Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'Not all,' Kalen said, entering behind them. 'I scouted around the perimeter. Whoever owned this place has a shuttle bedded in a silo out back.'

Gaunt smiled. The Emperor will always provide.

'So he didn't die?' mused Corbec, sat on his bunk in the troop bay. Bragg shook his head and swigged from the bottle of sacra. 'Don't think nothing's gonna kill old Gaunt. He said he was gonna get us all out, and he did. Even Obel and Brennan.'

Corbec thought about this. 'Actually,' he said finally, 'I meant Rawne.'

They both looked across the quiet bay to where Rawne and Feygor sat in quiet conversation.

'Oh, him. No, worse luck.' Bragg passed the bottle back to Corbec. 'So, I hear you had some fun of your own?'

A forward post, looking out into the water-choked thickness of the Monthax jungles. The flies were thick out here, like sparkling dust in the air. Amphibians gurgled and chugged in the mudbanks.

The sappers had raised the spit-post out beyond the broad levees of the main embankment, one of six that allowed the Tanith snipers greater reach into the front line. They were long, zagged and lined with frag-sacking and a double layer of overlapped flak-boards.

Gaunt edged along the spit, keeping low, passing the sentries at the heavy-bolter post at the halfway point. The mud, unmoving and stagnant in the dug-away bed, stank like liquescent death. The sagging cable of a land-line voxcaster ran down the length of the sacking, held above the water by iron loop-pins. Gaunt knew it ended at a vox-set at the sniper post. In the event of attack, he would want the earliest warning from his keen-eyed forwards, and one that could be conveyed by good old, reliable, un-scrambleable cable.

Larkin was his usual edgy self. At the loop hole at the end of the spit-post, he was sat on a nest of sacking, meticulously polishing his weapon.

A compulsive, Gaunt thought. The commissar stepped up to him. Larkin looked around, tense. 'You always look like you're afraid of me,' Gaunt said. 'Oh no, sir. Not you, sir.'

'I'd hate to think so. I count on men like you, Larkin. Men with particular skills.'

'I'm gratified, commissar.'

Larkin's weapon was sparkling, yet still the man worked the cloth to it. 'Carry on,' said Gaunt. But for how much longer, he wondered?

FIVE

THE ANGEL OF BUCEPHALON

Larkin thought about death. He thought he might well have begged for it long ago, had he not been so scared of it. He had never figured out, though he had spent whole nights wondering it, whether he was more afraid of death itself or the fear of death. Worse, there had been so many times when he had expected to find out. So many moments caught in Death's frosty gaze, snapped at by Death's steel incisors. The question had been nearly answered so many times.

Now perhaps, he would find out. Here. Death, or the fear of death.

If the Angel knew, she was saying nothing. Her stern face was turned down, demure, eyes closed as if sleeping, praying hands clasped at her breast.

Outside, below them, the war to take Bucephalon raged. The stained glass in the huge lancet window, what remained of it, shook and twinkled with reflections of tracer sprays, salvos of blazing rockets, bright air-bursts.

Larkin sat back against the cold stone pillar and rubbed a dirty hand around his lean jaw. His breathing was slowing now at last, his pulse dropping, the anxiety attack that had seen him wailing and gasping five minutes ago was passing like a cyclone. Or maybe he was just in the eye of that storm.

The ground shook. He felt it through the pillar. His pulse leapt for a moment. He forced himself to breathe deeply through his mouth, slow, deep inhalations of the sort he used to steady himself before taking a shot.

You were telling me how you came to be here.'

Larkin looked round at the Angel. Though her head was still angled down, now she was gazing at him, smiling grimly. Larkin licked his lips and gestured idly around with one dirt-caked hand.

'War. Fighting. Fate.'

'I meant specifically,' said the Angel.

'Orders. The will of the Emperor.'

The Angel seemed to shrug her robed shoulders slightly. 'You are very defensive. You hide yourself and the truth behind words.'

Larkin blinked. For a moment, sickle-shaped moons of bright white light and fuzzy oblongs of red blackness lurched across his vision. A tiny moment of nausea. He knew the signs. He'd known them since childhood. The visual disturbances, the nausea, the taste of tin in his mouth. Then, the anxiety, the tunnel vision. After that, if he was lucky, a white hot migraine pain that would burst inside his skull and leave him dazed and helpless for hours. If he was unlucky: fits, spasms, blackouts and an awakening hours later, bruised and bloodied from the thrashing seizures; empty, miserable, destroyed inside.

'What's the matter?' asked the Angel.

Larkin tapped his forehead gently with his index finger. 'I'm… not right. Never have been, not in all my life. The fits used to scare my mother, but not half as much as they did me. They come on me from time to time.'

'Times like now? Under pressure? In the presence of danger?'

'That doesn't help. But it's just another trigger. You know what a ploin is?'

'No.'

'Round fruit. Soft, green-skinned, juicy. Lots of black pips in pink flesh. They used to grow in my uncle's orchard on Tanith. Divine things, but even the smell of them would trigger an attack.'

'Is there no medicine you can take?'

'I had tablets. But I forget to take them.' He took a little wooden pill-box from his jacket, opened the lid and showed her it was empty. 'Or I forget when I run out.'

'What do they call you?' asked the Angel.

They call me Mad Larkin.'

That is cruel.'

'But true. I'm not right in my mind. Mad.'

'Why do you think you are mad?'

'I'm talking to a statue of the Imperium, aren't I?'

She laughed and smoothed the folds of the white robes over her kneeling legs. There was a low and perfect radiance to her. Larkin blinked and saw glowing moons and oblongs in afterimage again.

Outside, a hail of gunfire lit the evening and a ripple of explosions crackled the air. Larkin got to his feet and crossed to the nearest window. He looked out through interlocking pieces of coloured glass at the city below. Steepled, tall, rising within a curtain of walls eighty metres high, the capital city-state of Bucephalon clung to the ridge of the mountains. Smoke obscured the sky, las-fire filled the air like bright sleet. Two or more kilometres away, he saw the pair of enormous storming ramps that the sappers of the Imperial Guard had raised against the walls. Huge embankments of piled earth and concrete rubble almost a kilometre long, rising high and broad enough to deliver armoured vehicles to the top of the wall. Heavy fighting within blooms of flame lit the ramps.

Below, nearer, the men on the ground looked like insect dots. Thousands, churning in trenches, spilling out across the chewed and cratered mess of the battlefront to assault the forbidding walls.

Larkin's vantage point was high and good. This shelled, ruined fortress was part of a stone complex which straddled and guarded the main aqueduct into the city, a huge structure that had defied the most earnest attempts of the enemy to fell with mines. Though heavily defended, it had seemed to Commissar Gaunt a good way in for a stealth team. Not the first time the commissar had been wrong.

Gaunt had told them that, before the clutch of Chaos fell upon it, the city-state had been ruled by thirty-two noble families, the descendants of merchant dynasties that had established the settlement. Their brilliant banners, the heraldic displays of thirty-two royal houses, were displayed on the walls, tatters of rich cloth draped from massive timber awnings. Those mighty awnings were now additionally decorated with the crucified bodies of the leaders of those noble families.