No one spoke.
“Okay—” said Feygor with a wicked smile. “If our culprit would like to fit it back into the little whining bastard’s caster-set in… oh, three days? That’d be fine and I won’t mention it to Corbec. Understood?”
The troopers shifted awkwardly. Thunder was still grumbling around the forest and the rain was lashing down. Feygor looked over at Brostin. “Go and get some wine,” he said.
Brostin got up and shambled out.
“Are we not moving today?” asked Caffran.
“Do I look like I’m moving. Caff? Do I?”
“No, Mister Feygor.”
“Then I’m probably not moving.”
“We should—” Jajjo began.
“And not a word from you, Verghast. Okay?” Feygor rocked his chair onto its back legs. “Look,” he said, slightly more softly. “Have you seen this weather? It isn’t letting up. The way I call it, we stay put until it breaks. We’d be mad to try and push on in this. No offence, Larks.”
“None taken,” said Larkin.
“Anybody else got a problem with that? Anybody else got a problem with me being in charge? Because I seem to remember that’s the way Colonel Corbec wanted it.”
The back door opened, and Mkvenner came in, water streaming off the folds of his cape. He looked around at the silent assembly of figures.
“I take it we’re not going anywhere,” he said darkly.
“Any contacts?” Feygor asked him.
Mkvenner shook his head. “Nothing. Perimeter’s secure. The area’s quiet. Though someone or something’s disturbed one of the outhouses. Like someone’s been sleeping out there.”
“Recently?” Feygor asked.
“Couldn’t tell,” Mkvenner said.
“We won’t worry about it, then.”
“Your call,” said Mkvenner.
“Why, yes it is,” said Feygor.
Mkvenner paused. “Mission requirements call for us to scope this valley,” he said. “And we will,” said Feygor.
“When?”
“When I’m ready,” Feygor said, looking round at Mkvenner. “You ought to relax, Ven.”
“There’re many things I ought to do, Mister Feygor. But I won’t.”
Feth, thought Caffran. This could turn really ugly.
“Tell you what, Ven,” said Feygor. “You want to scope so badly, you go ahead. You’ll move faster without us. Head out, get the lie of the land, and swing back. By then, the weather may have cleared.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yeah, why not? Run a deep patrol, check things out, come back here. Once the storm’s gone, we’ll move out and finish the sweep with you. Think of us as base camp. As HQ. We’ll hold things here.”
Mkvenner had an icy look in his eyes. “Should we check that with Ins Arbor base?” he asked.
“Ah, sadly, vox is down,” Feygor said, with a contented smile.
Mkvenner looked around the kitchen. “Okay. I’ll be gone a day, tops.”
“The Emperor protects,” said Feygor.
Brostin came back in, his arms full of wine bottles. “These do?” he asked.
“They most certainly will,” said Feygor.
Mkvenner took one last contemptuous look at Brostin, Feygor and the bottles, and left.
“Ven! Ven!” Caffran called out as he ran through the rain, up the back plot of the manse, after the retreating scout.
Mkvenner stopped and waited for him. Thunder clashed above them.
“This isn’t right,” said Caffran.
“Yeah, but it’s what’s happening.”
“Feygor’s out of line.”
Mkvenner nodded. “He is. But he’s got command of this detail. What are you going to do? Mutiny?”
“Corbec would understand.”
“Yes, he would. But if you or I get into a clash with Feygor, it could get nasty long before Corbec arrives to intervene. It’s crap, but it’s better just left.”
Caffran shrugged. “We could just go with you.”
“We?”
“Me, Muril, Rerval… probably Larks. Jajjo definitely. Maybe even Gutes.” Thunder rolled again. “I’ll take Jajjo. Send him on up.”
“That’s it?”
Mkvenner fixed Caffran with a fierce stare. “Think about it this way. I’d be happy to sit out a few days in that place, getting plastered and telling old stories. But there’s a job to do. There’s a chance… just a chance… that there’s enemy activity in this forest. And while that chance exists, I’m going to look for it.”
“Yeah and—”
Ven held up a finger to silence Caffran. “In an ideal galaxy, we’d all go. The way we were meant to. But thanks to Murtan Feygor, this isn’t an ideal galaxy. So we improvise. That’s what we’re good at, after all. If I find something out there, Emperor protect me, I’d like to have a patrol fire-team at my back. Failing that, I’d like to know there’s a secure, well-defended strongpoint position not too far away at my heels. Stay here, Caff. Right here. Get Muril, Rerval, Larkin — maybe even Gutes, like you said — and lock this place up ready. Just in case.”
“Okay. If that’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want. Not what I’d wish for, but it’ll do. As far as I’m concerned, you’re in charge here now. Hold the manse and wait for me. Feygor can get his when we get back. I’ll see to it personally. For now, let’s just worry about getting the job done and not fething up.”
Caffran nodded.
Mkvenner took his hand and gripped it tight. “I’m relying on you.”
“Signal when you can.”
“Not a lot of range on these micro-beads. No more than a league or two in these woods.”
“Do it anyway. If it’s bad news… make the signal ‘comeuppance’.”
Mkvenner smiled. Caffran hadn’t seen him do that very often.
“Okay. Send Jajjo up. I’ll see you in a day and a night.” Caffran stood and watched Mkvenner stride away through the rain until he had vanished into the edge of the wood. Thunder boomed.
“Where’s Jajjo?” asked Muril, wandering into the kitchen. The storm had worsened and the light was bad. From the drawing room, they could hear sounds of laughter and drunken antics. “He’s gone with Ven,” said Caffran.
Muril sat down on the window bench. “Oh, that’s just typical!” she said venomously. “Calm down,” said Rerval.
“Bite me, Tanith! This whole tour’s turning into crap,” she complained.
There was a particularly loud roar from the drawing room. A crash. Laughter.
“What are they doing?” asked Caffran.
“Using that stuffed thing as a battering ram,” said Rerval. “I think the game is to see how long one of them can stay on its back with the others running it around the room.”
“Children,” Muril said, acidly.
“Listen,” said Caffran. “I spoke to Ven. He thinks there’s no point going up against Feygor. But he wants us to hold this place, in case.”
“In case of what?” asked Rerval.
“In case he and Jajjo find something out there. Okay? Where’s Larkin?” Rerval shrugged. “Muril, you seen Larks recently?”
“No,” she said, preoccupied. “Why the gak does Jajjo get to scout? Why the gak does that happen?”
“Just forget it,” said Caffran. “We have to focus. We’ll take watches. Two hours on. You handle the first one, Muril?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Rerval. Sweep the perimeter and then start building cover for us. Anything you can find.”
Rerval nodded. “What’ll you be doing, Caff?”
“I’m going to find Larks,” he said.
Night fell. The rainstorm continued to hammer the forest and drench the manse. In one of the outbuildings, an old greenhouse at the edge of the rear yard, facing north, Muril cowered and shivered, watching the tree-line. It was just a dark expanse of trunks half-screened by the sheeting rain.
Rerval brought her a cup of hot
caffeine and a plate of sliced salt beef.
“Been busy?” she asked him.
There’s not a lot to use, but I managed to raise a barricade across the yard at the back of the kitchen. And I boarded up some of the ground floor windows at the back.
“Where’s Caffran?”
“Doing the rounds,” he said.
Caffran was actually emptying pots. No one had bothered to tip out the pots and pans that had been standing under the drips, and now some of them were overflowing. He opened the front door and slung each one empty into the downpour.
Light bled into the hallway from the drawing room, along with raucous noise and the smell of a decent fire. Caffran could hear Brostin telling a coarse story, and Cuu and Gutes exploding into laughter. A bottle broke. There was another, stranger sound that Caffran realised was Feygor laughing too, choking the noise in and out of his augmetic throat.
Caffran shuddered.
He closed the front door. He hadn’t been able to find Larkin anywhere.
He looked at the coatstand. The raincoat had gone.
The drawing room door burst open and Gutes tumbled out. Light and heat and laughter spilled out around him.
“More wine!” he exclaimed.
“Haven’t you had enough?” Caffran asked.
“Don’t be so fething uptight, Caff!” Gutes replied. “Why don’t you join us. We’re having a fine time.”
“So I heard.”
“Makes a change from the fething war!” Gutes slurred.
“The war’s still going on,” smiled Caffran.
Gutes looked sad. He pulled the door shut, cutting out the sounds of merrymaking. He leaned against the hall wall and slid down until he was sitting.
“I know. I know. It never lets up, does it? War. There’s only war. It’s the only future we’ve got. Dark? Yes! Grim? Oh, yes, sir! There’s only ever war!”
“Don’t worry about it, Piet,” Caffran reassured.
“I don’t, Caff, I don’t,” Gutes mumbled. “I’m just so tired, you know? Just so very fething tired of it all. I’m worn out. I’ve had enough.”
Caffran crouched down beside the intoxicated trooper.
“Get off to bed, Piet. Things’ll seem better in the morning.”
Gutes struggled up to his feet. Caffran had to help him.
“Things seem better now, Caff! They really do. I gotta get more bottles.” He lurched away towards the cellar door.
Caffran thought about trying to stop him, but decided not to. Gutes was too far gone.
He heard a creak on the stairs above him, and quickly brought round his lasrifle, switching on the lamp pack under the barrel.
Halfway down the stairs, a little old woman flinched at the sudden, fierce beam of light. She was wearing a raincoat, and it was dripping wet.
Caffran’s light illuminated Larkin beside her. He was smiling as he steadied the old woman’s arm. “Hey, Caff,” he said. “Look who I found…”
TEN
SANTREBAR MILL
“Blood for land: the commerce of war.”
—Satacus, “Of the Great Sezars.”
The Republic subjected sectors 57 and 58 of the Peinforq Line to a sustained gas attack during the morning. The wind, a brisk westerly, favoured their enterprise, and carried the gas swiftly into the Alliance fire trenches: so swiftly, in fact, Alliance respirator drill was found wanting. Men died in dreadful numbers. Three hundred and forty-eight in one five-kilometre stretch alone. Hundreds more were brought out of the reeking amber mist, frothing and blistering, screaming and crying.
A fitful barrage responded to the gas attack. Less modest artillery quaked the earth for over an hour to the north, in 59th sector.
The gas took a long time to dissipate, and the Shadik had undoubtedly been planning on that. At a few minutes before 15.00, a considerable portion of the 57th sector fire trench was assaulted by a brigade of raiders who had advanced under cover of the chemical fog. For a period of about twenty-five minutes, savage, blind fighting occurred at the 57th, and there seemed a genuine danger that the line would be penetrated. The timely arrival of a detachment of the Bande Sezari, as well as a company of elite Kottsmark chemtroops, tipped the scales. Then the wind turned, and the poison smog began to drift east off the Peinforq defences. The Shadik raiders beat their retreat.
By then, this possible opportunity had been anticipated, and Alliance Staff Command 57th/58th opted to press. Cavalry and light foot elements were pushed through to overtake the raiders then continue on for a counter-attack. They were supplemented by armour.
Alliance armour was in the main ponderous, primitive, rhomboidal tanks with heavy roof or sponson guns. These sluggish giants rumbled their way out into the Pocket. They were menacing, but had not achieved much success in anything but psychological terms since their first employment twelve years earlier. However, on this day, five Imperial Guard Thunderers, spared from the action at Gibsgatte, led them out. By evening, they had made a memorable dent in the Shadik lines. It was the first demonstration of modem armour superiority witnessed on Aexe Cardinal.
At the time of the first toxin shelling, the First was laid up in a secondary line, awaiting the evening advance to the fire trench. They had decent warning time on their side, but their respirator drill was excellent anyway. They sat tight, until word started to come in of the raid on the 57th sector. Daur went to see Gaunt immediately.
“We can reinforce,” he suggested. “We’re close enough to do some good.”
Gaunt refused the idea. He’d worked hard to secure a legitimate role in the Alliance for both arms of the First, and he wasn’t about to upset that stability with a show of unilateral bravado. However much he wanted to.
“Stand three platoons to,” he conceded to Daur finally. “If command requests us, we’ll move at once.”
They waited, tense, for an hour or so. When the wind turned and the counter-assault pushed through, Gaunt and Golke moved down to an observation post on the hem of the secondary line.
Borrowing Gaunt’s magnoculars, Golke watched the steady advance of the tanks, his gaze lingering over the heavy-set, trundling shapes of the Guard armour pieces. The Thunderers were painted mustard drab, and moved forward with their siege-dozers lowered, ripping through piquet lines and thorny barricades of wire. Sprays of liquid mud kicked up from their churning treads.
Golke was seriously impressed. He spoke for a while about armour clashes he’d witnessed, though he was so preoccupied with what he was seeing there was no real thread to his talk. Gaunt understood that Golke had received his injuries during one of these clashes, but he didn’t want to press the count for details. Golke mentioned “dreadnoughts”, yet the word did not seem to mean the same thing for him as it did for Gaunt. To an Aexegarian, “dreadnought” was a catch-all word for any armoured war machine.
Whistles were blowing all along the trench system to sound all-clear. The gas had washed out of the line. Gaunt took off his respirator and wiped his sweat-damp face. The afternoon light was good and clear, grey and bright, except for the roiling yellow fume of the departing gas that blanketed no-man’s land.
“Nightfall’s at 19.40,” Golke remarked. He produced a data-slate. “I have a schedule for tonight’s barrages. When do you want to move out?”
It was a legitimate question. Provided he informed Allied GSC, the timing of the Ghosts’ next raid was down to him.
Gaunt looked at the Aexegarian. “Now,” he said.
The main field infirmary of 58th sector was a large system of bunkers situated amidst the reserve and firing trenches at the back of the line, west of the main gun-pits and artillery dens. Set well underground, beneath a roof of rockcrete and flak-sacks, it was said to have its own shield umbrella too, but Dorden didn’t believe that.
However, the facilities were decent. Curth had made strenuous efforts, since they’d moved north, to secure fresh supplies from the Munitorium fleet, and Mkoll had taken his own platoon back to escort the supplies and ma
ke sure they arrived unmolested. Many of the First, Dorden included, had been surprised that Mkoll had not been part of the regiment’s eastward deployment to the Montorq.
“Scouts are needed here too,” Mkoll had told Dorden when the subject came up. “I’m not about to head for the forest and expect the lads I leave here to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”
There was an implication in the master-scout’s remark, Dorden felt. Whatever happened out in the Montorq, good or bad, only bad was going to happen here. The Pocket was going to see action, no matter what. Mkoll’s selfless sense of duty wasn’t going to let him shirk.
When the First had been moved up to the 58th sector, Dorden had packed up his field hospital at Rhonforq and brought it with him, wounded and all, so he could maintain personal care for them and be on hand for the new fighting. That afternoon, gas-attack victims poured into the infirmary’s triage hall. None of them were Ghosts, but Dorden and his medicae staff didn’t hesitate. They sprang up to support the Alliance surgeons, bathing eyes, treating bums, washing poisons out of cloth and bubbling flesh. The respiratory damage was the worst. There was little they could do for the victims with fluid-filled, drowning lungs except try to stabilise them.
Dorden worked urgently. He clearly missed Foskin and Doctor Mtane, who had both gone west with the Montorq mission. He wanted to trust the ministrations of the Alliance surgeons, many of whom were devoted, good men, but their medical practices seemed so terribly outmoded. He took careful note of the treatment deficiencies he saw, and hoped there would be an opportunity for him to advise the sector’s chief of medicine on better, less barbarous techniques. At least three troopers he saved that afternoon were dying as a direct result of treatment rather than gas.
A terrible stench of chemical bums and corrupted blood filled the infirmary. Frothy, discoloured waste matter wept in lakes across the stone floor. Corpsmen turned on the roof vents and hosed with disinfectant but it didn’t do much good.
“Feth!” muttered Rawne. “The smell is going to choke me to death!”
“Will it make you stop talking?” asked Banda. He looked across the aisle at her cot with a withering stare, but she just grinned. She was pale, and a cut above her right eye was black with stitches. Her mending lungs were having a hard time coping with the wretched air. Still, she found the breath to taunt him.