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.'"You do hate him.''I admire him.I will follow him anywhere.That's all there is to say.I left my homeworld the night it died, and I've been fighting for its memory ever since.We Tanith are a dying breed.There are only about twenty hundred of us left.Gaunt only got away with enough for one regiment.The Tanith First.The First-and-Only.That's what makes us "ghosts", you see.The last few unquiet souls of a dead world.And I suppose we'll keep going until we're all done.'Caffran fell silent and in the dimness of the shell-hole there was no sound except the fall of the bombardment outside.Zogat was silent for a long while, then he looked up at the paling sky.'It will be dawn in two hours/ he said softly.'Maybe we'll see our way out of this when it gets light.''You could be right,' Caffran replied, stretching his aching, mud-caked limbs.The bombardment does seem to be moving away.Who knows, we might live through this after all.Feth, I've lived through worse.'SevenDaylight rolled in with a wet stain of cloud, underlit by the continued bombardment.The lightening sky was streaked and cross-hatched by con-trails, shell-wakes and arcs of fire from the massive Shriven emplacements in the distant shrouded hills.Lower, in the wide valley and the trench lines, the accumulated smoke of the onslaught, which had now been going on for just about twenty-one hours, dropping two or three shells a second, curdled like fog, thick, creamy and repellent with the stink of cordite and fycelene.Gaunt brought his assembled company to a halt in a silo bay that had once held furnaces and bell kilns.They pulled off their rebreather masks.The floor, the air itself, was permeated with a greenish microdust that tasted of iron or blood.Shattered plastic crating was scattered over the place.They were five kilometres from the bombardment line now, and the noise of the drum-mills, chattering away in barns and manufactories all around them, was even louder than the shells.Corbec had got his men away from the fire zone just about intact, although everyone had been felled by the Shockwaveand eighteen had been deafened permanently by the air-burst.The Imperial Guard infirmaries over the lines would patch ruptured ear drums with plastene diaphragms or implant acoustic enhancers in a matter of moments.But that was over the lines.Out here, eighteen deaf men were a liability.When they formed up to move, Gaunt would station them in the midst of his column, where they could take maximum guidance and warning from the men around them.There were other injuries too, a number of broken arms, ribs and collarbones.However, everyone was walking and that was a mercy.Gaunt took Corbec to one side.Gaunt knew a good soldier instinctively, and it worried him when confidence was misplaced.He'd chosen Corbec to offset Rawne.Both men commanded respect from the Tanith First and Only, one because he was liked and the other because he was feared.'Not like you to make a tactical error of that magnitude…' Gaunt began.Corbec started to say something and then cut himself short.The idea of making excuses to the commissar stuck in his throat.Gaunt made them for him.'I understand we're all in a tight spot.This circumstance is extreme, and your lot had suffered particularly.I heard about Drayl.I also think these drum-mills, which you decided to target with an almost suicidal determination, are meant to disorientate.Meant to make us act irrationally.Let's face it, they're insane.They are as much a weapon as the guns.They are meant to wear us down.'Corbec nodded.The war had pooled bitterness in his great, hoary form.There was a touch of weariness to his look and manner."What's our plan? Do we wait for the barrage to stop and retreat?'Gaunt shook his head.'I think we've come in so deep, we can do some good.We'll wait for the scouts to return.'The recon units returned to the shelter within half an hour.The scouts, some Vitrian, mostly Tanith, combined the data from their sweeps and built a picture of the area in a two kilometre radius for Gaunt and Zoren.What interested Gaunt most was a structure to the west.They moved through a wide section of drainage pipelines, through rain-washed concrete underpasses stained with oil anddust.The cordite fog drifted back over their positions.To the west rose the great hill line, to the immediate north the shadowy bulk of habitat spires, immense conical towers for the workforce that rose out of the ground fog, their hundred thousand windows all blown out by shelling and air-shock.There were fewer drum-mills in this range of the enemy territory, but still no sign of a solitary living thing, not even the vermin.They began passing blast-proofed bunkers of great size, all empty except for scattered support cradles and stacking pallets of grey fibre-plast.A crowd of battered, yellow, heavy-lift trolleys were abandoned on the concourses before the bunkers.'Munitions stores,' Zoren suggested to Gaunt as they advanced.They must have stockpiled a vast amount of shells for this bombardment and they've already emptied these sheds.'Gaunt thought this a good guess.They edged on, cautious, marching half-time and with weapons ready.The structure the reconnaissance had reported was ahead now, a cargo loading bay of tubular steel and riveted blast-board.The bay was mounted with hydraulic cranes and derricks on the surface, poised to lower cargo into a cavity below ground.The guardsmen descended on the metal grilled stairway onto a raised platform that lay alongside a wide, well-lit tunnel that ran off out of sight into the impacted earth
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