Ghostmaker (12 page)

In the cover of a slumped tree-stump, Trooper Caffran sighted his lasgun to his shoulder and loosed a burst of laser shot that sliced explosively through the foliage ahead. Bolter fire returned, smacking into the wood around him, blasting sprays of splinters and gouts of sap.

“Major Rawne?” Caffran yelled. “Comm link’s dead!”

“I know!” spat Rawne, dropped down against a tree nearby as metal shot exploded the bark behind him. He threw down Gaunt’s chainsword and swung his own lasgun up to fire.

Feygor took up a prone position, blasting with his own weapon, Kalen to his side. The four Ghost lasguns blasted an arc of fire into the dense trees, the dim grove flickering with the muzzle flashes.

Rawne span, his gun lowered, but dropped his aim with a curse as he saw Gaunt moving in behind them, the men in fire-team line.

“Report!” hissed Gaunt.

“We just walked into heavy bolter fire. Enemy positions ahead, unseen. Feels like an ambush, but who knew we were coming?”

“Comm link?”

“Dead… jammed.”

“Would help if we could see what we were shooting at,” Gaunt remarked. He waved a “come here” to Trooper Brostin, who hurried over, cradling the single flamer they’d pulled intact from the troop-ship.

“Positions!” Gaunt yelled, and fanned his men out so that all could take a clear shot once the target was revealed. “Brostin?”

The trooper triggered the flame cannon and a volcanic spear of liquid fire spat into the dense undergrowth. Maintaining the spurt, like a horizontal fountain of fire, Brostin swept it left and right.

The trees, horsetails and giant ferns ahead flared and blazed, some of them igniting as if their sap was petrol, some wilting and withering like dust. In twenty seconds, a wall of jungle had been scorched aside and they had a clear view sixty metres into an artificially cleared area.

Silence. Not even the bolter fire which had got them ducking.

“Scope!” called Gaunt, and took the instrument as Milo offered it up.

“Looks like we have…” Gaunt paused as the self-focus dials on his scope whirred and spun. “An Imperial installation. Three armoured, modular cabins, two larger hardened shelters… they’ve all had the insignia spray-painted out. Communicator-array and up-link mast for a voxcaster, that’s probably what’s jamming us… perimeter defence net… slaved servitors mounted into autoloader bolt cannons. You must have tripped a sensor as you came in, major. Triggered them off. I think we’ve fried a couple of them.”

“What is this place?” Caffran murmured.

“A way out… a chance we never thought we had. If we can get in there alive, that is.” Gaunt fell silent.

“But what’s it doing out here in the middle of this jungle?” Milo found himself asking. Gaunt looked round at him. “Good question.”

The word wasn’t good. All ground forces were stretched to breaking point maintaining the gains they had made. There was no one to move in to support the Ghosts.

“How can we fight that kind of stuff?” stammered Suth.

Corbec shook his head. He’d pulled the entire battle group back to the embankment overlooking the highway and the tenements beyond. Tenements that held the most abominable thing he’d ever seen.

“But it has to die!” Larkin whispered. “Don’t you see? It’s causing the storm. Unless it dies, we’re all stuck here!”

“You can’t know that, larks!” Varl sneered.

Corbec wasn’t so sure. Larkin’s gut instincts had always been good bets. “Emperor save us all!” Corbec said, exasperated. He thought hard. There had to be something… something… what would Gaunt have done? Something arrogant, no doubt. Pulled rank, broken the rules, thrown the strategy books out of the window and used the resources he knew he could count on…

“Hey, Raglon! Over here, lad!” he yelled to his comm-officer. “Patch me a link to the
Navarre!”

Executive Officer Kreff cleared his throat, took a deep breath and stepped into the Strategium, the captain’s armoured inner sanctum at the centre of the
Navarre
’s bridge. Captain Wysmark sat in dark, contemplative silence on a reclined throne, quietly assessing the flickering overlays of runic and schematic data that flowed across the smoothly curved walls and roof of the room.

He turned in his chair slightly. “Kreff?”

“I have, um, this is unorthodox, sir, but—”

“Out with it, man.”

“I’ve just spoken with Colonel Corbec, the acting chief of the Tanith First. His battle group is assaulting the western edge of the Nero Hive. He requests we… activate the main batteries and present on a target he has acquired.”

Wysmark sneered, the glow of the readouts flickering across his face in the gloom.

“Doesn’t this idiot know anything about Naval tactics?” he chuckled. “Fleet weapons will only engage a surface target from orbit before troop deployment. Once the ground forces are in, air-strikes are the responsibility of the attack squadrons.”

Kreff nodded. “Which are grounded due to the psychic storm, sir. The colonel is aware it is counter to usual tactics, as orbital bombardment is not known for its… um… finesse. However, he claims this is a critical situation… and he can supply us with pinpoint co-ordinates.”

Wysmark frowned, thoughtful. “Your assessment, Kreff? You’ve spent more time with these footsloggers since they’ve been aboard than anyone. Is this man mad, or should I grant his request?”

Kreff dared a little smile. “Yes… and yes, sir.”

Wysmark grinned back, very slightly. He rotated his chair to face Kreff. “Let’s see those co-ordinates.”

Kreff jumped forward and handed him the data-slate.

Wysmark keyed his micro-bead intercom. “Communications: patch me to Fleet Command. I wish to advise them of our next action. Fire control, energise the main batteries… I have a firing solution here. All stations, this is the captain… rig for main weapon firing.”

All so very neat and civil, Kreff smiled. This really was the only way to fight a war.

There was a blink of light, an astonishing shockwave that knocked them all down, and then a deafening roar that hammered across them.

Corbec rose, coughing dust and picked Raglon up.

“Right on the button,” he remarked jovially to his astonished men.

They scrambled up to the top of the slope and looked over the balustrade. Below them, the ruinous expanse of a ten-lane highway stretched into the dark industrial high rises of the hive. Across the highway, a vast blazing crater stood where the tenements had been.

“Holy Throne of Earth!” Varl stammered.

“Friends in high places,” sniggered Corbec. He glanced down the slope at the hundreds of waiting troops below, troops who could already sense the change in the air. There was smoke, and fumes and cordite — but the stink of Chaos was retreating. The storm was blowing itself out. “Let’s go!” he yelled into his bead.

The comms officer saluted Kreff as he crossed the polished deck of the serene bridge.

“Signal from the surface, sir.”

Kreff nodded.

“Standard Guard voxcaster encryption, data and time as now, orbit lag adjusted. Message reads: ‘Ghostly gratitude to the Navarre. Kreff, you bastard, we knew you had it in you.’ Message ends. Sorry about the vulgarity, sir.”

The comms officer looked up from the slate.

“I’ll take that,” Kreff said, trying to hide his grin as he sauntered away.

Gaunt moved in close to the cabins, bolt pistol in hand. Behind him came Feygor and Caffran, edging slowly.

There was a low whirr and one of the servitors nearby detected the movement and swung around, bringing its automated weapon to bear.

Gaunt blasted it apart with three quick shots. Diving forward, he slammed in through the doorway, rolling up in the blue, cold, artificial light of the interior, hunting for a target.

There was nothing but darkness. And dead stillness. Gaunt moved into the low habitat, mindful of the gloom. Ahead, a dull phosphorescence shone. There was a dark bunkroom full of over-thrown furniture and scattered papers. Gaunt took a look at one leaf and knew he would have to have them all burnt.

Rawne and Feygor slid in behind him.

“What is this?” Rawne asked.

“We’ll see…” murmured Gaunt.

They moved through the habitat into a greenhouse where the air was humid. There were things growing in the hydroponics vats that Gaunt didn’t want to look at. Fibrous, swollen, bulging things, pulsing with hideous life.

“What is this place?” asked Feygor, horrified.

“The start of it… the beginning of Caligula’s fall,” Gaunt said. “One of the industrialists of this world, hot-housing something he could not understand. The competition for better crops is fierce here. This poor fool didn’t realise what he was growing.”

Or at least, Gaunt thought, I hope he didn’t. If this had been done with foreknowledge, deliberately… He shook the idea away.

“Burn it. Burn it all,” he told his men.

“Not all,” Kalen said, entering behind them. “I scouted around the perimeter. Whoever owned this place has a shuttle bedded in a silo out back.”

Gaunt smiled. The Emperor will always provide.

“So he didn’t die?” mused Corbec, sat on his bunk in the troop bay. Bragg shook his head and swigged from the bottle of sacra. “Don’t think nothing’s gonna kill old Gaunt. He said he was gonna get us all out, and he did. Even Obel and Brennan.”

Corbec thought about this. “Actually,” he said finally, “I meant Rawne.”

They both looked across the quiet bay to where Rawne and Feygor sat in quiet conversation.

“Oh, him. No, worse luck.” Bragg passed the bottle back to Corbec. “So, I hear you had some fun of your own?”

A forward post, looking out into the water-choked thickness of the Monthax jungles. The flies were thick out here, like sparkling dust in the air. Amphibians gurgled and chugged in the mudbanks.

The sappers had raised the spit-post out beyond the broad levees of the main embankment, one of six that allowed the Tanith snipers greater reach into the front line. They were long, zagged and lined with frag-sacking and a double layer of overlapped flak-boards.

Gaunt edged along the spit, keeping low, passing the sentries at the heavy-bolter post at the halfway point. The mud, unmoving and stagnant in the dug-away bed, stank like liquescent death. The sagging cable of a land-line voxcaster ran down the length of the sacking, held above the water by iron loop-pins. Gaunt knew it ended at a vox-set at the sniper post. In the event of attack, he would want the earliest warning from his keen-eyed forwards, and one that could be conveyed by good old, reliable, un-scrambleable cable.

Larkin was his usual edgy self. At the loop hole at the end of the spit-post, he was sat on a nest of sacking, meticulously polishing his weapon.

A compulsive, Gaunt thought. The commissar stepped up to him. Larkin looked around, tense. “You always look like you’re afraid of me,” Gaunt said. “Oh no, sir. Not you, sir.”

“I’d hate to think so. I count on men like you, Larkin. Men with particular skills.”

“I’m gratified, commissar.”

Larkin’s weapon was sparkling, yet still the man worked the cloth to it. “Carry on,” said Gaunt.
But for how much longer,
he wondered?

Larkin thought about death. He thought he might well have begged for it long ago, had he not been so scared of it. He had never figured out, though he had spent whole nights wondering it, whether he was more afraid of death itself or the fear of death. Worse, there had been so many times when he had expected to find out. So many moments caught in Death’s frosty gaze, snapped at by Death’s steel incisors. The question had been nearly answered so many times.

Now perhaps, he would find out. Here. Death, or the fear of death.

If the Angel knew, she was saying nothing. Her stern face was turned down, demure, eyes closed as if sleeping, praying hands clasped at her breast.

Outside, below them, the war to take Bucephalon raged. The stained glass in the huge lancet window, what remained of it, shook and twinkled with reflections of tracer sprays, salvos of blazing rockets, bright air-bursts.

Larkin sat back against the cold stone pillar and rubbed a dirty hand around his lean jaw. His breathing was slowing now at last, his pulse dropping, the anxiety attack that had seen him wailing and gasping five minutes ago was passing like a cyclone. Or maybe he was just in the eye of that storm.

The ground shook. He felt it through the pillar. His pulse leapt for a moment. He forced himself to breathe deeply through his mouth, slow, deep inhalations of the sort he used to steady himself before taking a shot.

“You were telling me how you came to be here.”

Larkin looked round at the Angel. Though her head was still angled down, now she was gazing at him, smiling grimly. Larkin licked his lips and gestured idly around with one dirt-caked hand.

“War. Fighting. Fate.”

“I meant specifically,” said the Angel.

“Orders. The will of the Emperor.”

The Angel seemed to shrug her robed shoulders slightly. “You are very defensive. You hide yourself and the truth behind words.”

Larkin blinked. For a moment, sickle-shaped moons of bright white light and fuzzy oblongs of red blackness lurched across his vision. A tiny moment of nausea. He knew the signs. He’d known them since childhood. The visual disturbances, the nausea, the taste of tin in his mouth. Then, the anxiety, the tunnel vision. After that, if he was lucky, a white hot migraine pain that would burst inside his skull and leave him dazed and helpless for hours. If he was unlucky: fits, spasms, blackouts and an awakening hours later, bruised and bloodied from the thrashing seizures; empty, miserable, destroyed inside.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Angel.

Larkin tapped his forehead gently with his index finger. “I’m… not right. Never have been, not in all my life. The fits used to scare my mother, but not half as much as they did me. They come on me from time to time.”

“Times like now? Under pressure? In the presence of danger?”