Old Soldiers Never Die - Sandy Mitchell Read online

  “Wait,” I said, “forget that. Ask him if they’ve still got a stockpile of chemical munitions.”

  “Gas shells, got it,” Jurgen replied, with a brief nod to confirm that he’d properly understood the message, before disappearing again in search of a vox.

  “I don’t see what good they’ll do,” Kasteen said. “You can’t poison something that’s already dead.”

  “We won’t have to,” I said. “The shells are set to airburst, to disperse the payload as widely as possible. If we substitute vaccine phials for the original load, one barrage ought to be enough to take out the largest concentration of revenants.”

  “That would work,” Moroe agreed, after staring blankly into space for a moment. “Assuming the prevailing weather patterns hold, which seems approximately eighty-seven point three two four per cent probable over the next nineteen hours, falling to—”

  “Thank you, magos, that seems very reassuring,” I cut in hastily.

  “We should take out enough to turn the tide, at least,” Kasteen said, with rather more confidence than I felt. “After that, we can clear the city sector by sector.”

  “And then the other pockets of infection,” Samier added. He was gazing at me with the faintly bovine expression of awestruck admiration I was more used to seeing on the faces of civilians at official receptions. “You truly walk in the footsteps of the Emperor, commissar.”

  “No more than we all do,” I said, feeling a show of self-effacement would be best at this point. Sure enough, it had precisely the effect I’d anticipated.

  “Don’t be so modest, Ciaphas,” Kasteen said. “If this works, you’ve just saved the planet.”

  “If,” I said quietly, conscious, not for the first time, of how much could hang on so little a word.

  Editorial Note:

  Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if the additional clarity afforded By the material presented here is worth the effort of reading; But in this case I must regret­tably conclude that it is. Although Sulla’s prose is as much an ordeal to wade through as ever, she does summarise the events of the wider campaign to which Cain, typically, gives short shrift.

  From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: the Early Campaigns and Glori­ous Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101.M42.

  In those last desperate days we were hard pressed indeed; for, hard as we fought, and despite the advantages we possessed of greater speed, mobility and ranged firepower, these were matched by the countervailing advantage of our enemy, that of superior numbers. An advantage, in fact, which could only increase, since every one of us who fell was a potential recruit to the dire ranks of the walking dead: I soon lost count of the number of times I saw some sham­bling revenant sporting the uniform of one of our allied regiments, and began to dread the day when I was to behold the ravaged remains of some familiar visage from our own among them. How our gallant comrades in arms were able to bear the sight of the cadavers of those they’d fought alongside turned to so fell a purpose I could scarce imagine, but the toll taken on their morale must have been considerable, and I could only commend their fortitude and devotion to the Emperor.

  As the number of revenants continued to rise, and of those defend­ing Viasalix continued to dwindle, a change began to come over the wandering packs of the unquiet dead. Whereas at first they had been relatively few in number, they began to coalesce into far larger groups, presenting a correspondingly greater threat to those who sought to confront them; so much so that, until the lesson was learned, a number of patrols were overwhelmed attempting to engage them at close quarters, erroneously trusting to the firepower of their weapons to preserve them from harm. After that, we began to keep the ranges open, and to keep squads close enough together to support one another.

  Even this proved insufficient to fully prevail against their ever-increasing numbers, however, and with great reluctance we were forced to relinquish control of outlying areas, concentrating our forces in the centre of the city around the governor’s palace. As if scenting victory, the hellish legions of the undead flocked inwards, surrounding the fortified precincts, and laying siege to Lentonia’s greatest symbol of Imperial power.

  Why things without reason should act in such a manner seemed baffling, all the more so since they had shown not the least sign of tactical acumen up to this point. The shocking reason for their change in behaviour was shortly to be discovered, however, and by none other than Commissar Cain, who, true to his quietly heroic nature, unhesitatingly sought out the most hazardous assignment for himself.

  NINE

  If I’m honest, I was hoping for a relatively quiet life after that, basking in the kudos of having come up with the solution to our problem, while someone else got on with the job of implement­ing it. I didn’t get one, of course; for some reason, it seemed, every revenant in the city chose that night to throw themselves against our defensive line, in a never-ending wave of shuffling carrion.

  “I didn’t know there were that many cadavers on the continent, never mind in Viasalix,” I said, viewing the tightly-packed streets beyond the perimeter walls by the light of the arc lamps mounted around them, which, in happier times, illuminated the front of the building for the aesthetic appreciation of passers-by during the hours of darkness. Now they’d been turned to cast their radiance farther out, across the streets and the dark expanse of the park beyond; a pale shimmer of reflected light deep within it marked the marble sides of the imposing sepul­chre at the centre of the necropolis, through which Jurgen and I had passed so dramatically. Everywhere I looked there were more shuffling revenants, thronging the highways and packing the lawns and gardens of the park so deeply that the fringes of the pack faded into invisibility beyond the reach of the lights. “There must be thousands of them.”

  “There are always more dead than you think,” Broklaw said sar­donically, sweeping his amplivisor across the throng. A muffled drumbeat of weapons discharging punctuated our conversation, as the troopers defending the palace precincts poured a constant stream of fire into the densely packed meat below, while our other units harried their flanks. But it was like trying to flense a leviathan with teaspoons; however much damage we did, there were always more revenants to take the place of the fallen.

  “Something’s got ’em stirred up,” my aide said, materialising unex­pectedly at my shoulder, the usual harbinger of his approach having been masked by the stench of corruption rising from below. He handed me a message slip, this time mercifully unmarked by any traces of a snack. “Major Divas’s compliments, and they do have gas shells among the inventory.”

  “Well, that’s something,” I said, as a party of troopers trotted across the courtyard below and began hosing down the cadavers beyond the railing with flamers. The smoke began to drift in our direction, and the smell abruptly became ten times worse. “He can deploy the vaccine as soon as the magos and the hierophant can create another batch.”

  Callister and Moroe had left with Samier a few hours before, ahead of the revenants’ arrival, and with any luck would have begun their work by now behind a screen of Tallarn troops determined to keep the carrion off their backs; a job they were welcome to, so far as I was concerned. At least it didn’t look as though they’d have much interference to worry about; all the revenants on Lentonia seemed fixated on us, for some reason.

  “You really think we can hold this lot off for that long?” Broklaw asked, his tone enough to tell me what answer he’d give to that ques­tion if prompted.

  “The Emperor protects,” I said, as if I meant it, and fervently hoped that He would: because so far as I could see, the major was right. The flamer troopers below were already scuttling back into cover, their still burning victims being mashed against the barrier with a cracking of ribs audible even over the crackling of the flames as the wrought-iron railing bent visibly under the pressure of the press of uncountable bodies behind it. A few chips of rockcrete began to work loose from the footings, pattering like gravel a
gainst the cob­bles, and I flinched involuntarily. At this rate we’d be overrun in a couple of hours.

  Leaving Broklaw to his gloomy prognosis, I made the rounds of the jittery troopers, boosting morale as best I could with rote plati­tudes and the occasional bleak jest, but to a man and a woman they were spooked, and I couldn’t blame them. I was too, though I could hardly admit it, taking refuge in a pose of grim resolve which I found relatively easy to maintain. I concluded my peregrinations back at the operations centre, where Kasteen greeted me bleakly.

  “It’s not looking good,” she said, indicating the hololith.

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed. I couldn’t say for sure that every revenant in the city was now besieging us, but it certainly seemed that way. There were certainly few, if any, contact icons elsewhere that I could see, the groups of them which had been drawn to the borders of the quarantine zones by the prospect of fresh meat having abandoned their battle of attrition against the dwindling Vostroyan defenders on the very brink of victory. “Any idea what’s attracting them here?”

  “Not a clue,” Kasteen said, “unless it’s your magnetic personality.”

  “Hardly likely,” I said. There were foes in the past which had sought me out, under the delusion that my reputation was merited, but they’d been in search of an honourable duel against a worthy opponent, and died disappointed on both counts. But they’d been sentient, even cultured in their own bizarre fashion, whether xenos or Chaos-touched, and these lumps of rotting meat animated by an unnatural virus weren’t even self-aware.

  “Whatever it is, it’s a big mistake on their part,” Kasteen concluded, with more bravado than sober tactical analysis so far as I could see.

  “Let’s hope so,” I said, enlarging the image of the area around the palace. The artillery battery was only a couple of kilometres away, but until Moroe got another batch of vaccine produced, and Callister blessed it, we’d get no help from there. We could always call in a conventional artillery strike on the densely-packed revenants, of course, but they were so close to us we were liable to take the brunt of the barrage ourselves if things went wrong, and we weren’t quite that desperate. Yet. Then, as the three-dimensional representation of the palace and its environs continued to expand, my eye fell on a crucial detail I’d so far missed. “What are these tunnels?”

  Kasteen shrugged. “Just the usual, I suppose. Remnants of the undercity[32] , and a bolthole for the governor if things went wrong.” (Which Jona’s predecessor had never had the chance to use, his assassins having rather unsportingly struck in the open air.)

  “Of course.” I felt the palms of my hands begin to tingle, as a dis­tinctly unwelcome idea insinuated itself. “They are properly sealed, aren’t they?” The last thing we needed was to be outflanked by a mob of walking cadavers popping up from beneath our feet.

  “They are,” Kasteen assured me, to my great and unspoken relief. She adjusted the display, bringing the tunnel system fully into view. “There’s an old flood barrier here, and the sluices have been welded shut.” She indicated another choke point. “That’s supposed to be an escape route, leading into the service tunnels, but the household guard had it bricked up during the insurgency, while they tried to work out which side to support.”

  “So long as it’s still holding,” I said. It wasn’t likely that any of the revenants would work out how to use a spade or a pick, but I hadn’t lived that long by taking anything for granted. Then my innate affin­ity for tunnel systems kicked in, and with it a sudden realisation. “That service tunnel runs almost as far as the artillery park.”

  “So it does,” Kasteen said speculatively, clearly having the same idea that I’d had. “And we’ve still got the phials of vaccine the hierophant blessed.”

  Because we’d hoped to get our troopers immunised with all due dispatch, but, in the event, the mass attack by the revenants had left too little time to get that organised. She turned to me. “You’re our resident expert on tunnel fighting[33] . How quickly can you get through to the battery?”

  “That depends on how clear the tunnels are,” I said, considering the matter. There was no telling what might be lurking in the lightless labyrinth, but I’d lay good odds it was a lot better than what cur­rently had us surrounded. On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem too eager to make a run for it, while the rest of the regiment kept the revenants off my back. “But I’m not sure I should be the one to go. It sticks in my craw leaving the rest of you in the lurch, and I don’t mind admitting it.” For a moment I wondered if I’d overplayed my hand, but Kasteen was already smiling ruefully.

  “I knew you’d say that. But no one else knows tunnels like you do. You’re our best hope.” Her smile hardened. “In fact, you’re our only hope. If you don’t get through, we’ll be like the poor devils outside by the morning. If they’ve even left enough to get up again after they’ve finished feeding.”

  “No pressure, then,” I jested feebly, trying not to think about it. We’d served together a long time by that point, and the notion of losing the closest thing I had to friends was a dispiriting one.

  “I’ll assign a squad to go with you,” Kasteen said, which was a com­fort; at least I’d have a demi-score of troopers to hide behind. Then I thought a little more about the implications, and shook my head with a pang of heartfelt regret.

  “I’ll just take Jurgen,” I said. “We’ll move faster and more quietly alone.” Not to mention the fact that if I wasn’t able to get through, and found it more prudent to run in the opposite direction, I’d be spared the necessity of fabricating an excuse for the sudden change of plans.

  “You’re the expert,” Kasteen said.

  “Yes,” I agreed, rather wishing I wasn’t.

  TEN

  Accessing the network of tunnels beneath the city turned out to be relatively straightforward, the entrance to the erstwhile governor’s funk hole being hidden behind a butt of some local wine which the household troops who’d sealed the portal had apparently decided would be easier to shift if they drained it first, judging by the fruity aroma and the litter of broken goblets they’d left behind them when the job was done. By the time I’d collected the precious phials and stowed them carefully in a padded satchel which I slung from my shoulder so it rode behind my hip, mindful of the danger of foul­ing my laspistol should I need to draw it in a hurry, a group of our sappers had already smashed their way through the newly-cemented brickwork. They leaned on their crowbars as Jurgen and I stuck a cau­tious head apiece into the passageway beyond, which was smoothly finished in rendered rockcrete, no doubt so a fleeing aristocrat wouldn’t get his robes mucky.

  “Smells a bit,” my aide commented, as unconscious of the irony as always, and I nodded, filtering the ambient odour from the one beside me. A faint cloacal tang betrayed the proximity of a sewer, overlaid with traces of dust, mould and damp, and for a moment I felt quite nostalgic for the warrens of my childhood. Most sig­nificantly, however, the unmistakable stench of corrupted flesh was blessedly absent: if there were any revenants down here, they cer­tainly weren’t massing for an attack.

  “Seems clear, though,” I said, and tapped the vox-bead in my ear. “We’re moving out.”

  “Emperor speed,” Kasteen said, her voice attenuated by the tiny vox-receiver. “The Twelfth are expecting you.”

  “Tell Toren to get some tanna on,” I said, with what I felt to be a transparent display of bravado. “We’ll probably need one when we arrive.” I almost expected Divas himself to chime in at that point, with one of his usual fatuous remarks about wishing he was with us, but heard nothing on the 12th Field Artillery’s operational frequency apart from a faint hissing of static. Which was hardly surprising; the low-powered signals from a vox-bead wouldn’t punch through much of the intervening rock and soil.

  “I’ll do that,” Kasteen promised, as we stepped through the ragged hole in the brickwork, and I turned back to the loitering sappers.

  “Seal it up,” I said, despite
my natural aversion to having my line of retreat cut off. They were going to anyway, so I might as well pretend it was my idea.

  Not waiting for them to comply, because it would feel too much like being sealed into my own tomb, I led the way into the darkness, Jurgen trotting beside me. Luminators had been set into the ceiling during the tunnel’s construction[34] , but we refrained from kindling them, mindful of attracting attention. Instead, we followed the rela­tively faint cone of light cast by the luminator my aide had clipped to the bayonet lugs of his lasgun, which did the job more than ade­quately. I was also heartened to see the melta he favoured when expecting more trouble than usual slung across his back, where he could reach it easily if needed; a wise precaution, as things turned out.

  After a hundred metres or so we reached the end of the new tunnel, and found ourselves facing a sheet metal door, somewhat incongru­ously bearing the cogwheel sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Jurgen shouldered his lasgun, and reached for the melta.

  “Wait a moment,” I said; an obstruction here simply didn’t make sense. If I was building a secret passage for the express purpose of running for my life along it, I wouldn’t want anything to hold me up, even for a second. I placed my fingertips against the cold steel surface, and pushed cautiously; sure enough a pressure latch clicked open, revealing a faint crack of darkness. “Douse the light.” My aide complied, readying his lasgun again, and I pushed the panel all the way open, silently, on well-lubricated hinges.

  As I’d expected, the floor on the other side was level with the sur­face we were standing on, tripping and falling flat on your face hardly being conducive to an expeditious getaway, and I sidled out into the tunnel beyond, letting my other senses expand to fill the void left by the absence of light. The smell of the sewer was stronger here, which was hardly surprising, as it connected to the service tunnel we were now in by way of an access shaft a few hundred metres further along; as I strained my ears, I could just discern a faint, liquid trickling in that direction. Overlaid with it, and distorted by the echoes, rodents scuttered and chittered, alarmed by our intrusion, but, to my relief, I heard nothing like the shambling gait of a revenant.