Sabbat Worlds Page 31

  “Harl!” Linder ran for the stairs, as Sitrus took a couple of steps towards the nearest tunnel mouth, and collapsed to the floor. By the time I joined them, Sitrus’ face was grey, and he was fighting for breath.

  “Hell of a time to grow a backbone, Zale,” he said, the sardonic smile flickering on his face for the last time.

  Linder turned an anguished face in my direction. “Call a medicae!” he implored.

  “On the way,” I said calmly, although if the voices in my comm-bead were right about their location, they’d find nothing but a corpse when they arrived. I knelt on the grubby brickwork, next to Sitrus. “How many other Ferrozoicans did you give new identities to? You know every damn one of them will be tainted by Chaos. Do you want to face the Emperor with that on your conscience?”

  “You’re so clever, you work it out,” Sitrus said. Then he turned to Linder. “Tell Milena I’ll see her again sooner than we thought.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Linder said, his voice quaking; but I doubt that Sitrus ever heard.

  I couldn’t close the case without a formal identification of the body; and as the closest thing Sitrus had to next of kin on Verghast was Milena, I had to ask her. She held up well, all things considered, only showing signs of emotion when Linder gave her Sitrus’ final message. She heard him out without speaking, then nodded curtly.

  “Remember what I said about my funeral?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Linder said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t come after all.” Then she swept out of the Sector House like a mourning-clad storm front.

  “What now?” Linder asked, looking faintly dazed, which I could hardly blame him for.

  “Now we do it the hard way,” I said. “Go back to our list of suspects, and pull their records apart. Check for any anomalies, however small, that might indicate they’re not who they say they are.” I looked at him appraisingly. “Your expertise would be very useful, if the Administratum can spare you.”

  “I’ll make sure they can,” he said. “But what about Milena? Aren’t you going to bring her in?”

  I shook my head. “She’s a low priority,” I said. “We know she’s not from Ferrozoica, so she’ll keep. We’ll get around to her case in a year or two.” Technically, I suppose, that was Obstruction of Justice, but there was no point in prosecuting her; she’d be dead before the case came to trial. Like I said, everyone’s guilty of something, even me.

  Linder looked at me strangely. “You’re a good man,” he said.

  A new Gaunt story from me to finish this collection, a novella, actually.

  I don’t want to say too much about it, because almost anything I mention will be a spoiler. All I will say is that writing this story was exactly what I needed to get me back on the horse after my Adventures in Epilepsy. It was great to engage, up close and personal, with characters who were old friends.

  This story, like “The Iron Star”, fits precisely into the continuity. But I’m not going to tell you where.

  Dan Abnett

  OF THEIR LIVES IN THE

  RUINS OF THEIR CITIES

  Dan Abnett

  It feels like the afterlife, and none of them are entirely convinced that it isn’t.

  They have pitched up in a cold and rain-lashed stretch of lowland country, on the morning after somebody else’s triumph, with a bunch of half-arsed orders, a dislocating sense that the war is elsewhere and carrying on without them, and very little unit cohesion. They have a couple of actions under their belts, just enough to lift their chins, but nothing like enough to bind them together or take the deeper pain away and, besides, other men have collected the medals. They’re out in the middle of nowhere, marching further and further away from anything that matters anymore, because nothing matters anymore.

  They are just barely the Tanith First and Only. They are not Gaunt’s Ghosts.

  They are never going to be Gaunt’s Ghosts.

  Silent lightning strobes in the distance. His back turned towards it and the rain, the young Tanith infantryman watches Ibram Gaunt at work from the entrance of the war tent. The colonel-commissar is seated at the far end of a long table around which, an hour earlier, two dozen Guard officers and adjutants were gathered for a briefing. Now Gaunt is alone.

  The infantryman has been allowed to stand at ease, but he is on call.

  He has been selected to act as runner for the day. It’s his job to attend the commander, to pick up any notes or message satchels at a moment’s notice, and deliver them as per orders. Foot couriers are necessary because the vox is down. It’s been down a lot, this past week. It’d been patchy and unreliable around Voltis City. Out in the lowlands, it’s useless, like audio soup. You can hear voices, now and then. Someone said maybe the distant, soundless lightning is to blame.

  Munitorum-issue chem lamps, those tin-plate models that unscrew and then snap out for ignition, have been strung along the roof line, and there is a decent rechargeable glow-globe on the table beside Gaunt’s elbow. The lamps along the roof line are swaying and rocking in the wind that’s finding its way into the long tent. The lamps add a golden warmth to the tent’s shadowy interior, a marked contrast to the raw, wet blow driving up the valley outside. There is rain in the air, sticky clay underfoot, a whitewashed sky overhead, and a line of dirty hills in the middle distance that look like a lip of rock that someone has scraped their boots against. Somewhere beyond the hills, the corpse of a city lies in a shallow grave.

  Gaunt is studying reports that have been printed out on paper flimsies. He has weighed them down on the surface of the folding table with cartons of bolter rounds so they won’t blow away. The wind is really getting in under the tent’s skirt. He’s writing careful notes with a stylus. The infantryman can only imagine the importance of those jottings. Tactical formulations, perhaps? Attack orders?

  Gaunt is not well liked, but the infantryman finds him interesting. Watching him work at least takes the infantryman’s mind off the fact that he’s standing in the mouth of a tent with his arse out in the rain.

  No indeed, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt is not well liked. A reputation for genocide will do that to a man’s character. He is intriguing, though. For a career soldier, he seems surprisingly reflective, a man of thought not action. There is a promise of wisdom in his narrow features. The infantryman wonders if this was a mistake of ethnicity, a misreading brought about by cultural differences. Gaunt and the infantryman were born on opposites sides of the sector.

  The infantryman finds it amusing to imagine Gaunt grown very elderly. Then he might look, the infantryman thinks, like one of those wizened old savants, the kind that know everything about fething everything.

  However, the infantryman also has good reason to predict that Gaunt will never live long enough to grow old. Gaunt’s profession mitigates against it, as does the cosmos he has been born into, and the specific nature of his situation.

  If the Archenemy of Mankind does not kill Ibram Gaunt, the infantryman thinks, then Gaunt’s own men will do the job.

  A better tent.

  Gaunt writes the words at the top of his list. He knows he’ll have to look up the correct Munitorum code number, though he thinks it’s 1NXIGlxA. Sym will know and—

  Sym would have known, but Sym is dead. Gaunt exhales. He really has to train himself to stop doing that. Sym had been his adjutant and Gaunt had come to rely on him; it still seems perfectly normal to turn and expect to find Sym there, waiting, ready and resourceful. Sym had known how to procure a dress coat in the middle of the night, or a pot of collar starch, or a bottle of decent amasec, or a copy of the embarkation transcripts before they were published. He’d have known the Munitorum serial code for a tent/temperate winter. The structure Gaunt is sitting in is not a tent/temperate winter. It’s an old tropical shelter left over from another theatre. It’s waxed against rain, but there are canvas vents low down along the base hem designed to keep air circulating on balmy, humid days. This particular part of Voltemand se
ldom sees balmy humid days. The east wind, its cheeks full of rain, is pushing the vents open and invading the tent like a polar gale.

  Under A better tent he writes: A portable heater.

  He hardly cares for his own comfort, but he’d noted the officers and their junior aides around the table that morning, backs hunched, moods foul, teeth gritted against the cold, every single one of them in a hurry to get the meeting over so they could head back to their billets and their own camp stoves.

  Men who are uncomfortable and in a hurry do not make good decisions. They rush things. They are not thorough. They often make general noises of consent just to get briefings over with, and that morning they’d all done it: the Tanith officers, the Ketzok tankers, the Litus B.R.U., all of them.

  Gaunt knows it’s all payback, though. The whole situation is payback. He is being punished for making that Blueblood general look like an idiot, even though Gaunt’d had the moral high ground. He had been avenging Tanith blood, because there isn’t enough of that left for anyone to go around wasting it.

  He thinks about the letter in his pocket, and then lets the thought go again.

  When he’d been assigned to the Tanith, Gaunt had relished the prospect as it was presented on paper: a first founding from a small, agrarian world that was impeccable in its upkeep of tithes and devotions. Tanith had no real black marks in the Administratum’s eyes, and no longstanding martial traditions to get tangled up in. There had been the opportunity to build something worthwhile, three regiments of light infantry, to begin with, though Gaunt’s plans had been significantly more ambitious than that: a major infantry force, fast and mobile, well-drilled and disciplined. The Munitorum’s recruitment agents reported that the Tanith seemed to have a natural knack for tracking and covert work, and Gaunt had hoped to add that speciality to the regiment’s portfolio. From the moment he’d reviewed the Tanith dossier, Gaunt had begun to see the sense of Slaydo’s deathbed bequest to him.

  The plans and dreams have come apart, though. The Archenemy, still stinging from Balhaut, burned worlds in the name of vengeance, and one of those worlds was Tanith. Gaunt got out with his life, just barely, and with him he’d dragged a few of the mustered Tanith men, enough for one regiment. Not enough men to ever be anything more than a minor infantry support force, to die as trench fodder in some Throne-forgotten ocean of mud, but just enough men to hate his living guts for the rest of forever for not letting them die with their planet.

  Ibram Gaunt has been trained as a political officer, and he is a very good one, though the promotion Slaydo gave him was designed to spare him from the slow death of a political career. His political talents, however, can usually find a positive expression for even the worst scenarios.

  In the cold lowlands of Voltemand, an upbeat interpretation is stubbornly eluding him.

  He has stepped away from a glittering career with the Hyrkans, cut his political ties with all the men of status and influence who could assist him or advance him, and ended up in a low-value theatre on a third-tier warfront, in command of a salvaged, broken regiment of unmotivated men who hate him. There is still the letter in his pocket, of course.

  He looks down at his list, and writes:

  Spin this shit into gold, or get yourself a transfer to somewhere with a desk and a driver.

  He looks at this for a minute, and then scratches it out. He puts the stylus down.

  “Trooper,” he calls to the infantryman in the mouth of the tent. He knows the young man’s name is Caffran. He is generally good with names, and he makes an effort to learn them quickly, but he is also sparing when it comes to using them. Show a common lasman you know his name too early, and it’ll seem like you’re trying far too hard to be his new best friend, especially if you just let his home and family burn.

  It’ll seem like you’re weak.

  The infantryman snaps to attention sharply.

  “Step inside,” Gaunt calls, beckoning with two hooked fingers. “Is it still raining?”

  “Sir,” says Caffran non-committally as he approaches the table. “I want you to locate Corbec for me. I think he’s touring the west picket.”

  “Sir.”

  “You’ve got that?”

  “Find Colonel Corbec, sir.”

  Gaunt nods. He picks up his stylus and folds one of the flimsies in half, ready to write on the back of it. “Tell him to ready up three squads and meet me by the north post in thirty minutes. You need me to write that down for you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Three squads, north post, thirty minutes,” says Gaunt. He writes it down anyway, and then embosses it with his biometric signet ring to transfer his authority code. He hands the note to the trooper. “Thirty minutes,” he repeats, “lime for me to get some breakfast. Is the mess tent still cooking?”

  “Sir,” Caffran replies, this time flavouring it with a tiny, sullen shrug.

  Gaunt looks him in the eye for a moment. Caffran manages to return about a second of insolent resentment, and then looks away into space over Gaunt’s shoulder.

  “What was her name?” Gaunt asks.

  “What?”

  “I took something from every single Tanith man,” says Gaunt, pushing back his chair and standing up. “Apart from the obvious, of course. I was wondering what I’d taken from you in particular. What was her name?”

  “How do you—”

  “A man as young as you, it’s bound to be a girl. And that tattoo indicates a family betrothal.”

  “You know about Tanith marks?” Caffran can’t hide his surprise.

  “I studied up, trooper. I wanted to know what sort of men my reputation was going to depend upon.”

  There is a pause. Rain beats against the outer skin of the tent like drumming fingertips.

  “Laria,” Caffran says quietly. “Her name was Laria.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” says Gaunt.

  Caffran looks at him again. He sneers slightly. “Aren’t you going to tell me it will be all right? Aren’t you going to assure me that I’ll find another girl somewhere?”

  “If it makes you feel better,” says Gaunt. He sighs and turns back to look at Caffran. “It’s unlikely, but I’ll say it if it makes you feel better.” Gaunt puts on a fake, jaunty smile. “Somewhere, somehow, in one of the war-zones we march into, you’ll find the girl you’re supposed to be with, and you’ll live happily ever after. There. Better?”

  Caffran’s mouth tightens and he mutters something under his breath.

  “If you’re going to call me a bastard, do it out loud,” says Gaunt. “I don’t know why you’re so pissed off. You were walking out on this Laria anyway.”

  “We were betrothed!”

  “You’d signed up for the Imperial Guard, trooper. First Founding. You were never going to see Tanith again. I don’t know why you had the nerve to get hitched to the poor cow in the first place.”

  “Of course I was coming back to her—”

  “You sign up, you leave. Warp transfers, long rotations, tours along the rim. You never go back. You never go home, not once the Guard has you. Years go by, decades. You forget where you came from in the end.”

  “But the recruiting officer said—”

  “He lied to you, trooper. Do you think any bastard would sign up if the recruiters told the truth?”

  Caffran sags. “He lied?”

  “Yes. But I won’t. That’s the one thing you can count on with me. Now go and get Corbec.”

  Caffran snaps off a poor salute, turns and heads out of the tent.

  Gaunt sits down again. He begins to collect up the flimsies, and packs away the bolter shell cartons holding them down. He thinks about the letter in his pocket again.

  On his list, he writes:

  Appoint a new adjutant.

  Under that, he writes:

  Find a new adjutant.

  Finally, under that, he writes:

  Start telling a few lies?

  He pulls his storm coat on as he leaves t
he tent, partly to fend off the rain, and partly to cover his jacket. It’s his number one staff-issue field jacket, but it’s become too soiled with clay from the trek out of Voltis City to wear with any dignity. He has a grubby, old number two issue that he keeps in his kit as a spare, but it still has Hyrkan patches on the collar, the shoulders and the cuffs, and that’s embarrassing. Sym would have patched the skull-and-crossed-knives of the Tanith onto it by now. He’d have got out his sewing kit and made sure both of Gaunt’s field uniforms were code perfect, the way he kept the rest of Gaunt’s day-to-day life neat and sewn up tight.

  Steamy smoke is rising from the cowled chimneys of the cook-tents, and he can smell the greasy blocks of processed nutrition fibre being fried. His stomach rumbles. He sets off towards the kitchens. Beyond the row of mess tents lies the canvas city of the Tanith position, and to the north-east of that, the batteries of the Ketzok.

  Beyond that, the edge of the skyline flicks on and off with the unnervingly quiet lightning, far away, like a malfunctioning lamp filament that refuses to stay lit.

  Slab is pretty gruesome stuff. Pressure-treated down from any and all available nutritional sources by the Munitorum, it has no discernible flavour apart from a faint, mucusy aftertaste, and it looks like grey-white putty. In fact, years before at Schola Progenium on Ignatius Cardinal, an acquaintance of Gaunt’s had once kneaded some of it into a form that authentically resembled a brick of plastic explosive, complete with fuses, and then carried out a practical joke on the Master of the Scholam Arsenal that was notable for both the magnificent extent of the disruption it caused, and the stunning severity of the subsequent punishment. Slab, as it’s known to every common Guard lasman, comes canned and it comes freeze-dried, it comes in packets and it comes in boxes, it comes in individual heated tins and it comes in catering blocks. Company cooks slice, dice and mince it, and use it as the bulk base of any meal when local provision sources are unavailable. They flavour it with whatever they have to hand, usually foil sachets of powder with names like groxtail and vegetable (root) and sausage (assorted). Ibram Gaunt has lived on it for a great deal of his adult and sub-adult life. He is so used to the stuff, he actually misses it when it isn’t around.