Necropolis (22 page)

Caffran kicked the purring blade away.

He pulled her up. She was coughing and gasping. She felt so thin and fragile in his hands, though he knew she was mean and tough enough to hurt him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Her jabbing fingers punched into his eyes and he bellowed, rolling back and clutching his face.

By the time he struggled up again, she was pushing through the back wall to freedom. Caffran noticed she had been mindful enough to recover her blade.

He ran after her.

“Feth you, stop! I want to help! Stop!”

She looked back at him, her eyes as wild and mad as an animal. Her bulging pack was caught on a fork of fibre-boards, preventing her from squeezing through the hole.

“Get away! Get away!” she shrilled.

He approached her, hands held wide and empty, trying to look unthreatening.

“I won’t hurt you… please… my name is Caffran. My friends call me Caff. I’m a lost soul like you. Just a Ghost without a home. I didn’t ask for this and I know you fething didn’t. Please.”

He was a hand’s reach away from her now, hating the fear in her face. She spat and howled, then jabbed her blade round and cut the strap of her pack. It dropped to the ground, but she was free. Abandoning it, she flew out of the bam and sprinted away across the rubble.

Caffran pushed out after her, straining to get his greater bulk through the slit.

He got a glimpse of her looking back and terrified, darting over the splintered mounds of wreckage before dropping out of sight.

Tona lay in cover for a few minutes, buried in the soot of a crater, stinking corpses around her. When it seemed the soldier was not following, she crawled out and ran a few metres to a slumped wall and hid behind it.

Then she heard a crunch of boots on rubble and froze.

Twenty metres away, looking in the wrong direction, the black-uniformed soldier was walking up through the ruins, her pack dangling from his hand.

“Hello?” he was calling. “Hello? You need this. You really do. Hello?”

He stood for a long while, maybe ten minutes, looking around. Tona remained in hiding. Finally, the soldier put the pack down.

“It’s here if you want it,” he said. A long pause.

Then he walked back down the ruin slope and clambered back into the bam.

Tona waited a full fifteen minutes more before she moved. She ran from cover, scooped up the pack and leapt away into the confused maze of the ruins.

The soldier didn’t reappear or follow.

In a foxhole, she hunched and opened the pack, studying the contents. Everything she had taken was there, everything — as well as three flasks of sterilised water, a field-dressing kit, a pack of one-shot antibiotic jabs, some net-wrapped dry sausage… and a laspistol, the very laspistol she was sure he had fired after her in the barn. The charge pack was almost full.

She was dazed for a while, then she laughed. Gleeful, she took up the sack of trophies and ran back to her shelter, taking a wide route so she wouldn’t be followed.

It was only later, after she and Dalin had eaten their first good meal in a month and Yoncy was sleeping and content on milk-broth, that she found the cap-pin at the bottom of the pack: silver, clean, an Imperial eagle with the double head and the inscription
Tanith First, by the Grace of the God-Emperor of Terra
on the scroll held in the clawed feet.

In the gloomy dugout, her belly full, her wards fed and content, Tona Criid sat back by the light of a fire kindled from Guard-issue chemical blocks and wondered where she would pin the crest. As gang-badges went, it was better than most.

Behind Veyveyr Gate, the dead dominated the streets and squares.

Teams of Vervun Primary, work militia and Munitorum labourers, their faces masked by breathers or strips of torn cloth, carried the dead from the battle away from the smouldering railhead and laid them out in the open places north of Veyveyr for identification and disposal.

Agun Soric had brought his workforce in from the Commercia Refuge after the fighting had died down, and he had put them to work assisting the morbid but necessary duty.

He wanted to fight. Gak, but that brave Vervun Primary officer — what was his name? Racine! The one who’d given them the chance to pull their weight preparing the defence. He’d given Soric the taste of it. But for want of proper weapons, Soric and his people would have been at the front that morning. Let Ferrozoica tremble to face the wrath of smeltery workers from Vervun One with the blood up!

From what he’d been able to learn from those milling about him — some off-world Guard, some NorthCol — Soric knew the ferocious battle had ended with Zoica pushed out against all odds. He hoped to see Racine soon and slap the man’s back and hear how the pioneer efforts his workers had put in had helped to win the day by building defences the enemy couldn’t overrun.

There was time enough. With smeltery workers Gannif, Fafenge and Modj, Soric began loading corpses onto a handcart. It was filthy bestial work. They tried to wrap each body in a skein of linen and they’d been told to take tags and mark the identity of each on a data-slate. But some bodies didn’t come up in one piece. Some were only parts. Some parts didn’t match up obviously with others.

Some were still alive.

The place was a charnel house. Bodycarts moved all around them, medical and clearance personnel milled around and the wounded shuffled in slow, weary lines away from the gate railhead, many exhibiting awful injuries. Every now and then, they made way for a truck or a trundling medical Chimera, speeding away to the medical halls.

Soric, his hip braced on his axe-rake crutch, leaned down and slid his paper-gloved hands under the armpits of a blackened, legless corpse.

As he raised the cadaver, it groaned.

“Medic! Medic!” he cried out, pulling back from the ruined thing he had been touching.

A thickset medical officer pushed through the milling crowd, a man in his fifties with a silver beard and the look of an off-worlder about him. Under his hall-issue crimson apron he wore black fatigues and Guard-issue boots.

“Alive?” the medic asked Soric.

“Gak me, I suppose so. Tried to move him.”

The medic took out a flexible tube, put one end to his ear and the other to the blackened torso.

“Dead. You must have squeezed air out of the lungs when you lifted him.”

Soric nodded as the medic stood up, folding his scope-tube away into his shoulder-slung pack.

“You’re off-world, right?” asked Soric.

“What?” asked the medic, distracted.

“Off-worlder?”

The medic nodded curtly. “Tanith First. Chief medic.”

Soric stuck out a hand, then pulled the paper glove off it. “Thank you,” he said.

The medic paused, surprised, then took the hand and shook it.

“Dorden, Gaunt’s First-and-Only.”

“Soric. I used to run that place.” Soric gestured over his shoulder at the ruin of Vervun Smeltery One east of the railhead.

“This is a bad time for all of us,” Dorden said, studying the bullish, noble man who leaned on his crutch, black with ash.

Soric nodded.

“That eye wound… has it been treated?” asked Dorden, stepping forward.

Soric held up his hand. “Old news, friend, weeks old. There are others more needy of your skills.”

As if on cue, VPHC troops wheeled past a cart carrying a screaming, blood-soaked NorthCol soldier.

Mtane and one of Curth’s people hurried to it.

Dorden looked round at Soric. “You thanked me. Why?”

Soric shrugged. “I’ve been through this from the start. We were left to die. You didn’t have to come here but you did and I thank you for it.”

Dorden shook his head. “Warmaster Macaroth sends us where he wills. I’m glad to be able to help, however.”

“Without you off-worlders, Vervunhive would be dead. That’s why I thank you.”

“I appreciate it. Mine is often a thankless task.”

“Have you seen Major Racine? Vervun Primary? He’s a good man…”

Dorden shook his head and turned to where stretcher-bearers were beginning to bring the Tanith wounded out of the warzone. Troopers Milo and Baffels were carrying Manik, howling from the wound to his groin, blood dribbling over the edges of the stretcher.

Dorden moved in to deal with Manik. He was sure the young trooper was going to bleed out any moment.

He looked around at Baffels and Milo as he worked. “Racine? You know what happened to him?”

Dorden’s hands were already slippery with Manik’s blood. The groin artery had burst and he couldn’t tie it. It was pulling back into the body cavity and Dorden bellowed for Lesp to bring dean blades.

“Major Racine?” Milo said, standing back from Manik’s stretcher, adjusting the dressing on his shoulder wound. “He died. Under a flat-crab. He killed it, but he died.”

Soric listened to the off-world boy and shook his head sadly.

Lesp stumbled over the rubble and brought Dorden a scalpel. Dorden used it to try and open the screaming Manik’s groin wide enough so he could push his fingers in and pull the severed artery down to clamp it. It was too late. Manik bled out through his body cavity and died with Dorden’s hand still inside him.

“Let me take him,” Soric said and, with his men, he gently lifted Manik’s body onto his wheel-cart. Dorden was almost shocked by the reverence.

“Every soul for the hive, and the hive for every soul,” Soric said over his shoulder to the blood-soaked Dorden as he wheeled the dead Ghost away.

* * *

Ana Curth moved her orderlies through the confusion of Veyveyr Gate. There were more dead to recover than living.

She checked each corpse in turn, pulled off the tags and then left them for the recovery units.

She hesitated slightly when she found the corpses of Tanith. These were all Dorden’s friends. She took off their tags carefully and entered all the names in her dataslate.

In the gateway of Veyveyr, she paused. She checked the latest set of tags three times to be sure.

Tears welled in her eyes and she pushed the bloody tags into her apron-front.

The thirty-second day drew to a close. It was a day the citizens of Vervun-hive would remember perhaps more keenly than anything that had taken place so far. Despite the success of driving back the First Storm three days before, this seemed much more of a victory. Scant hours after the battle, the defence of Veyveyr began to take on a mythical flavour. In the Spine, the habs and the refuges alike, Vervunhivers spoke of it as a turning point, as the start of deliverance.

Public-address plates across the hive broadcast triumphant slogans, sanitised accounts of the battle and pictures from the glorious front, mainly those showing the People’s Hero raising the flag in the shattered gate-mouth, surrounded by jubilant Vervun Primary troopers. In the Basilica of the Ecclesiarchy, a victory mass was organised, featuring a choir of over ten thousand and long liturgical readings from the Codex Imperialis. Loudspeakers broadcast the worship across all the hive levels.

Spontaneous celebrations began in different areas and some revels — amongst Vervun Primary troops heady with relief — were broken up by the VPHC.

But the mood was impossible to suppress in the highest and lowest quarters of the hive. Oilcan fires were lit along the wharves and in the refuges, and drums, many homemade or improvised, thundered into the night. There were many reports of decadent banqueting in the High Spine, as merchants and house ordinary families abandoned the rationing restrictions and indulged in sumptuous private dinners of unstinting debauchery.

When Gaunt heard about them, he sighed. These were either gestures of ignorance or acts of denial against what must surely still await.

But let them have their delights, he decided. They may be their last.

In a grim mood, he’d stayed on at Veyveyr as the light failed, touring his men, noting those lost, restructuring squads around those losses. He gave Trooper Baffels a field promotion to sergeant and placed him in charge of Fols’ unit. The stocky, bearded trooper was almost overcome with emotion as Neskon, Domor, Milo and the others cheered him. He shook Gaunt’s hand and wiped away a tear that trickled down over his blue claw tattoo. There had been a brief rumour that Gaunt would award the sergeant pin to Milo, but that was absurd. He was barely a trooper and it wouldn’t look right, though Milo’s actions and improvised leadership at Veyveyr had won him a considerable respect that sat well with his reputation as the avatar of Gaunt.

Under Corbec’s command, the Tanith units who had seen action at Veyveyr pulled out to a mustering yard north of the Spoil, and fresh units under Rawne, partnered with Volpone forces commanded by Colonel Corday, moved in to hold the gate position. Stonemasons, metalworkers and engineers from the hab workforce were called up to assist the sapper units in defending the gate. Using fallen stone from the gate top, the masons erected two well-finished dyke walls just outside the gate, and the incandescent glare of oxylene torches fizzled in the night rain as the metalwrights crafted pavises and hoardings from broken tank plates. Sections of rail — and there were kilometres of it scattered throughout the railhead — were broken up and welded into cross-frames to carry barbed wire and razorwire strings. In an intensive twelve-hour period, with work continuing throughout the night under lamp-rigs, the workforce raised impressive concentric rings of well-built defences both inside and outside the broken gate. There were ramps along the eastern edge to allow forward access for the NorthCol tank files marshalled behind the troop lines. A forest of howitzers, barrels raised almost upright like slightly leaning trees, was established on the site of the main terminus, with a clear field of fire to bombard up and beyond the gate.

In the mustering yard, weary Tanith and NorthCol units from the front sprawled on rolled up jackets or on the hardpan itself, many falling asleep as soon as they got off their feet. Mess trucks with tureens of soup, baskets of bread and crates of weak beer arrived to tend them. It was estimated that they would be there until dawn, when the arterial routes would be finally clear enough for transports to carry them back to their billets.