Milo helped Wheln swing the doors shut, his fingers tracing the heraldic badge of the Tanith Elector inscribed on the heavy nal-wood panels. He blinked, and for a second saw taller, more slender doors of polished onyx, marked with alien runes he did not understand.
'What's up?' Wheln asked, panting.
Milo blinked again. The doors were arched nal-wood in the Tanith pattern again, the Elector's insignia clearly marked.
Feygor and Mkendrik dropped a long bar across the door loops to lock it tight. Beyond the thick barrier, they could hear muffled explosions and the rasp of flamers as the enemy tried to unblock the corpse-packed tunnel.
The eight Tanith men were exhausted. A day ago, at the Founding, none of them – with the possible exception of Rawne and Feygor – had ever fired a weapon in anger, let alone killed. Now they were truly baptised. There was no counting the dead they had piled up.
Gown sank to his heels against the wall, fighting for breath. 'Are we lost?' he asked. 'Is Tanith lost?'
Rawne turned to face him, fire in his eyes. 'Are we alive? Is Tanith living? Get up! Get up and move! Only that feckless off-worlder Gaunt seems to have given up on Tanith! Withdraw? Abandon? What kind of leadership is that? He'd make world-less ghosts of us!'
'Ghosts…' murmured Larkin, leaning slackly against the far wall, cheek and shoulder pressed against the cold stone. 'Gaunt's Ghosts…'
'What did you say?' Milo asked directly, blood racing in his ears. It was like a dream was breaking in his head.
'Ignore him!' Feygor ordered. 'Fething fool is weak in the head. But for his good eye, I'd have shot him as dead-weight before now.'
'No,' began Milo, 'This isn't right… it…'
'Of course it's not right!' Feygor snarled into Milo's face. Milo winced as spittle hit his cheek. 'The Imperium comes to Tanith when it needs men, but where is the Imperium now when Tanith needs it? They're leaving us to die!'
Caffran pulled Feygor back from Milo sharply. 'Then we'll die well, Feygor! We'll die fething well!' The young trooper's face was bright with passion. The thought of Laria burned in his mind. She was out there somewhere and he would fight and kill and kill again to save this place and be with her once more.
'Caffs right, Feygor,' Mkendrik said. Wheln and Cown both nodded in agreement. 'Let's die well so Tanith can live.'
'And feth any off-world commissar who says otherwise!' spat Cown.
Feygor, subdued, turned and nodded, deftly exchanging the power cell of his lasgun for a fresh one.
Rawne had been absent for a few moments and now strode back into view. 'I hear fighting down the hall, maybe three hundred spans away. Sounds like another group of our boys in defence. I say we move in to support.'
Mkendrik nodded. 'Bolster our numbers. Maybe they know where the Elector is sheltering.'
'If we could get him to the transport stables, we could maybe fly him to safety in a cutter,' Cown added.
Rawne nodded. 'Feygor, make the door a surprise.'
Feygor grinned and took out a brace of tube-charges from his pack. He strapped them with quick, practised diligence to the door bar. Anything that broke in here now after them would snap the trigger wire and bring the hallway down on top of them.
'Let's go!' Rawne ordered.
Milo fell into step with the others as they hurried on down the long palace hallway, boot-steps resounding from the stone flags. He wished with all his heart and soul he could work out what was wrong with… with reality. There was no other word. Reality itself seemed wrong and dreamlike and it was making his stomach turn. It must be the Chaos daemons, Milo thought. Maybe Major Rawne knew wh—
Milo paused. Major Rawne? In the tents of the Founding Fields outside Tanith Magna, Rawne had bivouacked with the common soldiers. A trooper, nothing more. No rank, no seniority. Since when had he got the collar pins and the promotion?
Have I forgotten something? Milo wondered. Have I…
Another flicker in his mind. An image of… of a cramped cabin on a starship. Rawne, Corbec, Milo. A deputation. A tall, powerful, lean-faced man that could only have been Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt, rising to meet them. How could he know what this Gaunt looked like? He'd never seen him. He could hear Gaunt speaking, making bold, confident field promotions: Colonel Corbec, Major Rawne.
Another dream?
There was no time to think about it. They were almost on the fighting. Gunshots. Screaming, just ahead.
That wasn't las-fire, Milo thought to himself as he and all the platoon checked stride and raised weapons. He'd heard enough lasgun exchanges in the last half an hour to know the distinctive snap. This was an eerie, singing shrill; a shrieking, a buzzing, like the saw-note of a wasp, amplified and broken into harsh, serried blasts.
What the feth was it?
'You hear that?' he gasped to Larkin beside him. Larkin was tuning the night-scope on his long gun, stabbing a slender target beam of porcelain blue light up at the roof.
'What? Lasguns on full auto? Yeah… someone's having a busy day.'
It's not a lasgun, thought Milo, it's not…
Third platoon rounded a corner in the hallway, moving in tight overlap formation, and broke into a wide
