Gaunt found himself on the embanked approach to one of the main sentry towers and pulled himself up the ladder. The towers, set at hundred metre intervals along the main defile, rose some ten metres out of the surface filth. They were fashioned from groups of tree-trunks, shored together and stout
buttressed with riveted beams, and supported large flak-board gun-nests mounted on the top.
Up in the dark nest, Trooper Bragg tended a cradle-mounted pair of twinned heavy bolters, drums of shells piled around his huge feet. A flak-board cover kept the rain off and the nest was shrouded by netting.
'Sir!' Bragg saluted, his big face cracking into a broad, embarrassed grin. He was making fortified caffeine over a little burner, his huge paws dwarfing the pot and cup. He tried to hide the flask of sacra behind the stove, but the scent of the liquor was pungent in the close air of the nest.
Gaunt nodded the salute. 'I'll have one myself,' he said. 'A stiff one.'
Bragg seemed to relax. He sloshed a generous measure of sacra into a second battered cup and fussed over the boiling pot. Gaunt was amused, as always, by the combination of brutal strength and timidity in this giant of a man. Bragg's hands were big and strong enough to crush skulls, but he moved almost meekly, as if afraid of his own strength – or afraid of what others might think him capable of.
He handed the commissar a hot cup and Gaunt sat on a pile of shell-drums, gesturing out across the jungle to the east. The nest's raised vantage point afforded a better view of the distant fighting. Flares and tracers showed above the trees, and as the rain dissipated the mist, there were ruddy ground fires to be seen amid the trunks.
'Someone's having fun,' he remarked.
Bragg nodded, sipping his own cup. 'I make four or maybe five enemy positions, infantry support teams. They've advanced and dug in, because the fire-patterns are static, but they've found something to shoot at.'
'If they move this way, we'll need to take action.'
Bragg patted his heavy weapons. 'Let 'em come.'
Gaunt grinned. Bragg was a good heavy weapons technician, but his aim had scarcely improved since the Founding. Still, with guns with that sort of cycle rate and that much ammo, he should hit something.
'Oh, while I remember,' Gaunt said, 'the western embankments are collapsing again. I told Major Rawne that you'd help the detail re-dig tomorrow. They need some heavy lifting.'
Bragg nodded without question. His great physical strength was an asset to the Ghosts, and was matched by his geniality and willingness to help. He reminded Gaunt of some great blunt weapon, like a club: deadly when delivered properly, but difficult to wield or aim.
Bragg batted a moth away from his face. 'Precious little place we've found here,' he remarked.
'Monthax is… short on charm,' Gaunt admitted, studying the hulking trooper quizzically. Bragg was a strange man. Gaunt had decided that long ago. He'd never met a human so physically powerful, yet mentally restrained, as if he was somehow afraid of the terrible power he could unleash. Others took it for stupidity and regarded big old Bragg as dumb. But the man patently wasn't stupid. In his own, quiet, mountainous way, he was the most formidable and dangerous Ghost of all. So preoccupied by his physical power, others always underestimated the mind behind it.
And the mind, Gaunt knew, was the strongest thing of all.
SIX
Caligula, after the Imperial liberation. Nights as bright as day, lit by the burning hive cities; days as dark as night, choked by the petrochemical smoke. Soot, like fat, black snowflakes, fluttered down everywhere. Even out here, in the deadlands.
Steepled canyons of coral-bright rock. Wisps of fluorescent dust licking the high places and the rims of the calderas. Cracked, dry basins of hard, russet cake-earth. Wide, slumping ridges of glass-sand. And death, bleached and baked white, like bones that had been out in the sun for years.
Eighteen cargo transports, thirty-wheel monsters, coughing blue exhaust from their vertical pipe-stacks, ground down the red-rock pass in low gear. The tractor units at the front of each payload wagon were monsters, armoured cabs of scorched metal rattling on top of a huge engine unit, glaring forward through multiple fog-lamp eyes and grinning fly-flecked smiles of fender bars, radiator grilles and spiked running boards, flanking the massive transports were the outriders, rushing through the dust on track-bikes and in armoured cars.
Palapr Tuvant, transport driver, Caligula born and bred, wrestled with the half-moon wheel of the convoy's lead freighter and glanced around at his co-driver. Hewn Milloom was looking out of the cab window, occasionally regarding his chronometer.
They were both wringing with sweat, entombed by the heat from the roaring engine under their feet. Milloom had dropped the window armour panels and opened the metal vents in the hope of washing them with cool breeze from outside. But the surface temperature out in the deadlands was pushing forty degrees, and they baked. Occasionally, sprays of hot engine oil spurted back from the leaky head gasket and spattered in at them through the forward grille-screen.
Milloom sat back in his ripped leather seat and looked up at the cab's ceiling hatch. 'He's still up there?'
Tuvant nodded, wrenching the wheel. Both of them were all too used to the juddering, shaking motion of the vehicle. 'Probably sticking his head out of the turret like a dog, enjoying the rush of air.'
Milloom chuckled. 'Kec, but he's a dumb-ass, right? Never stood in line for brains.'
Tuvant nodded. Typical Guard, all muscle and no head. Where the kec were they when the hives fell? Huh? Answer me that?'
'In a troop-ship in transit,' Trooper Bragg answered plainly, his huge bulk clambering down the rungs from the top hatch to join them. He stood at the back of the cab, holding onto a roll-bar for support as the tractor lurched over uneven ground. 'Colonel-Commissar Gaunt said we got here as fast as we could.' He smiled sheepishly at the two-man driving team.
'I'm sure he did,' Tuvant murmured.
