Rawne got up off his cot, and sat carefully. The ward hall was full of Ghosts, as well as a few Krassians, casualties from that first trench fight at the 55th sector. Many, like Rawne, were healing well, but it would be a long time before they could be pronounced fit for active duty. Rawne wondered how many more Ghosts would come through these halls before the present occupants made their way out.
The days since he had been wounded had passed at a dishearteningly slow crawl. Rawne felt detached and very much out of the loop, even though he’d been brought regular reports. He wanted to get up and out, but not because he was such a dutiful soldier he needed to get back to play his part.
He was distressed at the prospect of what feth-heads like Daur might be doing in his absence.
“What are you doing?” asked Banda.
He didn’t reply. He grabbed hold of the back of a wooden chair and slowly dragged himself to his feet. The pain in his stomach, which had been a dormant ache for the last thirty hours, started to throb again.
“What are you doing?” Banda repeated. “Doc Dorden’ll have your guts.”
“Feels like he already has,” Rawne snapped.
He took a deep breath, and let go of the chair back.
God-Emperor, it was hard. It felt like his legs had atrophied. It felt like someone had upturned a live brazier in his belly. It felt like someone was stabbing a bayonet into his spine.
“What are you doing?” Banda repeated for the third time. Then added, “Major?”
That did it. Rawne hadn’t been addressed by rank for what seemed like an age. Especially by Jessi Banda. If he but admitted it, that had been the best part of this enforced stay in the ward. Jammed together by the proximity of their beds, the comatose nature of their immediate neighbours, and their shared suffering at station 293, they had provided conversational company for one another. It wasn’t a friendship, exactly Rawne certainly wouldn’t acknowledge anything like that, but they’d talked, and played boredom-defeating word games, and joked occasionally. After the first few hours of them being cooped up together involuntarily, she had stopped calling him major and he’d stopped calling her trooper. They had formed a cordial, sparring companionship as a reaction to their situation.
“I’m going for a breath of fresh air,” Rawne said, panting.
“Oh, what? And leave me here? And I thought we were mates.”
It was too much effort to shoot her another withering stare. It was almost too much effort to remain standing. “Just…” he said. “Just…”
“What?” Banda asked.
He sighed. “Can you get up?”
“Can I gak.”
“Oh, for feth’s sake…” Slowly, very slowly, he plodded round the end of his cot and grabbed hold of a wheelchair that had been folded up against the foot of the next bunk. It took him a moment to force the spring-shot seat back into place, and he almost fell doing it.
“Careful!” she said.
“Like you care…”
He got the chair stable and shuffled it across to her bedside, leaning hard on the handles. “Come on,” he said.
She looked up at him. “Gakking well help, then.”
Setting the chair’s brake, he got her by the wrists, and levered her forward to the edge of the cot. He could hear the wheeze in her lungs.
“Maybe we shouldn’t—”
“You started this, Rawne,” she said.
“On three. You’ll have to help me. One, two…”
She almost missed the seat completely. As it was, she had to wriggle around once she’d got her breath back. Rawne leaned over, doubled up, dizzy from the pain in his gut.
“Okay?” she said.
“Oh, sure…”
He grabbed the handles of the chair, kicked off the brake after a couple of feeble tries, and trundled her up the aisle towards the exit. Pushing really hurt his fethed-up gut.
But at least now he had something to lean on.
Banda was chuckling to herself. Despite the real and growing pain in his stomach, Rawne realised he was smiling too. There was a genuine sense of escape. A comradely feel of fellow prisoners sticking together and making a break for freedom.
And there was an agreeable sensation of flaunting the system that Rawne hadn’t felt since he’d been coining it as part of Tanith Attica’s black market.
The two invalids edged up the infirmary’s exit ramp and out into the firing trench. It was their first sight of daylight in a while. He wheeled Banda along the duckboards as far as a waystation, pausing every few metres to rest, and then got an arm around her and manhandled her up into a vacant obs post. By then, they were both exhausted, and they flopped down onto the sandbags, leaning their backs to the parapet face.
Yet they were both sniggering too.
The pain in Rawne’s belly flared for a while, but slowly it subsided now he was no longer exerting himself. They both took deep breaths, enjoying the fresh air. It wasn’t fresh, exactly. There was a reek of mud, general sweat, wet sacking, fyceline, promethium, fungus, sour food, latrines. But it was light years better than the gas-corrupted waste-stink that permeated the infirmary.
“We ought to do this more often,” she quipped, clearly in pain but relishing the escape.
“Now I know what Corbec meant,” he replied.
“What?”
Rawne looked at her “He’s had a tough run, this last while. Wounded, bedridden. He told me the thing he missed worst, what hurt him worst, was missing stuff. The physical pain of injuries didn’t matter so much. It was losing his place in things.”
She nodded.
“I didn’t appreciate what he meant really. I thought getting wounded was a vacation. And that you’d be too taken up with your injury to worry about anything else. But he was right. It feels like I’ve been buried and left for dead and the galaxy has moved on without me.”
There was a long pause. A detachment of Fichuan Infantry tramped past along the reserve trench below them. Somewhere, muffled, a field-vox jangled.
“Why did you order me not to die?” she asked.
“What?”
“In the trench. I heard you. I couldn’t answer, but I heard you. You ordered me not to die.”
He thought about it. “Because I didn’t want the bother of finding a new platoon sniper,” he said.
The trace of a smile crossed her lips and she nodded sagely. “That’s what I thought,” she said.
Rawne got up and looked down over the sandbag wall into the reserve trench. Troops were coming and going. A dirty, black ATV grumbled past, laden with shells for the feldkannones and hessian-bagged rockets for the shargen-launchers.
“Something’s up,” he commented.
“What?”
“Beltayn just came running up and went into the infirmary.”
“Ah,” Banda said, knowingly. “You mean something’s awry…”
“I’m a little occupied, Adjutant Beltayn,” Dorden remarked as he made yet another attempt to rinse the eyes of a screaming, thrashing Aexe trooper.
“I can see that, doctor,” Beltayn said.
“So it’ll have to wait.”
“With respect, doctor, the colonel-commissar said you’d say that. He said to tell you that the infiltration unit is moving out in fifteen minutes and—”
“And?”
“And you should move your fething arse. His words.”
“Really?” said Dorden. “I thought he wasn’t mobilising until tonight?”
Beltayn said something that was drowned out by a particularly curdled shriek from the man on the gurney.
“I said… change of plan, doctor. We’ve got daylight cover. The gas, you see? And a whole bundle of distractions. There’s a counter-push going on. Tanks and everything.”
“I just can’t leave this, Beltayn,” Dorden said. He’d promised Gaunt he’d move out with the next patrol in the hope they’d find some of Raglon’s platoon, but he hadn’t counted on a triage hall full of chem-burned men.
“Go, Tolin. I can handle it,” said Curth, appearing from nowhere, her apron stained with bile and foam.
“You sure, Ana?”
“Yes. Just go.” She started to apply herself to the thrashing victim.
“Hold him!” she snarled at the stretcher bearers standing nearby. They jumped to help.
Dorden yanked off his smeared gloves and scrub-top and tossed them into a soil-bin. He took a fresh apron from the laundered rack, and started to fill his medicae kit from the supply shelves.
“We haven’t got much time,” Beltayn urged.
“Then be a good man and get my jacket and camo-cape from the side office. They’re on the peg.”
Dorden buttoned up his kit and slung it over his shoulder. “Attention!” he yelled above the tumult of the ward. “Be advised that Surgeon Curth is now in operational control here. No excuses, no exceptions. Go through her.”
Beltayn returned, and helped Dorden into his black. First-issue field jacket.
“Good luck!” called Curth.
“Keep it,” he replied. “You’ll need it more.”
Pulling his cape around his shoulders, Dorden hurried up the entrance ramp of the infirmary behind Beltayn.
“You say he’s decided to go in daylight?” he asked.
“Yes, doctor. I heard him telling Count Golke that stealth works even when it’s not quiet. He wants to make use of the noise and gas and confusion to get back to where the teams were last night.”
“I see. We have to go back. I’ve left my respirator behind.”
Beltayn turned and winked. “I brought that too,” he said.
“You think of everything,” Dorden mocked.
“That’s my job,” said Beltayn, without a hint of irony.
They ran out into the reserve trench and hurried along north towards the first communications spur running east.
Dorden suddenly stopped and looked back. Beltayn skidded to a halt.
“What the feth are you doing up there?” Dorden yelled at a nearby obs tower.
“Feeling better already!” Rawne shouted back, giving a little wave. “Good hunting, doctor!”
“Just… just take your medicine!” Dorden yelled at Rawne in frustration, then followed Beltayn up the trench.
Rawne sat back down and produced a hip-flask from his pocket He unscrewed the cap and offered it to Banda. “What is it?” she asked.
“Sacra. The best. The very last of Bragg’s legendary brew.”
“Don’t know if I should,” she said.
“You heard our venerable medic,” Rawne said. “Take your medicine.”
Laughing as hard as their painful wounds permitted, they drank to one another’s health.
The infiltrators went over the top and into the dead lands of the Pocket at a minute before five in the afternoon. Four platoons — Criid’s, Domor’s, Mkoll’s and Arcuda’s — along with a command team of Gaunt, Dorden, Zweil, Beltayn, Count Golke and four elite troopers from the Bande Sezari.
Respirator masks clamped on, they extended into the soupy veil of the drifting gas, which wrapped the landscape with a tobacco-yellow stain. Visibility was down to twenty metres, though the overall light was good. A bland glow of daylight bathed them through the toxin clouds, white and flat.
Scout Hwlan, from Criid’s platoon, took point, along with Mkoll himself and “Lucky” Bonin from Domor’s mob. Hwlan had found the mill the night before, and they were trusting his instincts to lead them in.
To Hwlan, an experienced scout with many years as a tracker in the nalwoods of Tanith in his past it was a strange experience. Many said the Tanith could never get lost, and claimed they had the most unerring sense of direction. The constantly shifting trees of Tanith had bred that into them.
That was the theory, anyway.
The chemical attack had changed the ground, baking the mud so dry it had begun to crack. Underneath it was wet and soft, and the feet of the troopers cracked the surface as they advanced, spilling up mud as fluid and yellow as custard.
Vague landmarks from the previous night — a broken tree, a fence of wire, a dead tank — had solidified and become permanent but they’d also been changed by the action of gas. The Pocket had become a dead space of embalmed features, desiccated, fused, chemically transmuted.
The point men reached a wire barricade that collapsed into rust as they touched it. The liquid chemicals accreted in some crater holes were burning.
And there were so many corpses. Dorden was shocked. Fresh corpses, hooked in wire or lying on the ground, so florid they looked like they were still alive. Others, older, hunched and flattened into the postures of submission only dead men can afford. Others, older still, cadaverous and dry, opening their bones to the sky.
It was also grimly silent. There was no wind, and the gas clouds stifled all noise. A bright, dry desert of war, lethal to the touch and the merest breath.
Gaunt placed Milo and Nehn from Domor’s platoon with Zweil. The old ayatani was a newcomer to gas gear and was clearly uncomfortable with the mask and the thick gloves. He’d cinched up the skirts of his long coat so that they wouldn’t drag in the mire, revealing an incongruous, borrowed pair of heavy Aexegarian army boots. Gaunt could hear a mumbling over the vox. Zweil was quietly reciting a prayer of protection. Gaunt signalled Milo to show the priest how to turn off his micro-bead.
“I appreciate your blessings, father,” he said, but perhaps for now you could keep them to yourself inside your hood. “We need the link quiet.”
The riven landscape curled up over a long ridge where the mud was covered in a mosaic of bones, human and hippine. They saw the occasional rusting scrap of a respirator valve, a saddle buckle, the bent barrel of a carbine. On the far side of the ridge, the ground shelved away into a wide basin where a brackish crescent of water shone in the flat light. Old piquets marched in a line down the slope and disappeared into the pool. Along the eastern shore of the water, the mud was crinkled into strange patches that reminded Gaunt of rose blooms. Shards of ashy glass clung to the folds of each patch. He realised they were the impact marks of gas bottles from a previous attack. The mud had baked and puckered with the intensity of the leaking toxins.
An Alliance trooper stood on the far side of the pool, headless. His rotting body was held up by the metal stake he’d fallen against.
The trio of scouts led them round the side of the basin, and out over its lowest lip. They entered a flat area covered in shell craters some large enough to swallow a man, others just pock-marks the size of a fist. The craters overlapped each other, small inside large, large intersecting with larger. The pattern was so dense and seemed so deliberate, it was surreal. To their north, on a bank of mud, lay the burnt-black carcass of a Shadik tank.
Mkoll indicated they should turn south a little, but Golke consulted his chart and advised against it A row of crossed timbers suggested to him the edge of a mined area. Old munitions, but it was stupid to risk it, and they weren’t set for sweeping work. In order to move light, landmine experts like Domor had left their sweeper sets at the line.
They moved north-east instead, following a mangled ridge, plodding through murky strands of water and oil. To their left was a series of waterlogged pits absolutely choked with bodies, as if the dead had all decided to congregate in one place. Zweil realised he was glad of his mask.
Since they’d set out, they’d been able to hear the roaring of the counter-assault pushing ahead of them, a little to the south. Now they heard a deeper, more booming noise. Boxed in by the gas-clouded air, they could see nothing, but Gaunt was sure it was the Shadik super-siege weapons opening up at the Peinforq Line in response to the push.
“Any way we can fix a source at all?” Gaunt asked Mkoll without much hope. Mkoll gestured at the hood he was wearing.
“Not really,” he replied. He thought about it and listened to the thumps. “Best guess is that way,” he pointed. “But it’s vague.”
Gaunt turned to Hwlan. “How far to this mill?”
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“Another half kilometre. We’re approaching from a slightly different angle to last night. There’s a creek, with a fence nearby, and then the mill itself in a wide hollow.”
“It’s more like three-quarters of a kilometre,” said Golke over the link, wiping specks of mud off his chart’s plastic cover. “And slightly more to the south.”
Gaunt looked back at Hwlan. Through the lens-plates of his bulky hood, he could see Hwlan shake his head slightly.
“With respect, sir,” Gaunt told Golke, “I have to trust my scout.”
Golke didn’t seem abashed. He was quickly coming to admire the First’s field skills.
They moved on. In less than fifteen minutes, they were drawing in on the south-eastern side of the mined mill, just a vague shape in the fog of gas.
Hwlan had been spot on.
It looked quiet, empty. Perhaps the Shadik had been unable to resecure it since the previous night. No sense taking chances, though.
The Ghosts advanced, low. Gaunt spread Criid’s platoon in a semi-circle to his right, and Mkoll’s and Domo’s wider to the left, with Arcuda’s in place to the rear, ready to support.
The troop got to within fifty metres of the shattered mill.
“Hold,” Gaunt signalled. Down, hidden under their capes, the Ghosts lined up their weapons, studying the ruin for movement. Gaunt gestured to Mkoll.
The master scout began to slide forward under his cape. To Golke, he seemed to all but vanish. Bonin and Hwlan quickly followed Mkoll, along with Oflyn, the scout from Arcuda’s platoon.
After ten seconds, Mkoll voxed. “Clear. We’re at the outside wall. Two big rockcrete beams fallen in a V-shape. See them?”
Gaunt acknowledged. Golke tried to see the beams. Even when he found them, he couldn’t see the Tanith.
“Move up the assault squad,” Mkoll linked.
The squad came up, and Gaunt advanced with them. Six men: Domor, Luhan, Vril and Harjeon, with Dremmond and Lubba and their flamers. Gaunt left fire command with Criid.