THE IMPERIAL WAY OF DEATH
—The battle-pledge of the Volpone Bluebloods
“Enough!” Gaunt snarled. The gunfire which had been shaking the martial court died away fitfully. The air reeked of laser discharge, cartridge powder and blood. VPHC corpses littered the floor and the shattered wooden seating ranks. One or two Bluebloods lay amongst them.
The half-dozen or so surviving VPHC officers, some wounded, had been forced into a corner, and Gilbear and his men, high on adrenaline, were about to execute them.
“Hold fire!” Gaunt snapped, moving in front of Gilbear, who glowered with anger-bright eyes and refused to put up his smoking hellgun. “Hold fire, I said! We came down to break up an illegal tribunal. Let’s not make another wrong by taking the law into our own hands!”
“You can dispense it! You’re a commissar!” Gilbear growled and his men agreed loudly.
“When there’s time—not here. You men, find shackles. Cuff these bastards and lock them in the cells.”
“Do as he says, Gilbear,” Sturm said, approaching and holstering his pistol. The Blueblood troopers began to herd the prisoners roughly out of the room.
Gaunt looked around the chamber. Pater sat against the far wall, with Bwelt fanning his pallid face with a scribe-slate. Daur was releasing the Narmenian defendants.
The room was a ruin. Sturm’s elite troops had slaughtered more than two thirds of the VPHCers present in a brutal action that had lasted two minutes and had cost them three Bluebloods. Tarrian was dead, his rib-cage blasted open like a burned-out ship’s hull.
Gaunt crossed to Kowle. The commissar was sat on one of the lower seating tiers, head bowed, clutching a hell-burn across his right bicep.
“It’s the end for you, Kowle. You knew damn well what an abuse of the law this was. I’ll personally oversee the avulsion of your career. A public disgrace… for the People’s Hero.”
Kowle slowly looked up into Gaunt’s dark eyes. He said nothing, as there was nothing left to say.
Gaunt turned away from the disturbing beige eyes. He remembered Bal-haut in the early weeks of that campaign. Serving as part of Slaydo’s command cadre, he had first encountered Kowle and his wretchedly vicious ways. Gaunt had thought he embodied the very worst aspects of the Commissariat. After one particularly unnecessary punishment detail, when Kowle had had a man flogged to death for wearing the wrong cap-badge, Gaunt had used his influence with the warmaster to have Kowle transferred to duties on the south-west continent, away from the main front. That had been the start of Kowle’s career decline, Gaunt realised now, a decline that had led him to the Vervunhive posting. Gaunt couldn’t let it go. He turned back.
“You had a chance here, Pius. A chance to make good. You’ve the strength a commissar needs, you just have… no control. Too busy enjoying the power and prestige of being the chief Imperial commissar to the armies of Verghast.”
“Don’t,” whispered Kowle. “Don’t lecture me. Don’t use my name like you’re my friend. You’re frightened of me because I have a strength you lack. It was the same on Balhaut, when you were Slaydo’s lap-dog. You thought I would eclipse you, so you used your position to have me sidelined.”
Gaunt opened his mouth in astonishment. Words failed him for a moment. “Is that what you think? That I reported you to advance my own career?”
“It’s what I know.” Kowle got to his feet slowly, wiping flecks of blood from his cheek. “Actually, I’m almost glad its over for me. I can go to my damnation relishing the knowledge that you’ve lost here. Vervunhive won’t survive now, not with the likes of you and Sturm in charge. You haven’t got the balls.”
“Like you, you mean?” Gaunt laughed.
“I would have led this hive to victory. It’s a matter of courage, of iron will, of making decisions that may be unpalatable but which serve the greater triumph.”
“I’m just glad that history will never get a chance to prove you wrong, Kowle. Surrender your weapon and rank pins.”
Kowle stood unmoving for a while, then tossed his pistol and insignia onto the floor. Gaunt looked down at them for a moment and then walked away.
“Appraise me of the situation upstairs,” Gaunt said to Sturm. “When you arrived, you said the hive was under assault.”
“A storm on all fronts. It looked grim, Gaunt.” Sturm refused to make eye contact with the Tanith commissar. “Marshal Croe was ordering a full deployment to repulse.”
“Sir?”
Gaunt and Sturm looked round. Captain Daur stood nearby, his face alarmingly pale. He held out a data-slate. “I used the stockade’s codifier link to access House Command. I thought you’d want an update and…”
His voice trailed off.
Gaunt took the slate and read it, thumbing the cursor rune to scroll the illuminated data. He could barely believe what he was seeing. The information was already a half-hour old. The Shield was down. Massive assaults and shelling had punished the hive. Zoican forces were already inside the Curtain Wall.
Gaunt looked across at Grizmund and his fellow Narmenians, flexing their freed limbs and sharing a flask of water. He’d come down here on a matter of individual justice and when his back was turned, hell had overtaken Vervunhive.
He almost doubted there’d be anything left to return to now at the surface.
Under the co-ordinated command of Major Rawne and Colonel Corday, the Tanith and Volpone units holding Veyveyr Gate staunchly resisted the massive Zoican push for six hours, hammered by extraordinary levels of shelling. There was no ebb in the heedless advance of Zoican foot troops and the waste ground immediately outside the gate was littered for hundreds of metres around with the enemy dead. Along the ore-work emplacements at the top of the Spoil, Mkoll’s marksmen and Ormon’s Spoilers held the slag slopes with relentless expertise.
Mkoll voxed Rawne when his ammunition supplies began to dwindle. Both had sent requests to House Command for immediate resupply, but the link was dead, and neither liked the look of the great firestorms seething out of the hive heartland behind them.
Larkin, holding a chimney stack with MkVenner and Domor, had personally taken thirty-nine kills. It was his all-time best in any theatre, but he had neither time nor compunction enough to celebrate. The more he killed, the more the memory of the Zoican’s bared face burned in his racing mind.
At the brunt-end of the Veyveyr position, Bragg ran out of rockets for his launcher and discarded it. It was overheating anyway. His autogun jammed after a few shots, so he moved down the trench, keeping his hefty frame lower than the parapet as las-fire hammered in, and he took over a tripod-mounted stubber whose crew had been shot.
As he began to squeeze the brass trigger-pull of the thumping heavy weapon, he saw Feygor spin back and drop nearby. A las-round had hit him in the neck.
