Ghostmaker

by Dan Abnett

  Together, Corbec and Dorden pulled their way through a litter of rubble and debris and broken furniture into the little room at the back of the farmhouse. It had lost its roof and the stars twinkled above them.

  Corbec had brought a lamp. He played its light over the rear walls, picking up the flaking painted image on the ornamental screen Mkoll had mentioned. It showed the Divine Emperor subduing the Heretics, and smaller figures of a man, a woman, and three small children, shown in obeisance to the central figure of the God-emperor of Man.

  'There's an inscription here,' Dorden said, scraping the dirt away from the wall with his cuff pulled up over the ball of his hand.

  'A pig! What is this?'

  Corbec raised the lamp and read off the inscription. 'Here's irony for you, Doc: this was a trophy world. A New Tanith. The master of this hall was a Parens Cloker, of the Imperial Guard, Hogskull Regiment. The Hogskulls won this world during the first advance into the Sabbat one hundred and ninety years ago Winning it, they were awarded settlement rights. Cloker was a corporal in the Guard, and he took his rights gladly. Settled here, made a family, raised swine in honour of the mascot beast of his old regiment. His kin have honoured that ever since.'

  Corbec faltered, something like sadness in his eyes. 'Feth! To get there, to win it, to take the trophy world… and still it comes down to this?'

  'Not for all. How many trophy worlds are there out there where the soldiers of the Guard have retired and lived out their days?'

  'I don't know. This is all too real. To fight for your lifetime, get the prize you wanted, and then this?'

  Corbec and Dorden sank down together in the debris-strewn chapel.

  'You asked me why I stayed with you, Doc. I'll tell you now as we're dead and we have nothing to live for.' With that last remark, Corbec flung his hand towards the reredos' inscription.

  'Well?'

  'You were the doctor for Pryze County for twenty years.'

  'Twenty-seven. And Beldane.'

  Corbec nodded. 'I was raised in Pryze. My family were wood workers there. I was born out of wedlock and so I took my father's name, when I knew him. My mother now… I was a difficult birth.'

  Dorden stiffened, knowing somehow what must come next.

  'She'd have died in labour, had it not been for the young medic who charged out in the night and saw to her. Landa Meroc. Remember her?'

  'She would have died if I hadn't—'

  Thank you, Doctor Dorden.'

  Dorden looked round at Corbec in wonder. 'I delivered you? Feth! Fething feth! Am I that old?!'

  They laughed together until they were choking. And until the thump of artillery began, blasting the quiet of the night away.

  The Imperial Guard drove the enemy back with their shelling and Gaunt was on the foremost half-track as they ploughed back into the fenlands in the early light of dawn. They caught the enemy almost unawares, and were blasting the Chaos artillery and infantry even as the enemy wheeled their own blasphemous guns around into position in the dark.

  The farmhouse, and its shattered defence of horseshoe fences, was almost unrecognisable. Mud, burnt flak-board and shattered corpses lay piled amidst the devastated ruins. He ordered the vehicle to stop, and it spun wheels on the fenland muck as it slid to a halt.

  Trooper Lesp was on duty at the gateway. He saluted the colonel-commissar as he passed in. Dorden and Corbec were waiting for him in the littered yard.

  'Medical evac is coming,' Gaunt told them. 'We'll get the Volpone wounded out of here.'

  'And our own too?' Dorden asked, thinking of Tremard, and Mkoll's lacerated face.

  'All of the wounded. So, you've had an adventure out here, it seems?'

  'Nothing to speak of, sir,' Corbec said.

  Gaunt nodded and moved off into the manor house ruin.

  Corbec turned to Dorden and showed him the pig's tooth he had clutched in his hand. 'I won't forget this,' he said. 'It may not have worked here on Nacedon for this guardsman, but hv this tooth, I'll trust it will work for us Ghosts. A trophy world, brighter and better than you can imagine.'

  Dorden's hand held a pig-tooth too, marked ''The Emperor''.

  'I trust you to do that, Colm. Do it. Doctor's orders.'

  Swing, address, stab, return… swing, address, stab, return…

  In the shade of the cycads at the edge of the Tanith encampment on Monthax, Trooper Caffran was practising bayonet discipline. Stripped to the waist, his powerful young shoulders glistening with sweat, he whirled his lasgun in time to his rhythmic chant, snapping it round, clutching it horizontally, lunging forward and killing the bole of one of the trees over and again. After each strike, he tugged it free with effort, and repeated the drill. The trunk was slashed and puckered, oozing orange sap from the wounds left by his nimble work.

  'Good skill,' Gaunt said from behind him. Caffran snapped around, realising he was being watched. He shook sweat from his brow and began a salute.

  'At ease,' Gaunt said. 'I'm just walking the lines. Everything alright with you? The men in your platoon?'

  Caffran felt tongue-tied, as he always did when Gaunt addressed him directly. He still, after all this time, had mixed feelings about the commissar who had both saved them and made them Ghosts in the same action.

  'We're all waiting for the word,' he said at last. 'Itching for action. This waiting…'

  'It's the worst part, I know.' Gaunt sat down on a nearby log. 'Until the killing starts and you realise the waiting wasn't all that bad after all.'

  Caffran caught the smile in Gaunt's eyes and grinned as well, unable to stop himself.

  Gaunt was pleased. He was very aware of the stiffness Caffran always manifested around him. A good soldier, one of the youngest, but so very nearly one of Rawne's malcontents.

  'Go again,' Gaunt suggested.

  Self-consciously, Caffran turned and repeated his drill. Swing, address, stab, return… It took a moment to pull his blade free from the thick bark.

  'Slide it,' Gaunt said. 'It'll come out easier if you slide it laterally before pulling.'

  Caffran did so. It was true.

  Gaunt got up, moving on with his circuit. 'Not long now, Caffran,' Gaunt said as he moved away.

  Caffran sighed. No, not long. Not long before the frenzy and the madness would start.

  Swing, address, stab, slide, return… Swing, address, stab, slide, return…

  NINE

  A SIMPLE PLAN

  Engines screaming, the imperial troop carriers fell upon the ocean world, Sapiencia.

  Like swarms of fat, black beetles shrilling in over the edges of a pond, they assaulted the Bay of Belano. Their combined down-draughts boiled the choppy surface water into foam mist, an embankment of steam three kilometres long and two hundred metres high that stormed forward across the beach rocks and blinded the island's outer defences.

  It entirely hid the merciless wall of solid water driven up under the spray by the concussive force, and this tidal wave exploded across the western sea-fall emplacements of Oskray Island twenty seconds after the steam cloud choked them. Rock and metal and flesh were pulverised, blasted into the air, then sucked back into the basin of the bay as pressures equalised and hydraulic action righted itself. A spume haze hung over the island, clogging the beaches and masking the final, slow approach of the gargantuan troop-ships.

  The heavy emplacements higher on the cliffs of Oskray spat fierce salvos down into the mist, or up into the striated clouds where further formations of troop-ships were beginning their final approaches to the island shore. The fire from the batteries, blue and flickering, danced like luminous damsel flies amongst the beetle-like ships. Some craft burst as they were touched, and burned; some dropped, bleeding smoke and trailing lines of debris.

  The twenty kilometres of Oskray Island was only partly rock. It was, in point of fact, a cluster of islets, linked as one by the massive industrial fortificati
on built up upon the shoulders of submarine mountains. Behind ocean-blocking walls of stone a hundred metres thick, pump structures, drill towers, flame-belching waste stacks and pylons rose against the sky. The primary target, the great refinery hive of Oskray Island One.

  Red hazard lights flashed and hooters started their deafening caterwaul as the jaw-hatch locks of troop-ship Lambda disengaged with a massive leaden thump. Dim light began to pour in from outside as the jaw-sections hinged open. Caffran, tensed tight and ready, knew they were assaulting a sea-bound target, and that the way in for the infantry was up the beach That was the plan. But as the troop-hatch opened, he believed for a moment they had come in too low and it was translucent torrents of water that were spurting into the dispersal deck. He gulped in his breath, held it, but it was only steam and pale light that rushed over him.

  The yells of men, of boots racing on metal decking, and of the hooters, were overwhelming. With fifty others, lasguns raised, he charged out of the hatch mouth, for a second, on the ramp, the dispersal deck noises were swamped by the greater volume of the thundering drop-ships all around. Caffran could see nothing beyond the men closest to him and the solid atmosphere of mist and smoke. He could smell salt and ozone, oil and thermite.

  Then nothing. Rushing silence, roaring dullness, a coldness all over him, enveloping him, dark grey blurs in his eyes.

  He was underwater, floundering in the chilly, muffled dark of the sea, writhing black bodies struggling and flailing around him, each one bejewelled with trapped baubles of silver air.

  The troop-ship had come up short of the beach slope, and all the men dropping blind off the ramp were falling into thirty metres of ocean where the island shelved steeply away.

  Caffran couldn't swim. He'd been born and raised in a forest a thousand kilometres from any open water. He'd never seen the ocean, any ocean, though he'd heard others, like the medicfisherman Lesp, speak of it. He was going to do the last thing he had ever expected to do: drown.

  Momentarily, he realised he had not yet released the deep breath he had instinctively sealed into his lungs when he thought the dispersal deck was going to flood, and he almost laughed, almost releasing the air.

  Instead, he held on to it, felt it burning and exhausting inside him as he rose slowly to what seemed the surface. It saved his life, where others had gone screaming and exhaling off the ramp.

  Sinking, blundering, black shapes thrashed around him: Tanith combat dress, dark as dry blood, faces pale like phantoms or ghouls. A body sank beside him, arms frozen in claws, mouth open to emit a dribble of bubbles, eyes glazed. Caffran kicked upwards again.

  Something struck him stunningly hard on the back of the neck and he lost his precious saved breath in a blurt of silvery air pebbles. Men were still coming off the ramp-end above, falling on those Ghosts now coming up from below. A boot had hit him. The man it belonged to was inverted in the water behind him, panicking, dying. Caffran kicked away, trying to rise and not breathe in to ease his emptied, screaming lungs. He saw men explode into the grey, dreamy world from above, fighting the water as they hit and sank. But that at least told him the surface was only a few metres away.

  The man who had kicked him on his way down had become entangled with another by the slings of their lasguns. One of them fired his lasgun in desperation, twice, three times. The water boiled around each slicing minnow of orange light. Caffran's ears throbbed as they heard the fizzing report of the underwater shots. One of the las-rounds punctured a drifting corpse nearby; another punched through the leg of a desperate swimmer next to Caffran. Blood fogged the water. Caffran heard the distant voices of his ancestors in his ears, muffled by pressure and fluid and distance and time.

  He surfaced in a gasping explosion, retching, treading water, blood streaming from his nose. He looked around to see Ghosts surfacing all around, kicking towards the shore or just panicking. Some were floating in the surge, lifeless, already lost. Noise rushed back to him, the momentous noise of combat now unfiltered by the deadness of the sea. Screaming, the whicker of lasguns, the roar of troop-ship downwash. He could smell blood, water and smoke, but was thankful, because that meant he was breathing. Behind him, las-rounds punched up out of the water into the fog as other unfortunates lost their grip on everything but their triggers as they drowned.

  Caffran paddled forward, hacking up each and every slop of sea-water he accidentally swallowed. The pall of smoke and fog cut visibility at the surface to ten metres. For a moment, he heard the voices of his ancestors again – then realised that wasn't what he'd heard at all. It was his micro-bead intercom, crackling with staccato traffic, screeching into his ear-plug. Underwater, it had been the tinny whisper of ghosts.

  Caffran felt gravel or sand under his boots, a slope. He felt weight and momentum return to him as he churned up through shallower and still shallower water, falling twice and choking. Bolt rounds and las-fire whipped and stitched the breakers around him, cutting down the Ghost beaching next to him. The man fell face-down, his body lifted and pulled back, lifted and pulled back again by the choppy waves.

  Caffran fell again as a las-round scorched across the top of his left shoulder, dropping him to his knees. His shins scraped on the stony gravel, shredding his fatigue pants from the knee down. He felt his lasgun grow heavier and flop away. The shot had cut his gun-strap across the shoulder.

  Hands pulled him up as he grabbed hold of his weapon.

  'Caffran!'

  It was Domor, the squad's sweeper. He was laden down with the heavy backpack of the sweeper unit and its long handled sensor-broom. Domor had lost his eyes – and almost his life – in that final push on Menazoid Epsilon six months before. They had been there together for that fatal time, in the thick of it as they were here. Domor's metal-irised artificial implants shuttered and whined as they adjusted to look down at Caffran. The sweeper's cybernetic implants looked like truncated binocular scopes crudely sutured into the scar tissue of his eye-sockets.

  'We can make the beach!' Domor yelled, pulling the young trooper to his feet. They ran, blundering through the breakers. Others charged or staggered in with them, a ragged line ol Ghosts making landfall on the fog-washed shore, some falling over submerged barricade crosses or entangling themselves on rolls of rusting razor-wire. The fire-storm fell amongst them and some dropped silently, or screaming, or in minced pieces.

  Now, the flinty shingle slope of the beach. They crashed up it, pebbles flying from each footfall. Twenty metres up, they ducked below the lichen-fronded line of an old wooden groyne, black as tar. Las-fire slammed into its weighty bulk.

  'What's the plan? What have we got?' Caffran yelled.

  'Nothing! Visibility is low! Heavy resistance from up there!' Domor pointed up into the spray-fog at something only his augmented vision could resolve, and then only barely.

  Two more bodies flung themselves down next to them, then a third. Trooper Mkendrik with his flamer; Trooper Chilam, missing an ear and yowling like a cat as he dabbed his salty hand at the bloody hunk of cartilage on the side of his head. And then, Sergeant Varl.

  Varl was a popular officer amongst the Ghosts; young, field-promoted from the rank of trooper, a wise-cracking, hard-nosed bastard refreshingly lacking all the airs and graces of the officer class. He'd lost his shoulder on Fortis Binary, and his black tunic bulged over the cybernetic joint the medics had given him. It was clear to Caffran that the sergeant was in some pain. Varl cursed and struggled with his artificial shoulder.

  Sea-water had soaked into the shoulder joint, shorting out servos and fusing linkages. His arm was dead and useless, but still the raw neural connections transmitted flickers of shorting electrical failure to his brain. Domor had been lucky. His ocular units had been sealed into his skull enough to prevent such damage… though Caffran wondered how long it would take the insidious touch of sea-water corrosion to blind the man.

  With Mkendrik's help, Caffran stripped off Varl's tunic and unscrew
ed the bolts on the small inspection plate in Varl's metal shoulder blade. With the point of his Tanith dagger, Mkendrik prised out the flat battery cells revealed there, cutting the electrical relay which governed the limb. Varl sighed as his arm went dead and Caffran strapped it up, tight against the sergeant's body. It was a desperate gesture. Without the booster relay of the cells, not only all neural control, but all life support would be cut from the organic parts of Varl's repaired arm. He needed proper help, or within an hour or two his now-lifeless arm would begin to decay and perish.

  For now, though, the sergeant was grateful, he scrambled over, supporting himself on his one good hand, and took a look over the cover-line. Along the beach, under the downpour of fire, men were coming ashore. Most were dying; some were making it to cover.

  'Where in Feth's name is the armour?' Varl wailed. 'They should have led the assault and opened this beach up!'

  Caffran scoped around, and saw heavy Basilisk tanks half-submerged, struggling up the beach a hundred metres away. They were in too deep, drowning like beached whales, squirming and coughing exhaust smoke as their engines flooded and died.

  'The troop-ships dropped us short,' he said to Varl.

  Varl looked where Caffran pointed. 'They've drowned the front end of this fething assault!' he bellowed.

  'They were blind… This spray—' Caffran began.

  'Feth them for not doing their job!' Varl spat.

  A whinnying bolt round ricocheted off the top of the groyne's solid woodwork and took Chilam straight in the face, exploding his head. He flew back onto the shingle, full length.

  'We have to advance! We have to!' Varl yelled. Micro-bead chatter, discordant and contradictory, rasped in their ears.

  'There's no going forward,' Domor said quietly.

  The spume of the spray-mist was receding, and now they could see what he saw. The vast white curtain wall of Oskray Island's sea-defences rose ahead of them, almost a kilometre high. Apart from some stray scorch marks, it was unblemished. The Basilisks had been meant to flatten it and break through for the infantry. But the wall still stood, impassive, cold, like a denial of any possible future.