Straight Silver, page 15
That’s what Kolea had believed anyway, before injury had robbed them of his character.
Curth felt it was her responsibility to watch over them all.
The anonymous wounded plodded in, through the late afternoon. Dorden found cases of shrapnel wounding, concussive damage and several chronic examples of harm done by gas, both caustic and lachrymatory. He extracted a five centimetre piece of hand-bomb casing from DaFelbe’s jaw, twenty-two nails from the foot and leg of Trooper Charel, and a broken length of bayonet from the ribcage of Jessi Banda.
She came round on the table as he was cleaning the wound prior to excising the foreign body.
‘Rawne!’ she gasped. ‘Rawne!’
‘Easy there,’ he scolded. He looked at Lesp. ‘Any morphosia?’
Lesp shook his head.
‘How’s Major Rawne?’ Banda called out, convulsing.
‘Easy,’ said Dorden. ‘You’ll be okay.’
‘Rawne…’ she murmured.
‘Was he hurt?’ Dorden asked.
Banda had passed out.
‘No breath sounds on the left,’ Lesp reported. ‘We’re losing her.’
‘Her lung’s collapsed,’ said Dorden matter-of-factly, and set to work.
Some of the most terribly wounded came from sixteen platoon, though there weren’t many of them. One of the Krassians told Curth that sixteen had been virtually wiped out by shellfire.
Trooper Kuren, who’d made it through the horrors of Operation Larisel on Phantine unscathed, had lost part of his leg. ‘They’re all dead,’ he told Curth. ‘Maroy’s dead.’
She shivered. ‘Dead?’
‘Almost all of us. The fething shells, like murder…’
She looked across the station. Mtane was trying to pull together a Krassian’s gaping chest. Foskin and Chayker were holding down a man who was going into a grand mal seizure and vomiting blood. Dorden was fighting to save Banda’s life.
‘Sergeant Maroy’s dead,’ said Curth.
Dorden nodded sadly. ‘Rawne may be too,’ he said.
Around 17.00 hours, the tide of wounded ebbed. Dorden’s triage station alone had dealt with nearly five hundred bodies.
The light was bad, choked by the shell-smoke. Drizzle pattered in. The ground inside and outside of the tents was awash with blood, and pieces of discarded uniform and equipment were scattered everywhere.
Light wounded had been sent along the road to Rhonforq and the other reserve stations. The really sick and injured were being ferried by cart and stretcher to the main field hospitals. Dorden made sure that all the seriously wounded Ghosts were labelled so they would be conveyed to his mill infirmary at Rhonforq.
Curth and Dorden exited their triage tent during the lull, complaining to each other about their parlous lack of supplies. Curth smoked another lho-stick, which Dorden shared briefly, though it made him cough. She was afraid she was teaching him bad habits.
‘Hey,’ she said, nudging him. ‘Over there.’ Across the churned mud of the station, Alliance orderlies were conveying medical supplies to their tents on sack-barrows.
Curth ran over, tossing her stick-butt into the mud. ‘Hey!’
Dorden tried to stop her. ‘No, Ana! Don’t!’
It was too late. Curth had reached the sack-barrows. She grabbed a box off the nearest and ripped open the lid, the Alliance orderlies objecting angrily.
‘Imperial supplies! This stuff is stamped for use by the First-and-Only! You bastards! You stole this!’
‘Be off!’ growled an Aexegarian.
‘I will not! Our supplies went missing, and we’ve been fighting to survive without them! You had them diverted, didn’t you? You fething well stole our med supplies!’
‘Ana! Please! It’s not worth it!’ Dorden cried as he came over. He’d seen this kind of despair-induced corruption too many times before. The Alliance was running painfully short of essential supplies. A big shipment of fresh medical goods must have seemed too choice a treasure to ignore. He’d get some more, he’d get some more shipped in from the Munitorium vessels. It wasn’t worth confronting these miserable, desperate wretches.
‘Hell, no!’ Curth exclaimed, and tried to gather up some of the cartons.
A thuggish Alliance trooper with a dirty bandage around his head struck out at her, and knocked her over into the mud. The cartons went flying.
‘No, oh no… no you don’t!’ Dorden yelled and leapt at the Alliance orderlies, pulling them back off the fallen Curth, who was hunched in a foetal position in the mud to protect herself from their toecaps.
They turned on him. One punched him in the mouth, another kicked him in the hip. Dorden yelped, and then threw a jab that laid one of the Aexegarians out. Then they really started to pound on him. Curth got up and threw herself back into the fray, clawing and punching and kicking.
A bolt-round went off, very loud in the close air.
The brawling figures broke away from Curth and Dorden at the sound. Ibram Gaunt walked across the muck, white smoke escaping through the vents of his bolt pistol’s flash retarder. He was splashed from head to toe in mud and blood, and powder burns marked his cheeks.
‘I am Imperial Commissar Gaunt,’ he said. ‘I am known to be a fair man, until I am pushed. You’ve just pushed me.’
Gaunt lowered his weapon and shot two of the Aexegarians dead where they stood. The rest fled. For good measure, Gaunt sighted and shot down one of the escapees too. Guardsmen, medics and Aexe personnel all around the field station stood and gawped in shock.
Gaunt helped Dorden and Curth to their feet.
‘No one does that to my medicae core,’ he said.
Curth looked at him in frank fear. She’d never seen him like this.
‘I’m a commissar,’ he said to her. ‘I don’t think you realise what a commissar is, Ana. Get used to it.’
Gaunt looked away. ‘You men!’ he shouted at a group of stunned onlookers. ‘Gather up these supplies and distribute them evenly between the Guard and Alliance medical teams at this station. Surgeon Curth here will supervise.’
She nodded.
‘Dorden?’ Gaunt turned to the old medicae. He had a swollen eye and his lip was split.
‘All right?’
‘I’ll survive,’ said Dorden. Gaunt could tell he was more angry than hurt. Angry that the fight had started at all, angry that he’d been stupid enough to get involved. And more than anything else, angry at the way Gaunt had just demonstrated the bleak side of Imperial Guard discipline. Dorden had vowed never to kill. He’d broken that vow once, on Menazoid Epsilon, in order to save Gaunt’s life. Now he saw Gaunt take life wantonly, in the name of iron discipline.
‘Doctor?’ Gaunt said.
‘Sir?’
‘See to Rawne, please.’
Gaunt’s arrival had marked a fresh influx of casualties, the majority of them Krassians and Alliance, but also a good number from at least seven Ghost platoons, including those of Rawne, Domor, Theiss and Obel. The injuries in Theiss’s and Obels’s units were mainly from shells. Some of these wounds, like Trooper Kell’s, were devastating. Others were insidious.
Trooper Tokar would be the first Tanith man to have to learn as a necessity the sign language used by previously blast-deafened Verghastites.
In Domor’s platoon, and in Rawne’s, the injuries were from close-quarters fighting. Milo, unharmed himself apart from a few bruises, carried in Trooper Nehn, who’d had his skull cracked by a trench club. Trooper Osket had lost an eye, and then had suffered the misfortune of grabbing a bayonet thrust at him. The blade had chopped in between his middle and third finger, right down through the palm to the base of the thumb. Corporal Chiria, one of the Verghastite girls in Domor’s outfit, had massive lacerations that would scar her plain but cheerful face forever.
Rawne was unconscious. Feygor and Leclan carried him in on an improvised stretcher made of duckboards.
‘What do you know?’ asked Dorden briskly as he started to cut away the major’s tunic and undershirt.
‘Solid round to the gut,’ said Leclan, three platoon’s corpsman. ‘Close range.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Two, maybe two and a half hours. It was mayhem in the trench. Bloody mayhem. I found him in a funkhole. Banda was holding on to him, but he’d passed out long before that.’
‘Banda was brought in earlier,’ said Dorden, washing the filth from Rawne’s stomach.
‘I sent her up,’ said Leclan. ‘In the first wave. I didn’t want to move Rawne. I called for a surgeon to come to him at the front, but the vox was down and the runners I sent never came back.’
‘Feth!’ Dorden said, examining the gunshot. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood. A feth of a lot.’ He leaned over and grabbed Rawne’s dog-tags, calling out the blood type printed on them to a waiting orderly.
‘Is Banda all right?’ Leclan asked.
Dorden stopped his relentless work, and looked at Leclan. The man was frightened and worried. Corpsmen like Leclan were standard troopers trained to administer only the most basic first aid. They weren’t medics. They were just there to do the fundamentals until medics came. ‘Jessi Banda’s going to live. It was touch and go. But she’ll be fine.’
Leclan sagged visibly with relief.
‘You did all right,’ Dorden said, returning to his work.
‘He’s not going to die, is he?’ Feygor asked. The involuntary sarcasm injected into his voice by his augmetic throat made Dorden snort.
‘We’ll see.’
‘How’s the thumb?’
Beltayn looked up and saw Gaunt. He scrambled up from the ammo hopper he’d been sitting on and showed the colonel-commissar his bandaged hand.
‘Hurt a bit when they reset it, but it’s fine. Doc Mtane says no heavy lifting, and absolutely no complicated vox work. In fact, he recommends a vacation somewhere where there’s no gunfire.’
‘Nice try,’ said Gaunt.
They were alone at the edge of the triage station, by the side of the trackway where long grass bushed out from broken fence posts. The sun had begun to come out, its light turned sooty by the vapour of war.
A train of stretcher bearers went past, heading west.
Gaunt sat down on the grass bank, and Beltayn resumed his seat on the old hopper.
‘You have the casualty lists?’ Gaunt asked.
Beltayn produced a data-slate.
Rawne had once joked, bleakly, that the Tanith spared Gaunt that one grim responsibility of commanding officers everywhere, the letter home. In truth, few Guard COs bothered to inform next of kin, though a handful of regiments were famous for the scrupulous way they did it. Gaunt had no one to write to, even if he’d felt the inclination. Tanith was gone, and most of the Verghastites who’d joined the Ghosts had done so because they were leaving no one behind.
Gaunt remembered the old days, when Oktar had charged him with composing the LIA notices for the families of the Hyrkan dead. After Balhaut, it had taken him the best part of a week.
Gaunt studied the data-slate.
‘Sixteen platoon pretty much doesn’t exist any more,’ said Beltayn. ‘I suppose we fold the survivors into squads that need making up.’
Gaunt nodded. From the list, he realised that the Ghosts’ strength had dropped to less than one hundred platoons for the first time since Verghast. He felt his anger returning. War consumed manpower. That was one of the first things they drummed into you at the commissariate.
But this war… this war consumed manpower like a glutton. It fed on death, even though it was bloated and full.
‘Can you get me a link to Van Voytz?’ Gaunt asked.
‘I can try,’ said Beltayn.
As his adjutant began to set up his vox-caster, Gaunt got to his feet, and wandered a little way down the track. Columns of Aexe Alliance foot soldiers were moving towards him from the reserves, weary and dirty. More bodies for the war machine.
Gaunt saw a lone figure trudging his way, overtaking the toiling infantry ranks.
‘Captain Daur?’
‘Sir,’ Daur saluted. He was out of breath. He’d been jogging all the way from Rhonforq.
‘The reserves are in safe hands, I trust?’
‘Mkoll, sir,’ Daur panted.
‘And you’re here?’
‘It looked bad. The vox was down. I wanted to… to know.’
‘It was bad. Over a hundred casualties. Thirty-six dead that I know of, including Maroy. Rawne may not make it, either.’
Daur looked away, gazing across the neglected fields and the withered woodlands.
‘It’s going to chew us all up, isn’t it, sir?’ he said.
‘Not if I have anything to say about it,’ Gaunt replied. ‘Be advised, Ban… with Rawne out, you have third ranking as of now.’
‘Understood.’
‘I want you to bring up five platoons early to replace two, three, eleven, twelve and sixteen. You call it. We’d best forget the standing rota. Any platoon that sees hard action gets rotated for fresh from now on.’
Daur nodded. ‘You want me at the front now?’
‘I understand Colm saw some feth today too. I’ll drop him back in favour of you.’
‘He’s all right?’
‘Far as I know. But I want to go easier on him. He’s had a rough time these past eighteen months. He’s still not… not his old self.’
‘That’s fine, sir,’ Daur said.
‘Colm will take the reserve, and you and I will lead at the front.’
‘Yes sir.’ Daur registered a certain pride. For the first time it would be Gaunt and a Verghastite in command at the sharp end. It felt like a coming of age. But his feelings were mixed. Rawne wounded, Corbec pulled back… would the Ghosts still be Ghosts without them?
When he first signed up, at the Act of Consolation, Daur had imagined a time when he’d be Gaunt’s XO. He’d all but willed death on Rawne and Corbec so that he could bring the Verghast strength to the fore.
Now it was happening, and he felt nothing but keen loss.
‘Sir?’ Beltayn called out. Gaunt strode over to his adjutant, who was listening intently to the phones of his vox-set.
‘No luck with the general, sir,’ Beltayn explained, ‘but I’ve spoken to his aide. You’re invited to dinner with the staff chiefs at Meiseq tomorrow night. Sixteen hundred hours. Dress uniform.’
Larkin wandered down the fire trench between stations 290 and 291, his long-las hanging from one hand and his Tanith blade hanging from the other. Troopers got out of his way. Mad Larkin was mad again.
‘Larks?’ Corbec called out, approaching him. ‘How you doing?’
Corbec had been shipping Sillo off to a triage station when word had reached him that Larkin was on the prowl. ‘He looks like he’s gone right over!’ Trooper Bewl had said excitedly.
Larkin blinked and slowly recognised Corbec. He glanced down at the weapons he was carrying as if he’d only just become aware of them, and carefully set them down on the firestep. Then he sat down next to them.
Corbec shooed the gawking troopers around him back to their duties and went down to Larkin’s side.
‘Bad day, Larks?’
‘Horrible.’
‘It’s been tough all round. Anything you want to talk about?’
‘Yes.’ Larkin paused. He opened his mouth to speak the name ‘Lijah Cuu’, but stopped himself. So badly, he wanted to tell Corbec about Cuu. Cuu the maniac. Cuu the psycho. Cuu, who would have killed him but for the sudden shelling.
Cuu, who had killed Bragg.
But now it seemed pointless. Loglas, the only witness, was very dead. If Larkin brought a charge, it would be Cuu’s word against his. And Cuu had proved to be bulletproof up till now.
Larkin knew Colm would take him seriously. But he also knew that Colm was hidebound by the rules.
As soon as the shells started to fall, Cuu had fled, leaving Larkin alone. Larkin had been so terrified, arms up over his head, eyes closed, it had taken him a moment to realise Cuu had actually gone and only Larkin’s fear of Cuu was left behind.
No, there was no point, Larkin decided. The only way to be free from his fear was to face it. Corbec couldn’t help him. Gaunt couldn’t. The system couldn’t.
Lijah Cuu had to die. It was that simple. Cuu wanted the score settled, didn’t he? So it would be settled. Fething straight, sure as sure, one way or another.
‘Larks?’ Corbec said. ‘What did you want to tell me about? You look like you’re all upset.’
‘I am,’ said Hlaine Larkin. ‘Loglas died,’ he confessed.
That was true, but it was also a lie. That wasn’t why Larkin was most upset.
But it was all Corbec needed to know.
SIX
One hand gives, one hand takes
‘I say, if they want to skulk, let them. I’d be interested to see great skulkers at work.’
– Colonel Ankre
That night, and the morning that followed, it was mercifully quiet in 55th sector. It was as if the tide of war had drawn out from that part of the line, slack, low.
It was flood tide elsewhere. Further south down the Naeme Valley, the 47th and 46th sectors were brutalised by twelve straight hours of heavy bombardment. A considerable stretch of the so-called Seronne Line, which ran east from the end of the Peinforq Sectors right across country to the Kottmark Massif, came under shellfire, and then armoured assault. The worst clashes were just south of the Vostl Delta.
