First and Only Read online

  Oktar grinned like a wolf. 'Both, naturally.'

  The Hyrkan sergeant bounded up the ridge to the field guns at the top, where the trees had been stripped a week before by a Secessionist air-strike. The splintered trunks were denuded back to their pale bark, and the ground under the snow was thick with wood pulp, twigs and uncountable fragrant needles. There would be no more air-strikes, of course. Not now. The Secessionist airforce had been operating out of two airstrips south of the winter palace which had been rendered useless by Colonel Dravere's armoured units. Not that they'd had much to begin with – maybe sixty ancient-pattern slamjets with cycling cannons in the armpits of the wings and struts on the wingtips for the few bombs they could muster. The sergeant had cherished a sneaking admiration for the Secessionist fliers, though. They'd tried damn hard, taking huge risks to drop their payloads where it counted, and without the advantage of good air-to-ground instrumentation. He would never forget the slamjet which took out their communication bunker in the snow lines of the mountain a fortnight before. It had passed low twice to get a fix, bouncing through the frag-bursts which the anti-air batteries threw up all around it. He could still see the faces of the pilot and the gunner as they passed, plainly visible because the canopy was hauled back so they could get a target by sight alone.

  Brave… desperate. Not a whole lot of difference in the sergeant's book. Determined, too – that was the commissar-general's view. They knew they were going to lose this war before it even started, but still they tried to break loose from the Imperium. The sergeant knew that Oktar admired them. And, in turn, he admired the way Oktar had urged the chief staff to give the rebels every chance to surrender. What was the point of killing for no purpose?

  Still, the sergeant had shuddered when the three thousand pounder had fishtailed down into the communications bunker and flattened it. Just as he had cheered when the thumping, traversing quad-barrels of the Hydra anti-air batteries had pegged the slamjet as it pulled away. It looked like it had been kicked from behind, jerking up at the tail and then tumbling, end over end, as it exploded and burned in a long, dying fall into the distant trees.

  The sergeant reached the hilltop and caught sight of the Boy. He was standing amidst the batteries, hefting fresh shells into the arms of the gunners from the stockpiles half-buried under blast curtains. Tall, pale, lean and powerful, the Boy intimidated the sergeant. Unless death claimed him first, the Boy would one day become a commissar in his own right. Until then, he enjoyed the rank of cadet commissar, and served his tutor Oktar with enthusiasm and boundless energy. Like the commissar-general, the Boy wasn't Hyrkan. The sergeant thought then, for the first time, that he didn't even know where the Boy was from – and the Boy probably didn't know either.

  'The commissar-general wants you,' he told the Boy as he reached him.

  The Boy grabbed another shell from the pile and swung it round to the waiting gunner. 'Did you hear me?' the sergeant asked. 'I heard,' said Cadet Commissar Ibram Gaunt.

  He knew he was being tested. He knew that this was responsibility and that he'd better not mess it up. Gaunt also knew that it was his moment to prove to his mentor, Oktar that he had the makings of a commissar.

  There was no set duration for the training of a cadet. After education at the Schola Progenium and Guard basic training, a cadet received the rest of his training in the field, and the promotion to full commissarial level was a judgement matter for his commanding officer. Oktar, and Oktar alone, could make him or break him. His career as an Imperial commissar, to dispense discipline, inspiration and the love of the God-Emperor of Terra to the greatest fighting force in creation, hinged upon his performance.

  Gaunt was an intense, quiet young man, and a commissarial post had been his dearest ambition since his earliest days in the Schola Progenium. But he trusted Oktar to be fair. The commissar-general had personally selected him for service from the cadet honour class, and had become in the last eighteen months almost a father to Gaunt. A stern, ruthless father, perhaps. The father he had never really known.

  'See that burning wing?' Oktar had said. 'That's a way in. The Secessionists must be falling back into their inner chambers by now. General Caemavar and I propose putting a few squads in through that hole and cutting out their centre. Are you up to it?'

  Gaunt had paused, his heart in his throat. 'Sir… you want me to…'

  'Lead them in. Yes. Don't look so shocked, Ibram. You're always asking me for a chance to prove your leadership. Who do you want?'

  'My choice?'

  'Your choice.'

  'Men from the fourth brigade. Tanhause is a good squad leader and his men are specialists in room to room fighting. Give me them, and Rychlind's heavy weapons team.'

  'Good choices, Ibram. Prove me right.'

  They moved past the fire and into long halls decorated with tapestries where the wind moaned and light fell slantwise from the high windows. Cadet Gaunt led the men personally, as Oktar would have done, the lasgun held tightly in his hands, his blue-trimmed cadet commissar uniform perfectly turned out.

  In the fifth hallway, the Secessionists began their last ditch counter-attack.

  Lasfire cracked and blasted at them. Cadet Gaunt ducked behind an antique sofa that swiftly became a pile of antique matchwood. Tanhause moved up behind him.

  'What now?' the lean, corded Hyrkan major asked.

  'Give me grenades,' Gaunt said.

  They were provided. Gaunt took the webbing belt and set the timers on all twenty grenades. 'Call up Walthem,' he told Tanhause.

  Trooper Walthem moved up. Gaunt knew he was famous in the regiment for the power of his throw. He'd been a javelin champion back home on Hyrkan. 'Put this where it counts,' Gaunt said.

  Walthem hefted the belt of grenades with a tiny grunt. Sixty paces down, the corridor disintegrated.

  They moved in, through the drifting smoke and masonry dust. The spirit had left the Secessionist defence. They found Degredd, the rebel leader, lying dead with his mouth fused around the barrel of his lasgun.

  Gaunt signalled to General Caernavar and Commissar-General Oktar that the fight was over. He marshalled the prisoners out with their hands on their heads as Hyrkan troops set about disabling gun emplacements and munitions stores.

  'What do we do with her?' Tanhause asked him.

  Gaunt turned from the assault cannon he had been stripping of its firing pin.

  The girl was lovely, white-skinned and black haired, as was the pedigree of the Darendarans. She clawed at the clenching hands of the Hyrkan troops hustling her and other prisoners down the draughty hallway.

  When she saw Gaunt, she stopped dead. He expected vitriol, anger, the verbal abuse so common in the defeated and imprisoned whose beliefs and cause had been crushed. But what he saw in her face froze him in surprise. Her eyes were glassy, deep, like polished marble. There was a look in her face as she stared back at him. Gaunt shivered when he realised the look was recognition.

  'There will be seven,' she said suddenly, speaking surprisingly perfect High Gothic with no trace of the local accent. The voice didn't seem to be her own. It was guttural, and its words did not seem to match the movement of her lips. 'Seven stones of power. Cut them and you will be free. Do not kill them. But first you must find your ghosts.'

  'Enough of your madness!' Tanhause snapped, then ordered the men to take her away. The girl was vacant-eyed by now and froth dribbled down her chin. She was plainly sliding into the throes of a trance. The men were wary of her, and pushed her along at arm's length, scared of her magic. The temperature in the hallway itself seemed to drop. At once, the breaths of all of the men steamed the air. It smelled heavy, burnt and metallic, the way it did before a storm. Gaunt felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He could not take his eyes off the murmuring girl as the men bustled her away gingerly.

  'The Inquisition will deal with her,' Tanhause shivered. 'Another untrained psyker witch working for the enemy.'

  'Wait!' Gaunt said and strode over to her. He tensed, scared of the supernaturally-touched being he confronted. 'What do you mean? 'Seven stones'? 'Ghosts'?'

  Her eyes rolled back, pupilless. The cracked old voice bubbled out of her quivering lips. The Warp knows you, Ibram.'

  He stepped back as if he had been stung. 'How did you know my name?'

  She didn't answer. Not coherently, anyway. She began to thrash and gibber and spit. Nonsense words and animal sounds issued from her shuddering throat.

  'Take her away!' Tanhause barked.

  One man stepped in, then span to his knees, flailing, blood streaming from his nose. She had done nothing but glance at him. Snarling oaths and protective charms, the others laid in with the butts of their lasguns.

  Gaunt watched the corridor for five full minutes after the girl had been dragged away. The air remained cold long after she had disappeared. He looked around at the drawn, anxious face of Tanhause.

  'Pay it no heed,' the Hyrkan veteran said, trying to sound confident. He could see the cadet was spooked. Just inexperience, he was sure. Once the Boy had seen a few years, a few campaigns, he'd learn to shut out the mad ravings of the foe and their tainted, insane rants. It was the only way to sleep at night.

  Gaunt was still tense. 'What was that about?' he said, as if he hoped that Tanhause could explain the girl's words.

  'Rubbish is what. Forget it, sir.'

  'Right. Forget it. Right.'

  But Gaunt never did.

  PART TWO

  FORTIS BINARY FORGE WORLD

  ONE

  The night sky was matt and dark, like the material of the fatigues they wore, day after day. The dawn stabbed in, as silent and sudden as a knife-wound, welling up a dull redness through the black cloth of the sky.

  Eventually the sun rose, casting raw amber light down over the trench lines. The star was big, heavy and red, like a rotten, roasted fruit. Dawn lightning crackled a thousand kilometres away.

  Colm Corbec woke, acknowledged briefly the thousand aches and snarls in his limbs and frame, and rolled out of his billet in the trench dugout. His great, booted feet kissed into the grey slime of the trench floor where the duckboards didn't meet.

  Corbec was a large man on the wrong side of forty, built like an ox and going to fat. His broad and hairy forearms were decorated with blue spiral tattoos and his beard was thick and shaggy. He wore the black webbing and fatigues of the Tanith and also the ubiquitous camo-cloak which had become their trademark. He also shared the pale complexion, black hair and blue eyes of his people. He was the colonel of the Tanith First and Only, the so-called Gaunt's Ghosts.

  He yawned. Down the trench, under the frag-sack and gabion breastwork and the spools of rusting razor wire, the Ghosts awoke too. There were coughs, gasps, soft yelps as nightmares became real in the light of waking. Matches struck under the low bevel of the parapet; firearms were un-swaddled and the damp cleaned off. Firing mechanisms were slammed in and out. Food parcels were unhooked from their vermin-proof positions up on the billet roofs.

  Shuffling in the ooze, Corbec stretched and cast an eye down the long, zigzag traverses of the trench to see where the picket sentries were returning, pale and weary, asleep on their feet. The twinkling lights of the vast communication up-link masts flashed eleven kilometres behind them, rising between the rusting, shell-pocked roofs of the gargantuan shipyard silos and the vast Titan fabrication bunkers and foundry sheds of the Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priesthood.

  The dark stealth capes of the picket sentries, the distinctive uniform of the Tanith First and Only, were lank and stiff with dried mud. Their replacements at the picket, bleary eyed and puffy, slapped them on the arms as they passed, exchanging jokes and cigarettes. The night sentries, though, were too weary to be forthcoming.

  They were ghosts, returning to their graves, Corbec thought. As are we all.

  In a hollow under the trench wall, Mad Larkin, the first squad's wiry sniper, was cooking up something that approximated caffeine in a battered tin tray over a fusion burner. The acrid stink hooked Corbec by the nostrils.

  'Give me some of that, Larks,' the colonel said, squelching across the trench.

  Larkin was a skinny, stringy, unhealthily pale man in his fifties with three silver hoops through his left ear and a purple-blue spiral-wyrm tattoo on his sunken right cheek. He offered up a misshapen metal cup. There was a fragile look, of fatigue and fear, in his wrinkled eyes. This morning, do you reckon? This morning?'

  Corbec pursed his lips, enjoying the warmth of the cup in his hefty paw. 'Who knows…' His voice trailed off.

  High in the orange troposphere, a matched pair of Imperial fighters shrieked over, curved around the lines and plumed away north. Fire smoke lifted from Adeptus Mechanicus work-temples on the horizon, great cathedrals of industry, now burning from within. A second later, the dry wind brought the crump of detonations.

  Corbec watched the fighters go and sipped his drink. It was almost unbearably disgusting. 'Good stuff,' he muttered to Larkin.

  A kilometre off, down the etched zigzag of the trench line, Trooper Fulke was busily going crazy. Major Rawne, the regiment's second officer, was woken by the sound of a lasgun firing at close range, the phosphorescent impacts ringing into frag-sacks and mud.

  Rawne spun out of his cramped billet as his adjutant, Feygor, stumbled up nearby. There were shouts and oaths from the men around them.

  Fulke had seen vermin, the ever-present vermin, attacking his rations, chewing into the plastic seals with their snapping lizard mouths. As Rawne blundered down the trench, the animals skittered away past him, lopping on their big, rabbit-legs, their lice-ridden pelts smeared flat with ooze. Fulke was firing his lasgun on full auto into his sleeping cavity under the bulwark, screaming obscenities at the top of his fractured voice.

  Feygor got there first, wrestling the weapon from the bawling trooper. Fulke turned his fists on the adjutant, mashing his nose, splashing up grey mud-water with his scrambling boots.

  Rawne slid in past Feygor, and put Fulke out with a hook to the jaw. There was a crack of bone and the trooper went down, whimpering, in the drainage gully.

  'Assemble a firing squad detail,' Rawne spat at the bloody Feygor unceremoniously and stalked back to his dugout.

  Trooper Bragg wove back to his bunk. A huge man, unarguably the largest of the Ghosts, he was a peaceable, simple soul. They called him ''Try Again'' Bragg because of his terrible aim. He'd been on picket all night and now his bed was singing a lullaby he couldn't resist. He slammed into young Trooper Caffran at a turn in the dugout and almost knocked the smaller man flat. Bragg hauled him up, his weariness damming his apologies in his mouth. 'No harm done, Try,' Caffran said. 'Get to your billet.'

  Bragg blundered on. Two paces more and he'd even forgotten what he'd done. He simply had an afterimage memory of an apology he should have made to a good friend. Fatigue was total.

  Caffran ducked down into the crevice of the command dugout, just off the third communication trench. There was a thick polyfibre shield over the door, and layers of anti-gas curtaining. He knocked twice and then pulled back the heavy drapes and dropped into the deep cavity.

  TWO

  The officer's dugout was deep, accessed only by an aluminium ladder lashed to the wall. Inside, the light was a frosty white from the sodium burners. The floor was well-made of duck-boards and there were even such marks of civilisation as shelves, books, charts and an aroma of decent caffeine.

  Sliding down into the command burrow, Caffran noticed first Brin Milo, the sixteen year-old mascot the Ghosts had acquired at their Founding. Word was, Milo had been rescued personally from the fires of their homeworld by the commissar himself, and this bond had led him to his status of regimental musician and adjutant to their senior officer. Caffran didn't like to be around the boy much. There was something about his youth and his brightness of eye that reminded him of the world they had lost. It was ironic: back on Tanith with only a year or two between them, they like as not would have been friends.

  Milo was setting out breakfast on a small camp table. The smell was delicious: cooking eggs and ham and some toasted bread. Cafrran envied the commissar, his position and his luxuries.

  'Has the commissar slept well?' Caffran asked.

  'He hasn't slept at all,' Milo replied. 'He's been up through the night reviewing reconnaissance transmissions from the orbital watch.'

  Caffran hesitated in the entranceway to the burrow, clutching his sealed purse of communiques. He was a small man, for a Tanith, and young, with shaved black hair and a blue dragon tattoo on his temple.

  'Come in, sit yourself down.' At first, Caffran thought Milo had spoken. But it was the commissar himself. Ibram Gaunt emerged from the rear chamber of the dugout looking pale and drawn. He was dressed in his uniform trousers and a white singlet with regimental braces strapped tight in place. He gestured Caffran to the seat opposite him at the small camp table and then swung down onto the other stool. Caffran hesitated again and then sat at the place indicated.

  Gaunt was a tall, hard man in his forties, and his lean face utterly matched his name. Trooper Caffran admired the commissar enormously and had studied his previous actions at Balhaut, at Formal Prime, his service with the Hyrkan Eighth, even his majestic command of the disaster that was Tanith.

  Gaunt seemed more tired than Caffran had ever seen, but he trusted this man to bring them through. If anyone could redeem the Ghosts it would be Ibram Gaunt. He was a rare beast, a political officer who had been granted full regimental command and the brevet rank of colonel.

  'I'm sorry to interrupt your breakfast, commissar,' Caffran said, sitting uneasily at the camp table, fussing with the purse of communiques.

  'Not at all, Caffran. In fact, you're just in time to join me.' Caffran hesitated once more, not knowing if this was a joke.

  'I'm serious,' Gaunt said. 'You look as hungry as I feel. And I'm sure Brin has cooked up more than enough for two.'