He looked up, oblivious to the constant thunder outside. “Major Rawne?”
Rawne stepped forward, almost reluctant to be anywhere near Gaunt. No one knew what had passed between them when they had been alone together on Blackshard, but everyone had seen Gaunt carry Rawne to safety on his shoulder, despite his own injuries. Surely that sort of action bonded men, not deepened their enmity?
Rawne adjusted a dial on the field-map’s edge so that the plate displayed a different section of the chart-slide. “The approach is straightforward. The Bokore River runs along the wide valley floor. It is broad and slow-moving, especially at this time of year. Most of the way is choked with bulrushes and waterweed. We can move down the river channel undetected.”
“You’ve scouted this?” Gaunt asked.
“My squad returned not half an hour ago,” Rawne said smoothly. “The Bluebloods had tried it a number of times, but they are semi-armoured and the mud was too great an impediment. We are lighter — and we are good.”
Gaunt nodded. “Corbec?”
The big man sucked on his cigar. His genial eyes twinkled and it made Milo smile. “We move by dark, of course. In the next half-hour. Staggered squads of thirty men to spread out our traces.” He tapped the map-screen at another place. “Primary point of entry is the old city Watergate. Heavily defended of course. Secondary squads under Sergeant Cluggan will attempt to storm the wall at the western sanitation outfalls. I won’t pretend either way will be a picnic.”
“Objective,” Gaunt said, “get inside and open the city. We’ll move in squads. One man in every ten will be carrying as much high explosive as he can. Squad leaders should select any man with demol experience. We provide cover for these demolition specialists to allow them to set charges that will take out sections of wall or gates. Anything that splits the city open.
“I’ve spoken to the Blueblood colonel. He has seven thousand men in motorised units ready to advance and take advantage of any opening we can make. They will be monitoring on channel eighty. The signal will be ‘Thunderhead’.”
There was silence, silence except for the relentless hammering of the Basilisk guns.
“Form up and move out,” Gaunt said.
Outside, Ortiz stood talking to several of his senior officers, one of them Doranz. They saw the Ghost officers emerge from the dugout and orders being given.
Across the emplacement, Ortiz caught Gaunt’s eye. It was too loud for words, so he clenched his fist and rapped it twice against his heart, an old gesture for luck.
Gaunt nodded.
“Scary men,” Doranz said. “I almost feel sorry for the enemy.” Ortiz glanced round at him.
“I’m joking, of course,” Doranz added, but Ortiz wasn’t sure he was.
Midnight had seen them waist deep in the stinking black water of the Bokore River reed beds, assailed by clouds of biting flies. Three hours’ hard trudge through the oily shallows of the old river, and now the sheer walls of Voltis rose before them, lit by cressets and braziers high up. Behind them, like a distant argument, the Basilisks spat death up into the heavens, a distant, rolling roar and a series of orange flashes on the skyline.
Gaunt adjusted his nightscope and panned it round, seeing features in the darkness as a green negative. The watergate was thirty metres across and forty tall, the mouth of a great chute and adjoining system that returned water to the Bokore once it had driven the mills inside the city. Gaunt knew that somewhere sluices must have been lowered, and the flow staunched, closing off the chute’s operation. Sandbagged emplacements could be made out up in the shadows behind the gate’s breastwork.
He adjusted his micro-bead link. “Corbec?”
Colm Corbec heard his commander in the darkness and acknowledged. He waded forward through the reeds to Bragg, who had hunkered down behind a rotting jetty.
“When you’re ready…” Corbec invited.
Bragg grinned, teeth bright in the starlight. He dragged the canvas cover off one of the two huge weapons he had lugged on his shoulders from Pavis Crossroads. The polished metal of the missile launcher had been dulled down with smears of Mirewood mud.
“Try Again” Bragg was a spectacularly lousy shot. But the watergate was a big target, and the missile rack held four melta-missiles.
The night exploded. Three missiles went straight up the throat of the chute. The force of the heat-blast sent stone debris, metal shards, water vapour and body parts out in a radius of fifty yards. The fourth vaporised a chunk of wall, and brought down a small avalanche of basalt chunks. For a moment the heat was so intense that Gaunt’s nightscope read nothing but emerald glare. Then it showed him the chiselled mouth of the watergate had become a bubbling, blazing wound in the huge wall, a ragged, slumping incision in the sheer basalt. He could hear agonised screaming from within the chute. Beyond the city wall, alarm bells and sirens rose in pandemonium.
The Ghosts charged the watergate. Orcha led the first squad up the sloping drain-away under the molten arch of ruptured stone. He and three of his men swung flamers in wide arcs, scorching and scouring up unto the darkness of the echoing chute. Behind them, Corbec brought in fire teams with lasguns who darted down into the side passages and cisterns of the watergate, butchering the cultists who had limped or crawled into cover after the first attack.
The third wave went in, under Major Rawne. In the front rank was Bragg, his empty launcher discarded in favour of the heavy bolter that he had liberated from its mounting back on Blackshard and now lugged around like a smaller man might heft a heavy rifle.
Gaunt leapt forward too, bolt pistol in one hand, chain sword in the other. He bellowed after his attacking men, all of them racing silhouettes backlit against the glittering water by fire. Milo sprang up, fumbling with the Tanith pipes under his arm.
“Now would be a good time, Brin,” Gaunt said. Milo found the mouthpiece, inflated the bag and began to keen an old battle lament of Tanith, “The Dark Path of the Forest”.
Up in the chute, Orcha and his squad heard the shrill wail of the pipes outside. Damp darkness was before them.
“Close up,” Orcha snapped into his micro-bead.
“Aye.”
“To your left,” Brith yelled suddenly.
An assault cannon raged out of the darkness of a side chute. Brith, Orcha and two others disintegrated instantly into red mist and flesh pulp.
Troopers Gades and Caffran ducked back behind the buttress work of the huge vault.
“Enemy fire!” Caffran yelled into his bead. “They have the chute covered in a killing sweep.”
Corbec cursed. He might have expected this.
“Stay down!” he ordered the young Ghost over the mike as he beckoned his first two squads up the lower chute, black water swilling around their knees.
“Hell of a foul place for a firefight,” mourned Mad Larkin, scoping with his lasgun.
“Stow it, Larks,” Corbec growled. Ahead they heard the nightmare chatter of the cannon, and the added rhythm of drums and guttural chants. Corbec knew Larkin was right. A tight, confined, unyielding stone tunnel was no place for a serious fight. This was a two-way massacre in the making.
“They’re just trying to psyche us out,” he told his Ghosts smoothly as they edged forward.
“What d’you know? It’s working!” Varl said.
The drums and chanting got louder, but suddenly the cannon shut off.
“It’s stopped,” Caffran reported over the link.
Corbec looked round into Larkin’s crazed eyes. “What do you think? A trick to lure us out?”
Larkin sniffed the thick air. “Smell that? Burning ceramite. I’d wager they’ve got an overheat jam.”
Corbec didn’t answer. He cinched his bayonet onto his lasgun and charged up the slope of the chute, screaming louder and shriller than Milo’s pipes. In uproar, the Ghost squads followed him.
Caffran and Gades joined the charge, bellowing, weapons held low as they splashed out from behind the buttress into the main v
ault.
Corbec leapt clear a sandbag line damming one gully and disembowelled the two cultists who were struggling to unjam the assault cannon.
Larkin dropped down on one knee in the brackish soup and popped the cover on his lasgun’s darkscope. Carefully selecting his expert long shots, he blasted four cultists further down the chute.
Las and bolt fire slammed back at the Ghosts, dropping several of them. The charging Guardsmen met the cultist force head on in a tight, tall sub-chute, no wider than two men abreast. Bodies exploded, blasted at close range. Bayonets and blades sliced and jabbed. Corbec was in the thick of it. Already a chain sword had gashed his left hand and cost him a finger, and blood blurted from a slash to his shoulder. He speared a man, but lost his gun when the corpse’s weight on the bayonet tore it out of his hands. He ripped out his fallback weapons, a laspistol and his Tanith knife of sheer silver. Around him in the frenzy, men killed or died in a confined press that was packed in close like a busy work transit, crowded at rush hour. Already the water level was rising because of the depth of bodies and body parts in the gully.
Corbec shot a cultist through the head as he was charged, and then lashed sideways with the silver blade, opening a throat.
“For Tanith! First and Last and Only!” he screamed.
Advancing up the tunnel fifty paces back, Gaunt could hear the sheer tumult of the nightmarish close-quarters fight in the chute. He looked down and saw that the trickle of Bokore River water that ran down over his boots was thick and red.
Ten yards further, he found Trooper Gades, part of Orcha’s original squad. The boy had lost his legs to a chainsword and the water had carried his twitching form back down the smooth slope of the channel.
“Medic! Dorden! To me!” Gaunt bellow, cradling the coughing, gagging Gades in his arms.
Gades looked up at his commissar. “A real close fight, so it is,” he said with remarkable clarity, “packed in like fish in a can. The Ghosts will make ghosts tonight.”
Then he coughed again. Bloody matter vomited from his mouth and he was gone.
Gaunt stood.
Milo had faltered, looking down at Gades’ stricken, miserable death.
“Play up!” urged Gaunt, and turned to shout down the chute to the Ghost main force in the bulrushes. “Advance! Narrow file! For the Emperor and the glory of Tanith!”
With a deafening bellow, Gaunt’s Ghosts charged forward en masse, breaking down into files of three, surging into the throttling entrance to hell.
Up ahead, in the dark, close, smoky killing zone, Rawne slumped against a buttress, splashed in gore, and panted. By his side, Larkin squatted and fired shot after shot into the darkness.
Corbec suddenly loomed out of the smoke, a terrible apparition drenched in blood. “Back!” he hissed. “Back down the chute! Sound the retreat!”
“What is it?” Rawne said.
“What’s that rumbling?” Larkin asked, distracted, pressing his ear to the stone work. “Whole tunnel is vibrating!”
“Water,” Corbec said grimly. “They’ve opened the sluices. They’re going to wash us out!”
The cultists were everywhere.
Sergeant Cluggan’s secondary expedition force poured in through the stinking crypts of the western sanitation outfalls, and the enemy rose to meet them all around. It was hand to hand, each step of the way won by strength and keen blades. The dark, tight confines of the drainage tunnels were lit by the flashes of lasfire, and shots ricocheted from the roof and walls.
“What the hell is that smell?” Forbin wailed, blasting away down an airless cavity with his lasgun.
“What do you think? This is the main sewage drain,” Brodd snapped, a one-eyed man in his fifties years. “Notice how the others get the nice clean watergate.”
“Keep it together!” Cluggan snarled, firing in a wide sweep and cutting down a trio of attacking cultists. “Forget the smell. It’s always been a dirty job.”
More, heavy fire came their way. Forbin lost his left arm and then the side of his head.
Cluggan, Brodd and the others returned fire in the close channel. Cluggan eyed the cultist troops they cut through: bloated, twisted men in robes that had been white silk before they had been dyed in vats of blood. They had come from off-world, part of the vast host of Chaos cultists that had descended like locusts onto Voltemand and destroyed its people. The sigils and runes of the blasphemy Khorne were cut into the flesh of their brows and cheeks. They were well equipped, with bolters and lasguns, and armoured. Cluggan hoped to the sweet, dead gods of Tanith that his commissar was faring better.
The Ghosts staggered and stumbled back from the spewing watergate, through the reed beds, towards the comparative cover of the riverbank. Enemy fire from the walls high above killed dozens, their bodies joining the hundreds swept out, swirling and turning, by the torrent of brown water roaring from the watergate.
Micro-bead traffic was frantic with cross-chatter and desperately confused calls. Despite their discipline, the madness of the flight from the water had broken Gaunt’s main force into a ragged jumble, scrambling for their lives.
Soaked through, furious, Gaunt found himself sheltering by some willows in a scummy river bend eighty yards from the watergate. With him were Caffran, Varl, a corporal called Meryn and two others.
Gaunt cursed. Cultists he could fight… World Eaters, daemons… anything. He’d set square with any beast in the cosmos. But seventy million litres of water pressured down through a stone conduit…
“May have lost as many as forty to the flood,” Varl said. He’d dragged Caffran by the tunic from the water and the young man could only retch and cough.
“Get a confirmed figure from the squad leaders! I don’t want rumours!” Gaunt snarled, then keyed his own radio link and spoke into his bead. “Squad leaders! Discipline the radio traffic. I want regroup status! Corbec! Rawne!”
The channels crackled and a more ordered litany of units and casualties reeled in.
“Corbec?” Gaunt asked.
“I’m west of you, sir. On the banks. Got about ninety men with me.” Corbec’s voice hissed back. “Assessment?”
“Tactical? You can forget the watergate, sir. Once they realised they couldn’t hold us out in a straight fight, they blew the sluices. It could run at flood for hours. By then they’ll have the chute exits on the city side sewn up with emplacements, maybe even mines.”
Gaunt cursed again. He wiped a wet hand across his face. They’d been so close and now it was all lost. Voltis would not be his.
“Sir?” Meryn called to him. The corporal was listening to other frequencies on his bead. “Channel eighty. The word has just been given.”
Gaunt crossed to him, adjusting his own setting. “What?”
“The word. ‘Thunderhead’,” Meryn said, confused.
“Source that signal!” Gaunt snapped, “If someone thinks that’s a joke, I’ll—”
He got no further.
The blast was so loud, it almost went beyond sound. The Shockwave mashed into them, chopping the water like a white squall. A kilometre away, a hundred metre section of the curtain wall blew out, ripping a vast wound in the city’s flank, burning, raw, exposed.
The channels went mad with frenzied calls and whoops.
Gaunt looked on in disbelief. Corbec’s voice cut through, person to person on the link.
“It’s Cluggan, sir! The old bastard got his boys into the sanitation outfalls and they managed to dump all of their high-ex into a treatment cistern under the walls. Blew the crap out of the cultists.”
“So I saw, colonel,” Gaunt said wryly.
“I mean it literally, sir,” Corbec crackled innocuously. “It was Cluggan sent the signal. We may have lost the fight to take the watergate, but Cluggan has won us the battle!”
Gaunt slumped back against a tree bole, up to his waist in the stinking river. Around him the men were laughing and cheering.
Exhaustion swept over him. And then he too began to
laugh.
General Sturm took breakfast at nine. The stewards served him toasted black bread, sausage and coffee. He read a stack of data-slates as he ate, and the message-caster on the sideboard behind him chattered and dealt out a stream of orbital deployment updates.
“Good news,” said Gilbear, entering with a coffee and a message slate in hand. “The best, in fact. Seems your gamble paid off. These Ghost fellows have taken Voltis. Broken it wide out. Our attack units followed them in en masse. Colonel Maglin says the city will be cleansed by nightfall.”
Sturm dabbed his mouth with a serviette. “Send transmissions of congratulation and encouragement to Maglin and to Gaunt’s mob. Where are they now?”
Gilbear eyed his slate and helped himself to a sausage from the dish. “Seems they’ve pulled out, moving back to Pavis Crossroads along the eastern side of the Bokore Valley.”
Sturm set down his silver cutlery and started to type into his memo-slate. “The greater half of our work here is accomplished, thanks to Gaunt,” he told the intrigued Gilbear. “Now we thank him. Send these orders under extreme encryption to the CO. of the Ketzok Basilisks at Pavis. Without delay, Gilbear.”
Gilbear took the slate. “I say…” he began.
Sturm fixed him with a stare. “There are dangerous cultist units fleeing along the eastern side of the valley, aren’t there, Gilbear? Why, you’ve just read me the intelligence reports that confirm it.”
Gilbear began to grin. “So I did, sir.”
Colonel Ortiz snatched the radio from his com-officer and yelled. “This is Ortiz! Yes! I know, but I expressly query the last orders we received. I realise that, but I don’t care! No, I-Listen to me! Oh, general! Yes, I… I see. I see, sir. No, sir. Not for a moment. Of course for the glory of the Emperor. Sir. Ortiz out.”