Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'Certainly an improvement on the last few facilities you've had to work with.'

Dorden smiled. He was a small, elderly man with a trimmed grey beard and genial eyes that had seen more pain than they deserved. 'It's empty yet.'

'I admit that surprised me when I came in. So used to seeing your places overflowing with wounded, Emperor spare us.'

'Give it time,' Dorden said, ominously. 'It unnerves me, I have to say. Seeing all those empty beds. I praise the Golden Throne I'm idle, but idleness doesn't suit me. Must've polished and swept the place a dozen times already.'

'If that's the worst work you have here on Monthax, we may all give thanks.'

'May we all indeed. Can I offer a cup of caffeine? I was about to light the stove.'

'Perhaps later, when I come back this way. I have to inspect the magazines. There are stirrings beyond us.'

'So I heard last night. Later then, sir.'

Gaunt nodded and left. He doubted he'd have time to stop by later, and he doubted too that this little paradise would remain unsullied much longer.

Dorden watched the commissar leave, and stood for a while longer surveying the clean ward with its empty cots. Like Gaunt, he had no illusions as to the horror-hole this place would become. It was inevitable.

He closed his eyes, and for a moment he could see the floor matting drenched in black blood; the soiled sheets; the moaning, screaming faces. And the silent ones.

His nostrils seemed to detect blood and burned flesh for a second, but it was just the incense.

Just the incense.

EIGHT

BLOOD OATH

The fallen men, scattered on the roadway and across the low, muddy fields of Nacedon, looked like they were wearing black mail armour. But they weren't. The meat-flies were busy. They covered the flesh like seething black links of armour. They glittered furiously, moving like a single thing. 'Medic!'

Tolin Dorden looked away from the flies. The afternoon sky lay wide and misty over the low, flat fens. Trackways and field boundaries were marked with dykes and hedge ways, all of them ruined and overrun with razor-posts, concertina wire and churned tank paths. The mist smelled of thermite powder.

'Medic!' The call again. Sharp and insistent, from down the roadway. Slowly, Dorden turned and trudged from the gutter of the road where, for a hundred metres, more corpses lay twisted and crumpled and coated in flies.

He advanced towards the buildings, feth, but he'd seen enough of this war now, no matter what the world. He was tired and he was spent. Sixty years old, older by twenty years than any of the other Ghosts. He was weary: weary of the death, the fighting, weary of the young bodies he had to patch back together. Weary, too, of being regarded as a father by so many men who had lost their own at the fall of Tanith.

Smoke clogged the late afternoon sky across the low fields. He approached the old red-brick buildings with their blown-out windows and crumpled walls. It had been a farm complex once, before the invasion. A feudal estate with a main house, outbuildings and barns. Agricultural machinery lay rusting and broken in waterlogged swine pens. A wide trench gully and a double fence of seared flak-boards topped with more spools of wire enclosed the complex in a horseshoe, with the northern side, the one that faced away from the frontline, open. Ghosts stood point all around, weapons ready. Trooper Brostin nodded him inside.

Dorden passed a sandbagged gunnery post from which the weapon had been hastily removed and entered the first of the buildings, the main house, through a doorway that had been shot out of the brick by sustained las-fire. More flies, billowing in clouds in the afternoon sunlight. The smell of death he was so, so used to. And other smells: antiseptic, blood, waste.

Dorden stepped across a tiled floor. Half the tiles were broken, littered with glass and pools of oil that shimmered rainbow colours. Corbec loomed out of the shadows nearby, shaking his weary head. 'Doc,' he acknowledged.

'Colonel.'

'Field hospital…' Corbec said, gesturing around himself. Dorden already knew as much. 'Anyone alive?'

'That's why I called for you.'

Corbec led him through to a vaulted hallway. The various stenches were stronger in here. Perhaps five dozen men lay on pallet beds in the chamber, half-lit by pallid yellow sunlight that streaked down through shattered lights in the sloping roof. Dorden walked the length of the room and then back.

'Why have they been left here?' he asked.

Corbec shot him a questioning look. 'Why do you think? We're all retreating. 'Too much to carry. Can you… sort them?'

Dorden cursed quietly. These men are what?'

'Bluebloods. Volpone 50th. You remember those devils from Voltemand? Their command units pulled out this morning, as Per orders.'

'And they left the wounded here?' Corbec shrugged. 'Seems so, Doc.'

'What kind of animal leaves his sick and wounded behind to die?' Dorden spat, moving to change the dressings on the nearest man.

'The human kind?' Corbec asked.

Dorden looked round sharply. This isn't funny. Corbec. It's not even whimsical. Most of these men will live with the proper attention. We're not leaving them.'

Corbec groaned softly. He rubbed the top of his scalp, folding the thick black hair between his big, swarthy fingers. 'We can't stay here, Doc. Commissar's orders…'

Dorden turned and looked at the colonel with fierce, old eyes. 'I'm not leaving them,' he stated plainly. Corbec seemed to start to say something, then hesitated and decided better of it. 'See what you can do for them,' he said, and left Dorden to his work.

Dorden was treating a leg wound when he heard the crunch of gravel on the roadway outside and the rumble of a troop carrier. He looked up to locate the source of the sound only after he had finished what he was doing.

'Thank you, sir,' said the young man whose leg he had treated. The boy was pale and sallow, too weak to rise from his pallet bed.

'What's your name?' Dorden asked.

'Culcis, sir. Trooper, Blueblood.' Dorden was sure that Culcis would have wanted to punctuate that statement with an exclamation mark, but he was too weak to manage it.

'I'm Dorden. Medic. Tanith. You need me, Trooper Culcis, you call my name.'

The boy nodded. Dorden went outside, approaching the Chimera parked below the leaning walls. Corbec was speaking to the tall figure perched on top.

The figure moved, dropped down to the soil, began to march towards him: Gaunt, his cap on, his face a shadow, his long coat flying.

'Sir!' Dorden said.

'Dorden – Corbec says you won't move.'

'Sixty-eight wounded here, sir. Can't leave them; won't leave them.'

Gaunt took Dorden's arm and led him across the muddy yard to the side wall that looked out across trampled farmland and vacant swine pens towards the setting suns beyond.

'You must, Dorden. Enemy forces are half a day behind us. General Muller has called us all to retreat. We can't carry them with us. I'm sorry.'

Dorden shook off the commissar's grip. 'So am I,' he said.

Gaunt turned away. Tor a moment, Dorden thought the commissar might round on him and discipline him with a fist. But he didn't. Instead, the man sighed. On reflection, Dorden knew violence wasn't Gaunt's first or chosen way of command. The endless war and his experience of other officer cadres in the field had soured Dorden's expectation, something he wasn't proud of.

Gaunt looked back at the medic. 'Corbec told me you'd say as much. Took, the counter-push for Nacedon is scheduled for tomorrow night. Then, and only then, Emperor willing, we'll retake this land and drive the enemy back.'