Alphant put his head down and shouldered into the surging mob. The hapless preacher would be torn apart in this, and the last thing the camp needed was a death. Alphant was still a strong man, and he found he remembered some of the old moves, enough to tackle and dissuade the most boisterous rioters in his path anyway. Nothing too vicious, just a little deflection and the occasional squeeze of a nerve point.
He got round the upturned wagon, and paused to prevent three screaming infardi from throttling one of the almsmen. Then he looked for the preacher who had started it all.
And saw an amazing thing.
The preacher was sitting on the rough ground, both hands clamped to his forehead. Blood was pouring out through his fingers, staining his robes and making dark patches in the dust. He was in no state to protect himself.
But no one was touching him. A girl, a young girl no more than eighteen, was standing over him. Her face, thin and pale, was confident, the look in her green eyes soft. She had one hand extended, palm out, to ward off the riot. Every time a part of it spilled towards her, she moved her hand in that direction and the people drew back. That simply, that quietly, she was maintaining a tiny circle of calm around the preacher, keeping at bay a crowd lusting for his blood.
He moved towards her. She looked at him, but did not turn her palm towards him, as if recognising his peaceful intentions.
“Do you need help?” Alphant asked.
“This man does,” she said. Her voice was tiny, but he heard her clearly over the uproar. He bent down at her side, and examined the preacher’s injury. It was deep and dirty. He tore a strip off his shirt, and wetted it with water from his ampulla without even thinking of the cost. Wasn’t it said to cure all wounds?
“Bad day coming,” the man murmured as Alphant wiped the blood away.
“Enough of that,” Alphant said. “It’s already here as far as you’re concerned.” He wondered how long the frail girl could hold the commotion at bay. He wondered how she was doing it.
“What’s your name?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Sabbatine,” she said. He laughed at that. Saint names and their diminutives were common enough in this part of the Imperium, and there was, as might be expected, a disproportionately high number of Sabbats, Sabbatas, Sabbatines, Sabbeens, Battendos and the like in the camps. But for her, it seemed terribly appropriate.
“I think he’s right,” she said.
“What?”
“I think something bad is about to happen.”
There was a quality to the way she said this that was more alarming than the entirety of the preacher’s manic declamation.
“You mean like another attack? The raiders again?”
“Yes. Get to safety.”
Alphant didn’t question her any further. He got his hands under the preacher’s arms and hoisted him up. When he’d got the lolling man upright he realised that the girl had disappeared.
And the nature of the uproar around him had changed. It wasn’t a riot any more It was a panic. People were fleeing, screaming, falling over one another in their anxiety to leave. Something was burning. Smoke filled the low sky above the Ironhall camp.
“Bad day…” the blood-streaked man gurgled.
“Yeah,” said Alphant. He’d just heard a sound that he hadn’t heard in twenty years, not since he’d handed back his standard issue mark IV, put his cap pins and badge away in a dresser drawer, and used his Guard-muster pay-out as deposit on a nice little parcel of cropland in the agri-collective west of the primary hive of Khan II.
The snap-crack of a lasrifle.
The tac logis situation reports were urgently identifying a heretic raid in progress in the pilgrim encampment just west of the Ironhall district, and true enough there was a furious plume of smoke rising from that quarter, a plume ominously undercut by the blink of weapons fire.
But as Udol rode a lurching carrier down the Guild Slope, through the deafening uproar of the panicked suburb, he caught sight of fat brown vapour clouds wallowing up heavily from the obsidae east of the Simeon Aqueduct.
“Is that the aqueduct?” he shouted.
“Fixing it now, major!” answered his signals officer, dropping back inside the carrier’s rusty top hatch to man the tactical station.
“It is the aqueduct, sir!” the signalman called back a moment later.
“What—”
“The aqueduct, and the obsidae on the other side of it!”
Their helmet mics were turned up full, but it was still nigh on impossible to hear one another over the din. The engines of the APCs were revving, and the vast crowds packing the street were wailing and shouting. Gorgonaught, the great prayer horn at the northern end of Principal I, was booming at the white sky from its ancient tower. Udol was sure he could also hear the slap of distant detonations and the sizzling kiss of impacts against the outer fan of shield cover. It was coming down again, fourth day in a row.
Udol slithered down inside the hull and cranked his bare-metal rocker seat around so he could look over the signalman’s shoulder at the screen.
“What does tac logis have?”
“Nothing on that, major. They’re directing us forward to the Ironhall zone. Captain Lamm has engaged. Heretic raid coming in from the wastes. He—”
“They’re in at the east door too,” Udol muttered. He adjusted his vox set’s channel. “Pento? Udol here. Take the front six with you and go look after Lamm’s interests. Seven and eight? Move off with me.”
Objections and several requests for clarification crackled back, but Udol ignored them. He tapped his driver on the arm and pointed.
The carrier obediently veered east parting the rushing crowds with blares from its warning sirens. Two other units from the convoy turned with it. They got off the Guild Slope and rumbled down a gravel linkway deeply shadowed by the tall buildings on either side. At the end of the linkway, the buildings framed an oblong of sky stained with clots of smoke.
They emerged onto Principal VI, flanked by low-rise habs, and crossed the wide boulevard until they were facing the towering lime-brick arches of the Simeon Aqueduct. Beyond that massive arched structure lay the open reaches of a glass field. Like so many vacant spaces at the city edges, the area had become a pilgrim shanty over the last two months, a sea of rough canvas tents, survival blisters and hastily raised clock shrines. Another makeshift expansion of the city’s limits to accommodate the massive influx of believers.
Filthy brown smoke billowed across the whole campsite and washed out between the arches of the aqueduct. Dirty pilgrims were pouring out with it, struggling with children and belongings.
“Some damn infardi’s knocked over a campstove in his jubilation,” said the signalman. “It happened the other week over at Camp Kiodrus. Whole row of tents went up and—”
“I don’t think that’s what it is, Inkerz,” Udol snapped. “Driver! Get us in through there!”
The driver dropped the gears down to the lowest ratio and began to roll the carrier through the nearest arch span onto the obsidae. Almost at once they were crushing tent structures and lean-tos under their heavy, solid wheels. Frantic pilgrims, flowing around the vehicle as they fled the area, hammered their fists on the armoured sides and implored them to stop.
“No go, major,” said the driver, hauling on the brake. “Not unless you want to, you know, crush them.”
“Everybody out!” Udol ordered. “Rove-team spread! Get on with it!”
The side hatches on all three troop carriers rattled open and the troops dismounted, fifteen from each. They lunged their way forward against the tide of the crowd, carrying their weapons upright Udol paused long enough for Inkerz to strap the compact accelerant tank to his back and connect the hose, then he took off, pushing to the head of his men. He raised his armour-sleeved left arm, squeezed the stirrup built into the palm of the glove, and scorched off a little rippling halo of flame into the air so they could pick him out in the crush. Once he had their attention, he dispers
ed them left and right through the forest of tents and personal detritus.
Fifty paces into the shanty, the place was almost deserted. The smoke was thicker. Udol was appalled but unsurprised at the wretched conditions the pilgrims had been living in. Junk, rubbish and human waste covered the narrow tracks that wound between the pathetic tents. It was hard to see more than a few metres in any direction. Quite apart from the smoke and the shelters, there were clock shrines everywhere No two were identical, but they all followed the same essential pattern: a timepiece of some sort — domestic clock, electric timer, digital chronometer, handsprung horolog — set in a home-made wooden box, the taller and more gaudily painted the better, it seemed. He looked at one nearby. As tall as a man, with reclaimed tin shutters open at the top to reveal the clock face, it was set on a wooden handcart and anchored in place with industrial rivets. The thing had been painted gold and silver and, in places, green, and skirts of plastic sheeting had been wrapped around the towering body. Inside that upright box, a stationary pendulum hung down, festooned with dried flowers, crystals, keepsakes, coins and a hundred other votive offerings. At the top, inside the shutters, the old clock face and the hands had been sprayed green and then the dial and the tips of the hands picked out again in gold. The hands were set at a heartbeat before midnight.
Major Udol knew precisely the significance of that.
He went around the shrine, waving the troopers behind him close. The pilgrim shelters ahead of them were burning freely. Dirty yellow flames licked away shelter cloth and canvas and leapt up into the morning air, swirling into dense, dark smoke Udol saw a clock shrine in the heart of the fire succumb and topple.
The trooper beside him suddenly jumped back, as if in surprise. Then he did it again and fell on his back.
Shot through the torso, twice. Udol didn’t even have to look.
He barked a hasty warning into his vox. The men around him scattered into cover. Two-thirds of them made it The bastards had been waiting.
Udol crouched down behind the relative shelter of an overturned flatbed as energy bolts spat and whistled overhead. One of his men nearby got in behind the frame of a plastic tent and then rolled over onto his side as a las-round came through the fabric skin and into the back of his head. Another man, caught in the open, was knocked over by a laser bolt that broke both his legs. He fell hard, and started crawling until another shot hit him in the face.
Udol felt his heart race. He glimpsed movement on the pathway next to the fire, drew his laspistol, and fired a few bright bars of energy down the narrow track. The troopers around him began to open up with their carbines.
“Inkerz!” Udol voxed. “Get tac logis. Tell them there’s another hot raid coming in right down here under the aqueduct!”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
It was hot, all right, and getting hotter. Udol counted forty-plus hostiles out there, in amongst the abandoned tents. He glimpsed drab red body armour and dust-cloaks. They matched the description of the hostiles that had been hitting and running all around the city skirts for the last four days. Heretic zealots, drawn to the city as surely as the pilgrims, as anxious to deny the truth occurring here as the pilgrims were to celebrate it. Marshal Biagi had told Udol personally that the hostiles were most probably militant cultists from a world in the local group. They’d made their way to the planet under cover of the mass pilgrim influx to stage terror attacks on the city.
The bastards could fight. Fight disciplined, and that was what made them really scary. Udol had tangled with warp scum many times before — had the scars to prove it — and Imperial military rigour had triumphed over zealot fanaticism every time.
Maybe it was the Imperium’s turn to play the fanatic, Udol considered. According to every clock in sight, the hour was on them. They certainly had something to be fanatical about at last.
A sudden wind picked up, and began to drive the smoke cover hard north. A great part of the hostiles’ position in amongst the tents was abruptly unveiled. Udol coordinated his shooters and began systematic counter-fire. His troop pounded rapid fire into the shamble of tents and bivouacs, and then pushed forward through the shanty, keeping their heads low.
A weapon cracked close to Udol, and the man to his left tumbled over onto the remains of a survival blister. Udol swung round and fired his sidearm, hitting the hostile square in the snarling iron visor he was wearing. Before the bastard’s body had even folded up under him, another two came charging out of cover, firing wildly. Udol dropped to one knee, raised his left arm straight and clenched the stirrup grip. A long spear of incandescent flame leapt from the torch-vent behind the knuckles of his glove and broke around their torsos. Both staggered, ablaze, screaming. The flames cooked off the powercells in the nearest one’s webbing and blew him apart, shredding his arms and torso right off his collapsing legs in a searing flash. The explosion felled his companion, who lay writhing and burning on the ground. Udol walked over to him and executed him with a single shot from his laspistol.
“Farenx. Beresi. Get forward on the double,” Udol told the men behind him. They were close to the edge of the shanty spread, and the hostiles were falling back fast. Just heretics, Udol thought. Maniac cultists testing the faith and resolve of the city with their cowardly terror-tactics. Exactly what the Regiment Civitas Beati had been formed to fight.
But when he reached the hem of the shanty, he realised he was wrong. It was more than that, far more. The open vista of the obsidae lay before him: a flat, cold waste of grey pumice and dust flecked by litters of black volcanic glass. It stretched away north for three kilometres towards Grace Gorge and the murky crags of the Stove Hills.
Three vehicles were approaching, striding in towards the shelter camp. Stalk-tanks. Behind them, at their plodding heels, came a fanned out line of over two hundred hostiles on foot, draped in dull red dust-capes. Since when did cult heretics have armour? Since when did they assault like a military force?
“Oh crap!” Udol heard himself say. “Fall back! Fall back!”
The stalk-tanks came on, scuttling like arachnids. Each had six piston-geared legs that supported the low-slung body casings. Udol could see the drivers in the underslung bubbles beneath the tails. On each raised head section, dual mini-turrets rotated and began to fire.
The blistering shots came in constant, rippling waves as the barrels of the double pulse lasers in each mini-turret pumped, recoiled and fired again with brutal, mechanised rhythm. Udol saw Beresi cut in two, and three other troopers lifted off the ground by the overpressure of impact blasts. Detonations threw pumice and obsidian chips into the air. Twinkling scratches of light flickered along the advancing row of blood-red troopers as they began to fire their weapons too. Udol fell into cover. He heard men he’d known since childhood screaming their last words into their moulded rebreather masks.
He did the only thing he could think of. He prayed to the Saint.
Fifteen kilometres south, at the crest levels of the inner city, the immortal choir was tuning up. Rampshel, the choir-master, was limping to and fro, waving his baton, and calling for the second voices to “pitch yourselves, for Terra’s sake!” The children in the front rank, some no more than six years old standard, were fidgeting with their formal ruffs and vestments, and gazing into the distance. The fumes of incense burners filled the cool air, and the temple slaves were setting out the last of the golden reliquary boxes under direction of the High Ecclesiarch and his black-robed provosts.
“Almost there, first officiary,” assured Rampshel as he shuffled past, leaning on his silver-knobbed cane. “Absolutely nearly almost there.”
“Very good, choir master. Carry on,” said Bruno Leger, elected first officiary of Beati City. He was a small man, with a cleanly shaved scalp and a neatly clipped goatee. He settled his mantle of office around his shoulders with a fastidious gesture, and double-checked that his amulet was hanging squarely on his chest. By his side, Marshal Biagi folded his huge arms and sighed.
??
?We’re good, I think,” muttered the first officiary. “Are we good?”
“We’re good, sir,” replied Biagi.
“Are we? Fine Excellent. I mean, is this… you know… sufficient?”
“It’s fine, first officiary,” said Biagi. He smoothed his regimental sash. “If the bloody choir can hit a note, we’ll be laughing.”
“Are they off-key? Are they? Off-key?” First Officiary Leger craned his head and cupped a hand around his ear. “They’re off, aren’t they? I’ll have a word…”
“Sir, please,” said Ayatani Kilosh, extending a gnarled hand out of the folds of his long, blue silk robes and placing it reassuringly on Leger’s arm. “Everything is quite perfect.”
“Is it? Is it perfect? Good. Excellent. Why are those little boys wandering off? Shouldn’t they be in the front rank of the choir?”
“Rampshel will see to it, sir,” said Biagi.
“Will he? I hope so. I want everything to be perfect. These are heroes we’re welcoming today. Veterans. Their reputation precedes them.”
“Certainly it does, sir,” said Ayatani Kilosh.
A shadow flickered past overhead, momentarily blotting out the skylights of the ceremonial docking terrace. They all felt the thump of touch down.
“Well, they’re here,” said Leger.
Rampshel raised his arms and the choir began to sing. He was conducting them strenuously when the first set of the terrace’s inner hatches cycled open and steam hissed in.
First Officiary Leger wasn’t quite sure what to expect, except something heroic. The choir, lungs bursting and antiphonals held open in front of them, voiced the Great Supplication of the Beati. They were bloody well almost in tune too.
Two figures sauntered down out of the steam. They came side by side. A louche male with a handsome face and the eyes of a joker, and a slender female with cropped bleached hair and an attitude. Both were dressed in matt-black fatigues and body armour; both had lasrifles slung casually over their shoulders. The man had an augmetic shoulder, and winked the moment he saw Leger. The woman was wearing a fur-trimmed bomber jacket, and carried her lasrifle yoked horizontally so that her right arm could hang near the trigger grip and her left folded casually over the top like it was a speeder’s door.