The Imperial maps of Cirenholm were good, but the Blood Pact owned the turf, and knew every last vent chute and sub-basement. They’d got into the stateroom wall space somehow, behind the rearguard of Soric and the rest.
And they were storming out into the middle of his strung-out platoon.
He didn’t have to issue instructions. His men reacted instinctively, even as some of them were cut down by the initial firing. Wersun ran forward, clipped twice by las-rounds, firing tight bursts that knocked at least three of the Blood Part infantry off their feet. Caober and Derin went in head to head, stabbing with fixed blades and loosing random shots.
Vanette, Myska, Lyse and Neith leapt up and chattered their shots into the wall-breach. Myska was hit in the left forearm and fell over but was back on his feet again almost at once, using a soot-streaked jardiniere as a rest for his weapon now he was firing one-handed.
Starck fell, hit in the throat. Lossa was caught in the forehead by a las-round, stumbled blindly holding his head, and then had his legs shot out from under him by two Blood Part at close range.
Those enemy soldiers both died quickly as successive rounds from Gaunt’s bolt pistol burst their torsos.
Gaunt leapt over Wersun, who was now lying in a pool of blood, panting, and sliced his sword at the next black metal grotesque he saw.
The blue-glow of the blade glimmered in the air and was followed by a sharp stench of burnt blood. There was another to his left, raising a lascarbine that was quickly cut in half, along with the forearms clutching it.
Gaunt recoiled, the power-blade deflecting a las-round, and ran at the next group of enemies. Three of them, stumbling through the smoke-filled gap in the wall. One doubled over, hit by Derin’s shots. Gaunt impaled another on his blade and slammed bodily into the third. That one tried to fire, but Gaunt dragged the sword and the heavy corpse draped on it absorbed the shots at point blank range. Gaunt punched the muzzle of his bolt pistol into the black visor and fired.
It was feral confusion now. Many of his Ghosts were dry. They fell into the mob of Blood Part pressing through the breach with blades, fists or lasrifles swung like clubs.
A shot crisped through the sleeve of his jacket. Gaunt fired again, blowing a figure back into his comrades so they all fell like bowling pins. He fired again, but there was nothing now except a dull clack.
He was out. There was no time to change bolt dips.
He scythed with the power sword, severing bayonets, gun-muzzles and wrists. Two of the Chaos filth jumped on him, trying to bring him down. One got too near to his sword and tumbled off, eviscerated.
The other went limp suddenly, and Caober pulled him away, his straight silver in his hand.
Gaunt rose. Almost immediately, Beltayn cannoned into him and dragged him down again.
There was the chugging roar of a .30, and then the whoosh of a flamer. Bool and Mkan, manning the support weapon, and Nitorri, the squad’s flame-trooper, had at last been able to move up from their positions at the end of the stateroom and address the assault. Gaunt crawled back to cover as the heavy cannon and the flames drove the enemy back into the wall.
Nitorri’s left shoulder sprayed blood as a parting shot struck him. He slumped over. Lyse, one of the female Verghastites, a veteran of the Vervunhive Civil Defence Cadre, ran forward, knelt by Nitorri’s shuddering body, and scooped up the earner’s hose. She swept it back and forth across the breach, igniting the panelwork and combusting the last two Blood Pact troopers who had dared to linger.
Gaunt wished he had a few more tube charges left.
“Cover that hole!” he yelled at the crew of the .30. “You too, Trooper Lyse. Good work.”
“Sir! Commissar Gaunt sir!”
“Beltayn?”
The vox-officer held out his headset urgently. “Sir,” he said. “It’s Scout Trooper Bonin.”
“Say again, sir! I can barely hear you!” Bonin kept the headset pressed to his ear and looked over with a desperate shrug to Nirriam, who was trying to adjust the big vox-unit.
There was another brief snatch of Gaunt’s voice.
“Stand by, sir. We’ll try and raise you on another channel.”
Bonin cut the link. “Can you boost it?” he asked Nirriam. Nirriam raised his eyebrows, like a man who’d just been asked to inflate a drogue with lung-power.
“I dunno,” said the Verghastite. A basic infantryman, Nirriam had once done a secondary skills course in vox use, which meant he was the best qualified operator Haller and Domor’s sections could rustle up. And that wasn’t saying much.
Nirriam pulled up a metal-framed operator’s chair and perched on it as he tried to familiarise himself with the vox unit. It was the mill control’s main communication desk, so old it was almost obsolete. Time and use had worn all the switch and dial labels blank. It was like some fiendish, inscrutable puzzle.
Bonin waited impatiently, and glanced around the room. The chamber was a fan vault, two storeys high, and provided workstation positions for the mill’s thirty tech-priests. Everything was finished in brass, with shiny cream enamel coating the extensive pipework running up and down the walls. The floor was paved in grubby green ceramic tiles. It had a faded air of elegance, a relic of a more sophisticated industrial age.
There were four exit points: a hatch on the upper gallery overlooking the main chamber and three on the ground floor, including the old service access they had come in through. Domor had spread the squads out to cover them all. Lillo, Ezlan and Milo were dragging the corpses into a corner.
There had been five adepts on duty, along with two Blood Pact sentries and an officer with a silver grotesque and shabby gold fragging down his tunic front. Bonin and Mkeller hadn’t been in the mood for subtlety. Most of the shooting was done by the time the main body of the party got into the chamber.
Commander Jagdea was looking dubiously at the dead and the blood decorating the tiles. Milo had taken it to be disgust at first but she was a warrior too, and had undoubtedly seen her fair share of death.
Her face pale with pain from her injury, she had looked at Bonin angrily. “We could have questioned them.”
“We could.”
“But you killed them.”
“It was safer.” Bonin had left it at that and moved away.
Now the wisdom of her remarks was chafing at him. If they’d kept the adepts alive — adepts, indeed, who may have been loyal Imperial citizens working under duress — one of them might have been able to operate the control room’s vox-unit.
No point regretting that now, Bonin thought. He silently prayed his lucky star was still with him. “Nirriam?”
“Give me a chance, Bonin.”
“Come on—”
“Gakking do it yourself!” the Verghastite complained, now down under the desk unplugging the switch cables one by one to blow on them.
Domor came over, pausing to check on Dremmond, Guthrie and Arilla who sat on the floor leaning against the wall, resting. Fayner was checking their wounds.
“Anything?” Domor asked.
Bonin made an off-hand gesture in the direction of Nirriam. “He’s working on it,” he said.
“Try it now!” Nirriam snorted. Bonin was certain the sentence had actually finished with a silent “gak-face”.
Bonin put the headset back on and keyed the mic.
“Thirty-two, one. Thirty-two, one, do you read?”
Nirriam leaned past him and gently turned a dial, as if it might actually do some good.
Bonin was surprised to find it did.
“—irty-two. One, thirty-two. You’re faint but audible. Do you read?”
“Thirty-two, one. We hear you. Messy channel, but it’s the best we can do.”
“There’s serious void shield activity in the dome, and it’s blocking the signals. Micro-beads are down. Are you getting through on your main vox?”
“Negative. We’re using a captured system. Must have enough power to beat the interference.”
As if to prove it wasn’t, there was a sudden yowl of trash noise before Gaunt’s voice continued.
“…were dead. Report location.”
“Say again, one.”
“We thought you were dead. I was told your drop had gone down in the run. What’s your situation and location?”
“Long story, one. Our drop did go in, but Haller and Domor got clear with about thirty bodies. Minimal casualties on the survivors. We’re inside the—” Bonin paused. He had suddenly realised that the channel might not be anything like secure.
“One thirty-two. Repeat last.”
Bonin took out his crumpled map. “Thirty-two, one. We’re… around about 6355.”
There was a long pause. The vox-speakers whined and hissed.
“One, thirty-two. Standby.”
Gaunt spread his map out on the top of a damaged side table. His gloves were bloody, and left brown smears on the thin paper where he flattened it.
Six three five five. 6355. There was no fething 6355 on the chart. But Bonin had said “around about”…
Gaunt reversed the sequence. 5536. Which meant…
The mill. The main control room of the vapour mill.
Feth!
Gaunt looked round at Beltayn and took the mic from him.
“One, thirty-two. We’re blocked in by an enemy shield wall ignited along marker 48:00. It’s sourcing power from the main city supply. We need that supply cut, and fast if we’re going to survive much past the next quarter hour. Do you understand?”
“Thirty-two, one. Very clear, sir. I’ll see what we can do. Standby.”
Gaunt could feel his pulse rating. Had the Ghosts just been cut the luckiest fething break in Imperial combat history? He realised he had become so resigned to defeat and death in the last few minutes that the idea they could still turn this around genuinely shook him.
He could suddenly taste victory. He could see its shadow, feel its heat.
He suddenly remembered the things that made the burden of command and the grind of service in the Emperor’s devoted Guard worthwhile.
There was a chance. Could he trust it? Making best use of it would require him to trust it, but if that trust was misplaced, his men would be slaughtered even more swiftly and efficiently than before.
And then he remembered Zweil. The old ayatani, stopping him outside the drogue Nimbus’s Blessing Chapel.
Let me look in your eyes, tell you to kill or be killed, and make the sign of the aquila at least.
Gaunt felt a sudden gnawing in his gut. He realised it was fear. Fear of the unknown and the unknowable. Fear of the supernatural that lurked beyond the galaxy he was familiar with.
Zweil had said trust Bonin.
How could he have known? How could he have seen…
But the old priest’s words echoed in his head, rising from holy depths to make themselves heard above the aftershock of the hours of combat that had flooded his conscious mind.
The saint herself, the beati, told me… you must trust Bonin.
He’d dismissed it at the time. He had barely remembered it as they approached the DZ, tense and busting fit to scream. It had gone from his head during the rush of the drop and the ever thicker combat that had followed.
But now it was there. Zweil. In his head. Advising him. Giving him the key to victory.
He had to trust it.
Gaunt grabbed the vox-mic from his waiting corn-officer and began to order a series of retreats, across the board, to all the squads he could reach. Dismayed complaints came in from many units, especially from Corbec, Hark and Soric. Gaunt shouted them down, aware that Beltayn was staring at him as if he was mad.
He checked the chart, surveying the spaces and chambers currently inaccessible behind the shield wall. He ordered all his men to pull back against the shield, with nowhere to run, and gave them quick instructions of how to deploy once they were able to move again.
Something in his tone and his confidence shut them up. They listened.
Upwards of a hundred squad officers, suddenly seeing a chance to live and to win.
“Fall back, hold on, and pray. When I give the word, follow your deployment orders immediately.”
The sound of explosions rocked down the length of the stateroom. Sensing a change in the dispersal of the Ghosts, the Blood Pact had renewed their assaults, bringing up heavy support weapons and seeding grenades.
Gaunt shouted orders to his squad. All we have to do is hold them, he thought. And all I have to do is trust Bonin.
SIX
“Ideas?” Bonin asked. He was answered by sighs and shaken heads.
“They might have known,” Jagdea said quietly, looking over at the heap of corpses in the corner.
Fething woman! Bonin thought he might strike her. He detested an “I told you so”. He looked around the control room, trying to perceive the mysteries of the vast mechanism. He felt like a child. It was hopeless. Dial needles quivered mysteriously, gauges glowed inscrutably, levers and switches seemed to be set “just so”. He was a soldier, not a fething tech-priest. He had no idea how to shut down a vapour mill.
“If we had tube charges, we could blow it,” said Ezlan.
“If we had tube charges,” Lillo echoed.
“Then what?” Haller groaned. He strode over to the nearest workstation and pulled a brass lever. There was absolutely no perceptible change in anything. He shrugged.
“If—” Milo began.
“If what?” said about ten people at once.
“If the Blood Pact rigged their shields into the main supply, it would be non-standard. I mean, cut in, intrusive. You know, like when we hike a breaker cable in to wire a door release.”
Domor nodded.
“I hear Milo,” said Vadim. “If they hooked it in, it would look jury-rigged. We might be able to recognise it.”
Bonin had been considering a desperate ploy of connecting all the power cells they had and forcing an overload. In the light of Milo’s more subtle idea, he put the notion of an improvised bomb to the back of his mind.
“Let’s try then, shall we?” he asked. Then he paused. Haller and Domor, sergeants both, were actually in charge here. He had overstepped the line. He glanced at them, embarrassed.
“Hey, I’m with Bonin,” Domor said.
“He’s got my vote,” said Haller.
“Then… go!” Bonin exclaimed.
The Ghost survivors of drop 2K scurried off in every direction as if they’d all been simultaneously slapped on the behinds. Inspection panels were prised off, service hatches pulled out, lamp packs shone up under workstations.
The only ones not searching were the sentries: Seena at the upper door, Mkeller and Lwlyn at the lower main doors and Caes, with Dremmond’s flamer, at the service hatch.
Bonin came out from under a work console and turned his attention to a wall plate. The wing nuts were stiff, and he had to use the pommel of his warknife like a mallet to move them.
Beside him, Vadim was investigating the guts of a relay position, up to his wrists in bunches of wires.
“Of course,” Vadim said cheerfully, “we could just turn every dial and switch to zero.”
“I thought of that. I also thought we could simply shoot the living feth out of everything in sight.”
“Might work,” Vadim sighed.
“Can I just say—” said a voice behind them. Bonin glanced round. It was Jagdea, her slung arm looking more uncomfortable than ever.
“What, commander?”
“I’m an aviator so I don’t know much about vapour mills, but I think I know a little more than you, having lived on Phantine all my life. The mill is a gas generator. It produces billions of litres of gas energy under extreme pressure. The priesthood that maintains the Phantine mills are privy to thousands of years of lore and knowledge as to their governance.”
“And your point… because I’m sure you have one somewhere,” said Bonin, finally forcing the wall plate off.
“It’s an an
cient system, working under millions… I don’t know… billions of tonnes of pressure. Blow it up, shoot it up, shut it down… whatever… it’s likely that the system will simply explode without expert control. And if this vapour mill explodes… well, I don’t think there’ll be a Cirenholm left for the taking.”
“Okay,” said Bonin, with false sweetness, “Thanks for that.” He turned to resume his work. Damn woman was going to get his knife in her back if she didn’t shut up. He knew she didn’t like him. Damn woman.
Damn woman had a point. They were playing around, fiddling in ignorance, with a power system that kept an entire city alive. That was real power. Jagdea was right. If they got this wrong, there wouldn’t be anything left of Cirenholm except a smouldering mountain peak.
“Feth!” Bonin cursed at the thought.
“What?” said Jagdea from behind him.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“Of course,” Jagdea continued, “if that boy was correct—”
“Milo.”
“What?”
“Trooper Brin Milo.”
“Okay. If Milo was correct, and the enemy has wired their shields into the mill systems, isn’t it likely they did it at source in the main turbine halls rather than down here in the control room?”
Bonin dropped the wall plate with a clang and rose, turning to face her. “Yes. Yes it is. Very likely. But we’re here and we’re trying our damnedest. We can’t go back now, because the foe is everywhere. So we work with what we have. Have you any other comments to make, because, if you haven’t quite frankly I’d love it if you shut up now and helped us look. You’re really pissing me off.”
She looked startled.
“Oh. Well. All right. What would you like me to do?”
Bonin glanced about. “Over there. Between Nirriam and Guthrie. Take a look at that desk, if you’d be so kind.”
“Of course,” she said, and hurried over to it.
“Way to go with the lady, Bonin,” laughed Vadim.
“Shut the feth up,” said Bonin.