Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett Page A

fire slammed back at the Ghosts, dropping several of them. The charging Guardsmen met the cultist force head on in a tight, tall sub-chute, no wider than two men abreast. Bodies exploded, blasted at close range. Bayonets and blades sliced and jabbed. Corbec was in the thick of it. Already a chain sword had gashed his left hand and cost him a finger, and blood blurted from a slash to his shoulder. He speared a man, but lost his gun when the corpse’s weight on the bayonet tore it out of his hands. He ripped out his fallback weapons, a laspistol and his Tanith knife of sheer silver. Around him in the frenzy, men killed or died in a confined press that was packed in close like a busy work transit, crowded at rush hour. Already the water level was rising because of the depth of bodies and body parts in the gully.
    Corbec shot a cultist through the head as he was charged, and then lashed sideways with the silver blade, opening a throat.
    “For Tanith! First and Last and Only!” he screamed.
     
    Advancing up the tunnel fifty paces back, Gaunt could hear the sheer tumult of the nightmarish close-quarters fight in the chute. He looked down and saw that the trickle of Bokore River water that ran down over his boots was thick and red.
    Ten yards further, he found Trooper Gades, part of Orcha’s original squad. The boy had lost his legs to a chainsword and the water had carried his twitching form back down the smooth slope of the channel.
    “Medic! Dorden! To me!” Gaunt bellow, cradling the coughing, gagging Gades in his arms.
    Gades looked up at his commissar. “A real close fight, so it is,” he said with remarkable clarity, “packed in like fish in a can. The Ghosts will make ghosts tonight.”
    Then he coughed again. Bloody matter vomited from his mouth and he was gone.
    Gaunt stood.
    Milo had faltered, looking down at Gades’ stricken, miserable death.
    “Play up!” urged Gaunt, and turned to shout down the chute to the Ghost main force in the bulrushes. “Advance! Narrow file! For the Emperor and the glory of Tanith!”
    With a deafening bellow, Gaunt’s Ghosts charged forward en masse, breaking down into files of three, surging into the throttling entrance to hell.
    Up ahead, in the dark, close, smoky killing zone, Rawne slumped against a buttress, splashed in gore, and panted. By his side, Larkin squatted and fired shot after shot into the darkness.
    Corbec suddenly loomed out of the smoke, a terrible apparition drenched in blood. “Back!” he hissed. “Back down the chute! Sound the retreat!”
    “What is it?” Rawne said.
    “What’s that rumbling?” Larkin asked, distracted, pressing his ear to the stone work. “Whole tunnel is vibrating!”
    “Water,” Corbec said grimly. “They’ve opened the sluices. They’re going to wash us out!”
     
    The cultists were everywhere.
    Sergeant Cluggan’s secondary expedition force poured in through the stinking crypts of the western sanitation outfalls, and the enemy rose to meet them all around. It was hand to hand, each step of the way won by strength and keen blades. The dark, tight confines of the drainage tunnels were lit by the flashes of lasfire, and shots ricocheted from the roof and walls.
    “What the hell is that smell?” Forbin wailed, blasting away down an airless cavity with his lasgun.
    “What do you think? This is the main sewage drain,” Brodd snapped, a one-eyed man in his fifties years. “Notice how the others get the nice clean watergate.”
    “Keep it together!” Cluggan snarled, firing in a wide sweep and cutting down a trio of attacking cultists. “Forget the smell. It’s always been a dirty job.”
    More, heavy fire came their way. Forbin lost his left arm and then the side of his head.
    Cluggan, Brodd and the others returned fire in the close channel. Cluggan eyed the cultist troops they cut through: bloated, twisted men in robes that had been white silk before they had been dyed in vats of blood. They had come from off-world, part of the vast host of Chaos cultists that