Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

The blast shook the hulking, hundred metre-high Imperial command Leviathan stationed sixteen kilometres back and threw the bridge crew to the deck. General Thoth leapt up as his multiple screens and main holographic display fizzled and went out. He yelled frantic orders into the darkness.

Rain sheeted down on top of the lightning, walls of cold, unseasonable downpour which demolished the ripe foliage of the upper tree cover and the moss-vines, and shredded trunks back to the heartwood. Drenched, the Imperial forces fell back blind into watercourses suddenly swollen by rich, red tides of floodwater, the battle forgotten.

Varl's platoon fell into cover under rocks, praying and gasping in the icy rain. Vox-lines were broken and no one could see more than a metre in any direction.

Pear tightened its grip on the Imperium forces. The enemy were lost in the storm all along the war-front. Chaos artillery persisted in firing, but their blasts and recoils seemed pathetic next to the elemental commotion. Guardsmen spoke of a Chaos-summoned witch-storm.

Lerod's platoon, what was left of it, ran back through the drumming rain, blind and almost grateful for the chance to break the impasse.

Half of Domor's platoon were carried away down a flash-flooding waterway. Two drowned.

Then, amidst the rain, came hail like fists. This fell on the west, breaking bones and killing nineteen men outright in the Volpone phalanx. The hail was so hard it dented tank armour.

Suddenly up to their knees in rushing, liquid mud, first and Second platoons of the Tanith backed from the breaching lagoon, Gaunt leading the way, gripping saplings and vines to stay upright. Corbec chased the stragglers, half-carrying Trooper Melk who had lost a knee.

'What in the name of Feth is this?' Gaunt screamed into the rain.

No one had an answer. Witchery, they all thought.

Typhoon-force winds surged in along the edges of the storm. Imperial air-cover was pulled out and grounded, but not before two Marauders had been torn out of the air and smashed. One, its stabilisers gone and its thrusters screaming, managed to turn its death into a pyrrhic victory by taking out a line of Chaos tanks gummed down in a clearing which had abruptly become a lake. The vast, multiple explosions were lost in the roar of the storm.

Caught in a sudden flash flood, stunned by the force of the hail and rain, Mkoll clung on to a nearly uprooted mangrove to stop himself being carried off. Blinking water from his eyes, he saw his lasgun ride away in the leaf-choked froth. He felt the loss acutely. He had been so careful and protective of that simple, standard-issue gun. There was none better kept, better cared for, or cleaner in the Tanith regiment. Now it spun away from him, ruined, swamped. But he had his life still – for as long as the roots would hold.

Rawne pushed Third platoon forward through the deluge. 'Their hair and uniforms were plastered to their pale skins. Some edifice rose ahead, a structure of stone raised from fashioned blocks. To Rawne, it seemed almost familiar. His urgent commands were lost in the hurricane winds.

A snapped off branch whickered through the gale and the near-horizontal downpour and struck Trooper Logris in the throat. Milo tried to help him but it was too late. His neck was broken and his head lolled around the wrong way. Already, his crumpled body was being sucked down into the swelling mud by the hideous rain.

Caffran grabbed Milo and dragged him through the storm of wind and rain and flurrying leaves into the cover of the stone ruin. Rawne yanked them in to join the other members of his platoon: Feygor, Cown, Wheln, Mkendrik, Larkin, Cheffers. But Cheffers was dead. There was no sign of injury on him until Cown spotted the blood oozing from a slit in his throat. Something protruded from it. It was a leaf. Carried point-first by the stabbing wind, the stiff leaf had punctured Cheffers's throat and cut his windpipe. I Iorrified, with the wind and rain wailing against the stone block at their backs, they saw how their tunics and cloaks had been torn and sliced by other such leaf-missiles.

'What kind of storm is this?' Caffran howled over the roar. 'And where the feth did it come from so suddenly?' Feygor bawled.

Rawne didn't know. Everything had been going smoothly until then. The mustering on the founding Fields. The preparation for disembarkment. And now a storm like nothing he'd seen before had fallen on Tanith Magna.

'Net your lives it's the work of the enemy!' he yelled to his men. 'A surprise attack to take Tanith from us! Ready your weapons!'

Every one of them responded, checking their lasguns.

Except Milo. 'Major – what did you just say?'

Rawne looked down at the boy. 'I know it's your first taste of battle, worm, but try to think like a trooper! You have only just mustered here, wet behind the ears from the Magna province farms, but you're in for a fight!'

Milo blinked. The roar of the storm just outside the stone blocks sheltering them seemed to have left him concussed. Rawne and the others had gone mad. This wasn't Tanith! They were acting like it was the homeworld and—

He stopped. The stone wall in front of him was a solid section of Tanith basalt, mined from the quarries at Pryze Junction. The crest of the Elector was inscribed into it. He knew this place… a side corridor just off the main western fortification of the capital city.

But—

For a moment, Milo faltered. He could remember something. A dying world, a small brotherhood of survivors… ghosts… playing the pipes to urge them on.

Just a dream. Just a bad dream, he realised. They were mustering at the Foundation of the Tanith regiments and Chaos had attacked their homeworld. They had no choice. Stand and fight, or die. And if they died, Tanith would die with them.

The storm, a spinning electrical disk of clouded black fury sixty kilometres in diameter, held its position unerringly above the battle front. Its power and force were so great, even the mighty cogitators of the hexathedral Sanctity, high in orbit, couldn't compute its magnitude or penetrate the dome of blistering interference it created. Any Imperial forces that still had a measure of mobility, those that had not been swept away or mired, began to pull back to their lines, making what headway they could in the appalling conditions. Many units, most of them armour and heavy fighting vehicles, were cut off or swamped, helpless and detached from the main retreat.

No one, not even General Thoth's chief tacticians, could begin to guess the state, response or position of the foe they were meant to be engaging. Had they broken too? Were they just as lost, or had all of them been obliterated by the hurricane? Or was this their doing?

Many of the Imperial veterans and officers had seen psychic storms before, a favoured terror-weapon of the Chaotic foe. But this was not the same. There was no pestilential quality to it, no reek of unholy filth, no heaviness in the air that made skin crawl and bowels churn and minds spin into waking nightmares.

Just titanic fury. Almost pure, elemental power. A null. Yet, if they could read it, the warp was there. The unmistakable flavour of the warp.

Inquisitor Lilith had no doubts at all. Her attuned senses had no trouble in detecting the cold psyker power galvanising the deluge. Indeed, it was all she could do to shut it out and stop it howling and screaming through her mind. The rumours of pysker-witchery said to haunt this world were true, but this witchery had a power and clarity like none she had ever felt.

She strode through the downpour in a long cape of dripping black leather, her cowl pulled up. She stared fixedly at the storm which boiled in the sky two leagues or so from her position. Her honour guard escort marched in her train. She could feel their nervousness and unwillingness to proceed into an area all other right-minded Guard units were fleeing from. But Lord Militant General Bulledin had appointed them to serve Lilith as she prosecuted this event, and they feared the Lord Militant and the inquisitor more than any storm.