Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'You've seen action, though, haven't you?' Caffran whispered. 'This is nothing new.'

Milo shrugged. 'Yes, but not like this. Not as a trooper.'

Caffran smiled. 'You'll be fine.'

Across the silky water, Larkin watched them from his position curled into the root network of a mangrove. He knew that Caffran and the piper boy had never been friends before now. He had heard Caffran talk of it. Though little more than two years separated them, Caffran felt uneasy around the lad, because he reminded him too much of home. Now that seemed to be forgotten and Larkin was glad. It seemed having Milo in his company had given Caffran purpose. A novice, a little brother, someone junior to the youngest Ghost that Caffran could take care of.

Caffran felt it too. He no longer despised Brin Milo. Trooper Milo was one of them now. It was like… it was like they were back home. Caffran couldn't understand why he had shunned the boy so. They were all in this together. All Tanith, after all. And besides, if Gaunt had seen fit to protect Milo all this time, Caffran was damned if anything would happen to the boy.

Rawne waited at the ditch edge for Logris and Teygor. His eyes were fierce diamonds of white with hard, dark centres, flashing from the band of camo-paint across his face. There was something terribly familiar about their situation. He could feel it in his marrow. Soon there would be killing.

Spoonbills flapped by. Mkoll turned to Domor and slung his weapon.

'Sir?' Domor asked quietly.

'Take them forward, Domor,' Mkoll said.

'Me?'

'You're up to it?'

Domor shrugged a ''yes'', the focussing rings of his bionic eyes whirring as they tried to manufacture the quizzical expression his real eyes would have wanted.

'I need to move ahead. Scout. I can only do that alone. You bring the Ninth up after me.'

'But—'

'Gaunt won't mind. I've spoken to him.' Mkoll tapped the ear-piece of his micro-bead intercom twice and softly told the rest of his platoon that Domor was now in charge, 'follow him like you would me,' he urged them.

He looked back at Domor. This is important. It may be the life or death of us. Okay?'

Domor nodded. Tor Tanith.'

'Tor Tanith, like it's still alive.'

Mkoll was gone an instant later, vanishing into the brooding, puffy, waterlogged vegetation like a rumour.

'Form on me and renew advance,' Domor whispered into his bead, and Ninth platoon formed and renewed.

Under the shade of great, oil-sweet trees, Corbec's platoon, the Second, moved into the mire and the glades. The colonel missed Larkin, but his squad already had the crack-shot Merrt, so it would have been churlish to complain.

Feth, Corbec was thinking, all this time driven mad by Larks's babbling and scaremongering, and now I actually wish he was here.

Ahead, the glades widened into a lagoon. The still water was coated with russet weed, and black, rotten wood limbs and roots poked up out of it. Corbec motioned the Second on behind him, the thigh-deep water leaving a greasy film on his fatigues. He raised his gun higher.

'Up there!' Merrt breathed through the intercom. Along the far end of the lagoon, Corbec could see shapes: moving figures.

'Ours?' Merrt asked.

'Only Varl could be dumb enough to bring his platoon in front of ours, and he's on the eastern limit. No. Let's go.'

Corbec raised his gun to firing position, heard nine other safeties hum off. 'For Tanith! For the Emperor! For us!' he bellowed.

Las-fire volleyed across the water of the lagoon and figures at the far end fell and started. Some dropped into the water, face down; others knelt for cover in the tree roots of the bank and returned fire. Laser shots echoed and returned across the water course. The lowest bolts cut furrows as they flew across the water. Others steamed as they hit the liquid or exploded sodden, decomposing bark.

Others hit flesh, or cut through armour, and figures tumbled down the far bank, sliding into the water or being arrested by root systems. Merrt made three priceless head shots before a stray return took him in the mouth and he dropped, face down and gurgling, into the ooze of the lagoon.

Corbec bellowed into his vox-bead that contact had been made and that he was engaging. Then he set his lasgun for full auto-fire and ploughed into the water, his finger clenching the trigger.

One for Merrt. Two. 'Three. Tour. Not enough. Not even half enough.

'Second platoon has engaged!' Comms-Officer Raglon reported quickly to Gaunt.

'Ahead now!' Gaunt ordered, urging the men of First forward through the shin-deep water along the glade bed. His chainsword was in his hand and purring. They could hear the close shooting, harsher and more immediate than the distant thunder of the mysterious war they were approaching: Corbec's platoon, fighting and firing. But the source was unspecified, remote. Gaunt damned the thickness and false echoes of the glades. Why was this place so impossibly confused?

Las-fire spat across the glades at the First platoon. Lowen fell, cut through and smouldering. Raglon went down too, a glancing burn to his cheek. Gaunt hauled the vox-caster man to his feet and threw him into cover behind a thick root branch.

'All right?'

'I'll live,' returned the comms-officer, dabbing the bloody, scorched weal along the side of his face with a medicine swab.

The enemy fire was too heavy to charge against. Gaunt fell his platoon into cover and they began to return fire with drilled, careful precision. They loosed their las-rounds down the funnel of the glade, and the salvos that came back at them were loose and unfocused. Gaunt could see the position of the enemy from their muzzle flashes. They were badly placed and poorly spaced.

He ordered his men up, searching for a rousing command. None came but for: 'First platoon… like you're the First and Only! Kill them! '

It would do. It would do.

'Third platoon froze, half at a hand gesture from Rawne, half at the sudden sounds of fighting from elsewhere in the glades. They settled in low, in the dark green shadows of the canopy, white eyes staring up from dark camo-paint at every ripple of sound. Feygor wiped a trickle of sweat off his cheek. Larkin tracked around with his custom rifle, hunting the trees around them with his night-scope. Wheln chewed at his lower lip, eyes darting. Caffran was poised like a statue, gun ready.

'To the left,' Rawne hissed, indicating with a finger, 'fighting there. No further than two hundred metres.'

Just behind him, Milo jerked a thumb off to the right. 'And to the right, sir. A little further off.' His voice was a whisper.

Feygor was about to silence the impudence with a fist, but Rawne raised a hand and nodded, listening. 'Sharp ears, boy. He's right. The echoes are confusing, but there is a second engagement.'

'All around us, then… What about our turn?' Feygor breathed.

Rawne could feel Feygor's itching impatience. The waiting, the fething anticipation, was often harder than the fighting itself.

'We'll find our fight soon enough.' Rawne slid out his silver dagger – given to him by Gaunt, Emperor damn his soul! – the blade dulled with fire-soot, and clipped it into the lugs under his lasgun's muzzle. His men fixed their own knives as bayonets in response.

'Let's keep the quiet and the surprise as long as we have it,' Rawne told them, and raised them to move on.

There was the sound of water, drizzling. The spitting noise almost blocked out the muffled fighting elsewhere. But not the distant heavy bombardment of the duelling armour.

Mkoll followed a lip of rocks, slick with black lichen, around the edge of a pool in deep shadow. A skein of water fell from a mossy outcrop thirty metres above, frothing the plunge pool. It was as humid and dark as a summer night in this dim place.