[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard Read online

  “We’ll be with them again soon,” Caffran said. He thought of them as his too now. By extension, by the nature of the relationship he had with Tona, Dalin called him Papa Caff. They were as close to an actual family unit as it was possible to get in the Imperial Guard.

  “Will we, though?” Tona asked.

  “Old Gaunt would never lead us into harm, not if he thought he could get out of it,” Caffran said.

  “The word is he’s finished,” said Larkin from nearby, overhearing. “Word is, we’re finished too. He’s a broken man. Dead on the wire, so to speak. He’s going to be stripped of command and we’re going to be kicked around the Imperial Guard in search of a home.”

  “Are we now?” said Sergeant Kolea, moving down the track bay, catching Larkin’s words.

  “S’what I heard,” said Larkin defensively.

  “Then shut up until you know. We’re the fighting Tanith First, and we’ll be together until the end of time, right?”

  Kolea’s words got a muted chorus of cheers from the troops in the track.

  “Oh, you can do better than that! Remember Tanith! Remember Vervunhive!”

  That got a far more resounding cheer.

  “What’s that you’ve got, Criid?” Kolea asked as he shambled back down the track.

  She showed him the pendant. “My kids, sir.”

  Kolea looked into the pendant’s portraits for a curiously long time.

  “Your kids?”

  “Adopted them on Verghast, sir. Their parents were killed.”

  “Good… good work, Criid. What are their names?”

  “Yoncy and Dalin, sir.”

  Kolea nodded and let go of the pendant. He walked to the end of the lurching track and looked out into the rainwoods and irrigated field systems as they passed.

  “Something the matter, sarge?” asked Trooper Fence, seeing the look on Kolea’s face.

  “Nothing, nothing…” Kolea murmured.

  They were his. The children in the pendant portrait were his children. Children he thought long gone and dead on Verghast.

  Some god-mocking irony had let them survive and be here. Here, with the Ghosts.

  He felt sick and overjoyed all at the same time.

  What could he say? What could he begin to say to Criid or Caffran or the kids?

  Tears welled in his eyes. He looked out at the rainwoods sliding by and said nothing because there was nothing he could say.

  The Tembarong Road ran flat, wide and straight through the arable lowlands and rainwoods west of the Doctrinopolis. The lowlands were formed by the broad basin of the holy river, which irrigated the fields and ditch systems of the local farmers every year with its seasonal floods. There was a fresh, damp smell in the air and for a lot of the way, the road followed the curving river bank.

  Sergeant Mkoll ran ahead of the main convoy in one of the scout Salamanders with troopers Mkvenner and Bonin and the driver. Mkoll had used Salamanders a couple of times before, but he was always impressed with the little open-topped track-machines’ turn of speed. This one wore Pardus Armour insignia on its coat of blue-green mottle, carried additional tarp-wrapped equipment slouched like papooses to the side sponsons, and had its pair of huge UHF vox-antennas bent back over its body and tied off on the rear bars. The driver was a tall, adenoidal youth from the Pardus Armour Aux who wore mirrored glare-goggles and drove like he wanted to impress the Tanith.

  They dashed down the tree-lined road at close to sixty kph, waking out a fan tail of pink dust behind them off the dry earth surface.

  Mkvenner and Bonin dung on, grinning like fools and enjoying the ride. Mkoll checked his map book and made notes against the edges of the glass-paper charts with a wax pencil.

  Gaunt wanted to make the most of the Tembarong Road. He wanted a quick motorised dash for the first few days as far as the sound highway lasted. Their speed was bound to drop once the trail entered the rainwoods, and after that, as they wound their way up into the highlands things might get very slow altogether. There was no way of telling what state the hill roads were in after the winter rains, and they were hoping to pass a great many tonnes of steel along them.

  As scout commander, Mkoll had special responsibilities for route-tasking and performance. He’d spent a while talking to Captain Herodas the night before, assessing the mean road and off-road speeds the Pardus could manage. He’d also spoken to Intendant Elthan, who ran the Munitorium’s freight motorpool. He and his drivers were crewing the troop trucks and tankers. Mkoll had taken their conservative estimates of speed and mileage and revised them down. Both Herodas and Elthan were imagining a trip of five or six days to travel the three hundred or so kilometres to the Shrine-hold, roads permitting. Mkoll was looking at seven at least, maybe eight. And if it was eight, they’d have barely a day to collect up what they’d come for and turn around for the home run, or they’d miss Lord General Lugo’s eighteen-day evacuation deadline.

  For now, the going was clear. The sky was still violet blue, and a combination of low altitude and the trees kept the breezes down. It was hot.

  At first they passed few people on the road except the occasional farmer, or a family group, and once or twice a drover with a small train of livestock. The farmfolk had tried to maintain cultivation during the Infardi occupation, but they had suffered, and Mkoll saw that great areas of the field-stocks and water beds were neglected and overgrown. The few locals they saw turned to watch them pass and raised a hand of greeting or gratitude.

  There was no sign of Infardi, many of whom had apparently fled out this way. The road and its environs showed some sign of shelling and air damage, but it was old. The war had passed over this area briefly months ago, but most of the conflict on Hagia had been focused on the dries.

  Every once in a while, their passing engines scared flocks of gaudy-feathered fliers up out of trees and roosts. The trees were lush green and roped with epiphytes, their trunks tall, curved and ridged. To Mkoll, raised in the towering, temperate nalwood forests of Tanith, they seemed slight and decorative, like ornamental shrubs, despite the fact that some of them were in excess of twenty metres tall.

  At regular intervals through the trees, they caught racing glimpses of the sunlight on the river. Along one half kilometre stretch where the highway ran right beside the water’s edge, they motored past a line of fishermen wading out into the river stream, casting hand nets. The fishers all wore sun-hats woven from the local vindeaves.

  The river dictated the way of life in the floodplains. The few roadside dwellings and small settlements they went through were built up on wood-post stilts against the seasonal water rise. They also passed ornately carved and brightly painted boxes raised three metres high on intricately carved single posts. These were occasional things, appearing singly by the roadside or in small groups in glades set from the highway.

  In the hour before noon, they ran through an abandoned village of overgrown, unkept stilt houses and came around one of the road’s sharper bends, almost head-first into a herd of chelons and their drovers.

  The Pardus driver gave out a little gasp, and hauled on the steering yoke, pulling the Salamander half up onto the bushy verge, into the foliage and to an undignified halt. Unconcerned, the chelons, more than forty of them, lowed and grunted as they shambled past. They were the biggest Mkoll had yet seen on Hagia, the great bell-domed shells of the largest and most mature towering above their vehicle. The smallest and youngest had blue-black skins that gleamed like oil and a fibrous dark patina to their shells, while the elders’ hides were paler and less lustrous, lined with cracks and wrinkles, their massive shells limed almost white. A haze of dry, earthy animal smells wafted from them: dung, fodder, saliva in huge quantities.

  The three drovers ran over to the Salamander the moment it came to rest, waving their jiddi-sticks and exclaiming in alarm. All three were tired, hungry men in the earth-tone robes of the agricultural caste.

  Mkoll jumped down from the back step and raised his arms to ca
lm their jabberings while Mkvenner directed the Pardus driver as he reversed the light tank back out of the thorn breaks.

  “It’s fine, no harm done,” Mkoll said. The drovers continued to look unhappy, and were busy making numerous salutes to the Imperials.

  “Please… If you feel like helping, tell us what’s ahead. On the road.” Mkoll pulled out his mapbook and showed the route to the men, who passed it between themselves, contradicting each other’s remarks.

  “It’s very good,” said one. “The road is very clear. We come down now this month from the high pastures. They say the war is over. We come down in the hope that the markets will be open again.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Mkoll.

  “People have been hiding in the woods, whole families, you know,” another said. His ancient weather-beaten skin was as lined and gnarled as that of the chelons he drove. “They were afraid of the war. The war in the cities. But we have heard the war is over and many people will come out of the woods now it is safe.”

  Mkoll made a mental note. He had already suspected that a good proportion of the rural population might have fled into the wilderness at the start of the occupation. As the honour guard pressed on, they might encounter many of these people emerging back into the lowlands. With the threat of Infardi guerrillas all around, that made their job harder. Hostiles and ambushes would be harder to pick out.

  “What about the Infardi?” Mkoll asked.

  “Oh, certainly,” said the first drover, cutting across the gabble of his companions. “Many, many Infardi now, on the road and in the forest paths.”

  “You’ve seen them?” Mkoll asked with sharp curiosity.

  “Very often, or heard them, or seen the signs of their camps.”

  “Many, you say?”

  “Hundreds!”

  “No, no… Thousands! More every day!”

  Feth! Mkoll thought. A couple of pitched fights will slow us right down. The chelon-men might be exaggerating for effect, but Mkoll doubted it. “My thanks to you all,” he said. “You might want to get your animals off the road for a while. There’s a lot more of this stuff coming along,” he pointed to the Salamander, “and it’s a fair size bigger.”

  The men all nodded and said they would. Mkoll was a little reassured. He wasn’t sure who would win a head-on collision between a Conqueror and a mature bull chelon, but he was sure neither party would walk away smiling. He thanked the drovers, assured them once more they had done him and his men no harm, and got back aboard the Salamander.

  “Sorry,” the driver grinned.

  “Maybe a tad slower,” Mkoll replied. He pulled out the handset for the tank’s powerful vox set and sent a pulse hail to the main convoy. Mkvenner was still standing in the road, gently and politely trying to refuse the honking chelon calf that one of the drovers was offering him to make amends. “Alpha-AR to main advance, over.”

  The speaker crackled. “Go ahead Alpha-AR.” Mkoll immediately recognised Gaunt’s voice.

  “Picking up reports of Infardi activity up the road. Nothing solid yet, but you should be advised.”

  “Understood, Alpha-AR. Where are you?”

  “Just outside a village called Shamiam. I’m going ahead as far as Mukret. Best you send at least a couple more advance recon units forward to me.”

  “Copy that. I’ll send Beta-AR and Gamma-AR ahead. What’s your ETA at Mukret?”

  “Another two to three hours, over.” Mukret was a medium-sized settlement on the river where they had planned to make their first overnight stop.

  “God-Emperor willing, we’ll see you there. Keep in contact.”

  “Will do, sir. You should be aware that there are non-coms on the road. Families heading back out of hiding. Caution advised.”

  “Understood.”

  “And about an hour ahead of you, there’s a big herd of livestock moving contra your flow. Lots of livestock and three harmless herdsmen. They may be off road by the time you reach them, but be warned.”

  “Understood.”

  “Alpha-AR out.” Mkoll hung up the vox-mic and nodded at the waiting Pardus driver. “Okay,” he said.

  The driver throttled the Salamander’s turbine and pointed her nose up the brown mud-cake of the highway.

  A good fifteen kilometres back down the Tembarong Road, the honour guard convoy slowed and came to a halt. The big khaki troop trucks bunched up, nose to nose and shuddered their exhaust stacks impatiently as they revved. A few sounded their horns. The sun was high overhead and gleamed blindingly off the metalwork. To the left of the convoy, the blue waters of the holy river crept by on the other side of a low levee.

  Rawne got up in the back of his transport and climbed up on the guardrail so he could look out along the length of the motorcade over the track’s cab. All he could see was stationary armour and laden tracks right down to the bend in the road three hundred metres away.

  He keyed his microbead as he glanced back down at Feygor.

  “Get them up,” Rawne told his adjutant.

  Feygor nodded and relayed the glib order to the fifty or so men in the transport cargo area. The Ghosts, many of them sweating and without headgear, roused and readied their weapons, scanning the tree-line and field ditches to the right of the road.

  “One three,” said Rawne into his link. There was a lot of vox traffic. Questioning calls were running up and down the convoy.

  “Three, one,” replied Gaunt from up ahead. “One, what’s the story?”

  “One of the munition Chimeras has thrown a track section. I’m going to wait fifteen minutes and see how the techs do. Longer than that I’ll leave them behind.”

  Rawne had seen the battered age of the worn Chimeras they’d been issued by the Munitorium motorpool. It would take more than fething fifteen minutes to get one running in his opinion.

  “Permission to recreationally disperse my men along the river edge”

  “Granted, but watch the tree-line.”

  Setting two men on point to cover the right-hand side of the road, Rawne ordered the rest of his troops off the truck. Joking, pulling off jackets and boots, they jogged down to the river edge and started bathing their feet and throwing handscoops of water on their faces. Other troop tracks pulled off the hardpan onto the levee shoulder and disembarked their men. A Trojan tank tractor grumbled past edging up along the length of the stationary column from the rear echelon to assist with the spot repairs.

  Rawne wandered down the line of vehicles to where Sergeants Varl, Soric Baffels and Haller stood on the levee. Soric was handing out stubby cigars from a waxed card box and Rawne took one. They all smoked for a while in silence, watching the Ghosts, both Verghastite and Tanith, engage in impromptu water fights and games of kickball.

  “Is it always like this, major?” Soric asked, jerking a thumb at the unmoving convoy. Rawne didn’t warm to people much, but he liked the old man. He was a capable fighter and a good leader, but he wasn’t afraid to ask questions that revealed his inexperience, which in Rawne’s book made him a good student and a promising officer.

  “Always the same with moralised transportation. Breakdowns, bottlenecks, bad terrain. I always prefer to shift the men by foot.”

  “The Pardus equipment looks alright,” said Haller. “Well maintained and all.”

  Rawne nodded. “It’s just the junk transports the Munitorium found for us. These trucks are as old as feth, and the Chimeras…”

  “I’m surprised they’ve made it this far,” said Varl. The sergeant gently windmilled his arm, nursing the cybernetic shoulder joint the augmeticists had given him on Fortis Binary several years before. It still hurt him in humid conditions. “And we’ll be fethed without them. Without the munitions they’re carrying, anyway.”

  “We’re fethed anyway,” said Rawne. “We’re the Imperial fething Guard and it’s our lot in life to be fethed.”

  Haller, Soric and Varl laughed darkly, but Baffels was silent. A stocky, bearded man with a blue claw tattoo under one
eye, Baffels had been promoted to sergeant after old Fols was killed at the battle for Veyveyr Gate. He still wasn’t comfortable with command, and took his duties too seriously in Rawne’s opinion. Some common troopers — Varl was a good example — were sergeants waiting to happen. Baffels was an honest footslogger who’d had responsibility dumped on him because of his age, his dependability and his good favour with the men. Rawne knew he was finding it hard. Gaunt had had a choice when it came to Fols’ replacement: Baffels or Milo, and he’d opted for Baffels because to give the lead job to the youngest and greenest Ghost would have smacked of favouritism. Gaunt had been wrong there, Rawne thought. He had no love for Milo, but he knew how capable he’d proved to be and how dearly the men regarded him as a lucky totem. Gaunt should have gone with his gut — ability over experience.

  “Good smoke,” Varl told Soric, glancing appreciatively at the smouldering brown tube between his fingers. “Corbec would have enjoyed them.”

  “Finest Verghast leaf,” smiled Soric. “I have a private stock.”

  “He should be here,” Baffels said, meaning the colonel. Then he glanced quickly at Rawne. “No offence, major!”

  “None taken,” Rawne replied. Privately, Rawne was enjoying his new-found seniority. With both Corbec and that upstart Captain Daur out of the picture, he was now the acting second of the regiment, with only the Pardus Major Kleopas and the outsider Commissar Hark near to him in the taskforce pecking order. Mkoll was the Ghosts’ number three officer for the duration, and Kolea had been given Daur’s Verghastite liaison tasks.

  It still irked Rawne that he was forced to maintain the call-sign “three” to Gaunt’s “one”. Gaunt had explained it was to preserve continuity of vox recognition, but Rawne felt he should be using Corbec’s “two” now.

  What irked him more was the notion that Baffels was right. Corbec should be here. It went against Rawne’s impulse, because he’d never liked Corbec that much either, but it was true. He felt it in his blood. What everyone knew and none wanted to talk about was that this seemed likely to be the last mission of the Tanith First The lord general had broken Gaunt, and Rawne would lead the applause when they came to march Gaunt away in disgrace, but still…