Necropolis (7 page)

Such was the size of the NorthCol deployment and such was the capacity of the ferries that estimates suggested it would take four days to cross them over the Hass into Vervunhive. When told of this, Marshal Croe ordered the Hass Viaduct reopened so that rail links could resume. The rail route had been closed at the start of the bombardment. Bypassing the ferry route, NorthCol got its forces into the hive in just under two days. Many tanks and armoured personnel carriers actually crossed the viaduct under their own power, trundling along the rail tracks. Two divisions of the NorthCol infantry also marched across the viaduct in a break between trains.

So far, nothing had been heard of the promised reinforcements from Vannick Hive, the great refinery collective three thousand kilometres away to the east. Vannick had undertaken to provide nine regiments, but thus far the only thing that had come from them was the continued fuel-oil supplies carried by the eastern pipeline. Many in Vervunhive wondered if the forces of Zoica had reached them too.

* * *

At dawn on the fourteenth day, lights were seen in the upper atmosphere. Flaring their braking jets, Imperial Guard dropships descended, diverted to the main lift-port at Kannak in the Northern Collective Hives. With the Shield erected, Vervunhive’s central landing field could accept no ships.

The Imperial Guard disembarked at Kannak and then marched south on the tail of the NorthCol forces. The simple sight of their high-orbit adjustments and blazing descents lifted the morale of the battered hive. The Guard was coming.

The Royal Volpone 1st, 2nd and 4th deployed south from Kannak Port swiftly, using the rail link to bring themselves deep into the hive. Marshal Croe personally greeted General Noches Sturm, the decorated victor of Grimoyr, on the rockcrete platform of the North Spine Terminus. A large crowd of politically approved citizens cheered them, under the watchful eyes of the VPHC.

Dressed in shimmering blue gowns, daughters of the noble houses — Merity Chass, Alina Anko, Iona Gavunda and Murdith Croe amongst them — were sent forward to decorate Sturm and his second officers, Colonels Gilbear and Corday, with silk floral wreathes.

Sturm was also greeted by the famous Commissar Kowle. The image of their smiling handshake was repeated on a million public-address plates across the hive.

The 5th and 7th regiments of the Roane Deepers, under General Nash, arrived by rail later that afternoon, amid more pantomime celebrations. Vice Marshal Anko was there to greet Nash and brass bands pomped and trumpeted the arrival. Amid the jubilation, Nash was able to confirm that three full regiments of Narmenian Armour were off-loading from carriers at the Kannak Port landing fields and would be en route south by dawn. The crowd rose, cheering the news, hailing the honoured Guard arrivals like they had already won the war.

The Tanith First-and-Only arrived by road, almost unnoticed, two nights later.

More than eighty matt-black troop trucks rumbled down the NorthCol highway through the northern outhabs of Vervunhive. The canvas tilts had been removed and around thirty Tanith troopers rode in each, crouched down with their weapons, webbing, haversacks, musette bags and bedrolls gathered to them. The bouncing trucks — six-wheelers with large, snarling front grills and pop-eye headlamps — bore the quadruple chevron cab-marks of NorthCol Utility Transport Division Three. Jerry cans and spare wheels were slung to their sides on sponson fittings.

A dozen outriders astride black-drab motorcycles ran along their flanks, and behind the main column came thirty more high-cabbed eight-wheelers laden with ammunition crates and regimental supplies, as well as the numerous cooks, armourers, mechanics, servitors and other attendant hangers-on that followed a Guard regiment on the move. These freighters were dull yellow, the livery of the Kannak Port Cargo Union, and netting was draped over their payloads. NorthCol soldiers in pale blue overalls and forage caps drove all the trucks, but the outriders were Tanith, in their distinctive dark battledress. Twelve kilometres short of Vervunhive, they paused to trickle through a checkpoint on the highway and they gained a vanguard of two dark-blue staff cars crewed by VPHC officers to lead them in.

All the headlamps in the convoy were blazing. Night had fallen sometime, unnoticed in the thick wallow of smoke. The only sights were the battered districts to either side, the fuzzy green glow of the hive itself — partly obscured by the smoke — and the occasional flash and flare of long-range shells falling into the outer habs they raced through.

Brin Milo, the youngest Ghost, rode with the rest of number one platoon in the lead truck. A slender, pale youth just now filling out with adult bulk, he had been the only non-soldier saved from the ruins of Tanith when their homeworld was overrun and destroyed four years earlier. The commissar himself had saved his life and dragged him from the fires that burned Tanith away.

For a long while, he had been “The Boy,” the company mascot, the piper, a little piece of Tanith innocence saved from hell, a reminder to all of the men of the place they had lost. But six months before, during the battle for Monthax, he had finally become a soldier too. He was proud of his issued equipment and lasgun, and he kept his pack in better order than any of the seasoned Tanith troopers.

He sat huddled in the cramped rear-bay of the rattling truck and polished the regimental crest on his black beret with a rag of gun-cloth.

“Milo.”

Brin looked up at Trooper Larkin opposite him. A wiry, taut-skinned man in his early fifties, Larkin was as well-known for his neurotic personality as his skill as the regiment’s most able sniper. The long, specialised shape of his marksman’s lasgun was sheathed in a canvas roll at his feet. Larkin had produced his gun-scope and was training it like a spyglass out of the truck. Larkin had once told Milo that he didn’t trust anything he hadn’t seen first through his beloved scope.

“Larkin?”

Larkin grinned and looked back, handing the delicate brass instrument to the youth, gently. From the tiny runes glowing on the setting dial, Milo noticed it was fixed to heat-see.

“Take a look. That way.”

Milo squinted into the scope, resting the rubberised cup to his eye-socket. He saw radiance and bewildering crosshair markers of floating red.

“What am I looking at?”

“The hive, boy, the hive.”

Milo looked again. He realised the radiance was the yellow dome of the Shield, a vast energy field that enveloped the unseen city-hive ahead.

“Looks big enough and ugly enough to look after itself,” he suggested.

“The same is said for so many of us,” Colonel Corbec said, holding on to the truck’s iron tilt-hoops as he edged down to Milo and Larkin. “Velvethive is in a pretty fix, so they say.”

“That’s Vervunhive, chief,” Trooper Burun said from nearby.

“Feth you, clever-ass!” Corbec tossed back at the grinning soldier. “Feth knows I can barely remember me own name most days, let alone where I’m supposed to be!”

First platoon laughed.

Milo held the scope up to Corbec, who waved it off with disinterest.

“I’ll meet the place that’ll kill me when I meet it. Don’t need to look for it in advance.”

Milo gave the precious scope back to Larkin, who took a final look and then slid the instrument back into its drawstring bag.

“Seen enough, Larks?” Corbec asked, his vast arms gripping the overhead frame, his beard split by a toothy grin.

“Seen enough to know where to aim,” Larkin replied.

In the juddering load-bay of the truck three vehicles back, Third Platoon were all wagering on cards. Trooper Feygor, a dangerous, lean man with hooded eyes, had bartered a full tarot pack from some Administratum fellow on the troopship and he was running a game of Hearts and Titans.

Trooper Brostin, big, heavyset and saturnine, had lost so much already he was ready to wager his flamer, with the fuel tanks, as his next lay-down.

Feygor, a thick cigar clenched between his sharp teeth, laughed at Brostin’s discomfiture and shuffled the pack again.

As he flicked the big pasteboard cards out into hands around the grilled deck, the men of the platoon produced coins, crumpled notes, rings and tobacco rations to add to the pot.

Trooper Caffran watched him deal. Short, young and determined, just a year older than Milo, Caffran had gained the respect of them all during the beach assault at Oskray about a year before. Caffran disliked cards, but in Rawne’s platoon it paid to mix in.

Major Rawne sat at the end of the truck-bay, his back to the rear wall of the cab. The Tanith second officer, he was infamous for his anger, guile and pessimism. Corbec had likened him to a snake more than once, both physically and in character.

“Will you play, major?” Feygor asked, his hands hesitating on the deal. Rawne shook his head. He’d lost plenty to his adjutant in the last forty days of transit in the troopship.

Now he could smell war and idle gaming had lost its interest.

Feygor shrugged and finished the deal. Caffran picked up his hand and sighed. Brostin picked up his hand and sighed more deeply. He wondered if wool socks would count as a wager.

The outriders raced around the speeding trucks, gunning for the destination. Sergeant Mkoll, head of the scout platoon, crossed his bike in between two of the troop vehicles and rode down the edge-gully so he could take a look at the hive emerging out of the smoke before them. It was big, bigger than any city he’d ever seen, bigger than the bastion towns of Tanith certainly.

He roared ahead, passing the staff cars of the local commissariat, until he was leading the column down the broken highway towards the docks.

A volley of shells fell into the outhabs to the east. Dorden, the grizzled, elderly chief medic of the Tanith Regiment, heaved himself up to see. Conflagrations, bright and bitter-lemon in colour, sizzled out from the distant detonations. The truck sashayed into a pothole and Dorden was dropped on his arse.

“Why bother?” Bragg asked.

“Say again?” asked the doctor.

Bragg shifted his position in the flat-bed uncomfortably. He was huge, bigger than any other two Ghosts put together. “We’ll get there sooner or later; die there sooner or later. Why bother craning for a view of our doom?”

Dorden looked across at the giant. “Is the cup half-full or half-empty, Bragg?” he asked.

“What cup?”

“It’s hypothetical. Half-full or half-empty?”

“Yeah, but what cup are we talking about?”

“An imaginary cup.”

“What’s in it?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Does to me, doc,” Bragg shrugged.

%
well, okay… it’s got sacra in it. Half-full or half-empty?”

“How much sacra?” Bragg asked.

Dorden opened his mouth once, twice, then sat back again. “Doesn’t matter.”

Bragg pulled out a canvas bottle-flask. “There’s sacra in this,” he announced.

“Thanks, not just yet…” Dorden said, raising his hands as if in surrender.

Bragg, sat opposite him in the shuddering truck, nodded and took a long swig.

Shells wailed down, half a kilometre from the road, close enough to be uncomfortable. Dorden reached out for the flask. “Ah well, if it’s there…”

Sergeant Varl, gripping the iron hand-loops of the truck’s flatbed with his whirring mechanical limb, tried to rouse the spirits of his platoon by encouraging a song. A few of them joined unenthusiastically with a verse or two of “Over the Sky and Far Away” but it soon faltered. When Varl tried another, he was told to shut up, to his face.

Sergeant Varl handled people better than most of the officers in the regiment and he knew when to reprimand and when to back off. He’d been a dog-soldier himself for long enough.

But the mood in his platoon was bad. And Varl knew why. No one wanted this. No one wanted to get in the middle of a hive-war.

The Magnificat was waiting at the northern docks as the column rolled in out of the firelit night. All the Hass ferries were working full-stretch to keep the river open and convoy after convoy of military supplies and ammunition were arriving each hour from the Northern Collectives. Troops from Vervun Primary — in blue greatcoats, grey webbing and the distinctive spiked helmets — along with VPHC men, servitors and a good few red-robed clerks and overseers from the Administratum were now controlling the river freight, much to the fury of the regular longshoremen of the Dockmaster Guild. Ecclesiarchy priests had also arrived on the third or fourth day, establishing a permanent prayer-vigil to protect the crossing and make the waterway and the viaduct safe. The hooded clergy were grouped around a brazier at a pier end, chanting and intoning. They were there each time Folik drew the
Magnificat
back to the northshore wharves. It seemed they never slept, never rested. He got into the habit of nodding to them every time he slid the ferry in past them. They never responded. On this night run, Folik expected to take on more supply vehicles and crates, but the house troopers running the dockside had drawn the North-Col freight trucks aside so that troop transports could move round them and roll down the landing stages.

Folik nursed the ancient turbines into station-keeping as Mincer dropped the ramp.

The first two trucks growled and bounced aboard. Mincer directed them to their deck spaces with a pair of dagger-lamps.

A tall, long-coated figure dropped from the cab of the first truck. He approached longshoreman Folik.

Folik was almost hypnotised by the commissar badge on the peaked cap. An awed smile creased his oil-spattered face and he took off his wool cap out of respect.

“Sir, it’s an honour to have you aboard!”

“The pleasure’s mine. What’s your name?”

“Folik, Imperial hero, sir!”

“I… I had no idea my reputation preceded me this far. Greetings, Folik.”

“It’s a true honour, sir, to be able to transport your reinforcement column to Vervunhive.”

“I appreciate the honour, Folik. My first vehicles are aboard. Shall we proceed?”