Gaunt’s feet found the rock floor at the base, and he straightened up, loosening the ropes so that the others could join him. It smelled of sweaty damp down here, and the tunnel he was in was low and jagged.
‘Lasgun!’ came a call from above. The weapon dropped down the flue and Gaunt caught it neatly, immediately igniting the lamp-pack which Dorden had webbed to the top of the barrel with surgical tape. He played the light over the dirty, low walls, his finger on the trigger. Above him came the sounds of others scrambling down the ragged chimney.
It took thirty minutes for the rest to join him. They all held lasguns with webbed-on lamps, except Dorden, who was unarmed but carried a torch, and Bragg, who hefted a massive autocannon. Bragg had enjoyed the hardest descent; bulky and uncoordinated, he had struggled in the flue and begun to panic.
Larkin was moaning about death and claustrophobia, young Caffran was clearly alarmed, Dorden was sour and defeatist, Baru was scornful of them all and Rawne was silent and surly. Gaunt smiled to himself. He had selected them well. They were all exhibiting their angst and worries up front. Nothing would linger to come out later. But between them, they encompassed the best stealth, marksmanship, firepower, medical ability and bravery the Tanith First-and-Only had to offer.
All of them seemed wary of the Imperial tactician and his trooper bodyguard which the commissar had suddenly decided to invite along. The troopers were tough, silent types who had scaled the chimney with professional ease. They stuck close to their leader, limpet-like, guns ready.
The party moved down the passage, stooping under outcrops and sags of rock and twisted stone. Their lamps cut obscure shadows and light from the uneven surfaces.
After two hundred careful steps and another twenty minutes, they emerged into a dripping, glistening cavern where the ancient rock walls were calcified and sheened with mineral moisture. Ahead of them, their lamps picked out an archway of perfectly fitted, dressed stone.
Gaunt raised his weapon and flicked the lamp as an indicator.
‘After me,’ he said.
Seven
‘HE WANTS TO see you, sir,’ the aide said.
Lord General Dravere didn’t want to hear. He was still staring at the repeater plates which hung in front of him, showing the total, desperate carnage that had befallen Marshal Sendak’s advance on Target Secundus. Even now, plates were fizzing out to blankness or growing dim and fading. He had never expected this. It was… It was not possible.
‘Sir?’ the aide said again.
‘Can you not see this is a crisis moment, you idiot?’ Dravere raged, swinging around and buffeting some of the floating plates out of his way. ‘We’re being murdered on the second front! I need time to counter-plan! I need the tactical staff here now!’
‘I will assemble them at once,’ the aide said, speaking slowly, as if he was scared of a thing far greater than the raging commander. ‘However, the inquisitor insists.’
Dravere hesitated, and then released the toggle of his harness and slid out of the hammock. He didn’t like fear, but fear was what now burned in his chest. He crossed the command globe to the exit shutter and turned briefly to order his second-in-command to take over and assemble the advice of the tactical staff as it came in.
‘Signal whatever remains of Sendak’s force to withdraw to staging ground A11-23. Alert the other forces to the danger of the towers. I want assessments and counter-strategies by the time I return.’
A brass ladder led down into the isolation sphere buried in the belly of the command globe.
Dravere entered the dimly-lit chamber. It smelled of incense and disinfectant. There was a pulse tone from the medical diagnosticators, and pale steam rose from the plastic sheeting tented over the cot in the centre of the room. Medical staff in cowled red scrubs left silently as soon as he appeared.
‘You wanted to see me, Inquisitor Heldane?’ Dravere began.
Heldane moved under the loose semi-transparent flaps of the tent. Dravere got a glimpse of tubes and pipes, draining fluid from the ghastly rent in the man’s neck, and of the ragged wound in the side of his head, which was encased in a swaddling package of bandage, plastic wrap and metal braces.
‘It is before us, my Lord Hechtor,’ Heldane said, his voice a rasping whisper from vox-relays at his bedside. ‘The prize is close. I sense it through my pawn.’
‘What do we do?’
‘We move with all stamina. Advance the Jantine. I will guide them in after Gaunt. This is no time for weakness or subtlety. We must strike.’
Eight
DEATH FLURRIED DOWN over the Tanith ranks from the stepped arches of the necropolis. A blizzard of las-shot showered down, along with the arcing stings of arcane electrical weapons. The air hummed, too, with the whine of the slower metal projectile-casters the enemy were using. Barb-like bullets, slow-moving enough to be seen, buzzed down at them like glittering hornets. Where they hit flesh, they did untold explosive damage. Corbec saw men rupture and come apart as the barbed rounds hit. Others were maimed by shrapnel as the vile shells hit stone or metal beside them and shattered.
A barbed round dug into the turf near Corbec’s foxhole cover and became inert.
The colonel flicked it out with his knife-point and studied it – a bulb of dull metal with forward-pointing, overlaid leaves of razor-sharp alloy. The blackened, fused remains of a glass cartridge at the base showed its method of propulsion. Shot from simple tube-launchers, Corbec decided, the propellant igniting as the firing pin shattered the glass capsule. He turned it over in one hand, protected by the edge of his stealth cape. Evil and ingenious, the barb’s leaves were scored to ease impact-shatter – either against a hard surface to produce a cloud of shrapnel, or against bone as it chewed through tissue to effect the worst wounds possible. The leaves were slightly spiralled too, suggesting that the launcher’s rifling set them spinning as they fired. Corbec decided he had never seen a more savage, calculated, more grotesque instrument of death and pain.
He sighed as the firestorm raged above him. Still no word had come from the commissar’s infiltration team, and only Corbec’s knowledge of Gaunt’s secret agenda allayed his fears at the high-risk tactic.
Corbec contacted his platoon leaders and had them edge the men forward along the facing lip, winning any inch they could. He had close on two thousand lasguns and heavier weapons raking the front of the pile, and the alcove-lined facade was shattering, slumping and collapsing under the fusillade. But the return fire was as intense as ever.
Trooper Mahan, communications officer for Corbec’s own platoon command, crouched in the foxhole beside him, talking constantly into the voice-horn of his heavy vox-set, relaying and processing battle-reports from all the units. Mahan suddenly leaned back, grabbed the colonel by a cuff and dragged him close, pushing the headset against his ear.
‘…are death! The towers are death!’ Corbec heard.
He shot a stare at Mahan, who was encoding the infor mation on his data-slate.
‘Target Secundus is routed,’ Mahan said grimly, scribing as he spoke and relaying the data in stuttered code-bursts through the handset of the vox-caster. ‘Sendak is dead… Feth, it sounds like they’re all dead. Dravere is signalling a total withdrawal. The towers–’
Corbec grabbed the slate and studied the scrolling text Mahan was direct-receiving from High Command. There were flickering, indistinct images captured from Sendak’s last transmission. He saw the towers erupt into life, laying down their destructive fences, saw the forces of the enemy manifest on the tower tops.
Instinctively, he looked up at the towers nearest them. If it happened here, they would suffer a similar fate.
Even as he formed the thought, a ragged flurry of frenzied reports flooded the comm-lines. The towers had ignited at Target Tertius too. Marshal Tarantine had received enough warning from the Secundus advance to protect the advance of his forces, but still he was suffering heavy losses. They were generally intact, but their assault was stymied.
‘Sacred Feth!’ Corbec hissed, heating the air with his curse. He keyed his microbead to open traffic and bellowed an order.
‘Any Ghosts within twenty metres of a tower! Use any and all available munitions to destroy those towers! Do it, for the love of us all!’
Answering links jabbered back at him and he had to shout to be heard. ‘Now, you fething idiots!’ he bawled.
Two hundred metres away, a little way down a slope in the hill, Sergeant Varl’s platoon reacted fastest, turning their rocket launchers on the nearest two towers and toppling them in earthy crumps of dirt and flame. Folore and Lerod’s platoon’s quickly followed suit to the left of Corbec’s position. Seven or more of the towers were demolished in the near vicinity. Sergeant Curral’s platoon, guarding the rear of the main defence, set to blasting towers further down the slope with their missile launchers. Stone dust and burnt bracken fibres drifted in the scorched air.
There was a report from Sergeant Hasker, whose platoon had lost all of its heavy weapon troops in the first exchange. Hasker was sending men up close to the towers in his sector to mine them with grenade strings and tube bombs.
By Corbec’s side, Mahan was about to say something, but stopped short in surprise, suddenly wiping fresh blood from his upper lip. Corbec felt the hot dribble in his own nose too, and sensed the sickly tingle in the air.
‘Oh–’ he began.
Mahan shook his head, trying to clear it, blood streaming from his nose. Suddenly he convulsed as catastrophic static noise blasted through his headset to burst his eardrums. He winced up in pain, crying out and tearing at his ear pieces.
He rose too far. A barbed round found him as he exposed his head and shoulders over the cover, and tore everything above his waist into bloody spatters. The comms unit on his back exploded. Corbec was drenched in bloody matter and took a sidelong deflection of shrapnel in the ribs, a piece of the barbed round that had fractured on impact with Mahan’s sternum.
Corbec slumped, gasping. The pain was hideous. The broken leaf of metal had gone deep between his ribs and he knew it had ruptured something inside him. Blood pooled in the bracken roots beneath him.
Fighting the agony, he looked up. The air-sting and the nosebleeds could only mean one thing – and Corbec had fought through enough theatres against Chaos to know the cursed signs.
The Primaris target had activated its towers.
Almost doubled up, clutching his side with bloodstained fingers, Corbec looked down the length of the assault line. His warning had come just in time. The Ghosts had demolished enough of the towers to break the chains. Fetid white energy billowed out of the necropolis, swirling in grasping tendrils that whipped forward to find the relay towers that were no longer there. Corbec’s orders had cut the insidious counter-defences of the enemy.
Unable to link with the tower relays, the abysmal energy launched from the necropolis wavered and then boiled backwards into the city. In an instant, the enemy’s own thwarted weapons did more damage to the city façade than Corbec’s regiment could have managed in a month of sustained fire. Entire plateaux of stone work exploded and collapsed as the untrained energy snapped back into the dead city. Granite shards blasted outwards in choking fireballs, and sections of the edifice slipped away like collapsing ice-shelves, baring tunnelled rock faces beneath.
Down the Tanith line, Hasker’s platoon had not been so lucky. Their mining efforts were only partially complete when the defence grid activated. The better part of fifty men, Dorain Hasker with them, were caught in the searing energy-fence and burned.
But Hasker had his revenge at the last, as the tower energy set off his munitions. The whole slope shuddered at the simultaneous report. Crackling towers dissolved in sheets of flame and great explosions of earth and stone. The feedback there was far greater. The flickering, blazing fence wound back on itself as the towers collapsed, lashing back into the necropolis and scourging a new ravine out of the mountainside.
As if stunned, or mortally crippled, the enemy gunfire trailed away and died.
Corbec rolled in the belly of the foxhole, awash with his own blood, and Mahan’s. He pulled a compress from his field kit and slapped it over the wound in his side, and then gulped down a handful of fat counter-pain tablets from his medical pouch with three swigs from his water flask while reciting a portion of the Litany for Merciful Healing.
More than the recommended dose, he knew. His vision swam, and then he felt a strength return as the pain dulled. His ribs and his chest throbbed, but he felt almost alive again. Alive enough to function, though at the back of his mind he knew it was no more than a bravura curtain call.
There were eight tablets left in his kit. He put them in his pocket for easy access. A week’s worth of dose, and he’d use it in an hour if he had to. He would fight until pain and death clawed through the analgesic barriers and stopped him.
He hefted himself up, recovered his lasgun and keyed his microbead.
‘Corbec to all the Ghosts of Tanith… now we advance!’
Nine
OVER THE VALE beyond them, Colonel Draker Flense and his Patrician units saw the flicker of explosions that backlit the hills and underlit the clouds. Night was falling. The concussion of distant explosions, too loud and large for any Guard ground-based weaponry, stung the air around them.
Trooper Defraytes, Flense’s vox-officer, stood to attention by him and held out the handset plate on which the assimilated data of Command flickered like an endless litany.
Flense read it, standing quite still in the dusk, amid the bracken and the soft flutter of evening moths.
The Tanith had met fierce opposition, but thanks to the warnings from the other target sites, they had broken the Chaos defence grid and blasted the opposition. Those thunderclaps still rolling off the far hills were the sounds of their victory.
‘Sir?’ Defraytes said, holding out his data slate. A battle-coded relay from Dravere was forming itself across the matt screen in dull runes.
Flense took it, pressing his signet ring against the reader plate so that it would decode. The knurled face of the ring turned and stabbed a stream of light into the slate’s code-socket. Magenta clearance, for his eyes only.
The message was remarkably direct and certain.
Flense allowed himself a moment to smile. He turned to his men, all six thousand of them spread in double file swirls down the scarp.
Nearby, Major Brochuss stared at his commander under hooded lids.
Flense keyed his microbead.
‘Warriors of Jant Normanidus Prime, the order has come. Evidence has now proved to our esteemed commander Lord General Dravere that the Colonel-Commissar Gaunt is infected with the taint of Chaos, as are his so-called Ghosts. They, and they alone, have passed through the defences of Chaos which have halted Marshal Sendak and Marshal Tarantine. They are marked with the badge of evil. Lord General Dravere has granted us the privilege of punishing them.’
There was a murmur in the ranks, and an edgy eagerness.
Flense cleared his throat. ‘We will take the scarp and fall upon the Tanith from behind. No longer think of them as allies, or even human. They are stained with the foul blackness of our eternal foe. We will engage them – and we will exterminate them.’
Flense cut his link and turned to face the top of the scarp. He flicked his hand to order the advance and knew without question that they would follow.
Ten
THE LIGHT DIED.
Gaunt tore the lamp pack off the muzzle of his lasgun and tossed it away. Dorden was at his side, handing him another.
‘Eight left,’ the elderly medic said, holding out a roll of surgical tape to help Gaunt wrap the lamp in place.
Neither of them wanted to talk about the darkness down here. A Guard-issue lamp-pack was meant to last six hundred hours. In less than two, they had exhausted the best part of twenty between them. It was as if the dark down in the underworld of the necropolis ate up the light. Gaunt shuddered. If this place could leac
h power from energetic sources like lamp-packs, he dared not think what it might be doing to their human frames.
They still edged forward: first the scouts, Mkoll and Baru, silent and almost invisible in the directionless dark, then Larkin and Gaunt. Gaunt noticed that Larkin was sporting some ancient firing piece instead of his lasgun, a long-limber rifle of exotic design. He had been told this was the weapon Larkin had used to take down the Inquisitor Heldane, and so it was now his lucky weapon. There was no time to chastise the man for superstitious foolishness. Gaunt knew Larkin’s mental balance hung by a thread as it was. He simply hoped that, come a firefight, the strange weapon would have a cycle rate commensurate to the las-gun.
Behind them came Rawne, Domor and Caffran, all with lamp pack-equipped lasguns at the ready. Domor had his sweeper set slung on his shoulder too, if the need came to scan for mines. Dorden followed, unarmed, and then Bragg with his massive autocannon. Behind them came Fereyd, with his anonymous, still visored troops as their rearguard.
Gaunt called a halt while the scouts took fresh bearings and inspected the tunnels ahead. Fereyd moved over to him.
‘Been a long time, Bram,’ he said in a smooth voice that was almost a whisper.
He doesn’t want the men to hear, thought Gaunt. He doesn’t know how much I’ve told them. He doesn’t even know what I know.
‘Aye, a long time,’ Gaunt replied, tugging the straps of his rifle sling tighter and casting a glance in the low lamplight at Fereyd’s unreadable face. ‘And now barely time for a greeting and we’re in it again.’
‘Like Pashen.’
‘Like Pashen,’ Gaunt nodded with a phantom smile. ‘We do always seem to make things up as we go along.’
Fereyd shook his head. ‘Not this time. This is too big. It makes Pashen Nine-Sixty look like a blank-round exercise. Truth is, Bram, we’ve been working together on this for months, had you but realised it.’
‘Without direct word from you, it was hard to know anything. First I knew was Pyrites, when you volunteered me as custodian for the damn crystal.’