted it up above the revet.

  He only had to wiggle it for a second before a rifle round cracked it and sent it spinning away into the air.

  Cown smiled at Corbec feebly, and shrugged.

  Ponore was looking around. “Holy gak!” he began. “We’re lucky we didn’t go up like bonfires when we started fire-fighting down this!”

  More complaints. Corbec wasn’t really interested in what Ponore had to say anymore. He’d march over and slap him quiet if it wasn’t for fact he’d have to get in line of shot to do it.

  Ponore wouldn’t shut up. He’d crossed to the other side of the zag and yanked up a tarpaulin. As was the case with many supply trenches, funk-holes had been dug out of the sides to make space for storage and then veiled with canvas curtains. Ponore was revealing stacked bags of dressings, tins of vegetable soup, muslin bags of candles, and three or four drums of lamp oil.

  “If a shot had hit this,” Ponore moaned, “whoomff! That’d been us.”

  Corbec suddenly grinned. “Ponore?”

  “Yes sir, chief?”

  “I could kiss you.”

  “He does that,” Cown warned earnestly. “Get those drums out. Careful, mind.” Veddekin and Ponore manhandled the first one up to the junction.

  Corbec peered around the corner again. He saw what he’d seen the first time he’d looked down the mun
itions track. Back then, he’d been too busy killing Shadik to pay attention.

  The secondary trench sloped away from them. Not much, barely, in fact. But enough. That’s why the duckboarding was good. Water drained away down this side trench.

  “What now?” asked Veddekin.

  “We need a tube or something,” Corbec improvised. “Cown? There must be a syphon or a funnel or something in there.”

  Cown searched the funk hole store, cursing every time the curtain fell back, blocking him in darkness. Ponore went over and held the tarp back for him. Cown emerged with a tin jug.

  “What about this?”

  “Toss it over.”

  Cown threw the jug across the junction and Corbec caught it by the handle. Four or five shots whined up the secondary at the movement.

  Corbec recovered his warknife from the ribs of the raider who’d somehow managed to rip it off. He mumbled an apology to the knife for what he was about to do.

  It took him about a minute of chopping and levering to bend out the base of the jug and cut it lengthways. He ended up bracing it against a trench post and ripping the curled-away half off by hand.

  He’d made a little trough. Not the best trough in the world, but a little trough all the same, with a spout end and everything. His machinesmith father would have been proud.

  He flipped it back to Cown. More shots.

  “Dig it into the earth there,” he instructed. “No, at the corner so the spout hangs over the edge. That’s it. Keep the back end in cover. That’s the lad. Dig it in if you have to. Make it stable.”

  Cown raked the earth away with the head of his nine seventy and made the trough stable.

  “Fine and lovely,” approved Corbec. “Now start pouring the oil down it.”

  Ponore unplugged the first drum and then tipped it over with Veddekin’s help. Clear, sweet-smelling lamp oil glugged out, swirling down the makeshift trough. It began to run down the secondary, gurgling under the duckboards.

  “And the rest,” urged Corbec, as Cown and Ponore rolled the first drum away, empty, and Veddekin tipped the second. Corbec realised he was fidgeting from foot to foot. He so wanted to be on the other side of the junction, mucking in with the work, but he could only stand and issue instructions.

  A sudden thought hit him. An epiphany. That’s what it was called. He’d heard Captain Daur talk about epiphanies. Daur was an educated lad. He understood these fine, subtle things.

  A moment of unexpected clarity. That’s what Corbec believed it to mean. A sudden revelatory instant of comprehension.

  He should never have become an officer. Never. Not even a sergeant, let alone XO of the Tanith regiment. Sure, he had the presence and the charisma, so he was told. He was a personality, and the men rallied round him. That was what Gaunt had seen in him, first time they’d met. Must’ve been. And Corbec was happy to serve.

  But there it was. Gaunt had made him colonel. He’d not asked for it. He’d not chased for it. He wasn’t a career man, like Daur or, Emperor protect them all, Rawne. He had no ambition.

  What was it they all said about him? That compliment? He led from the front. Just so. He was never happier than when he was at the very workface of fighting, confronting the practicals.

  He was the big, strong son of a machinesmith from County Pryze. He should have been a trooper, a dog-grunt, fething well mucking in. Mucking in over there, in fact. Not standing this side of the junction, yakking out orders.

  Corbec thought about that for a moment, watching the oil swirl away down the secondary.

  “Third drum going in now!” Cown hissed. “Is this going to work?”

  “Let’s find out,” Corbec grinned. He looked up-zag to the turn where Mkvenner and Rerval were talking with a bunch of bewildered-looking Krassians.

  “Rerval! Over here, son!”

  The vox trooper hurried down to Corbec.

  “Gimme your flare gun. What bums best?”

  “Sir?” Rerval said, handing over the fat-nosed signal gun. Corbec cracked it open.

  “Your flares, Rerval. Which one bums best?”

  Rerval searched in his bag. “Red, I guess, chief. It’s got the biggest powder charge. But we’re only supposed to thump one of them out in predicaments. It’s the emergency signal.”

  “Give me one. If this works, I’m sure as fething certain our Shadik friends yonder will consider this a predicament, and no mistake.”

  Rerval shrugged and handed Corbec a red-tabbed cartridge. Corbec slotted it into the gun and closed the spring-loaded mechanism. “Clear?” he asked Cown.

  The Ghosts on the other side had rolled the last drum away. Cown nodded.

  “Duck and cover,” Corbec told them. “Fire in the hole!” He pointed the flare pistol down the secondary and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “What the feth is wrong with this piece of crap?” he snarled, bringing his hand back in.

  “There’s a safety lock,” said Rerval, fussing and trying to be helpful. “Just there. No, the lever there by your thumb. Uh huh.”

  “Well, I knew that,” said Corbec and fired the flare down the munitions track.

  Superheated, glowing like a laser torpedo, it ricocheted off the right-hand wall, tumbled left, bounced off a druber post and went spinning away towards the cowering Shadik raiders, kicking off streams of bright red smoke.

  Corbec pulled Rerval back against the side wall of the zag.

  There was a distant yell. A cramp of ignition. Then forty metres of the secondary trench went off like a earner’s kiss. Fire leapt up into the sky, clearing the tops of the walls. Thick, intense, sweet-smelling like the wick-burn of the little lamps they’d given them.

  Then there was another smell. A terrible smell. Cooking fat and meat.

  “Good job,” Corbec told his boys, wincing into the bright flame light. “Good fething job.”

  The foot assault on 292 came at precisely sixteen minutes after the start of the bombardment. It came from the northeast, the Shadik using the big, rusting tube of the drain outfall as cover. Just like the note had said.

  Not a single raider made it closer to the parapet than fifteen metres. Agun Soric had clustered his rifles around the outfall, and they blazed at the advancing khaki.

  Trooper Kazel reckoned they slaughtered at least fifty, maybe sixty even. It was hard to tell. Five platoon had certainly blown them back to wherever they’d come from.

  Soric missed Doyl. Doyl had been his platoon’s scout. He’d died on the special mission at Ouranberg. Doyl would have been counting. Doyl would have known.

  Soric stood on the step and closed his good eye. He’d always refused a patch or an implant for the eye he’d lost at Vervunhive. He wore the rouched scar with some defiance. It made him look as if he was perpetually winking.

  He closed his eye and waited. He saw they’d killed at least seventy-six raiders, a multi-platoon force. Kazel had been underestimating.

  Sometimes, Soric saw better with his good eye closed. It was just one of those things. He didn’t think much of it. His eye was dead, and so he reckoned it saw things only the dead could see. It had a vantage his good eye didn’t.

  That had been particularly the case since Cirenholm. He’d been badly wounded there. Recovering, he’d had such strange dreams.

  Soric knew he should’ve kept quiet about them, but secrecy wasn’t his way. He’d talked about the dreams, and now Gaunt and Dorden and that sweet girl Ana Curth regarded him with mistrust. He should never have told them about his great-grandmother.

  Grandam had possessed the sight. Some called her a witch. So what? It wasn’t like she was a psyker, for gak’s sake! Grandam had just been able to… to see stuff others didn’t. Now Agun could, being the seventh son of a seventh son, as Grandam had always assured him.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Not until Cirenholm. Passage so close under death’s black wing and out the other side, that marked a man. That woke him up. That opened his senses.

  Opened
his eyes.

  The handwritten note though, that was another thing altogether. Soric felt his heart skip as he thought about that.

  How had he known that? How had he written it to himself?

  “Stand down,” he told his men, and the word was passed along. There’d be no more Shadik at 292 today.

  Soric realised he knew that for a fact. Why was that?

  He felt scared, really scared suddenly. He limped back to his dugout, ignoring the calls and questions of his men.

  “Vivvo?”

  “Boss?”

  “Get them settled,” he said and dropped the gas curtain after himself.

  In the dim lamp-light, he sat down at the little raw-wood table. The brass message shell was sitting there, on end, casting a little blunt shadow. There was no sign of the scrap of blue paper.

  Soric breathed slowly, clutching the edge of the table tightly with his gnarled hands. A drink. That might help.

  He got up, and waddled his stiff leg over to the shelf. Scope, ammo clips, candles… “spare water bottle”.

  Gaunt had said he’d have men shot for drinking on duty. Except in special cases.

  This was a special case.

  Soric unstoppered the flask with hands that were quaking more than he’d have liked them to. He took a slug of sacra. Good old Bragg had supplied him with the stuff. Soric had developed a taste for the Tanith liquor. Who’d get him sacra now Bragg was gone?

  The blue-paper despatch pad lay on the shelf beside the flask. Soric thought about picking it up, then took another swig instead. The grain alcohol burned in his belly. He felt better. He looked at the pad again.

  The first two sheets were missing.

  Soric glanced over at the table. The brass message shell sat there, ominous.