Ghostmaker (11 page)

“We’re in a forest caldera called K7-75, about forty kilometres north north east of the Nero city perimeter. Your assessment was good, major. We’re on the wrong side of the lines and in pretty damn inhospitable country. There’s dense forest for at least eight kilometres in any direction, and this sinkhole’s about a kilometre deep. We’d better get ready to move.”

“Move?” Feygor asked. “Commissar… we can get the crash beacon up and running…”

“No we can’t,” Meryn said. He showed them the molten residue of the beacon unit.

“And even if we could, Feygor?” Gaunt shook his head sadly. “About fifty kilometres south of us, the Imperial Guard is engaged in a massive assault. Thousands are dying. Every ship, and craft and man is committed to the attack. There will be nothing to spare to come looking — across enemy lines, mark you — for a few lost souls like us. They’ll have already written us off. Besides, there’s a psyker-bred storm raging up there, remember? No one could get to us even if they wanted to.”

Rawne spat and cursed. “So what do we do?” Gaunt grinned, but without humour. “We see how far we can get. Better that than just wait here to die.”

In fifteen minutes, the survivors were assembled and injuries tended. Salvageable equipment and weapons were divided up. Both Milo and the dazed co-pilot were given a laspistol and a few spare power cells. Obel and the now-freed Brennan lay unconscious on stretcher pallets.

Rawne looked grimly at Gaunt. He nodded his head at the two injured men. “We should… be merciful.”

Gaunt frowned. “We’re taking them with us.”

Rawne shook his head. “With respect, they’ll probably both be dead in an hour. Taking them will tie up four able-bodied soldiers as stretcher bearers.”

“We’re taking them,” Gaunt repeated.

“If you lashed ’em both to a frame,” Bragg put in thoughtfully, “I could drag ’em along. Better me than four other boys.”

Meryn and Feygor raised the two stretcher cases onto an A-frame of wood and Bragg took the weight of the point on his shoulder. Caffran had used his silver Tanith knife to cut lengths of waxy creeper and bound them on for a grip.

“I won’t be fast, mind,” Bragg noted. But with the party clearing the way, he could pull them along on the sling-bed efficiently enough.

The commissar checked the topolabe again, scanning for closer detail.

“Interesting,” he murmured. “About four kilometres east there’s some kind of structure. Maybe an old farming complex or something. Might provide us with some shelter. Let’s see.” Gaunt had armed himself with a lasgun from one of the dead. He handed his chainsword to Rawne. “Take point please, major,” he said.

Rawne moved to the head of the column and started to slice his way through the dense, wet forest.

The Tanith Ghosts advanced through the outer complexes of the hive city, surging down an embankment and across the blasted ferrocrete of a six-lane arterial highway.

Broken vehicles littered the lanes, and great pools of motor oil blazed up curtains of fire. Corbec urged the Ghosts forward, under traffic control boards that still flashed and winked speed limits and direction pointers. Guns blazing, they began to assault a vast block of worker residences on the far side.

As the battle group swept into the shattered hallways of the old worker residences, where peeling placards exhorted the citizen workers to meet production targets and praise the Emperor at all times, fighting became a close-quarter business with the enemy forces, now seen face to face for the first time. Humans, corrupted by Chaos, cult worshippers whose physical forms had become twisted and warped. Most wore the black, vulcanised work suits of the hive workforce, daubed now with Chaos patterns, their heads protected with tight grey hoods and industrial glare visors. They were well armed too.

Bodies littered the concourses and galleries of the residences, shattered glass and twisted plastic covered the ground. Intense fires blazed through some areas, and the air was full of drifting cinders, like incandescent snow.

And flies: dark, fat-bodied flies.

Blasting as he advanced, Corbec fired to left and right, through doorways and thin plastic-board walls, cutting down or exploding the foe all around.

Flanked in a fire-team, Larkin, Suth, Varl, Mallor, Durcan and Billad worked in immediate support. Larkin snatched off the occasional shot, his aim as fine as usual, though Corbec knew that thanks to the storm, he was closer to snapping than ever. Suth had the squad’s melta, and seared them a path.

Bolt fire and las-shot cut their way. Billad jerked as he was hit repeatedly, sprawling back against a wall and sliding down.

Corbec sent a steady stream of shot into the smoke haze.

The flies buzzed.

Radio chatter was almost as deafening as the firefight. Guard forces had begun to pincer the city. A combined force of Royal Volpone 50th and Raymian 13th and 16th had driven a steel fist into the ore-smelter heartland of the hive, meeting the enemy’s main motorised units in an armoured battle in the vast, echoing barns of the starship yards and dry-docks. Rumours were a battalion of Lakkarii Gundogs and some Raven Guard Space Marines had punched through into the upper levels, into the Administratum tower itself.

But an overall victory seemed so far away, especially given the psychic storm, which effectively shut off any further reinforcements. Or anything else.

“Any joy with the air-cover?” Corbec asked over the crackle of laser fire.

Trooper Raglon answered on the bead-link. “Marauder flights are all out of action, sir. Fleet Command recalled them because of the storm. The Chaos effects are screwing their guidance.”

Corbec glanced up at the corrosive purple turbulence that passed for sky. Forget the aircraft, that nightmare was screwing with his guidance. This close to a manifestation of Chaos, his senses were whirling. His balance was shot and he felt nauseous, with a throbbing pain in his temple. Terror dimpled his skin and ached in his marrow. He dared not think about what was out there, waiting for him.

And he knew his men were the same. There had been a dozen spontaneous nosebleeds already, and several men had convulsed, vomiting.

Still, they were making headway, clawing through the grim habitat towers and the workforce residence blocks where things came down to knife and pistol, room to room, in the old, dirty tenements where the lowest level of worker had dwelt.

The commissar would have been proud, Corbec thought. The Ghosts had done the job. He spat out a fly and listened carefully to the flow of radio traffic again for a moment. The Fleet Command channel repeated its overriding directive: unless the enemy psykers could be neutralised, the Fleet couldn’t land any more reinforcements, any more of the five million Imperial Guard troops still waiting in troop-ships in orbit. Or deploy air-cover. The fate of the entire battle teetered in the balance.

Corbec brushed off another fly. The air was thick with them now, choked with flies and cinders and ash. The smell was unbearable. Colm Corbec took a deep, shuddering breath. He knew the signs: they were close to something, something bad. Something of Chaos.

“Watch yourselves!” he warned his group over the link. “We’re getting into a real nest of Hell here!”

Through the swarming clouds of buzzing flies, the fire-team edged along a corridor littered with clear plastic shards and torn paper. Out in the concourse below, a fierce hand-to-hand battle was ending in screams and sporadic pistol fire. Something blew up a kilometre or so away, shaking the ground.

Corbec reached the turn in the hall and waved his men back.

Just in time, his fire-team sheltered in doorways as heavy stub gun fire raked up and down the old back-stairway, disintegrating the steps and tearing down the stained wall tiles.

Corbec looked round at Larkin, who was murmuring some Imperial Prayer under his breath, waving off the flies. It was probably the oath of allegiance to the Emperor they’d all been taught at school back home on Tanith.

Home…

This had once been someone’s home, thought Corbec, snapping back to the hard facts of real time. A dingy old hallway in a dingy old high rise, where humble, hardworking people came back from the shift-work at the fabrication plants in the hive and cooked meagre meals for their tired children.

“Larks!” He gestured up the stairwell. “A little Mad Magic on that stubbed.”

Larkin wiped his mouth and shook out his neck like a pianist about to play. He took out his nightscope, a little heat-sensitive spotter he’d used back home poaching larisel out in the woods at night. He trained it up the hall, found a hub of heat emanating from the wall.

Most would have aimed for that, thinking it the body heat of the gunner. Larkin knew better. The source was the muzzle heat of the big cannon. That put the gunner about sixty centimetres behind it, to the left.

“A bottle of sacra says it’s a head shot,” whispered Corbec as he saw Larkin snuggle down and aim his lasgun.

“Done,” Varl said.

Larkin punched a single shot up the stairwell and through the wall.

They moved forward, cautious at first, but there was no further firing.

Covering each other, they moved up the smashed staircase, past the landing where the cult soldier lay dead across his stub gun, head half gone. Corbec smiled and Varl sighed.

Then they entered a further landing and fanned out. There was a smell of burning flesh here, and the flies were thicker than ever.

Larkin edged along one wall, looking at the trash and broken possessions that had been dropped in the rubble. Along the wall, under a series of Chaos markings rendered in dark paint, someone had nailed up a series of dolls and other childrens’ toys. Something in Larkin’s heart broke as he gazed on the crucified dolls, remembering a world of family and friends and children forever lost to him.

Then he realised that not all of the dolls were dolls.

Larkin fell to his knees, retching.

On the far side of the gallery, Corbec, Durcan and Suth burst into a long concrete chamber that had once been a central meeting hall for the tenement block. It was dark inside. Several thousand eyes blinked in their direction.

They all belonged to the same… thing.

Something immeasurably vast began to coil up out of the darkness, extending the flaccid, blue-white mass of its bloated body, toxic spittle drooling from its befanged mouths. Jellied things quivered in the dark spaces of its translucent skin and flies billowed around it like a cloak.

Corbec’s nose spurted blood and soaked his beard as he backed away, his mind seized in horror. Suth dropped the melta with a clatter and started to retch, sliding down the wall, unable to stand. Durcan seemed unable to move. He began to cry, wailing as he fumbled to raise his lasgun. Limpid, greasy coils lashed out of the dark chamber and encircled him, embraced him, and then crushed him so hard and so suddenly he burst like a tomato.

Mallor and Varl turned and saw the horror slithering up from the chamber, saw Suth helpless and Corbec frozen, saw the pulpy red slick that had been Durcan.

“Daemon! Daemon!” Varl screamed down the comm link. “DALMON!”

Gaunt held up a hand and announced a ten minute rest. The group eased back and took the weight off their feet, leaning on tree trunks, hunkering down.

Meryn took the medi-pack back to Bragg and helped him lower the stretcher-bed.

“Oh, feth!” Milo heard him say.

Milo crossed over as Gaunt himself approached.

Meryn looked up, treating the ugly wounds of the two unconscious men. “It’s this place,” he explained, “hot, wet… spores in the air… insects. Their wounds gel re-infected as fast as I clean them. Obel’s fading fast. Some kind of fungus necrotizing the raw flesh. Maggots too.” He shook his head and continued with his work.

Milo moved away. The smell rising from the wounded men was not pleasant.

Nearby stood the co-pilot. He’d pulled his flight helmet off, and was staring nervously into the green darkness around them, clutching his laspistol. Milo thought he looked young, no older than him. The flesh around his cranial implants looked raw and fresh. He probably feels just like me, Milo decided. In over his head.

He had just considered approaching the navy cadet and speaking to him when the low whine of gunfire sang through the trees. Everyone ducked for cover, and there was a staccato series of safety locks disengaging and power-cells humming to life.

Near to Milo, Gaunt crawled forward, tapping his micro-bead.

“Rawne? Answer!” he hissed. The major, with Feygor, Caffran and a trooper called Kalen, had scouted ahead towards the mysterious structure.

“F’irefight!” came Rawne’s response, Milo picking it up via his own comm-bead. “We’re pinned! Daagh! Throne of Earth! There’s—”

The link went dead.

“Damn!” Gaunt hissed. Tie clambered to his feet. “Meryn! Bragg! Guard the wounded! You, Navy boy! Stay with them! The rest with me, fire-team spread!”

The Ghosts moved forward and Milo moved with them, checking his pistol was cleared to fire. Despite the fear, he felt pride. The commissar had needed all the men he could muster. He had not thought twice about including Milo.

Corbec was sure: his life was over when Larkin started shooting. Driven over the edge by what he had seen nailed along the wall, Larkin just went crazy; mindless, oblivious to the otherwise transfixing image of Chaos in that old tenement. Larkin simply opened fire and kept firing. “Larkin! Larkin!” Corbec hissed.

The little man’s howl was drying away into a hoarse whisper. A repetitive clicking came from the lasgun in his hands, the power cell exhausted.

The lashing tentacles of the vast thing in the hallway had been driven back by the hammerblow of relentless laser fire.

They had a moment of grace, time to retreat.

Corbec led his scrambling fire-team back down the tenement hall, half-carrying Larkin.

“Oh feth! Oh feth! Oh feth!” Larkin repeated, over and over.

“Shut up, Larks!” warned Corbec. “Contact Fleet Command!” he yelled to Raglon over his bead. “Tell them what we’ve found!”