Dan Abnett - First and Only

To their right, Gaunt was scything his way into the close-packed enemy. He began to laugh, coated with the rain of blood that he was loosing with his shrieking chainsword. Every now and then he would fire his pistol and explode another of the Shriven. He was filled with fury. The signal from Lord General Dravere had been draconian and cruel. Gaunt would have wanted to take the enemy trenches if he could, but to be ordered to do so with no other option except death was, in his opinion, the decision of a flawed, brutal mind. He'd never liked Dravere, not at any time since their first meeting twenty years before, when Dravere had still been an ambitious armour colonel. Back on Darendara, back with Oktar and the Hyrkans…

Gaunt had kept the nature of the orders from his men. Unlike Dravere, he understood the mechanisms of morale and inspiration. Now they were taking the damned trenches, almost in spite of Dravere's orders rather than because of them. His laughter was the laughter of fury and resentment, and pride in his men for doing the impossible regardless.

Nearby, Milo stumbled to his feet, holding the lasgun.

We're there, Gaunt thought, we've broken them!

Ten yards down the line, Sergeant Blane leapt in with his platoon and sealed the event, blasting left and right with his lasgun as his men charged, bayonets first. There was a frenzy of las-fire and a flash of silver Tanith blades.

Milo was still holding the lasgun when Gaunt snatched it from him and threw it down onto the duckboards. 'Do you think you're a soldier, boy?'

'Yes, sir!'

'Really?'

'You know I am.'

Gaunt looked down at the sixteen year-old boy and smiled sadly.

'Maybe you are, but for now play up. Play a tune that will sing us to glory!'

Milo pulled his Tanith pipes from his pack and breathed into the chanter. For a moment it screamed like a dying man. Then he began playing. It was Waltrab's Wilde, an old tune that had always inspired the men in the taverns of Tanith, to drink and cheer and make merry.

Sergeant Blane heard the tune and with a grimace he laid into the enemy. By his side, his adjutant, vox-officer Symber, started to sing along as he blasted with his lasgun. Trooper Bragg simply chuckled and loaded another rocket into the huge launcher that he carried. A moment later, another section of trench dissolved in a deluge of fire.

Trooper Caffran heard the music, a distant plaintive wail across the battlefield. It cheered him for a moment as he moved with the men under Major Rawne's direction up over the bodies of the Shriven, side by side with Neff, Lonegin, Larkin and the rest. Even now, poor Varl was being stretchered back to their lines, screaming as the drugs wore off.

That was the moment the bombardment started. Caffran found himself flying, lifted by a wall of air issued from a bomb blast that created a crater twelve metres wide. A huge slew of mud was thrown up in the sky with him.

He landed hard, broken, and his mind frayed. He lay for a while in the mud, strangely peaceful. As far as he knew, Neff, Major Rawne, Feygor, Larkin, Lonegin, all the rest, were dead and vaporised. As shells continued to fall, Caffran sank his head into the slime and silently begged for release from his nightmare.

A long way off, Lord High Militant General Dravere heard the vast emplacements of the Shriven artillery begin their onslaught. He realised that it would not be today, after all. Sighing angrily, he poured himself another cup from the freshly refilled samovar.

SEVEN

Colonel Corbec had three platoons with him and moved them forward into the traversed network of the enemy trenches. The bombardment had been howling over their heads for two hours now, obliterating the front edge of the Shriven emplacements and annihilating all those of the Guard who had not made it into the comparative cover of enemy positions. The tunnels and channels they moved through were empty and abandoned. Clearly the Shriven had pulled out as the bombardment began. The trenches were well-made and engineered, but at every turn or bend there was a blasphemous shrine to the Dark Powers that the enemy worshipped. Corbec had Trooper Skulane turn his flamer on each shrine they found and burn it away before any of his men could fully appreciate the grim nature of the offerings laid before it.

By Curral's estimation, after consulting the tightly-scrolled fibre-light charts, they were advancing into support trenches behind the Shriven main line. Corbec felt cut off – not just by the savage bombardment that shook their very bones every other second, and he fervently prayed no shell would fall short into the midst of them – but more, he felt cut off from the rest of the regiment. The electro-magnetic aftershock of the ceaseless barrage was scrambling their communications, both the microbead intercoms that all the officers wore and the long range vox-caster radio sets. No orders were getting through, no urgings to regroup, to rendezvous with other units, to press forward for an objective, or even to retreat.

In such circumstances, the rulebook of Imperial Guard warfare was clear: if in doubt, move forward.

Corbec sent scouts ahead, men he knew were fast and able: Baru, Colmar and Scout-Sergeant Mkoll. They pulled their Tanith stealth cloaks around them and slipped away into the dusty darkness. Walls of smoke and powder were drifting back over the trench lines and visibility was dropping. Sergeant Blane gestured silently up at the billowing smoke banks that were descending. Corbec knew his intent, and knew that he didn't wish to voice it for fear of spooking the unit. The Shriven had no qualms about the use of poison agents, foul airborne gases that would boil the blood and fester the lungs. Corbec pulled out a whistle and blew three short blasts. The men behind him put guns at ease and pulled respirators from their webbing. Colonel Corbec buckled his own respirator mask around his face. He hated the loss of visibility, the claustrophobia of the thick-lensed gas hoods, the shortness of breath that the tight rubber mouthpiece provoked. But poison clouds were not the half of it. The sea of mud that the bombardment was agitating and casting up into the wind as vapour droplets was full of other venoms: the airborne spores of disease incubated in the decaying bodies out there in the dead zone; typhus, gangrene, livestock anthrax bred in the corrupting husks of pack animals and cavalry steeds, and the vicious mycotoxins that hungrily devoured all organic matter into a black, insidious mould.

As first officer to the Tanith First, Corbec had been privy to the dispatches circulated from the general staff. He knew that nearly eighty per cent of the fatalities amongst the Imperial Guard since the invasion began had been down to gas, disease and secondary infection. A Shriven soldier could face you point-blank with a charged lasgun and still your chances of survival would be better than if you took a stroll in no-man's land.

Muffled and blinkered by the mask, Corbec edged his unit on. They reached a bifurcation in the support trenches, and Corbec called up Sergeant Grell, officer of the fifth platoon, instructing him to take three fire-teams to the left and cleanse whatever they found. The men moved off and Corbec became aware of his increasing frustration. Nothing had come back from the scouts. He was moving as blind as he had been before he sent them out.

Advancing now at double time, the Colonel led his remaining hundred or so men along a wide communication trench. Two of his sharper-eyed vanguard moved in front, using magnetically sensitive wands attached to heavy backpacks to sweep for explosives and booby traps. It seemed that the Shriven had pulled back too rapidly to leave any surprises, but every few yards, the column stopped as one of the sweepers found something hot: a tin cup, a piece of armour, a canteen tray. Sometimes it was a strange idol made of smelt ore from the forge furnaces that the corrupted workers had carved into some bestial form. Corbec personally put his laspistol to each one and blew it into fragments. The third time he did this, the wretched thing he was destroying blew up in sharp fragments as his round tore it open along some fault. Trooper Drayl, cowering a few feet away, was hit in the collarbone by a shard, which dug into the flesh. He winced and sat back in the mud, hard. Sergeant Curral called up the medic, who put on a field dressing.