Ghostmaker

by Dan Abnett

  They came out of the night shadows of the valley onto the wide expanse of the ice floe. Sunlight seared them and Gaunt and Rawne were blind for a moment, even after they pulled their glare goggles down.

  Ahead was the ice sea. White, scarlet, purple, green in patches, the ice was scalloped and curled like foam. Thousands of kilometres of open, frozen sea, spread out to a horizon where it met the blackness of space. The sunlight was a hostile white menace.

  The sea and all its waves had frozen as if in mid-ebb, and now the sled bounced and flew, rose and fell, across the dimpled peaks of breakers that had frozen a millennium before. The motor sled over-rewed each time it left the ground and kicked ice chunks each time it landed. Gaunt could barely control the machine as the drive wheels and slithering skids kissed ice again. Rawne had thought about firing back at the ork machines closing on them, but the bumpy ride had thrown him to the greasy deck and it was all he could do to cling on and lie flat. Face to the metal deck-boarding, he saw the punctures for the first time. Shrapnel holes, from the exploding bolter drums. There was a stink of oil rising from them. He crawled, hand over hand, to the tail gate as the sled jumped and crashed, and saw a staining line of brown marking their wake.

  He turned and yelled. 'We're bleeding fuel! The tank is punctured!'

  Gaunt cursed. Now he understood what one of the gauges – the one with the rapidly dipping needle – really meant.

  The ork pursuit was closing. Heavy bolter rounds and other explosive munitions rained down around them, blowing geysers of ice and steam up from the frozen sea.

  Gaunt realised his naked, glove-less hands were beginning to freeze solid around the steering grips. The pain brought tears to his eyes, tears which froze behind his goggles and blurred his vision, biting his cheeks.

  Two over-shot projectiles from the orks brought bigger explosions to the left of them. Sprays of glutinous, boiling liquid erupted far into the air from their impacts. Gaunt saw that the rushing landscape ahead of them was duller blue, more like frosted glass, cracked and crazed.

  They made the next rise. Then the engine coughed, spluttered, died. They slid sideways in a long, wide deceleration, ice gouged up by Gaunt's desperate use of the anchor. He kicked the starter. The engine flared once, then died forever in a cough of stinking oil smoke. Dry rotors and cylinders burst and ground.

  The ork machines were a hundred metres behind them. They could hear them whooping in victory. For the first time, Rawne realised that the wind was no longer screaming now they were out of the valley.

  Gaunt clambered out of the cockpit. 'Tube-charges, Rawne!' he bawled.

  'What?'

  Gaunt pointed to where other wide shots from their pursuers dug steaming vents from the glassy ice.

  'The ice is thin here. We're riding over a thin skin. The living ocean is right below us.'

  Another shot whinnied down and exploded the steering section of the sled where Gaunt had just been sitting. 'Now!'

  Rawne understood the commissar's idea just as suddenly as he recognised the insanity of it. But the orks were only fifty paces away. Rawne realised the desperation too.

  He had twelve stick mines in his satchel and he pulled them all out, handing half to Gaunt. He kicked the glass off one of the vehicle's lamps and used the white-hot filament to light the fuses. The two humans took three in each hand and hurled them as far and as hard as they could, scattering them wide.

  Twelve huge explosions, each big enough to kill a tank. They split the world apart. But more particularly, they burst and shattered the ice. The steaming hydrocarbon sea, so close beneath, rushed up to plume and boil and froth in the air.

  One ork machine cartwheeled, an explosion taking it over It tore itself and its occupants into fragments as it landed on ice that was beginning to separate and fracture in huge bob bing sections. Another dodged the rain of blasts and flew straight off the edge of an ice chunk into the sea, where it vaporised and burned. The last stopped short, the riders bellowing, just missing a gap in the ice. Then the ice chunk it sat on collapsed and they all dropped shrieking into the frothing, flaming liquid.

  The ice was coming apart, fracturing into chunks that burned and steamed as the rising ocean, locked in for so many thousands of years, welled up and conquered the surface. On the back of their dead machine, Gaunt and Rawne leapt and yelled in triumph until they realised the ice collapse was spreading their way fast.

  The ocean fizzed and thrashed up around their sled runners and the motor-sled dipped suddenly. Gaunt jumped clear onto a nearby iceberg, newly formed and sizzling in the hideous liquid.

  He held out his hand. Rawne jumped after him, grabbing Gaunt's hand, allowing himself to be pulled clear as their ruined machine slid backwards into the liquid and exploded.

  'We can't stay here,' Gaunt began. It was true. Their iceberg was rocking and dissolving like an ice cube in hot water. They leapt off it to the next, and then the next, hoping that the fractured sections of ice would remain intact long enough for them to reach some kind of shore. Vapours gasped and billowed around them.

  On the fourth, Rawne slipped and Gaunt caught him just centimetres from the frothing water.

  They made the next floe and Rawne moved ahead. He heard a cry behind him and turned to see the ice plate upending and Gaunt sliding backwards on his belly, clawing the surface as he slipped down towards the seething ocean of hydrocarbons.

  He could let him die. Rawne knew that. No one would know. No one would ever find the body. And even if they did… Besides, he couldn't reach him.

  Rawne pulled out his knife and hurled it. It stuck fast, blade down, in the tilting ice just above Gaunt's hand and gave the commissar a grip. Gaunt pulled himself up on the dagger and then got his foot braced on it until he could reach up and take Rawne's hand. The major hauled him up high enough for the pair to make a safe jump to the next berg. This was larger, more solid. They clung to it, side by side, panting and out of strength.

  The ice chunk behind them fell back into the ocean, taking Rawne's silver dagger with it.

  They sat together on top of the iceberg for six hours. Around them, the ocean refroze and its seething hiss died away. But they could go nowhere. The reforming ice skin was but a few centimetres thick – thick enough to enclose the lethal liquid but not so hard as to bear weight. The distress beacon from Gaunt's pack blinked and sighed behind them on the top of the ice chunk.

  'I owe you,' Gaunt said at last.

  Rawne shook his head. 'I don't want that.'

  'You pulled me up there. Saved me. I owe you for that. And frankly, I'm surprised. I know you'd like to see me dead and this was an opportunity that spared your hands from blood.'

  Rawne turned to look at Gaunt, his face half-lit by the dwindling starlight. His cheeks and chin seemed to catch the light more like a dagger now than ever before. And his eyes were hooded like a snake's.

  'One day, I will kill you, Gaunt,' he said simply. 'I owe it to Tanith. To myself. But I'm no murderer and I respect honour. You saved me from that greenskin in the cave and so I owed you.'

  'I would do as much for any man in my command.'

  'Precisely. You may think I'm a malcontent, but I stay loyal to the Emperor and the Guard always. I owed you and, though I hate myself for it, I repaid. Now we're even.'

  'Even,' Gaunt murmured, measuring the word softly in his mouth. 'Or level, perhaps.'

  Rawne smiled. The day will come, Ibram Gaunt. But it will be on equal terms. Level terms, as you put it. I will kill you, and I will rejoice in it. But now is not the time.'

  'Thank you for being so forthright, Rawne.'Gaunt pulled out his Tanith knife, the knife given to him by Corbec when they first mustered for war.

  Rawne tensed, jerking back. But Gaunt held it out to him, hilt first.

  'You lost yours. I know any Tanith would be incomplete without a long blade at his hip.'

  Rawne took the knife. Me held it in his hands for a second, spun
it with deft fingers, and then slid it into his empty belt sheath.

  'Do with it as you see fit,' Gaunt said, turning his back on Rawne.

  'I will… one of these days,' replied Major Elim Rawne.

  The Infirmary lay well back from the main embankment defence here on Monthax. Like Gaunt's modular hut, it was raised out of the soupy ground on stacks. Long, swoop-roofed, the Infirmary's wall planking was washed an arsenic green, while the roof was black with bitumen. Grey blast-curtains protected the doors and window hatches, and bunches of pipes and cables carried in air from the scrubbers and power from the chattering turbine behind the place. Symbols of the Imperium, and of the medical corps, were stencilled on the walls, for all that Chaos would notice them if they stormed over the bulwark. Gaunt climbed up a metal ladder next to the rush-ramp for stretcher parties, and pushed inside through the screens and heavy curtaining.

  Inside he found a paradise and a surprise. It was by far the coolest and most fragrant place in the camp, probably the coolest, most fragrant place on Monthax itself. Sweet odours of sap rose from the fresh timber of the floor and the clean rush matting. There was a scent of antiseptic fluids, rubbing alcohol and some purifying incense that burned in a bowl next to the small shrine set near the western end. The forty beds were made up and empty. Pale, artificial light shone from gauze-hooded lamps.

  Gaunt wandered the length of the ward and let himself through a screen door at the end. There, access led off into storerooms, latrines, a small operating theatre, and the Chief Medical Officer's quarters. Dorden wasn't in his little, tidy office, but Gaunt saw his distinctive handiwork in the careful arrangement of medical texts, chart folders, and the labels-front regimentation of the flasks and bottles in the locked dispensary cabinet.

  The medic was in the operating theatre, polishing the stain less-steel surface and blood drains of the theatre table. Gleaming surgical tools, an autoclave and a ressussitrex unit sat in corners.

  'Commissar Gaunt!' Dorden looked up in surprise. 'Can I help you?'

  'As you were, just a routine walkabout. Anything to report, any problems?'

  Dorden stood up straight, balling the polishing cloth in his hands and dropping it into a ceramic bowl of disinfectant. 'Not one, sir. Come to inspect the place?'

  'Certainly an improvement on the last few facilities you've had to work with.'

  Dorden smiled. He was a small, elderly man with a trimmed grey beard and genial eyes that had seen more pain than they deserved. 'It's empty yet.'

  'I admit that surprised me when I came in. So used to seeing your places overflowing with wounded, Emperor spare us.'

  'Give it time,' Dorden said, ominously. 'It unnerves me, I have to say. Seeing all those empty beds. I praise the Golden Throne I'm idle, but idleness doesn't suit me. Must've polished and swept the place a dozen times already.'

  'If that's the worst work you have here on Monthax, we may all give thanks.'

  'May we all indeed. Can I offer a cup of caffeine? I was about to light the stove.'

  'Perhaps later, when I come back this way. I have to inspect the magazines. There are stirrings beyond us.'

  'So I heard last night. Later then, sir.'

  Gaunt nodded and left. He doubted he'd have time to stop by later, and he doubted too that this little paradise would remain unsullied much longer.

  Dorden watched the commissar leave, and stood for a while longer surveying the clean ward with its empty cots. Like Gaunt, he had no illusions as to the horror-hole this place would become. It was inevitable.

  He closed his eyes, and for a moment he could see the floor matting drenched in black blood; the soiled sheets; the moaning, screaming faces. And the silent ones.

  His nostrils seemed to detect blood and burned flesh for a second, but it was just the incense.

  Just the incense.

  EIGHT

  BLOOD OATH

  The fallen men, scattered on the roadway and across the low, muddy fields of Nacedon, looked like they were wearing black mail armour. But they weren't. The meat-flies were busy. They covered the flesh like seething black links of armour. They glittered furiously, moving like a single thing. 'Medic!'

  Tolin Dorden looked away from the flies. The afternoon sky lay wide and misty over the low, flat fens. Trackways and field boundaries were marked with dykes and hedge ways, all of them ruined and overrun with razor-posts, concertina wire and churned tank paths. The mist smelled of thermite powder.

  'Medic!' The call again. Sharp and insistent, from down the roadway. Slowly, Dorden turned and trudged from the gutter of the road where, for a hundred metres, more corpses lay twisted and crumpled and coated in flies.

  He advanced towards the buildings, feth, but he'd seen enough of this war now, no matter what the world. He was tired and he was spent. Sixty years old, older by twenty years than any of the other Ghosts. He was weary: weary of the death, the fighting, weary of the young bodies he had to patch back together. Weary, too, of being regarded as a father by so many men who had lost their own at the fall of Tanith.

  Smoke clogged the late afternoon sky across the low fields. He approached the old red-brick buildings with their blown-out windows and crumpled walls. It had been a farm complex once, before the invasion. A feudal estate with a main house, outbuildings and barns. Agricultural machinery lay rusting and broken in waterlogged swine pens. A wide trench gully and a double fence of seared flak-boards topped with more spools of wire enclosed the complex in a horseshoe, with the northern side, the one that faced away from the frontline, open. Ghosts stood point all around, weapons ready. Trooper Brostin nodded him inside.

  Dorden passed a sandbagged gunnery post from which the weapon had been hastily removed and entered the first of the buildings, the main house, through a doorway that had been shot out of the brick by sustained las-fire. More flies, billowing in clouds in the afternoon sunlight. The smell of death he was so, so used to. And other smells: antiseptic, blood, waste.

  Dorden stepped across a tiled floor. Half the tiles were broken, littered with glass and pools of oil that shimmered rainbow colours. Corbec loomed out of the shadows nearby, shaking his weary head. 'Doc,' he acknowledged.

  'Colonel.'

  'Field hospital…' Corbec said, gesturing around himself. Dorden already knew as much. 'Anyone alive?'

  'That's why I called for you.'

  Corbec led him through to a vaulted hallway. The various stenches were stronger in here. Perhaps five dozen men lay on pallet beds in the chamber, half-lit by pallid yellow sunlight that streaked down through shattered lights in the sloping roof. Dorden walked the length of the room and then back.

  'Why have they been left here?' he asked.

  Corbec shot him a questioning look. 'Why do you think? We're all retreating. 'Too much to carry. Can you… sort them?'

  Dorden cursed quietly. These men are what?'

  'Bluebloods. Volpone 50th. You remember those devils from Voltemand? Their command units pulled out this morning, as Per orders.'

  'And they left the wounded here?' Corbec shrugged. 'Seems so, Doc.'

  'What kind of animal leaves his sick and wounded behind to die?' Dorden spat, moving to change the dressings on the nearest man.

  'The human kind?' Corbec asked.

  Dorden looked round sharply. This isn't funny. Corbec. It's not even whimsical. Most of these men will live with the proper attention. We're not leaving them.'

  Corbec groaned softly. He rubbed the top of his scalp, folding the thick black hair between his big, swarthy fingers. 'We can't stay here, Doc. Commissar's orders…'

  Dorden turned and looked at the colonel with fierce, old eyes. 'I'm not leaving them,' he stated plainly. Corbec seemed to start to say something, then hesitated and decided better of it. 'See what you can do for them,' he said, and left Dorden to his work.

  Dorden was treating a leg wound when he heard the crunch of gravel on the roadway outside and the rumble of a troop carrier. He loo
ked up to locate the source of the sound only after he had finished what he was doing.

  'Thank you, sir,' said the young man whose leg he had treated. The boy was pale and sallow, too weak to rise from his pallet bed.

  'What's your name?' Dorden asked.

  'Culcis, sir. Trooper, Blueblood.' Dorden was sure that Culcis would have wanted to punctuate that statement with an exclamation mark, but he was too weak to manage it.

  'I'm Dorden. Medic. Tanith. You need me, Trooper Culcis, you call my name.'

  The boy nodded. Dorden went outside, approaching the Chimera parked below the leaning walls. Corbec was speaking to the tall figure perched on top.

  The figure moved, dropped down to the soil, began to march towards him: Gaunt, his cap on, his face a shadow, his long coat flying.

  'Sir!' Dorden said.

  'Dorden – Corbec says you won't move.'

  'Sixty-eight wounded here, sir. Can't leave them; won't leave them.'

  Gaunt took Dorden's arm and led him across the muddy yard to the side wall that looked out across trampled farmland and vacant swine pens towards the setting suns beyond.

  'You must, Dorden. Enemy forces are half a day behind us. General Muller has called us all to retreat. We can't carry them with us. I'm sorry.'

  Dorden shook off the commissar's grip. 'So am I,' he said.

  Gaunt turned away. Tor a moment, Dorden thought the commissar might round on him and discipline him with a fist. But he didn't. Instead, the man sighed. On reflection, Dorden knew violence wasn't Gaunt's first or chosen way of command. The endless war and his experience of other officer cadres in the field had soured Dorden's expectation, something he wasn't proud of.

  Gaunt looked back at the medic. 'Corbec told me you'd say as much. Took, the counter-push for Nacedon is scheduled for tomorrow night. Then, and only then, Emperor willing, we'll retake this land and drive the enemy back.'