Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

The third wave went in, under Major Rawne. In the front rank was Bragg, his empty launcher discarded in favour of the heavy bolter that he had liberated from its mounting back on Blackshard and now lugged around like a smaller man might heft a heavy rifle.

Gaunt leapt forward too, bolt pistol in one hand, chain sword in the other. He bellowed after his attacking men, all of them racing silhouettes backlit against the glittering water by fire. Milo sprang up, fumbling with the Tanith pipes under his arm.

'Now would be a good time, Brin,' Gaunt said. Milo found the mouthpiece, inflated the bag and began to keen an old battle lament of Tanith, ''The Dark Path of the Forest''.

Up in the chute, Orcha and his squad heard the shrill wail of the pipes outside. Damp darkness was before them.

'Close up,' Orcha snapped into his micro-bead.

'Aye.'

'To your left,' Brith yelled suddenly.

An assault cannon raged out of the darkness of a side chute. Brith, Orcha and two others disintegrated instantly into red mist and flesh pulp.

Troopers Gades and Caffran ducked back behind the buttress work of the huge vault.

'Enemy fire!' Caffran yelled into his bead. 'They have the chute covered in a killing sweep.'

Corbec cursed. He might have expected this.

'Stay down!' he ordered the young Ghost over the mike as he beckoned his first two squads up the lower chute, black water swilling around their knees.

'Hell of a foul place for a firefight,' mourned Mad Larkin, scoping with his lasgun.

'Stow it, Larks,' Corbec growled. Ahead they heard the nightmare chatter of the cannon, and the added rhythm of drums and guttural chants. Corbec knew Larkin was right. A tight, confined, unyielding stone tunnel was no place for a serious fight. This was a two-way massacre in the making.

'They're just trying to psyche us out,' he told his Ghosts smoothly as they edged forward.

'What d'you know? It's working!' Varl said.

The drums and chanting got louder, but suddenly the cannon shut off.

'It's stopped,' Caffran reported over the link.

Corbec looked round into Larkin's crazed eyes. 'What do you think? A trick to lure us out?'

Larkin sniffed the thick air. 'Smell that? Burning ceramite. I'd wager they've got an overheat jam.'

Corbec didn't answer. He cinched his bayonet onto his lasgun and charged up the slope of the chute, screaming louder and shriller than Milo's pipes. In uproar, the Ghost squads followed him.

Caffran and Gades joined the charge, bellowing, weapons held low as they splashed out from behind the buttress into the main vault.

Corbec leapt clear a sandbag line damming one gully and disembowelled the two cultists who were struggling to unjam the assault cannon.

Larkin dropped down on one knee in the brackish soup and popped the cover on his lasgun's darkscope. Carefully selecting his expert long shots, he blasted four cultists further down the chute.

Las and bolt fire slammed back at the Ghosts, dropping several of them. The charging Guardsmen met the cultist force head on in a tight, tall sub-chute, no wider than two men abreast. Bodies exploded, blasted at close range. Bayonets and blades sliced and jabbed. Corbec was in the thick of it. Already a chain sword had gashed his left hand and cost him a finger, and blood blurted from a slash to his shoulder. He speared a man, but lost his gun when the corpse's weight on the bayonet tore it out of his hands. He ripped out his fallback weapons, a laspistol and his Tanith knife of sheer silver. Around him in the frenzy, men killed or died in a confined press that was packed in close like a busy work transit, crowded at rush hour. Already the water level was rising because of the depth of bodies and body parts in the gully.

Corbec shot a cultist through the head as he was charged, and then lashed sideways with the silver blade, opening a throat.

'For Tanith! First and Last and Only!' he screamed.

Advancing up the tunnel fifty paces back, Gaunt could hear the sheer tumult of the nightmarish close-quarters fight in the chute. He looked down and saw that the trickle of Bokore River water that ran down over his boots was thick and red.

Ten yards further, he found Trooper Gades, part of Orcha's original squad. The boy had lost his legs to a chainsword and the water had carried his twitching form back down the smooth slope of the channel.

'Medic! Dorden! To me!' Gaunt bellow, cradling the coughing, gagging Gades in his arms.

Gades looked up at his commissar. 'A real close fight, so it is,' he said with remarkable clarity, 'packed in like fish in a can. The Ghosts will make ghosts tonight.'

Then he coughed again. Bloody matter vomited from his mouth and he was gone.

Gaunt stood.

Milo had faltered, looking down at Gades's stricken, miserable death.

'Play up!' urged Gaunt, and turned to shout down the chute to the Ghost main force in the bulrushes. 'Advance! Narrow file! For the Emperor and the glory of Tanith!'

With a deafening bellow, Gaunt's Ghosts charged forward en masse, breaking down into files of three, surging into the throttling entrance to hell.

Up ahead, in the dark, close, smoky killing zone, Rawne slumped against a buttress, splashed in gore, and panted. By his side, Larkin squatted and fired shot after shot into the darkness.

Corbec suddenly loomed out of the smoke, a terrible apparition drenched in blood. 'Back!' he hissed. 'Back down the chute! Sound the retreat!'

'What is it?' Rawne said.

'What's that rumbling?' Larkin asked, distracted, pressing his ear to the stone work. 'Whole tunnel is vibrating!'

'Water,' Corbec said grimly. 'They've opened the sluices. They're going to wash us out!'

The cultists were everywhere.

Sergeant Cluggan's secondary expedition force poured in through the stinking crypts of the western sanitation outfalls, and the enemy rose to meet them all around. It was hand to hand, each step of the way won by strength and keen blades. The dark, tight confines of the drainage tunnels were lit by the flashes of lasfire, and shots ricocheted from the roof and walls.

'What the hell is that smell?' Forbin wailed, blasting away down an airless cavity with his lasgun.

'What do you think? This is the main sewage drain,' Brodd snapped, a one-eyed man in his fifties years. 'Notice how the others get the nice clean watergate.'

'Keep it together!' Cluggan snarled, firing in a wide sweep and cutting down a trio of attacking cultists. 'Forget the smell. It's always been a dirty job.'

More, heavy fire came their way. Forbin lost his left arm and then the side of his head.

Cluggan, Brodd and the others returned fire in the close channel. Cluggan eyed the cultist troops they cut through: bloated, twisted men in robes that had been white silk before they had been dyed in vats of blood. They had come from off-world, part of the vast host of Chaos cultists that had descended like locusts onto Voltemand and destroyed its people. The sigils and runes of the blasphemy Khorne were cut into the flesh of their brows and cheeks. They were well equipped, with bolters and lasguns, and armoured. Cluggan hoped to the sweet, dead gods of Tanith that his commissar was faring better.

The Ghosts staggered and stumbled back from the spewing watergate, through the reed beds, towards the comparative cover of the riverbank. Enemy fire from the walls high above killed dozens, their bodies joining the hundreds swept out, swirling and turning, by the torrent of brown water roaring from the watergate.

Micro-bead traffic was frantic with cross-chatter and desperately confused calls. Despite their discipline, the madness of the flight from the water had broken Gaunt's main force into a ragged jumble, scrambling for their lives.

Soaked through, furious, Gaunt found himself sheltering by some willows in a scummy river bend eighty yards from the watergate. With him were Caffran, Varl, a corporal called Meryn and two others.