[Gaunt's Ghosts 09] - His Last Command

by Dan Abnett - (ebook by Undead)

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  HIS LAST COMMAND

  The Lost - 02

  (Gaunt’s Ghosts - 09)

  Dan Abnett

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred

  centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne

  of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the

  gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his

  inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly

  with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the

  Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are

  sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his

  eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested

  miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their

  way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the

  Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on

  uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the

  Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-

  warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial

  Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant

  Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to

  name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely

  enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens,

  heretics, mutants—and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold

  billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody

  regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.

  Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has

  been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of

  progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future

  there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars,

  only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the

  laughter of thirsting gods.

  “By the middle of 776.M41, the twenty-first year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, War-master Macaroth’s main battle-groups had penetrated extensively into the Carcaradon Cluster, and had become locked in full-scale war against the main dispositions of the archenemy overlord, (‘Archon’), Urlock Gaur.

  However, to Macaroth’s coreward flank, an equally savage war front was being prosecuted by the War-master’s secondary battle-groups—the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Crusade Armies—as they attempted to oust the forces of Magister Anakwanar Sek, one of Gaur’s most ferocious warlord lieutenants, from the margins of the Khan Group.

  The theatres of that campaign read as a roll call of Imperial heroism and endeavour: the glass beaches of Korazon, the black glaciers of Lysander, the high sierra forests of Khan Nobilis, the step-cities of Ancreon Sextus…”

  —from A History of the Later Imperial

  Crusades

  PROLOGUE

  23.45 hrs, 185.776.M41

  Imperial Internment Camp 917 “Xeno”

  Southern Polar Plateau, Ancreon Sextus

  “Are you sure about this, sir?” Ludd yelled above the storm as they crossed the yard, heads down into the knifing gale.

  The wind was full of ice crystals that flashed like glass dust in the beams of the blockhouse stab-lights. Kanow had no intention of opening his mouth to reply.

  They reached the iron porch of the assessment block, and pulled the cold metal hatches shut behind them. The wind-howl subsided slightly.

  “I said—” Ludd began.

  “I heard,” Kanow replied, brushing powder-ice off his leather coat. “Sure about what?”

  Junior Commissar Nahum Ludd shrugged. “I was only wondering, sir, if we should wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Corroboration?”

  Kanow snorted. “This camp’s at full capacity, Ludd. We must process, process, process.” With each repetition of the word, he slapped his hands together quickly. “If I waste time checking each and every tall story these deserters and heretics spin, we’ll be overrun. What’s my motto, Ludd?”

  “Fast appraisal, fast despatch, sir.”

  “Fast appraisal, that’s right. And in this case, are you in any doubt?”

  The junior commissar hesitated.

  “Well, I’m not,” Kanow said. “Deserters and heretics. You can see that just by looking at them, and smell it just from the stink of their bodies. And that story? It doesn’t deserve corroboration, Ludd. It’s patently mendacious.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ludd.

  “What are they?”

  “Deserters and heretics, sir.”

  “That’s right. Did you actually think we should get this verified?”

  Ludd looked at his feet. Pools of ice-melt were forming on the metal floor around his boots and coat-hem. “There were certain aspects which I felt to be compelling and worth—”

  “Shut up, Ludd,” Commissar Kanow said.

  Kanow pushed through the inner hatch into the main hallway of the assessment block. Ludd followed. There was an animal warmth in the air, a cattle-bower stink. Laced with metal walkways and staircases, eight storeys of prison containment rose up on either side of the gloomy hall space, and from the shuttered rockcrete pens all around them, Ludd and Kanow could hear moans and murmurs issuing from thousands of incarcerated men. Dirty, degenerate wretches with ragged clothes peered out at them through the serried wire gates of the sorting cages on the ground floor.

  “Please, sir! By the grace of the Throne, please!” one man called out, reaching a filthy hand out through the bars.

  Kanow unholstered his bolt pistol and racked the slide. The wretch drew back immediately, and inmates in the nearby pens shrank away to the far walls with a muted wailing, like reprimanded dogs.

  A nearby blast-hatch whined open and let in a fierce gust of icy air. The commissar and his junior both shielded their faces from the cold. Yelling and waving shock mauls, a gang of armoured troopers began herding in another batch of new arrivals from Outer Processing.

  “Pen one seventeen!” a voice shouted, and a buzzer sounded as the electric cage door on one seventeen unlocked with a clack. The troopers drove the newcomers inside, enthusiastically beating the slowest or most reluctant amongst them.

  Once the cage was locked again, the gang of troopers began to disperse to other duties.

  “Trouble, commissar?” asked Troop Sergeant Maskar, noticing the drawn bolt pistol as he came over.

  “Not yet, Maskar,” Kanow grunted. “But I need you and an armed detail, if you’ve got a moment.”

  “At your command, sir,” Maskar nodded, and turned. “Squad six, with me!”

  Maskar was a big man, shaven-headed and fleshy. Like all the Camp Xeno troopers, he wore leather-jacked steel armour that was articulated around his body and limbs in interlocking segments, so as to give the impression of well-developed but flayed musculature. He slid his shock maul into its belt loop and unlimbered his cut-down autorifle. The five troopers with him did the same.

  Kanow ejected the magazine from his bolt pistol. The afternoon’s round of executions had left it almost spent. He slammed home a fresh one.

  “Pen three twenty-eight,” Kanow said, and the troopers fell into step behind him, arming their rifles.

  “Summary kills, sir?” Maskar asked.

  “I’ll have the paperwork done by the morning, sergeant. The warrants too. But this can’t wait. Follow my lead.”

  “Sir,
I—”

  Kanow looked round at Ludd.

  “What? What now?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Ludd said.

  The party clattered up two flights of metal stairs, their heavy tread shaking the steps, then turned right along the third deck gallery.

  They reached the cage door of three twenty-eight. The chamber within looked empty.

  “Pen three twenty-eight!” Maskar yelled, and the automated bolts shot open as the buzzer sounded.

  Kanow entered. The third deck pens were larger holding tanks reserved for groups of up to thirty inmates. Several of the wall lights in three twenty-eight had apparently malfunctioned. Kanow could just make out some dark figures, a dozen or so, cowering in the shadows at the back of the pen.

  “Were they armed?” asked Maskar.

  “They were when they arrived,” Ludd replied. “But they surrendered their weapons without protest.”

  Kanow ignored his junior’s pointed emphasis.

  “Where is the leader here?” he called.

  A figure walked towards him out of the shadows: tall, lean, feral. The man’s clothes were a dirty patchwork of leather and canvas, stained almost black with dirt and dust. A vagabond. His angular face was masked behind a thick, grey beard of matted dreadlocks, but where it could be seen, it was lined with scars, and seemed to have a discoloured, grey cast, as if the dirt was ingrained. His hair was shaggy and long, and also matted grey. His eyes were piercing.

  “Commissar,” he said, with a formal nod that was strangely at odds with his matted, shaggy appearance. His voice was dry, with a peculiar, alien inflection. “I trust you have reviewed my statement and have made contact with—”

  Kanow raised his pistol. “You are a heretic and a deserter. You now face the justice of the Imperial Throne and—”

  An immense and sudden force tore the pistol painfully out of Kanow’s hand. Simultaneously, a knuckle-punch struck him in the throat and he fell back, gasping.

  A vicing arm locked around his neck in a throttle-hold. Kanow felt himself being dragged back tightly against his assailant’s body. Then he felt the cold muzzle of his own pistol brush gently against his temple.

  “No one move,” said the man behind him, with that same, dry, curious inflection.

  Maskar and all the other troopers were aiming their autorifles directly at Kanow and his captor. Ludd stood in the middle of them, bewildered.

  “Put the gun down. Now,” Maskar snarled over his shouldered weapon.

  “So you can shoot me?” replied the voice behind Kanow’s head. “I don’t think so. But I’m a reasonable man. Look, sergeant. I had the stone drop on you just then, and yet no one’s dead so far. Is that the act of a heretic or a deserter?”

  “Drop the gun!”

  “Put up your weapons, sergeant,” Ludd urged.

  “That young man’s got the right idea,” said the man with the gun to Kanow’s skull.

  “Not in a million years, you bastard,” Maskar replied.

  “That’s a shame,” the man choking Kanow said. Then, quietly, he added, “Dercius.”

  Figures moved out of the shadows. Either that, or shadows moved out and became figures, Ludd wasn’t sure. All he knew was that in a heartbeat, Maskar and his men had been crippled and dropped by swift phantoms, their rifles ripped out of their hands.

  Maskar and his men writhed on the deck, clutching bloody faces, snapped arms and broken noses. The shadows, now armed with the troopers’ weapons, surrounded Ludd.

  “What do you want?” Ludd asked quietly.

  “Shut up, Ludd! Don’t give them anything!” Kanow yelled. The choke-hold tightened.

  “You were saying, Ludd?” said one of the shadows.

  Ludd swallowed. “What… what is it that you want?”

  “What I asked for in the first place,” replied Ibram Gaunt, his arm locked around Commissar Kanow’s neck. “I want to talk to Lord General Barthol Van Voytz, and I want to do it now.”

  ONE

  11.29 hrs, 188.776.M41

  Frag Flats HQ

  Sparshad Combat Zone, Ancreon Sextus

  He had been expecting to get a view of the infamous Sparshad Mons as they dropped into their shallow approach, but all he could see via his relay screen was a flat expanse of endless dust dunes baked bone-white in the merciless glare.

  He fiddled with the screen’s magnification, and zoomed in on the desert floor, glimpsing dark dots and tiny litters of black specks. The white flats were not so spotless as the distance had suggested. There were thousands of square kilometres of wreckage down below: the twisted shells of war machines, burned-out ruins, human bones, a dead city, the legacy of the previous year’s fighting. The debris was covered with a coating of white dust, smoothing it into the flatness of the desert. Once, the entire zone had been the site of the mighty prefecture city of Sparshad Celsior. War had transmuted it into Frag Flats.

  “Where’s the Mons?” he asked.

  “Directly ahead, sir,” the pilot’s voice crackled over the intervox.

  “I can’t see… oh.” He still couldn’t see the Mons, but he could now tell where it was. Where the flat, white land ended and the pitiless blue sky began, a vast bank of orange cloud covered the horizon, directly ahead. It looked like a natural weather pattern, or the haze of a gathering dust storm, rising like a cliff-face above the desert.

  But it was smoke. A gigantic slab of smoke lifting from the battlefront and veiling the bulk of the Mons. He dialled up to maximum magnification and was able to detect tiny flashes in the base of the fume-bank, like sparks. Laser artillery, heavy ordnance, earthshakers, all assaulting the hidden edifice.

  “Escort peeling off,” the vox reported.

  He looked round, squinting out of the tiny window port, and caught a glint in the sunlight as the Lightning escort turned away, leaving the Commissariat Valkyrie alone for its final approach.

  “Two minutes,” the pilot reported.

  “Thank you,” he replied. He adjusted his viewer again, and lined up on the rapidly approaching HQ. It squatted like a reptile on the bleak, white landscape. Four Command Leviathans docked together in a cross, surrounded by the vast, regimented lines of ranked fighting vehicles, gun-platforms, extensive habi-tent camps, fuel and munition depots, and parked fliers. A vast assembly of Imperial Guard power, a mobile city: each Leviathan alone was an armoured crawler the size of a small town.

  He switched off the viewer, and looked at his own face reflected in the blank plate. He put on his cap and adjusted the set of it, but despite the cap, and despite his splendid formal uniform, he still looked like a pale-faced youth. And a frightened one, too.

  Junior Commissar Nahum Ludd sat back in his restraint web, closed his eyes, and tried to calm his nerves. He was the only occupant of the passenger section, and the vacant seating all around troubled him more than he cared to admit. The transport rocked slightly as it applied thrusters to decelerate hard. Ludd felt his stomach flop as they began to drop vertically.

  “Thirty seconds to touchdown,” the pilot reported, his voice calm and expressionless.

  Ludd swallowed. My lord general, he rehearsed for the umpteenth time, I extend a cordial greeting from my commanding officer, Commissar Kanow, who apologises that he could not come here himself…

  There was a thump, a hard vibration, then all sense of motion fell away. The internal lighting flickered on, and the red runes on the bulkhead switched to green.

  “Sparshad Zone HQ, sir,” the vox crackled.

  “Thank you, pilot,” Ludd replied, unclasping his harness and rising to his feet. The cabin’s air-scrubbers had switched to external circulation, and the slightly stale air blew fresher from the vents. Ludd walked over to the hatch, past the rows of empty seats. Since boarding at Camp Xeno, he’d not seen another human face. That fact continued to bother him.

  There was a hand-written notice pasted to the inside of the hatch. It read “GLARE-SHADES!”. Ludd smiled, took his glare-shades out of his coat po
cket and put them on.

  “Hatch, please.”

  With a slight pop of decompression that hurt his ears, the hatch disengaged and began to slide away and out on its hydraulic arms.

  Light flooded in, and heat too. Ludd gasped at the hard bite of the atmosphere outside. The light was as white and fierce as a laser. Without his glare-shades, he’d have been blinded.

  Ludd looked out into the radiant world awaiting him. Then, with his data-case under his arm, he walked down the ramp.

  The Valkyrie had set down on a landing pad on the hunched back of one of the vast Leviathans. Service crews in full sun-shrouds were hurrying forward into the shadow of the big transport to couple it up and attach fuelling lines. The landing pad was a flat disc of pale green metal, coated with a thin dusting of fine, wind-blown white sand, so that the crews’ progress was recorded in smudged footprints and the smears left by trailing hoses.

  Ludd wandered a few paces away from the Valkyrie. The dust-caked back of the Leviathan spread out around him in all directions, a grim vista of cooling vents, gun-turrets and sensor domes. Ludd had not been aboard a Leviathan before. It was immense. Turning, he could see the other three crawlers, docked with it, a vast cruciform of dirt-swathed steel.

  There was a loud bang and a doppler scream of passing jet-wash as a pack of Imperial Interceptors streaked overhead. Ludd watched them as they turned north, jockeying into attack formation.

  Ludd walked over to the guard-rail. On the Leviathan’s back, he was as high up as if he’d been standing on the roof of a hive stack. It was a giddying drop to the desert below, but not so distant as it had been from the air. He could see the extent of the HQ encampment clearly now, the huge, marshalled assemblies of men and machines spread out around the Command crawlers. Brigades of fighting vehicles waited in the sunlight for deployment orders, tenders and armoury loaders moving amongst them. Vast forests of troop tents covered the desert like infestations of domed fungi, surrounding the large prefab modules of infirmaries, mess-halls and training barns. To the west, beyond the heavily defended mass of the supply dumps and the temporary hangars, lay a massive stretch of rolled-down hardstand matting lined with parked fighter-bombers and their smaller escorts. At the camp’s northern perimeter, he could see a column of armour, kicking up dust as it moved out towards the front. Dozens of black vox masts sprouted from the camp all around, like spears planted into the ground.