Hwlan nodded.
They moved on a little way. Criid checked the next two or three troopers at the firestep: Vulli, Jajjo, Kenfeld, Subeno. Kenfeld’s boots were leaking and he needed foot-powder.
Then they reached Cuu, or at least Cuu’s position. The firestep was empty.
“Mkhef!” Criid called to the next man along. “Where’s Cuu?”
“Latrine, sarge!” the trooper called back.
They waited, and Cuu reappeared. As soon as he saw Criid, he unslung his rifle and held it out for inspection, wordlessly. There was no expression in his eyes. His face still bore the bruise marks where she’d dented it.
“You left your post, Cuu.”
“Had to.”
“You wait until change-over.”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t wait. My belly’s a mess. Gakking food round here. An emergency, sure as sure.”
“How long have you been sick?”
“A day.” He did look pale and unwell, now she came to look. “You keeping anything in?”
“Going right through me,” he said with unnecessary relish.
“Signal a man up to cover,” she told DaFelbe, then she looked back at Cuu. “Report to Dorden. Get him to fix you up with salts or a shot. Then right back here, you understand me? I want you back before 13.00, no excuses.”
“Okay,” said Cuu, picking up his kit. “Back by one, sure as sure.”
Criid watched Cuu walk away until he was out of sight round the next traverse. “He’s trouble, that one,” said DaFelbe. “Sure as sure,” she replied.
In the next fire bay, Criid found Pozetine, Mosark and Nessa Bourah huddled in scrapes hulled out under the dripping parapet. They were playing dice, but she could tell their hearts weren’t in it. She ran a quick inspection, though the three were able troopers who didn’t need much steering, and asked if there were any problems.
“Only the waiting,” said Pozetine. He was a short, square-set Vervunhiver with a boxer’s splayed nose, ex-Vervun Primary, and a hell of a shot. A shoe-in for sniper specialisation in fact, had it not been for his grievous lack of patience. He worried, he fidgeted. A sniper he was not.
“Waiting’s always the killer,” said Criid.
Pozetine nodded. “S’why I hate digging in, sarge,” he said. His fingers were working the dice, making them move in and out between his knuckles. An edgy and all too practiced tick.
“Bide your time,” said Criid.
“What I keep telling him,” signed Nessa, a model of calm.
It was easy to say. No soldier liked the waiting hours. They had a habit of magnifying fears and gnawing at nerves. But they got to Pozetine worse than most.
“Do something,” Criid suggested. “I could find you a job. Latrines—”
“Gak that,” growled Pozetine. Mosark laughed. “Then take a turn on lookout.”
“I offered, but he’s happy and set.” The “he” Pozetine referred to was Kolea, down at the end of the bay. He was motionless, peering through a stereoscope rigged to peak out over the parapet.
Criid walked along the duckboards to him. “Kolea?”
He didn’t move. She put a hand gently on his arm and he looked up. She could tell it took a moment for him to work out who she was.
“You okay? You’ve been watching a long time.”
“Don’ mind it. I can watch.”
He could at that. If Pozetine was the most impatient man in the platoon — gak, the entire regiment — then Kolea had become the most focused and tranquil.
She knew for a fact that he’d been manning the scope for at least two hours, slowly playing it back and forth through a one-eighty arc. He didn’t get bored, he didn’t get tired. She’d have pulled any other man off the duty ages before for fear that fatigue would make him sloppy. Not Kolea.
Criid didn’t know precisely what the loxatl munition had done to Kolea’s brain. Surgeon Curth had tried to explain it to her, but the technical terms had been beyond Criid. Something to do with memory and personality. All of it, ruined. Gol Kolea, the scratch company hero, wise, smart, strong… lost, and only this physical shell of him left with them. His dependability had survived, and expressed itself in an extraordinary attention span.
Or at least, Criid told herself, an ability not to get bored with the most mundane tasks. Kolea could watch the line vigilantly for hours. Pick up a conversation five minutes after it had lapsed and he wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
Criid had admitted it to no one, but Kolea was the biggest problem in her command. Gaunt assumed it would be Cuu, but she knew she could handle that gak-pellet. No, it was Kolea. Ten was Kolea’s platoon, for a start. He’d forged the unit. It was his still. If he’d died, that would have been a different ball game, but he was still here, a constant reminder of his mental absence, of the void where his inspired leadership had been.
Worse still, he’d only ended up this way because of her. She’d been wounded during the fight for Ouranberg. Kolea had carried her to safety and taken his headwound as a consequence. She’d never found out why, really. Varl had said that it was simply Kolea’s way. He’d never leave a trooper down and in danger. Maybe so. But it felt like something else. Like Kolea had needed to save her for some reason, something more than simple loyalty.
Caffran reckoned it was because of the kids. Kolea had sometimes referred to the two orphans Criid had rescued from Vervunhive as a “little piece of good”, and Caffran believed Kolea had taken an almost patriarchal interest in looking after Criid and Caffran, the kids’ ersatz parents.
Whatever. She’d never know. She’d never be able to ask Kolea, because Kolea couldn’t even remember Ouranberg, let alone the motives that had once driven his life.
“You get tired, you sing out,” she said.
“Don’ worry, sarge.”
“You see anything, you sing too.”
His big fingers reached into the neck of his field coat and held out the tin whistle. He beamed. “Got my blower.”
“Good,” she said. “Carry on, Trooper Kolea.” She got up, but his next words stopped her in her tracks. “The kids.”
“What?”
“What?” he echoed.
“What did you say, Gol? Just then?”
“Um…” he thought about it. “The kids. They gonna be okay? They all right?”
“They’re fine,” she said. Her heart was banging in her ribcage. It was almost like the old Gol Kolea was in arm’s reach.
“They’re young,” he said. “Yes, they are.”
“But I guess they’ll manage. If you say they’re all right.”
“They will.”
He nodded. “So young. S’pose war is all they’ve known. But so young, most of them. Boys. Not even shaving yet. Acting like soldiers.”
The Aexe Alliance troopers. That’s what he was talking about. Everyone in the regiment had been shocked to see how terribly young most of the local soldiery was. “Kids,” Lubba had said.
Dear God-Emperor. Not her kids at all. She’d seen a spark, just for a second, but it had been false. “Carry on,” she said.
“You okay there, sarge?” asked DaFelbe.
“Yeah. Grit in my eyes,” said Tona Criid.
The canteen barrow had passed along the fire trench north of station 290 about fifteen minutes before, dishing out pieces of dry rye-bread and a watery gruel made of fish stock and tough root vegetables to the men of eleven platoon. Now Trooper Gutes was coming along through the rain with the wash bin, collecting up the troopers’ mess tins to take them up the supply trench and rinse them at the standpipe tap at rear/290.
It was a rota task, and Gutes had drawn for the day. He didn’t grumble, but it was a scummy job. By the time he’d collected all the mess tins, the wash bin would be slopping and full. Piet Gutes was one of the older Tanith troopers, drawn and tired. It wasn’t physical fatigue he suffered from. It was the wearying attrition of Guard life. The hopeless straggle to get through each day, knowing there was no h
appy ending waiting for them. No homeworld. No family embrace to return to.
The day Tanith had died, Gutes’ daughter Finra had been twenty-one, and her daughter Foona just four months old. It had been a wrench leaving them, but the Emperor called, and the Emperor was the Emperor.
Piet Gutes woke up some nights, sit-up-straight awake, with the last fire-flash of Tanith fading in his mind’s eye. That final, shuddering cough of flame and light that signalled the death of the world that’d raised him. It had been just a little thing, a wink in the night He’d witnessed it from the obs ports of the troop ship. Just a tiny, silent flash.
How could that have been Tanith dying, he often wondered. The mantle splitting. The oceans evaporating. The continents sliding into each other and disintegrating. The great nalwood forests licking into cinders in a wall of white heat. The core, cut loose, erupting and boiling out into the vacuum. Piet Gutes supposed that anything, even the most important and profound event in his life or anyone’s life, would seem like nothing more than a tiny, silent flash if you saw it from far enough away.
He wondered about it, sometimes, washing grease off mess tins, sorting power dips, sewing buttons back onto his tunic. The galaxy was big and everything in it was small, and he was small too. The Emperor’s dead! Really? Yeah… that tiny flash just then. Did you see it? The Imperium’s fallen! Sacred feth, you kidding? No… just that little flash. You must’ve noticed.
Far away. That’s where he’d like to be. “Far away up in the mountains”, like the old song. It was all he wanted these days. To be so far away that everything looked small and insignificant.
“Tins! Tins!” he called, plodding down the fire bay with both hands on the yoke of the big metal pail. Garond tipped his in, then Fenix and Tokar.
“Thank you kindly,” Gutes said to each, his voice so rich with sarcasm it made them laugh.
He straggled into the gun-nest where Caill and Melyr were hunched down beside their support weapon. Caill tossed his tin in, half-finished, but Melyr was still chasing the last drips of gravy with a scrap of Caill’s left over bread.
“Feth, you like that stuff?”
“Good eating, if you’ve a hunger,” said Melyr.
Gutes liked Melyr. Heavy-set, solid, an ace with a fat cannon or a rocket tube. But he hated seeing him there. Bragg had been eleven’s cannon man. Hark had switched Melyr in from twenty-seven when Bragg was killed. It was almost unseemly. Caill, the best ammo humper in the regiment in Gutes’ opinion, had just about been wedded to Bragg. Now here he was running boxes and feeding belts for someone else.
Times change. Needs must. Get far enough away and none of it looks big enough to be important anyway.
Melyr finished up, smacked his lips appreciatively, and plonked his mess tin into Gutes’ wash bin.
“My compliments to the chef,” he said.
“Melyr, man, you’re a fething lunatic,” said Gutes.
“You wanna worry,” said Caill. “I have to sit beside this feth-head.”
“Sit further back and it won’t seem to matter so much,” Gutes suggested. “What?”
Gutes shook his head. He was glad Caill was settling in with his new partner. That’s what really counted. He knew Caill was still down on himself. He’d left Bragg to run for fresh ammo, and by the time he’d got back, Bragg was done. Three loxatl flechette rounds at close range, that’s what Gutes had heard. Like he’d eaten a tube-charge. So much mess they’d been hard pushed to find enough to bury, and Bragg had been a big guy.
Feth happens, Gutes thought.
He stumbled on, under a reinforced arch, into the next fire bay, wishing he had a hand free to brash away the biter-flies that buzzed around his face. Loglas had told him about a trooper up the line who’d let those things settle and then woke up with his brain eaten out by hatching larvae.
Piet Gutes didn’t fancy that. He did however wonder how someone with his brain eaten out by larvae had managed to wake up at all. An inconsistency in the story. Maybe Loglas had been pulling his leg.
“Everything all right, Piet?” called Sergeant Obel, coming the other way down the trench with his runner.
“Fine, sir.”
“You got mine already,” said Obel.
“I did so,” said Gutes. Every Ghost’s mess tin was etched with his surname and pin code. The fun part of this job was getting the right tin back to the right body.
Fun part. Yeah, right. There was nothing about the collection, cleaning and redistribution of mess tins that could be considered fun.
“Carry on, Gutes,” Obel said.
Gutes stopped at the end of the bay and put his bucket down. Greasy slops rocked out over the lip. “Hey, Larks?”
Mad Larkin slowly turned back from the loophole where his long-las was resting. He smiled slightly when he saw Gutes. They’d been good buddies since the Founding Fields. It was nice to see him smile. Larkin seemed edgier than ever these days. He and Bragg had been particularly close.
“Got your tin?” Gutes asked.
Larkin looked around and eventually produced his mess tin from a shelf in the revet side. It was full of gruel, the hunk of bread disintegrating into it.
“Ah, Larks, you gotta eat.”
“Not hungry, Piet.”
“You gotta eat, but.”
Larkin shrugged.
Gutes picked up the tin. “You sure you don’t want this?”
“Yeah. No appetite.”
“Okay, then.” Gutes left his slop bucket next to Larkin’s firestep and went back down the trench. Melyr accepted the bonus rations with delight. “You gotta wash that up yourself and get it back to Larks,” Gutes told him.
He went back to his wash bin.
“What you doing, Larks?” he asked.
Larkin had been working a screwdriver into the setting of his rifle scope. “Calibrating,” he said.
Every sniper calibrated their scopes. It was a given. An adjustment to the milled ring on the back-sight, a moment to let the sighting scanner read your retina and set up the hairs, but Larkin played around more. He tweaked off the inspection cover and overrode the reader, calibrating his weapon to nuances of windspeed and shot-drop that were too subtle for the scope to set automatically. Gutes had heard him say sometimes that he saw the truth through his scope. The view through the scope was the one reality Larkin trusted.
“You wanna be careful no tech-priest catches you doing that,” Gutes admonished. “They’d have you burned at the stake.”
“So don’t tell ’em,” said Larkin.
“I won’t,” said Gutes. Larkin was the best shot in the regiment, and Gutes wasn’t about to tell him his job, even if tinkering with military tech was strictly forbidden. That was the province of the tech-priests, who guarded their secrets jealously. If Larkin had to be a heretic to shoot so well, that was fine with Gutes.
Gutes pulled up his sloshing bin and trotted on, picking up the last of the mess tins and then heading west up the supply trench.
“Hey, Larks.”
Larkin looked up from his scope, thinking Piet Gutes had come back for some reason. It wasn’t Piet Gutes. “How you doing?” said Lijah Cuu.
“What the feth?” Larkin cowered back into the corner of the firebay, his hand trying to find the hilt of his knife. “What the feth are you doing here?”
“Oh, now, that’s not nice.” Cuu crouched on the firestep, elbows resting on his knees. “Just dropped by to say hello to a friend. And you’re acting all unfriendly.”
“No,” mumbled Larkin.
“Yes, you are, sure as sure.”
“What do you want?”
Cuu straightened out his lean legs and sat down on the step with his back to the parapet. “Like I said, just saying hello.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Larkin.
“Who’s gonna know, tell me that? I’m meant to be seeing the doc. Who’s gonna miss me? Who’s gonna worry about two buddies chatting together?”
“I’m not your buddy,
” Larkin said bravely. His hand had found the knife now. He kept it behind his back.
Cuu thought about that. “Maybe not. Maybe not.”
He leaned forward, pushing his scar-split face right up into Larkin’s. “Buddies ain’t the right word, is it, Tanith? We got a score, you and me. You sold me out, sold me out to the commissars, back on Phantine. You and that big dumbo.”
“Don’t call him that!”
“Big dumbo? Why the gak shouldn’t I call that big dumbo a big dumbo? He was a big dumbo, sure as sure.”
“Shut up!”
“Hey, I’m just being nice and saying hello.” Cuu’s voice dropped to a raw whisper. “We got a score, Tanith. You know it, I know it. It’s gonna get settled. Thanks to you, I got flog-scars on my back. I think about you, most nights. You and that holier-than-thou big dumbo. Sooner or later, you’re gonna pay.”
Larkin pulled back even further. He knew he had no hope of getting his long-las free from the loop-hole. He wanted to shout out but there was no one around.
“What do you mean, pay?”
“Sooner or later, sure as sure. War’s a messy thing, Tanith. Confused and all shit like that. Middle of combat all crap flying this way and that. Who’s gonna notice if I get my payback? You’d just be another body in the count.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Oh, wouldn’t I now? You’ll get yours, just like big dumbo got his.”
Hlaine Larkin was petrified. Ever since Phantine, he’d been guarding his back, waiting for this moment. And now Lijah fething Cuu had just come up on him when he least expected it. But those last few words bit clean through his terror.
“What do you mean, he got his? What the feth does that mean?”
“Terrible shame. Big dumbo buying the farm like that.”
“No… no, that’s not what you meant. Not at all! Feth… feth, you bastard… you killed him!”
“As if,” smiled Cuu.
“You bastard! I’ll take this to Gaunt—”
Cuu snapped out a hand and closed it tightly around Larkin’s throat. His eyes went dark, like a cloud had passed across the sun.
“Oh no you won’t, you little gak. Who’d believe you, eh? Where’s your gakking proof? This is just between you and me. You and me. Our little score. And it’ll get settled, sure as sure. You’ll know why. And I’ll know why, and everyone else can take a gakking jump. You’ll pay for the flog-scars I got. You’ll pay with scars of your own.”