Ghostmaker (20 page)

Smoke clogged the late afternoon sky across the low fields. He approached the old red-brick buildings with their blown-out windows and crumpled walls. It had been a farm complex once, before the invasion. A feudal estate with a main house, outbuildings and barns. Agricultural machinery lay rusting and broken in waterlogged swine pens. A wide trench gully and a double fence of seared flak-boards topped with more spools of wire enclosed the complex in a horseshoe, with the northern side, the one that faced away from the frontline, open. Ghosts stood point all around, weapons ready. Trooper Brostin nodded him inside.

Dorden passed a sandbagged gunnery post from which the weapon had been hastily removed and entered the first of the buildings, the main house, through a doorway that had been shot out of the brick by sustained las-fire. More flies, billowing in clouds in the afternoon sunlight. The smell of death he was so, so used to. And other smells: antiseptic, blood, waste.

Dorden stepped across a tiled floor. Half the tiles were broken, littered with glass and pools of oil that shimmered rainbow colours. Corbec loomed out of the shadows nearby, shaking his weary head. “Doc,” he acknowledged.

“Colonel.”

“Field hospital…” Corbec said, gesturing around himself. Dorden already knew as much. “Anyone alive?”

“That’s why I called for you.”

Corbec led him through to a vaulted hallway. The various stenches were stronger in here. Perhaps five dozen men lay on pallet beds in the chamber, half-lit by pallid yellow sunlight that streaked down through shattered lights in the sloping roof. Dorden walked the length of the room and then back.

“Why have they been left here?” he asked.

Corbec shot him a questioning look. “Why do you think? We’re all retreating. Too much to carry. Can you… sort them?”

Dorden cursed quietly. “These men are what?”

“Bluebloods. Volpone 50th. You remember those devils from Voltemand? Their command units pulled out this morning, as Per orders.”

“And they left the wounded here?” Corbec shrugged. “Seems so, Doc.”

“What kind of animal leaves his sick and wounded behind to die?” Dorden spat, moving to change the dressings on the nearest man.

“The human kind?” Corbec asked.

Dorden looked round sharply. “This isn’t funny. Corbec. It’s not even whimsical. Most of these men will live with the proper attention. We’re not leaving them.”

Corbec groaned softly. He rubbed the top of his scalp, folding the thick black hair between his big, swarthy fingers. “We can’t stay here, Doc. Commissar’s orders…”

Dorden turned and looked at the colonel with fierce, old eyes. “I’m not leaving them,” he stated plainly. Corbec seemed to start to say something, then hesitated and decided better of it. “See what you can do for them,” he said, and left Dorden to his work.

Dorden was treating a leg wound when he heard the crunch of gravel on the roadway outside and the rumble of a troop carrier. He looked up to locate the source of the sound only after he had finished what he was doing.

“Thank you, sir,” said the young man whose leg he had treated. The boy was pale and sallow, too weak to rise from his pallet bed.

“What’s your name?” Dorden asked.

“Culcis, sir. Trooper, Blueblood.” Dorden was sure that Culcis would have wanted to punctuate that statement with an exclamation mark, but he was too weak to manage it.

“I’m Dorden. Medic. Tanith. You need me, Trooper Culcis, you call my name.”

The boy nodded. Dorden went outside, approaching the Chimera parked below the leaning walls. Corbec was speaking to the tall figure perched on top.

The figure moved, dropped down to the soil, began to march towards him: Gaunt, his cap on, his face a shadow, his long coat flying.

“Sir!” Dorden said.

“Dorden — Corbec says you won’t move.”

“Sixty-eight wounded here, sir. Can’t leave them; won’t leave them.”

Gaunt took Dorden’s arm and led him across the muddy yard to the side wall that looked out across trampled farmland and vacant swine pens towards the setting suns beyond.

“You must, Dorden. Enemy forces are half a day behind us. General Muller has called us all to retreat. We can’t carry them with us. I’m sorry.”

Dorden shook off the commissar’s grip. “So am I,” he said.

Gaunt turned away. For a moment, Dorden thought the commissar might round on him and discipline him with a fist. But he didn’t. Instead, the man sighed. On reflection, Dorden knew violence wasn’t Gaunt’s first or chosen way of command. The endless war and his experience of other officer cadres in the field had soured Dorden’s expectation, something he wasn’t proud of.

Gaunt looked back at the medic. “Corbec told me you’d say as much. Took, the counter-push for Nacedon is scheduled for tomorrow night. Then, and only then, Emperor willing, we’ll retake this land and drive the enemy back.”

“Few of them will last the night and day unattended. And none if they are found and attended by the Chaos filth!”

Gaunt took off his cap and smoothed his cropped blond hair. The dying suns-light silhouetted his angular profile, but kept his internal thoughts in shadow. “You have my respect, medic. You’ve always had it, since the Founding Fields even. The only Ghost who refuses to bear arms, the only man who can keep us alive. The Ghosts owe you, many of them owe you their lives. I owe you for that. I’d hate to have to give you an order.”

“Then don’t, commissar. You know I’ll refuse it. I’m a medic first and a Ghost second. Back on Tanith, as a community practitioner, I worked for thirty years ministering to the sick, the infirm, the new-born and the weak in the Beldane District and County Pryze. I did it because I took an oath at the Medical College in Tanith Magna. You understand allegiances and oaths, commissar. Understand mine.”

“I understand the weight of the medical oath well enough.”

“And you’ve honoured it! Never asked me to break my vow on confidentiality over men with private problems… drink, pox, mind-troubles… you’ve always let me do as my oath bids. Let me now.”

Gaunt replaced his cap. “I can’t leave you here to die.”

“But you’d leave these men to die?”

“They’re not the Ghosts’ chief medic!” Gaunt spat the answer and then fell silent.

“A doctor is vowed to serve any injured. Oh, I swore to the Emperor, on the Founding Fields, to serve him and you and the Imperial Guard. But I’d already sworn to the Emperor to uphold life. Don’t make me break that vow.”

Gaunt tried logic. “Our illustrious forces were routed on the delta at Lohenich. We are fleeing before a massed Chaos army that thunders at our heels, barely half a day away. You’re a non-combatant. How could you hold this place?”

“With words, if I have to. With volunteers, if any will stay and you’ll allow it. After all, it’s only until tomorrow night. Until your counter-push retakes this place. Or was that a lie? Propaganda?”

Gaunt said nothing for a while, tilting his tall bulk into the evening suns, adjusting his muddy coat. Then he turned back to the old medic.

“No lie. We will retake this land, and beyond. We will drive them back as they come to us. But to leave you out here, even for a night…”

“Don’t think of me. Think of the Volpone wounded in there.”

Gaunt did. It didn’t change his mind much. “They would have had us butchered—”

“Don’t go to that place!” Dorden warned. “Hate has no place between allies. These are men, Troopers, valuable soldiers. They could live to fight again, to turn another conflict for the better. Leave me to care for them, with whoever you can spare. Leave me, and come back for us all.”

Gaunt cursed. “I’ll give you a squad. I can spare no more. Ten men, volunteers. If it doesn’t come to ten, tough. Muller will have my head for leaving any in the field as it is.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Dorden said. “Thank you.”

Gaunt strode away abruptly, then turned, came back and took Dorden’s hand tightly in his own.

“You’re a brave man. Don’t let them take you alive… and don’t make me regret allowing you to be too brave.”

Gaunt and the retreating lines of Ghosts passed on and then they were alone. Dorden was working in the long hall, and only noticed the passing of time as the sunshine through the skylights faded to blue and dusk fell. He lit lamps on crates placed between the wounded and went outside into the yard. Overhead, alien stars were coming out in the mauve sky.

He saw three Ghosts at first: Lesp, Chayker and Toskin, who acted as his orderlies and were skilled field medics. They were sorting through the medical supplies Gaunt had left for them. Dorden had half-expected them to volunteer and stay, hoped for it, but to see his three staffers working as usual was refreshing and uplifting. He crossed to them, meaning to carry on as normal and ask about the supply level, but all he found in his throat was thanks. Each one smiled, took his hand as he offered it, grunted an acknowledgement of duty. Dorden was proud of them.

He started to give them dispersal instructions, and began to run through the needs of the sick in priority order, when other Ghosts stepped into view: Mkoll, the chief scout and Dorden’s closest friend in the unit, accompanied by Troopers Brostin, Claig, Caffran and Gutes. They had just finished a patrol sweep of the horseshoe boundary and were preparing to dig in for the night.

Dorden greeted Mkoll. “You needn’t have stayed.”

“And leave you alone here?” Mkoll laughed. “I’ll not have the records say ‘Medic Dorden died and where was his friend, the warrior Mkoll?’ The commissar asked for volunteers and so we volunteered.”

“I’ll not forget this, however short my life,” Dorden replied. “We have the flank guarded well,” Mkoll told Dorden, indicating the double fence. “All ten of us.”

“Ten?”

“That’s what the colonel-commissar allowed. Us five, your three, and the other two. All of the Ghosts were arguing over who could stay, did you know? Everyone volunteered for the duty.”

“Everyone? Not Major Rawne, I’d bet!”

Mkoll grinned ruefully, “All right, not everyone. But there was a scramble for places. Gaunt finally decided on first come, first served. So you got your three, me, Brostin, Claig, Caffran and Gutes. Plus Tremard, on watch at the gates. And…”

“And?”

Dorden whipped round, sensing someone was suddenly behind him. He looked up into the smiling bearded face of Colm Corbec.

“And me. So, Doc, you’re in charge. How do we play this?”

Night fell. The air cleared. Distantly, carrion-dogs howled. Three or more moons rose and set, duelling with each others’ orbits. The darkness was clear and cold and smelled of death. Far away, on the southern horizon, amber clouds thumped and boiled, a storm approaching. A mighty land army was moving towards them. That, and a real storm. Lightning shuddered the sky in hazes of white-flash. The air became heavy and sweet.

Inside the farmhouse, one of the Bluebloods spasmed and died. Dorden was fighting for that life, his apron-smock slick with spurting blood. There was nothing he or Lesp could do.

Dorden stepped back from the cooling corpse and handed bloodied instruments to Lesp. “Record time and manner of death, and the name and number from the tags,” he said darkly “Emperor willing, we can pass it to the Volpone adjutant’s office and they can adjust their records.”

Lesp snorted. “The Bluebloods have doubtless marked all these as dead already.”

Lesp was a tall, thin man from Tanith Longshore, with cold blue eyes and an Adam’s apple that looked like a knee in his slender neck. He’d been a fisherman back on the Lost Place, part of a sea-fishing family which plied the ocean currents beyond the archipelago. He owned a fierce skill with a sailcloth and net needle, and an almost surgical knack with a blade learned from gutting fish back in those days. Dorden had put those skills to use in the name of healing when he had co-opted Lesp as an orderly. Lesp had taken to it well, and enjoyed his work alongside the chief medic.

Dorden took all the willing, able help he could get. Most of the trained medics who had founded with the Ghosts on Tanith had never made it off-world. Originally, the only fully qualified medics had been Dorden, Gherran and Mtane, with twenty other troopers trained as field medics. Dorden had interviewed and studied all of the surviving men to recruit for the badly needed medical staff. Without devoted, constantly learning amateurs like Lesp, Foskin and Chayker, the health of the regiment would have failed long ago.

Mtane and Gherran had moved on with Gaunt’s main force, though both had wanted to stay. Losing all three trained medics in one rash act was more than Gaunt would tolerate.

Dorden stepped out into the muddy yard and, as if on cue, the heavens opened and sheeting rain hammered down on him, washing another’s blood out of his tunic. He stood there, dripping, as the downpour eased a little.

“You’ll get wet out there,” came a voice from nearby.

Dorden swung round to face Corbec, who was smoking a cigar in the cover of the slumping side-roof. All Dorden could see was the shape and the red coal of the light.

Dorden crossed to him. Corbec offered up a waxy box of smokes. “Liquorice. Got the taste of them on Voltemand and it’s taken me an age to get some on the black market. Take one for now and one for later.”

Dorden took two, slid one behind his ear unlit and lit up the other from Corbec’s half-smoked stick.

They looked out into the night.

“It’s going to be rough,” remarked Corbec softly.

He was looking at the flash and howl of the storm, but Dorden knew what he meant.

“Yet you stayed.”

Corbec took a deep drag and white smoke plumed out of his hairy shadow. “I’m a sucker for good deeds.”

“Or lost causes.”

“The Emperor will provide. And aren’t we all just one big lost cause? The First and last and Lost? You don’t see me giving up on that.”

Dorden smiled. The cigar was strong and the flavour hellish, but he was enjoying it. It had been twenty years since he’d smoked. His wife had never approved, said it didn’t set a good example to the patients Dorden tended to. Then the kids came along, Mikal and Clara, and he’d kicked the habit, so—