First and Only
‘Blood of the Emperor!’ spat Blane as he understood the tactic: superior numbers, total loyalty and an unquenchable thirst for victory. The Jantine commander had deployed his troops as expendable, using their sheer weight to soak up the Ghosts’ fire and overwhelm them.
Three hundred Jantine Patricians were dead before the charge made it into Tanith lines. Dead to the Tanith guns, the slope of the hill, the angles of death. But that still left close on seven hundred of them to meet head on in screaming waves at the ditch line of the slit-trenches.
SINGING THE ANCIENT war-hymn of Jant Normanidus, the Alto Credo, Major Brochuss led the assault over the Tanith Ghosts’ paltry defence line. A las-round punched through his cloth-armoured sleeve and scorched the flesh of one arm. He swung around, double-blasting the Ghost before him as teams of his soldiery came in behind him.
The Ghosts were nothing… and to tear into them like this was a joy that exorcised Brochuss’s own ghosts, ghosts which had been with him one way or another since the humiliation on Khedd, and which had been further reinforced on Fortis Binary and Pyrites. Anger, battle-joy, lust, rage – they thrilled through the powerful body of the Jantine Patrician.
The tempered steel of his bayonet slashed left and right, impaling and killing. Twice he had to fire his rifle pointblank to loosen a corpse stuck on his blade.
The nobility of his upbringing made him recognise the courage and fighting skill of the spidery black-clad men they crushed in this trench. They fought to the last, and with great skill. But they were light troops, dressed in thin fabrics, utterly unmatching the physical strength and resilience of his hard-armoured Jantine. His men had the discipline of the military academies of Jant in their blood, the fierce will to win. That was what made them Patricians, what made them as feared by others of the Imperial Guard as the Guards feared the Adeptus Astartes.
If Brochuss thought of the cost which had earned them the route to the top of the hill, it was only in terms of the victory hymns they would sing at the mass funerals. If it cost one or a thousand, victory was still victory – and a punishment victory over traitor scum like this was the most cherished of all. The Ghosts were vermin to be exterminated. Colonel Flense had been right to give the order to charge, even though he had seemed strangely pale and horrified when he had given it.
Victory was theirs.
SERGEANT BLANE CAUGHT the first Jantine over the lip of the ditch in the belly with his bayonet and threw him over his head as he rolled. The man screamed as he died. A second bayoneted Blane’s left thigh as he followed in and the sergeant bellowed in pain, swinging his lasgun so that the blade cut open the man’s throat under the armour of the helmet. Then Blane fired a single shot point blank into the writhing man’s face.
Coline shot two Jantine on the lip of the line and then fell under a hammer-blow of fixed blades. Fighting was now thick, face-to-face, close-quarter. Symber shot three of Coline’s killers before a loose las-shot took the top of his head off and dropped his twitching body into a narrow ditch already blocked by a dozen dead.
Killing another Jantine with a combination of bayonet thrust and rifle butt swipe, Blane saw the vox-caster spin from Symber’s dying grasp, and wished he had the time to grab it and send a signal to Gaunt or Corbec. But the top of the ridge was a seething mass of men, stabbing, striking, firing, dying, and there was no pace to give and no moment to spare. This was the heat of battle, white heat, hate heat, as it is often spoken of by soldiers but seldom seen.
Blane shot another Patrician dead through the chest at a range of two metres and then swung his blade around into the chin of another that lunged at him. Something hot and hard nudged him from behind. He looked down and saw the point of a Jantine bayonet pushing out through his chest, blood gouting around its steel sheen.
Snarling with glee, Major Brochuss fired his lasgun and let the shot blow the stumbling Ghost off his blade. Sergeant Blane fell on his face without a murmur.
Seventeen
IT WAS AS HOT as Milo had ever known it.
The main column of the Ghosts was slowly advancing though the tumbled stones of the necropolis, and had emerged into a long valley of ancient colonnades which rose on either hand in sun-blocking shadows. The valley, a natural rift in the mountain on either side of which the primitive architects had built towering formations of alcoves, was nearly eight kilometres long, and its floor, half a kilometre wide, was treacherous with the slumped stone work and rockfalls cast down from the high structures by slow time.
The energetic feedback of the defence grid had exploded ruinously in here as well and the fallen rocks, tarry-black and primeval, had soaked it up and were now radiating it out again. It was past sixty degrees down here, and dry-hot. Sweat streaked every Tanith man as he crept forward. Their black fatigues were heavy with damp and none except the scouts still wore cloaks.
Trooper Desta, advancing alongside Milo, hawked and spat at the gritty black flank of a nearby slab and tutted as his spittle fizzled and fried into evaporated nothingness.
Milo looked up. The gash of sky above the rift sides was pale and blue, and bespoke a fair summer’s day. Down here, the long shadows and rocky depth suggested a cool shelter. But the heat was overwhelming, worse than the jungle miasma of the tropical calderas on Caligula, worse than the humid reaches of Voltis, worse than anything he had ever known, even the parching hot-season of high summer at Tanith Magna.
The radiating rocks glowed in his mind, aching their way into his drying bones and sinuses. He longed for moisture. He teased himself with memories of Pyrites, where the stabbing wet-cold of the outer city reaches had seemed so painful. Would he was there now. He took out his water flask and sucked down a long slug of stale, blood-warm water.
A half-shadow fell across him. Colonel Corbec stayed his hand.
‘Not so fast. We need to ration in this heat and if you take it down too fast you’ll cramp and vomit. And sweat it out all the faster.’
Milo nodded, clasping his bottle. He could see how pale and drawn Corbec had become, his flesh pallid and wet in the deep shadows of the rift’s belly.
But there was more. More than the others were suffering. Pain.
‘You’re wounded, aren’t you, sir?’
Corbec glanced at Milo and shook his head.
‘I’m fine and bluff, lad. Yes, fine and bluff.’ Corbec laughed, but there was no strength in his voice. Milo clearly saw the puncture rip in the side of Corbec’s tunic which the colonel tried to hide.
Black fabric showed little, but Milo was sure that the wet patches on Corbec’s fatigues were not sweat, unlike the patches on the other men.
A cry came back down the rift from the scout units and a moment later something creaked on the wind.
Corbec howled an order and the Ghosts fanned out between the sweltering rock, rock that afforded them cover but which they dare not touch. The enemy was counterattacking.
They came at them down the valley, some on foot, most in the air. Dozens of small, missile-shaped airships, garish and fiercely-bright in colour and adorned with the grotesque symbols of Chaos, powered down the rift towards them, propellers thumping in their diesel-smoking nacelles, their belly-slung baskets, gondolas and platforms filled with armed warriors of Chaos. The swarm of airships drifted down across the Ghosts, raking the ground with fire.
Now it was all or nothing.
Eighteen
DRAVERE, HIS FACE angry and hollow-eyed, pushed aside the medics in the isolation sphere and yanked apart the plastic drapes veiling Inquisitor Heldane’s cot. The inquisitor gazed up at him from beneath the clamped medical support devices covering him with fathomlessly calm eyes.
‘Hechtor?’
Dravere flung a data-slate on the cot. The inquisitor’s one good hand carefully put down the small mirror he had been holding and took up the slate, keying the data-flow with his long-nailed thumb.
‘Madness!’ Dravere spat. ‘The Jantine have taken the rise and exterminated Gaunt’s rearguard, but F
lense reports that the main Tanith unit has actually advanced into Target Primaris. What by the Throne do we do now? We’re losing more men to our own than to the foe, and I still require victory here! I’ll not face Macaroth for this!’
Heldane studied the slate’s information. ‘Other regiments are moving in. The Mordian here, the Vitrians… they’re close too. Let Gaunt’s Ghosts lead the assault on the Target as they have begun. Sacrifice them to open a wedge. Move the Patricians in behind to consolidate this and finish off the Ghosts. Your main forces should be ready to advance after them by then.’
Dravere took a deep breath. Tactically, the advice was sound. There was still a good opportunity to silence the Ghosts without witnesses and still effect a victory. ‘What of Gaunt?’
Heldane took up his mirror again and gazed into it. ‘He progresses well. My pawn is still at his side, primed to strike when I command it. Patience, Hechtor. We play games within games, and all are subservient to the intricate processes of war.’
He fell silent, resolving images in the distances of the mirror invisible to the lord general.
Dravere turned away. The inquisitor was still useful to him, but as soon as that usefulness ended he would not hesitate to remove him.
Gazing into the mirror, Heldane absently recognised the malicious thought in Dravere’s blunt intellect. Dravere utterly misunderstood his place in the drama. He thought himself a leader, a manipulator, a commander. But in truth, he was nothing more than another pawn – and just as expendable.
Nineteen
COLONEL FLENSE LED the Jantine Patricians down the great outer ditch and into the outskirts of the necropolis ruins, passing through the exploded steatite fragments and blackened corpses left by Corbec’s assault. Distantly, through the archways and stone channels they could hear gunfire. The Ghosts had plainly met more opposition inside.
The afternoon was lengthening, the paling sky striated with lingering bands of smoke from the fighting. Flense had six hundred and twelve men left, forty of that number so seriously injured they had been retreated to the field hospitals far back at the deployment fields. Fifty Tanith, fighting to the last, had taken over a third of his regiment. He felt bitterness so great that it all but consumed him. His hatred of Ibram Gaunt, and the rivalry with the Tanith First that it had bred, had been a burning frustration. Now when they actually had the chance to face them on the field, the Tanith skirmishers had fought above their weight and scored a huge victory, even in defeat.
He cared little now what happened. The other Ghosts could live or die. All he wanted was one thing: Gaunt. He sent a Magenta level communiqué to Dravere, expressing his simple wish.
The reply surprised and delighted him. Dravere instructed Flense to place his main force under Brochuss’s direct command to continue the advance into the Target Primaris. The battle orders were to neutralise the Ghosts and then prosecute a direct assault on the enemy itself. With luck, the Tanith would be crushed between the Jantine and the forces of Chaos.
But for Flense there was a separate order. Dravere had learned from the Inquisitor Heldane that Gaunt was personally leading an insertion team into the city from below. The entry point, a shaft beneath an outcrop of stones on the hillside, was identified and a route outlined. On Dravere’s personal orders, Flense was to lead a fire-team in after the commissar and destroy him.
Flense quietly conveyed the directive to Brochuss as they stood watching the men advance in three file lines up into the vast ancient necropolis. Brochuss was swollen with pride at this command opportunity. The big man turned to face his colonel with a battle-light firing his eyes. He drew off his glove and held out his hand to Flense. The colonel removed his own gauntlet and they shook, the thumb-clasping grip of brotherhood learned in the honour schools of Jant Normanidus.
‘Advance with hope, fight with luck, win with honour, Brochuss,’ Flense said.
‘Sheath your blade well, colonel,’ his second replied.
Flense turned, pulling his glove back on and tapping his microbead. ‘Troopers Herek, Stigand, Unjou, Avranche, Ebzan report to the colonel. Bring climbing rope.’
Flense took a lasrifle from one of the dead, blessed it silently to assuage the soul of its previous owner, and checked the ammo clips. Brochuss had two of his platoon gather spare lamp packs from the passing men. The rearguard platoon watched over Flense and his team as they made ready and descended into the shaft under the stones.
IN THE ISOLATION sphere of the command globe, Heldane sensed this manoeuvre. He hadn’t been inside the fool Flense’s mind for long enough to turn him, but he had left his mark there, and through that psychic window he could sense and feel so much already. Above all, he could feel Flense’s bitter hatred.
So, Dravere was trying a ploy of his own, playing his own man Flense into the intrigue, anxious to secure his own leverage. Aching with dull pain, Heldane knew he should be angry with the lord general. But there was no time, and he hadn’t the will power to spare for such luxuries. He would accommodate Dravere’s counter-ploy, and appropriate what elements of it he could use for his own devices. For mankind, for the grand scheme at hand, he would serve and manipulate and win the Vermilion treasure hidden beneath Target Primaris. Then, and only then, he would allow himself to die.
He swallowed his pain, blanked out the soft embrace of death. The pain was useful in one sense; just as it allowed him to co-opt the minds of blunt tools, so it gave his own mind focus. He could dwell upon his own deep agony and drive it on like a psychic scalpel to slit open the reserve of his pawn and make him function more ably.
He looked at the mirror again, the life-support machines around him thumping and wheezing. He saw how his hand trembled, and killed the shake with a stab of concentration.
He saw into the small mind of his pawn again, sensed the close, cold, airless space of the tunnels he moved through, far beneath the tumbling steatite of the necropolis. He branched out with his thoughts, seeing and feeling his way into the spaces ahead of his pawn. There was warmth there, intellect, pulsing blood.
Heldane tensed, and sent a jolt of warning to his pawn: ambush ahead!
Twenty
THEY HAD REACHED a long, low cistern of rock, pale-blue and glassy, which branched off ahead in four directions. Oily black water trickled and pooled down the centre of the sloping floor-space.
Rawne felt himself tense and falter. He reached out a hand to support himself against the gritty wall as a stabbing pain entered his head and clung like a great arachnid, biting into the bones of his face. His vision doubled, then swirled.
It was like a warning… warning him that something ahead was…
The major screeched an inarticulate sound that made the others turn or drop in surprise. The noise had barely begun to echo back down the cistern when Wheyland was firing, raking the darkness ahead with his lasgun, bellowing deployment orders.
A volley of barbs and las-blasts spat back at them.
Gaunt dropped against a slumped rock as gunfire cracked and fizzed against the glassy walls over him. They almost walked into that! If it hadn’t been for Rawne’s warning and Fereyd’s rapid reaction… But how had Rawne known? He was well back in the file. How could he have seen anything that Mkoll’s sharp eyes, right at the front, had missed?
Fereyd was calling the shots at the moment but Gaunt didn’t resent the abuse of command. He trusted his friend’s tactical instinct and Fereyd was in a better position and line of sight to direct the tunnel fight. Gaunt clicked off his lamp pack to stop himself becoming a target and then swung his las-rifle up to sight and fire. Mkoll, Caffran, Baru and the tactician’s troopers were sustaining fire from their own weapons, and Larkin was using his exotic rifle to cover Bragg while he moved the hefty autocannon up into a position to fire. Dorden cowered with Domor.
Rawne bellied forward and fitted a barbed round to his stolen weapon. He rose, fingers feeling their way around the unfamiliar trigger grip, and blasted a buzzing barb up the throat of the passage. There w
as a crump and a scream. Rawne quickly reloaded and fired again, his shot snaking like a slow, heavy bee between the darting light-jags of the other men’s lasguns.
Larkin’s rifle fired repeatedly with its curious clap-blast double sound. Then Bragg opened up, shuddering the entire chamber with his heavy, rapid blasts. The close air was suddenly thick with cordite smoke and spent fycelene.
‘Cease fire! Cease!’ Gaunt yelled with a downward snap of his hand. Silence fell.
Heartbeats pounded for ten seconds, twenty, almost a minute, and then the charge came. The enemy swarmed down into the chamber, flooding out of two of the tunnel forks ahead.
Gaunt’s men waited, disciplined to know without order how long to pause. Then they opened up again: Rawne’s barb-gun, Bragg’s autocannon, Larkin’s carbine, the lasguns of Gaunt, Fereyd, Mkoll, Baru, Caffran, the three Crusade bodyguards. The cistern boxed the target for them. In ten seconds there were almost thirty dead foe bunched and crumpled in the narrow chamber, their bodies impeding the advance of those behind, making them easier targets.
Gaunt knelt in concealment, firing his lasgun over a steatite block with the drilled track-sight-fire-readdress pattern which he had trained into his men. He expected it of them and knew they expected no less in return. They were slaughtering the enemy, every carefully placed shot exploding through plastic body suits and masked visors. But there was no slowing of the tide. Gaunt began to wonder what would run out first: the flow of enemy, his team’s ammo or airspace in the cistern not filled with dead flesh.
Twenty-One
THEY EMERGED FROM the stifling shadows of the necropolis arches and into a vast interior valley of baking heat and warmth-radiating rock. Brochuss and his men blinked in the light, eyes tearing at the intense heat. The major snapped orders left and right, bringing his men up and thinning the file, extending in a wide front between the jumbled monoliths and splintered boulders. He kept as many of his soldiers in the sweeping overhanging shadows of the valley sides as he could.