Dan Abnett - First and Only

Flense saluted too and walked towards the door. He picked I op his peaked cap from the sideboard and carefully set it upon his head, the back of the brim first.

'Praise the Emperor, lord general,' he said.

'What? Oh, yes. Indeed,'Dravere said absently, as he sat back on his chaise and lit a cigar.

FIVE

Kmor Rawne threw himself flat into a foxhole and almost downed in the milky water which had accumulated in its I depths. Spluttering, he pulled himself up to the lip of the crater and took aim with his lasgun. The air all around was thick with smoke and the flashing streams of gunfire. Before he had time to fire, several more bodies crashed into the makeshift cover by his side: Trooper Neff and the platoon adjutant, Feygor, beside them Troopers Caffran, Varl and Lonegin. There was Trooper Klay as well, but he was dead. The fierce crossfire had cauterised his face before he could reach cover. None of them looked twice at Way's body in the water behind them. They had seen that sort of thing a thousand times too often.

Rawne used his scope to check over the rim of the foxhole. Somewhere out there the Shriven were using some heavy weapon to support their infantry. The thick and explosive fire was cutting a wedge out of the Ghosts as they advanced. Neff was fiddling with his weapon and Rawne glanced down at him.

'What's the matter, trooper?' he asked.

There's mud in my firing mechanism, sir. I can't free it.'

Feygor snatched the lasgun from the younger man, ejected the magazine and slung back the oiled cover of the ignition chamber, so that it was open and the focus rings exposed. Feygor spat into the open chamber and then slammed it shut with a clack. Then he shook it vigorously and jammed the energy magazine back into its slot. Neff watched as Feygor swung round again and lifted the gun above his head, firing i wholesale into the smoke beyond the foxhole.

Feygor tossed the weapon back to the trooper. 'See? It's working now.'

Neff clutched the returned weapon and wriggled up to the lip of the hole.

'We'll be dead before we go another metre,' Lonegin said from below them.

'For Feth's sake!' Trooper Varl spat. 'We'll just get them ducking then.' He unhooked a dutch of grenades from his webbing and tossed them out to the other soldiers, sharing them like a schoolboy shares stolen fruit. A click of the thumb primed each weapon and Rawne smiled to his men as he prepared to heave his into the air.

'Varl's assessment is correct,' Rawne said. 'Let's blind them.'

They hefted the bombs into the sky. They were frag grenades, designed to deafen, blind and pepper those in range with needles of shrapnel.

There was the multiple crump of detonation.

'That's got them ducking at least,' Caffran said, then realised that the others were already scrambling up out of the foxhole lo charge. He followed quickly.

Screaming, the Ghosts charged over a short stretch of grey ooze and then slithered down into a revetment, screened from them by the smoke. The blackened impacts of the grenades were all around them, as were the twisted bodies of several of their dead foe. Rawne slammed onto his feet at the bottom of the slide and looked around. For the first time in six months on Fortis Binary, he saw the enemy face to face. The Shriven, the ground forces of the enemy he had been sent here to fight. They were surprisingly human, but twisted and malformed. They wore combat armour cleverly adapted from the work suits that they had used in the forges of the planet, the protective masks and gauntlets actually woven into their wasted, pallid flesh. Eawne tried not to linger on the dead. It made him think too much about those legions he had still to kill. In the smoke he found two more of the Shriven, crippled by the grenade blasts. He finished them quickly.

He found Caffran close behind him. The young trooper was shocked by what he saw.

'They have lasguns,' Caffran said, aghast, 'and body armour.'

Beside him, Neff turned one of the corpses over, with his toe. 'I look… they have grenades and munitions.' Neff and Caffran looked at the major.

Rawne shrugged. 'So they're tough bastards. What did you expect? They've held the Imperium off here for six months.' Lonegin, Varl and Feygor hurried along to join them. Rawne waved them along, further into the enemy dugout. The space widened in front of them and they saw the metal-beamed, i None barns of an industrial silo.

Rawne quickly gestured them into cover. Almost at once las-ire started to sear down the trench towards them. Varl was hit and his shoulder vanished in a puff of red mist. He went down hard on his backside and then flopped over clutching with the one arm that would still work. The pain was so momentous he couldn't even scream.

'Feth!' spat Rawne. 'See to him, Neff!'

Neff was the squad medic. He pulled open his thigh pouch ctf field dressings as Feygor and Caffran tried to drag the whimpering Varl into cover. Gleaming lines of las-fire stitched the trench line and tried to pin them all. Neff quickly bound Varl's ghastly injury. We have to get him back, sir!' he shouted down the grey channel to Rawne.

Rawne was pushing himself into the cover of the defile, the grey ooze matting his hair as the las-bursts burnt the air around him. 'Not now,' he said.

SIX

Ibram Gaunt leaped down into the trench and broke the neck of the first Shriven he met with his descending boots. The chainsword screamed in his fist and as he reached the duck-boards of the enemy emplacement he swung it left and right to cut two more apart in drizzles of blood. Another charged him, a great curved blade in his hand. Gaunt raised his bolt-pistol and blew the masked head into vapour.

This was the thickest fighting Gaunt and his men had encountered on Fortis, caught in the frenzied narrows of the enemy trenches, sweeping this way and that to meet the incessant advance of the Shriven. Pinned behind the commissar, Brin Milo fired his own weapon, a compact automatic handgun that the commissar had given him some months before. He killed one – a bullet between the eyes – then another, winging him first and then putting a bullet into his upturned chin as he flailed backwards. Milo shivered. This was the horror of war that he had always dreamt of, yet never wished to see. Passionate men caught against each other in a dug out hole three metres wide and six deep. The Shriven were monsters, almost elephantine with the long, nozzled gas masks sewn into the flesh of their faces. Their body armour was a dull industrial green and rubberised. They had taken the protective garb of their workspace and made it their battledress, daubing everything with eye-aching symbols.

Slammed against the trench wall by a falling body, Milo looked down at the corpses which gathered around them. He saw for the first time, in detail, the nature of his foe… the twisted corrupted human forms of the Chaos host, incised with twisted runes and sigils, painted on the dull green rubber of their armour or carved into their raw flesh.

One of the Shriven ploughed in past Gaunt's shrieking sword and dove himself at Milo. The boy dropped and the cultist smashed into the trench wall. Scrabbling in the muddy wetness of the trench bed, Milo retrieved one of the lasguns that had fallen from the dying grasp of one of Gaunt's previous victims. The Shriven was on him as he hefted the weapon up and fired, point blank. The flaming round punched through his opponent's torso and the dead cultist fell across him, forcing him down by sheer weight into the sucking ooze of the trench floor. Foul water surged into his mouth, and mud and blood. A second later he was heaved, coughing, to his feet by Trooper Bragg, the most massive of the men of Tanith, who was somehow always there to watch over him.

'Get down,' Bragg said as he hoisted a rocket launcher onto his shoulder. Milo knelt and covered his ears, tight. Hopefully muttering the Litany of True Striking to himself, Bragg fired his huge weapon off down the companionway of the trench. A fountain of mud and other unnameable things were blown into fragments. He often missed what he was aiming at, but in these conditions that wasn't an option.