First and Only (5 page)

‘Praise the Emperor, lord general,’ he said.

‘What? Oh, yes. Indeed,’ Dravere said absently, as he sat back on his chaise and lit a cigar.

Five

M
AJOR
R
AWNE THREW
himself flat into a foxhole and almost drowned in the milky water which had accumulated in its depths. Spluttering, he pulled himself up to the lip of the crater and took aim with his lasgun. The air all around was thick with smoke and the flashing streams of gunfire. Before he had time to fire, several more bodies crashed into the makeshift cover by his side: Trooper Neff and the platoon adjutant, Feygor, beside them Troopers Caffran, Varl and Lonegin.

There was Trooper Klay as well, but he was dead. The fierce crossfire had cauterised his face before he could reach cover. None of them looked twice at Klay’s body in the water behind them. They had seen that sort of thing a thousand times too often.

Rawne used his scope to check over the rim of the foxhole. Somewhere out there the Shriven were using some heavy weapon to support their infantry. The thick and explosive fire was cutting a wedge out of the Ghosts as they advanced. Neff was fiddling with his weapon and Rawne glanced down at him.

‘What’s the matter, trooper?’ he asked.

‘There’s mud in my firing mechanism, sir. I can’t free it.’

Feygor snatched the lasgun from the younger man, ejected the magazine and slung back the oiled cover of the ignition chamber, so that it was open and the focus rings exposed.

Feygor spat into the open chamber and then slammed it shut with a clack. Then he shook it vigorously and jammed the energy magazine back into its slot. Neff watched as Feygor swung round again and lifted the gun above his head, firing it wholesale into the smoke beyond the foxhole.

Feygor tossed the weapon back to the trooper. ‘See? It’s working now.’

Neff clutched the returned weapon and wriggled up to the lip of the hole.

‘We’ll be dead before we go another metre,’ Lonegin said from below them.

‘For Feth’s sake!’ Trooper Varl spat. ‘We’ll just get them ducking then.’ He unhooked a clutch of grenades from his webbing and tossed them out to the other soldiers, sharing them like a schoolboy shares stolen fruit. A click of the thumb primed each weapon and Rawne smiled to his men as he prepared to heave his into the air.

‘Varl’s assessment is correct,’ Rawne said. ‘Let’s blind them.’

They hefted the bombs into the sky. They were frag grenades, designed to deafen, blind and pepper those in range with needles of shrapnel.

There was the multiple crump of detonation.

‘That’s got them ducking at least,’ Caffran said, then realised that the others were already scrambling up out of the foxhole to charge. He followed quickly.

Screaming, the Ghosts charged over a short stretch of grey ooze and then slithered down into a revetment, screened from them by the smoke. The blackened impacts of the grenades were all around them, as were the twisted bodies of several of their dead foe.

Rawne slammed onto his feet at the bottom of the slide and looked around. For the first time in six months on Fortis Binary, he saw the enemy face to face. The Shriven, the ground forces of the enemy he had been sent here to fight.

They were surprisingly human, but twisted and malformed. They wore combat armour cleverly adapted from the work suits that they had used in the forges of the planet, the protective masks and gauntlets actually woven into their wasted, pallid flesh. Rawne tried not to linger on the dead. It made him think too much about those legions he had still to kill. In the smoke he found two more of the Shriven, crippled by the grenade blasts. He finished them quickly.

He found Caffran close behind him. The young trooper was shocked by what he saw.

‘They have lasguns,’ Caffran said, aghast, ‘and body armour.’

Beside him, Neff turned one of the corpses over, with his toe. ‘And look… they have grenades and munitions.’ Neff and Caffran looked at the major.

Rawne shrugged. ‘So they’re tough bastards. What did you expect? They’ve held the Imperium off here for six months.’ Lonegin, Varl and Feygor hurried along to join them. Rawne waved them along, further into the enemy dugout. The space widened in front of them and they saw the metal-beamed, stone barns of an industrial silo.

Rawne quickly gestured them into cover. Almost at once las-fire started to sear down the trench towards them. Varl was hit and his shoulder vanished in a puff of red mist. He went down hard on his backside and then flopped over clutching with the one arm that would still work. The pain was so momentous he couldn’t even scream.

‘Feth!’ spat Rawne. ‘See to him, Neff!’

Neff was the squad medic. He pulled open his thigh pouch of field dressings as Feygor and Caffran tried to drag the whimpering Varl into cover. Gleaming lines of las-fire stitched the trench line and tried to pin them all. Neff quickly bound Varl’s ghastly injury. ‘We have to get him back, sir!’ he shouted down the grey channel to Rawne.

Rawne was pushing himself into the cover of the defile, the grey ooze matting his hair as the las-bursts burnt the air around him. ‘Not now,’ he said.

Six

I
BRAM
G
AUNT LEAPT
down into the trench and broke the neck of the first Shriven he met with his descending boots. The chainsword screamed in his fist and as he reached the duckboards of the enemy emplacement he swung it left and right to cut two more apart in drizzles of blood. Another charged him, a great curved blade in his hand. Gaunt raised his bolt-pistol and blew the masked head into vapour.

This was the thickest fighting Gaunt and his men had encountered on Fortis, caught in the frenzied narrows of the enemy trenches, sweeping this way and that to meet the incessant advance of the Shriven. Pinned behind the commissar, Brin Milo fired his own weapon, a compact automatic handgun that the commissar had given him some months before. He killed one – a bullet between the eyes – then another, winging him first and then putting a bullet into his upturned chin as he flailed backwards. Milo shivered. This was the horror of war that he had always dreamt of, yet never wished to see. Passionate men caught against each other in a dug out hole three metres wide and six deep. The Shriven were monsters, almost elephantine with the long, nozzled gas masks sewn into the flesh of their faces. Their body armour was a dull industrial green and rubberised. They had taken the protective garb of their workspace and made it their battledress, daubing everything with eye-aching symbols.

Slammed against the trench wall by a falling body, Milo looked down at the corpses which gathered around them. He saw for the first time, in detail, the nature of his foe… the twisted, corrupted human forms of the Chaos host, incised with twisted runes and sigils, painted on the dull green rubber of their armour or carved into their raw flesh.

One of the Shriven ploughed in past Gaunt’s shrieking sword and dove at Milo. The boy dropped and the cultist smashed into the trench wall. Scrabbling in the muddy wetness of the trench bed, Milo retrieved one of the lasguns that had fallen from the dying grasp of one of Gaunt’s previous victims. The Shriven was on him as he hefted the weapon up and fired, point blank. The flaming round punched through his opponent’s torso and the dead cultist fell across him, forcing him down by sheer weight into the sucking ooze of the trench floor. Foul water surged into his mouth, and mud and blood. A second later he was heaved, coughing, to his feet by Trooper Bragg, the most massive of the men of Tanith, who was somehow always there to watch over him.

‘Get down,’ Bragg said as he hoisted a rocket launcher onto his shoulder. Milo knelt and covered his ears, tight. Hopefully muttering the Litany of True Striking to himself, Bragg fired his huge weapon off down the companionway of the trench. A fountain of mud and other unnameable things were blown into fragments. He often missed what he was aiming at, but in these conditions that wasn’t an option.

To their right, Gaunt was scything his way into the close-packed enemy. He began to laugh, coated with the rain of blood that he was loosing with his shrieking chainsword. Every now and then he would fire his pistol and explode another of the Shriven.

He was filled with fury. The signal from Lord General Dravere had been draconian and cruel. Gaunt would have wanted to take the enemy trenches if he could, but to be ordered to do so with no other option except death was, in his opinion, the decision of a flawed, brutal mind. He’d never liked Dravere, not at any time since their first meeting twenty years before, when Dravere had still been an ambitious armour colonel. Back on Darendara, back with Oktar and the Hyrkans…

Gaunt had kept the nature of the orders from his men. Unlike Dravere, he understood the mechanisms of morale and inspiration. Now they were taking the damned trenches, almost in spite of Dravere’s orders rather than because of them. His laughter was the laughter of fury and resentment, and pride in his men for doing the impossible regardless.

Nearby, Milo stumbled to his feet, holding the lasgun.

We’re there, Gaunt thought, we’ve broken them!

Ten metres down the line, Sergeant Blane leapt in with his platoon and sealed the event, blasting left and right with his lasgun as his men charged, bayonets first. There was a frenzy of las-fire and a flash of silver Tanith blades.

Milo was still holding the lasgun when Gaunt snatched it from him and threw it down onto the duckboards. ‘Do you think you’re a soldier, boy?’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Really?’

‘You know I am.’

Gaunt looked down at the sixteen year-old boy and smiled sadly.

‘Maybe you are, but for now play up. Play a tune that will sing us to glory!’

Milo pulled his Tanith pipes from his pack and breathed into the chanter. For a moment it screamed like a dying man. Then he began playing. It was Waltrab’s Wilde, an old tune that had always inspired the men in the taverns of Tanith, to drink and cheer and make merry.

Sergeant Blane heard the tune and with a grimace he laid into the enemy. By his side, his adjutant, vox-officer Symber, started to sing along as he blasted with his lasgun. Trooper Bragg simply chuckled and loaded another rocket into the huge launcher that he carried. A moment later, another section of trench dissolved in a deluge of fire.

* * *

T
ROOPER
C
AFFRAN HEARD
the music, a distant plaintive wail across the battlefield. It cheered him for a moment as he moved with the men under Major Rawne’s direction up over the bodies of the Shriven, side by side with Neff, Lone-gin, Larkin and the rest. Even now, poor Varl was being stretchered back to their lines, screaming as the drugs wore off.

That was the moment the bombardment started. Caffran found himself flying, lifted by a wall of air issued from a bomb blast that created a crater twelve metres wide. A huge slew of mud was thrown up in the sky with him.

He landed hard, broken, and his mind frayed. He lay for a while in the mud, strangely peaceful. As far as he knew, Neff, Major Rawne, Feygor, Larkin, Lonegin, all the rest, were dead and vaporised.

As shells continued to fall, Caffran sank his head into the slime and silently begged for release from his nightmare.

A
LONG WAY OFF
, Lord High Militant General Dravere heard the vast emplacements of the Shriven artillery begin their onslaught. He realised that it would not be today, after all. Sighing angrily, he poured himself another cup from the freshly refilled samovar.

Seven

C
OLONEL
C
ORBEC HAD
three platoons with him and moved them forward into the traversed network of the enemy trenches. The bombardment had been howling over their heads for two hours now, obliterating the front edge of the Shriven emplacements and annihilating all those of the Guard who had not made it into the comparative cover of enemy positions. The tunnels and channels they moved through were empty and abandoned. Clearly the Shriven had pulled out as the bombardment began. The trenches were well-made and engineered, but at every turn or bend there was a blasphemous shrine to the Dark Powers that the enemy worshipped.

Corbec had Trooper Skulane turn his flamer on each shrine they found and burn it away before any of his men could fully appreciate the grim nature of the offerings laid before it.

By Curral’s estimation, after consulting the tightly-scrolled fibre-light charts, they were advancing into support trenches behind the Shriven main line. Corbec felt cut off – not just by the savage bombardment that shook their very bones every other second, and he fervently prayed no shell would fall short into the midst of them – but more, he felt cut off from the rest of the regiment. The electro-magnetic aftershock of the ceaseless barrage was scrambling their communications, both the microbead intercoms that all the officers wore and the long range vox-caster radio sets. No orders were getting through, no urgings to regroup, to rendezvous with other units, to press forward for an objective, or even to retreat.

In such circumstances, the rulebook of Imperial Guard warfare was clear: if in doubt, move forward.

Corbec sent scouts ahead, men he knew were fast and able: Baru, Colmar and Scout-Sergeant Mkoll. They pulled their Tanith stealth cloaks around them and slipped away into the dusty darkness. Walls of smoke and powder were drifting back over the trench lines and visibility was dropping. Sergeant Blane gestured silently up at the billowing smoke banks that were descending.

Corbec knew his intent, and knew that he didn’t wish to voice it for fear of spooking the unit. The Shriven had no qualms about the use of poison agents, foul airborne gases that would boil the blood and fester the lungs. Corbec pulled out a whistle and blew three short blasts. The men behind him put guns at ease and pulled respirators from their webbing. Colonel Corbec buckled his own respirator mask around his face. He hated the loss of visibility, the claustrophobia of the thick-lensed gas hoods, the shortness of breath that the tight rubber mouthpiece provoked. But poison clouds were not the half of it. The sea of mud that the bombardment was agitating and casting up into the wind as vapour droplets was full of other venoms: the airborne spores of disease incubated in the decaying bodies out there in the dead zone; typhus, gangrene, livestock anthrax bred in the corrupting husks of pack animals and cavalry steeds, and the vicious mycotoxins that hungrily devoured all organic matter transforming it into a black, insidious mould.