The blade was a compact chain-form: a thick, decorated grip with an extending blade of steel fifteen centimetres long. A flick of the rubberised stud on the index-finger ridge activated an internal power-cell that made the blade-edge vibrate so fast it looked still. But, gak, could it cut!
She touched the stud and the blade purred. She switched it off and crawled towards the flak-board fence.
The supply barn was dark and as stacked with supplies as she remembered it. She couldn’t read many of the labels on the crate stacks, so it was a matter of cutting them open and sampling them. The first she tried was full of small flat boxes packed with bootlaces.
The second had cartons of stoppered metal tubes. Hoping they might be food-paste, she squeezed a coil of black matter out into her palm and licked it.
She spat, retching. If this is what the off-world fighters ate, they were truly from another world. She moved on, leaving the half-squeezed tube of camo-paint on the floor behind her.
Ear-pieces with wires and plugs. Powercells. Rolls of gauze in paper wraps that smelled of disinfectant.
In the next crate-stack, foil-packs of freeze-dried buckwheat porridge. Better. She dropped half a dozen into her bag, then added a handful more. She’d eat them dry if she couldn’t find water. Then she found chemical blocks for firelighting and a pile went into her bag. Next, metal beakers. She prised one out of its packing, then another. Dalin would want his own.
In the next row, pay dirt: corn crackers in long, plastic tubes, soya bars in vacuum-packets. She pushed a dozen or more into her bag and bladed one open, cramming the soft, wet food into her mouth and gulping it down, brine dribbling down her chin and pattering on the floor.
Tona froze, mid-swallow, her cheeks bulging, her stomach gnawing at her with the sudden input of food. A noise, behind her, to the right, a noise her wolfish chewing had half-hidden. She ducked into cover.
A flashlight flickered between supply stacks, three rows away. She willed herself invisible and huddled behind a tower of mess-tin crates, the blade in her hand. The beam of light jiggled around and she heard a voice, uttering a snarl. The sudden crack and flash of a lasweapon made her jump out of her boots. A carrion-dog went racing past her, yelping and trailing a burned hind leg.
She relaxed a little. The voice said something in an accent she couldn’t work out. The flashlight wavered, then moved off and away.
She darted across the aisle into the next bank of crates. A few slices of her knife, all the while listening to the darkness around her. Nutrient packs for first aid. Tins of soup that heated themselves when the foil strip was pulled out. Jars of air-dried vegetables in oil. Small, flat cans of preserved fish. Cartons of heat-treated milk.
She took a handful of them all. Her pack was heavy now and she was pushing her luck. Time to go.
Light jabbed down into her face, making her cry out, and a hand grabbed her shoulder.
Tona Criid had been taught to fight by her brothers, all of them gangers. Instinctively, she pivoted back into the grip and shoulder-threw the owner of the hand. The flashlight bounced away across the rockcrete barn floor and the heavy male form bounced after it, barking out an oath and most of its breath.
But it had her still, and even as it went over her, it twisted her round in combat-trained hands and threw her sideways into the crate stack.
The impact stunned her. She tried to rise, hearing the other moving too. A few more oaths, a harsh question she didn’t understand.
She rose and delivered a spin-kick into the darkness. It would be the VPHC, she was sure. She braced for the las-shot, the bolt-round, the mindset that would treat her no better than a carrion-dog.
Her spinning foot connected and the figure went down with a bone-crack. More rampant cursing.
Tona ran for the crack in the barn wall.
A much larger form tackled her from behind in the dark and brought her down on her belly on the rockcrete floor. She was frantic now, kicking and thrashing.
Her assailant had her pinned by way of superior strength and technique. His weight slumped on top of her and the flashlight winked on again, probing down at her wincing eyes.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” said a hoarse voice in tunefully accented Low Gothic. “Don’t fight me.”
She looked up, fighting still. She saw the face of the off-world soldier, the young one, the man who had chased Dalin out of the barn weeks before.
The blade purred in her hand and she sliced it upwards.
Caffran saw the vibro-blade coming and threw himself aside, releasing his captive. It was the gang girl, the beautiful one he had glimpsed across the rubble when he had gone chasing the boy.
She was on her feet now, menacing with the buzzing blade, head down. Knife-combat stance, thought Caffran, good enough to be a Ghost.
“Put it down,” he said carefully. “I can help you.”
She turned and ran, heading for the slit in the fibre-board back wall of the barn.
Caffran pulled out his laspistol, braced his aiming hand and fired three times, blowing a ring of holes in the back wall of the shed around her. Daylight streamed in through the punctures. She skidded to a halt, frozen, as if expecting the next one to let the light shine through her too.
Caffran got to his feet, gun raised. “I can help you,” he repeated. “I don’t want to see you live like that. You’ve got children, right, a boy at least? What do you need?”
She turned slowly to face him and his light, blade in one hand, the other raised against the stabbing beam. Caffran lowered it so it wouldn’t blind her.
“Trick,” she said.
“What?”
“This is a trick. lust shoot me, you gak.”
“No trick.” He stepped forward and holstered his pistol. “No trick.”
She flew at him, blade slicing the air. He flinched and grabbed her arms, rolling backwards to deposit her flat on her own back. The impact knocked her out for a moment.
Caffran kicked the purring blade away.
He pulled her up. She was coughing and gasping. She felt so thin and fragile in his hands, though he knew she was mean and tough enough to hurt him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Her jabbing fingers punched into his eyes and he bellowed, rolling back and clutching his face.
By the time he struggled up again, she was pushing through the back wall to freedom. Caffran noticed she had been mindful enough to recover her blade.
He ran after her.
“Feth you, stop! I want to help! Stop!”
She looked back at him, her eyes as wild and mad as an animal. Her bulging pack was caught on a fork of fibre-boards, preventing her from squeezing through the hole.
“Get away! Get away!” she shrilled.
He approached her, hands held wide and empty, trying to look unthreatening.
“I won’t hurt you… please… my name is Caffran. My friends call me Caff. I’m a lost soul like you. Just a Ghost without a home. I didn’t ask for this and I know you fething didn’t. Please.”
He was a hand’s reach away from her now, hating the fear in her face. She spat and howled, then jabbed her blade round and cut the strap of her pack. It dropped to the ground, but she was free. Abandoning it, she flew out of the bam and sprinted away across the rubble.
Caffran pushed out after her, straining to get his greater bulk through the slit.
He got a glimpse of her looking back and terrified, darting over the splintered mounds of wreckage before dropping out of sight.
Tona lay in cover for a few minutes, buried in the soot of a crater, stinking corpses around her. When it seemed the soldier was not following, she crawled out and ran a few metres to a slumped wall and hid behind it.
Then she heard a crunch of boots on rubble and froze.
Twenty metres away, looking in the wrong direction, the black-uniformed soldier was walking up through the ruins, her pack dangling from his hand.
“Hello?” he was calling. “H
ello? You need this. You really do. Hello?”
He stood for a long while, maybe ten minutes, looking around. Tona remained in hiding. Finally, the soldier put the pack down.
“It’s here if you want it,” he said. A long pause.
Then he walked back down the ruin slope and clambered back into the bam.
Tona waited a full fifteen minutes more before she moved. She ran from cover, scooped up the pack and leapt away into the confused maze of the ruins.
The soldier didn’t reappear or follow.
In a foxhole, she hunched and opened the pack, studying the contents. Everything she had taken was there, everything — as well as three flasks of sterilised water, a field-dressing kit, a pack of one-shot antibiotic jabs, some net-wrapped dry sausage… and a laspistol, the very laspistol she was sure he had fired after her in the barn. The charge pack was almost full.
She was dazed for a while, then she laughed. Gleeful, she took up the sack of trophies and ran back to her shelter, taking a wide route so she wouldn’t be followed.
It was only later, after she and Dalin had eaten their first good meal in a month and Yoncy was sleeping and content on milk-broth, that she found the cap-pin at the bottom of the pack: silver, clean, an Imperial eagle with the double head and the inscription Tanith First, by the Grace of the God-Emperor of Terra on the scroll held in the clawed feet.
In the gloomy dugout, her belly full, her wards fed and content, Tona Criid sat back by the light of a fire kindled from Guard-issue chemical blocks and wondered where she would pin the crest. As gang-badges went, it was better than most.
Behind Veyveyr Gate, the dead dominated the streets and squares.
Teams of Vervun Primary, work militia and Munitorum labourers, their faces masked by breathers or strips of torn cloth, carried the dead from the battle away from the smouldering railhead and laid them out in the open places north of Veyveyr for identification and disposal.
Agun Soric had brought his workforce in from the Commercia Refuge after the fighting had died down, and he had put them to work assisting the morbid but necessary duty.
He wanted to fight. Gak, but that brave Vervun Primary officer — what was his name? Racine! The one who’d given them the chance to pull their weight preparing the defence. He’d given Soric the taste of it. But for want of proper weapons, Soric and his people would have been at the front that morning. Let Ferrozoica tremble to face the wrath of smeltery workers from Vervun One with the blood up!
From what he’d been able to learn from those milling about him — some off-world Guard, some NorthCol — Soric knew the ferocious battle had ended with Zoica pushed out against all odds. He hoped to see Racine soon and slap the man’s back and hear how the pioneer efforts his workers had put in had helped to win the day by building defences the enemy couldn’t overrun.
There was time enough. With smeltery workers Gannif, Fafenge and Modj, Soric began loading corpses onto a handcart. It was filthy bestial work. They tried to wrap each body in a skein of linen and they’d been told to take tags and mark the identity of each on a data-slate. But some bodies didn’t come up in one piece. Some were only parts. Some parts didn’t match up obviously with others.
Some were still alive.
The place was a charnel house. Bodycarts moved all around them, medical and clearance personnel milled around and the wounded shuffled in slow, weary lines away from the gate railhead, many exhibiting awful injuries. Every now and then, they made way for a truck or a trundling medical Chimera, speeding away to the medical halls.
Soric, his hip braced on his axe-rake crutch, leaned down and slid his paper-gloved hands under the armpits of a blackened, legless corpse.
As he raised the cadaver, it groaned.
“Medic! Medic!” he cried out, pulling back from the ruined thing he had been touching.
A thickset medical officer pushed through the milling crowd, a man in his fifties with a silver beard and the look of an off-worlder about him. Under his hall-issue crimson apron he wore black fatigues and Guard-issue boots.
“Alive?” the medic asked Soric.
“Gak me, I suppose so. Tried to move him.”
The medic took out a flexible tube, put one end to his ear and the other to the blackened torso.
“Dead. You must have squeezed air out of the lungs when you lifted him.”
Soric nodded as the medic stood up, folding his scope-tube away into his shoulder-slung pack.
“You’re off-world, right?” asked Soric.
“What?” asked the medic, distracted.
“Off-worlder?”
The medic nodded curtly. “Tanith First. Chief medic.”
Soric stuck out a hand, then pulled the paper glove off it. “Thank you,” he said.
The medic paused, surprised, then took the hand and shook it.
“Dorden, Gaunt’s First-and-Only.”
“Soric. I used to run that place.” Soric gestured over his shoulder at the ruin of Vervun Smeltery One east of the railhead.
“This is a bad time for all of us,” Dorden said, studying the bullish, noble man who leaned on his crutch, black with ash.
Soric nodded.
“That eye wound… has it been treated?” asked Dorden, stepping forward.
Soric held up his hand. “Old news, friend, weeks old. There are others more needy of your skills.”
As if on cue, VPHC troops wheeled past a cart carrying a screaming, blood-soaked NorthCol soldier.
Mtane and one of Curth’s people hurried to it.
Dorden looked round at Soric. “You thanked me. Why?”
Soric shrugged. “I’ve been through this from the start. We were left to die. You didn’t have to come here but you did and I thank you for it.”
Dorden shook his head. “Warmaster Macaroth sends us where he wills. I’m glad to be able to help, however.”
“Without you off-worlders, Vervunhive would be dead. That’s why I thank you.”
“I appreciate it. Mine is often a thankless task.”
“Have you seen Major Racine? Vervun Primary? He’s a good man…”
Dorden shook his head and turned to where stretcher-bearers were beginning to bring the Tanith wounded out of the warzone. Troopers Milo and Baffels were carrying Manik, howling from the wound to his groin, blood dribbling over the edges of the stretcher.
Dorden moved in to deal with Manik. He was sure the young trooper was going to bleed out any moment.
He looked around at Baffels and Milo as he worked. “Racine? You know what happened to him?”
Dorden’s hands were already slippery with Manik’s blood. The groin artery had burst and he couldn’t tie it. It was pulling back into the body cavity and Dorden bellowed for Lesp to bring dean blades.
“Major Racine?” Milo said, standing back from Manik’s stretcher, adjusting the dressing on his shoulder wound. “He died. Under a flat-crab. He killed it, but he died.”
Soric listened to the off-world boy and shook his head sadly.
Lesp stumbled over the rubble and brought Dorden a scalpel. Dorden used it to try and open the screaming Manik’s groin wide enough so he could push his fingers in and pull the severed artery down to clamp it. It was too late. Manik bled out through his body cavity and died with Dorden’s hand still inside him.
“Let me take him,” Soric said and, with his men, he gently lifted Manik’s body onto his wheel-cart. Dorden was almost shocked by the reverence.
“Every soul for the hive, and the hive for every soul,” Soric said over his shoulder to the blood-soaked Dorden as he wheeled the dead Ghost away.
* * *
Ana Curth moved her orderlies through the confusion of Veyveyr Gate. There were more dead to recover than living.
She checked each corpse in turn, pulled off the tags and then left them for the recovery units.
She hesitated slightly when she found the corpses of Tanith. These were all Dorden’s friends. She took off their tags carefully and entered all the na
mes in her dataslate.
In the gateway of Veyveyr, she paused. She checked the latest set of tags three times to be sure.
Tears welled in her eyes and she pushed the bloody tags into her apron-front.
The thirty-second day drew to a close. It was a day the citizens of Vervun-hive would remember perhaps more keenly than anything that had taken place so far. Despite the success of driving back the First Storm three days before, this seemed much more of a victory. Scant hours after the battle, the defence of Veyveyr began to take on a mythical flavour. In the Spine, the habs and the refuges alike, Vervunhivers spoke of it as a turning point, as the start of deliverance.
Public-address plates across the hive broadcast triumphant slogans, sanitised accounts of the battle and pictures from the glorious front, mainly those showing the People’s Hero raising the flag in the shattered gate-mouth, surrounded by jubilant Vervun Primary troopers. In the Basilica of the Ecclesiarchy, a victory mass was organised, featuring a choir of over ten thousand and long liturgical readings from the Codex Imperialis. Loudspeakers broadcast the worship across all the hive levels.
Spontaneous celebrations began in different areas and some revels — amongst Vervun Primary troops heady with relief — were broken up by the VPHC.
But the mood was impossible to suppress in the highest and lowest quarters of the hive. Oilcan fires were lit along the wharves and in the refuges, and drums, many homemade or improvised, thundered into the night. There were many reports of decadent banqueting in the High Spine, as merchants and house ordinary families abandoned the rationing restrictions and indulged in sumptuous private dinners of unstinting debauchery.