by Dan Abnett
He reached the top of the shaft, and swung over the lip into a gloomy machine space. His breath fogged the air. Breath. Why was he respiring? Ghosts didn’t breathe.
No time to wonder about the laws of the afterlife. He could smell something. Burned metal. The molten stink of a cutting lance. The Ghost moved forwards, soundless, like all ghosts.
He saw a glowing orange oval, a slice cut through the skin of the ship. The edges of the metal were bright like neon. The cut section, slightly dished, lay on the deck, surrounded by droplets of glowing melt-spatter. There were two figures in the gloom – men, but not men. The Ghost could smell the feral stench of them despite the hot stink of the burned metal.
One of them saw him.
It said something, and raised a weapon to fire.
The Ghost fired first.
But his rifle was dead.
Malfunction? Dead cell? No time to find out. Two las-bolts spat at him, deafening in the confined space. The Ghost lunged to the side, falling among oily bulky machinery. The shots banged off the wall behind him like hand slaps.
The Ghost had fallen awkwardly, hitting his head against a piston or bearing. The pain came as a surprise. He felt his head, and his hand came away bloody.
Ghosts bled. Odd. Unless…
The men-but-not-men came for him, shouting to each other in a foul language. The Ghost ditched his rifle, and drew his warknife. It fit his hand perfectly. The feel of it filled him with assurance, with confidence. He knew it. It knew him. They would help each other. Later, it could tell him who he was.
A man-but-not-man came out of the darkness to his left, leaning down to peer under the machinery. The Ghost reached out, grabbed the intruder by the throat and pulled him onto his blade. It sank deep into the man-but-not-man’s chest. He shuddered violently, kicking the deck as though he were throwing a tantrum. Then he went limp.
The Ghost slid the blade out, let go of his prey and rolled clear. He crawled along the length of the machinery and came up against a work cart laden with tools. Pliers? No. Hammer? Perhaps. Cable hatchet? Better.
It was about the length of his forearm, with a slightly curved steel grip and a single-headed drop-blade. The blade was curved along its edge and had a long chin, perfect for hacking through burned-out cabling during emergency repairs. He took it in his left hand, straight silver in his right.
The second man-but-not-man appeared from nowhere. The Ghost silently commended his adversary for his stealth aptitude. He side-swung the axe, chopping the man-but-not-man’s lascarbine aside. It fired uselessly, sparking a las-bolt along the machine space. The Ghost, legs braced wide, delivered a double blow, slashing from the outside in with both hands. The axe in his left hand and the warknife in his right passed each other expertly, so that the Ghost finished the move with his arms across his chest.
Both blades had cut through the man-but-not-man’s neck. He toppled, blood jetting from the half-stump as his head hinged back like the lid of a storage hopper.
A third man-but-not-man appeared, running at him. The Ghost ducked, spinning as he did so, avoiding the spiked boarding mace that the man-but-not-man was swinging at him. He turned the spin into a gut-kick, and smashed his opponent back into the bulkhead. The man-but-not-man grunted as the air was smashed out of him. The Ghost hurled the axe, and skewered the man-but-not-man to the bulkhead by the shoulder.
Pinned, the man-but-not-man screamed. The sound was only approximately human.
The Ghost got up in his victim’s face, straight silver to the intruder’s throat. A little pressure from his left forearm tightened the angle of the firmly planted axe, and elicited more screams.
‘Who are you?’ the Ghost demanded.
He got a jumble of noises, half pain, half words. Neither made any sense.
He leaned again.
‘What is your strength? How many of you are there?’
More words-but-not-words.
He leaned again.
‘Your last chance. Answer my questions or I will make it very slow indeed. Who are you?’
The man-but-not-man wailed. The Ghost wasn’t getting anything. In frustration, he tried a different tack.
‘Who am I?’
‘Ver voi mortek!’ the man-but-not-man shrieked.
Mortek. The Ghost knew that word. No, he was not death. That was wrong. The man-but-not-man was lying.
The Ghost knew that because his thawing brain had finally remembered his name.
He was Mkoll. Scout Sergeant Oan Mkoll, Tanith First.
He was Mkoll, and he was alive. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t a ghost at all.
Not that kind, anyway.
THREE: AND BACK
They had so very nearly got away with it. Got away with it and survived to tell the tale.
So very nearly.
Hell and back. That’s how someone had described the Salvation’s Reach mission. It sounded like the sort of thing Larkin or Varl would say.
Hell and back. They’d gone into hell and come out on the other side, and not for the first time. But after everything they had endured, it seemed as though they weren’t going to make it home after all.
Four weeks out from the Rimworld Marginals, and the target rock known as Salvation’s Reach, the doughty old warship Highness Ser Armaduke had begun to limp.
‘How far are we from the intended destination?’ Ibram Gaunt asked the Armaduke’s shipmaster.
Spika, leaning back thoughtfully in his worn command seat, shrugged his shoulders.
‘The estimate is another fifteen days,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t like the look of the immaterium. Bad patterns ahead. I think we’ll be riding out a proper storm before nightfall, shiptime.’
‘And that could slow us down?’ asked Gaunt.
‘By a margin of weeks, if we’re unlucky,’ said Spika.
‘Still, you’re saying the storm isn’t the real problem?’ Gaunt pressed.
‘No,’ said Spika. He held up a finger for quiet. ‘You hear that?’
Gaunt listened, and heard many sounds: the chatter and chime of the multiple cogitators ranked around the warship’s bridge; the asthmatic wheeze of the air-circulation system and environmental pumps; the hum of the through-deck power hubs charging the strategium display; the deranged murmuring from the navigator’s socket; the voxed back-chatter from the crew; footsteps on the deck plates; the deep, deep rumble of the warp drives behind everything else.
During the course of the Salvation’s Reach mission, he had begun to learn the multifarious ambient running noises of the Armaduke, but not enough to become an expert.
‘Not really,’ he admitted.
‘Not really?’ asked Spika. ‘No?’ The shipmaster sounded disappointed. Though the life and the lifetime expectations of a Navy man were, quite literally, worlds away from those of a Guard officer, the two men had bonded during the mission tour, and had both gained insight into operational worlds quite alien from their own. They were not friends, but there was a measure of something that, nurtured, might one day resemble friendship. Clemensaw Spika seemed rather let down that Gaunt had grasped less shipboard nuance than he had expected.
‘It’s quite distinct,’ Spika said, sadly. ‘Number two drive. There’s an arrhythmia in its generative pulse. The modulation is out of step. There. There. There. There.’
Like an orchestral conductor, he beat his finger to a pattern. It was a pattern that Ibram Gaunt did not have the experience of practice to discern.
It was Gaunt’s turn to shrug.
Spika adjusted the brass levers on his armrests, and swept his command seat around. The entire chair, a metal-framed throne of worn leather with banks of control surfaces and levers set into each arm, sat upon a gilded carriage that connected it to a complex gimbal-jointed lifting arm. At a touch, Spika could hoist himself above the entire bridge, incline to share the point of view of any of the bridge stations below, or even raise himself up into the bridge dome to study hololithic star-map projections.
This more gentle adjustment merely turned the seat so he could dismount and lead Gaunt across the bridge to the bank of stations occupied by the Master of Artifice and his key functionaries.
‘Output display, all engines,’ Spika requested.
‘Output display, all, aye,’ the Master of Artifice answered. His hands – busy bionic spiders that dripped spots of oil and were attached to wrists made of rotator struts and looped cables jutting from the fine double-buttoned cuffs of his duty uniform – played across the main haptic panel of his console. Each finger-touch caused a separate and distinct electronic note, creating a little musical flurry like an atonal arpeggio. The Master of Artifice was not blind, for Gaunt could see the ochre-and-gold receptors in his enhanced pupils expanding and contracting his irises, but his attitude was that of a sightless pianist. He was not looking at what he was doing. His picture of the universe and the ship, which were, after all, the same thing, was being fed to him in a constantly updated flow through aural implants, and through data-trunks that ran up his neck like bulging arteries and entered the base of his skull through dermal sockets.
A hololithic display sprang up above the man’s station. Side by side, in three dimensions, the rising and falling graph lines of the Armaduke’s engines were arranged for comparison. Gaunt’s limited expertise was not found wanting now.
‘I see,’ Gaunt said. ‘Clearly a problem.’
‘Clearly,’ replied Spika. ‘Number two drive is operating at least thirty-five per cent below standard efficiency.’
‘The yield is declining by the hour, shipmaster,’ the Master of Artifice said.
‘Are you examining it?’ asked Gaunt.
‘It’s hard to examine a warp drive when it’s active,’ replied Spika. ‘But, yes. Nothing conclusive yet. I believe this down-rate is the result of damage we sustained during the fight at Tavis Sun on the outward journey. Even a micro-impact or spalling on the inner liner might, over time, develop into this, especially given the demands we’ve made on principal artifice.’
‘So this could be an old wound only now showing up?’ asked Gaunt.
Spika nodded.
‘The Master of Artifice,’ he said, ‘prefers the theory that it is micro-particle damage taken during our approach to Salvation’s Reach – ingested debris. This theory has some merit. The Reach was a particularly dense field.’
‘What’s the prognosis?’ asked Gaunt.
‘If we can effect repair, we’re fine. If we can’t, and the output continues to decline in this manner, we may be forced to exit the warp, and perhaps divert to a closer harbour.’
Gaunt frowned. They’d travelled non-stop since departing the Reach, except for one scheduled resupply halt at a secure depot, Aigor 991, a week earlier. It had not gone to plan. Resupply was urgently needed: the raid had expended a vast quantity of their munitions and perishable supplies, but they’d been obliged to abort and press on without restocking. Gaunt was reluctant to make another detour. He wanted to reach their destination as fast as possible.
‘Worst case?’ he asked.
‘Worst case?’ Spika replied. ‘There are many kinds of worst case. The most obvious would be that the drive fails suddenly and we are thrown out of the warp. Thrown out of the warp… if we’re lucky.’
‘Is there anything,’ Gaunt asked the shipmaster, ‘which suggests to you that luck follows the occupants of this vessel around on any permanent or regular basis?’
‘My dear colonel-commissar,’ Spika replied, ‘I’ve lived in this accursed galaxy long enough to believe that there’s no such thing as luck at all.’
Gaunt didn’t reply.
Spika walked back to his command seat and resumed his station.
‘I will begin running assessment variables through astronavigation to see if there are any viable retranslation points,’ he said. ‘I intend to give this condition twelve hours grace. Twelve hours to correct itself or to be repaired. After that, I will be effecting the neatest possible real space translation in the hope of finding a safe haven or fleet support.’
Gaunt nodded.
‘I take it this is all for my information?’ he asked.
‘Colonel-commissar,’ said the shipmaster, ‘if we are forced to terminate this voyage prematurely, or if the drive fails, it is more than likely we will find ourselves adrift in hostile space. There will, very probably, be no safe haven or fleet support. It is likely we will have to protect ourselves.’
He adjusted some armrest levers, and rotated his seat up into the navigation dome and the eternal glow of the star maps.
‘I am telling you this,’ he called down over his shoulder, ‘so that you can ready your Ghosts.’
Gaunt walked aft from the warship’s bridge, ignoring the salute of the Navy armsmen. He clattered down two companionway staircases and entered Port Primary, one of the ship’s main communication corridors. There was a general bustle to and fro; servitors and crew, and the occasional Tanith First trooper who threw him a salute.
The sounds and the smells of the ship were all around him. Warp stress was pulling at the Armaduke’s frame, and deck plates creaked. Wall panels groaned. Ice had formed in some places, glazing the walls, and unexpected hotspots trembled their haze in others. Blast shutters, which stood at twenty-metre intervals along Port Primary, ready to slam shut and compartmentalise the long thoroughfare in the event of a hull breach or decompression, rattled in their frames, temporarily malformed by the tensions of the warp.
If it’s visibly doing that to the metal structure of the ship, thought Gaunt, what’s it doing to our bodies? Our cellular structures? Our minds? Our souls?
He exited Port Primary and entered the tighter network of halls, companionways and tunnel ducts that linked the habitation levels and cargo spaces. Ceilings were lower, and the corridors were more densely lined with cabling and exterior-mounted switching boxes and circuitry. It was in these levels, less-well lit and claustrophobic, that the ancient ship felt more like a hive. An underground hive.
The light strings, glow-globes and wall lamps flickered at what seemed like a too infrequent rate, as if power was intermittent or struggling to reach the extremities of the ship. Bad odours gusted like halitosis from the air-circ vents: the rank stink of oil and grease, of sump water, of stagnant hydraulics, of refuse and badly draining sanitation systems, of stale cooking, of unwashed flesh, of grilles overheating because they were clogged with lint and soot and dust.
The Armaduke should have been scrapped long ago. It had been spared from the breaker’s yards to perform the Salvation’s Reach run, with little expectation it would be seen again.
Gaunt knew how it felt.
The mission had been a success – an astonishing success, in fact, given the odds. As had happened so often before, Gaunt took little satisfaction from that, because of the cost. The cost was too great, every time.
Gaunt passed the door of one of the mess halls, and saw Viktor Hark sitting alone at one of the long, shabby tables, nursing a cup of caffeine. A cold smell of boiled cabbage and root veg lingered in the hall. The room was too brightly lit. From the back, Gaunt could hear servitors prepping food for the next meal rotation.
‘Viktor?’
Hark started to rise.
‘Easy,’ Gaunt told him. ‘Briefing. In thirty minutes. Can you scare up the company officers and particulars for me?’
Hark nodded.
‘Everyone?’
‘Just those you can find. Don’t pull people off duties. This is informal for now, but I want to get the word out.’
‘The word?’
‘Could be trouble ahead.’
Hark got to his feet and plonked his cup on the cart for empties and dirties.
‘Ibram,’ he said, ‘there’s always trouble ahead.’
They met in the wardroom. Hark had rounded up Ludd, Fazekiel, Mkoll, Larkin, Baskevyl, Kolea and most of the company commanders. The notable absences were Blenner, Rawne, Meryn, and Daur and Major Pasha, both of whom we
re still in the infirmary. Captain Nico Spetnin was standing in for Pasha, and Adjutant Mohr and Sergeant Venar for Daur.
‘No Criid?’ Gaunt asked Hark as he came in and the officers rose.
‘Criid?’ Hark replied. ‘Tona’s not company or particular level.’
Gaunt hesitated. His mind had been all over the place since–
He’d forgotten he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even Criid.
‘All right, as you were,’ he said, with a gesture to ‘easy’ themselves that they all recognised.
‘Something awry, sir?’ Baskevyl asked, pre-empting the standard comment of Gaunt’s adjutant.
Beltayn, sitting up front, data-slate in hand ready to take notes, rolled his eyes at the trickle of laughter.
‘Yeah, Bask,’ Gaunt replied. They settled down quickly.
Gaunt took off his cap and unbuttoned his coat. The air got close in the wardroom when you packed it with bodies.
‘It may be nothing,’ he told them, ‘but we need to come to secondary order as of right now.’
‘Secondary order?’ Kolosim repeated.
‘Combat ready?’ asked Kolea.
Gaunt nodded.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘We’re only four weeks out of that shitstorm…’ Obel murmured.
Gaunt looked at him. The intensity of Gaunt’s unblinking augmetic stare pinned Obel to his seat.
‘Sir, I didn’t mean–’ he began.
Gaunt often forgot how hard his new eyes could be. He hadn’t meant to discomfort an officer as loyal and dependable as Obel.
‘I know, Lunny,’ Gaunt said. ‘We’re all still licking our wounds. And I’m aware of our piss-poor supply levels. But the war works to its own schedule, not ours. I need the First to come to secondary order in the next twelve hours.’
There was a general groan.
‘Any specifics you can give us, sir?’ asked Bask.
‘Shipmaster Spika informs me that the Armaduke is experiencing drive issues. It might not bring us home. If we fall short or explosively de-translate, I want the fighting companies ready for protection duties.’
‘Shipboard? Counter-boarding?’ asked Kolea, his voice a growl.