Old Soldiers Never Die - Sandy Mitchell Read online

Accordingly, I paid a fair amount of attention to our surroundings as we left the bleak expanse of the starport and began to make our way into the city proper. Like many predominantly urban worlds, the main conurbation was contiguous with the boundary of the landing field, the outer hab-blocks protected from the consequences of a crash or explosion by a thick, high, blast wall, through which we trundled in a short, squat tunnel. Not unnaturally this made a formidable fortification, which the rebels had attempted to hold against the arriving Imperial forces, resulting in a fair amount of damage, particularly once my old comrades from the 12th Field Artillery unlimbered their Earthshakers and got stuck in.

  Deep craters in the inner walls, and a few crumbled ramparts, clearly marked the positions where the main fortifications had been. Shells being shells, the hab-blocks around the perimeter had taken quite a battering too, and on first re-emerging into daylight we found ourselves traversing a bleak hinterland of tumbled walls and scattered rubble, through which the hastily patched roadway slashed like a gutting knife. At first I thought it deserted, but before long occasional glimpses of a stretched tarp or the smoke from a cooking fire betrayed the presence of inhabitants, eking out what existence they could among the ruins.

  “Outliers,” Jona said, seeing the direction of my gaze. “Not much trouble, unless they get caught up in a food riot. Most of ’em just want to be left alone.”

  “Most of them?” I asked, my paranoia going into overdrive, and the governor shrugged. “There’s a few rock lobbers among ’em, and gangers squabbling over territory. But they’ll keep till the local mili­tia are reactivated.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, somewhat relieved, but still keeping my hands near my weapons. I was beginning to see movement between the shattered walls, more and more frequently, and wondered if waiting for the rest of the regiment might not have been a better idea.

  “Why are we slowing?” Kasteen asked, unfastening the flap of her holster, and I hastened to follow her lead; we’d both spent most of our lives in warzones, and knew from bitter experience that even the most subtle intimations of trouble should never be ignored.

  Jona looked bewildered, and about as nervous as most civilians do when their guests unexpectedly draw sidearms in a confined space. My chainsword I left scabbarded for the nonce, as it would be more of a danger to ourselves in our suddenly claustrophobic surround­ings than to a putative attacker. “No idea,” he said, and activated the vox. “Fossel?”

  “The road’s blocked,” the chauffeur informed us, sounding irritated rather than concerned. “Some kind of crowd up ahead.”

  “Armed?” I asked.

  “Nothing obvious,” a feminine voice cut in, Klarys I presumed. “They’re just milling around. Trading food, probably. Moving up to clear them.”

  “Can we see from in here?” Kasteen asked, a moment before I could pose the question myself, and the governor poked a control stud. With a squeal of gears the partition retracted, revealing our driver, dressed in the same body armour as the outriders, but without a helmet. Beyond him, the road was now visible, blocked by twenty or thirty ragged-looking civilians. It was hard to make much out, as the shadows were plentiful and deep, but they were an unhealthy-looking bunch, their skin sallow, their movements slow and uncoordinated. All of a sudden, I found myself grateful for the armoured bodywork surrounding us, for I had no doubt that it would be proof against any weapons this curiously passive mob might bring to bear.

  Not a single one reacted as the motorcyclists bore down on their position, beyond slowly turning heads to track their movement: the outriders drew to a halt a few metres away, their engines revving, and ordered them to disperse. Still no reaction, and I found my palms tingling, a warning from my subconscious I’d learned to take seri­ously over the years.

  “Pull back,” I cautioned, hoping the vox would relay my words, but if they did it was too late; the whole crowd suddenly began to move, like a single viscid pool of degenerate humanity, surging forwards to engulf the riders before either could react. Both troopers tried to gun their engines and pull away, but hadn’t room to turn the heavy bikes. As we watched, helpless and horrified, they were pulled from their mounts and overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers, disap­pearing into the depths of the mob as thoroughly as if they’d been absorbed by a tyranid swarm.

  “What he said,” Jona snapped, knowing trouble when he saw it, which was hardly surprising given his former occupation. Unfortu­nately the chauffeur had kept us moving slowly forwards, confident in his comrades’ ability to clear the way, and by the time he slammed the gears into reverse, with a grinding sound even Jurgen might have winced at, the tide of bodies was already lapping around our frag­ile refuge. The car bumped, running over several yielding obstacles, before suddenly fetching up against an immovable one with a groan of stressed metal. Unable to see, our driver had mounted the pave­ment and rammed one of the larger pieces of rubble.

  “How solid is this thing?” I asked, flicking the safety off my laspistol, while Kasteen chambered a round into her bolt pistol, and began an urgent conversation about reinforcements over her vox-bead. Rein­forcements we both knew were unlikely to arrive in time.

  “Solid enough,” Jona said, although I doubted that; the colonel’s bolt pistol could definitely punch a hole through the armourglass window, although doing so from this side would undoubtedly deafen us, not to mention fill the passenger compartment with razor-edged shards. Our attackers didn’t seem to be carrying any armour-piercing small arms, however, so getting in would take them a little more time than that.

  Or not. Blank-eyed, heedless of the damage they were doing to themselves, they kept battering relentlessly at the bodywork, clawing at the metal and armourglass in their single-minded determination to get in. The window nearest my head crazed where one of the riot­ers butted it repeatedly, flecks of blood and brain tissue marring the transparent surface.

  Most disturbing of all was the silence. Throughout their frenzied onslaught, not one of them spoke, although given their behav­iour that was hardly surprising; I’d seen things in Jurgen’s hair that showed more signs of intelligence. Even the sounds of their move­ment were inaudible, muffled by the thick armour enclosing us.

  “They’re insane!” Kasteen said, more of a dispassionate tactical assessment than an expression of alarm, despite her vehemence.

  “Or on combat drugs,” I agreed, although where they might have got them from was beyond me. I turned to the governor, who was looking pale, and hyperventilating: a bad sign, as, offhand, I could hardly think of worse circumstances in which to be stuck in a con­fined space with a panicking civilian. “Any of the local gangers use ’slaught, ’zerk, stuff like that?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  As I’d hoped, answering the simple, direct question brought him back a little, and I pressed my advantage.

  “You’re a gleaner, right? Anything unusual, you’d know.”

  He shook his head, though whether in negation or to clear it would be anybody’s guess. “The last year or so there’ve been noth­ing but wild stories,” he told me. “The insurrection, then the heretics—there were even supposed to be psykers among ’em, but nobody actually saw any.” The whole car lurched, a development I didn’t like the feel of in the least.

  “They’re climbing onto the roof,” Kasteen said, clearly wondering whether to try putting a bolt through it to discourage them, before deciding against the experiment, much to my relief. The top armour would be the weakest, to save weight, but it might still be strong enough to direct the full force of the explosive charge back towards us. The floor, on the other hand, had been heavily reinforced against mines, lowering the car’s centre of gravity, and thank the Throne for that: they’d probably have had us over by now if it wasn’t.

  Sure enough, the battering sound above us grew louder, and the ceiling began to develop some ominous dents. Isolated from us in his armourglass box, the chauffeur produced a combat shotgun from under his seat, and rack
ed it with an ominous clack, clearly anticipating the end in a matter of moments.

  I was just on the point of commending my spirit to the Emperor, and hoping He hadn’t been paying too much attention to my activi­ties of late, when the world around us erupted in a flickering orange glare. Searing flames lapped around the immobilised car, our attack­ers crisping and withering, losing their grips on the bodywork along with their musculature. Naked bones appeared through the sizzling flesh, skulls leering at us for a moment before falling away; then the firestorm ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Jurgen asked, his familiar and welcome voice suddenly filling my vox-bead, as he brought the hurtling Salamander to a shuddering halt amid a blizzard of shredded road­bed from beneath the locked tracks. He waved a cheerful greeting over the jagged lip of metal where a carnifex had ripped the top of the driver’s compartment clean away in its eagerness to get at him during our desperate flight to safety. Unsurprisingly, it seemed, the regimental enginseers were still concentrating their efforts on get­ting the Chimeras back into shape, my personal transport having to wait its turn in the name of operational efficiency.

  “Fine.” I kicked the car door open, and piled out instantly, drawing my chainsword as I went; there were still scattered pools of blazing promethium from the heavy flamer burst in our immediate vicinity, not to mention a fair number of combusting corpses, and if our fuel tank had been ruptured the whole thing could go up at any moment. Nothing attacked me, although if any of our assailants still lived and were making a run for it I couldn’t tell, the thick pall of foul-smelling smoke from their fellows’ immolation concealing most of our surroundings from view.

  Now that it seemed I’d escaped sharing their fate I had an image to maintain, so I glanced back at Kasteen, Jona and the open-mouthed chauffeur, with an appropriately heroic flourish of my weapons, and beckoned to them. “All clear,” I said, rather spoiling the gesture with a cough, as I got a lungful of greasy smoke.

  “Lucky the armour held,” Kasteen said, with a rather tight nod in Jurgen’s direction.

  “Thought it would,” my aide agreed phlegmatically. “But it wouldn’t have if I’d used the heavy bolter to scrape ’em off.”

  “I suppose not,” I agreed, unable to fault his logic, and, scabbarding the chainsword again, I turned to the governor. “It seems it’s my turn to offer you a lift.”

  “I appreciate it,” the young man assured me, scrambling into the rear passenger compartment of the Salamander, while his chauffeur stood guard with the shotgun, glancing left and right in barely sup­pressed panic.

  “Best check out the riders,” Kasteen said, leading the way towards the wreckage of the motorbikes.

  Conscious of our audience I began to follow her, despite the almost overwhelming impulse to clamber aboard the scout vehi­cle and get as far away from this blighted wasteland as possible. As I approached the nearest body, Jurgen joined me, his lasgun held ready for use, and his distinctive odour fighting to be noticed over the stench from the crackling cadavers.

  “Messy,” he commented, looking down, and I nodded. The larger of the two outriders had been partially protected from the fury of the mob by his body armour, but clearly not thoroughly enough. His head was lolling at an angle only possible with a broken neck, while several plates of his external carapace had been ripped clean away, exposing the flesh beneath; and the condition of that had already been accurately summarised by my aide.

  After some of the sights I’ve seen, it takes a lot to turn my stomach, but those raking, bone-exposing wounds did the trick all right, not least because I had no doubt that I’d have suffered a similar fate if my aide hadn’t intervened in so timely a fashion. “Are those bite marks?” I asked, incredulous, although the answer to that was obvi­ous after even the most cursory inspection, the manner in which the flesh was torn all too distinctive.

  Jurgen nodded. “Looks like,” he agreed, as incapable as ever of rec­ognising a rhetorical question.

  “This one’s alive!” Kasteen called, forestalling any further comment I might have made, and we hurried over to join her. Klarys had fared a little better, evidently having had time to draw her hellpistol and get off a shot or two before being borne to the ground, although she was unconscious, and her visible wounds were hardly less severe than those of her deceased colleague.

  “Not for long,” I said, while Jurgen produced a medi-pack from the collection of pouches and webbing he was habitually festooned with and began patching up the worst of the leaks, “unless we get her to a medicae.”

  Kasteen nodded, her face set. “We will,” she said grimly. “Then I’m sending in a couple of platoons to clear the ruins.” She shook her head, still unwilling to believe the evidence of her own eyes. “Can­nibals in the heart of an Imperial capital. It’s intolerable.”

  “Desperation can drive people to almost anything,” I said, although if the tingling in my palms was anything to go by, there was some­thing a lot deeper and darker at the heart of Lentonia than that. Just how dark, though, I had still to discover.

  TWO

  What with one thing and another, our official reception at the Con­cilium was rather late in starting. Like most local seats of government, the huge building was vulgarly over-ornamented on the outside, so the local plebeians would be left in no doubt of the exalted state of their rulers and betters, and even more so on the inside, to produce an appropriate sense of awe among those venturing within to peti­tion the Administratum functionaries who thronged the place, or pay their tithes. The effect on Kasteen and I was rather the opposite, however, since we’d seen it all before, and tended to notice things like the way the gilt was tarnishing on the death masks of deceased local luminaries (Jona’s immediate predecessor being a notable absentee), and the inordinate number of fraying threads in the fading tapestries of long-forgotten triumphs. If Jurgen had an opinion he kept it to himself, merely parting the throng of babbling pict-recorders and printscribes between us and the door with grim determination, the butt of his lasgun, and a bow wave of halitosis.

  Over a hundred heads turned in our direction as we entered the wide, high reception room, which, to my complete lack of surprise, resembled nothing so much as a gambling den with pretensions to an air of sophistication. Spotting a refreshment table, I made my way towards it as best I could through the scrum, most of the com­ponents of which seemed to want a word or a handshake; reminding myself that this was what I was here for, and clearing the way with my chainsword was probably a bad idea, I smiled and nodded like an automaton, pretending to remember names and faces, none of which made an impression strong enough to last a second beyond the breaking of eye contact. When I finally made it to the viands, I found I might as well not have bothered: it seemed Jona hadn’t been exaggerating about the extent of the food shortages he’d men­tioned in the course of our journey here. If the top of the social heap were making do with such basic fare, Throne alone knew what the commoners were eating, apart from each other. All of a sudden, the evidence of cannibalism I’d stumbled across seemed a lot less sur­prising, although the thought of it still stirred my stomach.

  The meagre table had one compensation for the effort required to reach it, however: a steaming samovar stood at one end, exuding the welcome odour of tanna and a faint hiss of steam, no doubt intended to make the Valhallan contingent feel at home. Following my nose through the obstacle course of scarlet Vostroyan uniforms, admixed with flowing Tallarn robes, and the rather more ornate garments favoured by local officials and nobles, I pitched up at the urn, while the governor did his best to make himself heard over the babble of conversation.

  “Sorry we’re late,” he said, his voice shaking a little. He still looked a bit green around the gills to me, although whether this was the result of delayed shock, or his first exposure to Jurgen’s driving, I couldn’t be sure. “We were attacked.” He went on for some while after that, giving the impression that I’d leapt out of the car to face th
e mob, and seen them off single-handed, while I turned my attention to the tanna.

  “Cai!” a familiar voice called. A hand fell on my arm, and I turned, selecting an appropriate expression of pleased surprise.

  “Toren.” Sure enough it was Divas, a tanna bowl of his own in hand, grinning at me in the puppyish manner I remembered so well. “I was wondering if you’d be here.” Rather to my own surprise, I found I wasn’t having to work nearly as hard at looking pleased as I’d expected. The intervening years had evidently been kind to him: the streaks of grey around his temples hadn’t spread very far, and the lines on his face were still faint enough to be barely noticeable.

  “I knew you’d be joining us eventually.” He grinned. “Once you got bored with charging off to chase heretics, as usual.” Which was one of the reasons I tolerated his company; despite being better placed than most to see past the facade I took such pains to present to the galaxy, he believed implicitly in my heroic public persona. Perhaps because he chafed at the lack of opportunity afforded him to engage the enemy directly in an artillery regiment, which generally potted at them from a safe distance of several kilometres[9] , and being even tangentially associated with my exploits allowed him a little vicarious excitement.

  “Little enough, compared to what you and the other regiments have been through,” I said. So far as I could see, the senior officers of all the Imperial Guard regiments on the planet were assembled in the room, along with their commissars, the high command of the local militia, and the usual random assortment of local notables. Most of them looked haggard and gaunt, on the brink of exhaustion, which was hardly surprising; the fighting had been concentrated around Viasalix, since whoever controlled the capital effectively controlled the world, and city fighting against an enemy who knows the terrain is a grim, attritional business. I had no doubt they’d be heartily glad to hand the mopping up over to the 597th, and take the chance of a bit of downtime before moving on to their next war. Kasteen was conversing with Colonel Mostrue, the CO of the 12th Field Artillery, who didn’t seem to have changed a bit; seeing me glance in their direction he nodded a curt greeting, before resuming what looked like an urgent discussion with her, no doubt filling her in on all the stuff that had been left out of our briefing slate.