PART THREE

FORTIS BINARY
FORGE WORLD

One

IT WASN’T THE drums that Corbec really detested, it was the rhythm. There was no sense to it. Though the notes were a regular drum sound, the beats came sporadically like a fluctuating heart, overlapping and syncopated. The bombardment was still ever-present but now, as they closed on the source of the beating, the drumming overrode even the roar of the explosions beyond the front trenches.

Corbec knew his men were spooked even before Sergeant Curral said it. Down the channel ahead, Scout-Sergeant Mkoll was returning towards them. He had missed the signal to put on his respirator and his face was pinched, tinged with green. As soon as he saw the masked men of his company, he anxiously pulled on his own gas-hood.

‘Report!’ Corbec demanded quickly.

‘It opens up ahead,’ Mkoll said through his mask, breathing hard. ‘There are wide manufactory areas ahead of us. We’ve broken right through their lines into the heart of this section of the industrial belt. I saw no one. But I heard the drums. It sounds like there are… well, thousands of them out there. They’re bound to attack soon. But what are they waiting for?’

Corbec nodded and moved forward, ushering his men on behind him. They hugged the walls of the trench and assumed fire pattern formation, crouching low and aiming in a sweep above the head of the man in front.

The trench opened out from its zigzag into a wide, stonewalled basin which overlooked a slope leading down into colossal factory sheds.

The thump of the drums, the incessant and irregular beat, was now all-pervading.

Corbec waved two fire-teams forward on either flank, Drayl taking the right and Lukas taking the left. He led the front prong himself. The slope was steep and watery-slick. By necessity, they became more concerned with keeping upright and descending than with raising their weapons defensively.

The concourse around the sheds was open and empty. Feeling exposed, Corbec beckoned his men on, the front prong of the attack spearheading out into a wide phalanx as men slipped down the slope and joined them. Drayl’s team was now established to his right covering them, and soon Lukas’s was also in position.

The drums now throbbed so loudly they vibrated the hard plastic lenses in their respirator masks and thudded against their chest walls.

Corbec scurried across the open space with eight men accompanying him and covering every quarter. Sergeant Grell moved another dozen in behind them as Corbec reached the first of the sheds. He looked back and saw the men were keeping the line well, although he was concerned to see Drayl lift his respirator for a moment to wipe his face with the back of his cuff. He knew the man was ill at ease following that unhappy injury, but he still disliked undisciplined activity.

‘Get that fething mask in place!’ he shouted at Trooper Drayl and then, with seven lasguns covering the angles, he entered the shed.

The gabled building throbbed with the sound of drums. Corbec could scarcely believe what he saw. Thousands of makeshift mechanisms had been set up in here, rotary engines and little spinning turbines, all in one way or another driving levers that beat drumsticks onto cylinders of every shape and size, all stretched with skin. Corbec didn’t even want to think where that skin had come from. All that he was aware of was the syncopated and irregular thudding of the drum machines that the Shriven had left here. There was no pattern to their beat. Worse still, Corbec was more afraid that there was a pattern, and he was too sane to understand it.

A further sweep showed that the building was vacant, and scouting further they realised all of the sheds were filled with the makeshift drum machines… ten thousand drums, twenty thousand, of every size and shape, beating away like malformed, failing hearts.

Corbec’s men closed in around the sheds to hold them and assumed close defensive file, but Corbec knew they were all scared and the rhythms throbbing through the air were more than most could stand.

He called up Skulane, his heavy flamer stinking oil and dripping petroleum spill. He pointed to the first of the sheds. ‘Sergeant Grell will block you with a fire-team,’ he told the flame thrower. ‘You don’t have to watch your back. Just burn each of these hell-holes in turn.’

Skulane nodded and paused to tighten a gasket on his fire-blackened weapon. He moved forward into the first doorway as Grell ordered up a tight company of men to guard him. Skulane raised his flamer, his finger whitening under the tin guard of the rubberised trigger.

There was a beat. A single beat. For one incredible moment all of the eccentric rhythms of the mechanical drums struck as one.

Skulane’s head exploded. He dropped like a sack of vegetables onto the ground, the impact of his body and the spasm of his nervous system clenching the trigger on his flamer. The spike of fierce flame stabbed around in an unforgiving arc, burning first the portico of the blockhouse and then whipping back to incinerate three of the troopers guarding him. They shrieked and flailed as they were engulfed.

Panic hit the men and they spread out in scurrying bewildered patterns. Corbec howled a curse. Somehow, at the point of death, Skulane’s finger had locked the trigger of the flamer and the weapon, slack on its cable beneath his dead form, whipped back and forth like a fire-breathing serpent. Two more soldiers were caught in its breath, three more. It scorched great conical scars across the muddy concrete of the concourse.

Corbec threw himself flat against the side wall of the shed as the flames ripped past him. His mind raced and thoughts formed slower than actions. A grenade was in his hand, armed with a flick of his thumb.

He leapt from cover, and screamed to any who could hear him to get down even as he flung the grenade at Skulane’s corpse and the twisting flamer. The explosion was catastrophic, igniting the tanks on the back of the corpse. Fire, white hot, vomited up from the door of the shed and blew the front of the roof out. Sections of splintered stone collapsed down across the vestigial remains of Trooper Skulane.

Corbec, like many others, was knocked flat by the hot shockwave of the blast. Cowering in a ditch nearby, Scout-Sergeant Mkoll had avoided the worst of the blast. He had noticed something that Corbec had not, though with the continual beat of the drums, now irregular and unformed again, it was so difficult to concentrate. But he knew what he had seen.

Skulane had been hit from behind by a las-blast to the head. Cradling his own rifle, he scrambled around to try and detect the source of the attack. A sniper, he thought, one of the Shriven guerrillas lurking in this disputed territory.

All the men were on their bellies and covering their heads with their hands, all except Trooper Drayl, who stood with his lasgun held loosely and a smile on his face.

‘Drayl!’ Mkoll yelled, scrambling up from the trench. Drayl turned to face him across the concourse with a milky nothingness in his eyes. He raised his gun and fired.

Two

MKOLL THREW HIMSELF flat, but the first shot seared down the length of his back and broke his belt. Slumping into the ditch, he felt dull pain from the bubbled flesh along his shoulder blade. There was no blood. Lasfire cauterised whatever it hit.

There was shouting and panic, more panic than even before. Whooping in a strange and chilling tone, Drayl turned and killed the two Ghosts nearest to him with point blank shots to the back of the head. As others scrambled to get out of his way, he turned his gun to full auto and blazed at them, killing five more, six, seven.

Corbec leapt to his feet, horrified at what he saw. He swung his lasgun into his shoulder, took careful aim and shot Drayl in the middle of the chest. Drayl barked out a cough and flew backwards with his feet and hands pointing out, almost comically.

There was a pause. Corbec edged forward, as did Mkoll and most of the men, those that didn’t stop to try and help those that Drayl had blasted who were still alive.

‘For Feth’s sake…’ Corbec breathed as he walked forward towards the corpse of the dead guardsman. ‘What the hell is going on?’

Mkoll didn’t answer. He crossed the concourse in several fierce bounds and slammed into Corbec to bring him crashing to the ground.

Drayl wasn’t dead. Something insidious and appalling was blistering and seething inside the sack of his skin. He rose, first from the hips and then to his feet. By the time he was standing, he was twice human size, his uniform and skin splitting to accommodate the twisting, enlarging skeletal structure that was transmuting within him.

Corbec didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see the bony thing which was erupting from Drayl’s flesh. Watery blood and fluid spat from Drayl as the Chaos infection grew something within him, something that burst out and stepped free of the shredded carcass that it had once inhabited.

Drayl, or the thing that had once been Drayl, faced them across the yard. It stood four metres high, a vast and grotesque skeletal form whose bones seemed as if they had been welded from tarnished sections of steel. The head was huge, topped by polished horns that twisted irregularly. Oil and blood and other unnameable fluids dripped from its structure. It looked like it was smiling. It turned its head from left to right, as if anticipating the carnage to come.

Corbec saw that, despite the fact that all fabric and flesh of Drayl had been shed away, the obscenity still wore his dog-tags.

The beast reached up with great metallic claws and screamed at the sky.

‘Get into cover!’ Corbec screamed to his terrified men and they fled into every shadow and crevice they could find. Corbec and Mkoll dropped into a culvert; the scout was shaking. Along the damp drainage channel, Corbec could see Trooper Melyr, who carried the company’s rocket launcher. The man was too terrified to move. Corbec slithered down to him through the fetid soup and tried to pull the rocket launcher from his shoulder. Melyr was too limp and too scared to let it go easily.

‘Mkoll! Help me, for Feth’s sake!’ Corbec shouted as he wrestled with the weapon.

It came free. He had it in his hands, the unruly weight of the heavy weapon unfamiliar to his shoulders. A quick check told him it was primed and armed. A shadow fell across him.

The beast that was no longer Drayl stood over him and hissed with glee through its blunt, equine teeth.

Corbec fell on his back and tried to aim the rocket launcher, but it was wet and slippery in his hands and he slid in the mud of the culvert. He began to mutter: ‘Holy Emperor, deliver us from the Darkness of the Void, guide my weapon in your service… Holy Emperor, deliver us from the Darkness of the Void…’ He squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Damp was choking the baffles of the firing mechanism.

The thing reached down towards him and hooked him by the tunic with its metal fingers. Corbec was lifted up out of the channel, dangling at arm’s length from the abomination. But the baffles were now clear. He squeezed the trigger mechanism again and the blast took the beast’s head off at point blank range.

The explosion somersaulted Corbec back twenty paces and dumped him on his back in a pile of mud and slag. The rocket launcher skittered clear.

Headless, the obscenity teetered for a moment and then collapsed into the culvert. Sergeant Grell was right behind with a dozen men that he had roused out of their panic with oathing taunts. They stood around the lip of the culvert and fired their lasguns down at the twitching skeleton. In a few moments, the sculptural, metallic form of the beast was reduced to shrapnel and slag.

Corbec looked on a moment longer, then flopped back and lay prostrate.

Now he had seen everything. And he couldn’t quite get over the idea that it had been his fault all along. Drayl had been contaminated by that fragment from the damned statuette. Get a grip, he hissed to himself. The men need you. His teeth chattered. Rebels, bandits, even the foul orks he could manage, but this…

The bombardment continued over and behind them. Close at hand the drum machines continued to patter out their staccato message. For the first time since the fall of Tanith, weary beyond measure, Corbec felt tears in his eyes.

Three

EVENING FELL. The Shriven bombardment continued as the light faded, a roaring forest of flames and mud-plumes three hundred kilometres wide. Gaunt believed he understood the enemy tactic. It was a double-headed win-win manoeuvre.

They had launched their offensive at dawn in the hope of breaking the Imperial frontline, but expecting stiff opposition which Gaunt and his men had provided. Failing to break the line, the Shriven had then countered by falling back far further than necessary, enticing the Imperial Guard forward to occupy the Shriven frontline…and place themselves in range of the Shriven’s artillery batteries in the hills.

Lord Militant General Dravere had assured Gaunt and the other commanders that three weeks of carpet bombing from orbit by the Navy had pounded the enemy artillery positions into scrap metal, thus ensuring comparative safety for an infantry advance. True enough, the mobile field batteries used by the Shriven to harry the Imperial lines had taken a pasting. But they clearly had much longer range fixed batteries higher in the hills, dug in to bunker emplacements impervious even to orbital bombardment.

The weapons that were throwing the shells their way were leviathans, and Gaunt was not surprised. This was a forge world after all, and though insane with the doctrines of Chaos, the Shriven were not stupid. They had been spawned among the engineers and artisans of Fortis Binary, trained and schooled by the Tech-Priests of Mars. They could make all the weapons they wanted and they had had months to prepare.

So here it was, a finely executed battlefield trap, drawing the Tanith First, the Vitrian Dragoons and Emperor-knew-who-else across no-man’s land into abandoned trench lines and fortifications where a creeping curtain of shell-fire would slowly pull back, a metre at a time, and obliterate them all.

Already, the frontline of the Shriven’s old emplacements had been destroyed. Only hours before, Gaunt and his men had fought hand to hand down those trenches to get into the Shriven lines. Now the futility of that fighting seemed bitter indeed.

The Ghosts with Gaunt, and the company of Vitrian Dragoons with whom they had joined up, were sheltering in some ruined manufactory spaces, a kilometre or so from the creeping barrage that was coming their way. They had no contact with any other Vitrian or Tanith unit. For all they knew, they were the only men to have made it this far. Certainly there was no sign or hope of a supporting manoeuvre from the main Imperial positions. Gaunt had hoped the wretched Jantine Patricians or perhaps even some of Dravere’s elite Stormtroops might have been sent in to flank them, but the bombardment had put paid to that possibility.

The electro-magnetic and radio interference of the huge bombardment was also cutting their comm-lines. There was no possible contact with headquarters or their own frontline units, and even short range vox-cast traffic was chopped and distorted. Colonel Zoren was urging his communications officer to try to patch an uplink to any listening ship in orbit, in the hope that they might relay their location and plight. But the upper atmosphere of a world where war had raged for half a year was a thick blanket of petrochemical smog, ash, electrical anomalies and worse. Nothing was getting through.

The only sounds from the world around them was the concussive rumble of the shelling – and the background rhythm of the incessant drums.

Gaunt wandered through the dank shed where the men were holed up. They sat huddled in small groups, camo-cloaks pulled around them against the chilly night air. Gaunt had forbidden the use of stoves or heaters in case the enemy range finders were watching with heat-sensitive eyes. As it was, the plasteel-reinforced concrete of the manufactory would mask the slight traces of their body heat.

There were almost a hundred more Vitrian Dragoons than there were Ghosts, and they kept themselves pretty much to themselves, occupying the other end of the factory barn. Some slight interchange was taking place between the two regiments where their troops were in closer proximity, but it was a stilted exchange of greetings and questions.

The Vitrians were a well-drilled and austere unit, and Gaunt had heard much praise heaped upon their stoic demeanour and approach to war.

He wondered himself if this clinical attitude, as clean and sharp-edged as the famous glass-filament mesh armour they wore, might perhaps be lacking in the essential fire and soul that made a truly great fighting unit. With the shell-fire falling ever closer, he doubted he would ever find out.

Colonel Zoren gave up on his radio efforts and walked between his men to confront Gaunt. In the shadows of the shed, his dark-skinned face was hollow and resigned.

‘What do we do, commissar-colonel?’ he asked, deferring to Gaunt’s braid. ‘Do we sit here and wait for death to claim us like old men?’

Gaunt’s breath fogged the air as he surveyed the gloomy shed. He shook his head. ‘If we’re to die,’ he said, ‘then let us die usefully at least. We have nearly four hundred men between us, colonel. Our direction has been chosen for us.’

Zoren frowned as if perplexed. ‘How so?’

‘To go back walks us into the bombardment, to go either left or right along the line of the fortification will take us no further from that curtain of death. There is only one way to go: deeper into their lines, forcing ourselves back to their new front line and maybe doing whatever harm we can once we get there.’

Zoren was silent for a moment, then a grin split his face. Even white teeth glinted in the darkness. Clearly the idea appealed to him. It had a simple logic and an element of honourable glory that Gaunt had hoped would please the Vitrian mindset.

‘When shall we begin to move?’ Zoren asked, buckling his mesh gauntlets back in place.

‘The Shriven’s creeping bombardment will have obliterated this area in the next hour or two. Any time before then would probably be smart. As soon as we can, in fact.’

Gaunt and Zoren exchanged nods and quickly went to rouse their officers and form the men up.

In less than ten minutes, the fighting unit was ready to move. The Tanith had all put fresh power clips in their lasguns, checked and replaced where necessary their focussing barrels, and adjusted their charge settings to half power as per Gaunt’s instruction. The silver blades of the Tanith war knives attached to the bayonet lugs of their weapons were blackened with soil to stop them flashing. Camo-cloaks were pulled in tight and the Ghosts divided into small units of around a dozen men, each containing at least one heavy weapons trooper.

Gaunt observed the preparations of the Vitrians. They were drilled into larger fighting units of about twenty men each, and had fewer heavy weapons. Where heavy weapons appeared, they seemed to prefer the plasma gun. None of them had melta-guns or flamers as far as Gaunt could see. The Ghosts would take point, he decided.

The Vitrians attached spike-bladed bayonets to their las-guns, ran a synchronised weapons check with almost choreographed grace, and adjusted the charge settings of their weapons to maximum. Then, again in unison, they altered a small control on the waistband of their armour. With a slight shimmer in the darkness, the finely meshed glass of their body suits flipped and closed, so that the interlocking teeth were no longer the shiny ablative surface, but showed instead the dark, matt reverse side. Gaunt was impressed. Their functional armour had an efficient stealth mode for movement after dark.

The bombardment still shuddered and roared behind them, and it had become such a permanent feature they were almost oblivious to it. Gaunt conferred with Zoren as they both adjusted their microbead intercoms.

‘Use channel Kappa,’ said Gaunt, ‘with channel Sigma in reserve. I’ll take point with the Ghosts. Don’t lag too far behind.’

Zoren nodded that he understood.

‘I see you have instructed your men to set charge at maximum,’ Gaunt said as an afterthought.

‘It is written in the Vitrian Art of War: “Make your first blow sure enough to kill and there will be no need for a second.”’

Gaunt thought about this for a moment. Then he turned to lead the convoy off.

* * *

Four

THERE WERE JUST two realities: the blackness of the foxhole below and the brilliant inferno of the bombardment above.

Trooper Caffran and the Vitrian cowered in the darkness and the mud at the bottom of the shell-hole as the fury raged overhead, like a firestorm on the face of the sun.

‘Sacred Feth! I don’t think we’ll be getting out of here alive…’ Caffran said darkly.

The Vitrian didn’t cast him a glance. ‘Life is a means towards death, and our own death may be welcomed as much as that of our foe.’

Caffran thought about this for a moment and shook his head sadly. ‘What are you, a philosopher?’

The Vitrian trooper, Zogat, turned and looked at Caffran disdainfully. He had the visor of his helmet pulled up and Caffran could see little warmth in his eyes.

‘The Byhata, the Vitrian art of war. It is our codex, the guiding philosophy of our warrior caste. I do not expect you to understand.’

Caffran shrugged, ‘I’m not stupid. Go on… how is war an art?’

The Vitrian seemed unsure if he was being mocked, but the language they had in common, Low Gothic, was not the native tongue of either of them, and Caffran’s grasp of it was better than Zogat’s. Culturally, their worlds could not have been more different.

‘The Byhata contains the practice and philosophy of war-riorhood. All Vitrians study it and learn its principles, which then direct us in the arena of war. Its wisdom informs our tactics, its strength reinforces our arms, its clarity focuses our minds and its honour determines our victory.’

‘It must be quite a book,’ Caffran said, sardonically.

‘It is,’ Zogat replied with a dismissive shrug.

‘So do you commit it to memory or carry it with you?’

The Vitrian unbuttoned his flak-armour tunic and showed Caffran the top of a thin, grey pouch that was laced into its lining. ‘It is carried over the heart, a work of eight million characters transcribed and encoded onto mono-filament paper.’

Caffran was almost impressed. ‘Can I see it?’ he asked.

Zogat shook his head and buttoned up his tunic again. ‘The filament paper is gene-coded to the touch of the trooper it is issued to so that no one else may open it. It is also written in Vitrian, which I am certain you cannot read. And even if you could, it is a capital offence for a non-Vitrian to gain access to the great text.’

Caffran sat back. He was silent for a moment. ‘We Tanith… we’ve got nothing like that. No grand art of war.’

The Vitrian looked round at him. ‘Do you have no code? No philosophy of combat?’

‘We do what we do…’ Caffran began. ‘We live by the principle, “Fight hard if you have to fight and don’t let them see you coming.” That’s not much, I suppose.’

The Vitrian considered this. ‘It certainly… lacks the subtle subtext and deeper doctrinal significances of the Vitrian Art of War,’ he said at last.

There was a long pause.

Caffran sniggered. Then they both erupted in almost uncontrollable laughter.

It took some minutes for their hilarity to die down, easing the morbid tension that had built up through the horrors of the day.

Even with the bombardment thundering overhead and the constant expectation that a shell would fall into their shelter and vaporise them, the fear in them seemed to relax.

The Vitrian opened his canteen, took a swig and offered it to Caffran. ‘You men of Tanith… there are very few of you, I understand?’

Caffran nodded. ‘Barely two thousand, all that Commissar-Colonel Gaunt could salvage from our homeworld on the day of our Founding as a regiment. The day our home-world died.’

‘But you have quite a reputation,’ the Vitrian said.

‘Have we? Yes, the sort of reputation that gets us picked for all the stealth and dirty commando work going, the sort of reputation that gets us sent into enemy-held hives and deathworlds that no one else has managed to crack. I often wonder who’ll be left to do the dirty jobs when they use the last of us up.’

‘I often dream of my homeworld,’ Zogat said thoughtfully, ‘I dream of the cities of glass, the crystal pavilions. Though I am sure I will never see it again, it heartens me that it is always there in my mind. It must be hard to have no home left.’

Caffran shrugged. ‘How hard is anything? Harder than storming an enemy position? Harder than dying? Everything about life in the Emperor’s army is hard. In some ways, not having a home is an asset.’

Zogat shot him a questioning look.

‘I’ve nothing left to lose, nothing I can be threatened with, nothing that can be held over me to force my hand or make me submit. There’s just me, Imperial Guardsman Dermon Caffran, servant of the Emperor, may he hold the Throne for ever.’

‘So then you see, you do have a philosophy after all,’ Zogat said.

There was a long break in their conversation as they both listened to the guns. ‘How… how did your world die, man of Tanith?’ the Vitrian asked.

Caffran closed his eyes and thought hard for a moment, as if he was dredging up from a deep part of his mind, something he had deliberately discarded or blocked. At last he sighed. ‘It was the day of our Founding…’ he began.

Five

THEY COULDN’T STAY put, not there. Even if it hadn’t been for the shelling that slowly advanced towards them, the thing with Drayl had left them all sick and shaking, and eager to get out.

Corbec ordered Sergeants Curral and Grell to mine the factory sheds and silence the infernal drumming. They would move on into the enemy lines and do as much damage as they could until they were stopped or relieved.

As the company – less than a hundred and twenty men since Drayl’s corruption – prepared to move out, the scout Baru, one of the trio Corbec had sent ahead as they first moved in the area, returned at last, and he was not alone. He’d been pinned by enemy fire for a good half an hour in a zigzag of trenches to the east, and then the shelling had taken out his most direct line of return. For a good while, Baru had been certain he’d never reunite with his company. Edging through the wire festoons and stake posts along the weaving trench, he had encountered to his surprise five more Tanith: Feygor, Larkin, Neff, Lonegin and Major Rawne. They’d made it to the trenches as the bombardment had begun and were now wandering like lost livestock looking for a plan.

Corbec was as glad to see them as they were to see the company. Larkin was the best marksman in the regiment, and would be invaluable for the kind of insidious advance that lay ahead of them. Feygor, too, was a fine shot and a good stealther. Lonegin was good with explosives, so Corbec sent him immediately to assist Curral and Grell’s demolition detail. Neff was a medic, and they could use all the medical help they could get. Rawne’s tactical brilliance was not in question, and Corbec swiftly put a portion of the men under his direct command.

In the flicker of the shellfire against the night, which flashed and burst in a crazy syncopation against the beat of the drums, Grell returned to Corbec and reported the charges were ready; fifteen-minute settings.

Corbec advanced the company down the main communication way of the factory space away from the mined sheds at double time, in a paired column with a floating spearhead fire-team of six: Sergeant Grell, the sniper Larkin, Mkoll and Baru the scouts, Melyr with the rocket launcher and Domor with a sweeper set. Their job was to pull ahead of the fast moving column and secure the path, carrying enough mobile firepower to do more than just warn the main company.

The sheds they had mined began to explode behind them. Incandescent mushrooms of green and yellow flame punched up into the blackness, shredding the dark shapes of the buildings and silencing the nearest drums.

Other, more distant rhythms made themselves heard as the roar died back. The drum contraptions closest to them had masked the fact that others lay further away. The beating ripple tapped at them. Corbec spat sourly. The drums were grating at him, making his temper rise. It reminded him of nights back home in the nalwood forests of Tanith. Stamp on a chirruping cricket near your watchfire and a hundred more would take up the call beyond the firelight.

‘Come on,’ he growled at his men. ‘We’ll find them all. We’ll stamp ’em all out. Every fething one of ’em.’

There was a heartfelt murmur of agreement from his company. They moved forward.

MILO GRABBED GAUNT’S sleeve and pulled him around just a heartbeat before greenish explosions lit the sky about six kilometres to their west.

‘Closer shelling?’ Milo asked. The commissar pulled his scope round and the milled edge of the automatic dial whirred and spun as he played the field of view over the distant buildings.

‘What was that?’ Zoren’s voice rasped over the short range intercom. ‘That was not shellfire.’

‘Agreed,’ Gaunt replied. He ordered his men to halt and hold the area they had reached, a damp and waterlogged section of low-lying storage bays. Then he dropped back with Milo and a couple of troopers to meet with Zoren who led his men up to meet them.

‘Someone else is back here with us, on the wrong side of hell,’ he told the Vitrian leader. ‘Those buildings were taken out with krak charges, standard issue demolitions.’

Zoren nodded his agreement. ‘I… I am afraid…’ he began respectfully, ‘…that I doubt it is any of mine. Vitrian discipline is tight. Unless driven by some necessity unknown to us, Vitrian troops would not ignite explosions like that. It might as well act as a marker fire for the enemy guns. They’ll soon be shelling that section, knowing someone was there.’

Gaunt scratched his chin. He had been pretty sure it was a Tanith action too: Rawne, Feygor, Curral… maybe even Corbec himself. All of them had a reputation of acting without thinking from time to time.

As they watched, another series of explosions went off. More sheds destroyed.

‘At this rate,’ Gaunt snapped, ‘they might as well vox their position to the enemy!’

Zoren called his communications officer to join them and Gaunt wound the channel selector on the vox-set frantically as he repeated his call sign into the wire-framed microphone. The range was close. There was a chance.

THEY HAD JUST set and flattened the third series of drumsheds and were moving into girder-framed tunnels and walkways when Lukas called over to Colonel Corbec. There was a signal.

Corbec hurried over across the wet concrete, ordering Curral to take his demolition squad to the next row of thumping, clattering drum-mills. He took the headphones and listened. A tinny voice was repeating a call sign, chopped and fuzzed by the atrocious radio conditions. There was no mistaking it – it was the Tanith regimental command call sign.

At his urgings, Lukas cranked the brass dial for boost and Corbec yelled his call sign hoarsely into the set.

‘Corbec!… olonel!… peat is that you?… mining… peat s… ive away p…’

‘Say again! Commissar, I’m losing your signal! Say again!’

ZOREN’S COMMUNICATIONS officer looked up from the set and shook his head. ‘Nothing, commissar. Just white noise.’

Gaunt told him to try again. Here was a chance, so close, to increase the size of their expeditionary force and move forward in strength – if Corbec could be dissuaded from his suicidal actions in the face of the guns.

‘Corbec! This is Gaunt! Desist your demolition and move sharp east at double time! Corbec, acknowledge!’

* * *

‘READY TO BLOW,’ Curral called, but stopped short as Corbec held up his hand for quiet. By the set, Lukas craned to hear past the roar of the shelling and the thunder of the drumming.

‘W-we’re to stop… he’s ordering us to stop and move east double time… w-we’re…’

Lukas looked up at the colonel with suddenly anxious eyes.

‘He says we’re going to draw the enemy guns down on us.’

Corbec turned slowly and looked up into the night, where the shells streaking from the distant heavy emplacements tore whistling furrows of light out of the ruddy blackness.

‘Sacred Feth!’ he breathed as he realised the foolhardy course his anger had made them follow.

‘Move! Move!’ he yelled, and the men scrambled up in confusion. At a run, he led them around, sending a signal ahead to pull his vanguard back around in their wake. He knew he had scarce seconds to get his men clear of the target zone they had lit with their mines, an arrow of green fire virtually pointing to their advance.

He had to pull them east. East was what Gaunt had said. How close was the commissar’s company? A kilometre? Two? How close was the enemy shelling? Were they already swinging three tonne deuterium macroshells filled with oxy-phosphor gel into the gaping breeches of the vast Shriven guns, as range finders calibrated brass sights and the sweating thews of gunners cranked round the vast greasy gears that lowered the huge barrels a fractional amount?

Corbec led his men hard. There was barely time for running cover. He put his faith in the fact that the Shriven had pulled back and left the area.

THE VITRIAN COMMUNICATIONS officer played back the last signal they had received, and made adjustments to his set to try to wash the static out. Gaunt and Zoren watched intently.

‘A response signal, I think,’ the officer said. ‘An acknowledgement.’

Gaunt nodded. ‘Take up position here. We’ll hold this area until we can form up with Corbec.’

At that moment, the area to their west where Corbec’s mines had lit up the night, and the area around it, began to erupt. Lazily blossoming fountains of fire, ripple after ripple, annihilated the zone. Explosion overlaid explosion as the shells fell together. The Shriven had pulled a section of their overall barrage back by about three kilometres to target the signs of life they had seen.

Gaunt could do nothing but watch.

COLONEL FLENSE WAS a man who’d modelled his career on the principle of opportunity. That was what he seized now, and he could taste victory.

Since the abortive Jantine advance in the late afternoon, he had withdrawn to the Imperium command post to consider an alternative. Nothing was possible while the enemy barrage was curtaining off the entire front. But Flense wanted to be ready to move the moment it stopped or the moment it faltered. The land out there after such a bombardment would be ash-waste and mud, as hard for the Shriven to hold as it was for the Imperials. The perfect opportunity for a surgical armoured strike.

By six that evening, as the light began to fail, Flense had a strike force ready in the splintered streets below a bend in the river. Eight Leman Russ siege tanks, the beloved Demolishers with their distinctive short thick barrels, four standard Phaethon-pattern Leman Russ battle tanks, three Griffon Armoured Weapons Carriers, and nineteen Chimeras carrying almost two hundred Jantine Patricians in full battledress.

He was at the ducal palace, discussing operational procedures with Dravere and several other senior officers, who were also trying to assess the losses in terms of Tanith and Vitrians sustained that day, when the vox-caster operator from the watchroom entered with a sheaf of transparencie that the cogitators of the orbital Navy had processed and sent down.

They were orbital shots of the barrage. The others studied them with passing interest, but Flense seized on them at once. One shot showed a series of explosions going off at least a kilometre inside the bombardment line.

Flense showed it to Dravere, taking the general to one side.

‘Short fall shells,’ was the general’s comment.

‘No sir, these are a chain of fires… the blast areas of set explosions. Someone’s inside there.’

Dravere shrugged. ‘So someone survived.’

Flense was stern. ‘I have dedicated myself and my Patricians to taking this section of the front, and therein taking the world itself. I will not stand by and watch as vagabond survivors run interference behind the lines and ruin our strategies.’

‘You take it so personally, Flense…’ Dravere smiled.

Flense knew he did, but he also recognised an opportunity. ‘General, if a break appears in the bombardment, do I have your signal permission to advance? I have an armoured force ready.’

Bemused, the lord general consented. It was dinner time and he was preoccupied. Even so, the prospect of victory charmed him. ‘If you win this for me, Flense, I’ll not forget it. There are great possibilities in my future, if I am not tied here. I would share them with you.’

‘Your will be done, Lord Militant General.’

FLENSE’S KEEN opportunistic mind had seen the possibility – that the Shriven might retarget their bombardment, or better still a section of it, to flatten the activity behind their old lines. And that would give him an opening.

Taking his lead from the navigation signals transmitted from the fleet to an astropath in his lead tank, Flense rumbled his column out of the west, along the river road and then out across a pontoon bridgehead as far as he dared into the wasteland. The Shriven bombardment dropped like fury before his vehicles.

Flense almost missed his opportunity. He had barely got his vehicles into position when the break appeared. A half-kilometre stretch of the bombardment curtain abruptly ceased and then reappeared several kilometres further on, targeting the section that the orbital shots had shown.

There was a doorway through the destruction, a way in to get at the Shriven.

Flense ordered his vehicles on. At maximum thrust they tore and bounced and slithered over the mud and into the Shriven heartland.

Six

THE VOICE OF Trooper Caffran floated out of the fox-hole darkness, just audible over the shelling.

‘Tanith was a glorious place, Zogat. A forest world, evergreen, dense and mysterious. The forests themselves were almost spiritual. There was a peace there… and they were strange too. What they call motile treegrowth, so I’m told. Basically, the trees, a kind we called nalwood, well… moved, replanted, repositioned themselves, following the sun, the rains, whatever tides and urges ran in their sap. I don’t pretend to understand it. It was just the way things were.

‘Essentially, the point is, there was no frame of reference for location on Tanith. A track or a pathway through the nal-forest might change or vanish or open anew overnight. So, over the generations, the people of Tanith got an instinct for direction. For tracking and scouting. We’re good at it. I guess we can thank those moving forests of our homeworld for the reputation this regiment has for recon and stealth.’

‘The great cities of Tanith were splendid. Our industries were agrarian, and our off-world trade was mainly fine, seasoned timbers and wood carving. The work of the Tanith craftsmen was something to behold. The cities were great, stone bastions that rose up out of the forest. You say you have glass palaces back home. This was nothing so fancy. Just simple stone, grey like the sea, raised up high and strong.’

Zogat said nothing. Caffran eased his position in the dark mud-hole to be more comfortable. Despite the bitterness in his voice and his soul, he felt a mournful sense of loss he had not experienced for a long while.

‘Word came that Tanith was to raise three regiments for the Imperial Guard. It was the first time our world had been asked to perform such a duty, but we had a large number of able fighting men trained in the municipal militias. The process of the Founding took eight months, and the assembled troops were waiting on wide, cleared plains when the transport ships arrived in orbit. We were told we were to join the Imperial Forces engaged in the Sabbat Worlds campaign, driving out the forces of Chaos. We were also told we would probably never see our world again, for once a man had joined the service he tended to go on wherever the war took him until death claimed him or he was mustered out to start a new life wherever he had ended up. I’m sure they told you the same thing.’

Zogat nodded, his noble profile a sad motion of agreement in the wet dark of the crater. Explosions rippled above them in a long, wide series. The ground shook.

‘So we were waiting there,’ Caffran continued, ‘thousands of us, itchy in our stiff new fatigues, watching the troopships roll in and out. We were eager to be going, sad to be saying goodbye to Tanith. But the idea that it was always there, and would always be there, kept our spirits up. On that last morning we learned that Commissar Gaunt had been appointed to our regiment, to knock us into shape.’ Caffran sighed, trying to resolve his darker feelings towards the loss of his world. He cleared his throat. ‘Gaunt had a certain reputation, and a long and impressive history with the veteran Hyrkan regiments. We were new, of course, inexperienced and certainly full of rough edges. High Command clearly believed it would take an officer of Gaunt’s mettle to make a fighting force out of us.’

Caffran paused. He lost the track of his voice for a moment as anger welled inside him. Anger – and the sense of absence. He realised with a twinge that this was the first time since the Loss that he had recounted the story aloud. His heart closed convulsively around threads of memory, and he felt his bitterness sharpen. ‘It all went wrong on that very last night. Embarkation had already begun. Most of the troops were either aboard transports waiting for takeoff or were heading up into orbit already. The Navy’s picket duty had not done its job, and a significantly-sized Chaos fleet, a splinter of a larger fleet running scared since the last defeat the Imperial Navy had inflicted, slipped into the Tanith system past the blockades. There was very little warning. The forces of Darkness attacked my homeworld and erased it from the galactic records in the space of one night.’

Caffran paused again and cleared his throat. Zogat was looking at him in fierce wonder. ‘Gaunt had a simple choice to deploy the troops at his disposal for a brave last stand, or to take all those he could save and get clear. He chose the latter. None of us liked that decision. We all wanted to give our lives fighting for our homeworld. I suppose if we’d stayed on Tanith, we would have achieved nothing except maybe a valiant footnote in history. Gaunt saved us. He took us from a destruction we would have been proud to be a part of so that we could enjoy a more significant destruction elsewhere.’

Zogat’s eyes were bright in the darkness. ‘You hate him.’

‘No! Well, yes, I do, as I would hate anyone who had supervised the death of my home, anyone who had sacrificed it to some greater good.’

‘Is this a greater good?’

‘I’ve fought with the Ghosts on a dozen warfronts. I haven’t seen a greater good yet.’

‘You do hate him.’

‘I admire him. I will follow him anywhere. That’s all there is to say. I left my homeworld the night it died, and I’ve been fighting for its memory ever since. We Tanith are a dying breed. There are only about twenty hundred of us left. Gaunt only got away with enough for one regiment. The Tanith First. The First-and-Only. That’s what makes us “ghosts”, you see. The last few unquiet souls of a dead world. And I suppose we’ll keep going until we’re all done.’

Caffran fell silent and in the dimness of the shell-hole there was no sound except the fall of the bombardment outside. Zogat was silent for a long while, then he looked up at the paling sky. ‘It will be dawn in two hours,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe we’ll see our way out of this when it gets light.’

‘You could be right,’ Caffran replied, stretching his aching, mud-caked limbs. ‘The bombardment does seem to be moving away. Who knows, we might live through this after all. Feth, I’ve lived through worse.’

Seven

DAYLIGHT ROLLED IN with a wet stain of cloud, underlit by the continued bombardment. The lightening sky was streaked and cross-hatched by contrails, shell-wakes and arcs of fire from the massive Shriven emplacements in the distant shrouded hills. Lower, in the wide valley and the trench lines, the accumulated smoke of the onslaught, which had now been going on for just about twenty-one hours, dropping two or three shells a second, curdled like fog, thick, creamy and repellent with the stink of cordite and fycelene.

Gaunt brought his assembled company to a halt in a silo bay that had once held furnaces and bell kilns. They pulled off their rebreather masks. The floor, the air itself, was permeated with a greenish microdust that tasted of iron or blood. Shattered plastic crating was scattered over the place. They were five kilometres from the bombardment line now, and the noise of the drum-mills, chattering away in barns and manufactories all around them, was even louder than the shells.

Corbec had got his men away from the fire zone just about intact, although everyone had been felled by the shockwave and eighteen had been deafened permanently by the air-burst. The Imperial Guard infirmaries over the lines would patch ruptured ear drums with plastene diaphragms or implant acoustic enhancers in a matter of moments. But that was over the lines. Out here, eighteen deaf men were a liability. When they formed up to move, Gaunt would station them in the midst of his column, where they could take maximum guidance and warning from the men around them. There were other injuries too, a number of broken arms, ribs and collarbones. However, everyone was walking and that was a mercy.

Gaunt took Corbec to one side. Gaunt knew a good soldier instinctively, and it worried him when confidence was misplaced. He’d chosen Corbec to offset Rawne. Both men commanded respect from the Tanith First and Only, one because he was liked and the other because he was feared.

‘Not like you to make a tactical error of that magnitude…’ Gaunt began.

Corbec started to say something and then cut himself short. The idea of making excuses to the commissar stuck in his throat.

Gaunt made them for him. ‘I understand we’re all in a tight spot. This circumstance is extreme, and your lot had suffered particularly. I heard about Drayl. I also think these drum-mills, which you decided to target with an almost suicidal determination, are meant to disorientate. Meant to make us act irrationally. Let’s face it, they’re insane. They are as much a weapon as the guns. They are meant to wear us down.’

Corbec nodded. The war had pooled bitterness in his great, hoary form. There was a touch of weariness to his look and manner.

‘What’s our plan? Do we wait for the barrage to stop and retreat?’

Gaunt shook his head. ‘I think we’ve come in so deep, we can do some good. We’ll wait for the scouts to return.’

The recon units returned to the shelter within half an hour. The scouts, some Vitrian, mostly Tanith, combined the data from their sweeps and built a picture of the area in a two kilometre radius for Gaunt and Zoren.

What interested Gaunt most was a structure to the west.

THEY MOVED THROUGH a wide section of drainage pipelines, through rain-washed concrete underpasses stained with oil and dust.

The cordite fog drifted back over their positions. To the west rose the great hill line, to the immediate north the shadowy bulk of habitat spires, immense conical towers for the workforce that rose out of the ground fog, their hundred thousand windows all blown out by shelling and air-shock. There were fewer drum-mills in this range of the enemy territory, but still no sign of a solitary living thing, not even vermin.

They began passing blast-proofed bunkers of great size, all empty except for scattered support cradles and stacking pallets of grey fibre-plast. A crowd of battered, yellow, heavy-lift trolleys were abandoned on the concourses before the bunkers.

‘Munitions stores,’ Zoren suggested to Gaunt as they advanced. ‘They must have stockpiled a vast amount of shells for this bombardment and they’ve already emptied these sheds.’

Gaunt thought this a good guess. They edged on, cautious, marching half-time and with weapons ready. The structure the reconnaissance had reported was ahead now, a cargo loading bay of tubular steel and riveted blast-board. The bay was mounted with hydraulic cranes and derricks on the surface, poised to lower cargo into a cavity below ground.

The guardsmen descended on the metal grilled stairway onto a raised platform that lay alongside a wide, well-lit tunnel that ran off out of sight into the impacted earth. The tunnel was modular, circular in cross section, with a raised spine running along the lowest part. Feygor and Grell examined the tunnel and the armoured control post overlooking it.

‘Maglev line,’ said Feygor, who had done all he could to augment his basic engineering knowledge with off-world mechanisms. ‘Still active. They cart the shells from the munitions dump and lower them into the bay, then load them onto bomb trains for fast delivery to the emplacements in the hills.’

He showed Gaunt an indicator board in the control position. The flat-plate glowed green, showing a flickering runic depiction of a track network. ‘There’s a whole transit system down here, purpose-built to link all the forge factories and allow for rapid transportation of material.’

‘And this spur has been abandoned because they’ve exhausted the munitions stores in this area.’ Gaunt was thoughtful. He took out his data-slate and made a working sketch of the network map.

The commissar ordered a ten-minute rest, then sat on the edge of the platform and compared his sketch with area maps of the old factory complexes from the slate’s tactical archives. The Shriven had modified a lot of the details, but the basic elements were still the same.

Colonel Zoren joined him. ‘Something’s on your mind,’ he began.

Gaunt gestured to the tunnel. ‘It’s a way in. A way right into the central emplacements of the Shriven. They won’t have blocked it because they need these maglev lines active and clear to keep the bomb trains moving to feed their guns.’

‘There’s something odd, though, don’t you think?’ Zoren eased back the visor of his helmet.

‘Odd?’

‘Last night, I thought your assessment of their tactics was correct. They’d tried a frontal assault to pierce our lines, but when it failed they pulled back to an extreme extent to lure us in and then set the bombardment to flatten any Imperial forces they’d drawn out.’

‘That makes sense of the available facts,’ Gaunt said.

‘Even now? They must know they could only have caught a few thousand of us with that trick, and logic says most of us would be dead by now. So why are they still shelling? Who are they firing at? It’s exhausting their shell stocks, it must be. They’ve been at it for over a day. And they’ve abandoned such a huge area of their lines.’

Gaunt nodded. ‘That was on my mind too when dawn broke. I think it began as an effort to wipe out any forces they had trapped. But now? You’re right. They’ve sacrificed a lot of land and the continued bombardments make no sense.’

‘Unless they’re trying to keep us out,’ a voice said from behind them. Rawne had joined them.

‘Let’s have your thoughts, major,’ Gaunt said.

Rawne shrugged and spat heavily on to the floor. His black eyes narrowed to a frowning squint. ‘We know the spawn of Chaos don’t fight wars with any tactics we’d recognise. We’ve been held on this front for months. I think yesterday was a last attempt to break us with a conventional offensive. Now they’ve put up a wall of fire to keep us out while they switch to something else. Maybe something that’s taken them months to prepare.’

‘Something like what?’ Zoren asked uncomfortably.

‘Something. I don’t know. Something using their Chaos power. Something ceremonial. Those drum-mills… maybe they aren’t psychological warfare… maybe they’re part of some vast… ritual.’

The three men were silent for a moment. Then Zoren laughed, a mocking snarl. ‘Ritual magic?’

‘Don’t mock what you don’t understand!’ Gaunt warned. ‘Rawne could be right. Emperor knows, we’ve seen enough of their madness.’ Zoren didn’t reply. He’d seen things too, perhaps things his mind wanted to deny or scrub out as impossible.

Gaunt got up and pointed down the tunnel. ‘Then this is a way in. And we’d better take it – because if Rawne’s right, we’re the only units in a position to do a damn thing about it.’

Eight

IT WAS POSSIBLE to advance down the maglev tunnel four abreast, with two men on each side of the central rider spine. It was well lit by recessed blue-glow lighting in the tunnel walls, but Gaunt sent Domor and the other sweepers in the vanguard to check for booby traps.

An unopposed advance down the stuffy tunnels took them two kilometres east, passing another abandoned cargo bay and forks with two other maglev spurs. The air was dry and charged with static from the still-powered electromagnetic rail, and hot gusts of wind breathed on them periodically as if heralding a train that never came.

At the third spur, Gaunt turned the column into a new tunnel, following his map. They’d gone about twenty metres when Milo whispered to the commissar.

‘I think we need to go back to the spur fork,’ he said.

Gaunt didn’t query. He trusted Brin’s instincts like his own, and knew they stretched further. He retreated the whole company to the junction they had just passed. Within a minute, a hot breeze blew at them, the tunnel hummed and a maglev train whirred past along the spur they had been about to join. It was an automated train of sixty open carts, painted khaki with black and yellow flashing. Each cart was laden with shells and munitions, hundreds of tonnes of ordnance from distant bunkers destined for the main batteries. As the train rolled past on the magnetic-levitation rail, slick and inertia free, many of the men gawked openly at it. Some made signs of warding and protection.

Gaunt consulted his sketch map. It was difficult to determine how far it was to the next station or junction, and without knowing the frequency of the bomb trains, he couldn’t guarantee they’d be out of the tunnel before the next one rumbled through.

Gaunt cursed. He didn’t want to turn back now. His mind raced as he reviewed his troop files, scrabbling to recall personal details.

‘Domor!’ he called, and the trooper hurried over.

‘Back on Tanith, you and Grell were engineers, right?’

The young trooper nodded. ‘I was apprenticed to a timber haulier in Tanith Attica. I worked with heavy machines.’

‘Given the resources at hand, could you stop one of these trains?’

‘Sir?’

‘And then start it again?’

Domor scratched his neck as he thought. ‘Short of blowing the mag-rail itself… You’d need to block or short out the power that drives the train. As I understand it, the trains move on the rails, sucking up a power source from them. It’s a conductive electrical exchange, as I’ve seen on batteries and flux-units. We’d need some non-conductive material, fine enough to lay across the rider-spine without actually derailing the train. What do you have in mind, sir?’

‘Stopping or slowing the next train that passes, jumping a ride and starting it again.’

Domor grinned. ‘And riding it all the way to the enemy?’ He chuckled and looked around. Then he set off towards Colonel Zoren, who was conversing with some of his men as they rested. Gaunt followed.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ Domor began with a tight salute, ‘may I examine your body armour?’

Zoren looked at the Tanith trooper with confusion and some contempt but Gaunt soothed him with a quiet nod. Zoren peeled off a gauntlet and handed it to Domor. The young Tanith examined it with keen eyes.

‘It’s beautiful work. Is this surface tooth made of glass bead?’

‘Yes, mica. Glass, as you say. Scale segments woven onto a base fabric of thermal insulation.’

‘Non-conductive,’ Domor said, showing the glove to Gaunt. ‘I’d need a decent-sized piece. Maybe a jacket – and it may not come back in one piece.’

Gaunt was about to explain, hoping Zoren would ask for a volunteer from among his men. But the colonel got to his feet, took off his helmet and handed it to his subaltern before stripping off his own jacket.

Stood in his sleeveless undervest, his squat, powerful frame, shaven black hair and black skin revealed for the first time, Zoren paused only to remove a slim, grey-sleeved book from a pouch in his jacket before handing it to Domor. Zoren carefully tucked the book into his belt.

‘I take it this is part of a plan?’ Zoren asked as Domor hurried away, calling to Grell and others to assist him.

‘You’ll love it,’ Gaunt said.

* * *

A WARM GUST of air announced the approach of the next train, some seventeen minutes or so after the first they had seen. Domor had wrapped the Vitrian major’s jacket over the rider-rail just beyond the spur and tied a length of material cut from his own camo-cloak to it.

The train rolled into view. Every one of them watched with bated breath. The front cart passed over the jacket without any problem, suspended as it was just a few centimetres above the smooth rail by the electromagnetic repulsion so that the whole vehicle ran friction-free along the spine. Gaunt frowned. For a moment he was sure it hadn’t worked.

But as soon as the front cart had passed beyond the non-conductive layer, the electromagnetic current was broken, and the train decelerated fast as the propelling force went dead. Forward momentum carried the train forward for a while – by the track-side, Domor prayed it would not carry the entire train beyond the circuit break, or it would simply start again – but it went dead at last and came to a halt, rocking gently on the suspension field.

There was a cheer.

‘Mount up! Quick as you can!’ Gaunt ordered, leading the company forward. Vitrians and Tanith alike clambered up onto the bomb-laden carriages, finding foot and handholds where they could, stowing weapons and holding out hands to pull comrades aboard. Gaunt, Zoren, Milo, Bragg and six Vitrians mounted the front cart alongside Mkoll, Curral and Domor, who still clutched the end of the cloth rope.

‘Good work, trooper,’ Gaunt said to the smiling Domor and held a hand up as he watched down the train to make sure all had boarded and were secure. In short order, the entire company were in place, and relays of acknowledgements ran down the train to Gaunt.

Gaunt dropped his hand. Domor yanked hard on the cloth cord. It went taut, fought him and then flew free, pulling Zoren’s jacket up and out from under the cart like a large flatfish on a line.

In a moment, as the circuit was restored, the train lurched and silently began to move again, quickly picking up speed. The tunnel lights began to strobe-flash as they flicked past them.

Clinging on carefully, Domor untied his makeshift cord and handed the jacket back to Zoren. Parts of the glass fabric had been dulled and fused by contact with the rail, but it was intact. The Vitrian pulled it back on with a solemn nod.

Gaunt turned to face the tunnel they were hurtling into. He opened his belt pouch and pulled out a fresh drum-pattern magazine for his bolt pistol. The sixty round capacity clip was marked with a blue cross to indicate the inferno rounds it held. He clicked it into place and then thumbed his wire headset.

‘Ready, weapons ready. Word is given. We’re riding into the mouth of hell and we could be among them any minute. Prepare for sudden engagement. Emperor be with you all.’

Along the train, lasguns whined as they powered up, launchers clicked to armed, plasma packs hummed into seething readiness and the ignitors on flamer units were lit.

Nine

‘COME ON,’ CAFFRAN said, wriggling up the side of the stinking shell-hole that had been home for the best part of a day. Zogat followed. They blinked up into the dawn light. The barrage was still thundering away, and smoke-wash fog licked down across no-man’s land.

‘Which way?’ Zogat said, disorientated by the smoke and the light.

‘Home.’ Caffran said. ‘Away from the face of hell while we have the chance.’

They trudged into the mud, struggling over wire and twisted shards of concrete.

‘Do you think we may be the only two left?’ the Vitrian asked, glancing back at the vast barrage.

‘We may be, we may be indeed. And that makes me the last of the Tanith.’

* * *

THE JANTINE ARMOURED unit stabbed into the Shriven positions behind the barrage, but in two kilometres or more of advancing they had met nothing. The old factory areas were lifeless and deserted.

Flense called a halt and rose out of the top hatch to scan the way ahead through his scope. The ruined and empty buildings stood around in the fog like phantoms. There was a relentless drumming sound that bit into his nerves.

‘Head for the hill line,’ he told his driver as he dropped back inside. ‘If we do no more than silence their batteries, we will have entered the chapters of glory.’

FOUR KILOMETRES, FIVE, passing empty stations and unlit cargo bays. A spur to the left, then to the left again, and then an anxious pause of three minutes, waiting while another bomb train passed ahead of them from another siding. Then they were moving again.

The tension wrapped Gaunt like a straitjacket. All of the passing tunnel looked constant and familiar, there were no markers to forewarn or alert. Any moment.

The bomb train slid into a vast cargo bay on a spur siding, coming to rest alongside two other trains that were being offloaded by cranes and servitor lifters. An empty train was just leaving on a loop that would take it back to the munitions dumps.

The chamber was lofty and dark, lit by thousands of lanterns and the ruddy glare of work-lamps. It was hot and smelled bitter, like a furnace room. The walls, as they could see them, were inscribed with vast sigils of Chaos, and draped with filthy banners. The symbols made the guardsmen’s eyes weep if they glanced at them and made their heads pound if they looked for longer. Unclean symbols, symbols of pestilence and decay.

There were upwards of two hundred Shriven in the dim, gantried chamber, working the lifters or sliding bomb trolleys. None of them seemed to notice the new train’s extra cargo for a moment.

Gaunt’s company dismounted from the train, opening fire as they went, laying down a hail of lasfire that cracked like electricity in the air. There was the whine of the Tanith guns on the lower setting and the stinging punch of the full-force Vitrian shots. Gaunt had forbidden the use of meltas, rockets and flamers until they were clear of the munitions bay. None of the shells were fused or set, but there was no sense cooking or exploding them.

Dozens of the Shriven fell where they stood. Two half-laden shell trolleys spilled over as nerveless hands released levers. Warheads rolled and chinked on the platform. A trolley of shells veered into a wall as its driver was shot, and overturned. A crane assembly exploded and collapsed.

The guardsmen surged onwards. The Vitrian Dragoons fanned out in a perfect formation, taking point of cover after point of cover and scything down the fleeing Shriven. A few had found weapons and were returning fire, but their efforts were dealt with mercilessly.

Gaunt advanced up the main loading causeway with the Tanith, blasting Shriven with his bolt pistol. Nearby, Mad Larkin and a trio of other Tanith snipers with the needle-pattern lasguns were ducked in cover and picking off Shriven on the overhead catwalks.

Trooper Bragg had an assault cannon which he had liberated from a pintle mount some weeks before. Gaunt had never seen a man fire one without the aid of power armour’s recoil compensators or lift capacity before. Bragg grimaced and strained with the effort of steadying the howling weapon with its six cycling barrels, and his aim was its usual miserable standard. He killed dozens of the enemy anyway. Not to mention a maglev train.

The Ghosts led the fight up out of the cargo bay and onto loading ramps which extended up through great caverns cut into the hillside. A layer of blue smoke rose up under the flickering pendulum lighting rigs.

Clear of the munitions deck, Gaunt ordered up his meltas, flamers and rocket launchers, and began to scour a path, blackening the concrete strips of the ramps and fusing Shriven bone into syrupy pools.

At the head of the ramps, at the great elevator assemblies which raised the bomb loads into the battery magazines high above them in the hillside, they met the first determined resistance. A massed force of Shriven troops rushed down at them, blasting with lasguns and autorifles. Rawne commanded a fire-team up the left flank and cut into them from the edge, matched by Corbec’s platoons from the right, creating a crossfire that punished them terribly.

In the centre of the Shriven retaliation, Gaunt saw the first of the Chaos Space Marines, a huge horned beast, centuries old and bearing the twisted markings of the Iron Warriors Chapter. The monstrosity exhorted his mutated troops to victory with great howls from his augmented larynx. His ancient, ornate boltgun spat death into the Tanith ranks. Sergeant Grell was vaporised by one of the first hits, two of his fire-team a moment later.

‘Target him!’ Gaunt yelled at Bragg, and the giant turned his huge firepower in the general direction with no particular success. The Chaos Marine proceeded to punch butchering fire into the Vitrian front line. Then he exploded. Headless, armless, his legs and torso rocked for a moment and then fell.

Gaunt nodded his grim thanks to Trooper Melyr and his missile launcher. Lasfire and screaming autogun rounds wailed down from the Shriven units at the elevator assembly. Gaunt ducked behind some freighting pallets and found himself sharing the cover with two Vitrians who were busy changing the power cells of their lasguns.

‘How much ammo have you left?’ Gaunt asked briskly as he swapped the empty drum of his bolt pistol with a fresh sickle-pattern clip of Kraken penetrators.

‘Half gone already,’ responded one, a Vitrian corporal.

Gaunt thumbed his microbead headset. ‘Gaunt to Zoren!’

‘I hear you, commissar-colonel.’

‘Instruct your men to alter their settings to half-power.’

‘Why, commissar?’

‘Because they’re exhausting their ammo! I admire your ethic, colonel, but it doesn’t take a full power shot to kill one of the Shriven and your men are going to be out of clips twice as fast as mine!’

There was a crackling pause over the comm-line before Gaunt heard Zoren give the order.

Gaunt looked across at the two troopers who were adjusting their charge settings.

‘It’ll last longer, and you’ll send more to glory. No point in overkill,’ he said with a smile. ‘What are you called?’

‘Zapol,’ said one.

‘Zeezo,’ said the other, the corporal.

‘Are you with me, boys?’ Gaunt asked with a wolfish grin as he hefted up his pistol and thumbed his chainsword to maximum revs. They nodded back, lasrifles held in strong, ready hands.

Gaunt and the two dragoons burst from cover firing. They were more than halfway up the loading ramp to the elevators. Rawne’s crossfire manoeuvre had fenced the Shriven in around the hazard striped blast doors, which were now fretted and punctured with las-impacts and fusing burns.

As he charged, Gaunt felt the wash of fire behind him as his own units covered and supported.

He could hear the whine of the long-pattern sniper guns, the crack of the regular las-weapons, the rattle of Bragg’s cannons.

‘Keep your aim up, Try Again…’ Gaunt hissed as he and the two dragoons reached the makeshift defences around the enemy.

Zeezo went down, clipped by a las-round. Gaunt and Zapol bounded up to the debris cover and cut into the now-panicked Shriven. Gaunt emptied his boltgun and ditched it, scything with his chainsword. Zapol laid in with his bayonet, stabbing into bodies and firing point blank to emphasise each kill.

It took two minutes. They seemed like a lifetime to Gaunt, each bloody, frenzied second playing out like a year. Then he and Zapol were through to the elevator itself and the Shriven were piled around them. Five or six more Vitri-ans were close behind.

Zapol turned to smile at the commissar.

The smile was premature.

The elevator doors ahead of them parted and a second Iron Warrior Chaos Marine lunged out at them. It was loftier than the tallest guardsman, and clad entirely in an almost insect-like carapace of ancient power armour dotted with insane runes in dedication to its deathless masters. It was preceded by a bow-wave of the most foetid stench, exhaled from its grilled mask, and accompanied by a howl that grazed Gaunt’s hearing and sounded like consumptive lungs exploding under deep pressure.

The beast’s chain fist, squealing like an enraged beast, pulped Zapol with a careless downwards flick. The Vitrian was crushed and liquefied. The creature began to blast wildly, killing at least four more of the supporting Vitrians.

Gaunt was right in the thing’s face. He could do nothing but lunge with his chainsword, driving the shrieking blade deep into the Chaos Marine’s armoured torso. The toothed blade screamed and protested, and then whined and smoked as the serrated, whirling cutting edge meshed and glued as it ate into the monster’s viscous and toughened innards.

The Iron Warrior stumbled back, bellowing in pain and rage. The chainsword, smoking and shorting as it finally jammed, impaled its chest. Reeking ichor and tissue sprayed across the commissar and the elevator doorway.

Gaunt knew he could do no more. He dropped to the floor as the stricken creature rose again, hoping against hope.

His prayers were answered. The rearing thing was struck once, twice… four or five times by carefully placed las-shots which tore into it and spun it around. Gaunt somehow knew it was the sniper Larkin who had provided these marksman blasts.

On one knee, the creature rose and raged again, most of its upper armour punctured or shredded, smoke rising and black fluid spilling from the grisly wounds to its face, neck and chest.

A final, powerful las-blast, close range and full-power, took its head off.

Gaunt looked round to see the wounded Corporal Zeezo standing on the barricade.

The Vitrian grinned, despite the pain from his wound. ‘I went against orders, I’m afraid,’ he began. ‘I reset my gun for full charge.’

‘Noted… and excused. Good work!’

Gaunt got to his feet, wet and wretched with blood and fouller stuff. His Ghosts, and Zoren’s Vitrians, were moving up the ramp to secure the position. Above them, at the top of the elevator shaft, were maybe a million Shriven, secure in their battery bunkers. Gaunt’s expeditionary force was inside, right in the heart of the enemy stronghold.

Ibram Gaunt smiled.

Ten

IT TOOK ANOTHER precious half hour to regroup and secure the bomb deck. Gaunt’s scouts located all the entranceways and blocked them, checking even ventilation access and drainage gullies.

Gaunt paced, tense. The clock was ticking and it wouldn’t take long for the massive forces above them to start wondering why the shell supply from below had dried up. And come looking for a reason.

There was the place itself too: the gloom, the taste of the air, the blasphemous iconography scrawled on the walls. It was as if they were inside some sacred place, sacred but unholy. Everyone was bathed in cold sweat and there was fear in everyone’s eyes.

The comm-link chimed and Gaunt responded, hurrying through to the control room of the bomb bays. Zoren, Rawne and others were waiting for him. Someone had managed to raise the shutters on the vast window ports.

‘What in the name of the Emperor is that?’ Colonel Zoren asked.

‘I think that’s what we’ve come to stop,’ Gaunt said, turning away from the stained glass viewing ports.

Far below them, in the depths of the newly-revealed hollowed cavern, stood a vast megalith, a menhir stone maybe fifty metres tall that smoked with building Chaos energy. Its essence filled the bay and made all the humans present edgy and distracted. None could look at it comfortably. It seemed to be bedded in a pile of… blackened bodies. Or body parts.

Major Rawne scowled and flicked a thumb upwards.

‘It won’t take them long to notice the bomb levels aren’t supplying them with shells any more. Then we can expect serious deployment against us.’

Gaunt nodded but said nothing. He crossed to the control suite where Feygor and a Vitrian sergeant named Zolex were attempting to access data. Gaunt didn’t like Feygor. The tall, thin Tanith was Rawne’s adjutant and shared the major’s bitter outlook. But Gaunt knew how to use him and his skills, particularly in the area of cogitators and other thinking machines.

‘Plot it for me,’ he told the adjutant. ‘I have a feeling there may be more of these stone things.’

Feygor touched several rune keys of the glass and brass machined device.

‘We’re there…’ Feygor said, pointing at the glowing map sigils. ‘And here’s a larger scale map. You were right. That menhir down there is part of a system buried in these hills. Seven all told, in a star pattern. Seven fething abominations! I don’t know what they mean to do with them, but they’re all charging with power right now.’

‘How many?’ Gaunt asked too quickly.

‘Seven,’ Feygor repeated. ‘Why?’

Ibram Gaunt felt light-headed. ‘Seven stones of power…’ he murmured. A voice from years ago lilted in his mind. The girl. The girl back on Darendara. He could never remember her name, try as hard as he could. But he could see her face in the interrogation room. And hear her words.

When her words about the Ghosts had come true, two years earlier, he had been chilled and had spent several sleepless nights remembering her prophecies. He’d taken command of the worldless wretches of Tanith and then one of the troop, Mad Larkin, it was asserted, had dubbed them Gaunt’s Ghosts. He’d tried to put that down to coincidence, but ever since, he’d watched for other fragments of the Night of Truths to emerge.

Cut them and you will be free, she had said. Do not kill them.

‘What do we do?’ asked Rawne.

‘We have mines and grenades a plenty,’ Zoren said. ‘Let’s blow it.’

Do not kill them.

Gaunt shook his head. ‘No! This is what the Shriven have been preparing, some vast ritual using the stones, some industrial magic. That’s what has preoccupied them, that’s what they’ve tried to distract us from. Blowing part of their ceremonial ring would be a mistake. There’s no telling what foul power we might unleash. No, we have to break the link…’

Cut them and you will be free.

Gaunt got to his feet and pulled on his cap again. ‘Major Rawne, load as many hand carts as you can find with Shriven warheads, prime them for short fuse and prepare to send them up on the elevator on my cue. We’ll choke the emplacements upstairs with their own weapons. Colonel Zoren, I want as many of your men as you can spare – or more specifi-cally, their armour.’

The major and the colonel looked at him blankly.

‘Now?’ he added sharply. They leapt to their feet.

GAUNT LED THE way up the ramp towards the menhir. It smoked with energy and his skin prickled uncomfortably. Chaos energy smelled that way, like a tangy stench of cooked blood and electricity. None of them dared look down at the twisted, solidified mound below them.

‘What are we doing?’ Zoren asked by his side, clearly distressed about being this close to the unutterable.

‘We’re breaking the chain. We want to disrupt the circle without blowing it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Inside information,’ Gaunt said, trying hard to grin. ‘Trust me. Let’s short this out.’

The Vitrians by his side moved forward at a nod from their commander. Tentatively, they approached the huge stone and started to lash their jackets around the smooth surface. Zoren had collected the mica armoured jackets of more than fifty of his men. Now he fused them together as neat as a surgeon with a melta on the lowest setting. Gingerly the Vitrians wrapped the makeshift mica cloak around the stone, using meltas borrowed from the Tanith like industrial staplers to lock it into place over the stone.

‘It’s not working,’ Zoren said.

It wasn’t. After a few moments more, the glass beads of the Vitrian armour began to sweat and run, melting off the stone, leaving the fabric base layers until they too ignited and burned.

Gaunt turned away, his disheartened mind churning.

‘What now?’ Zoren asked, dispiritedly.

Cut them and you will be free.

Gaunt snapped his fingers. ‘We don’t blow them! We realign them. That’s how we cut the circle.’

Gaunt called up Tolus, Lukas and Bragg. ‘Get charges set in the supporting mound. Don’t target the stone itself. Blow it so it falls away or drops.’

‘The mound…’ Lukas stammered.

‘Yes, trooper, the mound,’ Gaunt repeated. ‘The dead can’t hurt you. Do it!’

Reluctantly, the Ghosts went to work.

Gaunt tapped his microbead intercom. ‘Rawne, send those warheads up.’

‘Acknowledged.’

A ‘sir’ wouldn’t kill him, Gaunt thought.

At the elevator head, the troops under Rawne’s command thundered trolleys of warheads into the car.

‘Shush!’ a Vitrian said suddenly. They stopped. A pause – then they all heard the clanking, the distant tinny thumps. Rawne swung up his lasgun and moved into the elevator assembly. He pulled the lever that opened the upper inspection hatch.

Above him, the great lift shaft yawned like a beast’s throat.

He stared up into the darkness, trying to resolve the detail.

The darkness was moving. Shriven were descending, clawing like bat-things down the sheer sides of the shaftway.

Terror punched Rawne’s heart. He slammed the hatch and screamed out, ‘They’re coming!’

The intercom lines went wild with reports as sentries reported hammerings at the sealed hatches and entrance-ways all around. Hundreds of fists, thousands of fists.

Gaunt cursed, feeling the panic rising in his men. Trapped, entombed, the infernal enemy seeping in from all sides. Speakers mounted on walls and consoles all around squawked into life, and a rasping voice, echoing and overlaying itself from a hundred places, spat inhuman gibberish into the chambers.

‘Shut that off!’ Gaunt yelled at Feygor.

Feygor scrabbled desperately at the controls. ‘I can’t!’ he cried.

A hatchway to the east exploded inwards with a shower of sparks. Men screamed. Lasfire began to chatter. A little to the north, another doorway blew inwards in a flaming gout and more Shriven began to battle their way inwards.

Gaunt turned to Corbec. The man was pale. Gaunt tried to think, but the rasping, reverberating snarls of the speakers clogged his mind. With a bark, he raised his pistol and blasted the nearest speaker set off the wall.

He turned to Corbec. ‘Start the retreat. As many as we dare to keep the covering fire.’

Corbec nodded and hurried off. Gaunt opened his intercom to wide band. ‘Gaunt to all units! Commence withdrawal, maximum retreating resistance!’ He sprinted down through the mayhem into the megalith chamber, knocked back for a second by the noxious stench of the place. Lukas, Tolus and Bragg were just emerging, their arms, chests and knees caked with black, tarry goo. They were all ashen and hollow-eyed.

‘It’s done,’ Tolus said.

‘Then blow it! Move out!’ Gaunt cried, pushing and shoving his stumbling men out of the cavern. ‘Rawne!’ ‘Almost there!’ Rawne replied from over at the elevator.

He and the Ghost next to him looked up sharply as they heard a thump from the liftcar roof above them. Cursing, Rawne pushed the final trolley of shells into the elevator bay.

‘Back! Back!’ Rawne shouted to his men. He hit the riser stud of the elevator and it began to lift up the shaft towards the Shriven emplacements high above. They heard impacts and shrieks as it pulverised the Shriven coming down the shaft.

The Ghosts and Vitrians with Rawne were running for their lives. Somewhere far above, their payload arrived – and detonated hard enough to shake the ground and sprinkle earth and rock chips down from the cavern roof. Lamp arrays swung like pendulums.

Gaunt felt it all going off above them, and it strengthened his resolve. He was moving towards the maglev tunnel in the middle of a tumble of guardsmen, almost pushing the dazed Bragg by force of will. Shriven fire burned their way. A Ghost dropped, mid-flight. Others turned, knelt, returned fire. Las-fire glittered back and forth.

Behind them all, in the megalith chamber, the charges planted by Domor’s team exploded. Its support blown away, the great crackling stone teetered and then slumped down into the pit. The speakers went silent.

Total silence. The Shriven firing had stopped. Those that had penetrated the chamber were prostrate, whimpering.

The only sound was the thumping footfalls and gasping breaths of the fleeing guardsmen.

Then a rumbling started. Incandescent green fire flashed and rippled out of the monolith chamber. Without warning the stained glass view-ports of the control room exploded inwards. The ground rippled, ruptured; concrete churned like an angry sea.

‘Get out! Get out now!’ bellowed Ibram Gaunt.

Eleven

THE SHELLING FALTERED, then stopped. Caffran and Zogat paused as they trudged back across the deadscape and looked back.

‘Feth take me!’ Caffran said. ‘They’ve finally–’

The hills beyond the Shriven lines exploded. The vast shockwave threw them both to the ground. The hills splintered and puffed up dust and fire, swelling for a moment before collapsing into themselves.

‘Emperor’s throne!’ Zogat said as he helped the young Tanith trooper up. They looked back at the mushroom cloud lifting from the sunken hills.

‘Hah!’ Caffran said. ‘Someone just won something!’

IN THE VILLA, Lord High Militant General Dravere put down his cup and watched with faint curiosity as it rattled on the cart. He walked stiffly to the veranda rail and looked through the scope, though he hardly needed it. A bell-shaped cloud of ochre smoke boiled up over the horizon where the Shriven stronghold had once been. Lightning flared in the sky. The vox-caster speaker in the corner of the room wailed and then went dead. Secondary explosions, munitions probably, began to explode along the Shriven lines, blasting the heart out of everything they held.

Dravere coughed, straightened and turned to his adjutant. ‘Prepare my transport for embarkation. It seems we’re done here.’

A FIRESTORM OF shockwave and flame passed over the armoured vehicles of Colonel Flense’s convoy. Once it had blown itself out, Flense scrambled out of the top hatch, looking towards the hills ahead of him, hills that were sliding down into themselves as secondary explosions went off.

‘No…’ he breathed, looking wide-eyed at the carnage.

‘No!’

THEY HAD BEEN knocked flat by the shockwave, losing many in the flare of green flame that followed them up the tunnel. Then they were blundering through darkness and dust. There were moans, prayers, coughs.

In the end it took almost five hours for them all to claw their way up and out of the darkness. Gaunt led the way up the tunnel himself. Finally the surviving Tanith and Vitrian units emerged, blinking, into the dying light of another day. Most flopped down, or staggered into the mud, sprawling, crying, laughing. Fatigue washed over them all.

Gaunt sat down on a curl of mud and took off his cap. He started to laugh, months of tension sloughing off him in one easy tide. It was over. Whatever else, whatever the mopping up, Fortis was won.

And that girl, damn whatever her name was, had been right.