He got to his feet and stretched, trying to shake off the sadness so his mind could be sharp. The bare room was lit by a single chemical lamp that Nessa had dared to ignite because the windows were boarded with sheets of pulp-ply. Her long-las was laid out on her camo-cloak, disassembled. She was using a thimble sewn from vizzy-cloth to polish and oil the firing mechanism.
Milo took out some foil-sealed bag rations and wolfed them down, swigging water from his flask. He noticed his hands were grimed with dust, but didn’t care.
He opened the tissue paper schematic of Ouranberg they had all been issued with and studied it again, plotting routes.
“Did you sleep?” he asked, touching her arm first so she knew to look at him.
“A little.”
“Enough?”
“I had a dream,” Nessa said as she worked on her sniping piece.
“A dream?” he asked.
“I dreamed Colonel Corbec and Sergeant Soric came to find us. They were alive.”
“They probably are,” Milo said. “I mean, we don’t know.”
“No, but they were close to dying when we left. It’s one thing to lose someone in battle. It’s another to leave them dying and then never know… never find out…”
“We’ll find out. They’ll be waiting for us when we get back. Soric will be full of jokes and terribly proud of you. Corbec will have a bottle of sacra open and be demanding I dig out my pipes for a tune or two.”
“Why will Soric be proud of me?” she asked.
“Because you will have put a hot-shot between Slaith’s eyes.”
She laughed. “It’s good to know you have such confidence in me. And that you can see into the future, Brin.”
“It’s a gift I have.”
She shook her head with a chuckle and started to slide her long-las together. Her hands worked with economical practice, clicking the components together. Milo doubted he could have reassembled a lasrifle in twice the time.
He watched her. She was commonly regarded as the most beautiful woman in the Ghosts, though the men had their favourites: Muril, Arilla, Banda, Solia, Elian, Criid and, when they were drunk or in pain enough to actually dare admit it. Ana Curth. Criid and Banda were thought to be the most alluring, though it often impressed Milo that Criid was firmly considered out of bounds even in terms of conversational fantasy because of her tie to Caffran. Nessa wasn’t sexy in the same way Banda or Solia were. It was partly her quietness, itself a scar of warfare. But it was mostly her fine-boned, stunning face, the perfect angles of her cheeks and nose and the deep blue of her eyes. Her streaming, glossy hair had seemed to be a key part of her appeal. That was gone now, and she was still utterly beautiful. Her hair was just beginning to grow in again, a fine down-like felt. The lack of hair emphasised her sculptural features.
Her eyes came up and caught his. “What’s so interesting?” she asked.
Milo shook his head.
He looked away, and saw a small slab of pulp-ply leaning against the wall. A knife tip had cut the words “Nessa Bourah, 341.748 to 225.771 M41.” into it.
“What the feth is that?” he asked.
“Just a habit,” she replied.
“It’s a fething grave marker!”
“Relax, Brin. We did it every day during the scratch fighting. I never got out of the habit.”
Milo shook his head, puzzled. “You’ll have to explain more than that,” he said.
She put down her long-las and faced him. “We were going to die. Every day, fighting the guerilla war in the ruined out-habs of Vervunhive, we were going to die. The death rate was awful. So we got into the habit of carving our own grave markers in what little downtime there was. If we died, you see, there would be a marker ready. Easy. Simple. A quickly dug slit-trench, a scatter of earth over the body, a prayer, and a marker ready and waiting.”
“That’s terrible.”
“That’s… the way it was.” She paused and cleared her throat quietly. Then she continued, “It became routine, and people started putting the next morning’s date on the markers, as if daring fate to take them. It was a joke at first. A bad, dark joke. Then someone, I don’t remember who, pointed out that, as a rule, the fighters who carved the next day’s date as their death date survived.”
“Survived?”
“The sensible ones who left the death date blank tended to die. Those that gleefully etched in that the next day would be their last… lived. So they’d have to scrap the marker and make a new one because the date was wrong. After a week or two, it became a habit, a lucky charm. We all did it, daring the gods, or daemons or whatever rules the cosmic order, to make our grave markers useless.”
“And you still do it?”
She nodded. “At times like this, I do.”
“I feel like I should make one,” he said.
“Only works for Verghastites, I’m afraid,” she said.
“Damn shame…” he grinned.
And froze.
He could hear a knocking, scraping sound from the floor below. Seeing his look, Nessa got up and loaded a cell magazine into her long-las.
Slowly, listening, Milo lifted his cannon.
More knocking, a crash.
Let’s go, he signed.
They gathered up their kit rapidly, keeping an eye on the door. Nessa extinguished the lamp.
In the sudden, blue gloom, Milo gestured to the back door with his thumb, they moved slowly, silently towards it, weapons ready, camo-cloaks draped around them.
Milo gently pulled back the pulp-ply boarding the nearest window.
Three platoons of Blood Pact were assembling in the square outside.
Another search-patrol. Ever since Adare and Doyl had been discovered, the enemy had been scouring the mill district for other Imperial interlopers. The public address system had broadcast imploring appeals to “find the vermin”, alternating with demands that the “Imperial scum” give themselves up.
Milo and Nessa backed to the rear door. They were expecting Blood Part.
But it wasn’t.
The hab-room door splintered in, exploded by some powerful shotgun blast, and the first loxatl scurried through.
In the half-light, Milo got a glimpse of a sinuous, grey body with a flat, snouted head and a short, muscular tail. It came in and went up the wall, dewclaws ripped into the plaster to gather purchase. An augmetic limb-frame snapped around its mottled belly tracked around the pepper-pot nose of an alien scattergun.
A second loxad slithered in through the door and clawed its way rapidly up the other wall. Milo could smell spearmint mixed with sour milk.
Its bionic weapon-frame clicked around, sweeping the room. It aimed at Milo, shooting out a dull green aiming light that splashed on his cloak.
Nessa’s long-las roared.
The second alien mercenary was ripped off the wall by the hot-shot and smashed, convulsing, into the doorframe.
The other one fired its weapon. A huge hole was chewed out of the pressed-fibre panelling beside Milo.
He opened fire, lurched back for a moment by the U90’s almost unmanageable recoil.
The hi-ex AP rounds blew the lizard thing apart and hosed the wall with its unwholesome blood. Its smoking carcass fell off the wall and slammed onto the floor.
“Feth!” he heard Nessa scream. The creature she had shot was lurching up again, sweeping its flechette blaster towards Milo.
Milo emptied the rest of the drum mag into the second loxad, pulping its head and chest. He looked round at Nessa.
Come on! he signed. She nodded and pulled him towards the doorway the loxatl had come through. Trusting her, Milo realised she was right. The Blood Pact squads were storming up the rear of the hab, intending to pick off any fleeing stragglers the loxad had missed.
No one was expecting anybody to exit from the front of the building.
Nessa and Milo, hand in hand, raced out of the hab tenement, and sprinted away towards the forbidding shells of residence blocks on the far si
de of the square.
In the hab behind them, Nessa’s grave marker lay crushed under the bulk of a dead loxatl.
They’d had to wait the best part of the day for a chance to sneak back to the air wharf, where it took them just ninety seconds to commandeer the carrier. Banda’s long-shot took out the driver, and Bonin and Varl did the rest with warknives.
Jagdea ran forward across the air wharf and heaved the driver’s corpse out of its seat.
“Do we leave them here?” Unterrio asked, nodding at the dead bodies.
“No, get them aboard,” said Vadim.
They hefted up the heretics’ corpses and threw them on to the carrier’s cargo bed.
It was a light hauler, with a roofed cabin section and a tarp-covered payload bay. Jagdea got behind the controls as the rest of Larisel 1 finished lugging the dead onto the vehicle’s bay and climbed aboard.
“Commander?” Varl prompted.
“Just familiarising myself with the layout,” she said.
Expertly, Jagdea launched them, and they flew down a canyon of habs towards the porta of Alpha dome.
At just about the same time, far to the north-west, Mkoll was scaling the granite outcrop where the pipeline finally joined Ouranberg. It was dark, freezing cold, and the wind was fearful, but he felt triumphant. He had made it all the way across. Now all he had to do was get inside.
Convoys of transport vehicles loaded with munitions for Alpha dome’s air defences had been rumbling down the access routes non-stop for over an hour. Larisel 2 had been forced into hiding until the activity died down. They waited, with nervy impatience, in the basement of a burned-out Ministorum chapel.
Kuren watched the door, armed with Meryn’s U90. In the course of the day they’d seen plenty of the vile loxad mercenaries accompanying the Blood Pact patrols.
“This remind you of anything?” Mkvenner said. He’d been searching through the broken litter that covered the basement floor, and now held up a cheap plaster figurine, one of a dozen he’d found in a box.
“It’s a memento of Saint Phidolas, who led the first settlers to Phantine,” said Kersherin. “Every church on the planet sells cheap souvenirs like it. For the pilgrims.”
“Yeah,” said Mkvenner, “but what else?”
“I don’t know…” said Kersherin.
Mkvenner casually smacked the figurine against a pillar, smashing off its head and upper body. “How about now?”
They all looked at it, like it was a joke and they were ready for the punchline. “Feth,” said Larkin suddenly. “It was behind Slaith.”
“Right,” said Mkvenner.
“What?” Meryn snapped. “Behind Slaith? What are you talking about?”
“When he was on the screen,” said Larkin, “when he… he showed us Cardinale… there was a big window behind him and a ruined statue outside.”
“I don’t remember any statue,” Kuren said.
“There was a statue,” said Mkvenner. “Ruined. Right outside his windows.”
The scout turned the broken figurine over and examined a label on the bottom.
“An image of Saint Phidolas,” he read, “copied from the great statue that may be seen in the Imperial concourse, Alpha dome, Ouranberg.”
“Well, well, well…” Meryn chuckled.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Jagdea said.
“Keep going,” Bonin told her. He was riding next to her in the hauler’s cab.
They had got through the porta into Alpha dome with remarkable ease, and joined an access route that had seemed busy enough for them to blend in. Varl hoped they might get as far as the dome’s core districts by midnight.
But the traffic was slowing, and armoured Blood Part air-speeders with rotating orange lamps were forcing all vehicles down to road level so that they could be channelled through a check station.
“We need to get off this route,” said Jagdea. They were barely crawling, following the tail of a large munitions truck.
“They’ll see us if we try and break away. Besides, the route has no obvious intersections.”
“Well, I don’t think going through that checkpoint is going to be an especially healthy idea!” she hissed.
“Sarge?” Bonin called back through the mesh partition to Varl. “Any stunningly good suggestions from you?”
Varl peered down the line of near stationary traffic ahead and behind them. The six-lane route itself was open, with little cover, and thirty storey tenements rose on either side. Not the place for a firefight.
He cursed himself. Using the hauler had been a smart idea, and it had saved them a lot of time. But Jagdea and Bonin had advised him to ditch it once they were inside Alpha dome. Varl had wanted to press on, to see how far they could get. He felt stupid now, like he’d let them down. Even though Gol Kolea was nowhere around, the Kolea-Varl devil-dare rivalry had landed them in this fix. Gol had been the hero at Cirenholm. Shutting down the power plant like that had effectively won the battle for them. He’d triumphed that round. When Operation Larisel came up, all Varl had been able to think of was that this might be his turn. His turn to be the hero. Devil-dare, Kolea! How d’you like that?
So he’d pushed them on, far further than they should ever have gone out in the open like this. He had pushed them so they would reach Slaith and be heroes. “Stupid” didn’t even begin to cover it.
“There’s a road to the left, about seventy metres up,” Varl said through the mesh.
“I see it,” said Jagdea dubiously.
“We keep rolling forward like this, up to the checkpoint, and then break left fast and exit.”
“Just like that?”
“Commander, I have absolute faith in your ability to drive this thing like it was a Lightning on afterburner. We get down there, ditch this cart and go to ground.”
“That’s your plan?” asked Unterrio.
“Yes, it fething is,” said Varl. “We all clear?”
“What happens if they rumble us before we reach the turn?” asked Jagdea.
“Okay…” Varl said. “We pull out of the queue anyway. Fly straight at the tenement.”
“What?”
“I’ve got hi-ex loaded. I’ll make a hole. We’ll get inside the building and then ditch and cover there. Okay? Clear?”
The traffic line crept forward. The air was thick with exhaust fumes and the sound of dozens of engines. An air-speeder droned by overhead, flying down the queue.
Incomprehensible instructions boomed out of an amplifier at the checkpoint.
“Foot troops!” Bonin whispered sharply.
“Where?” asked Varl.
“Walking down the line towards us. On the median strip. There, by the crash barrier.”
“Oh feth.”
“They’re checking papers,” Jagdea said. She tugged off her gloves, wiped her sweating hands dry on her jacket, and then gripped the wheel and the throttle lever again, tensed and ready.
“Wait for it. Wait for it,” Varl said. Banda, Vadim and Unterrio raised their weapons to their shoulders. Bonin put his laspistol on his lap.
“They may not come down this far,” Banda whispered hopefully.
The vehicles moved forward again, another few metres. A Blood Pact officer, standing on the route’s central barrier, waved the three trucks immediately in front of them on with a torch stick.
Then he stepped out into their path and held up a hand. “Shit!” said Jagdea.
Four more Blood Pact troopers and a slaver with a team of hate-dogs approached behind the officer. He walked towards the hauler.
“We’re blown,” announced Bonin.
“I know!” said Varl. “Wait to the last possible moment…”
The officer stepped up to the cab and peered in. They could smell his body odour and see his blood-shot eyes through the slits of his iron mask. He began to ask something in a language they didn’t understand and then stopped as he saw Bonin and Jagdea and their Imperial combat gear.
“Go!” sa
id Bonin, and shot the officer through the head with his pistol.
Jagdea threw the hauler out of the line, engaging the throttle so hard that Unterrio was thrown off his feet in the back. The air-truck screamed across the route towards the tenements as shouts, sirens and shots rang out after it. Heavy fire from an air-speeder stitched plumes of debris from the road surface as it tried to track them.
“Varl!” Jagdea screamed. The front of the tenement was approaching very fast.
Varl threw back the tarp and stood up so he could fire over the roof of the cab. He had to fight to stay upright. They were going to hit the wall in scant seconds.
He fired the U90 and created a rippling blister of overlapping explosions that blew the ground floor facade in.
They went through the hole.
Almost.
Varl had barely ducked in again when an overhang of brick caught the tarp of the speeding machine and ripped the entire cover frame off. That tipped the nose up and spun the back end out. The left rear engine mount sheared off against an exposed metal beam and a considerable portion of the hauler’s underside shredded away.
The tenement’s ground floor was one great, open space used for storage and presently empty, except for the metre square rockcrete pillars every thirty paces.
The stricken machine flew into the store-space almost sidelong. It hit the floor once with boneshaking force, bounced up under its own headlong momentum, and then impacted again, shrieking along the floor in an astonishing wake of sparks and fragmenting metal.
It hit the first pillar head-on with enough force to spin it off the ground and leave it crumpled and smoking, facing the way it had come.
Varl and Banda had both been thrown clear and lay unconscious on the ground nearby. Unterrio got to his feet and tried to get Vadim up. The young Verghastite had struck his head and was out cold.
“Come on! Come on!” Unterrio screamed.
Bonin came round. He was hanging out of the shattered cab section. It took him a moment to work out what was going on. He could hear Unterrio shouting.
Jagdea, saved by her harness belt, was alive but semi conscious. Bonin fought with her harness and began to drag her out.