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The Vincula Insurgency: Ghost Dossier 1 – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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1.

The question isn’t how he died. A close-focus anti-personnel mine, Militarum issue, had been rigged under the seat, arming via a pressure pad when he sat down. And then he got up to leave.

The question isn’t who killed him. Insurgents have been targeting Imperial infrastructure and staff for nine weeks.

The question is, how did they get in?

Ibram Gaunt stands at the window and looks down. The street, Clavis Street, a main thoroughfare, is twelve storeys below. There is no ledge, no hand-hold, no toe-hold. Nests of razor wire clump every buttress, at every floor, around upturned crowns of spikes.

It’s hot. The city smells of hot plastek and burning fuel. There’s a breeze from the east that brings the noise of traffic and worship-horns, but it’s as dry as leather.

Gaunt stands a moment longer, hands behind his back. He makes like he’s observing, but he’s seen all he needs to see. An unscaleable wall. An absence of answers. But he stands, gets some air on his face, dry as it is. Gets it in his lungs, imagines it’s borne from some cooler place in the hills, not sandpapered by heat and smoke.

There’s an awful, hacking gurgle coming from the room at his back. Shrapnel, maybe spalled casing from the device, maybe bone shards from the victim, has punctured the room’s climate system. Pipes have ruptured. It’s still running, but it’s drowning in its own coolant. Blue fluid drools down the wall from the grille. The air gusting from the vents is no longer cold, and it stinks of ammonia. He wants to turn it off, because it sounds like a wet death rattle, but he knows how unbearable it’s going to get without the unit.

One moment longer with the open air, at a window stripped of glass by overpressure.

‘Do we have a name?’ he asks.

‘Talaxin,’ someone says. ‘Intendant, third grade. Payroll and, uhm–’

Someone checks their notes.

Gaunt turns. The office is generally the way this Talaxin must have seen it when he arrived that afternoon. Shelves, files, two charts pinned up. The front of the desk is marvellously intact, but it has no back, and there’s no chair.

‘Payroll?’ Gaunt says.

The Administratum aide, whose name Gaunt has not been told, is still checking his data-slate.

‘Payroll and provisioning,’ the aide replies. ‘Materiel requisition, answering to Intendant Fallastrine and Provision-slash-Audit.’

Gaunt nods, as though this means something. Militarum and Administratum speak different languages.

‘Security check on all other offices,’ Gaunt says.

‘That’s been instructed, sir,’ says the aide.

‘But is it being done?’ Gaunt asks.

The aide’s data-slate doesn’t tell him that, so he nods and steps out to check. The office air is filmed with motionless smoke. There’s a halo of cooked blood, black as baked treacle, coating the remains of the desk, across the floor, up the walls and the bookcases, across the ceiling. A few ceiling tiles, scorched, have started to dip. Gaunt looks at the Tanith corpsman at the door. Chayker has brought a body bag. There’s nothing to put in it.

Gaunt takes another look out of the window. Twilight’s falling. Far below, an impossible climb below, he can see figures on the street, lit by the headlamps of Militarum trucks and carriers.

The climate unit chugs, splutters and dies, aspirating its own coolant. The sudden lack of noise is oppressive. Nothing remains except the muted wash of city noise, and the hum of the flies. Breathless heat comes instantly. Gaunt feels the sweat break on his back before he’s even out of the room.

Trooper Raglon follows him down the stairs.

‘That’s what? Six?’ Gaunt asks.

‘Eight, sir,’ Raglon replies, consulting his slate. It’s not a slim steel tablet like the aide’s. It’s Militarum issue, sturdy, with a vulcanised cover for field-wear. It’s slow, perhaps defective. Or perhaps Raglon is. He hasn’t got the hang of it yet.

‘I thought it was six,’ says Gaunt. They’re taking the stairs because the building’s elevators have been locked down during the sweep. Red emergency lighting has come up, thanks to tumblers shaken by the blast. Raglon’s trying to walk and work.

‘Six in the last twelve days,’ says Gaunt.

‘Oh, yes,’ says Raglon. ‘Yes, six, in that period. Two others, but at the back end of last month.’

Gaunt pauses, turns, takes the slate from Raglon. He taps the surface quickly, closing data blocks.

‘Clear the sub-panels,’ he says. He’s been using slates since the start of his career. ‘See? This and this? They auto-archive and you can recall them with that icon. If you clear them, there’s more cogitation power available for the work at hand.’ He hands it back.

‘Thank you, sir,’ says Raglon. He hadn’t noticed the icon. No one’s even told him about the icon. The colonel-commissar’s had him working as adjutant for three weeks, since Kosdorf. Raglon hopes it’s not going to last. He’s a vox-trooper. He’s got the patch for it on his sleeve. He did basic on casters and comm-ops, not this kind of duty.

It should have been Cluggan.

‘So, six,’ says Gaunt. He starts walking again, taking the stairs at a pace. ‘Eight total. That’s since securement. All minor, low-tier Administratum.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Raglon. ‘Except one. One was a local tithe collector seconded to the occupation council.’ Raglon remembers that. He doesn’t have time to check it. But he’s pretty sure.

‘Litus B.R.U. had security responsibility for this building,’ says Gaunt. More a statement than a question.

‘Yes, sir. Do you want to revise that?’

‘I want to talk to their C.O., certainly. I want the sentries quizzed. I want a review of procedure, and a look at any security feed. Set me up with a meeting, their C.O.’

Raglon pauses, concentrating on the slate.

Gaunt stops, and looks back at him. ‘You can schedule it via the Militarum message annex,’ he says.

‘Yep,’ says Raglon, opening a sub-panel in error.

Gaunt bristles very slightly.

‘I’ll just send a runner, Rafflan,’ he says, and starts walking again.

‘Raglon, sir,’ says Raglon.

‘What?’

‘It’s Raglon, sir.’

Gaunt thinks about it, nods.

‘Right,’ he says. He’s generally good with names. Raglon, Rafflan. Both vox-troopers. Easily done.

Raglon hesitates for a second, then follows. It’s not the first time. It’s as if they all look alike. All Tanith. All lasmen, interchangeable. Gaunt remembers Cluggan well enough, because he mentions him from time to time, but that’s no good to anyone because Cluggan died at Voltis. It’s a name Gaunt should erase. More cogitation power available for the work at hand. Feels like they’ve got to be dead before they’re remembered.

2.

Rawne’s waiting outside on the street in the early night. Waiting, but not necessarily waiting for Gaunt. Rawne always seems to be waiting for something. An opportunity. A dark alley.

He’s standing with some of the men from First Section, chatting, smoking a hand-rolled lho-stick. They’re starkly side-lit by the headlights of a Militarum cargo-10. Their shadows, lean and black like them, fall across the wall behind them, and across a brand new tin sign that reads ‘Officio Departmento Administratum (Occupation Council)’. It’s been pressure-bolted to the facade over an older brass sign that read ‘Department of Taxation, Vincula City’.

Gaunt steps into the fierce pool of light from the vehicles. Moths and other dark-adapted insects are milling in the glare like wheat chaff.

Rawne sort of straightens, and sort of salutes.

‘Got the building secure,’ he says. ‘First, Third and Fifth sections. Pulled the Litus out.’

No ‘sir’. He doesn’t put his smoke out, either.

‘The Litus?’ asks Gaunt, not caring.

‘Got them all in a mess hall across the street,’ says Rawne, pointing vaguely. ‘Feygor’s taking statements.’

‘All of them?’ Gaunt asks.

Rawne nods. ‘Especially those who were ground level door-watch, perimeter, or freight access. But I thought you’d want them all pulled anyway.’

‘Correct,’ says Gaunt.

‘It’s what Corbec would have done, so…’

Gaunt nods. ‘Marksmen?’ he asks.

‘Oh, yes,’ says Rawne. He glances up, non-specifically, at the invisible tops of buildings overlooking Clavis Street. They are soot-black against a sky that’s been soot-black and starless every night since they arrived, six days earlier. ‘Scoped up, watching, but there’ll be nothing.’

‘Long gone?’

Rawne nods.

‘Or here the whole time,’ he adds.

The idea hasn’t eluded Gaunt. A maraud could have got in, then slipped away again. But the Litus B.R.U. is a solid regiment, experienced, and they had perimeter watch on the Administratum building. Gaunt will interview them, but an insurgent – a maraud, according to jargon – would have had to be more than just cunning to slip by. Paperwork, accreditation, a knowledge of scheduled deliveries or message-runner protocols. It’s unlikely.

Gaunt looks up at the face of the blocky government building. Above the pool of headlamps, it’s a black cliff. Flush granite, armoured windows. He can just make out the pockmarks of a few shell holes and small-arms impacts near ground level, but still nothing that could serve as purchase.

‘Could you go up that?’ he asks.

Rawne frowns. ‘Do I look like a fething larisel?’

Gaunt has no idea. He doesn’t know what one of those is.

‘A scout, then? Could one of the scouts?’

Rawne considers this long enough to show that it’s not an entirely ridiculous question, then shakes his head.

As expected. The maraud didn’t slip in, and he didn’t free-climb up the outside for twelve floors. Almost seventy per cent of the staff working in the building, and the government compound, are locals: local bureaucratic infrastructure, clerical, cleaners, catering, maintenance. Someone who was supposed to be here, who was authorised to be here, brought a Militarum-issue K10 anti-personnel mine and a pressure trigger to work with them this morning.

Gaunt looks back at Raglon.

‘Get a full list of personnel,’ Gaunt tells him. ‘Security checks, validations, work roster. We’ll go through it all, and see if there’s any crossover with the other incidents – workplace, residential addresses, routes to work…’

Raglon nods.

‘We’re doing that, then?’ asks Rawne.

‘We’re doing that,’ Gaunt confirms.

‘I just thought it might fall to Military Intelligence,’ Rawne suggests, with a shrug. ‘More their speed.’

‘Well, there are two Mil-Int officers in Vincula,’ says Gaunt, ‘and they are hands-full with the general insurgency review so, yes, ideally it would be their job, but we’ll be doing it.’

‘I just thought,’ says Rawne, ‘now there are more of them here…’

Gaunt looks at him, his frown asking the question.

‘Arrived just now,’ says Rawne indifferently, gesturing to a large group of figures waiting by the transports on the forecourt. ‘Convoyed in from Voltis.’

‘You didn’t think to tell me?’

‘I didn’t think you’d want them in the building until it was secure,’ says Rawne, ‘and you were busy.’ He says all of this in a flat tone that’s supposed to sound reasonable, but his words might as well be, ‘the elevators were locked down and I couldn’t be bothered to haul my arse up twelve flights to find you.’

Rawne shrugs, scratches his neck, a gesture which only serves to draw attention to his micro-bead earpiece, which has been pulled out and is dangling over his collar.

Gaunt calls to Adare and Baffels, and tells them to oversee the lockdown.

‘Let’s go and present our compliments,’ he tells Rawne. It’s not a suggestion.

‘Really?’ asks Rawne.

‘It’s what Corbec would have done.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
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