Dan Abnett - First and Only

Terror punched Rawne's heart. He slammed the hatch and screamed out, They're coming!'

The intercom lines went wild with reports as sentries reported hammerings at the sealed hatches and entranceways all around. Hundreds of fists, thousands of fists.

Gaunt cursed, feeling the panic rising in his men. Trapped, entombed, the infernal enemy seeping in from all sides. Speakers mounted on walls and consoles all around squawked into life, and a rasping voice, echoing and overlaying itself from a hundred places, spat inhuman gibberish into the chambers.

'Shut that off!' Gaunt yelled at Feygor.

Feygor scrabbled desperately at the controls. 'I can't!' he cried.

A hatchway to the east exploded inwards with a shower of sparks. Men screamed. Lasfire began to chatter. A little to the north, another doorway blew inwards in a flaming gout and more Shriven began to battle their way inwards.

Gaunt turned to Corbec. The man was pale. Gaunt tried to think, but the rasping, reverberating snarls of the speakers dogged his mind. With a bark, he raised his pistol and blasted the nearest speaker set off the wall.

He turned to Corbec. 'Start the retreat. As many as we dare to keep the covering fire.'

Corbec nodded and hurried off. Gaunt opened his intercom to wide band. 'Gaunt to all units! Commence withdrawal, maximum retreating resistance!' He sprinted down through the mayhem into the megalith chamber, knocked back for a second by the noxious stench of the place. Lukas, Tolus and Bragg were just emerging, their arms, chests and knees caked with black, tarry goo. They were all ashen and hollow eyed.

'It's done,' Tolus said.

'Then blow it! Move out!' Gaunt cried, pushing and shoving his stumbling men out of the cavern. 'Rawne!'

'Almost there!' Rawne replied from over at the elevator. He and the Ghost next to him looked up sharply as they heard a thump from the liftcar roof above them. Cursing, Rawne pushed the final trolley of shells into the elevator bay.

'Back! Back!' Rawne shouted to his men. He hit the riser stud of the elevator and it began to lift up the shaft towards the Shriven emplacements high above. They heard impacts and shrieks as it pulverised the Shriven coming down the shaft.

The Ghosts and Vitrians with Rawne were running for their lives. Somewhere far above, their payload arrived – and detonated hard enough to shake the ground and sprinkle earth and rock chips down from the cavern roof. Lamp arrays swung like pendulums.

Gaunt felt it all going off above them, and it strengthened his resolve. He was moving towards the maglev tunnel in the middle of a tumble of guardsmen, almost pushing the dazed Bragg by force of will. Shriven fire burned their way. A Ghost dropped, mid-flight. Others turned, knelt, returned fire. Las-fire glittered back and forth.

Behind them all, in the megalith chamber, the charges planted by Domor's team exploded. Its support blown away, the great crackling stone teetered and then slumped down into the pit. The speakers went silent.

Total silence.

The Shriven firing had stopped. Those that had penetrated the chamber were prostrate, whimpering.

The only sound was the thumping footfalls and gasping breaths of the fleeing guardsmen.

Then a rumbling started. Incandescent green fire flashed and rippled out of the monolith chamber. Without warning the stained glass view-ports of the control room exploded inwards. The ground rippled, ruptured; concrete churned like an angry sea.

'Get out! Get out now!' bellowed Ibram Gaunt.

ELEVEN

The shelling faltered, then stopped. Caffran and Zogat paused as they trudged back across the deadscape and looked back. 'Feth take me!' Caffran said. 'They've finally—' The hills beyond the Shriven lines exploded. The vast shock-wave threw them both to the ground. The hills splintered and puffed up dust and fire, swelling for a moment before collapsing into themselves.

'Emperor's throne!' Zogat said as he helped the young Tanith trooper up. They looked back at the mushroom cloud lifting from the sunken hills.

'Hah!' Caffran said. 'Someone just won something!'

In the villa, Lord High Militant General Dravere put down his cup and watched with faint curiosity as it rattled on the cart. He walked stiffly to the veranda rail and looked through the scope, though he hardly needed it. A bell-shaped cloud of ochre smoke boiled up over the horizon where the Shriven stronghold had once been. Lightning flared in the sky. The vox-caster speaker in the corner of the room wailed and then went dead. Secondary explosions, munitions probably, began to explode along the Shriven lines, blasting the heart out of everything they held.

Dravere coughed, straightened and turned to his adjutant. 'Prepare my transport for embarkation. It seems we're done here.'

A firestorm of shockwave and flame passed over the armoured vehicles of Colonel Flense's convoy. Once it had blown itself out, Flense scrambled out of the top hatch, looking towards the hills ahead of him, hills that were sliding down into themselves as secondary explosions went off.

'No…' he breathed, looking wide-eyed at the carnage.

'No!'

They had been knocked flat by the shockwave, losing many in the flare of green flame that followed them up the tunnel. Then they were blundering through darkness and dust. There were moans, prayers, coughs.

In the end it took almost five hours for them all to claw their way up and out of the darkness. Gaunt led the way up the tunnel himself. Finally the surviving Tanith and Vitrian units emerged, blinking, into the dying light of another day. Most flopped down, or staggered into the mud, sprawling, crying, laughing. Fatigue washed over them all.

Gaunt sat down on a curl of mud and took off his cap. He started to laugh, months of tension sloughing off him in one easy tide. It was over. Whatever else, whatever the mopping up, Fortis was won. And that girl, damn whatever her name was, had been right.

A MEMORY

IGNATIUS CARDINAL, TWENTY-NINE YEARS EARLIER

'What…' The voice paused for a moment, in deep confusion, 'What are you doing?'

Scholar Blenner looked up from the draughty tiles of the iong cloister where he was kneeling. There was another boy standing nearby, looking down at him in quizzical fascination. Blenner didn't recognise him, though he was also wearing the sober black-twill uniform of the Schola Progenium. A new boy, Blenner presumed.

'What do you think I'm doing?' he asked tersely. 'What does it look like I'm doing?'

The boy was silent for a moment. He was tall and lean, and Blenner guessed him to be about twelve years old, no more than a year or two less than his own age. But there was something terribly old and horribly piercing about the gaze of those dark eyes.

'It looks,' the new boy said, 'as if you're polishing the spaces between the floor tiles in this cloister using only a buckle brush.'

Blenner smirked humourlessly up at the boy and flourished the tiny brush in his grimy hand. It was a soft-bristle tool designed for buffing uniform buttons and fastenings. 'Then I think you'll find that you've answered your own question.' He dipped the tiny brash back into the bowl of chilly water at his side and began to scrub again. 'Now if you don't mind, I have three sides of the quadrangle still to do.'

The boy was silent for several minutes, but he didn't leave. Blenner scrubbed at the tiles and could feel the stare burning into his neck. He looked up again. 'Was there something else?'

The boy nodded. 'Why?'

Blenner dropped the brush into the bowl and sat back on his knees, rubbing his numb hands. 'I was reckless enough to use live rounds in the weapons training silos and somewhat – not to say completely – destroyed a target simulator. Deputy Master Flavius was not impressed.'