‘But an infection? That sounds nasty. It can get in your blood. You can die of it.’
‘You’re right,’ Gaunt says. ‘The only way to be properly sure is to amputate the extremity before infection can spread.’
He puts his hand on the pommel of his chainsword.
‘Is that what you want me to do, Larkin?’
‘I’ll be happy to live out me born days without that ever happening, colonel-commissar,’ Larkin chuckles.
‘Get your boot back on.’
Gaunt wanders over to Corbec. The colonel has produced a short, black cigar and clamped it in his mouth, though he hasn’t lit it. He takes another out of his pocket and offers it to Gaunt, perhaps hoping that if Gaunt accepts it, it’ll give him the latitude to break field statutes and light up. Gaunt refuses the offer.
‘Is Larkin taunting me?’ Gaunt asks him quietly.
Corbec shakes his head.
‘He’s nervous,’ Corbec replies. ‘Larks gets spooked very easily, so this is him dealing with that. Trust me. I’ve known him since we were in the Tanith Magna Militia together.’
Gaunt throws a half shrug, looking around.
‘He’s spooked? I’m spooked,’ he says.
Corbec smiles so broadly he takes the cigar out of his mouth.
‘Good to know,’ he says.
‘Maybe we should head back,’ Gaunt says. ‘Push back in tomorrow with some proper armour support.’
‘Best plan you’ve had so far,’ says Corbec, ‘if I may say so.’
The Tanith scout, the tall, thin man with the menacing air, appears suddenly at the top of a ridge of rubble and signals before dropping out of sight.
‘What the hell?’ Gaunt begins to say. He glances around to have the signal explained by Corbec or one of the men.
He is alone on the concourse. The Tanith have vanished.
What the feth is he doing, Caffran wonders? He’s just standing there. He’s just standing there out in the open, when Mkvenner clearly signalled...
He hears a sound like a bundle of sticks being broken, slowly, steadily.
Not sticks, las-shots; the sound echoes around the concourse area. He sees a couple of bolts in the air like luminous birds or lost fragments of lightning.
With a sigh, Caffran launches himself from under the cover of his camo-cloak, and tackles Colonel-Commissar Gaunt to the ground. Further shots fly over them.
‘What are you playing at?’ Caffran snaps. They struggle to find some cover.
‘Where did everyone go?’ Gaunt demands, ducking lower as a zipping las-round scorches the edge of his cap.
‘Into cover, you feth-wipe!’ Caffran replies. ‘Get your cloak over you! Come on!’
The ingrained, starch-stiff commissar inside Gaunt wants to reprimand the infantryman for his language and his disrespect, but tone of address is hardly the point in the heat of a contact. Perhaps afterwards. Perhaps a few words afterwards.
Gaunt fumbles out his camo-cloak, still folded up and rolled over the top of his belt pouch. He realises the Tanith haven’t vanished at all. At the scout’s signal, they have all simply dropped and concealed themselves with their cloaks. They are still all around him. They have simply become part of the landscape.
He, on the other hand, nonplussed for a second, had remained standing; the lone figure of an Imperial Guard commissar against a bleak, empty background.
The behaviour of a novice. A fool. A... what was it? Feth-wipe? Indeed.
Corbec looks over at him, his face framed between the gunsight of his rifle and the fringe of his cape.
‘How many?’ Gaunt hisses.
‘Ven said seven, maybe eight,’ Corbec calls back.
Gaunt pulls out his bolt pistol and racks it.
‘Return fire,’ he orders.
Corbec relays the order, and the advance company begins to shoot. Volleys of las-shots whip across the concourse.
The gunfire coming their way stops.
‘Cease fire!’ Gaunt commands.
He gets up, and scurries forwards over the rubble, keeping low. Corbec calls after him in protest, but nobody shoots at Gaunt. You didn’t have to be a graduate of a fancy military academy, Corbec reflects, to appreciate that was a good sign. He sighs, gets up, and goes after Gaunt. They move forwards together, heads down.
‘Look here,’ says Corbec.
Two bodies lie on the rubble. They are wearing the armoured uniform of the local PDF, caked with black mud. Their cheeks are sunken, as if neither of them have eaten a decent plate of anything in a month.
‘Damn,’ says Gaunt, ‘was that a mistaken exchange? Have we hit some friendlies? These are planetary defence force.’
‘I think you’re right,’ says Corbec.
‘I am right. Look at the insignia.’
‘Poor fething bastards,’ says Corbec. ‘Maybe they’ve been holed up here for so long, they thought we were–’
‘No,’ says Mkoll.
Gaunt hasn’t seen the scout standing there. Even Corbec seems to start slightly, though Gaunt wonders if this is for comic effect. Corbec is unfailingly cheerful.
The chief scout has manifested even more mysteriously than the Tanith had vanished a few minutes ago.
‘There was a group of them,’ he says, ‘a patrol. Mkvenner and I had contact. We challenged them, making the same assumption you just did, that they were PDF. There was no mistake.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Gaunt.
‘I thought maybe they were scared,’ says Mkoll, ‘scared of everything. Survivors in the rubble, afraid that anything they bumped into might be the Archenemy. But this wasn’t scared.’
‘How do you know?’ asks Gaunt.
‘He knows,’ says Corbec.
‘I’d like him to explain,’ says Gaunt.
‘You know the difference between scared and crazy, sir?’ Mkoll asks him.
‘I think so,’ says Gaunt.
‘These men were crazy. There were speaking in strange tongues. They were ranting. They were using language I’ve never heard before, a language I never much want to hear again.’
‘So you think there are Archenemy strengths here in Kosdorf, and they’re using PDF arms and uniforms?’
Mkoll nods. ‘I heard the tribal forces often use captured Guard kit.’
‘That’s true enough,’ says Gaunt.
‘Where did the others go?’ asks Corbec, looking down at the corpses glumly.
‘They ran when your first couple of volleys brought these two over,’ says Mkoll.
‘Let’s circle up and head back,’ says Corbec.
There’s a sudden noise, a voice, gunfire. One of the other scouts has reappeared. He is hurrying back across the fish-scale slabs of the square towards them, firing off bursts from the hip. A rain of las-fire answers him. It cracks paving stones, pings pebbles, and spits up plumes of muck.
‘Find cover!’ the scout yells as he comes towards them. ‘Find cover!’
They have jammed a stick into the ruins of Kosdorf, and wiggled it around until the nest underneath the city has been thoroughly disturbed.
Hostiles in PDF kit, caked in dirt, looking feral and thin, are assaulting the concourse area through the ruins of an old Ecclesiarchy temple and, to the west of that, the bones of a pauper’s hospital.
They look like ghosts.
They come surging forwards, out of the dripping shadows, through the mist, into the strobing twilight. In their captured kit, they look to Gaunt like war-shocked survivors trying to defend what’s left of their world.
‘Fall back!’ Corbec yells.
‘I don’t want to fight them,’ Gaunt says to him as they run for better cover. ‘Not if they’re our own!’
‘Mkoll was pretty sure they weren’t!’
‘He could have been wrong. These could be our people, come through hell. I don’t want to fight them unless I have to.’