close his eyelids was long passed, way back on Menazoid Epsilon.
Domor had a path cleared in under five minutes, playing out a fibre-cord to mark its zigzag path. By the time he had finished, the assault force had caught up with them and were waiting with MkVenner, Haller, Nessa and Bonin at the fence.
“He found nothing?” asked Haller, pointing over at Domor on the far side of the area.
“No, he found plenty, but we’re not here to mine-lift. Follow the cord,” replied MkVenner.
Single file, the eighty soldiers crossed the ex-artillery emplacement and moved down along a reinforced walkway that crossed one of the hive’s main drainage gullies. Swollen by the heavy rains, the gully was in full flood. It was partially dammed in places by slews of debris rubbish and bundles of corpses.
Up the other side, they climbed the chute slope by a metal stairway and hurried in small packs across another highway. The ruined remains of bodies littering the road stretched as far as the eye could see. Most tried not to look. Larkin stared in horrified fascination as he crossed the road. Nothing more than bundles of rags, the bodies were those of workers and habbers slaughtered as they had tried to flee inwards towards Vervunhive. They had fallen weeks before, and no one had touched or moved them, except tire mashing tracks of Zoican war machines heading north towards their target.
Gaunt called a halt-period in the broken habitats on the far side of the highway. His motley brigade set up defence watches all around as he climbed to the third storey of a hab block with Kolea and Gilbear.
“I smell smoke,” Gilbear said suddenly. He moved ahead, down the dirty, dank hallway, his weapon raised, and kicked open the rotting door of a worker flat.
Gaunt and Kolea, weapons ready, moved in behind him. All three stopped short.
The flat was thick with trash and overrun with vermin. The smoke issued from a small fire set in a tar bucket over which swung a metal pot on a wire frame that had once been a clothes hanger. The five inhabitants of the room, a mother with three children and a much older woman, cowered in the far corner. They were emaciated and filthy, just terrified skin and bone clad in dirty tatters. The old woman whined like a caged animal and two of the children cried silently The mother, her eyes bright and fierce in her soot-black face, held out a shank of metal, sharpened to a point.
“Back off! Now!” Gaunt told Kolea and Gilbear, though Kolea needed no urging.
“It’s all right… I’m sorry” Gaunt told the mother, his hands raised, open. The shank remained pointing at him.
“Leave them,” Kolea said. He pulled a wad of ration cakes from his pack and went over, dropping them on the floor in front of the group when the mother refused to take them.
They went back out into the hallway and Kolea pulled the door back into place.
“Throne of Earth…” Gaunt hissed, shaking his head.
“Quite,” joined Gilbear. “What a waste of rations.”
Gaunt looked round at him, began to speak, and then just shook his head. Explaining the real nature of his horror to Gilbear might take a lifetime.
And that time, however it could be measured, was all Gaunt had left to do something far more important than drum compassion into an aristocratic warrior like the Blueblood colonel.
Kolea had heard Gilbear’s remark and he glowered at the man with utter disdain. Kolea doubted even the colonel-commissar understood what it was like to claw and scrape for survival in the shelled ruins of your home, day after day. Gol Kolea had seen enough of that misery since the Zoicans came, enough to last a hundred lifetimes. There were thousands of hab families out here still, slowly dying from starvation, disease and cold.
The trio of officers climbed out onto a fire escape at the eastern end of the hab block, and Gaunt and Gilbear pulled out their scopes.
Five kilometres south, across the ruins, through the smoke and rain, rose the bulk of the Spike. It was moving at a slow crawl, up towards the main hive. Gaunt swung his scope around and looked back at the vast, glinting dome of the Shield and the massive Spine and hab structures within.
Gaunt offered his scope to Kolea, but the man wasn’t interested. Gilbear gestured, suddenly and sharply, to them both and pointed down at the highway below, the one they had just crossed. A host of Zoican troopers, escorted by a vanguard of carriers and light tanks, was advancing towards them. Chaos banners flopped lankly in the rain and the light shone off the wet, ochre-coloured armour.
Gilbear raised his hellgun, about to turn, but Gaunt stopped him. “We’re not here to fight them. Our fight is elsewhere.”
The commissar keyed his microbead. “Mass enemy formation approaching along the highway outside. Stay low and stay silent.”
Rawne voxed back an acknowledgement.
It took half an hour for the Zoican column to go by. Gaunt estimated there were a little over two thousand foot troops and sixty armoured vehicles—reserves, advancing to bolster the assault. He wished to the Emperor himself he had reserves of such numbers to call upon. Feth, he wished he had such strengths in his active units!
Once the column was safely past and clear, the Operation Heironymo assault cadre left the habitats and moved on through rain-swilled ruins, towards the Spike.
The closer they got, the bigger it grew, dwarfing all the building structures around. Larkin bit back deep unease—it was big, so fething big! How in the name of feth were eighty souls going to take on a thing that size?
They were cowering in rubble. Larkin raised his head and saw Banda grinning back at him.
“Scared yet, Tanith?” she hissed.
Larkin shook his head and looked away.
Mkoll, MkVenner and Gaunt moved forward with Kolea, Rawne and Haller in a line behind them. Now they could hear the throbbing grind of the Spike’s enormous track sections, the deep growl of its engines. Gaunt noticed dust and ash trickling down the rubble around him in sharp, rhythmic blurts. He realised the vast machine, still a kilometre distant, was vibrating the earth itself with its weight and motivation.
The rain grew suddenly heavier. An incessant patter filled the air around them, accompanied by a regular, tinking chime. It came from a broken bottle wedged in a spill of bricks, sounding every time a raindrop hit its broken neck.
Gaunt wiped water droplets from the end of his scope and studied the Spike.
“How do we do this?” he asked Mkoll.
Mkoll frowned. “From above. Let’s get ahead and find a suitable habitat overlook—unless it changes course.”
Gaunt took the group across the wide, pulverised trail behind the advancing Spike, a half-kilometre strip of soil and ash compressed by the vehicle’s weight into glinting carbon. The Spike didn’t steer around buildings. It flattened them, making its own path.
The Imperial strikeforce overtook the great war machine on
