First and Only (10 page)

Caffran paused again and cleared his throat. Zogat was looking at him in fierce wonder. ‘Gaunt had a simple choice to deploy the troops at his disposal for a brave last stand, or to take all those he could save and get clear. He chose the latter. None of us liked that decision. We all wanted to give our lives fighting for our homeworld. I suppose if we’d stayed on Tanith, we would have achieved nothing except maybe a valiant footnote in history. Gaunt saved us. He took us from a destruction we would have been proud to be a part of so that we could enjoy a more significant destruction elsewhere.’

Zogat’s eyes were bright in the darkness. ‘You hate him.’

‘No! Well, yes, I do, as I would hate anyone who had supervised the death of my home, anyone who had sacrificed it to some greater good.’

‘Is this a greater good?’

‘I’ve fought with the Ghosts on a dozen warfronts. I haven’t seen a greater good yet.’

‘You do hate him.’

‘I admire him. I will follow him anywhere. That’s all there is to say. I left my homeworld the night it died, and I’ve been fighting for its memory ever since. We Tanith are a dying breed. There are only about twenty hundred of us left. Gaunt only got away with enough for one regiment. The Tanith First. The First-and-Only. That’s what makes us “ghosts”, you see. The last few unquiet souls of a dead world. And I suppose we’ll keep going until we’re all done.’

Caffran fell silent and in the dimness of the shell-hole there was no sound except the fall of the bombardment outside. Zogat was silent for a long while, then he looked up at the paling sky. ‘It will be dawn in two hours,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe we’ll see our way out of this when it gets light.’

‘You could be right,’ Caffran replied, stretching his aching, mud-caked limbs. ‘The bombardment does seem to be moving away. Who knows, we might live through this after all. Feth, I’ve lived through worse.’

Seven

D
AYLIGHT ROLLED IN
with a wet stain of cloud, underlit by the continued bombardment. The lightening sky was streaked and cross-hatched by contrails, shell-wakes and arcs of fire from the massive Shriven emplacements in the distant shrouded hills. Lower, in the wide valley and the trench lines, the accumulated smoke of the onslaught, which had now been going on for just about twenty-one hours, dropping two or three shells a second, curdled like fog, thick, creamy and repellent with the stink of cordite and fycelene.

Gaunt brought his assembled company to a halt in a silo bay that had once held furnaces and bell kilns. They pulled off their rebreather masks. The floor, the air itself, was permeated with a greenish microdust that tasted of iron or blood. Shattered plastic crating was scattered over the place. They were five kilometres from the bombardment line now, and the noise of the drum-mills, chattering away in barns and manufactories all around them, was even louder than the shells.

Corbec had got his men away from the fire zone just about intact, although everyone had been felled by the shockwave and eighteen had been deafened permanently by the air-burst. The Imperial Guard infirmaries over the lines would patch ruptured ear drums with plastene diaphragms or implant acoustic enhancers in a matter of moments. But that was over the lines. Out here, eighteen deaf men were a liability. When they formed up to move, Gaunt would station them in the midst of his column, where they could take maximum guidance and warning from the men around them. There were other injuries too, a number of broken arms, ribs and collarbones. However, everyone was walking and that was a mercy.

Gaunt took Corbec to one side. Gaunt knew a good soldier instinctively, and it worried him when confidence was misplaced. He’d chosen Corbec to offset Rawne. Both men commanded respect from the Tanith First and Only, one because he was liked and the other because he was feared.

‘Not like you to make a tactical error of that magnitude…’ Gaunt began.

Corbec started to say something and then cut himself short. The idea of making excuses to the commissar stuck in his throat.

Gaunt made them for him. ‘I understand we’re all in a tight spot. This circumstance is extreme, and your lot had suffered particularly. I heard about Drayl. I also think these drum-mills, which you decided to target with an almost suicidal determination, are meant to disorientate. Meant to make us act irrationally. Let’s face it, they’re insane. They are as much a weapon as the guns. They are meant to wear us down.’

Corbec nodded. The war had pooled bitterness in his great, hoary form. There was a touch of weariness to his look and manner.

‘What’s our plan? Do we wait for the barrage to stop and retreat?’

Gaunt shook his head. ‘I think we’ve come in so deep, we can do some good. We’ll wait for the scouts to return.’

The recon units returned to the shelter within half an hour. The scouts, some Vitrian, mostly Tanith, combined the data from their sweeps and built a picture of the area in a two kilometre radius for Gaunt and Zoren.

What interested Gaunt most was a structure to the west.

T
HEY MOVED THROUGH
a wide section of drainage pipelines, through rain-washed concrete underpasses stained with oil and dust.

The cordite fog drifted back over their positions. To the west rose the great hill line, to the immediate north the shadowy bulk of habitat spires, immense conical towers for the workforce that rose out of the ground fog, their hundred thousand windows all blown out by shelling and air-shock. There were fewer drum-mills in this range of the enemy territory, but still no sign of a solitary living thing, not even vermin.

They began passing blast-proofed bunkers of great size, all empty except for scattered support cradles and stacking pallets of grey fibre-plast. A crowd of battered, yellow, heavy-lift trolleys were abandoned on the concourses before the bunkers.

‘Munitions stores,’ Zoren suggested to Gaunt as they advanced. ‘They must have stockpiled a vast amount of shells for this bombardment and they’ve already emptied these sheds.’

Gaunt thought this a good guess. They edged on, cautious, marching half-time and with weapons ready. The structure the reconnaissance had reported was ahead now, a cargo loading bay of tubular steel and riveted blast-board. The bay was mounted with hydraulic cranes and derricks on the surface, poised to lower cargo into a cavity below ground.

The guardsmen descended on the metal grilled stairway onto a raised platform that lay alongside a wide, well-lit tunnel that ran off out of sight into the impacted earth. The tunnel was modular, circular in cross section, with a raised spine running along the lowest part. Feygor and Grell examined the tunnel and the armoured control post overlooking it.

‘Maglev line,’ said Feygor, who had done all he could to augment his basic engineering knowledge with off-world mechanisms. ‘Still active. They cart the shells from the munitions dump and lower them into the bay, then load them onto bomb trains for fast delivery to the emplacements in the hills.’

He showed Gaunt an indicator board in the control position. The flat-plate glowed green, showing a flickering runic depiction of a track network. ‘There’s a whole transit system down here, purpose-built to link all the forge factories and allow for rapid transportation of material.’

‘And this spur has been abandoned because they’ve exhausted the munitions stores in this area.’ Gaunt was thoughtful. He took out his data-slate and made a working sketch of the network map.

The commissar ordered a ten-minute rest, then sat on the edge of the platform and compared his sketch with area maps of the old factory complexes from the slate’s tactical archives. The Shriven had modified a lot of the details, but the basic elements were still the same.

Colonel Zoren joined him. ‘Something’s on your mind,’ he began.

Gaunt gestured to the tunnel. ‘It’s a way in. A way right into the central emplacements of the Shriven. They won’t have blocked it because they need these maglev lines active and clear to keep the bomb trains moving to feed their guns.’

‘There’s something odd, though, don’t you think?’ Zoren eased back the visor of his helmet.

‘Odd?’

‘Last night, I thought your assessment of their tactics was correct. They’d tried a frontal assault to pierce our lines, but when it failed they pulled back to an extreme extent to lure us in and then set the bombardment to flatten any Imperial forces they’d drawn out.’

‘That makes sense of the available facts,’ Gaunt said.

‘Even now? They must know they could only have caught a few thousand of us with that trick, and logic says most of us would be dead by now. So why are they still shelling? Who are they firing at? It’s exhausting their shell stocks, it must be. They’ve been at it for over a day. And they’ve abandoned such a huge area of their lines.’

Gaunt nodded. ‘That was on my mind too when dawn broke. I think it began as an effort to wipe out any forces they had trapped. But now? You’re right. They’ve sacrificed a lot of land and the continued bombardments make no sense.’

‘Unless they’re trying to keep us out,’ a voice said from behind them. Rawne had joined them.

‘Let’s have your thoughts, major,’ Gaunt said.

Rawne shrugged and spat heavily on to the floor. His black eyes narrowed to a frowning squint. ‘We know the spawn of Chaos don’t fight wars with any tactics we’d recognise. We’ve been held on this front for months. I think yesterday was a last attempt to break us with a conventional offensive. Now they’ve put up a wall of fire to keep us out while they switch to something else. Maybe something that’s taken them months to prepare.’

‘Something like what?’ Zoren asked uncomfortably.

‘Something. I don’t know. Something using their Chaos power. Something ceremonial. Those drum-mills… maybe they aren’t psychological warfare… maybe they’re part of some vast… ritual.’

The three men were silent for a moment. Then Zoren laughed, a mocking snarl. ‘Ritual magic?’

‘Don’t mock what you don’t understand!’ Gaunt warned. ‘Rawne could be right. Emperor knows, we’ve seen enough of their madness.’ Zoren didn’t reply. He’d seen things too, perhaps things his mind wanted to deny or scrub out as impossible.

Gaunt got up and pointed down the tunnel. ‘Then this is a way in. And we’d better take it – because if Rawne’s right, we’re the only units in a position to do a damn thing about it.’

Eight

I
T WAS POSSIBLE
to advance down the maglev tunnel four abreast, with two men on each side of the central rider spine. It was well lit by recessed blue-glow lighting in the tunnel walls, but Gaunt sent Domor and the other sweepers in the vanguard to check for booby traps.

An unopposed advance down the stuffy tunnels took them two kilometres east, passing another abandoned cargo bay and forks with two other maglev spurs. The air was dry and charged with static from the still-powered electromagnetic rail, and hot gusts of wind breathed on them periodically as if heralding a train that never came.

At the third spur, Gaunt turned the column into a new tunnel, following his map. They’d gone about twenty metres when Milo whispered to the commissar.

‘I think we need to go back to the spur fork,’ he said.

Gaunt didn’t query. He trusted Brin’s instincts like his own, and knew they stretched further. He retreated the whole company to the junction they had just passed. Within a minute, a hot breeze blew at them, the tunnel hummed and a maglev train whirred past along the spur they had been about to join. It was an automated train of sixty open carts, painted khaki with black and yellow flashing. Each cart was laden with shells and munitions, hundreds of tonnes of ordnance from distant bunkers destined for the main batteries. As the train rolled past on the magnetic-levitation rail, slick and inertia free, many of the men gawked openly at it. Some made signs of warding and protection.

Gaunt consulted his sketch map. It was difficult to determine how far it was to the next station or junction, and without knowing the frequency of the bomb trains, he couldn’t guarantee they’d be out of the tunnel before the next one rumbled through.

Gaunt cursed. He didn’t want to turn back now. His mind raced as he reviewed his troop files, scrabbling to recall personal details.

‘Domor!’ he called, and the trooper hurried over.

‘Back on Tanith, you and Grell were engineers, right?’

The young trooper nodded. ‘I was apprenticed to a timber haulier in Tanith Attica. I worked with heavy machines.’

‘Given the resources at hand, could you stop one of these trains?’

‘Sir?’

‘And then start it again?’

Domor scratched his neck as he thought. ‘Short of blowing the mag-rail itself… You’d need to block or short out the power that drives the train. As I understand it, the trains move on the rails, sucking up a power source from them. It’s a conductive electrical exchange, as I’ve seen on batteries and flux-units. We’d need some non-conductive material, fine enough to lay across the rider-spine without actually derailing the train. What do you have in mind, sir?’

‘Stopping or slowing the next train that passes, jumping a ride and starting it again.’

Domor grinned. ‘And riding it all the way to the enemy?’ He chuckled and looked around. Then he set off towards Colonel Zoren, who was conversing with some of his men as they rested. Gaunt followed.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ Domor began with a tight salute, ‘may I examine your body armour?’

Zoren looked at the Tanith trooper with confusion and some contempt but Gaunt soothed him with a quiet nod. Zoren peeled off a gauntlet and handed it to Domor. The young Tanith examined it with keen eyes.

‘It’s beautiful work. Is this surface tooth made of glass bead?’

‘Yes, mica. Glass, as you say. Scale segments woven onto a base fabric of thermal insulation.’

‘Non-conductive,’ Domor said, showing the glove to Gaunt. ‘I’d need a decent-sized piece. Maybe a jacket – and it may not come back in one piece.’

Gaunt was about to explain, hoping Zoren would ask for a volunteer from among his men. But the colonel got to his feet, took off his helmet and handed it to his subaltern before stripping off his own jacket.