THE WARMASTER Read online

  ‘We’re screwed, captain,’ Urnos whined.

  She slapped his face hard.

  ‘Get on your feet, Verghast!’ she said.

  Gripping her carbine, she started to edge forwards. Urnos got up and followed her. She could hear the hoarse gulps of his rapid breathing.

  ‘This is madness…’

  ‘Just shut up, Urnos. Operate like a soldier.’

  A few metres beyond, two bodies lay against the wall. Archenemy boarders. They were dirty and roughly armoured, patchwork soldiers that reminded Zhukova of the scratch companies that had hunted the Zoican Rubble. She had no idea who had cut them down. It could have been her or Urnos. She fumbled with their webbing, and found some hard-round clips, but nothing that would suit her carbine or Urnos’ rifle.

  She heard movement from ahead. She pushed Urnos against the wall, then clamped her hand around his mouth and nose to dampen the noise of his frantic breathing.

  Trapped smoke made the tunnel air thick and glassy. She saw two of the enemy picking their way towards them out of the haze. Two more followed. They were shrouded in heavy, filthy coats and their body-plate was dull and worn. Their faces were covered by blast visors or mesh hoods. Red light glowed from the visor slits, suggesting enhanced optics or even dark-sight systems.

  But she’d spotted them before they’d spotted her. Verghast eyes were strong, and beat corrupt tech enhancements. Because Vervun was strong, built to endure and survive, its youth born strong into freedom, healthy and vital, in the image of the God-Emperor…

  Zhukova swallowed. It was all so much bull. She’d been listening to Major Pasha’s patriotic speeches too long, listening to the crap spouted by the commissars as they conditioned the fighting schools.

  The enemy hadn’t seen her because she and Urnos were cowering behind a wall strut. Another few seconds, and their optics would pick up their body heat through the ambient fuzz of the smoke. Optic enhancers didn’t necessarily mean heat-readers too, but Zhukova’s experience told her that the universe took every opportunity it could to be as cruel as possible.

  They had to move, or they’d be dead in seconds.

  She slowly withdrew her hand from Urnos’ mouth. She held up four fingers, then tapped herself and indicated left with two fingers. Then she tapped his chest and forked two fingers right.

  Urnos nodded. He was scared out of his wits.

  She made a fist he could see, and bounced it, one… two…

  Three.

  They came out of hiding together, firing. It was a simple, effective play, one the company had done in drill many times. She’d take the two on the left, he’d take the two on the right. Surprise was in their corner.

  Their disadvantage was that Urnos, damn his garlic-reeking hide, didn’t know his left from his right.

  The two boarders on the left went straight down. Zhukova had tagged one with a headshot, and the other had been slammed over by las-bolts from both their weapons. Urnos was in her way, jostling her, trying to occupy the half of the tunnel he thought she’d told him to be in. Her next shot went wide, and he put two precious bolts into the floor.

  She never got to ask him if he was just plain stupid, or if the fear and tension had scrambled his wits.

  The two raiders on the right returned fire immediately, before their comrades had even hit the deck. Muzzle flashes leapt and flickered in the closed space. Hard-rounds spat at them. Urnos took a round in the forehead and another in the cheek, the impacts twisting his face into a gross cartoon of itself. He rotated away from her, blood jetting from his ruptured skull, hit the far wall and slid down, his legs kicking.

  Zhukova turned, unflinching, and dropped the raiders with single shots, pinpoint. She ran into the smoke, ducked into the shadows, and shot at the next wave of raiders as they pushed forwards, hitting them in the ribs and the sides of their heads.

  She risked a look. More raiders were advancing on her. She snapped off a shot or two, and a hail of gunfire came in reply.

  There was no one with her, no one behind her, not even close.

  She could stay down and wait to die, or move and strike. It would cost her her life, but it was a chance to put a stop to the enemy advance. Scratch company tactics. She remembered Pasha’s lectures. Do the unexpected. Take the risk. Deal a wound to the enemy when you get the chance, even if you pay for it. Because it’s not you, it’s the fight entire. You do your part when you can. You don’t step back so you can enjoy reviewing the battle when it’s done, because the result you review will probably be a loss.

  Zhukova swung out, firing. She had switched to full auto. Las-rounds kicked out of her carbine and ripped through the first rank of raiders. The next rank began to topple and collapse. Some got off shots, but they went past her, wild.

  ‘Gak you all to hell and back!’ she screamed.

  Zhukova kept firing. Damn wastage. Damn aiming. Damn even seeing. Urnos’ blood was in her eyes and all over her face.

  The boarders came apart like bags of meat. They fell towards her. Shaking, Zhukova looked down at her weapon. The alert sigil lit up, telling her the cell was out. How long had it been out? Had she emptied it making the kills?

  The boarders had fallen towards her…

  She blinked, and wiped blood off her mouth with a shaking hand.

  Mkoll appeared through the smoke behind the bodies of the enemy. He raised his hand, and beckoned to her with a double twitch of his fingers.

  On the company deck, the women of the retinue had gathered the children and the elderly into the storage rooms and set up barriers at the main hatches using cot frames. Ayatani Zwiel hurried around, helping the injured, and making reassuring speeches to dispel fear. It was going to take more than a few kind words.

  Yoncy wouldn’t stop crying.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Juniper soothed her. ‘We’ll be safe.’

  It wasn’t all right. Juniper could smell smoke in the air, and every few minutes there was a thump or bang from aft, some of them fierce enough to shake the deck. Most of the children were crying or at least whimpering, but Yoncy’s sobbing seemed particularly piercing.

  It didn’t sound like fear. It sounded like pain.

  ‘Juniper?’

  Juniper looked around and saw Elodie.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Juniper asked.

  ‘I was in the infirmary when it happened,’ Elodie said.

  ‘But what happened?’ Juniper asked.

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ said Elodie. She could see that Juniper was scared. ‘I thought I could help down here. Help with the kids.’

  She took Yoncy out of Juniper’s arms.

  ‘Honne’s taken a knock to the head,’ she said, gesturing towards a woman sprawled in the walkway nearby. ‘Get her on a cot and see if you can fix a dressing.’

  Juniper nodded and hurried to Honne’s side.

  ‘It’s all right, Yoncy,’ Elodie said. Yoncy was crying loudly, and it was setting off the younger children all around them.

  ‘Yoncy, calm yourself,’ said Elodie. ‘You’re a big girl now. Stop your sobbing.’

  ‘The bad shadow,’ Yoncy wailed.

  ‘What? What, honey?’

  ‘I want Tona. I want my brother. I want Papa Gol!’

  ‘They’re busy, Yoncy,’ Elodie said, stroking the girl’s hair.

  ‘Busy with the bad shadow because it came back,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the bad shadow?’ asked Elodie. She didn’t really want to know. Sometimes, the imaginations of children conjured horrors far worse than anything real. In the cot rows some nights, she’d talked small children down from nightmares that had chilled her heart.

  ‘I want my papa,’ said Yoncy, wiping her eyes clumsily on her over-long sleeve. ‘He knows what to do. He knows how things are meant to be.’

  ‘Major Kolea is a brave soldier,’ nodded Elodie. ‘He’ll be here soon, I’m sure of it, and he will chase the bad shadows away, Yoncy.’

  The child looke
d at her as if she were stupid.

  ‘Shadow,’ she said, overemphasising the correction. ‘Papa Gol can’t chase the shadow away. He’s not bright enough.’

  ‘Oh, now! Gol’s a clever man,’ said Elodie.

  ‘Not bright bright, silly,’ frowned Yoncy. ‘Bright bright. When Papa comes, everything…’

  She hesitated.

  Elodie smiled.

  ‘Gol will be here soon,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ asked Yoncy.

  ‘I… No, not really.’

  ‘No one does,’ said Yoncy. ‘No one can see in the dark.’

  Yoncy tilted her head and looked up at the broad, ducted ceiling of the company deck.

  ‘It’s almost here,’ she said. ‘The bad shadow will fall across us.’

  EIGHT: BAD SHADOW

  The screaming was Vaynom Blenner’s first clue that he wasn’t dealing with just another hangover.

  He got off his cot and stumbled into the hallway. The deck seemed to be at a slight angle. That wasn’t right; shiftship decks didn’t slope. They had systems, gravitic whatchamacallits, to make sure the horizontal true was maintained. Maybe his head was sloping.

  That wasn’t ideal either, but it was a local problem.

  ‘What’s the feth-name commotion?’ he growled, grabbing Ree Perday as she hurried past.

  ‘The ship’s foundered, sir!’ she replied. She was scared.

  ‘Foundered? What does foundered mean?’ he asked.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Swear to the Throne, Perday, I’m not in the mood–’

  ‘I don’t know what it means!’ Perday snapped, her anxiety getting the better of her discipline in the face of a senior officer. ‘It’s a word. Someone said, just now. Someone said we’d foundered.’

  Blenner looked around.

  ‘The hell is that screaming?’

  ‘Cargo shifted,’ she said. ‘People are hurt. And upset.’

  He pushed past her and entered the practice chamber. The instruments of the Colours band, most of them packed in crates or cases, had broken free of their packing ties and stow-nets and created a pile like a rockslide across the floor. Corpsmen were treating bruises, cuts and the occasional twisted ankle of bandsmen caught in the spill.

  ‘Throne of Terra!’ Blenner snorted. ‘I thought someone was actually hurt!’

  ‘Get this mess stowed again!’ he shouted.

  ‘We were getting it stowed, commissar,’ said the old bandmaster, Yerolemew. ‘For secondary orders, as per instruction. You remember that?’

  ‘I don’t like your tone, old man,’ Blenner snapped. Yerolemew took a step back, and lowered his gaze. Blenner swallowed. It had slipped his mind. He was foggy, but he remembered the warning. The ship was running poorly. It could fall out of warp. Then they’d be sitting ducks, so the regiment had to come to secondary.

  At which point, apparently, he had decided to take a nap.

  ‘I was just in my cabin, checking inventory,’ he mumbled. ‘How do we stand with secondary?’

  Yerolemew gestured towards Jakub Wilder, who was dealing with a bandsman named Kores. Kores was almost hysterical. In fact, most of the screaming seemed to be coming from him.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Blenner asked.

  Kores started to wail something.

  ‘Not you,’ Blenner snarled, ‘you.’

  ‘The shock tore the cargo loose,’ said Wilder sullenly. ‘Heggerlin has broken an arm, and Kores here, his hautserfone got smashed.’

  ‘His instrument?’

  ‘It’s an heirloom,’ said Wilder. ‘It probably can’t be repaired. The valves are busted.’

  Blenner sighed. His contentment that he had been placed in charge of a bunch of fething idiot bandsmen, who were unlikely ever to see action and thus reward him with an easy, carnage-free life, came with a downside, to wit they were a bunch of fething idiots.

  He was considering how much to shout at them when the fog cleared slightly. The slope of the deck, the toppling of the packed cases, Perday’s use of the word ‘foundered’.

  ‘Oh, feth,’ he murmured. The Armaduke had fallen out of warp. They were in trouble.

  ‘Get Gaunt,’ he said.

  ‘Comms are down,’ replied Wilder.

  ‘Have you sent anyone to get Gaunt?’ Blenner asked.

  Wilder half shrugged.

  ‘You’re a bunch of fething idiots,’ said Blenner.

  ‘Commissar!’

  Blenner turned. Gol Kolea had entered the chamber, flanked by troopers from C Company. They were all armed. They all looked like actual proper soldiers. Rerval, Kolea’s adjutant and vox-man, had a dressing on his head that was soaked in blood, and he was still walking around performing duties. Fething idiot bandsmen.

  ‘Everyone all right here, sir?’ Kolea asked.

  ‘Not really, major,’ said Blenner, ‘and in ways you couldn’t possibly want to imagine.’

  Kolea frowned.

  ‘This… with respect, commissar, this doesn’t look much like secondary order to me.’

  ‘Or me,’ Blenner nodded. ‘I think I’ll shoot the lot of them for being idiots.’

  ‘I’d rather you got the Colours Company on their feet and held Transit Six,’ said Kolea. ‘What’s the munition situation?’

  Probably plentiful, thought Blenner, seeing as my mob hardly ever shoot at anything.

  ‘I’ll check,’ he said.

  He paused.

  ‘Hold Transit Six?’ he asked.

  ‘The ship’s been boarded,’ said Kolea. ‘We have hostiles advancing from the aft section, from the engine house.’

  Blenner’s guts turned to ice water.

  ‘Boarded?’

  ‘That’s as much as I know.’

  ‘Who’s coordinating? Gaunt?’

  ‘We’ve got no central coordination because the comms are out and vox is patchy. I’m trying to coordinate with Kolosim and Baskevyl. They’re advancing into Lower Transitionary Eight. Elam and Arcuda have Nine covered. According to Elam, there’s fighting in the engine house, and hostiles reported.’

  ‘What kind of hostiles?’ asked Blenner.

  ‘The hostile kind,’ said Kolea. ‘That’s all I know.’

  Blenner nodded.

  ‘Brace yourself, major,’ he said. Kolea looked nonplussed, but nodded.

  Blenner turned to the bandsmen. He was a genial man, but he possessed a powerful voice, especially in times of crisis, such as the bar being noisy when he wanted a round, or when a waiter was ignoring him.

  ‘You’re a disgrace to the fething Emperor, may He bless us all, Throne knows why!’ he bellowed. ‘We are under attack, Colours! Forget farting around with your fething musical instruments and get yourselves formed up! Wilder!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Munition count! Get everyone stocked and loaded! Anyone shows short, get people to tip out their musettes and even things up!’

  ‘You’re shouting and I’m right in front of you,’ said Wilder.

  ‘Damn right I’m shouting! I want Colours in secondary order in two minutes, or I will take a fething hautserfone and start clubbing people to death with it! Find that Fury of Belladon and find it fast!’

  The bandsmen started to scramble. Blenner turned back to Kolea.

  ‘We’ll be secure in five, major,’ he said. ‘I’ll have them advance and hold Transit Six.’

  Kolea nodded.

  ‘Move out!’ Kolea told his company. ‘May the Emperor protect you,’ he said, looking back at Blenner.

  Blenner went back to his cabin. At least, he thought, at least with Kolea, Kolosim, Elam and Baskevyl in the field, there would be a buffer between him and the hostiles.

  He found the bottle of pills in his campaign chest. He took two, then a third just to be sure. He knocked them down with a swig of amasec.

  He could do this. He was a fething fighting man of the Throne. Of course he could.

  And if he couldn’t, there were plenty o
f places to hide.

  Dalin Criid was in charge, and he didn’t like it much. There was no sign of Captain Meryn – the last word was that Meryn had gone to the infirmary – so although there were several men senior to him in the company, Dalin, as adjutant, had command.

  E Company’s barrack deck was in uproar. He had to yell repeatedly to get some kind of order. The last command received had been to go to secondary order, so that’s what Dalin intended to do until he heard otherwise.

  ‘Secure the barrack deck!’ he shouted. ‘I want watches and repulse details at every hatch! Let’s scout the halls nearby too! I want to know what shape everyone else is in!’

  E Company started to move with some purpose. Support and ancillary personnel looked scared. There were a lot of minor injuries, but Dalin could see that fear was the biggest problem.

  ‘What do you want us to do, sir?’ asked Jessi Banda. Dalin didn’t rise to the sarcastic emphasis she put on ‘sir’.

  ‘Help anybody that needs help,’ said Dalin. ‘Try to calm fears. Leyr? Neskon? Take a party to the far hatches and sing out if anyone approaches from aft.’

  The men nodded.

  Dalin wanted to head to the retinue holds and find Yoncy. He desperately needed to know if his kid sister was all right. But he knew he couldn’t show any kind of favouritism. The situation needed to be controlled, and essential personnel needed to be–

  He turned.

  ‘Get things settled here,’ he told Banda and Wheln.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Banda.

  ‘I’ll be right back.’

  The private and reserved cabins were at the for’ard end of the company deck. He pushed his way through the jostle of bodies and headed that way. Gaunt’s son, Felyx, was billeted in one of those cabins. Dalin knew Gaunt would want the boy secured. The colonelcommissar hated the fact that his offspring was here at all. He’d made a special point of asking Dalin to watch Felyx.

  And Dalin wanted to check too. He liked Felyx. He felt they had become friends. He was a little afraid that the bond he had formed was part of a selfish urge to impress and please Gaunt. He liked to dismiss that idea, and tell himself that he had found a friend, and that Felyx needed a comrade he could count on, but the nagging doubt wouldn’t go away.