Straight Silver, page 30
‘Can’t someone tag that fething cannon?’ Muril barked.
‘Negative, can’t see it,’ Caffran voxed, his opinion swiftly agreed with by Gutes.
‘Larks? You see it?’ Muril called.
‘Too deep in the woods,’ Larkin replied. ‘Can’t even see a snout flash.’
‘Gak that!’ said Muril. She and Jajjo were pinned down behind the narrow stone wall, and cannon fire was gradually creeping their way. They needed a break, enough time to run back down the lawn to the main house.
It didn’t look like they were going to get it.
‘Hold tight and wait for my word,’ said Larkin over the link. ‘Wait for it…’
He couldn’t see the cannon crew, even from his raised vantage, and he couldn’t see any muzzle flash. But he watched the dipping line of the cannon’s tracer rounds as they tore out of the woodland. The high calibre shots punished the garden wall and made sappy steam out of the undergrowth. Another few seconds and it would be punching through the wall where Muril and Jajjo were sheltering.
Larkin rolled his aim back, following the line of tracers until it vanished at its mysterious source. He made an educated adjustment to his aim, and fired into the woods.
The cannon fire stopped abruptly.
‘Go! Muril! Go!’ he cried, as he reloaded and fired another shot exactly where he’d placed the first.
Muril and Jajjo fled down the garden towards the barricade. A few loose las-rounds from rifles chased them, chewing up the turf.
The cannon started up again, but it was lacking confidence now, as if someone else had taken over. Its shots bombarded the back wall of the garden or shot clear over it, smacking into the rear face of the house. A window smashed.
By then, Muril and Jajjo had reached the barricade and had hurled themselves over it.
The cannon continued to spray.
‘First thing you learn,’ Larkin said to himself, ‘is move if someone knows where you are.’
He fired another shot, aiming exactly at the point he’d placed the last two. For the second time in thirty seconds, the cannon fell suddenly silent.
‘Nice bit of shooting that, Larks,’ voxed Gutes.
Now Caffran felt exposed. With Muril and Jajjo dropping back, he now occupied point position in the defence.
He kept scanning the end of the garden, the wall, the chokes of undergrowth leading into the trees.
He didn’t have to wait long.
At least two dozen Blood Pact troopers came out of the tree-line and assaulted the rear wall, sheeting fire at the manse. All of the Ghosts, even Larkin, had to drop down to avoid the ferocity. The attackers were now using the rear garden wall and the ruined sheds abandoned by Muril and Jajjo as cover.
Caffran was the first to begin return fire. He lanced shots along the back of the wall that hit at least one attacker and caused several more to duck. This interruption in firing gave Cuu and Larkin an opening. Cuu sprayed the back of the outhouses with fire, and Larkin fired another hot-shot that took a Blood Pact trooper in the chest.
To the east, from the dining room window, Gutes took up the slack, firing his trademark way: slow, methodical, jaggedly. Two Blood Pact troopers tried to flank by sprinting down the side wall of the property, following the hedges into the ditch. Gutes got them both. Then a third that he didn’t kill outright. Then a fourth who emerged, trying to drag the injured man back into cover.
As an afterthought, Gutes picked off the wounded bastard too.
A flurry of fire was hitting down at the manse and the barricade from the central portion of the rear wall. Cuu and Rerval replied, supplemented by Jajjo and Muril, who were now up the barricade with them. Feygor added his own support from the kitchen window, and Brostin suddenly broke from the kitchen doorway and ran up the yard to the side of Caffran’s station, leaving his flamer behind. The big thug wriggled in beside Caffran and started to fire his pistols, one in each meaty hand.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a tread-fether right now,’ Brostin grumbled.
‘I hear that!’ said Caffran.
A shot spat across them from the left. Blood Pacters moving west to flank them from the other side. Brostin rolled to his feet and slid out of Caffran’s greenhouse, swung round behind it and came up over the low wall to meet the three Pacters rushing them across the kitchen garden. His laspistols chattered as he raked them back and forth. He killed two and winged a third.
Down at the barricade, Cuu deselected rapid fire and switched his Mark III to single shot. He hunted the garden wall, waiting for Blood Pacters to pop up for a shot. Every time they did, he shot them in the face. Three in a row. Four. The fifth one was smacked over by one of Larkin’s shots before Cuu could fire.
Ducking round the kitchen doorway for cover, Feygor dared the yard and ran for the barricade as a welter of shots rained down, exploding plaster, brick, gutters, tiles.
He ducked in beside Muril.
‘Get up with Larkin!’ he said. ‘I know you don’t have a long-las any more, but you’ll do more good up there.’
She nodded and ran back for the kitchen door.
Feygor got up and started firing. He looked over at Jajjo.
‘Where’s Ven?’
Jajjo shook his head.
Beside Jajjo, Rerval fired and scored a killshot. He distinctly saw the Blood Pact trooper fall.
He turned to grin triumphantly at Feygor and a las-round hit the side of his head.
Jajjo ducked down to help him, but Rerval was getting up without assistance. ‘I’m okay,’ he said, but it didn’t sound like that. From the corner of his mouth back to his jaw-line, his cheek was flopped open and blood was streaming out down his neck. Rerval fired one more shot, then reached up and felt the rip in his face.
‘Feth–’ he slurred and fell over.
Jajjo dragged him back into the kitchen. The amount of blood pouring out of Rerval’s torn face was extraordinary. ‘Help me!’ Jajjo shouted to the old woman and the young boy he saw cowering in the corner. He had no idea who they were.
Las-fire smacked and punched through the kitchen window and covered the tiles with glass shards. Several more shots exploded fibres from the kitchen door. Jajjo tried to hold Rerval’s face together.
The old woman ran across the kitchen, her head down, and took over. She pinched the wound tight and started to wrap it with her shawl.
‘Let me free! Let me free, for god’s sake! I can help!’ bellowed the young man. Jajjo realised the youth was tied to his chair.
Jajjo got up, went across to the boy, and cut his bonds with his dagger. ‘I don’t know why you’re tied up,’ he said, ‘but don’t gak with me.’
The young man – Jajjo realised how dirty and unshaven he was – darted across to the field dressing kit Gutes had left on the bench seat. He recovered it and ran over to join the old woman cradling Rerval. An astonishingly wide pool of blood had spread out under her.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Jajjo asked.
‘I was a corpsman. I know field aid,’ replied the boy.
‘Don’t let him bleed out,’ said Jajjo, and ran out into the fight again.
Las-fire flickered up and down the lawn, fierce and heavy. Caffran thought he’d scored another hit but it was hard to tell. There were at least a dozen shooters up there.
Muril arrived on the first floor, and tried to find the window with the best sweep.
She could hear the hot-shot whine of Larkin’s weapon from nearby.
Larkin reloaded again and took aim. He’d switched bedrooms three times since the fight had begun so his shots didn’t come from the same place each time. In the far end bedroom, he knelt and sighted.
A steel helmet over a grotesque iron mask.
Bang!
The Blood Pact trooper fell. Larkin reloaded.
He hunted for targets. The back of his skull hurt worse than ever, and he could taste blood. Every now and then, his vision faltered. The blizzard of las-fire coming down at them was almost overwhelming. Middle of combat, all crap flying this way and that…
Larkin stroked his long-las and tilted the aim down. Lijah Cuu was below him in the yard, firing away up hill.
The scope’s crosshairs made a luminous frame around the back of Cuu’s head.
Larkin paused. He breathed carefully. His head was really aching now, that terrible stabbing migraine that had haunted him all his life.
He blinked away sweat. He would fething do this.
Cuu, right in his sights. Lijah Cuu. His nemesis. The embodiment of his fear. The man who had killed Try Again Bragg.
One shot.
Pop.
Easy.
Larkin’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Target-fix. Cuu. Nine point seven metres.
Larkin whined aloud, a pitiful sound. He wanted to do it, yet he couldn’t. He was a sniper, a marksman, a killer. But not a murderer. He couldn’t shoot one of their own in the back, even if it was Lijah fething Cuu.
He wanted to. He had to. It was the only way. It was why he’d come.
But…
Cuu would have done it without hesitation, Larkin thought. That thought and that thought alone convinced him to take his finger off the trigger.
‘Larks! What the gak are you doing?’
Larkin looked up from his carefully laid gun. Muril stood behind him, appalled.
‘Don’t do it,’ she said. ‘Please. I know you want to. I know he deserves it. But don’t…’
‘Sehra,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t anyway.’
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Really, Larks. Don’t descend to that animal’s level.’
‘Oh, feth,’ sighed Larkin. His head was truly spinning now. His vision was closing in with flashes and lumps of colour. She was right. He was so fething glad he hadn’t stained his soul the way Cuu had stained his. There was honour. There was morality. There was sleeping at night without waking up screaming. Bragg would understand. Wherever he was, Bragg would understand.
Larkin turned and took a last look out of his scope. Cuu was looking right back at them.
Lijah Cuu saw the aimed rifle.
And smiled.
Brostin and Caffran finally drove the last of the Pacters back from the left hand flank of the house. Feygor and Gutes smacked shots against the rear wall, and Feygor hit another body.
Then the Blood Pact fell silent.
The Ghosts waited. No contact. No sound. The rain got heavier and washed the traces of Rerval’s blood out of the yard.
‘Stand down,’ said Feygor, at last.
‘They’ll be back,’ said Caffran.
‘Lie down,’ Muril advised him.
‘My head really hurts.’
‘Cuu smacked you a good one with that skillet, Larks. I’ve been worried.’
Larkin lay back on the dirty mattress in the upstairs room. ‘It’s not that. I get headaches. Really bad ones. I’ve always had them.’
‘Whatever,’ said Muril. ‘I think it’s that headwound. Cuu really hurt you. I don’t want to worry you, Hlaine, but it needs to be looked at. I wish for gak’s sake Curth or Dorden was here.’
Larkin had already passed out on the mattress. Watery blood wept into the padding behind his head.
‘Gak,’ said Muril. ‘You really need a doc fast…’
She froze. Down below, she could hear Feygor and the others repairing defences and reloading for the next wave.
She’d heard a sound from the front of the house.
She took up her lasgun and went out onto the landing. Another tiny sound, a movement at the porch.
She went down the staircase slowly, gun raised.
At the foot of the stairs, she wheeled round, and found herself aiming at Cuu. He winked at her.
‘Careful, girl.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I heard something out the front,’ he said.
She covered him with her weapon. ‘Check it out,’ she said.
‘Why the hostility?’ he asked.
‘You know why, you bastard. Now… check it out.’
Cuu went down to the front door, Muril watching him every centimetre of the way. He drew his blade.
Cuu threw open the door.
The dagger flew from his hand as a tall figure took him in a choke hold.
‘Do you realise how easy it was to get round the front of this place?’ asked Mkvenner.
FIFTEEN
The Monsters
‘In the long run, a man with a brain is more dangerous than a man with brawn.’
– Warmaster Slaydo, from A Treatise on the Nature of Warfare
Firebreathing, like the giant creatures of old myth, the monsters lay before them.
When the monsters roared, the ground shook and the air came past, hot and acrid, in a pressurised shockwave. The light flashes were painful and immense, like grounded stars being switched on and off in the night. The sound shook teeth and bone and marrow.
The battle in the ammunition corridor had taken seven minutes to conclude in the Ghosts’ favour. Squaring off against a Shadik battalion of slightly greater size, Gaunt’s infiltration group had lost five men – four Ghosts and one of Golke’s Bande Sezari troopers. But their superior weaponry and, in Gaunt’s opinion, far superior battlecraft had left nearly thirty Shadik troopers dead. Broken, the rest had fallen back.
Undoubtedly, the Shadik commanders knew they had intruders now. Despite the open invitation to the siege guns’ location offered by the corridor, Gaunt and Mkoll had pulled the mission team off east into a muddy, trackless wasteland beyond.
The area was lightless and cold, rambling with old lines of wire and jumbles of wreckage. Weeds and thorny scrub grew in clumps and thickets, sprouting around the split rockcrete of old pill boxes and between the axles of rusted trucks. This was an old battlefield, years old, that the war had passed over and left behind. Now it was just dead ground in the hinterland of the Republican line.
The Ghosts advanced silently through the dark terrain, heading north, towards the titanic blasts of the guns. They kept the ammunition corridor just in sight to their left, and moved parallel to its course.
There would be troops out searching for them. Gaunt was sure of that. Even with the huge offensive going on, drawing on Shadik manpower, the enemy commanders would not allow a suspected infiltration so close to their super-guns to go unchecked.
On three occasions, the Ghosts dropped down into cover when the scouts alerted them to Shadik patrols in the corridor. Gaunt didn’t need another stand-up fight at this stage. Better to hide and wait and move on once the jeopardy had passed.
The night sky was amber, tinged by the vast doughnut of smoke drifting out from the guns. On occasions, they glimpsed the moon, an orange semi-circle dancing in and out of the bars of cloudy exhaust.
Nearly three hours after they had first emerged from the mill tunnel, they came up to a ridge that overlooked the guns.
The monsters.
It was physically hard to observe them directly. For the last forty minutes the Imperials had been trudging through a wasteland made spectral by the almighty flashes going off beyond the black horizon. They had almost become acclimatised to the noise and the light and the trembling soil.
But looking on the guns was virtually impossible. The flashes seared eyesight, leaving idiot repeats glowing on the back of the eyelids. The shockwaves came like slaps. The discharge blasts felt like they were exploding eardrums. Beltayn reported that the pulse shock had killed all vox-links.
Lying on his side on the earth near the top of the ridge, with the men spread out below him, Gaunt pondered his next move. He felt frustration gnawing at him. They’d got so close, against all expectations except his own, and now they couldn’t go the last distance.
It was like one of the myths he’d read as a child in the scholam progenium. Monsters so ghastly that the very breath or sight of them blinded men and turned them to stone.
He adjusted his data-slate and took a compass bearing. At least now he had accomplished something. The precise location of the siege guns was known to them. Without other options to hand, their imperative now was to get that information back to GSC. And that meant physically, with the vox dead.
Gaunt turned to Mkoll and the sergeants and used Verghast scratch-company sign language to communicate his intention to pull back and break out. Halfway through, a chillingly eerie thing happened. Darkness and silence fell.
It wasn’t complete silence. The distant, frenzied commotion of the offensive was now audible, and it wasn’t true darkness either because of the ambient background firelight.
But the guns had stopped firing.
Gaunt crawled back to the top of the ridge. What he had only vaguely glimpsed before was now laid out below him. The monster guns, each one set on a huge rail cart, their massive barrels, the size of manufactory chimneys, elevated to the sky. There were seven of them, just like Bonin had insisted. Smoke lay thick like ground fog around them, blurring their shapes and distorting the bare white glow of the chemical lanterns strung up around the area. Gaunt saw figures moving around, gun-crew dwarfed by the huge railway cannons. Electric hoists and flatbed loading carts, which had been occupied serving shells into the automatic arming mechanisms, were now busy clearing unused shells and propellant-mix cartridges clear of the firing site. Some laden carts were being attached to a greasy shunting engine that began puffing them away down the ammunition corridor.
‘Why d’you think they’ve stopped?’ whispered Golke.
‘They’ve been firing all night,’ Gaunt replied. ‘I imagine there comes a point when the barrels get so hot, you have to let them cool. God-Emperor! Now we’ve found them, what do we do?’
Golke shrugged. Even dormant, the massive guns and their rivetted steel cars looked invincible. Oil and condensation dripped from their huge shock-absorber pylons and clung in glittering droplets to the taut wires of the warping winches. The shells alone were taller than a man.
