[Gaunt's Ghosts 01] - First & Only

by Dan Abnett - (ebook by Undead)

  Gaunt signalled back at his team and instructed them to follow the pair of them over on the path Domor had made. He noticed that Fereyd was first in line, his face set with an urgent, impatient scowl.

  As they came, Gaunt turned his attention back to the door. It was visible only by its seams in the rock, a marvellously smooth piece of precision engineering. Gaunt did what the data crystal had told him he should: he placed an open palm against the right hand edge of the door and exerted gentle pressure.

  Silently, the twin, fifteen metre tail blocks of stone rolled back and opened. Beyond lay a huge chamber so brightly lit and gleaming it made Gaunt close his eyes and wince.

  “What? What do you see?” Domor asked by his side.

  “I don’t know,” Gaunt said, blinking, “but it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  The others closed in behind them, looking up in astonishment, crossing the threshold of the Edicule behind Gaunt and the eager Fereyd. Rawne was the last inside.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Inquisitor Heldane allowed himself a gentle shudder of relief. His pawn was now inside the sacred Edicule of the Menazoid necropolis, and with him went Heldane’s senses and intellect. After all this time, all this effort, he was right there, channelled through blunt mortal instruments until his mind was engaging first hand with the most precious artefact in space.

  The most precious, the most dangerous, the most limitless of possibilities. A means at last, with all confidence, to overthrow Macaroth and the stagnating Imperial rule he espoused. It would make Dravere warmaster, and Dravere would in turn be his instrument. All the while mankind fought the dark with light, he was doomed to eventual defeat. The grey, thought Heldane, the secret weapons of the grey, those things that the hard-liners of the Imperium were too afraid to use, the devices and possibilities that lay in the blurred moral fogs beyond the simple and the just. That is how he would lead mankind out of the dark and into true ascendancy, crushing the perverse alien menaces of the galaxy and all those loyal to the old ways alike.

  Of course, if Dravere used this weapon and seized control of the Crusade, used it to push the campaign on to undreamed-of victory, then the High Lords of Terra would be bound to castigate him and declare him treasonous. But they wouldn’t know until it was done. And then, in the light of those victories, how could they gainsay his decision?

  Some of the orderlies in the isolation bay began to notice the irregularities registering in the inquisitor’s bio-monitors and started forward to investigate. He sent them scurrying out of sight with a lash of his psyche.

  Heldane took up the hand mirror again and gazed into it until his mind loosed once more and he was able to psychically dive into its reflective skin like a swimmer into a still pool.

  Invisible, he surfaced amongst Gaunt’s wondering team in the Edicule. He turned the eyes of his pawn to take it all in: a cylindrical chamber a thousand metres high and five hundred in diameter, the walls fibrous and knotted with pipes and flutes and tubes of silver and chromium. Brilliant white light shafted down from far above. The floor underfoot was chased with silver, richly inscribed with impossibly complex algorithmic paradoxes, a thousand to a square metre. Heldane expanded his mind in a heartbeat and read them all… solved them all.

  Bounding eagerly beyond this trifle, he looked around and focussed on the great structure which dominated the centre of the chamber. A machine, a vast device made of brilliant white ceramics, silver piping, chromium chambers.

  A Standard Template Constructor. Intact.

  The secrets of originating technology had been lost to mankind for so long. Since the Dark Ages, the Imperium, even the Adeptus Mechanicus could only manufacture things they had learned by recovering the processes of the ancient STC systems. From scraps and remnants of shattered STC systems on a thousand dead worlds, the Imperium had slowly relearned the secrets of construction, of tanks and machines and laser weapons. Every last fragment was priceless.

  To find a dedicated Constructor intact was a find made once a generation, a find from which the entire Imperium benefited.

  But to find one like this intact was surely without precedent. All of the speculation had been correct. Long ago, thousands of years before Chaos had overwhelmed it, Menazoid Epsilon had been an arsenal world, manufacturing the ultimate weapon known to those lost ages. The secrets of its process and purpose were contained within those million and half algorithms etched into the wide floor.

  The Men of Iron. A rumour so old it was a myth, and myth from the oldest times, before the Age of Strife, from the Dark Age of Technology, when mankind had reached a state of glory as the masters of a techno-automatic Empire, the race that had perfected the Standard Template Construct. They created the Men of Iron, mechanical beings of power and sentience but no human soul. Heretical devices in the eyes of the Imperium. War with the self-aware Men of Iron had led to the fall of that distant Empire and, if the old, deeply arcane records Heldane had been privy to were correct, that was why the Imperium had outlawed any soulless mechanical intelligence. But as servants, implacable warriors — what could not be achieved with Men of Iron at your side?

  And here, at the untouched heart of the ancient arsenal world, was the STC system to make such Men of Iron.

  There was more! Heldane broadened his focus and took in the walls of the chamber for the first time. At floor level, all around, were alcoves screened by metal grilles. Behind them, as still and silent as terracotta statues guarding a royal tomb, stood phalanxes of Iron Men. Hundreds, hundreds of hundreds, ranked back in symmetrical rows into the shadows of the alcove. Each stood far taller than a man, faces like sightless skulls of burnished steel, the sinews and arteries of their bodies formed from cable and wire encased in anatomical plate-sections of lustreless alloy. They slept, waiting the command to awaken, waiting to receive orders, waiting to ignite the great device once more and multiply their forces again.

  Heldane breathed hard to quell his excitement. He wound his senses back into his pawn and surveyed the gathered men.

  Gaunt gazed in solemn wonder; the Ghosts were transfixed with awe and bafflement, the Crusade staff alert and eager to investigate. Gaunt turned to Dorden and ordered him to take Domor aside and let him rest. He told the other Ghosts to stand down and relax. Then he crossed to Fereyd, who was standing before the vast STC device, his helmet dangling by its chin-strap from his hand.

  “The prize, old friend,” Fereyd said, without turning.

  “The prize. I hope it was worth it.”

  Now Fereyd turned to look. “Do you have any idea what this is?”

  “Ever since I unlocked that crystal, you know that I have. I don’t pretend to understand the technology, but I know that’s an intact Standard Template weapons maker. And I know that’s as unheard of as a well-manicured ork.”

  Fereyd laughed. “Sixty years ago on Geyluss Auspix, a rat-water world a long way from nothing in Pleigo Sutarnus, a team of Imperial scouts found an intact STC in the ruins of a pyramid city in a jungle basin. Intact. You know what it made? It was the Standard Template Constructor for a type of steel blade, an alloy of folded steel composite that was sharper and lighter and tougher than anything we’ve had before. Thirty whole Chapters of the great Astartes are now using blades of the new pattern. The scouts became heroes. I believe each was given a world of his own. It was regarded as the greatest technological advance of the century, the greatest discovery, the most perfect and valuable STC recovery in living memory.”

  “That made knives, Bram… knives, daggers, bayonets, swords. It made blades and it was the greatest discovery in memory. Compared to this… it’s less than nothing. Take one of those wonderful new blades and face me with the weapon this thing can make.”

  “I read the crystal before you did, Fereyd. I know what it can do. Iron Men; the old myth, one of the tales of the Great Old Wars.”

  Fereyd grinned. “Then breathe in this moment, my friend. We’ve found the impossible here. A device to guara
ntee the ascendancy of man. What’s a stronger, lighter, sharper, better blade when you can overrun the homeworld of the man wielding it with a legion of deathless warriors? This is history, you know, alive in the air around us. This makes us the greatest of men. Don’t you feel it?”

  Gaunt and Fereyd both turned slowly, surveying the silent ranks of metal beings waiting behind the grilles.

  Gaunt hesitated. “I feel… only horror. To have fought and killed and sacrificed just to win a device that will do more of the same a thousandfold. This isn’t a prize, Fereyd. It is a curse.”

  “But you came looking for it? You knew what it was.”

  “I know my responsibilities, Fereyd. I dedicate my life to the service of the Imperium, and if a device like this exists then it’s my duty to secure it in the name of our beloved Emperor. And you gave me the job of finding it, after all.”

  Fereyd set his helmet on the silver floor and began to unlace his gloves, shaking his head. “I love you like a brother, old friend, but sometimes you worry me. We share a discovery like this and you trot out some feeble moral line about lives? That’s called hypocrisy, you know. You’re a killer, slaved to the greatest killing engine in the known galaxy. That’s your work, your life, to end others. To destroy. And you do it with relish. Now we find something that will do it a billion times better than you, and you start to have qualms? What is it? Professional jealousy?”

  Gaunt scratched his cheek, thoughtful. “You know me better. Don’t mock me. I’m surprised at your glee. I’ve known the Princeps of Imperial Titans who delight in their bloodshed, and who nevertheless regard the vast power at their disposal with caution. Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he’s got the wisdom and morals of a god to match. There’s nothing feeble about my moral line. I value life. That is why I fight to protect it. I mourn every man I lose and every sacrifice I make. One life or a billion, they’re all lives.”

  “One life or a billion?” Fereyd echoed. “It’s just a matter of proportion, of scale. Why slog in the mud with your men for months to win a world I can take with Iron Men… and not spill a drop of blood?”

  “Not a drop? Not ours, maybe. There is no greater heresy than the thinking machines of the Iron Age. Would you unleash such a heresy again? Would you trust these… things not to turn on us as they did before? It is the oldest of laws. Mankind must never again place his fate in the hands of his creations, no matter how clever. I trust flesh and blood, not iron.”

  Gaunt found himself almost hypnotised by the row of dark eye-sockets behind the grille. These things were the future? He didn’t think so. The past, perhaps, a past better forgotten and denied. How could any one wake them? How could anyone even think of making more and unleashing them against…

  Against who? The enemy? Warmaster Macaroth and his retinue? This was how Dravere planned to usurp control of the Crusade? This was what it had all been about?

  “You’ve really taken your poor orphan Ghosts into your heart, haven’t you, Bram? The concern doesn’t suit you.”

  “Maybe I sympathise. Orphans stick with orphans.”

  Fereyd walked away a few paces. “You’re not the man I knew, Ibram Gaunt. The Ghosts have softened you with their wailing and melancholy. You’re blind to the truly momentous possibilities here.”

  “You’re not, obviously. You said ‘I’.”

  Fereyd stopped in his tracks and turned around. “What?”

  “ ‘A world I can take without spilling a drop of blood’. Your words. You would use this, wouldn’t you? You’d use them.” He gestured to the sleeping iron figures.

  “Better I than no one.”

  “Better no one. That’s why I came here. It’s why I thought you had come here too, or why you’d sent me.”

  Fereyd’s face turned dark and ugly. “What are you blathering about?”

  “I’m here to destroy this thing so that no one can use it,” said Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt.

  He turned away from Fereyd’s frozen face and called to Caffran and Mkoll. “Unpack the tube charges,” he instructed. “Put them where they count. Rawne knows demolition better than any. That’s why I brought him along. Get him to supervise. And signal Corbec, or whoever’s left up top. Tell them to pull out of the necropolis right now. I dare not imagine what will happen when we do this.”

  In the isolation sphere, Heldane froze and clenched the mirror so tightly that it cracked. Thin blood oozed out from under his hooked thumb. He had entirely underestimated this Gaunt, this blunt fool. Such power, such scope; if only he had been given the chance to work on Gaunt and make him the pawn.

  Heldane swallowed. There was no time to waste now. The prize was in his grasp. No Imperial Guard nobody would thwart him now. Discretion and subterfuge went to the winds. He lanced his mind down into the blunt skull of his pawn, urging him to act and throw off the deceit. To kill them all, before this madman Gaunt could damage the holy relic and kill the Iron Men.

  Sat at the edge of the Edicule chamber, checking his barb-lance with his back resting against the silver wall, Rawne shuddered and blood seeped down out of his nose, thick in his mouth. He felt the touch of the bastard monster Heldane more strongly than ever now, clawing at his skull, digging in his eyes like scorpion claws. His guts churned and trembling filled his limbs.

  Major Rawne stumbled to his feet, sliding a barb-round into the lance-launcher and swinging it to bear.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  With the sudden reinforcement of Zoren’s Vitrians, Corbec’s platoons pushed the Chaos elements back into the ruins of the necropolis, slaughtering as they went. The misshapen forces of madness were in rout.

  Leaning on a boulder and wheezing at the pain flooding through his ribs, Corbec thought to order up a vox-caster and signal command that the victory was theirs, but Milo was suddenly at his side, holding a foil-print out from a vox-caster.

  “It’s the commissar,” he said, “We have to get clear of the Target Primaris. Well clear.”

  Corbec studied the film slip. “Feth! We spend all day getting in here…”

  He waved Raglon over and pulled the speaker horn from the caster set on the man’s back.

  “This is Corbec of the Tanith First and Only to all Tanith and Vitrian officers. Word from Gaunt: pull back and out! I repeat, clear the necropolis area!”

  Colonel Zoren’s voice floated across the speaker channel. “Has he done it, Corbec? Has he achieved the goal?”

  “He didn’t say, colonel,” Corbec snapped in reply. “We’ve done this much on his word, let’s do the rest. Withdrawal plan five-ninety! We’ll cover and support your Dragoons in a layered fall back.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Replacing the horn, Corbec shuddered. The pain was almost more than he could bear and he had taken his last painkiller tab an hour before. He returned to his men.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Bragg cried out in sudden shock, his voice dwarfed by the vastness of the Edicule. Gaunt, walking towards Dorden and Domor by the doorway, spun around in surprise, to find Fereyd and his bodyguard raising their lasrifles to bear on the Ghosts.

  For a split second, as Fereyd swung his gun to aim. Gaunt locked eyes with him. He saw nothing in those deep, black irises he recognised of old. Only hate and murder.

  In a heartbeat…

  Gaunt flung himself down as Fereyd’s first las-bolt cut through the air where his head had been.

  Fereyd’s elite troopers began firing, winging Bragg and scattering the other Ghosts. Dorden threw himself flat over Domor’s yelling body.

  Rawne sighted and fired the barb-lance.

  The buzzing, horribly slow round crossed the bright space of the Edicule and hit Fereyd’s face on the bridge of the nose. Everything of Imperial Tactician Wheyland above the sternum explosively evaporated in a mist of blood and bone chips.

  Larkin howled as he fell, shot through the forearm by a las-round from one of the elite troopers flanking the Tactician.

  Caffran and Mkoll, bot
h sprawling, whipped around to return fire with their lasguns, toppling one of the bodyguards with a double hit neither could truly claim.

  Gaunt rolled as he dived, pulling out his laspistol and bellowing curses as he swung and fired. Another of Fereyd’s troopers fell, blasted backwards by a trio of shots to his chest. He jerked back, arms and legs extended, and died.

  Gaunt squeezed the trigger again, but his lasgun just retched and fizzed. The energy draining effect of the catacombs, which had sapped their lamp packs, had wasted ammo charges too. His weapon was spent.

  The remaining bodyguard lurched forward to blast Gaunt, helpless on the floor — and dropped with a laser-blasted hole burnt clean through his skull. His body smashed back hard against the side of the STC machine and slid down, leaving a streak of blood down the chased silver facing. Gaunt scrambled around to look.

  Clutching the bawling Domor to him, Dorden sat half-raised with Domor’s laspistol in his hand.

  “Needs must,” the doctor said quietly, suddenly tossing the weapon aside like it was an insect which had stung him.

  “Great shot, doc,” Larkin said, getting up, clutching his seared arm.

  “Only said I wouldn’t shoot, not that I couldn’t,” Dorden said.

  The Ghosts got back to their feet. Dorden hurried to treat the wounds Bragg and Larkin had received.

  “What’s that sound?” Domor asked sharply. They all froze.

  Gaunt looked at the great machine. Amber lights were flicking to life on a panel on its flank. In death, the last Crusader had been blown back against the main activation grid. Old technologies were grinding into life. Smoke, steam perhaps, vented from cowlings near the floor. Processes moved and turned and murmured in the device.

  There was another noise too. A shuffling.

  Gaunt turned slowly. Behind the dark grilles in the alcoves, metal limbs were beginning to flex and uncurl. As he watched, eyes lit up in dead sockets. Blue. Their light was blue, cold, eternal. Somehow, it was the most appalling colour Gaunt had ever seen. They were waking. As their creator awoke, they awoke too.