F
ROM THE RIM
of the wadi, looking west, it was possible to see Tel Utan itself, a jumble of terracotta blocks and walls capping a long, loaf-shaped hill ten kilometres away. The intervening landscape was a broken tract of ridges and ancient basins and, in the sidelong evening light, the basins had filled with shadows so black they looked like pools of ink. Soneka felt a comparable blackness in his heart: Tel Utan was proving to be their nemesis. For eight months, it had held them at bay, through a combination of terrain, tactics, stoicism and plain bad luck.
The Geno Five-Two Chiliad was one of the oldest brigades in the Imperial Army. An elite force of one thousand companies, it had a martial tradition that stretched back through the time of the Great Crusade and into the era of the Unification Wars that had preceded it. The geno was a proud member of the Old Hundred, the Strife Epoch regiments that the Emperor, in his grace, had maintained after Unification, provided they pledged loyalty to him. Many thousands of others had been forced to disband, or had been actively purged and neutered, depending on their level of resistance to the new order.
Peto Soneka had been born in Feodosiya, and had served, in his youth, in the local army, but he had petitioned eagerly for transfer into the Geno Five-Two, because of their illustrious reputation. He’d been with the geno for twenty-three years, achieving the rank of hetman. In that time, they hadn’t met a nut they couldn’t crack.
There had been tough dances along the way, of course there had. Off the top of his head, Soneka could mention Foechion, where they had slogged toe to toe for six weeks with the greenskins in lightless, frozen latitudes, and Zantium, where the Dragonoid cadres had almost bested them in a series of running battles and ambuscades.
But Nurth, Tel Utan in particular, was as stubborn as anything they’d ever met. Word was the Lord Commander was getting edgy, and no one wanted to be around Namatjira when that happened.
Soneka pulled his glare-shields back on. He was a lithe, slender man of forty-two years standard, though he could pass for twenty-five. He had a striking, angular head, with hard cheek and jaw lines, a pointed chin and a generous, full-lipped mouth full of gleaming white teeth that women found especially attractive. Like all of them, his skin had bronzed in the Nurthene light. He made a signal, and his bashaws brought the troops in along the rim of the wadi and down into the dry basins beyond. Geno armour followed them, bounding along on their treads, and spuming wakes of red dust behind them as they churned out across the basin floor. Soneka’s Centaur was waiting, its engine revving, but he waved it on. This was a time for walking.
There was half an hour of daylight left. Night, they had learned to their cost, belonged to the Nurthene. Soneka hoped to run his troop as far as the forward command post at CR23 before they lost the light. The last tangle with the Nurthene had slowed their advance considerably. Dislodging them from this country was like pulling out splinters.
Soneka’s troops looked very fine as they strode forwards. The geno uniform was a bulky, tight-buckled bodyglove of studded leather and armour links, with a waist-length cape of yellow merdacaxi, a Terran silk, much rougher and more hard-wearing than the pink silks of the Nurthene. The ornate leather armour was marked with devices and trimmed with fur, and the backs of their capes were richly embroidered with company emblems and motifs. They carried lightweight packs, munition slings, long sword bayonets, and the bottles of their double water rations, which clinked against the liqnite cylinders they had all been issued with. Standard weapons were laser carbines and RPG sowers, but some men lugged fire poles or support cannons. They were all big men, all genic bred and selected for muscle. Soneka was slight compared to most. Their headgear was spiked helms, either silvered steel or glossy orange, often edged with brims of fur or neck veils of beaded laces. The glare shields were goggle-eyed: bulbous, paired hemispheres of orange metal with black slits across them.
Soneka’s troop was coded the Dancers, a name that they’d owned for almost eight hundred years. In those last few minutes of daylight, the Dancers were going to take the worst beating they had ever known.
‘S
O, WHO
’
S THAT
?’ asked Bronzi quietly. ‘Do you know?’
Bashaw Tche, busy with the wrapper of a ration, shrugged. ‘Some kind of something,’ he grunted.
‘You’re a world of use, you know that?’ Bronzi replied, punching Tche in the arm. The bashaw, of the regimental uterine stock and considerably bigger in all measurements than Bronzi, gave his hetman a tired look.
‘Some kind of specialist, they said,’ he volunteered.
‘Who said?’
‘The Uxor’s aides.’
The Jokers had reached the CR23 forward command post about an hour earlier, and had been billeted in the eastern wing of the old, brick-built fort. Chart Referent 23 was a Nurthene outpost captured two weeks before, and lay just eight kilometres from the Tel. It formed part of the ‘noose’ that Lord Commander Namatjira was tightening around the enemy city.
Hurtado Bronzi, a sixty-year veteran possessed of boundless charisma and a stocky body going to seed, leaned out of the billet doorway and took another deliberate stare along the red brick passageway. At the far end, where it opened out into a central courtyard, he could see the newcomer standing in conversation with Honen Mu and some of her aides. The newcomer was a big fellow, really big, a giant dressed in a dust-grey mail sleeve and a head shawl, with a soot-dulled bolter slung over his shoulder.
‘He’s a sizeable fugger, though,’ said Bronzi, idly toying with the small gold box dangling on the chain around his neck.
‘Don’t stare so,’ Tche advised, gnawing on his bar.
‘I’m just saying. Bigger than you, even.’
‘Stop staring.’
‘He’s only where I happen to be aiming my eyes, Tche,’ Bronzi said.
Something was going on. Bronzi had a feeling in his water. Something had been going on for the last few days. Uxor Honen was unusually tight-lipped, and had been unavailable on several occasions.
The man
was
big. He towered over Honen, though everyone towered over her. Even so, he had to be two twenty, two twenty-five maybe. That was gene-build big,
Astartes
big even. Honen was looking up at him, craning up, nodding once in a while at a conversation Bronzi couldn’t catch. Despite the fact that she was conferring with a giant, Honen’s posture was as tenacious as ever: spiky and fierce, like a fighting cock, full of vigour and attitude. Bronzi had long suspected Uxor Honen’s body language was a compensation for her doll-like physique.
Bronzi looked back into the billet hall. His Jokers were busy sacking out, drinking and eating, playing bones. Some of them were cleaning off weapons or polishing armour scutes, wiping away the red dust that had slowly caked on during the long day in the field.
‘Think I might go for a little stroll,’ Bronzi told Tche. The bashaw, munching, simply stared down at the hetman’s feet. Bronzi was still fully armoured, but he’d taken off his boots when they’d arrived. His thick, dirty toes splayed out through the holes in his woollen socks.
‘Not cutting a dash?’ Bronzi asked. Tche shrugged.
‘Well, fug it.’ Bronzi pulled off his embroidered cape, his webbing and his weapon belt, and dumped them on the baked earth floor. He kept hold of his water bottles. ‘I just need a refill,’ he said.
Bronzi padded out into the passageway, his water bottles dangling from his pudgy fingers. He was disappointed to see that the giant had vanished. The Uxor and her aides were heading away across the courtyard, talking together.
Honen turned as Bronzi wandered into the yard. The air was still warm and the day’s heat was radiating out of the shadowed brick. Evening had washed the sky overhead a dark, resiny purple.
‘Hetman Bronzi? Was there something you wanted?’ she called. The words came pinging out of her mouth like tiny chips of ice.
Bronzi smiled back amiably, and waggled the empty water bottles. ‘Going to the pump,’ he said.
Uxor Honen pushed through her waiting aides and came towards him. She was such a tiny thing, built like a girl-child, compact and slight. She wore a black bodyglove and a grey wrap, and walked on heeled slippers, which served only to emphasise her lack of stature. Her face was oval, her pursed mouth small, and her skin so very black. Her eyes seemed huge. At twenty-three, she was exceptionally young, given her level of responsibility, but that was often the way with uxors. Bronzi had a bit of a thing for her: so perfect, so delicate, so much power emanating from her tiny frame.
‘Going to the pump?’ she asked, switching from Low Gothic to Edessan. She often did that. She made a habit of speaking to the men, one on one, in their native tongues. Bronzi supposed these displays of linguistic skill were meant to seem cordial while emphasising her formidable intelligence. Where Bronzi came from – Edessa – funnily enough, that was called showing off.
He switched with her. ‘For water. I’m out.’
‘Water rationing was done earlier, hetman,’ she said. ‘I think that’s just an excuse to be nosey.’
Bronzi made what he hoped was a loveable shrug. ‘You know me,’ he said.
‘That’s why I think you’re being nosey,’ Honen said.
They stared at one another. Her enormous eyes slowly travelled down to his stockinged feet. He saw her fighting a smile. The trick with Flonen was to appeal to her sense of humour. That was why he’d left his boots off. Bronzi tried to hold his stomach in and still look natural.
‘Hard, isn’t it?’ she smirked.
What’s that now?’
‘Holding that gut of yours in?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, uxor,’ he replied.
Honen nodded. ‘And I don’t know why we keep you around, Hetman Bronzi,’ she remarked. ‘Isn’t there a mandatory fitness requirement any more?’
‘Or a weight threshold?’ suggested one of her aides: four blonde, teenage girls, who gathered around Honen with wry smiles on their faces.
‘Oh, you may mock me,’ Bronzi said.
‘We may,’ agreed one of the aides.
‘I’m still the best field officer you’ve got.’
Honen frowned. ‘There’s some truth in that. Don’t be nosey, Hurtado. You’ll be told what you need to know soon enough.’
‘A specialist?’
Honen shot a questioning glance sidelong at her aides. She reached out to them with her ’cept too. They all looked away, recoiling from the touch of the scolding ’cept, concentrating on other things. ‘Someone’s been talking,’ Honen announced.
‘A specialist, then?’ Bronzi pressed.
‘As I said,’ Honen answered, turning her attention back to him.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ said Bronzi, rattling his water bottles together as he gestured. ‘I’ll know when I know.’
‘Get your men settled,’ she told him, and turned to go.
‘Are the Dancers in?’ he asked.
‘The Dancers?’
‘They should be in by now. Peto owes me a payout on a wager. Are they here yet?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘No, Hurtado, not yet. We’re expecting them soon.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘then I request permission to take a foray team out, on a ramble, to find out what’s keeping them.’
‘Your loyalty to your friend does you credit, Hurtado, but permission is not granted.’
‘It’ll be dark soon.’
‘It will. That’s why I don’t want you rambling around out there.’
Bronzi nodded.
‘Are we clear on that? No clever or ingenious misinterpretations of that order forming in your mind this time?’
Bronzi shook his head. As if.
‘There’d better not be. Goodnight, hetman.’
‘Goodnight, uxor.’
Honen clicked away on her heels, sending out a command with her ’cept. Her aides paused for a moment, scowling at Bronzi, and then followed her.
‘Yeah, stare at me all you like, you blonde bitches,’ Bronzi murmured.
He padded back to the billet. ‘Tche?’
‘Yes, het?’
‘Get a foray team up and ready in ten minutes.’ Tche sighed at him. ‘Is this sanctioned, het?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely. The uxor told me personally that she doesn’t want some fug-fingered ramble blundering around out there, so tell the boys it’s going to have to be sharp and professional, which will make a change for them.’
‘Not a ramble?’
‘I never ramble. Sharp, Tche, and professional. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Bronzi pulled on his boots and redressed his weapon belt. He realised he needed to take a leak. ‘Five minutes,’ he told the bashaw.
He found the latrine, a stinking cement pit down the hall, unbuckled his armour and sighed as his bladder emptied. Nearby, men were showering in the communal air baths, and he could hear singing from one of the other troop billets.
‘You’ll stay put tonight,’ said a voice from behind him.
Bronzi tensed. The voice was quiet and hard, small yet powerful, like the super-gravity coal of a dead sun.
‘I think I’ll finish what I’m doing, actually,’ he replied, deliberately not looking around, and deliberately keeping a tone of levity in his voice.
‘You will stay put tonight. No fun and games. No bending the rules. Are we clear?’
Bronzi buckled up, and turned.
The specialist stood behind him. Bronzi slowly adjusted his stance until he was looking up at the man’s face. Terra, he was huge, a monster of a man. The specialist’s features were hidden in the shadows of his dust shawl.
‘Is that a threat?’ Bronzi asked.
‘Does someone like me
need
to threaten someone like you?’ the specialist replied.
Bronzi narrowed his eyes. He was a lot of things, but timid wasn’t one of them. ‘Come on then, if you want some.’
The specialist chuckled. ‘I really admire your balls, hetman.’
‘They were only out because I was taking a leak,’ said Bronzi.
‘Bronzi, right? I’ve heard about you. More barefaced cheek in you than all the arses in the Imperial Army.’
Bronzi couldn’t help but grin, though his pulse was racing. ‘I could mess you up, son, I really could.’
‘You could try,’ said the specialist.