Necropolis (11 page)

They’d been hiding in their bunkers, some weeping in rage or pain or dismay, that night when the broken remnants of the column had limped back in, heading for the city.

By then, he had twenty men left.

In the days that followed, Fencer had issued his own orders by necessity, as all links to House Command were broken. Indeed, he was sure no one in the hive believed there was anyone still alive out here. He had followed the edicts of the Vervun Primary emergency combat protocols to the letter, organising the digging of a series of trenches, supply lines and fortifications through the ruins of the outhabs, though the shelling still fell on them.

His first sergeant, Grosslyn, had mined the roadways and other teams had dug tank-traps and dead-snares. Despite the shelling, they had also raised a three hundred-metre bulwark of earth, filled an advance ditch with iron stakes and railing sections, and sandbagged three stubbers and two flamers into positions along the Highway.

All by the tenth day. By then, he had eighteen soldiers left.

Three more had died of wounds or disease by the fourteenth day, when the high-orbit flares of troopships told them Guard reinforcements were on their way planetside.

Now it was sunrise on the nineteenth day. Plastered in dust and blood, Fencer moved down the main trench position as his soldiers woke or took over guard duty from the weary night sentries.

But now he had sixty troops. Main Spine thought everything was levelled out here, everything dead, but they were wrong. Not everyone on the blasted outer habs had fled to the hive, though it must have seemed that way. Many stayed, too unwilling, too stubborn, or simply too frightened to move. As the days of bombardment continued, Fencer found men and women — and some children too — flocking to him from the ruins. He got the non-coms into any bunkers he had available and he set careful rationing. All able-bodied workers, of either sex, he recruited into his vanguard battalion.

They’d raised precious medical supplies from the infirmary unit of a bombed-out mine and they’d set up a field hospital in the ruins of a bakery, under the supervision of a teenage girl called Nessa who was a trainee nurse. They’d pilfered food supplies in the canteens of three ruined manufactories in the region. A VPHC Guard House on West Transit 567/kl had provided them with a stock of lasguns and small arms for the new recruits, as well as explosives and one of the flamers.

Fencer’s recruits had come from everywhere. He had under his command clerks who’d never held a weapon, loom workers with poor eyesight and shell-shocked habbers who were deaf and could only take orders visually.

The core of his recruits, the best of them, were twenty-one miners from Number Seventeen Deep Working, who had literally dug their way out of the ground after the main lift shaft of their facility had fallen.

Fencer bent low and hurried down the trench line, passing through blown-out house structures, under fallen derricks, along short communication tunnels the miners had dug to link his defences. Their expertise had been a godsend.

He reached the second stub emplacement at 567/kk and nodded to the crew. Corporal Gannen was making soup in his mess tin over a burner stove, while his crewmate, a loom-girl called Calie, scanned the horizon. They were a perfect example of the way necessity had made heroes of them all. Gannen was a trained stub-gunner, but better at ammo feeding than firing. The girl had proven to be a natural at handling the gun itself. So they swapped, the corporal conceding no pride that he now fed ammo to a loom-girl half his age.

Fencer moved on, passing two more guard points and found Gol Kolea in the corner nest, overlooking the highway. Kolea, the natural leader of the miners, was a big man, with great power in his upper body. He was sipping hot water from a battered tin cup, his lasgun at his side. Fencer intended to give him a brevet rank soon. The man had earned it. He had led his miners out of the dark, formed them into a cohesive work duty and done everything Fencer could have asked of them. And more besides. Kolea was driven by grim, intense fury against the Zoican foe. He had family in the hive, though he didn’t speak of them. Fencer was sure it was the thought of them that had galvanised Kolea to such efforts.

“Captain,” Kolea nodded as Fencer ducked in.

“Something’s wrong, Gol,” Fencer said. “Something’s different.”

The powerfully built miner grinned at him. “You haven’t noticed?” he asked.

“Noticed?”

“The shelling has stopped.”

Fencer was stunned. It had been so much a part of their daily life for the last fortnight or more, he hadn’t realised it had gone. Indeed, his ears were still ringing with remembered Shockwaves.

“Emperor save us!” he gasped. “I’m so stupid.”

He’d been awake for upwards of twenty minutes and it took a miner to tell him that they were no longer under fire.

“See anything?” Fencer asked, crawling up to the vigil slot in the sandbags next to Kolea for a look.

“No. Dust, smoke, haze… nothing much.”

Fencer was about to reach for his scope when Zoica began its land offensive.

A wave of las-fire peppered the entire defence line of the outhabs, like the flashes of a billion firecrackers. The sheer scale of the salvos was bewildering. Nine of Fencer’s troops died instantly. Three more, all workers, fled, utterly unprepared for the fury of a land assault.

Grenades and rockets dropped in around them, blowing out two communication dug-outs. Another hit the mess hall and torched their precious food supplies.

Fencer’s people began their resistance.

He’d ordered them all to set weapons for single fire to preserve ammunition and power cells. Even the stubbers had been ordered only to fire if they had a target. In response to the Zoican assault, their return seemed meagre and frail.

Fencer got up to the nest top and raised his lasgun. Five hundred metres ahead, through the smoke and the rubble, he saw the first shapes of the enemy, troopers in heavy, ochre-coloured battledress, advancing in steady ranks.

Fencer began firing. Below, Kolea opened up too.

They took thirteen down between them in the first five minutes.

Zoican tanks, mottled ochre and growling like beasts, bellied up the road and fanned out into the ruins, using the available open roadways and other aisles in the rubble sea. Mines took two of them out in huge vomits of flame and armour pieces, and the burning hulks blocked the advance of six more.

Rockets flailed into the bulwark and blew a fifteen-metre section out. Corporal Tanik and three other troops were disintegrated.

Another Zoican tank, covered with mesh netting, rumbled through the ruins and diverted down a dead-snare. Blocked in by rockcrete walls to either side and ahead, it tried to reverse and swing its turret as one of the Vervun flamer positions washed it with incandescent gusts of blowtorch fire and cooked it apart.

Sergeant Grosslyn, with two Vervun Primary regulars and six enlisted habbers, cut a crossfire down at Zoican troops trying to scramble a staked ditch on the eastern end of the file. Between them, they killed fifty or more, many impaled on the railings and wire. When Jada, the female worker next to him, was hit in the chest and dropped, screaming, Grosslyn turned to try and help her. A las-round from one of the dying Zoican assault troops impaled on the stakes took the back of his head off.

Gannen and Calie held the west transit for two hours, taking out dozens of the enemy and at least one armoured vehicle which ruptured and blew out as the loom-girl raked it with armour-piercing stub rounds.

Gannen was torn apart by shrapnel from a rocket when the enemy pushed around to the left.

Calie kept firing, feeding her own gun until a tank round blew her, her stub gun and twenty metres of the defence bulwark into the sky.

Overwhelmed, Fencer’s force fell back into the ruins of the outhab. Some were crushed by the advancing armour. One enlisted clerk, dying of blood-loss from a boltwound, made a suicide run with a belt of grenades and took out a stationary tank. The explosion lit up the low clouds and scraps of tank metal rained down over the surrounding streets.

Others fought a last-ditch attempt as the sheer numbers of the advancing infantry overran them. There were insane pockets of close fighting, bayonet to bayonet, hand to hand. Not a metre of Vervunhive’s outhab territory was given up without the most horrific effort.

Gol Kolea, his las weapon exhausted, met the enemy at the barricade and killed them one by one, to left and right, with savage swings of his axe-rake. He screamed his wife’s name with every blow.

A las-round punctured Captain Olin Fencer’s body at the hip and exited through his opposite shoulder. As he fell, weeping, he clicked his lasgun to autofire and sprayed his massing killers with laser rounds.

His hand was still squeezing the trigger when the pack ran out.

By then, he was already dead.

“A war waged by committee is a war already lost.”

—Sebastian Thor,
Sermons,
vol. XV, ch. DIV

Gaunt felt the monumental bulk of the Curtain Wall around him actually vibrate. The shellfire falling against its outer skin was a dull roar.

Captain Daur and three other officers of the liaison staff led the oversight party up the stair-drum of a secondary tower in the wall just west of the massive Heironymo Sondar Gate. Gaunt had brought Rawne and Mkoll, with Trooper Milo as his adjutant. General Grizmund — with three of his senior Narmenians — and General Nash — with two of his regimental aides — made up the rest of the party, along with Tarrian of the VPHC. They had a bodyguard detail of thirty Vervun Primary troopers in full battledress.

The oversight party emerged onto the tower-top, where hot breezes, stifling with fycelene fumes, billowed over them. Three missile launchers were raised and ready here, their crews standing by, but additional awnings of flak-board had been erected in preparation for the visit of the dignitaries, and the launchers, with no safe room for their exhaust wash under this extra shelter, had fallen silent. The crews saluted the visitors smartly.

“These are for our benefit?” Gaunt asked Tarrian, indicating the freshly raised awnings.

“Of course.”

“You muzzle an entire defence tower so we can get a safe peek over the Wall?”

Tarrian frowned. “General Sturm has made it a standing requirement every time he visits the Wall. I presumed you and the other eminent generals here would expect the same.”

“We’ve come to fight, not hide. Take them down and get these crews operational.”

Tarrian looked round at Nash and Grizmund. The Narmenian nodded briefly. “Gaunt speaks for us all,” said Nash dryly. “We don’t need any soft-soap.”

Tarrian turned from the group and began issuing orders to the launcher crews.

The rest of the oversight party approached the rampart and took up magnoculars or used the available viewscopes on their tripod stands. Milo handed Gaunt his own scope from its pouch and the commissar dialled the magnification as he raised it and gazed out.

Below them, the miserable wasteland of the southern outer habs lay exposed and broken. There was no discernible sign of life, but a hateful storm of enemy shelling and missiles pounded in across it at the hive. A fair amount fell short into the habs, but a good percentage struck the Curtain Wall itself. Gaunt craned over for a moment, training his scope down the gentle slope of the Wall. Its adamantine surface was peppered and scarred like the face of a moon, as far as he could see. Every few seconds, batteries to either side of them on the Wall fired out, or the great siege guns in the emplacements below in the thickness of the Wall recoiled and volleyed again.

The vibration of the Wall continued.

“No way of knowing numbers or scale—” began Nash.

Grizmund shook his head. “Not so, sir,” he replied, pointing out to the very edge of the vast, outer-hab waste. “As we have been told, this is no longer the work of their long-range artillery out in the grasslands. This is ground assault from closer range — armour moving in through the outer habitations and factories.”

“Are you certain?” asked Gaunt.

“You can see the flashes of tank cannons as they fire. Four, five kilometres out, in the very skirts of the outer habs. Their weapons are on full elevation for maximum range, so the muzzle-flashes are high and exposed. It is a simple matter of observing, counting, estimating.”

Gaunt watched for flashes through his scope. Like Nash, he was an infantry commander, and he always appreciated technical insight from experienced officers with expertise in other schools of warfare. Grizmund had a fine reputation as an armour commander. Gaunt fully trusted the Narmenian’s judgement in this. As he looked, he began to discern the flickering display of brief light points out in the hinterland.

“Your estimate?” asked Nash, also studying the scene and, like Gaunt, willing to listen to an expert opinion.

Grizmund glanced to his attending officers, who all looked up from their scopes.

“Nachin?”

The brigadier answered directly, his voice rich with the taut vowel sounds of the Narmenian accent. “At a first estimate, armour to the magnitude of twenty thousand pieces. Straight-form advance, with perhaps a forced salient to the east, near those tall cooling towers still standing. Innumerable rockets and mortars, harder to trace, but all mobile. Forty, maybe forty-five thousand.”

The other Narmenians concurred. Grizmund turned back to Gaunt and Nash as Tarrian rejoined the group. “Nachin knows his stuff as well as me. You heard his numbers. A multiple regiment-strength assault. Grand-scale armour attack. Yet — if what Commissar Kowle says is correct — not even a fraction of their numbers.”

“We can presume other army strengths are moving round through the mining district, the mud flats, perhaps the eastern outer habs and the Hass East river junction too,” said Nash dourly.

“I can make no estimates of troop strength, however,” Grizmund added.

“With permission, sir,” Rawne said, and Gaunt nodded for him to continue.