Brochuss smiled under his blast-cowl and prepared to signal the Vitrian commander. With the support of the Vitrian Dragoons, they could–
Las-fire erupted along the rear line of his regiment.
COLONEL ZOREN LED his men directly down onto the exposed and straggling line of the Jantine Patricians. They were upwards of six hundred in number and the Vitrians only four hundred, but he had them on the turn.
Gaunt’s message had been as per their agreement, though it was still the worst, most devastating message he had received in sixteen years as a fighting man. Their mutual enemies had shown their hands and now the success of the venture depended upon his loyalty. To Colonel-Commissar Gaunt. To the man called Fereyd, among other things. To the Emperor.
It went against all his schooling as an Imperial Guardsman, all his nature. It went against the intricate teachings of the Byhata. But still, the Byhata said there was honour in friendship, and friendship in valour. Loyalty and honour, the twinned fundamental aspects of the Vitrian Art of War.
Let Dravere have him shot, him and all four hundred of his men. This was not insubordination, nor was it insurrection. Gaunt had showed the colonel what was at stake. He had showed him the greater levels of loyalty and honour at stake on Menazoid Epsilon. He had been truer to the Emperor and truer to the teachings of the Byhata than Dravere could ever have been.
In a triple arrowhead formation, almost invisible in their glass armour, the Vitrian Dragoons punched into the hindquarters of Brochuss’s extended advance line; a tight, dense triple wedge where the Patricians were loose and extended. The Jantine had formed a lateral file to embrace the enemy, utterly useless for countering a rearguard sweep. So it said in the Byhata: book six, segment thirty-one, page four hundred and six.
The Patricians had greater strength, but their line was convex where it should have been concave. Zoren’s men tore them apart. Zoren had ordered his men to set las-weapons for maximum discharge. He hoped Colonel-Commissar Gaunt would forgive the extravagance, but the Jantine heavy troops wore notoriously thick armour.
The First Regiment of the Jantine Patricians, the so called Emperor’s Chosen, the Imperial Guard elite, were destroyed that late afternoon in the valley inside the necropolis of the Target Primaris. The noble forces of the Vitrian Dragoon’s Third, years later to be decorated and celebrated as one of the foremost Guard armies, took on their superior numbers and vanquished them in a pitched battle that lasted twenty-eight minutes and relied for the most part on tactical discretion.
MAJOR BROCHUSS denied the Vitrians for as long as he was able. Screaming in outrage and despair, he smashed back through his own ranks to confront the Vitrians with Pha-rant’s massive autocannon. It was in no way the death he had foreseen for himself, nor the death of his celebrated company.
He bellowed at his men, admonishing them for dying, kicking at corpses as they fell around him in a raging despair to get them to stand up again. In the end, Brochuss was overwhelmed by a stinging wash of anger that having come so far, fought so hard, he and his Patricians would be cheated.
Cheated of everything they deserved. Cheated of glory by this inglorious end. Cheated of life by lesser, weaker men who nevertheless had the resolve to fight courageously for what they believed in.
He was amongst the last to die, as the last few shells clattered out of his ammo drums, raining into the Vitrian advance as he squeezed the trigger of the smoking, hissing stubber on full rapid. Brochuss personally killed forty-four Vitrian Dragoons in the course of the Jantine First’s last stand. His autocannon was close to overheating when he was killed by a Vitrian sergeant called Zogat.
His armoured torso pulverised by Zogat’s marksmanship, Brochuss toppled into the flecked mica sand of the valley floor and his name, and bearing and manner and being, was utterly extinguished from the Imperial Record.
Twenty-Two
THEN BARU DIED. The filthy barbed round smelted into the rock-face behind him and ribboned him with its lethal backwash of shrapnel. He didn’t even have time to scream.
From his cover, seeing the death and regretting it desperately, Gaunt slid around and set his lasgun to full auto, bombarding the torrent of foe with a vivid cascade of phosphorescent bolts. He heard Rawne scream something unintelligible.
Baru, one of his finest, as good a scout and stealther as Mkoll, pride of the Tanith. Pulling back into cover to