knee in his slender neck. He'd been a fisherman back on the Lost Place, part of a sea-fishing family which plied the ocean currents beyond the archipelago. He owned a fierce skill with a sailcloth and net needle, and an almost surgical knack with a blade learned from gutting fish back in those days. Dorden had put those skills to use in the name of healing when he had co-opted Lesp as an orderly. Lesp had taken to it well, and enjoyed his work alongside the chief medic.
Dorden took all the willing, able help he could get. Most of the trained medics who had founded with the Ghosts on Tanith had never made it off-world. Originally, the only fully qualified medics had been Dorden, Gherran and Mtane, with twenty other troopers trained as field medics. Dorden had interviewed and studied all of the surviving men to recruit for the badly needed medical staff. Without devoted, constantly learning amateurs like Lesp, Foskin and Chayker, the health of the regiment would have failed long ago.
Mtane and Gherran had moved on with Gaunt's main force, though both had wanted to stay. Losing all three trained medics in one rash act was more than Gaunt would tolerate.
Dorden stepped out into the muddy yard and, as if on cue, the heavens opened and sheeting rain hammered down on him, washing another's blood out of his tunic. He stood there, dripping, as the downpour eased a little.
'You'll get wet out there,' came a voice from nearby.
Dorden swung round to face Corbec, who was smoking a cigar in the cover of the slumping side-roof. All Dorden could see was the shape and the red coal of the light.
Dorden crossed to him. Corbec offered up a waxy box of smokes. 'Liquorice. Got the taste of them on Voltemand and it's taken me an age to get some on the black market. Take one for now and one for later.'
Dorden took two, slid one behind his ear unlit and lit up the other from Corbec's half-smoked stick.
They looked out into the night.
'It's going to be rough,' remarked Corbec softly.
He was looking at the flash and howl of the storm, but Dorden knew what he meant.
'Yet you stayed.'
Corbec took a deep drag and white smoke plumed out of his hairy shadow. 'I'm a sucker for good deeds.'
'Or lost causes.'
The Emperor will provide. And aren't we all just one big lost cause? The First and last and Lost? You don't see me giving up on that.'
Dorden smiled. The cigar was strong and the flavour hellish, but he was enjoying it. It had been twenty years since he'd smoked. His wife had never approved, said it didn't set a good example to the patients Dorden tended to. Then the kids came along, Mikal and Clara, and he'd kicked the habit, so—
Dorden shut off the thoughts. Tanith had taken his wife with it, and Clara and her husband and their baby too. All he had was Mikal, Trooper Mikal Dorden, vox-caster operator in Sergeant Hasker's platoon.
'You're thinking about home,' Corbec muttered.
Dorden broke his sad reverie. 'What?'
'I know that look.'
'It's dark, colonel!'
'I know that… feeling, then. The set of a man's shoulders. Comes on us all, time to time.'
'I'd guess the commissar has told you to stamp it out where ever you see it? Bad for morale.'
'Not in my book. Tanith still lives while we all carry it here…' Corbec tapped his forehead. 'And we don't know where we're going if we don't know where we came from.'
'Where are we going, do you suppose?'
Corbec flicked his butt onto the mud and let it sputter dead. 'On a bad day, to hell. On a good day, I'd say we were bound for that trophy world Gaunt's promised us. Slaydo's gift: the first world we truly win we can take and claim and settle as our own.'
Dorden gazed at the storm. 'New Tanith, huh? Tike the men talk of when they're drunk or dying? Do you believe that? Might we ever take a world ourselves, get the credit clean and true? We're less than two thousand, livery theatre we enter, we do so alongside other regiments, and that muddies victory claims and credit. I'm not a pessimist, colonel, but I doubt any of us will ever find that New Tanith, except in drink or death.'
Corbec smiled, his white teeth shining in the gloom. 'Then lucky me. One way or another, I'll see more of it than most.'
A door banged to their left. Chayker, shrouded in his cape, emerged from the hospital and carried a tin drum over to the well. A few moments' cranking, and he struggled with it back to the buildings. Dorden and Corbec could already smell the broth Chayker and Foskin were brewing for all the company.
'Something smells good,' Corbec said.
Toskin found tubers and grain in a field beyond the ditch walls, and we turned up dried pulses and salt meat in an old pantry. Should be the best supper any of us have had in a while. But first rations go to any of the patients who can take it.'
'Of course. They need it more than us. I've got a flask of sacra and a box of these smokes. Should keep me going awhile.'
'Come in when you're ready for proper nourishment,' Dorden instructed, as if issuing a prescription. 'Thanks for the cigars.' He headed back to the ward.
A circuit of the wounded took another hour and a half. Tesp and the other orderlies had done well, and many had eaten or at least taken fluid. There were twelve who were too far gone to remain conscious, and Dorden carefully rationed out his supply of drugs to prioritise them. The boy, Culcis, along with a few others, were now sitting up, chatting, grateful. All of them, Volpone aristo-blood, were disdainful of the Tanith, but civil nevertheless. Being cut adrift by their regiment, and
