Ghostmaker (16 page)

“You can start by not attacking me. You fething non-combatants really wind me up. Where the feth would you be if we hadn’t come to pull your arses out of the Chaos pit?”

“Safe and sound in Aurelian Hive, probably!” Milloom jeered. “Not out in the deadlands, surrounded by terrorist infantry!”

Bragg shrugged. “Probably. With the other cowards. Are you a coward, Driver Milloom?”

“Kec you!”

“Just asking. The colonel-commissar told me to watch out for cowards. Told me to shoot them on sight, as they were treasonous dogs who didn’t deserve the salvation of the Golden Throne. I wouldn’t shoot them, not me.”

There was a pause.

Bragg smiled. “I’d just hit them. Has a similar result. Do you want me to hit you, Milloom?”

“N… no.”

“Then don’t assault me again. You can help even if you don’t know the business end of a weapon from your own arse. Get on the voxcaster. Recite the Ecclesiarchy’s Oath of Obedience. You know that?”

“Of course I know that! Then what?”

“Then recite it again. Make it clear and proud. Recite it again, then again and then again. If you get bored, insert the Emperor’s Daily Prayer for variation. Maybe the Imperial Litany of Deliverance for good measure. Fill the vox-channels with soothing, inspiring words. Can you do that?”

Milloom nodded and crossed to the vox-caster built into the tractor’s dash.

“Good man,” Bragg said. Milloom started to speak into the caster horn, remembering the verses he had learned as a child.

Outside, laser and stub fire whined into the circled convoy. The outriders were laying in hard. Meryn drew his bike in so that Caffran could do real damage to the slowly encircling bandits.

Fulke, Mktea and Tanhak ran the line. From the back of Fulke’s machine, Logris excelled and scored four kills. Mktea’s gunner Laymon made one of his own before the upper part of his head was scythed off by a las shot at the mouth. Tanhak and Grummed made six, maybe seven, good kills before a short-range missile ended their lives and their glory. Debris and body parts flew out from a searing typhoon of ignited bike fuel.

“Bragg! Bragg! We have to retreat!” Wheln yelled from the half-track, Abat dead behind him and Brostin blazing with his flamer.

In the cab of his freighter, Bragg was calmly unwrapping his autocannons from a felt shroud. Behind him, Milloom was steadily reciting into the vox-horn. Bragg paused, fingering his micro-bead to open the vox-line.

“No, Wheln. No retreat. No retreat,” he said simply.

Rubbing his sore throat, Tuvant scrambled up from the floor, about to argue with the huge Ghost, but he stopped dead as he saw the weapon that the Tanith hulk was preparing. Not one but two autocannons, the like of which were usually fixed to tripod or pintle mounts. Bragg had them lashed together, with a makeshift trigger array made out of a bent ration-pack fork so he could fire them as a pair. Long belt loops of ammunition played out from the gun-slots, leading back to a parcel of round-boxes.

Bragg punched out the perspex window section from the rear of the cab and laid his twin muzzles across the sill. He looked back at Tuvant.

“You wanted something?”

“No,” Tuvant replied, ducking suddenly as stub-fire perforated the cab and showered them with metal shards and soot.

“I can fire this on my own if I have to, but it would be easier if I had someone to feed.”

Tuvant blinked. Then he scrambled forward and grabbed the ammo-belts, easing them around so they would pull unobstructed from the boxes.

“Thanks,” smiled Bragg quickly, then turned to hunch and squint out of the window port. He squeezed the trigger assembly. The twin guns barked deafeningly in the confines of the cab. Milloom paused in his recitation, and covered his ears with a grimace. Tuvant shuddered, but kept working dutifully to play the ammo-belts out clear and clean. Shell cases billowed through the air like chaff.

Bragg’s first devastating salvo had gone wide, passing over the top of the nearby cliffs. He grinned at himself and adjusted his aim.

“Try again…” he murmured. “What?” asked Tuvant. “Nothing.”

Bragg opened fire again, the barking chatter of the paired guns filling the cab again. Now his shots were stitching along the valley wall and crossing the far dunes. Something he touched exploded in a violent plume of red fire. Bragg played his guns around that area again for a minute or so.

Out on the dunes, with the convoy circled behind him, Merrt crawled forward, re-adjusting his aim. He could hear the anxious but determined voice reciting the Emperor’s Prayer over his ear-plug and it filled him with a sense of right and dignity. He blinked dust out of his eyes. He’d ditched his sand-goggles the moment he’d hit the ground. Larkin had told him that nothing should get between a sniper’s scope and his naked eye. You only saw the truth of the world when your eye was clear and you were looking down your scope, Larkin had said in training. Merrt smiled at the memory. He remembered how Larkin would often carry his scope around in his thigh-pouch and take it out to look at people through it. “To tell if they’re lying,” he always said.

Merit’s scope wasn’t lying now. He could see over three dozen bandits advancing over the dunes under cover of the foggy dust kicked up by the firefight. They were running low, heads down, hugging the contours of the ground. Merrt took aim at the nearest one. He sighed and fired, timing his finger to the moment of respiratory emptiness so nothing in his torso would jerk the aim. The laser burst punched through the top of the bandit’s bowl-helmet, presented as it was by his head-down approach. The shot probably passed down through his skull, his neck and his torso, following the line of his spinal column, Merrt thought, as the figure dropped stone dead in a crumpled pile.

He adjusted his aim and took another bandit in the face when he looked up to take a bearing. A slight swing to the left, and another came into his sight, scurrying forward to gain new cover. A sigh. A squeeze. A slight recoil. The figure flipped back and fell still.

Merrt readjusted and was about to target a small group of infantry when their position dissolved in a haze of heat and outflung debris. Missile hit, he thought.

Rahan and Nehn were keeping the aim of the missile turret low, sliding off single shots that hugged the ground cover and buried themselves in the foe. Mkteeg edged the half-track along The lip of the folded dunes, skirting the enemy as best he could. His weapon crew had almost expended their missiles, so he set the drive in idle and clambered back into the turret bed to set up the stub-gun folded away in a deck-locker.

He had it up and lashed in to the armoured side panel of the track as Rahan volleyed off five missiles high into the air. They looked like burning javelins as they arched over the desert and flew down onto unseen targets below the dune.

Mktea fired the autocannon mount Laymon had been manning until the feeder belt jammed and the gun glowed red. With a curse, he snatched up his lasrifle and dived over the side. Enemy las-fire reached his vehicle a moment later and blew it up in a shower of metal debris that pattered around him as he crawled through the sand. Mktea felt a sharp and painful impact in his ankle. Looking back, prone on his belly, he realised his combat trousers were smouldering from the wash of cinders and a thick piece of metal debris had pierced his foot.

He beat down the fire then rolled over to yank the debris from his ankle. It was the shattered handle of his vehicle’s auto-gun return, he realised. The pain was immense. He pulled at it and passed out momentarily. Coming to, he realised that the shrapnel wasn’t going to come free from the bones of his foot without a surgeon. He chewed down a handful of painkillers, and as the heady high smacked into his brain, he rolled over and began firing his lasgun into the dune crest behind him.

Wheln blasted away from his vehicle’s turret next to Brostin, who had ditched his flamer for a lasrifle. Bandits were running at them from a scoop of low-lying desert, and they shot everything that moved.

Mkendrik realised his guns were out as the last of the belt-feed whickered through the slot and the weapons coughed dry. Bandit troops were all over him, charging up to take his machine. He pulled out his laspistol and shot the first one through the head, gutting the second and blowing a knee off the third. Then he took a glancing wound in the left shoulder that turned him sideways and knocked him to the deck. There was a roaring sound.

Meryn’s bike came over the rise in a puff of dust, landing hard, Caffran hammering the enemy with his guns. Meryn slewed to the left as Caffran played the cannons around, exploding most of the enemy who were in eye-shot. The others scrambled for cover.

“Come aboard!” Meryn shouted over the roar of his engine and Mkendrik leapt onto the flat-bed next to Caffran. Meryn gunned the engine and they hammered straight at the enemy lines.

Tiring from the back of his vehicle, Logris, one of Mkoll’s elite scout brigade, realised his driver was losing it. Fulke was crying out, screaming, resisting the hammer of weaponsfire. He slewed the bike around, away from the action.

“Pull us back around! The war’s over there!” Logris bellowed Fulke said something absurd and gunned the motor of the outrider towards the comparative safety of the convoy circle. Logris climbed forward over the ammo boxes and feeder-cables strewn across the back-platform of the bike. He came upon the whimpering Fulke from behind and slammed his head sideways into the armour panel of the pilot’s door. The bike shuddered to a sidelong halt as Fulke went limp.

Logris spat on the driver. “Coward,” he said, then turned back. Enemy troops were scurrying across the cracked dust-land towards him. He took out his lasgun and armed it.

“Let’s go,” he said to them, though they couldn’t hear.

Bragg pulled back from the window and released his finger on the trigger assembly. “What?” Tuvant asked.

“Get out,” Bragg said suddenly. “You and Milloom, get out of the cab and back onto the trailer.”

“Why?”

“Tire-patterns…”

“What?”

Bragg turned and cursed at the Caligulan driver. “Tire-patterns! Tire-patterns! They’re concentrating their fire on the tractor units. It’s the freight they want! If you want to be safe, get into the sections they don’t dare shoot at!”

Tuvant and Milloom hurried back through the communicating door into the freight section. Bragg wiped his brow. His hand was rich with sweat and soot. Over the vox-link, he ordered all his crews to do the same. The bandits want this cargo… and so, Throne help me, they’ll be less sure of shooting at us when we’re part of it.

He yanked his autocannons off the sill and dragged them and the ammo boxes out onto the top of the freight unit.

“We’re gonna die here!” Tuvant said, looking out from the top of the freight unit at the hundreds of bandit troopers who were advancing on their circle of machines.

“No, we’re not,” Bragg told him.

“You’re mad!” spat Tuvant. “We’re surrounded by them! Thousands of them! They’ll pick us off, every last man!” Bragg sighed and closed his eyes.

The Maurader bombers came low over the ridge, annihilating the enemy with their belly-slung payloads.

“There are bandits… hiding out there in the deadlands, impossible to target.” Bragg smiled, repeating what Gaunt had told him. “Unless there is something to draw them out and unify them. Something like… this convoy.”

Tuvant looked at the huge ghost in disbelief. “We were bait?”

“Yes.”

“Kec you for using us!”

“I’m sorry. It was the colonel-commissar’s idea.”

Tuvant sagged down onto the freighter-top walkway.

Bragg hunkered next to him. Around them, sheets of incendiary bombs and phosphor fire scorched the hills. The Imperial fighter-bombers shattered the air as they went supersonic and crossed the low hills to pull around for another massacre run.

“Tuvant?”

Tuvant looked round at the giant.

“We were bait, but we still have a purpose. We’ll get this convoy through. Calphernia will rejoice, just like I said. It’s just the colonel-commissar—”

Tuvant turned, eyes red. “I’m getting kec tired of hearing that title!”

“His name’s Gaunt. A good man. General Thoth ordered him to supervise the relief work here on your world. He knew that couldn’t happen all the while the terrorists and bandit-clans were out here. So he set a lure. A lure of fat, tasty freight trucks bound for Calphernia.”

“Great.”

“We got them all in one place so that the Navy air-wing could dispose of them. Be happy, man! We’ve won a great victory here!”

Tuvant looked up at him. His face was pale. “All I know is I’ve been used as bait by your colonel-commissar. You knew that all along.”

Bragg sat back against the guard rail, smelling the acid-rich reek of the burning napalm. “Yes. The bandits aren’t working blind, you know. Hive workers in Aurelian are tipping them off as to the movement of supply convoys. Why else do you think the colonel-commissar put me in charge of this run?”

Tuvant blinked at him, uncertain.

Bragg patted his vast chest with huge hands. “I’m big… I must be stupid. No brain. The sort of — what was it again?—‘kec’ who would drive the convoy into trouble and then circle it in a defense position for easy pickings. The sort of idiot who was likely to deliver the convoy right into the hands of the bandits.”

“Are you telling me you were part of the lure too?”

“The sweet part, the part they couldn’t resist. The part the workers on the inside would vox to their bandit friends about. Convoy’s coming, boys and there’s an idiot in charge. Right, Milloom?”

Milloom glared back at them from his place against the rail. “Kec you!”

Bragg shook his great head. He held up a data-slate. “Friend of mine, Trooper Raglon… Comms-Officer Raglon, was monitoring your cipher traffic. I’ve got you here, tipping off your bandit friends as to the time, schedule, make-up and strength of this convoy. Colonel-Commissar Gaunt told me to do it.”

“Milloom?” Tuvant stammered.

A compact auto-pistol was suddenly in Milloom’s hand as he leapt up. “Kec you, Guard filth!”