Dan Abnett - First and Only

'It's all wrong, sir. We're still on the right tack, and I'll be fethed if I don't get you there – but this is different.'

'To the map I showed you?'

'Yes… And worse, to the way it was five minutes ago. The structure is static enough,'Mkoll slapped the glass-brick wall as emphasis, 'but it's like direction is altering indistinctly. Something is affecting the left and right, the up and down…'

'I've noticed nothing,' Wheyland's trooper interrupted bluntly. 'We should proceed. There is nothing wrong.'

Gaunt and Mkoll both shot him a flat look.

'Perhaps it's time I saw your map,' a voice said from behind. Tactician Wheyland had approached, smiling gently. 'And your data. We were… interrupted before.'

Gaunt felt a sudden hesitation. It was peculiar. He would trust Fereyd to the Eye of Terror and back, and he had shown the data to chosen men like Mkoll. But something was making him hold back.

'Ibram? We're in this together, aren't we?' Fereyd asked.

'Of course,' Gaunt said, pulling out the slate and drawing Fereyd aside. What in the Emperor's name was he thinking? This was Fereyd. Fereyd! Mkoll was right: there was something down here, something that was even affecting his judgement.

Mkoll stood back, waiting. He eyed the Crusade trooper at his side. 'I don't even know your name,' he said at last. 'I'm called Mkoll.'

'Cluthe, sergeant, Tactical Counsel war-staff.'

They nodded to each other. Can't show me your fething face even now, Mkoll thought.

Back down the gallery, Domor was whimpering gently. Dorden inspecting his eyes again. Larkin hunted the shadows with his gun-muzzle.

Rawne was staring into the glass blocks of the wall with a hard-set face. 'Those are bones in there,' he said. 'Feth, what manner of carnage melted bones into glass so it could be made into slabs for this place?'

'What manner and how long ago?' Dorden returned, rewinding Domor's gauze.

'Bones?' Bragg asked, looking closer at what Rawne had indicated. He shuddered. 'Feth this place for a bundle of nal-sticks!'

Behind them, Caffran hissed for quiet. He had been carrying the team's compact vox-set ever since Domor had been injured, and had plugged the wire of his microbead earpiece into it to monitor the traffic. The set was nothing like as powerful as the heavy vox-casters carried by platoon comm-officers like Raglon and Mkann, and its limited range was stunted further by the depth of the rock they were under. But there was a signal: intermittent and on a repeating automatic vox-burst. The identifier was Tanith, and the platoon series code that of the Seventh. Blane's men.

'What is it, Caff?' Larkin asked, his eyes sharp.

'Trooper Caffran?' Major Rawne questioned.

Caffran pushed past them both and hurried up the tunnel to where Gaunt stood with the Imperial tactician.

As he approached, he saw Wheyland gazing at the lit displays of Gaunt's data-slate, his eyes wide.

'This is… unbelievable!' Fereyd breathed. 'Everything we hoped for!'

Gaunt shot a sharp glance at him. 'Hoped for?'

You know what I mean, Bram. Throne! That something like this could still exist… that it could be so close. We were right to chase this without hesitation. Dravere cannot be allowed to gain control of… of this.'

Fereyd paused, reviewing the data again, and looked back at the commissar. This makes all the work, all the loss, all the effort… worthwhile. To know there really was a prize here worth fighting for. This proves we're not wasting our time or jumping at ghosts – no offence to the present company.' He said this with a diplomatic smile at Caffran as the trooper edged up closer.

Watching the tactical officer, Mkoll stiffened. Was it the fething place again, screwing with his mind? Or was there something about this grand Imperial tactician that even Gaunt hadn't noticed?

'Caffran?' Gaunt said, turning to his make-do vox-officer.

Caffran handed him the foil from the field-caster that he had just printed out. 'A signal from Sergeant Blane, sir. Very indistinct, very chopped. Took me a while to get it.'

'It says ''Ghostmaker'', sir.'

Gaunt screwed his eyes shut for a moment.

'Bram?'

'It's nothing, Fereyd,' Gaunt said to his old friend. 'Just what I was expecting and hoped wouldn't come to pass. Dravere is making his counter-move.'

Gaunt turned to Caffran. 'Can we get a signal outY he asked, nodding to the voxer on its canvas sling over Caffran's shoulder.

'We can try fething hard and repeatedly,' responded Caffran, and Gaunt and Mkoll both grinned. Cafrran had borrowed the line from comms-officer Raglon, who had always used that retort when the channels were particularly bad.

Gaunt handed Caffran a pre-prepared message foil. A glance showed Caffran it wasn't in Tanith battle-tongue, or Imperial Guard Central Cipher either. He couldn't read it, but he knew it was coded in Vitrian combat-cant.

Caffran fed the foil into the vox-set, let the machine read it and assemble it and then flicked the ''send'' switch, marked by a glowing rune at the edge of the set's compact fascia.

'It's gone.'

'Repeat every three minutes, Caffran. And watch for an acknowledgement.'

Gaunt turned back to Fereyd. He took the data-slate map back from him smartly.

'We advance,' he told the Imperial Tactician. 'Tell your men,' he nodded at the Crusade troopers, 'to follow every instruction my scout gives, without question.'

With Mkoll in the front, the raiding party moved on.

A long way behind, back down the team, Major Rawne shuddered. The image of the monster Heldane had just flickered across his mind again. He felt the seeping blackness of Heldane's touch and felt his surly consciousness wince.

Get out! His thoughts shrilled in his head. Get out!

SIXTEEN

It was, Sergeant Blane decided, ironic.

The defence was as epic as any hallowed story of the Guard. Fifty men gainsaying the massed assault of almost a thousand. But no one would ever know. This story, of Guard against Guard, was too unpalatable for stories. The greatest act of the Tanith First and Only would be a record hushed up and unspoken of, even by High Command.

The Jantine units, supported by light artillery and heavy weapons in the valley depths, swung up around the rise Blane's men commanded in a double curl, like the arms of a throat-tore, extending overlapping fans of las fire in disciplined, double-burst shots. The rain of shots, nearly fifteen hundred every twenty seconds, spat over the Ghosts' heads or thumped into the sloping soil, puffing up clods of smoky dust and igniting numerous brush fires through the cloaking bracken.

Sergeant Blane watched them from cover through his scope, his flesh prickling as he saw the horribly assured way they covered the ground and made advance. The warrior-caste of Jant were heavy troops, their silver and purple combat armour made for assault, rather than speed or stealth. They were storm-troopers, not skirmishers; the Tanith were the light, agile, stealthy ones. But for all that, the drilled brilliance of the Jantine was frightening. They used every ounce of skill and every stitch of cover to bring the long claw of their attack up and around to throttle the Ghosts' seventh platoon.

Blane had fought the temptation to return fire when the Jantine first addressed them. They had nothing to match the range of the lantine heavy weapons and Blane told himself that the las-fire fusillade was as much a psychological threat as anything.

His fifty men were deployed along the ridge line in a straggled stitch of natural foxholes that the Ghosts had augmented with entrenching tools and sacking made of stealth cloaks and sleeping rolls, lashed into bags and filled with dust and soil. Blane made his command instructions clear: fix blades, set weapons to single shot, hold fire and wait for his signal.