He could hear the grind of the enemy assault carriers even now, striding on their long, hydraulic legs through the mud, peppering the air with sharp needle blasts of blood-red light, washing death and fire towards his men. A physical memory of the tension and fatigue ran down his spine, the superhuman effort with which he and his best fire-teams had stormed the Oligarchy Gate ahead of even the glorious forces of the Adeptus Astartes, driving a wedge of las-fire and grenade bursts through the overlapping plates of the enemy’s buttress screens.
He saw Tanhause making his lucky shot, still talked about in the barracks of the Hyrkan: a single las-bolt that penetrated a foul, demented Chaos dreadnought through the visor-slit, detonating the power systems within. He saw Veitch taking six of the foe with his bayonet when his last power cell ran dry. He saw the Tower of the Plutocrat combust and fall under the sustained Hyrkan fire.
He saw the faces of the unnumbered dead, rising from the mud, from the flames.
He opened his eyes and the visions fled. The Empyrean lashed and blossomed in front of him, unknowable. He was about to turn and return to his quarters.
But there was a blade at his throat.
TWO
There was no sense of anyone behind him — no shadow, no heat, no sound or smell of breath. It was as if the cold sharpness under his chin had arrived there unaccompanied. He knew at once he was at the mercy of a formidable opponent.
But that alone gave him a flicker of confidence. If the blade’s owner had simply wanted him dead, then he would already be dead and none the wiser. There was something that made him more useful alive. And he was fairly certain what that was.
“What do you want?” he asked calmly.
“No games,” a voice said from behind him. The tone was low and even, not a whisper but of a level that was somehow softer and lower still. The pressure of the cold blade increased against the skin of his neck fractionally. “You are reckoned to be an intelligent man. Dispense with the delaying tactics.”
Gaunt nodded carefully. If he was going to live even a minute more, he had to play this precisely right. “This isn’t the way to solve this, Brochuss,” he said carefully.
There was a pause. “What?”
“Now who’s playing games? I know what this is about. I’m sorry you and your Patrician comrades lost face on Pyrites. Lost a few teeth too, I’ll bet. But this won’t help.”
“Don’t be a fool! You’ve got this wrong! This isn’t about some stupid regimental rivalry!”
“I have?”
“Think hard, fool! Think why this might really be happening! I want you to understand why you are about to die!” The weight of the blade against his throat shifted slightly. It didn’t lessen its pressure, but there was a momentary alteration in the angle. Gaunt knew his comments had misdirected his adversary for a heartbeat.
His only chance. He struck backwards hard with his right elbow, simultaneously pulling back from the blade and raising his left hand to fend it off. The knife cut through his cuff, but he pulled clear as his assailant reeled from the elbow jab.
Gaunt had barely turned when the other countered, striking high. They fell together, limbs twisting to gain a positive hold. The wayward blade ripped Gaunt’s jacket open down the seam of the left sleeve.
Gaunt forced the centre of balance over and threw a sideways punch with his right fist that knocked his assailant off him. A moment later the commissar was on his feet, drawing the silver Tanith blade from his belt.
He saw his opponent for the first time. The navy rating, a short, lean man of indeterminate age. There was something strange about him. The way his mouth was set in a determined grimace while his wide eyes seemed to be… pleading? The rating flipped up onto his feet with a scissor of his back and legs, and coiled around in a hunched, offensive posture, the knife held blade-uppermost in his right hand.
How could a deck rating know moves like that? Gaunt worried. The practised movements, the perfect balance, the silent resolve — all betrayed a specialist killer, an adept at the arts of stealth and assassination. But close up, Gaunt saw the man was just an engineer, his naval uniform a little tight around a belly going to fat. Was it just a disguise? The rank pins, insignia and the coded identity seal mandatory for all crew personnel all seemed real.
The blade was short and leaf-shaped, shorter than the rubberised grip it protruded from. There was a series of geometric holes in the body of the blade itself, reducing the overall weight whilst retaining the structural strength. And it plainly wasn’t metal; it was matt blue, ceramic, invisible to the ship’s weapon-scan fields.
Gaunt stared into the other’s unblinking eyes, searching for recognition or contact. The gaze which met him was a desperate, piteous look, as if from something trapped inside the menacing body.
They circled, slowly. Gaunt kept his body angled and low as he had learned in bayonet drill with the Hyrkans. But he held the Tanith blade loosely in his right hand with the blade descending from the fist and tilted in towards his body. He’d watched the odd style the Ghosts had used in knife drill with interest, and one long week in transit aboard the Navarre, he had got Corbec to train him in the nuances. The method made good use of the weight and length of the Tanith war-knife. He kept his left hand up to block, not with a warding open palm as the Hyrkans had practised (and as his opponent now adopted) but in a fist, knuckles outward. “Better to stop a blade with your hand than your throat,” Tanhause had told him, years before. “Better the blade cracks off your knuckles than opens a smile in your palm,” Corbec had finessed more recently.
“You want me dead?” Gaunt hissed.
“That was not my primary objective. Where is the crystal?” Gaunt started as the man replied. Though the mouth moved, the voice was not coming from it. The lip movements barely synched with the words. He’d seen that before somewhere, years ago. It looked like… possession. Gaunt bristled as fear ran down his back. More than the fear of mortal combat. The fear of witchcraft. Of psykers.
“A commissar-colonel won’t be easily missed,” Gaunt managed.
The rating shrugged stiffly as if to indicate the infinite raging vastness beyond the glass dome. “No one is so important he won’t be missed out here. Not even the Warmaster himself.”
They had circled three times now. “Where is the crystal?” the rating asked again.
“What crystal?”
“The one you acquired in Cracia City,” returned the killer in that floating, unmatched voice. “Give it up now, and we can forget this meeting ever took place.”
“Who sent you?”
“Nothing in the known systems would make me answer that question.”
“I have no crystal. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A lie.”
“Even if it was, would I be so foolish to carry anything with me?”
“I’ve searched your quarters twice. It’s not there. You must have it. Did you swallow it? Dissection is not beyond me.”
Gaunt was about to reply when the rating suddenly stamped forward, circling his blade in a sweep that missed the commissar’s shoulder by a hair’s breadth. Gaunt was about to feint and counter when the blade swept back in a reverse of the slice. The touch of a stud on the grip had caused the ceramic blade to retract with a pneumatic hiss and re-extend through the flat pommel of the grip, reversing the angle. The tip sheared through his blocking left forearm and sprayed blood across the deck.
Gaunt leapt backwards with an angry curse, but the rating followed through relentlessly, reversing his blade again so it poked up forward of his punching fist. Gaunt blocked it with an improvised turn of his knife and kicked out at the attacker, catching his left knee with his boot tip.
The man backed off but the circling did not recommence. This was unlike the sparring in bayonet training, the endless measuring and dancing, the occasional dash and jab. The man rallied immediately after each feint, each deflection, and struck in once more, clicking his blade up and down out of the grip to w
rong-foot Gaunt, sometimes striking with an upwards blow on the first stroke and thumbing the blade downwards to rake on the return.
Gaunt survived eight, nine, ten potentially lethal passes, thanks only to his speed and the attacker’s unfamiliarity with the curious Tanith blade technique.
They dashed again, and this time Gaunt jabbed not with his knife but with his warding left hand, directly at the man’s weapon. The blade cut a stinging gash in his knuckles, but he slipped in under the knife and grabbed the man by the right wrist. They clenched, Gaunt driving forwards with his superior size and height. The man’s left hand found his throat and damped it in an iron grip. Gaunt gagged, choking, his vision swimming as his neck muscles fought against the tightening grip-Desperately, he slammed the man backwards into the guard rail. The rating thumbed his blade catch again and the reversing tongue of ceramic stabbed down into Gaunt’s wrist. In return he plunged his own knife hard through the tricep of the arm holding his throat.
They broke, reeling away from each other, blood spurting from the stab wounds in their arms and hands. Gaunt was panting and short of breath from the pain, but the man made no sound. As if he felt no pain, or as if pain was no hindrance to him.
The rating came at him again, and Gaunt swung low to block, but at the last moment, the man tossed the ceramic blade from his right hand to his left, the blade reversing itself through the grip in mid air so that what had started as an upwards strike from the right turned into a downward stab from the left. The blade dug into the meat of Gaunt’s right shoulder, deadened only by the padding and leather of his jacket. White-hot pain lanced down his right side, crushing his ribs and the breath inside them.
The blade slid free cleanly and blood drizzled after it. The hot warmth was coursing down the inside of his sleeve and slickening his grip on the knife handle. It dripped off his knuckles and the silver blade. If he kept bleeding at that rate, even if he could hold off his assailant, he knew he would not survive much longer.
The rating crossed his guard again, switching hands like a juggler, to the right and then back to the left, reversing the blade direction with each return. He feinted, sliced in low at Gaunt’s belly with a left-hand pass and then pushed himself at the commissar. Gaunt stabbed in to meet the low cut, and caught the point of his silver blade through one of the perforations in the ceramic blade.
Instinctively, he wrenched his blade back and levered at the point of contact. A second later, the ceramic tech-knife whirled away across the Glass Bay and skittered out of sight over the cold floor. Suddenly disarmed, the rating hesitated for a heartbeat and Gaunt rammed his Tanith knife up and in, puncturing the man’s torso and cracking his sternum.
The rating reeled away sharply, sucking for air as his lungs failed. The silver knife was stuck fast in his chest. Thin blood jetted from the wound and gurgled from his slack mouth. He hit the deck, knees first, then fell flat in his face, his torso propped up like a tent on the hard metal prong of the knife.
Gaunt stumbled back against the rail, gasping hoarsely, his body shaking and burning pain jeering at him. He wiped a bloody hand across his clammy, ashen face and gazed down at the rating’s body as it lay on the floor in a pool of scarlet fluid.
He sank to the deck, trembling and weak. A laugh, half chuckle, half sob broke from him. When next he saw Colm Corbec, he would buy him the biggest—
The rating got up again.
The man wriggled back on his knees, rippling the pool of blood around him, and then swung his body up straight, arms swaying limp at his sides. Kneeling, he slowly turned his head to face the prone, dismayed Gaunt. His face was blank, and his eyes were no longer pleading and trapped. They were gone, in fact. A fierce green light raged inside his skull, making his eyes pupilless slits of lime fire. His mouth lolled open and a similar glow shone out, back-lighting his teeth. With one simple, direct motion, he pulled the Tanith knife out of his chest. There was no more blood, just a shaft of bright green light poking from the wound.
With a sigh of finality, Gaunt knew that the psychic puppetry was continuing. The man, who had been a helpless thrall of the psyker magic when he first attacked, was now reanimated by abominable sorcery.
It would function long enough to win the fight.
It would kill him.
Gaunt battled with his senses to keep awake, to get up, to run. He was blacking out. The rating swayed towards him, like a zumbay from the old myths of the nondead, eyes shining, expression blank, the Tanith blade that had killed him clutched in his claw of a hand.
The dead thing raised the knife to strike.
THREE
Two las-shots slammed it sideways. Another tight pair broke it open along the rib cage, venting an incandescent halo of bright psychic energy. A fifth shot to the head dropped the thing like it had been struck in the ear with a sledgehammer.
Colm Corbec, the laspistol in his hand, stalked across the deck of the Glass Bay and stood looking down at the charred and smouldering shape on the floor, a shape that had self-ignited and was spilling vaporous green energies as it ate itself up.
Somewhere, the weapons interdiction alarm started wailing.
Using the rail for support, Gaunt was almost on his feet again by the time Corbec reached him.
“Easy there, commissar…”
Gaunt waved him off, aware of the way his blood was still freely dribbling onto the deck.
“Your timing…” he grunted, “is perfect… colonel.”
Corbec grimly gestured over his shoulder. Gaunt turned to look where he pointed. Brin Milo stood by the elevator assembly, looking flushed and fierce.
“The lad had a dream,” Corbec said, refusing to be ignored and looping his arm under his commander’s shoulder. “Came to me at once when he couldn’t find you in your quarters.”
Milo crossed to them. “The wounds need attention,” he said.
“We’ll get him to the apothecarium,” Corbec began.
“No,” Milo said firmly and, despite the pain, Gaunt almost laughed at the sudden authority his junior aide directed at the shaggy brute who was the company commander. “Back to our barrack decks. Use our own medics. I don’t think the commissar wants this incident to become a matter for official inquiry.”
Corbec looked at the boy curiously but Gaunt nodded. In his experience, there was no point fighting the boy’s gift for judgement. Milo never intruded into the commissar’s privacy, but he seemed to understand instinctively Gaunt’s intentions and wishes. Gaunt could not keep secrets from the boy, but he trusted him — and valued his insight beyond measure.
Gaunt looked at Corbec. “Brin’s right. There’s more to this… I’ll explain later, but I want the ship hierarchy kept out of it until we know who to trust.”
The weapons alarm continued to sound.
“In that case, we better get out of here—” Corbec began.
He was cut off by the elevator shutters gliding open with a breathy hiss and a choral exhalation. Six Imperial Navy troopers in fibre-weave shipboard armour and low-brimmed helmets exited in a pack and dropped to their knees, covering the trio with compact stubguns. One barked curt orders into his helmet vox-link. An officer emerged from the elevator in their wake. Like them, his uniform was emerald with silver piping, the colours of the Segmentum Pacificus Fleet, but he was not armoured like his detail. He was tall, a little overweight and his puffy flesh was unhealthily pale.
A career spacer, thought Corbec. Probably hasn’t stood on real soil in decades.
The officer stared at them: the shaggy Guard miscreant with his unauthorised laspistol; the injured, bloody man leaning against him and bleeding on the deck; the rangy, strange-eyed boy.
He pursed his lips, spoke quietly into his own vox-link and then touched a stud on the facilitator wand he carried, waving it absently into the air around him. The alarm shut off mid-whine.
“I am Warrant Officer Lekulanzi. It is my responsibility to oversee the security of this vessel on behalf of Lord Captain Grasticus. I
take a dim view of illicit weapons on this holy craft, though I always expect Imperial Guard scum to try something. I look with even greater displeasure on the use of said weapons.”
“Now, this is not how it loo—” Corbec began, moving forward with a reassuring smile. Six stubgun muzzles swung their attention directly at him. The detail’s weapons were short-line, pump-action models designed for shipboard use. The glass shards and wire twists wadded into each shell would roar out in a tightly packed cone of micro-shrapnel, entirely capable of shredding a man at close range. But unlike a lasgun or a bolter, there was no danger of them puncturing the outer hull.
“No hasty movements. No eager explanations.” Lekulanzi stared at them. “Questions will be answered in due time, under the formal process of your interrogation. You are aware that the bring of a prohibited weapon on a transport vessel of the Adeptus Mechanicus is an offence punishable court martial. Surrender your weapon.”
Corbec handed his laspistol to the trooper who rose smartly to take it from him.
“This is stupid,” Gaunt said abruptly. The guns turned their attention to him. “Do you know who I am, Lekulanzi?”
The warrant officer tensed as his name was used without formal title. He narrowed his flesh-hooded eyes.
Gaunt hauled himself forward and stood free of Corbec’s support. “I am Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt.”
Warrant Officer Lekulanzi froze. Without the coat the cap, the badges of authority, Gaunt looked like any low-born Guard officer.
“Come here,” Gaunt told him. The man hesitated, then crossed to Gaunt, whispering a low order into his vox-link. The guard detail immediately rose from their knees, snapped to attention and slung their weapons.
“That’s better…” Corbec smiled.
Gaunt placed a hand on Lekulanzi’s shoulder, and the officer stiffened with outrage. Gaunt was pointing to something on the deck, a charred, greenish slick or stain, oily and lumpy.