First and Only by Dan Abnett Page B

on itself and thundered home towards friendly lines before the Shriven emplacements could range them. Victory would have to wait a while longer. The Tanith First and Only and the Vitrian support regiments were on their own. If there were indeed any of them left alive.

A MEMORY
GYLATUS DECIMUS,
EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER
    O KTAR DIED SLOWLY . It took eight days.
    The commander had once joked – on Darendara, or was it Folion? Gaunt forgot. But he remembered the joke: ‘It won’t be war that slays me, it’ll be these damn victory celebrations!’
    They had been in a smoke-filled hall, surrounded by cheering citizens and waving banners. Most of the Hyrkan officers were drunk on their feet. Sergeant Gurst had stripped to his underwear and climbed the statue of the two-headed Imperial eagle in the courtyard to string the Hyrkan colours from the crest. The streets were full of bellowing crowds, static, honking traffic and wild firecrackers.
    Folion. Definitely Folion.
    Cadet Gaunt had smiled. Laughed, probably.
    But Oktar had a way of being right all the time, and he had been right about this. The Instrumentality of the Gylatus World Flock had been delivered from the savage ork threat after ten months of sustained killing on the Gylatan moons. Oktar, Gaunt with him, had led the final assault on the ork war bunkers at Tropis Crater Nine, punching through the last stand resistance of the brutal huzkarl retinue of Warboss Elgoz. Oktar had personally planted the spike of the Imperial Standard into the soft grey soil of the crater bottom, through Elgoz’s exploded skull.
    Then here, in the Gylatan hive city capital on Decimus, the victory parades, the hosts of jubilant citizenry, the endless festivities, the medal ceremonies, the drinking, the–
    The poison.
    Canny, for orks. As if realising their untenable position, the orks had tainted the food and drink reserves in the last few days of their occupation. Taster servitors had sniffed most of it out, but that one stray bottle. That one stray bottle.
    Adjutant Broph had found the rack of antique wines on the second night of the liberation festivities, hidden in a longbox in the palace rooms which Oktar had commandeered as a playground for his officer cadre. No one had even thought–
    Eight were dead, including Broph, by the time anyone realised. Dead in seconds, collapsed in convulsive wracks, frothing and gurgling. Oktar had only just sipped from his glass when someone sounded the alarm.
    One sip. That, and Oktar’s iron constitution, kept him alive for eight days.
    Gaunt had been off in the barracks behind the hive central palace, settling a drunken brawl, when Tanhause summoned him. Nothing could be done.
    By the eighth day, Oktar was a skeletal husk of his old, robust self. The medics emerged from his chamber, shaking hopeless heads. The smell of decay and corruption was almost overpowering. Gaunt waited in the anteroom. Some of the men, some of the toughest Hyrkans he had come to know, were weeping openly.
    ‘He wants the Boy,’ one of the doctors said as he came out, trying not to retch.
    Gaunt entered the warm, sickly atmosphere of the chamber. Locked in a life-prolonging suspension field, surrounded by glowing fire-lamps and burning bowls of incense, Oktar was plainly minutes from death.
    ‘Ibram…’ The voice was like a whisper, a thing of no substance, smoke.
    ‘Commissar-general.’
    ‘It is past time for this. Well past time. I should never have left it to a finality like this. I’ve kept you waiting too long.’
    ‘Waiting?’
    ‘Truth of it is, I couldn’t bear to lose you… not you, Ibram… far too good a soldier to hand away to the ladder of promotion. Who are you?’
    Gaunt shrugged. The stench was gagging his throat.
    ‘Cadet Ibram Gaunt, sir.’
    ‘No… from now you are Commissar Ibram Gaunt, appointed in the extremis of the field to the commissarial office, to watch over the Hyrkan Regiments. Fetch a clerk. We must record my authority in this