Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

Laser fire peppered down at them suddenly, rebounding from the iron walkway or punching through it. Bude stumbled as a round hit him in the top of the left shoulder and exited through his right hip. Caffran knew he was dead, but he tried desperately to get to him nevertheless. Bude leaned on the rail for a moment, upright, then pitched over and fell away into the smoke below silently.

There were dark shapes on a catwalk forty metres above and to the left of them. More zinging fire spat down through the clouds. The Ghosts opened up in return, pasting shots up into the roof of the smoke. A body fell past them. Mkendrik swivelled his flamer and vomited huge curls of fire up at the enemy position. The catwalk above them collapsed and spilled four fire-streaming comets down into the chasm: burning, screaming, flailing human forms.

Caffran led the way to the tower at a run and entered a grilled-off section that faced an open-sided elevator car. Caill and Mkallun joined him first, the others close on their heels. A steep stairwell of open-backed mesh steps led both down and up the tower alongside the open elevator shaft.

More las-fire, and stub rounds, started spanking off the ironwork and tinging around the metal cage of the tower.

'Which way?' bellowed Caill.

'Up!' Caffran decided.

'Where's the sense in that? We'll be trapped like rats at the top of the tower with nowhere to run!'

'No,' Caffran countered, trying desperately to think.

He was trying to bring back the briefing. The commissar had shown them aerial views of the Oskray facility, concentrating on the sea wall area they were meant to assault. He tried to picture the other, inner derrick areas he had glimpsed. Towers, dozens of them, just like the one on which they stood, bridging to each other at various levels, including some higher than the sea wall. If that was true – if the memory was true – they could cross to other towers higher up as well as lower down.

'Trust me,' Caffran said and started up the stairs, blasting las rounds over the side at distant walkways where muzzles flashed in their direction.

They ascended.

Caffran fought the panic in his mind. The way in, the chance to sneak inside, had seemed a good plan, a brave plan, but now they were here, eight men alone in a city of the enemy, he had no idea what they had even expected to be able to achieve. There was no plan, not even the raw materials for a plan. He dreaded any of the others asking him to explain their purpose here.

Tire from below; three or four storeys down, squads of Kith soldiery were moving up the tower, blasting upwards. Las-rounds popped and thumped through the mesh steps around them. Mkallun lost the front of his foot and toppled, screaming in pain. Adare, just a few steps below him, arrested his fall and hauled the whimpering man up with him. The others blasted downwards and an odd vertical firefight began, laser salvos spitting up and down the tower structure. Mkendrik, last of the ascending Ghosts, hosed the stairs below them with his flamer and belching clouds of fire drizzled down through the open metal edifice and torched the closest of the pursuers.

Six more flights up, a bridging walkway opened to their left, crossing the smoky chasm to another tower. There seemed to be no one on the other structure, and Caffran gestured the men across, stopping to help Adare with Mkallun. Adare grabbed Caffran's shoulder and pointed to the swiftly ascending elevator in the tower they were leaving. It was packed with enemy troopers, climbing far faster than those on the stairs. Caffran sent Adare hobbling onwards with Mkallun, then pulled a pair of tube-charges from his pack. He set short fuses and rolled them along the bridge onto the tower deck, then ran to join the others.

The blast tore through the tower assembly, blowing out stanchions and main-supports all around. With a deafening howl, the tower crumpled and collapsed, hundreds of metres of steeple section from above sliding down with almost comical slowness, splintering the body of the tower below. The packed elevator car fell like a stone. Power servos tore out and exploded. Secondary explosions rippled out into the gloom.

The collapse tore away the bridge they had just crossed by, and ripped the bridge supports out of their side of the crossing, shearing metal and girders around them, shaking the other tower. Heavier impacts shook them as bridges higher up tore loose with the descending tumult and came slamming or dragging down the length of their tower.

From below, as the tower mass crashed to the ground, other explosions fluttered out as fuel stores and pumps detonated under the impact. Plumes of fire gusted around them.

'What the Teth have you done?' bellowed F'laven.

Caffran wasn't sure. In desperation, he hadn't really thought through the consequences of mining the tower. One simple thing occurred to him.

'I've bought us some time,' he whispered.

Now they moved downwards, partly because down seemed to make sense, and partly because none of them trusted the stability of the tower now that its neighbour had been torn so brutally away. They descended into thicker, blacker smoke. Bright cinders floated on the wind and there was a deep, rank smell of burning fuel and spilt promethium. Even from here, they knew the collapsing tower had done vast damage to the plant.

Down, thought Caffran. Still he had no plan he could speak of, but down seemed to be instinctively right. What could they do here except perhaps some small, specific act? Like… take out the Kith's command cadre.

He laughed to himself as he thought the words. Bold, ridiculous words. As if they could even find Sholen Skara and his seniors in an island-hive this size. But it was a notion worth hanging on to.

A few hundred metres from the ground, he instructed his men to work stealthily, to do what the Ghosts did best. They blackened their skin with soot from the handrails, and pulled down their camo-cloaks, melting into the darkness of the smoke and the blackened tower-scaffold.

Below them, around the base of the tower, twisted, burning wreckage lay scattered five hundred metres in every direction Flames leapt from small lakes of petroleum and mineral gels The debris from the fallen tower, some of it great chunks of tower-section intact and twisted on the concrete, crushed beneath it smaller buildings and storage blocks, cranes and other rig service vehicles. Charred bodies lay crumpled or burst here and there. They passed at least one section of walkway dangling from their tower like a loose flap, clanking as it swung back and forth against the girders. Reedy klaxons barked through the smoke like the sound of yapping guard dogs.

They strode out from the base of the tower into the wreckage in fire-team formation, Caffran and Tokar at point. Domor supported the hopping Mkallun; Caffran wasn't going to leave him behind.

Spools of chain, frayed wire hawsers, splashes of oil and metal litter covered the concourse. Caffran skirted around a pair of Kith corpses, men who had clung together as they fell and been mangled into one hideous ruin by the ground.

Sending Mkendrik ahead in his place, Caffran dropped back to check on Domor and Mkallun. A hefty shot of analgesic had left Mkallun vacant, lolling and useless. Domor was blind. The iris shutters on his bionic implants had finally failed and shut tight. Filmy fluid leaked around the focussing rings and wept down his face. It hurt Caffran to see his friend like this. It was like Menazoid Epsilon all over again, when Domor had lost his eyes and still fought on without them, playing his part with a valour and tenacity even Gaunt had been awed by.

'Leave us,' Domor told him. Caffran shook his head. He wiped away the sweat that beaded his brow and trickled down the blue dragon tattoo on his temple. Caffran opened Mkallun's pack and took out a one-shot plastic injector of adrenaline, stamping it into Mkallun's bare forearm. The injured trooper roared as he came out of his stupor. Caffran slapped him.