Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 4

  ‘First things first, though,’ he says, nodding in the direction of the gate. ‘We have to deal with the little wall they’ve built.’

  ‘It is too far distant for me,’ Zane says, before anyone asks it of her.

  ‘I know,’ Hale says. ‘And I wasn’t going to ask.’ He takes the vox handset from Kayd and clicks it live. ‘Dern,’ Hale says. ‘Bring up your Woodcutters, would you? Put some holes in those barricades.’

  The response over the vox is distorted by interference, but Raine can hear Meri Dern’s smile in his words.

  ‘Got it, captain,’ he says.

  A moment later, five rattling, clanking shadows emerge from the smoke, moving up the central avenue towards the Delta Gate and the Sighted’s barricades. Their heavy tread shakes the ashes from the machines around Raine. The heavy support Sentinels are painted in splintered green and grey, just like their regiment. Hard rounds clatter against the extra armour plates heat-fused to their cabs, denting and scorching but not going through. The Sentinels bristle with rocket pods and missile launchers. Dern’s lead Sentinel has a lascannon mounted on its cheek, the barrel charred black with use.

  ‘Woodcutters in position,’ Dern voxes.

  The Sentinels plant their feet, stablights piercing the smoke. There are a series of booms as missiles launch from them, trailing smoke. Dern’s lascannon fires a searing beam of bright white light. There’s a loud crack of displaced air. Seconds later, light blooms again at the far end of the avenue, against the Sighted barricades.

  More Sighted gunfire chatters off the Sentinels’ heavy plating, sending sparks raining to the floor.

  ‘That’s their answer,’ Dern says. ‘Sounds like nothing more than a springtime storm.’

  Raine can hear the heavy clatter of the Sentinels’ missile pods reloading.

  ‘And again,’ Dern says. ‘Ready to fire.’

  ‘Fire…’ whispers Lydia Zane in horror.

  The psyker throws up her hands as the air is split with a catastrophic boom that cancels all other noise for an instant, even the forge machinery. Raine’s ears ring, but she doesn’t blink or flinch. That’s how she sees the moment the massive shell fired by the Sighted impacts against Lydia Zane’s kine-shield. Raine has seen her use them before to shield whole squads from hellfire and deflect falling stones the size of tanks. But not this time.

  This time, Zane’s shield breaks.

  The shell goes through, hits Dern’s lead Sentinel and detonates. The second blast is just as loud as the first. The pressure wave knocks Raine to the ground. Knocks the air from her lungs too. All five of the Woodcutters are caught up in it, swallowed by smoke and flame. The vox crackles for an instant, then falls silent. In the wake of it, the forge halls are still. Not a single gun is fired from either end of the avenue.

  Raine gets back to her feet, leaning against the machine press to do it. Her ears are still ringing, and the bright flare of the explosion sticks when she blinks. She has heard that sound before and seen those kinds of detonations. The Sighted haven’t just repurposed tank armour. They are using the guns too.

  What they just fired was a Baneblade cannon.

  Hale drags himself upright beside her, coughing.

  ‘Woodcutters,’ he says, into the vox. ‘Any of you still alive?’

  Raine knows the answer before she has it confirmed to her by the parting smoke. There is nothing left of Meri Dern’s five-strong squad but bits of scrap and blackened ashes.

  Yuri Hale thumps one blood-caked, blackened fist against the cover and curses in Antari.

  Raine takes her timepiece out of the pocket of her greatcoat. The burr of the ticking through her glove steadies her thundering heart. The brass is highly polished and the glass is unmarked, save for the crack by the top of the dial that has been there since the day she first held it, all those years ago.

  By her count, the Duskhounds should be almost in place.

  ‘If we cannot break them, then we bury them,’ she says. ‘Crush them under their own defences.’

  Hale laughs. It’s a bitter sound.

  ‘Then go in and bleed any left standing,’ he says.

  ‘For every betrayal, for every blasphemy,’ Raine says.

  ‘For every death,’ Hale finishes.

  The vox clicks in Andren Fel’s ears as he steps out of the shadowed alcove, a pace behind two Sighted scouts. He knocks the first one into the oily muck with a blow to the back of the head from the butt of his hellgun. The second one turns in time for Fel to kick him hard into the tunnel wall, where he staggers, gasping. Fel puts a las-bolt into the first before he can rise. The second one is quicker. He brings his own rifle up and fires.

  But he’s not quick enough.

  Fel knocks the rifle upwards, sending the shot into the tunnel ceiling. A pipe bursts with a blast of steam. His face mask and carapace protect him. The Sighted doesn’t have either. The heated mist scalds him badly, and he screams. Fel cuts it short by breaking the scout’s neck. The body slumps down against the curve of the tunnel wall.

  The vox clicks again, and this time he answers.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Fel says.

  ‘We are going to need those charges you carry.’

  Raine’s voice is crackling and distorted, but Fel knows her well enough to pick up the cold anger in it.

  ‘They escalated,’ he says.

  He hears her take a breath.

  ‘That is one way to put it. Target location incoming.’

  Fel keeps moving along the tunnel as the targeting data comes through. The supply network runs all the way under the forge complex. Fel’s Duskhounds were sent down into the tunnels to outflank the Sighted, and strike at their backs. Fel knew there was trouble when the roof of the supply tunnel shook like that. He knew it would be so before the battle even started. The leaves don’t lie, and there were many dark shapes in those he read in the hours before they deployed. The new target location blinks live on Fel’s display. He checks his mission chrono and thinks back to the forge schematics. Fel remembers every detail, because that’s how he was trained at the scholam on Antar. Forgetting meant the lash, or the submersion tanks. Recall became second nature as much as firing his rifle.

  ‘Keep holding their stare,’ he says. ‘We will have the charges set in five minutes and be up top to bleed them with you.’

  He saw dark shapes in the leaves, true enough, but that wasn’t all he saw. There was the noon sun too. That’s light. Fire. There is more than one way to read it, but Fel chooses to see it as a good omen.

  ‘They will know fire,’ he says to Raine.

  She used to laugh, back at the beginning, when he told her about the leaves. It’s different now. It’s not that she has come to believe it, but more that she understands why he does. When Raine answers this time there’s something else in her voice. Something close to a smile.

  ‘And thunder,’ she says. ‘Good hunting, captain.’

  ‘Hold their stare,’ Hale says, bitterly. ‘I want to blind them. Burn them, like they burned us.’

  He spits again. This time, there’s some blood in it. ‘Do you hear that?’ he says.

  Raine listens, and she does. It is the Sighted, chanting. Some words are lost to the machine noise and the distance, but a handful stand out clear.

  Make dust of the Emperor’s bones.

  Their blasphemy hits Raine like a physical blow. Anger burns from her heart outwards, a heat that even the forge fires cannot match. She clicks the vox-set live, on the regiment-wide open channel. Kayd sits beside her, keeping the broadcast clear, murmuring soft benedictions as he does so.

  ‘Sons and daughters of Antar,’ she says. ‘The Sighted want to make us fear. To make us doubt.’

  She looks at the faces of the men and women around her. Yuri Hale, his face twisted by those deep scars. Makar Kayd, plastered with blood.
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br />   ‘But fear is for the weak of heart. Doubt is for the weak of mind.’

  Nuria Lye puts her fingertips to the aquila pendant she wears around her neck. Ari Rath nods his head, his filthy, bloody fingers gripping the pole of the Antari battle-standard. The icon of the crossed rifles against the wreath of thorns is a spare, bright flash of green in all that grey. It is riddled with bullet holes, but it has never looked prouder.

  ‘We are strong of heart. Strong of mind. We are children of the Emperor, the liberators of the Bale Stars, and we are not afraid. We do not doubt.’

  Zane watches too, her hands white-knuckled around her darkwood staff. Beyond her, hidden by the smoke and spread across the massive forge complex, the rest of the regiment will be listening. Nearly two thousand souls, heeding Raine’s words.

  ‘We are fire, and we are thunder!’

  Raine’s fury feels pure now. Her body aches with the want to run and fight. She draws her pistol.

  ‘Now,’ she says, into the live channel. ‘Let us show them just how loud thunder can be.’

  In the moment between the gasp and bellow of smelting metal, Raine distinctly hears the Antari start to sing, their voices made rough by war.

  Andren Fel is setting his last demolition charge on the ceiling of the supply tunnel when he hears the words coming tinny through his vox-link.

  Through the wylds of winter, through the evenfall.

  Brightly burning is He.

  There’s no mistaking Soul of Antar. He has no memories longer held than the words of that song.

  Fel switches to his squad’s encrypted internal channel.

  ‘Do you hear that, Duskhounds?’ he says.

  Four aye, captains answer him. The rest of his squad are setting their own charges in other tunnels along the line, right under the Sighted barricades. Cassia Tyl is a moment before the others, because she always is. Tyl is fierce and quick in all regards, including words.

  ‘Would that we were up there singing it with them,’ she says.

  Fel smiles. He can’t argue with that.

  ‘Set chronos,’ he says, instead. ‘Three minutes.’

  Fel sets his chrono as four acknowledgement clicks come through, again with Tyl slightly ahead of the others. He sends three bursts of vox static to Hale up top to let him know the job is done.

  Fel can’t listen to his kinfolk sing, but he still lets the words play out in his head as he goes for the ladder that will take him back to the surface. His tread is light and swift, almost silent on the tunnel floor.

  Through times of strife.

  Fel ducks underneath a pipe that’s hot to the touch. The ceiling of the supply tunnel is low, and the temperature is stifling. Machine noise shakes the walls. If it wasn’t for his helmet, Fel knows he’d be deafened by it.

  Through blood we spend.

  He steps over the body of one of the Sighted scouts he killed on the way up.

  Brightly burning are we.

  That’s when Fel notices something. He slows his pace. His hellgun is already up, because there’s no place in a warzone that you carry at ease. He blinks the sweat from his eyes and stares into the patch of shadows that he could swear just shifted. Dark shapes. Just like he saw in the leaves.

  ‘Be wary,’ he voxes to his squad.

  ‘What do you see, captain?’ Tyl says.

  And then it happens again, just a flicker.

  ‘Shadows,’ Fel says, then fires.

  The bolt from the hellgun is a whisper, but it punches the shadow onto its back. As it falls, its shape crazes and flickers, then resolves. The shadow is Sighted, and it’s not alone. The tunnel fills with las-fire as two more cloaked in the same way fire back at Fel. He catches a las-bolt in the shoulder as he twists to minimise the damage. His carapace armour takes the worst of it.

  ‘Three targets on me,’ he voxes. ‘Camo gear.’

  The shadows grow closer, their footsteps silent. He can only tell where they are by the flickering and the way the puddles of oil in the tunnel move. Even thermal doesn’t pick them up. Fel fires and misses. He takes a grazing hit to the leg in return.

  ‘I have two,’ says Tyl.

  Fel fires again and wings one of them. Blood sprays up the tunnel wall, but there’s no sound.

  ‘And here, captain,’ yells Myre.

  ‘Bastards,’ says Jeth.

  There’s no answer from Rol, and his signal has disappeared from Fel’s display. Fel doesn’t get the chance to try the vox again because one of the shadows comes out of the dark and knocks him back against the tunnel wall. Tries to bury a hooked, black knife in his gut. Fel snaps the shadow’s arm at the wrist before the blow lands, then drives his elbow into its throat. The shadow staggers back, its camouflage flickering wildly. Fel fires once, dropping it with a neat headshot. Two dead shadows.

  The oily puddle at his feet ripples.

  Fel turns just in time to block the third shadow’s knife with his arm. It clashes off the vambrace and cuts into the soft joint at his elbow. The pain blinds him for an instant, and he loses his grip on his gun. It swings loose by the strap. Fel takes a blunt strike to the throat, and another to the ribs. The shadow is hitting him where it’ll hurt, and it does, but Fel is trained to take the hits and stay standing. He grabs the shadow by its flickering edges and the camouflage dazzles and disengages. He sees it for what it is. A man baring pointed, black teeth. The Sighted has blue-grey carapace armour and feathers tied into his lank brown hair. He is kitted with thermal goggles and auditory dampers. He is trying to get past Fel, to run for where he set his charges, but the Sighted isn’t a shadow anymore and Fel sees him well enough to return the cut with his own knife. The combat blade goes in to the hilt, and the last shadow falls to his knees, dribbling blood through those pointed teeth. Fel pulls the blade free, and the Sighted gasps air from his throat, and the hole in his chest.

  ‘Tick tock,’ he says, before falling over dead.

  Fel looks to the datafeed built into his left vambrace. It reads thirty-six seconds.

  ‘Hells,’ Andren Fel says. He snatches that auditory damper off the Sighted’s body and starts to run.

  The last few bars of Soul of Antar echo in his head as the timer ticks down.

  Walk with Him, know His face.

  Fel’s injured leg tries to buckle under him. He sees the ladder, but it’s far. Too far.

  Give your soul, await His grace. Then come home, my dear.

  The counter hits zero. Fel drops to the ground, hands over his head. As the tunnel grows light, that last line repeats in his mind.

  Brightly burning.

  Four detonations blow up through the floor of the main machine hall, spread along the Sighted’s defensive lines. Four fireballs that reach for the ceiling of the manufactorum in white-hot columns. The floor tremors under Raine’s feet.

  Five, she thinks. There should have been five.

  There’s a part of her, just for an instant, that wonders if the missing charge belonged to Fel. If he’s dead. She pushes the thought aside. There is no time for it. Before she can call the charge there’s a fifth massive explosion from the centre of the Sighted lines that shakes her eyes in her head and makes her stagger. It can only have been the Baneblade cannon. Scrap is hurled so far by it that it clatters off the machines and the floor around her.

  ‘That’s our cue,’ Hale says, on the company-wide channel. ‘Let’s go, Rifles!’

  ‘Fire and thunder,’ Raine shouts, with her ears still ringing.

  And hundreds of Antari voices answer her.

  Fire.

  She runs, her heart hammering, up the central avenue.

  And.

  Everywhere there is steam and smoke. Ash and motes of fire.

  Thunder!

  Raine’s legs burn, but her heart is singing. It feels like the tide turning. She rea
ches the smoking mess that’s left of the barricades alongside Yuri Hale’s command squad and the Hartkin, under Rom Odi. The dead are everywhere, some just painted as shadows by the force of the explosion. The metal flooring has been torn up. But the Sighted are many, and they are not quite beaten yet.

  Two dozen figures marshal in the smoke, their armour glinting in the forge light. It was Laxian Home Guard armour, once, but the yellow and blue heraldry markings have been scorched off or overpainted. Every single one has marked their face. Raine fires Penance three times. Blood joins the smoke in the air, misted by the explosive rounds. Where it scatters on Raine’s silver chest-plate, it looks black. The Antari light the forge with las-fire, moving up to what’s left of the barricades and firing over and around them. Two more of the dug-in Laxians fall heavily, their guns going quiet. One of the Hartkin falls in return. He screams before going quiet just as the guns did.

  A stun grenade bounces off the barricades and lands among the Antari. Raine sees Yuri Hale throw it back, and follow with one of his own, only he doesn’t carry stun grenades. What Hale throws is a frag grenade. When they both go off in short succession, the Sighted are blinded. Then they are burned, just as Hale promised.

  ‘Push forwards!’ Hale shouts.

  The Antari obey, taking the moment afforded to them by the explosions, but then a whirring sound cuts the air. Raine recognises it.

  A heavy stubber.

  ‘Down!’ Raine shouts, dropping into a slide as the large calibre rounds put dents and holes in the wreckage of the barricades around her. She hears screams from her side. Hears Hale cursing.

  Raine chances a look around the cover. The stubber isn’t mounted. One of the Sighted is holding it. She is walking braced, letting the barrel run hot as she tracks the Antari going to ground. The roar of the gun is absolutely deafening, which makes the absence of it all the more apparent when it stops suddenly.

  Raine looks up over the cover in time to see Lydia Zane raise her hand to the heavy gunner. The stubber crumples and deforms from the barrel down until it detonates in the Sighted’s hands. The Sighted screams, but that stops abruptly too as she is also crumpled and deformed under the telekinetic pressure.