Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

He crossed to the window. What he saw made him gawp speechlessly. The Basilisk tank thundering up the drive was dragging part of the main gate after it and scattering gaudcocks and drilling Bluebloods indiscriminately in its path. It slewed to a halt on the front lawn, demolishing an ornamental fountain in a spray of water and stone.

A powerful man in the uniform of a Serpent colonel leapt down and strode for the main entrance to the house. His face was set and mean, swollen with bruises down the left side. A door slammed. There was some shouting, some running footsteps. Another slamming door.

Some moments later, an aide edged into the study, holding out a data-slate for Sturm. 'Colonel Ortiz has just filed an incident report. He suggested you saw it at once, sir.'

Gilbear snatched it and read it hastily. 'It seems that Major Ortiz wishes to make it clear he was injured by his own weapon's recoil during the recent bombardment.' Gilbear looked up at Sturm with a nervous laugh. 'That means—'

'I know what it means!' Sturm snapped. 'The general glared at Gaunt, and Gaunt glared right back, unblinking.

'I think you should know,' Gaunt said, low and deadly, 'it seems that callous murder can be committed out here in the lawless warzones, and the fact of it can be hidden by the confusion of war. You should bear that in mind, general, sir.'

Sturm was lost for words for a moment. By the time he had remembered to dismiss Gaunt, the commissar had already gone.

'Oh, for Feth's sake, play something more cheerful,' Corbec said from his troop-ship bunk, flexing his bandaged hand. He was haunted by the ghost of his missing finger. Appropriate, he thought.

In the bunk below him, Milo squeezed the bladder of his pipes and made them let out a moan, a shrill, sad sigh. It echoed around the vast troop bay of the huge, ancient starship, where a thousand Tanith Ghosts were billeted in bunks. The dull rhythm of the warp engines seemed to beat in time to the wailing pipes.

'How about… 'Euan Fairlow's March'?' Milo asked.

Above him, Corbec smiled, remembering the old jig, and the nights he heard it played in the taverns of Tanith Magna.

'That would be very fine,' he said.

The energetic skip of the jig began and quickly snaked out across the iron mesh of the deck, between the aisles of bunks, around stacks of kits and camo-cloaks, through the smoky groups where men played cards or drank, over bunks where others slept or secretly gazed at portraits of women and children who were forever lost, and tried to hide their tears.

Enjoying the tune, Corbec looked up from his bunk when he heard footsteps approach down the deck-plates. He jumped up when he saw it was Gaunt. The commissar was dressed as he had first met him, fifty days before, in high-waisted dress breeches with leather braces, a sleeveless undershirt and jack boots.

'Sir!' Corbec said, surprised. The tune faltered, but Gaunt smiled and waved Milo on. 'Keep playing, lad. It does us good to hear your merrier tunes.'

Gaunt sat on the edge of Milo's bunk and looked up at Corbec.

'Voltemand is credited as a victory for the Volpone Bluebloods,' he told his number two frankly. 'Because they seized the city. Sturm mentions our participation with commendations in his report. But this one won't win us our world.'

'Feth take'em!' spat Corbec.

There will be other battles. Count on it.'

'I'm afraid I do, sir,' Corbec smiled.

Gaunt bent down and opened the kit-bag he was carrying. He produced a half dozen bottles of sacra.

'In the name of all that's good and holy!' Corbec said, jumping down from his bunk. 'Where—'

'I'm an Imperial commissar,' Gaunt said. 'I have pull. Do you have glasses?'

Chuckling, Corbec pulled a stack of old shot glasses from his kit.

'Call Bragg over, I know he likes this stuff,' Gaunt said. 'And Varl and Meryn. Mad Larkin. Suth. Young Caffran… hell's teeth, why not Major Rawne too? And one for the boy. There's enough to share. Enough for everyone.' He nodded down the companion way to the three bewildered naval officers who were approaching with a trolley laden with wooden crates.

'What do we drink to?' Corbec asked.

To Sergeant Cluggan and his boys. To victory. And to the victories we are yet to have.'

'Drink to revenge, too,' Milo said quietly from his bunk, setting down his pipes. Gaunt grinned. 'Yes, that too.'

'You know, I've got just the treat to go with this fine brew,' Corbec announced, searching his pockets. 'Cigars, liquorice flavour…'

He broke off. What he had pulled from his coat pocket had ceased to be cigars a good while before. There were a matted, frayed, waterlogged mess.

Corbec shrugged and grinned, his eyes twinkling as Gaunt and the others laughed.

'Ah, well,' he sighed philosophically, 'Some you win…'

Heavy, spoon-billed wading birds flew west across the lines, white against the encroaching dark. In the thickets, the daytime chirruping insects gave up their pitches to the night beetles, the nocturnal crickets, the tick-flies, creatures that spiralled and swam in the light of the stove fires and filled the long hot darkness with their percussion. Other cries rolled in the sweaty air: the whoops and gurgles of unseen climbers and grazers in the swamp. The distant artillery had fallen silent.

Gaunt returned to the command shed just as the grille-shaded watch lights came on, casting their greenish glow downwards into the slush, bull's-eye covers damping their out-flung light in any direction other than down. No sense in making a long range target of the base. Furry, winged insects the size of chubby hands flew in at once to bounce persistently off the lit grilles with a dull, intermittent thok thok thok.

Gaunt took one last look around the base site, now distinguished only by the points of light: the cook-fires, stoves, watch lights and moving torches. He sighed and went inside.

The command centre was long and low, with a roof of galvanised corrugate and walls of double-ply flak-board. The floor was fresh-cut local wood sawn into planks and treated with vile-smelling lacquer. Blast shutters on the windows stood half-open and the wire screens inside them were already thick with a fuzzy, quivering residue – the mangled bodies of moths and night-bugs which had thrown themselves at the mesh.

Gaunt's command equipment and his duffel bags of personal effects were set off the floor on blocks of wood. They'd been sat directly on the floor for the first two days until it was discovered that where damp didn't seep up, burrowing worms did.

He draped his coat on a wire hanger and hung it from a nail on the overhead rafter, then pulled up a camp chair and sat down heavily. Before him, block-mounted, sat a cogitator, a vox-uplink and a flat-screen mimeograph. A tech-priest had spent over an hour diligently intoning prayers of function as he made the sacred machines ready. They were still propped in their half-open wrought-iron casings to protect against the damp, and thick power feeds snaked off from them and ran from clip supports on the rafters, out of a socket-shutter and off to the distant generator. Lights and light images shimmered and flickered on glass plates glossed by condensation. Setting dials throbbed a dull orange. The vox-link made a low-level serpent hiss as it rose and fell through frequencies.

Gaunt leaned forward and idly surveyed the latest information and tactical data coming through from the orbital fleet and other units. A skein of coded runes crossed and blinked on the dark glass.

Quiet as nightfall, Milo entered from the ante-room. He offered a pewter beaker to his commissar. Gaunt took it with a nod, delighting at the beaded coolness of the metal.

'The tech-priests got the cooling units working again just now,' Milo muttered by way of explanation. 'For a few minutes. It's only water, but it's cold.'