Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

The frigate's bridge was Kreff's favourite place in the universe. It was hushed like a chapel and always serene, even though it controlled a starship capable of crossing parsecs in a blink, a starship with the firepower to roast cities.

He returned to his study of the vast bright bulk of Caligula below him, plump and puffy like an orange, speckled with white-green blotches of mould.

Imperial starships hung in the blackness between it and him: some vast, grey and vaulted like cathedrals twenty kilometres long, some bloated like oceanic titans; others long, lean and angular like his own frigate. They floated in the sea of space and tiny black dots, thousands upon thousands of dots, tumbled out of them, fluttering down towards the ripe planet.

Kreff knew the dots were troop-ships: each speck was a two-hundred tonne dropcraft loaded with combat-ready troops. But they looked just like pepper ground from a mill. As if the Imperial fleet had come by to politely season Caligula.

Kreff wondered which of the pepper grains contained Commissar Gaunt. Things had certainly livened up since Gaunt had arrived: Ibram Gaunt, the notorious, decorated war hero, and the rag-tag regiment known as the Ghosts that he had salvaged from the murdered planet Tanith.

Kreff smoothed the emerald trim of his Segmentum Pacificus Fleet uniform and sighed. When he had first heard the Navarre had been assigned to Gaunt's mob, he had been dismayed. But true to his track record, Gaunt had shaped the so-called Ghosts up and taken them through several courageous actions.

It had been an education having him aboard. As executive officer, the official representative of the captain in all shipboard organisational matters, he'd had to mix with the Ghosts more than other Navy personnel. He'd got to know them: as well as anyone could know a band of black-haired, raucous, tattooed soldiers, the last survivors from a planet that Chaos had destroyed. He'd been almost afraid of them at first, alarmed by their fierce physicality. Kreff knew war as a silent, detached, long-distance discipline, a chess-game measured in thousands of kilometres and degrees of orbit. They knew war as a bloody, wearying, frenzied, close-up blur.

He'd been invited to several dinners in the Guard mess, and spent one strange, only partially-remembered evening in the company of Corbec, the regiment's colonel, a hirsute giant of a man who had, on closer inspection, a noble soul. Or so it had seemed after several bottles and hours of loose, earnest talk. They had debated the tactics of war, comparing their own schools and methods. Kreff had been dismissive of Corbec's brutal, primitive ethos, boasting of the high art that was Navy fleet warfare.

Corbec had not been insulted. He'd grinned and promised Kreff would get to fight a real war one day.

The thought made Kreff smile. His eyes went back to the dots falling towards the planet and the smile faded.

Now he doubted he would see either Gaunt or Corbec again.

Far away, below, he could see the scorching flashes of anti-orbit guns, barking up at the fluttering pepper grains. That was a dog's life, going down there into the mouth of hell. All that noise and death and mayhem.

Kreff sighed again, and felt suddenly grateful for the tranquil bridge around him. This was the only way to fight wars, he decided.

Milo opened his eyes, but it hadn't gone away. The world was still convulsing. He glanced about, down the hold of the troopship where another twenty-five Guardsmen sat rigid, clamped in place by the yellow-striped restraint rigs, their equipment shuddering in mesh packs under every seat. The air was sweet with incense, and the ship was shaking so hard that he could not read the inspirational inscriptions etched on the cabin walls. Milo heard the roaring of the outer hull, white-hot from the steep dive. What he couldn't hear was the booming cough of the anti-orbit batteries down below, welcoming them.

He glanced around for a friendly face. Hulking Bragg was gripping his restraints tight, his eyes closed. Young Trooper Caffran, only three years older than Milo, was gazing at the roof, muttering a charm or prayer. Across from him, Milo found the hard eyes of Major Rawne.

Rawne smiled and nodded his head encouragingly.

Milo took a breath. Being encouraged by Major Rawne in these circumstances was like being patted on the back by the Devil at the gates of Hell.

Milo shut his eyes again.

In the rear of the slender cockpit, strapped in his G-chair, Commissar Gaunt craned his neck round to see past the pilots and the astropath and look through the narrow front ports. Chart displays flickered across the thick glass and the ship was bucking wildly, but Gaunt could see the target coming up: the hive city called Nero, poking up out of the ochre soil through a caldera ninety kilometres wide, like an encrusted lump of coal set in a plump navel.

'Sixty seconds to landfall,' the pilot said calmly. His voice was electronically tonal as it rasped via the intercom.

Gaunt pulled out his bolt pistol and cocked it. He started counting down.

High above the sunken city of Nero, the troop-ships came down like bullets, scorching in out of the cloud banks. Anti-air batteries thumped the sky.

Then the cotton-white clouds began to singe. The fluffy corners scorched and wilted. A dark purple stain leached into the sky, billowing through the cumulus like blood through water. Lightning fizzed and lashed.

Leagues above, Kreff paused and stared. Something was discolouring the atmosphere far below. 'What the—' he began.

'Weather formation!' the co-pilot yelped, frantically making adjustments. 'We're hitting hail and lightning.'

Gaunt was about to query further but the shaking had increased. He glanced round at the astropath, suddenly aware that the man was uttering a low, monotone growl.

He was just in time to see the astropath's head explode. Blood and tissue painted the pilot, co-pilot, Gaunt and the entire cabin interior.

The pilot was screaming a question.

It was a psychic storm, Gaunt was horribly sure. Far below them, something of unimaginable daemonic power was trying to keep them out, trying to ward off the assault with a boiling tempest of Chaos.

The ship was shaking so hard now Gaunt could no longer focus. Multiple warning nines flashed up in series across the main control display, blurring into scarlet streaks before his rattling eyes.

Something, somewhere exploded.

The vibration and the shrieking didn't stop, but they changed. Milo suddenly knew that they were no longer crash diving into attack. They were simply crash-diving.

He wasn't feeling sick any more. But the wicked incincerated-in-a-hypervelocity-crashlanding-voice started to crow: I told you so.

There was impact…

…so huge, it felt like every one of his joints had dislocated.

There was sliding…

…sudden, shuddering, terrifying.

And finally…

…there was roaring fire.

And, as if as an afterthought…

…complete excruciating blackness.

Hundreds of Imperial troop-ships were already well below the doudbank when the psychic typhoon exploded into life, and so escaped the worst of its effects, levelling out, they descended on the massive citadel of Nero Hive like a plague of locusts. The air was thick with them, ringing with the roar of their thrusters as they banked in and settled on the wasteland outskirts of the towering black city-hive. Traceries of laser and plasma fire divided the sky in a thousand places, making it look for all the world like some insanely complex set of blueprints. Some struck landing ships which flared, fluttered and died. Flak shells sent loud, black flowers up into the air. Marauder air-support shrieked in at intervals, moving in close, low formations like meteorites hunting as a pack, strafing the ground with stitching firestorms.