[Gaunt's Ghosts 05] - The Guns of Tanith

  Gaunt sipped the last of his drink. “The Verghastites have made their mark. They’ve helped our sniper strength grow enormously.”

  “Yes, but who’s given them that edge? The women, for the most part. Don’t mistake me, the girl snipers are a goddamned blessing to this combat force. But male Verghast pride is dented because the women are the best they can offer. They’ve made no scouts. And that’s where the true honour lies. That’s what the First is famous for. The Tanith scouts are the elite, and have the Verghasts produced even one trooper good enough to make that cut? No.”

  “They’ve come close. Cuu.”

  “That bastard.”

  Gaunt chuckled. “Oh, I agree. Lijah Cuu is a fething menace. But he’s got all the qualities of a first-rate scout.”

  Hark set his beaker down on the windowsill and wiped his lips. “So… have you given any thought as to how we can improve the regimental divide?”

  You’re testing again, Gaunt thought. “I’d welcome ideas,” he told Hark diplomatically.

  “A few promotions. I’d make Harjeon up to squad rank. And LaSalle. Lillo too, maybe Cisky or Fonetta. We’ll need a few fresh sergeants now Indrimmo and Tarnash are gone.”

  “Cisky’s dead. More’s the pity. But I agree in principle. Not Harjeon. An ex-pen pusher. The men don’t have any respect for him. Lillo’s a good choice. So’s Fonetta. LaSalle, maybe. My money would be on Arcuda. He’s a good man. Or Criid.”

  “Okay. Arcuda. Makes sense. I don’t know about Criid. A female sergeant? That might cause more problems than it solves. But I think we should fast-track two or three into the scout corps.”

  “Viktor, we can’t do that if there isn’t the talent. I’m not going to field point men who haven’t got the chops for the job.”

  “Of course. But Cuu, like you said. There are others. Muril.”

  “Isn’t she wounded?”

  “Getting a brand new steel hip, but she’ll make it. Also Jajjo, Livara and Moullu.”

  Gaunt frowned. “They’re possibles. Some of them. Muril’s got potential, and Livara. But I’ve never known a man as clumsy as Moullu, for all that he’s light on his feet. And Jajjo? I’d have to think about that. Besides, the cut’s not down to me. It’s Mkoll’s call. Always has been.”

  “You could order him t—”

  “Viktor, enough. Don’t push it. The scout elite has always been Mkoll’s area. I happily bow down to his expertise, I always have. If he thinks any of that list can make the grade, he’ll take them. But if he doesn’t, I’m not going to force them on him.”

  “That’s fine. Mkoll knows his stuff.”

  “He does. Look, I’ll keep my eyes open. I’ll do everything I can to balance out the Verghastite/Tanith mix. Positive discrimination if necessary. But I won’t risk damaging the combat core by advancing those who aren’t ready or good enough.”

  Hark seemed satisfied with this, but then he surprised Gaunt with a final comment. “The Verghast need to know you value them as much as the Tanith, Ibram. Really, they do. What will destroy them is the idea they’re latecomers who can’t make the grade. They feel like second-class elements of this regiment. That’s not good.”

  Gaunt was about to reply, taken aback by the remark, but the deck’s inner door slid open and a vox-officer dressed in the fur-trimmed uniform of the Phantine Skyborne entered and saluted.

  “Lord General Barthol Van Voytz is coming aboard, Colonel-Commissar Gaunt. He requests your company.”

  The drogue Nimbus was already edging in towards the vast hangar bay under the primary dome, a little tug-launch revving its over-powered thrusters as it heaved the vessel home. The drogue’s immense aluminium propeller spars were making deep, whispering chops as they slowed to a halt.

  Van Voytz had flown ahead. Escorted by two Lightnings that veered away sharply once it had reached the hangar mouth, his checker-painted tri-motor purred in under the shadow. It was a stocky transport plane with a bulbous glass nose, and it made a heavy but clean landing on the deck way, its powerful double-screwed props chattering into reverse as soon as its tail hook caught the catch-line.

  Gaunt stood waiting in the gloom of the hangar, a hangar which already accommodated the massive bulk of the drogue Aeolus without seeming full.

  The tri-motor’s engines were still roaring as the footwell slapped down from the hull and Van Voytz emerged.

  “Guard, attention!” Gaunt barked and the honour detail of Ghosts — Milo, Guheen, Cocoer, Derin, Lillo and Garond, under the supervision of Sergeant Theiss — smacked their heels together and shouldered arms smartly. Theiss held the company standard.

  The lord general bent low under the downwash of the props and hurried forward up the ramp, flanked by his aide, Tactician Biota and four splendid bodyguard troopers with blue-black tunics, hellguns and gold braid around the brims of their shakos.

  “Gaunt!”

  “Lord general.”

  Van Voytz shook his hand. “Damn fine job, soldier.”

  “Thank you, sir. But it wasn’t me. I have a list of commendations.”

  “They’ll all be approved, Gaunt. Mark my words. Damn fine job.” Van Voytz gazed up around him as if he’d never seen a hangar deck before.

  “Cirenholm.”

  “Cirenholm, eh? One step forward.”

  “One step back for the Urdeshi, with respect.”

  “Ah, quite. I’ll be having words with Zhyte once he’s out of surgery. He screwed up, didn’t he? Man’s a blow-hard menace. But you, Gaunt… you and your Ghosts. You turned this fiasco on its head.”

  “We did what we could, lord.”

  “You did the Guard proud, colonel-commissar.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You quite pulled a fast one, didn’t you?”

  “Sir?”

  “You and your covert experts. He quite pulled a fast one, didn’t he, Biota?”

  “He seems to have done, lord general,” Biota replied mildly.

  “Making us do a rethink, Gaunt. A radical rethink. Ouranberg awaits, Gaunt, and your work here has prompted us to make a hasty reappraisal of combat policy. Hasn’t it, Biota?”

  “It has, lord general.”

  “It has indeed. What do you think of that, Gaunt?” Ibram Gaunt didn’t know quite what to think.

  Onti Flyte regarded herself as a true Imperial citizen, and had raised her three children in that manner. When the archenemy had come to Cirenholm, and overrun it so fast, she’d felt like the sky had fallen in. Her husband, a worker in the mill, had been killed by the Part in the initial invasion. Onti, her children and her neighbours, had been herded out of their habs by the masked brutes and shut up in a pen in the bowels of tertiary.

  It had been hellish. Precious little food or water, no sanitation. The place had stunk like a drain by the end of the first day.

  After that there had been disease and dirt, and the stench had become so high she could no longer smell it.

  Now, as the Imperial Guard escorted them back to their habs, she could smell the stink. It was in her clothes and in her hair. She knew the street-block shower would have queues, and the laundry would be full to bursting, but she wanted her kids clean and dressed in fresh clothes. That meant getting the outhouse tub full, and hard work with the press.

  A nice young Guardsman in black called Caffran had seen her and the kids back to their hab. Onti had kept apologising for the way they smelled. The boy, Caffran, had been so polite and kind.

  It was only when she was back in her place, in the little parlour of her terraced hab, that she’d cried. She realised how much she missed her husband, and she was haunted by what the arch-enemy had undoubtedly done to him.

  Her children were running around. She wanted them to quiet down. She was beside herself. The nice soldier — Caffran — looked in on her as the streets outside swarmed with people returning to their homes under escort.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked.

  “Just a handsome husband,” Onti ha
d joked, painfully, but trying hard. “Sorry,” the nice soldier said. “I’m spoken for.”

  Onti had put her head in her hands when he was gone and sobbed over the parlour table.

  Her eldest Beggi, had run in to tell her that the tub was almost full. He’d put the soap crystals in, the special ones, and all the kids said they wanted their mam to have the first bath.

  She kissed them all in turn, and asked Erini to warm up a pot of beans for them all.

  Onti went out into the yard and saw the steam wallowing from the outhouse where the tub sat. She could smell the peppermint vapours of the soap crystals.

  On the other side of the yard fence, her neighbour, an old pensioner called Mr. Absolom, was sweeping out his back step.

  “The mess they made, Ma’am Flyte,” he cried. “I know, Mr. Absolom! Such a mess!” Onti Flyte went into the outhouse and dragged off her filthy clothes.

  Naked and wrapped in a threadbare towel, she was testing the water with her hand when she heard the creak.

  She looked up and froze, realising someone was crouching in the back of the outhouse.

  She felt vulnerable. She felt open. For a terrifying moment she thought it was one of the arch-enemy, gone to ground. One of the foul, masked Blood Part.

  But it wasn’t.

  The figure stepped out of the shadows.

  It was a fine young Guardsman. Just like the lovely young man who had escorted her and the kids back to her hab.

  “Well, you shouldn’t be in here, sir,” she said. “You know what people say about a fine soldier boy…”

  She sniggered.

  The soldier didn’t.

  Onti Flyte suddenly realised that she was in trouble. Really bad trouble. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  The soldier stepped forward. He was very distinctive looking.

  He had a knife. A long, straight silver knife that shone against the black fabric of his battledress.

  She felt a scream building inside her. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it worked.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She screamed anyway. For a very short time.

  Doc Dorden held the chipwood tongue depresser in the same confident way Neskon held his flamer. “Say ‘Aaargh’,” he said.

  “Sgloot—” Milo managed.

  “No, boy. ‘Aaargh’… ‘AAARGH’… like you’ve been stuck with an ork bayonet.”

  “Aaargh!”

  “Better,” smiled Dorden, taking the stick out of Milo’s mouth and tossing it into a waste sack taped to the side of his medikit. He grabbed Milo by the head with both hands and examined his eyes, dragging the lids aside with firm fingertips.

  “Any nausea?”

  “Only now.”

  “Ha ha… any cramps? Blood in your spittle or stools? Headaches?”

  “No.”

  Dorden released his head. “You’ll live.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  Dorden smiled. “Not one in my power to give, I’m afraid. I wish—”

  The old Tanith doctor added something else, but his words were lost in the background hubbub of the billet hall. Milo didn’t ask him to repeat it. He was sure from the doc’s sad eyes it had had something to do with his son, Mikal Dorden, Ghost, dead on Verghast.

  It was the third day after the raid. The Tanith First had been assigned billets in a joined series of packing plants in the secondary dome. Hundreds of wood bales had been laid down in rows for cots and the Munitorium distribution crews had dropped a pair of thin blankets on each one. Most Ghosts had supplemented this meagre bedding with their camo-cloaks, bedrolls and musette bags stuffed with spare clothing.

  The noise in the chamber was huge. In Milo’s alone there were nine hundred men, and the wash of their voices and their activities filled the air and echoed off the high roof. The men were relaxing, cleaning kit, field stripping weapons, smoking, dicing, arm-wrestling, talking, comparing trophies, comparing wounds, comparing deeds…

  Dorden, Curth and the other medics were moving through the billets, chamber by chamber, doing the routine post combat fitness checks.

  “It’s amazing how many troopers hide injuries,” Dorden was saying as he collected his kit together. “I’ve seen five flesh wounds already that men didn’t think were worth bothering me with.”

  “Honour scars,” said Milo. “Marks of valour. Lesp’s such a good needleman, they’re afraid they’ll not have the marks to show and brag about.”

  “More fool them, Brin,” said Dorden. “Nour had a las-burn that was going septic.”

  “Ah, there, you see?” replied Milo. “Verghast. They want the scars most of all, to match our Tanith tattoos.”

  Dorden made a sour face, the sort of sour face he always made when confronted by naive soldier ways. He handed Milo two pill capsules of different colours and a paper twist of powder.

  “Take these. Basic vitamins and minerals, plus a hefty antibiotic boost. New air, new germ pool. And sealed and recirculated, which is worse. We don’t want you all coming down with some native flu that your systems have no defence against. And we don’t know what the scum brought here with them either.”

  “The powder?”

  “Dust your clothes and your boots. The Blood Pact had lice and now they’re gone, the lice are looking for new lodgings. The poor Phantine found their billets in tertiary were infested.”

  Milo swigged the pills down with a gulp from his canteen and then set about obediently sprinkling his kit with the powder. He’d been halfway through stripping his lasrifle when the doc reached his cot in the line, and he wanted to get back to it. Troops were being pulled out every few hours to assist in Major Rawne’s final sweep of the primary dome. Milo was sure he would be called soon.

  Dorden nodded to Milo and moved on to Ezlan at the next cot.

  Milo looked across the busy activity of the cot rows. Two lines away, Surgeon Curth was checking a trooper’s scalp wound. Milo sighed. He liked Doc Dorden a lot but he wished Curth had reached his row first. He would have enjoyed being examined by her.

  He pushed his half-stripped las to one side and lay back on his cot with his hands behind his head, staring at the roof and trying to blot out the noise. Try as he might over these last few months, he had been unable to stop thinking about Esholi Sanian, the young scholar who had guided them to the Shrinehold on Hagia, their last battlefield. He’d liked her a lot. And he had been sure the feeling was mutual. The fact that he would never, ever see her again didn’t seem to matter to Milo. She wouldn’t leave his mind and she certainly wouldn’t leave his dreams.

  He’d never spoken about it to anyone. Most of the Tanith had lost wives or sweethearts on the home world, and most of the Verghastites had left their loves and lives behind. There were females in the regiment now, of course, and every last one of them was the object of at least one trooper’s affection. There were some romances too. His friend Caffran’s was the best. His first love Laria had perished with Tanith, and he’d been as forlorn as the rest for a long time. Then on Verghast, right in the thick of the hive-war, he’d met Tona Criid. Tona Criid… ganger, hab girl, scratch fighter, mother of two young kids. Neither Caffran nor Criid, both of whom Milo now counted amongst his closest friends, had ever described it as love at first sight. But Milo had seen the way they looked at each other.

  When the Act of Consolation had been announced, Criid had joined the Ghosts as standard infantry. Her kids came along, cared for during times of action by the Ghosts’ straggling entourage of cooks, armourers, quartermasters, barbers, cobblers, musicians, traders, camp followers and other children. Every Guard regiment had its baggage train of non-combatants, and the Ghosts’ now numbered over three hundred. Regiments accreted non-combatant hangers-on like an equine collected flies.

  Now Caff and Criid were together. It was the Ghosts’ one, sweet love story. The troops might smile at the couple, but they respected the union. No one had ever dared get in between them.

  Milo sighed t
o himself sadly. He wished that Sanian had been able to come along with him that way.

  He thought for a moment about going down to the hangar deck where the entourage was encamped. He could get a meal from the cook-stoves, and maybe visit one of the overly-painted women who followed the regiment and saw to the men’s needs.

  He rejected the idea. He’d never done that and it didn’t really appeal except at the most basic level.

  Anyway, they weren’t Sanian. And it wasn’t sex he was after. Sanian was inside his head, like it mattered she should be there. He didn’t want to do anything that might eclipse her memory.

  And he couldn’t for the life of him explain why the memory of her refused to fade. Except… the prophecy. The one the old ayatani priests of Hagia had made. That Milo would find some way, some purpose, in years to come.

  Milo hoped that had something to do with Sanian. He hoped that was why she remained bright in his mind. Maybe, somehow, she was his way.

  Probably not. But it made him feel better to think of it like that.

  “Now that looks like trouble,” he heard Doc Dorden say from the next cot along.

  Milo sat up and looked. Far away, at the entrance to the billet hall, he could see Captain Daur talking seriously with a pair of Imperial commissars Milo had never seen before. The commissars were flanked by eight armed Phantine troopers.

  “On whose authority?” Daur snapped.

  “Imperial Taskforce Commissariate, captain, Commissar Del Mar. This is an internal security matter.”

  “Does Colonel-Commissar Gaunt know about this?”

  The two commissars looked at each other.

  “He doesn’t does he?” smiled Daur. “What about Commissar Hark?”

  “You are delaying us, captain,” said the shorter of the two commissars. His name, he had told Daur, was Fultingo, and he was attached to Admiral Ornoff’s staff. The other one, taller and gawkier, and wearing the pins of a cadet-commissar, had fresh Urdeshi insignia sewn onto his coat.

  “Yes, I am. I want to know what this is about,” said Daur. “You can’t just march in here and start questioning my troops.”