Seven
And deliverance came for the city of Breisol. It came in the form of a full infantry regiment of fair-haired Skanian soldiers, lho-sticks dangling from their lips as their sunken topped and squared visor caps were pulled low to protect their eyes from the sun in the north as they marched towards it. It was combat, full combat with all three battalions of the regiment, and both armored battalions of the Atalantan regiment, and General HQ said that the Noctae regiments mustered eight battalions, nearly twenty thousand men. Against that, the Skanians and Atlantans were putting twelve thousand infantry in three battalions and seventy armored vehicle in two battalions. The armor was a solid core of Leman Russ tanks, numbering forty vehicles. The Vanquisher, Exterminator, and Conqueror variants filled out the rest of the regiment's armor numbers.
Alexander Folke knew none of that. What he knew was that he and his platoon were spread across six of the lead Leman Russes, and there had been no resistance as they and the Atalantans had driven hard through the sleeper communities around Breisol, and it was in these communities that the units began to break up from the massive column marching formations that allowed a Skanian light infantry battalion to muster and move thirty miles a day on bad roads. First companies began separating from the parent formation, then platoons from companies, then squads from the platoons, until the Skanians surrounded the city in a loose chain of infantrymen with solid hammers of armor behind them, waiting to move forward with the infantry. The Leman Russ that Folke was riding grumbled to a halt outside some sort of two story building two miles from the city limits of Breisol proper, according to the map on Folke's dataslate.
The entire silent ride, the Skanians had watched as the sky reflected and then became flames from the fires burning inside the city, and miles distant, they could feel the wash of heat from one of the larger fires. Folke stood and leapt down to the road below, taking the landing in his bent knees. He unslung the lasrifle he'd taken from one of his own dead, and then slotted the bayonet into place with a metallic snick.
"It's to be one of those, then, is it, Lieutenant?" Carpelan shrugged when Folke looked at him, and then drew his own bayonet. "Bayonets, you bastards," Carpelan growled at the platoon. Time for a speech, Folke decided
"We've fought hard," he began. "We've fought hard, and we've let the traitors and rebels know that the men of Skania know fear, but fear is nothing to us! Now we face a different foe, a harsher, tougher foe: our fellow Guard. But they're not our fellows, anymore. They've spat on the Guard, they've spat on the Emperor, and they've spat on the Imperium. We're Skanians! We're going to show them the error of their ways, and the Emperor and Saint Langley will see us through to the end, whatever that end might be: the glorious dead, or the heroic victors. Now let's liberate this city."
The only response from his platoon was a determined silence, and the snick of bayonets being fastened onto lasrifle barrels. Good, he thought. Let's get to work.
"March fast and fight hard, you sleepy bastards," Carpelan growled, his voice harsh behind the black neck scarf that they'd all pulled over their lower faces. "We're Skanians, and the Sky-Father and Saint are watching. These silly cunts think they're hard, but they haven't seen you lot! Off the tanks, and thank the nice Atalantans for the ride, but now we've got work to do, boys, real soldier's work!"
Folke could feel the desire to turn his back on the enemy, walk away and leave the fight. The fear reared its head back and made itself known in the sweat on his palms and his watery guts. Folke puffed on his lho-stick angrily, burning through it, and then used the butt to light another. He tossed the burnt-out one into the dirt, grinding it beneath his boot. We need a break, he thought. There had been gaps in the formation when they'd mustered for this, men that were rock-solid foundations of the platoon, and Folke knew they'd be sore missed.
There was no break in the forecast for the day's weather. Only cold alternating with heat, and combat. We need a break, he thought again, and then swallowed. He couldn't sigh. Sighing was bad for morale, even if there was no desperately needed break forthcoming. Instead, he spat once to the side, and began walking forwards, leading the way for his men.
They passed the burnt out shell of a convenience store of some stripe, shelves knocked aside and product strewn about. One man whistled, then ducked inside when the platoon's point man took a knee, leaving Folke and Carpelan standing at separate ends of the line of men. The man emerged with a grin and a dump pouch full of chokladkaka, sweet candy bars made from kakao beans. He began passing them forward and back, and each man that took one passed it on, so that by the end of the pouch, the only Skanian without one was Folke. He took it, then slipped it into a tunic's breast pocket.
The pointman stepped off again as soon as Folke gave a short blast on the whistle dangling around his neck. They went through an intersection of pavement similar to rock-crete, and a half kilometer away at another intersection, Folke watched a second Skanian platoon move through their intersection at a brisk walk. There was, he decided, absolutely no hurry whatsoever. The city would be there when they finished their advance. The cordon of Atalantan vehicles and a second Skanian infantry regiment meant that there might be a break-out attempt, but it would be blunted and destroyed by the tanks and dug in Skanians.
Time went by, and so too did the city. At one point, they passed a small neighborhood church with the naked corpse of a female Commissar hanging from a noose on a lamppost. Folke ordered her cut down, and one man laid an Imperial standard over her after Carpelan closed her eyes forever. The city changed, here and there, from low, single family houses and small strips of retail space (and Folke marveled at the wastage of space,) to larger multi-family buildings, office spaces and retail stores, to towering tenements and living quarters, something he was more familiar with from his time in Stockarta. The towering buildings meant danger, but also opportunity. The lho-stick in his mouth had burned to the butt, and Folke swapped it from side to side in his mouth, before finally tossing it aside, and signalled for a halt.
Behind him, Carpelan and the other Sergeants stood in a clump and started smoking lho-sticks and drinking from their canteens. Folke pulled a rat-bar out of a tunic pocket. He unwrapped it and then bit into it, savoring the tastelessness.
"They always make these things taste terrible." One of the Sergeants gave a short bark of a laugh, then glanced to Carpelan to see what he was doing. Carpelan, like Folke, had started eating a ration bar. So were most of the men, and the noncommissioned officer followed suit. Folke finished his tasteless, mostly odorless bar, and then shoved the empty wrapper into the pocket that the bar had come from.
He let his men have another few minutes of break, and then whistled the order for the platoon to advance again. They hefted their rifles, scanned the buildings around them, and searched for any tell-tale signs of an opportunistic ambush or that they were walking into a prepared kill zone.
Instead, fifty meters from where they had taken their impromptu break, Folke's platoon caught a platoon of green-coated mutineers crossing the road, all semblance of military discipline gone. Folke himself fired the first shot, a snap decision to pull the trigger as he raised the lasrifle to his shoulder to take aim.
One man spun around and went down, and the mutineers responded by rushing forwards. They tried to overwhelm Folke and his men with a fast rush, their lasguns held low with bayonets fixed. The two platoons met, blue against green, in a clatter of steel bayonets against wood and synthetic stocks. Folke caught the blade of the man charging at him on the butt of his lasrifle, and slashed at the man's throat with his own bayonet. The enemy blocked it with the finger guard of his bayonet, snarled something in his native tongue at Folke, and spat. Folke brought his knee up fast and drove it into the man's testicles, then followed through with a savage headbutt to his nose. He fell backwards, and Folke drove his bayonet into the man's eye and then his brain. He slumped down, and Folke jerked his rifle backwards, trying to recover it.
Another man came at him with a roar and bayonet-tipped rifle held high. Folke stepped to the side, leaving his lasrifle, letting the strike sail passed him, and he clawed at his hip for his heavy laspistol. He cleared leather and began firing as soon as the barrel was pointed in his enemy's general direction. The man went down, his head and skull and brain vaporized with the second shot. The sharp, acrid stench of burning flesh and vaporized hair filled the air. Someone staggered into him, sending him reeling. He slammed into the rockcrete road, landing on one hand and jarring his shoulder badly.
He rolled, and missed being bayoneted by the testicle hair on a Skanian war hound. Folke wound up beneath two men struggling to bayonet the other. He shot straight up with his pistol into the green-coated man, who dropped one hand to his stomach and then collapsed in a heap, screaming. The man in Folke's platoon he had helped jerked Folke onto his feet, roaring something wordless, and then he was gone, leaving Folke with a dislocated shoulder and a ringing in his ears.
His men, carried by a wave of faith and fury, swept aside the mutineers, an inexorable force. Some of the mutineers tried to run, when Folke's men proved too much for them to handle. His men made a game of letting them go for a heartbeat, and then shooting them down from behind.
"Throne damn them." No one asked him who he was referring to, but Folke was feeling uncharitable and he hurt, so he said it again, more savagely this time, with a curl of his lip and a scowl. Feeling a bit better, Folke went back and jerked his rifle out of the deadman.
"We need better bayonets," he said to no one in particular. "This isn't the first damned time mine has gotten stuck in a body."
"It happens, Lieutenant," a trooper said from beside him. Folke shrugged. One of the men came up with a cloth for Folke to clean his blades on, and after he'd done so Folke turned to his platoon Sergeant.
"Butcher's toll, if you please, Carpelan?" Once his blades were clean, while the Sergeants tallied up the dead and injured, Folke lit a lho-stick.
"Three of ours mustered to the Sky-Father today, Lieutenant, with another three too badly hurt to keep fighting. We got fifteen of theirs in the fight, and, well... You know what happened to the rest, sir."
"Vox it to Battalion HQ, let them know we haven't encountered any organized resistance and ask 'em if they'll send a detachment from the sister regiment to grab our wounded."
"Very good," Carpelan said, and then left Folke to look at the strewn dead in green coats. Most of them had brown or black hair, with brown or blue eyes, and Folke felt a pang of regret that they'd had to die. Worse, they'd done it badly. I hope Father is proud of me. The thought, unbidden, sprang from his thoughts of dying and dying well. Father had died well - everyone had told him so. Crushed and then burned up shoving one of his men out of the way of a falling crucible, there had been nothing left except his bones, which were honorably interred in the ossuary in a dusty old hall of the Ironworker's Cathedral to He on the Golden Throne.
But his father had been dead for four Skanian years now, and Folke wondered when he would join Father. Soon, he thought. Soon I will be naught but mouldering bones and a name on a rock in Hive Stockarta, my deeds lost to time and the Sky-Father alone.
The grand exhortations of the priests and commissars said that names would become dust, but deeds were eternal. Folke always wanted to ask about the men that had crusaded beside the Emperor and his nine beloved sons, the Primarchs, martyrs all.
Instead he wondered if there would be anyone to mourn him when he was gone. Would there be anyone to mourn the men they'd killed today? Certainly there would be for the locals that he and his men had killed. They were, after all, locals. It didn't matter, he decided.
"Good news, Lieutenant!" That was the Colonel's son, the other platoon voxman. Folke turned as he came up at a jog, handset held out to Folke. The smell of death lingered, men's guts spilled and blood and the ozone of lasrifles. Folke felt the fatigue in him, in his bones and spirit. It settled heavily on his spirit, and Vasa's enthusiasm would be grating if the young man kept it up.
"The Colonel has told me to congratulate you on your promotion to Captain, sir, and you'll be taking the Grenadiers once this dust-up has sett-" The shot took the younger Vasa through his neck, and he dropped the handset. His hands went up to clutch at hole through which Folke could see bits of bone.
"Find that sniper!" The snarl propelled the platoon into action, and Folke grabbed Vasa by his webbing and pulled back him into an alley. Folke dropped his lasrifle and tried to find Vasa's pack of gauze for wounds. He ripped open pockets and pouches, frantically fingering his way through them.
"Fuck," he said. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck don't die on me, lad." Vasa gurgled at him, eyes panicked as Folke shoved gauze on the front and back of the wound. "MEDIC!" He bellowed, sticky-hot blood covering his hands. Fuck, he thought, doing his best to save the life of the Colonel's son. One of the platoon's medics came up, red cross on a white armband bright against the color of his tunic.
"Move, Lieutenant, let me work on him." Carpelan pulled Folke backwards, letting the medic have room to do his job.
"Save his life, doc," Folke told him. "I don't give a damn what you have to do to do it." The medic ignored him, and Folke fell back onto his legs, staring at the dark blood staining his hands. Fuck, he thought. Fuck fuck fuck. God-Emperor keep him. A niggling doubt in the back of his mind said that there would be no miracle forthcoming for Heinrich Vasa. The medic went to work, and Carpelan helped Folke stand.
"We got the sniper, sir. You're going to want to take a look." Folke kept looking at Vasa, lying on the rockcrete of an alley, and wiped his bloody hands on his breeches.