Ghostmaker

by Dan Abnett

  He beat down the fire then rolled over to yank the debris from his ankle. It was the shattered handle of his vehicle's auto-gun return, he realised. The pain was immense. He pulled at it and passed out momentarily. Coming to, he realised that the shrapnel wasn't going to come free from the bones of his foot without a surgeon. He chewed down a handful of painkillers, and as the heady high smacked into his brain, he rolled over and began firing his lasgun into the dune crest behind him.

  Wheln blasted away from his vehicle's turret next to Brostin, who had ditched his flamer for a lasrifle. Bandits were running at them from a scoop of low-lying desert, and they shot everything that moved.

  Mkendrik realised his guns were out as the last of the belt-feed whickered through the slot and the weapons coughed dry. Bandit troops were all over him, charging up to take his machine. He pulled out his laspistol and shot the first one through the head, gutting the second and blowing a knee off the third. Then he took a glancing wound in the left shoulder that turned him sideways and knocked him to the deck. There was a roaring sound.

  Meryn's bike came over the rise in a puff of dust, landing hard, Caffran hammering the enemy with his guns. Meryn slewed to the left as Caffran played the cannons around, exploding most of the enemy who were in eye-shot. The others scrambled for cover.

  'Come aboard!' Meryn shouted over the roar of his engine and Mkendrik leapt onto the flat-bed next to Caffran. Meryn gunned the engine and they hammered straight at the enemy lines.

  Tiring from the back of his vehicle, Logris, one of Mkoll's elite scout brigade, realised his driver was losing it. Fulke was crying out, screaming, resisting the hammer of weaponsfire. He slewed the bike around, away from the action.

  'Pull us back around! The war's over there!' Logris bellowed Fulke said something absurd and gunned the motor of the outrider towards the comparative safety of the convoy circle. Logris climbed forward over the ammo boxes and feeder-cables strewn across the back-platform of the bike. He came upon the whimpering Fulke from behind and slammed his head sideways into the armour panel of the pilot's door. The bike shuddered to a sidelong halt as Fulke went limp.

  Logris spat on the driver. 'Coward,' he said, then turned back. Enemy troops were scurrying across the cracked dust-land towards him. He took out his lasgun and armed it.

  'Let's go,' he said to them, though they couldn't hear.

  Bragg pulled back from the window and released his finger on the trigger assembly. 'What?' Tuvant asked.

  'Get out,' Bragg said suddenly. 'You and Milloom, get out of the cab and back onto the trailer.'

  'Why?'

  'Tire-patterns…'

  'What?'

  Bragg turned and cursed at the Caligulan driver. 'Tire-patterns! Tire-patterns! They're concentrating their fire on the tractor units. It's the freight they want! If you want to be safe, get into the sections they don't dare shoot at!'

  Tuvant and Milloom hurried back through the communicating door into the freight section. Bragg wiped his brow. His hand was rich with sweat and soot. Over the vox-link, he ordered all his crews to do the same. The bandits want this cargo… and so, Throne help me, they'll be less sure of shooting at us when we're part of it.

  He yanked his autocannons off the sill and dragged them and the ammo boxes out onto the top of the freight unit.

  'We're gonna die here!'Tuvant said, looking out from the top of the freight unit at the hundreds of bandit troopers who were advancing on their circle of machines.

  'No, we're not,' Bragg told him.

  'You're mad!' spat Tuvant. 'We're surrounded by them! Thousands of them! They'll pick us off, every last man!' Bragg sighed and closed his eyes.

  The Maurader bombers came low over the ridge, annihilating the enemy with their belly-slung payloads.

  'There are bandits… hiding out there in the deadlands, impossible to target.'Bragg smiled, repeating what Gaunt had told him. 'Unless there is something to draw them out and unify them. Something like… this convoy.'

  Tuvant looked at the huge ghost in disbelief. 'We were bait?'

  'Yes.'

  'Kec you for using us!'

  'I'm sorry. It was the colonel-commmissar's idea.'

  Tuvant sagged down onto the freighter-top walkway.

  Bragg hunkered next to him. Around them, sheets of incendiary bombs and phosphor fire scorched the hills. The Imperial fighter-bombers shattered the air as they went supersonic and crossed the low hills to pull around for another massacre run.

  'Tuvant?'

  Tuvant looked round at the giant.

  'We were bait, but we still have a purpose. We'll get this convoy through. Calphernia will rejoice, just like I said. It's just the colonel-commissar—'

  Tuvant turned, eyes red. 'I'm getting kec tired of hearing that title!'

  'His name's Gaunt. A good man. General Thoth ordered him to supervise the relief work here on your world. He knew that couldn't happen all the while the terrorists and bandit-clans were out here. So he set a lure. A lure of fat, tasty freight trucks bound for Calphernia.'

  'Great.'

  'We got them all in one place so that the Navy air-wing could dispose of them. Be happy, man! We've won a great victory here!'

  Tuvant looked up at him. His face was pale. 'All I know is I've been used as bait by your colonel-commissar. You knew that all along.'

  Bragg sat back against the guard rail, smelling the acid-rich reek of the burning napalm. 'Yes. The bandits aren't working blind, you know. Hive workers in Aurelian are tipping them off as to the movement of supply convoys. Why else do you think the colonel-commissar put me in charge of this run?'

  Tuvant blinked at him, uncertain.

  Bragg patted his vast chest with huge hands. 'I'm big… I must be stupid. No brain. The sort of – what was it again? – ''kec'' who would drive the convoy into trouble and then circle it in a defense position for easy pickings. The sort of idiot who was likely to deliver the convoy right into the hands of the bandits.'

  'Are you telling me you were part of the lure too?'

  The sweet part, the part they couldn't resist. The part the workers on the inside would vox to their bandit friends about. Convoy's coming, boys and there's an idiot in charge. Right, Milloom?'

  Milloom glared back at them from his place against the rail. 'Kec you!'

  Bragg shook his great head. He held up a data-slate. 'Friend of mine, Trooper Raglon… Comms-Officer Raglon, was monitoring your cipher traffic. I've got you here, tipping off your bandit friends as to the time, schedule, make-up and strength of this convoy. Colonel-Commissar Gaunt told me to do it.'

  'Milloom?' Tuvant stammered.

  A compact auto-pistol was suddenly in Milloom's hand as he leapt up. 'Kec you, Guard filth!'

  Bragg was up in an instant, shielding Tuvant and swinging a massive fist at Milloom.

  The gun went off. There was a sickening gristle-crack of impact. The shot went wild.

  His face mashed beyond recognition, Tlewn Milloom tumbled off the walkway of the freight unit and was dead before his body snapped on the hard-packed desert twenty metres below.

  Bragg turned back to Tuvant and helped him up. There was blood on his bulky knuckles. Behind them, the sky was washed with heat-wash and cinder-smog from the bombing runs.

  'He was a traitor. And a coward,' Bragg explained to Tuvant.

  'Colonel-Commmissar Gaunt told you that, right?'

  'No, I worked that out all by myself. Now, I believe we have a date with Calphernia Hive.'

  A rusty dawn split the sky over Monthax. The air reminded Gaunt of the tall windows at the Schola Progenium back on Ignatius Cardinal where he had been reared and trained years ago, after his father's death. Smoky, like glass, fading through scattered panels of reds and ochres to the frostier tones of mauve and purple high above where the stars still twinkled. All it lacked was the lead-edged figure of some champion of the Imperium, some holy sai
nt frozen in an attitude of victory over the piled heads of the slain.

  For a moment, he thought he heard the plainsong of the Schola choir, singing the dawn celebrant as the star Ignatius rose. But he shook himself. He was mistaken. Across the long daybreak shadows that laced the stinking, muddy trench lines, he heard men singing a rougher, more brutal Guard anthem as they set their cooking fires and made breakfast. Milo was amongst them, edging the throaty music of the men's husky, dreamy voices with silvery notes from a slender reed-pipe.

  Just as much an offering, just as celebrational for the providence of a new day, safe-delivered from night, Emperor be thanked. Beyond the lines, the unyielding jungles steamed as the heat of the rising sun boiled the damp out of them. Mist coated the dark trees. In that darkness of foliage and water and mud and flies, what miseries awaited the Imperial Guard?

  Near to him, one man wasn't singing. Major Rawne sat back on a folded bedroll set by the fire before his tent. He was shaving, using a bowl of hot water, a broken mirrored tile and the razor edge of his silver Tanith knife. He had lathered with a tiny hunk of soap and Gaunt could hear the scratch of the blade against the bristles of his cheek and throat.

  The commissar found himself almost hypnotised by the practised, meticulous motions; the way Rawne held the skin of his cheek taut with his free hand as he looked sidelong into the propped mirror, drew the knife in a short scrape and then rattled it clean in the shallow bowl.

  A knife against a knife, Gaunt thought. He always saw Rawne's face as a thin dagger, sleek and handsome. A dagger… or a snake, perhaps.

  Both would be appropriate. Gaunt admired Rawne's abilities, and indeed even his ruthlessness. But there was no love lost. He wondered how many throats had been opened by the knife Rawne now stroked delicately across his own vulnerable flesh. Watching him shave, without so much as a nick, it emphasised the dangerous control of the tall, slender man. Precise, perfect, the tiny difference between a clean shave and killing stroke.

  And with that knife in particular…

  Rawne looked up and caught Gaunt's eye. He made no other sign of recognition and continued with his work. But Gaunt knew how dearly Rawne would love to rattle that blade clean of soap-foam and bristles, and plunge it into his heart.

  Or turn into a serpent and bite him.

  Gaunt turned away. He would always have to watch his back against Rawne. Always, forever. It was the way of things. Ibram Gaunt had a billion enemies out there, but the bitterest was at his side, amongst his own, waiting for the moment to come where he could make a ghost of Gaunt.

  SEVEN

  PERMAFROST

  There is a valley on Typhon Eight where frozen screams saw at the air, day and night, through eternity. The valley is a glacial cleft, its sheer sides nine kilometres deep. Where the starlight catches the top flanks, the ancient ice is so white, the eye can only take it briefly. Deeper, as it plunges, the ice becomes translucent blue, mauve, then crimson. Algae forms, frozen billions of years before into the rock-ice, stain it with their dyes and fluids.

  It is the wind that screams, shredded and sliced by the razor-edged outcrops of ice along the valley crest, twisted and amplified by the gorge. Typhon Eight is an ice moon, its surface a crust of frozen water sometimes a hundred kilometres deep. Below that, boiling oceans of hydrocarbons pulse with the tidal rhythms of the planetoid's living core.

  The screaming loud in his ears, Rawne rolled and slipped down a slope of scarlet ice at the bottom of the valley. The piercing wind raked at him, trying to steal his camo-cloak. Despite the cloak and his gloves and the insulation of his cold-weather fatigues, he was numb and leaden. The feeling – or the lack of feeling – replaced the rawness of an hour before and was no more welcome. He lay still, fumbling with his lasgun.

  Ice crystals formed on the metal of the weapon. He could barely hold it.

  More shots came his way. Rawne had become used to the peculiar sound the impacts made in this place: a wet popping and a sizzle as superheated rounds punched into ice which melted around them and refroze. Blackened wounds, perfect circles, dotted the red ice sheet around him. He slithered into a deeper depression in the icescape and held himself low. More shots, low and desperate, one buzzing a hand's breadth over his head.

  Then silence, or as close to silence as the perpetual screaming would allow. He rolled onto his back and, with his chin on his chest, looked back along the valley the way he had come. There was no sign of anyone or anything, except a crumpled black shape one hundred metres behind him that he knew was Trooper Nylat.

  Dead. They were all dead, and he was the last.

  He wriggled up and took a sight. The lens of the lasgun spotter was cracked and filmed with ice, ice which had formed from the moisture of his own eye. He pulled back, cursing. A day before, Trooper Malhoon had frozen his eyeball to his sight while spotting for targets on the ice floes. He could still hear the man's screams as they had separated him from his weapon.

  He fired a triple salvo blind, wayward, into the dark of the gorge. In answer, a dozen guns opened up on him, and blew up an artificial blizzard in the ice-dust.

  Caves: low, arched, steepled defiles in the ice-cliff wall carved by the slow shift of the crust. Short of breath and with a shrapnel wound stinging his thigh, Rawne half-fell into the nearest and lay on his face until the cold ache of the ice made him roll over. It abruptly seemed breathlessly hot in the cave. Rawne realised that it was because he was suddenly shielded from the slicing wind. Though only a few degrees above zero in the ice cave, out of the wind it felt almost tropical in there. He pulled off his cloak and his gloves and, after a moment, his insulated vest too. He shuddered, damp and too hot, sweat built up under his insulating garments trickling like sauna moisture off his back.

  He checked his leg. There was a hole in his fatigues at mid-thigh and it looked like he had been burnt by a melta. Then he realised the blood had not clotted on the flesh wound. It had frozen. He snapped the black ice off his flesh and, wine ing as the action pinched, looked at the oozing wet gash in his leg.

  Not for the first time in his military career and certainly not for the last, he cursed the name of Ibram Gaunt.

  Rawne reached for his medi-pouch and pulled it open. He took the flesh clamps out and worked with them as the medic, Dorden, had instructed them all during Foundation Training. But the wire clamps were frozen and his numb fingers managed little more than to ping them off across the floor instead of opening them.

  It took him an age to extract a needle from the sterile papei packets. He dropped four or five before he grasped one, and then set it between his teeth as he tried to find the loose end of the surgical thread.

  Finally, it was pinched between unfeeling fingers. He took the needle and tried to thread it. He'd have had more chance making a bull's-eye on a target ten kilometres away with a wrong-sighted lasgun. After twenty attempts, he put the needle back between his teeth and tried to twist together the now frayed ends of the thread.

  Something hit him hard from behind, smashing him head first into the snow floor.

  He lay on his face, fazed, slowly becoming aware of the snorting and sniffling behind him. His tongue hurt and his mouth was full of blood which drooled out and frosted down into the ice. A big shape was moving behind him.

  He turned his head slowly and dared to take a look. Circumspect, sidelong, as one might do into a mirror whilst shaving.

  The ork was nearly three metres tall and almost as wide. Impossibly large muscles corded its shoulders and arms and stinking furs swaddled its bulk. Its head was huge, twice the size of a human's, thrust forward and seated on the vast lower jaw. Blackened teeth stuck like chisel blades out of the rotten gums. He couldn't see the eyes. He could smell the reeking breath, the corrosive saliva that spattered and dripped from the half-open mouth.

  Playing dead, he watched as it toyed with his medi-pouch, rooting through the contents with hands big enough to break a human throat like a tw
ig. It took out a roll of gauze and bit it munching and then spitting out.

  It's hungry, thought Rawne, and his guts iced and tightened at the idea.

  Suddenly, it moved to him, pulling him up by the hair and jerking him back like a puppet, rummaging in his clothing with the other hand for food pouches, rations, munitions.

  Blood spilled out of Rawne's jerked-open mouth, spattering down his chest. He tried to remain limp, but his left hand crept down towards the knife sheathed at his waist. The huge ork jerked and twisted him like a sack of bones, sniffing and gurgling behind his ear, hot breath on Rawne's neck, rancid smell in his nose.

  Rawne found his knife and slid it out. He must have tensed doing so because the ork froze and then muttered something in its arcane tongue. Rawne moved to swing his knife, but the ork's huge paw was suddenly around his blade-hand, crushing it and slamming it into the icy wall beside them. Two slams and Rawne's hand gave up. The Tanith dagger whipped away.

  The ork roared, a guttural bellow that deafened Rawne and shook his diaphragm. Holding him from behind, it bear-hugged, pulling its arms apart, determined to rip his torso in two. Rawne screamed, fighting futilely at the greater strength, tearing his arms free. He was dead, he knew that. Death was a moment away.

  Pain made him reach into his mouth, to pull at whatever throbbed in his tongue. He found the end of the surgical needle, protruding from the flesh of his tongue. He yanked it out. A shockingly long spurt of blood followed it. Then he stabbed back behind his head with the little sliver of metal.

  The ork screamed and dropped him. Rawne landed, spitting and coughing blood from his pulsing tongue. The ork was flailing around the cave wildly, holding one eye that dribbled with clear fluid and stained ichor. The noise of its rage was deafening in the ice-hole.