Ghostmaker

by Dan Abnett

'Few of them will last the night and day unattended. And none if they are found and attended by the Chaos filth!'

  Gaunt took off his cap and smoothed his cropped blond hair. The dying suns-light silhouetted his angular profile, but kept his internal thoughts in shadow. 'You have my respect, medic. You've always had it, since the Founding Fields even. The only Ghost who refuses to bear arms, the only man who can keep us alive. The Ghosts owe you, many of them owe you their lives. I owe you for that. I'd hate to have to give you an order.'

  Then don't, commissar. You know I'll refuse it. I'm a medic first and a Ghost second. Back on Tanith, as a community practitioner, I worked for thirty years ministering to the sick, the infirm, the new-born and the weak in the Beldane District and County Pryze. I did it because I took an oath at the Medical College in Tanith Magna. You understand allegiances and oaths, commissar. Understand mine.'

  'I understand the weight of the medical oath well enough.'

  'And you've honoured it! Never asked me to break my vow on confidentiality over men with private problems… drink, pox, mind-troubles… you've always let me do as my oath bids. Let me now.'

  Gaunt replaced his cap. 'I can't leave you here to die.'

  'But you'd leave these men to die?'

  'They're not the Ghosts' chief medic!' Gaunt spat the answer and then fell silent.

  'A doctor is vowed to serve any injured. Oh, I swore to the Emperor, on the Eounding Fields, to serve him and you and the Imperial Guard. But I'd already sworn to the Emperor to uphold life. Don't make me break that vow.'

  Gaunt tried logic. 'Our illustrious forces were routed on the delta at Lohenich. We are fleeing before a massed Chaos army that thunders at our heels, barely half a day away. You're a non-combatant. How could you hold this place?'

  'With words, if I have to. With volunteers, if any will stay and you'll allow it. After all, it's only until tomorrow night. Until your counter-push retakes this place. Or was that a lie? Propaganda?'

  Gaunt said nothing for a while, tilting his tall bulk into the evening suns, adjusting his muddy coat. Then he turned back to the old medic.

  'No lie. We will retake this land, and beyond. We will drive them back as they come to us. But to leave you out here, even for a night…'

  'Don't think of me. Think of the Volpone wounded in there.'

  Gaunt did. It didn't change his mind much. 'They would have had us butchered—'

  'Don't go to that place!' Dorden warned. 'Hate has no place between allies. 'These are men, Troopers, valuable soldiers. They could live to fight again, to turn another conflict for the better. Leave me to care for them, with whoever you can spare. Leave me, and come back for us all.'

  Gaunt cursed. 'I'll give you a squad. I can spare no more. Ten men, volunteers. If it doesn't come to ten, tough. Muller will have my head for leaving any in the field as it is.'

  'I'll take whatever I can get,' Dorden said. 'Thank you.'

  Gaunt strode away abruptly, then turned, came back and took Dorden's hand tightly in his own.

  'You're a brave man. Don't let them take you alive… and don't make me regret allowing you to be too brave.'

  Gaunt and the retreating lines of Ghosts passed on and then they were alone. Dorden was working in the long hall, and only noticed the passing of time as the sunshine through the skylights faded to blue and dusk fell. He lit lamps on crates placed between the wounded and went outside into the yard. Overhead, alien stars were coming out in the mauve sky.

  He saw three Ghosts at first: Lesp, Chayker and Toskin, who acted as his orderlies and were skilled field medics. They were sorting through the medical supplies Gaunt had left for them. Dorden had half-expected them to volunteer and stay, hoped for it, but to see his three staffers working as usual was refreshing and uplifting. He crossed to them, meaning to carry on as normal and ask about the supply level, but all he found in his throat was thanks. Each one smiled, took his hand as he offered it, gainted an acknowledgement of duty. Dorden was proud of them.

  He started to give them dispersal instructions, and began to run through the needs of the sick in priority order, when outer Ghosts stepped into view: Mkoll, the chief scout and Dorden's closest friend in the unit, accompanied by Troopers Brostin, Claig, Caffran and Gutes. They had just finished a patrol sweep of the horseshoe boundary and were preparing to dig in for the night.

  Dorden greeted Mkoll. 'You needn't have stayed.'

  'And leave you alone here?' Mkoll laughed. 'I'll not have the records say 'Medic Dorden died and where was his friend, the warrior Mkoll?'

  'The commissar asked for volunteers and so we volunteered.'

  'I'll not forget this, however short my life,' Dorden replied. 'We have the flank guarded well,' Mkoll told Dorden, indicating the double fence. 'All ten of us.'

  'Ten?'

  'That's what the colonel-commissar allowed. Us five, your three, and the other two. All of the Ghosts were arguing over who could stay, did you know? Everyone volunteered for the duty.'

  'Everyone? Not Major Rawne, I'd bet!'

  Mkoll grinned ruefully, 'All right, not everyone. But there was a scramble for places. Gaunt finally decided on first come, first served. So you got your three, me, Brostin, Claig, Caffran and Gutes. Plus Tremard, on watch at the gates. And…'

  'And?'

  Dorden whipped round, sensing someone was suddenly behind him. He looked up into the smiling bearded face of Colm Corbec.

  'And me. So, Doc, you're in charge. How do we play this?'

  Night fell. The air cleared. Distantly, carrion-dogs howled. Three or more moons rose and set, duelling with each others' orbits. The darkness was clear and cold and smelled of death. Far away, on the southern horizon, amber clouds thumped and boiled, a storm approaching. A mighty land army was moving towards them. That, and a real storm. Lightning shuddered the sky in hazes of white-flash. The air became heavy and sweet.

  Inside the farmhouse, one of the Bluebloods spasmed and died. Dorden was fighting for that life, his apron-smock slick with spurting blood. There was nothing he or Lesp could do.

  Dorden stepped back from the cooling corpse and handed bloodied instruments to Lesp. 'Record time and manner of death, and the name and number from the tags,' he said darkly 'Emperor willing, we can pass it to the Volpone adjutant's office and they can adjust their records.'

  Lesp snorted. The Bluebloods have doubtless marked all these as dead already.'

  Lesp was a tall, thin man from Tanith Longshore, with cold blue eyes and an Adam's apple that looked like a knee in his slender neck. He'd been a fisherman back on the Lost Place, part of a sea-fishing family which plied the ocean currents beyond the archipelago. He owned a fierce skill with a sailcloth and net needle, and an almost surgical knack with a blade learned from gutting fish back in those days. Dorden had put those skills to use in the name of healing when he had co-opted Lesp as an orderly. Lesp had taken to it well, and enjoyed his work alongside the chief medic.

  Dorden took all the willing, able help he could get. Most of the trained medics who had founded with the Ghosts on Tanith had never made it off-world. Originally, the only fully qualified medics had been Dorden, Gherran and Mtane, with twenty other troopers trained as field medics. Dorden had interviewed and studied all of the surviving men to recruit for the badly needed medical staff. Without devoted, constantly learning amateurs like Lesp, Foskin and Chayker, the health of the regiment would have failed long ago.

  Mtane and Gherran had moved on with Gaunt's main force, though both had wanted to stay. Losing all three trained medics in one rash act was more than Gaunt would tolerate.

  Dorden stepped out into the muddy yard and, as if on cue, the heavens opened and sheeting rain hammered down on him, washing another's blood out of his tunic. He stood there, dripping, as the downpour eased a little.

  'You'll get wet out there,' came a voice from nearby.

  Dorden swung round to face Corbec, who was smoking a cigar in
the cover of the slumping side-roof. All Dorden could see was the shape and the red coal of the light.

  Dorden crossed to him. Corbec offered up a waxy box of smokes. 'Liquorice. Got the taste of them on Voltemand and it's taken me an age to get some on the black market. Take one for now and one for later.'

  Dorden took two, slid one behind his ear unlit and lit up the other from Corbec's half-smoked stick.

  They looked out into the night.

  'It's going to be rough,' remarked Corbec softly.

  He was looking at the flash and howl of the storm, but Dorden knew what he meant.

  'Yet you stayed.'

  Corbec took a deep drag and white smoke plumed out of his hairy shadow. 'I'm a sucker for good deeds.'

  'Or lost causes.'

  The Emperor will provide. And aren't we all just one big lost cause? The First and last and Lost? You don't see me giving up on that.'

  Dorden smiled. The cigar was strong and the flavour hellish, but he was enjoying it. It had been twenty years since he'd smoked. His wife had never approved, said it didn't set a good example to the patients Dorden tended to. Then the kids came along, Mikal and Clara, and he'd kicked the habit, so—

  Dorden shut off the thoughts. Tanith had taken his wife with it, and Clara and her husband and their baby too. All he had was Mikal, Trooper Mikal Dorden, vox-caster operator in Sergeant Hasker's platoon.

  'You're thinking about home,' Corbec muttered.

  Dorden broke his sad reverie. 'What?'

  'I know that look.'

  'It's dark, colonel!'

  'I know that… feeling, then. The set of a man's shoulders. Comes on us all, time to time.'

  'I'd guess the commissar has told you to stamp it out where ever you see it? Bad for morale.'

  'Not in my book. Tanith still lives while we all carry it here…' Corbec tapped his forehead. 'And we don't know where we're going if we don't know where we came from.'

  'Where are we going, do you suppose?'

  Corbec flicked his butt onto the mud and let it sputter dead. 'On a bad day, to hell. On a good day, I'd say we were bound for that trophy world Gaunt's promised us. Slaydo's gift: the first world we truly win we can take and claim and settle as our own.'

  Dorden gazed at the storm. 'New Tanith, huh? Tike the men talk of when they're drunk or dying? Do you believe that? Might we ever take a world ourselves, get the credit clean and true? We're less than two thousand, livery theatre we enter, we do so alongside other regiments, and that muddies victory claims and credit. I'm not a pessimist, colonel, but I doubt any of us will ever find that New Tanith, except in drink or death.'

  Corbec smiled, his white teeth shining in the gloom. 'Then lucky me. One way or another, I'll see more of it than most.'

  A door banged to their left. Chayker, shrouded in his cape, emerged from the hospital and carried a tin drum over to the well. A few moments' cranking, and he struggled with it back to the buildings. Dorden and Corbec could already smell the broth Chayker and Foskin were brewing for all the company.

  'Something smells good,' Corbec said.

  Toskin found tubers and grain in a field beyond the ditch walls, and we turned up dried pulses and salt meat in an old pantry. Should be the best supper any of us have had in a while. But first rations go to any of the patients who can take it.'

  'Of course. They need it more than us. I've got a flask of sacra and a box of these smokes. Should keep me going awhile.'

  'Come in when you're ready for proper nourishment,' Dorden instructed, as if issuing a prescription. 'Thanks for the cigars.' He headed back to the ward.

  A circuit of the wounded took another hour and a half. Tesp and the other orderlies had done well, and many had eaten or at least taken fluid. There were twelve who were too far gone to remain conscious, and Dorden carefully rationed out his supply of drugs to prioritise them. The boy, Culcis, along with a few others, were now sitting up, chatting, grateful. All of them, Volpone aristo-blood, were disdainful of the Tanith, but civil nevertheless. Being cut adrift by their regiment, and spared from death only by a barbarian unit, would seem to have altered many of their deeper prejudices and snobberies. For that at least, Dorden felt pleased.

  He saw Trooper Caffran, coming in soaked from a patrol circuit, taking his bowl of broth to sit with Culcis. They were about the same age, Dorden reckoned. The same age as Mikal. He heard them share a joke.

  Lesp took his arm. One of the critical cases was showing signs of fading. With Chayker's help, they carried the man out into what had once been the household kitchen, and now served as a surgical theatre. A refectory table sat there, long enough for a man, and they heaved him onto it.

  'The Blueblood, a Corporal Regara by his tags, had lost a leg below the knee and taken shrapnel in the chest. His blood was far from blue. The refectory table became slick and blood drooled off onto the flagstones. Chayker almost slipped and Dorden ordered him to fetch a mop and more wadding.

  'There are no mops,' Chayker shrugged.

  'Then find something like a mop.'

  Dorden had to take off more of the ruined leg from the shrieking Regara with his handsaw before he could staunch and tie the haemorrhage. He directed Tesp's sure fingers in to suture the breach with fine, sail-maker's stitches. By then, Chayker had returned. Dorden found he was mopping the floor with shredded strips from his cape tied to an old rake handle. For a Ghost to tear up his treasured stealth cloak to mop blood… Dorden's admiration for his volunteers' devotion to duty grew.

  They carried the softly moaning Regara back to his bed. With luck, and a fever-breaking shot of mascetamine, he might yet live. But Dorden was called away almost at once to a seizure that Toskin couldn't cope with, and then to a man who had woken from near-coma, only to begin violently retching blood.

  The ward fell quiet towards midnight, as other dramas came and passed. Dorden was scrubbing his chrome rib-spreaders in a bucket of scalding water when Mkoll came in, shaking the water from his cape. The storm was still booming outside and thunder rattled the casements and roofing. Every now and then, loose glass in a window somewhere fell in, or tiles slipped off and shattered. The storm had continued all that evening, but until then, Dorden had blanked it out.

  He watched Mkoll sit and clean his gun, the first thing he always did before seeing to other duties like food or warmth. Dorden took him a bowl of broth.

  'Anything out there?'

  Mkoll shook his head. 'If we're lucky, the storm is slowing their advance.'

  'And if we're not?'

  'They conjured the storm.'

  Mkoll looked up at the rafters and the high roof. This must have been quite a place. A good homestead, worth the working. The soil is healthy and they had plenty of livestock.'

  'A family home,' Dorden pondered, who hadn't thought about it before. The thought of another home and family lost to the war now bit at him. He felt weary again. Old.

  Mkoll spooned his broth quietly. There's an old chapel at the rear of the house. Blown in, of course, but you can still see the painted reredos commemorating the Emperor. The Volpone used it as a privy. Whoever lived here were devout servants of the Imperium, working the land, raising their kin.'

  'Until this.'

  Dorden fell silent. Chaos had taken this world, Nacedon, two months gone, as part of their counter-punch to thwart Macaroth's crusade. It hadn't been occupied, or even corrupted from within. Nacedon, an agricultural world with three million Imperial colonists, had been violated and invaded in the space of three nights.

  What kind of universe was it, Dorden wondered, where humans could struggle and break their backs and love their families and worship the Emperor and build for years, only to lose it all in a few hours? His universe, he concluded, the same one that had taken Tanith away.

  A late moon was up, a lonely sentry in a sky suddenly clear of storm. The rain had stopped and silver clouds scudded across the purple openness of the heaven.

  Counte
rpart to the moon, a lone sentry stood at the gate of the station. Trooper Tremard, sitting his second shift at the gate in the sandbag emplacement, watched the tree lines, black fuzzes of darkness edging the flats of the equally black fields and fens. He was tired, and he wished that the fething Volpone had left their heavy gun in the emplacement.

  Mist rose across the fenland, drifting sideways like smoke. Something twinkled in the dark.

  Tremard started up, grabbing his scope from the sandbags. He fumbled with the focus ring, pulling the green-on-green night vision view into true. Mist – and other things in it. The twinkle he had seen. Moonlight flashing back from the staring reflective retina of hunting eyes.

  He triggered his micro-bead link. 'Gate to Ghosts! Can you hear me, colonel? To arms! To arms! Movement to the south!'

  Corbec rose abruptly from his cot, like a dead man lifting from a grave, making Dorden start. The colonel had been catching forty winks on a spare bed in the ward as the medic sorted pills into paper twists. 'What is it?'

  Corbec was on his feet. 'Three guesses, Doc.'

  Dorden was up too. He looked around at the fragile hall, the vulnerable, half-dead men, as Corbec readied his lasgun and voxed-in with the other troopers. Dorden felt suddenly stupid. He knew what a full-on assault of Chaos was like. They'd all be shattered like an egg-shell. He'd been stupid to insist on staying. Now he had them all dead – the Bluebloods, the Ghosts… valuable, peerless Ghosts like Corbec and Mkoll. He'd wasted them all, over some foolish pride in an old oath. An old medical oath, taken in safer times, in a nice community practice where the worst injury was a laceration at the sawmill.

  Feth me for a fool! Feth me for my pride!

  'We'll front them as long as we can. The boys know some tricks,' Corbec told him. 'I'll need Chayker and Foskin… Lesp can stay with you. If we lose the first attack, you need to be ready to get as many of the wounded out into the back rooms. They're ruins I know, but it'll put more walls between you and the fighting.'

  Dorden swallowed, thinking of the work it would take him and Lesp to carry sixty-seven men out into the rear of the dwelling on stretchers. He heard the distant wail of las-fire and realised it wouldn't be half the effort Corbec and his soldiers were about to make. So he simply nodded, beckoning Lesp to him.