Old Soldiers Never Die - Sandy Mitchell Read online

  I looked around for Kasteen as we entered the room, but it seemed she wasn’t back from her meeting with Samier yet. The two of them were supposed to be coordinating strategies for hunting down revenants more effectively[26] ; but every day saw more of the walking corpses rising from the dead, and, barring a miracle, we’d be back on the defensive for good before long. At least the ones I’d found in the necropolis, drawn there by the abundance of carrion to feed on, had been cleared out by flamer-wielding Guardsmen by now; but for every pocket we found and cleansed, there were probably a dozen others left undiscovered, where the taint continued to fester and the threat continued to grow.

  “Commissar.” Moroe was waiting for us, gazing at the hololith display, in which the number of runes indicating active units con­tinued to dwindle with dispiriting inevitability. Divas’s artillery company was still in the fight, though, and I was unexpectedly cheered by that; he could be undeniably irritating at times, but in my vocation you make precious few friends, and I’d have been loath to lose one, particularly in so vile a manner. “I have the infor­mation you requested.”

  “Any progress?” Broklaw asked, clearly expecting the answer to be in the negative.

  “Some,” the tech-priest replied, with the flat intonation favoured by his brethren, leaving his listeners to infer as best they could whether he was pleased, despondent, or indifferent; which, given his audible emotion at our first meeting, I hoped was some sort of encouraging sign. “We have indeed succeeded in isolating promising antibodies in the blood of the Tallarn soldiery, just as Commissar Cain surmised.”

  “Excellent,” I said, feeling the first faint flare of hope since this nightmare had begun. “Is there any prospect of producing a vaccine from it?”

  “More than a prospect,” Moroe said, in the same maddening mono­tone, which left me struggling as before to discern whether this was good news or bad. “We have succeeded in producing one, which, with the correct bio-cultures, we can synthesise in greater quanti­ties. However, our trials with infected subjects have been entirely negative.”

  “You mean it doesn’t work,” Broklaw said, in the tone of a man who’s just won a bet with himself, and badly doesn’t want to pay up.

  “Precisely,” Moroe said. “For reasons which, quite frankly, continue to elude us.”

  “How so?” I asked, then held up a forestalling hand. “In plain, sim­ple Gothic.” I’d spoken to too many tech-priests over the years not to realise that the rider was essential, if I didn’t want to be subjected to an interminable lecture that only a fellow member of the Cult Mechanicus would have understood in the first place.

  The magos biologis looked as uncomfortable as it was possible to with half a face composed of immobile ironmongery. “The serum should prove effective,” he said. “We can find no biological reason why it doesn’t.”

  “I’m sure you’ll discover one soon,” I said, though whether to bol­ster his morale or my own I had no idea. “How’s the governor?”

  “Degrading rapidly,” Moroe said, his monotonous voice lending an air of sombre finality to the pronouncement. “Hierophant Callister is providing spiritual succour, which seems all the aid possible at the moment.” Anyone else would have been granted the Emperor’s Peace long ago, but, as I said, political expediency meant keeping the poor bastard alive as long as we could. Besides, I suppose Moroe needed someone to test his potions on.

  “Is he still around?” Broklaw asked, and I nodded; the ecclesiarch had turned up the previous evening, with the maps we’d asked for pinpointing the mass burial sites, and seemed in no hurry to return to the relative danger of the revenant-infested city; which I can’t say I blamed him for[27] .

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t come down with it too,” I said, conscious that I’d spent some time with the stricken governor myself, and been lucky to get away with it.

  “Possible, but unlikely,” Moroe assured us. “The virus spreads rela­tively slowly in most cases, and typically takes two to three weeks to manifest.”

  “Then how come Jona came down with it so fast?” I asked. A memory of our wild drive through the necropolis bubbled to the surface. “And his bodyguard, Klarys. She was killed and resurrected far quicker than that.”

  “I was speaking of airborne infection,” Moroe said, pedantic as only a cogboy could be. “Governor Worden was scratched by a revenant in the cathedral, which must have delivered the virus directly into his bloodstream. Such a mechanism may well account for the frequently observed accelerated progress of the disease in others directly wounded by them.”

  “Jurgen,” I said, a cold knot of horror tying itself around my gut. One of the revenants had laid his face open, a far deeper and more serious wound than Jona had suffered. If the cogboy was right, my aide was probably doomed.

  “He’s over there,” Broklaw said, completely mistaking my meaning, and a second or two later the aroma of socks of archaeological antiq­uity announced Jurgen’s arrival.

  “Thought you might need something to eat, sir,” he said, hold­ing out a plate of sandwiches made with some local cheese, which smelled as though it had spent some time in an ogryn’s athletic sup­port, and a steaming mug of tanna.

  “Thank you, Jurgen,” I said, taking them mechanically, although you can be sure I would have starved rather than consume either under the circumstances, and studying his face as I did so. The dress­ing on his cheek was now pale grey, but there was no sign of sepsis in any of the skin that I could see between clumps of beard and eruptions of psoriasis, his flesh remaining as pallid as ever beneath its patina of grime. No sense in taking any risks, though, given the virulence of what we were dealing with. I indicated the dressing as I deposited the plate on a convenient desk, and kept my voice casual. “Isn’t it time you took that to the medicae for assessment?”

  “This?” Jurgen looked baffled for a moment, and scratched the pad­ded bandage absently. “I’d forgotten all about it, to be honest.”

  “Then it’s high time you were reminded.” I winced theatrically, con­scious that I needed an excuse to accompany him without Broklaw and the magos thinking anything was out of the ordinary. “I’d better come too. See if they’ve got anything for heartburn.”

  “If they have, bring some back,” Broklaw said, with a jaundiced look at the abandoned snack. “That cheese is lethal.”

  Editorial Note:

  Appended without comment.

  From The Liberation of Lentonia, by Jonas Worden, uncompleted manuscript.

  Vox record now. Can’t hold... thing. Makes marks.

  So tired. Can’t sleep.

  Dreams of blood. Always blood.

  Can’t be sick. For them.

  Hate this job.

  Hate them.

  Always blood...

  EIGHT

  I waited tensely, while the Sister Hospitaller on duty in the aid station peeled the soiled primary aid strip away from my aide’s face. He winced a little as it tore free, and a few clinging facial hairs and fragments of scab accompanied it into the clinical waste bin. The Hospitaller tutted.

  “Don’t be such a baby. There’s nothing there.”

  “There isn’t?” I craned my neck to look at site of the wound, remembering the slick of blood and the ragged edge of torn flesh I’d patched up less than seventy-five hours[28] before.

  “See for yourself.” The Sister swabbed the last of the clotted blood away, creating an oasis of flesh-coloured skin among the encircling grime, in the centre of which a barely-visible ridge of pinkish scar tissue was fad­ing back to a healthy glow; or at least as close to it as Jurgen ever got.

  I blinked in bemusement, while my aide turned his head from side to side, examining the site of the wound from every angle in the reflective surface of the Sister’s desktop pict screen. “Told you it was only a scratch,” he said.

  * * *

  Which might have resolved matters to my aide’s satisfaction, but certainly didn’t to mine. If Moroe was right, and he’d certainly
seen enough cases, no one should have been able to shrug off the infec­tion which would have followed on from a revenant bite as surely as night followed day. True, Jurgen had been remarkably healthy for as long as we’d served together, most of the bugs which had tried to infect him finding rather too late that it was more like the other way around, but he showed no signs of contagion at all. Come to that, the gash in his cheek shouldn’t have knitted together anything like as quickly as it had done either.

  The only possible explanation I could see was that it had something to do with his peculiar talent for nullifying the powers of the warp; but that led inescapably to the conclusion that there must be something unnatural about the virus itself. Which would certainly explain why Moroe’s vaccine didn’t seem to be working; it probably was on the purely physical level, but if the problem went deeper, and warpcraft of some kind was involved, that wasn’t going to be enough.

  So I brooded in silence as Jurgen and I made our way back to the operations room, wondering what to do for the best. If I passed on my insight to Moroe, he might be able to find a way of mak­ing the vaccine work, and save this world, its population, and my own hide, in ascending order of importance. On the other hand, doing so without revealing my aide’s secret, thereby bringing down the wrath of Amberley by making him a high priority target for any other inquisitors in the vicinity who fancied adding a blank to their entourage[29] , seemed impossible. And why were the Tallarns relatively immune to the disease? It was hardly likely there were any blanks among them, let alone that they all were.

  So musing, I passed along the corridors of the palace paying little attention to my surroundings, only coming back to myself with a start as someone called my name. Turning, I found Kasteen walking towards us, the Tallarn colonel unexpectedly at her heels.

  “Colonel. Colonel.” I greeted them each in turn, Kasteen first, then extended a hand to Samier. “I must confess I’m surprised to see you.”

  “And I to be here.” He sighed, with the air of one prepared to dis­charge an onerous duty. “But the hierophant is requesting an escort back to the cathedral precincts, and under the circumstances he’ll be safer in my Chimera than a civilian vehicle.”

  Which was undeniably true; but in his shoes I’d just have assigned the nearest duty sergeant to round up a squad of Guardsmen, instead of running the errand myself. But that was Tallarns for you, never slow to curry favour with the Ecclesiarchy, and I suppose he felt someone of the hierophant’s standing should be babysat by someone senior as a matter of protocol[30] .

  “I take it the meeting was productive?” I asked, and Kasteen nodded.

  “We’ve hammered out some new strategies,” she said. “I’ll be hold­ing a briefing in the morning.”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” I said, with a lack of sarcasm I found vaguely surprising. “I’m sure Colonel Samier’s experience of fight­ing these things on Ferantis will have given you some useful insights.”

  “Let us hope so,” Samier agreed. “Although at least here the packs are disorganised, operating entirely on instinct.”

  “And they weren’t on Ferantis?” I asked.

  The Tallarn colonel shook his head. “By no means. They were being herded by the blasphemous acolytes of the Great Enemy.”

  “You mean Chaos cultists?” I said, my head buzzing with a half-formed realisation. “Wyrds, sorcerers, that kind of thing?”

  “Worse,” Samier said, glowering. “Priests of the disease god.”

  “Nurgle,” I said, hearing an audible gasp from the Tallarn colonel’s aide at the very mention of the foul name. But Samier was made of sterner stuff.

  “Quite so.” He nodded. “They called this foul pestilence a blessing, and drove its victims against our guns. But we cleansed them all, in fire and our faith in the Emperor.”

  At which point Callister wandered into the hall, in earnest conver­sation with Moroe, the half-overheard gist of which was that Jona was on his way to check in at the Golden Throne before too much longer, and there didn’t seem a damn thing either of them could do about it. At the sight of them together, and the smell of my aide at my shoulder, the last pieces of the puzzle clicked together in my mind.

  “Magos,” I called. “Your grace, I think I have a solution to our problem.”

  “The governor’s condition has stabilised,” Moroe reported, a few hours later, walking into the command centre. “Physically, anyway, although very little of his mind is left. But how did you know?” Despite his best efforts to sound as bland as cogboys normally did, he couldn’t keep his astonishment entirely out of his voice, and I permitted myself the indulgence of feeling smug for a moment.

  “Seeing you and the hierophant together, it suddenly made sense,” I said. “Especially after what Colonel Samier had just told me. It just struck me that the contagion might have been spiritual as well as physical, and that the piety of his men was what had preserved them from it.” Which let me skirt neatly around the issue of Jurgen’s abnor­mal reaction to a revenant bite without having to mention it at all.

  “Which meant that blessing the vaccine would make it effective against the lingering taint of... of one of the Ruinous Powers,” Cal­lister cut in, to show he was keeping up, and fastidiously avoiding mention of Nurgle by name.

  “It seemed worth a try,” I said. “The Tallarns always say faith is the strongest weapon in their arsenal, and in this case it was literally true.”

  “Can you bless the rest of the stock?” Kasteen asked, bringing the discussion back from the realms of the numinous to the strictly practical, like the exemplary officer she was.

  “Of course.” The hierophant puffed himself up a little, clearly delighted to be the centre of attention. “Do you have much on hand?”

  “A few phials only,” Moroe admitted. “But now it’s proven its effi­cacy, we can produce more.”

  “Do we have enough on hand to immunise the regiment?” I asked, and the tech-priest nodded.

  “I would say so. Most of it, anyway.”

  “Throne be praised,” Kasteen said, to which the hierophant responded with a reflexive benediction. “Can we use it as a weapon too?”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Moroe said, allowing a taint of confusion to contaminate his carefully modulated tones.

  Samier, however, shared her warrior instincts, and nodded in instant understanding. “If it stabilised Governor Worden, it must have neutralised the virus in his system. What happens if the revenants get a dose?”

  “The animating virus in the brainstems should be eliminated, and the cadavers become inert,” the magos said, as though explaining the obvious, which to him I suppose it was.

  “You can hardly walk up to a pack of revenants and stick a needle in their arms, though, can you?” I asked sceptically.

  “That wouldn’t work,” Moroe said, completely missing the sar­casm, as tech-priests so often did, given their penchant for taking everything literally. “Their hearts don’t beat, so the serum wouldn’t circulate round their systems.”

  “So we’re back to killing them the hard way again?” Kasteen asked.

  “Perhaps not,” Callister said. “If the contagion is indeed a mani­festation of... the plague lord,” at which point he hesitated, still clearly uncomfortable with referring to one of the Dark Gods even in oblique terms, “mere contact with the consecrated fluid may be enough to exorcise the Chaotic taint.”

  “Leaving the antibodies free to soak through the tissues, and eradi­cate the virus,” Moroe added.

  “Then it sounds like we’re looking at spraying from the air,” I said, approaching the hololith and scanning the topographical display eagerly in search of anything that looked like a military aerodrome. “Do the militia have any aircraft available?”

  “Four squadrons of Valkyries,” Samier told me, without bothering to check any of the data-feeds. Since he’d been liaising with them for far longer than the rest of the expeditionary force, though, I was pre­pared to take his word f
or it without arguing. “Which, unfortunately, are of no use to us without pilots.”

  “There must be some left uninfected,” I said, and the Tallarn colonel shook his head.

  “One of the earliest outbreaks hit the ADC[31] barracks,” he said, looking chagrined. “We used aircraft extensively during our initial deployment.” Thus making sure their crews were the first to come into contact with the virus, of course.

  “What about shuttles, then?” I persisted. “There are plenty of ships in orbit we can requisition them from.”

  “Jona issued a planetary quarantine order, remember?” Kasteen said, her frustration burning through the forced calm of her delivery. “None of them can land until it’s rescinded.” Which we couldn’t do without revealing his condition to the entire planet.

  “Frakking great,” I said, with feeling. “How else are we supposed to disperse the stuff?” I turned, as a familiar odour wafted in my direc­tion, to find, as I’d expected, my aide approaching. “Yes, Jurgen, what is it?”

  “Vox-message, sir,” he replied, handing me a crumpled sheet of scrawled-on paper, which adhered unpleasantly to my fingertips as I took it. “From Major Divas. Wondering if you got his last one.” He squinted at the note. “Sorry about the jam stains.”

  “That’s all right.” I breathed deeply, remembering to use my mouth, and exhaled a calming breath, making use of the unex­pected interruption to restore a measure of calm to my demeanour. After all, I had a reputation for keeping a cool head in a crisis to maintain, however unmerited it actually was. “Tell him much as I appreciate the invitation, I’m not really free for social engagements at the moment.”

  “Very good, sir,” Jurgen said, and turned to leave, sidestepping the hololith on the way out. At which point my eye fell on the icon marking Divas’s artillery battery once more, and I called my aide back hastily, as a memory of our time serving in that unit together suddenly surfaced.