Zhyte screamed and fired. He heard heavy weapon fire, and laughed like a maniac as tracers whinnied down the hall and tore through the front ranks of the advancing Blood Pact.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Singis yelled at him. “Get on your feet and help me!”
Zhyte fell dumb, like a stunned drunk, shock setting in. His trousers were soaked red with his blood. Dyed red. Like the Blood Pact.
They were in the doorway. Three four two. Belthini was dragging him through. He couldn’t see Singis, but he fell sidelong across the hatch opening, and saw Bothris and Manahide manning the .50 cal cannon, raking the enemy with tracer tire. Three four two. His support weapon pitch.
“Give the bastards hell!” he said. At least he thought he said it. He couldn’t hear his own voice and they didn’t seem to hear him.
There was blood welling up in his throat.
Everything went quiet. Zhyte could see the furious flashes of the .50’s barrel. The lancing tracers. The las impacts all around. He could see men’s mouths moving, yelling. Manahide. Bothris. Belthini, in the doorway, over him, a look on his face that seemed touchingly concerned.
Between Belthini’s legs, Zhyte saw the Blood Pact. They had Rhindemann. They were hacking him apart with their bayonets. He was vomiting gore and screaming.
Zhyte couldn’t hear him.
He could hear nothing but his own pounding heart. He sagged. Belthini stooped over him. Belthini said something.
Zhyte suddenly realised he could smell something. Something sharp, pungent. Ozone. It was ozone.
His head fell sideways. His skull bumped against the floor, and glanced off the sill of the hatch.
He saw the little box in the hatch frame, wired to the power sockets in the wall. There was a light flickering inside it.
Ozone.
He crawled. Crawled forward. He was sure he said something important, but Belthini was looking over at the gun team and didn’t hear him.
There was a flash.
Just a bright flash, as if light had suddenly become solid, as if the air had suddenly become hard. He tasted smoke and heat.
Zhyte looked back in time to see the void shield engage across the doorway, chopping Manahide and Bothris in two, along with their .50, which exploded. It was quite amazing. A boiling fog of blood and atomised metal. Men falling apart, torsos and skulls cut vertically like scientific cross-sections. He saw smoothly severed white bone, sectioned brains, light coming in through Manahide’s open mouth as the front of his face and body spilled forward on the other side of the shield.
Two sliced portions of human meat slumped back next to him, their edges curled and sizzling from the void field.
Zhyte looked up and saw Belthini trapped on the other side of the shield, his image distorted and blurred by the energy. He was shouting, desperate, hammering his fists. No sound came through.
Belthini was hit from behind by about six or seven las-rounds. Blood sprayed up the shield and he fell against it, sliding down like a man sliding down a pane of glass.
“Oh shit,” said Zhyte, hearing himself for the first time.
He realised the pain in his leg was gone.
And then he realised that was because his legs were still on the other side of the shield.
FOUR
He was the only one in the group who could see the stars.
They were hidden behind the black on black cloud cover that roiled across the heavens above the secondary dome, but he, and only he, could detect their light spill.
Sergeant Dohon Domor was known affectionately as Shoggy Domor by the men of the regiment. He’d been blinded in action back on Menazoid, years ago now as it seemed to him. He’d become quite used to the bulbous augmetic optics that crudely replaced his eyes.
Shoggy Domor. A shoggy was a little amphibian with bulging eyes found in the woodland pools on Tanith. He corrected himself: an extinct amphibian. The nickname had stuck.
Domor tried his micro-bead one last time, but there was nothing but static fizzle. They were out of range, and their main gain vox-sets, both of them, had gone down with the drop, still attached to vox-officers Liglis and Gohho.
He walked with careful steps up the dome’s treacherous curve to rejoin the team. His augmetic eyes whirred and adjusted to reduce the light glare from the mill stacks ahead. The tips of the chimneys showed as flaring yellow, the stacks themselves as orange. The figures of the men were red shadows and beyond them the night cooled into shapes of blue, purple and black.
“Anything?” asked Sergeant Haller.
“No,” Domor replied. His limbs were beginning to ache from the cold and he could feel the throb of raw bruises. All their uniforms and the canvas of their gas-hoods were beginning to stiffen with hoarfrost.
With Bonin leading the way, flanked by Vadim, the survivors of drop 2K climbed cautiously into the scaffolding superstructure surrounding Cirenholm’s vapour mill. Steamy gusts of hot, wet air exhaled over them, thawing their ice-stiff clothes and making them sweat suddenly. They could feel the thunder of massive turbines underfoot, shaking the roof housing. Meltwater and condensation drooled off every surface.
The beams of their lamp packs twitched nervously back and forth. It seemed more than a little likely that the enemy would have positioned sentries around the roof access here.
Commander Jagdea was back on her feet. Fayner, the corps-man, had given her a shot of dexahedrene and bound her broken right arm up across her chest in a tight brace. She carried her snub-snouted automatic pistol in her left hand.
They moved in under a dripping stanchion onto a massive grilled exhaust vent that steamed away in the cold of the night. Amber heat glowed far below down the shaft. Domor’s energy sensitive vision adjusted again.
“Ah, feth!” Nehn shuddered.
The edges of the vent and all the girders around were thick with glistening, writhing molluscs, each one the size of an ork’s finger. They turned towards the lights, fleshy mouth-parts twitching and weeping viscous slime. They were everywhere, thousands of them. Arilla brushed one from her sleeve and it left a streak of ooze that hardened quickly like glue. The fat slug made a disgusting, meaty sound as it bounced off the roof.
“Thermovores,” said Jagdea, her breathing shallow and rapid. “Vermin. They cluster around the heat exchangers feeding off the bacteria in the steam.”
“Charming,” said Milo, crushing one underfoot and really wishing he hadn’t.
“They’re harmless, trooper,” said the aviator. “Just watch for skinwings.”
“Skinwings?”
“The next link of the food chain. Pollution mutants. They feed on the slugs.”
Milo thought about this. “And what feeds on the skinwings?”
“Scald-sharks. But we should be all right. They don’t usually come in close to the cities. They’re deep sky hunters.”
Milo wasn’t sure what a shark was. Indeed, he wasn’t really sure what the Scald was either, but he was conscious of the stress Jagdea put on each word.
Bonin had stopped to consult the map, conferring with the sergeants and with Corporal Mkeller, the Tanith scout assigned to Haller’s squad.
“That way,” Bonin said, and Mkeller concurred. The troop followed the scouts under a series of dripping derricks that rose up from the skin of the dome into the freezing night. Navigation lights winked on the mast tops, and on the fatter, higher columns of the chimneys. The slugs squirmed around them, following their lights, dribbling slime and forming glittering snot-bubbles around their snouts.
Bonin stopped by a raised vent and used his knife blade to scrape off the clusters of thermovores. Together with Mkeller, he managed to break the vent grille away and toss it aside.
Bonin peered in. “It’s tight, but we can make it. Break out ropes.”
“No,” said Vadim. “What?”
“Let me look at that map,” Vadim said. He turned the thin paper sheet Bonin offered him in his gloved hands. “That’s a hot gas out-flue.”
 
; “So?”
“So, we’ll be dead if we go down there.”
“How do you reckon that?” asked Mkeller.
Vadim looked up so that Bonin and Mkeller could see his eyes behind the lenses of the hood. “It’s a fifty metre vertical climb. With our numbers and our impediments—” he glanced over at Jagdea, “it’d take us upwards of two hours to get down there.”
“So?”
“I don’t know how often this thing vents, but none of us want to be halfway down it when the hot gas comes up. It’d broil us. Clothes, armour, skin, flesh… all cooked off the bones.”
“How the feth do you know so much?” asked Mkeller.
“He was a roofer, back at Vervunhive,” Milo said quickly. “He knows about this kind of thing.”
“I did some work on the heating systems. Vox-masts and sensor blooms mostly, but heating too. Look at the way the grille you pulled off is made. The louvres curl up… out. It’s an out-flue.”
Bonin seemed genuinely impressed. “You know this stuff, then? Good. You call it.”
Vadim looked at the map again, pausing to wipe condensing vapour from the eye plates of his hood. “Here… here. The big intakes. Intake shafts for the cooler coils. It’s a longer climb, and we’ll have to be wary of duct fans and inrush—”
“What’s inrush?” asked Domor.
“If they cycle up the fans for extra cooling, we could be caught in a wind tunnel effect. I’m not saying it’s safe, but it’s safer.”
There was a sudden bang and a howl of heat. The flue Bonin and Mkeller had been contemplating suddenly voided a thick cloud of superheated gas-flame and soot. It seemed, comically, to underscore the validity of Vadim’s advice.
Bonin watched the donut of expelled gas-flame wobble up into the sky.
“I’m convinced,” he said. “Let’s go with Vadim’s plan.”
All across the secondary dome, the shields were lit, blocking them in and penning them in the outer limits of the dome. An anxious vox-signal from Fazalur in the tertiary dome confirmed that it was happening there too.
And then the signal cut off abruptly.
There was nothing from the Urdeshi at primary except a strangled mess of incoherent panic.
“Form up and move in!” Gaunt ordered, swinging his squad around. He voxed ahead to Corbec and Bray, instructing them to sweep laterally along the edge of the shield block and converge on him.
“Can’t raise the spearhead,” Beltayn said.
Gaunt wasn’t surprised. The shield effects distorted vox-links badly. The platoons led by Varl, Kolea and Obel were cut off from the main force, deep in the heart of the enemy-held dome.
As he moved his men around, down a wide stairwell and across a series of ransacked aerodrome hangars, Gaunt tried to work out the enemy tactics. Part of it seemed blindingly obvious: allow the Imperial forces a foothold in the perimeter of the dome, and then deprive them of advance. The question was… what next?
He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
The Blood Pact had been waiting. They hadn’t withdrawn at all. They’d concealed themselves in false floors and behind wall panels.
Now the Imperial invaders were penned in, they sprung their ambush, coming out in the midst of the confused guard units.
Guard units who no longer had any room to manoeuvre.
The trooper next to Colonel Colm Corbec turned to speak and then fell silent forever as a tracer round blew his head off. A brittle rain of las-fire peppered down onto Corbec’s squad from balcony positions all along the mezzanine floor he was moving across.
“Down! Down and cover! Return fire!” Corbec yelled.
He saw three troopers drop, and watched in horror as the metal-tiled flooring all around ruptured and punctured in a thousand places under the cascade of enemy shots.
Corbec crawled behind an overturned baggage cart that shook and bucked as rounds struck it. He tugged out his las-pistol and blasted through the mesh at indistinct figures on the gallery above.
Trooper Orrin was beside him, firing selective rounds from his lasrifle.
“Orrin?”
“Last chance box, sir,” Orrin answered. Corbec fired another few shots with his pistol and tugged his remaining clip from his ammo-web, handing it to Orrin. “Use it well, lad,” he said.
Corbec was pretty sure none of his men had any more than a single clip of size three left after the initial assault. Loaded, they might do this. They might hold.
But running empty… it would be a matter of minutes until they were totally overwhelmed.
Already, he could see two or three of the best men in his squad — Cisky, Bewl, Roskil, Udir — crouching in cover, heads down, their ability to resist gone.
They were out of ammo.
Corbec prayed with all his heart that someone, someone in authority… Ornoff, Van Voytz, maybe even Macaroth himself, would punish the simpletons in the Munitorium who, for want of a signed docket had hung them all out to dry.
Corbec crawled forward to the end of the cart. Someone was crying out for a medic, and Corpsman Munne was darting through the rain of fire to reach him, aid bag in his hand.
Corbec fired his las-pistol up at the gallery. He had six clips — size twos - left for the handgun and that was his only arm now he’d given his last rifle pack to Orrin. There had been a plentiful supply of size two pistol format in the drogue’s stores. But few of the regular men carried pistols.
He saw Udir firing a solid-ammo revolver at the enemy. A trophy gun, taken on some past battlefield. A lot of Ghosts cherished captured weapons. He hoped Udir wasn’t the only man in his squad to have kept his trophy with him and in working order.
There was a blast of serious firepower from his left. Surch and Loell had managed to get the light support .30 onto its brass stand and were firing. Their peals of tracers chased along the upper levels and several dismembered red figures tumbled down into the air shaft along with sections of stonework.
Told of the shortage of standard rifle packs before lift-off, Corbec had wisely assigned troopers Cown and Irvinn to hump extra boxes of .30 shells for the support weapon. At least his land-hammer had some life in it yet.
Lancing beams of terrible force, bright white and apocalyptic, shafted down from the massing enemy. A tripod-mounted plasma weapon was Corbec’s best guess. He saw two of his men blown into flakes of ash by it.
Corbec fired his pistol twice more and then ran, braving the torrent of indiscriminate fire, back to a marble portico where Muril crouched with the platoon scout Mkvenner.
“Up there!” Corbec yelled as he skidded in beside them.
“Where?” Muril asked, swinging her long-las.
Muril, a female Vervunhiver with a heroic track record from the Zoican War, was Corbec’s chosen sniper. Rawne had once asked Corbec why he’d personally selected Muril for the second platoon — Rawne seemed to have an unseemly interest in the female soldiers these days — and Corbec had laughed and told him it was because Muril had a deliciously dirty laugh and red hair that reminded him of a girl he’d been a fething fool to leave behind in County Pryze.
Both facts were true, but the real reason was that Corbec believed Muril to have a shooter’s eye second only to Mad Larkin, and that given a well-maintained lasrifle and a generous crosswind, she could pick off anything, anywhere, clean and true.
“Get the fething heavy weapon!” Corbec urged her. “I see it… gak!” She took the weapon off her shoulder. “What?” asked Corbec.
“The gakking discharge from it… so bright… just about blinding me through the scope every time it fires. Screwing the scope’s photoreceptors…”
Corbec watched in horror as Muril calmly uncoupled the bulky power-scope from her weapon and aimed it again, by naked eye, down the barrel to the foreplate.
“You’ll never make it…” he whispered.
“As you Tanith would say, fething watch me—”
Muril fired.
Corbec saw a spray of dust and sto
ne chips burst from the gallery overhead.
“Yeah, yeah, okay—” Muril growled. “I was just getting my eye in.”
The plasma weapon fired again, blowing a hole out of the lower gallery and sending Trooper Litz into the hereafter, incinerated.
“I see you,” said Muril, and fired again.
The hot-shot round blew the head off one of the Blood Pact gunners and he dropped out of sight. Another iron-masked warrior ran over to recrew the gun as the loader yelled out but Muril had already used her first hit as a yardstick and she was firing again. Once, twice…
The third round hit the weapon’s bulky power box and a whole section of the upper gallery exploded in a cone of energy. The floor level blew out, and thirty or more Blood Pact warriors tumbled to their deaths in an avalanche of blistered stone.
“I could kiss you,” Corbec murmured.
“Later,” Muril replied, adding a ‘sir’ that was lost in her dirty, triumphant laughter.
Leaving her to refit her scope, Corbec and Mkvenner ran towards the stairhead, where the team with the .30 autocannon was doing its level best to stem the tide of the Blood Pact stormers charging down at them. The stairs were littered with bodies, body parts and gore.
Loell was winged and knocked down by a stray round, but Cown leapt up to take over the ammo feed.
The .30 was chattering, its air-cooled barrel glowing red-hot.
Then it jammed.
“Oh feth—” stammered Corbec.
The Blood Pact were all over them.
“Straight silver! Straight silver!” Corbec ordered, and shot the nearest enemy soldier with his pistol as he drew his warknife. The troops in his squad pressed forward, those that had power left firing, those that didn’t using their lasrifles like spears, their warknives locked to the bayonet lugs.