Milloom muttered something unflattering about the high and mighty colonel-commissar.
“What did you say?” Bragg asked sharply.
Milloom stiffened. He looked across at Tuvant. They’d been in the company of this huge guardsman for maybe three hours all told, and had so far reckoned him to be dim-witted and slow. Of course, his sheer bulk was impressive, but they had felt confident about laughing at him behind his back. Now Milloom tensed, feeling perhaps he’d gone too far, feeling the giant behind them might suddenly unleash his undoubted physical power in a mindless tantrum.
“I… I didn’t say anything.”
“You did. You said something about my colonel-commissar. Something bad.”
Milloom turned slowly to face the huge Tanith. “I didn’t mean anything. I was just joking.”
“So it was a bad thing. An insult.”
“Yes, but just a joke.” Milloom tensed, expecting the worst, reaching his left hand down beside his seat for the axle-bar he kept stowed there.
“That’s okay,” Bragg said lightly, turning to look out of a window. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion. The colonel-commissar told us that.”
Milloom sat back and exchanged knowing grins with the driver. A total dummy, they agreed wordlessly.
“So,” Tuvant asked, teasing, looking at Bragg in the rear-view mirror, “you do everything this colonel-commissar tells you?”
“Of course!” the giant replied brightly. “He’s the colonel. And the commissar. We’re his men. We’re Imperial Guard. Tanith First-and-Only. We’re loyal to the Emperor and we do everything the colonel-commissar tells us.”
“What if he told you to jump off a cliff?” Milloom laughed, conspiratorially sharing the baiting with Tuvant.
“Then we’d jump off the cliff. Was that a trick question?”
The convoy rolled on into the deadlands. It had assembled that morning on a stained curtain road outside the half-burned ruin of the Aurelian Hive City, where a second front of Imperial Guard had seized control after the main assault on Nero Hive. The mammoth Imperium victory was in no doubt, but still pockets of enemy soldiers held out, fighting a lingering war of wastage and attrition to wear out the lines of supply.
The Imperial Guard closed in en masse to root out and eradicate all remnants of resistance, and the work to rebuild Caligula began. What resources were available — and despite everything Aurelian Hive was rich in storehouses — had to be redistributed. The convoy marked the first attempt to convey relief supplies to the stricken Hive Calphernia. That meant a two hundred kilometre crossing of the battlewaste recently dubbed “the deadlands”.
Six convoys had departed Aurelian Hive that dawn. Four were headed to Nero Hive, one to Tiberius and one to Calphernia. Gaunt’s Ghosts, the Tanith First, were given the protection duty. It was agreed that the run to Calphernia was the most dangerous, as it crossed the territories of bandits — ex-hive workers who had fled the war and set themselves up as feudal warlords in the waste. Not a single relief vehicle had made it through in the last six weeks and the rumours told of thousands of rebels, stockpiling weapons. Some even whispered that Chaos powers were involved.
Everyone, including Bragg himself, was amazed when Gaunt chose Bragg to command the defence of the Calphernia convoy. Gaunt had ignored all the protests and taken the bemused Bragg into his command bunker to brief him.
Caober, Rawne, Larkin and the other Ghosts decided that Gaunt’s choice simply represented an acceptance that the Calphernia convoy wouldn’t get through. It was a write-off and Gaunt wasn’t going to waste any decent commander to such long odds.
“And so our caring commissar shows his true colours!” Rawne had hissed, playing with the hilt of his silver Tanith dagger. Others fidgetted nervously, unhappy with what seemed to be going on but unwilling to question Gaunt’s authority directly.
Bragg simply grinned at the honour bestowed upon him. It seemed he missed the irony. He was oblivious to the fact that he was already given up as dead. Rawne spat in the dust.
At the behest of the men, Corbec had approached Gaunt fiercely, demanding to know why Gaunt had been so callous as to deem Bragg expendable. “Sir, with me or Hasker or Lerod at the helm, we might get a chance to drive that convoy through. Don’t throw it away, don’t waste Bragg—”
“I know what I’m doing,” Gaunt had replied curtly, sending the proud Bragg and seventy other Ghosts off on the detail from which everyone was sure no one would come back.
The convoy rumbled down a wide-bottomed crevasse and began to cross a cracked, red dust-plain of baked earth. Heat shimmered up, distorting the horizons. Outrider one roared ahead of the convoy, a track-bike driven by Corporal Meryn with Trooper Caffran manning the pintle-mounted twin auto-cannons in the rear. Both had their stealth cloaks wrapped up around their mouths against the heat and dust, and wore filmed, heat-crazed goggles.
Meryn heaved the cycle to a halt on a rise, the convoy a kilometre behind them, and pulled down his swaddling dust-veils to spit and cough.
“You feel that?” he called back to Caffran. “Eyes watching us from all around?”
“Just your imagination,” Caffran returned, cranking the guns round all the same. Caffran felt a pulse in his temple that wasn’t simply the heat. He’d seen the expression on Colonel Corbec’s face when Gaunt had given the convoy command to Bragg. They were dead out here, as good as written off. The hundred burnt and crucified bodies they had passed on the roadside an hour before had nothing to do with imagination. Caffran shuddered.
Other outriders whirred forward in hazes of dust. Trooper Kelve drove one cycle with Merrt, one of Corbec’s favoured sharpshooters, in the rear cradle. Merrt had his sniper gun wrapped in oil-cloth in the footwell below him, ready to switch to it when the autocannon rig ran dry. Kelve pulled them up to a revving halt on a sand-rise.
To their left, engine idling, was Ochrin and his gunner Hellat. To their right, five hundred metres distant, Mkendrick and his gunner Beris. A signal, waved from bike to bike, then they all flew forward into the dusty basin beyond, racing parallel to the track left by Meryn and Caffran. The huge convoy thundered in after them. Tailing it, and flanking the rear, came three more outriders: Fulke with Logris gunning, Mktea with Laymon at the weapons, and Tanhak with Grummed manning the cannons. Behind them, an Imperial Guard half-track driven by Wheln, with Abat and Brostin at the weapons stations, and another with long, double-tracks driven by Mkteeg with Rahan and Nehn crewing a missile launcher platform.
Bragg clambered up into the gun-turret over the cab of his tractor, half-hearing the whispered slanging of the Caligulan drivers, Milloom and Tuvant. Heat and dust assaulted his big face. The sun was a torrential heat. His nostrils immediately clogged with ash-dust and he had to hawk and spit to clear his head. As an afterthought, he wrapped his stealth cloak around his mouth and nose, pulling out the goggles he had been issued and also remembering to wipe zinc paste over his exposed skin. The paste, clagging and damp in a small circular tin, smelled bad, but the colonel-commissar had told them all to use it. Bragg lifted his micro-bead comms-set and slid the plug into his ear.
“Bragg to all Ghosts, remember to use your sun-paint. The zinc stuff. Tike the colonel-commissar told us. Over.”
Over the vox-link came a round of curses and protests.
“I mean it,” Bragg said. “Wipe it on, Tanith. There’s burning and there’s burning, the colonel-commissar said, and our fair skins won’t last a minute out in this.”
Sliding his bike to a halt, Ochrin pulled out his tin and grudgingly applied paste to his brow and nose. He held the tin out, straight armed, to Hellat in the back.
There was soft, distant ping, a hollow, empty sound.
Hellat took the tin from Ochrin’s outstretched hand just as he realised Ochrin no longer had a face. Ochrin’s corpse flopped stiffly back off the saddle.
Hellat cried out in alarm, gripping the yokes of his pintle weapon and raining metal fury on the distant dunes.
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“Ochrin’s down! We are attacked!” he screamed as he fired.
A second later a missile lifted his cycle into the air and blew Hellat and Ochrin’s corpses into pieces of cooked meat each no larger than a clenched fist.
Vox-traffic suddenly tumbled in confusion over the static. Murmuring the litany of protection the Ecclesiarch had taught him back on Tanith, at the Primer Educatory, Mkteeg drew his half-track hull-down behind a salty dune and his weapon crew spat a rack of missiles into the cliff edges.
Meryn drove his cycle around in a wide arc, pulling to rejoin, puffing up a wide skim of dust. Caffran rattled round the gun mount and flickered off a curving row of tracer shells into the position marked by Hellat’s last assault. Ochrin and Hellat’s vehicle lay in a burning heap on a crisped sand-rise.
The main convoy slowed as the attack made itself known. The enemy fire whickered into them from the right hand side like rain — a few shots at first, then faster and more furious.
Mkendrick raced his bouncing bike in, screaming a Tanith warcry, and only when his gunner didn’t begin firing did he turn to find Beris hanging dead over the pintle mount, sunlight shining through a vast hole in his torso. Mkendrick braked, leapt out of the driver’s position and tossed Beris’ corpse aside, maniacally training and firing the guns from a stationary position.
As his cycle raced into the firefight, Merrt knew he had a good angle, pumping round after round from the big calibre guns into the distant dust dunes. He screamed to his driver to go faster and to overrun the enemy. Kelve was about to reply, or was half-way through saying something, when a salvo of stub rounds tore the vehicle to pieces and overturned them.
Merrt pulled himself out of the dust and looked round to see Kelve trapped under the wreckage, shrieking in pain. The control column had impaled him, ripping him open and pinning him into the sand under three tonnes of twisted, smouldering metal.
Merrt ran to him, trying to raise the wreck, trying to tip it over. Kelve bayed at him, begging, pleading.
When Merrt realised how heavy the wreck was and how grievous Kelve’s wound, he did as his driver instructed him. He took out his laspistol and shot Kelve through the head, point blank. Kelve’s body spasmed and died, gratefully.
Merrt dived flat as further fire found his position. He located his swaddled sniper gun, thrown clear out from the wreck. There was no time to check for damage. He pulled off the cloth, lay low, and sighted, snuggling a fresh power cell into the receiver. His long sight brought the enemy into view, magnified, hazy, distant figures milling around trying to reload a khaki-painted missile launcher.
He made his first shot. It went long. He adjusted his scope, as Larkin had taught him, breathed out, and made the second shot a clean kill. The enemy were turning in confusion when he made the next three shots in calm, cold series.
Three clean hits. Sniper Master Larkin would be proud.
Atop the main tractor, Bragg yelled into his micro bead, ordering the convoy to form a defensive circle. Various counter-demands whipped into his ears over the link and he shouted them down, gripping the gun-yokes with both of his huge hands and sending tight bursts of hammer-fire into the starboard hills.
The convoy vehicles reluctantly obliged, following Bragg’s orders, circling round and forming a defensive position that the remaining outriders circled. Vehicles two and four in the convoy took heavy hits, and vehicle six exploded outright as a rocket torched into its tractor unit. The side-panelling of the cargo-unit rippled off as internal explosions blistered out through the metal skin, shredding it. Scraps of metal hull span away from the boiling black-smoked fireball, puffing hundreds of individual ripples in the ashy sand all around.
Relieved at the turret guns by Trooper Cavo, Bragg dropped down into the cab to find Milloom and Tuvant sheltering under window level, the grid-shields and hatches pulled up.
“This is madness, you stupid kec!” Tuvant bellowed. “They’ll pin us down and murder us all!”
“I don’t think these bandits are really so tough,” Bragg began.
Tuvant turned on him. “You kec-head! They’re all over us! God-Emperor, but there are thousands of bandits out here, more than enough to kill us all! We should have kept moving! Stopping like this, we’ll give them all a chance to congregate for the kill!”
Bragg shambled across to the Caligulan drivers. There was a dull look in his eye Tuvant didn’t like. With one meaty, hairy-knuckled paw, Bragg lifted Tuvant off the cabin deck by his throat.
“I’m in charge here,” he growled, his voice as deep and solid as his build, reverberative. “The colonel-commissar said so. If we have to fight our way through to Calphernia a micron at a time, we will. And we will all fight. Clear?”
“C-clear!” gasped Tuvant, going blue.
“Now, can you make yourself useful?”
“How?” snarled Milloom acidly from behind. Bragg dropped Tuvant, who sprawled, retching, and turned to face the other driver. Milloom had his greasy axle-bar in his hands. “You don’t scare me, Ghost.”
“Then you must be very stupid,” Bragg muttered, turning aside without interest. Milloom launched forward to crush the big man’s skull with five kilos of cold-stamped metal. Bragg broke stride lightly, impossibly lightly it seemed for such a great bulk. He caught the descending bar in one palm. There was an audible slap. Milloom gasped as the bar was pulled out of his hands. Bragg tossed it aside.
“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.
Rubbin
g 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.