bearers were beginning to bring the Tanith wounded out of the warzone. Troopers Milo and Baffels were carrying Manik, howling from the wound to his groin, blood dribbling over the edges of the stretcher.
Dorden moved in to deal with Manik. He was sure the young trooper was going to bleed out any moment.
He looked around at Baffels and Milo as he worked. “Racine? You know what happened to him?”
Dorden’s hands were already slippery with Manik’s blood. The groin artery had burst and he couldn’t tie it. It was pulling back into the body cavity and Dorden bellowed for Lesp to bring dean blades.
“Major Racine?” Milo said, standing back from Manik’s stretcher, adjusting the dressing on his shoulder wound. “He died. Under a flat-crab. He killed it, but he died.”
Soric listened to the off-world boy and shook his head sadly.
Lesp stumbled over the rubble and brought Dorden a scalpel. Dorden used it to try and open the screaming Manik’s groin wide enough so he could push his fingers in and pull the severed artery down to clamp it. It was too late. Manik bled out through his body cavity and died with Dorden’s hand still inside him.
“Let me take him,” Soric said and, with his men, he gently lifted Manik’s body onto his wheel-cart. Dorden was almost shocked by the reverence.
“Every soul for the hive, and the hive for every soul,” Soric said over his shoulder to the blood-soaked Dorden as he wheeled the dead Ghost away.
* * * * *
Ana Curth moved her orderlies through the confusion of Veyveyr Gate. There were more dead to recover than living.
She checked each corpse in turn, pulled off the tags and then left them for the recovery units.
She hesitated slightly when she found the corpses of Tanith. These were all Dorden’s friends. She took off their tags carefully and entered all the names in her dataslate.
In the gateway of Veyveyr, she paused. She checked the latest set of tags three times to be sure.
Tears welled in her eyes and she pushed the bloody tags into her apron-front.
The thirty-second day drew to a close. It was a day the citizens of Vervun-hive would remember perhaps more keenly than anything that had taken place so far. Despite the success of driving back the First Storm three days before, this seemed much more of a victory. Scant hours after the battle, the defence of Veyveyr began to take on a mythical flavour. In the Spine, the habs and the refuges alike, Vervunhivers spoke of it as a turning point, as the start of deliverance.
Public-address plates across the hive broadcast triumphant slogans, sanitised accounts of the battle and pictures from the glorious front, mainly those showing the People’s Hero raising the flag in the shattered gate-mouth, surrounded by jubilant Vervun Primary troopers. In the Basilica of the Ecclesiarchy, a victory mass was organised, featuring a choir of over ten thousand and long liturgical readings from the Codex Imperialis. Loudspeakers broadcast the worship across all the hive levels.
Spontaneous celebrations began in different areas and some revels—amongst Vervun Primary troops heady with relief—were broken up by the VPHC.
But the mood was impossible to suppress in the highest and lowest quarters of the hive. Oilcan fires were lit along the wharves and in the refuges, and drums, many homemade or improvised, thundered into the night. There were many reports of decadent banqueting in the High Spine, as merchants and house ordinary families abandoned the rationing restrictions and indulged in sumptuous private dinners of unstinting debauchery.
When Gaunt heard about them, he sighed. These were either gestures of ignorance or acts of denial against what must surely still await.
But let them have their delights, he decided. They may be their last.
In a grim mood, he’d stayed on at Veyveyr as the light failed, touring his men, noting those lost, restructuring squads around those losses. He gave Trooper Baffels a field promotion to sergeant and placed him in charge of Fols’ unit. The stocky, bearded trooper was almost overcome with emotion as Neskon, Domor, Milo and the others cheered him. He shook Gaunt’s hand and wiped away a tear that trickled down over his blue claw tattoo. There had been a brief rumour that Gaunt would award the sergeant pin to Milo, but that was absurd. He was barely a trooper and it wouldn’t look right, though Milo’s actions and improvised leadership at Veyveyr had won him a considerable respect that sat well with his reputation as the avatar of Gaunt.
Under Corbec’s command, the Tanith units who had seen action at Veyveyr pulled out to a mustering yard north of the Spoil, and fresh units under Rawne, partnered with Volpone forces commanded by Colonel Corday, moved in to hold the gate position. Stonemasons, metalworkers and engineers from the hab workforce were called up to assist the sapper units in defending the gate. Using fallen stone from the gate top, the masons erected two well-finished dyke walls just outside the gate, and the incandescent glare of oxylene torches fizzled in the night rain as the metalwrights crafted pavises and hoardings from broken tank plates. Sections of rail—and there were kilometres of it scattered throughout the railhead—were broken up and welded into cross-frames to carry barbed wire and razorwire strings. In an intensive twelve-hour period, with work continuing throughout the night under lamp-rigs, the workforce raised impressive concentric rings of well-built defences both inside and outside the broken gate. There were ramps along the eastern edge to allow forward access for the NorthCol tank files marshalled behind the troop lines. A forest of howitzers, barrels raised almost upright like slightly leaning trees, was established on the site of the main terminus, with a clear field of fire to bombard up and beyond the gate.
In the mustering yard, weary Tanith and NorthCol units from the front sprawled on rolled up jackets or on the hardpan itself, many falling asleep as soon as they got off their feet. Mess trucks with tureens of soup, baskets of bread and crates of weak beer arrived to tend them. It was estimated that they would be there until dawn, when the arterial routes would be finally clear enough for transports to carry them back to their billets.
In the gloomy rear section of a NorthCol Chimera, Corbec and Bulwar shared a bottle and dissected the day. The performance of the Vervun troops and of Modile especially was cursed frequently. The bottle was vintage sacra from Corbec’s own stock and he broke the wax-foil stamp with relish. Bulwar had set his power-claw on a metal rack and, flexing fingers stiff from the glove, produced two shot glasses from a leather box, and a tin of fat smokes, the best brand the Northern Collective hives produced.
Bulwar had never tasted the Tanith liquor before, but he didn’t flinch and Corbec wasn’t surprised. Bulwar was as grizzled and hardened a soldier as any Corbec had met in his career. They clinked glasses again.
“Anvil,” Corbec toasted, letting blue smoke curl out of his mouth to wreath his face.
Bulwar nodded. “Let’s hope we don’t need it again. But I have an ache in my leg that says there’s a measure left before us.”
“Your leg?”
Bulwar tapped his right thigh. “Metal hip. A stub round during the moon war. Hurts like buggery when it’s damp—and worse when trouble’s coming.”
“Weather’s changing. More rain on the way.”
