Domor pointed and Caffran looked up. The broken wall rose like a cliff above them, scabbed with slumping masonry and broken reinforcement girders. Fifty metres up, just above a severed end of pipe work, Caffran saw the door. Teth, but your eyes are sharp!'
There were tunnels in the wall, troop tunnels buried deep This hole has cut through one of them and exposed it.'
Caffran called Varl over, and a group of Ghosts gathered to look up.
'We could get a fire-team inside the wall… follow the tunnel to where ever it led us.'
'Hell?' supposed Trooper Haven. 'It's high up…' Varl began.
'But the cliff is ragged and full of good handholds. The first man up could secure a line. Sergeant, it's a plan…'
Varl looked round at Caffran. 'I'd never make it, with one arm dead. Who'd lead?'
'I could,' said Sergeant Gorley of five platoon. He was a tall, barrel-chested man with a boxer's nose. 'You get the wounded back onto the beach. I'll take a squad and see what we can do.'
Varl nodded. He began to round up the walking wounded, and seconded several able bodies to help him with the more seriously injured. Gorley selected his commando squad: Caffran, Domor, Mkendrik, Haven, Tokar, Bude, Adare, Mkallun, Caill.
Mkendrik, raised in the mountains of Tanith Steeple, led off, clambering up the splintered wall, hand over hand. He left his flamer and its tanks with Gorley, to raise them later on a line.
By the time the ascent was made, and ropes secured, their leeway was almost up, and the ten Ghosts were alone in the chasm. Within moments, the Basilisks at the throat of the breach would start their bombardment.
The men went up quickly, following the ropes. Gorley was last, securing a line around the flamer unit and other heavy supplies. The team at the top, crowded into the splintered doorway, hauled them up.
Gorley was halfway up the ascent when the bombardment began. The nine Ghosts above cowered into the shelter of the concrete passageway they had climbed into and covered their ears at the concussion.
A shell hit the wall and vaporised Gorley, as if he had never been there.
Realising he was gone, Caffran urged the party to collect their equipment and move inwards. Soon this entire wall section would be brought down.
The Ghost squad crept up the unlit passageway. Though generally intact, the tunnel had slumped a little following the massive shockwave from the troop-ship crash. The ground was split in places, exposing crumbling rock. Pipes and cables dangled from the cracked roof; dust trickled down from deep fissures. In places, the shock-impact had sectioned the wall, cutting the originally straight and horizontal tunnel into a series of cleanly stepped slabs. The Tanith clambered on, probing the dusty darkness with the cold green glare of assault lamps.
Behind them, the stonework of the great sea wall began to shake. The Ketzok had redoubled their furious work. Caffran found himself leading, as if there had been an unspoken vote electing him in Gorley's place. He presumed it was because he had suggested this incursion in the first place. The Ghosts picked up their speed and moved deeper into the tunnel system that threaded the marrow of the wall.
They reached a vertical communications shaft, down the centre of which ran a great wrought-iron spiral staircase. The air was damp and smelled of wet brick and the sea. Shock damage was evident here too, and the bolts securing the metal stairway and its adjoining walkways to the shaft-sides had sheared off or snapped. The entire metal structure, hundreds of tonnes of it filling the shaft, creaked uneasily with each shuddering impact from the guns of the distant Basilisks.
The Ghosts stepped across the metal landing of the stair-coil to where the tunnel resumed beyond. It squealed and yelped with every step, sometimes threatening to tilt or fall.
Caill and Flaven were last across. A metal bolt-end the size of a man's forearm rang off the gantry, just missing Caill. It had come loose far above.
'Move!' yelled Caffran.
With a protesting, non-vocal scream, the staircase collapsed, tearing itself apart and rattling away down into the black depths of the bottomless shaft. Where larger parts of the structure remained intact – a few turns of steps laced together, a long section of handrail, a series of stanchion poles – they fell with heavy fury, raking sparks and hideous shrieks from the shaft walls.
Empty, the stairs fallen away, the brick shaft seemed immense, uncrossable.
Domor looked back at the tunnel they had come along, out of reach now across the gulf. 'No going back now…' he muttered.
'Good thing that's not the way we're going,' Caffran replied, pointing into the darkness to come with the barrel of his lasgun.
Wide cisterns opened up around them. The cement floors were painted with glossy green paint and the wall bricks matt white. The walls tapered upwards so that the ceiling was narrower than the floor, and the whole tunnel turned a few degrees to the left. The entire passageway was following both the line and the profile of the wall it ran through. Grilled lighting panels, glowing phosphorescent white, hung at intervals from the roof. They looked like a giant stream of tracer rounds, arcing off down the line of the tunnel, frozen in time.
Caffran's Ghosts – and indeed now they were ''his'' Ghosts, bonding to him as leader now that they were cut off from outside without asking or deciding – haunted the long passageways, hugging the walls in the fierce white glow of the lights. Every sixty metres, tunnels bisected the main route on the inland side: deep, wide throats of brick and concrete that sloped downwards. Mkendrik thought they might be drainage channels, but if that was true, the size alarmed Caffran. They were big enough to take a man walking upright and just as broad. If that kind of liquid quantity flooded these tunnels from time to time…
Domor believed the channels to be for personnel movement, or for running carts of ammo and supplies up to the emplacements buried in the sides and along the top of the great sea wall. But they'd seen no vertical cargo shafts for munitions lifting, and Caffran doubted sheer manpower could roll enough shells up the sloping channels without mechanical assistance.
And they had met no one, not a trace of the Kith soldiery, not even a corpse.
'They're all fully engaged, deploying on the defences,' Caill suggested.
