Straight Silver, page 13
Corbec thought about that for a moment, watching the oil swirl away down the secondary.
‘Third drum going in now!’ Cown hissed. ‘Is this going to work?’
‘Let’s find out,’ Corbec grinned. He looked up-zag to the turn where Mkvenner and Rerval were talking with a bunch of bewildered-looking Krassians.
‘Rerval! Over here, son!’
The vox trooper hurried down to Corbec.
‘Gimme your flare gun. What burns best?’
‘Sir?’ Rerval said, handing over the fat-nosed signal gun. Corbec cracked it open.
‘Your flares, Rerval. Which one burns best?’
Rerval searched in his bag. ‘Red, I guess, chief. It’s got the biggest powder charge. But we’re only supposed to thump one of them out in predicaments. It’s the emergency signal.’
‘Give me one. If this works, I’m sure as fething certain our Shadik friends yonder will consider this a predicament, and no mistake.’
Rerval shrugged and handed Corbec a red-tabbed cartridge.
Corbec slotted it into the gun and closed the spring-loaded mechanism.
‘Clear?’ he asked Cown.
The Ghosts on the other side had rolled the last drum away. Cown nodded.
‘Duck and cover,’ Corbec told them. ‘Fire in the hole!’
He pointed the flare pistol down the secondary and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
‘What the feth is wrong with this piece of crap?’ he snarled, bringing his hand back in.
‘There’s a safety lock,’ said Rerval, fussing and trying to be helpful. ‘Just there. No, the lever there by your thumb. Uh huh.’
‘Well, I knew that,’ said Corbec and fired the flare down the munitions track.
Superheated, glowing like a laser torpedo, it ricocheted off the right-hand wall, tumbled left, bounced off a timber post and went spinning away towards the cowering Shadik raiders, kicking off streams of bright red smoke.
Corbec pulled Rerval back against the side wall of the zag.
There was a distant yell. A crump of ignition. Then forty metres of the secondary trench went off like a flamer’s kiss. Fire leapt up into the sky, clearing the tops of the walls. Thick, intense, sweet-smelling like the wick-burn of the little lamps they’d given them.
Then there was another smell. A terrible smell. Cooking fat and meat.
‘Good job,’ Corbec told his boys, wincing into the bright flame light. ‘Good fething job.’
The foot assault on 292 came at precisely sixteen minutes after the start of the bombardment. It came from the north-east, the Shadik using the big, rusting tube of the drain outfall as cover.
Just like the note had said.
Not a single raider made it closer to the parapet than fifteen metres. Agun Soric had clustered his rifles around the outfall, and they blazed at the advancing khaki.
Trooper Kazel reckoned they slaughtered at least fifty, maybe sixty even. It was hard to tell. Five platoon had certainly blown them back to wherever they’d come from.
Soric missed Doyl. Doyl had been his platoon’s scout. He’d died on the special mission at Ouranberg. Doyl would have been counting. Doyl would have known.
Soric stood on the step and closed his good eye. He’d always refused a patch or an implant for the eye he’d lost at Vervunhive. He wore the rouched scar with some defiance. It made him look as if he was perpetually winking.
He closed his eye and waited. He saw they’d killed at least seventy-six raiders, a multi-platoon force. Kazel had been underestimating.
Sometimes, Soric saw better with his good eye closed. It was just one of those things. He didn’t think much of it. His eye was dead, and so he reckoned it saw things only the dead could see. It had a vantage his good eye didn’t.
That had been particularly the case since Cirenholm. He’d been badly wounded there. Recovering, he’d had such strange dreams.
Soric knew he should’ve kept quiet about them, but secrecy wasn’t his way. He’d talked about the dreams, and now Gaunt and Dorden and that sweet girl Ana Curth regarded him with mistrust. He should never have told them about his great-grandmother.
Grandam had possessed the sight. Some called her a witch. So what? It wasn’t like she was a psyker, for gak’s sake! Grandam had just been able to… to see stuff others didn’t. Now Agun could, being the seventh son of a seventh son, as Grandam had always assured him.
It hadn’t always been that way. Not until Cirenholm. Passage so close under death’s black wing and out the other side, that marked a man. That woke him up. That opened his senses.
Opened his eyes.
The handwritten note though, that was another thing altogether. Soric felt his heart skip as he thought about that.
How had he known that? How had he written it to himself?
‘Stand down,’ he told his men, and the word was passed along. There’d be no more Shadik at 292 today.
Soric realised he knew that for a fact. Why was that?
He felt scared, really scared suddenly. He limped back to his dugout, ignoring the calls and questions of his men.
‘Vivvo?’
‘Boss?’
‘Get them settled,’ he said and dropped the gas curtain after himself.
In the dim lamp-light, he sat down at the little raw-wood table. The brass message shell was sitting there, on end, casting a little blunt shadow. There was no sign of the scrap of blue paper.
Soric breathed slowly, clutching the edge of the table tightly with his gnarled hands. A drink. That might help.
He got up, and waddled his stiff leg over to the shelf. Scope, ammo clips, candles… ‘spare water bottle’.
Gaunt had said he’d have men shot for drinking on duty. Except in special cases.
This was a special case.
Soric unstoppered the flask with hands that were quaking more than he’d have liked them to. He took a slug of sacra. Good old Bragg had supplied him with the stuff. Soric had developed a taste for the Tanith liquor. Who’d get him sacra now Bragg was gone?
The blue-paper despatch pad lay on the shelf beside the flask. Soric thought about picking it up, then took another swig instead. The grain alcohol burned in his belly. He felt better. He looked at the pad again.
The first two sheets were missing.
Soric glanced over at the table. The brass message shell sat there, ominous.
‘Go away!’ he said.
‘Uh, I did knock,’ said the shell.
But it wasn’t the shell. It was Commissar Hark.
The commissar peered in at Soric, holding the gas curtain back.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Oh, oh! Come in.’
Hark entered.
Soric felt hugely exposed. He tried to keep his mouth clamped shut so he wouldn’t exude the smell of liquor. Gaunt might have forgiven him. Hark was a different matter. Hark was a commissar, unqualified, unalloyed.
‘Everything all right?’ Hark asked. He seemed suspicious.
‘Fine, fine,’ said Soric, breathing through his nose.
Hark looked at him. ‘You could relax, sergeant.’
Mouth clamped shut, Soric grinned and shrugged.
Hark sat down on the stool, removing his cap. ‘Good work today, sergeant. Excellent, in fact. How did you guess the Shadik’s approach route?’
Soric shrugged again.
‘Lucky, huh?’ Hark nodded. ‘Shrewd is a better word. You’re very shrewd. You know your stuff, Agun. Can I call you Agun? It doesn’t offend your sense of rank?’
‘Not at all, sir,’ Soric muttered, trying not breathe as he spoke.
‘The bombardment’s stopped,’ Hark said. Soric realised he hadn’t noticed.
‘We’ve held them off for the most part,’ Hark added. ‘Tough stuff around 293 and 294, and also with Criid, Obel and Theiss. And Maroy’s dead.’
‘Shit, no!’ said Soric, despite himself.
‘Yeah, it’s too bad. Good soldier. But his section took seventy per cent losses. Shells caught them hard. Lasko, Fewtin, Bisroya, Mkdil. All gone. Not you, though, eh?’
‘Sir.’
Hark gestured expansively. ‘I don’t have the full picture yet, but I’m pretty sure your platoon gave the best today, unit for unit. A hell of a job, Agun. Good work. Smart to pick up on their route of attack. I’m impressed.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I’ll be commending your unit to Gaunt. Any one you want to pick out?’
‘Uh… Vivvo and Kazel.’
Hark nodded. ‘I tell you what you could do now.’
‘Sir?’
‘I don’t know about you, Agun, but I’m shaking fit to drop. Man like you must have some hard stuff hereabouts.’
‘Oh,’ said Soric. He rattled round on the shelf. ‘Forgive my inhospitality, commissar.’
He poured sacra into two of the least chipped shot glasses cluttering his shelf and handed one to Hark.
‘Excellent. Knew I could count on a trusty Vervunhiver like you.’
Hark knocked back the shot. Soric sipped his own. He refilled Hark’s glass and breathed more naturally.
Hark finished the second shot. ‘Takes a while, but that Tanith stuff is good, isn’t it?’
‘Becoming a favourite, sir,’ said Soric.
‘You’ll have to tell me how you did it, some time,’ said Hark.
‘Did what, sir?’
‘Outguessed the Shadik. Good work, though. Excellent. The regiment is proud of you.’
Hark got up.
‘I have to get down the line now. Rawne’s been hit. His section is a mess.’
‘Hit bad?’
‘I’m going to find out. Again, good work, Agun. My compliments to your boys.’
Hark pulled back the gas curtain to leave.
‘Thanks for the drink,’ he added, and disappeared.
Soric sat down hard as soon as the commissar had gone. He played with his shot glass, and then finished the dregs.
Vivvo stuck his head through the curtain.
‘Boss? Do you w–’
‘Go away,’ said Soric.
‘Yes, boss.’
Alone, Soric picked up the message shell and unscrewed the top. He had to thump the base of the canister twice to get the fold of blue paper out.
The message was written in his own handwriting, just like before. It said: ‘Don’t drink. Commissar Hark is coming.’
FIVE
Silver, red and black
‘Waiting is crap. It’s crap for a hungry man in a canteen line, it’s shit for a groom at his wedding supper, and it’s double triple quadrilateral crap for a soldier boy like yours truly.’
– Colm Corbec, colonel
It had been a bad day at the front. The Tanith First reserves at Rhonforq could tell that just from the false dusk caused by the wall of black smoke rising in the distance. They waited for news, hoping for good, steeled for bad.
Gaunt had left Captain Ban Daur in command of the First’s reserve section, a full two-thirds of the regiment’s strength, and Daur fretted miserably throughout the afternoon. Every ten, twenty minutes he wandered outside and watched the flickering lights and puffing smogs of the distant battle. At first, the thump of the shells had been like the thunder of a distant storm; muffled, remote, lagging behind the flashes. Then the sound had become continuous, without break or breath or pause. A constant rumble, as if the earth was slowly faulting and tearing.
Sometimes, the ground shook, even this far away.
Once in a while, there came a blast roar so loud and plangent that it rose out of the rumble. Daur couldn’t work out if these noises came from shells that had landed closer to his position, or bigger shells landing with the rest. They’d been told the enemy had brought up some big-reach, huge calibre weapons. All the men were talking about ‘super-siege’ guns.
Daur tried to occupy himself, but the rumble was too distracting. At around 14.00, he went to eat at one of the pensions, and got a curious look from the matronly owner when he ordered scrambled eggs. Only when it arrived did he remember that he’d already taken lunch – scrambled eggs – just an hour before.
He thought of visiting Zweil. The unit’s chaplain was refreshing company sometimes, and good at distracting a man’s mind with provocative conversation. But he was told that Zweil had gone to the front that morning with Gaunt, as if he’d known he’d be needed today.
Daur toured the billets instead. The Ghosts had occupied the stableblocks and barns of a pair of farmsteads in the south of the town, their overspill camped out in a sea of tents pitched in the paddocks behind. The paddocks adjoined an old tannery occupied by a company of Krassians, and a little vee of derelict shops and outbuildings at the junction of the two southern roads, which was the billet of a local brigade, the Twelth Ostlund ‘Shielders’.
Daur wandered into the muddy yard of one of the stableblocks. Burone, Bray and Ewler had taken the long, left-hand barn for their platoons. The men mostly lurked around, dejected in the light rain, like prisoners of war in a blockhouse pen. Daur saw the coals of burning lho-sticks in the shadows of the high-loft hatches. Under the slope of a lean-to roof, Pollo from seven platoon was trying to teach card tricks to a crowd of onlookers. Pollo had been bodyguard for a noble house back on Verghast, and his nerves were augmented by extravagantly expensive neural enhancers, so his fingers split and spread the cards faster than the eye could follow. It was a little piece of magic to watch, and the men around him were captivated. Daur watched for a little while, until Pollo had exhausted his repertoire of tricks and produced three cups and a shell case instead. The audience groaned.
‘Who wants a try?’ Pollo asked, his hands circling the up-turned cups in a blur. He caught Daur’s eye and winked. ‘You, sir?’
Daur smiled. ‘You see my rank pins, Trooper Pollo? I get those for being smart. No thanks.’
Pollo grinned. ‘Your loss.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Daur and wandered on. At the back end of the yard, Haller’s men were kicking a ball around with some of the Krassians. It was a lively, muddy game. Noa Vadim was running circles around the Krassians, his squad mates urging him on. Daur was sure they were really shouting and whooping to shut out the distant growl of the battle.
Daur heard low-level gunfire coming from one of the stable pens and went to investigate. He found Trooper Merrt practising his aim against old bottles ranged on the cross-beams of the end wall.
Merrt looked up as Daur appeared. ‘Sorry, sir.’ he said. ‘Just gn… gn… practising. I’ve set it to gn… gn… low-charge.’ He looked a little shame-faced, though it was hard to tell. Merrt’s jaw and one side of his face were crude metal implants, poorly disguised by a flesh-coloured mask. Daur knew why he was practising. Merrt practised every chance he got. A Tanith, he’d been one of the regiment’s original snipers, with a hit rate lower than Larkin’s or Rilke’s but still impressive. Then, on Monthax, he’d taken a horrific head wound and his aim had gone to hell. Gaunt had kept him as sniper for a time – too generous a time, according to Hark – but Merrt’s lack of success on Phantine had finally obliged Gaunt, reluctantly, to reassign him back to a standard trooper role.
Daur knew Merrt hated his loss of status even more than he hated the loss of his face. Merrt practised and practised, striving to regain his prowess and win back his marksman’s lanyard.
‘How’s it going?’ Daur asked.
Merrt shrugged. ‘I’d like to be working with a gn… gn… long-las, but they took it off me and gn… gn… gave it to some girl,’ he said bleakly, indicating the standard-pattern lasrifle he was holding. His speech was distorted by the rebuilt portions of his head. Merrt seemed to gnaw the words out. He stammered a lot, thanks to that ugly replacement jaw.
‘Some of those girls are good shots,’ said Daur smoothly. He knew too well a lot of the Tanith resented the Verghastite volunteers, particularly the females, and especially the females like Banda, Muril and Nessa who excelled at shooting.
Daur wouldn’t hear them bad-mouthed. They were the Verghastites’ one claim to excellence in the regiment.
Merrt stammered particularly badly, realising he’d spoken out of turn to the senior Verghastite officer. ‘I didn’t mean anything gn… gn… by that, sir.’
‘I know,’ said Daur. There was no real anti-Verghast or misogynistic rancour in Merrt. He was just a damaged man struggling with his own failure.
‘Gn… gn… sorry.’
Daur nodded. ‘You carry on,’ he said.
Daur felt wretched as he walked away from the stall. There had been plenty of scorch marks on the end wall, but precious few broken bottles.
Daur crossed the end of the back paddock, passing the time with a few soldiers there. Then he followed a quaggy path up onto a bank that ran down through what had once been an orchard, before the men in the billets had felled most of it for firewood. Arcuda and Raglon were sheltering from the rain by a low wall, their capes pulled up around them.
Daur knew they were both nervous. Both had been promoted, along with Criid, to platoon command just prior to Aexe. Both were anticipating their first taste of field command.
But both had reason to be proud, in Daur’s book. Arcuda, a Verghastite with a long, thin doleful face, had proved himself in the ranks and won his pins. Raglon had made his way to squad command through distinguished service in company signals. It was odd not to see Raglon with his vox-set. Daur was pleased to find them together; Verghastite and Tanith, on equal footing, counting on each other.
They greeted him and he squatted down beside them.
‘Action at the front,’ Daur said.
‘We noticed,’ said Raglon.
‘Chances are, we may move forward early,’ Daur added.
