[Gaunt's Ghosts 01] - First & Only

by Dan Abnett - (ebook by Undead)

  Fereyd smiled. “I knew you were up to it. I needed someone I could trust. Someone there…”

  “Someone who was part of the intricate web of friends and confidantes you have nurtured wherever you go?”

  “Hard words, Ibram. I thought we were friends.”

  We are. You know your friends, Fereyd. You made them yourself.

  There was a silence.

  “So tell me… from the beginning.” Gaunt raised a questioning eyebrow.

  Fereyd shrugged. “You know it all, don’t you?”

  “I’ve had gobbets of it, piecemeal… bits and scraps, educated guesses, intuitions. I’d like to hear it clean.”

  Fereyd put down his lasgun, drew off his gloves and flexed his knuckles. The gesture made Gaunt smile. There was nothing about this man, this Tactician Wheyland, that remotely resembled the Fereyd he’d known on the city farms of Pashen Nine-Sixty, such was the spy’s mastery of disguise. But now that little gesture, an idiosyncrasy even careful disguise couldn’t mask. It reassured the commissar.

  “It is standard Imperial practice for a warmaster to establish a covert network to observe all of his command. Macaroth is cautious, a son of the Emperor in instinct. And glory knows, he’s got a lot of shadows to fear. Slaydo’s choice wasn’t popular. Many resent him, Dravere most of all. Power corrupts, and the temptation of power corrupts even more. Men are just men, and they are fallible. I’ve been part of the network assigned by Macaroth to keep watch and check on his Crusade’s officers. Dravere is a proud man, Bram, he will not suffer this slight.”

  “You’ve said as much before. Hell, I’ve even paraphrased you to my men.”

  “You’ve told your men?” Fereyd asked quickly, with a sharp look.

  “My officers. Just enough to make sure they are with me, just enough to give them an edge if it matters. Fact is, I’ve probably told them all I know, which is precious little. The prize, the Vermilion trophy… that’s what has changed everything, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. Even with regiments loyal to him, Dravere could never hope to turn on our beloved warmaster. But if he had something else, some great advantage, something Macaroth didn’t have…”

  “like a weapon.”

  “Like a great, great weapon. Eight months ago, part of my network on Talsicant first got a hint that Dravere’s own covert agencies had stumbled upon a rumour of some great prize. We don’t know how, or where… we can only imagine the efforts and sacrifices made by his operatives to locate and recover the data. But they did. A priceless nugget of ancient, Vermilion level secrets snatched from some distant, abominable reach of space and conveyed from psyker to psyker, agent to agent, back to the Lord High Militant General. It couldn’t be sent openly of course, or Macaroth would have intercepted it. Nor was it possible to send it directly, as it was being carried out of hostile space, far from Imperial control. On the last leg of its journey, transmitted from the Nubila Reach to Pyrites, we managed to track it and intercept it, diverting it from Dravere’s agents. That was when it fell into your hands.”

  “And the General’s minions have been desperate to retrieve it ever since.”

  Fereyd nodded. “In anticipation of its acquisition, Dravere has set great wheels in motion. He knew its import, and the location it referred to. With it now in our hands — just — we couldn’t allow it to fall back into Dravere’s grasp. But we were not positioned strongly or closely enough to recover it. It was decided… I decided, in fact… that our best choice was to let you run with it, in the hope that you would get to it for us before the Lord General and his coterie of allies.”

  “You have terrifying faith in my abilities, Fereyd. I’m just a footslogger, a commander of infantry.”

  “You know you’re more than that. A loyal hero of unimpeachable character, resourceful, ruthless… one of Warmaster Slaydo’s chosen few, a man on whom the limelight of fame fell full enough to make it difficult for Dravere to move against you directly.”

  Gaunt laughed. “If the attempts to kill me and my men recently weren’t direct, I hate to think what direct means!”

  Fereyd caught his old friend with a piercing look. “But you did it! You made it this far! You’re on top of the situation, close to the prize, just as I knew you would! We did everything we could, behind the scenes, to facilitate your positioning and give you assistance. The deployment of the Tanith in the frontline here was no accident. And I’m just thankful I was able to manipulate my own cover as part of the Tactical Counsel to get close enough to join you now.”

  “Well, we’re here now, right enough, and the prize is in our grasp…” Gaunt began, hefting up his rifle again and preparing to move.

  “May I see the crystal, Bram? Maybe it’s time I read its contents too… if we’re to work together on this.”

  Gaunt swung round and gazed at Fereyd in slow realisation. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know?”

  “You don’t know what it is we’re here risking our lives for?”

  “You thought I did? Even Macaroth and his allies don’t know for sure. All any of us are certain of is that it is something that could make Dravere the man to overthrow the Crusade’s High Command. As far as I know, you’re the only person who’s decoded it. Only you know — you and the men you’ve chosen to share it with.”

  Gaunt began to laugh. The laughter rolled along the low stone tunnel and made all the men look round in surprise.

  “I’ll tell you then, Fereyd, and it’s as bad as you fear—”

  Mkoll’s hard whistle rang down the space and cut them all silent.

  Gaunt spun around, raising his rifle and looked ahead into the blackness, his fresh lamp-pack already dimmer. Something moved ahead of him in the darkness. A scrabbling sound.

  A barbed round hummed lazily out of nowhere, missing the flinching Larkin by a whisker and exploding against the stone wall of the corridor. Domor started screaming as Caffran held him. Shrapnel had taken his eyes and his face was a mask of flowing blood.

  Gaunt seared five shots off into the darkness, and heard the chatter of Bragg’s autocannon starting up behind him. The party took up firing positions along the rough-hewn walls of the tunnel.

  Now the endgame, Gaunt thought.

  ELEVEN

  The medics, trailing their long red scrubs like priests’ robes, their faces masked by gauze, moved silently around the isolation sphere in the belly of the Leviathan. They reset diagnosticators and other gently pulsing machines, muttering low intonations of healing invocations.

  Heldane knew they were the best medics in the Segmentum Pacificus fleet. Dravere had transferred a dozen of his private medical staff to Heldane when he learned of the Inquisitor’s injury. It mattered little, Heldane knew as a certainty. He was dying. The rifle round, fired at such close range, had destroyed his neck, left shoulder and collarbone, left cheek and throat. Without the supporting web of the medical bay and the Emperor’s grace, he would already be cold. He eased back in his long-frame cot, as far as the tubes and regulator pipes piercing his neck and chest would allow. Beyond the plastic sheeting of his sterile tent, he could see the winking, pumping mechanisms on their brass trolleys and racks that were keeping him alive. He could see the dark fluids of his own body cycling in and out of centrifuge scrubs, squirting down ridged plastic tubes supported by aluminium frames. Every twenty seconds, a delicate silvered scorpion-form device screwed into the bones of his face bathed his open wound with a mist of disinfectant spray from its hooked tail. Soothing smoke rose from incense burners around the bed.

  He looked up through the plastic veil at the ceiling of the sphere, lucidly examining the zigzag, black-and white inlay of the roof-pattern. With his mind, the wonderful mind that could pace out the measures of unreal space and stay sane in the full light of the Immaterium, he considered the overlaid pattern, the interlocking chevrons of ivory and obsidian. The nature of eternity lay in their pattern. He unlocked it, psychically striding beyond his ruined physicality, pene
trating the abstract realms of lightness and darkness, the governing switches on which all reality was triggered.

  Light interlocked with dark. It pleased him. He knew, as he had always known, that his place lay somehow in the slivered cracks of shadow between the contrasting white and black. He entered this space between, and it embraced him. He understood, as he was sure the Emperor himself did not understand, the miraculous division between the Light of mankind and the Darkness of the foe. It was a distinction so obvious and yet so overlooked. Like any true son of the Imperium of Man, he would fight with all his soul and vigour against the blackness, but he would not do so standing in the harshness of the pure white. There was a shadow between them, a greyness, that was his to inhabit. The Emperor, and his heir Macaroth, were oblivious to the distinction and that was what made them weak. Dravere saw it, and that is why Heldane bent his entire force of will to support the lord general. What did he care if the weapon they hunted for was made by, or polluted by, Chaos? It would still work against the Darkness.

  If man was to survive, he must adjust his aspect and enter the shadow. Ninety years as an Inquisitor had shown Heldane that much at least. The political and governing instincts of mankind had to shift away from the stale Throne of Earth. The blackness without was too deep, too negative for such complacency.

  Despite his weakness, Heldane lazily read the blunt minds of the medics around him, as a man might flick through the pages of open books. He knew they feared him, knew that some found his inhuman form repulsive. One, a medic called Guylat, dared to regard him as an animal, a beast to be treated with caution. Heldane had been happy to work on Guylat’s prejudices, and from time to time he would slide into the man’s mind anonymously, fire a few of the synapses he found, and send the medic racing to the latrine rooms beyond the sphere with a loose bowel or a choking desire to vomit.

  Usable minds. They were Heldane’s favourite tools.

  He scanned out again, thumbing through blunt intelligences that frankly alarmed him with their simple limits. Two medics were talking softly by the door — out of earshot, they thought, from the patient in the bed. One supposed Heldane to be insane, such was the damage to his brain. The other concurred.

  They were afraid of him. How delightful, Heldane chuckled.

  He had exercised his mind enough. It was free and working. He could perform his task. He knitted his raking brow and summoned one of the medics. The medic came at once, unsure as to why he was lifting the edge of the plastic tent and approaching Heldane.

  “A mirror. I require a mirror,” Heldane said through the larynx augmenters. The man nodded, swept back out of the tent, and returned in a moment with a round surgical mirror.

  Heldane took hold of it with his right hand, the only limb that would still function. He dismissed the blunt with a curt thought and the medic went back to his work.

  Heldane raised the mirror and looked into it, glimpsing the steepled line of his own skull, the grinning mouth, the bloody wound edges and medical instrumentation. He looked into the mirror.

  Creating a pawn was not easy. It involved a complex focussing of pain and a training of response, so that the pawn-mind became as a lock shaped to fit Heldane’s psychic key. The process could be done rudely with the mind, but was better affected through surgery and the exquisite use of blades.

  Heldane enjoyed his work. Through the correct application of pain and the subtle adjustment of mind response, he could fashion any man into a slave, a psychic puppet through whose ears and eyes he could sense — and through whose limbs he could act.

  Heldane used the mirror to summon his pawn. He focused until the face appeared in the mirror, filmy and hazed. The pawn would do his bidding. The pawn would perform. Through the pawn, he would see everything. It was as good as being there himself. As he had promised Dravere, his pawn was with Gaunt now. He sensed everything the pawn could: the wet rock, the swallowing darkness, the exchange of fire. He could see Gaunt, without his cap and storm-coat, dressed in a short leather jacket, blasting at the foe with his lasgun.

  Gaunt.

  Heldane reached out and took control of his pawn, enjoyed the rich seam of hatred for Ibram Gaunt that layered through his chosen pawn’s mind. That made things so much easier. Before he submitted to death, Heldane told himself, he would use his pawn to win the day. To win everything.

  TWELVE

  Rawne threw himself flat as laser fire and barb-shells winnowed down the corridor. He raised his lasgun, hunting for a target. A flat pain, like a migraine headache, darted through his head, disturbing memories of sharp physical pain. In his mind, Rawne saw the beast, the arch-manipulator, the Inquisitor, with his hooked blades and micro-surgery drills, leaning over him.

  Heldane. The bastard’s name had been Heldane. His blades had opened Rawne’s body and unshackled his mind. And Heldane’s venomous, obscene mind had swept into the breach…

  He shook his head and felt droplets of sweat flick away. Heldane be damned. He fired off a trio of shots into the darkness of the vault and silently thanked the mad sniper, Larkin, and his shot that had blasted Heldane apart. He had never thanked Larkin personally, of course. A man like him verbally acknowledge a peasant like Mad Larkin?

  The infiltration team had all made cover, except for Baru who had lost a knee to a las-round and was fallen in the open, crawling and gasping.

  Gaunt bellowed a command down the narrow tunnel and Bragg swept out of cover, thumping sizzling shots from his autocannon in a wide covering spread, which gave Gaunt and Mkoll time to drag Baru into shelter. Domor was still screaming, even as Caffran tried to bind his face wounds from the field kit.

  Las-fire whickered along the passage around them, but Rawne feared the barbs more. Even missing or deflecting or ricocheting, they could do more damage. He squeezed off two hopeful shots, breathless for a target. Unease coiled in his mind, a faint, stained darkness that had been there since his torture at the hands of the lean giant, Heldane. He fought it off, but it refused to go away.

  Gaunt slid across to Domor, taking the shuddering man’s bloody hands in his own.

  “Easy, trooper! Easy, friend! It’s me, the commissar… I’ve come all the way from Tanith with you, and I won’t leave you to die!”

  Domor stopped whimpering, biting on his lip. Gaunt saw that his face was an utter mess. His eyes were ruined and the flesh of his right check hung shredded and loose. Gaunt took the ribbons of bandage from Caffran and strapped the trooper’s head back together, winding the tape around his eyes in a tight blindfold. He hissed to Dorden, who was just finishing field-dressing Baru’s knee. The medical officer wriggled over under the sporadic fire. Gaunt had stripped Domor’s sleeve away from his forearm with a jerking cut of his blade and Dorden quickly sunk a dose of painkiller into the man’s bulging wrist veins.

  Gaunt had seen death wounds before, and knew that Domor would not live long outside of a properly-equipped infirmary. The eye wounds were too deep, and already rusty smears of blood were seeping through the pale white bindings. Dorden shook his head sadly at Gaunt, and the commissar was glad Domor couldn’t see the unspoken verdict.

  “You’ll make it,” Gaunt told him, “if I have to carry you myself!”

  “Leave me…” Domor moaned.

  “Leave the trooper who hijacked the maglev train and lead us to our victory battle on Fortis? We won a world with your help, Domor. I’d rather hack off an arm and leave that behind!”

  “You’re a good man,” Domor said huskily, his breathing shallow, “for an anroth.”

  Gaunt allowed himself a thin smile.

  Behind him, Larkin sighted the ancient weapon he had adopted and dropped a faint figure in the darkness with a clean shot. Fereyd’s troopers, supported by Rawne and Mkoll, fired las-rounds in a pulsing rhythm that battered into the unseen foe.

  Then it fell suddenly quiet.

  Together with one of Fereyd’s men, Mkoll, a shadow under his stealth cloak, edged forward. After a moment, he shouted back: “Clea
r!”

  The party moved on, Caffran supporting the weakening Domor and Dorden helping the limping Baru. At a turn in the corridor, they picked their way between the fallen foe: eight dead humans, emaciated and covered in sores, dressed in transparent plastic body gloves, their faces hidden by snarling bone masks. They were inscribed with symbols: symbols that made their minds hurt; symbols of plague and invention. Gaunt made sure that the dead were stripped of all plasma ammo packs. Rawne slung his lasgun over his shoulder and lifted one of the barb-guns — a long, lance-tube weapon with a skate-like bayonet fixed underneath. He pulled a satchel of barb rounds off the slack arm of one of the corpses.

  Gaunt didn’t comment. Right now, anything they could muster to their side was an advantage.

  THIRTEEN

  The citadel had fallen silent. Smoke, some thin and pale, some boiling and black, vented from the jagged stone facade.

  Breathlessly light-headed on painkillers, Colonel Colm Corbec led the first advance down into the steep, rubble-strewn ditch and up into the diff-face of buildings. Silent, almost invisible waves of Tanith warriors crept down after him, picking their way into the ruins, lasguns ready.

  Corbec had not sent any signals back to Command. This advance would be as unknown as he could manage. This would be the Ghosts alone, taking what ground they could before crying for help.

  They edged through stone shattered and fused into black bubbles, crushing the ashen remains of the foe underfoot. The feedback of the fence weapons had done greater damage than Corbec could have imagined. He called up Varl’s platoon and sent them forward as scouts, using double the number of sweepers.

  Corbec turned suddenly, to find Milo standing next to him.

  “No tunes now, I’d guess, sir,” the boy said, his Tanith pipes slung safely under his arm.