Gaunt glared at him. “Throne’s sake, Ludd! Feth, I’d forgotten you didn’t actually take orders from me.”
Ludd pulled back, stung. “That’s not fair, sir. Not at all.”
“Really? You’re Balshin’s spy. You never denied that. You’re my… what is it? Minder? That was all fine when this was just a game, but it’s not a game any more, Ludd. You see what’s going on out there? You see what’s coming?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, I do.”
“Then show some wit, Ludd,” Gaunt snarled. “Us commissars have got to spread thin, to maximise our effect. Are you really telling me that Mamzel Balshin’s orders are so intractable you’re going to stick with me like a bad smell instead of getting the job done?”
“No, sir.”
“Louder so it means something, Ludd.”
“No, sir!”
“Find the Dev Hetra, Ludd. Get them into formation. This is war now, lad. Not politics. Not games.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get on with you. You’re an Imperial commissar, Ludd. Act like one. And if Balshin chews your ear, send her to me.”
“Yes, sir,” Ludd shouted, scrambling down the wet, grassy bank.
“Ludd?” Gaunt called after him.
“Sir?”
“Don’t die, all right?”
“No, sir.”
It would take a two kilometre dash, cross-country, to reach the Dev Hetra 301. Ludd ran as fast as he could, stumbling through the loose, plashy mires of the lowland belt. He crossed behind the drawn-up retinues of the Binar infantry, behind the hasty dug-outs where they had secured their infantry support weapons. He dodged through lines of battle tanks, squirming through the mud to their deployment positions.
By some miracle, he realised, Gaunt and Whitesmith were bringing the Binar line together. It was strong and it was firm. Men were singing battle-songs that had last rung out over the field of war between the ruined refineries of Fortis Binary. Behind the Guard front line, a kilometre south-west, artillery positions were thumping shells into the air with maintained vigour.
Shells sang back. The enemy was dreadfully close. That roiling belt of smoke and flame. Huge explosions ripped into the Guard line, hurling bodies into the air, rupturing tanks. The Blood Pact was at the door and their assault was slicing mercilessly into the ranged forces of the Emperor.
Ludd ran on, slipped, and righted himself. A shell dropped just behind the next rise and lifted a huge column of water, fire and mud into the air. Drenched by it, Ludd sprinted forward. There was a buzzing sound, which got louder, and then much louder still. A wave of Vultures flocked overhead, fifty or more machines, wrenching off rocket fire into the closing enemy line. A long, snickering wildfire of overlapping explosions crackled along the target spread. The Vultures peeled away. A second wave went in, another fifty or so. Ludd could hear their rocket pods banging like snare drums, and their autocannons grinding like whetstones. Less than half a kilometre away, he saw Blood Pact AT70’s disintegrate in twitchy puffs of smoke and fragmenting metal.
Lasfire from the advancing enemy infantry started to kiss into the Imperial lines.
Ludd reached the upland above the Dev Hetra position. Something hit the ground behind him, and turned the whole world into fire.
Gaunt drew his powersword and ignited it. In his right hand, he clutched one of his paired bolt pistols. The sky was as black as a coal-star now, and thick smoke billowed in from the ends of creation. All along the line beside him, Fortis Binar officers blew whistles and demanded order. Gaunt could hear mumbled prayers and frightened moans addressed to mothers and loved ones. Shells wailed down. Gritty blasts tore the air and quaked the earth.
“Men of Fortis Binar, stand firm!” he yelled.
It was no use now. They couldn’t really hear him.
The first of the Blood pact AT70’s were in view. Gaunt could hear the distinctive whistle-whoop of their main weapons discharging. He saw figures in crimson battle-dress massing forward alongside the tanks, running in through the smoke towards the raised ground where the Imperials had chosen to meet them. He saw the black masks, grotesques, like faces frozen in agony, the glint of bayonets.
“Rise and address!” he yelled. Whistles blew in answer. The young, virgin troopers of the Second Fortis Binars stepped up to meet the onrushing tide of the Blood Pact.
Gaunt leapt over the ledge of the hastily dug slit-trench and greeted the enemy head on. Binar troops either side of him buckled and died under sudden, hailing gunfire.
Gaunt’s blade cleanly decapitated the first Blood Pact trooper to reach him. The second and third fell victim to his booming bolt pistol.
Mayhem descended. Bodies clashing in the smoke, blood flecking the air. Gaunt fired his bolt pistol at point-blank range, right into the chest of a charging Blood Pact soldier. He leapt over the fallen body and fired again, knocking another of the archenemy host onto his back. Figures rushed in around him: the Binar boys, yelling, firing, stabbing with their bayonets.
“For the Throne!” Gaunt bellowed. Two rifle rounds punched through his coat. Gaunt twisted round and shot a Pact trooper to his left, hurling the man into the air in a tangle of limbs. The sloping ground was treacherous. He found himself sliding into a scrum of enemy troopers that was trying to scale the muddy bank. Gaunt stroked left and right with his power blade, sliced off a trooper’s arm at the shoulder, took out the throat of another. A third fell over in the mire in his frantic effort to dodge the slashing blade.
A Blood Pact officer, barking orders and curses, ploughed up the low bank and assaulted Gaunt with a keening chainsword. Gaunt deflected the first stroke with his power blade, and then was driven backwards, knocking aside the demented, hacking cuts that swung at him.
“Bastard!” he yelled, throwing the force of his arm into a ripping cross-cut that caught the chainsword halfway down its length and buckled it. As the enemy officer attempted to defend with the broken weapon, Gaunt sliced back in a reprise, and the tip of his blade found the side of the warrior’s face. The officer recoiled and fell, blood pouring from his head, his silver grotesque hanging off to one side.
Guardsmen in the charging line dropped and sprawled as las-shots streaked across the mud and hit them. Shells detonated with huge, sucking roars. Explosions plumed like geysers across the miasmal fen.
Gaunt strode on. He buried his blade into the helmet of a Blood Pact trooper, wrenched it free, and shot another, who was wading in with his bayonet. A hard round skimmed his right shoulder and knocked him down for a second.
Strong hands grabbed him. Gaunt looked up and found Eszrah Night dragging him back to his feet. The partisan had streaked his face with wode, a ritual symbol of his intention to make war.
“I told you to stay back!” Gaunt yelled over the din. Eszrah put a hand to his ear as if to sign he couldn’t hear. The Nihtgane turned and aimed his reynbow. The electromag weapon spat out a quarrel that dropped a nearby enemy trooper. Eszrah reached into his satchel and loaded another barb, sliding it down the reynbow’s tube. The partisan weapon fired the iron darts with such force that they would easily kill a man if they hit squarely, but the fact they were tipped with powerful Untill venom meant that even a scratch was lethal.
Eszrah fired again. What little sound the reynbow made was lost entirely in the roar of battle. Another Blood Pact trooper collapsed, an iron quarrel jutting from an eye slit.
Gaunt picked up his fallen sword and resumed his advance. Almost immediately, he lost contact with Eszrah as the smoke swirled in. There were stalk-tanks ahead, trotting through the filthy air, hosing laser fire from their gun-pods. Gaunt saw one of them blow out as a rocket struck it. The flash was so bright, it left an afterimage on his retina.
Another wave of vile figures emerged from the hellish smoke. Blood running from his shoulder wound, Gaunt urged the Binar infantrymen into them. Bodies slammed together along the course of the ditch, clubbing and stabbing.
Gaunt broke free, breathing hard. His clip ou
t, he holstered the pistol and dragged out its twin. He looked around for the next enemy to kill. Nearby, three Vanquisher tanks lurched and splattered forward, their hulls bouncing. The support weapons on the tanks chattered, licking out brilliant tongues of ignited gas. Several dozen enemy troopers fell back before the approaching tanks.
Beams of light lanced through the smoke wall ahead of them. Gaunt saw one of the tanks simply disintegrate in front of him.
Churning out of the vapour, clearing a path for the archenemy advance, the stumble-guns had arrived.
TWENTY
10.29 hrs, 197.776.M41
Third Compartment
Sparshad Mons, Ancreon Sextus
When he was a boy, Nahum Ludd had been particularly taken with the frescoes on the ceiling of the scholam chapel. He’d loved all pictures of war, and pored over old books and military texts, but the frescoes had been special. The domed ceiling had been a wide, cloudy blue, an imitation sky through which Imperial angels of war had flown on golden wings, swords aloft. With them, depicted in that quaint, slightly primitive style of old murals, there had been gunships and strike fighters, the hosts of the air, radiant and mighty.
He opened his eyes, and thought for a moment that he was still a boy, still in the old chapel. The roof above him, swollen with white cloud, full of gunships and angels.
His hearing returned like a hammer blow. Ludd sat up quickly. He’d been lying on his back in the muddy grass. A blast had knocked him down, he remembered that now. He was numb and cold, but there seemed to be no obvious signs of injury.
Ludd looked around. Overhead, Vulture gunships were making approach passes, chasing low and hunting for surface targets. To the east, the vast horror of the battle spread out against the encroaching black cloud. It was turmoil. Ludd took a moment to accept the scale of it, the blinding flash and blast of the shelling, the stink of mud and fyceline, the juddering buffet of overpressure.
Individual figures were almost too small for him to make out, but he saw dark, sparking lumps that were evidently tanks engaging as they thundered into the lowland belt. He saw the fiery breath of flamers, the strafing blizzards of autolaser fire in the sky, detonations of extraordinary violence. In the thick of the fighting, he could make out obscene banners and battle standards, waving aloft, mocking the sanctity of the Emperor and the purity of man. He saw rockets fly like sparks from a bonfire.
A bonfire. That’s what it looked like: a gigantic, blazing bonfire, filling the entire compartment, crackling with sparks and embers, lashing with tongues of yellow flame, choking out the sky to the east with a mountainous block of charcoal smoke.
He realised that this was finally it. This was war. He’d yearned for it, trained for it, prepared for it, and worked hard to earn a place for himself in the ranks of the Imperium so he could pursue it. This, ridiculously, was what he had been searching for all his life. This madness, this chaos, this calamity.
It had no sense or shape, no structure or meaning. It was simply a maelstrom of hurt and damage, a sundering whirlpool laced with fire and blood and splintering metal. It was as if Ludd had been let in on some giant, private joke. Men trained for war, rehearsed, honed skills, solemnly studied military teachings, as if warfare was something that could be learned and controlled and conducted, like a formal banquet or a great country dance. But here was the raw truth of it. All theories of combat perished immediately in the furnace heat of real war.
How foolish lord generals seemed, plotting in their back rooms and command cells, dreaming up principles and schemes of battle. They might as well be trying to govern and contain a supernova.
Ludd had almost forgotten why he had been running north, or what it was Gaunt had demanded of him. Surely he could serve no purpose now? The frenzy of war was feeding itself, fire into fire. It just was, and no man could alter that.
Ludd wondered where Gaunt was. He tried his microbead, but there was nothing except sizzling distortion. Gaunt had to be somewhere down there, in the jaws of the beast.
And probably dead by now. Could anything human survive in that horror?
He wondered where to go, what to do. Binar tanks and infantry groups were advancing past him on the flanks of the ridge. He could see where the foremost sections were entering the battle, riding forward into the fierce gunfire. Shells were slamming into the fenland, and showering water up from the long, wide lakes.
On the far side of the ridge lay the Dev Hetra positions. Over two hundred units, most of them Hydra and multi-laser mobiles, along with some bulky Thunderer siege tanks and heavy Basilisk platforms. There was very little fire coming from them.
Ludd began to head down the slope towards the light support line. There was an abrupt bang overhead, as if the vault of heaven had finally split. Ludd looked up, and watched in helpless awe as a Vulture gunship fell out of the air, trailing ochre smoke. Sub-assemblies disintegrated off it as it dropped. It hit the fenland short of the main line and tumbled over and over, ripping apart, leaking fire.
Ludd turned and ran on into the Dev Hetra position. Motors were running, and gun-crews were stacking munitions and power-chargers. The Dev Hetra machines were of the finest quality, and polished like they’d just rolled out of the forge silos. The uniforms the men wore were almost regal in their decoration: dress white with gold braiding, with gleaming silver crest-helmets for the officers, and black fur shakoes for the rank and file. They looked like the ceremonial escort detail of a sector governor. Ludd had never seen such resplendent troops.
“Who’s in charge here?” Ludd shouted. His voice was hoarse from the smoke. The men, magnificent in their regalia, looked at him archly, as if he was some filthy low-life blundering uninvited into their midst. T said who’s in charge here, dammit?”
The men around still didn’t answer. They continued to regard him with what appeared to be utter disdain. No, he thought, they’re just dazed, frightened. That was it. Despite their finery, the soldiers here, all of them young, all of them no doubt first-timers and fresh recruits, were simply too shocked by the spectacle of the battle to form any coherent reply. Ludd knew how that felt. He swallowed hard, tried to clear his throat a little and put some authority into his words.
“Who’s in charge?”
A sergeant came forward. He wore a blue sash and carried a silver power-sabre. He bowed curtly.
“Who may I say is asking?”
“Ludd. Commissar Ludd.”
“Do you not have a hat, sir?” the man enquired.
Ludd realised his cap had come off somewhere, probably when he’d been knocked down. He tried to stroke back his hair, and felt it was caked with mud. His coat was torn and smeared with drying dirt. He realised his first instinct had been correct. The haughty Dev Hetra had chosen to ignore him because of his dishevelled appearance.
“No, I don’t have a hat! I’ve also not got much patience! Get me a ranking officer! Now, if you please!”
The sergeant bowed again, and led Ludd over to a gun platform where a very young officer, a captain, was working a vox-caster set. The sergeant had a few quiet words with the captain. The captain put down the vox-horn, and turned to face Ludd. His white uniform was frogged up the tunic front with gold braid, and his high peaked cap was a sumptuous affair of silverwork and yet more braiding. He wore a mantle of black fur around one shoulder, secured by a golden clasp.
“Are you really a commissar?” he asked. He was handsome, in a fey, high-born way, his slightly-slanted eyes disapproving.
“I fell down,” said Ludd.
The captain looked Ludd up and down. “Did you? How unfortunate.”
“Who am I addressing?” Ludd asked.
“Captain Sire Balthus Vuyder Kronn.” The young man was very softly spoken, and his accent betrayed fine breeding. Ludd remembered his briefing. The Hetrahan came from a highly structured world ruled by an aristocratic elite. They appointed officers by merit of birth and breeding.
“Why aren’t you engaged, Kronn?” Ludd asked.
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“I would prefer it if you used my full nomenclature when addressing me,” the captain said, and began to turn away.
“I would prefer you answered my frigging question, Kronn,” Ludd said. “Why isn’t this unit engaged?”
Ludd might as well have slapped him by the look on Kronn’s face. “At this time,” Kronn said, “it has been deemed inappropriate for us to engage.”
“Really? By whom?”
“My commander, Colonel Sire Sazman Vuyder Urfanus.”
“Well, I’d better have a word with him, then.”
“He has gone. He has already quit the field. I have been given charge of the withdrawal of the war machines.”
“He’s gone? Your commanding officer has left you here?”
Kronn raised his eyebrows. “Of course. There is some jeopardy here. Sire Vuyder Urfanus is a high-born man, first cousin to the Hzeppar of Korida himself. His security takes precedence.”
Ludd began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. The sheer insanity of it all had got to him. Behind him, the amoral, elemental fury of war was loose, defying comprehension and logic. In front of him, stood men hidebound by tradition and breeding, who were packing away for the day like their garden party had been rained off.
“I do not like the way you laugh,” Kronn said. “It is uncivil.”
“I don’t much like anything about anything at the moment,” Ludd replied. “Look, you were given orders.”
“The communication systems are inoperative,” Kronn said, gesturing to the vox.
“You were sent orders. By runner. Orders from the Fortis Binar commander.”
“The orders were garbled, and the runner refused to address Sire Vuyder Urfanus with a correct measure of formality. Sire Vuyder Urfanus will only respect orders given to him by the marshal.”
“Listen to me carefully, captain sire,” Ludd said. “If he survives today, Sire Vuyder Urfanus will find himself in deep trouble with the Commissariat. This will be because he has disobeyed orders. Most likely, he will be shot without trial.”