Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett Page B

bulbs that had triggered at the sound of the explosion. Its needle apertures were spent. He could use it as cover safely now it was unarmed.
    The dreadnought was thumping his way, drawn by the sound of the grenade. Waed had fallen silent.
    Mkoll adjusted his gun and set it on the ground. Then he spoke.
    “Over here, you bastard!”
    It sounded impossibly loud. A final taunt to follow the grenade. Bulbs popped around him. But none had spines left on the sides facing him.
    The dreadnought crunched into the clearing. Its left foot clinked against something in the dust. It bent to retrieve it.
    Mkoll’s lasgun.
    The dreadnought raised it in its bionic claws, holding the gun up to its already ruptured frontal armour as if to sniff or taste it.
    Mkoll started to run.
    By his estimation, there were five seconds before the lasgun magazine overloaded as he had set it. He threw himself flat as it went off. Hundreds of cacti loosed needles at the roar. Then silence.
     
    With Waed, silently, Mkoll re-entered the thicket. They found the dreadnought broken open in the blackened clearing. The overload had not killed it, but it had split its armour as the towering machine had strode forward. Poison darts had done the rest, puncturing and killing the now-vulnerable once-man inside. Mkoll could see where the maddened Chaos beast-machine had strode arrogantly on for a few heavy steps after the puny laser blast. Then it had toppled, poisoned, dead.
    They headed back onto the trail.
    “You’re a fething hero!” Waed said finally.
    “How is that?”
    “A fething dreadnought, Mkoll! You killed a dreadnought!” Mkoll turned and faced Waed with a look that brooked no denial.
    “We’ll tell the commissar that the area is cleared. Understood? I don’t want any stupid glory. Is that clear?”
    Waed nodded and followed his sergeant. “But you killed it…” he ventured softly.
    “No, I didn’t. I listened and waited and was silent… and when I made the opening, Ramillies did the rest.”

FOUR
THE HOLLOWS OF HELL
     
     
    Colm Corbec was sat outside his habitat unit. As regimental second officer, he was given a bivouac like Gaunt’s, but the commissar knew that he preferred to sleep in the open.
    As Gaunt approached, he saw that Corbec was whittling a piece of bark with his Tanith knife. Gaunt slowed and watched the thick-set man. If he himself died, Gaunt mused, could Corbec hold them together? Could he lead the Ghosts with Gaunt gone?
    Corbec would say “no”, Gaunt knew, but he was confident of Corbec’s abilities. Even though he had chosen his second in command on a decision that was as simple as a flick of a coin.
    “Quiet night,” Corbec said as Gaunt crouched next to him and his fire.
    “So far,” Gaunt replied. He watched the big man’s hands play the blade over the pale wood. He knew Corbec hated the role of command, would do almost anything to distract himself. Gaunt also knew that Corbec hated ordering men to their deaths or glories. But he did it well. And he took charge when it was needed. Never more so, than on Caligula…
     
    He would be sick. Very soon, very violently. Of this sole fact, Brin Milo was absolutely sure.
    His stomach somersaulted as the troop-ship plunged out of the sky, and every bone in his body shook as the impossibly steep descent vibrated the sixty-tonne vessel like a child’s rattle.
    Count… …think happy thoughts… …distract yourself… …counselled a part of his mind in desperation. It won’t look good if the commissar’s aide, the regimental piper, wonderboy and all round lucky bloody charm hurls his reconstituted freeze-dried ready-pulped food rations all over the deck.
    And whatever you do, don’t think about how pulpy and slimy those food rations were… advised another, urgent part of his brain.
    Deck? What deck? wailed another. Chuck now and it’ll wobble out in free fall and— Shut up! Brin Milo ordered his seething imagination.
    For a moment, he was calm, He breathed deeply to loosen and relax, to centre himself,