[Gaunt's Ghosts 10] - The Armour of Contempt Read online

  At last, he said, “How’s the lad doing?”

  “He’s doing well, “specially given the mongrel squad he’s in.”

  “That’s good.”

  “He’s fitter than I’ve seen him,” Criid added, “though his feet are hurting him right now. Last few weeks, a lot of circuit marches.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Punishment.”

  Kolea frowned. “Punishment for what?”

  “For being too good. For showing the driller up. He’s being made an example of, and he’s sucking it up.”

  “Maybe this driller needs-” Kolea began.

  She shook her head. “No, no, Gol. It’s fine. It’s the way Dalin wants it. He knows how the Guard works, and he’s toeing every line. The driller’s on him because he’s never had such a model recruit and he can’t shake the feeling that it has to be a trick.”

  Down below, there was a sudden whoop and the drums picked up their beat again.

  “You could ask him how he’s doing yourself,” she said.

  “I don’t want to get in the way.”

  “You’re his father.”

  “I’m his surviving biological parent,” Kolea replied. “He’s got a father and a mother.”

  “You’re his father,” Criid repeated. “There’s nothing normal about the lives we lead, so I don’t believe it matters how you, me and Caff fit together, so long as we do. Dalin wouldn’t mind if you showed an interest.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d go as far as to say he’d like it if you showed an interest.”

  Kolea pursed his lips and thought about that. He didn’t look at her. His eyes remained fixed on the game below them.

  “Do it before it’s too late,” Criid suggested.

  “Too late?”

  “We’re walking Glory Road,” she said. “Sooner or later, we get to the end of that, and you know what’s waiting there. Leave it till then, and it could be too late.”

  XII

  They were in the Basement, cleaning kit. Each one of them had their stuff laid out on their ground sheet. Kexie would come by, occasionally kicking a meal-can or a cup the length of the chamber if it wasn’t up to regs. Sometimes he’d pick up a tin, toss it lightly into the air as he straightened up, and use Saroo like a bat to swat it into the roof.

  Dalin could see the distant figures of several comrades down the far end of the Basement, recovering their launched kit items.

  Kexie came up to Dalin. As he arrived, Dalin stood at attention, the ground sheet at his feet.

  Find a fault with that, he willed.

  He heard Kexie grunt—the slight disappointment of finding nothing to pick on.

  “Pack it up. Carry on,” Kexie hissed, moving to inspect the next candidate.

  It was the end of the fifth week of RIP detail. At the close of the day’s cycle, they would hand in the battered practice kit they’d been caring for over the last three weeks and get issued with service materials. The following day, they would get their weapons. Then, a last three days of tight drill and prep.

  It had been getting tougher every step. Kexie had been supplemented by Commissariat officers to hone the mindset alongside the body drill. There was a feeling of order, of discipline. No one played up any more.

  Just looking around, Dalin could see how most of the detail had changed. Intense exercise had worn them all lean and tight, even Fourbox. The patched hand-me-down fatigues they were wearing were loose. There wasn’t a pick of fat on their frames. Their hands and feet were hard and calloused. Their scalp-cuts were just growing back in, hard-edged. Their minds were wound tight like wire. Off detail, they walked with a swagger and a presence.

  In just under four days they would be cycled back into their home regiments to return to duty or, like Dalin, pass out of Basic Indoctrination and become a Guardsman.

  Not everyone in RIP would make it. Statistically, Caff had told Dalin, a reasonable chunk of any RIP detail got folded in again for another shakedown. The rate was higher on the Second Front, where the abnormally high percentage of sub-standard troop quality was the Crusade’s shame.

  Some fethers just never made the grade. That was true of this bunch. There were slackers who couldn’t meet the physical grades and idiots who couldn’t perform, and there were individuals like Wash who wouldn’t rather than couldn’t. Wash had got fit enough, but his attitude still stank. Dalin was fairly confident that Wash was one of thirty or so of them who would fold back.

  Sooner or later, the repeat malingerers just got kicked out of the service, which is what most of them wanted, or got executed by the Commissariat, which is what most of them didn’t.

  Dalin cinched his kitbag and carried it over to the group that had finished packing. Amongst them were Fourbox and Lovely, and Hamir, one of the detail’s other ‘I’ candidates. He and Dalin had bonded particularly well.

  Hamir was a tall, olive-skinned youth from Fortis Binary. He’d followed his father and uncles in the Binars off-world after their founding and, like Dalin, had lived amongst the followers on the strength until he was old enough to take the aquila. Hamir had intelligent eyes and a slightly learned manner about him, so Fourbox had dubbed him “Scholam”.

  “No Saroo for you, Holy?” Lovely asked.

  “He knows when he’s beaten,” Dalin replied, looking across the chamber at Kexie, who was clubbing a candidate’s shoulder blades for the incorrect fastening of a bed roll.

  “Nearly there,” Hamir said.

  “What?” asked Dalin.

  Hamir looked up at the lights. “We’re nearly there. Can’t you feel it?”

  “Where?”

  “The end of training. The start of Guard life. Wherever this transport is going. Take your pick.”

  “I’m going to miss this,” Fourbox muttered ruefully.

  Dalin, Hamir and Lovely stared at him. He beamed. “That was a joke,” he said.

  As the detail assembled, the last stragglers running to their places pursued by Saroo, Dalin caught sight of Merrt. He hadn’t spoken to him since the night on the circuit march weeks before. Not before or since. Merrt had kept himself to himself.

  Dalin felt terrible pity for Merrt, which he was sure the older man wouldn’t appreciate. The pity came from the fact that the bulk of the RIP were all youngsters. Merrt was an old man in their midst. It seemed cruel to see him forced to repeat the mindless drills of basic ‘I’, like an adult forced to play along in children’s games. He was above it, beyond it. He’d seen real life and felt its lash. He didn’t need a refresher course.

  Dalin wasn’t sure what it was that Merrt needed. Merrt simply got on with RIP duties and never uttered a word of complaint. He hadn’t stood up to Kexie over anything again. In Fourbox’s opinion, this was because “with a mouth like that” Merrt hated to have to speak, but Dalin believed it was that Merrt didn’t have to. After that day on the range, although he had beaten many of them since, Kexie had never pulled a stunt so vindictive and unfair.

  “All right?” Dalin said, stepping up alongside Merrt.

  Merrt looked around, then nodded.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Dalin said.

  Merrt shrugged.

  “On the range—” Dalin began.

  “We’ve spoken about that,” Merrt said quickly.

  “No,” replied Dalin. “No, not then. I mean since. On the range, you’re regularly getting, what, sixty, sixty-two?”

  “Yeah,”

  “You never seem happy with that.”

  “What are you rating, son?”

  “Around seventy-one.”

  “You gn… gn… gn… happy with that?”

  “Feth, yes. Of course.”

  Merrt sighed. “Know what I used to get? On an average day, I mean?”

  “No?”

  “Ninety-seven,” Merrt said. “Ninety-seven, without any trouble. It was just in me. Range best was ninety-nine on three occasions.”

  A consistent, sustainable ninety-four got a man
a marksman’s lanyard. Dalin knew specialists the likes of Raess, Banda and Nessa Bourah, even Larks himself, were happy with a steady ninety-five.

  “Now I’m scraping sixty-one. You think I’m gn… gn… gn… happy?”

  XIII

  Tona woke with such a shock that her hands clawed at the coop-wire of the cage-wall and made it shake and rattle. There were muffled complaints from nearby billets.

  It was dark, and there was the heavy body smell of night cycle. Caff was asleep. She went out onto the cage landing. The barrack hall was dim, just deck lighting on, but the overheads were warming up. Day-cycle was close.

  She looked at her hands. They were pale in the spare blue light. She couldn’t see them shaking, but she knew they were.

  She walked down the companionway towards Gaunt’s quarters and heard the sounds of a blade striking another blade. She drew her warknife and stepped forwards cautiously.

  Eszrah appeared, magically, from the shadows, and shook his head. She put the knife away again.

  At the end of the companionway, in a small open space of deck in front of the hatch into Gaunt’s private accommodation, two men were duelling with swords, by lamplight.

  Gaunt and Hark, both in breeches and shirts, were swinging sabres. The swordplay was intense, and from the sweat on them, they’d been at it for a while.

  Leaning against some ducting, his arms folded, Rawne was watching them.

  “What is this?” Criid asked.

  Rawne glanced at her. “Just sparring. They’ve been doing it just before the start of day-cycle for weeks now.”

  “Why?”

  Rawne shrugged. “Practice. Hark said something about improving his blade skills.”

  “Has he?”

  “Well, if I wanted to take him, I’d choose a gun,” Rawne replied. Tona watched the combatants. Gaunt had always been skilled with a sword, and she reckoned these last few years she’d seen none finer. But Hark, who she’d always thought of as heavy and slow, was holding his own.

  “Why are you here?” she asked Rawne.

  “I was just watching. You never know. He might slip and kill him.”

  “Which one are you talking about?” Tona asked.

  Rawne grinned. “I don’t care.”

  Gaunt and Hark broke off and saluted one another.

  “We’ve got an audience,” Gaunt remarked. Hark nodded and took a swig of water from a flask on a nearby stand.

  “Word is, orders are about to be sent down,” Rawne said. “I just came to tell you that.”

  Gaunt nodded. “You need something, Criid?”

  “A private matter,” she said.

  “Give me a moment,” Gaunt said, sheathing his sword and fetching himself a drink.

  “Rawne tells me you wanted to improve your blade skill,” Criid said to Hark.

  “The colonel-commissar was recently good enough to remind me of the importance of diligent practice, sergeant,” Hark said. “A little reminder against complacency. He’s been good enough to offer some instruction.”

  She nodded. Gaunt waved her over and she joined him, while Hark struck up a conversation with Rawne.

  “What is it, Tona?” Gaunt asked.

  “I feel stupid saying this, but—”

  “Just say it.”

  “I dreamed you died.”

  “I died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure it was me?”

  She hesitated. “I think so. It mattered that much.”

  “And you told me this because of the dream on Gereon?”

  “Yes, sir. I dreamed of Wilder there, and that was true. I wonder if it’s something about Gereon.”

  “Thank you, Tona. I appreciate that this was an odd thing to confess. Tell you what, though… Gereon didn’t kill me the first time. I’m not going to give it a second chance.”

  She nodded, faked a smile and realised Gaunt was looking past her. Beltayn had appeared.

  “Bel?”

  “Just issued, sir,” Beltayn said, saluting and handing a wafer envelope to Gaunt. Gaunt tore it open and pulled out the tissue-thin paper inside.

  “It’s what we’ve been waiting for,” he said. “We’ll be translating in ten hours, at which time the ship will be marshalling with others at a designated staging area. All units are to make themselves combat ready and prepare for dispersal.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Rawne said.

  “With you,” Hark said, following him out.

  “Is that all?” asked Criid.

  “What?”

  “You hesitated when you were reading the orders, sir,” she said. “Was there something else?”

  “Just a list of disposition details,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  XIV

  The bridge and sub-bridge levels were about the only locations aboard the vast spaceship where a man might be afforded a look outside. Most occupants spent the long passages stacked blind, deck after deck, inside the armoured hull, like seeds in a case, but the bridge decks were furnished with cabin ports and windows.

  Since translation from warp-space, the ship had been on a steady deceleration, and armoured shutters had been peeled back from those ports like eyelids from waking eyes.

  A strange, silvery light shone in from the void outside, a light quite at odds with the hot glow of the instrumentation and decks lamps. As he waited, his cap under his arm, Gaunt crossed to the nearest cabin port and peered out.

  He always misremembered the sheer blackness of space. He would think of it as a rich, solid, substantial black, and picture it in his mind’s eye, and then when he saw it again, he was always surprised. It was a black like no other, admitting no form or variance, but of impossible depth. The light of stars and other objects, simply sat against it, hard and contained and tiny. Starlight itself ran off the background black like water down a wall.

  There was a star nearby, a cone of silver smoke, bright as a flashlight, even through the metre-thick porthole, and Gaunt could feel the faint impulse through the deck as the ship turned in towards it. This was the staging area. They were moving in through a silent shoal-pattern of other ships, all of them sharply lit at their sunwards ends and silhouetted at the others, some of them breathing furnace glows from idling drive systems.

  Many of the cathedral-like ships were massive, massive like the carrier on which he stood, some more massive still: manufactory vessels, Munitorum supply ships, bulk conveyances. Great and ancient cruisers and frigates lay off to sunward like fortified broadswords. In places, transport ships and tankers were lashed together in long drifts, like the seed-purses of sea creatures. Small craft—luggers, shuttles, cutters, lighters and tugs—flitted between and around the great warp-going vessels, sometimes bright specks in the sunlight, sometimes trace-glimmers of exhaust in the lee of some cyclopean hull shadow.

  Gaunt began to count the ships and lost the tally at seventy-three. Sunflare and the hard lines of shadows made it hard to differentiate shapes. This was a fleet, however. A fleet massed for invasion on a vast scale.

  Gaunt wondered which of the basking giants out there contained Van Voytz.

  “Sir?”

  Gaunt turned from the port and found a junior deck officer waiting for him. The officer, a subordinate of the ship’s Master Companion of Vox, offered Gaunt a sheet of message foil and waited politely while he read it. Gaunt balled the foil up in his hand.

  “Will there be a reply, sir?” asked the officer.

  “No. Just re-send my original request.”

  “With respect, sir, that has now been declined three times,” the officer ventured tentatively.

  Gaunt was well aware of the two other scrunched up foils in his coat pocket. “I know, but repeat it, please.”

  The officer hesitated. “The Master Companion has made it known that he will not have all signal bands tied up with traffic during the manoeuvring phase.”

  “One more try, please.”

  Gaunt waited twenty minutes for the man
to come back. During that time, with a series of deep thumps and heavy vibrations, the carrier came to a standstill alongside another ship whose bulk all but occluded the window ports. The dull noise of machine drills and unspooling cables began to echo up from the lower levels, along with the occasional distant rasp of a hazard siren.

  The junior officer reappeared, trotting up the wide iron screwstair from the vox hub. The gabbling of the deck crew running post-dock crosschecks filled the sub-bridge air. The officer presented a foil to Gaunt, but the commiserating look on the man’s face told Gaunt what to expect.

  “Very well,” Gaunt sighed, casting his eyes over the repeated form message: BY ORDER OF THE LORD GENERAL’S OFFICIUM, REQUEST DECLINED.

  “Your name is Gaunt, sir?” the man asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “There was a separate message for your attention.” The officer consulted a data-slate. “A party is en route to meet with you, and requests you wait for them at the aft 7 airgate.”

  It was the first time he had seen Commissar-General Balshin since the Ancreon Sextus campaign. She stood on the extended ramp for a moment until she caught sight of him, and then strode swiftly in his direction. Two men in the dark uniform of the Commissariat flanked her.

  The airgate was cold, and stank of fumes and interchange gases. Steam from the pneumatic clamps hung like fog, and billowed occasionally in the sharp gusts of directional vents.

  Gaunt bowed his head and made the sign of the aquila across his breast. “Lady commissar-general.”

  “Gaunt,” she replied with a curt nod. Her face was hard and pale, like white marble, and no warmth whatsoever flickered around her thin mouth. Her violet right eye, beady and bright, was utterly unmatched by the augmetic embedded in her left socket.

  “I had not expected my remonstrances to draw a personal visit by so august a person as you,” Gaunt said.

  “Remonstrances?” she asked.

  “Yes, concerning the activation of the reserves.”

  Balshin frowned. “I know nothing of such matters, Gaunt. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Ah,” Gaunt murmured. He had suspected as much.