Milo nodded.
“Watch Zweil. He can be a handful. Consider yourself in receipt of the brevet rank of sergeant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Gaunt smiled and saluted Milo. Milo returned the gesture. “You’ve come a long way from Tanith Magna, Brin. Be proud of yourself.”
“I am, sir.”
The hole was a dark, sinister space. “Clear?” hissed Gaunt. Two micro-bead taps from Mkoll said yes. “Advance,” Gaunt said.
The infiltration team filed quickly into the dugout run Mkoll and Domor had the lead, followed by Lubba and Hwlan. Gaunt was right behind them with Bonin.
Initially, the earth-dug tunnel dropped away rather sharply The floor was a congealed mass of soil-waste. But after about ten metres, it levelled out and its nature changed. Rather than earth-cut walls, the tunnel was made of mouldering stone, old, but well-laid. It reminded Gaunt of a storm-drain or a sewer.
It was far too elaborate and significant to have been built to cover Republican troops out to the forward observation point at the mill. This was ancient. Gaunt realised it was most likely some part of the mill’s old water-system, a drain or possibly a feeder sluice. The Shadik had unearthed it and put it to use.
It was quite narrow and low, and the wet, slime-covered stones were treacherous, especially in the near-pitch darkness. They dared not use lamp packs for fear of advertising their approach. That was why he’d put Sergeant Domor in the lead. “Shoggy” Domor had been blinded on Menazoid Epsilon, and his eyes had been replaced with bulky augmetic optics, which made him resemble a certain bug-eyed amphibian and thus earned him his nickname. Domor adjusted his optics to night-vision mode.
After a further twenty metres, the tunnel dropped again, this time suddenly, and they had to wade through knee-deep water. There was greater damage to the stone work — evidently this part of the tunnel had subsided or dropped badly.
Gaunt looked back down the file. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, as much as they were going to, anyway. He could see grey-black shapes moving against the darkness, and hear the occasional splash or clink of rock. It was hard effort, and the men were trying to keep their breathing quiet. It was also hot and airless, and everyone was sweating freely.
About three hundred metres along, Mkoll called a stop. A secondary tunnel opened up to the left, also stone-built, and water gurgled out of it. They waited while the master scout checked it. A minute. Two. Three.
Then a double-tap on the micro-bead link.
Gaunt risked vocals, keeping his voice low. “One, four?”
“Four, one,” Mkoll responded, barely audible. “A side chute. Dead-end. It’s collapsed.”
They moved on. In the space of the next two hundred metres, three more side chutes opened. The party waited as Mkoll checked each one scrupulously.
A few minutes more, and Gaunt felt cool air moving past his face. He could smell water. In another step or two, he could hear it. A torrent, fast moving.
The tunnel opened out Gaunt couldn’t see enough, but he could feel the space in front of him.
“Some kind of vault,” Domor reported over the link. There was a sudden scrabbling noise and a low curse.
“Report!” Gaunt said.
“Lubba nearly slipped over. Sir, I think we’re going to have to risk lamps.”
“How clear is the way ahead?”
“No sign of contact. Wait.”
They heard soft boot-steps on stone, a wooden creak, and then it fell silent for a few seconds. “Domor?”
“It’s clear. I think we should use lamps. Someone’s gonna fall, otherwise.”
“Your call, Domor, you’re in the best position to decide.”
“Do it, sir.”
“Two lamps only. Hwlan. Bonin.”
The scouts switched on their packs. The pools of light they cast seemed alarmingly bright. They illuminated the chamber, and Gaunt realised at once that Domor had been correct.
The tunnel they had been following came out halfway up the stone walls of a deep cistern area. It dropped away below them. Narrow, rail-less stone steps led down from the tunnel to a stone buttress where lengths of duckboards had been placed as a bridge across the gap over onto a matching but-tress. From there, another flight of steps led up to the resumption of the tunnel. Domor was on the far side, crouched at the top of the opposite steps, watching the way ahead.
There was nothing to hold on to, and every surface was dripping with slime. Without the light, a good many of them would have lost their footing on either set of steps, and the narrow duckboard bridge would have been impossible to negotiate.
Far below them, water thundered through the bottom of the stone vault.
Holding his lamp, Hwlan went across the bridge. He stood at the foot of the opposite steps to light the way. Bonin waited with his own lamp at the bottom of the near flight.
Gaunt and Mkoll went across with Lubba. Gaunt turned back and signalled the troop to follow, single file. He wanted Bonin and Hwlan free to move up at the front. He instructed every third man to stop and take over the job of holding the lamps. The last man through would collect in the lamps and turn them off.
They’d been underground for about fifty minutes, and had advanced what Mkoll reckoned was about two-thirds of a kilometre, when the barrage began.
It sounded like a distant hammering at first, then rose in volume and tempo until they could actually feel the earth around them vibrating. Gaunt calculated there was between eight and twelve metres of solid earth above their heads, but still everything jarred. Spoil and water squirted and dribbled out of the roof, shaken loose or forced out through ground distortions. Every once in a while, a whole stone block popped out of the wall and fell on the floor.
Agitation rose. Gaunt could feel it. It wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen if a heavy shell scored a direct hit above them. Crushed, suffocated, buried alive. The tunnel could cave or collapse. They’d already seen it had done that further back.
Even the most confident Ghosts wanted to be out of this potential grave. They wanted to be taking their chances in the open. It didn’t matter that they were probably at less risk from the shelling and the shrapnel down in the drain.
Indeed, Gaunt felt his own pulse rate rising steeply. Claustrophobia had never been a private fear of his, but down here, like this…
The earth shook with an especially violent jar. Someone back in the line moaned in fear.
“Quiet!” Gaunt hissed.
Then he realised how stupid the comment had been. If it was loud down here, it would be deafening above ground. The shelling would cover their noise. They could advance now at double time, not worrying about stealth.
He issued the order and they started to move, almost fleeing down the line of the tunnel. The deluge of explosives continued to roar above them.
“Hold it!” Mkoll cried.
They skidded up. “What is it?” Gaunt asked.
“You hear that?”
Gaunt couldn’t hear anything above the shell blasts and the panting of the men. “What?”
“A scratching noise. A rattling…”
“Sacred feth!” Domor suddenly cried out. He could see further than any of them. He could see what was coming.
“Vermin!” he said in horror. “A swarm of vermin, coming this way! Oh God-Emperor!”
“Sir?” urged Lubba, slightly frantic. He had his flamer ready.
“No,” said Gaunt. The shelling might be covering their advance, but sustained flamer-bursts would be an insane risk to take. “Stand your ground!” Gaunt said. “They’re fleeing the shelling. Just grin and bear it. That’s an order.”
The rats hit them.
A river of squealing, matted bodies, surging in a tide back along the tunnel, filling the floor space to shin-depth, some scampering along the walls. Gaunt felt them collide with his legs, rocking him back, and then pouring around and under him. Men cried out. The noise and stench of the living river was atrocious. The writhing pr
essure of the rats’ bodies was even worse.
Frantic, seeking cover in the deeper drains, the rats clawed and bit as they swept past. Gaunt had to steady his hands against the tunnel wall to prevent himself being knocked over. He felt sharp needle-bites on his shins and calves.
There was a scream, and frantic activity behind him. Harjeon had been carried over, and had virtually disappeared into the streaming mass of black bodies.
Criid and Livara struggled and swore, trying to get him up again.
We’re probably all dead, Gaunt thought to himself. All of us infected with the multitude of filthy plagues and infections these vile things carry. Golden throne! Of all the things that I imagined might end my service to the Imperium, it was never rats.
As suddenly as it had begun, the vermin tide stopped. A last few squeaking things scuttled by in the gloom. Gaunt heard men stamping at them.
“Report!” he said.
There were general moans and comments of loathing. Not a single member of the mission had avoided bites or tears. Harjeon was covered in them, and started shaking and vomiting in loathing.
“They got on my face… in my mouth—” he wailed.
“Shut him up, Criid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s move.”
The sounds of the shelling grew louder, but not because they were closer. There was a faint, cold light ahead, and the noise of the barrage was being carried back along to them from the tunnel mouth.
Just a hundred metres to go.
Gaunt ordered Mkoll, Bonin and Hwlan forward.
“Ready order,” he said to the rest. “Straight silver. Let’s keep the surprise on our side as long as possible.”
Two taps. “Forward,” he said.
Up ahead, the three scouts emerged into the open air. It was cold and foggy from the shelling, and the shock-flashes of blasts backlit the misted air. The sound of the barrage was deafening: whooping shell-falls, some high-pitched, some low and basso, others still oddly melodic and expressive. Most detonations were huge and so loud they shook the diaphragm. Others made hotter, flatter sounds. Some made no sound at all, just a flash and a quake of the ground. After every single one there was a surging, pattering hush, like breakers on a shingle beach, as soil and shrapnel rained down.
Finding their way by the strobing flicker of the impacts, Mkoll, Bonin and Hwlan scurried out of the tunnel mouth, heads down. There was a sandbagged revetment and a guard point at the Shadik end of the tunnel, but it was unmanned. The guards had fled for cover.
The scouts found themselves in a deep bay off the main fire trench. They fanned out to the exit, and then ducked back as three Shadik troopers ran past boots clumping the duck-boards. These disappeared, and then two more came by, carrying a screaming man on a stretcher They too vanished into the glowing smoke.
Mkoll signalled the other two up with him. They emerged into the fire trench proper. It was deeper and better laid than the Alliance trenches, with a wider firestep and a back-slanted parapet of rockcrete blocks. The trench, as far as they could see, which was to the next traverse, was empty.
“Move up,” Mkoll said.
A moment later, five Shadik troopers, running hell for leather, appeared round the traverse to their left. They didn’t seem to register the Tanith until the last moment.
The scouts didn’t give them a chance to react. Mkoll brought down the first one, sliding his silver knife through gas-mask and windpipe. Hwlan skewered another in the sternum and then propelled himself and the corpse into a third.
Bonin crashed his rifle-butt into the belly of the enemy soldier nearest him, and sent him tumbling away, winded, then put his weight into a stinging sidekick that snapped the fifth trooper’s neck and dropped him abruptly onto the duck-boards. Bonin leapt over him, and quickly killed the winded man with his bare hands.
Hwlan tried to make a clean kill of the last trooper, but the fether was struggling hard. The Tanith man got his lasrifle braced across the man’s neck and wrenched it around, twisting the helmeted skull down hard against the trench floor.
Five men dealt with in just a few seconds.
They were dragging the bodies into cover behind the camo-nets of a funk hole as Gaunt led the first of the main party into the fire trench.
“Which way?” Gaunt asked.
Mkoll pointed left.
“Lead off with Hwlan,” Gaunt told him. He turned to Bonin “Set here with Oflyn, and take up the rear of the file. Stay in close contact.”
“Sir,” nodded Bonin.
The party moved off quickly behind Mkoll and Hwlan. Two scouts at the head and two at the rear was the best insurance Gaunt could muster.
Beyond the second traverse they came to, a Shadik fire-team was trying to set up a pair of autocannons at the parapet. Nine men, all told.
Mkoll and Hwlan came at them from behind, knives out Gaunt followed them, drawing his power sword, along with Criid, Ezlan and LaSalle. Brutal killing followed. One of the Shadik got a shot off, but Gaunt hoped its sound would be drowned by the barrage. He decapitated a man with his sword, and then impaled another. Nothing stopped his ancient blade, not mail-armour, not battle-plate, not leather and certainly not flesh.
Criid finished off the last man, and looked up at Gaunt.
The shelling had just suddenly ceased.
That meant the ground attack was coming. And it also meant that the Shadik would be streaming back out of their bunkers and shelters to man the step and repel.
THIRTEEN
CORPSE LIGHT
“Sometimes, y’know, I really miss my slum. Times like this, for instance.”
—Flame-Trooper Lubba
Fifteen regiments of Alliance troops assaulted the line in the wake of the barrage. A wave attack, welling up from the smoke-skeined darkness of no-man’s-land. The twenty-kilometre stretch of line had been lit up for half an hour by the salvos of the bombardment. After a moment’s eerie silence, it lit up again. Small-arms. Machine guns. Grenades. Flamers. From the air, the wide band of massive light bursts reduced to a thinner, fizzling line of fire.
It was the most significant attack mounted on the Shadik line in eighteen months. An offensive, the officers of the GSC were calling it back in the safety of the rear-line bunkers. Lyntor-Sewq and Martane had been prepping for it since Lyntor-Sewq’s promotion to supreme commander. Lyntor-Sewq had dearly wanted to make his mark early, and prove to the high sezar how lax his predecessor, Count Golke, had been in his accomplishments. It was all part of a greater strategy that incorporated the northern push through Gibsgatte, where the supreme commander had invested the bulk of his Imperial Guard armour. The idea was to sucker punch Shadik by a northern thrust and then take him hard in the belly at the Pocket and Bassin-on-Naeme. Lyntor-Sewq’s overall scheme was to divert the enemy’s strengths to the north and retake the river valley, establishing a new front he called the Frergarten Line before winter set in. If successful, the Peinforq Line would become obsolete for the first time in twenty-six years.
Over winter, the new line could be reinforced using Alliance troops, and be ready by spring not only to hold against the inevitable counter-push, but also to launch an invasion of the Southern Republic, in concerted effort with the Kottmark armies on the Ostlund Line.
It was an over-ambitious scheme, typical of a new commander trying to be emphatic and break the deadlock apparently imposed by his predecessor. If Golke had been privy to the planning meetings, he’d have been able to tell Lyntor-Sewq frankly that the same thing had been tried before, three times, in point of fact. The “Oust-and-Out” strategy was an old one, and it had never worked.
If Ibram Gaunt had been privy to the planning meetings, his comments would have been earthier still. Lyntor-Sewq was playing the war like a game of regicide. The first thing a commander learns that’s of any use at all is that army groups do not behave like playing pieces. They don’t obey set rules, they don’t have preset “moves”. Often a strong group signally fails to do wh
at was expected of it. Often, too, a “weak” piece can win the game by being used cleverly.
Unfortunately, neither officer was present at the meetings. By the time it was getting too late to advise Lyntor-Sewq differently, both Gaunt and Golke, the latter by choice, were at the sharp end of things.
Van Voytz was at the meetings, most of them anyway. His counselling efforts were completely eclipsed by the determination of the new supreme commander. When, months later. Van Voytz finally withdrew from Aexe Cardinal, he would come to regard his time there as the most frustrating and impotent of his career.
Most GSC staffers believed that this particular night had been chosen to launch the offensive because of the opening the counter-strike at 57th had provided. Its success had jibed in a timely way with the frontal press at Gibsgatte. This was only partially true.
Though Gaunt never learned the truth, the offensive had been launched because of Redjacq Ankre. Discovering, from logged notes, that the First was infiltrating that night, he’d persuaded Martane to put the call in. Ankre was a proud man. His pride would eventually cost him his life, many years later. He hated the idea that the Tanith could have found an opening, and he used that hate to fuel his persuasive powers. If the stealthers of the First could break the Shadik line, then so could the Alliance ground forces. Ankre was actually afraid that the off-worlders of the Guard might actually achieve something that the Alliance had failed to do. He could not stomach the idea.
He personified the emotion-led failing of the Alliance top brass, a failing that had prolonged this war by decades. As with all efforts of such scale, his failing went unnoticed in the general scheme of things.
Almost three thousand Alliance troops fell casualty on the line assault that night. No figure, not even an estimation, was made for the Shadik forces. At one stretch of the line, one hundred and seventy-eight men of the Genswick Foot, including Lieutenant Fevrierson, became encumbered in lines of wire and were slaughtered by machine guns. At another section, no more than fifty metres long, three hundred Fichuan infantrymen died in the storm charge. The trench filled up, level with the surrounding terrain, packed with bodies so deeply the Shadik were forced to fall back and hold a reserve trench. Trench mortars killed sixty men of the Meuport Fifth as they came towards the parapet and were illuminated by starshells sent up by a nearby Bransgatte unit who had become disoriented. The surviving men of the Meuport Fifth later took the fire trench, held it for an hour, lost it again and then retook it before dawn. The action entered their regimental legend.