'At ease,' Gaunt said. 'I'm just walking the lines. Everything alright with you? The men in your platoon?'
Caffran felt tongue-tied, as he always did when Gaunt addressed him directly. He still, after all this time, had mixed feelings about the commissar who had both saved them and made them Ghosts in the same action.
'We're all waiting for the word,' he said at last. 'Itching for action. This waiting…'
'It's the worst part, I know.' Gaunt sat down on a nearby log. 'Until the killing starts and you realise the waiting wasn't all that bad after all.'
Caffran caught the smile in Gaunt's eyes and grinned as well, unable to stop himself.
Gaunt was pleased. He was very aware of the stiffness Caffran always manifested around him. A good soldier, one of the youngest, but so very nearly one of Rawne's malcontents.
'Go again,' Gaunt suggested.
Self-consciously, Caffran turned and repeated his drill. Swing, address, stab, return… It took a moment to pull his blade free from the thick bark.
'Slide it,' Gaunt said. 'It'll come out easier if you slide it laterally before pulling.'
Caffran did so. It was true.
Gaunt got up, moving on with his circuit. 'Not long now, Caffran,' Gaunt said as he moved away.
Caffran sighed. No, not long. Not long before the frenzy and the madness would start.
Swing, address, stab, slide, return… Swing, address, stab, slide, return…
NINE
Engines screaming, the imperial troop carriers fell upon the ocean world, Sapiencia.
Like swarms of fat, black beetles shrilling in over the edges of a pond, they assaulted the Bay of Belano. Their combined down-draughts boiled the choppy surface water into foam mist, an embankment of steam three kilometres long and two hundred metres high that stormed forward across the beach rocks and blinded the island's outer defences.
It entirely hid the merciless wall of solid water driven up under the spray by the concussive force, and this tidal wave exploded across the western sea-fall emplacements of Oskray Island twenty seconds after the steam cloud choked them. Rock and metal and flesh were pulverised, blasted into the air, then sucked back into the basin of the bay as pressures equalised and hydraulic action righted itself. A spume haze hung over the island, clogging the beaches and masking the final, slow approach of the gargantuan troop-ships.
The heavy emplacements higher on the cliffs of Oskray spat fierce salvos down into the mist, or up into the striated clouds where further formations of troop-ships were beginning their final approaches to the island shore. The fire from the batteries, blue and flickering, danced like luminous damsel flies amongst the beetle-like ships. Some craft burst as they were touched, and burned; some dropped, bleeding smoke and trailing lines of debris.
The twenty kilometres of Oskray Island was only partly rock. It was, in point of fact, a cluster of islets, linked as one by the massive industrial fortification built up upon the shoulders of submarine mountains. Behind ocean- blocking walls of stone a hundred metres thick, pump structures, drill towers, flame-belching waste stacks and pylons rose against the sky. The primary target, the great refinery hive of Oskray Island One.
Red hazard lights flashed and hooters started their deafening caterwaul as the jaw-hatch locks of troop-ship Lambda disengaged with a massive leaden thump. Dim light began to pour in from outside as the jaw-sections hinged open. Caffran, tensed tight and ready, knew they were assaulting a sea-bound target, and that the way in for the infantry was up the beach That was the plan. But as the troop-hatch opened, he believed for a moment they had come in too low and it was translucent torrents of water that were spurting into the dispersal deck. He gulped in his breath, held it, but it was only steam and pale light that rushed over him.
The yells of men, of boots racing on metal decking, and of the hooters, were overwhelming. With fifty others, lasguns raised, he charged out of the hatch mouth, for a second, on the ramp, the dispersal deck noises were swamped by the greater volume of the thundering drop-ships all around. Caffran could see nothing beyond the men closest to him and the solid atmosphere of mist and smoke. He could smell salt and ozone, oil and thermite.
Then nothing. Rushing silence, roaring dullness, a coldness all over him, enveloping him, dark grey blurs in his eyes.
He was underwater, floundering in the chilly, muffled dark of the sea, writhing black bodies struggling and flailing around him, each one bejewelled with trapped baubles of silver air.
The troop-ship had come up short of the beach slope, and all the men dropping blind off the ramp were falling into thirty metres of ocean where the island shelved steeply away.
Caffran couldn't swim. He'd been born and raised in a forest a thousand kilometres from any open water. He'd never seen the ocean, any ocean, though he'd heard others, like the medicfisherman Lesp, speak of it. He was going to do the last thing he had ever expected to do: drown.
Momentarily, he realised he had not yet released the deep breath he had instinctively sealed into his lungs when he thought the dispersal deck was going to flood, and he almost laughed, almost releasing the air.
Instead, he held on to it, felt it burning and exhausting inside him as he rose slowly to what seemed the surface. It saved his life, where others had gone screaming and exhaling off the ramp.
Sinking, blundering, black shapes thrashed around him: Tanith combat dress, dark as dry blood, faces pale like phantoms or ghouls. A body sank beside him, arms frozen in claws, mouth open to emit a dribble of bubbles, eyes glazed. Caffran kicked upwards again.
Something struck him stunningly hard on the back of the neck and he lost his precious saved breath in a blurt of silvery air pebbles. Men were still coming off the ramp-end above, falling on those Ghosts now coming up from below. A boot had hit him. The man it belonged to was inverted in the water behind him, panicking, dying. Caffran kicked away, trying to rise and not breathe in to ease his emptied, screaming lungs. He saw men explode into the grey, dreamy world from above, fighting the water as they hit and sank. But that at least told him the surface was only a few metres away.
