Ghostmaker (7 page)

The cultists were everywhere.

Sergeant Cluggan’s secondary expedition force poured in through the stinking crypts of the western sanitation outfalls, and the enemy rose to meet them all around. It was hand to hand, each step of the way won by strength and keen blades. The dark, tight confines of the drainage tunnels were lit by the flashes of lasfire, and shots ricocheted from the roof and walls.

“What the hell is that smell?” Forbin wailed, blasting away down an airless cavity with his lasgun.

“What do you think? This is the main sewage drain,” Brodd snapped, a one-eyed man in his fifties years. “Notice how the others get the nice clean watergate.”

“Keep it together!” Cluggan snarled, firing in a wide sweep and cutting down a trio of attacking cultists. “Forget the smell. It’s always been a dirty job.”

More, heavy fire came their way. Forbin lost his left arm and then the side of his head.

Cluggan, Brodd and the others returned fire in the close channel. Cluggan eyed the cultist troops they cut through: bloated, twisted men in robes that had been white silk before they had been dyed in vats of blood. They had come from off-world, part of the vast host of Chaos cultists that had descended like locusts onto Voltemand and destroyed its people. The sigils and runes of the blasphemy Khorne were cut into the flesh of their brows and cheeks. They were well equipped, with bolters and lasguns, and armoured. Cluggan hoped to the sweet, dead gods of Tanith that his commissar was faring better.

The Ghosts staggered and stumbled back from the spewing watergate, through the reed beds, towards the comparative cover of the riverbank. Enemy fire from the walls high above killed dozens, their bodies joining the hundreds swept out, swirling and turning, by the torrent of brown water roaring from the watergate.

Micro-bead traffic was frantic with cross-chatter and desperately confused calls. Despite their discipline, the madness of the flight from the water had broken Gaunt’s main force into a ragged jumble, scrambling for their lives.

Soaked through, furious, Gaunt found himself sheltering by some willows in a scummy river bend eighty yards from the watergate. With him were Caffran, Varl, a corporal called Meryn and two others.

Gaunt cursed. Cultists he could fight… World Eaters, daemons… anything. He’d set square with any beast in the cosmos. But seventy million litres of water pressured down through a stone conduit…

“May have lost as many as forty to the flood,” Varl said. He’d dragged Caffran by the tunic from the water and the young man could only retch and cough.

“Get a confirmed figure from the squad leaders! I don’t want rumours!” Gaunt snarled, then keyed his own radio link and spoke into his bead. “Squad leaders! Discipline the radio traffic. I want regroup status! Corbec! Rawne!”

The channels crackled and a more ordered litany of units and casualties reeled in.

“Corbec?” Gaunt asked.

“I’m west of you, sir. On the banks. Got about ninety men with me.” Corbec’s voice hissed back. “Assessment?”

“Tactical? You can forget the watergate, sir. Once they realised they couldn’t hold us out in a straight fight, they blew the sluices. It could run at flood for hours. By then they’ll have the chute exits on the city side sewn up with emplacements, maybe even mines.”

Gaunt cursed again. He wiped a wet hand across his face. They’d been so close and now it was all lost. Voltis would not be his.

“Sir?” Meryn called to him. The corporal was listening to other frequencies on his bead. “Channel eighty. The word has just been given.”

Gaunt crossed to him, adjusting his own setting. “What?”

“The word. ‘Thunderhead’,” Meryn said, confused.

“Source that signal!” Gaunt snapped, “If someone thinks that’s a joke, I’ll—”

He got no further.

The blast was so loud, it almost went beyond sound. The Shockwave mashed into them, chopping the water like a white squall. A kilometre away, a hundred metre section of the curtain wall blew out, ripping a vast wound in the city’s flank, burning, raw, exposed.

The channels went mad with frenzied calls and whoops.

Gaunt looked on in disbelief. Corbec’s voice cut through, person to person on the link.

“It’s Cluggan, sir! The old bastard got his boys into the sanitation outfalls and they managed to dump all of their high-ex into a treatment cistern under the walls. Blew the crap out of the cultists.”

“So I saw, colonel,” Gaunt said wryly.

“I mean it literally, sir,” Corbec crackled innocuously. “It was Cluggan sent the signal. We may have lost the fight to take the watergate, but Cluggan has won us the battle!”

Gaunt slumped back against a tree bole, up to his waist in the stinking river. Around him the men were laughing and cheering.

Exhaustion swept over him. And then he too began to laugh.

General Sturm took breakfast at nine. The stewards served him toasted black bread, sausage and coffee. He read a stack of data-slates as he ate, and the message-caster on the sideboard behind him chattered and dealt out a stream of orbital deployment updates.

“Good news,” said Gilbear, entering with a coffee and a message slate in hand. “The best, in fact. Seems your gamble paid off. These Ghost fellows have taken Voltis. Broken it wide out. Our attack units followed them in en masse. Colonel Maglin says the city will be cleansed by nightfall.”

Sturm dabbed his mouth with a serviette. “Send transmissions of congratulation and encouragement to Maglin and to Gaunt’s mob. Where are they now?”

Gilbear eyed his slate and helped himself to a sausage from the dish. “Seems they’ve pulled out, moving back to Pavis Crossroads along the eastern side of the Bokore Valley.”

Sturm set down his silver cutlery and started to type into his memo-slate. “The greater half of our work here is accomplished, thanks to Gaunt,” he told the intrigued Gilbear. “Now we thank him. Send these orders under extreme encryption to the CO. of the Ketzok Basilisks at Pavis. Without delay, Gilbear.”

Gilbear took the slate. “I
say…”
he began.

Sturm fixed him with a stare. “There are dangerous cultist units fleeing along the eastern side of the valley, aren’t there, Gilbear? Why, you’ve just read me the intelligence reports that confirm it.”

Gilbear began to grin. “So I did, sir.”

Colonel Ortiz snatched the radio from his com-officer and yelled. “This is Ortiz! Yes! I know, but I expressly query the last orders we received. I realise that, but I don’t care! No, I-Listen to me! Oh, general! Yes, I… I see. I see, sir. No, sir. Not for a moment. Of course for the glory of the Emperor. Sir. Ortiz out.”

He sank back against the metal flank of his Basilisk. “Make the guns ready,” he told his officers. “In the name of the Emperor, make them ready.”

The guns had been silent for ten hours. Ortiz hoped he would never hear them blaze again. Dawn frosted the horizon with light. Down in the valley, and in the Blueblood emplacements, victory celebrations continued with abandon.

Dorentz ran over to Ortiz and shook him. “Look, sir!” he babbled. “Look!”

Men were coming up the Metis Road out of the valley towards them, tired men, weary men, filthy men, walking slowly, carrying their dead and wounded. They were a straggled column that disappeared back into the morning mist.

“In the name of mercy…” Ortiz stammered. All around, shocked, silent Basilisk crew were leaping down from their machines and going to meet the battered men, supporting them, helping them, or simply staring in appalled disbelief.

Ortiz walked over to meet the arrival. He saw the tall figure in the long coat, now ragged, striding wearily out of the mist. Ibram Gaunt was half-carrying a young Ghost whose head was a bloody mess of bandages.

He stopped in front of Ortiz and let medics take the wounded Ghost from him.

“I want—” Ortiz began.

Gaunt’s fist silenced him.

“He’s here,” Gilbear said with an insouciant smirk. Sturm got to his feet and straightened his jacket. “Bring him in,” he said.

Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt marched into the study. He stood, glowering at Sturm and his adjutant.

“Gaunt!” Sturm said. “You opened the way for the Royal Volpone. Good show! I hear Chanthar turned a melta on himself.” He paused and absently tapped at a data-slate on his desk. “But then this business with what’s-his-name…?”

“Ortega, sir,” Gilbear said helpfully.

“Ortiz,” Gaunt corrected.

“The Ketzok fellow. Striking a fellow officer. That’s a shooting offence, and you know it, Gaunt. Won’t have it, not in this army. No, sir.”

Gaunt breathed deeply. “Despite knowing our position, and line of retreat, the artillery unit pounded the eastern flanks of the Bokore Valley for six hours straight. They call the phenomenon ‘friendly fire’, but I can tell you when you’re in the target zone with nothing but twigs and dust for cover, it’s nothing like friendly. Host nearly three hundred men, another two hundred injured. Amongst the dead was Sergeant Cluggan, who had led the second prong of my assault and whose actions had actually won us the city.”

“Bad show indeed,” Sturm admitted, “but you must learn to expect this kind of loss, Gaunt. This is war.” He tossed the data-slate aside. “Now this hitting business. Chain of command and all that. My hands are tied. It’s to be a court martial.”

Gaunt was level and unblinking. “If you’re going to shoot me for it, get on with it. I struck Ortiz in the heat of the moment. In hindsight, I realise he was probably following orders. Some damn fool orders from HQ.”

“Now look, you jumped up—” Gilbear began, stepping forward.

“Would you like me to demonstrate what I did to Ortiz?” Gaunt asked the bigger man acidly.

“Silence, both of you!” snarled Sturm. “Commissar Gaunt…
Colonel-
commissar… I take my duty seriously, and that duty is to enforce the discipline and rule of Warmaster Macaroth, and through him the beloved Emperor himself, strictly and absolutely. The Imperial Guard is based upon the towering principles of respect, authority, unswerving loyalty and total obedience. Any aberration, even from a officer of your stature, is to be—
What the hell is that noise?”

He crossed to the window. What he saw made him gawp speechlessly. The Basilisk tank thundering up the drive was dragging part of the main gate after it and scattering gaudcocks and drilling Bluebloods indiscriminately in its path. It slewed to a halt on the front lawn, demolishing an ornamental fountain in a spray of water and stone.

A powerful man in the uniform of a Serpent colonel leapt down and strode for the main entrance to the house. His face was set and mean, swollen with bruises down the left side. A door slammed. There was some shouting, some running footsteps. Another slamming door.

Some moments later, an aide edged into the study, holding out a data-slate for Sturm. “Colonel Ortiz has just filed an incident report. He suggested you saw it at once, sir.”

Gilbear snatched it and read it hastily. “It seems that Major Ortiz wishes to make it clear he was injured by his own weapon’s recoil during the recent bombardment.” Gilbear looked up at Sturm with a nervous laugh. “That means—”

“I know what it means!” Sturm snapped. The general glared at Gaunt, and Gaunt glared right back, unblinking.

“I think you should know,” Gaunt said, low and deadly, “it seems that callous murder can be committed out here in the lawless warzones, and the fact of it can be hidden by the confusion of war. You should bear that in mind, general, sir.”

Sturm was lost for words for a moment. By the time he had remembered to dismiss Gaunt, the commissar had already gone.

“Oh, for Feth’s sake, play something more cheerful,” Corbec said from his troop-ship bunk, flexing his bandaged hand. He was haunted by the ghost of his missing finger. Appropriate, he thought.

In the bunk below him, Milo squeezed the bladder of his pipes and made them let out a moan, a shrill, sad sigh. It echoed around the vast troop bay of the huge, ancient starship, where a thousand Tanith Ghosts were billeted in bunks. The dull rhythm of the warp engines seemed to beat in time to the wailing pipes.

“How about… ‘Euan Fairlow’s March’?” Milo asked.

Above him, Corbec smiled, remembering the old jig, and the nights he heard it played in the taverns of Tanith Magna.

“That would be very fine,” he said.

The energetic skip of the jig began and quickly snaked out across the iron mesh of the deck, between the aisles of bunks, around stacks of kits and camo-cloaks, through the smoky groups where men played cards or drank, over bunks where others slept or secretly gazed at portraits of women and children who were forever lost, and tried to hide their tears.

Enjoying the tune, Corbec looked up from his bunk when he heard footsteps approach down the deck-plates. He jumped up when he saw it was Gaunt. The commissar was dressed as he had first met him, fifty days before, in high-waisted dress breeches with leather braces, a sleeveless undershirt and jack boots.

“Sir!” Corbec said, surprised. The tune faltered, but Gaunt smiled and waved Milo on. “Keep playing, lad. It does us good to hear your merrier tunes.”

Gaunt sat on the edge of Milo’s bunk and looked up at Corbec.

“Voltemand is credited as a victory for the Volpone Bluebloods,” he told his number two frankly. “Because they seized the city. Sturm mentions our participation with commendations in his report. But this one won’t win us our world.”

“Feth take ’em!” spat Corbec.

“There will be other battles. Count on it.”

“I’m afraid I do, sir,” Corbec smiled.

Gaunt bent down and opened the kit-bag he was carrying. He produced a half dozen bottles of sacra.

“In the name of all that’s good and holy!” Corbec said, jumping down from his bunk. “Where—”

“I’m an Imperial commissar,” Gaunt said. “I have pull. Do you have glasses?”

Chuckling, Corbec pulled a stack of old shot glasses from his kit.

“Call Bragg over, I know he likes this stuff,” Gaunt said. “And Varl and Meryn. Mad Larkin. Suth. Young Caffran… hell’s teeth, why not Major Rawne too? And one for the boy. There’s enough to share. Enough for everyone.” He nodded down the companion way to the three bewildered naval officers who were approaching with a trolley laden with wooden crates.