Dan Abnett - First and Only

'Shut up, commissar,' the captain said with a suddenly sour look. His day had been disrupted enough. 'The reports are unconfirmed. Get down there and see to it, warrant officer!'

Lekulanzi scurried out of the chamber. Grasticus turned back to the two Imperial Guard colonels.

This matter needs my undivided attention. I will summon you when we can speak further.'

Zoren and Gaunt nodded and backed out of the strategium smartly. Side by side they crossed the nave of the bridge, through the hubbub of bridge crew, and entered the lifts.

'Is it working?' Zoren asked as the doors closed and the choral chime sang out.

'Pray by the Throne that it is,' Gaunt said.

NINETEEN

They took the infirmary in a text-book move.

The room was wide, long and low. The robed figure was bent over Rawne, who was strapped, screaming, to a gurney. A pair of Jantine troopers stood guard at the door. Corbec came in between them, ignoring them both as he dived into a roll, his shotgun raised up to fire. The robed figure turned, as if sensing the sudden intrusion. The shot-gun blast blew him backwards into a stack of wheezing resuscitrex units.

The guards began to turn when Mkoll and Baru launched in on Corbec's heels and knifed them both. Corbec rolled up onto his feet, slung his shotgun by the strap and grabbed Rawne.

'Sacred Feth…' he murmured, as he saw the head wound, and the insidious pattern of scalpel cuts across the major's face, neck and stripped body. Rawne was slipping in and out of consciousness.

'Come on, Rawne, come on!' Corbec snapped, hauling the major up over his shoulder.

'We have to move now!' Mkoll bellowed, as secondary weapons violation sirens began to shrill. Corbec threw the shotgun over to him.

'Take point! We shoot our way out if we have to!'

'Colonel!' Baru yelled. Weighed down by Rawne, Corbec couldn't turn in time. The robed figure was clawing its way back onto its feet behind him. Its hood was thrown back, and they gasped to see the equine extension and bared teeth of the head. Fury boiled in the eyes of the man-monster, and violet-dark energy crackled around him.

Corbec felt the room temperature drop. Fething magic, was all he had time to think – before a shot took the man-monster's throat clean away.

Larkin stood in the doorway, the old rifle raised in his hands.

'Now we're leaving, right?' he said.

TWENTY

Gaunt took the tile Milo held out for him. Then he shut the door of his quarters on the faces of the men crowded outside. Inside, Corbec, Zoren and Milo watched him carefully.

'That had better be worth all that damn effort,' Corbec said eventually, voicing what they all thought.

Gaunt nodded. The gamble had been immense. But for the Jantine's bloodthirsty and brutal methods of pursuing their intrigue, they would never have got this far. The ship was still full of commotion. Adeptus Mechanicus security details clogged every corridor, conducting barrack searches. Rumour, accusation and threat rebounded from counter rumour, counter accusation and promise.

Gaunt knew his hands weren't spotless in this, and he would make no attempt to hide that his men fought back against the Jantine in a feud. There would be reprimands, punishment details, rounds of questioning that would lead to nothing conclusive. But, like him, the Jantine would not take the matter beyond a simple regimental feud. And only he and those secret elements pitched against him would know precisely what had been at stake.

He slotted the tile into his artificer, and then set the crystal in the read-slot. He touched a few keys.

There was a pause.

'It isn't working,' Zoren began.

It wasn't. As far as Gaunt could tell, Milo had indeed downloaded the latest clearance ciphers via the Munitorium artificer, but still they would not open the crystal. In fact, he couldn't even open the ciphers and set them to work.

Gaunt cursed.

'What about the ring?' Milo asked.

Gaunt paused, then fished Dercius's ring from his pocket. He fitted that into the read-slot beside the one that held the crystal and activated it.

Old and too out of date to open the dedicated ciphers of the crystal, the ring was nevertheless standardised in its cryptography enough to authorise use of the downloaded codes. The vista-plate scrolled nonsense for a moment, as runic engram languages translated each other and overlaid data, transcribing and interpreting, rereading and re-setting. The crystal opened, spilling its contents up in a hololithic display which projected up off the vista-plate.

'Oh Feth… what's this mean?' Corbec murmured, instantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he saw.

Milo and Gaunt were silent, as they read on for detail.

'Schematics,' Zoren said simply, an awed note in his voice. Gaunt nodded. 'By the Golden Throne, I don't pretend to understand much of this, but from what I do… now I see why they were so keen to get it.'

Milo pointed to a side bar of the display. 'A chart. A location. Where is that?'

Gaunt looked and nodded again, slowly. Things now made sense. Like why Fereyd had chosen him to be the bearer of the crystal. Things had just become a great deal harder than even he had feared.

'Menazoid Epsilon,' he breathed.

A MEMORY

KHEDD 1173, SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER

The Kheddite had not expected them to move in winter, but the High Lords of Terra's Imperial Guard, whose forces dwelt in seasonless ship-holds plying the ever-cold of space, made no such distinction between campaigning months and resting months. They burned two dan-towns at the mouth of the River Heort, where the deep fjord inlets opened to the icy sea and the archipelago, and then moved into the glacial uplands to prosecute the nomads who had spent the summer harrying the main Imperial outposts with guerrilla strikes.

Up here, the air was clear like glass, and the sky was a deep, burnished turquoise. Their column of Chimera troop transports, ski-nosed half-traks commandeered locally, Hellhounds and Leman Russ tanks with big bulldozer blades, made fast going over the sculptural ice desert, snorting exhaust smoke and ice-spumes in their wake. The khaki body-camouflage from their last campaign in the dust-thick heatlands of Providence Lenticula had been painted over with leopard-pelt speckles of grey and blue on white. Only the silver Imperial Eagles and the purple insignia of the Jantine Patricians remained on the flanks of the rushing, bouncing, roaring vehicles.

The Sentinel scouts, stalking as swift outriders to the main advance, had located a nomad heluka three kilometres away over a startlingly vivid glacier of green ice. General Aldo Dercius swung the column to a stop and sat on the turret top of his command tank, pulling off his fur mittens so he could sort through the sheaf of flimsy vista-prints the sentinels had brought back.

The heluka seemed of normal pattern – a stockade of stripped fir-stems surrounding eighteen bulbous habitat tents of tanned mahish hide supported on umbrella domes of the animals' treated rib-bones. There was a corral adjacent to the stockade, holding at least sixty anahig, the noxious, hunchbacked, flightless bird-mounts that the Kheddite favoured. Damn things – ungainly and comical in appearance, but the biped steeds could run faster than an unladen Chimera across loose snow, turn much faster, and the scales under their oily, matted down-fur could shrug off las-fire while their toothed beaks sliced a man in two like toffee.

Dercius slid his flare goggles up for a better look at the vista-prints, and winced at the glare of the open snow. Down on the prow of the Leman Russ, his crew were taking time to stretch their limbs and relax. A stove boiled water for treacly caffeine and Dercius's two adjutant/bodyguards were applying mahish fat to their snow-burned cheeks and noses out of small, round tins they had bartered from the local population. Dercius smiled to himself at this little thing. His Patricians had a reputation for aristo snobbery, but they were resourceful men – and certainly not too proud to follow the local wisdom and smear their faces with cetacean blubber to block the unforgiving winter suns.