Dan Abnett - First and Only

Flense ordered his vehicles on. At maximum thrust they tore and bounced and slithered over the mud and into the Shriven heartland.

SIX

The voice of Trooper Caffran floated out of the fox-hole darkness, just audible over the shelling.

Tanith was a glorious place, Zogat. A forest world, evergreen, dense and mysterious. The forests themselves were almost spiritual. There was a peace there… and they were strange too.

What they call motile treegrowth, so I'm told. Basically, the trees, a kind we called nalwood, well… moved, replanted, repositioned themselves, following the sun, the rains, whatever tides and urges ran in their sap. I don't pretend to understand it. It was just the way things were.

'Essentially, the point is, there was no frame of reference for location on Tanith. A track or a pathway through the nal-forest might change or vanish or open anew over night. So, over the generations, the people of Tanith got an instinct for direction. For tracking and scouting. We're good at it. I guess we can thank those moving forests of our homeworld for the reputation this regiment has for recon and stealth.'

The great cities of Tanith were splendid. Our industries were agrarian, and our off-world trade was mainly fine, seasoned timbers and wood carving. The work of the Tanith craftsmen was something to behold. The cities were great, stone bastions that rose up out of the forest. You say you have glass palaces back home. This was nothing so fancy. Just simple stone, grey like the sea, raised up high and strong.'

Zogat said nothing. Caffran eased his position in the dark mud-hole to be more comfortable. Despite the bitterness in his voice and his soul, he felt a mournful sense of loss he had not experienced for a long while.

'Word came that Tanith was to raise three regiments for the Imperial Guard. It was the first time our world had been asked to perform such a duty, but we had a large number of able fighting men trained in the municipal militias. The process of the Founding took eight months, and the assembled troops were waiting on wide, cleared plains when the transport ships arrived in orbit. We were told we were to join the Imperial Forces engaged in the Sabbat Worlds campaign, driving out the forces of Chaos. We were also told we would probably never see our world again, for once a man had joined the service he tended to go on wherever the war took him until death claimed him or he was mustered out to start a new life wherever he had ended up. I'm sure they told you the same thing.'

Zogat nodded, his noble profile a sad motion of agreement in the wet dark of the crater. Explosions rippled above them in a long, wide series. The ground shook.

'So we were waiting there,' Caffran continued, 'thousands of us, itchy in our stiff new fatigues, watching the troopships roll in and out. We were eager to be going, sad to be saying goodbye to Tanith. But the idea that it was always there, and would always be there, kept our spirits up. On that last morning we learned that Commissar Gaunt had been appointed to our regiment, to knock us into shape.' Caffran sighed, trying to resolve his darker feelings towards the loss of his world. He cleared his throat. 'Gaunt had a certain reputation, and a long and impressive history with the veteran Hyrkan regiments. We were new, of course, inexperienced and certainly full of rough edges. High Command dearly believed it would take an officer of Gaunt's mettle to make a fighting force out of us.'

Caffran paused. He lost the track of his voice for a moment as anger welled inside him. Anger – and the sense of absence. He realised with a twinge that this was the first time since the Loss that he had recounted the story aloud. His heart closed convulsively around threads of memory, and he felt his bitterness sharpen. 'It all went wrong on that very last night. Embarkation had already begun. Most of the troops were either aboard transports waiting for take-off or were heading up into orbit already. The navy's picket duty had not done its job, and a significantly-sized Chaos fleet, a splinter of a larger fleet running scared since the last defeat the Imperium Navy had inflicted, slipped into the Tanith system past the blockades. There was very little warning. The forces of Darkness attacked my homeworld and erased it from the galactic records in the space of one night.'

Caffran paused again and cleared his throat. Zogat was looking at him in fierce wonder. 'Gaunt had a simple choice to deploy the troops at his disposal for a brave last stand, or to take all those he could save and get clear. He chose the latter. None of us liked that decision. We all wanted to give our lives fighting for our homeworld. I suppose if we'd stayed on Tanith, we would have achieved nothing except maybe a valiant footnote in history. Gaunt saved us. He took us from a destruction we would have been proud to be a part of so that we could enjoy a more significant destruction elsewhere.'

Zogat's eyes were bright in the darkness. 'You hate him.'

'No! Well, yes, I do, as I would hate anyone who had supervised the death of my home, anyone who had sacrificed it to some greater good.'

'Is this a greater good?'

'I've fought with the Ghosts on a dozen warfronts. I haven't seen a greater good yet.'

'You do hate him.'

'I admire him. I will follow him anywhere. That's all there is to say. I left my homeworld the night it died, and I've been fighting for its memory ever since. We Tanith are a dying breed. There are only about twenty hundred of us left. Gaunt only got away with enough for one regiment. The Tanith First. The First-and-Only. That's what makes us ''ghosts'', you see. The last few unquiet souls of a dead world. And I suppose we'll keep going until we're all done.'

Caffran fell silent and in the dimness of the shell-hole there was no sound except the fall of the bombardment outside. Zogat was silent for a long while, then he looked up at the paling sky. 'It will be dawn in two hours,' he said softly. 'Maybe we'll see our way out of this when it gets light.'

'You could be right,' Caffran replied, stretching his aching, mud-caked limbs. 'The bombardment does seem to be moving away. Who knows, we might live through this after all. Feth, I've lived through worse.'

SEVEN

Daylight rolled in with a wet stain of cloud, underlit by the continued bombardment. The lightening sky was streaked and cross-hatched by con-trails, shell-wakes and arcs of fire from the massive Shriven emplacements in the distant shrouded hills. Lower, in the wide valley and the trench lines, the accumulated smoke of the onslaught, which had now been going on for just about twenty-one hours, dropping two or three shells a second, curdled like fog, thick, creamy and repellent with the stink of cordite and fycelene.

Gaunt brought his assembled company to a halt in a silo bay that had once held furnaces and bell kilns. They pulled off their rebreather masks. The floor, the air itself, was permeated with a greenish microdust that tasted of iron or blood. Shattered plastic crating was scattered over the place. They were five kilometres from the bombardment line now, and the noise of the drum-mills, chattering away in barns and manufactories all around them, was even louder than the shells.

Corbec had got his men away from the fire zone just about intact, although everyone had been felled by the Shockwave and eighteen had been deafened permanently by the air-burst. The Imperial Guard infirmaries over the lines would patch ruptured ear drums with plastene diaphragms or implant acoustic enhancers in a matter of moments. But that was over the lines. Out here, eighteen deaf men were a liability. When they formed up to move, Gaunt would station them in the midst of his column, where they could take maximum guidance and warning from the men around them. There were other injuries too, a number of broken arms, ribs and collarbones. However, everyone was walking and that was a mercy.