Domor had a path cleared in under five minutes, playing out a fibre-cord to mark its zigzag path. By the time he had finished, the assault force had caught up with them and were waiting with MkVenner, Haller, Nessa and Bonin at the fence.
“He found nothing?” asked Haller, pointing over at Domor on the far side of the area.
“No, he found plenty, but we’re not here to mine-lift. Follow the cord,” replied MkVenner.
Single file, the eighty soldiers crossed the ex-artillery emplacement and moved down along a reinforced walkway that crossed one of the hive’s main drainage gullies. Swollen by the heavy rains, the gully was in full flood. It was partially dammed in places by slews of debris rubbish and bundles of corpses.
Up the other side, they climbed the chute slope by a metal stairway and hurried in small packs across another highway. The ruined remains of bodies littering the road stretched as far as the eye could see. Most tried not to look. Larkin stared in horrified fascination as he crossed the road. Nothing more than bundles of rags, the bodies were those of workers and habbers slaughtered as they had tried to flee inwards towards Vervunhive. They had fallen weeks before, and no one had touched or moved them, except tire mashing tracks of Zoican war machines heading north towards their target.
Gaunt called a halt-period in the broken habitats on the far side of the highway. His motley brigade set up defence watches all around as he climbed to the third storey of a hab block with Kolea and Gilbear.
“I smell smoke,” Gilbear said suddenly. He moved ahead, down the dirty, dank hallway, his weapon raised, and kicked open the rotting door of a worker flat.
Gaunt and Kolea, weapons ready, moved in behind him. All three stopped short.
The flat was thick with trash and overrun with vermin. The smoke issued from a small fire set in a tar bucket over which swung a metal pot on a wire frame that had once been a clothes hanger. The five inhabitants of the room, a mother with three children and a much older woman, cowered in the far corner. They were emaciated and filthy, just terrified skin and bone clad in dirty tatters. The old woman whined like a caged animal and two of the children cried silently The mother, her eyes bright and fierce in her soot-black face, held out a shank of metal, sharpened to a point.
“Back off! Now!” Gaunt told Kolea and Gilbear, though Kolea needed no urging.
“It’s all right… I’m sorry” Gaunt told the mother, his hands raised, open. The shank remained pointing at him.
“Leave them,” Kolea said. He pulled a wad of ration cakes from his pack and went over, dropping them on the floor in front of the group when the mother refused to take them.
They went back out into the hallway and Kolea pulled the door back into place.
“Throne of Earth…” Gaunt hissed, shaking his head.
“Quite,” joined Gilbear. “What a waste of rations.”
Gaunt looked round at him, began to speak, and then just shook his head. Explaining the real nature of his horror to Gilbear might take a lifetime.
And that time, however it could be measured, was all Gaunt had left to do something far more important than drum compassion into an aristocratic warrior like the Blueblood colonel.
Kolea had heard Gilbear’s remark and he glowered at the man with utter disdain. Kolea doubted even the colonel-commissar understood what it was like to claw and scrape for survival in the shelled ruins of your home, day after day. Gol Kolea had seen enough of that misery since the Zoicans came, enough to last a hundred lifetimes. There were thousands of hab families out here still, slowly dying from starvation, disease and cold.
The trio of officers climbed out onto a fire escape at the eastern end of the hab block, and Gaunt and Gilbear pulled out their scopes.
Five kilometres south, across the ruins, through the smoke and rain, rose the bulk of the Spike. It was moving at a slow crawl, up towards the main hive. Gaunt swung his scope around and looked back at the vast, glinting dome of the Shield and the massive Spine and hab structures within.
Gaunt offered his scope to Kolea, but the man wasn’t interested. Gilbear gestured, suddenly and sharply, to them both and pointed down at the highway below, the one they had just crossed. A host of Zoican troopers, escorted by a vanguard of carriers and light tanks, was advancing towards them. Chaos banners flopped lankly in the rain and the light shone off the wet, ochre-coloured armour.
Gilbear raised his hellgun, about to turn, but Gaunt stopped him. “We’re not here to fight them. Our fight is elsewhere.”
The commissar keyed his microbead. “Mass enemy formation approaching along the highway outside. Stay low and stay silent.”
Rawne voxed back an acknowledgement.
It took half an hour for the Zoican column to go by. Gaunt estimated there were a little over two thousand foot troops and sixty armoured vehicles — reserves, advancing to bolster the assault. He wished to the Emperor himself he had reserves of such numbers to call upon. Feth, he wished he had such strengths in his active units!
Once the column was safely past and clear, the Operation Heironymo assault cadre left the habitats and moved on through rain-swilled ruins, towards the Spike.
The closer they got, the bigger it grew, dwarfing all the building structures around. Larkin bit back deep unease — it was big, so fething big! How in the name of feth were eighty souls going to take on a thing that size?
They were cowering in rubble. Larkin raised his head and saw Banda grinning back at him.
“Scared yet, Tanith?” she hissed.
Larkin shook his head and looked away.
Mkoll, MkVenner and Gaunt moved forward with Kolea, Rawne and Haller in a line behind them. Now they could hear the throbbing grind of the Spike’s enormous track sections, the deep growl of its engines. Gaunt noticed dust and ash trickling down the rubble around him in sharp, rhythmic blurts. He realised the vast machine, still a kilometre distant, was vibrating the earth itself with its weight and motivation.
The rain grew suddenly heavier. An incessant patter filled the air around them, accompanied by a regular, tinking chime. It came from a broken bottle wedged in a spill of bricks, sounding every time a raindrop hit its broken neck.
Gaunt wiped water droplets from the end of his scope and studied the Spike.
“How do we do this?” he asked Mkoll.
Mkoll frowned. “From above. Let’s get ahead and find a suitable habitat overlook — unless it changes course.”
Gaunt took the group across the wide, pulverised trail behind the advancing Spike, a half-kilometre strip of soil and ash compressed by the vehicle’s weight into glinting carbon. The Spike didn’t steer around buildings. It flattened them, making its own path.
The Imperial strikeforce overtook the great war machine on the right flank and pressed ahead, hugging the ruins and the rubble. Mkoll indicated a pair of worker hab blocks ahead of them that promised to intersect the Spike’s course. Gaunt detailed his troopers into two units and sent one ahead under Gilbear, leading the other himself.
Gaunt’s troop was climbing up the stairwell of the nearer hab, five hundred paces ahead of the crawling target, when the Spike fired again. Its awesome spinal weapon, the cutting beams, howled vast energies above and past them at some target in the main hive. The sound was louder than their ears could manage. The hab shuddered thoroughly, and a harsh light-flash penetrated every crevice and opening in the stairwell for a moment. A second later there was a pop of pressure, a wall of dissipating heat and the stink of plasma.
Gaunt and his troop exchanged glances. It had been like standing too near a star for a millisecond. Their eyes ached and the energised stench burned their sinuses. Gaunt wiped a thread of blood from his lip.
There was no time to waste, however. Gaunt and Mkoll led the party up to the fifth floor, to the flats at the far end. The Spike was almost on them. Half a dozen ragged habbers fled past them, running like beaten dogs from their hideaways.
Gaunt got a signal from Gilbear in the other block. The second un
it was in position. He looked out of the end window, glassless and burned, and saw how close the massive machine now was.
Its lower slopes swiped the edge of the hab block and tore it away, rubble cascading down under the tracks. Gaunt moved his soldiers back as the passing armour wall tore the end off the room they waited in. Then they moved.
In pairs and trios they leapt clear of the ripped-open building and dropped seven metres onto the sloping sides of the Spike. Most slid down the ochre-painted hull before managing to cling fast to moulding projections, rivets or weld-seams. Gaunt landed hard, slid for a moment, then braced against a row of cold-punched bolt-heads. He heard a cry from above and looked up to see Larkin slithering down the armoured slope, his hands clawing uselessly at the tarnished metal. Gaunt snagged the sniper by his stealth cape and arrested his slide, nearly throttling him with the taut fabric. Larkin found purchase and crawled up beside Gaunt.
“Saving my arse again, Ibram?” Larkin stammered in relief.
Gaunt grinned. At a time like this, he hardly minded Mad Larkin’s informality.
“You’re welcome. It’s my job.”
Ten metres down the Spike’s side, Haller also lost his grip. He slid, barking out a helpless curse and slammed into Dremmond, who was barely holding on himself. The two of them tore away and started to slide much more swiftly down the flank, thrashing for handholds.
Bragg drew his Tanith blade, punched it into the Spike’s plating to provide a firm anchor point, and caught them as they tumbled past. He captured Dremmond by the harness of his flamer, and Dremmond held tight to Haller. By then, they had barrelled into Muril — one of the scratch company loom girls — too, and Haller held on to her. Secured by one meaty fist around the hilt of his knife, Bragg supported three dangling humans.
“Feth!” he grunted, his arm shaking under the weight. “Get a grip! Get a grip! I can’t hold on much longer!”
Muril swung around and grabbed the edge of an armour plate, digging her fingertips into the seam. As soon as she was secure, Haller let go and slid down beside her. Bragg heaved the kicking Dremmond up next to him by the man’s flamer’s straps.
“Good fething catch,” Dremmond gasped, gripping tightly, trying to slow his anxious breathing.
“I don’t always miss,” replied Bragg. He didn’t dare voice his relief. For a moment, he had been close to dropping them — or being pulled away with them.
Gaunt’s unit, forty bodies, clung to the sloping side of the gigantic Zoican war machine and slowly began to climb up it. The Spike’s pyramid form was punctuated by shelflike terraces, like some step-temples of antiquity Gaunt had once seen on Fychis Dolorous. The soldiers crawled up over the lip and made themselves fast on the nearest horizontal shelf.
The progressing Spike, oblivious to the human lice now adhering to its hide, moved on and slammed over and through the hab block where Gilbear’s team was waiting. Gaunt watched in horror as the metal slopes demolished a large chunk of the hab’s lower storeys.
Then he saw Gilbear and his team leaping down from a far higher level. They’d clearly moved up a floor or two when the impact of the Spike’s course had become evident.
The troopers, led by Gilbear, dropped far further than Gaunt’s unit had done. They impacted on the hull above the shelf Gaunt and the others occupied, and most slid down onto that safe landing. Some clung on where they found purchase on the slopes above. Two — a Volpone and the Tanith scout Bonin — bounced away like rocks down a mountainside and dropped past Gaunt, disappearing a hundred metres below under the lip of the hull. Gaunt looked away. If the sheer fall hadn’t killed them outright, they were dead under the massive caterpillar carriage.
Gaunt signalled around and made contact with the remaining troopers. They were all rendezvousing on the shelf-lip. The Curtain Wall of Vervunhive was now only minutes away and their time was disappearing fast. Weapons ready, reaching out hands to steady themselves against the motion of the Spike, the strike team followed Gaunt down the shelf.
The difficult part remained: how to find a way inside this armoured monster.
The hull was solid. Domor pulled out the head of his sweeper kit and pressed it against the throbbing metal.
“Dense — no cavities,” he growled disappointedly.
Gaunt sighed. They could blast or cut the hull open if there was a chance of accessing a hollow space within, but Domor was positive. It stood to reason a machine like this would be thick-skinned.
Two of Gilbear’s Volpone returned along the shelf from scouting the far end. Gilbear heard their reports and edged along to Gaunt.
“The main weapon ports along the forward face. They’re open, ready for firing. It’s that or nothing.”
“And if they fire while we’re entering?”
“Then we’re dead. You want to stay out here for the rest of the war?”
Gaunt barked out a laugh at Gilbear’s attitude.
“No. I guess we won’t know anything about it if they fire.”
“It’ll be quick, certainly,” Gilbear agreed.
Gaunt notified the squad leaders and led the single-file team along the shelf.
They were about to make the turn onto the forward face when the beam weapons fired again. The light flash was even more brutal out in the open and the sucking roar monstrous. The whole Spike shook.
“How long since the last salvo?” Gaunt asked Larkin as soon as his ears stopped ringing.
“Eight minutes, just about, boss.”
“I’m working with the idea it takes a while for the batteries to recharge. We’ve got eight minutes to get inside.”
“It sounds so easy when you put it like that,” snarled Rawne.
“Shouldn’t we be moving rather than debating?” Kolea asked, shaming them all.
Gaunt nodded. “Yes. Now. Go!”
Always, always lead from the front. Never expect a man under your command to undertake an action you’re not prepared to make yourself. It was one of Delane Oktar’s primary rules, drummed into Gaunt during his years with the Hyrkans. He was not about to forget his mentor’s advice now.
Gaunt led the way around the corner of the hull and hurried towards the huge, main-weapon recesses below him. Visor hatches the size of the Sondar Gates were pulled up from the ports like eyelids. The air was sweet and tangy with burnt plasma and fluorocarbons.
Gaunt reached the edge of the emplacement recess and grabbed hold of one of the shutter stanchions, a heavyweight hydraulic limb at full extension. His leather glove slid off the oiled, shining metal. He pulled the glove off and took hold with his bare hand, arming his bolt gun in the other.
Gaunt leapt and let himself fall, swinging down and around like an ape by one hand. Using his body weight’s pendulum momentum, he threw himself in through the weapon hatch, letting go of the hydraulic limb at the same moment.
He fell, rather than jumped, inside the hull, landing and stumbling on a grilled cageway that ran alongside the massive snouts of the beam cannons. Rolling, he saw two black-clad Zoican gunners leap up from their firing consoles, and he shot them down.
Three Zoican soldiers in full battledress charged up onto the cageway, blasting at him. Gaunt lost his footing and fell, the las-shots screaming over his head. The shots blew apart the torso of the Volpone leaping in behind him and threw his corpse back and outwards so it fell away down the slope of the hull. Recovering, Gaunt resumed firing, aiming precise head-shots at the Zoicans, exploding their full-face helmets with high-explosive rounds.
Then Gilbear, Mkoll and three other Tanith had made it inside behind him. Mkoll opened up with his lasrifle, supporting Gaunt’s fire-pattern, and Gilbear turned back to pull others of the strike force in through the huge awning.
Gaunt and Mkoll advanced with Crothe and Rilke, partly to secure the weapon deck and partly to make room. The commissar and his three Tanith troopers scoured the gun-control position, blasting dozens of Zoican personnel.
Within moments, the Zoican troopers set up a
flaying return of fire. Crothe was blasted off his feet and Mkoll took a hit in his hip. He slammed back into the wall and fell, but somehow maintained his fire rate.
Now Gilbear and three of his elite Blueblood were coming in behind, laying down a field of fire with their hellguns. Behind them on the cageway, Haller and Kolea were dragging the other squad members in through the hatch.
Gilbear’s fire team advanced and secured the gunnery deck behind the colossal beam emitters, slaying everything that moved. The air in the chamber was dense and rich with gunsmoke. The grilled deck was strewn with Zoican dead.
Somewhere an alarm began to wail.
Inside four minutes, Gaunt’s strike team had entered the Spike via the gun-ports, all seventy-eight of them. Three had died in the initial engagement. Gaunt checked on Mkoll. His wound was superficial and he was already back on his feet.
The strike force spread out to cover all the exitways on the gloomy gundeck.
He led the way to a main blast door that gave access to the Spike’s inner cavities. It was locked fast.
“I can blow it,” said Kolea at his side.
Gaunt drew the powersword of Heironymo Sondar, activated it, and sliced the incandescent blade through the hatch. A further three sweeps and a kick left the hatchway open, the cut section of metal clanging as it fell on the deck outside.
“Move!” cried Gaunt. “Move!”
The Spike’s main weapon deck was linked to the primary command sections by a long, sloping accessway wide enough for a Leman Russ to drive along it. It was painted matt red, the colour of meat, and thick bulkhead frames stood at every twenty metres. The floor was a metal grille and in the underfloor cavity, pipes, tubing and feeder cables could be seen. Off to either side, just on the other side of the blast door, stood service elevators with metal cage frames, set in circular loading docks. The elevators were heavy-duty freight lifts designed to haul shells from the munition stockpiles deep in the belly of the Spike up to the artillery blisters on the upper slopes. The metal walls of the accessway were covered with intricate emblems, the curious, nauseating runes of Chaos. Gaunt realised they had been fashioned from bone that had been inlaid into the metal and then polished flat with the wall so they glowed and shone like pearl.