“You know these quarters well, Kolea. I guess they were your home,” Gaunt remarked softly to the miner.
“Correct. Just half a kilometre from here, I could take you to the crater where my hab once stood.”
“You lost family?”
“A wife, two children. I don’t know they’re dead, but—gak! What are the chances?” Gaunt shrugged.
“How many did you lose coming here?” Kolea asked. “Troops?”
Kolea shook his head. “Family.”
“I didn’t have any to lose. I don’t know which of us is luckier.” Kolea smiled, but without any light or laughter in his face. “Neither one, commissar. And that’s the tragedy.”
“I don’t know about the girls,” Larkin muttered as they moved through the scorched-out, rain-pelted ruins. Bragg, his missile launcher and autocannon slung over his shoulders, raised his eyebrows and made no reply. There were eight females in Kolea’s scratch company, none older than twenty-five. Each held a captured Zoican lasgun or a Vervun Primary autorifle and carried an equipment pack over their ragged work fatigues. Most of them, like the men, wore salvaged military boots wadded with socks and wrapped tight with puttees made of cargo tape to keep them fast. The women moved as silently and as surely as their male comrades. A month of intense guerrilla war in the outhabs had trained them well. Those that had not learned had not made it.
“Women can fight,” Rilke murmured, holding his sniper rifle with the stock high in his armpit and the long barrel pointing downwards. “My sister, Loril, used to hold her own against the rowdies when it got to chucking-out time in my father’s tavern back home. Feth, but she could throw a punch!”
“That’s not what I meant,” growled Larkin, rain dripping off his thin nose. “It doesn’t seem right, sending women in like this, all gussied up in combat gear and waving lasguns. I mean, they’re just girls. This is gonna get nasty. No place for women.”
“Keep it down!” Dremmond hissed, lugging his flamer with its weighty, refilled tanks. “They’ll hear you, Larks!”
“You heard what that big, bastard miner said. They’re all shell-deaf! I can speak my mind without insulting no one! They can’t hear me!”
“But we can read lips, Tanith,” Banda said, moving past the chief sniper with a smirk. Some of the other scratches nearby laughed.
“I—I didn’t mean nothing by it,” Larkin began, moving his mouth over-emphatically to make sure she could hear. Banda looked back at him, a mocking expression on her dirty face.
“And anyway, I’m not deaf. Neither’s Muril. And neither are the Zoicans. So why don’t you clamp it and do us all a favour?”
They moved on, the eighty-strong assault group splashing down a damp, debris-strewn side road.
“That told you,” Dremmond whispered to Larkin.
“Shut up,” Larkin replied.
MkVenner scouted ahead as part of Mkoll’s recon deployment. In his immediate field of vision was Scout Bonin and the scratch company guides: a girl called Nessa and a Vervun Primary sergeant named Haller, who was second in command of Kolea’s makeshift group. Haller was one of nine Vervun Primary survivors to have found their way into the scratch company, though with his dirty, patched uniform and the woollen cap he wore in place of his spiked helmet, he didn’t look much like a Primary infantryman any more. He seemed content to be commanded by a miner rather than a military officer. MkVenner knew the members of the scratch company had weathered the very worst of the war, and he couldn’t begin to understand their loyalties or the circumstances that had brought them together.
Nessa guided them through a series of torched manufactories, covering the ground quickly, keeping low and making curt, direct gestures they could read easily. They crossed an arterial highway where the rockcrete was crumpled by a series of shell-holes, and they skirted the wrecks of two Zoican battletanks and an infantry carrier that had been flipped over onto its back.
Across the highway, they fanned through textile mills where the constant rain trickled in through the holed roofs and rows of iron-framed looms stood silent and shattered. The loose ends from hundreds of bales of twine rippled in the breeze. MkVenner stopped in a doorway and scanned around. He watched with idle fascination as droplets of rainwater crept down taut feed-threads over one loom, glinting like diamonds and thickening before dripping off the hanging brass bobbin onto the weaving frames beneath.
MkVenner realised he’d lost sight of the woman. Haller appeared behind him.
“You have to watch her,” Haller mouthed, signing at the same time. He knew full well MkVenner could hear, but the practise was now instinctive.
Bonin joined them and they edged down the length of the mill, until they found Nessa in an open loading dock at the far end, crouched behind an overturned bale-lifter. Outside, in the bright, thin light of the cargo yard, a quintet of Zoican flamer tanks grumbled by, heading north. The foot soldiers could smell the coarse stench of the promethium lapping in the tanks’ heavy bowsers.
Once the tanks had passed, Nessa made a punching motion in the air and the troops hurried on, across the open yard and into the razorwire-edged enclosure of a guild’s freight haulage plant. The rusting bulks of overhead cranes and hoists creaked in the wind above them. Rainwater had formed wide, shallow lakes across the rockcrete apron. They moved past rows of plasteel cargo crates and produce hoppers flaking paint. Near the haulage site office, a small Imperial chapel built for the workers had been desecrated by the advancing Zoicans. They’d shot out the windows and soiled the walls with excrement. A dozen site workers had been crucified along the front porch on gibbets made from rail sleepers. The bodies were little more than ghastly, stringy carcasses now. They’d been nailed up three weeks before, and the steady rain and the carrion birds had done their best to erode the flesh.
Haller’s boot clipped an empty bottle and the noise of it tinkling away across the ground startled the birds, who rose in cawing, raucous mobs, revealing the gristly horrors beneath. Some of the birds were fat, glossy-black scavengers, the others dirty-white seabirds from the estuary with clacking pincer-bills. Black and white, the birds made a brief checker pattern in the air before flocking west to the haulage barn roof and settling. The open ground was peppered and sticky with their droppings.
There was a break in the fence behind the chapel. MkVenner held position long enough to check, via microbead, that the main force was within range behind them. Gaunt and the column were just entering the haulage site.
The land south of the freight-holding was a mass of chalky rubble and sprouting weeds. There were dark driver holes in the ground at intervals and the area was littered with thousands of gleaming, brass shell cases. In an earlier stage of the war, massive Zoican field pieces had been braced here, trained at the Wall. MkVenner was about to move on, but Nessa stopped him.
He made the gesture for question, and she signed and mouthed back at him.
“In our experience, the Zoicans trap-wire their sites when they move on.”
MkVenner nodded. He signalled back and Gaunt sent Domor forward. Haller helped Domor lock his sweeper set together, and then the Ghost began to creep away from them, playing the head of the broom back and forth over the dirt. Domor liked to do this work by sound and MkVenner smiled to see him dosing the shutters of his bionic ocular implants by hand. The time when Domor could simply
