spared from death only by a barbarian unit, would seem to have altered many of their deeper prejudices and snobberies. For that at least, Dorden felt pleased.
He saw Trooper Caffran, coming in soaked from a patrol circuit, taking his bowl of broth to sit with Culcis. They were about the same age, Dorden reckoned. The same age as Mikal. He heard them share a joke.
Lesp took his arm. One of the critical cases was showing signs of fading. With Chayker's help, they carried the man out into what had once been the household kitchen, and now served as a surgical theatre. A refectory table sat there, long enough for a man, and they heaved him onto it.
'The Blueblood, a Corporal Regara by his tags, had lost a leg below the knee and taken shrapnel in the chest. His blood was far from blue. The refectory table became slick and blood drooled off onto the flagstones. Chayker almost slipped and Dorden ordered him to fetch a mop and more wadding.
'There are no mops,' Chayker shrugged.
'Then find something like a mop.'
Dorden had to take off more of the ruined leg from the shrieking Regara with his handsaw before he could staunch and tie the haemorrhage. He directed Tesp's sure fingers in to suture the breach with fine, sail-maker's stitches. By then, Chayker had returned. Dorden found he was mopping the floor with shredded strips from his cape tied to an old rake handle. For a Ghost to tear up his treasured stealth cloak to mop blood… Dorden's admiration for his volunteers' devotion to duty grew.
They carried the softly moaning Regara back to his bed. With luck, and a fever-breaking shot of mascetamine, he might yet live. But Dorden was called away almost at once to a seizure that Toskin couldn't cope with, and then to a man who had woken from near-coma, only to begin violently retching blood.
The ward fell quiet towards midnight, as other dramas came and passed. Dorden was scrubbing his chrome rib-spreaders in a bucket of scalding water when Mkoll came in, shaking the water from his cape. The storm was still booming outside and thunder rattled the casements and roofing. Every now and then, loose glass in a window somewhere fell in, or tiles slipped off and shattered. The storm had continued all that evening, but until then, Dorden had blanked it out.
He watched Mkoll sit and clean his gun, the first thing he always did before seeing to other duties like food or warmth. Dorden took him a bowl of broth.
'Anything out there?'
Mkoll shook his head. 'If we're lucky, the storm is slowing their advance.'
'And if we're not?'
'They conjured the storm.'
Mkoll looked up at the rafters and the high roof. This must have been quite a place. A good homestead, worth the working. The soil is healthy and they had plenty of livestock.'
'A family home,' Dorden pondered, who hadn't thought about it before. The thought of another home and family lost to the war now bit at him. He felt weary again. Old.
Mkoll spooned his broth quietly. There's an old chapel at the rear of the house. Blown in, of course, but you can still see the painted reredos commemorating the Emperor. The Volpone used it as a privy. Whoever lived here were devout servants of the Imperium, working the land, raising their kin.'
'Until this.'
Dorden fell silent. Chaos had taken this world, Nacedon, two months gone, as part of their counter-punch to thwart Macaroth's crusade. It hadn't been occupied, or even corrupted from within. Nacedon, an agricultural world with three million Imperial colonists, had been violated and invaded in the space of three nights.
What kind of universe was it, Dorden wondered, where humans could struggle and break their backs and love their families and worship the Emperor and build for years, only to lose it all in a few hours? His universe, he concluded, the same one that had taken Tanith away.
A late moon was up, a lonely sentry in a sky suddenly clear of storm. The rain had stopped and silver clouds scudded across the purple openness of the heaven.
Counterpart to the moon, a lone sentry stood at the gate of the station. Trooper Tremard, sitting his second shift at the gate in the sandbag emplacement, watched the tree lines, black fuzzes of darkness edging the flats of the equally black fields and fens. He was tired, and he wished that the fething Volpone had left their heavy gun in the emplacement.
Mist rose across the fenland, drifting sideways like smoke. Something twinkled in the dark.
Tremard started up, grabbing his scope from the sandbags. He fumbled with the focus ring, pulling the green-on-green night vision view into true. Mist – and other things in it. The twinkle he had seen. Moonlight flashing back from the staring reflective retina of hunting eyes.
He triggered his micro-bead link. 'Gate to Ghosts! Can you hear me, colonel? To arms! To arms! Movement to the south!'
Corbec rose abruptly from his cot, like a dead man lifting from a grave, making Dorden start. The colonel had been catching forty winks on a spare bed in the ward as the medic sorted pills into paper twists. 'What is it?'
Corbec was on his feet. 'Three guesses, Doc.'
Dorden was up too. He looked around at the fragile hall, the vulnerable, half-dead men, as Corbec readied his lasgun and voxed-in with the other troopers. Dorden felt suddenly stupid. He knew what a full-on assault of Chaos was like. They'd all be shattered like an egg-shell. He'd been stupid to insist on staying. Now he had them all dead – the Bluebloods, the Ghosts… valuable, peerless Ghosts like Corbec and Mkoll. He'd wasted them all, over some foolish pride in an old oath. An old medical oath, taken in safer times, in a nice community practice where the worst injury was a laceration at the sawmill.
Feth me for a fool! Feth me for my pride!
'We'll front them as long as we can. The boys know some tricks,' Corbec told him. 'I'll need Chayker and Foskin… Lesp can stay with you. If we lose the first attack, you need to be ready to get as many of the wounded out into the back rooms. They're ruins I know, but it'll put more walls between you and the fighting.'
Dorden swallowed, thinking of the work it would take him and Lesp to carry sixty-seven men out into the rear
