There was a brief, brutal struggle at the stairs. Corbec stabbed and fired, at one point ending up with a Blood Pact trooper’s iron mask caught around his knife, the blade through the eye-slit.
He saw Cisky drop, trying to hold in his ripped guts. He saw Mkvenner halfway up the stairs, firing his last few rounds and killing an enemy with each one. He saw Udir dubbing the brains out of a Chaos trooper with his solid-ammo revolver, his last few bullets used up.
A spear of flame ripped up the staircase, consuming the heads of enemy troops descending on them. Furrian, Corbec’s flamer-man, advanced into the press, blitzing his drizzles of fire across the screaming foe, driving them back.
“Go, Furrian! Go, boy!” Corbec bellowed.
Furrian had grown up in the same wood-town as Brostin, and shared his unhealthy enthusiasm for naked flames. The tanks on his back coughed and spat liquid promethium that the burner head in his hands ignited into blossoms of incandescent fire.
Now we’re turning this, thought Corbec, now we’re fething turning this.
A las-round hit Furrian in the head. He twisted and fell, the flamer spurting weak dribbles of fire across the floor.
Then another las-round hit the tanks on Furrian’s back.
The blast-wash of fire knocked Corbec down. Udir screamed as his clothes caught fire and he pitched off the staircase a blazing comet of struggling limbs. Orrin lost his face to the flames, but not his life. He rolled on the floor, shrieking and squealing through a lip-less mouth, choking on the melted fat of his own skin.
The Blood Pact poured in. They were met by Mkvenner, Cown and Surch, the only men still standing at the stairhead after the blast. Corbec struggled up, gasping, and saw something that would remain in his mind until his dying day: the most heroic display of last stand fighting he would ever witness.
Mkvenner was by then out of ammo, and Cown had nothing but his Tanith blade.
Surch was firing a laspistol, and had attached his warknife to a short pole.
Mkvenner swung his lasgun and decapitated the first enemy on him with the bayonet, las-rounds passing either side of him. He spun the weapon and smashed a Chaos soldier down with the butt-end before ramming the blade into the belly of another.
Cown opened the torso of a Blood Pact trooper with a downward slash, and then punched his knife through the eye-slit of the iron grotesque that followed. There were enemy troopers surging all round them.
Surch shot two, then pistol-whipped another when his handgun ran dry. He drove an iron mask back into the face behind it with the dumb end of his makeshift spear shaft and then sliced it round to cut the right hand off another of their visored foes.
The warknife flew out of Cown’s hand as a Blood Pact trooper with a short sword all but tore his arm off. Cown fell down, cursing, and then grabbed a drum magazine from beside the .30. He used it to beat the swordsman to death before passing out across him.
Surch killed four more and wounded a fifth before a las-shot hit him in the knee, dropped him and exposed him to the butt of an enemy gun.
Mkvenner… Mkvenner was terrifying. He was using his lasrifle as a quarter staff, spinning it and doing equal damage with the stock end as with the blade. Urlock Gaur’s chosen finest tumbled away from him on either side, cut, clubbed or smashed over by his heavy boots. Lanky and long, Mkvenner kicked like a mule and moved like a dancer. Mkoll had once told Corbec that Mkvenner had been trained in the martial tradition of cwlwhl, the allegedly lost fighting art of the Tanith wood-warriors. Corbec hadn’t believed it. The wood-warriors were a myth, even by Tanith’s misty standards.
But as he gazed at Mkvenner then, Corbec could believe it. Mkvenner was so fast, so steady, so direct. Every hit counted. Every swing, every strike, every counter-spin, every stab. The wood-warriors of ancient Tanith lore had fought in the old feudal days, using only spear-staves tipped with single edged silver blades. They had united Tanith and overthrown the Huhlhwch Dynasty, paving the way for the modern democratic Tanith city-states.
Mkvenner seemed to Corbec like a figure from the fireside tales of his childhood. The Nalsheen, the wood-warriors, the fighters of legend, masters of cwlwhl.
No wonder Mkoll had such a special admiration for Mkvenner.
But even he, even a Nalsheen, couldn’t withstand the assault forever.
Corbec stumbled to join him, firing wildly with his laspistol.
He fell, halfway up the steps.
Then light and dazzling streams of las-fire sliced into the pouring foe from the top of the stairs.
Sergeant Bray’s platoon had found them, moving along a higher level to fall on the Blood Pact from the rear. Twenty-five strong, Bray’s squad quickly slaughtered the enemy and wiped the upper gallery clear.
Bray himself hurried down the steps, pausing only to finish off a couple of wheezing, twitching Blood Pact fallen, and joined Corbec.
“Just in time, I think,” Bray smiled.
“Yeah,” panted Corbec. The colonel clambered up the stairs and helped the exhausted, gasping Mkvenner to his feet.
“Brave lad,” Corbec told him. “Brave, brave lad…”
Mkvenner was too breathless to reply.
Supporting Mkvenner, Corbec looked back at Bray.
“Get ready,” he said. He could hear snare drums now, and the ritual hollering of the enemy as they regrouped in the galleries and halls around them. “Get your platoon into position. Scare up as many working weapons and viable ammo as you can from the enemy dead. This is just beginning.”
“D’you ever consider,” murmured Varl, taking a lho-stick out of a little wooden pocketcase and putting it between his lips, “that we might have been too good?”
Kolea shrugged. “What do you mean?”
Varl pursed his lips around the lho-stick, but he didn’t light it. He wasn’t that stupid. It was just a comfort thing, trying to block out just how much he really wanted a smoke right then. “Well, we sure pushed ahead, didn’t we? Right into the heart of them, leading the way. And look where it’s got us.”
Kolea knew what the Tanith-born sergeant meant. They were, it seemed, cut off from the main force now. The last few transmissions received from Gaunt had spoken about shields or something. Now there was nothing but ominous vox-hiss. The three platoons under Varl, Kolea and Obel, numbering some seventy men, were deep in the secondary dome and utterly without support.
They had moved, cautiously, through block after block of deserted worker habitats, places that had presumably been looted and abandoned when the Blood Pact had first taken Cirenholm. Little, tragic pieces of evidence were all that showed this had once been an Imperial town: a votive aquila from a household shrine tossed out and smashed in the street; two empty ale bottles perched on a low wall; a child’s toy lasgun, carved from monofibre; clothes hanging on a washing line between habs that had been left so long they were dirty again.
On the end wall of one hab-terrace was a large metal noticeboard that had once proudly displayed the workforce’s monthly production figures, along with the names of the star workers. The words “Cirenholm South Mill Second Shift” were painted in gold leaf along the top, and under that the Phantine flag and the motto, “Our value to the beloved Emperor”. Someone had taken a lasgun to the sign, holing it repeatedly, before resorting to a flamer to burn off most of the paint.
Kolea looked at it sadly. Both it, and the hab area they were in, reminded him of the low-rent hab-home he had lived in with his family in Vervunhive. He’d worked Number Seventeen Deep Working for over a decade. Sometimes, at night, he’d dream of the smell of the ore-face, the rumble of the drills. Sometimes, he’d dream of the faces of his workmates, Trug Vereas, Lor Dinda. There’d been a proudly maintained production notice in their hab-block too. Kolea’s name had appeared on it more than once.
The workers who had lived here had been employed by Cirenholm’s vapour mill. Kolea wondered where they had gone, how many of them were still alive. Had the Blood Pact slaughtered the population of Cire
nholm’s domes, or were the poor devils penned up somewhere?
He looked back down the street block. It was broken and ruined, and made all the more dingy by the dirty yellow light shining down from the girdered roof. At least when his exhausting shifts down Number Seventeen Deep Working had been done, he’d risen to daylight and open air, to the sun rising or setting behind the artificial mountain of Vervunhive.
The Ghosts were prowling down the streets, checking the habs on either side. Varl had insisted on room-to-room checking, and it made sense. They hadn’t seen an enemy since they’d first broken into the inner dome areas. The Blood Pact could be dug in anywhere. This hadn’t turned into the straight fight they had been expecting. Not at gakking all.
Obel stood with a fireteam at the head of the street, looking out into a small market yard that had served the worker habs. Shops and businesses were boarded up or ransacked.
“Look at this,” Obel said, as Kolea approached. He led him into a broken down store that had once been the paymaster’s office.
Munitorium crests were painted on the walls. Kolea scowled when he saw them. His opinion of the Imperial Munitorium was miserably low. He didn’t know a man in their section of the company who had more than one las-cell remaining now.
Obel opened a drawer in the paymaster’s brass desk, a raised mechanical lectern, with cable-sockets that showed it had once needed a cybernetic link to an authorised official in order to operate. The clamps had been broken and the drawer now rolled free and loose. Kolea was amazed to see the slots were still full of coins.
“They ransacked the city and they didn’t loot the money?” Kolea wondered.
Obel picked a coin out of the tray and held it up. It was defaced. Someone with a makeshift tool, formidable strength and an obsessive amount of time on their hands, had crushed the coin and obliterated the Emperor’s head. In its place was a crudely embossed rune. It made him queasy just to look at it.
Obel tossed the coin back. “I guess that says something for the discipline of these bastards. They’re more interested in leaving the mark of their maker everywhere than getting rich.”
Kolea shuddered. Every coin in the tray was the same. It was a strangely little thing, but somehow more horrifying than the sights of destruction and desecration he’d seen in his time. The arch-enemy wanted to take the Imperium and reshape every last little piece of it in his own image.
Outside, Kolea saw the hand-daubed words that the Blood Pact had painted on the walls. Words he didn’t understand, made of letters he didn’t know, mostly, but some were written in Low Gothic. Names. “Gaur” and “Slaith”.
Urlock Gaur, he knew, was the warlord controlling the main enemy strengths in this sector of the war, a fiend who commanded the loyalty of the Blood Pact. Gaunt had spoken of him with a mixture of revulsion and respect. From the recent turn of fortune the Crusade had experienced, it was clear this Urlock Gaur was a capable commander.
“Slaith” he wasn’t too sure about. The commanding officers had mentioned several of Gaur’s field commanders, and Kolea was pretty certain Slaith had been one of them. Perhaps he was the devil behind the war here on Phantine.
Varl wandered up and joined the both of them. “What d’you think, eh?” he asked them. Obel shrugged.
“We’ve got to be closing on the vapour mill,” Kolea replied. “I say we push on and take that.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re on our own, and there doesn’t seem a way back. If we’re going to go down, I say we go down doing something that matters.”
“The mill?” asked Varl.
“Yes, the mill. Think how bad it could be. We could be the only ones left, and if we are, that means we’ll not be getting out of here in one piece. Let’s hurt them with what we have left. Let’s take out their main power supply.”
On the far side of the marketplace, Larkin scooted in through the doorway of another smashed shop, taking care not to kick up the broken glass on the floor. He held his long-las ready. Baen and Hwlan, the scouts from Varl and Kolea’s squads, had moved forward with fireteams to clear the west side of the market, and they’d taken the snipers with them.
Larkin looked round and saw Bragg behind him in the doorway, covering the line of open street with his heavy cannon. Caill was close by, shouldering the ammo hoppers for Bragg’s support weapon.
“Anything, Larks?” Bragg hissed.
Larkin shook his head. He stepped back out onto the street Fenix, Garond and Unkin hurried past, covering each other as they went into the next tumbled set of premises. Larkin could see Rilke and Nessa, his fellow snipers, positioned in good cover behind a stack of rotting crates, guarding the northern approach to the market hub.
Larkin moved on, slightly more comfortable with the idea of Bragg and his firepower flanking him. His sharp eyes suddenly caught something moving in a shop that Ifvan and Nour had supposedly already cleared.
“With me, Try,” Larkin hissed. As a rule, Mad Larkin didn’t do brave. He preferred to lie back, pick his targets and leave the hero stuff to the likes of Varl and Kolea. But he was getting edgy. He wanted something to shoot at before he snapped, or before the tension dredged up another of his killer headaches from the dark sludge at the bottom of his brain.
He licked his lips, looked over at Bragg, who nodded reassuringly over the heavy barrel of his .50, and kicked in the old wooden door.
Larkin swept his long-las from side to side, peering into the gloom.
Dust swirled up in the sickly light that shafted in through the door and the holes in the shutters. “Gak you, Tanith. You nearly gave me a cardiac”
“Cuu?”
Trooper Cuu loomed out of the shadows at the back of the shop, his feline eyes appearing first.
“What the feth are you doing back there?”
“Minding my own business. Why aren’t you minding yours, Tanith?”
Larkin lowered his weapon. “This is my business,” he said, trying to sound tough, though there was something about Lijah fething Cuu that made him feel anything but.
Cuu laughed. The grimace put a nasty twist in the scar that ran down his face. “Okay, there’s enough to share.”
“Enough what?”
Cuu gestured to a small iron strong box that lay open on the shop counter. “I can’t believe these brain-donors left all this behind, can you?”
Larkin looked into the box. It was half full of coins. Cuu began pocketing some more and tossed a handful down the dirty counter to Larkin.
Larkin picked one up. It seemed like an Imperial coin, but the faces had been messed up. Cut reworked, with a clumsy sign he didn’t like.
“Take some,” said Cuu.
“I don’t want any.”
Cuu looked round at him, a nasty sneer on his face. “Don’t you go trying to cut in on my action and then get high and mighty about it,” he hissed.
“I’m not—” Larkin began.
“Looting is contrary to regimental standing orders,” Bragg said softly. He was looking in through the doorway behind Larkin.
“Gak me, it’s big dumbo too.”
“Shut up, Cuu,” Bragg said.
“What’s the matter, big dumbo? You going all holy on me like Larkin?”
“Put the coins back,” Bragg said.
“Or what? You and Mad Larks don’t got nothing that can threaten me, sure as sure.”
“Just put them back,” Bragg said.
Cuu didn’t. He pushed past Larkin, and then stepped past Bragg into the street. As he did so, he paused, grinning up at the massive support gunner. “Let’s hope we don’t meet up on some exercise again any time soon, eh, big dumbo?”
“What does that mean?” asked Bragg.
“Don’t want to cut you with my paint stick again,” said Cuu.
Bragg and Larkin watched him walk away. “What was that about?” asked Caill, striding up. Bragg shook his head.
“That guy’s a—” Larkin paused. “Someone needs to teach him a lesson
,” he finished. “That’s all I’m saying.”
FIVE
An invisible plume of hard, cold air was tearing at him. Somewhere far below in the amber darkness, he could here a steady, dreadful “whup! whup! whup!”, the sound of beating fan blades.
Milo’s fingers were going stiff. The climbing cable cut into his palms, even though he was sure he was holding it the way Vadim had shown him.
“Left!” hissed a voice. “Milo! Left! Move your feet left!”
Milo floundered around, trying not to kick the hollow metal walls of the great vent, but still making what seemed to him was the sound of heavy sacks of root vegetables bouncing down a tin chute.
“Left! For gale’s sake! There’s a rim right there!”
Milo’s left foot found the rim and he eased his right over on to it.
“Vadim?” he gasped.
“You’re there. Now let go of the cable with your left hand.”
“But—”
“Gakking do it! Let go and reach out. There’s a bulkhead right beside you.”
Milo was perspiring so hard now he felt like his whole skin might just slip off. He couldn’t see anything except the darkness, couldn’t feel anything except the cable biting into his lands and the sill under his toes, and couldn’t hear anything except his own frantic breathing and the threatening “whup! whup! whup!” from below.
That, and the persistent voice. “Milo! Now!”
He reached out, and his fingers found reassuringly solid metal.
“Now slide round. Slide round to me… that’s it.”
Milo tried, but his balance was shot. He lunged as he started to fall. “Feth!”
Strong hands grabbed him and dragged him over the edge of a hard metal frame.
“Got you! I got you! You’re down!”
Milo rolled on his back, panting, and saw Vadim looking own at him in the sub-light. The Verghastite was smiling. “Good job, Milo.”
“Feth… really?”
Vadim helped him up. “That’s no easy climb. I wouldn’t have wished it on many of the guys I used to roof with. Damn sight more sheer than I was expecting, and gakking few grab-holds. Not to mention that in-rush. You feel it?”