First and Only (30 page)

Las-fire whickered along the passage around them, but Rawne feared the barbs more. Even missing or deflecting or ricocheting, they could do more damage. He squeezed off two hopeful shots, breathless for a target. Unease coiled in his mind, a faint, stained darkness that had been there since his torture at the hands of the lean giant, Heldane. He fought it off, but it refused to go away.

G
AUNT SLID ACROSS
to Domor, taking the shuddering man’s bloody hands in his own.

‘Easy, trooper! Easy, friend! It’s me, the commissar… I’ve come all the way from Tanith with you, and I won’t leave you to die!’

Domor stopped whimpering, biting on his lip. Gaunt saw that his face was an utter mess. His eyes were ruined and the flesh of his right check hung shredded and loose. Gaunt took the ribbons of bandage from Caffran and strapped the trooper’s head back together, winding the tape around his eyes in a tight blindfold. He hissed to Dorden, who was just finishing field-dressing Baru’s knee. The medical officer wriggled over under the sporadic fire. Gaunt had stripped Domor’s sleeve away from his forearm with a jerking cut of his blade and Dorden quickly sunk a dose of painkiller into the man’s bulging wrist veins.

Gaunt had seen death wounds before, and knew that Domor would not live long outside of a properly-equipped infirmary. The eye wounds were too deep, and already rusty smears of blood were seeping through the pale white bindings. Dorden shook his head sadly at Gaunt, and the commissar was glad Domor couldn’t see the unspoken verdict.

‘You’ll make it,’ Gaunt told him, ‘if I have to carry you myself!’

‘Leave me…’ Domor moaned.

‘Leave the trooper who hijacked the maglev train and led us to our victory battle on Fortis? We won a world with your help, Domor. I’d rather hack off an arm and leave that behind!’

‘You’re a good man,’ Domor said huskily, his breathing shallow, ‘for an anroth.’

Gaunt allowed himself a thin smile.

Behind him, Larkin sighted the ancient weapon he had adopted and dropped a faint figure in the darkness with a clean shot.

Fereyd’s troopers, supported by Rawne and Mkoll, fired las-rounds in a pulsing rhythm that battered into the unseen foe.

Then it fell suddenly quiet.

Together with one of Fereyd’s men, Mkoll, a shadow under his stealth cloak, edged forward. After a moment, he shouted back: ‘Clear!’

The party moved on, Caffran supporting the weakening Domor and Dorden helping the limping Baru. At a turn in the corridor, they picked their way between the fallen foe: eight dead humans, emaciated and covered in sores, dressed in transparent plastic body gloves, their faces hidden by snarling bone masks. They were inscribed with symbols: symbols that made their minds hurt; symbols of plague and invention. Gaunt made sure that the dead were stripped of all plasma ammo packs. Rawne slung his lasgun over his shoulder and lifted one of the barb-guns – a long, lance-tube weapon with a skate-like bayonet fixed underneath. He pulled a satchel of barb rounds off the slack arm of one of the corpses.

Gaunt didn’t comment. Right now, anything they could muster to their side was an advantage.

* * *

Thirteen

T
HE CITADEL HAD
fallen silent. Smoke, some thin and pale, some boiling and black, vented from the jagged stone facade.

Breathlessly light-headed on painkillers, Colonel Colm Corbec led the first advance down into the steep, rubble-strewn ditch and up into the cliff-face of buildings. Silent, almost invisible waves of Tanith warriors crept down after him, picking their way into the ruins, lasguns ready.

Corbec had not sent any signals back to Command. This advance would be as unknown as he could manage. This would be the Ghosts alone, taking what ground they could before crying for help.

They edged through stone shattered and fused into black bubbles, crushing the ashen remains of the foe underfoot. The feedback of the fence weapons had done greater damage than Corbec could have imagined. He called up Varl’s platoon and sent them forward as scouts, using double the number of sweepers.

Corbec turned suddenly, to find Milo standing next to him.

‘No tunes now, I’d guess, sir,’ the boy said, his Tanith pipes slung safely under his arm.

‘Not yet,’ Corbec smiled thinly.

‘Are you all right, colonel?’

Corbec nodded, noticing for the first time there was the iron tang of blood in his mouth. He swallowed.

‘I’m fine…’ he said.

Fourteen

‘W
HAT DO YOU
make of that, sir?’ Trooper Laynem asked, passing the scope to his platoon sergeant, Blane. The seventh platoon of the Ghosts were, as per Gaunt’s instructions, hanging back to guard the back slopes of the rise over which the main force were advancing. Blane knew why; the commissar had made it plain. But he hadn’t found the right way to tell his men.

He squinted through the scope. Down the valley, massed formations of the Jantine Patricians were advancing up towards them, in fire-teams formed up in box-drill units. It was an attack dispersal. There could be no mistake.

Blane swung back into his bracken-edged foxhole and beckoned his comms officer, Symber. Blane’s face was drawn.

‘They… they look like they mean to attack us, sergeant,’ Laynem said in disbelief. ‘Have they got their orders scrambled?’

Blane shook his head. Gaunt had been over this and had seemed quite certain, but still Blane had fought to believe it. Guard assaulting Guard? It was… not something to even think about. He had obeyed the commissar’s directive, of course – it had been so quietly passionate and direct – but he still had not understood the enormity of the command. The Jantine were going to attack them. He took the speaker horn Symber offered.

‘Ghosts of the Seventh,’ he said simply, ‘form into defensive file along the slope and regard the Jantine advance. If they fire upon us, it is not a mistake. It is real. Know that the commissar himself warned me of this. Do not hesitate. I count on you all.’

As if on cue, the first blistering ripple of las-fire raked up over their heads from the Jantine lines.

Blane ordered his men to hold fire. They would wait for range. He swallowed. It was hard to believe. And an entire regiment of elite Jantine heavy infantry against his fifty men?

Las-fire cracked close to him. He took the speaker horn and made Symber select the commissar’s own channel.

He paused. The word hung like a cold, heavy marble in his dry mouth until he made himself say it.

‘Ghostmaker,’ he breathed.

Fifteen

D
ANK
,
CLAMMY DARKNESS
dripped down around them. Gaunt moved his team along through the echoing chambers and caves of wet stone. Caffran led Domor by the hand and one of Fereyd’s elite and anonymous troopers assisted the limping Baru.

The place was lifeless except for the cockroaches which swarmed all around them. At first, there had been just one or two of the black-bodied vermin bugs, then hundreds, then thousands. Larkin had taken to stamping on them but gave up when they became too numerous. Now they were everywhere. The darkness all around the infiltration team murmured and shifted with beetles, coating the walls, the floor, the roof. The insistent chattering of the insects susurrated in the gloom, a low, crackling slithering from the shifting blanket of bodies instead of distinct, individual sounds.

Shuddering, the Tanith moved on, finally leaving the mass of beetles behind and heading into galleries that were octagonal in cross section, the walls made of glass blocks fused together. The glass, its surface a dark, crazed patina where the slow passage of time had abraded it, cast back strange translucent phantoms from their failing lights; sometimes sharp reflections, sometimes wispy glows and embers.

Mkoll’s sharp eyes saw shapes in the glass, indistinct relics of semi-molten bone set in the vitreous wall like flecks of grit in pearls… or the tan-flies he used to find set in hard, amber nodes of sap while scouting the nal-wood forests back home.

Mkoll, a youthful-looking fifty year old with a wiry frame and a salting of grey in his hair and beard, remembered the forests keenly for a moment. He remembered his wife, dead of canth-fever for twelve years now, and his sons who had timbered on the rivers rather than follow his profession and become woodsmen.

There was something about this place, this place he could never in all his life have imagined himself in all those years ago when his Eiloni still lived, that reminded him of the nal-forests.

Sometime after the First Founding, when the commissar had noted his background from the files and appointed him sergeant of the scouting platoon with Corbec’s blessing, he had sat and talked of the nal-wood to Gaunt. Commissar Gaunt had remarked to him that the unique shifting forests of Tanith had taught the Ghosts a valuable lesson in navigation. He conjectured that was what made them so sure and able when it came to reconnaissance and covert insertion.

Mkoll had never thought about it much before then, but the suggestion rang true. It had been second nature to him, an instinct thing, to find his way through the shifting trees, locating paths and tracks which came and went as the fibrous evergreens stalked the sun. It had been his life to track the cuchlain herds for pelts and horn, no matter how they used the nal to obscure themselves.

Mkoll was a hunter, utterly attuned to the facts of his environs, utterly aware of how to read solid truth from ephemerally-shifting inconsequence. Since Gaunt had first remarked upon this natural skill, a skill shared by all Tanith but distilled in him and the men of his platoon, he’d prided himself in never failing the task.

Yes, now he considered, there was something down here that reminded him very strongly of lost Tanith.

He signalled a halt. The Crusade Staff trooper which Tactician Wheyland – or Fereyd, as the commissar called him – had sent forward to accompany him glanced around. Probably asking an unvoiced question, but any expression was hidden by the reflective visor of his red and black armour. Mkoll inherently mistrusted the tactician and his men. There was just something about them. He disliked any man who hid his face and even when Wheyland had revealed himself, Mkoll had found little to trust there. In his imagination he heard Eiloni tut-tutting, scolding him for being a loner, slow to trust.

He blinked the memory of his wife away. He knew he was right. These elite bodyguard troops were certainly skilled; the trooper had moved along with him as silently and assuredly as the best in his platoon. But there was just something, like there was something about this place.

Gaunt moved up to join the head of the advance.

‘Mkoll?’ he asked, ignoring Wheyland’s trooper, who was standing stiffly to attention nearby.

‘Something’s wrong here,’ Mkoll said. He pointed left and right with a gesture. ‘The topography is, well, unreliable.’

Gaunt frowned. ‘Explain?’

Mkoll shrugged. Gaunt had made him privy to the unlocked data back on the Absalom, and Mkoll had studied and restudied the schematics carefully. He had felt privileged to be taken that close to the commissar’s private burden.

‘It’s all wrong, sir. We’re still on the right tack, and I’ll be fethed if I don’t get you there – but this is different.’

‘To the map I showed you?’

‘Yes… And worse, to the way it was five minutes ago. The structure is static enough,’ Mkoll slapped the glass-brick wall as emphasis, ‘but it’s like direction is altering indistinctly. Something is affecting the left and right, the up and down…’

‘I’ve noticed nothing,’ Wheyland’s trooper interrupted bluntly. ‘We should proceed. There is nothing wrong.’

Gaunt and Mkoll both shot him a flat look.

‘Perhaps it’s time I saw your map,’ a voice said from behind. Tactician Wheyland had approached, smiling gently. ‘And your data. We were… interrupted before.’

Gaunt felt a sudden hesitation. It was peculiar. He would trust Fereyd to the Eye of Terror and back, and he had shown the data to chosen men like Mkoll. But something was making him hold back.

‘Ibram? We’re in this together, aren’t we?’ Fereyd asked.

‘Of course,’ Gaunt said, pulling out the slate and drawing Fereyd aside. What in the Emperor’s name was he thinking? This was Fereyd. Fereyd! Mkoll was right: there was something down here, something that was even affecting his judgement.

Mkoll stood back, waiting. He eyed the Crusade trooper at his side. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said at last. ‘I’m called Mkoll.’

‘Cluthe, sergeant, Tactical Counsel war-staff.’

They nodded to each other. Can’t show me your fething face even now, Mkoll thought.

Back down the gallery, Domor was whimpering gently. Dorden inspecting his eyes again. Larkin hunted the shadows with his gun-muzzle.

Rawne was staring into the glass blocks of the wall with a hard-set face. ‘Those are bones in there,’ he said. ‘Feth, what manner of carnage melted bones into glass so it could be made into slabs for this place?’

‘What manner and how long ago?’ Dorden returned, rewinding Domor’s gauze.

‘Bones?’ Bragg asked, looking closer at what Rawne had indicated. He shuddered. ‘Feth this place for a bundle of nal-sticks!’

Behind them, Caffran hissed for quiet. He had been carrying the team’s compact vox-set ever since Domor had been injured, and had plugged the wire of his microbead earpiece into it to monitor the traffic. The set was nothing like as powerful as the heavy vox-casters carried by platoon comm-officers like Raglon and Mkann, and its limited range was stunted further by the depth of the rock they were under. But there was a signal: intermittent and on a repeating automatic vox-burst. The identifier was Tanith, and the platoon series code that of the Seventh. Blane’s men.

‘What is it, Caff?’ Larkin asked, his eyes sharp.

‘Trooper Caffran?’ Major Rawne questioned.

Caffran pushed past them both and hurried up the tunnel to where Gaunt stood with the Imperial tactician.

As he approached, he saw Wheyland gazing at the lit displays of Gaunt’s data-slate, his eyes wide.

‘This is… unbelievable!’ Fereyd breathed. ‘Everything we hoped for!’