He roared ahead, passing the staff cars of the local commissariat, until he was leading the column down the broken highway towards the docks.
A volley of shells fell into the outhabs to the east. Dorden, the grizzled, elderly chief medic of the Tanith Regiment, heaved himself up to see. Conflagrations, bright and bitter-lemon in colour, sizzled out from the distant detonations. The truck sashayed into a pothole and Dorden was dropped on his arse.
“Why bother?” Bragg asked.
“Say again?” asked the doctor.
Bragg shifted his position in the flat-bed uncomfortably. He was huge, bigger than any other two Ghosts put together. “We’ll get there sooner or later; die there sooner or later. Why bother craning for a view of our doom?”
Dorden looked across at the giant. “Is the cup half-full or half-empty, Bragg?” he asked.
“What cup?”
“It’s hypothetical. Half-full or half-empty?”
“Yeah, but what cup are we talking about?”
“An imaginary cup.”
“What’s in it?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Does to me, doc,” Bragg shrugged.
% well, okay… it’s got sacra in it. Half-full or half-empty?”
“How much sacra?” Bragg asked.
Dorden opened his mouth once, twice, then sat back again. “Doesn’t matter.”
Bragg pulled out a canvas bottle-flask. “There’s sacra in this,” he announced.
“Thanks, not just yet…” Dorden said, raising his hands as if in surrender.
Bragg, sat opposite him in the shuddering truck, nodded and took a long swig.
Shells wailed down, half a kilometre from the road, close enough to be uncomfortable. Dorden reached out for the flask. “Ah well, if it’s there…”
Sergeant Varl, gripping the iron hand-loops of the truck’s flatbed with his whirring mechanical limb, tried to rouse the spirits of his platoon by encouraging a song. A few of them joined unenthusiastically with a verse or two of “Over the Sky and Far Away” but it soon faltered. When Varl tried another, he was told to shut up, to his face.
Sergeant Varl handled people better than most of the officers in the regiment and he knew when to reprimand and when to back off. He’d been a dog-soldier himself for long enough.
But the mood in his platoon was bad. And Varl knew why. No one wanted this. No one wanted to get in the middle of a hive-war.
The Magnificat was waiting at the northern docks as the column rolled in out of the firelit night. All the Hass ferries were working full-stretch to keep the river open and convoy after convoy of military supplies and ammunition were arriving each hour from the Northern Collectives. Troops from Vervun Primary—in blue greatcoats, grey webbing and the distinctive spiked helmets—along with VPHC men, servitors and a good few red-robed clerks and overseers from the Administratum were now controlling the river freight, much to the fury of the regular longshoremen of the Dockmaster Guild. Ecclesiarchy priests had also arrived on the third or fourth day, establishing a permanent prayer-vigil to protect the crossing and make the waterway and the viaduct safe. The hooded clergy were grouped around a brazier at a pier end, chanting and intoning. They were there each time Folik drew the Magnificat back to the northshore wharves. It seemed they never slept, never rested. He got into the habit of nodding to them every time he slid the ferry in past them. They never responded. On this night run, Folik expected to take on more supply vehicles and crates, but the house troopers running the dockside had drawn the North-Col freight trucks aside so that troop transports could move round them and roll down the landing stages.
Folik nursed the ancient turbines into station-keeping as Mincer dropped the ramp.
The first two trucks growled and bounced aboard. Mincer directed them to their deck spaces with a pair of dagger-lamps.
A tall, long-coated figure dropped from the cab of the first truck. He approached longshoreman Folik.
Folik was almost hypnotised by the commissar badge on the peaked cap. An awed smile creased his oil-spattered face and he took off his wool cap out of respect.
“Sir, it’s an honour to have you aboard!”
