First and Only Read online

  '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 homeworld 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 trench 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 fireteam 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 drum-sheds 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 loosing 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 transparencies that the cog-itators 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 snowed 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 over night. 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.'