Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

Dorden stepped out into the muddy yard and, as if on cue, the heavens opened and sheeting rain hammered down on him, washing another's blood out of his tunic. He stood there, dripping, as the downpour eased a little.

'You'll get wet out there,' came a voice from nearby.

Dorden swung round to face Corbec, who was smoking a cigar in the cover of the slumping side-roof. All Dorden could see was the shape and the red coal of the light.

Dorden crossed to him. Corbec offered up a waxy box of smokes. 'Liquorice. Got the taste of them on Voltemand and it's taken me an age to get some on the black market. Take one for now and one for later.'

Dorden took two, slid one behind his ear unlit and lit up the other from Corbec's half-smoked stick.

They looked out into the night.

'It's going to be rough,' remarked Corbec softly.

He was looking at the flash and howl of the storm, but Dorden knew what he meant.

'Yet you stayed.'

Corbec took a deep drag and white smoke plumed out of his hairy shadow. 'I'm a sucker for good deeds.'

'Or lost causes.'

The Emperor will provide. And aren't we all just one big lost cause? The First and last and Lost? You don't see me giving up on that.'

Dorden smiled. The cigar was strong and the flavour hellish, but he was enjoying it. It had been twenty years since he'd smoked. His wife had never approved, said it didn't set a good example to the patients Dorden tended to. Then the kids came along, Mikal and Clara, and he'd kicked the habit, so—

Dorden shut off the thoughts. Tanith had taken his wife with it, and Clara and her husband and their baby too. All he had was Mikal, Trooper Mikal Dorden, vox-caster operator in Sergeant Hasker's platoon.

'You're thinking about home,' Corbec muttered.

Dorden broke his sad reverie. 'What?'

'I know that look.'

'It's dark, colonel!'

'I know that… feeling, then. The set of a man's shoulders. Comes on us all, time to time.'

'I'd guess the commissar has told you to stamp it out where ever you see it? Bad for morale.'

'Not in my book. Tanith still lives while we all carry it here…' Corbec tapped his forehead. 'And we don't know where we're going if we don't know where we came from.'

'Where are we going, do you suppose?'

Corbec flicked his butt onto the mud and let it sputter dead. 'On a bad day, to hell. On a good day, I'd say we were bound for that trophy world Gaunt's promised us. Slaydo's gift: the first world we truly win we can take and claim and settle as our own.'

Dorden gazed at the storm. 'New Tanith, huh? Tike the men talk of when they're drunk or dying? Do you believe that? Might we ever take a world ourselves, get the credit clean and true? We're less than two thousand, livery theatre we enter, we do so alongside other regiments, and that muddies victory claims and credit. I'm not a pessimist, colonel, but I doubt any of us will ever find that New Tanith, except in drink or death.'

Corbec smiled, his white teeth shining in the gloom. 'Then lucky me. One way or another, I'll see more of it than most.'

A door banged to their left. Chayker, shrouded in his cape, emerged from the hospital and carried a tin drum over to the well. A few moments' cranking, and he struggled with it back to the buildings. Dorden and Corbec could already smell the broth Chayker and Foskin were brewing for all the company.

'Something smells good,' Corbec said.

Toskin found tubers and grain in a field beyond the ditch walls, and we turned up dried pulses and salt meat in an old pantry. Should be the best supper any of us have had in a while. But first rations go to any of the patients who can take it.'

'Of course. They need it more than us. I've got a flask of sacra and a box of these smokes. Should keep me going awhile.'

'Come in when you're ready for proper nourishment,' Dorden instructed, as if issuing a prescription. 'Thanks for the cigars.' He headed back to the ward.

A circuit of the wounded took another hour and a half. Tesp and the other orderlies had done well, and many had eaten or at least taken fluid. There were twelve who were too far gone to remain conscious, and Dorden carefully rationed out his supply of drugs to prioritise them. The boy, Culcis, along with a few others, were now sitting up, chatting, grateful. All of them, Volpone aristo-blood, were disdainful of the Tanith, but civil nevertheless. Being cut adrift by their regiment, and spared from death only by a barbarian unit, would seem to have altered many of their deeper prejudices and snobberies. For that at least, Dorden felt pleased.

He saw Trooper Caffran, coming in soaked from a patrol circuit, taking his bowl of broth to sit with Culcis. They were about the same age, Dorden reckoned. The same age as Mikal. He heard them share a joke.

Lesp took his arm. One of the critical cases was showing signs of fading. With Chayker's help, they carried the man out into what had once been the household kitchen, and now served as a surgical theatre. A refectory table sat there, long enough for a man, and they heaved him onto it.

'The Blueblood, a Corporal Regara by his tags, had lost a leg below the knee and taken shrapnel in the chest. His blood was far from blue. The refectory table became slick and blood drooled off onto the flagstones. Chayker almost slipped and Dorden ordered him to fetch a mop and more wadding.

'There are no mops,' Chayker shrugged.

'Then find something like a mop.'

Dorden had to take off more of the ruined leg from the shrieking Regara with his handsaw before he could staunch and tie the haemorrhage. He directed Tesp's sure fingers in to suture the breach with fine, sail-maker's stitches. By then, Chayker had returned. Dorden found he was mopping the floor with shredded strips from his cape tied to an old rake handle. For a Ghost to tear up his treasured stealth cloak to mop blood… Dorden's admiration for his volunteers' devotion to duty grew.

They carried the softly moaning Regara back to his bed. With luck, and a fever-breaking shot of mascetamine, he might yet live. But Dorden was called away almost at once to a seizure that Toskin couldn't cope with, and then to a man who had woken from near-coma, only to begin violently retching blood.

The ward fell quiet towards midnight, as other dramas came and passed. Dorden was scrubbing his chrome rib-spreaders in a bucket of scalding water when Mkoll came in, shaking the water from his cape. The storm was still booming outside and thunder rattled the casements and roofing. Every now and then, loose glass in a window somewhere fell in, or tiles slipped off and shattered. The storm had continued all that evening, but until then, Dorden had blanked it out.

He watched Mkoll sit and clean his gun, the first thing he always did before seeing to other duties like food or warmth. Dorden took him a bowl of broth.

'Anything out there?'

Mkoll shook his head. 'If we're lucky, the storm is slowing their advance.'

'And if we're not?'

'They conjured the storm.'

Mkoll looked up at the rafters and the high roof. This must have been quite a place. A good homestead, worth the working. The soil is healthy and they had plenty of livestock.'

'A family home,' Dorden pondered, who hadn't thought about it before. The thought of another home and family lost to the war now bit at him. He felt weary again. Old.

Mkoll spooned his broth quietly. There's an old chapel at the rear of the house. Blown in, of course, but you can still see the painted reredos commemorating the Emperor. The Volpone used it as a privy. Whoever lived here were devout servants of the Imperium, working the land, raising their kin.'

'Until this.'

Dorden fell silent. Chaos had taken this world, Nacedon, two months gone, as part of their counter-punch to thwart Macaroth's crusade. It hadn't been occupied, or even corrupted from within. Nacedon, an agricultural world with three million Imperial colonists, had been violated and invaded in the space of three nights.