[Gaunt's Ghosts 09] - His Last Command Read online

  Gaunt looked at the deck.

  “I take it you recall what that edict is?”

  “Of course I do. Do you intend to prepare every one of my team for the hearings?”

  “Provided I have the time, yes. I’d appreciate it if you passed the word along to your team members to cooperate with me.”

  Gaunt looked up. “I’ll recommend it. It’s up to them. Be advised, you’ll have trouble with Cirk, Feygor, Mkoll and Eszrah especially. In fact, I’d like to be present when you handle Eszrah. He’s… not Guard. He’s not like anything you or this tribunal will have ever handled.”

  Ludd made a note on the dossier with a steel stylus. “So noted. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “So why do we get you as an advocate, Ludd?” Gaunt asked.

  “You’re permitted one under the rules of the tribunal, sir,” Ludd replied.

  “And we don’t get to pick?” Gaunt asked.

  Ludd put his stylus down and looked squarely through the cage at Gaunt. “No, sir. It’s a voluntary thing. The tribunal appoints an advocate if no one volunteers, of course. No one did besides me.”

  “Feth,” said Gaunt, with a sad shake of his head. “How old are you, Ludd?”

  “Twenty-three, sir.”

  “So a twenty-three year-old junior is the only friend we’ve got?”

  “I could stand aside, allow the tribunal to appoint. You’d probably get Faragut. I didn’t think you’d want that, so I put my name forward.”

  “Thank you,” said Ibram Gaunt.

  Ludd turned a few pages in the open dossier and replaced the dataslate to weight them down. “I need to clarify a few points, sir. So I’m up to speed for the hearing. I will be a greater asset if I’m not taken by surprise.”

  “Go on.”

  “This mission you refer to. You mentioned it back at Camp Xeno too. But without specifics. It was on Gereon, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What were the parameters?”

  “The parameters were encoded vermillion, Ludd. Between me and the lord general. I can’t divulge them to you.”

  “Then that makes it hard for me to—”

  “Go to Van Voytz. If he gives you written clearance, I’ll tell you. If he comes and gives me a direct order, I’ll tell you. Otherwise, my lips are sealed… to you and the tribunal.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Ludd. He closed the dossiers and put them away. “The hearings begin tomorrow at 16.00 hours. As mission commander, you’ll be called first. Your testimony may take a day or two to hear. I’ll be back at 18.00 hours, sooner if I can get the waiver from the lord general. We may be prepping into the night.”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “One last thing,” Ludd said, picking up the plastek sack from the floor beside his chair and dropping it into the hopper basket built into the wire screen at knee height. “I need you to shower and put on this change of clothes. Your team will have to do the same. I’ll provide kit for them as necessary.”

  Gaunt looked dubiously at the sack of clothes. “What I’m wearing,” he said firmly, “I’ve been wearing through it all. It’s my uniform, though I don’t suppose you’d recognise it any more. Patched, repaired, sewn back together, it’s been on me from start to finish. It’s like my skin, Ludd.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. You’re filthy. Ragged. You smell. I can smell you from here, and I can tell you, the smell isn’t pleasant. I’m not talking dirt, sir, I’m talking a sweet, sickly stench. Like corruption, like taint. And that grey hue to your skin.”

  “That won’t come off easily.”

  “Try. Scrub. And shave, for Throne’s sake. Don’t give the commissar-general any reason to suspect you more than she does.”

  Gaunt took the plastek sack out of the hopper.

  “So I stink?”

  “Like a bastard, sir. Like a daemon of the archenemy.”

  The Commissariat guards led Gaunt back along the cellblock of the Leviathan’s detention deck. Grim bars of lumin strip made a ladder of light along the low ceiling. The air was damp and musty. Patches of green-white corrosion mottled the iron walls.

  They were walking past a row of individual cages. Each one contained a Ghost. Young Dughan Beltayn was in the first cage, sitting close to the bars. He nodded to Gaunt, a little eager, a little hopeful, and Gaunt tried to put some reassurance into the half-smile he sent back to his adjutant as he passed. Next in line was Cirk. She simply followed Gaunt with her caustic gaze as he went by, then looked away as he tried to make eye contact.

  Flame-trooper Aongus Brostin, thuggish and hairy, was in the next cage. He was standing at the back, leaning against the far wall, with his meaty, tattooed arms folded and his eyes closed. Dreaming of lho-sticks, no doubt. Then came Ceglan Varl, sitting on his cell’s fold-down cot. The sergeant was stripped to the waist, displaying his dirty, lean torso and his battered augmetic shoulder. He flipped Gaunt a laconic salute.

  “Just keep walking,” said one of the guards.

  In the next cell sat Hlaine Larkin, huddled in a corner, looking more like a tanned leather bag of bones and nerves than ever. He watched Gaunt pass with a sniper’s unblinking stare. Larkin’s neighbour was Simen Urwin Macharius Bonin, Mach Bonin, the darkly-handsome and preternaturally fortunate scout-trooper. Bonin was standing at the cage front, leaning forward and clutching the bars with raised hands.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” one of the guards said.

  “Screw you too,” Bonin called after them.

  Gaunt passed the cell holding Tona Criid. She’d not cut her hair since the start of the mission, and it had grown out long and straight, returning to its original, brick-brown colour, stained with Untill grey. She’d taken to wearing it loose, swept down to veil the left side of her face. Gaunt knew why. As he passed her cage, she made the quick Tanith code-gesture that was Ghost shorthand for “everything all right?”

  Gaunt managed to reply with a quick nod before he was marched on out of sight.

  Eszrah ap Niht, or Eszrah Night as they had all come to know the Untill partisan, stood in the next cell, silent and staring, his mosaic-edged eyes hidden behind the old, battered pair of sunshades Varl had given him so long ago.

  “Histye seolfor, soule Eszrah,” Gaunt called out quickly in the Sleepwalker’s ancient tongue.

  “Be quiet!” the guard behind him cried, and prodded Gaunt between the shoulder-blades with his maul.

  Gaunt stopped in his tracks and looked round at the three armoured guards. “Do that again,” he began, “and you’ll—”

  “What?” taunted the guard, patting his maul into the palm of his glove.

  Gaunt bit back, tried to counsel his temper, tried to remember what Ludd had told him.

  He turned round and continued to walk. The next cage in the line held Scout-Sergeant Oan Mkoll. The grizzled, older man remained staring at the floor as Gaunt went by.

  Murtan Feygor lay on the cot in the next cell. He sat up as Gaunt passed and called out “We dead yet, Ghost-maker?” His voice had a rasping, monotonous quality thanks to the augmetic larynx in his corded throat, the legacy of an old war wound.

  One of the guards kicked the bars of Feygor’s cage as they went by.

  “Oh, you think so? You think so?” Feygor called after them. “Come back here, you feth-wipe, come back here and I’ll make your momma weep.” The threat was curiously dry and flat uttered in that monotone. It was almost comical.

  Rawne was in the final cage they passed. He was sitting on the floor, near the front, his back against the left-hand cell partition. He didn’t even bother to look up.

  At the last cage on the block, the guards slid the barred gate open. Gaunt looked at them.

  “Shower pen?” he asked.

  “We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” one of the guards replied. Gaunt nodded, and stepped into the empty cell. The guards slammed the cage shut with a reverberating clang of metal on metal, locked it, and
walked away.

  Gaunt dropped the plastek sack onto the cell floor, then walked across to the right hand partition and slithered down, his back to it, near the cage mouth.

  “So what’s the story, Bram?” Rawne asked quietly from the other side of the wall.

  “We’re in it up to our necks, Eli,” Gaunt replied. “My bad call, I think. I pushed them way too far.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Rawne said. “We all knew why you called it like you did. They were treating us like shit. You couldn’t take chances.”

  “Maybe I should have. We’re facing a tribunal. Bal-shin’s in charge. Van Voytz may not be on side any more, after what I did.”

  “Combat necessity, Bram,” Rawne replied, stoically. “If we’d stayed in that fething pod…”

  “We might be all right now. Or in a better situation. I should have trusted Ludd.”

  “That feth?”

  “We’re all going to have to trust him now, Elim. That feth’s our only friend. Pass the word along. We have to comply with his every instruction and recommendation, or we’re blindfolded with our backs to a wall.”

  “Why?”

  Gaunt sighed. “The accusation is Chaos taint.”

  “Hard to prove.”

  “Harder to disprove. Eli, as a commissar, I’d always err on the side of caution.”

  “Shoot first, you mean?”

  “Shoot first.”

  “Feth.”

  “Ludd’s in our corner, and I may be able to swing Van Voytz round, if I can get any time with him. But make sure the Ghosts cooperate with Ludd. Whether you like him or not, he’s the only decent card in our hand.”

  “That an order?”

  “More than any other I’ve ever given you.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Gaunt looked over at the sagging plastek sack nearby. “Ludd wants us to shower and clean ourselves up. Get new fatigues on. Get fresh, shaved and scrubbed for the hearings.”

  “I’m fine as I am.”

  “Rawne, I’m not kidding. We stink of filth and corruption. We reek of what they think is taint. Everyone does this, or they’ll answer to me.”

  “Eszrah won’t like it.”

  “I know.”

  “And Cirk…”

  “I know. Leave her to me.”

  “You gonna follow my advice?” Rawne asked.

  Gaunt shook his head. Rawne’s advice, repeated two dozen times through the last few days, had been to sell Cirk out, to give her to the Commissariat in exchange for the Ghosts’ lives. He’d never liked her. And that was crazy, because in the last ten months she’d given Rawne so many reasons to do so. Sabbatine Cirk was a brave, driven officer. But there was just something about her that was inherently untrustworthy. On Gereon, she’d suffered under the archenemy occupation too long. She’d learned that essential skill of the die-hard resistance fighter, that quality that was both a blessing and curse: no one, not a friend, not a family member, not even a life-partner, was beyond betrayal if it benefitted the cause. That made her as mercurial and unpredictable as a razor-snake.

  Cirk had been Elim Rawne’s lover for the past eight months. Rawne desired her, but he still didn’t like her much, or trust her even slightly.

  “So what happens now?” Rawne asked.

  “They’ll start with me. You’ll be next, I’m guessing. Stick to the facts. And observe our clearance unless I tell you otherwise.”

  “Got it. Feth, I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but… we’d have been safer staying on Gereon.”

  Gaunt grinned. “Yes, maybe. But we had our chance and we took it. We had to get off-world with the news about Sturm. And about the Sons. Demands of duty, Eli.”

  “And this is how they thank us,” Rawne said bitterly. Gaunt heard him slide closer to the edge of the wall. Rawne’s dirty hand appeared through the bars.

  “I never wanted to go to Gereon,” Gaunt heard him say. “I thought it was madness, I thought it was suicide, and it so nearly was. But I did what you ordered and what the God-Emperor deserved. And by feth, I never expected it to turn out like this. We’re loyal soldiers of the Imperium, Bram. After all we did, and all we sacrificed, where the hell did justice go?”

  Gaunt reached his own hand out through the bars and clasped Rawne’s.

  “It’s coming, Eli. On my life, it’s coming.”

  * * * * *

  “I want this quashed,” Van Voytz said.

  “After what they did?” Balshin replied.

  Van Voytz waved his hands as if brushing crumbs away from his lap. “We treated them badly. I owe them—”

  “Nothing, sir. You owe them nothing if they are tainted. That’s the bottom line. Whatever mission they accomplished, whatever great service they did for you and the Crusade, if they’ve come back tainted, it’s the end. We can take no chances. We would be derelict in our duty to the Golden Throne if we did.”

  “You’re such a bitch, Balshin,” Van Voytz said.

  “Thank you, Barthol. I try.”

  Seated at the long debrief table in his chambers, Van Voytz looked sidelong at Biota. “Are they tainted, Antonid?” he asked.

  Biota keyed open a dataslate. “Medical scans say no, though there is a significant degree of obscurity. For all their filth and organic corruption, they seemed to have survived exposure to what we might think of as actual taint—”

  Balshin raised her hand. “Point of order, lord general. Master Biota, with respect, is a member of the Departmento Tacticae Imperialis. Since when did he get to render psycho-biological evidence? It’s not his field.”

  Van Voytz got to his feet and went to the sideboard to pour himself an amasec. As an afterthought—and a silent gesture of solidarity—he filled a thimble glass with sacra instead.

  “Antonid is my right hand man. He also knows Gaunt and the Ghosts of old. I’ve asked him to bring his close scrutiny and eye for detail to their case. Go on, Biota.”

  Biota cleared his throat. “I am not an advocate or a specialist martial lawyer, madam commissar-general, as you indicate. But my mind is trained to a superior level in the processing of evidence and intelligence. As far as I can determine from the medicae and psychologicae reports, Gaunt and his men are not tainted. They are genuinely damaged in many ways: they are tired, scared, traumatised, unappreciated. But there is no sign of actual taint. Medicae and toxicological scans agree. They are physically infested… lice, worms, bacteria… and they show perplexing registers of some kind of toxin or venom that they have built up a resistance to. They are scarred, they are battered, they are strung out, and they may never again be the fine warriors we once knew. But they are not tainted.”

  Balshin nodded. “I don’t agree. At least, I’m not convinced. Lord general, you trusted your man Biota here to process the data on your behalf. I saw fit to call upon the services of another expert.”

  “Did you?” Van Voytz asked.

  Balshin turned and gestured to Faragut, who was waiting by the door.

  Faragut opened the hatch and a short, thickset figure walked in. He was wearing a dark brown leather coat reinforced with patches of chainmail. His greying hair was receding, but a tight black goatee covered the chin of a face that was pugnacious, almost sunken in aspect. His eyes were entirely dark blue, without a hint of white.

  “Lord General Van Voytz,” Balshin began, “may I present—”

  “Lornas Welt,” Van Voytz finished. “Lornas and I know each other of old, Balshin. How fare you, master inquisitor?”

  “Very well, my lord general,” Welt replied in soft, clipped tones.

  Van Voytz turned to Biota. “Inform Junior Ludd that the Inquisition is now involved.”

  Biota got to his feet.

  “I don’t believe that’s necessary, my lord,” Balshin said.

  “I do, Viktoria,” Van Voytz snapped. “You’ve just upped the ante. Ludd needs to know that. Throne, Gaunt needs to know that.”

  �
�This is acceptable,” Welt said, politely.

  Biota left the room. Welt took a seat at the table beside Balshin.

  “I’ve reviewed the data,” the inquisitor said. “It’s a tough call. These people have served the Imperium creditably. They have given their all. However, for the safety of us all, I believe they should be put to death quickly and quietly.”

  Van Voytz glared at the inquisitor. “That is a brutal—”

  “It is the price you pay, my lord. The price of the mission you had them undertake. They did what you ordered them to do, and for that, they should be celebrated. But there is no way they could have come out of that nightmare untouched. It would have been better for them if they had died on Gereon. You sent them to their deaths, after all. The only nagging problem is that they’ve come back and now you’re faced with doing the dirty work Chaos failed to do for you. You must execute them.”

  “If they survived the hell I sent them into,” Van Voytz said, “then I’ll give them a chance.”

  Welt nodded. “Hence the hearings. We will be compassionate.”

  “I hope so,” said the lord general.

  Faragut approached Balshin and handed her a slip of paper.

  “My lord, I am called away briefly.”

  Van Voytz nodded.

  Following Faragut out of the hatchway, Balshin asked quietly. “Is this true?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The cage-hatch of the detention deck slid open and Balshin walked down the block, Faragut tailing her. The lady commissar-general stopped at one of the cages.

  “You wanted to see me?” she asked.

  Sabbatine Cirk got to her feet and walked to the cage-front. “Yes. I want to cut a deal.”

  FIVE

  16.03 hrs, 190.776.M41

  Frag Flats HQ

  Sparshad Combat Zone, Ancreon Sextus

  The guards stationed around the hearing chamber came to attention with a rattle of armour, and the eight senior Commissariat officers seated around the semicircular dais rose to their feet. Commissar-General Balshin swept in through the main hatch, her long gown billowing out behind her, accompanied by Faragut, Inquisitor Welt, and an Imperial Guard colonel in a dark blue dress uniform. The four of them marched to their seats at the centre of the curved dais.