Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

The escort was thirty troopers from the Royal Volpone 50th, the Bluebloods. 'They wore the grey and gold body armour and low-brimmed bowl helmets of the Volpone, with wet-weather oilskins draped lankly over their torsos. Their shoulders and arms were massive with segmented carapace armour, and they were each armed with a matt-black hellgun fresh from the weapon shops of Leipaldo. Each man had a bright indigo Imperial Eagle stud pinned into his armaplas collar section, marking them all as from the Volpone Tenth Brigade, the elite veteran force. Only the best of the best for an Imperial inquisitor. With them came a shrouded astropath, one of Lilith's own staff. He jerked and staggered at every twitch of the storm, and was given a wide berth by the Volpone soldiers.

The detail commander, Major Gilbear, fell in step with the inquisitor. His face was set grimly, but he projected a sickening sense of pompous pride at taking this duty. Lilith could barely shut that out either.

'Can you outline our purpose and approach, my lady inquisitor?' Gilbear asked, using the formal aristocratic dialect of the highest Imperial courts. It was partly to impress her, Lilith knew, and partly to establish his own self-importance. The huge Volpone clearly wanted to show he believed himself to be more than a common soldier. As if they were… equals…

'I'll let you know when I decide, major,' she replied in the blunt and crude low-Gothic of the common soldiery. An insult, she knew, but one that might make him quit his airs and graces. She hadn't time to be bothered with him right now.

He nodded curtly, and she smiled at the throb of bitten-down anger he radiated.

They crossed a foaming waterbed, shallow, but fast running, where a dozen Chimeras of the Roane Deepers were struggling to dig themselves out. Agitated, spooked troopers milled around, shouting, cursing and heaving on stripped tree trunks to lever out clogged track units. Tine drizzle from the edge of the storm whipped across them, creating a billion impact ripples in the water.

On the far side, the inquisitor's party followed the bank in towards the edge of the storm. There was debris in the spraying water here: shreds of equipment, helmets, pieces of foliage, drowned bodies, all swirling downstream in the flood.

Inquisitor Lilith called a halt in a clearing where vast deciduous trees had been reduced to blackened columns by lightning strikes. A raft of wood pulp and leaves sloshed and ebbed over the swamped ground. She pulled out her data-slate and reviewed it. It showed the positions of all the Imperial forces, each individual unit, as last recorded before the storm came down. A complex data-mosaic of thousands of individual components, one that would take a trained tactician hours to assess. But she had already located the one element which interested her: the Third platoon of the First-and-Only Tanith.

Mkoll made it to higher ground, the rain and wind pelting him. The sky was black, and it was as dark as night, but his night-vision couldn't adjust because of the frequent blinding flashes of lightning which strobed across him. He was all but deaf with the near-constant thunder. In places, mud-slides had brought parts of the high ground slope down, and more than once he was almost carried off his feet as thick, slimy folds of mud came loose and oozed away down the incline. He glimpsed something in the next lightning flash that made him stop in his tracks, and he wailed for the next searing discharge to confirm what he had seen.

The ruin. 'The ruin he had glimpsed on patrol before and had spent so long trying to find once more. He wouldn't lose it again. Mkoll stayed put and waited through the next three or four flashes, memorising the elements of the landscape, both near and far, as it was revealed to him in split-second snapshots.

In the last flash, he saw the movement too.

Enemy warriors, higher up the slope, stumbling across him in the deluge by chance. As the world went black again, they fired his way, cracking red lines in the darkness and the rain. Mkoll slid down onto his knees in the mud, trying to use the slope to give him as much cover as possible against the killers moving down the hill from above.

Another flash. They were closer. Six or more, most holding their weapons one-handed as they clung onto sagging saplings and outcrops of rock to keep themselves upright as they came down the incline. In the darkness, more red fire-bolts.

Mkoll pulled out his laspistol. He was blind, but the red flashes were a focus in the dark. He waited for more shots, then fired directly at the source of the blasts.

Then he scrambled to his left so they couldn't use the same trick on him. His precaution was wise. The muddy ridge which had previously sheltered him was hit by four separate bursts of enemy fire. Boiled mud spattered up in lazy splashes. The tumultuous rain washed the steam away immediately.

More lightning. This brief gift of sight revealed to Mkoll the huge shape of a Chaos soldier almost on top of him. He'd either been trying to flank Mkoll's last position or been brought down the slick, treacherous slope faster than intended They had almost collided.

Mkoll swung up his laspistol and shot him through the chest, point blank, before he could react. The enemy, a stinking dead-weight draped in loose chains and angular, rusty armour plates, slammed into Mkoll and flattened him back into the ooze. Locked under the corpse, Mkoll began to slide back down the mud-slope. He fought to get out from under the body and freed himself. Now he and the corpse slid down the hill more gently, head first, on their backs, side to side.

Mkoll swung over onto his knees, slipping down again twice before he properly righted himself. He was coated with mud and slime, though the slap of the rain washed it out of his eyes. He felt it had poured thickly into his ears too, because he was truly deaf now. Or had the detonations of the thunder finally burst his eardrums? Gunfire chased his way, hunting his last shot. He could see the red rips in the rain, but they were silent now. There was nothing but a low, constant grumble in his ears.

He got down next to the corpse. There was no sign of its main weapon, but an antique laspistol was hooked into its waistband. He pulled it out. It was longer, heavier and far more ornate than his simple, standard-pattern Guard pistol. The pear-shaped hand-grip was wrapped in fine chain and leather cord, and grotesque symbols were inlayed along the under-bar-rel furniture in pearl and silver. A yellow dot of light showed it was fully charged.

Blue light, harsh and electrical, shone over him. Phosphor flares, two first, then a third, trembled up into the sheeting rain over the hillside. Mkoll's eyes adjusted to the bright, flickering twilight. He could see the trees in stark black relief, the solid, blurring veil of the rain. He could see the enemy, nine or more, scrambling down the bank onto him, the closest twenty metres away.

And they could see him.

They opened fire. It was silent still, just that rumble like grinding teeth, but plumes of mud burst up from impacts around him, and scythed through the bole of a tree to his left, bringing the fifty metre tall trunk crashing down. Mkoll slid under it where the ground dipped, pulling himself through a gully full of rushing water. Emerging on the other side, with the fallen trunk as cover, he found sound had returned. The water had sluiced the sticky mud from his ears and the sides of his head. Noise rushed in at him: the thunder, the crack of shots, the clamouring voices like a baying pack of hounds.

Digging his heels into the soft ground for purchase, he swung up and leaned across the tree trunk, firing a pistol in each hand. The laser bolts from his regular gun were stark and white. Those from the captured weapon were dirty and red. He shot at the two attackers closest to him and dropped them straight off. One fell twisted, into a tangle of foliage. The other slid on his nose, spread-eagled, right down the slope and disappeared into the rushing water of the creek bed below.