He sat down on the pew and laughed to himself dryly.
“What?” she asked.
Gaunt shook his head. Such thoughts! He had committed the cardinal sin of any good officer. He’d placed his emotions in the firing line. Even now, he could hear Oktar’s dirty chuckle in his mind, scolding him for becoming attached to anyone or anything. Over the years they had spent campaigning together, Gaunt had seen Oktar leave many tearful women behind as he moved on to the next warzone.
“Don’t get involved, Ibram, not with anything. If you don’t care, you won’t care, and that makes the hardest parts of this army life that much easier. Do what you must, take what you need and move on. Never look back, never regret and never remember.”
Gaunt buttoned his shirt. He realised, perhaps for the first time, that he had broken with Oktar’s advice a long time since. When he had met the Tanith and had brought them as Ghosts from the deathfires of their world, he had started to care. He decided he didn’t see it as a weakness. In that one thing, old Oktar had been wrong. Caring for the Ghosts, for the cause, for the fight, or for anyone, made him what he was. Without those reasons, without an emotional investment, he would have walked away or put a gun-muzzle in his mouth years before.
Gaunt got to his feet and found his cap, his gloves and his weapon belt.
He was trying to remember the furious notions that had woken him. Ideas, whirling…
Daur burst into the sacristy. “Commissar! Sir, we—” Daur saw the naked woman cloaked in the overcoat and stopped in his tracks. He turned away, flushing.
“A moment, captain.”
Gaunt crossed to Merity.
“I must go. When this is over—”
“We’ll either be dead, or we’ll be a noble lady and a soldier once again.”
“Then I thank the Emperor for this precious interlude of equality. Until the hour of my death, however far away that is, I will remember you.”
“I should hope so. And I hope that hour is a long time coming.”
He kissed her mouth, stroked his fingers down her cheek, and then followed Daur out of the sacristy, pulling on his jacket and weapon-harness. At the door, he put on his cap and adjusted the metal rose Lord Chass had given him for honour. It was drooping in his lapel and he straightened it.
“Sorry, sir,” Daur said as Gaunt followed him down the hall.
“Forget it, Ban. You should have woken me earlier.”
“I wanted to give you all the rest you could get, sir.”
“What’s the situation now?”
“A holding pattern as before. Intense fighting on all fronts. The enemy has taken the north shore. And Hass West fell a few minutes ago.”
“Damn!” Gaunt growled. They strode into the bustle of the Baptistry Command Centre. Additional cogitators and vox-sets had been added over night. Over three hundred men and women from Vervun Primary, the Administratum and the guilds now crewed them, working in concert with dozens of servitors. Major Otte was occupying “the Font,” as the command station was now known. Intendant Banefail and members of his elite staff assisted the major.
Many saluted as Gaunt entered the chamber. He acknowledged the greetings while taking in the details of the main hololithic display.
“Just before it fell, Hass West reported seeing a massive mobile structure moving in towards them. We’re fairly sure it is their main command vehicle.”
Gaunt spotted the marker on the display. The thing was certainly huge, and now close to the western extremity of the Wall. “The marker code… ‘spike’?”
Banefail joined them. The distinguished lord was almost dead on his feet with fatigue. “My fault, commissar. I referred to it as a bloody great spike, and the word stuck.”
“It’ll do. What do we know about it?”
“It’s a massive weapon, but slow moving,” Major Otte said, crossing the floor to Gaunt. “I guess we can assume it’s well armoured too.”
“What makes you think it’s the command element?”
“It’s the only one we’ve sighted,” Daur said, “and its size clearly indicates its importance.”
“More than that,” Banefail said, gesturing at a vox-set manned by a female Administratum cleric, two servitors and a withered astropath. “It’s the source of the chatter.”
Gaunt glanced at the woman operating the set. She dialled up the speaker and the air filled briefly with the coded, incessant growl of the enemy.
“The enemy vox-traffic unites them all,” lisped the pallid astropath thickly. Gaunt tried not to look at him and the festoon of data-plugs stapled into his translucent scalp. The astropath lifted a bionically augmented, wasted limb and pointed to data runes flashing across the instrumentation. “We knew it was coming from outside the hive and we suspected the source was Zoica. But it’s mobile now and audio scans confirm it is being emitted by that structure.”
Gaunt nodded to himself. “Asphodel.”
Banefail glanced around at the name. “He’s there? So close?”
“It matches his recorded behaviour. The Heritor likes to be near to his triumphs, and he likes to maintain intense control. He commands by charisma, intendant. Where his legions march, we will not find him far behind.”
“Golden Throne…” Otte murmured, looking at the display with frightened eyes.
Gaunt forced himself to look at the astropath. The stink of the warp hung about the cadaverous wretch. “Your opinion? This chatter: could it be the control signal of the Zoican forces? An addictive broadcast that maintains the Heritor’s hold over his zealots?”
“It is certainly patterned and hypnotic. I find myself reluctant to listen to it for any length of time. It is a Chaos pulse. Though we can’t — daren’t — interpret its meaning, the flow of the enemy troops and armour seems to match its rhythmic fluctuations.”
Gaunt turned away, deep in thought. The idea that had woken him reformed in his mind.
“I have a notion,” he told Daur, Otte and Banefail. “Send word to Major Rawne’s units and to Sergeant Mkoll and his scout platoon.” He ordered other preparations to be made, and then told Daur to fetch him a fresh box of bolter shells.
“Where are you going? We need you here, sir!” stammered Otte.
“You have my full confidence, major,” Gaunt said. He gestured to the hololithic display. “The defence strategies are set in motion. You and this staff are more than able to direct them. I’m a foot soldier. A warrior, not a warmaster. It’s time I did my job, the job I’m best at. And with the grace of the Emperor shining on me, I may take this field yet.”
Gaunt took Heironymo’s amulet from his pocket and felt it whisper and chuckle in his hand. The flickering light patterns on its carapace roiled like the twisting flashes of the Immaterium.
“In my absence, Otte and Daur have field command. If I fail to return, intendant, you should signal Warmaster Macaroth and plead for salvation. But I believe it won’t come to that.”
The amulet gurgled and quivered.
This could work, thought Gaunt. God-Emperor save us, this could fething work!
SEVENTEEN
OPERATION HIERONYMO
“I believe this Gaunt fellow is singularly overrated.”
—General Noches Sturm to Major Gilbear,
during the assault on Voltemand
A scratch company met them at 281/kl to guide them in. The company was forty strong and had been conducting guerrilla work in the southern outer habs before the Shield fell. Their leader, a powerful, saturnine ex-miner called Gol Kolea, saluted Gaunt as he approached. Gaunt looked every centimetre a leader, though the braid of his cap had been rubbed with ash to dull its glint. He wore the powersword at his waist and his boltgun in a holster across his chest, under a short, black, leather jacket. On top of that, draped expertly as Colm Corbec had instructed him during the first days of the Ghost regiment’s existence, was his Tanith stealth cape.
The roar of battle thundered down the ruined streets beside them, but this sector was cl
ear and quiet. Cold, morning light filtered in through the crackling Shield. Gaunt signalled his units up to join Kolea’s scratch company: thirty men, all Tanith, pale-skinned, dark-haired warriors in black fatigues and stealth capes, their skin decorated with various, blue tattoo symbols. They were the cream of Rawne’s unit and the pride of Mkoll’s stealth scouts. Amongst them, Bragg, Larkin, Domor, MkVenner, Dremmond, Genx, Neskon, Cocoer, the medic Gherran — most of the very best.
Gaunt was beginning to outline “Operation Heironymo” to his waiting squad when Rawne heard movement down a side street. The Ghosts and scratches fanned out and made ready, arming weapons freshly supplied for the mission.
A fireteam of ten Volpone advanced down the side street, led by Colonel Gilbear. They were all Volpone elite troops from the 10th: massive, carapace-armoured and holding hellguns ready.
Gaunt walked out into the rubble-strewn open to meet Gilbear. They saluted each other.
“Not going in without the Bluebloods, I hope, colonel-commissar?” Gilbear said archly.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, colonel,” Gaunt replied. “I’m glad you got my message and gladder still you found your way here. Join us. We’re about to move out.”
Gaunt crossed to Rawne and Kolea as the Volpone meshed into the column spread.
“I don’t fething believe you invited them,” Rawne cursed.
“Keep your thoughts to yourself, major. The Bluebloods may be bastards, but I feel I have reached an understanding with them. Besides, we’ll need their muscle when it comes to it.”
Rawne spat in the puddles and made no reply.
“I understand you’re command now,” Kolea said bluntly to Gaunt. “May I ask what the gak you’re doing here? Gnide and Croe never got their hands dirty.”
“Their command ethic was different, Kolea. I hope you’ll appreciate my method of doing things.”
“Can you sign?”
“What?”
“Most of my company are deaf. Can you sign your commands?”
“I can, sir,” Mkoll piped up.
Gaunt gestured to the scout sergeant. “Mkoll can relay my instructions to your fighters. Good enough?”
Gol Kolea scratched his cheek. “Perhaps.”
Gaunt could tell Kolea had been through hell in the last thirty-odd days. Courage and determination seemed to ooze out of him like sweat. He was not a man Gaunt wanted to be on the wrong side of.
They followed dingy, battle-worn streets out through the southern extremities of the hive, and they left the shattered Curtain Wall behind them. Mkoll’s scouts led the way, directed by Kolea’s troops. The bulky Volpone struggled to keep up with the swift, silent advance. Clear of the Shield, they were all exposed to the bitter rain.
“You know these quarters well, Kolea. I guess they were your home,” Gaunt remarked softly to the miner.
“Correct. Just half a kilometre from here, I could take you to the crater where my hab once stood.”
“You lost family?”
“A wife, two children. I don’t know they’re dead, but — gak! What are the chances?” Gaunt shrugged.
“How many did you lose coming here?” Kolea asked. “Troops?”
Kolea shook his head. “Family.”
“I didn’t have any to lose. I don’t know which of us is luckier.” Kolea smiled, but without any light or laughter in his face. “Neither one, commissar. And that’s the tragedy.”
“I don’t know about the girls,” Larkin muttered as they moved through the scorched-out, rain-pelted ruins. Bragg, his missile launcher and autocannon slung over his shoulders, raised his eyebrows and made no reply. There were eight females in Kolea’s scratch company, none older than twenty-five. Each held a captured Zoican lasgun or a Vervun Primary autorifle and carried an equipment pack over their ragged work fatigues. Most of them, like the men, wore salvaged military boots wadded with socks and wrapped tight with puttees made of cargo tape to keep them fast. The women moved as silently and as surely as their male comrades. A month of intense guerrilla war in the outhabs had trained them well. Those that had not learned had not made it.
“Women can fight,” Rilke murmured, holding his sniper rifle with the stock high in his armpit and the long barrel pointing downwards. “My sister, Loril, used to hold her own against the rowdies when it got to chucking-out time in my father’s tavern back home. Feth, but she could throw a punch!”
“That’s not what I meant,” growled Larkin, rain dripping off his thin nose. “It doesn’t seem right, sending women in like this, all gussied up in combat gear and waving lasguns. I mean, they’re just girls. This is gonna get nasty. No place for women.”
“Keep it down!” Dremmond hissed, lugging his flamer with its weighty, refilled tanks. “They’ll hear you, Larks!”
“You heard what that big, bastard miner said. They’re all shell-deaf! I can speak my mind without insulting no one! They can’t hear me!”
“But we can read lips, Tanith,” Banda said, moving past the chief sniper with a smirk. Some of the other scratches nearby laughed.
“I — I didn’t mean nothing by it,” Larkin began, moving his mouth over-emphatically to make sure she could hear. Banda looked back at him, a mocking expression on her dirty face.
“And anyway, I’m not deaf. Neither’s Muril. And neither are the Zoicans. So why don’t you clamp it and do us all a favour?”
They moved on, the eighty-strong assault group splashing down a damp, debris-strewn side road.
“That told you,” Dremmond whispered to Larkin.
“Shut up,” Larkin replied.
MkVenner scouted ahead as part of Mkoll’s recon deployment. In his immediate field of vision was Scout Bonin and the scratch company guides: a girl called Nessa and a Vervun Primary sergeant named Haller, who was second in command of Kolea’s makeshift group. Haller was one of nine Vervun Primary survivors to have found their way into the scratch company, though with his dirty, patched uniform and the woollen cap he wore in place of his spiked helmet, he didn’t look much like a Primary infantryman anymore. He seemed content to be commanded by a miner rather than a military officer. MkVenner knew the members of the scratch company had weathered the very worst of the war, and he couldn’t begin to understand their loyalties or the circumstances that had brought them together.
Nessa guided them through a series of torched manufactories, covering the ground quickly, keeping low and making curt, direct gestures they could read easily. They crossed an arterial highway where the rockcrete was crumpled by a series of shell-holes, and they skirted the wrecks of two Zoican battletanks and an infantry carrier that had been flipped over onto its back.
Across the highway, they fanned through textile mills where the constant rain trickled in through the holed roofs and rows of iron-framed looms stood silent and shattered. The loose ends from hundreds of bales of twine rippled in the breeze. MkVenner stopped in a doorway and scanned around. He watched with idle fascination as droplets of rainwater crept down taut feed-threads over one loom, glinting like diamonds and thickening before dripping off the hanging brass bobbin onto the weaving frames beneath.
MkVenner realised he’d lost sight of the woman. Haller appeared behind him.
“You have to watch her,” Haller mouthed, signing at the same time. He knew full well MkVenner could hear, but the practise was now instinctive.
Bonin joined them and they edged down the length of the mill, until they found Nessa in an open loading dock at the far end, crouched behind an overturned bale-lifter. Outside, in the bright, thin light of the cargo yard, a quintet of Zoican flamer tanks grumbled by, heading north. The foot soldiers could smell the coarse stench of the promethium lapping in the tanks’ heavy bowsers.
Once the tanks had passed, Nessa made a punching motion in the air and the troops hurried on, across the open yard and into the razorwire-edged enclosure of a guild’s freight haulage plant. The rusting bulks of overhead cranes and hoists creaked in the wind above them. Rainwater had form
ed wide, shallow lakes across the rockcrete apron. They moved past rows of plasteel cargo crates and produce hoppers flaking paint. Near the haulage site office, a small Imperial chapel built for the workers had been desecrated by the advancing Zoicans. They’d shot out the windows and soiled the walls with excrement. A dozen site workers had been crucified along the front porch on gibbets made from rail sleepers. The bodies were little more than ghastly, stringy carcasses now. They’d been nailed up three weeks before, and the steady rain and the carrion birds had done their best to erode the flesh.
Haller’s boot clipped an empty bottle and the noise of it tinkling away across the ground startled the birds, who rose in cawing, raucous mobs, revealing the gristly horrors beneath. Some of the birds were fat, glossy-black scavengers, the others dirty-white seabirds from the estuary with clacking pincer-bills. Black and white, the birds made a brief checker pattern in the air before flocking west to the haulage barn roof and settling. The open ground was peppered and sticky with their droppings.
There was a break in the fence behind the chapel. MkVenner held position long enough to check, via microbead, that the main force was within range behind them. Gaunt and the column were just entering the haulage site.
The land south of the freight-holding was a mass of chalky rubble and sprouting weeds. There were dark driver holes in the ground at intervals and the area was littered with thousands of gleaming, brass shell cases. In an earlier stage of the war, massive Zoican field pieces had been braced here, trained at the Wall. MkVenner was about to move on, but Nessa stopped him.
He made the gesture for question, and she signed and mouthed back at him.
“In our experience, the Zoicans trap-wire their sites when they move on.”
MkVenner nodded. He signalled back and Gaunt sent Domor forward. Haller helped Domor lock his sweeper set together, and then the Ghost began to creep away from them, playing the head of the broom back and forth over the dirt. Domor liked to do this work by sound and MkVenner smiled to see him dosing the shutters of his bionic ocular implants by hand. The time when Domor could simply close his eyelids was long passed, way back on Menazoid Epsilon.