[Gaunt's Ghosts 01] - First & Only

by Dan Abnett

  “Not yet,” Corbec smiled thinly.

  “Are you all right, colonel?”

  Corbec nodded, noticing for the first time there was the iron tang of blood in his mouth. He swallowed.

  “I’m fine…” he said.

  FOURTEEN

  “What do you make of that, sir?” Trooper Laynem asked, passing the scope to his platoon sergeant, Blane. The seventh platoon of the Ghosts were, as per Gaunt’s instructions, hanging back to guard the back slopes of the rise over which the main force were advancing. Blane knew why; the commissar had made it plain. But he hadn’t found the right way to tell his men.

  He squinted through the scope. Down the valley, massed formations of the Jantine Patricians were advancing up towards them, in fire-teams formed up in box-drill units. It was an attack dispersal. There could be no mistake.

  Blane swung back into his bracken-edged foxhole and beckoned his comms officer, Symber. Blane’s face was drawn.

  “They… they look like they mean to attack us, sergeant,” Laynem said in disbelief. “Have they got their orders scrambled?”

  Blane shook his head. Gaunt had been over this and had seemed quite certain, but still Blane had fought to believe it. Guard assaulting Guard? It was… not something to even think about. He had obeyed the commissar’s directive, of course — it had been so quietly passionate and direct — but he still had not understood the enormity of the command. The Jantine were going to attack them. He took the speaker horn Symber offered.

  “Ghosts of the Seventh,” he said simply, “form into defensive file along the slope and regard the Jantine advance. If they fire upon us, it is not a mistake. It is real. Know that the commissar himself warned me of this. Do not hesitate. I count on you all.”

  As if on cue, the first blistering ripple of las-fire raked up over their heads from the Jantine lines.

  Blane ordered his men to hold fire. They would wait for range. He swallowed. It was hard to believe. And an entire regiment of elite Jantine heavy infantry against his fifty men?

  Las-fire cracked close to him. He took the speaker horn and made Symber select the commissar’s own channel.

  He paused. The word hung like a cold, heavy marble in his dry mouth until he made himself say it.

  “Ghostmaker,” he breathed.

  FIFTEEN

  Dank, clammy darkness dripped down around them. Gaunt moved his team along through the echoing chambers and caves of wet stone. Caffran led Domor by the hand and one of Fereyd’s elite and anonymous troopers assisted the limping Baru.

  The place was lifeless except for the cockroaches which swarmed all around them. At first, there had been just one or two of the black-bodied vermin bugs, then hundreds, then thousands. Larkin had taken to stamping on them but gave up when they became too numerous. Now they were everywhere. The darkness all around the infiltration team murmured and shifted with beetles, coating the walls, the floor, the roof. The insistent chattering of the insects susurrated in the gloom, a low, crackling slithering from the shifting blanket of bodies instead of distinct, individual sounds.

  Shuddering, the Tanith moved on, finally leaving the mass of beetles behind and heading into galleries that were octagonal in cross section, the walls made of glass blocks fused together. The glass, its surface a dark, crazed patina where the slow passage of time had abraded it, cast back strange translucent phantoms from their failing lights; sometimes sharp reflections, sometimes wispy glows and embers. Mkoll’s sharp eyes saw shapes in the glass, indistinct relics of semi-molten bone set in the vitreous wall like flecks of grit in pearls… or the tan-flies he used to find set in hard, amber nodes of sap scouting the nal-wood forests back home.

  Mkoll, a youthful-looking fifty year old with a wiry frame and a salting of grey in his hair and beard, remembered the forests keenly for a moment. He remembered his wife, dead of canth-fever for twelve years now, and his sons who had timbered on the rivers rather than follow his profession and become woodsmen.

  There was something about this place, this place he could never in all his life have imagined himself in all those years ago when his Eiloni still lived, that reminded him of the nal-forests. Sometime after the First Founding, when the commissar had noted his background from the files and appointed him sergeant of the scouting platoon with Corbec’s blessing, he had sat and talked of the nal-wood to Gaunt. Commissar Gaunt had remarked to him that the unique shifting forests of Tanith had taught the Ghosts a valuable lesson in navigation. He conjectured that was what made them so sure and able when it came to reconnaissance and covert insertion.

  Mkoll had never thought about it much before then, but the suggestion rang true. It had been second nature to him, an instinct thing, to find his way through the shifting trees, locating paths and tracks which came and went as the fibrous evergreens stalked the sun. It had been his life to track the cuchlain herds for pelts and horn, no matter how they used the nal to obscure themselves.

  Mkoll was a hunter, utterly attuned to the facts of his environs, utterly aware of how to read solid truth from ephemerally-shifting inconsequence. Since Gaunt had first remarked upon this natural skill, a skill shared by all Tanith but distilled in him and the men of his platoon, he’d prided himself in never failing the task.

  Yes, now he considered, there was something down here that reminded him very strongly of lost Tanith.

  He signalled a halt. The Crusade Staff trooper which Tactician Wheyland — or Fereyd, as the commissar called him — had sent forward to accompany him glanced around. Probably asking an unvoiced question, but any expression was hidden by the reflective visor of his red and black armour. Mkoll inherently mistrusted the tactician and his men. There was just something about them. He disliked any man who hid his face and even when Wheyland had revealed himself, Mkoll had found little to trust there. In his imagination he heard Eiloni tut-tutting, scolding him for being a loner, slow to trust.

  He blinked the memory of his wife away. He knew he was right. These elite bodyguard troops were certainly skilled; the trooper had moved along with him as silently and assuredly as the best in his platoon. But there was just something, like there was something about this place.

  Gaunt moved up to join the head of the advance.

  “Mkoll?” he asked, ignoring Wheyland’s trooper, who was standing stiffly to attention nearby.

  “Something’s wrong here,” Mkoll said. He pointed left and right with a gesture. “The topography is, well, unreliable.”

  Gaunt frowned. “Explain?”

  Mkoll shrugged. Gaunt had made him privy to the unlocked data back on the Absalom, and Mkoll had studied and restudied the schematics carefully. He had felt privileged to be taken that close to the commissar’s private burden.

  “It’s all wrong, sir. We’re still on the right tack, and I’ll be fethed if I don’t get you there — but this is different.”

  “To the map I showed you?”

  “Yes… And worse, to the way it was five minutes ago. The structure is static enough,” Mkoll slapped the glass-brick wall as emphasis, “but it’s like direction is altering indistinctly. Something is affecting the left and right, the up and down…”

  “I’ve noticed nothing,” Wheyland’s trooper interrupted bluntly. “We should proceed. There is nothing wrong.”

  Gaunt and Mkoll both shot him a flat look.

  “Perhaps it’s time I saw your map,” a voice said from behind. Tactician Wheyland had approached, smiling gently. “And your data. We were… interrupted before.”

  Gaunt felt a sudden hesitation. It was peculiar. He would trust Fereyd to the Eye of Terror and back, and he had shown the data to chosen men like Mkoll. But something was making him hold back.

  “Ibram? We’re in this together, aren’t we?” Fereyd asked.

  “Of course,” Gaunt said, pulling out the slate and drawing Fereyd aside. What in the Emperor’s name was he thinking? This was Fereyd. Fereyd! Mkoll was right: there was something down here, something that was even affecting
his judgement.

  Mkoll stood back, waiting. He eyed the Crusade trooper at his side. “I don’t even know your name,” he said at last. “I’m called Mkoll.”

  “Cluthe, sergeant, Tactical Counsel war-staff.”

  They nodded to each other. Can’t show me your fething face even now, Mkoll thought.

  Back down the gallery, Domor was whimpering gently. Dorden inspecting his eyes again. Larkin hunted the shadows with his gun-muzzle.

  Rawne was staring into the glass blocks of the wall with a hard-set face. “Those are bones in there,” he said. “Feth, what manner of carnage melted bones into glass so it could be made into slabs for this place?”

  “What manner and how long ago?” Dorden returned, rewinding Domor’s gauze.

  “Bones?” Bragg asked, looking closer at what Rawne had indicated. He shuddered. “Feth this place for a bundle of nal-sticks!”

  Behind them, Caffran hissed for quiet. He had been carrying the team’s compact vox-set ever since Domor had been injured, and had plugged the wire of his microbead earpiece into it to monitor the traffic. The set was nothing like as powerful as the heavy vox-casters carried by platoon comm-officers like Raglon and Mkann, and its limited range was stunted further by the depth of the rock they were under. But there was a signal: intermittent and on a repeating automatic vox-burst. The identifier was Tanith, and the platoon series code that of the Seventh. Blane’s men.

  “What is it, Caff?” Larkin asked, his eyes sharp.

  “Trooper Caffran?” Major Rawne questioned.

  Caffran pushed past them both and hurried up the tunnel to where Gaunt stood with the Imperial tactician.

  As he approached, he saw Wheyland gazing at the lit displays of Gaunt’s data-slate, his eyes wide.

  “This is… unbelievable!” Fereyd breathed. “Everything we hoped for!”

  Gaunt shot a sharp glance at him. “Hoped for?”

  “You know what I mean, Bram. Throne! That something like this could still exist… that it could be so close. We were right to chase this without hesitation. Dravere cannot be allowed to gain control of… of this.”

  Fereyd paused, reviewing the data again, and looked back at the commissar. “This makes all the work, all the loss, all the effort… worthwhile. To know there really was a prize here worth fighting for. This proves we’re not wasting our time or jumping at ghosts — no offence to the present company.” He said this with a diplomatic smile at Caffran as the trooper edged up closer.

  Watching the tactical officer, Mkoll stiffened. Was it the fething place again, screwing with his mind? Or was there something about this grand Imperial tactician that even Gaunt hadn’t noticed?

  “Caffran?” Gaunt said, turning to his make-do vox-officer.

  Caffran handed him the foil from the field-caster that he had just printed out. “A signal from Sergeant Blane, sir. Very indistinct, very chopped. Took me a while to get it.”

  “It says ‘Ghostmaker’, sir.”

  Gaunt screwed his eyes shut for a moment.

  “Bram?”

  “It’s nothing, Fereyd,” Gaunt said to his old friend. “Just what I was expecting and hoped wouldn’t come to pass. Dravere is making his counter-move.”

  Gaunt turned to Caffran. “Can we get a signal out?” he asked, nodding to the voxer on its canvas sling over Caffran’s shoulder.

  “We can try fething hard and repeatedly,” responded Caffran, and Gaunt and Mkoll both grinned. Cafrran had borrowed the line from comms-officer Raglon, who had always used that retort when the channels were particularly bad.

  Gaunt handed Caffran a pre-prepared message foil. A glance showed Caffran it wasn’t in Tanith battle-tongue, or Imperial Guard Central Cipher either. He couldn’t read it, but he knew it was coded in Vitrian combat-cant.

  Caffran fed the foil into the vox-set, let the machine read it and assemble it and then flicked the “send” switch, marked by a glowing rune at the edge of the set’s compact fascia.

  “It’s gone.”

  “Repeat every three minutes, Caffran. And watch for an acknowledgement.”

  Gaunt turned back to Fereyd. He took the data-slate map back from him smartly.

  “We advance,” he told the Imperial Tactician. “Tell your men,” he nodded at the Crusade troopers, “to follow every instruction my scout gives, without question.”

  With Mkoll in the front, the raiding party moved on.

  A long way behind, back down the team, Major Rawne shuddered. The image of the monster Heldane had just flickered across his mind again. He felt the seeping blackness of Heldane’s touch and felt his surly consciousness wince.

  Get out! His thoughts shrilled in his head. Get out!

  SIXTEEN

  It was, Sergeant Blane decided, ironic.

  The defence was as epic as any hallowed story of the Guard. Fifty men gainsaying the massed assault of almost a thousand. But no one would ever know. This story, of Guard against Guard, was too unpalatable for stories. The greatest act of the Tanith First and Only would be a record hushed up and unspoken of, even by High Command.

  The Jantine units, supported by light artillery and heavy weapons in the valley depths, swung up around the rise Blane’s men commanded in a double curl, like the arms of a throat-tore, extending overlapping fans of las fire in disciplined, double-burst shots. The rain of shots, nearly fifteen hundred every twenty seconds, spat over the Ghosts’ heads or thumped into the sloping soil, puffing up clods of smoky dust and igniting numerous brush fires through the cloaking bracken.

  Sergeant Blane watched them from cover through his scope, his flesh prickling as he saw the horribly assured way they covered the ground and made advance. The warrior-caste of Jant were heavy troops, their silver and purple combat armour made for assault, rather than speed or stealth. They were storm-troopers, not skirmishers; the Tanith were the light, agile, stealthy ones. But for all that, the drilled brilliance of the Jantine was frightening. They used every ounce of skill and every stitch of cover to bring the long claw of their attack up and around to throttle the Ghosts’ seventh platoon.

  Blane had fought the temptation to return fire when the Jantine first addressed them. They had nothing to match the range of the Jantine heavy weapons and Blane told himself that the las-fire fusillade was as much a psychological threat as anything.

  His fifty men were deployed along the ridge line in a straggled stitch of natural foxholes that the Ghosts had augmented with entrenching tools and sacking made of stealth cloaks and sleeping rolls, lashed into bags and filled with dust and soil. Blane made his command instructions clear: fix blades, set weapons to single shot, hold fire and wait for his signal.

  For the first ten minutes, their line was silent as las-fire crackled up at them and the air sifted with white smoke plumes and drifting dust. Light calibre field shells fluttered down, along with a few rocket-propelled grenades, most falling way short and creating new foxholes on the slope. Blane first thought they were aiming astray until he saw the pattern. The field guns were digging cover-holes and craters in the flank of the hillside for the Jantine infantry to advance into. Already, to his west, Jantine squads had crossed from their advance and dug in to a line of fresh shell holes a hundred metres short of the Ghosts’ line. Immediately, the field guns adjusted their range and began digging the next line for advance.

  Blane cursed the Jantine perfection. Commissar Gaunt had always said there were two foes most to be feared, the utterly feral and the utterly intelligent, and of the pair, the second were the worst. The Jantine were schooled and educated men who excelled at the intricacies of war. They were justly feared. Blane had, in fact heard stories of the Jantine Patricians even before he had entered the Guard. He could hear them singing now, the long, languid, low hymn of victory, harmonised by nearly a thousand rich male voices, beautiful, oppressive… demoralising. He shuddered.

  “That damn singing,” Trooper Coline hissed beside him.

  Blane agreed but said nothing. The first las
-rounds were now crossing overhead and if the Jantine guns were reaching them it meant one reassuring fact: the Jantine were in range.

  Blane tapped his microbead link, selecting the open command channel. He spoke in Tanith battle-cant: “Select targets carefully. Not a wasted shot now. Fire at will.”

  The Ghosts opened fire. Streams of single-shot cover fire whipped down from their hidden positions into the advancing fans of the Jantine. In the first salvo alone, Blane saw ten or more of the Jantine jerk and fall. Their rate of fire increased. The wave punctured the Jantine ranks in three dozen places and made the incoming rain of fire hesitate and stutter.

  The infantry duel began: two lines of dug-in troopers answering each other volley for volley up and down a steeply angled and thickly covered slope. The very air became warm and electric-dry with the ozone stench of las-fire. It was evenly pitched, with the Tanith enjoying the greater angle of coverage and the greater protection the hill afforded. But, unlike the Jantine, they were not resupplied every minute by lines of reinforcement.

  Even firing off a well-placed round every six seconds, and scoring a kill one out of four shots, Blane felt they were helpless. They could not retreat, neither could they advance in a charge to use the ground to their advantage. Defeat one way, overwhelming death the other; the Ghosts could do nothing but hold their line and fight to the last.

  The Jantine had more options, but the one they decided to use amazed Blane. After a full thirty minutes of fire exchange, the Patricians charged. En masse. Close on a thousand heavy troopers, bayonets fixed to muzzle-clips, rose as one from the bracken-choked foxholes and stormed up the slope towards his platoon.

  It was an astonishing decision. Blane gasped and his first thought was that madness had gripped the Jantine command. And a sort of madness had, but one that would surely win the day. The fifty guns of the Ghosts had more targets then they could pick. Dozens, hundreds of Jantine never made it up the slope, their twitching thrashing or limp bodies collapsing brokenly into the ochre undergrowth. But there was no way Blane’s men could cut them all down before they reached the hill line.