Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'Domor will be your legs – you have to be his eyes.'

Mkallun growled and then spat and nodded as he understood. The adrenaline rush was killing all his pain and refortifying his limbs.

'I can do it, I can do it…' he said, clutching hold of Domor hard.

They moved on. Beyond the area of debris, the hive complex was a warren of drum silos and loading docks, red-washed girder towers marked with the Imperial eagle and then defaced with sickening runes of Chaos.

In one open concourse there was a row of fifty cargo trucks, flatbeds, smashed and burned out. Along one wide access ramp, millions of sections of broken pipe and hose, scattered in small random mounds. Inside one damaged silo, countless pathetic bodies were piled and jumbled: a mass grave of those Oskray workers who would not join Skara's cause.

So Flaven suggested. 'Perhaps not,' Caffran said, covering his mouth and nose with the edge of his cloak as he looked in. 'Enemy insignia there, and armour. These aren't long dead.'

'When have they found time to gather and pile their dead? There's an assault going on!'

Caffran agreed with Flaven's incredulity, but the signs were there. What purpose… what peculiar intent lay behind this charnel heap?

They heard shots, a ripple of las-fire from beyond the silo and swung in close, moving with the shadows. More shots, another almost simultaneous volley. Perhaps… a hundred guns, thought Caffran? He ordered them to stay down and crept forward with Adare.

What they saw beyond the next bunker shocked them.

There was wide concourse, almost a kilometre square, at the heart of this part of the island complex. From the markings on the ground, this had been a landing pad for the cargo lighters. Across the centre, a thousand Kith soldiers stood in ranks of one hundred. Facing them was a messy litter of bodies which tractors with fork shovels and dozer blades were heaping into freight trucks.

Caffran and Adare watched. The front rank of the Kith took twenty steps forward and turned to face the other rows. At a signal from a nearby officer, what was now the front rank raised their weapons and cut the file of a hundred men down in an uneven burst of gunfire. As the tractors pushed the bodies aside, the rank that had fired stepped forward and marched to where their targets had been. They turned, waited. Another order. Another ripple of fire.

Caffran wasn't sure what sickened him most: the scale of the mass firing squads or the willing, uncomplaining way each rank slew the last and then stepped forward and waited to be cut down.

'What the Feth are they doing?' Adare gasped.

Caffran thought for a moment, reaching into his memory to recover the parts of the briefing he had blanked. The parts where Gaunt had spoken about Sholen Skara.

It came back to him, out of the darker reaches of his mind, recollections rising like marsh-gas bubbles out of the mire of forgetfulness. Suddenly, Gaunt's voice was in his ear, Gaunt's image before him. 'The briefing auditorium of the mighty troop-ship Persistence, Gaunt, in his long storm coat and cap, striding onto the dais under the stone lintel of the staging, glancing up at the gilt spread-eagle with its double heads on the velvet drop behind him. Gaunt, removing his coat and dropping it on the black leather chair, standing there in his dress jacket, taking off his cap once to smooth his cropped hair as the men came to order.

Gaunt, speaking of the abominations and filthy concepts Caffran had blanked from his mind.

'Sholen Skara is a monster. He worships death. He believes it to be the ultimate expression of the Chaotic will. On Balhaut, before we came in, he ran murder-camps. There, he ritually slaughtered nearly a billion Balhauteans. His methods were inventive and—'

'Even now, Caffran could not bring himself to think of Gaunt's descriptions. The names of the foul species of Chaos that Sholen Skara had commanded, the symbolic meaning of their crimes. Now though, he understood why Ibram Gaunt, champion of human life and soldier of the divine Fmperor, would so personally loathe the likes of the monster called Skara.

'He kills to serve Chaos. Any death serves him. Here, we can be sure, he will have butchered any Imperially-loyal hive workers en masse. We can also be sure that if he believes defeat is close, he will begin a systematic purge of any living things, including his own troops. Mass suicide, to honour Chaos. To honour the blasphemy they call Khorne.'

Gaunt coughed at the word as if his gorge was rising, and a murmur of revulsion passed through the assembled Ghosts.

That is a way we have of winning. We can defeat him – and we can convince him he will be defeated and thus save us the bother of killing them all. If he thinks he is losing, he will begin to slaughter his own as a final hymn of defiance and worship.'

Caffran's mind swam round to the present. Adare was speaking, '—fething more of them, Caff! Look!'

Kith soldiers, in their hundreds, were marching out onto the concourse to fall in behind the rows already slaughtered.

Not slaughtered, thought Caffran: harvested. It reminded him of the rows of corn stooks back on the meadows of Tanith, as the mechanical threshers came in reaping row after row.

Despite the sickness in his stomach, a sickness that pinched and viced with each echo of gunfire, Caffran smiled.

'What?' Adare asked.

'Nothing…'

'So what do we do now? What's the plan?'

Caffran grinned again. He realised he did have a plan, after all. And he'd already executed it. When he'd brought that tower crashing down, he'd made Sholen Skara believe a significant enemy force was inside Oskray Hive. Made him believe that defeat loomed.

As a result, Skara was ordering the Kith to kill themselves, one hundred at a time. One hundred every thirty seconds.

Caffran sat back. His aching body throbbed. There was a las-burn across his thigh he hadn't even noticed before.

'You're laughing!' said Adare, perplexed.

Caffran realised he was.

'Here's the plan,' he said at last. 'We wait.'

Afternoon squalls from the ocean were clearing the smoke from Oskray Hive, but even the wind and rain couldn't pry the stink of death from the great refinery. Formations of Imperial gunships shrieked overhead, pummelling the rain clouds with their fire-wash.

Gaunt found Caffran asleep amongst several hundred other Ghosts under a tower piling. The young trooper snapped to attention as soon as he realised who had woken him.

'I want you with me,' Gaunt said.

They crossed the great concourse of the refinery city, passing squads of Ghosts, Volpone and Abberloy Guardsmen detailed at building-to-building clearance. Shouts and whistles rang commands through the air as the Imperial forces took charge of the island hive and marshalled ranks of dead-eyed prisoners away.

'I never thought you to be a tactical man, Caffran,' Gaunt began as they walked together.

Caffran shrugged. 'I have to say I made it up as I went along, sir.'

Gaunt stopped and turned to smile at the young Ghost. 'Don't tell Corbec that, for Feth's sake, he'll get ideas.'

Caffran laughed. He followed Gaunt into a blockhouse of thick stone where oil-drum stacks had been packed aside to open a wide space. Sodium lamps burned from the roof.

A ring of Imperial Guardsmen edged the open area; Volpone mostly, but there were some Ghosts, including Rawne and other officers.

In the centre of the open area, a figure kneeled, shackled. He was a tall, shaven-headed man in black, tight-fitting robes. Powerful, Caffran presumed, had he been allowed to stand. His eyes were sunken and dark, and glittered out at Gaunt and Caffran as they approached from the edge of the guarding circle.