Ghostmaker (21 page)

Dorden shut off the thoughts. Tanith had taken his wife with it, and Clara and her husband and their baby too. All he had was Mikal, Trooper Mikal Dorden, vox-caster operator in Sergeant Hasker’s platoon.

“You’re thinking about home,” Corbec muttered.

Dorden broke his sad reverie. “What?”

“I know that look.”

“It’s dark, colonel!”

“I know that… feeling, then. The set of a man’s shoulders. Comes on us all, time to time.”

“I’d guess the commissar has told you to stamp it out where ever you see it? Bad for morale.”

“Not in my book. Tanith still lives while we all carry it here…” Corbec tapped his forehead. “And we don’t know where we’re going if we don’t know where we came from.”

“Where are we going, do you suppose?”

Corbec flicked his butt onto the mud and let it sputter dead. “On a bad day, to hell. On a good day, I’d say we were bound for that trophy world Gaunt’s promised us. Slaydo’s gift: the first world we truly win we can take and claim and settle as our own.”

Dorden gazed at the storm. “New Tanith, huh? Tike the men talk of when they’re drunk or dying? Do you believe that? Might we ever take a world ourselves, get the credit clean and true? We’re less than two thousand, livery theatre we enter, we do so alongside other regiments, and that muddies victory claims and credit. I’m not a pessimist, colonel, but I doubt any of us will ever find that New Tanith, except in drink or death.”

Corbec smiled, his white teeth shining in the gloom. “Then lucky me. One way or another, I’ll see more of it than most.”

A door banged to their left. Chayker, shrouded in his cape, emerged from the hospital and carried a tin drum over to the well. A few moments’ cranking, and he struggled with it back to the buildings. Dorden and Corbec could already smell the broth Chayker and Foskin were brewing for all the company.

“Something smells good,” Corbec said.

“Toskin found tubers and grain in a field beyond the ditch walls, and we turned up dried pulses and salt meat in an old pantry. Should be the best supper any of us have had in a while. But first rations go to any of the patients who can take it.”

“Of course. They need it more than us. I’ve got a flask of sacra and a box of these smokes. Should keep me going awhile.”

“Come in when you’re ready for proper nourishment,” Dorden instructed, as if issuing a prescription. “Thanks for the cigars.” He headed back to the ward.

A circuit of the wounded took another hour and a half. Tesp and the other orderlies had done well, and many had eaten or at least taken fluid. There were twelve who were too far gone to remain conscious, and Dorden carefully rationed out his supply of drugs to prioritise them. The boy, Culcis, along with a few others, were now sitting up, chatting, grateful. All of them, Volpone aristo-blood, were disdainful of the Tanith, but civil nevertheless. Being cut adrift by their regiment, and spared from death only by a barbarian unit, would seem to have altered many of their deeper prejudices and snobberies. For that at least, Dorden felt pleased.

He saw Trooper Caffran, coming in soaked from a patrol circuit, taking his bowl of broth to sit with Culcis. They were about the same age, Dorden reckoned. The same age as Mikal. He heard them share a joke.

Lesp took his arm. One of the critical cases was showing signs of fading. With Chayker’s help, they carried the man out into what had once been the household kitchen, and now served as a surgical theatre. A refectory table sat there, long enough for a man, and they heaved him onto it.

The Blueblood, a Corporal Regara by his tags, had lost a leg below the knee and taken shrapnel in the chest. His blood was far from blue. The refectory table became slick and blood drooled off onto the flagstones. Chayker almost slipped and Dorden ordered him to fetch a mop and more wadding.

“There are no mops,” Chayker shrugged.

“Then find something
like
a mop.”

Dorden had to take off more of the ruined leg from the shrieking Regara with his handsaw before he could staunch and tie the haemorrhage. He directed Tesp’s sure fingers in to suture the breach with fine, sail-maker’s stitches. By then, Chayker had returned. Dorden found he was mopping the floor with shredded strips from his cape tied to an old rake handle. For a Ghost to tear up his treasured stealth cloak to mop blood… Dorden’s admiration for his volunteers’ devotion to duty grew.

They carried the softly moaning Regara back to his bed. With luck, and a fever-breaking shot of mascetamine, he might yet live. But Dorden was called away almost at once to a seizure that Toskin couldn’t cope with, and then to a man who had woken from near-coma, only to begin violently retching blood.

The ward fell quiet towards midnight, as other dramas came and passed. Dorden was scrubbing his chrome rib-spreaders in a bucket of scalding water when Mkoll came in, shaking the water from his cape. The storm was still booming outside and thunder rattled the casements and roofing. Every now and then, loose glass in a window somewhere fell in, or tiles slipped off and shattered. The storm had continued all that evening, but until then, Dorden had blanked it out.

He watched Mkoll sit and clean his gun, the first thing he always did before seeing to other duties like food or warmth. Dorden took him a bowl of broth.

“Anything out there?”

Mkoll shook his head. “If we’re lucky, the storm is slowing their advance.”

“And if we’re not?”

“They conjured the storm.”

Mkoll looked up at the rafters and the high roof. “This must have been quite a place. A good homestead, worth the working. The soil is healthy and they had plenty of livestock.”

“A family home,” Dorden pondered, who hadn’t thought about it before. The thought of another home and family lost to the war now bit at him. He felt weary again. Old.

Mkoll spooned his broth quietly. “There’s an old chapel at the rear of the house. Blown in, of course, but you can still see the painted reredos commemorating the Emperor. The Volpone used it as a privy. Whoever lived here were devout servants of the Imperium, working the land, raising their kin.”

“Until this.”

Dorden fell silent. Chaos had taken this world, Nacedon, two months gone, as part of their counter-punch to thwart Macaroth’s crusade. It hadn’t been occupied, or even corrupted from within. Nacedon, an agricultural world with three million Imperial colonists, had been violated and invaded in the space of three nights.

What kind of universe was it, Dorden wondered, where humans could struggle and break their backs and love their families and worship the Emperor and build for years, only to lose it all in a few hours? His universe, he concluded, the same one that had taken Tanith away.

A late moon was up, a lonely sentry in a sky suddenly clear of storm. The rain had stopped and silver clouds scudded across the purple openness of the heaven.

Counterpart to the moon, a lone sentry stood at the gate of the station. Trooper Tremard, sitting his second shift at the gate in the sandbag emplacement, watched the tree lines, black fuzzes of darkness edging the flats of the equally black fields and fens. He was tired, and he wished that the fething Volpone had left their heavy gun in the emplacement.

Mist rose across the fenland, drifting sideways like smoke. Something twinkled in the dark.

Tremard started up, grabbing his scope from the sandbags. He fumbled with the focus ring, pulling the green-on-green night vision view into true. Mist — and other things in it. The twinkle he had seen. Moonlight flashing back from the staring reflective retina of hunting eyes.

He triggered his micro-bead link. “Gate to Ghosts! Can you hear me, colonel? To arms! To arms! Movement to the south!”

Corbec rose abruptly from his cot, like a dead man lifting from a grave, making Dorden start. The colonel had been catching forty winks on a spare bed in the ward as the medic sorted pills into paper twists. “What is it?”

Corbec was on his feet. “Three guesses, Doc.”

Dorden was up too. He looked around at the fragile hall, the vulnerable, half-dead men, as Corbec readied his lasgun and voxed-in with the other troopers. Dorden felt suddenly stupid. He knew what a full-on assault of Chaos was like. They’d all be shattered like an egg-shell. He’d been stupid to insist on staying. Now he had them all dead — the Bluebloods, the Ghosts… valuable, peerless Ghosts like Corbec and Mkoll. He’d wasted them all, over some foolish pride in an old oath. An old medical oath, taken in safer times, in a nice community practice where the worst injury was a laceration at the sawmill.

Feth me for a fool! Feth me for my pride!

“We’ll front them as long as we can. The boys know some tricks,” Corbec told him. “I’ll need Chayker and Foskin… Lesp can stay with you. If we lose the first attack, you need to be ready to get as many of the wounded out into the back rooms. They’re ruins I know, but it’ll put more walls between you and the fighting.”

Dorden swallowed, thinking of the work it would take him and Lesp to carry sixty-seven men out into the rear of the dwelling on stretchers. He heard the distant wail of las-fire and realised it wouldn’t be half the effort Corbec and his soldiers were about to make. So he simply nodded, beckoning Lesp to him.

“Emperor be with you and watch over you, Colm Corbec,” he said. “And you, Doc.”

Tremard held the gate. Dark shapes moved across the fields and through the dim hedgerows towards him, crackling out green pulses of laser fire and white-hot bolt rounds. The treacherous moon showed movement and the occasional glint of armour, and he picked his targets well, barking orange slices of laser into the open fenland beyond the farm.

Ducking the incoming sprays of fire, a figure dropped into the position beside him. It was Colonel Corbec. Corbec grinned at Tremard, made some obscene remark as to the maternal origins of the enemy that had Tremard cackling at its vulgarity, and leaned up over the bags to loose a volley of shots from his lasgun down the lane into the fens.

Along the ditch walls, the other Ghosts opened up. Eight las guns against the encroaching dark, eight lasguns picking their targets through scope and skill, matching the hundreds of fire-points blasting back at them from the fens.

“Where’s Brostin?” Corbec barked into his micro-bead, over the howl of gunplay, sustaining a regular fire-pattern.

A second later, his query was lost in a withering assault which blasted down the lane and onto his position. A hundred or more warriors of Chaos were forcing their approach at the main gate, charging them, weapons blazing. Corbec and Tremard could see nothing but the light-blur of their guns.

Corbec ducked under the intense volley. He didn’t even curse. It was over, he knew. The end of Colm Corbec. By his side, Tremard, a second too late in ducking, flew backwards, his left arm gone in a shredded waste of flesh below the shoulder, He fell on his back, screaming and writhing. His lasgun, with his left hand still holding the grip, sat miraculously on the parapet where he had rested it.

Corbec scrambled to him, under the hideous rain of bolt and las-fire, grabbing the struggling man and holding him close. He had to calm him and make him still before he could tie up that awful stump.
If he lived that long.

Tremard screamed and screamed, fighting like a scalded cat, drenching Corbec and himself with the pumping arterial spray of his stump. Corbec glanced up to see black forms in quilted armour, faces covered by gas-hoods, scrambling over the lip of the sandbags towards him. He could smell their rank animal scent, and the badges of the Dark Gods blazoned on their armour burned in his mind even at a glimpse and turned his stomach.

There was a double click, dry and solid, and then a whoosh of heat as the night lit up. Corbec winced. Trooper Brostin stood over him, raking the tops of the sandbags and the lane beyond with his flamer. The hurricane force of the flame gout cut the enemy away like dry grass.

“I was wondering where you’d got to,” Corbec said to Brostin. Then he tapped his micro-bead. “Medic! Medic!”

Dorden and Lesp were halfway through transporting the injured into the rear of the house when the call came through. Stray shots were punching through the ward hall, exploding rafters and shattering wall-plaster and brick.

Dorden fumbled with his micro-bead, trying to steady the stretcher he was sharing with the backing Tesp.

“Dorden! What?”

“Tremard’s down bad. Get out here!” Any more of Corbec’s message was lost in crackling static, drowned by the gunfire.

“Set it down! I’ll drag it,” Tesp cried to Dorden as a las-round punched a hole in the plaster near his head.

Dorden did so and Lesp hauled the stretcher through the archway, its wooden handles screeching on the floor, “Just like a fish box back home!” Lesp yelled over the onslaught as he disappeared.

Dorden grabbed his kit. “Corbec! I’m coming out, but you need to send someone in to help Lesp move the wounded!”

“Feth that! We’re all engaged out here! Can’t spare a man!”

“Don’t give me that!” Dorden returned, scuttling under the puncture level of the las-range as the hall fell apart around him. “Lesp needs help! These men need help!”

A hand took his shoulder. He looked round. It was the Blueblood Culcis. Several more of the less seriously injured Volpone were with him. “I can’t manage a stretcher with my leg, but I can man a fire-point, doctor. I’ll take any lasgun free if it means able bodies can help you here!”

Dorden smiled at the young man’s bravery. Pain was slashed into the Blueblood’s thin face.

He nodded them forward to the door and they looked into the rain of fire.

“Caffran!” Dorden called on the link. “I’m sending a Blueblood over to you. Give him your weapon and then return!”

He didn’t wait for an answer.

Using Chayker’s mop as a crutch, Culcis scurried out into the yard and made the inner wall, where Caffran was blasting through a fire-slot. A nod, and Caffran gave up his gun and position to the Blueblood. Culcis settled in, leaning against the flak-boards, and resumed blasting. Caffran ran back to the farmhouse door where Dorden was waiting.