Dan Abnett - First and Only

A great smile crossed Corbec's face.

'Let's play along with their game and use it to our own ends. Doctor,' he gestured to Dorden, 'you're going to get medical supplies with my authority now you have a critical case.'

'What are you going to do?' Dorden asked, wiping his hands on a gauze towel.

Gaunt was thinking hard. He needed a plan now, a second option now that Dercius's ring had failed. He cursed his over-confidence in it. Now they had to start from scratch, both to safeguard themselves and to learn the crystal's secrets. But Gaunt was determined now. He would see this through. He wowed take the fight to the enemy.

'I need access to the bridge. To the captain himself. Colonel Zoren?'

'Yes?' Colonel Zoren moved up close to join Gaunt. He was entirely unprepared for the punch that laid him out, lip split and already bloody.

'Report that,' Gaunt said. His plan began to fall into place.

TWELVE

Chief Medical Officer Galen Gartell of the Janune Patricians turned slowly from his patient in the bright, clean medical bay of the Jantine barrack deck. He had been tending the man since he had been brought in: a lout, a barbarian. One of the Tanith, the stretcher bearers had told him.

The patient was a slim, powerful man with hard, angular good looks and a blue starburst tattoo over one eye. Currently the lean, handsome temple was disfigured by a bloody impact wound. 'Keep him alive!' Major Brochuss had hissed as he had helped to carry the man in.

Such damage… such a barbarian… Gartell had mused as he had begun work, cleaning and healing. He disliked using his skill on animals like this, but clearly his noble regiment had shown mercy to some raiding rival scum and were going to heal his wounds and send him off as a gesture of their benign superiority to the deck rats they were bunked with.

The voice that made him turn was that of Colonel Flense. 'Is he alive, doctor?'

'Just. I don't know why I should be saving a wretch like this, wasting valuable medical commodities.'

Flense hushed him and moved into the infirmary. A tall hooded figure followed him.

Gartell took a step back. The figure was well over two metres tall and there was a suggestion of smoke around him that fluctuated and masked his presence.

Who is this? Gartell wondered. And the shadow-cloak^ only a formidable scion of the Imperium would have such a device.

'What do you need?' Flense asked, addressing the figure. It hovered forward, past Gartell and looked down at the patient.

'Cranial damps, a neural probe, perhaps some long, single-edged scalpels,' it said in a hollow voice.

'What?' Gartell stammered. 'What in the name of the Emperor are you about to do?'

'Teach this thing. Teach it well,'the figure replied, reaching out a huge, twisted hand to stroke the Ghost's brow. The fingernails were hooked and brown, like claws.

Gartell felt anger rise. 'I am chief medical officer here! No one performs any procedure in this infirmary without my—'

The hooded figure flicked its arm.

Galen Gartell suddenly found himself staring at his booted toes. It took the rest of his life for him to realise that something was wrong. Only when his headless body fell onto the deck next to him he realised that… his head… cut… bastard… no.

'Flense? Clear that up, would you?' Inquisitor Heldane asked, gesturing to the corpse at his feet with a swish of the blood-wet, long-bladed scalpel in his hands. He turned back to the patient.

'Hello, Major Rawne,' he crooned softly. 'Let me show you your heart's desire.'

THIRTEEN

Reclining in his leather upholstered command throne, Lord Captain Itumade Grasticus, commander of the Adeptus Mechanicus Mass Conveyance Absalom, raised his facilitator wand in a huge, baby-fat hand and gestured gently at one of the many hololithic plates which hovered around him on suspen-sor fields, bobbing gently like a cluster of buoys in an ebb-tide. The matt, dark surface of the chosen plate blinked, and a slow swirl of amber runes played across it. Grasticus carefully noted the current Warp-displacement of his vast ship, and then selected another plate to appraise himself of the engine tolerances.

Through reinforced metal cables that grew from the deck plates under his throne and dung like thick growths of creeper to the back of his chair, Grasticus felt his ship. The data-cables, many of them tagged with paper labels bearing codes or prayers, spilled over the headrest of his throne and entered his cranium, neck, spine and puffy cheeks through sutured bio-sockets. They fed him the sum total of the ship's being, the structural integrity, the atmospheric levels, the very mood of the great spacecraft. Through them, he experienced the actions of every linked crewman and servitor aboard, and the distant / ihy*''*n of the engines set the pace of his own pulse.

Grasticus was immense. Three hundred kilos of loose meat hung from his great frame. He seldom left his throne, seldom ventured outside the quiet peace of his private strategium, an armoured dome at the heart of the busy bridge vault, set high on the command spire at the rear of the Absalom.

One hundred and thirty standard years before, when he had inherited this vessel from the late Lord Captain Ulbenid, he had been a tall, lean man. Indolence, and the addictive sympathy with the ship, had made him throne-bound. His body, as if sensing he was now one with such a vast machine, had slowed his metabolism and increased his mass, as if it wanted him to echo the swollen bulk of the Absalom. The conveyance vessels of the Adeptus Mechanicus were not like ships of the Imperial Navy. Immeasurably older and often much larger, they had been made to carry the engines of war from Mars to wherever they were needed. Their captains were more like the Princeps of great walking Titans, hardwired into the living machines through mind-impulse links. They were living ships.

Grasticus wanded another screen which allowed him direct observation of his beloved navigators, husks of men wired into their shrine, set in an alcove a few marble steps down from the main bridge. Their chanting voices sung him the Immaterium co-ordinates and their progress, forming them into a data-plainsong which resonated a pale harmony through his mind. He listened, understood, was reassured. There was a slight course adjustment which he relayed to the senior helm officers. The Menazoid Clasp was now just two day-cycles away. The ether showed no signs of storm fronts or Warp-pools, and the signal from the Astronomicon beacon, whose psychic light guided all ships through the Empyrean, was clear and clean. Blessed are the songs of the Navis Nobilite, murmured Grasticus in his thick voice, pronouncing part of^the Navis Blessing Creed, for from them shines the Ray of Hope that lights our Golden Path.

Grasticus frowned suddenly. There was an uproar outside his hardwired womb. Human voices raised in urgent conference. His flesh-heavy brow furrowed like sand-dunes slipping, and he wanded his throne to revolve to face the arched opening to the strategium.

'Warrant Officer Lekulanzi,' he said into his intercom horn, hanging on taut brass wires from the vaulted roof, 'enter and explain this disturbance.'

He dropped the storm shield guarding the entry arch with a flick of his wand and Lekulanzi hurried in, looking alarmed. The warrant officer gazed up at the obese bulk in the hammock-like throne above him and toyed with compulsive agitation at the hem of his uniform and his own facilitator wand. He seldom saw the captain face to face.

'Lord captain, a senior officer of the Imperial Guard petitions for audience with you. He wishes to make a formal complaint.'

'An item of cargo wishes to complain?' Grasticus said with slow wonder.