The Vincula Insurgency: Ghost Dossier 1, page 20
‘Well, it’s some other fether’s problem now,’ says Corbec. ‘You’re a funny bugger, sir, if you’ll allow me to speak out of turn and all that… First you want to go, then you want to stay.’
‘I like to finish a job,’ says Gaunt. ‘An assigned duty.’
‘Some duties don’t ever end,’ says Corbec.
The air stinks of counterseptic wash. Aid teams are still ferrying casualties in from the various insurgent attacks. There’s bloodied wadding heaped on the floor of the corridor, and piles of clothes that have been cut off bodies.
Fastening his smock, Dorden pushes the glass door open with his elbow.
‘Where will I be useful?’ he asks.
Lesp looks up from the laceration he’s suturing. His patient is a local man, dull-eyed with shock, gazing at nothing as he allows the Tanith corpsman to work. His laced tunic and crumpled sun hat lie on the consulting bench beside him.
‘One of ours waiting, Doc,’ says Lesp, nodding to the back room.
Dorden heads through, passing Chayker, Foskin and some Litus corpsmen tending to walking wounded. Some burns. Shrapnel splinters mostly.
‘Good to have you back with us,’ says Chayker.
In the back room, Dorden examines Mkvenner’s forearm. It’s not the scout’s only injury, but it’s the worst.
‘Why didn’t you get this looked at yesterday?’ Dorden asks, as he washes the wound.
‘There were more urgent cases,’ replies Ven.
‘This isn’t clotting,’ says Dorden.
‘I know. That’s why I came back. Otherwise, I’d have bound it up myself.’
‘I hear you and Mkoll got knocked about.’
Mkvenner nods.
‘A maraud?’
He nods again.
‘Feth, what did this?’ asks Dorden. ‘The bruising is impact, but the cuts? Looks like you were thrashed with thorns.’
‘Blocking a blow,’ says Mkvenner.
‘From what?’
‘His hand.’
‘His hand did this?’
Mkvenner doesn’t make eye contact. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Like his palm was hardened. Or scaled.’
‘Glove?’
‘No.’
‘You reported this?’ Dorden asks.
‘Everything we saw,’ says Mkvenner. ‘Which wasn’t much. He had active camo. A bodyglove.’
Dorden starts spraying counterseptic, then wound sealant. He preps a dressing.
‘Did he have marks?’
‘Marks?’
‘This maraud,’ says Dorden. ‘Did he have any ink?’
Now Mkvenner looks at him. An odd look.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Tribal icons. Archonate tribal. I put it in my report.’
Dorden applies the dressing and binds it tight.
‘All right. Come back and see me tomorrow and I’ll change the dressing.’
Mkvenner gets up off the exam bed. He pulls the sleeve of his undershirt back down to cover the dressing, and leans over to gather his uniform jacket from the floor.
As the scout bends, Dorden sees him reflected in the wall mirror behind him. He sees the hem of the vest ride up and, just for a moment, glimpses the tattoo in the small of Mkvenner’s back. Small, old and faded, right at the base of the spine.
He can’t be sure, but it looks like a coiled snake, head extended to strike.
‘Something the matter?’ Mkvenner asks.
‘No,’ says Dorden.
‘You can go,’ says Commandant Vacheri. The Royal Slokan continues to study his data-slate and then looks up, raising an eyebrow to suggest mystification that there’s anyone still in the room.
‘You’ve read my recommendations?’ asks Gaunt.
‘Yes, yes. They’re here somewhere.’ Vacheri sits back and motions vaguely at the files and slates on his desk.
‘I strongly suggest–’ Gaunt says.
‘I strongly suggest, sir,’ says Vacheri, ‘that you get on with your business and leave me to mine. You have routing and embarkation orders. Vincula is no longer your purview. Or yours, colonel.’ He looks at Farek, standing beside Gaunt.
‘The Litus are commencing withdrawal,’ says Farek. ‘Handover in two days.’
‘Good,’ says Vacheri, rising to his feet. He’s wearing his dress uniform, the ornate garb of the ‘Gallant’ Fifth. ‘My regiment is taking over here. I am responsible for province security and peacekeeping. At the governor’s direct request.’
The last part is unnecessary, but he says it anyway, with relish.
‘Look, Kurt,’ says Farek. ‘I urge you to pay close heed to Ibram’s recommendations. His insight into insurgent activities is crucial. They ran rings around us–’
‘They made you look like fools,’ says Vacheri. ‘How many dead is it now? How many has the Militarum lost? The Administratum?’
‘And the people of Vincula?’ Gaunt asks.
‘Come on, Kurt,’ says Farek.
‘The Fifth has it covered, colonel,’ says Vacheri. He’s making a point not to use first names. ‘I have it covered.’
‘I don’t think you know what you’re walking into,’ says Gaunt. ‘The threat is still live. You’re going to make the same mistakes we did.’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Vacheri, with a sniff of disdain.
‘My recommendations illustrate the two-tier structure of the insurgent network,’ says Gaunt, ‘the tactics of their specialists, and their target prioritisation. My report is supported by Captain Daybell of Mil-Int–’
‘Mil-Int’s operation in this province is under review,’ says Vacheri. ‘Too many mistakes. I don’t want them underfoot, frankly. Their intel is discredited. I know how to hold a city. I know how to keep a population in line.’
‘Are you pursuing their munition sources?’ asks Gaunt. ‘They are lifting equipment, including mines and jamming systems, from Munitorum depots in other provinces. To do that, they may have people on the inside. You don’t just walk into a Guard depot–’
‘I think that’s all for now,’ says Vacheri. ‘May the Emperor protect you, out on the front line, gentlemen. Duty calls you.’
‘I want to speak to Balgrada,’ says Gaunt.
‘He is busy,’ smiles Vacheri. ‘So much to do, taking over a shambles like this. The Pax Imperialis must be enforced.’
‘You’re not really listening, are you?’ says Rawne. He’s standing behind Gaunt and Farek, his arms folded. Gaunt’s never seen him with such a bleak expression, not even after Tanith, and it’s not just the pain in his lower back.
‘Are you addressing me?’ Vacheri says.
‘You need to look at the tribal affiliations,’ says Rawne. ‘The cultural connections. You need translators fluent in Archonate Gaurin and Archonate Aezyri. You need to run interviews – not interrogations – in the community here. There are people who know things, people who are too scared to speak out. There are family and clan connections that go beyond provincial or global borders. Tribes inside tribes. You–’
‘Oh, I’ve seen the initial xeno-ethnological report,’ says Vacheri carelessly. ‘It’s not really applicable. No practical use. Just fatuous, book-learning nonsense.’
Rawne takes a step forward. Gaunt puts a hand on his arm to stay him.
‘Besides,’ says Vacheri, ‘the intendant responsible for that line of research isn’t in a position to support it. The Administratum has put in a request for a replacement, and we’re expecting one to arrive in six weeks.’
‘You can read her fething report,’ says Rawne.
‘I’ve read it.’
‘You’ve seen it. You can read it properly. You can do your fething job now she’s done the hard part for you.’
Vacheri’s cheeks flush. He looks at Gaunt.
‘I won’t have your man speak to me like that, Gaunt,’ he says. ‘Chastise him. I don’t even know why he’s here. He’s a unit leader. A lasman.’
‘I’ve listened to him,’ says Gaunt. ‘He was able to observe things during the Low Quarter attack. Observe them close hand. He has valuable intel, Vacheri. I recommend you listen to him.’
‘I won’t listen to anybody who addresses me with such flagrant disrespect.’
‘Then over the next few weeks, you’d better watch where you sit,’ says Rawne.
‘Steady,’ warns Farek.
‘Checked under your chair today?’ Rawne asks Vacheri, almost spitting the words. ‘I’d get in the habit. Those K10s are easy to conceal. Pressure trigger under your comfy fething cushions.’
‘No maraud will get the better of me,’ snaps Vacheri.
‘Who said anything about marauds?’ asks Rawne. Farek turns, concern in his eyes, and puts his palm firmly against Rawne’s shoulder to stop him shoving forwards.
‘That’s insolence,’ says Vacheri. ‘Gaunt? Chastise your man now, or I’ll have him up on a charge.’
‘You shouldn’t speak to Commandant Vacheri like that,’ Gaunt says to Rawne.
Rawne glares at him.
‘He’s clearly too stupid to understand you,’ Gaunt says.
Outside, Royal Slokans are unloading equipment crates from their transports. The heat of the day throbs with engines, with voices, with the distant threnody of the city’s worship-horns.
Gaunt speaks to Farek for a minute or two, then shakes his hand and walks over to where Rawne is standing. Rawne’s in the shade, leaning on the door post of one of the workshops. Power-drivers whiz and whir behind him. He’s lit a smoke.
‘Have I got to apologise?’ he asks.
‘Not to me,’ says Gaunt.
‘Good.’
‘Have I got to apologise?’ Gaunt asks him.
Rawne looks at him in surprise. ‘For what?’
‘I know you have a list, major,’ says Gaunt. ‘Like so many of the Ghosts. We’re about to go to war. Front line. We have to work together. So I’m trying to find an accommodation with you.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ says Rawne.
Gaunt shrugs, and looks away at the Slokans manhandling crates out of payload bays.
‘I don’t have to like you to do my job,’ says Rawne quietly. ‘Sir.’
‘That’s true,’ says Gaunt. ‘You liked her, though.’
Rawne says nothing.
‘You listened to her,’ says Gaunt. ‘Heard out what she had to say. Realised it was important. She was better looking than me, of course.’ He looks at Rawne. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘What about?’
‘That Eiwolt died. That you couldn’t prevent it. That Tanith was lost. Take your pick.’
Rawne takes a drag on his smoke.
‘You grew up on Manzipor?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ says Gaunt. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Someone told me.’
‘Why do you ask?’
Rawne shrugs.
‘Officer briefing in three hours,’ says Gaunt. ‘Try not to be late.’
He walks away across the yard. Rawne watches him go, then he wanders to a stack of ammo boxes and sits. He takes the data-slate out of his pocket.
The screen is cracked. He handed all her possessions to the Administratum clerks, all her work and files. All except this. He opens the image archive, and goes through the picts, one by one, the bars and spirals, the blocks and lines, the circles and the snakes.
Milo sees Gaunt from across the yard, heading for the manse. He knows he’s got a few minutes before he’s needed. He’s carrying the fresh kit Colonel Corbec told him to pull from stores.
He ducks into the main building, showing his code tag to the door guards. He finds the washrooms beside the basement billets, enough space to get changed.
He strips off his threadbare, dirty kit, and pulls the new kit out of its paper cover. He’ll have to sew the patches on later, standard trooper patches – the three dagger bars inside a stylised Robby Ross – just like Corbec told him. He unfastens the gleaming Tanith crest from his old jacket. He mustn’t lose that. With a little effort, he snaps the side daggers off it, the way the other men in the regiment do. One warknife, for the Tanith First, the Tanith Only. Lose the two that represented the regiments lost.
He sees how dirty his hands are. Dust, soot, boot-black from shining the colonel-commissar’s boots. He needs a wash before he puts on the new kit. He’s not an orphan boy any more. But before he does, he grinds the pads of his dirty thumbs over the crest, drabbing it down, removing the buff and the gleam so it won’t catch the light. Ghosts need to be invisible, and he’s been good at that up to now.
He runs water into the metal sink, and washes his face, neck, arms, hands and chest. The water’s cold, and the building’s fierce air-circ raises gooseflesh on his arms.
He looks at his reflection in the washroom’s foxed mirror. A skinny, pale boy, not a man yet, but on the way. His black hair is as shaggy as Corbec’s. He looks at the tattoos on his white flesh. The blue fish over his eye: that’s for Tanith Longshore, where his family came from, a baptismal ink he got when he was eight. The Robby Ross on his left shoulder that he got the week before Founding. The concentric circles of Tanith Magna on his ribs to show the place he lived.
And the oldest one, the smallest, the one he was given first. He doesn’t remember when or why exactly, because it happened when he was very young, too young to recall it properly. It’s an open serpent, head striking outwards, the body coiled in a ring on his breastbone.
He pulls on the black uniform, and pins the crest to his jacket.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor, Eisenhorn and Bequin books, the most recent of which is Penitent. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of the Siege of Terra novel Saturnine, as well as Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous Black Library audio dramas. Many of his short stories have been collected into the volume Lord of the Dark Millennium. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.
An extract from The Founding.
They were walking by lamplight, finding their way by the criss-crossing beams of their lamp packs. They were deep underground, so of course it was going to be dark.
Except it seemed unnecessarily, extravagantly dark. Lightless. As though some kind of anti-light, an un-light, had been poured into the gloom to thicken it.
Every few seconds, and to no particular rhythm, the earth shook.
Ibram Gaunt could feel it through his boots. He swapped his lamp pack to his right hand, and placed his left palm against the tunnel wall. He felt the rough surface transmit the vibrations. At every subterranean quiver, dirt trickled down from the ceiling, or spilled from loose sections of the old, decaying arches.
The men in the advance squad could feel the shaking too, and it was putting them on edge. Gaunt could tell that by the way the beams of their lamps jerked and shifted at every tremble. Gaunt knew someone should say something. That someone was him, a part of his duty.
‘Shelling,’ he said. ‘The Warmaster has focused the artillery divisions on Sangrel Hive. It’s just shelling.’
‘Feels like the world’s moving,’ muttered one of the troopers.
Gaunt tilted his lamp to find the man’s face. Picked out starkly by the lamp’s beam, Trooper Gebbs shielded his eyes at the glare.
‘It’s just shelling,’ Gaunt assured him. ‘Concussion from the shelling.’
Gebbs shrugged.
The ground shook. Pebbles skittered.
‘Why are we here?’ asked another man. Gaunt’s lamp beam moved to identify Trooper Ari Danks.
‘You getting all philosophical now, Ari?’ Gebbs asked with a chuckle made throaty by the dust in the air.
‘I just wondered what the Throne we were supposed to be doing?’ Danks replied. ‘There’s nothing out here. Just these endless, pitch-black bloody ruins…’
‘So you’d rather be hacking your way through Charismites in the hive-stacks, would you?’ asked Trooper Hiskol.
‘At least it wouldn’t be as black as up my–’
‘Enough,’ said Gaunt. He didn’t have to raise his voice, and the troopers didn’t have to turn their beams to see his face and read its expression. They ceased their chatter. Some of them had served long enough to remember when Gaunt had just been ‘the Boy’, Oktar’s cadet, but none of them were about to forget what that young cadet had become. Gaunt was the commissar. He was discipline.
The ground shook again. Gaunt heard a little river of grit spill down the curve of the tunnel wall. He had to admit that Trooper Danks had a point. What were they doing here?
Gaunt understood the mission parameters clearly enough, and frankly, given the intensity of the hive-war, this advance detail was a blessed relief.
Even so, he’d calculated the journey time that morning, overestimating to allow for detours where the maps didn’t match the navigable reality of the undersink, and they should have reached their destination two hours ago.
Gaunt told the men to wait, and used his lamp to pick his way along the unlit tunnel. The officer in charge of the detail was standing at the next bend, checking his charts.
Major Czytel glanced up at the lamplight bobbing towards him.
‘That you, Gaunt?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We may have taken a wrong turn back there, Gaunt,’ Czytel said. ‘At that junction where the tunnel split.’
He turned and twitched his beam back the way they had come, partly as an indicator, partly to pick out Gaunt’s face.
Gaunt nodded. He’d presumed as much. Galen Czytel was old school, and most definitely remembered the time when Gaunt had merely been ‘the Boy’. Unlike the rank and file, he had never really got over the idea that Ibram Gaunt was an over-educated, over-privileged scholam boy with too much book-learning and not enough actual soldiering. Czytel liked what he called ‘honest men’. He seemed to be allergic to anybody who had an air of the officer class or entitlement. Czytel had ‘dragged himself’ up through the Hyrkan ranks. He’d freely tell you that, possibly several times in the course of one regimental dinner.
