[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

by Dan Abnett

  Freezing cold air gusted in around him as the hatch opened.

  “Come on! Come on!” Scout Sergeant Mkoll yelled down at him, his arms outstretched. LeGuin looked around himself for a moment at the rained interior of his beloved tank. “Goodbye,” he said, and then reached up and allowed Mkoll to pull him out.

  Mkoll and LeGuin had got twenty metres from the Grey Venger when it exploded and flattened them both.

  Too many! Too many! cried Larkin, firing through his last remaining barrel.

  Beside him, a las-shot struck Trooper Cuu in the shoulder and threw him back into the bloody snow.

  “Oh, feth! Too many!” Larkin murmured.

  “No, Tanith,” smiled Banda beside him as she fired again and again. “Not nearly enough.”

  “Think I win my wager,” croaked Cuu, staring up at the warp storm that blistered overhead. “Sure as sure.”

  Gaunt was just thirty metres from the pillar, running through the blitz of shots. Infardi were closing all around him.

  He didn’t feel the las-round hit his shin, but his leg went dead and he fell, tumbling over and over in the drifts.

  “No,” he cried out. “No, please…”

  A figure bent over him. It was Sanian, her lasrifle trained on the advancing enemy. She sprayed off a burst and then turned to Gaunt.

  “I’ll take it. Let me.”

  Gaunt knew he couldn’t move unaided. “Just help me up, girl. I can make it.”

  “Give it to me! I can move faster alone! It’s what she wants!”

  Hesitating, Gaunt reached out his hand, the trigger-icon in it.

  “Do it right, girl,” he said through pain-gritted teeth. She took the silver icon. “Don’t worry, I—”

  Fierce las-fire exploded in the snow around them. Three Ershul troopers were just a few metres away.

  Sanian turned to fire, the unfamiliar lasrifle awkward in her hands.

  The closest Ershul aimed his weapon to kill her. She threw herself down in desperation.

  Pin-point las-fire toppled her would-be killer and the two Ershul behind him.

  Spraying las-shots into the face of the enemy, Milo ran to them both, blood streaming from his head.

  “Good work Milo,” said Gaunt, straggling for breath and rising on his elbow to fire his bolt pistol.

  “The icon! Where is it?” Milo called, looking around. “I can make it! It’s not far! Where the feth is it?”

  “It was here! I had it in my hand!” Sanian replied, groping about in the snow as blisteringly intense shots fell around them.

  “Where is it? Oh, God-Emperor! Where the hell is it?”

  Major Kleopas was smiling. He didn’t need his augmetic implant to see it. The view through the scope was clear. The last round fired from the Heart of Destruction had destroyed a Reaver in a bloom of fire.

  But it was the last round. The last round ever.

  His valiant crew was dead. Flames filled his turret basket, igniting his clothes. He couldn’t move to escape. Shrapnel had destroyed his legs and severed his spine.

  “Damn. You. All. To. Hell,” he gasped out word byword, as the inferno surged up around him and consumed him.

  The Ghosts around him were falling back in panic in the face of the overwhelming host.

  “There’s nowhere to ran to,” mumbled Commissar Hark, firing at the foe. Blood from a head wound was running down his cheek and he’d lost his cap.

  An Ershul officer, another swirling ball of shield energy, loomed ahead of him. He’d killed three of its kind so far. Hark hoped this was Pater Sin.

  “For the saint! For the Ghosts! For Gaunt!” he bellowed at the top of his voice.

  He fired his plasma pistol and the shield exploded.

  Half-buried in the snow under the enemy onslaught, Sanian cried out, “Oh my lord! Look! Look!”

  Returning fire, Gaunt and Milo both looked around.

  “Good feth,” Gaunt stammered.

  It was cold out there, on the edge of the promontory. From below the lip, howling gorge winds cut like knives. Overhead, the warp storm blistered the heavens.

  The pillar stood just ahead, a massive finger of corundum, fire flaming from the top of it.

  Close now.

  It was hard going. He’d been hurt badly. Including the chest wound Greer had dealt him, he had seven wounds. Las-fire from the Ershul had stabbed at him ferociously these last ten metres.

  Daur’s silver trinket was clamped tightly in his hands. It had just been lying there, in the snow, as if it was waiting for him.

  A las blast clipped his calf. Eight. Almost there.

  He could see her piercing eyes. The little girl, the herder. He could smell the wet stink of the chelons’ nests and the cold wind of the high pastures.

  He could smell the fragrances of acestus and wild islumbine.

  Vamberfeld slumped against the cold, hard side of the watch flame pillar. He uncurled his fingers from the silver trinket and placed it in the recess, just like he had been shown during the miracle.

  His hand wasn’t shaking anymore.

  That was good.

  An Ershul bolter round blew out the back of his head. Vamberfeld fell back into the snow, a sad smile on his face Nine.

  EIGHTEEN

  HONOUR GUARD

  “Taken at face value, we were clearly mad. Actually, I believe we’re clearly mad most of the rest of the time, so go fething figure.”

  —Colm Corbec, at Hagia

  From deep inside its planetary core, obeying ancient instructions, the mechanisms of the saint came alive. Vast psychic amplifiers woke and broadcast their signal. For just an instant.

  An instant enough to send abject fear into the souls of the Chaos spawn infesting the planet.

  An instant enough to cremate the minds of Ershul hosts choking up across the promontory.

  An instant enough to blow back the warp storm with such force that the advancing fleet was tumbled aside.

  An instant enough to show Tolin Dorden his smiling son again, to show Colm Corbec one last glimpse of his father, to show Ban Daur a final vision of the old woman with the shockingly white hair in the refugee crowd.

  To show Trooper Niceg Vamberfeld the hard, penetrating eyes of the chelon herdsgirl in the last moment of his life.

  Outside the Shrinehold, under a cold, blue sky, Ibram Gaunt limped out, and down a churned-up mass of snow and stone that used to be steps. He was clad in full dress uniform.

  The remnants of the convoy waited below.

  Beyond them, littered across the snows of the promontory, lay the fused and charred skeletons of nine thousand Chaos-touched humans and the blackened wrecks of over five hundred war machines.

  “Hark?”

  Hark stepped up and saluted the colonel-commissar.

  “Units present and numbers correct, sir.”

  “Very good.” Gaunt paused and looked back along the promontory at the lonely post tomb the tempelum ayatani had erected in the snow and rock beside the corundum pillar of the eternal watch fire.

  Gaunt climbed up into his waiting Salamander.

  “Honour guard, mount up!”

  “As the commander orders, mount up and make ready!” Hark relayed down the line. Cries came back.

  “Column ready to move out, sir,” Hark reported.

  Gaunt thought of Slaydo for a moment and the old blood pact. He touched the scar on his palm. Then he took one last look back at Vamberfeld’s lonely post tomb.

  “Honour guard, advance!” he cried, making a sweeping gesture with his hand.

  The units began to rumble forward, under a spotless sky of frozen blue, down towards the head of the pass.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dan Abnett lives and works in Maidstone, Kent, in England. Well known for his comics work, he has written everything from Mr Men to the X-Men in the last decade, and currently scripts Legion of Superheroes for DC Comics and Sinister Dexter and Durham Red for 2000 AD. His work for the Black Library includes the popula
r strips Lone Wolves and Darkblade, the best-selling Gaunt’s Ghosts novels, and the acclaimed Inquisitor Eisenhorn trilogy.

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