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

  “I see,” said Gaunt.

  “About the Gereon mission,” Van Voytz said. With Macaroth’s approval, I have requested citation for you and your team. A special honour or decoration may be approved eventually. Throne knows, you deserve it. But the matter’s knotted up in larger, political issues, and these things take time anyway. In a few months, there might be an official recognition. I’m telling you this because for now, and perhaps for always, you’ll receive only private thanks.”

  “I didn’t do it for the glory,” said Gaunt. The Emperor knows there was precious little in it anyway. I’d simply like to get back to active line duties as soon as possible.”

  “That was my next question. It’s in my power to retire you from the front for the duration. A little soft duty in the rear echelons might do you the power of good. But I expected that wouldn’t appeal, knowing how you’re made. As soon as you’re cleared fit, I can get you into the field again, if that’s what you want.”

  “It is, sir,” Gaunt nodded.

  “Well, then…” Van Voytz began. Gaunt could see that the lord general seemed unsettled. Van Voytz had changed too, from the man who had sent the Ghosts off on their mission. The change was perhaps not as dramatically obvious as the alterations hardship had wrought upon Gaunt and his men on Gereon. But it was there, nevertheless. Van Voytz was older, more haggard, more worn than Gaunt remembered him. He’d lost weight too, so his crisp day uniform hung limply from his frame. The stress of command seemed to have eroded his robust physique.

  “Sir,” Gaunt said. “May I ask what you meant when you said ‘the way things have gone this last year’?”

  Van Voytz shrugged. “Tough times, Ibram. The Second Front’s facing especially bitter resistance from Sek’s forces, right across the coreward Khans. Macaroth expects results, but they’re just not coming fast enough. Here alone, we should have been done six months ago.”

  “Particular problems?”

  “Enemy fanaticism is especially high. Plus the special terrain here and on a couple of other key worlds. That’s a killer. Here, it’s the damn step-cities. Clearing them is a nightmare. There’s also the issue of taint.”

  “That again?”

  “In the last twelve months, the Second Front has lost thirty-two per cent more to taint or suspected taint than during the previous phase. Whole units are deserting the field. Some are even changing sides.”

  “Hence the commissar-general’s particular obsession with that heresy?”

  “Indeed. It’s endemic. Oh, there are reasons, I’m sure. Men break easier when the going’s hard, and it’s certainly hard here. We’re making nothing like the palpable inroads the Main Front’s achieving in the Car-caradon System. It also doesn’t help that the majority of troop units in the Second Front armies are fresh and inexperienced. Most of them are new-founded regiments sent to us from the rear to replace lost strengths. Macaroth took most of the veteran regiments with him for the main push. I’m left with boys, Ibram. Untried, innocent, naive. Their first experiences of real combat are against ferocious cult units lousy with corruption, heresy and the marks of the Ruinous Powers. Suicide is up, mental collapse, desertion…”

  “Is the enemy using psykers to magnify the effect?”

  “Jury’s out on that one, Ibram. Possibly. All we know is, the corruption of the foe is sweeping through our ranks like a plague, right across the Second Front. Morale is at an all time low, and that can only lead one way.”

  “The collapse of the Second Front.”

  “Unless Second Front Command can turn the tide. Or unless the Warmaster decides we are not leading and inspiring the men in a manner appropriate to our authority, and replaces us.”

  “Is that a real possibility?” Gaunt asked.

  Van Voytz did not reply. Clearly it was. Clearly he was under immense pressure to dig his command out of a deep, dark hole.

  “So, your field posting,” Van Voytz said, at length. “It’ll be good to have another experienced officer on the line.”

  “I am anxious to return to the Tanith First,” Gaunt said. He’d deliberately not thought of that possibility for a long time. In the dark days on Gereon, it had been too much to hope for, too painful a hope to cling to. Gaunt allowed himself the pleasure of anticipation for the first time in months.

  It was short lived.

  “That… look, I’m sorry, Ibram. There’s no easy way into this. That’s not going to happen.”

  “What? Why?”

  “There are two reasons, really.” Van Voytz got to his feet and helped himself to a small amasec. He didn’t offer one to Gaunt. The first is you. I’ve moved heaven and earth to get you reinstated, Ibram. Called in favours, like I said… and, like I said, I’m down to my last few. Particularly with Macaroth regarding my performance with mounting displeasure. I had to compromise. It was a condition demanded by Balshin and the senior Commissariat. You may return to the line in the capacity of commissar, with a purview to reinforce and support unit discipline. They don’t want you given a command posting again.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Gaunt said.

  “I don’t like it. Not at all. But it’s the hand we’re dealt. You must come around to the idea that the future of your career lies with the Commissariat, not with command. A separation of powers. I’m sorry. New duties await you, new challenges. The Tanith First was your last command.”

  “Can I file a protest?” Gaunt asked.

  “To whom?” Van Voytz laughed, mirthlessly.

  “Then… then what was the second reason, sir?”

  Van Voytz cleared his throat. “Simple enough, Ibram. You can’t go back to commanding the Tanith First, because the Tanith First doesn’t exist any more.”

  SEVEN

  06.19 hrs, 193.776.M41

  Fifth Compartment

  Sparshad Mons, Ancreon Sextus

  Once they had made him, they named him Crookshank. Crookshank Thrice-wrought, in honour of his twisted form and the complexity of his making. It was a name he could recognise—sometimes—but could not say. In the barking cant of the wrought, he was known simply by the depth and timbre of a particular throat-roar.

  The sun was rising, but no daylight had yet penetrated the vast black gulf of the fifth compartment. High overhead, the visible sky was blue-white, suffused with smoky light, and the rays of the sun were illuminating the faces of the towering stepped walls of the inner Mons to the east. Where the sunlight touched the stone, far away and high above, it glowed like amber.

  The deep floor of the colossal fifth compartment was a blind, cold place, trapped in the shadow of the western wall. The pre-dawn temperature was minus three, and a chill mist shrouded the jumbles of wet, black stones and deep crater pools. It was quiet and still: just the occasional skitter of vermin in the rubble, or the distant grumbling roars of other wrought ones echoing down the compartment’s long canyon.

  Crookshank Thrice-wrought was hunting. The urge to do so was knotting his omnivorous stomach and needling at the tiny, primitive lump of his brain. Quietly, he clambered his great bulk along a ridge of broken ruby quartz. The only sounds he made were the slight clicks of his thick claws against the quartz, the low wheeze of his phlegmy lungs.

  The end of the ridge overlooked a sunken watercourse. He could see it clearly, despite the blackness. His eyes resolved the details of the world as pink phantoms, and he could smell and taste the shapes of it too. He snorted twice, pulling rushes of cold air in through the blood-rich olfactory passageways of his long skull. He smelled the texture of stone, the feeble flow of the shallow water in the sunken course, the damp lichen clinging to the underside of granite boulders.

  There were two wrought ones behind him. He’d been well aware of them for the last fifteen minutes, but had made no show of acknowledging them. They were little, once-wrought, immature things, lacking the display decoration of a mature bull, their lank black hair plastered damply over their pink, sutured scalps. They were following him unbidden, hoping he�
�d lead them to a kill, hoping to share in his success. The once-wrought often did that. They tailed the elders to learn skills from them and benefit from their protection.

  Crookshank ignored them. They were making too much noise. One was panting hard as the adrenaline rose, and it was causing his throat tubes to hoot involuntarily.

  Crookshank moved forward. His massive hands and feet read every notch and crevice of the rock, but he felt no scratch or graze or pain, just as his body registered it was cold but knew no discomfort. He could smell something new now. He could smell meat.

  There was a sudden bang. The thump of it echoed down through the darkness, and made distant voices hoot and bark. Five minutes run ahead of him, Crookshank saw flames. A fierce spot of fire, bright like a star in the darkness, painfully bright to his straining dark-sight.

  His blood began to course. Engorged, the fighting spines of his hackles rose up. Crookshank did not choose this reaction. It was bonded into the flesh of him, wired into his bones. The killing instinct that motivated him to do the things for which he had been made. Already, his dark-sight had clouded from pink to red. He felt the flush on his skin, the wetness as his throat tubes distended and vibrated with the rapid gusts of his exhalations.

  He stood upright, swung his huge arms back and then forward, and pulled that momentum into a great forward leap which carried him down into the watercourse. He landed in the mud, and began to hurtle along the littered shore on his feet and his knuckles, bounding like a giant simian.

  His two followers came after him eagerly. Both leapt off the promontory and landed in the shallow water itself, splashing after him on all fours. One left the water and began to chase Crookshank down the muddy shore, but the other— which was now hooting loudly with every overexcited breath—continued to crash and spray through the shallows.

  Crookshank slid to a halt and turned suddenly. The once-wrought on the bank quailed back in alarm, but the other one came on, whooping and splashing. Crookshank ploughed into the stream and swung for him. The blow connected with the once-wrought’s head and neck, and lifted him clean out of the water. He landed on the far side of the watercourse, twitching and convulsing, black blood pumping from the lacerations Crookshank’s claws had left in his throat. But the throat wound wasn’t the killer. The convulsions were just nerve-spasms. The immense force of Crookshank’s blow had crushed the once-wrought’s skull.

  Crookshank turned and resumed his charge. He saw only red now. Red, and the bright white star of the flames. He shredded his way through a stand of stiff black thorn-rushes, snapping their stems, came in over a low ridge, and saw the prey. Little meat figures, struggling around a burning metal box. One of them saw him coming and screamed. Darts of light flickered at him.

  Crookshank unleashed the full fury of his roar through his throat tubes, shaking the world. As he pounced, throwing all eight hundred kilos of himself forward into the air, arms outstretched, his massive jaws opened on their hinges and the steel daggers of his teeth slid out and locked in place.

  “Contact!” the company vox-officer was yelling, but that much was obvious. A kilometre ahead, the predawn dark in the compartment was lighting up with flashes and flame-light. They could hear the chatter of weapons, and another sound. A roaring sound.

  Wilder ran across the ice-clagged track to where Major Baskevyl crouched beside the vox-officer.

  “Report!”

  “It’s not entirely clear, sir,” Baskevyl replied, making dragon breath. He was pressing the vox-set phones to his left ear. “Sounds like the Hauberkan push has found a mined zone. At least one vehicle crippled. Now they seem to be under attack.”

  “Oh, for Throne’s sake!” Wilder said. “I thought the area had been swept?”

  “Last night, before dark,” Baskevyl shrugged.

  “What are the Hauberkan doing?”

  “Their commander’s just signalled a halt, citing danger of mines.”

  Wilder cursed again. “Patch me through,” he said to the vox-officer. The man nodded and handed Wilder the horn.

  “This is Wilder, Eighty-First Bellad—” He paused, and corrected himself. “Wilder, Eighty-First First. Request confirmation. Are you moving?”

  “Uh, negative on that, Wilder.”

  “In the Emperor’s name, Gadovin, if you sit still, they’ll find you and gut you. Tank or no tank.”

  “The zone is mined. We are holding as of now.”

  Wilder tossed the horn back to the vox-man. “What the hell’s wrong with these idiots?” he asked Baskevyl. “Didn’t they have this explained to them?”

  “The Hauberkan just got here, sir. I don’t think they yet appreciate the jeopardy.”

  “Did they think we were explaining it because we like the sound of our own voices?” Wilder asked.

  “I think that’s exactly what it was, sir.”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Wilder said, adjusting the gain of his low-light goggles so he could study a plastek-sheathed chart. “We’re going to move forward in a broad line and come up in support of these morons.”

  “The order was to hold these trackways for the second wave,” Baskevyl advised.

  “A second wave is going to be as effective as quick piss through a furnace grate if the forward line remains stalled. We’ll leave six companies here on the trackways. The rest go forward. Tell the commissars I’ll need them with me when we reach the Hauberkan command section. Tell them to bring sharp, pointy sticks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s if the Hauberkan are still alive when we get there. Bask, if we advance in the current disposition, which company’s going to make that contact point first?”

  “Best guess, E Company.”

  Wilder nodded. “Let’s get to it,” he said.

  Baskevyl saluted and crunched down the frosty track, ordering the men of the Eighty-First First up out of their cover. In their black camo, the troops flooded like shadows down the trackway and up across the open ground to the left.

  “Get those support weapons moving!” Wilder heard Baskevyl shouting. “Slog it! Look alive now!”

  Wilder watched the fast deploy for a moment, and was satisfied. Moving together, no shirking. Still, blessedly, no sign of an enthusiasm problem in this newly alloyed force. There hadn’t been a single serious issue of morale since the mix. He wasn’t sure if he should feel flattered or simply lucky.

  He adjusted his microbead link. “Wilder to E Company lead. Talk to me.”

  “Receiving. Go ahead, sir.”

  “Chances are your first troop are going to reach that contact, captain. I’m relying on you to deal with it.”

  “Understood, colonel. No problem,” the voice of the young captain crackled back.

  “Thank you, Meryn. See you on the far side.”

  The first spears of intrusive daylight were stabbing down over the high, black crest of the western wall. A sort of twilight gathered in the depths of the compartment.

  This was a bad time of day. Too dark for eyes, too light for goggles. Meryn removed his goggles anyway. According to scout philosophy, the sooner you got your eyes adjusted, the better.

  The forward elements of E Company were pushing ahead through stands of black rushes thriving on a strip of wetland between the line of a trackway and a low watercourse. They were following the crushed and trampled pathways left by the Hauberkan armour. Ahead, all sounds of fighting had ceased, but they could still see fire, lifting into the air beyond the sticky, black undergrowth. The sight of the flames seemed to emphasise how cold it was.

  Dark shapes loomed up ahead. Three Hauberkan treads, parked and immobile. Meryn heard the voice of his adjutant Fargher rising angrily.

  “What’s the problem?” Meryn demanded as he came up.

  Fargher gestured to the vehicle commander in the open hatch.

  “He won’t budge, captain,” he said.

  “I’ve got orders,” the armour officer said.

  “Feth your orders,” Meryn
told him. Those are your boys in trouble up there.”

  “I was told not to move,” the man protested.

  “Feth you too, then,” Meryn spat. “Fargher, take a note of this tread’s stencil plate. Put it in the book.”

  “Sir.”

  “Let’s close it up!” Meryn called, turning to the advancing troopers. “Sergeant?”

  Caffran jogged over to him. “Sir?”

  “Move your troop around to the right,” Meryn pointed. “Come in along those rocks. I’ll sweep in from the left, with Arlton’s mob at the flank.”

  Caffran nodded. It was still as strange to be taking orders from Meryn as it was to be wearing the silver badge with 81/1(r) on it. Times change, war didn’t. Neither did men. Flyn Meryn was as fond of giving orders now as he had been as a lowly squad leader. In Caffran’s opinion, Wilder hadn’t made many mistakes during the mix, but Meryn’s promotion was surely one.

  They ranged forward, moving fast and low through the rushes. Caffran kept an eye on his troop. Five of them were Belladon, but they’d got the hang of the camo-capes pretty well. Besides, they had their own rep to uphold.

  Crossing the rocks, they reached the contact.

  A Hauberkan Chimera had churned out of the rushes onto a stretch of shingle and mud, and gone right over a mine. The blast had burst it wide open, scattering the mud with debris and fragments of armour. Fire was boiling fiercely from the machine’s exposed guts. Two other Chimeras, moving in just behind, had evidently halted. Open hatches showed where the crews had exited in an effort to help the stricken tread.

  Then something else had happened. The ground around the vehicles was littered with torn remains that steamed in the cold air. Caffran swallowed. They’d been hit hard, slaughtered. He knew what must have done this. The deep, terrifying roars of the spooks had echoed down the compartment valley all night.