by Dan Abnett
Varl cursed.
Caffran heard the protesting wail first. He looked back out to sea, then grabbed Domor and Varl and threw them flat into the painful jumble of the shingle. Mkendrik dived down too.
A troop-ship, one of the great fat beetles, on fire from end to end, was coming in low, half-sidelong, nose down, spilling burning fuel and shreds of fuselage. It was huge, blocking out the sky, six hundred tonnes of dying metal keening in towards the beach over their heads. Its jaw-hatches were still closed.
Men are cooking in there, Caffran thought, wondering which regiment, and then, as it came down on top of his head, his thoughts guttered out like a candle flame in a hurricane.
Mkendrik shook him awake. Caffran stirred, and woke up into the roar of the assault. 'How long have I been out?'
'Less than a minute,' Mkendrik said.
Caffran struggled up out of the shingle. It had felt like hours, like all his fatigue and pain had overwhelmed him and sent him to sleep. 'What happened?' he gasped. 'I thought for Feth we were dead then.'
Mkendrik pointed. At first there was little to see. The white steam and mist had become fouled with black smoke, and the ashy curls of it, thick with glowing cinders, enveloped the beach. Then, Caffran made out more. The stricken troop-ship had slammed over them, coming to rest at the head of the beach where the last few seconds of its crash-flight had been broken by the fortified seawall of Oskray Island. The impact had blown the wall in. For six hundred metres, its immeasurably old and solid stone was fused and fractured. A blackened chasm had opened into the heart of the refinery. The men aboard that troop-ship had brought a way into the target with their lives as surely as if they had fought their way up the beach.
Caffran gathered scattered items which had split from his burst pack, and recovered his fallen lasgun. Mkendrik was changing las-cells. A short way off, Varl and Domor were making ready, and small groups of Ghosts in foxholes along the beach were also preparing to make use of this new way in.
Enemy fire still strafed down from the wall, though it was thinner now such a chunk of the wall had gone. The incoming troop-ships, still roaring and settling over the tide-line behind them, were jockeying into this blind spot to avoid the tracking fire from the main batteries on the cliffs. Caffran heard thunder, and turned to see four Basilisks hoving up the beach, properly delivered, moving past them into the breach and tracking to fire. They sizzled up wet stone flecks as they rolled, cranking their huge, decorated bulks up and over the groynes. Caffran recognised the markings. Ketzoks, the 17th Armoured Regiment, the so-called Serpents who had been gulled into slaughtering them back on Voltemand.
With Varl, Domor, Mkendrik and several others, Caffran moved in towards the breach, running over stone litter and smouldering fragments of blackened mechanicals, the last remnants of the troop-ship. Stray las-shots winged down at them and stubber rounds rattled with a curious clack-clack sound off the stone facings to their left.
Entering the chasm in the wall, Caffran passed into deep shadow. Ahead, one hundred metres down the V-shaped channel blasted by the crash, a dimness loomed. He felt a sense of pride. They would be the first – the Chosts would be the first to break through the stalwart defences of the target.
He was close to the far end now, stumbling with the others through the shadow, picking his way around mangled hull fragments. Ahead, the dimness was becoming a forest of steel and iron. The refinery itself.
Gaunt had been precise in his briefing. The fleet could have vaporised Oskray Island from orbit, but it was too valuable. That meant a land assault to retake it from the legions of Chaos. The vile host here called themselves the Kith, some hive-fermented sub-cult of Khorne… Caffran had blanked on some of the briefing's complexities, partly because it was alien gibberish to him, and partly because the gibberish made him feel ill. He didn't want to listen to the details concerning the filth they were going up against. The Kith: that was all he focussed on. The Kith were the sub-human vermin he was here to eradicate. Their leader was a monster called Sholen Skara. Fragments of the Chaos armada stopped at Balhaut had run to Sapiencia for shelter, and their leaders had conjoined with a Chaos cult already thriving in the underclass of the vast hive to overthrow Imperial rule and seize the fuel-oil and promethium wells.
Colonel-Commissar Gaunt had spoken long and passionately about the Kith in his briefing. Caffran knew Gaunt had been part of the great Balhaut victory, back when he was still a political officer with the Hyrkan Eighth. Gaunt loathed all Chaos, but loathed especially the tendrils of it which had escaped destruction at Balhaut only to twist and pollute other worlds, thanks, as he saw it, to the tactical miscalculations of Warmaster Macaroth. Gaunt had spoken of Sholen Skara, renegade of the Balhaut murder-camps, as if he had known him personally. That was why the colonel-commissar had volunteered his Ghosts for the Oskray assault. He had made it plain to them all.
And that, mused Caffran, was why they had been drowned and blasted and torn apart on the razor-wire.
Caffran often thought about Gaunt. Ibram Gaunt. He rolled the name in his mind, a name he would never dare voice aloud. The colonel, the commissar. A strange man, and Caffran's feelings for him were strange too. He was the best, most caring, most charismatic leader Caffran could imagine. Caffran had seen, time and again, the way Gaunt looked after the Ghosts. Caffran had also seen enough of other regiments and their commanders and politicos to know how rare a thing that was. Many, like beloved Colonel Corbec, regarded Gaunt as a saviour, a friend, a brother, and Caffran could not deny he admired Gaunt and would follow him to the ends of any earth.
But Caffran knew Feygor, Rawne and the other malcontents well, and in bitter moments he shared their contempt for the colonel-commissar. Tor all his fatherly love, like their own private Emperor, Gaunt had left Tanith to die. Prom time to time, Caffran had been tempted to throw aside his reservations about Gaunt and worship him as so many others did. But always, that creeping resentment in his heart had stopped him from total devotion. Gaunt was ruthless, calculating, direct. He would never stint from sending men to their deaths, for his duty was to the Emperor and the rule of Terra long before it was to the lost souls of Tanith.
Caffran saw the boy Milo, the so-called adjutant, as a constant reminder of the lost youth of his homeworld. Milo was only a year or two younger than Caffran, but a gulf divided them. He never spoke to the boy. Gaunt, in his oh-so generous wisdom, had saved Milo from the fires of Tanith Magna. Saved one – but no one else.
Caffran thought, at such times, of Laria. How he had loved her. How very much. All Caffran knew for sure was that Laria was dead now. How she had died he had no idea, and frankly, he was thankful for that. But Laria haunted him. Laria embodied everything he had lost. Tanith itself, his friends, his life, his family. Tor Laria's sake, Caffran knew he would always remain one of those Ghosts in the middle way, one who would follow Gaunt to hell devoutly, but would never forgive him when they arrived.
Here, in the wall gully of Oskray, it was easy to hate Gaunt. The stink of death and fire filled the place. Caffran slid in low against a fallen tower of stone blocks as he approached the opening into the island proper. Varl, Mkendrik and Trooper Vulliam dropped in beside him.
Behind them, down the crash-chasm at the mouth of the breach, Caffran could hear shouts and grinding tracks.
He looked at Varl questioningly.
'The fething Basilisks!' the sergeant said. 'They want to storm in ahead of the infantry, but they can't get their fat arses into the gap.'
'Then we still have point,' Caffran smiled. 'Feth the armour!'
Varl chortled. 'Feth them indeed. Did us no favours on Voltemand, doing us no favours now.'
Varl signalled the advance beyond the breach gap, and fifty-nine Ghosts rose from cover and moved forward. Vulliam, two metres ahead of Caffran, was one of the first to break into the open. Stub rounds broke him messily into four.
Six more Ghosts died as they broke cover. Though hammered
, the Kith had their side of the chasm in the wall soundly covered. Caffran fell back with the others as las-rounds and bolts and stub charges peppered the exit of the breach.
In cover, they lay trembling as the deadly rain continued to drum the opening ahead.
'Blocked as surely as we were before,' Domor said, scratching at his eye-sutures.
'You all right?' Mkendrik asked.
'Vision's a little foggy. Got water in there. Hope…' Domor said no more, but Caffran knew what he was thinking. The seawater had ruined Varl's arm, and now it seemed to be starling its slow work on Domor's eyes.
'Might as well have left this fething wall standing for all tin-good it's going to do us!'
'Trooper Callun said.
Varl nodded, nursing his strapped arm. His laspistol, the only weapon he could handle now, lay in his lap.
'What about missiles? Munitions?' Mkendrik wondered. 'We could blow them out and—'
'What do we aim at?' Varl asked sourly. 'Do you even see them?
Mkendrik settled back with no answer. Ahead of them was nothing but a sliced mouth cut in the wall. Beyond, the steeple girders and scaffolds of the refinery, thirty storeys high. 'The enemy gunners could be anywhere.
Silence fell. Sand flies billowed around the dead, and oceanic carrion swooped in to peck at the cindered flesh with hooked, pink beaks. The birds mobbed the chasm, squawking and shrilling. Trooper Tokar drove them off with a scatter burst of las-fire.
There was movement and voices behind them. Caffran and the others turned to see several Ketzok gunnery troopers creeping their way, pausing to exchange words with each group of Ghosts.
One hurried over to them, bent double, and saluted Varl's sergeant patch as he crouched next to them.
'Corporal Fuega, Ketzok 17th Serpents.'
Varl, sergeant, Ghost. And your purpose is?'
Fuega scratched his ear for a moment, unmanned by Varl's attitude. 'Our Basilisks can't manage this breach, so we're going to split it wider with shelling. My commander asks you to fall back out of the fire-zone.'
'Wish he'd given us such a warning on Voltemand,' Domor said icily.
Fuega stepped back. That black day is forever in our shame, Tanith. If we could give anything, even our lives, to change it, we would.'
'I'm sure you would,' Varl sneered. He got up to face the Ketzok corporal. 'What's the plan?'
Fuega coughed. 'Orders from General Kline. You pull out, we shell, then we advance with heavy infantry.'
'Heavy infantry?'
'The Volpone have just beached in legion strength. They have heavy armour and weapons. We will clear the way for their advance.' Fuega turned away. 'You have fifteen minutes to withdraw.'
The Ghosts sat in a stupefied gaggle. 'All this, all we lost, for nothing?' Domor sighed.
Varl was angry. 'Teth those Volpone, and the Ketzok too! We die in the wire to open the beach and then they march in and follow the tanks to glory!'
'I don't know about you, sergeant, but I don't want to be sitting here still, complaining about life, when those Basilisks open up.'
Varl spat and sighed. 'Me neither. Okay! By platoon team, call the retreat.'
The Ghosts all around scrambled up and prepared to fall back. Domor, looking up, caught Caffran by the arm.
'What?'
'Up there – do you see it?'
Domor pointed and Caffran looked up. The broken wall rose like a cliff above them, scabbed with slumping masonry and broken reinforcement girders. Fifty metres up, just above a severed end of pipe work, Caffran saw the door. Teth, but your eyes are sharp!'
There were tunnels in the wall, troop tunnels buried deep This hole has cut through one of them and exposed it.'
Caffran called Varl over, and a group of Ghosts gathered to look up.
'We could get a fire-team inside the wall… follow the tunnel to where ever it led us.'
'Hell?' supposed Trooper Haven. 'It's high up…' Varl began.
'But the cliff is ragged and full of good handholds. The first man up could secure a line. Sergeant, it's a plan…'
Varl looked round at Caffran. 'I'd never make it, with one arm dead. Who'd lead?'
'I could,' said Sergeant Gorley of five platoon. He was a tall, barrel-chested man with a boxer's nose. 'You get the wounded back onto the beach. I'll take a squad and see what we can do.'
Varl nodded. He began to round up the walking wounded, and seconded several able bodies to help him with the more seriously injured. Gorley selected his commando squad: Caffran, Domor, Mkendrik, Haven, Tokar, Bude, Adare, Mkallun, Caill.
Mkendrik, raised in the mountains of Tanith Steeple, led off, clambering up the splintered wall, hand over hand. He left his flamer and its tanks with Gorley, to raise them later on a line.
By the time the ascent was made, and ropes secured, their leeway was almost up, and the ten Ghosts were alone in the chasm. Within moments, the Basilisks at the throat of the breach would start their bombardment.
The men went up quickly, following the ropes. Gorley was last, securing a line around the flamer unit and other heavy supplies. The team at the top, crowded into the splintered doorway, hauled them up.
Gorley was halfway up the ascent when the bombardment began. The nine Ghosts above cowered into the shelter of the concrete passageway they had climbed into and covered their ears at the concussion.
A shell hit the wall and vaporised Gorley, as if he had never been there.
Realising he was gone, Caffran urged the party to collect their equipment and move inwards. Soon this entire wall section would be brought down.
The Ghost squad crept up the unlit passageway. Though generally intact, the tunnel had slumped a little following the massive shockwave from the troop-ship crash. The ground was split in places, exposing crumbling rock. Pipes and cables dangled from the cracked roof; dust trickled down from deep fissures. In places, the shock-impact had sectioned the wall, cutting the originally straight and horizontal tunnel into a series of cleanly stepped slabs. The Tanith clambered on, probing the dusty darkness with the cold green glare of assault lamps.
Behind them, the stonework of the great sea wall began to shake. The Ketzok had redoubled their furious work. Caffran found himself leading, as if there had been an unspoken vote electing him in Gorley's place. He presumed it was because he had suggested this incursion in the first place. The Ghosts picked up their speed and moved deeper into the tunnel system that threaded the marrow of the wall.
They reached a vertical communications shaft, down the centre of which ran a great wrought-iron spiral staircase. The air was damp and smelled of wet brick and the sea. Shock damage was evident here too, and the bolts securing the metal stairway and its adjoining walkways to the shaft-sides had sheared off or snapped. The entire metal structure, hundreds of tonnes of it filling the shaft, creaked uneasily with each shuddering impact from the guns of the distant Basilisks.
The Ghosts stepped across the metal landing of the stair-coil to where the tunnel resumed beyond. It squealed and yelped with every step, sometimes threatening to tilt or fall.
Caill and Flaven were last across. A metal bolt-end the size of a man's forearm rang off the gantry, just missing Caill. It had come loose far above.
'Move!' yelled Caffran.
With a protesting, non-vocal scream, the staircase collapsed, tearing itself apart and rattling away down into the black depths of the bottomless shaft. Where larger parts of the structure remained intact – a few turns of steps laced together, a long section of handrail, a series of stanchion poles – they fell with heavy fury, raking sparks and hideous shrieks from the shaft walls.
Empty, the stairs fallen away, the brick shaft seemed immense, uncrossable.
Domor looked back at the tunnel they had come along, out of reach now across the gulf. 'No going back now…' he muttered.
'Good thing that's not the way we're going,' Caffran
replied, pointing into the darkness to come with the barrel of his lasgun.
Wide cisterns opened up around them. The cement floors were painted with glossy green paint and the wall bricks matt white. The walls tapered upwards so that the ceiling was narrower than the floor, and the whole tunnel turned a few degrees to the left. The entire passageway was following both the line and the profile of the wall it ran through. Grilled lighting panels, glowing phosphorescent white, hung at intervals from the roof. They looked like a giant stream of tracer rounds, arcing off down the line of the tunnel, frozen in time.
Caffran's Ghosts – and indeed now they were ''his'' Ghosts, bonding to him as leader now that they were cut off from outside without asking or deciding – haunted the long passageways, hugging the walls in the fierce white glow of the lights. Every sixty metres, tunnels bisected the main route on the inland side: deep, wide throats of brick and concrete that sloped downwards. Mkendrik thought they might be drainage channels, but if that was true, the size alarmed Caffran. They were big enough to take a man walking upright and just as broad. If that kind of liquid quantity flooded these tunnels from time to time…
Domor believed the channels to be for personnel movement, or for running carts of ammo and supplies up to the emplacements buried in the sides and along the top of the great sea wall. But they'd seen no vertical cargo shafts for munitions lifting, and Caffran doubted sheer manpower could roll enough shells up the sloping channels without mechanical assistance.
And they had met no one, not a trace of the Kith soldiery, not even a corpse.
'They're all fully engaged, deploying on the defences,' Caill suggested.
Caffran thought it a fair bet. 'We wanted to get inside, I figure we might get further than we expected.' They had just reached the latest of the mysterious sloping shafts. Caffran nodded to it. 'It leads into the heart of the island itself. Let's try it.'