Captain Petro, one of the tacticians, emerged from the baptistry too and came to stand with Daur, an old friend from their academy days.
“He’s frightening…”Petro said.
“Gaunt?”
Petro nodded. “His mind, his focus… it’s like a codifier. All drive, all purpose.”
Daur sipped his glass. “Like Slaydo,” he said. Petro raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Remember how we studied the warmaster’s career? The keynote was always Slaydo’s singularity of purpose — that he could look at a theatre and plan it in his head, hold the whole situation in his mind. That was military brilliance. I think we’re seeing its like again.”
“He served with Slaydo, didn’t he?”
“Yes. His record speaks for itself.”
“But as an infantry officer.” Petro frowned. “Gaunt’s reputation’s never been for overall battlefield command, not on this scale.”
“I don’t think he’s ever had the chance to show it before — a commissar, a troop commander, always following the lead of higher ranks. He’s never had an opportunity like this before. Besides… I think it may be because he’s got everything to prove.”
“What the gak do you mean, Ban?”
“The high commanders are dead… or, like Sturm, disgraced. Fate and his own actions have put Gaunt in command, and I think he’s determined to prove he should have been there all along.”
At a crossroads designated fg/567, in the heart of the eastern central habs, Bulwar’s infantry divisions were close to breaking. They had no anti-armour ordnance left and the Zoican tank thrust was burning a spearhead through from Croe Gate, laying waste to hectares of habitat structures.
Bulwar and his NorthCol battlegroup moved south around the crossroads, tackling Zoican troops in the rockcrete tangles that had once been labour-homes. Tank rounds screamed down over them, blowing out sections of wall and roadway, collapsing precarious spires of rubble and masonry.
In the shell of a funicular carriage station, between the ornate marble pillars and the old brass benches, they fought at close quarters with a phalanx of Zoicans. More were pouring in through the ticket booths at the far end or climbing up into the station through the shattered wreck of a carriage train that had made its last stop at the platform. Civilian dead lay all around.
Bulwar led the attack, breaking body armour with his power claw and shooting with his autogun. Men fell around him, too many to count. A las-round struck his shoulder and he was thrown backwards off his feet.
When he got up, things had changed. A fighting force had erupted into the station from the passenger exits and it was tearing into the Zoicans from the side. They weren’t NorthCol or Vervun Primary or even Guard. They were workers, hive labourers, armed with captured guns, axe-rakes, or any other weapon they could find. Bulwar realised they were one of the many “scratch companies” informally raised by willing habbers to support the defence. He’d heard of many emerging from the ruins to assist the Imperial forces, but not one of this size and organisation. Their vengeful fury was astonishing.
The frenzied fighting lasted about eight minutes. Between them, Bulwar’s platoon and the workers killed every Zoican in the station precinct.
There was cheering and whooping, and NorthCol troopers hugged Vervunhivers like lost brothers.
A short, thick-set worker with one eye, bedraggled in muck and blood, limped over to Bulwar and saluted.
“Who are you?” asked Bulwar.
“Soric, commander of the Smeltery Irregulars, sir!”
Bulwar couldn’t help smiling. The worker boss had a general’s pins, fashioned out of bottle caps, sewn into his jacket.
“I thank the Emperor for you, General Soric.”
Soric paused and glanced bashfully at his insignia. “Sorry, sir; just a joke to rally the men. I’m just a plant supervisor—”
“Who fights like a warmaster. How many are you?”
“About seven hundred, sir — workers, habbers, anyone really. We’ve been trying to do our bit for the hive ever since the start, and when the Shield went down, it was run or fight.”
“You’d put us to shame.”
Soric frowned. “If we won’t fight for our own bloody hive, sir, I don’t know who should.”
Standing orders required all unit commanders to inform Spine Command of the size and composition of any scratch companies encountered so that they could be designated a marker code and factored into the defence structure. Bulwar called up his vox-officer and called in the details of Soric’s Irregulars. He looked to Soric. “We need to co-ordinate, general. I thank the Emperor for the likes of you, but we’ll only win this thing if the military forces and the civilian levies work as one. Get your men to spread the word. Scratch companies must try to make contact with Imperial forces and be accounted for. They’ll have to take orders too.”
Soric nodded and called his “officers” up to brief them.
“You can’t be a general though, I’m afraid,” said Bulwar. Soric was already pulling his makeshift rank pins off.
“Take a brevet rank, Soric. State-of-emergency field promotion. You’re a sergeant now and you’ll answer to me. Designate one man in every twenty a corporal, and fix a chain of command. You choose them; you know them.”
Soric nodded again, lost for words with pride.
Explosions thundered across the station, throwing some of the men to the ground. One of Soric’s freedom fighters was yelling out. “Enemy tanks! Enemy tanks!”
Bulwar and Soric scrambled over to the station’s east entrance to see. The huge shapes of Zoican storm-tanks, long-barrelled and heavily armoured, were scything in towards the station and the surrounding habs. Others, including fast-moving light assault tanks and squat, super-heavy flamer platforms, were pushing round onto the transit streets leading to the Commercia and the Shield Pylon.
“We have explosives, sir,” said Soric, saluting again for good measure. “Mining charges we lifted from the stores behind the smelteries.”
“Static charges with no launchers… against tanks?”
“It’s how we’ve been doing it so far, sir: a man takes a wrap of charges and runs with it, anchors it to the tank hull—”
“Suicide!”
Soric frowned. “Duty, sir. What other way is there?”
“How many tanks have you taken out with that method?”
“Twenty-four, I think.”
“How many men has it cost you?”
Soric shrugged. “Twenty-four, of course.”
Bulwar wiped his mouth on the back of his glove. Incredible. The devotion, the determination. The sacrifice. The workers of Vervunhive, who had built this place with their sweat, were now buying it back with their blood. It was an object lesson in loyalty and devotion that even the finest Imperial Guard regiment could admire.
The tanks were closing now, hammering the station, blowing sections of the overhead trackway down. Sheets of fire leapt through the terminus hall.
“Throne of Earth!” Soric gasped, pointing.
Mustard-drab battle tanks, moving at full power across the rubble scarps, some of them bursting through sections of wall, were thundering forward from the west. They were firing freely, with huge accuracy, maintaining a cycle rate of fire that the Zoican armour, turning to the flank to greet them, couldn’t even begin to match.
Neither Bulwar nor Soric had ever seen a mass armour charge before, certainly not one undertaken by a crack Imperial tank brigade like the Narmenians. They opened their mouths in awe, and nothing but wild cheers came out.
Grizmund called it “Operation Dercius.” He’d sent his sentinel recon units and foot-troop spotter units forward towards Croe Gate as he composed his tank brigade in the Commercia. The spotters couldn’t fix the position of the moving Zoican armour, but they could assess its force and direction. Grizmund had compiled the data and sent his main columns first south into the habs and then turned them east at full speed, to catch the enemy’s flank. Grizmund
truly understood the power of armoured vehicles, not just the physical power, but the psychological strength. If a tank was a threatening thing then a tank moving fast, and firing accurately and repeatedly, was a nightmare. The tank strike was his forte and he only admitted into the Narmenian cadre drivers who could handle thirty-plus tonnes of armour at speed, and gunners and layers who could fire fast, repeatedly and make kills each time.
In the command chair of The Grace of the Throne, Grizmund watched the picts on his auspex slate wink and flash as they marked hits on the glowing target runes. The interior of the turret was a red-lit sweat-box, alive with the chatter of the vox and the efficient call and return of the gun team. Fresh brass-stamped shells clanked down into the greased loading rack from the magazine over the aft wheels, and the layer primed them and shunted them forward to the gunner, who was hunting through the glowing green viewer of his scope. Every few seconds, the layer eased the muzzle recoil brake and the main gun fired with a retort that shook the tank and welled smoke into the turret, smoke quickly sucked out through the louvres of the outlets.
Grizmund’s driver, Wolsh, was one of the finest and he kept them moving even when firing. He had a master’s eye for terrain and seemed to know exactly what to ram and what to steer around, what to drive over and what to avoid. The Narmenians joked that Wolsh could smell a mine a kilometre off.
Operation Dercius threw forty fast-moving Narmenian heavy tanks down through fg/567 and cut through the neck of the Zoican column spread. Grizmund’s forces had killed or crippled seventy-two enemy vehicles by the time they doubled back, swinging around without breaking speed to re-engage the shattered Zoican armour from the other side. By then, the Zoican armour was milling and fracturing in confusion.
Now came the part that required true skill, a manoeuvre Grizmund had dubbed The Scissors’. As his tanks came around to re-engage, another fifty under Brigadier Nachin charged the enemy from the other side, from the direction of Grizmund’s original strike. A textbook disaster in the hands of less able commanders, but at the turn, Grizmund’s forces had begun to send identifying vox beacons to distinguish them from the enemy, and Nachin’s forces did the same. The rule was anything caught between their charges that didn’t broadcast the correct beacon was a target. Grizmund had used this tactic nine times before and never lost a tank to his own fire.
That fine record was maintained at Vervunhive. Like the jaws of some vast beast, the opposing Narmenian armour charges tore in towards each other, crushing and destroying everything between them. Grizmund and Nachin’s speeding tanks passed through each other’s ranks, some vehicles missing others at full speed by only a hull’s span.
And they had just begun. In the course of the thirty-fifth afternoon, the Narmenian divisions executed three more precision scissor manouvres, looping back and forth onto each other, slowly chewing the head, neck and shoulders off the vast Zoican incursion.
By four o’clock, the Zoicans had lost nearly two hundred tanks and armoured battle-hulks. The Narmenians had lost only two.
By nightfall, the Narmenians had driven the Zoican armour back into the inner habs, less than ten kilometres from Croe Gate, and cut a slice down the spearhead from Ontabi. With the routes behind them clear of enemy armour, efforts to resupply the Imperial ground troops were now no longer suicidal. Labour forces of the Administratum, the cargo guilds and Vervun Primary spread out in convoys and brought fresh ammunition to the dug-in infantry forces. Many, like Bulwar’s, now resupplied with rockets, launchers and grenades, followed the Narmenian thrust out towards the great eastern gates, killing every Zoican tank the Guard armour had missed.
Rising from his seat at the font-desk in the baptistry, Gaunt took the data-slate Petro held out to him and smiled a weary smile as he read the reports of Grizmund’s sally. He felt… justified: justified in his faith in the general, justified in fighting for him in the stockade, and justified in his tactical plans to hold the hive.
Towards Sondar Gate and Veyveyr, the position was less heartening. The NorthCol armour lacked the genius of leadership or the combat-experienced skill that shone in the Narmenians. Major Clodel, commanding the NorthCol units, had done little more than grind his tanks into a slugfest with the Zoican armour penetrating the hive from the south. He had stopped them, though, halting them at the edge of the southern manufactories, and for that he would get Gaunt’s commendation. But now a blistering, static tank-war raged through the southern skirts, and there was no possibility of driving the invaders back and out or of sealing the gates. North of Veyveyr, the NorthCol were losing as many tanks as they were destroying. Gaunt wished for another of Grizmund’s ilk to lead them, but he couldn’t spare any of the Narmenians from the eastern repulse. He would be content with what he had.
And what he had was a shattered hive spared from the brink of defeat at the eleventh hour. He wasn’t winning, but he wasn’t losing either. To the east, he was driving the foe out. To the south and west, he was holding them hard. There was still a chance that they could win out and deny Heritor Asphodel and his Zoican zealots.
The baptistry hummed with activity and Gaunt wandered away into the side chapel as tacticians filled in for him at the hololithic chart. Daur was orchestrating the command workforce. A good man, Gaunt thought, rising courageously to his moment in Imperial history.
Can the same be said about me, he wondered?
The side chapel — a sacristy, peculiarly calm and softly lit given the apocalypse currently unleashed outside the Spine walls — seemed to welcome him. He was dead on his feet with fatigue. He’d spent all day at a desk, with a data-slate in one hand and a vox-horn in the other, and yet he’d fought the greatest and most exhausting battle of his career so far. This was command, true high command, wretched with absolutes and finites. He pulled his newly bestowed powersword from its sheath and leaned it on the edge of the gilt altar rail so he could sit down. Above him, a great, golden statue of the Emperor glowered. The air was full of the continuing song of the Ecclesiarch.
He made no obeisance to the Emperor. He was too tired. He sat on a bench pew in the tiny chapel, removed his cap and buried his face in his hands.
Gaunt thought of Oktar, Dercius, Slaydo and his father, the men who had moulded his life and brought him to this, equipping him, each in their own way, with the skills he now used. He missed them all, missed their confidences and strength. Oktar had trained him, and Gaunt had been at the great commissar-general’s side when he had passed, wracked with ork poison on Gylatus Decimus, over twenty years before. Slaydo, the peerless warmaster — Gaunt had been at his deathbed too, on Balhaut after the finest victory of all. Gaunt’s father had died far away when he was still a child. And Dercius — bad, old Uncle Dercius; Gaunt had killed him.
But each, in their own way, had made him. Oktar had taught him command and discipline; Dercius: ruthlessness and confidence; Slaydo: the merits of command and the selflessness of Imperial service. And his father? What he had gleaned from his father was more difficult to identify. What a father leaves to his child is always the most indefinable quality.
“Lord commander?”
Gaunt looked up from his reverie. Merity Chass, dressed in a simple, black gown of mourning, stood behind him in the arch of the sacristy. She held something in her hands.
Gaunt got up. “Lady Chass?”
“I need to speak with you,” she began, “about my father.”
SIXTEEN
THE LEGACY
“That our beloved hive should be conquered, or should fall into the controlling hands of unwise or unfit masters, I greatly fear and sadly anticipate. For this reason, I entrust this ultimate sanction to you. Use it wisely.”
—Heironymo Sondar, to Lord Chass
“It has been in the trust of my family since the Trade War,” she explained, her voice broken and exhausted.
Gaunt took the amulet from her hands and felt it purr and whisper between his fingers.
“Sondar made this?”
“It was his provision for the future. It is — in its own way — treachery.”
“Explain it again. I cannot see how this is treachery.”
Merity Chass looked up into Gaunt’s tired eyes fretfully.
“Vervunhive is a democratic legislative. The High Lord is voted in by his noble peers. It is written in the sacred acts of constitution that absolute power should never be allowed to rest with any one individual who could not be unseated by the Legislature should it become necessary.”
“Yet the hive has suffered under one individual: Salvadore.”
“Precisely the kind of evil Heironymo dreaded, commander. My father told me that after the Trade War, great Heironymo wished to vouchsafe the future security of Vervunhive. Above all else, he feared a loss of control. That an invader — or a ruler not fit for the role — would seize control of Vervunhive so entirely that nothing could unseat him. What usurper or tyrant observes the mechanisms of constitution and law?”
Gaunt began to understand the far-reaching political dilemma attached to the device in his gloved hand. “So this was his failsafe: the ultimate sanction, so very undemocratic, to be used when democracy was overturned?”
“And so you understand why it had to be a secret. Heironymo knew that by constructing such a device he would lay himself open to accusations of tyranny and dictatorship.”
She gestured towards the amulet. “He made that and entrusted it to House Chass, whom he considered the most humanitarian and neutral noble house. It was never made to fall into the hands of any ruler. It was the safeguard against totalitarian rule.”
“And if House Chass became the High House?”
“We were to entrust it to another, as surety against our misuse of power.”
“And you give it to me?”