Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

The Ghosts stepped across the metal landing of the stair-coil to where the tunnel resumed beyond. It squealed and yelped with every step, sometimes threatening to tilt or fall.

Caill and Flaven were last across. A metal bolt-end the size of a man's forearm rang off the gantry, just missing Caill. It had come loose far above.

'Move!' yelled Caffran.

With a protesting, non-vocal scream, the staircase collapsed, tearing itself apart and rattling away down into the black depths of the bottomless shaft. Where larger parts of the structure remained intact – a few turns of steps laced together, a long section of handrail, a series of stanchion poles – they fell with heavy fury, raking sparks and hideous shrieks from the shaft walls.

Empty, the stairs fallen away, the brick shaft seemed immense, uncrossable.

Domor looked back at the tunnel they had come along, out of reach now across the gulf. 'No going back now…' he muttered.

'Good thing that's not the way we're going,' Caffran replied, pointing into the darkness to come with the barrel of his lasgun.

Wide cisterns opened up around them. The cement floors were painted with glossy green paint and the wall bricks matt white. The walls tapered upwards so that the ceiling was narrower than the floor, and the whole tunnel turned a few degrees to the left. The entire passageway was following both the line and the profile of the wall it ran through. Grilled lighting panels, glowing phosphorescent white, hung at intervals from the roof. They looked like a giant stream of tracer rounds, arcing off down the line of the tunnel, frozen in time.

Caffran's Ghosts – and indeed now they were ''his'' Ghosts, bonding to him as leader now that they were cut off from outside without asking or deciding – haunted the long passageways, hugging the walls in the fierce white glow of the lights. Every sixty metres, tunnels bisected the main route on the inland side: deep, wide throats of brick and concrete that sloped downwards. Mkendrik thought they might be drainage channels, but if that was true, the size alarmed Caffran. They were big enough to take a man walking upright and just as broad. If that kind of liquid quantity flooded these tunnels from time to time…

Domor believed the channels to be for personnel movement, or for running carts of ammo and supplies up to the emplacements buried in the sides and along the top of the great sea wall. But they'd seen no vertical cargo shafts for munitions lifting, and Caffran doubted sheer manpower could roll enough shells up the sloping channels without mechanical assistance.

And they had met no one, not a trace of the Kith soldiery, not even a corpse.

'They're all fully engaged, deploying on the defences,' Caill suggested.

Caffran thought it a fair bet. 'We wanted to get inside, I figure we might get further than we expected.' They had just reached the latest of the mysterious sloping shafts. Caffran nodded to it. 'It leads into the heart of the island itself. Let's try it.'

'And then what?' Bude asked.

'Then?'

'I mean, what's your plan, Caff?'

Caffran paused. Getting in, that had been everything. Now… 'We're inside,' he began, 'no one's got this far.'

Bude and others nodded. 'But what then?' Flaven asked.

Again, Caffran was lost for words. 'We… we… we see how far we can get. Inside.'

None demurred. Lighting in the sloped tunnel was built into the wall and hidden behind transparent baffles. The concrete floor had a mesh grill set into it, providing greater purchase for walking.

They moved in formation. Half a kilometre, by Domor's gyro-compass. A kilometre. The air became damp-cold. The tunnel began to level out. The distant thump and shudder of the sea-wall assault dimmed behind them.

They heard the humming before they saw the end of the tunnel. A low, ululating throb that bristled the air. It reminded Caffran of the heavy fruit-wasps in the nal-forests of Tanith, crossing glades on iridescent wings to bury their long ovipositors into soft bark in search of nal-grubs to use as living kindergartens.

Adare, at the head of the pack with Mkallun, called out. The tunnel was sealed fifty metres ahead by a vast metal hatchway. A thick ironwork seal surrounded a man-sized hatch closed with lever-latches and greased hydraulic hinges. The door and its frame were painted matt green with rust-proof paint, all except the clean steel inner rods of the extended hydraulics, which glittered with filmy brown oils.

The throbbing was coming from the far side of the hatch.

Adare checked the hatch seals, but they were wound tightly shut and locked, it seemed, from the other side. Caffran shoul-dered his way forward and reached out a hand to the metal barrier. It was wet-cold but it tingled, vibrating gently with the reverberations behind it.

'How do we get through?' Caffran murmured.

'Do we want to get through?' Bude returned.

Domor knelt down and started to open the clasps of his sweeper pack. Caffran noticed with some concern that Domor was regularly pausing to fidget and scratch at his eyes now, as if irritated by persistent flies. Domor pulled the head of the sweeper broom out of the pack, removed the soft cloth bag it was wrapped in, and carried it to the wall with his set unit and his headphones. He plugged the headphones and the sweeper head into the unit and switched it on, listening patiently to the clicking returns in his ear-pieces as he moved the flat pad of the sweeper head across the metal door surround. Three or four times he stopped, went back to check, and then marked the green painted metal with a graphite cross, using a stick he kept in his bicep pocket.

Domor turned back to Caffran, pulling his headphones back down around his neck. The main internal lock for the hatch is buried inside the frame. Those crosses mark the threads of the gears.'

Caffran let Tokar do the honours. He put a point-blank las round through each of the crosses, leaving round puncture holes with sharp metal edges.

The latches and locks spun free easily now their mechanisms were ruined. Adare and Haven hauled the green hatch open and the Ghosts crept forward into a blue, gloomy realm of smoke.

Caffran knew they were emerging on the land side of the great sea wall, deep in the refinery complex of Oskray Island. They were exiting onto a lattice walkway of scrubbed iron that jutted out of the fastness wall and crossed a gulf whose depths he had no way of judging. Above, below and around, everything was smoke. The walkway was five metres wide, with a low handrail, and reached across forty metres to a tower that rose skeletally out of the haze.

'The air smelled of cordite and salt. It was cold and clammy suddenly.

Caffran scanned around. Behind them, the way they had come, he was just able to make out the back of the vast sea wall rising up, lost in the fog. The throbbing and pulsing was much louder now and Caffran knew it must be coming from the fuel-mills, the promethium pumps and the other working systems of the vast refinery.

Domor was next to him, prying into the smoke with his prosthetic eyes. The focus rings were buzzing now, and he strained with them. Thick, discoloured tears trickled down his stubbled cheeks. The salt water had really done its devious work.

'This smoke is backwash from the enemy guns along the wall top,' Domor said. 'The sea air and the downdraft of our ships is blowing it back over the wall and it's pooling here in the inner basin of the refinery.'

All the better for them to move unseen, thought Caffran, but… to where? Adrenaline had brought them so far. Where was the plan?

They were nearly at the tower, a vast red-painted skeletal needle of girders with dull flashing lamps at the corners. Other walkways stretched away from it into the soupy air. Caffran was beginning to make sense of the place, and picked out other catwalks and walkways above, below and parallel to the one the Ghosts used, through the billowing smoke.