black-uniformed soldier was walking up through the ruins, her pack dangling from his hand.
“Hello?” he was calling. “Hello? You need this. You really do. Hello?”
He stood for a long while, maybe ten minutes, looking around. Tona remained in hiding. Finally, the soldier put the pack down.
“It’s here if you want it,” he said. A long pause.
Then he walked back down the ruin slope and clambered back into the bam.
Tona waited a full fifteen minutes more before she moved. She ran from cover, scooped up the pack and leapt away into the confused maze of the ruins.
The soldier didn’t reappear or follow.
In a foxhole, she hunched and opened the pack, studying the contents. Everything she had taken was there, everything—as well as three flasks of sterilised water, a field- dressing kit, a pack of one-shot antibiotic jabs, some net-wrapped dry sausage… and a laspistol, the very laspistol she was sure he had fired after her in the barn. The charge pack was almost full.
She was dazed for a while, then she laughed. Gleeful, she took up the sack of trophies and ran back to her shelter, taking a wide route so she wouldn’t be followed.
It was only later, after she and Dalin had eaten their first good meal in a month and Yoncy was sleeping and content on milk-broth, that she found the cap-pin at the bottom of the pack: silver, clean, an Imperial eagle with the double head and the inscription
In the gloomy dugout, her belly full, her wards fed and content, Tona Criid sat back by the light of a fire kindled from Guard-issue chemical blocks and wondered where she would pin the crest. As gang-badges went, it was better than most.
Behind Veyveyr Gate, the dead dominated the streets and squares.
Teams of Vervun Primary, work militia and Munitorum labourers, their faces masked by breathers or strips of torn cloth, carried the dead from the battle away from the smouldering railhead and laid them out in the open places north of Veyveyr for identification and disposal.
Agun Soric had brought his workforce in from the Commercia Refuge after the fighting had died down, and he had put them to work assisting the morbid but necessary duty.
He wanted to fight. Gak, but that brave Vervun Primary officer—what was his name? Racine! The one who’d given them the chance to pull their weight preparing the defence. He’d given Soric the taste of it. But for want of proper weapons, Soric and his people would have been at the front that morning. Let Ferrozoica tremble to face the wrath of smeltery workers from Vervun One with the blood up!
From what he’d been able to learn from those milling about him—some off-world Guard, some NorthCol—Soric knew the ferocious battle had ended with Zoica pushed out against all odds. He hoped to see Racine soon and slap the man’s back and hear how the pioneer efforts his workers had put in had helped to win the day by building defences the enemy couldn’t overrun.
There was time enough. With smeltery workers Gannif, Fafenge and Modj, Soric began loading corpses onto a handcart. It was filthy bestial work. They tried to wrap each body in a skein of linen and they’d been told to take tags and mark the identity of each on a data-slate. But some bodies didn’t come up in one piece. Some were only parts. Some parts didn’t match up obviously with others.
Some were still alive.
The place was a charnel house. Bodycarts moved all around them, medical and clearance personnel milled around and the wounded shuffled in slow, weary lines away from the gate railhead, many exhibiting awful injuries. Every now and then, they made way for a truck or a trundling medical Chimera, speeding away to the medical halls.
Soric, his hip braced on his axe-rake crutch, leaned down and slid his paper-gloved hands under the armpits of a blackened, legless corpse.
As he raised the cadaver, it groaned.
“Medic! Medic!” he cried out, pulling back from the ruined thing he had been touching.
A thickset medical officer pushed through the milling crowd, a man in his fifties with a silver beard and the look of an off-worlder about him. Under his hall-issue crimson apron he wore black fatigues and Guard-issue boots.
“Alive?” the medic asked Soric.
“Gak me, I suppose so. Tried to move him.”
The medic took out a flexible tube, put one end to his ear and the other to the blackened torso.
“Dead. You must have squeezed air out of the lungs when you lifted him.”
Soric nodded as the medic stood up, folding his scope-tube away into his shoulder-slung pack.
“You’re off-world, right?” asked Soric.
“What?” asked the medic, distracted.
“Off-worlder?”
The medic nodded curtly. “Tanith First. Chief medic.”
Soric stuck out a hand, then pulled the paper glove off it. “Thank you,” he said.
The medic paused, surprised, then took the hand and shook it.
“Dorden, Gaunt’s First-and-Only.”
“Soric. I used to run that place.” Soric gestured over his shoulder at the ruin of Vervun Smeltery One east of the railhead.
“This is a bad time for all of us,” Dorden said, studying the bullish, noble man who leaned on his crutch, black with ash.
Soric nodded.
“That eye wound… has it been treated?” asked Dorden, stepping forward.
Soric held up his hand. “Old news, friend, weeks old. There are others more needy of your skills.”
As if on cue, VPHC troops wheeled past a cart carrying a screaming, blood-soaked NorthCol soldier.
Mtane and one of Curth’s people hurried to it.
Dorden looked round at Soric. “You thanked me. Why?”
Soric shrugged. “I’ve been through this from the start. We were left to die. You didn’t have to come here but you did and I thank you for it.”
Dorden shook his head. “Warmaster Macaroth sends us where he wills. I’m glad to be able to help, however.”
“Without you off-worlders, Vervunhive would be dead. That’s why I thank you.”
“I appreciate it. Mine is often a thankless task.”
“Have you seen Major Racine? Vervun Primary? He’s a good man…”
Dorden shook his head and turned to where stretcher-
