by Dan Abnett
Urdesh, the famous forge world, had fallen to the archenemy several years before. Gaunt’s men had already fought the products of the captured weapon shops and tank factories on Hagia. The Urdeshi regiments, eight of them, were famously good shock troops, and, like the Tanith, were dispossessed. The difference was that the Urdeshi still had a home world to win back.
Even now, the Urdeshi Sixth, Fourth Light and Tenth were engaged upon the liberation of their world. Zhyte’s filthy demeanor was probably down to the fact he wished he and his men were all there, instead of here, fighting to free up some stinking vapour mills.
Still, Gaunt wished his men had been given the main assault. He felt in his bones they’d do it better.
“Second wave goes here. The secondary dome. That’s your Tanith, Gaunt. The secondary dome houses Cirenholm’s vapour mill, but ironically, that’s not your primary objective. It goes against what I said earlier, I know, but we need to secure Cirenholm as a staging position. It’s vital. Our real trophy will be Ouranberg, and we don’t have a hope of taking that unless we have a base in this hemisphere to operate out of. Cirenholm is the doorway to victory on Phantine, my friends. A stepping stone to triumph.”
Van Voytz pointed his stick towards the smallest dome. “Third wave takes the tertiary dome. Major Fazalur’s Phantine Skyborne will lead that one in, supported by Urdeshi storm-troops.”
Fazalur, next to Gaunt, smiled at last. He was a weathered man with shaven hair. He wore the quilted cream tunic of the local army. Gaunt was aware of the terrible loyalties being stretched in this force-screened room. Zhyte, longing to be in a war elsewhere, a war that actually mattered to him and his men. Daur — and Gaunt himself — wishing the Ghosts weren’t going in so underprepared. Fazalur, yearning for his men to have the honour of leading the liberation of his own fething world. But the Phantine Skyborne numbered less than six hundred. No matter how brave or driven, they would have to allow others to win back their high cities for them.
“Any other comments?” asked the lord general.
There was an uneasy pause. Gaunt knew that at least three men around that table ached to unburden themselves and complain.
No one spoke.
“Right,” said the lord general. He waved to his aide. “Let’s collapse the force screen now and bring in some refreshments. I think we should all drink to D-hour.”
The drinks after the briefing had been intended to be convivial, to break the ice between commanders who knew little about one another. But it had been stiff and awkward.
Turning down the lord general’s vintage amasec, Gaunt had withdrawn early, walking down the hardwood floor of the bridge deck and up a screwstair onto the drogue’s forward observation deck.
He stood on a metal grille suspended by tension hawsers inside an inverted dome of armoured glass. Outside, the endless skies of Phantine boiled and frothed. He looked down. There was no land to see. Only millions of square kilometres of dimpled, stained cloud.
There were fast moving ribbons of pearly sculpture, dotting puffs of yellow fleece, iridescent bars of almost silver gas. Murky darkness seeped up through parts of the cloud, unwholesome twists of smog and venting corruption. Far below, occasional flares of ignited gas blossomed in the dense, repellent cloud.
Phantine had been an industrial world for fifteen centuries, and now it was largely inhospitable to human kind. Unchecked resource mining and rapacious petrochemical overproduction had ruined the surface and created a lethal blanket of air pollution five kilometres deep.
Only the highest places remained. Spire-like mountains, or the uppermost tips of long-dead hives. These spires and tips protruded from the corrosive gas seas and formed remote islands where mankind might just continue the habitation of the world its greed had killed. Places like Cirenholm and Ouranberg.
And the only reason for those precarious habitations was so that mankind could continue to plunder the chemical resources of Phantine Sliding under the handrail, Gaunt sat down on the edge of the walkway so that his boots were dangling. Craning out, he could just see back down the vast underbelly of the drogue. The pleated gas sacks. The armoured canvas panels. They glowed ochre in the unhealthy half-sun. He could see one of the huge engine nacelles, its chopping propeller blades taller than a warlord titan.
“They said I’d find you up here, Ibram.”
Gaunt glanced up. Colonel Colm Corbec hunkered down next to him.
“What’s the word, Colm?” asked Gaunt, nodding to his second-in-command.
The big, thick-bearded man leaned against the handrail. His bared forearms were like hams and decorated, under the hair, with blue spirals and stars.
“So, what did Lord General Van Voytz have to say?” said Corbec. “And what’s he like?” he added, sitting down next to Gaunt and letting his legs swing off the grille.
“I was just wondering that. It’s hard to know, sometimes, what a commander is like. Dravere and Sturm, well, they don’t fething count. Bastards, the both of them. But Bulledin and Slaydo… they were both fine men. I always resented the fact Lugo replaced Bulledin on Hagia.”
“Lugo,” growled Corbec. “Don’t get me started on him.”
Gaunt smiled. “He paid. Macaroth demoted him.”
“The Emperor protects,” grinned Corbec. He plucked a hip flask from his trouser pocket, took a swig, and offered it to Gaunt.
Gaunt shook his head. He’d abstained from alcohol with an almost puritanical conviction since the dark days on Hagia several months before. There, he and his Ghosts had almost paid the price for Lord General Lugo’s mistakes. Cornered and frustrated, and tormented by an over-keen sense of responsibility invested in him by his mentors Slaydo and Oktar, Gaunt had come closer to personal failure than at any time in his career. He’d drunk hard, shamefully, and allowed his men to suffer. Only the grace of the Emperor, and perhaps of the beati Saint Sabbat, had saved him. He’d fought back, against the forces of Chaos and his own private daemons, and routed the arch-enemy, driving back their forces just hours before Hagia could be overrun.
Hagia had been spared, Lugo disgraced, and the Ghosts had survived, both as an active unit and as living beings. There was no part of that hard path Gaunt wanted to retrace.
Corbec sighed, took back the flask and sipped again. He missed the old Gaunt the commander who would kick back and drink the night away with his men as hard as he’d fight for them the next day. Corbec understood Gaunt’s caution, and had no wish to see his beloved commander turned back into a raging, drunken malcontent. But he missed the comradely Gaunt. There was a distance between them now.
“So… this Van Voytz?”
“Van Voytz is a good man, I think. I’ve heard nothing but good reports about him. I like his style of command—”
“I sense there’s a ‘but’, Ibram.”
Gaunt nodded. “He’s sending the Urdeshi in for first kill. I don’t think their hearts are in it. He should trust me. And you. The Ghosts, I mean.”
“Maybe he’s on our side for once.”
“Maybe.”
“Like you said, it’s often hard to get the measure of your commander on first sight.” Gaunt turned to look at Corbec. “Meaning?”
“Look at us.”
“Look at us, what?”
Corbec shrugged. “First time I saw you, I thought I’d been saddled with the worst burn-boil of a commander in the Imperium.”
They both snorted with laughter.
“Of course, my planet was dying at the time,” said Corbec as their amusement subsided. “Then it turned out you were—”
“What?”
“Okay.”
Gaunt toasted Corbec with an imaginary glass. “Thanks for that underwhelming vote of confidence.”
Corbec stared at Gaunt, all the laughter gone from his eyes. “You’re the best fething commander I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“Thanks, Colm,” said Gaunt.
“Hey…” said Corbec quietly. “Look, sir.”
Outs
ide, the sun had come out and the noxious clouds had wafted away from the ports. They looked out and saw the vast shape of the drogue escorting them, a kilometre long dirigible painted silver on the belly and white on the top. It had a ribbed, hardwood frame and extended out at the front in a fluked ram the size of a giant nalwood. They could see the eight motor nacelles along its belly beating the air with their huge props. Beyond it, in the suddenly gleaming light, they could see the next drogue in formation.
Floating islands, armed and armoured, each carrying upwards of four thousand men.
“Feth!” Corbec repeated. “Pinch me. Are we aboard one of them?”
“We are.”
“I knew it but it takes seeing it to know it, you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
Gaunt looked up at Corbec. “Are we ready, Colm?”
“Not really. I’m not even going to tell you about the ammunition situation. But… well, we’re as ready as we can be.”
“Then that’s good enough for me.”
DZ OR DEAD
CIRENHOLM, WEST CONTINENTAL
REACHES, PHANTINE
212 to 213.771, M41
“There was a lot of shouting, a lot of jostling, a lot of activity at first. After that, everyone just went quiet. We knew what was coming. Then we went in. Down the rope. Gak! Holy gak! That was a ride.”
—Jessi Banda, sniper, Tanith First
ONE
Night had fallen three hours before. Moonless, as Tactician Biota had promised. A light easterly. The immense gloom outside was a profound black, broken only, from far below, by the faint foam of polluted cloud bars and lustrous mist.
The lumbering drogues, running dark with blackout shutters closed, blinds drawn and rigging lights off, swung slowly around over a six hundred square kilometre cloud bank designated as the dispersal field. They faced north. They faced Cirenholm. It was twenty-one ten hours Imperial.
Commander Jagdea, dressed in a bulky green pressure suit her crimson helmet on the deck at her feet finished up her final briefing, and clasped hands with each of the Halo Flight personnel in turn. They had been grouped around her in a huddle at the edge of drogue Nimbus’s secondary flight deck, and now they rose from perches on jerry cans and cannon-shell pallets to take her hand.
The secondary flight deck was brightly lit and throbbed with noise and activity. Deck crews ran back and forth, releasing anchor lines, uncoupling feeder hoses, and pushing empty munition carriages out of the way. Pressure-powered drivers and ratchets wailed and stuttered as the last few plates and panels were screwed into place. Ordnance teams moved down the chevron of waiting warplanes, arming and blessing the wing-slung munitions. A group of deck servitors followed the tech-magi, collecting up the priming pins, each marked with a tag of yellow vellum, that the armourers left in their wake.
The six Marauder fighter-bombers of Halo Flight were set in a herring-bone pattern down the length of the deck in greasy locking cradles. Three faced port, three faced starboard, all of them raked at a forty-five degree angle from the rear.
The flight crews, half a dozen for each forty tonne beast ran down the centre line of the deck and climbed into their designated aircraft.
A buzzer sounded, followed by a quick whoop of klaxons. Cycling amber lights in a row down the centre ridge of the bay roof began flashing.
Jagdea scooped up her helmet and retreated to the far end of the deck, behind an angled blast-board.
The main lighting went off abruptly, as the buzzer had warned. Lines of low-power deck lights winked on, casting their feeble glow up through the grille of the floor. Deck crew with light poles moved down the line, flagging signals. Hatches and canopies began to close, techs leapt down and rolled away the lightweight access stairs. The massive thrust-tunnel turbines, four on each ship, began to turn over. A whine rose, shaking the deck.
Jagdea pulled on her vox-earpiece so she could listen in.
“Halo Two, at power.”
“Halo Four, check.”
“Halo Five, at power now.”
“Halo Three, power, aye.”
“Halo Six, at power.”
“Halo Leader, confirming I have power. Twenty seconds. Standby to mark.”
The roar was bone-shaking now. Jagdea could feel every organ in her torso vibrating. She loved that feeling.
“Control, Halo Leader. The word is Evangeline. Deck doors opening.”
“Halo Leader, control. I hear Evangeline. Praise be the Emperor. Flight confirm.”
“Halo Two, the word Evangeline.”
“Halo Five, I hear it”
“Halo Six, aye, Evangeline.”
“Halo Three, Evangeline.”
“Halo Four, I hear Evangeline.”
“Halo Leader. Go with grace.”
The deck doors opened. Shutters peeled back along both sides of the deck, and hydraulic doors yawned underneath the cradles. The tumultuous inrush of high altitude wind and exterior prop noise drowned the engine roar.
“Control, Halo Leader. Execute.”
“Halo Leader. We have launch execute. Set to release cradles. Count off from three. Three, two—”
There was a lurch, and a series of concussive bangs. The huge warplanes tilted as their cradles tipped and disengaged, sliding them out of the deck space, dropping them like stones. Three dropped out to port, the other three to starboard. The huge drogue barely trembled as it released the weight.
They fell for a second into the blackness and then fired their engines, belching thrust pulling hard G’s as they took lift and climbed away from the airship.
The deck doors began to close. Jagdea took a last, wistful look at the retreating specks of afterburner glow that twinkled out there in the dark, like stars.
Another thirty minutes and it would be her turn.
Cirenholm was about fifty minutes’ flying time from the dispersal field at a comfortable cruising speed, but Halo Flight were pushing their tolerances. In a long, vee formation they burned north, gaining altitude in the lightless air.
A little turbulence. The airframes raided. On Halo Leader, Captain Viltry made a miniscule adjustment and scribed a mark on his thigh pad chart with a wax pencil. There were wind-whorls at this height. Counter-turning cones of cold, super-fast air.
There was frost on his canopy, stained yellow by air pollutants, and his limbs were stiff with altitude shock and air-burn.
He sucked hard on his mask.
To his side and just below, his navigator Gammil was hunched over his station, studying the hololithic charts by the light of a hooded spodamp.
“Turn two two zero seven,” Gammil voxed.
“Halo Leader, Halo Flight. Turn two two zero seven. Make your height forty-four fifty.”
Viltry’s sensors showed the first hard returns of the Cirenholm promontory. Nothing by eye.
“Halo Leader, Halo Flight. Make ready.”
Viltry noted with satisfaction the ten green lights that flashed live on his munition screen. Serrikin, his payload officer, had done his job perfectly.
“Two minutes,” Viltry announced.
Another patch of turbulence. Harder. The cabin shook. The glass on a dial cracked. “Steady. One minute twenty.”
Viltry kept glancing at the locator. An enemy cloud-fighter now would be disastrous. “Forty seconds.”
Something blurry crept across the sweeping display. An interceptor? Pray to the God-Emperor it was just a falling ice-cloud, echoing on their sensor patterns.
“Halo Two, Halo Leader. West quadrant. Nine by nine by six.”
“I see it Halo Two. Just an ice-cloud. Twenty seconds.” The Marauder bucked again, violently. The bulb in Gammil’s spotlamp burst and the cabin below Viltry went dark.
He saw the snowy pleats of the filth clouds below, violet in the night. He made the sign of the aquila. He thumbed back the safety covers on the ten release switches.
“At ten seconds! Ten, nine, eight seven…”
Halo Flight banked a
tad, holding pattern.
“…three, two, one… drop! Drop! Drop!”
Viltry threw the release switches. His Marauder rose with a lurch as it loosed the weight. He nursed it back.
Halo Flight banked away west, turning and reforming for the run back to the drogue.
Behind them, colossal clouds of feathery nickel filaments bloomed out in the air, blinding the already half-blind sensors of Cirenholm.
The muster-deck of the Nimbus, lit a cold, merciless white, was thronging with Ghosts. They were arranged by squad in rows marked by pew-like benches. It was twenty-one twenty-five hours.
Ibram Gaunt entered the muster hall and walked down the rows, chatting and exchanging pleasantries with the men. He was dressed for the drop in a hip-length, fur collared leather jacket, his cap still on. His bolt pistol was bolstered under his left armpit in a buckled rig, and his power sword, the trophy weapon of House Sondar, was webbed across his back. He already wore his drop-harness, the heavy arrester hook banging against his thigh.
The Tanith seemed ready. They looked fine. No one had the nervous look Gaunt always watched for.
Each Ghost was prepping up, and then turning to let his neighbour in the squad double-check his harness and couplings. They were all buttoned up and beginning to sweat. Lasguns were cinched tight across their chests. Gloves were going on. Each trooper had a balaclava and a rubberised gas-hood ready to pull on, his beret tucked away. Camo-cloaks were rolled like bedding into a tight tube across the backside.
Gaunt saw Obel checking Bragg down.
“How’s the arm, Try?” asked Gaunt.
“Good enough to fight with, sir.”
“You can manage that?” Gaunt indicated the autocannon and tripod that Bragg was to carry down the rope. Support weapon troopers and vox-officers would have the hardest time tonight.
“No problem, sir.”
“Good.”
Caill was Bragg’s ammo-humper. He had drum magazines strung over both shoulders. “Keep him fed, Caill.”
