Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

Mkoll heard movement, a skittering of rocks high above at the top of the falls. Cover was scant, so without hesitation he slid off the lip of stone into the water, sinking down to his neck, his lasgun held up in one hand at ear level, just above the surface. With fiuid precision, he glided under the shadow of the rock, moving behind the churning froth of the cataract.

Shadows moved along the top of the rock above him. Fifteen, perhaps twenty warriors. He caught their scent: the spicy, foul reek of something barely human. He heard low, clipped voices crackle back and forth via helmet intercoms, speaking a language that he was thankful he could not understand. Mkoll felt his guts vice involuntarily. It wasn't fear of the enemy, or of death; it was fear of what the enemy was. Their nature. Their abomination.

The water seemed glass-cold around him. His limbs were deadening. But hot sweat leaked down his face. Then they were gone.

Mkoll waited a full two minutes until he was sure. Then he crawled up out of the water and padded off silently in the direction from which his enemy had come.

Seventh platoon came out of a deep grove into sudden sunlight and even more sudden gunfire. Three of Sergeant Lerod's men were down before he had time to order form and counter. Enemy fire stripped the trees all around, pulverising bark and foliage into sap mist and splinters. The enemy had at least two stub guns and a dozen las-weapons in cover on the far side of the narrow creek.

Lerod bellowed orders in the whistling flashes of the exchange, moving backwards and firing from the hip on auto. Two of his men had made good cover and were returning hard. Others fought for places with him. T'argin, the vox-operator, was hit twice in the back and fell sideways, his twitching corpse held upright, like a puppet, in a drapery of moss-creepers.

A las-round stung Lerod's thigh. He knelt helplessly, then dropped to his belly in desperation, blasting up into the trees. His wild fire hit something – a weapon power-pack, perhaps – and a seething sheet of flame rushed out of the far creek bank, stripping and felling trees and tossing out two blackened bodies which cartwheeled in the air and fell into the creek bed. Pin-pointing Lerod as the source of this little victory, the unseen stubbers traversed and sent stitching lines of firepower down the earth trail where he sprawled.

He saw them in a split second: the twin lines of ferocious tracers etching their way across the loam to slice him into the ground. There was nothing he could do… no time. He closed his eyes.

Lerod opened them again. By some miracle, both lines of fire had missed him, passing either side of his prone form.

He began to laugh at the craziness of it and rolled into the cover of trees a few metres to the left, exhorting his surviving company with renewed vigour to give back and give hard. He felt jubilant, like he had on the founding fields below Tanith Magna, before the Toss. He had never thought he would have that feeling again.

With bitter resentment, Corbec pulled the Second back from the lagoon where they were stymied. They were outgunned and partly circled. The Tanith fell back, quickly and silently into the trees, leaving tripwires and tube rounds in their wake.

A quick vox-exchange brought the Second round alongside the first platoon and Gaunt himself, holding the line of a wide creek.

'Thick as flies!' Corbec yelled to Gaunt as his men reinforced the first. 'Big numbers of them, determined too!'

Gaunt nodded, directing his men forward a metre at a time trying to out-mark and topple the enemy possession of the fat-bank.

Explosions crackled through the trees in the direction of Corbec's retreat as the advancing foe tripped the first of the mines. Gaunt cursed. 'This terrain was meant to give the Ghosts the advantage with their stealth skills, but the enemy was everywhere, as if milling and confused. And though that meant they were not working to a cohesive plan, it also meant the larger enemy force was splintered, unpredictable and all around them.

Raglon was firing from cover and Gaunt ducked in behind him, waving Corbec over. Corbec sprinted across the open ground, his tunic and face splattered with pulverised leaf flecks and sap. He looked like the Old Man of the Woods in the traditional least of Leaves, back home on Tanith, whe—

Gaunt froze, startled and confused. Back home on Tanith! What tricks was his mind playing now? He'd never heard of any Feast of the Leaves, yet it had seemed to bob up from his memory as a truth. For a moment, he could even smell the sugared nal-fruit as they roasted in their charcoal ovens.

'What's up, sir?' Corbec asked, trying to squeeze his bulk into the scant cover as las-rounds whipped around them.

Gaunt shook his head. 'Nothing,' he pulled his data-slate from the pocket of his leather coat and plugged the short lead into the socket at the base of the vox-link on Raglon's back. Then he tapped his clearance into the small board of rune-marked keys, and main battle-data began to display on his slate, direct from General Thoth's Leviathan command base.

Gaunt selected an overall tactical view so he and Corbec could take in the state of the battle.

The Tanith were shown as a thin, vulnerable line, static and held along the main watercourse. To either side of them, heavier regiments and armoured units were making greater headway, but these too were slow and foundering. The Volpone were pushing from the east, with massive artillery support, but the Trynai Sixth and Sixteenth were pinned down and slowly being slaughtered.

'Teth, but it's bad…' Corbec muttered. 'This whole push is grinding to a halt.'

'We'll have to see if we can improve matters,' Gaunt returned, solemn and occupied. He wound the dial to bring up a specific display of the Ghosts' struggling advance. All of the platoons were essentially halted and most engaged in heavy fire. I^rod's unit was taking the brunt of it. Rawne's, Gaunt noticed, had so far failed to engage.

'Have they got the luck?' Corbec asked.

'Or are they not trying?' Gaunt said aloud.

The Third edged on, passing a deep hidden pool with a glittering waterfall that fell from a crop of mossy rock. Rawne split his platoon and moved them up either side of the water.

Feygor stooped to pick up something and showed it to the major. It was a cell from a lasgun, but not Imperial issue.

'They've been through here.'

'And we've missed them!' Rawne cursed. 'Teth take this bastard jungle! We're in amongst them and we can't see them!'

On the far side of the pool, Milo paused and turned to Caffran. 'Smell that?' he whispered.

Caffran frowned. 'Mud? Filthy water? Pollen?'

'This jungle doesn't smell like it did before. I can almost smell… nal-wood.' Milo rubbed his own nose, as if he distrusted it.

Caffran was about to laugh, but then realised that he smelled it too. It was astonishing, almost overwhelming in its nostalgia. The air indeed smelt of the rich conifers of Tanith. Now he thought about it, the trees and foliage around them seemed darker, much more like the wet-land forests of his lost home-world. Nothing like the stinking, seething jungle they had known since arriving on Monthax.

'This is crazy,' he said, reaching out and touching one of the familiar trees. Milo nodded. It was crazy – and scary too.

From the cover of some low, flowering bushes, busy with insects, Mkoll could see a clearing ahead. There had been brief, heavy fighting there not more than two hours before. The earth was churned up, trees burned back and splintered. Bodies smouldered on the ground.

He crept forward to look. The dead were Chaos soldiery heavily armed and armoured in quilted red fatigues and bare steel armoured sections. Their helmets were inscribed with such horrific symbols and figures he began to dry-heave until he looked away.