Milo had faltered, looking down at Gades's 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 had descended like locusts onto Voltemand and destroyed its people. The sigils and runes of the blasphemy Khorne were cut into the flesh of their brows and cheeks. They were well equipped, with bolters and lasguns, and armoured. Cluggan hoped to the sweet, dead gods of Tanith that his commissar was faring better.
The Ghosts staggered and stumbled back from the spewing watergate, through the reed beds, towards the comparative cover of the riverbank. Enemy fire from the walls high above killed dozens, their bodies joining the hundreds swept out, swirling and turning, by the torrent of brown water roaring from the watergate.
Micro-bead traffic was frantic with cross-chatter and desperately confused calls. Despite their discipline, the madness of the flight from the water had broken Gaunt's main force into a ragged jumble, scrambling for their lives.
Soaked through, furious, Gaunt found himself sheltering by some willows in a scummy river bend eighty yards from the watergate. With him were Caffran, Varl, a corporal called Meryn and two others.
Gaunt cursed. Cultists he could fight… World Eaters, daemons… anything. He'd set square with any beast in the cosmos. But seventy million litres of water pressured down through a stone conduit…
'May have lost as many as forty to the flood,' Varl said. He'd dragged Caffran by the tunic from the water and the young man could only retch and cough.
'Get a confirmed figure from the squad leaders! I don't want rumours!' Gaunt snarled, then keyed his own radio link and spoke into his bead. 'Squad leaders! Discipline the radio traffic. I want regroup status! Corbec! Rawne!'
The channels crackled and a more ordered litany of units and casualties reeled in.
'Corbec?' Gaunt asked.
'I'm west of you, sir. On the banks. Got about ninety men with me.' Corbec's voice hissed back. 'Assessment?'
'Tactical? You can forget the watergate, sir. Once they realised they couldn't hold us out in a straight fight, they blew the sluices. It could run at flood for hours. By then they'll have the chute exits on the city side sewn up with emplacements, maybe even mines.'
Gaunt cursed again. He wiped a wet hand across his face. They'd been so close and now it was all lost. Voltis would not be his.
'Sir?' Meryn called to him. The corporal was listening to other frequencies on his bead. 'Channel eighty. The word has just been given.'
Gaunt crossed to him, adjusting his own setting. 'What?'
'The word. 'Thunderhead',' Meryn said, confused.
'Source that signal!' Gaunt snapped, 'If someone thinks that's a joke, I'll—'
He got no further.
The blast was so loud, it almost went beyond sound. The Shockwave mashed into them, chopping the water like a white squall. A kilometre away, a hundred metre section of the curtain wall blew out, ripping a vast wound in the city's flank, burning, raw, exposed.
The channels went mad with frenzied calls and whoops.
Gaunt looked on in disbelief. Corbec's voice cut through, person to person on the link.
'It's Cluggan, sir! The old bastard got his boys into the sanitation outfalls and they managed to dump all of their high-ex into a treatment cistern under the walls. Blew the crap out of the cultists.'
