The roadway went mad. Troopers appeared from all around, alerted by the sound of gunfire. Alien voices bellowed and screamed.
Brostin leant into the recoil and fired another burst, one-handed, that sent two more archenemy troopers over onto the road. Las-shots chopped his way.
Mkvenner holstered his pistol and swung his lasrifle out, firing as the muzzle came up. He kept it on single-shot. He seldom wasted ammo on blurts of auto.
The gun up to his shoulder, he ran forward, aiming and slaying. Each bolt was a perfect kill-shot. Men dropped.
Mkoll was still under the half-track. He had crawled forward until he was under the front fender. His pistol spat. The officer who had, until recently, been chatting beside the bowser went down. Then so did his adjutant Another trooper ran for cover and dropped on his face. “Brostin!” Mkoll yelled.
Bonin looked up. Gunfire echoed down the causeway. Fierce gunfire. The figures above them began to break and run. Engines started. Trucks rolled away.
“Diversion,” he said to Rawne.
“Let’s take them over,” Rawne said.
“Do it yourself,” Bonin snapped, and began to run up out of the culvert towards the figure in the weeds.
“Let’s go!” Rawne called, and the main force began to scramble up the embankment onto the road.
Bonin reached Gaunt.
“Come on, sir!” he yelled.
“Help me with him,” Gaunt protested, trying to drag Lefivre’s dead weight.
“There’s no time, sir!” Bonin exclaimed.
“Now, Bonin! The Emperor Protects!”
With a curse, Bonin grabbed a limp arm.
Mkoll got up from under the track and started firing his lasrifle. Mkvenner was covering his back. Serious fire was coming from both directions along the causeway. Squads were closing on foot, and trucks were approaching too. “Brostin!” Mkoll yelled. “Brostin, now or never!” He looked round. Rifle under his arm, Brostin stood beside the fuel bowser. The driver hung, limp and shot, from the cab. Brostin had unhooked the hose and started the pump again. Promethium flooded out over the road, gushing across the hardpan, trickling down the embankments, pooling under the halftracks and the crumpled bodies.
Brostin was still smoking the lho-stick. It was down to the stub almost.
Mkoll skidded to a halt.
Brostin smiled at him. “All right, sarge. I got it from here. This is my thing.”
Mkoll gaped. “But—”
“Seriously, take a fething hike. You and Ven. Now, you got me?”
Firing off the last of their clips, Mkoll and Mkvenner threw themselves off the causeway into the deep grass on the mill side of the road.
The stink of promethium in the air was now unbearably strong.
The occupation troopers closed from both sides, stumbling to a halt as their boots splashed into the edges of the widening lake of liquid fuel ebbing out over the roadway. Hurriedly, they stopped firing and began to back away.
They all saw the man. The big-built, hairy man, standing beside the fuel bowser with the flooding pump in one hand and lho-stick in the other. He glistened from head to toe, as if he had dowsed himself in fuel as well.
“That’s it,” Brostin grinned. “Guess what’s cooking.”
He took one last, long drag on the lho-stick, exhaled a sigh, then flicked the butt away.
It circled twice in the air.
Then two hundred metres of causeway went up in a wall of fire.
THIRTEEN
Rising, dazed, Mkoll and Mkvenner toiled up through the long grass away from the road, the furnace-heat of the fire on their backs. Patches of the field around them were ablaze, and sparks and burning cinders fluttered down out of the sky. Glancing back when they dared, shielding their eyes against the blazing light, they saw the ruin of the causeway stretch away. An inferno, in which the vague outlines of consumed vehicles could just be made out. The blast had been so intense it had conjured up a swirling doughnut of flame that mushroomed into the sky and even now was spilling out in a wider and wider halo.
On the road, they could see the picket line disintegrating as men rushed to aid their comrades and then were beaten back by the unquenchable heat.
“Holy Throne,” Mkoll muttered.
“Let’s get to the mill,” Mkvenner said. His voice was cold. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle the stoic scout, not even a spectacle of this magnitude.
Then he paused. At long last something penetrated his reserve and produced a response.
“Feth me…” he said.
Mkoll looked. A figure, trailing flame, was staggering through the grass below the causeway. It fell, and rolled, trying to stifle its own burning clothes. Then it got up again and began to limp towards them.
It was Brostin. His clothes were scorched, his hair and eyebrows singed, his skin blackened and blistered.
But he was alive. And smiling.
They hurried down the slope to him and helped him along.
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice hoarse and wheezing.
“How the feth… how the feth are you not dead?” Mkoll asked him.
Brostin hesitated before replying. There had been a drum of detergent gel on the back of the bowser, retardant material carried in case of spills. Just like the stuff Brostin had used back in his days on the fire watch in Tanith Magna. He’d poured it over himself just before his trick with the lho-stick. It wouldn’t stop him burning, not in an inferno like that, but it would protect him long enough to get clear. Brostin considered explaining this to Mkoll and Mkvenner, but he realised that, for the first time, he had shown skills and secrets that impressed the unimpressable scouts. He wasn’t about to waste that moment of superiority with a mundane explanation.
He said: “I know fire. Been waging war with it for years. It wouldn’t dare harm me, not after all we’ve been through together.”
The scouts looked at him, suspecting they were being hoodwinked, but lost for an answer. Brostin clambered on up the slope.
“Come on,” he said. “We haven’t got all day.”
“Thank you, sir,” Landerson said. Gaunt turned to look at him. “For what?”
“For Lefivre. You could have left him. By rights, you should have killed him. He nearly blew it for everyone.”
“He was scared. I can’t blame him for that.”
“We’re all scared,” Landerson said. “We all deal with it. Lefivre’s nerves are shot and he’s a liability—”
Gaunt held up a hand. “Listen, Landerson. You and Lefivre and the other cell members have risked everything to help my team. I can’t repay you the way you’d like me to. I can’t save your world. But I’ll damn well save any of you if it’s in my power to do so. If we don’t look out for each other, we might as well quit now.”
“You’re not at all what I expected,” Landerson said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean… you’re a Guard commissar. I’ve heard stories. Stories of ruthlessness. Brutality. Iron rule and unflinching punishment.”
“I’m all of those things,” said Gaunt. “When I have to be. But I have a soul too. I serve the beloved Emperor, and I serve mankind. I believe that service extends to the weak and the frightened. If I’d executed your friend or left him to die, what kind of servant of mankind would that make me?”
Throughout Gaunt’s career, the ability to turn out an inspirational phrase had served him well. A key part of any commissar’s job was to inspire and uplift, to make a man forget the privations he suffered or the horrors he faced. He was good at it. Right now, with some distaste, he realised he was playing on that skill, saying what Landerson needed to hear. The truth was he hadn’t wanted to leave Lefivre’s body behind, nor any other clue the archenemy could exploit. If he was going to pull Lefivre out, it might as well have been alive.
But Gaunt wanted to keep Landerson on his side. The Ghosts needed the resistance now, more than ever. Without their cooperation, the mission was doomed. Gaunt had serious misgiv
ings about Cirk, and by extension her associates Plower and Acreson. But Landerson seemed the soundest of them. Solid, dependable, driven. And loyal. Gaunt didn’t want to breed any resentment between the mission team and the cell fighters by treating them as expendable.
So he did what commissars had been doing since the inauguration of the Officio Commissariat. He put a positive spin on things. He inspired and kindled trust.
They had been at the air-mill now for twenty minutes. Ruined and derelict, the structure rose above the thinning mist at the top of the fields. There was a decent view down across the three kilometres to the causeway. Gaunt could see the shimmering light of the huge fire, and with his scope he could pick out the commotion along the enemy line.
So far there was no sign of the diversion team. Cirk was pressing to move on. “They’ll be scouring the area before the hour’s out,” she’d told Gaunt. Gaunt decided to give Mkoll’s team another ten minutes.
He prayed they were alive. The fireball had been vast. Had it been the promised diversion, or an accident?
“Go check on Lefivre,” Gaunt said to Landerson. Tell him… tell him we’re fine. Him and me, I mean. No hard feelings.”
Landerson turned and went back inside the mill, leaving Gaunt in the stone doorway. Gaunt looked up at the winch window twenty metres above him in the tower’s side.
“Anything?” he called.
Larkin’s head appeared and shook.
“Keep watching. Larks.”
Gaunt wandered around the mill’s vast base and entered the loading yard. Feygor stood watch on the gate, and nodded to his commander. Criid had found a rusting water tank and was purifying water to refill their flasks.
“Any sign of the sarge?” she asked Gaunt. Criid was a sergeant herself, a platoon leader, the first female sergeant in the Tanith First. But everyone called Mkoll “the sarge”.
“Not yet, Tona.”
She shrugged. “I had a dream last night,” she went on. “Saw Caff and the kids. They were fine.”
“Good,” he smiled. They were all suffering from vivid, sometimes delusional dreams. Tona Criid had been a gang-girl on Verghast, hard-forged by that tough and uncompromising life, but she still displayed a wonderful naïveté. The florid dreams Gereon was fermenting in their minds were not illusions to her. She reported her dream as a matter of fact, as if she’d had a pict message from home. Gaunt wasn’t about to contradict her. Criid was one of the most dependable and four-square people in his team, up there with Ven and Mkoll.
“How light are we getting?” he asked. Criid and Beltayn shared responsibility for supervising the team’s supplies of food and ammunition.
“Down to two days on rations,” she said. “Four if we switch to emergency conservation. I don’t recommend that. Doc Curth agrees. We’ll get slow and tired. Time to start foraging.”
Gaunt nodded. There had been no way they’d have been able to bring enough rations for the entire mission. Foraging was a necessary evil, and he’d been putting it off. Once they started eating the native resources, it would likely accelerate the effect of Chaos in their systems.
Time was running out.
“Ammo?” he asked.
“Plenty for the heavy, and almost a full set of charges. Las down by a third. Hard rounds is a different story. Pretty short. We’ve been into a gak of a lot more firelights than we were expecting at this stage.”
Gaunt pursed his lips. They certainly had. The standoff in Ineuron Town alone had almost cleaned him out of bolt and slug clips.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Tona?”
“Do you know someone called Wilder?”
“Wilder? No, I don’t think so.”
“A Colonel Wilder. He has dark hair, and is a good looking man.”
“No, sergeant. I don’t believe I do. Why?”
She smiled, screwing the lid onto one of the flasks. “He was in my dream too. Caff kept calling him ‘sir’.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that’s all about, Criid,” Gaunt said.
“Oh well,” she said. “I’m sure Caff will tell me.”
Feygor called out from the gate. Out of the mists, Mkoll, Mkvenner and Brostin had just come into view.
A wretchedly thick pall of smoke hung over the causeway. Uexkull swung down out of the deathship hatch and walked along through the jumble of transports until he reached the point where the road surface became black and blistered. Behind him, the occupation troopers cowered on their knees.
Before him lay a stretch of destruction. Buckled rockcrete, charred heaps, the torched, molten residue of vehicles.
“A fuelling accident?” he asked.
At his side, Virag cleared his augmented throat. “Lord, we think not. There was a report of gunfire just before the ignition. A firefight.”
Uexkull turned slowly to look up-country at the air-mills now slowly being revealed as the fog breathed away. “Then they died here. Or they used the confusion to slip past the picket.”
“They have shown themselves to be devious and resourceful thus far,” Virag said. “I think we have to presume they are beyond the road. Some of them, at least.”
“Agreed,” said Uexkull. “Start a point by point search of the region. Begin with the mills and the nearby villages.
“I have a nasty feeling they have played me for a fool, and that is not a sensation I wish to prolong. Find them, Virag. Find them, or at least point me at them. I want to kill them myself.”
“Yes, lord.”
“One last thing,” Uexkull said. “Summon all the sirdars and other seniors in charge of the picket line. Have them come to me in the next five minutes.”
Virag nodded. Uexkull drew his bolter and checked the clip load.
“The next five minutes, you hear me? I wish to discipline the morons who let this happen.”
Idresha Cluwge had been belching at him for three hours now. True, her skeletal hand-maids had been translating her guttural questions, but the pheguth felt like he’d been burped at for long enough.
“I’m tired,” he said.
The Anarch’s chief ethnologue leaned back in her grav-chair and steepled her massive fingers across her domed chest.
“We have barely begun, pheguth,” she said, via one of her life-wards.
The pheguth shrugged. The ethnologue bemused him. Not as a person—she was a grotesque monster, and that was bafflement enough. No, it was her purpose. It was her “duty to learn in all detail about the life and culture of the enemy. That’s what she’d told him on the dam. She asked him curious questions like:
“How does a man make the sign of the aquila, and what does it represent?”
or
“Eggs, when fried, are popular amongst men of the Imperium, are they not?”
or
“How old must an Imperial child be before he or she is considered fit for military service?”
or
“Explain simply the financial mechanisms of the Munitorum.”
They knew nothing. Nothing! It made the pheguth laugh. For all its might, for all its frightening power, the archenemy of mankind understood virtually nothing about the day-to-day workings of the Imperium.
The ethnologue was, in his opinion, the archenemy’s most formidable weapon. The forces of the Ruinous Powers might lay waste to worlds, conquer planets, and burn fleets out of the void, but they did not even begin to understand the mechanisms of their sworn enemy.
Cluwge was an instrument in that subtle war. She asked the questions that were unanswerable during the heat of combat. She asked about the little details, the small particulars of Imperial life. The hosts of the Archon might crush the warriors of the Imperium, might drive them to rout, but Cluwge’s understanding offered them true mastery. Defeating the enemy was one thing. Comprehending the workings of its society so that it might be controlled and suppressed—that was quite another.
Idresha Cluwge was a tool of domination. What she learned informed the higher powers and armed
them for rule.
The pheguth had answered his best.
“I want to go now,” he said. The nagging pain of transcoding soaked his brain. Tomorrow, or the day after, we can take this up again.”
Cluwge shrugged.
The pheguth rose. “A pleasure,” he said and walked out of the room.
He had expected to find his antlered handlers in the anteroom, but there was no sign of them. The door stood open and bright sunlight beckoned from the gallery beyond.
The pheguth walked through the door and out onto the gallery. Daylight spilled in through the windows. The gallery was empty right down its length. At the far end, the next door was also open.
“Desolane, Desolane,” the pheguth tutted as he scurried down the gallery in his slippers. “When will you stop these tests of my loyalty?”
A figure stepped in through the doorway at the end of the hall. It was not Desolane. The pheguth had never seen this person before. He came to a halt, eyes narrowed in curiosity.
“Who—?” he began.
The man was tall and clad in dark khaki fatigues. He was sweating, as if he was scared.
“Are you the pheguth?” he asked in a curiously accented voice.
The pheguth began to step backwards. “That is what they call me…” he replied, his voice tailing off.
The man in khaki produced a laspistol from his tunic and aimed it at the pheguth’s head.
“In the name of the Pact and the Archon!” he said.
And fired.
FOURTEEN
The pheguth stood where he was and blinked. There was an odd, stinging pain in the left side of his face, and a warmth on his left shoulder. The man in khaki continued to point the pistol at him, his hand shaking, his eyes wide.
The pheguth glanced down slowly. Blood was soaking his left shoulder and the front of his tunic. Hi’s blood. He raised his hand and gently prodded the fused mess of his left ear. His fingertips came away bloody. The man in khaki had been so scared, so worked up that he’d botched the point-blank headshot.