Dan Abnett - First and Only

One sip. That, and Oktar's iron constitution, kept him alive for eight days.

Gaunt had been off in the barracks behind the hive central palace, settling a drunken brawl, when Tanhause summoned him. Nothing could be done.

By the eighth day, Oktar was a skeletal husk of his old, robust self. The medics emerged from his chamber, shaking hopeless heads. The smell of decay and corruption was almost overpowering. Gaunt waited in the anteroom. Some of the men, some of the toughest Hyrkans he had come to know, were weeping openly.

'He wants the Boy,' one of the doctors said as he came out, trying not to retch.

Gaunt entered the warm, sickly atmosphere of the chamber. Locked in a life-prolonging suspension field, surrounded by glowing fire-lamps and burning bowls of incense, Oktar was plainly minutes from death.

'Tbram…' The voice was like a whisper, a thing of no substance, smoke.

'Commissar-general.'

'It is past time for this. Well past time. I should never have left it to a finality like this. I've kept you waiting too long.'

'Waiting?'

Truth of it is, I couldn't bear to lose you… not you, Ibram… far too good a soldier to hand away to the ladder of promotion. Who are you?'

Gaunt shrugged. The stench was gagging his throat.

'Cadet Ibram Gaunt, sir.'

'No… from now you are Commissar Ibram Gaunt, appointed in the extremis of the field to the commissarial office, to watch over the Hyrkan Regiments. Fetch a clerk. We must record my authority in this matter, and your oath.'

Oktar willed himself to live for seventeen minutes more, as an Administratum clerk was found and the proper oath ceremony observed. He died clutching Commissar Gaunt's hands in his bony, sweat-oiled claws.

Ibram Gaunt was stunned, empty. Something had been torn out of his insides, tom out and flung away. When he wandered out into the anteroom, he didn't even notice the soldiers saluting him.

PART THREE

FORTIS BINARY FORGE WORLD

ONE

It wasn't the drums that Corbec really detested, it was the rhythm. There was no sense to it. Though the notes were a regular drum sound, the beats came sporadically like a fluctuating heart, overlapping and syncopated. The bombardment was still ever-present but now, as they closed on the source of the beating, the drumming overrode even the roar of the explosions beyond the front trenches.

Corbec knew his men were spooked even before Sergeant Curral said it. Down the channel ahead, Scout-Sergeant Mkoll was returning towards them. He had missed the signal to put on his respirator and his face was pinched, tinged with green. As soon as he saw the masked men of his company, he anxiously pulled on his own gas-hood.

'Report!' Corbec demanded quickly.

'It opens up ahead,' Mkoll said through his mask, breathing hard. 'There are wide manufactory areas ahead of us. We've broken right through their lines into the heart of this section of the industrial belt. I saw no one. But I heard the drums. It sounds like there are… well, thousands of them out there. They're bound to attack soon. But what are they waiting for?'

Corbec nodded and moved forward, ushering his men on behind him. They hugged the walls of the trench and assumed fire pattern formation, crouching low and aiming in a sweep above the head of the man in front.

The trench opened out from its zigzag into a wide, stonewalled basin which overlooked a slope leading down into colossal factory sheds. The thump of the drums, the incessant and irregular beat, was now all-pervading.

Corbec waved two fire teams forward on either flank, Drayl taking the right and Lukas taking the left. He led the front prong himself. The slope was steep and watery-slick. By necessity, they became more concerned with keeping upright and descending than with raising their weapons defensively.

The concourse around the sheds was open and empty. Feeling exposed, Corbec beckoned his men on, the front prong of the attack spearheading out into a wide phalanx as men slipped down the slope and joined them. Drayl's team was now established to his right covering them, and soon Lukas's was also in position.

The drums now throbbed so loudly they vibrated the hard plastic lenses in their respirator masks and thudded against their chest walls.

Corbec scurried across the open space with eight men accompanying him and covering every quarter. Sergeant Grell moved another dozen in behind them as Corbec reached the first of the sheds. He looked back and saw the men were keeping the line well, although he was concerned to see Drayl lift his respirator for a moment to wipe his face with the back of his cuff. He knew the man was ill at ease following that unhappy injury, but he still disliked undisciplined activity.

'Get that fething mask in place!' he shouted at Trooper Drayl and then, with seven lasguns covering the angles, he entered the shed.

The gabled building throbbed with the sound of drums. Corbec could scarcely believe what he saw. Thousands of makeshift mechanisms had been set up in here, rotary engines and little spinning turbines, all in one way or another driving levers that beat drumsticks onto cylinders of every shape and size, all stretched with skin. Corbec didn't even want to think where that skin had come from. All that he was aware of was the syncopated and irregular thudding of the drum machines that the Shriven had left here. There was no pattern to their beat. Worse still, Corbec was more afraid that there was a pattern, and he was too sane to understand it.

A further sweep showed that the building was vacant, and scouting further they realised all of the sheds were filled with the makeshift drum machines… ten thousand drums, twenty thousand, of every size and shape, beating away like malformed, failing hearts.

Corbec's men closed in around the sheds to hold them and assumed close defensive file, but Corbec knew they were all scared and the rhythms throbbing through the air were more than most could stand.

He called up Skulane, his heavy flamer stinking oil and dripping petroleum spill. He pointed to the first of the sheds.

'Sergeant Grell will block you with a fire team,' he told the flame thrower. 'You don't have to watch your back. Just burn each of these hell-holes in turn.'

Skulane nodded and paused to tighten a gasket on his fire-blackened weapon. He moved forward into the first doorway as Grell ordered up a tight company of men to guard him. Skulane raised his flamer, his finger whitening under the tin guard of the rubberised trigger.

There was a beat. A single beat. For one incredible moment all of the eccentric rhythms of the mechanical drums struck as one.

Skulane's head exploded. He dropped like a sack of vegetables onto the ground, the impact of his body and the spasm of his nervous system clenching the trigger on his flamer. The spike of fierce flame stabbed around in an unforgiving arc, burning first the portico of the blockhouse and then whipping back to incinerate three of the troopers guarding him. They shrieked and flailed as they were engulfed.

Panic hit the men and they spread out in scurrying bewildered patterns. Corbec howled a curse. Somehow, at the point of death, Skulane's finger had locked the trigger of the flamer and the weapon, slack on its cable beneath his dead form, whipped back and forth like a fire-breathing serpent. Two more soldiers were caught in its breath, three more. It scorched great conical scars across the muddy concrete of the concourse.

Corbec threw himself flat against the side wall of the shed as the flames ripped past him. His mind raced and thoughts formed slower than actions. A grenade was in his hand, armed with a flick of his thumb.

He leapt from cover, and screamed to any who could hear him to get down even as he flung the grenade at Skulane's corpse and the twisting flamer. The explosion was catastrophic, igniting the tanks on the back of the corpse. Fire, white hot, vomited up from the door of the shed and blew the front of the roof out. Sections of splintered stone collapsed down across the vestigial remains of Trooper Skulane.