Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'C-clear!' gasped Tuvant, going blue.

'Now, can you make yourself useful?'

'How?' snarled Milloom acidly from behind. Bragg dropped Tuvant, who sprawled, retching, and turned to face the other driver. Milloom had his greasy axle-bar in his hands. 'You don't scare me, Ghost.'

'Then you must be very stupid,' Bragg muttered, turning aside without interest. Milloom launched forward to crush the big man's skull with five kilos of cold-stamped metal. Bragg broke stride lightly, impossibly lightly it seemed for such a great bulk. He caught the descending bar in one palm. There was an audible slap. Milloom gasped as the bar was pulled out of his hands. Bragg tossed it aside.

'You can start by not attacking me. You fething non-combatants really wind me up. Where the feth would you be if we hadn't come to pull your arses out of the Chaos pit?'

'Safe and sound in Aurelian Hive, probably!' Milloom jeered. 'Not out in the deadlands, surrounded by terrorist infantry!'

Bragg shrugged. 'Probably. With the other cowards. Are you a coward, Driver Milloom?

'Kec you!'

'Just asking. The colonel-commissar told me to watch out for cowards. Told me to shoot them on sight, as they were treasonous dogs who didn't deserve the salvation of the Golden Throne. I wouldn't shoot them, not me.'

'There was a pause.

Bragg smiled. 'I'd just hit them. Has a similar result. Do you want me to hit you, Milloom?'

'N… no.'

Then don't assault me again. You can help even if you don't know the business end of a weapon from your own arse. Get on the voxcaster. Recite the Ecclesiarchy's Oath of Obedience. You know that?'

'Of course I know that! Then what?'

Then recite it again. Make it clear and proud. Recite it again, then again and then again. If you get bored, insert the Emperor's Daily Prayer for variation. Maybe the Imperial Litany of Deliverance for good measure. Fill the vox-channels with soothing, inspiring words. Can you do that?'

Milloom nodded and crossed to the vox-caster built into the tractor's dash.

'Good man,' Bragg said. Milloom started to speak into the caster horn, remembering the verses he had learned as a child.

Outside, laser and stub fire whined into the circled convoy. The outriders were laying in hard. Meryn drew his bike in so that Caffran could do real damage to the slowly encircling bandits.

Fulke, Mktea and Tanhak ran the line. From the back of Fulke's machine, Logris excelled and scored four kills. Mktea's gunner Laymon made one of his own before the upper part of his head was scythed off by a las shot at the mouth. Tanhak and Grummed made six, maybe seven, good kills before a short-range missile ended their lives and their glory. Debris and body parts flew out from a searing typhoon of ignited bike fuel.

'Bragg! Bragg! We have to retreat!' Wheln yelled from the half-track, Abat dead behind him and Brostin blazing with his flamer.

In the cab of his freighter, Bragg was calmly unwrapping his autocannons from a felt shroud. Behind him, Milloom was steadily reciting into the vox-horn. Bragg paused, fingering his micro-bead to open the vox-line.

'No, Wheln. No retreat. No retreat,' he said simply.

Rubbing his sore throat, Tuvant scrambled up from the floor, about to argue with the huge Ghost, but he stopped dead as he saw the weapon that the Tanith hulk was preparing. Not one but two autocannons, the like of which were usually fixed to tripod or pintle mounts. Bragg had them lashed together, with a makeshift trigger array made out of a bent ration-pack fork so he could fire them as a pair. Long belt loops of ammunition played out from the gun-slots, leading back to a parcel of round-boxes.

Bragg punched out the perspex window section from the rear of the cab and laid his twin muzzles across the sill. He looked back at Tuvant.

'You wanted something?'

'No,' Tuvant replied, ducking suddenly as stub-fire perforated the cab and showered them with metal shards and soot.

'I can fire this on my own if I have to, but it would be easier if I had someone to feed.'

Tuvant blinked. Then he scrambled forward and grabbed the ammo-belts, easing them around so they would pull unobstructed from the boxes.

'Thanks,' smiled Bragg quickly, then turned to hunch and squint out of the window port. He squeezed the trigger assembly. The twin guns barked deafeningly in the confines of the cab. Milloom paused in his recitation, and covered his ears with a grimace. Tuvant shuddered, but kept working dutifully to play the ammo-belts out clear and clean. Shell cases billowed through the air like chaff.

Bragg's first devastating salvo had gone wide, passing over the top of the nearby cliffs. He grinned at himself and adjusted his aim.

'Try again…' he murmured. 'What?' asked Tuvant. 'Nothing.'

Bragg opened fire again, the barking chatter of the paired guns filling the cab again. Now his shots were stitching along the valley wall and crossing the far dunes. Something he touched exploded in a violent plume of red fire. Bragg played his guns around that area again for a minute or so.

Out on the dunes, with the convoy circled behind him, Merrt crawled forward, re-adjusting his aim. He could hear the anxious but determined voice reciting the Emperor's Prayer over his ear-plug and it filled him with a sense of right and dignity. He blinked dust out of his eyes. He'd ditched his sand-goggles the moment he'd hit the ground. Larkin had told him that nothing should get between a sniper's scope and his naked eye. You only saw the truth of the world when your eye was clear and you were looking down your scope, Larkin had said in training. Merrt smiled at the memory. He remembered how Larkin would often carry his scope around in his thigh-pouch and take it out to look at people through it. To tell if they're lying,' he always said.

Merit's scope wasn't lying now. He could see over three dozen bandits advancing over the dunes under cover of the foggy dust kicked up by the firefight. They were running low, heads down, hugging the contours of the ground. Merrt took aim at the nearest one. He sighed and fired, timing his finger to the moment of respiratory emptiness so nothing in his torso would jerk the aim. The laser burst punched through the top of the bandit's bowl-helmet, presented as it was by his head-down approach. 'The shot probably passed down through his skull, his neck and his torso, following the line of his spinal column, Merrt thought, as the figure dropped stone dead in a crumpled pile.

He adjusted his aim and took another bandit in the face when he looked up to take a bearing. A slight swing to the left, and another came into his sight, scurrying forward to gain new cover. A sigh. A squeeze. A slight recoil. The figure flipped back and fell still.

Merrt readjusted and was about to target a small group of infantry when their position dissolved in a haze of heat and outflung debris. Missile hit, he thought.

Rahan and Nehn were keeping the aim of the missile turret low, sliding off single shots that hugged the ground cover and buried themselves in the foe. Mkteeg edged the half-track along The lip of the folded dunes, skirting the enemy as best he could. His weapon crew had almost expended their missiles, so he set the drive in idle and clambered back into the turret bed to set up the stub-gun folded away in a deck-locker.

He had it up and lashed in to the armoured side panel of the track as Rahan volleyed off five missiles high into the air. They looked like burning javelins as they arched over the desert and flew down onto unseen targets below the dune.

Mktea fired the autocannon mount Laymon had been manning until the feeder belt jammed and the gun glowed red. With a curse, he snatched up his lasrifle and dived over the side. Enemy las-fire reached his vehicle a moment later and blew it up in a shower of metal debris that pattered around him as he crawled through the sand. Mktea felt a sharp and painful impact in his ankle. Looking back, prone on his belly, he realised his combat trousers were smouldering from the wash of cinders and a thick piece of metal debris had pierced his foot.