Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

'You've checked up on me. My background.'

'I'm an inquisitor, Gaunt. What do you expect? I enquire.'

'And what are you really inquiring about here on Monthax?' he asked curtly.

'What do you mean?'

'I'm no psyker, but I read people well enough. This is about more than victory here, more than the successful prosecution of psyker-deviants in our forces. You have an agenda.'

She flashed a smile at him. 'No mystery, Ibram. Back on the Sanctity, I told you. Bulledin had reported back to us because it was suspected some powerful psyker component might be at work here. We thought that it was the enemy itself, that we were in for a mind-war. But now, this ruin. The foe embark on an advance, ignoring us completely, and seem hell-bent on taking that place. You've got to wonder why. You've got to believe that there's something very valuable up there.'

'Something that caused this storm?'

She shrugged. 'Or something that made them cause this storm to cover their movement towards it. But I think your guess is probably more likely.'

'And that's what you want?'

'It's my duty, Ibram. And I don't think I need to explain that concept to one of the Imperium's best commissars.'

'Don't try distracting me with flattery. Give me some idea what you mean by 'something valuable'.'

Think back to Menazoid Epsilon. I told you, I checked your background thoroughly. As an inquisitor, I got to look at some very classified reports. You know what was at stake there.'

Gaunt was wary. 'You're talking about technology? Artefacts?'

She nodded. 'It could be.'

'Ancient human? Alien?'

Lilith produced something from her pocket. 'Mkoll found this. He dug it out of a tree stump at a battle site just before the storm hit. You tell me what you think it means.'

She held up the metal star with the sharpened points. Gaunt stared at it with dark comprehension.

'Now you know as much as I do.'

The brigade moved down a deep defile into a tree-sheltered vale that blocked the raging storm partially for the first time. Gaunt was becoming numb with the incessant wind and rain, and knew his men must be too. It was a blessed, temporary relief to move through the deep gorge with its almost cathedral-like arches of ancient cattails and clopeas, where rain arrested by the leaf canopy simply drooled down to the ground in long, slow, sappy streams. The storm raged, muffled, far above them.

Gaunt moved up to Mkoll at the point of the formation. Still on track?'

Mkoll nodded. 'Like I said, I couldn't lose the trail now if I wanted to.'

'Like coming home, you said,' Gaunt reminded him. Mkoll closed his eyes and saw Eiloni just ahead, beckoning him back to the farmstead. She was whispering promises of a hot supper, and of rowdy boys ready for one of their father's fireside tales before bed. 'You have no idea, commissar.'

The advancing tide of Chaos warriors only stopped when the numbers of their dead choked the passageway.

Rawne ordered his platoon back and they hauled a set of double doors closed, barring them to seal the tunnel. Milo helped Wheln swing the doors shut, his fingers tracing the heraldic badge of the Tanith Elector inscribed on the heavy nal-wood panels. He blinked, and for a second saw taller, more slender doors of polished onyx, marked with alien runes he did not understand.

'What's up?' Wheln asked, panting.

Milo blinked again. The doors were arched nal-wood in the Tanith pattern again, the Elector's insignia clearly marked.

Feygor and Mkendrik dropped a long bar across the door loops to lock it tight. Beyond the thick barrier, they could hear muffled explosions and the rasp of flamers as the enemy tried to unblock the corpse-packed tunnel.

The eight Tanith men were exhausted. A day ago, at the Founding, none of them – with the possible exception of Rawne and Feygor – had ever fired a weapon in anger, let alone killed. Now they were truly baptised. There was no counting the dead they had piled up.

Gown sank to his heels against the wall, fighting for breath. 'Are we lost?' he asked. 'Is Tanith lost?'

Rawne turned to face him, fire in his eyes. 'Are we alive? Is Tanith living? Get up! Get up and move! Only that feckless off-worlder Gaunt seems to have given up on Tanith! Withdraw? Abandon? What kind of leadership is that? He'd make world-less ghosts of us!'

'Ghosts…' murmured Larkin, leaning slackly against the far wall, cheek and shoulder pressed against the cold stone. 'Gaunt's Ghosts…'

'What did you say?' Milo asked directly, blood racing in his ears. It was like a dream was breaking in his head.

'Ignore him!' Feygor ordered. 'Fething fool is weak in the head. But for his good eye, I'd have shot him as dead-weight before now.'

'No,' began Milo, 'This isn't right… it…'

'Of course it's not right!' Feygor snarled into Milo's face. Milo winced as spittle hit his cheek. 'The Imperium comes to Tanith when it needs men, but where is the Imperium now when Tanith needs it? They're leaving us to die!'

Caffran pulled Feygor back from Milo sharply. 'Then we'll die well, Feygor! We'll die fething well!' The young trooper's face was bright with passion. The thought of Laria burned in his mind. She was out there somewhere and he would fight and kill and kill again to save this place and be with her once more.

'Caffs right, Feygor,' Mkendrik said. Wheln and Cown both nodded in agreement. 'Let's die well so Tanith can live.'

'And feth any off-world commissar who says otherwise!' spat Cown.

Feygor, subdued, turned and nodded, deftly exchanging the power cell of his lasgun for a fresh one.

Rawne had been absent for a few moments and now strode back into view. 'I hear fighting down the hall, maybe three hundred spans away. Sounds like another group of our boys in defence. I say we move in to support.'

Mkendrik nodded. 'Bolster our numbers. Maybe they know where the Elector is sheltering.'

'If we could get him to the transport stables, we could maybe fly him to safety in a cutter,' Cown added.

Rawne nodded. 'Feygor, make the door a surprise.'

Feygor grinned and took out a brace of tube-charges from his pack. He strapped them with quick, practised diligence to the door bar. Anything that broke in here now after them would snap the trigger wire and bring the hallway down on top of them.

'Let's go!' Rawne ordered.

Milo fell into step with the others as they hurried on down the long palace hallway, boot-steps resounding from the stone flags. He wished with all his heart and soul he could work out what was wrong with… with reality. There was no other word. Reality itself seemed wrong and dreamlike and it was making his stomach turn. It must be the Chaos daemons, Milo thought. Maybe Major Rawne knew wh—

Milo paused. Major Rawne? In the tents of the Founding Fields outside Tanith Magna, Rawne had bivouacked with the common soldiers. A trooper, nothing more. No rank, no seniority. Since when had he got the collar pins and the promotion?

Have I forgotten something? Milo wondered. Have I…

Another flicker in his mind. An image of… of a cramped cabin on a starship. Rawne, Corbec, Milo. A deputation. A tall, powerful, lean-faced man that could only have been Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt, rising to meet them. How could he know what this Gaunt looked like? He'd never seen him. He could hear Gaunt speaking, making bold, confident field promotions: Colonel Corbec, Major Rawne.

Another dream?

There was no time to think about it. They were almost on the fighting. Gunshots. Screaming, just ahead.

That wasn't las-fire, Milo thought to himself as he and all the platoon checked stride and raised weapons. He'd heard enough lasgun exchanges in the last half an hour to know the distinctive snap. This was an eerie, singing shrill; a shrieking, a buzzing, like the saw-note of a wasp, amplified and broken into harsh, serried blasts.