Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'You feel that?' he called back to Caffran. 'Eyes watching us from all around?'

'Just your imagination,' Caffran returned, cranking the guns round all the same. Caffran felt a pulse in his temple that wasn't simply the heat. He'd seen the expression on Colonel Corbec's face when Gaunt had given the convoy command to Bragg. They were dead out here, as good as written off. The hundred burnt and crucified bodies they had passed on the roadside an hour before had nothing to do with imagination. Caffran shuddered.

other outriders whirred forward in hazes of dust. 'Trooper Kelve drove one cycle with Merrt, one of Corbec's favoured sharpshooters, in the rear cradle. Merrt had his sniper gun wrapped in oil-cloth in the footwell below him, ready to switch to it when the autocannon rig ran dry. Kelve pulled them up to a revving halt on a sand-rise.

To their left, engine idling, was Ochrin and his gunner Hellat. To their right, five hundred metres distant, Mkendrick and his gunner Beris. A signal, waved from bike to bike, then they all flew forward into the dusty basin beyond, racing parallel to the track left by Meryn and Caffran. The huge convoy thundered in after them. Tailing it, and flanking the rear, came three more outriders: Fulke with Logris gunning, Mktea with Laymon at the weapons, and Tanhak with Grummed manning the cannons. Behind them, an Imperial Guard half-track driven by Wheln, with Abat and Brostin at the weapons stations, and another with long, double-tracks driven by Mkteeg with Rahan and Nehn crewing a missile launcher platform.

Bragg clambered up into the gun-turret over the cab of his tractor, half-hearing the whispered slanging of the Caligulan drivers, Milloom and Tuvant. Heat and dust assaulted his big face. The sun was a torrential heat. His nostrils immediately clogged with ash-dust and he had to hawk and spit to clear his head. As an afterthought, he wrapped his stealth cloak around his mouth and nose, pulling out the goggles he had been issued and also remembering to wipe zinc paste over his exposed skin. The paste, clagging and damp in a small circular tin, smelled bad, but the colonel-commissar had told them all to use it. Bragg lifted his micro-bead comms-set and slid the plug into his ear.

'Bragg to all Ghosts, remember to use your sun-paint. The zinc stuff. Tike the colonel-commissar told us. Over.'

Over the vox-link came a round of curses and protests.

'I mean it,' Bragg said. 'Wipe it on, Tanith. There's burning and there's burning, the colonel-commissar said, and our fair skins won't last a minute out in this.'

Sliding his bike to a halt, Ochrin pulled out his tin and grudgingly applied paste to his brow and nose. He held the tin out, straight armed, to Hellat in the back.

There was soft, distant ping, a hollow, empty sound.

Hellat took the tin from Ochrin's outstretched hand just as he realised Ochrin no longer had a face. Ochrin's corpse flopped stiffly back off the saddle.

Hellat cried out in alarm, gripping the yokes of his pintle weapon and raining metal fury on the distant dunes.

'Ochrin's down! We are attacked!' he screamed as he fired.

A second later a missile lifted his cycle into the air and blew Hellat and Ochrin's corpses into pieces of cooked meat each no larger than a clenched fist.

Vox-traffic suddenly tumbled in confusion over the static. Murmuring the litany of protection the Ecclesiarch had taught him back on Tanith, at the Primer Educatory, Mkteeg drew his half-track hull-down behind a salty dune and his weapon crew spat a rack of missiles into the cliff edges.

Meryn drove his cycle around in a wide arc, pulling to rejoin, puffing up a wide skim of dust. Caffran rattled round the gun mount and flickered off a curving row of tracer shells into the position marked by Hellat's last assault. Ochrin and Hellat's vehicle lay in a burning heap on a crisped sand-rise.

The main convoy slowed as the attack made itself known. The enemy fire whickered into them from the right hand side like rain – a few shots at first, then faster and more furious.

Mkendrick raced his bouncing bike in, screaming a Tanith warcry, and only when his gunner didn't begin firing did he turn to find Beris hanging dead over the pintle mount, sunlight shining through a vast hole in his torso. Mkendrick braked, leapt out of the driver's position and tossed Beris's corpse aside, maniacally training and firing the guns from a stationary position.

As his cycle raced into the firefight, Merrt knew he had a good angle, pumping round after round from the big calibre guns into the distant dust dunes. He screamed to his driver to go faster and to overrun the enemy. Kelve was about to reply, or was half-way through saying something, when a salvo of stub rounds tore the vehicle to pieces and overturned them.

Merrt pulled himself out of the dust and looked round to see Kelve trapped under the wreckage, shrieking in pain. The control column had impaled him, ripping him open and pinning him into the sand under three tonnes of twisted, smouldering metal.

Merrt ran to him, trying to raise the wreck, trying to tip it over. Kelve bayed at him, begging, pleading.

When Merrt realised how heavy the wreck was and how grievous Kelve's wound, he did as his driver instructed him. He took out his laspistol and shot Kelve through the head, point blank. Kelve's body spasmed and died, gratefully.

Merrt dived flat as further fire found his position. He located his swaddled sniper gun, thrown clear out from the wreck. There was no time to check for damage. He pulled off the cloth, lay low, and sighted, snuggling a fresh power cell into the receiver. His long sight brought the enemy into view, magnified, hazy, distant figures milling around trying to reload a khaki-paintcd missile launcher.

He made his first shot. It went long. He adjusted his scope, as Larkin had taught him, breathed out, and made the second shot a clean kill. The enemy were turning in confusion when he made the next three shots in calm, cold series.

Three clean hits. Sniper Master Larkin would be proud.

Atop the main tractor, Bragg yelled into his micro bead, ordering the convoy to form a defensive circle. Various counter-demands whipped into his ears over the link and he shouted them down, gripping the gun-yokes with both of his huge hands and sending tight bursts of hammer-fire into the starboard hills.

The convoy vehicles reluctantly obliged, following Bragg's orders, circling round and forming a defensive position that the remaining outriders circled. Vehicles two and four in the convoy took heavy hits, and vehicle six exploded outright as a rocket torched into its tractor unit. The side-panelling of the cargo-unit rippled off as internal explosions blistered out through the metal skin, shredding it. Scraps of metal hull span away from the boiling black-smoked fireball, puffing hundreds of individual ripples in the ashy sand all around.

Relieved at the turret guns by Trooper Cavo, Bragg dropped down into the cab to find Milloom and Tuvant sheltering under window level, the grid-shields and hatches pulled up.

'This is madness, you stupid kec!' Tuvant bellowed. 'They'll pin us down and murder us all!'

'I don't think these bandits are really so tough,' Bragg began.

Tuvant turned on him. You kec-head! They're all over us! God-Emperor, but there are thousands of bandits out here, more than enough to kill us all! We should have kept moving! Stopping like this, we'll give them all a chance to congregate for the kill!'

Bragg shambled across to the Caligulan drivers. There was a dull look in his eye Tuvant didn't like. With one meaty, hairy-knuckled paw, Bragg lifted Tuvant off the cabin deck by his throat.

'I'm in charge here,' he growled, his voice as deep and solid as his build, reverberative. 'The colonel-commissar said so. If we have to fight our way through to Calphernia a micron at a time, we will. And we will all fight. Clear?'