In the juddering load-bay of the truck three vehicles back, Third Platoon were all wagering on cards. Trooper Feygor, a dangerous, lean man with hooded eyes, had bartered a full tarot pack from some Administratum fellow on the troopship and he was running a game of Hearts and Titans.
Trooper Brostin, big, heavyset and saturnine, had lost so much already he was ready to wager his flamer, with the fuel tanks, as his next lay-down.
Feygor, a thick cigar clenched between his sharp teeth, laughed at Brostin’s discomfiture and shuffled the pack again.
As he flicked the big pasteboard cards out into hands around the grilled deck, the men of the platoon produced coins, crumpled notes, rings and tobacco rations to add to the pot.
Trooper Caffran watched him deal. Short, young and determined, just a year older than Milo, Caffran had gained the respect of them all during the beach assault at Oskray about a year before. Caffran disliked cards, but in Rawne’s platoon it paid to mix in.
Major Rawne sat at the end of the truck-bay, his back to the rear wall of the cab. The Tanith second officer, he was infamous for his anger, guile and pessimism. Corbec had likened him to a snake more than once, both physically and in character.
“Will you play, major?” Feygor asked, his hands hesitating on the deal. Rawne shook his head. He’d lost plenty to his adjutant in the last forty days of transit in the troopship.
Now he could smell war and idle gaming had lost its interest.
Feygor shrugged and finished the deal. Caffran picked up his hand and sighed. Brostin picked up his hand and sighed more deeply. He wondered if wool socks would count as a wager.
The outriders raced around the speeding trucks, gunning for the destination. Sergeant Mkoll, head of the scout platoon, crossed his bike in between two of the troop vehicles and rode down the edge-gully so he could take a look at the hive emerging out of the smoke before them. It was big, bigger than any city he’d ever seen, bigger than the bastion towns of Tanith certainly.
He roared ahead, passing the staff cars of the local commissariat, until he was leading the column down the broken highway towards the docks.
A volley of shells fell into the outhabs to the east. Dorden, the grizzled, elderly chief medic of the Tanith Regiment, heaved himself up to see. Conflagrations, bright and bitter- lemon in colour, sizzled out from the distant detonations. The truck sashayed into a pothole and Dorden was dropped on his arse.
“Why bother?” Bragg asked.
“Say again?” asked the doctor.
Bragg shifted his position in the flat-bed uncomfortably. He was huge, bigger than any other two Ghosts put together. “We’ll get there sooner or later; die there sooner or later. Why bother craning for a view of our doom?”
Dorden looked across at the giant. “Is the cup half-full or half-empty, Bragg?” he asked.
“What cup?”
“It’s hypothetical. Half-full or half-empty?”
“Yeah, but what cup are we talking about?”
“An imaginary cup.”
“What’s in it?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Does to me, doc,” Bragg shrugged.
“How much sacra?” Bragg asked.
Dorden opened his mouth once, twice, then sat back again. “Doesn’t matter.”
Bragg pulled out a canvas bottle-flask. “There’s sacra in this,” he announced.
“Thanks, not just yet…” Dorden said, raising his hands as if in surrender.
Bragg, sat opposite him in the shuddering truck, nodded and took a long swig.
Shells wailed down, half a kilometre from the road, close enough to be uncomfortable. Dorden reached out for the flask. “Ah well, if it’s there…”
Sergeant Varl, gripping the iron hand-loops of the truck’s flatbed with his whirring mechanical limb, tried to rouse the spirits of his platoon by encouraging a song. A few of them joined unenthusiastically with a verse or two of “Over the Sky and Far Away” but it soon faltered. When Varl tried another, he was told to shut up, to his face.
Sergeant Varl handled people better than most of the officers in the regiment and he knew when to reprimand and when to back off. He’d been a dog-soldier himself for long enough.
But the mood in his platoon was bad. And Varl knew why. No one wanted this. No one wanted to get in the middle of a hive-war.
The Magnificat was waiting at the northern docks as the column rolled in out of the firelit night. All the Hass ferries were working full-stretch to keep the river open and convoy after convoy of military supplies and ammunition were arriving each hour from the Northern Collectives. Troops from Vervun Primary—in blue greatcoats, grey webbing and the distinctive spiked helmets—along with VPHC men, servitors and a good few red-robed clerks and overseers from the Administratum were now controlling the river freight, much to the fury of the regular longshoremen of the Dockmaster Guild. Ecclesiarchy priests had also arrived on the third or fourth day, establishing a permanent prayer-vigil to protect the crossing and make the waterway and the viaduct safe. The hooded clergy were grouped around a brazier at a pier end, chanting and intoning. They were there each time Folik drew the
Folik nursed the ancient turbines into station-keeping as Mincer dropped the ramp.
The first two trucks growled and bounced aboard. Mincer directed them to their deck spaces with a pair of dagger-lamps.
A tall, long-coated figure dropped from the cab of the first truck. He approached longshoreman Folik.
Folik was almost hypnotised by the commissar badge on the peaked cap. An awed smile creased his oil-spattered face and he took off his wool cap out of respect.
“Sir, it’s an honour to have you aboard!”
“The pleasure’s mine. What’s your name?”
