Gaunt cursed.
“What about the ring?” Milo asked.
Gaunt paused, then fished Dercius’ ring from his pocket. He fitted that into the read-slot beside the one that held the crystal and activated it.
Old and too out of date to open the dedicated ciphers of the crystal, the ring was nevertheless standardised in its cryptography enough to authorise use of the downloaded codes. The vista-plate scrolled nonsense for a moment, as runic engram languages translated each other and overlaid data, transcribing and interpreting, rereading and re-setting. The crystal opened, spilling its contents up in a hololithic display which projected up off the vista-plate.
“Oh Feth… what’s this mean?” Corbec murmured, instantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he saw.
Milo and Gaunt were silent, as they read on for detail.
“Schematics,” Zoren said simply, an awed note in his voice. Gaunt nodded. “By the Golden Throne, I don’t pretend to understand much of this, but from what I do… now I see why they were so keen to get it.”
Milo pointed to a side bar of the display. “A chart. A location. Where is that?”
Gaunt looked and nodded again, slowly. Things now made sense. Like why Fereyd had chosen him to be the bearer of the crystal. Things had just become a great deal harder than even he had feared.
“Menazoid Epsilon,” he breathed.
A MEMORY
KHEDD 1173,
SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER
The Kheddite had not expected them to move in winter, but the High Lords of Terra’s Imperial Guard, whose forces dwelt in seasonless ship-holds plying the ever-cold of space, made no such distinction between campaigning months and resting months. They burned two clan-towns at the mouth of the River Heort, where the deep fjord inlets opened to the icy sea and the archipelago, and then moved into the glacial uplands to prosecute the nomads who had spent the summer harrying the main Imperial outposts with guerrilla strikes.
Up here, the air was clear like glass, and the sky was a deep, burnished turquoise. Their column of Chimera troop transports, ski-nosed half-traks commandeered locally, Hellhounds and Leman Russ tanks with big bulldozer blades, made fast going over the sculptural ice desert, snorting exhaust smoke and ice-spumes in their wake. The khaki body-camouflage from their last campaign in the dust-thick heatlands of Providence Lenticula had been painted over with leopard-pelt speckles of grey and blue on white. Only the silver Imperial Eagles and the purple insignia of the Jantine Patricians remained on the flanks of the rushing, bouncing, roaring vehicles.
The Sentinel scouts, stalking as swift outriders to the main advance, had located a nomad heluka three kilometres away over a startlingly vivid glacier of green ice. General Aldo Dercius swung the column to a stop and sat on the turret top of his command tank, pulling off his fur mittens so he could sort through the sheaf of flimsy vista-prints the sentinels had brought back.
The heluka seemed of normal pattern — a stockade of stripped fir-stems surrounding eighteen bulbous habitat tents of tanned mahish hide supported on umbrella domes of the animals’ treated rib-bones. There was a corral adjacent to the stockade, holding at least sixty anahig, the noxious, hunchbacked, flightless bird-mounts that the Kheddite favoured. Damn things — ungainly and comical in appearance, but the biped steeds could run faster than an unladen Chimera across loose snow, turn much faster, and the scales under their oily, matted down-fur could shrug off las-fire while their toothed beaks sliced a man in two like toffee.
Dercius slid his flare goggles up for a better look at the vista-prints, and winced at the glare of the open snow. Down on the prow of the Leman Russ, his crew were taking time to stretch their limbs and relax. A stove boiled water for treacly caffeine and Dercius’ two adjutant/bodyguards were applying mahish fat to their snow-burned cheeks and noses out of small, round tins they had bartered from the local population. Dercius smiled to himself at this little thing. His Patricians had a reputation for aristo snobbery, but they were resourceful men — and certainly not too proud to follow the local wisdom and smear their faces with cetacean blubber to block the unforgiving winter suns.
His face caked in the pungent white grease, Adjutant Brochuss slid his tin away in the pocket of his fur-trimmed, purple-and-chrome Patrician battledress and took a wire-handled can of caffeine up to the turret.
Dercius accepted it gratefully. Brochuss, a young and powerfully built trooper, nodded down at the prints spread out on the turret canopy.
“A target? Or just another collection of thlak hunters?”
“I’m trying to decide,” Dercius said.
Since they had left the mouth of the Heort eight days before, they had made one early, lucky strike at a camp of nomad guerrilla Kheddite, and then wasted four afternoons assaulting helukas that had sheltered nothing more than herders and hunters in ragged family groups. Dercius was eager for another success. The Imperial Guard had strength, technology and firepower in their corner, but the nomad rebels had patriotic determination, a fanatical mindset and the harsh environment in theirs.
Dercius knew that many campaigns had faltered when the initially victorious forces had driven the natives back onto the advantage of inhospitable home turf. The last thing he wanted was a war of attrition that locked him here in a police action against elusive guerrillas for years. The Kheddite knew and used this beautiful, cruel environment well, and Dercius knew they could be hunting them for months, all the while suffering a slow erosion of strength to lightning strikes by the fast-moving foe. If they only had a base, a static HQ, a city that could be assaulted. But the Kheddite culture out here was fierce and nomadic. This was their realm, and they would be masters of it until he could catch them.
Still, he reassured himself that Warmaster Slaydo had promised him three more Guard units to help his Jantine Fourth and Eleventh in their hunt. Just a day or two more…
He looked back at the prints, and saw something. “This is promising,” he told Brochuss, sipping his caffeine. “It’s a large settlement. Large by comparison with the herder/hunter helukas we’ve seen. Sixty plus animals. Those anahig are big; they look like war-mounts to me.”
“Veritable destrier!” Brochuss laughed, referring to the beautiful, sixteen-hand beasts traditionally bred in the stud-farms of the baronies back on Jant Normanidus Prime.
Dercius enjoyed the joke. It was the sort of quip his old major, Gaunt, would have made; a pressure-release for the slow-building tension bubble of a difficult campaign. He rubbed the memory away. That was done, left behind on Kentaur.
“Look here,” he said, tapping a particular print. Brochuss leaned closer.
“What does that look like to you?” Dercius asked.
“The main habitat tent? Where your finger is? I don’t know — a smoke flue? An airspace?”
“Maybe,” Dercius said and lifted the print so that his adjutant could get a closer look. “There’s certainly smoke issuing from it but we all know how easy smoke is to make. That wink of light… there.”
Brochuss chuckled, nodding. “Throne! An uplink spine. No doubt. They’ve got a vox-vista set in that place, with the mast extending up out of the opening. You’ve got sharp eyes, general.”
“That’s why I’m the general, Trooper Brochuss!” Dercius snorted with ample good humour. “So what does that give us? A larger than normal heluka, sixty head of war-mount in the pen…”
“And since when did thlak herders need an intercontinental uplink unit?” finished the adjutant.
“I think the Emperor has smiled on our fortune. Have Major Saulus circle the tanks into a crescent formation around the edge of the glacier. Bring the Hellhounds forward, and hold the troops back for final clearing. We will engulf them.”
Brochuss nodded and jumped back off the track bed of the Leman Russ, running to shout his orders.
Dercius poured the last dregs of his caffeine away over the side of the turret. It melted and stained the snow beside the tank’s treads.
Just before s
unset, with the first sun a frosty pink semi-circle dipping below the horizon and the second a hot apricot glow in the wispy clouds of the blackening sky, the heluka was a dark stain too.
The Kheddite had fought ferociously… as ferociously as any fur-dad ice-soldier whose tented encampment had been pounded by tank shells and hosed by infernos unleashed from the trundling Hellhounds. Most of the dead and the debris were fused into thick curls of the rapidly refreezing ice-cover; twisted, broken, blackened shapes around which the suddenly liquid ice had abruptly solidified and set.
Some twenty or so had made it to their anahig mount and staged a counter charge along the north flank. A few of his infantry had been torn apart by the clacking beaks or churned under the heavy, three-toed feet. Dercius had pulled the troops back and sent in the tanks with their relentless dozer blades.
The sunset was lovely on Khedd. Dercius pulled his vehicle up from the glacier slope until he overlooked the ocean. It was vibrant red in the failing light, alive with the flashing bioluminescence of the micro-growth and krill which prospered in the winter seas. Every now and then, the dying light caught the slow glitter of a mahish as it surfaced its great bulk to harvest the surface. Dercius watched the flopping thick-red water for the sudden breaks of twenty metre flukes and dorsal spines and the sonorous sub-bass creaks of deep-water voices.
The vox-caster set in the lit turret below him was alive with back-chat, but he started as he heard a signal cut through: a low, even message couched in simple Jantine combat-cant.
“Who knows that… who’s broadcasting?” he murmured, dropping into the turret and adjusting the dial of the set.
He smiled at first. Slaydo’s promised reinforcements were coming in. The Hyrkan Fifth and Sixth. And the message was from the Hyrkan commissar, little Ibram Gaunt.
Fog lights lit the glacier crest as the armoured column of the Hyrkan hove in to view, kicking up snow-dust from their tracks as they bounced down towards the Jantine column.
It will be good to see Ibram, Dercius thought. What’s it been… thirteen, fourteen years? He’s grown up since I last saw him, grown up like his father. Served with the Hyrkan, made commissar. Dercius had kept up with the long-range reports of Ibram’s career. Not just an officer, as his father intended, a commissar no less. Commissar Gaunt. Well, well, well. It would be good to see the boy again.
Despite everything.
Gaunt’s half-trak slewed up in the snow next to the general’s Leman Russ. Dercius was descending to meet it, putting his cap on, adjusting his regimental chain-sword in its decorative sheath. He hardly recognised the man who stepped out to meet him.
Gaunt was grown. Tall, powerful, thin of face, his eyes as steady and penetrating as targeting lasers. The black uniform storm-coat and cap of an Imperial Commissar suited him.
“Ibram…” Dercius said with a slow smile. “How long has it been?”
“Years,” the commissar said flatly, face expressionless. “Space is wide and too broad to be spanned. I have looked forward to this. For too long. I always hoped circumstance would draw us together again, face to face.”
“Ah… so did I, Ibram! It’s a joy to see you.” Dercius held his arms out wide.
“Because I am, as my father raised me, a fair man, I will tell you this, Uncle Dercius,” Gaunt said, his voice curiously low. “Four years ago on Darendara, I experienced a revelation. A series of revelations. I was given information. Some of it was nonsense, or was not then applicable. Some of it was salutary. It told me a truth. I have been waiting to encounter you ever since.”
Dercius stiffened. “Ibram… my boy… what are you saying?”
Gaunt unsheathed his chainsword. It murmured waspishly in the cold air. “I know what happened on Kentaur. I know that, for fear of your own career, my father died.”
Dercius’ adjutant was suddenly between them. “That’s enough!” Brochuss spat. “Back off!”
Major Tanhause and Sergeant Kleff of the Hyrkan stood ready to second Gaunt.
“You’re speaking to an Imperial Commissar, friend,” Gaunt said. “Think hard about your objections.” Brochuss took a pace back, uncertainty warring with duty.
“Now I am a commissar,” Gaunt continued, addressing Dercius, “I am empowered to deliver justice where ever I see it lacking. I am empowered to punish cowardice. I am granted the gift of total authority to judge, in the name of the Emperor, on the field of combat.”
Suddenly realising the implications behind Gaunt’s words, Dercius pulled his own chainsword and flew at the commissar. Gaunt swung his own blade up to block, his grip firm.
Madness and fear filled the Jantine commander… how had the little bastard found out? Who could have known to tell him? The calm confidence which had filled his mind since the Khedd campaign began washed away as fast as the dying light was dulling the ice-glare around them. Little Ibram knew. He knew! After all this time, all his care, the boy had found out! It was the one thing he always dreaded, always promised himself would never happen.
The scything chainswords struck and shrieked, throwing sparks into the cold night, grinding as the tooth belts churned and repelled each other. Broken sawteeth spun away like shrapnel. Dercius had been tutored in the duelling schools of the Jant Normanidus Military Academy. He had the ceremonial honour scars on his cheek and forearms to bear it out. A chain-blade was a different thing, of course: ten times as heavy and slow as a coup-epee, and the clash-torsion of the chewing teeth was an often random factor. But Dercius had retrained his swordsmanship in the nuances of the chainsword on admission to the Patricians. A duel, chainsword to chainsword, was rare these days, but not unheard of. The secrets were wrist strength, momentum and the calculated use of reversal in chain direction to deflect the opponent and open a space.
There was no feinting with a weapon as heavy as a chainsword. Only swing and re-address. They turned, clashed, broke, circled, dashed again. The men were calling out, others running to see. No one dared step in. From the frank determination of the officers, it was clear this was an honour bout.
Dercius hooked in low, cycling the action of his blade to a fast reversal and threw Gaunt’s weapon aside with a shriek of tortured metal. An opening. He sliced, and the sweep took Gaunt across the gut. His commissar’s coat and tunic split open, and blood exploded from a massive cut across his lower belly.
Gaunt almost fell. The pain was immense, and he knew the ripped, torn wound was terrible. He had failed. Failed his honour and his father. Dercius was too big, too formidable a presence in his mind to be defeated. Uncle Dercius, the huge man, the laughing, scolding, charismatic giant who had strode into his life from time to time on Manzipor, full of tales and jokes and wonderful gifts. Dercius, who had carved toy frigates for him, told him the names of the stars, sat him on his knee and presented him with ork tooth souvenirs.
Dercius, who, with the aid of awning rods, had taught him to fence on the sundecks over the cataracts. Gaunt remembered the little twist-thrust that always left him sitting on his backside, rubbing a bruised shoulder. Deft with an epee, impossible with a chainsword.
Or perhaps not. Trailing blood and tattered clothes and flesh, Gaunt twisted, light as a child, and thrust with a weapon not designed to be thrust.
There was a look of almost unbearable surprise on Dercius’ face as Gaunt’s chainsword stabbed into his sternum and dug with a convulsive scream through bone, flesh, tissue and organs until it protruded from between the man’s shoulder blades, meat flicking from the whirring teeth. Dercius dropped in a bloody quaking mess, his corpse vibrating with the rhythm of the still-active weapon impaling it.
Gaunt fell to his knees, clutching his belly together as warm blood spurted through the messy gut-wound. He was blacking out as Tanhause got to him.
“You are avenged, father,” Ibram Gaunt tried to say to the evening sky, before unconsciousness took him.
PART SIX
MENAZOID EPSILON
ONE
No one wanted Epsilon. No one want
ed to die.
Colonel-Commissar Gaunt recalled his own deliberations in the Glass Bay of the Absalom with a rueful grin. He remembered how he had prayed his Ghosts would be selected for the main offensive on the main planet, Menazoid Sigma. How things change, he laughed to himself. How he would have scoffed back then in the Glass Bay if he had been told he would deliberately choose this action.
Well, choose was perhaps too strong a word. Luck, and invisible hands had been at work. When the Absalom had put in at one of the huge beachhead hexathedrals strung out like beads across the Menazoid Clasp, there had been a bewildering mass of regiments and armoured units assembling to deploy at the Menazoid target zones. Most of the regimental officers had been petitioning for the glory of advancing on Sigma, and Warmaster Macaroth’s tactical counsel had been inundated with proposals and counter-proposals as to the disposition of the Imperial armies. Gaunt had thought of the way that Fereyd, the unseen Fereyd and his network of operatives, had arranged for the Vitrians to support him on the Absalom. With no direct means of communication, he trusted that they would observe him again and where possible facilitate his needs, tacitly understanding them to be part of the mutual scheme.
So he had sent signals to the tactical division announcing that he believed his Ghosts, with their well-recognised stealth and scout attributes, would be appropriate for the Epsilon assault.
Perhaps it was chance. Perhaps it was because no other regiment had volunteered. Perhaps it was that Fereyd and his network had noted the request and manipulated silently behind the scenes to ensure that it happened. Perhaps it was that the conspiring enemy faction, rebuffed in their attempts to extract the secrets of the crystal from him, had decided the only way to reveal the truth was to let him have his way and follow him. Perhaps he was leading them to the trophy they so desired.