[Gaunt's Ghosts 06] - Straight Silver Read online

  The air smelled of coal-tar. Whistles shrilled. The Tanith exited the tracks and huddled under dripping temporary awnings as the local militia moved amongst them, issuing embarkation numbers. Heavy equipment and vehicles were loaded aboard freight trains with wide conflat wagons. From under the awnings, the Tanith waved and exchanged cat-calls with the Krassian troops mustering on the far side of the tracks. The regiments had fought together at Ouranberg. Old friendships — and rivalries — were renewed.

  Ditching the military staff car that had brought him from the LZ, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt strode in through the steam and the bustle. The liaison officer appointed to him, a Major Nyls Fep Buzzel, scurried to keep up. Buzzel was a short, plump man who kept his right hand stiffly in the pocket of his green overcoat, and Gaunt presumed him to be an invalid veteran. As Gaunt understood the circumstances on Aexe Cardinal, all able-bodied men not in reserved occupations were at the front. The fronts, he corrected himself. This was a global war, with theatres to the north and west of Aexegary, along the sovereign states of the southern oceans, and in the east.

  Buzzel was pleasant enough. He wore an officer’s cap with cockade made from some sort of plumage. The feather was wilting in the rain. He’d said something about serving with the Bande Sezari, a name he mentioned with pride as if to suggest it was something special, but Gaunt had never heard of it.

  “When do I see data-slates? Tacticals? Charts of disposition?” Gaunt asked as he strode along.

  “There will be time, sir!” Buzzel replied, side-stepping a munition cart.

  Gaunt stopped and looked at the Aexegarian. “I’m moving my troops to the front line, major. I’d like to have a feel for that area at least before they get there.”

  “We will be breaking the transit to Rhonforq, the allied staff headquarters, sir. Briefing dossiers have been forwarded there.”

  “Are these cattle trucks?” Gaunt asked, banging the side of the nearest wagon.

  “Yes, but—” Buzzel began before realising Gaunt was already moving again.

  “Sergeant Bray! Secure those tent rolls!” Gaunt called.

  “Sir!”

  “Obel? Ewler? Which train are you supposed to be on? Look at the dockets, for feth’s sake!”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Varl? Nice speech. You’re missing a few of your mob. I saw them down past the gangers’ huts, smoking and dicing.”

  “Right on it sir!”

  Buzzel watched the colonel-commissar curiously. Apparently, he was quite a war hero, so they said. Tall, imposing in his black leather stormcoat and commissariate cap, with a face like… like his name. Narrow, sculptural, noble. Buzzel reflected sourly that he didn’t know what a war hero was meant to look like. Sixteen years of front-line service and he’d never met one.

  He liked Gaunt’s manner. Authoritative, brisk, disciplined, and he still seemed to know every man by name.

  “Daur!”

  A handsome young Tanith captain rushing past stopped to salute Gaunt.

  “You malting any sense of this?”

  Captain Daur nodded, producing a data-slate. “I borrowed this from one of the local marshals,” he said. “Makes more sense than a lot of whistle blowing and shouting.”

  “Let me look,” said Gaunt and reviewed the slate.

  “Managing all right?” he asked as he read.

  “Yes sir. Trying to find Grell’s platoon. They should be aboard C Train already, but they’ve been lost in the mix.”

  Gaunt turned and pointed. “I saw them over there, behind the signal gantries, helping to load munition crates from a stalled tractor.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Daur said as he took back the slate and hurried off.

  “A car has been prepared for you in Train A,” Buzzel said, but Gaunt wasn’t listening.

  “Surgeon Curth? What’s the problem?”

  A woman had appeared. She was young and wore a borrowed rain-slicker over her red medicae overalls. A stern expression gave her appealing, heart-shaped face a hard edge.

  “All the regimental medical supplies have gone walkabout, Gaunt,” she said. Buzzel was surprised to hear her use the colonel-commissar’s surname without the respect of rank.

  “Have you looked around?”

  “We’ve all looked around. Dorden’s hopping mad.”

  Buzzel stepped forward. “If I may, sir… the medical supplies would have been loaded onto Train E along with consumables. That’s already on its way.”

  “There’s your answer. Ana,” said Gaunt. “Aexegarian efficiency is a step ahead of you.”

  The woman smiled and disappeared into the melee of hurrying bodies.

  Gaunt moved on, jumping down off the rockcrete platform so he could walk down the side of a troop train along the gravelly sleeper bed. Tanith troops pressed themselves eagerly against the wagon window slits and dangled like apes out of the doorways, clapping their hands and chanting his name. “Gaunt! Gaunt! Gaunt!”

  Gaunt made a mock bow, doffed his cap to them and then stood again, clapping back at them. There were cheers.

  “Soric! Mkoll! Haller! Domor! My thanks to your men for that warm support! Are you ready to move?” A chorus of “Ayes!”

  “We’re ready, sir!” called a thickset, older sergeant with one eye.

  “Good for you, Soric. Tell your boys to get as comfortable as they can. It’s a six-hour ride.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “It’s only four hours to Rhonforq, sir,” whispered Buzzel.

  “I know. But if they steel themselves for six, four will seem like nothing. It’s called psychology,” Gaunt whispered back.

  He turned to face the train again. “Sergeant Domor?”

  “Sir!” replied a soldier with bulky augmetic optical implants.

  “Where’s Milo?”

  “Here, sir!”

  A lad appeared in the crowded wagon doorway, the youngest Tanith Buzzel had yet seen.

  “Milo… pipe us on our way,” Gaunt said. The boy nodded and, after a few moments, a wailing, haunting note rose up above the frenetic activity. Buzzel recognised the tune: The old Imperial hymn “Behold! The Triumph of Terra”.

  Three tracks away, Colm Corbec, colonel and second officer of the Tanith regiment, heard the pipes as he slammed the wagon’s side-door shut and dropped the latch.

  Corbec was an oak of a man, bearded and hairy limbed, with a fighting temper and a playful good humour that made him beloved of the men.

  “Ah, the pipes,” he sighed. “Magnifying the glory of Terra to the heavens in bitter-sweet lament.”

  “You talk a lot of old feth sometimes, chief,” said Muril, the sniper in Corbec’s squad, and the other troopers laughed. Muril was a Verghastite, one of a host of men and women recruited from the city of Vervunhive to bolster the original Tanith strength. The divided loyalties and cultural differences of the two sides — Tanith and Verghast — had taken a long time to gel, but now they seemed to be pulling together as one fluid unit and for that Corbec was grateful. They’d fought well together, mixed well, complemented each other’s strengths, but as far as Corbec was concerned, the real breakthrough had come when they’d started using each other’s curse words. Once he’d heard Verghastites saying “Feth!” and Tanith saying “Gak!” he’d known they were home and dry.

  Muril was one of his favourite troopers. Like many of the female Verghast volunteers, she’d excelled at marksmanship and had specialised as a sniper. Her bagged long-las lay beside her on the straw-littered floor of the wagon and the grey silk marksman’s lanyard was displayed between the third button of her field jacket and the stud of the left-hand breast pocket. Muril was tall and lean, with long dark hair that she kept pinned back in a bun, and a slender, sharp-nosed face framing knowing dark eyes and a refreshing smile. Corbec had seen her injured during the fight for Cirenholm. In fact, he’d almost got himself killed dragging her to safety. Despite the fact the surgeon had been required to rebuild her pelvis, she had recovered a fething sight
quicker than he had.

  He was still shaky, still weak, though he put a brave face on it. Several people had commented on how much weight he had lost. I’m old, Corbec told himself. Recovery takes longer for a man of my distinguished years.

  Old in so many ways, he reflected. Sehra Muril was as lovely as any girl he had courted back in his oat-sowing days in County Pryze, but he appreciated she was quite out of his league now. He knew several young troopers were competing for her attention. Muril paid Corbec attention all right, but he was rather afraid he knew that look. The look a girl would give her father.

  Mkoll, the regiment’s chief scout had told Corbec that Muril had put in for scout training. If she was successful, Corbec would lose her, but he didn’t begrudge it Stealth scouts were the Tanith First’s forte, and so far no Verghastite had made the grade. Mkoll was doing his best to bring some of them up to scratch, and if one of those was going to be Sehra Muril, Corbec was determined to be nothing but fething proud.

  The train lurched and then began to roll. Corbec shot out a hand to steady himself against the wagon’s side.

  He pulled his dog-eared tarot pack from his blouse pocket and grinned. “Okay, lads and lasses. Who’s for a game of Strip Solon Naked?”

  Train E pulled out, rattling as it hunted over the multiple points and gained speed.

  Major Elim Rawne, third officer of the regiment under Gaunt and Corbec, sat back in the first troop wagon and accepted a lho-stick from his adjutant, Feygor.

  “What do you reckon to this one, major?” Feygor asked.

  Feygor was a vicious whip of a man, tall and thin, who had allied himself to Rawne right from the off. Some said they had a murky history that went back to their days on Tanith. They were alike. Rawne was handsome, in the way that weapons and snakes are handsome. Slim but well-built, Rawne had a fine profile and eyes that, as Corbec put it, could charm the drawers off a Sororitas nun. When this comment had filtered back to Rawne, his only remark had been, “Oh. Do they wear drawers?”

  Rawne hated Gaunt. It was that simple. He hated him for a number of things, but foremost he hated him for letting the Tanith homeworld die. But it was an old hatred, and it had become feeble with neglect. These days, he tolerated Gaunt. Even so, most of the troops thought Rawne was the nastiest piece of work the Tanith First could offer.

  They were wrong.

  Murtan Feygor had got his throat shot away during the fight for Vervunhive, and his every word came flat and monotone through a speech enhancer sewn into his larynx. Since then, he’d sounded permanently sarcastic, though several Ghosts, Varl and Corbec in particular, had opined that it was no great disability because he always had anyway. Fierce as a cornered plague-rat, he was snide and cunning and trusted no one except Rawne.

  But he wasn’t the nastiest piece of work the Tanith First could offer either.

  Rawne exhaled a long bar of blue smoke as he thought about Feygor’s question. “Dug-in war, isn’t it, Murt? Drawn out, old. It’ll be trenches, you mark my words. Fething field fortifications. We’ll spend our time either labouring with nine seventies like common navvies or ducking for cover in some other bastard’s latrine.”

  “I hear you,” said Feygor with disgust. “Fething trenches. Fething nine-seventies.”

  A nine-seventy referred to the Imperial Guard’s standard issue entrenching tool: a heavy, compact multi-purpose pick that could be stowed by detaching the helve from the head. Its official name was the “Imperial Implement (General Field Fortification) Pattern 970”. Every Ghost wore one in a button-down leather sheath on the back of his webbing.

  “Trenches,” Rawne muttered blackly. “It’ll be just like Fortis Binary again.”

  “Fortis fething Binary,” Feygor echoed.

  “Where was that?” Banda whispered to Caffran. They were sitting a little way down the wagon with their backs to the door, close enough to overhear their platoon commander’s remarks.

  “Before your time,” Caffran told her. Jessi Banda was Verghast, another grade one sniper like Muril. Fortis Binary was a piece of hell the Tanith had endured several years before the fight at Vervunhive had brought the new recruits in.

  “It was a forge world,” Caffran explained. “We were trench-bound for a long time. It was… unpleasant.”

  “What happened?” Banda asked.

  “We survived,” growled Rawne, listening in.

  It was a straight put-down, but Banda just raised her eyebrows and grinned, letting it wash over her. Major Rawne had never been able to disguise his contempt for the female troopers. He didn’t believe they had any business being in the Tanith First. Banda had often wondered why. She’d have to ask him sometime.

  “Any advice?” she asked.

  The boldness of the question floored Rawne for a second, but that was the way of these fething women. He tried to come up with something good, but “Keep your head down” was all he could manage.

  “Fair enough,” she nodded, and settled back.

  “You hear that?” Feygor asked suddenly.

  “What?” asked Rawne.

  “Raised voices. In the next wagon.”

  Rawne glowered. “Sort it out, will you?” he said.

  “I won’t tell you again,” said Tona Criid.

  “So don’t,” replied Lijah Cuu, not even looking at her. Every member of Criid’s platoon, crowded into the wagon space, had fallen silent and was watching the confrontation warily.

  “You will service your kit and field strip your weapon, trooper.” Criid’s voice was firm.

  “It’s a waste of time,” Cuu replied.

  “You got something better to do?” she asked.

  Cuu looked at her for the first time, fixing her with his cold green eyes. “Plenty,” he said.

  No one had dared mess with Tona Criid before her promotion. Thin and tough, with cropped bleached hair, Criid was a ganger from the slums of Vervunhive, an environment that had schooled her wits, reflexes and fighting smarts. Though young, she could more than look after herself, and was reckoned to be one of the hardest of the female troopers. Unlike Verghastites such as Banda and Muril, she hadn’t specialised. She was a regular trooper with front-line experience.

  Her promotion to sergeant, and the squad command that went with it, was never going to be an easy ride. Gaunt had done it on Mark’s advice. Hark believed it would send the right message to all the troopers in the regiment… take the Verghastites seriously. Take the women seriously.

  Certainly ten platoon needed a Verghastite officer now Kolea was incapacitated. He’d commanded almost automatic respect because of his record as a guerrilla company leader during the hive war. But his squad was tight, and everyone knew they wouldn’t take kindly to any replacement no matter how qualified. There were some tough customers in ten platoon, and none tougher than Lijah Cuu.

  Cuu was a bad ploin and no mistake. A competent trooper, with abilities that could probably take him into either sniper or scout speciality, but he had a mean streak as deep and obvious as the scar that split his face from top to bottom. At Cirenholm, he’d been accused of the brutal rape-murder of a civilian and had come within sniffing distance of a firing squad before Gaunt had got him off. Innocent of that, perhaps, but guilty of so many other things. The plain fact was that he liked killing things. You got troopers like that in the Guard sometimes.

  Gaunt had considered transferring Cuu out of ten platoon but knew that would undermine Criid’s authority. The Ghosts would read that as him giving Criid an easy ride. He’d told her she’d have to deal with him.

  Criid took Cuu’s gaze without blinking. “Let’s review,” she said, slowly and clearly. “You’re a member of ten platoon. I’m the squad officer. I’ve just given Ten a direct order to make use of this transit time to service kit and weapons, and everyone else is happy to do that. Aren’t you? Lubba?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” grunted the gang-tattooed flamer bearer.

  “Nessa?”

  The squad’s sniper, permanentl
y deaf from shell-damage at the hive, signed back “yes”.

  “Jajjo? Hwlan? Any problems with my order?”

  Jajjo, a mixed-race Verghastite with dark brown skin and darker eyes shrugged and smiled. Ten platoon’s Tanith scout Hwlan nodded with a brisk, “Yes, m — sarge!”

  “Only you seem to have a problem, Cuu.”

  “Seems so. Sure as sure.” He smiled. It was the most unset-ding smile in the Imperium. The most evil servants of Chaos would have killed to have a smile that lethal.

  Tona Criid was not smiling. Deep inside, she was trembling. Her greatest fear was not death or torture or grievous injury. It was failure. Failure to live up to the opportunity Gaunt had given her. She would make this platoon her own. Or die trying. And die trying, seemed more likely the case.

  “Do it now,” she said.

  Cuu deliberately dropped his pack and weapon onto the floor and took out a lho-stick, which he lit with a tinder box. “You know what I hate,” he said, blowing smoke at her. “What I hate is the fact that you talk to me like I was one of your gakking kids.”

  “Oh feth me!” Trooper Vril whispered to Hwlan. “There’s gonna be a fight now.”

  “Sure as sure,” Hwlan whispered back sarcastically.

  Unless you were going to make nice, you didn’t mention Criid’s kids. Yoncy and Dalin. They weren’t hers biologically, just war-waifs she’d rescued from the killing grounds at Vervunhive and looked after ever since. She and her man Caffran were parents to them, and when they were off in action, the two kids were looked after by the regiment’s camp followers. It was the Tanith First’s one little happy-ending tale. Criid and Caffran, true love, kids saved from death… you couldn’t make feth like that up.

  “What did you say, trooper?” asked Criid.

  “Here we go,” murmured Vril.

  “Ah feth it,” whispered Hwlan. He slid the haft of his nine seventy out to use as a baton. If it came to fists, he’d get in on Criid’s side. Cuu was a vicious worm. The scout saw that DaFelbe and Skeen both looked ready to jump in, and Nessa had got to her feet too.