Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

Las fire cut the air near him. He turned and fired, and then took the staircase at a run, vaulting over the bodies of the fallen. There was a struggling group up ahead, on the main landing. Two bloodied fighting men of the Tanith militia, wrestling with Sym at the doors to the launch silos.

'Let us through, you bastard!' Gaunt could hear one of them crying, 'You'd leave us here to die! Let us through!'

Gaunt saw the autopistol in the hand of the other too late. It fired the moment before he ploughed into them.

Raging, he broke one's jaw with the butt of his bolter, knocking the man backwards to the head of the stairs. He picked up the other and threw him over the stair rail into the smoke below.

Sym lay in a pool of blood.

'I— I've signalled… the carrier fleet, as you ordered… for the final withdrawal… Leave me and get aboard the cutter or—' Sym began.

'Shut up!' Gaunt snapped, trying to lift him, his hand slick with the man's blood. 'We're both going!'

'T-there's no time, not for me… just for you! Go, sir!' Sym rasped, his voice high with pain. From the bay beyond, Gaunt heard the scream of the cutter's thrusters rising to take-off readiness.

'Damn it, Sym!' Gaunt said. The aide seemed to reach for him, clawing at his tunic. For a second, Gaunt though Sym was trying to pull himself up so that Gaunt could carry him.

Then Sym's torso exploded in a red mist and Gaunt was thrown back off his feet.

At the head of the stairs, the grotesque shock troops of Chaos bayed and advanced. Sym had seen them over Gaunt's shoulder, had pulled himself up and round to shield Gaunt with his own body.

Gaunt got to his feet. His first shot burst the horned skull of the nearest beast. His second and third tore apart the body of another. His fourth, fifth and sixth gutted two more and sent them spinning back into their comrades behind on the steps.

His seventh was a dull clack of dry metal.

Hurling the spent bolter aside, Gaunt backed away towards the silo bay doors. He could smell the rancid scents of Chaos over the smoke now, and hear the buzz of the maggot-flies. In a second they would be on him.

Autocannon fire blasted into the heathen nightmares, sustained heavy fire from an angle nearby. Gaunt turned, and saw the boy, the piper with the fish tattoo. He was laying down an arc of covering fire from the portico of the silo bay with a sentry's autocannon that he had rested across the stonework. 'Get in! The last cutter's waiting for you!' cried the boy.

Gaunt threw himself through the bay doors into the fierce whirlwind of the cutter's engine backwash. The side hatch was just closing and he scrambled through, losing the tails of his coat to the biting hinge.

Enemy weapons fire resounded off the hull.

Gaunt was face down on the cabin floor, drenched in blood, looking up at the terrified faces of the Munitorium officials who made up this last evacuation flight to the fleet.

'Open the door again!' he yelled. 'Open it again!'

None of them moved to do so. Gaunt hauled himself up and heaved on the hatch lever. The door thumped open and the boy scrambled inside.

Gaunt dragged him clear of the hatch and yanked it shut. 'Now!' he bellowed down the cabin to the pilot's bay. 'Go now if you're going!'

The cutter rose from the tower bay hard and fast, lifter jets screaming as they were jammed into overdrive. Aerial laser fire exploded the brass orchid-shutters around them and clipped a landing stanchion. Hovering, the cutter wobbled. Below it, Tanith Magna was a blazing inferno.

Forgetting fuel tolerances, flight discipline, even his own mother's name, the pilot hammered the main thrusters to maximum and the cutter fired itself up through the black smoke like a bullet.

Left to die, the forests burned.

Gaunt fell against a bulkhead and clawed his way to a porthole. Just like in his dreams – fire, like a flower. Blossoming. Pale, greenish fire, scuttling like it was alive. Eating the world, the whole world.

Ibram Gaunt gazed into his reflection, his own lean, pale, bloody face. Trees, blazing like the heart of a star, rushed past behind his eyes.

High over the cold, mauve, marbled world of Nameth, Gaunt's ships hung like creatures of the deep marine places. Three great troop carriers, their ash-grey, crenellated hulls vaulted like monstrous cathedrals, and the long, muscular escort frigate Navarre, spined and blistered with lance weapons and turrets, hooked and angular like a woodwasp, two kilometres long.

In his stateroom on the Navarre, Gaunt reviewed the latest survey intelligence. Tanith was lost, part of a conquered wedge of six planet systems that fell to the Chaos armada pincer which Macaroth had allowed to slip behind his over-eager war-front. Now Crusade forces were doubling back and re-engaging the surprise enemy. Sporadic reports had come in of a thirty-six hour deep-space engagement of capital ships near the Circudus. The Imperial Crusaders now faced a war on two fronts.

Gaunt's ruthless retreat had salvaged three and a half thousand fighting men, just over half of the Tanith regiments, and most of their equipment. The cruellest, most cynical view could call it a victory of sorts.

Gaunt slid a data-slate out from under a pile of other documents on his desk and eyed it. It was the transcript of the communique from Macaroth himself, applauding Gaunt's survival instinct and his great feat in salvaging for the crusade a significant force of men. Macaroth had not seen fit to mention the loss of a planet and its population. He spoke of ''Colonel-Commissar Gaunt's correct choice, and frank evaluation of an impossible situation'', and ordered him to a holding position at Nameth to await deployment.

It made Gaunt queasy. He tossed the slate aside.

The shutter opened and Kreff entered. Kreff was the frigate's executive officer, a hard-faced, shaven-headed man in the emerald, tailored uniform of the Segmentum Pacificus Fleet. He saluted, a pointless over-formality given that he had been covering as Gaunt's adjutant in Sym's place, and had been in and out of the room ten times an hour since Gaunt came aboard.

'Anything?' Gaunt asked.

'The astropaths tell us that something may be coming soon. Perhaps our orders. There is a current, a feeling. And also, uhm…'Kreff was obviously uncomfortable. He didn't know Gaunt and vice versa. It had taken Sym four years to get used to the commissar.

Sym…

'What is it?' Gaunt asked.

'I wondered if you would care to discuss our more immediate concern? The morale of the men.'

Gaunt got up. 'Okay, Kreff. Speak your mind.'

Kreff hesitated. 'I didn't mean with me. There is a deputation from the troop-ships—'

Gaunt turned hard at this. 'A what?'

'A deputation of Tanith. They want to speak to you. They came aboard thirty minutes ago.'

Gaunt took his bolt pistol out of the holster slung over his chair back and checked the magazine. 'Is this your discreet way of announcing a mutiny, Kreff?'

Kreff shook his head and laughed humourlessly. He seemed relieved when Gaunt reholstered his weapon.

'How many?'

'Fifteen. Mostly enlisted men. Few of the officers came out alive.'

'Send three of them in. Just three. They can choose who.'

Gaunt sat down behind his desk again. He thought about putting his cap on, his jacket. He looked across the cabin and saw his own reflection in the vast bay port. Two metres twenty of solid bone and sinew, the narrow, dangerous face that so well matched his name, the cropped blond hair. He wore his high-waisted dress breeches with their leather braces, a sleeveless undershirt and jack boots. His jacket and cap gave him command and authority. Bare-armed, he gave himself physical power.