Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

Corbec was in the canal gully with three remaining men and Rawne yelling through the intercom.

'It's no good! They've got it sealed tight! We have to withdraw!'

'Feth you, Rawne! This is the only way! We move in! Bring your men forward!'

'It's suicide, Corbec, you fool! We'll all be dead in a moment!'

'Are you deserting me, major? Is that what you're doing? There's a price for that!'

'Feth you, you insane moron! You'd have to be utterly mad to go in there!'

Nokad advanced. His men loved him. They sang together, jubilant as they forced the invaders back.

On the canal lip, Nokad howled his inspirational verses to his men, arms uplifted, chainsword whirring.

There was a crack, a stab of light – and Nokad's head vanished in a film of blood.

Larkin fell back in the doorway, frothing and convulsing, spasms snapping his body as the brain fever took hold once more.

'Larks? Larks?' Corbec's voice was soft.

Larkin lay in a foetal ball, messed by his own fluids, in the doorway of the shattered chapel. As he came around he felt his mind was clear, violently clear, like it had been purged with light.

'Colm…'

'You son of a bitch, Larks!' Corbec pulled him upright, unsteady on his legs. Larkin's lasgun lay on the floor, its barrel broken, burnt and spent.

'You got him! You got him, you old bastard! You smoked him good!'

'I did?'

'Listen to that!' Corbec crowed, pulling Larkin around towards the doorway. There was a cheering and chanting noise rising from below the aqueduct. 'They've surrendered! We've taken Bucephalon! Nokad is fried!'

'Shit…' Larkin sank to his knees.

'And I thought you'd run on us! Honestly! I thought you'd fething deserted!'

'Me?' Larkin said, looking up.

'I shouldn't have doubted you, should I?' Corbec asked, bear-hugging the wiry little sniper.

'Where's the angel gone?' Larkin said quietly.

'Angel? There's no angel here except her!' Corbec pointed to the damaged statue of the angel above the chapel font, a beautiful winged woman knelt in the attitude of prayer. Her perfect hands were clasped. Her head was bowed demurely. The inscription on the plinth rejoiced that she was a symbol of the God-Emperor, a personification of the Golden Throne who had come to the elders of Bucephalon in the first days of the colony and watched over them as they conquered the land.

An old myth. A hunk of stone.

'But—' Larkin started as Corbec dragged him to his feet. 'But nothing!' Corbec laughed.

Larkin began to laugh too. He convulsed and gagged with the force of laughter inside him.

Corbec dragged him from the chapel, both laughing still.

The very last thing Larkin saw before Corbec wrenched him away was his fallen lasgun, with the peerless, scorched white cloth still wrapped around the barrel.

A sudden barrage of enemy guns, distant, impatient, came on just before the middle of the night over Monthax, and stippled the belly of the low brown sky with reflected flashes of fire and light. Wet, hollow rumbles barked and growled through the swamps and ground mist like starving hounds. Leagues away, some brutal night-combat was underway.

Gaunt woke instinctively at the sound of the guns and took a walk out of the command shed. The sound was coming from the east and he had a sergeant circle around to check on the sentry lines. The artillery sounded like someone flapping and cracking a large, sweat-damp sheet in the hot, heavy air.

He crossed a gurgling creek via a duck-board bridge and made it into the tree line just as the humidity broke and cold drooling rain began to fall through air suddenly stirred by chill breezes. It was almost a relief, but the rain was sticky and sappy and stung his eyes.

Gaunt found himself on the embanked approach to one of the main sentry towers and pulled himself up the ladder. The towers, set at hundred metre intervals along the main defile, rose some ten metres out of the surface filth. They were fashioned from groups of tree-trunks, shored together and stout

buttressed with riveted beams, and supported large flak-board gun-nests mounted on the top.

Up in the dark nest, Trooper Bragg tended a cradle-mounted pair of twinned heavy bolters, drums of shells piled around his huge feet. A flak-board cover kept the rain off and the nest was shrouded by netting.

'Sir!' Bragg saluted, his big face cracking into a broad, embarrassed grin. He was making fortified caffeine over a little burner, his huge paws dwarfing the pot and cup. He tried to hide the flask of sacra behind the stove, but the scent of the liquor was pungent in the close air of the nest.

Gaunt nodded the salute. 'I'll have one myself,' he said. 'A stiff one.'

Bragg seemed to relax. He sloshed a generous measure of sacra into a second battered cup and fussed over the boiling pot. Gaunt was amused, as always, by the combination of brutal strength and timidity in this giant of a man. Bragg's hands were big and strong enough to crush skulls, but he moved almost meekly, as if afraid of his own strength – or afraid of what others might think him capable of.

He handed the commissar a hot cup and Gaunt sat on a pile of shell-drums, gesturing out across the jungle to the east. The nest's raised vantage point afforded a better view of the distant fighting. Flares and tracers showed above the trees, and as the rain dissipated the mist, there were ruddy ground fires to be seen amid the trunks.

'Someone's having fun,' he remarked.

Bragg nodded, sipping his own cup. 'I make four or maybe five enemy positions, infantry support teams. They've advanced and dug in, because the fire-patterns are static, but they've found something to shoot at.'

'If they move this way, we'll need to take action.'

Bragg patted his heavy weapons. 'Let 'em come.'

Gaunt grinned. Bragg was a good heavy weapons technician, but his aim had scarcely improved since the Founding. Still, with guns with that sort of cycle rate and that much ammo, he should hit something.

'Oh, while I remember,' Gaunt said, 'the western embankments are collapsing again. I told Major Rawne that you'd help the detail re-dig tomorrow. They need some heavy lifting.'

Bragg nodded without question. His great physical strength was an asset to the Ghosts, and was matched by his geniality and willingness to help. He reminded Gaunt of some great blunt weapon, like a club: deadly when delivered properly, but difficult to wield or aim.

Bragg batted a moth away from his face. 'Precious little place we've found here,' he remarked.

'Monthax is… short on charm,' Gaunt admitted, studying the hulking trooper quizzically. Bragg was a strange man. Gaunt had decided that long ago. He'd never met a human so physically powerful, yet mentally restrained, as if he was somehow afraid of the terrible power he could unleash. Others took it for stupidity and regarded big old Bragg as dumb. But the man patently wasn't stupid. In his own, quiet, mountainous way, he was the most formidable and dangerous Ghost of all. So preoccupied by his physical power, others always underestimated the mind behind it.

And the mind, Gaunt knew, was the strongest thing of all.

SIX

THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

Caligula, after the Imperial liberation. Nights as bright as day, lit by the burning hive cities; days as dark as night, choked by the petrochemical smoke. Soot, like fat, black snowflakes, fluttered down everywhere. Even out here, in the deadlands.

Steepled canyons of coral-bright rock. Wisps of fluorescent dust licking the high places and the rims of the calderas. Cracked, dry basins of hard, russet cake-earth. Wide, slumping ridges of glass-sand. And death, bleached and baked white, like bones that had been out in the sun for years.