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  As if on cue, the boy produced two ceramic plates of food – mashed eggs and grilled ham with tough, toasted chunks of wheatbread. Caffran looked at the plate in front of him for a moment as Gaunt tucked into his with relish.

  'Go on, eat up. It's not every day you get a chance to taste officer's rations,' Gaunt said, wolfing down a forkful of eggs.

  Caffran nervously picked up his own fork and began to eat. It was the best meal he'd had in sixty days. It reminded him of his days as an apprentice engineer in the wood mills of lost Tanith, back before the Founding and the Loss, of the wholesome suppers served on the long tables of the refectory after last shift. Before long, he was consuming the breakfast with as much gusto as the commissar, who smiled at him appreciatively.

  The boy Milo then produced a steaming pot of thick caffeine, and it was time to talk business.

  'So, what do the dispatches tell us this morning?' Gaunt started.

  'I don't know, sir,' Caffran said, pulling out the communique purse and dropping it onto the tabletop in front of him. 'I just carry these things. I never ask what's in them.'

  Gaunt paused for a moment, chewing a mouthful of eggs and ham. He took a long sip of his steaming drink and then reached out for the purse.

  Caffran thought to look away as Gaunt unsealed the plastic envelope and read the print-out strips contained within.

  'I've been up all night at that thing,' Gaunt said, gesturing over his shoulder to the green glow of the tactical communication artificer, built into the muddy wall of the command burrow. 'And it's told me nothing.'

  Gaunt reviewed the dispatches that spilled out of Caffran's purse. 'I bet you and the men are wondering how long we'll be dug into this hell hole,' Gaunt said. 'The truth is, I can't tell you. This is a war of attrition. We could be here for months.'

  Caffran was by now feeling so warm and satisfied by the good meal he had just eaten the commissar could have told him his mother had been murdered by orks and he wouldn't have worried much.

  'Sir?' Milo's voice was a sudden intruder into the gentle calm.

  Gaunt looked up. 'What is it, Brin?' he said.

  'I think… that is… I think there's an attack coming.'

  Caffran chuckled. 'How could you know—' he began but the commissar cut him off.

  'Somehow, Milo's sensed each attack so far before it's come. Each one. Seems he has a gift for anticipating shell-fall. Perhaps it's his young ears.' Gaunt crooked a wry grin at Cafrran. 'Do you want to argue, eh?'

  Caffran was about to answer when the first wail of shells howled in.

  THREE

  Gaunt leapt to his feet, knocking the camp table over. It was the sudden motion rather than the scream of incoming shells which made Caffran leap up in shock. Gaunt was scrabbling for his side-arm, hanging in its holster on a hook by the steps. He grabbed the speech-horn of the vox-caster set, slung under the racks that held his books.

  'Gaunt to all units! To arms! To arms! Prepare for maximum resistance!'

  Caffran didn't wait for any further instruction. He was already up the steps and banging through the gas curtains as volleys of shells assaulted their trenches. Huge plumes of vaporised mud spat up from the trench head behind him and the narrow gully was full of the yells of suddenly animated guardsmen. A shell whinnied down low across his position and dug a hole the size of a drop-ship behind the rear breastwork of the trench. Liquid mud drizzled down on him. Caffran pulled his lasgun from its sling and slithered up towards the top of the trench firestep. There was chaos, panic, troopers hurrying in every direction, screaming and shouting.

  Was this it? Was this the final moment in the long, drawn-out conflict they had found themselves in? Caffran tried to slide up the side of the trench far enough to get a sight over the lip, across no-man's land to the enemies' emplacements which they had been locked into for the last six months. All he could see was a mist of smoke and mud.

  There was a crackle of las weapons and several screams. More shells fell. One of them found the centre of a nearby communications trench. Then the screaming became real and immediate. The drizzle that fell on him was no longer water and mud. There were body parts in it.

  Caffran cursed and wiped the sight-lens of his lasgun clean of filth. Behind him he heard a shout, a powerful voice that echoed along the traverses of the trench and seemed to shake the duckboards. He looked back to see Commissar Gaunt emerging from his dugout.

  Gaunt was dressed now in his full dress uniform and cap, the camo-cloak of his adopted regiment swirling about his shoulders, his face a mask of bellowing rage. In one hand he held his bolt pistol and in the other his chainsword, whidi whined and sang in the early morning air.

  'In the name of Tanith! Now they are on us we must fight! Hold the line and hold your fire until they come over the mud wall!'

  Caffran felt a rejoicing in his soul. The commissar was with them and they would succeed, no matter the odds. Then something closed down his world with a vibratory shock that blew mud up into the air and seemed to separate his spirit from his body.

  The section of trench had taken a direct hit. Dozens of men were dead. Caffran lay stunned in the broken line of duck-boards and splattered mud. A hand grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him up. Blinking he looked up to see the face of Gaunt. Gaunt looked at him with a solemn, yet inspiring gaze.

  'Sleeping after a good breakfast?' the commissar enquired of the bewildered trooper.

  'No sir… I… I…'

  The crack of lasguns and needle lasers began to whip around them from the armoured loopholes on the trench head. Gaunt wrenched Caffran back to his feet.

  'I think the time has come,' Gaunt said, 'and I'd like all of my brave men to be in the line with me when we advance.'

  Spitting out grey mud, Caffran laughed. 'I'm with you, sir,' he said, 'from Tanith to whereever we end up.'

  Caffran heard the whine of Gaunt's chainsword as the commissar leapt up the scaling ladder nailed into the trench wall above the firestep and yelled to his men.

  'Men of Tanith! Do you want to live forever?'

  Their reply, loud and raucous, was lost in the barrage of shells. But Ibram Gaunt knew what they had said.

  Weapons blazing, Gaunt's Ghosts went over the top and blasted their way towards glory, death or whatever else awaited them in the smoke.

  FOUR

  There was a sizzling thicket of las-fire a hundred paces deep and twenty kilometres long where the advancing legions of the enemy met the Imperial Guard regiments head on. It looked for all the world like squirming nests of colonial insects bursting forth from their mounds and meeting in a chaotic mess of seething forms, lit by the incessant and incandescent sparking crossfire of their weapons.

  Lord High Militant General Hechtor Dravere turned away from his tripod-mounted scope. He smoothed the faultless breast of his tunic with well-manicured hands and sighed.

  'Who would that be dying down there?' he asked in his disturbingly thin, reedy voice.

  Colonel Flense, field commander of the Jantine Patricians, one of the oldest and most venerated Guard regiments, got off his couch and stood smartly to attention. Flense was a tall, powerful man, the tissue of his left cheek disfigured long ago by a splash of Tyranid bio-acid.

  'General?'

  'Those… those ants down there…' Dravere gestured idly over his shoulder. 'I wondered who they were.'

  Flense strode across the veranda to the chart table where a flat glass plate was illuminated from beneath with glowing indication runes. He traced a ringer across the glass, assessing the four hundred kilometres of battlefield frontline which represented the focus of the war here on Fortis Binary, a vast and ragged pattern of opposing trench systems, facing each other across a mangled deadland of cratered mud and shattered factories.

  'The western trenches,' he began. 'They are held by the Tanith First Regiment. You know them, sir: Gaunt's mob, what some of the men call ''The Ghosts'' I believe.'

  Dravere wandered
across to an ornate refreshment cart and poured himself a tiny cup of rich black caffeine from the gilt samovar. He sipped and for a moment sloshed the heavy fluid between his teeth.

  Flense cringed. Colonel Draker Flense had seen things in his time that would have burned through the souls of most ordinary men. He had watched legions die on the wire, he had seen men eat their comrades in a frenzy of Chaos-induced madness, he had seen planets, whole planets, collapse and die and rot. There was something about General Dravere that touched him more deeply and more repugnantly than any of that. It was a pleasure to serve.

  Dravere swallowed at last and set aside his cup. 'So Gaunt's Ghosts get the wake-up call this morning,' he said.

  Hechtor Dravere was a squat, bullish man in his sixties, balding and yet insistent upon lacquering the few remaining strands of hair across his scalp as if to prove a point. He was fleshy and ruddy, and his uniform seemed to require an entire regimental ration of starch and whitening to prepare each morning. There were medals on his chest which stuck out on a stiff brass pin. He always wore them. Flense was not entirely sure what they all represented. He had never asked. He knew that Dravere had seen at least as much as him and had taken every ounce of glory for it that he could. Sometimes Flense resented the fact that the lord general always wore his decorations. He supposed it was because the lord general had them and he did not. That was what it meant to be a lord general.

  The ducal palace on whose veranda they now stood was miraculously intact after six months of serial bombardment and overlooked the wide rift valley of Diemos, once the hydroelectric industrial heartland of Fortis Binary, now the axis on which the war revolved. In all directions, as far as the eye could see, sprawled the gross architecture of the manufacturing zone: the towers and hangers, the vaults and bunkers, the storage tanks and chimney stacks. A great ziggurat rose to the north, the brilliant gold icon of the Adeptus Mechanicus displayed on its flank. It rivalled, perhaps even surpassed, the Temple of the Ecdesiarchy, dedicated to the God-Emperor. But then, the Tech-Priests of Mars would argue this entire world was a shrine to the God-Machine Incarnate. The ziggurat had been the administrative heart of the Tech-Priests' industry on Fortis, from where they directed a workforce of nineteen billion in the production of armour and heavy weaponry for the Imperial war machine. It was a burned-out shell now. It had been the uprising's first target.

  In the far hills of the valley, in fortified factories, worker habitats and material store yards, the enemy was dug in – a billion strong, a vast massed legion of daemoniac cultists. Fortis Binary was a primary Imperial forge world, muscular and energetic in its industrial production. No one knew how the Ruinous Powers had come to corrupt it, or how a huge section of the massive labour force had been infected with the taint of the Fallen Gods. But it had happened. Eight months before, almost overnight, the vast manufactory arks and furnace-plants of the Adeptus Mechanicus had been overthrown by the Chaos-corrupted workforce, once bonded to serve the machine cult. Only a scarce few of the Tech-Priests had escaped the sudden onslaught and evacuated off world.

  Now the massed legions of the Imperial Guard were here to liberate this world, and the action was very much determined by the location. The master-factories and tech-plants of Fortis Binary were too valuable to be stamped flat by an orbital bombardment. Whatever the cost, for the good of the Imperium, this world had to be retaken a pace at a time, by men on the ground: fighting men, Imperial Guard, soldiers who would, by the sweat of their backs, root out and destroy every last scrap of Chaos and leave the precious industries of the forge world ready and waiting for re-population.

  'Every few days they try us again, pushing at another line of our trenches, trying to find a weak link.' The lord general looked back into his scope at the carnage fifteen kilometres away.

  'The Tanith First are strong fighters, general, so I have heard.'Flense approached Dravere and stood with his hands behind hit back. The scar-tissue of his cheek pinched and twitched slightly, as it often did when he was tense. 'They have acquitted themselves well on a number of campaigns and Gaunt is said to be a resourceful leader.'

  'You know him?' the general looked up from his eye-piece, questioningly.

  Flense paused. 'I know him, sir. In the main by reputation,' he said, swallowing many truths, 'but I have met him in passing. His philosophy of leadership is not in tune with mine.'

  'You don't like him, do you, Flense?' Dravere asked pertinently. He could read Flense like a book, and could see some deep resentment lay in the colonel's heart when it came to the subject of the infamous and heroic Commissar Gaunt. He knew what it was. He'd read the reports. He also knew Flense would never actually mention it.

  'Frankly? No, sir. He is a commissar. A political officer. But by a turn of fate, he has achieved a regimental command. Warmaster Slaydo granted him the command of the Tanith on his deathbed. I understand the role of commissars in this army, but I despise his officer status. He is sympathetic where he should be inspiring, inspirational where he should be dogmatic. But… still and all, he is a commander we can probably trust.'

  Dravere smiled. Flense's outburst had been from the heart, and honest, but it still diplomatically skirted the real truth. 'I mist no other commander than myself, Flense,' the General said flatly. 'If I cannot see the victory, I will not trust it to other hands. Your Patricians are held in reserve, am I correct?'

  They are barracked in the work habitats to the west, ready to support a push on either flank.'

  'Go to them and bring them to readiness,' the lord general said. He crossed to the chart table again and used a stylus to mark out several long sweeps of light on the glassy top. 'We have been held here long enough. I grow impatient. This war should have been over and done months ago. How many brigades have we committed to break the deadlock?'

  Flense wasn't sure. Dravere was famously extravagant with manpower. It was his proud boast that he could choke even the Eye of Terror if he had enough bodies to march into it. Certainly in the last few weeks, Dravere had become increasingly frustrated at the lack of advance. Flense guessed that Dravere was anxious to please Warmaster Macaroth, the new overall commander of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. Dravere and Macaroth had been rivals for Slaydo's succession. Having lost to Macaroth, Dravere probably had a lot to prove. Like his loyalty to the new warmaster.

  Flense had also heard rumours that Inquisitor Heldane, one of Dravere's most trusted associates, had come to Fortis a week before to conduct private talks with the lord general. Now it was as if Dravere yearned to move on, to be somewhere, to achieve something even grander than the conquest of a world, even a world as vital as Fortis Binary.

  Dravere was talking again. The Shriven have shown their hand this morning, in greater force than before, and it will take them eight or nine hours to withdraw and regroup from whatever advances they make now. Bring your regiments in from the east and cut them off. Use these Ghosts as a buffer and slice a hole into the heart of their main defences. With the will of the beloved Emperor, we may at last break this matter and press a victory.' The lord general tapped the screen with the point of the stylus as if to emphasise the non-negotiable quality of his instruction.

  Flense was eager to comply. It was his determined ambition that his regiments should be fundamental in achieving the victory on Fortis Binary. The notion that Gaunt could somehow take that glory from him made him sicken, made him think of—

  He shook off the thought, and basked in the idea that Gaunt and his low-born scum would be used, expended, sacrificed on the enemy guns to affect his own glory. Still, Flense wavered for a second, about to leave. There was no harm in creating a little insurance. He crossed back to the chart table and pointed a leather-gloved finger at a curve of the contours on the map. There is a wide area to cover, sir,' he said, 'and if Gaunt's men were to… well, break with cowardice, my Patricians would be left vulnerable to both the dug in forces of the Shriven and to the retreating elements.'

  Dravere mused on this for a
moment. Cowardice: what a loaded word for Flense to use in respect to Gaunt. Then he dapped his chubby hands together as gleefully as a young child at a birthday party. 'Signals! Signals officer in here now!'

  The inner door of the lounge room opened and a weary soldier hurried in, snapping his worn, but clean and polished boots together as he saluted the two officers. Dravere was busy scribing orders onto a message slate. He reviewed them once and then handed them to the soldier.

  'We will bring the Vitrian Dragoons in to support the Ghosts in the hope that they will drive the Shriven host back into the flood plains. In this way, we should ensure that the fighting is held along the western flank for as long as it takes your Patricians to engage the enemy. Signal to this effect, and signal also the Tanith Commander, Gaunt. Instruct him to push on. His duty today is not merely to repel. It is to press on and use this opportunity to take the Shriven frontline trenches. Ensure that this instruction is clearly an order directly from me. There will be no faltering, tell him. No retreat. They will achieve or they will die.'

  Flense allowed himself an inward smile of triumph. His own back was now comfortably covered, and Gaunt had been forced into a push that would have him dead by nightfall. The soldier saluted again and made to exit.

  'One last thing,' Dravere said.

  The soldier skidded to a halt and turned, nervously.

  Dravere tapped the samovar with a chunky signet ring. 'Ask them to send in some fresh caffeine. This is stale.' The soldier nodded and exited. From the clunk of the ring it was clear that the big, gilt vessel was still nearly full. A regiment could drink for several days on what the General clearly intended to throw away. He managed to wait until he was out of the double doors before he spat a silent curse at the man who was orchestrating ihis bloodbath.

  Flense saluted too and walked towards the door. He picked I op his peaked cap from the sideboard and carefully set it upon his head, the back of the brim first.

  'Praise the Emperor, lord general,' he said.