[Gaunt's Ghosts 01] - First & Only Read online

  He turned back to Sergeant Curral at the head of the column across the crater.

  “Move the men up and round!” he cried. “And bring the medic over in the first party.” Afraid by the exposure of moving around the lip of the crater against the sky, the men traversed quickly and timidly. Corbec had Curral regroup them on the far side in fire-team lines along each side of the trench. The medic came to him and the sweepers, and sprayed their legs with antiseptic mist from a flask. The pain eased and the fabric was damped so that it no longer smouldered. Corbec was picking up his gun when Sergeant Grell called to him. He moved forward down the lines of waiting men and saw what Grell had found.

  It was Colmar, one of the scouts he had sent forward. He was dead, hanging pendulously from the trench wall on a great, rusty iron spike which impaled his chest. It was the sort of spike that the workers of the forge world would have used to wedge and manipulate the hoppers of molten ore in the Adeptus Mechanicus furnace works. His hands and feet were missing.

  Corbec gazed at him for a minute and then looked away. Though they had met no serious resistance, it was sickeningly clear that they weren’t alone in these trenches. Whatever the number of the Shriven still here, be it stragglers left behind or guerrilla units deliberately set to thwart them, a malicious presence was shadowing them in the gullies and channels of the support trenches.

  Corbec took hold of the spike and pulled Colmar down. He took out the ground sheet from his own bedroll and rolled the pitiful corpse in it so that no one would see. He could not bring himself to incinerate the soldier, as he had done with the shrines.

  “Move on,” he instructed and Grell led the men forward behind the sweepers. Corbec suddenly stopped dead as if an insect had stung him. There was a rasping in his ear. He realised it was his microbead link. He registered an overwhelming sense of relief that the radio link should be live at all even as he realised it was a short range broadcast from Mkoll, sergeant of the scouting unit.

  “Can you hear it, sir?” came Mkoll’s voice.

  “Feth! Hear what?” Corbec asked. All he could hear was the ceaseless thunder of the enemy guns and the shaking tremors of the falling shells.

  “Drums,” Scout-Sergeant Mkoll said, “I can hear drums.”

  NINE

  Brin Milo heard the drums before Gaunt did. Gaunt valued his musician’s almost preternaturally sharp senses, but they sometimes disturbed him nonetheless. The insight reminded him of someone. The girl perhaps, years ago. The one with the sight. The one who had haunted his dreams for so many years afterwards.

  “Drums!” the boy hissed — and a moment later Gaunt caught the sound too.

  They were moving through the silos and shelled-out structures of the rising industrial manufactories just behind the Shriven lines, sooty shells of melted stone, rusted metal girder-work and fractured ceramite. Gargoyles, built to ward the buildings against contamination, had been defaced or toppled completely. Gaunt was exceptionally cautious. The action of the day had played out unexpectedly. They had advanced far farther than he had anticipated from the starting point of a ample repulse of an enemy attack, thanks both to good fortune and Dravere’s harsh directive. Reaching the front of the enemy lines they had found them generally abandoned after the initial fighting, as if the majority of the Shriven had withdrawn in haste. Though a curtain of enemy bombardment cut off their lines of retreat, Gaunt felt that the Shriven had made a great mistake and pulled back too far in their urgency to avoid both the Guard attack and their own answering artillery. Either that or they were planning something. Gaunt didn’t like that notion much. He had two hundred and thirty men with him in a long spearhead column, but he knew that if the I Shriven counterattacked now he might as well be on his own. As they progressed, they swept each blackened factory bunker, storehouse and forge tower for signs of the enemy, moving beneath flapping, torn banners, crunching broken stained glass underfoot. Machinery had been stripped out and moved, or simply vandalised. There was nothing whole left here — apart from the Chaos shrines which the Shriven had erected at regular intervals. Like Colonel Corbec, the commissar had a flamer brought up to expunge any trace of these outrages. However, ironically, he was moving in exactly the opposite direction along the trench lines to Corbec’s advance. Communication was lost and the breakthrough elements of the Tanith First and Only were wandering blind and undirected through what was by any estimation enemy territory.

  The sound of the drums rolled in. Gaunt called up his vox-caster operator, Trooper Rafflan, and tersely barked into the speech-horn of the heavy backpack set, demanding to know if there was anyone out there.

  The drums rolled.

  There was a return across the radio link, an incomprehensible squawk of garbled words. At first, Gaunt thought the transmission was scrambled, but then he realised that it was another language. He repeated his demand and after a long painful silence a coherent message returned to him in clipped Low Gothic.

  “This is Colonel Zoren of the Vitrian Dragoons. We are moving in to support you. Hold your fire.”

  Gaunt acknowledged and then spread his men across the silo concourse in cover, watching and waiting. Ahead of them something flashed in the dull light and then Gaunt saw soldiers moving down towards them. They didn’t see the Ghosts until the very last minute. With their tenacious ability to hide in anything, and their obscuring cloaks, Gaunt’s Ghosts were masters of stealth camouflage.

  The Dragoons approached in a long and carefully arranged formation of at least three hundred men. Gaunt could see that they were well-drilled, slim but powerful men in some kind of chain-armour that was strangely sheened and which caught the light like unpolished metal. Gaunt shrugged off the Tanith stealth cloak that had been a habitual addition to his garb since he joined the First and Only, and moved out of concealment, signalling them openly as he rose to his feet from cover. He advanced to meet the commanding officer.

  Close to, the Vitrians were impressive soldiers. Their unusual body armour was made from a toothed metallic mail which covered them in form-fitting sections. It glinted like obsidian. Their helmets were full face and grim with narrow eye slits, glazed with dark glass. Their weapons were polished and clean.

  “Commissar Gaunt of the Tanith First and Only,” Gaunt said as he saluted a greeting.

  “Zoren of the Vitrian Dragoons,” came the reply. “Good to see that there are some of you left out here. We feared we were being called in to support a regiment already slaughtered.”

  “The drums? Are they yours?”

  Zoren slid back the visor of his helmet to reveal a handsome, dark-skinned face. He caught Gaunt with a quizzical stare. “They are not… we were just wondering what in the name of the Emperor it was ourselves.”

  Gaunt looked away into the smoke and the fractured buildings around them. The noise had grown. Now it sounded like hundreds of drums… thousands… from all around. For each drum, a drummer. They were surrounded and completely outnumbered.

  TEN

  Caffran dragged himself across the mud and slid into a crater. Around him the bombardment showed no signs of easing. He had lost his lasgun and most of his kit, but he still had his silver knife and an auto-pistol that had come his way as a trophy at some time or other.

  Wriggling to the lip of the crater he caught sight of figures far away, soldiers who seemed to be dressed in glass. There was a full unit of them, caught in the crossfire of the serial bombardment. They were being slaughtered.

  Shells fell close again and Caffran slid down to cover his head with his arms. This was hell and there was no way out of it. Curse this, in the name of Feth!

  He looked up and grabbed his pistol as something fell into the shell hole next to him. It was one of the glass-clad soldiers he had seen from a distance, presumably one who had fled in search of cover. The man held up his hands to avoid Caffran’s potential wrath.

  “Guard! I’m Guard, like you!” the man said hastily, pulling off his dark-lensed full-face helmet to reveal an attra
ctive face with a tan that was almost as dark and glossy as polished ebonwood.

  “Trooper Zogat of the Vitrian Regiment. We were called in to support you and half our number were in the open when the artillery cranked up.”

  “My sympathies,” Trooper Caffran said humourlessly, holstering his pistol. He held out a pale hand to shake and was aware I of the way the man in the articulated metallic armour regarded I the blue dragon tattoo over his right eye with disdain.

  “Trooper Caffran, Tanith First,” he said. After a moment the Vitrian shook his hand.

  A shell fell close and showered them in mud. Getting up from their knees they turned and looked out at the apocalyptic vista all around.

  “Well, friend,” Caffran said, “I think we’re here for the duration.”

  ELEVEN

  To the west, the Jantine Patricians moved in under the command of Colonel Flense. They rode on Chimera personnel carriers that lurched and reeled across the slick and miry landscape. The Patricians were noble soldiers, tall men in deep purple uniforms dressed with chrome. Flense had been honoured when, six years before, he had become their commanding officer. They were haughty and resolute, and had won for him a great deal of praise. They had a regimental history that dated back fifteen generations to their first Founding in the castellated garrisons of Jant Normanidus Prime, generations of notable triumphs, and associations with illustrious generals and campaigns. There was just the one blemish on their honour roll, just the one, and it nagged at Flense day and night. He would rectify that. Here, on Fortis Binary.

  He took his scope and looked at the battlefield ahead. He had two columns of vehicles with upwards of ten thousand men scissoring in to cut into the flank of the Shriven as the Tanith and the Vitrians drove them back. Both those regiments were fully deployed into the Shriven lines. But Flense had not counted on this bombardment from the Shriven artillery in the hills. Two kilometres ahead the ground was volcanic with the pounding of the macro-shells and a drizzle of mud fogged back to splatter their vehicles. There was no way of going round and Flense didn’t even wish to consider the chances of driving his column through the barrage. Lord General Dravere believed in acceptable losses, and had demonstrated this practicality on a fair few number of occasions without compunction, but Flense wasn’t about to commit suicide. His scar twitched. He cursed. For all his manoeuvring with Dravere, this wasn’t the way it was meant to go. He had been cheated of his victory.

  “Pull back!” he ordered into the vox handset and felt the gears of his vehicle grind into reverse as the carrier pulled around.

  His second officer, a big, older man called Brochuss, glared at him under the low brim of his helmet. “We are to pull out, colonel?” he asked, as if obliteration by artillery shell was something he craved.

  “Shut up!” spat Flense and repeated the order into the vox-caster.

  “What about Gaunt?” Brochuss asked.

  “What do you think?” Flense sneered, gesturing out of the Chimera’s vision slit at the inferno that raged along the dead-land. “We may not get glory today, but at least we can content ourselves in the knowledge that the bastard is dead.”

  Brochuss nodded, and a slow smile of consolation spread across his grizzled features. None of the veterans had forgotten Khedd 1173.

  The Patrician armoured convoy snaked back on itself and thundered home towards friendly lines before the Shriven emplacements could range them. Victory would have to wait a while longer. The Tanith First and Only and the Vitrian support regiments were on their own. If there were indeed any of them left alive.

  A MEMORY

  GYLATUS DECIMUS,

  EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  Oktar died slowly. It took eight days.

  The commander had once joked — on Darendara, or was it Folion? Gaunt forgot. But he remembered the joke: “It won’t be war that slays me, it’ll be these damn victory celebrations!”

  They had been in a smoke-filled hall, surrounded by cheering citizens and waving banners. Most of the Hyrkan officers were drunk on their feet. Sergeant Gurst had stripped to his underwear and climbed the statue of the two-headed Imperial Eagle in the courtyard to string the Hyrkan colours from the crest. The streets were full of bellowing crowds, static, honking traffic and wild firecrackers.

  Folion. Definitely Folion.

  Cadet Gaunt had smiled. Laughed, probably.

  But Oktar had a way of being right all the time, and he had been right about this. The Instrumentality of the Gylatus World Flock had been delivered from the savage ork threat after ten months of sustained killing on the Gylatan moons. Oktar, Gaunt with him, had led the final assault on the ork war bunkers at Tropis Crater Nine, punching through the last stand resistance of the brutal huzkarl retinue of Warboss Elgoz. Oktar had personally planted the spike of the Imperial Standard into the soft grey soil of the crater bottom, through Elgoz’s exploded skull.

  Then here, in the Gylatan hive city capital on Decimus, the victory parades, the hosts of jubilant citizenry, the endless festivities, the medal ceremonies, the drinking, the—

  The poison.

  Canny, for orks. As if realising their untenable position, the orks had tainted the food and drink reserves in the last few days of their occupation. Taster servitors had sniffed most of it out, but that one stray bottle. That one stray bottle. Adjutant Broph had found the rack of antique wines on the second night of the liberation festivities, hidden in a longbox in the palace rooms which Oktar had commandeered as a playground for his officer cadre. No one had even thought-Eight were dead, including Broph, by the time anyone realised. Dead in seconds, collapsed in convulsive wracks, frothing and gurgling. Oktar had only just sipped from his glass when someone sounded the alarm.

  One sip. That, and Oktar’s iron constitution, kept him alive for eight days.

  Gaunt had been off in the barracks behind the hive central palace, settling a drunken brawl, when Tanhause summoned him. Nothing could be done.

  By the eighth day, Oktar was a skeletal husk of his old, robust self. The medics emerged from his chamber, shaking hopeless heads. The smell of decay and corruption was almost overpowering. Gaunt waited in the anteroom. Some of the men, some of the toughest Hyrkans he had come to know, were weeping openly.

  “He wants the Boy,” one of the doctors said as he came out, trying not to retch.

  Gaunt entered the warm, sickly atmosphere of the chamber. Locked in a life-prolonging suspension field, surrounded by glowing fire-lamps and burning bowls of incense, Oktar was plainly minutes from death.

  “Tbram…” The voice was like a whisper, a thing of no substance, smoke.

  “Commissar-general.”

  “It is past time for this. Well past time. I should never have left it to a finality like this. I’ve kept you waiting too long.”

  “Waiting?”

  “Truth of it is, I couldn’t bear to lose you… not you, Ibram… far too good a soldier to hand away to the ladder of promotion. Who are you?”

  Gaunt shrugged. The stench was gagging his throat.

  “Cadet Ibram Gaunt, sir.”

  “No… from now on you are Commissar Ibram Gaunt, appointed in the extremis of the field to the commissarial office, to watch over the Hyrkan Regiments. Fetch a clerk. We must record my authority in this matter, and your oath.”

  Oktar willed himself to live for seventeen minutes more, as an Administratum clerk was found and the proper oath ceremony observed. He died clutching Commissar Gaunt’s hands in his bony, sweat-oiled claws.

  Ibram Gaunt was stunned, empty. Something had been torn out of his insides, tom out and flung away. When he wandered out into the anteroom, he didn’t even notice the soldiers saluting him.

  PART THREE

  FORTIS BINARY FORGE WORLD

  ONE

  It wasn’t the drums that Corbec really detested, it was the rhythm. There was no sense to it. Though the notes were a regular drum sound, the beats came sporadically like a fluctuating heart, overlapping and syncopated.
The bombardment was still ever-present but now, as they closed on the source of the beating, the drumming overrode even the roar of the explosions beyond the front trenches.

  Corbec knew his men were spooked even before Sergeant Curral said it. Down the channel ahead, Scout-Sergeant Mkoll was returning towards them. He had missed the signal to put on his respirator and his face was pinched, tinged with green. As soon as he saw the masked men of his company, he anxiously pulled on his own gas-hood.

  “Report!” Corbec demanded quickly.

  “It opens up ahead,” Mkoll said through his mask, breathing hard. “There are wide manufactory areas ahead of us. We’ve broken right through their lines into the heart of this section of the industrial belt. I saw no one. But I heard the drums. It sounds like there are… well, thousands of them out there. They’re bound to attack soon. But what are they waiting for?”

  Corbec nodded and moved forward, ushering his men on behind him. They hugged the walls of the trench and assumed fire pattern formation, crouching low and aiming in a sweep above the head of the man in front.

  The trench opened out from its zigzag into a wide, stonewalled basin which overlooked a slope leading down into colossal factory sheds. The thump of the drums, the incessant and irregular beat, was now all-pervading.

  Corbec waved two fire teams forward on either flank, Drayl taking the right and Lukas taking the left. He led the front prong himself. The slope was steep and watery-slick. By necessity, they became more concerned with keeping upright and descending than with raising their weapons defensively.