Ghostmaker (8 page)

“What do we drink to?” Corbec asked.

“To Sergeant Cluggan and his boys. To victory. And to the victories we are yet to have.”

“Drink to revenge, too,” Milo said quietly from his bunk, setting down his pipes. Gaunt grinned. “Yes, that too.”

“You know, I’ve got just the treat to go with this fine brew,” Corbec announced, searching his pockets. “Cigars, liquorice flavour…”

He broke off. What he had pulled from his coat pocket had ceased to be cigars a good while before. There were a matted, frayed, waterlogged mess.

Corbec shrugged and grinned, his eyes twinkling as Gaunt and the others laughed.

“Ah, well,” he sighed philosophically, “Some you win…”

Heavy, spoon-billed wading birds flew west across the lines, white against the encroaching dark. In the thickets, the daytime chirruping insects gave up their pitches to the night beetles, the nocturnal crickets, the tick-flies, creatures that spiralled and swam in the light of the stove fires and filled the long hot darkness with their percussion. Other cries rolled in the sweaty air: the whoops and gurgles of unseen climbers and grazers in the swamp. The distant artillery had fallen silent.

Gaunt returned to the command shed just as the grille-shaded watch lights came on, casting their greenish glow downwards into the slush, bull’s-eye covers damping their out-flung light in any direction other than down. No sense in making a long range target of the base. Furry, winged insects the size of chubby hands flew in at once to bounce persistently off the lit grilles with a dull, intermittent thok thok thok.

Gaunt took one last look around the base site, now distinguished only by the points of light: the cook-fires, stoves, watch lights and moving torches. He sighed and went inside.

The command centre was long and low, with a roof of galvanised corrugate and walls of double-ply flak-board. The floor was fresh-cut local wood sawn into planks and treated with vile-smelling lacquer. Blast shutters on the windows stood half-open and the wire screens inside them were already thick with a fuzzy, quivering residue — the mangled bodies of moths and night-bugs which had thrown themselves at the mesh.

Gaunt’s command equipment and his duffel bags of personal effects were set off the floor on blocks of wood. They’d been sat directly on the floor for the first two days until it was discovered that where damp didn’t seep up, burrowing worms did.

He draped his coat on a wire hanger and hung it from a nail on the overhead rafter, then pulled up a camp chair and sat down heavily. Before him, block-mounted, sat a cogitator, a vox-uplink and a flat-screen mimeograph. A tech-priest had spent over an hour diligently intoning prayers of function as he made the sacred machines ready. They were still propped in their half-open wrought-iron casings to protect against the damp, and thick power feeds snaked off from them and ran from clip supports on the rafters, out of a socket-shutter and off to the distant generator. Lights and light images shimmered and flickered on glass plates glossed by condensation. Setting dials throbbed a dull orange. The vox-link made a low-level serpent hiss as it rose and fell through frequencies.

Gaunt leaned forward and idly surveyed the latest information and tactical data coming through from the orbital fleet and other units. A skein of coded runes crossed and blinked on the dark glass.

Quiet as nightfall, Milo entered from the ante-room. He offered a pewter beaker to his commissar. Gaunt took it with a nod, delighting at the beaded coolness of the metal.

“The tech-priests got the cooling units working again just now,” Milo muttered by way of explanation. “For a few minutes. It’s only water, but it’s cold.”

Gaunt nodded his appreciation and sipped. The water was metallic and sharp, but it was deliciously cool.

There was a thump on the outside step, then a quiet knock at the door. Gaunt smiled. The thump had been deliberate, a reassuring advance warning from a man who made no sound if he did not wish to.

“Come in, Mkoll,” Gaunt said.

Mkoll entered, his lined face a little quizzical as if surprised at being recognised in advance. “Patrol report, sir,” he said, standing stiffly in the doorway.

Gaunt gestured him to a seat. Mkoll’s battledress and cloak were drenched in wet mud. Everything including his face was splattered — everything except his lasgun, miraculously clean.

“Let’s have it.”

“Their positions are still far back,” Mkoll began, “beyond the offensive line coded alpha pink. A few forward patrols.”

“Trouble?”

The powerful, wiry man grimaced noncommittally. “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

“I’ve always admired your modesty,” Gaunt said, “but I need to know.”

Mkoll screwed up his mouth and nose. “We took six of them in the western swamps. No losses on our side.”

Gaunt nodded approval. He liked Mkoll, the Tanith’s finest scout. Even in a regiment of stealthers and covert warriors, Mkoll was exceptional. A woodsman back home on lost Tanith, he had reconnaissance skills that had proved themselves time and again to the Ghosts. A ghost amongst ghosts, and modest with it. He never bragged, and it was certain he had more to brag about than most.

Gaunt offered his beaker to the man.

“Thank you, sir, no.” Mkoll looked down at his hands.

“It’s cold,” Gaunt assured him.

“I can tell. But no. I’d rather go without something I could get used to.”

Gaunt shrugged and sipped again. “So they’re not moving?”

“Not yet. We sighted a… I’m not sure what it was, an old ruin of some kind.” Mkoll rose and pointed to a position on the wall chart. “Around here, far as I can tell. Could be nothing, but I’d like to follow it through with a survey in the morning.”

“An enemy position?”

“No, sir. Something… that was already here.”

“You’re right: deserves a look. In the morning then,” Gaunt agreed. “If that’ll be all, sir?”

“Dismissed, Mkoll.”

“I’ll never get the measure of him,” Gaunt said to Milo after Mkoll had left. “Quietest man I’ve ever known.”

“That’s what he does, isn’t it, sir?” Milo said. “What?”

“Quiet.”

All around there was a hushing sound, as if the whole world wanted to silence him.

Mkoll bellied in low amid the forest of ferns, trying to pick through the oceanic rushing sound they made as the wind stirred them. The fern growth in that part of Ramillies 268-43, flourishing on the thin, ashy soils of the long-cold volcanic slopes, was feathery and fibrous, mottled stalks rough as cane rising three man-heights into swaying multi-part fronds as white as water-ice.

They reminded him of the nal-wood forests back home, when there was still a back home, the nal-woods in winter, when he’d gone out logging and hunting. Frost had crusted the evergreen needles on the sighing trees then until they had tinkled like wind chimes.

Here, now, there was only the sigh, the motion of the dry ferns and the clogging dust that got into every pore and rasped the soft tissue at the back of the throat. The sunlight was bright and harsh, stabbing down through the pale, spare air out of a sky translucent blue. It made a striated web out of the ground cover under the ferns — stark sun-splashes and jagged shadows of blackness.

He crept forward twenty metres into a break of skeleton brush. His lower legs were already double-wrapped with chain-cloth to protect against the shredding thorns. He had his lasgun held to his chest on a tightly cinched strap to keep it clear of the dust but, every ten minutes or so, he checked its moving parts and cleared the dust, fern-fibres, twig-shreds and burrs that accumulated constantly.

Several cracks made him turn and freeze, sliding his gun into a firing grip between smooth, dry palms. Something was moving through the thicket to his left, cracking the occasional spent thorn underfoot.

To be fair, they were moving with extreme and trained stealth, but still their progress sounded like a careless march to Mkoll’s acute hearing.

Mkoll drew his knife, its long silver blade deliberately dulled with ash. He backed into a thorn stalk and moulded his body to the kinking plant. Two steps, one.

He swung out, only pulling back his blade at the last moment.

Trooper Dewr cried out and fell backwards, splintering dry stalks as he dropped. Mkoll was on top of him in a second, pinning his arms and pushing the blade against his neck.

“Sacred Feth! You could’ve killed me!” Dewr barked agitatedly.

“Yes, I could,” said Mkoll, a whisper.

He relaxed his grip, rolled off and let the man rise.

“So could anything else out here, noise you were making.”

“I…” Dewr dropped his voice suddenly. “Are we alone?”

Mkoll didn’t answer. Chances were, if anything else was out here, it would have heard Dewr’s fall too.

“I didn’t mean anything,” Dewr began hoarsely, wincing as he plucked out the thorns he had fallen on.

Mkoll was scanning around, his gun ready. “What the feth did they teach you during basic?” he whispered. “You’re meant to be a scout!”

Dewr didn’t reply. All the scouts knew Mkoll’s exacting standards, and knew just as well how they all failed to meet them. Dewr felt angry, in fact. During basic training, before that as a hunter in the southern gameland of Tanith Attica, he’d been reckoned as a good tracker. That was why they had selected him for the scout unit when the regiment mustered, for feth’s sake! And this old bastard made him feel like a fool, a clumsy fool!

Wordlessly, ignoring the stare he knew Dewr was boring into the back of his head, Mkoll signalled an advance, heading down the slope into the fern-choked vale.

The Tanith had arrived on Ramillies two weeks before, just in time to miss the main action. The Adeptus Astartes had cleaned out and secured the four enemy strongholds, banishing Chaos from the world. The Ghosts had assembled on the low plains near one burning fortress, seeing Space Marines, threatening bulks in the smoky distance like the giants of myth, piling the ragged corpses of slain cultists onto pyres. The air had been thick with filthy char.

It seemed some small components of the enemy had fled the defeat, making into the fern forests in the north, too small and insignificant for the glorious Space Marines to waste time upon. The commissar was charged with a search and destroy detail. The Ghosts had advanced into the low hills and the dense forestation, to smoke out the last of the foe.

There were a few early successes: enclaves of cultists, some well-armed, dug into bolt-holes and lodges, making a last stand. Then, after a week, as they reached the colder, higher plateaux and the real thickness of the fern-cover, a working pattern developed. Mkoll would plan recon sweeps each day, deploying a couple of dozen scouts in a wide fan into the thickets. They would quarter each area and report back, signalling in the main Ghost forces if contact was made.

Perhaps they had become lazy, complacent. Major Rawne averred that they had silenced the last of the enemy and were now wasting their time and patience cutting deeper and deeper into the lonely territories of the hinterland. The commissar himself seemed devoted to discharging the task properly, but even he had doubled the reach and range of the scout sweeps. Another few days and they would quit, he had told Mkoll.

This day, this high cold windy day, with the ever present whisper of the ferns, the scouts had gone deeper and wider into the hills. There had been no contact with anything for two whole sweeps. Mkoll sensed that less dedicated troopers like Dewr were getting slack with the routine.

But he himself had seen things that kept him sharp and made him determined to press on. Things he had reported to Gaunt to convince him to work the forests a little longer: broken paths in the vegetation; trampled areas; torn, apparently random trails in the underbrush. There was something still out here.

They crossed the valley floor and came up the shaded side, where the ferns listed restlessly, like shadow-fans. Every dozen or so steps, Dewr’s feet cracked a thorn or a seed case, or chinked a rock, no matter how delicately he walked. He cursed every sound. He was determined to prove his ability to Mkoll. And he had no clue how Mkoll moved so silently, like he was floating.

The ferns hissed in the wind.

Mkoll stopped to check his compact chart and referred his eyes to sun and compass. Within a quarter of an hour their circuit should bring them into contact with Rafel and Waed, on a mirror sweep towards them.

Mkoll suddenly held up a hand and Dewr stopped sharp. The scout sergeant fanned his fingers twice to indicate Dewr should cover, and the other slid in low beside a thick fern stem, knelt and raised his lasgun. There was dust on the exchanger and he wiped it off. Dust in his eyes too, and he wiped them. He braced and then took aim, rolling it left and right as Mkoll advanced.

Mkoll dropped down another few metres and found another torn trail in the fem. As wide as three men walking abreast, ferns uprooted or snapped and trampled. Mkoll gingerly touched one sappy, broken twist of stalk. It was as thick as his thigh, and the bark was tough as iron. He could not have severed it this clean even with a wood axe. He checked the ground. Trample marks, deep and wide, like giant footsteps. The trail snaked away both ahead and behind as far as he could see, uneven, weaving. Mkoll raised three fingers and circled them. Dewr advanced to join him.

The younger man looked at the trail, questions in his mouth, but the look in Mkoll’s eyes told him not to ask them. Not to say anything. There was no sound at all except the hissing of the fronds. Dewr knelt and looked at the trail for himself. Something… someone… big, moving blindly. His fingers touched something buried in the ashy soil and he plucked it out. A chunk of blackened metal, part of the rim of something, large as a cupped hand. He held it out to Mkoll. The sergeant took it with genuine interest, studied it, and tucked it into his thigh pouch. He nodded a firm acknowledgement to Dewr for his sharp eyes. Dewr felt greater pride in that fleeting moment Than he had ever done in his life before. Or would again.

They moved on, down the trail line, following the bent-forward fronds which indicated the direction of motion. After sixty metres, the trail veered uphill. Mkoll stopped and wiped his weapon again.