Traitor General, page 34
Behind them came Eszrah ap Niht, his reynbow aimed, alongside Ana Curth who had drawn her silenced pistol. Further back, the rest of the group – Rawne, Larkin, Feygor and Cirk – covered the hallway back down to the landing.
Gaunt and Mkvenner burst through the door, weapons sweeping from side to side. The lamps were lit, but there was no one around. It was a handsome sitting room, with richly upholstered chairs, a card table and a tall looking-glass. An adjoining door led through to a bedchamber. Garments lay scattered on the floor. Parts of an Occupation force uniform. There was also an elegant brass bath tub, full of used water. Mkvenner touched the side of the tub.
‘Cooling. Used not long ago. We’ve missed him.’
‘If this was his room at all,’ said Gaunt. ‘Let’s check the rest of the floor.’
Bonin and Criid came bounding back down the stairs.
‘We have to go! Now!’ Bonin cried. Stray shots were following them down the steps, slapping off the curving wall.
‘Move out!’ Mkoll ordered.
‘Done! Done!’ Varl yelped, and gathered up his gear.
The squad scrambled down the next long hallway, a wide, panelled gallery. Mkoll was at the back, waving the others on. They were halfway down when the first bastion troopers appeared in the stair doorway behind them.
Mkoll dropped to one knee and opened fire with his lasrifle. ‘First and only!’ he yelled.
Several of the enemy troopers pitched over, struck by his searing las-bolts. The others began blasting with their rifles.
Criid and Landerson both turned and added their firepower to Mkoll’s. Hard rounds and las-shots chopped up and down the great gallery for a few furious seconds, tearing into the wood panelling and shattering lamps. Landerson felt a bullet graze his left thigh, but he kept firing.
A dull bang shook the floor. Somewhere, the first of Varl’s charges had gone off.
More bastion troopers appeared. The doorway area was littered with dead, but still they surged to get through.
Firing, hugging the gallery walls, Mkoll, Landerson and Criid backed off towards the rest of the squad, who had now made it to the far end of the gallery.
Beltayn was the first to the exit.
‘Check it!’ Bonin yelled, but the vox-officer had already gone through.
A sizzling shot from a las-lock hit Beltayn square in the back and threw him down on his face.
‘Beltayn!’ Bonin yelled. He ran forward, firing his lasrifle one-handed as he tried to drag Beltayn back into cover. Troopers and excubitors were pouring up the steps ahead.
Mkoll’s squad was trapped.
Gaunt heard the thump of Varl’s second charge come up through the floor from far below. He was about to suggest they might be on the wrong floor, when three figures came round the corner not ten metres away. Two big soldiers, dressed in menacing ochre fatigues, with another man between them.
It was Noches Sturm.
For one nanosecond Sturm’s eyes met Gaunt’s. One fleeting heartbeat of shocking mutual recognition.
Then the soldiers in yellow were shooting.
Gaunt felt a bullet go through his left shoulder. He crashed against the door of a nearby room. Mkvenner had thrown himself at Gaunt, bringing them both down in the partial cover of the doorway to avoid the withering fire from the strange enemy troopers.
Behind Gaunt and Mkvenner, the others scrambled for cover. By the time Rawne had got himself into some kind of firing position, the two warriors in ochre had expertly backed off around the hall-turn, covering Sturm every step of the way.
‘Him! It was him!’ Gaunt yelled.
‘Gaunt? Gaunt? How could… how could he be here?’ Sturm was saying. Humiliti didn’t know if he should be recording this, but he did anyway. Guns smoking, the Sons of Sek hustled the general roughly towards the nearest apartment, kicked the door open, and pushed him inside.
‘How is this possible?’ Sturm demanded. ‘How is this happening?’
The Sons didn’t reply. Rawne, Mkvenner and Feygor had already appeared around the corridor turn and were firing down the passageway. The Sons slid into hallway doors, using the heavy sills as cover, and replied with quick, calculating bursts that forced the Ghosts back into cover.
‘How?’ Sturm was yelling. ‘How?’
Gaunt reached the corner, ignoring Curth’s attempt to dress the wound in his shoulder. Shots were zinging past the end of the wall.
‘There’s only two of them!’ Rawne was yelling.
‘There only needs to be,’ replied Mkvenner. ‘They’ve got the whole passageway covered. And they’re fething good.’
Gaunt knew that already. Sturm’s bodyguard had reacted with the speed and tenacity of elite force troopers.
‘Two or two hundred, we’re taking them now,’ Gaunt said.
But suddenly there was gunfire coming from behind him too.
The Bastion Guard detail that Desolane had sent to intercept Sturm had just arrived at the other end of the sixteenth floor. Drawn by the sound of weapons fire, they were rushing down the corridor to engage.
Larkin, Cirk, Eszrah and even Curth had opened fire.
The din of battle echoing from the outer courtyards was immense. It trembled the cold night air and echoed off the surrounding mountains. A large stretch of the curtain wall around the main gate was ablaze, generating an infernal radiance that lit the vast plume of white smoke rising off the gate itself. Inside, between the curtain wall and the inner bulwark, a flickering mass of flashes, bursts and tracer fire stitched the night.
Desolane reached the bulwark. Reserves of bastion troops, along with visiting companies, were drawn up behind the inner wall, checking their weapons.
Desolane approached the senior officers. ‘Report?’
‘Somehow, they’ve breached the gates and got into the outer yards,’ said one sirdar.
‘We’ve sealed the bulwark,’ another reported, ‘but they’re hitting it hard.’
‘Numbers? And who are they?’ asked Desolane.
‘Several hundred. Uncomfirmed reports say it is the resistance,’ a senior excubitor stated.
‘Of course it is!’ snapped Desolane.
‘This is an unforgivable outrage,’ High Sirdar Brendel announced. ‘I will of course present his highness the Plenipotentiary with my abject apologies for this miserable failure of security.’
There was a rapid, whistling noise, and a crunch. The officers all flinched. One of Desolane’s ketra blades had cleaved the high sirdar’s head and helmet in two. His corpse fell backwards.
‘I’ll save him the bother of accepting them,’ Desolane whispered. The life-ward turned to the other seniors. ‘That idiot was mistaken. The security of the bastion, the Plenipotentiary and the pheguth is mine to uphold. Mine alone. You will follow my orders and contain this disgraceful exhibition at once. Where is the etogaur?’
‘I’m here, life-ward,’ Mabbon stepped into view.
‘I need a commander I can trust to crush this uprising immediately. Are the Sons of Sek ready?’
‘Eager, life-ward.’
‘Command of the field is yours. Sirdars and seniors? You answer to the etogaur.’
There was a hasty chorus of affirmatives. ‘Prepare to deploy!’ Mabbon yelled out. ‘In the name of the Anarch, whose word drowns out all others! Now!’
‘Life-ward?’
Desolane turned. A junior officer was approaching, panting hard.
‘What?’
‘Reports of explosions, life-ward,’ the junior gasped. ‘From within the bastion.’
Desolane pushed the junior aside and began to run across the inner yard towards the keep.
‘Get the feth down!’ Brostin bellowed and squeezed the trigger-spoon of his captured flamer. The weapon gurgled, coughed and then sent a dazzling spear of liquid flame out through the doorway into the stairwell. Voices began to scream.
Mkoll, Criid and Landerson had now rejoined them, still duelling hard with the Archenemy troopers coming in through the gallery’s far end.
‘I’ll clear us a way,’ Brostin said, firing through the doorway again.
‘Make it fast!’ Mkoll snapped. Shots were raining down around them, ripping into the walls and carpet. Mkoll saw Beltayn lying on his face, Bonin crouching over him.
‘Oh, feth! No!’ the scout-sergeant cried.
‘It’s all right,’ said Bonin. ‘He’s alive.’
Beltayn rolled over, gagging. The potent las-lock shot had hit him squarely in the vox-caster strapped to his back. The sheer force had winded him badly, but he was completely intact.
The same could not be said for his vox-set. Bonin pulled it off him. It was a blackened ruin, smoke wisping out of the shattered cover.
‘I need that…’ Beltayn gasped.
‘Not any more, Bel,’ Bonin said. ‘It’s junked. Come on, on your feet.’
With Criid, Varl and Landerson forming a rearguard, blazing away down the now devastated gallery, Brostin led them through the doorway. The stone stairwell radiated heat from the torching and soot caked every surface. Smouldering bodies, most of them so reduced by fire they were charcoal lumps, littered the stairs. Brostin sent another searing blast down the stairwell for good measure.
‘Let’s shift!’ he cried.
From somewhere overhead, they felt the thump from another of Varl’s charges.
There was smoke in the air. It drifted lazily along the empty hallways of the bastion. From far below echoed the sounds of the battle outside, and the pandemonium amongst the ordinals cowering in the main halls.
But this smoke, up here… It was coming from inside the fortress, from higher up. Desolane paused as a tremble ran through the stone floor. Something had just exploded, a few levels above.
The life-ward swept out its ketra blades.
‘Rawne!’ Gaunt yelled. ‘Take the squad and drive those bastards back! Ven and I will go in after Sturm!’
There was no time to argue. The hammer of gunfire from the battle with the bastion detail made it almost impossible to hear anyway. Rawne nodded and rolled to his feet. Cirk, Feygor, Curth and Larkin had taken up firing positions along the sixteenth floor’s main hallway, and were trying to keep the troopers at bay. The partisan was backing them up, thumping quarrels at the ceremonially-attired enemy soldiers. One of the iron darts hit a man in the face, and he toppled over, his huge helmet-plume of white feathers swishing like a game-bird brought down in flight.
Rawne edged forward. Somehow, Cirk had ended up in charge of the defence, and Rawne had to admit she was doing a good job. She’d arranged the Ghosts into a decent cover formation using doorways and pillars as shields, and they were, for now, holding the enemy back.
Only Curth – inexperienced in combat – was ignoring Cirk’s instructions. Curth’s anger had broken loose again. She was blasting away wildly with her pistol. It pained Rawne to see the strong, wilful medicae so broken and mad.
‘Cirk!’ he yelled. ‘I want to try and drive them back through the stair head doorway! We can hold that much more securely!’
‘Agreed!’ she shouted.
Rawne dropped down, and pointed to Cirk, Feygor and Larkin in turn, indicating each position of cover he wanted them to move up to when he gave the order. He and Cirk would move first.
‘Larks!’ he called. ‘Smack a hotshot down through the centre of them and get them ducking!’
Larkin nodded, and loaded a fresh cell into his long-las. The powerful hotshot clips each delivered one super-heated shot before they were spent. He was down to his last three. After that, he’d be using his pistol.
‘Set!’ he yelled.
‘Go!’ Rawne cried.
The long-las cracked and the gleaming bolt stung down the passageway. Rawne and Cirk were already moving.
But as he came out of cover, Rawne hesitated. The smoke swirling in the air in front of him had formed the precise shape of the stigma mark, and behind it, the figures of the regal enemy troopers somehow matched it perfectly. The creeping madness was on him again, the paranoia. They were going to fail and die and–
A shot tore through his left thigh and he went down on one knee with a grunt. Confused for a moment by Rawne’s hesitation, Larkin wavered too, and was smacked over onto his back by a shot that broke his collarbone.
Larkin writhed on the floor, wailing, blood soaking out of him into the hall carpet.
‘Larks!’ Feygor bawled, and ran through the hailing fire, head-down. He grabbed Larkin by the straps of his webbing and began to drag him back towards the cover of a doorway, oblivious to his own safety. A shot ripped through his left triceps, another cut the flesh above his right knee, a third glanced off his forehead so savagely it almost scalped him. Blood pouring into his eyes, Feygor screamed out and continued to drag the helpless sniper backwards. At every jolt, Larkin shrieked as his broken bones twisted and ground together.
Rawne crawled into cover, cursing his own frailty. Their effort had been completely unsuccessful.
Worse than that, Cirk had dashed forward ahead, assuming they were all behind her. Now she was pinned down, alone and entirely helpless.
Thirty metres behind them, Gaunt and Mkvenner edged back to the corner. The shooting had stopped. Gaunt risked a glance, in time to see the two warriors in ochre rushing Sturm away around the next hallway turn. A curious little hominid in long robes was waddling after them.
‘Come on!’ Gaunt yelled. With Mkvenner at his side, he began to run after the man he had crossed light-years and risked everything to eliminate.
On the next landing, Desolane paused again. The smoke was thicker now. Somewhere in the bastion there was a considerable fire. The life-ward felt yet another vibration. Another explosion. How many was that now? Six? Seven?
Who was doing this? Surely this was beyond the scope of the local resistance. All they ever seemed to manage to do was blow up roads or set fire to granaries.
Desolane thought of Lord Uexkull. He and his band of warriors were now long overdue, along with Ordinal Sthenelus. In his last report, Uexkull had spoken of ‘Imperial killers’, specialist soldiers who had fought off everything the Occupation had thrown at them. Were they here now? Were they the ones who had so entirely shamed the life-ward and the bastion’s regiments?
There could be only one reason an elite squad of the False Emperor’s soldiers was here on occupied Gereon. Desolane knew it. That reason was the pheguth. Desolane’s beloved pheguth. The life-ward had sworn before Isidor himself to protect the life of the Anarch’s precious eresht. Other life-wards had refused the duty, spurning it. A traitor, they believed, an enemy, hardly deserved the sort of protection usually reserved for the most high-ranking ordinals. But Desolane had not. Desolane had seen it as a true challenge of its abilities. Life-wards were bred from birth to be the ultimate protectors. Nothing was more important than the safety of the charges they pledged themselves to.
And Desolane was the very best. It had been a mark of pride to accept this task from the Anarch, whose word drowns out all others, and to carry it out faultlessly.
There was another side to it too. Over the months they had spent in close company, often just the two of them alone for days at a time, Desolane had come to care for the pheguth. A bond had grown between them. The pheguth had seemed to Desolane a kindly, sorrowful man, broken down by the harsh hand fortune had dealt him, always respectful of the life-ward, always appreciative of every special attention Desolane paid to make his incarceration more bearable. When the attempt had been made on his life, the pheguth hadn’t blamed Desolane. He’d actually refused to dish out the ritual punishment. It had been then that Desolane had realised the pheguth cared for the life-ward too.
Of course, it had been difficult when the mindlock collapsed, and the pheguth had become Sturm again. Sturm was a pompous, arrogant soul, and he had shown far less respect for the life-ward. But even then, Desolane had been able to see the man it had sworn to protect. The humble pheguth, in his slippers and gown, shackled to a steel bed, smiling as he sipped a cup of weak black tea as if it was the most precious thing in the galaxy.
Desolane would protect its pheguth now. Against anything. The life-ward took a little golden scanner-wand out from under its smoke-cloak. The pheguth didn’t know, but early on a tracker had been embedded in his right buttock, so that Desolane would always know his location.
Desolane checked the wand’s reading, and then leapt up the staircase, four steps at a time.
The resistance was at the bulwark. Thresher reported that one of the gates was about to break. Gunfire licked in all directions, most of it coming off the top of the bulwark itself. Around Noth, cell fighters were dying, cut to pieces by the lethal defences.
But they were still advancing. If there had been any time to consider it, Noth would have marvelled at their success so far. There was still a chance. If the bulwark could be breached, they would be into the inner yards of the bastion. In amongst the damned ordinals and the other dignitaries, killing the bastards in the name of a free Gereon.
‘Move in!’ Noth yelled above the gunfire, his own weapon chattering in his hands as he ran forward. ‘Take the gate! Tube launchers! Come on, we’ve got them! Gereon resists! Gereon resists!’
Noth staggered as the backwash of an explosion struck him from the left-hand side. Grit flew into the air and pattered onto the yard. Through the smoke, Noth saw movement. One of the other bulwark gates had opened from the inside, and troops were charging out to counter-attack them.
They were daemons, dressed in ochre. Noth had never seen anything like them before.
A cell fighter to his left folded as gunfire ripped through her belly. Another man went down howling, his leg shot off below the knee. Still more collapsed under the streaming fire.
