It was only later, after she and Dalin had eaten their first good meal in a month and Yoncy was sleeping and content on milk-broth, that she found the cap-pin at the bottom of the pack: silver, clean, an Imperial eagle with the double head and the inscription Tanith First, by the Grace of the God-Emperor of Terra on the scroll held in the clawed feet.
In the gloomy dugout, her belly full, her wards fed and content, Tona Criid sat back by the light of a fire kindled from Guard-issue chemical blocks and wondered where she would pin the crest. As gang-badges went, it was better than most.
Behind Veyveyr Gate, the dead dominated the streets and squares.
Teams of Vervun Primary, work militia and Munitorum labourers, their faces masked by breathers or strips of torn cloth, carried the dead from the battle away from the smouldering railhead and laid them out in the open places north of Veyveyr for identification and disposal.
Agun Soric had brought his workforce in from the Commercia Refuge after the fighting had died down, and he had put them to work assisting the morbid but necessary duty.
He wanted to fight. Gak, but that brave Vervun Primary officer—what was his name? Racine! The one who’d given them the chance to pull their weight preparing the defence. He’d given Soric the taste of it. But for want of proper weapons, Soric and his people would have been at the front that morning. Let Ferrozoica tremble to face the wrath of smeltery workers from Vervun One with the blood up!
From what he’d been able to learn from those milling about him—some off-world Guard, some NorthCol—Soric knew the ferocious battle had ended with Zoica pushed out against all odds. He hoped to see Racine soon and slap the man’s back and hear how the pioneer efforts his workers had put in had helped to win the day by building defences the enemy couldn’t overrun.
There was time enough. With smeltery workers Gannif, Fafenge and Modj, Soric began loading corpses onto a handcart. It was filthy bestial work. They tried to wrap each body in a skein of linen and they’d been told to take tags and mark the identity of each on a data-slate. But some bodies didn’t come up in one piece. Some were only parts. Some parts didn’t match up obviously with others.
Some were still alive.
The place was a charnel house. Bodycarts moved all around them, medical and clearance personnel milled around and the wounded shuffled in slow, weary lines away from the gate railhead, many exhibiting awful injuries. Every now and then, they made way for a truck or a trundling medical Chimera, speeding away to the medical halls.
Soric, his hip braced on his axe-rake crutch, leaned down and slid his paper-gloved hands under the armpits of a blackened, legless corpse.
As he raised the cadaver, it groaned.
“Medic! Medic!” he cried out, pulling back from the ruined thing he had been touching.
A thickset medical officer pushed through the milling crowd, a man in his fifties with a silver beard and the look of an off-worlder about him. Under his hall-issue crimson apron he wore black fatigues and Guard-issue boots.
“Alive?” the medic asked Soric.
“Gak me, I suppose so. Tried to move him.”
The medic took out a flexible tube, put one end to his ear and the other to the blackened torso.
“Dead. You must have squeezed air out of the lungs when you lifted him.”
Soric nodded as the medic stood up, folding his scope-tube away into his shoulder-slung pack.
“You’re off-world, right?” asked Soric.
“What?” asked the medic, distracted.
“Off-worlder?”
The medic nodded curtly. “Tanith First. Chief medic.”
Soric stuck out a hand, then pulled the paper glove off it. “Thank you,” he said.
The medic paused, surprised, then took the hand and shook it.
“Dorden, Gaunt’s First-and-Only.”
“Soric. I used to run that place.” Soric gestured over his shoulder at the ruin of Vervun Smeltery One east of the railhead.
“This is a bad time for all of us,” Dorden said, studying the bullish, noble man who leaned on his crutch, black with ash.
Soric nodded.
“That eye wound… has it been treated?” asked Dorden, stepping forward.
Soric held up his hand. “Old news, friend, weeks old. There are others more needy of your skills.”
As if on cue, VPHC troops wheeled past a cart carrying a screaming, blood-soaked NorthCol soldier.
Mtane and one of Curth’s people hurried to it.
Dorden looked round at Soric. “You thanked me. Why?”
Soric shrugged. “I’ve been through this from the start. We were left to die. You didn’t have to come here but you did and I thank you for it.”
Dorden shook his head. “Warmaster Macaroth sends us where he wills. I’m glad to be able to help, however.”
“Without you off-worlders, Vervunhive would be dead. That’s why I thank you.”
“I appreciate it. Mine is often a thankless task.”
“Have you seen Major Racine? Vervun Primary? He’s a good man…”
Dorden shook his head and turned to where stretcher-bearers were beginning to bring the Tanith wounded out of the warzone. Troopers Milo and Baffels were carrying Manik, howling from the wound to his groin, blood dribbling over the edges of the stretcher.
Dorden moved in to deal with Manik. He was sure the young trooper was going to bleed out any moment.
He looked around at Baffels and Milo as he worked. “Racine? You know what happened to him?”
Dorden’s hands were already slippery with Manik’s blood. The groin artery had burst and he couldn’t tie it. It was pulling back into the body cavity and Dorden bellowed for Lesp to bring dean blades.
“Major Racine?” Milo said, standing back from Manik’s stretcher, adjusting the dressing on his shoulder wound. “He died. Under a flat-crab. He killed it, but he died.”
Soric listened to the off-world boy and shook his head sadly.
Lesp stumbled over the rubble and brought Dorden a scalpel. Dorden used it to try and open the screaming Manik’s groin wide enough so he could push his fingers in and pull the severed artery down to clamp it. It was too late. Manik bled out through his body cavity and died with Dorden’s hand still inside him.
“Let me take him,” Soric said and, with his men, he gently lifted Manik’s body onto his wheel-cart. Dorden was almost shocked by the reverence.
“Every soul for the hive, and the hive for every soul,” Soric said over his shoulder to the blood-soaked Dorden as he wheeled the dead Ghost away.
* * * * *