The Vincula Insurgency: Ghost Dossier 1 by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-03-08T14:41:00+00:00

12.

Turns out, there is no way out. The back office leads into another back office, and a storeroom, all caked in dust, and then to a door that Bragg forces with his shoulder, which leads into a wide courtyard at the back of the counting house. The courtyard is surrounded on all sides by high brick walls, with taller buildings beyond them. There’s a street gate, but it’s armoured and rusted shut. This was a counting house, and this courtyard was where the treasury trucks delivered tithe payments. Of course the walls are high. Of course the gate is armoured. Not even Bragg will get through it. He starts to try anyway.

Milo looks around, getting frantic. He can hear gunfire still, from the main street beyond the buildings. Smoke from the nearby inferno is streaming across the yard, forming a blanket at second-floor height like the belly of a black storm cloud. Sparks whirl in it. Flakes of ash are falling on the yard. Bragg keeps throwing himself at the gate, dislodging showers of rust from the seams with every thwarted impact.

There’s a low rockcrete loading dock. The rusted carcass of a cargo trolley, weeds growing between the corroded wheels. Nothing else. The walls are too high. They can’t climb them. Milo wouldn’t reach the top of the lowest one even if Bragg gave him a boost, and even if he did, he’d never haul Bragg up after him.

Bragg slams into the gate again, and reels back clutching his shoulder. If he keeps going, he’ll break something, and not just the Imperial record for futile effort. He just wants to save the boy. He doesn’t care about himself. He just wants to get the boy out of this. Milo knows that’s all that’s driving the big man.

Milo stands, gazing at the back door they came through. The pulse is in his chest still, throbbing inside his ribcage. It urges him that the enemy is close. There’s not enough time to figure anything out, even if there was something to figure out, and there isn’t.

‘Bragg,’ says Milo.

Bragg’s about to take another run up.

‘Bragg, get your fething gun,’ says Milo.

Bragg glances at him, panting. He reaches for the lasrifle he put down on the cobbles.

The first insurgent appears at the back door. Milo lifts the pistol Bragg gave him and fires three shots. He wings the insurgent with one, damages the door frame with the other two. The maraud ducks back inside. Gunfire starts to come at them from the shadows of the back doorway, more than one weapon. Glass breaks, and shots start coming from a rear window too. Laslock-fire and auto-rounds chop across the courtyard. They hit the back wall and the gate, and clip the cobbles.

Bragg and Milo get down behind the edge of the loading dock. Bragg pinks back return fire, to little effect. His aim is characteristically lousy, but it’s not just that. The angle’s poor. They’re too tight to get a decent shot into the doorway. The window’s an impossible target altogether.

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