Kronn began to speak, outrage in his face.
“Continue with your intent to retreat now, and you… and all your fellow officers… will suffer the same, ignoble fate. If that doesn’t appeal, get your arses in gear, and start doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”
“You are uncouth,” Kronn announced. He unbuttoned his leather glove and smacked Ludd round the face with it. Then he threw the glove on the grass.
“You have grossly offended my honour, the honour of my sire, and the honour of Hetrahan. I will be pleased to settle this matter in a bout of merit at your convenience.”
“Did you…” Ludd paused as he fought to get his head around it. “Did you just challenge me to a duel?” he asked, rubbing his smarting face.
“Are you such a base thing you do not know common manners? Of course I did. By the Code Duello, we will—”
Ludd punched Kronn in the face and broke his nose. The young captain staggered back a few steps and fell down against the tracks of the weapon platform.
“Duel’s over.” said Ludd. “You did say it would be at my convenience. That was a good time for me. Now, get the hell on!”
Kronn looked up at Ludd. There were tears in his eyes, but that was probably just pain.
“Throne’s sake!” Ludd cried. “How far have you and your men come to be here, Kronn? How many frigging light years have you travelled? Your war machines are shiny and new, your uniforms pressed and clean. What are these, gold buttons? You come all this way, dress up in your finest, get to the front line… and then just decide to go home again without firing a shot?”
“It was deemed inappropriate—” Kronn gasped. He paused, and swallowed. Ludd realised the tears were real. For all his bluster, the captain was embarrassingly young, just a precocious child. Kronn looked up at Ludd, and his voice became thin and piteous. “Look at it out there! Look at it! It’s simply madness! Just blind madness! Tell me you do not think so!”
“No,” Ludd lied. He dragged Kronn to his feet, and jerked him round to face the calamitous battle. “Break now, and you simply postpone your deaths. Break now, the line breaks, the line breaks, the city falls, the city falls…”
He looked at Kronn. “…the city falls, the world falls. Death and glory, Kronn. Or cut down running away. What does your breeding tell you a man should choose?”
Kronn wiped the blood from his face. His hand was shaking. “I am afraid,” he said, simply.
“So am I,” said Ludd. “And there’d be something wrong with us if we weren’t. But it’s worth remembering that the Imperium of Man, which has endured these thousands of years, was forged by men who were afraid, yet who faced down the daemons anyway.”
He let go of Kronn, bent down, and picked up the captain’s fallen cap. It was heavy with gold thread and finely-worked bands of silver. He dusted it off and handed it to Kronn. “Let’s begin again, Captain Sire Vuyder Kronn.”
Kronn turned to the men who had gathered nearby. “We will engage, Sergeant Janvier. Make ready.”
“Yes, captain sire!”
“Crews to your platforms! Load munitions! Connect power cells!”
Ludd followed Kronn back to his command vehicle, a gleaming super-Hydra with twin quad turrets. Standing before the machine, Kronn paused and looked back at Ludd. “What do we do, commissar?”
“The line’s left us behind a little. I suggest you move forward in formation about five hundred metres, maybe a touch more. We have to seal up this side of the line. More importantly, we have to start hitting the enemy sections. You may not have a large complement of treads, sir, but your Hydras and multi-laser carriages pack a serious fire rate. We need to lay down a blanket of sustained firepower across that stretch there.” Ludd pointed. “Carve into them, and maybe even split up their spearhead phalanx.”
Kronn nodded and clambered up onto the footplate. “I would appreciate your advice as we progress,” Kronn said. “As you so easily detected, this unit is new to war. We are… novices. We have never seen anything like this. We would benefit from your experience in these things.”
Ludd was startled for a second. “My experience?”
“Whatever it is that allows you to remain so calm, so centred. Assist me, please, commissar. I’m sure you can sympathise with our situation. You must remember your own first taste of battle.”
Ludd climbed up onto the riding board. “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “You never forget your first time.”
Stumble-guns were virtually spherical frames of plated steel, three metres in diameter. The muzzles of plasma-beam cannons jutted out from their carcasses like the spines of a sea-urchin. They rolled and bounced across the field of war, heavy and relentless, propelled by some kind of inertial drive, spilling out random beams of destructive energy.
Gaunt had never seen one in the flesh, but he’d heard far too many reports of their devastating effect in other conflicts. They were like murderous playthings, gewgaws rolled out of the archenemy’s toy-box, blitzing out slaughter wherever they bounced.
Phalanxes of cult troopers followed the tumbling advance of the stumble-guns. The cultists were heavily armoured in black plate, and brandished flamers to scour the ground wracked by the ball-weapons. The cultists also carried heavy censers, bearing them along like litters. The censers were vomiting out the dark, black cloud that marked the archenemy advance, sheeting up swirling cover that amplified the smoke of the firestorms.
“Hold fast! Form a line here!” Gaunt yelled.
Some of the Binars obeyed. Others broke. The lead stumble-gun rolled in across a line position, massacring men with its lancing blasts, crushing others under its metal frame. Gaunt saw men die. Too many men.
The stumble-guns weren’t solid. Well armoured and heavily plated, as well as being wrapped in rusty razor wire, they were still frameworks. Gaunt glimpsed the operators inside the balls, supported in stabilized, gyro-mounted cockpits that remained upright against the turn of the ball-cages around them.
They made a terrible sound as they advanced: a clanking, rattling noise overlaid by the screech and whine of the sputtering weapons.
Gaunt turned to shout another rallying cry, and a plasma beam destroyed the ground beneath him. He fell, squirming, into the mud, into a jagged furrow where the ground water steamed, super-heated.
Explosions burst overhead. Gaunt clambered up from the furrow, drenched in muck. He saw a stumble-gun buffet past, and ducked as more plasma beams speared his way. The Binar line had broken back. Men were running. Some caught fire and fell as the randomly lancing beams touched them. Others were cut in half, or decapitated, by direct hits. A direct plasma beam, especially the crude, stream-blasts of a stumble-gun, severed a human body quite thoroughly. A bright beam ripped along an entire platoon of fleeing men, and their torsos left their legs behind. Gaunt saw a Fortis colour sergeant trying to struggle out of a ditch. A beam touched him, bright as the sun, and the man fell in two directions, bisected vertically down the length of his spine.
Gaunt got up, and began to run back towards the broken Binar formation. Men were milling around him, running. A Binar Vanquisher stormed forward over the ditches, and hit one of the stumble-guns squarely with a shot from its turret weapon. The stumble-gun rocked back, over and over, like a kicked ball, and then began to rotate towards the tank again. It squealed and fired.
The tank’s armour caved in like wet paper and it began to burn.
“Hold fast!” Gaunt yelled.
“They’re killing us!” a man protested.
“So kill them back!” Gaunt shouted.
But how? The line had crumpled. All the precious gains they had made in the first few minutes of the battle were slipping away. How did you even begin to kill machines like that?
Gaunt found himself wishing he had Larkin with him. The grizzled marksman would have had the wit and ability to put a round in through the stumble-gun cages and kill the operators, at least.
But the Ghosts weren’t with him any more,
nor would they ever be again. He was surrounded by frightened youths, who were fleeing and soiling themselves in the face of death.
And he couldn’t blame them.
“Someone give me a grenade!” he yelled.
The nearest stumble-gun suddenly stopped firing, and rolled to a halt. Gaunt ran towards it, expecting at every step to be incinerated. He approached the smoking ball. Even from a few metres away, through the frame and plating, he could see that the operator was dead, bent over in his cradle.
An iron dart transfixed the operator’s throat.
“Eszrah! Eszrah!” Gaunt yelled.
The tall, slender figure of the Nihtgane appeared, bounding towards Gaunt across the mud. He reloaded his reynbow.
“Hwat seythee, soule?”
“You did that?”
Eszrah plucked his fingers from his mouth again. The Nihtgane’s kiss of soul-taking.
“Do it again, if you please.”
He might not have Hlaine Larkin, but he had the hunter skills of an Untill’s partisan.
Gaunt and Eszrah ran towards the next stumble-gun. It had rolled past them into the soft footing of the fen.
Men were running before it. A few of the Binar troops had taken cover behind some scorched boulders.
“You! What’s your name?” Gaunt yelled.
“Sergeant Tintile, sir. Georg Tintile.”
“Good to know you,” Gaunt said as he ran up to the man. “My name is Gaunt.”
“We all know who you are, sir,” Tintile said.
“I’m flattered. Listen to me, sergeant. Our line’s broken, but the day’s not lost. I want you to send a runner to Whitesmith and tell him you’re advancing.”
“Why, sir?”
“Because you are advancing. The stumble-guns are terror weapons. See for yourself, they’ve already burst through our ranks. The enemy believes that when that happens, we’ll break like fools. Prove them wrong. Advance. Hit those bastards coming in.”
“But the stumble-guns, sir…” Tintile began.
“Leave them to me. Do this for me, please, Tintile. The Emperor protects.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have grenades, Tintile?”
The sergeant handed his last two hand-bombs to Gaunt.
“Good luck, sir,” he said.
Tintile rallied his men and continued to advance. Piecemeal at first, then more urgently. The rattled and broken structure of the Binar line re-formed and pushed ahead again.
Gaunt and Eszrah approached the next stumble-gun. It had trampled into a break of larch and coster, and was slicing out plasma beams at the Binar armour as it revved its inertials to clatter free.
Eszrah killed its operator with his second shot. As the stumble-gun died and rolled back into the mud-wash, Gaunt ran up close and tossed one of Tintile’s grenades into the cage.
The stumble-gun blew out with such force that Gaunt was thrown flat. Eszrah helped him up and away from the burning sphere.
“That’s two,” Gaunt said, looking around for the other terror-weapons.
“Histye,” Eszrah said, and pointed.
Away to the north, a monumental rain of shells and lasfire had begun to sweep across the archenemy advance. The phalanxes of cult warriors shrieked and fell as multi-laser fire, at a fabulous rate, rippled across them. Censer-bearers collapsed. A deluge of shots, like torrential flame, was engulfing the enemy’s right flank.
The Dev Hetra had moved forward and, at last, brought their gun-platforms into the fight.
TWENTY-ONE
15.50 hrs, 198.776.M41
Fifth Compartment
Sparshad Mans, Ancreon Sextus
For a whole day, they held them off.
About three hours after Rawne’s unilateral repulse of the Blood Pact, the enemy struck again from the east, using the quartz bastion of Ridge 19 to shield its approach onto the compartment floor. By then, following consultation with DeBray, Wilder had brought the entire bulk of the Eighty-First First into position on the eastern flank in anticipation of just such an event, leaving the Kolstec Fortieth to assume responsibility for Hill 56.
At that point, the day seemed to turn spectacularly bad. Massed in much more considerable numbers than before, the Blood Pact poured out into the scrub, resolutely determined not to be denied a second time. The Eighty-First First became locked in place, rigidly defending a two-kilometre line of rough ground from hasty dug-outs, relying heavily on its crew-served weapons.
In apparent coordination with the Blood Pact’s attempt at an eastern breakthrough, the archenemy armour brigades beyond Hill 56 renewed their assault. All possibility of the fatigued Rothberg tankers withdrawing evaporated. With the Hauberkan reserves, they became tangled in an increasingly feral struggle, which was only relieved by the arrival of the promised Sarpoy armour, the force that had been supposed to replace them on the field. More Kolstec infantry was rapidly sent down from post 36 to reinforce both Hill 56 and Wilder’s line, and strings of Valkyries began flying urgent munition runs back and forth across the southern compartment to keep both fighting zones supplied.
By nightfall, it became evident that the archenemy was not going to back down from either fight.
Through the course of that long, wearisome day, Wilder had kept himself updated with news from the Mons as a whole. From the sound of things, the third compartment was in an even worse state. Both Wilder and Fofobris had sent requests to high command, via DeBray, for reinforcement, but got little satisfaction. Significant reserves had been sent through to the third compartment, where the situation was described as “grave”. After a while, even that choked off. Wilder listened to frantic and disheartening vox traffic describing mayhem in the first and second compartments, where relief columns were becoming boxed in by personnel fleeing the third compartment fighting. There were also ominous reports that some of the relief forces themselves had broken back, too scared of what they had heard was happening ahead of them. Some of these units were actually reported to be “in flight”. Others, more cautious perhaps, were declaring “mechanical problems” and other set-backs that were preventing them from moving.
It was an ugly picture. The two key “hot” compartments, three and five, were enduring massive offensives, and the rest of the Imperial strength was milling around in headless confusion, unable or unwilling to come to the aid of either.
It had been Wilder’s professional experience that warfare ebbed and flowed. Quiet days, quiet months, could be suddenly disrupted by angry flares of enemy activity. He did not see anything especially sinister in the fact that the enemy had chosen that particular day to coordinate and unify its defence of Sparshad Mons. In many ways, he’d been waiting for it to happen.
But there was no denying how successful the archenemy had been. No one knew for sure how centralised the enemy command was in the mysterious heart of the Mons, but by whatever means, it had orchestrated a shatteringly well-timed attack on all sides. And the systems and discipline of the vaunted Imperial Guard had seized up, paralysed, as a result.
In the fifth compartment, fighting continued after nightfall. As the temperature dropped, the ferocious tank battle behind Hill 56 raged on, lighting up the low horizon and painting the looming black walls of the compartment with a shadowplay of coloured flashes. At Wilder’s line, the intensity dropped a little, but all through the night the support weapons of the Eighty-First First continued to hammer away at invasive attempts by Blood Pact strike teams to edge their way forward in the darkness. Just after midnight, one force almost broke through, but it was denied by Callide’s Company after a brutal, forty-minute gun battle across the frosty scrub.
Other dangers lurked in the darkness. Stalkers appeared again, some inexplicably, haunting the darkness behind the Imperial front, as if they had somehow lurked hidden during daylight in dens or lairs in the southern part of the compartment. Two munitions convoys were attacked, and men lost, and Fofobris’ Kolstec troops on the hill suffered a series of predatory raids f
rom the rear.
The next day dawned, but the sun was only a little bruise of light against the black undercast. The unnaturally dark smoke rising off the third compartment war zone was blanketing the entirety of Sparshad Mons. The surreal twilight it created seemed like the product of some foul sorcery.
Along the Eighty-First First’s position, things were quiet for the first few, chilly hours of the day. Vox distortion levels rose, and the inexplicable daylight winds groaned across the scrub and clumpy thorn-rush. Then the Blood Pact renewed its assault on the eastern flank.
This time they sent stumble-guns to shatter the infantry line that had repelled them time and again the previous day. Wilder had been forewarned about these things via the garbled reports flowing out of the third compartment. They were supposed to strike down everything before them like skittles, random and wild, and make a path for the ground forces.
There were three of them. They came down across the escarpment of Ridge 19, rattling like pebbles in a mess can. At a distance, they seemed so odd, so unthreatening, Wilder’s troops just stared at them. Steel balls, trundling in across the damp, gritty soil. Then their spines started to glow and they began to flash out searing plasma beams in all directions, like jumping firecrackers.
The men and women of the Eighty-First First, veterans all, did not break in panic as the inexperienced Binars had done the day before in the third compartment. They held their line. That resolve cost them nearly thirty lives in the time it took to kill the stumble-guns.
The worst of the losses were amongst L Company, Varaine’s troop. Oblivious to the stupendous rally of gunfire they sent at it, the stumble-gun rolled into them and crushed those that it did not dismember and char with its beams. Corporal Choires, one of Varaine’s toughest, finally halted its progress. Luck, more than anything else, had left Choires unscathed as the ball-weapon rolled past, and he bowled a grenade in through its armoured structure, annihilating the operator. Choires did not live to celebrate. As it expired, one of the stumble-gun’s final, spasmodic plas-beams vapourised his head.