Still, he understood it. But he didn’t like it. Such ancient high technology was a fearful thing, like psyker witchcraft.
He set it down on the pew next to him. It gurgled and hummed, system patterns reconfiguring like sunlight on moving water across its smooth casing.
“We don’t need it.”
Merity Chass stiffened and stared up at the stained-glass rosette of the sacristy.
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
She turned to face him. Her face was pale, and her eyes were angry and dark. Multi-coloured light from the window behind her created a halo around her slim form. “My father agonised about using it. When I reached the shelters and found he had hidden it in my belongings, I agonised too. Even as I came here to find you, I realised we had left it too late. You have already unseated cursed Salvador. Our dire situation is no longer a matter of control.”
“We have control,” Gaunt agreed. “The problem is now simply one of physical warfare. Though Vervunhive stands at the brink of doom, it is not the doom Heironymo feared or planned for with this.”
She sat down next to him, smouldering with rage. “If only I had brought it sooner—or urged my father to do the same. We could have used it to overthrow Salvador—”
“Praise the Throne we did not!”
She glanced around at him sharply.
Gaunt shrugged. “We’d have crippled ourselves, crippled the hive systems, left ourselves with nothing to use to regain control. A system-slayer is an absolute weapon, lady.”
“So, my soul-searching, my father’s painstaking deliberations… were all pointless anyway?” She laughed a thin, scratchy laugh. “How fitting! House Chass, so gakking intellectual and refined, agonising over nothings while the hive bleeds and burns!”
He pulled off his gloves and tossed them aside. “Heironymo’s legacy was never to be taken lightly. That we can’t use it now does not reflect badly on the care and devotion with which House Chass held that trust.”
She reached out her hand and clasped his callused fingers. “What happens now, Gaunt?
Slowly, he looked round at her. “We fight a simple war, men and machines, lasguns and shells. We fight and try to drive them out. If we win, we live. If we lose, we die.”
“It sounds so bleak.”
“It’s all I know, the crude equation of battle. It’s not so bad. It’s simple at least. There’s no deliberation involved.”
“How long?”
“How long what?”
Her eyes, more alive than anything Gaunt had ever seen, gazed into his. “How long before we know?”
Ibram Gaunt exhaled deeply, shaking his head. “Just hours now. Perhaps a day, perhaps two. Then it will be over, one way or another.”
She pulled him to her, her arms stretched tightly around his broad back. He could smell her hair and her perfume, faint and almost worn away but still tangible despite the odours of cold and damp and dirt she had been exposed to in the shelters.
Gaunt had long forgotten the simple consolation of another’s body warmth. He held her gently, swimming with fatigue, as the low voices of the Ecclesiarch choir ebbed through the sacristy. Her mouth found his.
He pulled back. “I don’t think—” he began.
“A common soldier messing with a high-born lady?” She smiled. “Even if that mattered once, it doesn’t now. This war has made us all equals.”
They kissed again, neither resisting. For a while, their passion was all that mattered to either of them. Two human souls, intimate and wordless, shutting the apocalypse out.
Midnight was long past. Bray’s Tanith units, after a day and night of tank-busting in the slag-reaches of the chem plant district, fell back through the battered central hab zone towards the Shield Pylon. All the Zoican southern efforts seemed to be directed at the pylon and Bray knew that its strategic importance was unmatched by anything in the hive. Bray had about two hundred and eighty Tanith left, augmented by four hundred more Vervun Primary, Volpone, Roane and NorthCol stragglers, plus around six hundred hivers. The hivers were mostly non-coms, who looked to the troops for protection, and Bray and his colleague officers found themselves managing more of a refugee exodus than a troop retreat.
But some of the hivers had consolidated into scratch units, adding about one hundred and seventy fighting bodies to Bray’s forces.
More than half of the scratch companies were made up of women, and Bray was amazed. He’d never seen women fight. Back on Tanith war was a masculine profession. But he couldn’t deny their determination. And he understood it. This was their fething home, after all.
Bray’s immediate command chain was formed by Vervun Primary and NorthCol, but though some of them outranked him, they looked to him for leadership. Bray suspected this was because Gaunt was now field commander. Everyone deferred to the Tanith now the endgame had begun.
Shells from Zoican armour whooped over his head and Bray sprinted into a trench-stretch between a blown-out meat-curing plant and a guild estate mansion. In the trench, Sergeant Zweck of the NorthCol and Major Bunce of the Vervun Primary were directing the men around the curing plant to engage the enemy’s forward push.
Las-fire zagged down at them. Most of the Imperial shooters fired from shallow foxholes at the ranks of Zoican assault troops advancing, bayonets fixed, across the rubble. Mortar shells rebounded off the rockcrete slag and exploded as airbursts, causing significantly more damage.
Behind the toppling lines of Zoican infantry, tanks rumbled in, many carrying troops clinging to the hull netting like apes.
Bray fired his weapon over the trench lip. Beside him, Zweck was decapitated by air-burst splinters. Blood saturated the side of Bray’s dark fatigues.
He reached for another clip.
“What are their names?” Caffran yelled over the pounding thunder of the tanks. He had Yoncy under one arm and was leading Dalin by the hand. Tona hurried after him.
Scratch companies to their west were holding the Zoican front back, and they were struggling to keep up with a straggle of civilian refugees fleeing into the northern sectors. Caffran yelled again.
Tona Criid was busy and didn’t answer Caffran.
She was firing her laspistol at the Zoican assault troops crossing into the street behind her. But she was in trouble. There was no one to cover her.
“Hold tight to your sister and get down!” Caffran cried at Dalin, pressing the swaddled baby into the boy’s arms. “I’m going back for your mother!”
“She’s not my mother. She’s Auntie Tona,” said Dalin.
Caffran glanced back confused and then ran on as lasbursts flickered around him.
He fired his lasgun wildly and dropped into the shell-hole
