Human bone, he guessed. The Heritor would demand such details.
A team of Zoican heavy troopers in segmented ochre body armour greeted them in the accessway as they entered, firing up the sloping tunnel from cover at the far end. One of the scratches, a man whose name Gaunt would never know, was sliced apart by the initial shots. His blood sprayed the bone icons on the wall, and the symbols began to squirm and shift.
Larkin saw this and fell back in horror, his guts churning. The eldritch symbols were alive, excited by blood. He knew he was about to vomit with fear.
“Taking a breather?” Banda asked sourly as she pushed past him, firing down at the enemy position. The Imperials were hugging the walls and using the bulkheads for cover, edging down the accessway as far as the enemy fire would allow.
“A breather?” Larkin gulped. He was incredulous. No smirking girl from the hab looms would show him up.
Forgetting his fear, he knelt in cover, shook out his neck, raised his sniper-variant lasrifle and put a hot-shot between the eyes of a Zoican heavy twenty paces away.
“Nice work,” Banda growled from her position and blew Larkin a cocky kiss.
Larkin grinned and made another kill-shot. Either he was beginning to like this woman, or he’d kill her himself.
Another of the scratches fell, ripped open by the mauling heavy weapons the enemy had trained on them. They were caught too tightly between the hall and the entry point Gaunt had cut open. His men fanned round into the side loading docks, but they were packed in.
Rawne hurled a tube charge down the tunnel, but the Zoicans had enough cover to shelter from it.
“Dremmond!” Gaunt yelled.
The flamer-trooper was still trying to pull his bulky tanks through the narrow opening Gaunt’s powersword had sliced. Las-rounds peppered the metal around him. A Ghost nearby, Lonner, collapsed with the back of his neck blown out.
Dremmond was clear. Gaunt and Kolea physically dragged the big Ghost to the front of the line and Dremmond braced his scorched flame-gun, ensuring the feed-pipe wasn’t twisted and the igniter was sparking.
He squeezed the trigger grip and billows of white-hot flame sheeted down the tunnel, incinerating the Zoican heavies. The scourging flame bubbled the paint off the walls and the twitching bone-runes began to shriek.
He washed the hall with another gout to be sure, and then Rawne, Haller and Bragg led off to secure the hall. Bragg reached the position the enemy had been holding and he stepped over the black, fused corpses. There was another accessway to his left and he sprayed bursts of autogun fire through the door mouth.
Haller moved to the right and went over hard as a half-burned Zoican soldier threw himself at the scratch officer. The blackened thing, its ceramite armour part-melted into its flesh by Dremmond’s flames, tore at him in a frenzy. Haller screamed out, frantic. Rawne grabbed the Zoican and threw it off Haller. It bounced off a wall and, before it could rise, Rawne had shot it four times with his lasgun.
“I owe you, Ghost,” said Haller, getting up.
“No, you don’t, habber. I don’t like it when any one owes me anything. Forget it.”
Haller paused, as if slapped in the face. He hadn’t much liked the look of the Tanith major when they had all first assembled. Banda had whispered Rawne had “toxic eyes.” It seemed true. Even the haughty Volpone seemed to be making more of an effort to be comradely than this Tanith bastard.
“Suit yourself,” Haller said.
“He always does,” mocked Bragg. The big Ghost knew it was neither the time nor the place to bring Haller up to speed on Rawne’s history, the fact that Rawne hated Gaunt with an inhuman passion precisely because “he owed him.”
“Shut it and get soldiering!” Rawne snorted to Bragg. Already there were noises from the side tunnels and fresh Zoican forces were firing on them.
The main strike force had moved up by then. Gilbear swung a party of Blue-bloods to the right and cremated a side-tunnel with grenades from their under-barrel launchers. MkVenner hurried right with four Tanith and a number of scratches, moving to secure their advance from enemy prosecution. A las-round hit him in the arm and spun him to the deck. Domor, right behind him, knelt over the injured scout and sprayed las-fire down at the hidden shooter, calling for a medic. Beside him, Vinya, one of the loom-girls, rebounded off the wall as a brace of las-shots caught her in the belly. Several troopers pushed past Domor to hold the side-tunnel, flaying las-fire down into the dark.
Gherran joined Domor, running low, holding a las pistol in one hand, the other hand curled around the narthecium kit to stop it jolting.
“It’s MkVenner—” Domor began. The medic dropped to his knees beside the scout. The las-shot had exploded MkVenner’s left elbow and disintegrated his biceps. He was curled up, crying with pain, but he forced his voice to work.
“Her first — her!” he said, nodding over at Vinya.
“Let me look at it, MkVenner,” Gherran said.
“No! You know fething triage: serious cases first! She’s gut-shot! See to her!”
“Give him this,” Gherran told Domor, handing him a gauze-packed inoculator full of high-dose painkillers. He scrambled over to the sprawled scratch soldier. She was twisted like a broken puppet, her chin forced into her chest where she lay with the back of her head against the wall. Blood oozed out of her in a wide pool. The wound itself had self-cauterised in charred, knotty lumps, but the damage had shredded her insides, and she was bleeding out rapidly.
“Oh, feth!” Gherran spat. “Someone give me a hand here!”
Kolea was beside him. “Tell me how.”
“Pressure: here and here. Hold it tight. No, tight like you mean it!”
They were both sodden with her blood. She stirred, moaning.
“Vinya… s’okay… Stay awake…” Kolea murmured to her, his hands damping hard on her ruined organs.
He looked around at Gherran as he worked frantically.
“She’s not going to make it, is she?”
“Major trauma,” Gherran explained as he worked. “I can stabilise her, but no, it’s just a matter of time.”
Kolea nodded. He let go and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “You fought well, Vinya Terrigo of Hab 45/jad. Vervunhive will never forget your courage. The hive loves you for your devotion.”
Then he reached down with huge, gentle hands and snapped her neck.
“Oh, God-Emperor!” Gherran cried, recoiling in horror.
“There’s a man you can save,” Kolea said, pointing at MkVenner with a bloody hand. “I love my people, and I will fight for them with every last measure of my strength, but this would have uselessly wasted the time of a good medic when there are better causes. Her pain is over. She has found peace.”
Gherran wiped his mouth.
“I—” he began.
“If you were going to tell me you couldn’t begin to understand what we habbers have gone through to get here, save it. I don’t want your pity.”
“Actually, friend, I was going to tell you I do understand. And admire your courage, to boot. Our lives are all on the line fighting for your home. Me, I don’t have a home anymore. So, feth you and that oh-so-noble crap.” Gherran gathered his kit-pack and moved over to MkVenner.
Kolea picked up his lasgun and strode past, rejoining the fight.
Cocoer, Neskon and Flinn had made it to the corner of the right hand side access, and they drove the gathering Zoicans backwards. Gaunt, with Genx and Maroy, crawled up behind them.
“Access?” asked Gaunt.
“Not a fething hope, sir!” sang out Cocoer. The air was flickering with las crossfire.
“Bloody bastard hell!” Neskon cried as his gun jammed. He shook it. Gaunt grabbed him and yanked him down into cover just as laser blasts pummelled the wall above his head.
“Never forget the drill, Neskon. Gun jams: duck and cover. Don’t stand there playing with it.”
“No, colonel-commissar.”
“I like you bette
r alive.”
“Me… me too, sir.”
Rilke, reckoned to be the best sniper in the Ghosts after Larkin, and the scratch woman Nessa moved up to flank them. Rilke wasted two shots trying to hit a Zoican in cover down the tunnel. Nessa, with her standard-issue lasgun, picked him off and the Zoican behind him.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Rilke protested, but she didn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear him.
Gaunt looked across at her, waiting until she saw his face. “Good,” he said.
She grinned.
A ceiling panel ten metres back slammed open and Zoican stormtroops began to drop down out of it like grains of sand through the neck of an hourglass. They sprayed shots in both directions. Four Ghosts, two scratches and a Blueblood went down. Bragg wheeled and decimated the spilling Zoicans, his withering autocannon supported by Haller, Rawne, Genx and a dozen others.
The Zoican dead lay in a heap under the ceiling drop. Bragg raised his muzzle and began to fire up into the roof, his heavy rounds punching smooth-edged holes through the sheet metal. Blood began to drip down through some of them.
“We’re bottled in!” Mkoll yelled at Gaunt.
Gaunt knew as much. Gilbear had blocked the left-hand access, but the right was still thick with Zoicans. And now they were coming down through the ceiling, for feth’s sake! At this rate, his strike cadre would exhaust themselves simply maintaining a perimeter. If they were going to do anything of note, they had to focus.
“Mkoll?” Gaunt called.
Mkoll knew what was being asked of him. Gaunt had always valued the chief scout’s unnerving ability to find the right way. It wasn’t a gift, really. Somehow, sometime back in the shifting, drifting forest ways of Tanith, he had come to understand the logic of structure, the underlying sense of any environment.
Mkoll’s gut said straight ahead and down.
“Through the blast shields, sir,” Mkoll announced.
That was good enough for Gaunt. He crawled back, under heavy fire, to the shields. “Rawne! Tube charges here!”
“What are you doing?” bellowed Gilbear, moving up. “That way will lead us off into the right hand side of the structure!”
Gaunt looked at Gilbear, las-shots whizzing around them. “After all we’ve seen, Gilbear, do you trust me?”
“Very probably, but—”
“If you were constructing this Spike, would you put the main command deck in the dead centre where anyone would expect it to be?”
Gilbear thought for a moment and shook his head.
“Then humour me. I’ve learned to go with Mkoll’s instincts. If I’m wrong, I’ll stand you a case of wine. You can choose the vintage.”
“If you’re wrong, we’ll be dead!”
“Why do you think I made the bet?”
Gilbear laughed out loud.
“Cover and clear!” yelled Rawne, hastening from the bundle of tube charges he had glued to the shield hatch.
The channelled blast tore the doors inwards like paper. Whatever else you could say about him, Rawne knew explosives. There was barely a Shockwave on the Imperial side of the hatch.
“For Tanith!” yelled Gaunt, hurling himself through the opening.
“For Volpone!” bawled Gilbear, right beside him.
“For Vervunhive!” mouthed Nessa to herself, close on their heels.
Guild Githran Agricultural had fallen. Corbec drove his Tanith back towards the base of the Main Spine with all hell following. Milo and Baffels guided their survivor company out of the ruins, chased by Zoican tank groups. Bray’s mixed units wilted in retreat as divisions of Zoican stormtroopers drove up into the inner habs.
The Shield Pylon shuddered as it took shell after shell.
At Croe Gate, Grizmund’s valiant counteraction finally reached a stop. Flat crabs and spider death machines lumbered in at them, in strengths even the crusade’s finest tank regiment could not withstand.
On the dock causeway, Varl and Rodyin began to pull their infantry back, facing an ochre host ten thousand strong.
Along the edge of the Commercia, where one of the war’s bloodiest battles had been waged, Bulwar ordered his NorthCol and scratch companies to retreat. Overhead, the Shield flickered and waned. It would not last much longer. In the middle of a horrendous brawl in a side trench, Soric hammered his axe-rake into the foe. He was one of the last to heed Bulwar’s retreat order.
Corday’s Volpone unit was pincered by Zoican detachments. The Blue-bloods were slaughtered by crossfire in the rubble wastes that had once been the inner-sector habs. Corday died with his men.
In a lost pocket in the wastelands, Caffran held Tona Criid tight, Yoncy and Dalin curled between them. The sky was on fire and shells fell all around. It was just a matter of time, Caffran knew. But until then, he would hold her and the children as tight as he could.
In the baptistry, Ban Daur set aside his headset and sat back in his seat. The workers and staff servitors were still milling around, trying to maintain some semblance of control.
It was over. Daur got up and crossed to Otte at the Font. Windows blew in down the hall and the Main Spine shuddered as shells struck it.
“We gave it our best,” Daur said.
“For Vervunhive,” Otte agreed, weeping quietly with fatigue.
Intendant Banefail joined them. “High Legislator Anophy has just been carried out. A heart attack.”
“Then he’s been spared,” Daur said callously.
Otte looked at him reprovingly, but Banefail seemed to agree. “This is the end, my brave friends. The Emperor love you for your efforts, but this is the end of all things. Vervunhive is lost. Make your peace.”
Daur looked round at Immaculus. The minister stood nearby with his robed clergy.
“Begin the mass, sir,” Daur told him. “The requiem. I want the last sound I hear to be a psalm of loss voiced by the Emperor’s own.”
Immaculus nodded. He led his brethren into the celebratory and the soft dirge, a haunting melody, began to lift above the baptistry and the high stations of Vervunhive.
In the abandoned hall of her house, high in the Spine, Merity Chass heard the low plainsong welling through the walls. She had put on a long, formal gown and her father’s ducal chain and signet ring, which Daur had brought to her.
She had spent an hour putting the House Chass ledgers in order and encrypting all the family documents onto storage crystals. At the sound of the mass, she frowned.
“Not yet… not yet…” she murmured. “He won’t fail us…”
EIGHTEEN
THE LAIR OF ASPHODEL
“A friend of death, a brother of luck and a son of a bitch.”
—Major Rawne, of his commander
Its sounds amplified by the thick, metal walls around, carnage exploded into the Spike’s command level. Savage fighting boiled through the dark, mesh-floored chambers. The strikeforce were engaging crew now as well as troops. The crew members wore loose flak-tunics and work-fatigues, and their heads were generally exposed. Gaunt’s troopers could see for themselves the horror that had disturbed Larkin so at Veyveyr Gate. It wasn’t the implants fused and sutured into their eyes, ears and scalps, linking their senses and brain patterns to the insidious chatter. It was the fact that they were men and women of all ages: hab workers, parents, guilders, older children, the elderly. The entirety of Zoica’s population had mobilised for war, just as Gaunt had assessed. The bald proof was overwhelmingly tragic. With blank expressions, somehow even more lifeless than Sondar’s servitor puppets, the people of Ferrozoica threw themselves at the attackers.
Gaunt hacked through a pair of Zoican troopers with his powersword, fighting to cut a route down onto the main bridge area. Through the seething press, the smoke and the flashes of las-fire, he could make out a wide, open platform of polished chrome, surrounded by black towers of control instrumentation. In the centre of the platform, the glowing, pinkish ball of a coherent light field, ten metres in diameter, coalesced up from
an emitter ring in the floor. He fought his way to it, channelling his deepest reserves of aggression and determination.
Suddenly, he was on the platform itself, virtually alone, lit by the pink radiance. His last frenzied efforts to break through had been almost too successful. He’d effectively separated himself from the rest of his party, still locked into the mayhem in the adjacent bridge areas.
Gaunt was breathing hard and shaking. He’d lost his cap somewhere, his jacket was torn and he was splattered with blood. An almost painful adrenaline high fizzled through him like electricity glowing through fuse-wire. He had never been pushed to such an extremity of raw fury before in his life. His mind was locked out in a paroxysm of battle-rage. Everything had become distant and incomprehensible. For a moment, he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing.
Something flickered behind him and he wheeled, his blade flashing as it made contact. A tall, black figure lurched backwards. It was thin but powerful and much taller than him, dressed in form-fitting, glossy-black armour and a hooded cape of chainmail. The visage under the hood-lip was feral and non-human, like the snarling skull of a great wolf-hound with the skin scraped off. It clutched a sabre-bladed powersword in its metal-gloved hands.
Gaunt had seen its like before, on Balhaut. He’d glimpsed its kind distantly on the fields of war, during the final stage of the battle, and then seen several corpses closer to after the victory. It was one of the Dark-watch, the elite retinue of Chaos champions who had been gifted to the warlord, Asphodel, as his personal bodyguard. The thing flickered again, employing its monstrous, innate control of the warp to shift its location around him. Gaunt yelled and blocked the incoming blade of the repositioned horror. The cold blue energies of Heironymo’s powersword clashed against the sparking, blood-red fires of the Darkwatcher’s weapon.