Ghostmaker Read Free Page B

angle nearby. Gaunt turned, and saw the boy, the piper with the fish tattoo. He was laying down an arc of covering fire from the portico of the silo bay with a sentry’s autocannon that he had rested across the stonework. “Get in! The last cutter’s waiting for you!” cried the boy.
    Gaunt threw himself through the bay doors into the fierce whirlwind of the cutter’s engine backwash. The side hatch was just closing and he scrambled through, losing the tails of his coat to the biting hinge.
    Enemy weapons fire resounded off the hull.
    Gaunt was face down on the cabin floor, drenched in blood, looking up at the terrified faces of the Munitorium officials who made up this last evacuation flight to the fleet.
    “Open the door again!” he yelled. “Open it again!”
    None of them moved to do so. Gaunt hauled himself up and heaved on the hatch lever. The door thumped open and the boy scrambled inside.
    Gaunt dragged him clear of the hatch and yanked it shut. “Now!” he bellowed down the cabin to the pilot’s bay. “Go now if you’re going!”
    The cutter rose from the tower bay hard and fast, lifter jets screaming as they were jammed into overdrive. Aerial laser fire exploded the brass orchid-shutters around them and clipped a landing stanchion. Hovering, the cutter wobbled. Below it, Tanith Magna was a blazing inferno.
    Forgetting fuel tolerances, flight discipline, even his own mother’s name, the pilot hammered the main thrusters to maximum and the cutter fired itself up through the black smoke like a bullet.
    Left to die, the forests burned.
    Gaunt fell against a bulkhead and clawed his way to a porthole. Just like in his dreams — fire, like a flower. Blossoming. Pale, greenish fire, scuttling like it was alive. Eating the world, the whole world.
    Ibram Gaunt gazed into his reflection, his own lean, pale, bloody face. Trees, blazing like the heart of a star, rushed past behind his eyes.
     
    High over the cold, mauve, marbled world of Nameth, Gaunt’s ships hung like creatures of the deep marine places. Three great troop carriers, their ash-grey, crenellated hulls vaulted like monstrous cathedrals, and the long, muscular escort frigate Navarre, spined and blistered with lance weapons and turrets, hooked and angular like a woodwasp, two kilometres long.
    In his stateroom on the Navarre, Gaunt reviewed the latest survey intelligence. Tanith was lost, part of a conquered wedge of six planet systems that fell to the Chaos armada pincer which Macaroth had allowed to slip behind his over-eager war-front. Now Crusade forces were doubling back and re-engaging the surprise enemy. Sporadic reports had come in of a thirty-six hour deep-space engagement of capital ships near the Circudus. The Imperial Crusaders now faced a war on two fronts.
    Gaunt’s ruthless retreat had salvaged three and a half thousand fighting men, just over half of the Tanith regiments, and most of their equipment. The cruellest, most cynical view could call it a victory of sorts.
    Gaunt slid a data-slate out from under a pile of other documents on his desk and eyed it. It was the transcript of the communiqué from Macaroth himself, applauding Gaunt’s survival instinct and his great feat in salvaging for the crusade a significant force of men. Macaroth had not seen fit to mention the loss of a planet and its population. He spoke of “Colonel-Commissar Gaunt’s correct choice, and frank evaluation of an impossible situation”, and ordered him to a holding position at Nameth to await deployment.
    It made Gaunt queasy. He tossed the slate aside.
    The shutter opened and Kreff entered. Kreff was the frigate’s executive officer, a hard-faced, shaven-headed man in the emerald, tailored uniform of the Segmentum Pacificus Fleet. He saluted, a pointless over-formality given that he had been covering as Gaunt’s adjutant in Sym’s place, and had been in and out of the room ten times an hour since Gaunt came aboard.
    “Anything?” Gaunt asked.
    “The astropaths tell us that