Gaunt turned to the advocate, who was wheezing for breath and leaning on his cane after the exertions of the frantic journey down into the bottom of the Spine. “Don’t you have an override, an authorisation?”
Pater held up his badge of office. “Administratum pass level magenta… but the VPHC are a law to themselves. They have their own lock codes. Besides, colonel-commissar, do you see a keyhole?”
Gaunt pulled off his leather coat and threw it to Bwelt. “Hold that,” he said bluntly and swung out his chainsword. The weapon whined as he cycled it up to full power.
He stabbed it at the armoured shutter. It rode aside, shrieking, leaving scratch marks and sending broken saw-teeth away in a flurry of sparks. He dug again and sliced into the metal, cutting a jagged slot a few centimetres across before the sword meshed and over-revved. With the sheer force of his upper arms and his shoulders, Gaunt heaved down, snarling a curse out at the top of his lungs, tearing down another few centimetres.
“Sir?” Daur said sharply behind him.
Gaunt spun around, raising the chainsword, in time to see the armoured lift cage descend and clank to rest. The grill-doors squealed open. General Sturm, flanked by Colonel Gilbear and ten Blueblood stormtroops, emerged from the lift car.
“Sturm, don’t make this worse by—”
“Oh, shut up, you stupid fool, and put that weapon away,” snapped Sturm. He and his men approached and surrounded the quartet at the shutter. Gilbear was oozing a dreadfully superior smile at Gaunt.
“Get him out of my face, Sturm, or I’ll practise what I’m doing to the door on him.”
Gilbear raised his hellgun, but Sturm slapped it aside. “You know, Gaunt,” Sturm said, “I almost respect you. I could do with a few men of your passion in my regiment. But still and all, you are a benighted fool and beneath the contempt of civilised men. You’ve spent too much time with those Tanith savages and—what are you doing, you old fool?”
This last remark was directed at Pater, who was carefully and quietly dictating material for Bwelt to set down on his slate.
“Transcribing your words, general, in case the colonel-commissar wishes to press a slander action against you later on.” The old advocate’s voice was utterly empty of expression or nuance: a true lawyer. Gaunt laughed out loud.
Sturm looked away from the old man. He held up Croe’s ducal signet. “If you want to get inside, you need one of these.” He pressed it against the centre of the shutter. There was a dull thunk, a noise of servos churning and the shutter, with its chainsword tear, rose.
The group entered and Sturm opened the inner shutter. They passed on into the sodium-lit inner hall of the stockade.
“Marshal Croe has ordered me to release Grizmund. The world is going all to hell above our heads, Gaunt. Zoica assaults on all fronts. It is time to forget all petty bickering.”
Three VPHC troopers ran forward to confront them. One started to ask what they were doing in the stockade. Gilbear and his pointman cut them down with loose, brutal shots.
Gaunt pushed forward past the bodies and kicked open a set of wooden double doors to the left of the inner concourse.
There was a large circular chamber beyond, lit by bracketed wall-lamps with glass chimneys. Grizmund and his officers, hands tied behind their backs and hoods over their heads, stood on a raised dais under spotlights in the centre of the room. Kowle, Tarrian and nine senior VPHC officers sat on a tiered rank of wooden stalls before them, and a dozen VPHC troops with riot-guns lined the walls.
“What the gak is this?” Tarrian roared, getting to his feet.
Sturm held up the ducal signet. “By order of the marshal himself, this court is overthrown. The prisoners will be freed.”
Kowle rose too. “The meeting is in session and obeys the edicts of both planetary and Imperial law. We—”
“Shut your damn face, Kowle!” snapped Gaunt. “The hive is dying above us and you waste your time persecuting good, honest men for the sake of some political point-scoring. You have no idea what real war is, do you, you bastard? You didn’t on Balhaut and you don’t here!”
Kowle’s face went purple with rage, but the furious Tarrian pushed him aside. “Interference with VPHC proceedings is a capital offence, Gaunt! Your maverick actions won’t get you anywhere except to the sharp end of a firing squad detail!”
“Actually, that’s not correct,” said Bwelt firmly. “Imperial Edict 95674, sub-clause 45, states that an Imperial judicial officer, such as a full commissar, may interrupt and foreclose any planetary legal affair without restraint or penalty.”
“You tell him, boy!” cackled Pater.
Gaunt stared at Tarrian. “Don’t push them, Tarrian.”
“Who?”
“Gilbear and the other Bluebloods. Sturm can’t control them and I sure as feth can’t either. From me, you’ll get tough honesty. From them, you’ll get a hell-round between the eyes.” Even as he spat the words, Gaunt felt them all crossing an almost imperceptible line. The line between a precarious confrontation and total mayhem.
“Gak you, you wretched off-world scum!” bawled Tarrian as he pulled his autopistol from its holster. Gilbear dropped him with a shot to the chest. Tarrian’s body exploded out through the back of the wooden seating.
The VPHC guards surged forward, racking riot-guns and firing. Gaunt saw a Blueblood fly backwards, hit in the shoulder. Sturm was cursing and blasting with his regimental service pistol. The Bluebloods opened up and sprayed the room.
Grizmund and his officers, blind under their hoods, dropped to the floor in terror. Gaunt wrestled the gasping advocate and his stunned clerk to the ground out of harm’s way. Daur’s laspistol cracked repeatedly.
Point-blank, in the tight confines of the court chamber, Volpone met VPHC head on, hellgun against riot-gun, filling the air with smoke, blood-mist and death.
Salvador Sondar slumped. A dribble of blood-bubbles fluttered from his ear towards the roof of the tank. He gave in. The chatter filled him, eating into his flesh, his blood, his marrow, his mind.
He did what it told him to do.
He deactivated the Shield.
THIRTEEN
THE HARROWING
“Never.”
—Warmaster Slaydo, on being asked under what
circumstances he would signal surrender
There was a loud, subsonic bang of pressure as the great Shield collapsed.
Windows blew out all across the hive. The ambient temperature dropped by six whole degrees as the insulation of the energy dome vanished and the cold of the Verghast night swept in. The vortex of collapsing air whisked up the vast smoke banks collected around the Curtain Wall and blew them into the hive itself like acrid fog. Disconnected energies crackled up out of the great pylon and the anchor stations and burned themselves out ferociously in the blackness.
A shuddering and terrifying noise drove in across Vervunhive. It was the unified howl of triumph from the millions of Zoicans outside.
Marshal Croe, majestic in his robes and armour, had just reached Sondar Gate with his staff retinue, and he stopped in his tracks, gazing up incredulously into the cold dark. His first thought was mechanical failure or even sabotage, but the Shield generators were the most securely guarded installations in the hive, and he had expressly ordered work-teams to inspect them every hour.
This was unthinkable. Inside the ceramite of his freshly donned war armour, Croe felt his heart grow as cold as the night around him. The ungifted powersword of Heironymo Sondar, most valued of all the hive’s war-icons, felt heavy and useless in his hand. He caught himself and glanced around. The bannerpoles of his colour-sergeants drooped and fluttered dismally about him.
“Lord marshal?” whispered his adjutant, Major Otte.
“We…” Croe began, his mind racing, frantic but empty. He was torn. He wanted to return to the Main Spine at once and cut to the root of this disaster, get the Shield back on. It was Sondar, he felt it in his blood. That bastard Salvador had finall
y gone over the edge.
But the immediate fight was here at the hive wall, in the face of the massing foe. His men had seen his arrival and if he turned around now, just as he had arrived, it would destroy their morale.
The silence that had followed the ghastly massed howl of the Zoicans outside, a silence that in truth could only have lasted a few seconds, was lost abruptly as the ear-splitting bombardment resumed. For leagues, the sky behind the towering shadow of the Curtain Wall that rose above him was lit yellow by the flare of colossal assault. Croe saw a section of turret to the west of the gate explode and collapse down into the Square of Marshals in a shower of sparks and rubble.
He took the tower steps two at a time at the head of his retinue, blazing the sacred sword into life, raging out orders to both the men around him and those unseen on the wall-top via his microbead link.
One of those orders, direct and succinct, coded in House Croe battle language, was for the ears of Izak, Croe’s personal bodyguard. The big house warrior, clad in maroon body-armour, faltered at the foot of the tower steps and then turned back, curtly acknowledging his lord’s command. He ran back across the square to the armoured staff-track that had brought Croe to Sondar Gate, and he steered it away at full throttle towards the Main Spine.
Alarms and klaxons began to whoop and wail once again. In the refuges and the camps of the Commercia and the other open spaces of the hive, the multitude seethed in panic. They’d seen the Shield fail. They’d fought their way to the security of the hive and now that too was gone.
Stampeding in places, two and a half million refugees began to surge north towards the river, the deluge of their bodies choking the streets. Their vast numbers were quickly swelled by inner hab citizens, worker families and low guilders, who had all, in a brief few seconds, seen their protection from Zoica disappear. In a matter of minutes, the hive was haemorrhaging people, rivers of panicking, screaming civilians, heading in hordes to a river they couldn’t hope to cross.
Lord Heymlik Chass looked up from his scriptorium and gazed out of the ogee window. The stylus dropped from his trembling fingers and made a blot of violet ink on the pages of his journal. He got up, his ornamental chair tumbling over onto its back, and he stumbled across to the window, pressing his hands against the lead glass.
“Oh, Salvador,” he said, tears in his eyes, “what have you done?”
His daughter burst into the room, still dressed in her nightgown, her terrified maids trying to wrap a velvet robe around her. Outside in the hall. House Chass lifeguards were shouting and running to and fro. Lord Chass turned and saw the look of jolted fear and bewilderment in his daughter’s eyes.
He took her in his arms.
“The alarms woke me, father. What—”
“Hush. You will be all right, Merity.” He stroked her hair, holding her head tight to his chest.
“Handmaids?”
The women barely curtsied. They were terrified and half-dressed themselves.
“Take my daughter to Shelter aa/6. Do it now.”
“The chamberlain is preparing the house shelter, lord,” said Maid Wholt.
“Forget the house shelter! Escort her now to aa/6 in the sub-levels!”
“A municipal bunker, lord?” gasped Maid Francer.
“Are you both deaf and stupid? The sublevels! Now!”
The maids scurried around, pulling at Merity. She clung on to her father. She was crying so much she couldn’t speak.
“Go, daughter of Chass. Go now. I will follow shortly. I beg you, go!”
The maids managed to drag the sobbing girl out of the chamber and away towards the Spine elevators.
“Rudrec!” At Lord Chass’ shout, the chief lifeguard appeared in the doorway. He was still buttoning on his ornate body-armour. His weapon was armed and unshrouded. He bowed.
Lord Chass handed him a small, silk satchel. “Go with my daughter. See she is brought safe to the municipal shelter. No other will do — no other is deep enough. Take this for her: a few private family items. Make sure she gets them.”
Rudrec tucked the satchel inside the body of his flak-mail hauberk. “It is my duty to escort you too, lord, I—”
“You are a good man, Rudrec. You have served this house well. Serve it again by doing as I order.”
Rudrec paused, his eyes meeting his lord’s directly for the first and last time in his life.
“Go!”
Alone now, the hall outside thundering with footsteps and voices, Chass put on his ceremonial robes, his bicorn hat, his shot-silk gloves. He was shaking, but most of that was rage. He put his ducal seal in his coat pocket, pushed the heavy code-signet ring onto his gloved finger, and slid a compact, single-shot bolt pistol with inlaid grips into his gown’s inner sleeve. A handful of shells followed it.
Chass strode out into the corridor, stopping three of his lifeguards short. They saluted uncertainly.
“Come with me,” he told them.
Less than five minutes after the Shield vanished, the first Zoican shells began to wound the inner hive. It was as if their artillery, their Earthshakers, their siege mortars, their missile positions had all been ranged ready, waiting.
Wave after wave of shrieking missiles screamed in over the Curtain Wall and hit the central district. Concussive ripples of explosions blew out along block after block, closing arterial routes with rubble, setting fires that blazed through dozens of high-rise habitat structures. Thousands of habbers, either sheltering in their homes or fleeing through the streets, were obliterated or left crippled and helpless.
Siege mortar shells wailed in across Sondar Gate and punctured the stone concourse of the Square of Marshals. Flagstone sections, whizzing like blades, were flung out, decapitating or mashing wall troopers from behind. The distinguished lines of statues edging the square were toppled by the blasts or disintegrated outright.
Mass shelling pounded the manufactories alongside Croe Gate. Swathes of machine shops and warehousing caught fire, and the flames established a firm hold, licking west into the worker habs. Similar shelling, supported by ground-to-ground rockets, began to systematically hammer the habs and manufactories behind Hass West, and the impacts of their fall crept north into the elite sector. Guild holdings and house ordinary estates were flattened and torn apart.
The shelling and the dreadful cutting beams searing Hass East scored a hole a hundred metres wide where the Curtain Wall and the Ontabi Gate had once stood, and as the beams redirected towards the inner habs and the upper stretches of the Curtain, the Zoican armoured column and massed infantry along the Vannick Highway pressed in through the breach. The Zoican land forces made their first entry into Vervunhive proper thirteen minutes after the Shield came down, though the insurgent forces encountered by Sergeant Varl were, by then, well inside the hive.
Long-range shells — some two thousand kilos apiece, launched from railcars drawn up on hasty, makeshift trackways out in the southern grasslands — whistled and whooped as they dropped on the Commercia and the mercantile suburbs. Barter-houses blew out, their rich canopies igniting in sheets of flame as hot as the heart of a star. Shockwaves crumpled others and the massive shells dug vast craters in the rockcrete footing of the hive. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were still pressing to leave the commercial spaces. Most died in the firestorms or were instantly obliterated by the shelling. Some of the craters were five hundred metres across.
Shelling and missile attacks began to hit the vast Main Spine itself. In hundreds of places, the adamantine skin of the city-peak ruptured and holed. Fires burned unchecked through nine or more levels. House Nompherenti, on Level 68, took a direct hit from a massive incendiary rocket and the entire noble lineage was immolated. They died frenzied, tortured deaths amid the furnace of tapestries, furniture and drapes in their exalted court. Lord Nompherenti himself, ablaze from head to foot, ran screaming for a hundred paces and toppled from the raised balcony of his banquet hall. His burning body, streaming a trail of fire like a comet, plu
nged fifteen hundred metres down onto the roofs of the central district.
General Xance, with a tattered vanguard of seven hundred NorthCol troops, was pushing through the firestorm chaos west of Croe Gate when pinpoint shells began to rip along his straggle of trucks and Chimera troop carriers. Vehicle after vehicle exploded, showering the street with metal debris, ignited ammunition and plumes of gushing fuel. NorthCol troopers fled the convoy to either side, dying in further shell-strikes everywhere they turned. Xance’s truck was overturned by a shell that struck the road alongside it. Blacked out for a few seconds, the general found himself lying twisted in a mangle of ruptured wreckage and the bloody remains of his command team. There was a fine, dark drizzle in the air which he realised was a vapour of blood droplets.
He tried to move, but pain gutted him. A transverse-gear rod had disembowelled him. He was half-buried in splintered body parts.
He moved aside a fragment of leg that lay across his chest, coughing blood. Then a limbless torso that still had the NorthCol insignia on its braids. Then a severed arm.
He gazed at it. It was his own.
Shells dropped all around, lighting the space with flashes so bright they burned out his optic nerves. They made no sound, not to him anyway. His eardrums had been punctured by the initial shell strike. Blind and deaf, he could only sense the carnage around by the quaking of the ground and the Shockwaves that buffeted at him.
Xance was almost the last of his seven hundred-strong unit to die. He had bled to death, howling in rage, before yet another shell vaporised him.
In House Command, Vice Marshal Anko had fallen silent, his voice robbed to hoarse whispers by the screaming orders he had been issuing. He slumped across the great chart table as the command staff hurried around, stunned and helpless.