Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'The little juicy maggot of the Imperial—' the figure began, in a soft, sugar-sweet tone. Gaunt smacked him to the ground with the back of his fist to silence him.

'Sholen Skara,' Gaunt said to Caffran, pointing down at the sprawled figure who was trying to rise, despite his fetters, blood spurting from his smashed mouth.

Caffran's eyes opened wide. He gazed down.

Gaunt pulled out his bolt pistol, checked it, cocked it and offered it to Caffran. 'I thought you might like the honour. There's no court here. None's needed. I think you deserve the duty.'

Caffran took the proffered gun and looked down at Skara. The monster had pulled himself up onto his knees and grinned up at Caffran, his teeth pink with blood.

'Sir—' Caffran began.

'He dies here, today. Now. By the Fmperor's will,' Gaunt said curtly. 'A duty I would dearly liked to have saved for myself. But this is your glory, Caffran. You wrought this.'

'It's… an honour, commissar.'

'Do it… Do it, little Ghost-boy… What are you waiting for?' Skara's sick-sweet tones were clammy and insistent. Caffran tried not to look down into the sunken, glittering eyes.

He raised the gun.

'He wants death, sir.'

'Indeed he does! It is the least we can do!' Gaunt snapped.

Caffran lowered the gun and looked at Gaunt, aware that every eye in the chamber was on him.

'No, sir, he wants death. Like you told us. Death is the ultimate victory for him. He craves it. We've won here on Sapiencia. I won't soil that victory by handing the enemy what he wants.' Caffran passed the gun back to Gaunt, grip first.

'Caffran?'

'You really want to punish him, commissar? Let him live.'

Gaunt thought for a moment. He smiled.

'Take him away,' he said to the honour guard as it closed ranks around Skara.

'I may have to promote you someday,' Gaunt told Caffran as he led him away.

Behind them, Skara screamed and begged and pleaded and shrieked. And lived to do so, again and again.

Brin Milo, Gaunt's young adjutant, brought the commissar a tin cup of caffeine brew and the data-slates he hadn't requested – though he had been about to. Gaunt was sat on a camp chair on the deck outside his command shelter, gazing out at the Tanith lines and the emerald glades of Monthax beyond them. Milo gave the data-slates to the commissar and then paused as he turned away, guilty as he realised what he had done.

Gaunt eyed the slates, scrolling the charts on the lit fascia of the top one. 'Mkoll's surveys of the western swamps… and the orbital scans of Monthax. Thank you.'

The boy tried to cover his mistake. 'I thought you'd want to look them over,' he began. 'When you attack today, you'll—'

'Who said I'd attack today?'

Milo was silent. He shrugged. 'A guess. After last night's action, so close, I thought…'

Gaunt got up and looked the boy squarely in the eyes. 'Enough of your guesses. You know the trouble they might cause. For me. For you. For all the Ghosts.'

Milo sighed and leaned against the rail of the command shed's stoop where he attended the commissar. Mid-morning light lit the marshy groves beyond, lighting the tops of the tree cover an impossibly vivid green. Armoured vehicles aimbled through the mire somewhere, kilometres away. There was the distant thump of guns.

'Is there some crime…' he ventured at last, 'in anticipation? Sir. Isn't that what a good adjutant is supposed to do? Anticipate his officer's needs and requirements ahead of time? Have the right thing to hand?'

'No crime in that, Brin,' Gaunt replied, sitting back down. 'That's what makes a good adjutant, and you're making a fine job of being one. But… you anticipate too well sometimes. Some times it spooks me, and I know you. Others might view it another way. I don't need to tell you that.'

'No…'

'You know what happened in orbit last week. That was too close.'

'It was a conspiracy. I was set up.'

Gaunt wiped the sweat from his temple. 'You were. But it was easy to do. You'd be an easy victim for a determined manipulator. And if it came to that again, I'm not sure I could protect you.'

'About that… I have a request, sir. You do protect me… you have since Tanith.'

'I owe you. But for your intervention, I would have died with your world.'

'And from that you know I can handle myself in a combat situation. I want to be issued with a gun. I want to fight with the Tanith in the next push. I don't care what squad you put me in.'

'You've seen your share of fighting, Brin,' Gaunt said, shaking his head. 'But I won't make a soldier out of you. You're too young.'

'I was eighteen three days ago,' the boy said flatly.

Gaunt frowned. He hadn't realised. He flapped away a persistent fly and sipped his cup. 'Not a lot I can say to counter that,' he admitted.

He sat back down. 'What if we make a deal?'

Milo looked back at him with bright eyes and a cautious smile. 'Like what?'

'I give you a brevet field rank, a gun, and stick you next to Corbec. In return, you stop anticipating – completely.'

'Completely?'

That's right. Well, I don't mean stop doing your job. Just stop doing things that people could take the wrong way. What do you say?'

'I'd like that. Thank you. A deal.'

Gaunt flashed him a rare smile. 'Now go and find me Corbec and Mkoll. I need to run through some details with them.'

Milo paused and Gaunt turned, looking down off the stoop to see the colonel and the scout sergeant standing side by side, looking up at him expectantly.

'Milo suggested that we should stop by. When we had a chance,' Corbec said. 'Is now a good time?'

Gaunt turned back to find Milo but the boy, probably on tin-basis of another wise anticipation, had made himself scarce.

TEN

WITCH HUNT

Varl lifted the Tanith camo-cloak off the censer on the floor like a magician about to perform a conjuring trick. There was a hushed silence around the ship's hold as the veil came away.

The game was simple and enticing and completely fixed, and Sergeant Varl and the boy mascot made a good team. They had a jar of fat, jumping lice scooped from the troop-ship's grain silos and that beaten old censer borrowed from the Ecclesiarch chapel. The censer was a hollow ball of rusty metal whose hemispheres hinged open so that incense could be crumbled into the holder inside and lit. The ball's surface was dotted with star-shaped holes.

'The game is simple,' Varl began, holding up the jar and jiggling it so all could see the half dozen, thumb-sized bugs inside. He held it in his mechanical hand, and the servos hummed and whirred as he agitated the glass.

'It's a guessing game. A game of chance. No trickery, no guile.'

Varl was something of a showman, and Milo liked him very much. He was one of what Milo regarded as the inner circle of Ghosts, a close friend of Corbec and Larkin, one of a gaggle of tight-knit friends and comrades mustered together from the militia of Tanith Magna at the founding. Varl's sharp tongue and speak-your-mind attitude had retarded his promotion chances early on, but then he had lost his arm on Fortis Binary during the heroic reconquest of the forge world and by the time of the now-legendary actions of Menazoid Epsilon he had been made a squad sergeant. Many thought it was well past time. Next to the ruthless command styles of Rawne and Feygor, and the intense military mindset of the likes of Mkoll and the commissar himself, Varl, like the beloved Colonel Corbec, injected a note of humanity and genial compassion into the Ghosts' command structure. The men liked him: he told jokes as often as Corbec, and they were for the most part funnier and cruder; his prosthetic arm proved he was not shy of close fighting; and he could, in his own, informal, garrulous way, spin a fine, inspiring speech to rouse his squad if the need called for it.