It would do. It would do.
'Third platoon froze, half at a hand gesture from Rawne, half at the sudden sounds of fighting from elsewhere in the glades. They settled in low, in the dark green shadows of the canopy, white eyes staring up from dark camo-paint at every ripple of sound. Feygor wiped a trickle of sweat off his cheek. Larkin tracked around with his custom rifle, hunting the trees around them with his night-scope. Wheln chewed at his lower lip, eyes darting. Caffran was poised like a statue, gun ready.
'To the left,' Rawne hissed, indicating with a finger, 'fighting there. No further than two hundred metres.'
Just behind him, Milo jerked a thumb off to the right. 'And to the right, sir. A little further off.' His voice was a whisper.
Feygor was about to silence the impudence with a fist, but Rawne raised a hand and nodded, listening. 'Sharp ears, boy. He's right. The echoes are confusing, but there is a second engagement.'
'All around us, then… What about our turn?' Feygor breathed.
Rawne could feel Feygor's itching impatience. The waiting, the fething anticipation, was often harder than the fighting itself.
'We'll find our fight soon enough.' Rawne slid out his silver dagger – given to him by Gaunt, Emperor damn his soul! – the blade dulled with fire-soot, and clipped it into the lugs under his lasgun's muzzle. His men fixed their own knives as bayonets in response.
'Let's keep the quiet and the surprise as long as we have it,' Rawne told them, and raised them to move on.
There was the sound of water, drizzling. The spitting noise almost blocked out the muffled fighting elsewhere. But not the distant heavy bombardment of the duelling armour.
Mkoll followed a lip of rocks, slick with black lichen, around the edge of a pool in deep shadow. A skein of water fell from a mossy outcrop thirty metres above, frothing the plunge pool. It was as humid and dark as a summer night in this dim place.
Mkoll heard movement, a skittering of rocks high above at the top of the falls. Cover was scant, so without hesitation he slid off the lip of stone into the water, sinking down to his neck, his lasgun held up in one hand at ear level, just above the surface. With fiuid precision, he glided under the shadow of the rock, moving behind the churning froth of the cataract.
Shadows moved along the top of the rock above him. Fifteen, perhaps twenty warriors. He caught their scent: the spicy, foul reek of something barely human. He heard low, clipped voices crackle back and forth via helmet intercoms, speaking a language that he was thankful he could not understand. Mkoll felt his guts vice involuntarily. It wasn't fear of the enemy, or of death; it was fear of what the enemy was. Their nature. Their abomination.
The water seemed glass-cold around him. His limbs were deadening. But hot sweat leaked down his face. Then they were gone.
Mkoll waited a full two minutes until he was sure. Then he crawled up out of the water and padded off silently in the direction from which his enemy had come.
Seventh platoon came out of a deep grove into sudden sunlight and even more sudden gunfire. Three of Sergeant Lerod's men were down before he had time to order form and counter. Enemy fire stripped the trees all around, pulverising bark and foliage into sap mist and splinters. The enemy had at least two stub guns and a dozen las-weapons in cover on the far side of the narrow creek.
Lerod bellowed orders in the whistling flashes of the exchange, moving backwards and firing from the hip on auto. Two of his men had made good cover and were returning hard. Others fought for places with him. T'argin, the vox-operator, was hit twice in the back and fell sideways, his twitching corpse held upright, like a puppet, in a drapery of moss-creepers.
A las-round stung Lerod's thigh. He knelt helplessly, then dropped to his belly in desperation, blasting up into the trees. His wild fire hit something – a weapon power-pack, perhaps – and a seething sheet of flame rushed out of the far creek bank, stripping and felling trees and tossing out two blackened bodies which cartwheeled in the air and fell into the creek bed. Pin-pointing Lerod as the source of this little victory, the unseen stubbers traversed and sent stitching lines of firepower down the earth trail where he sprawled.
He saw them in a split second: the twin lines of ferocious tracers etching their way across the loam to slice him into the ground. There was nothing he could do… no time. He closed his eyes.
Lerod opened them again. By some miracle, both lines of fire had missed him, passing either side of his prone form.
He began to laugh at the craziness of it and rolled into the cover of trees a few metres to the left, exhorting his surviving company with renewed vigour to give back and give hard. He felt jubilant, like he had on the founding fields below Tanith Magna, before the Toss. He had never thought he would have that feeling again.
With bitter resentment, Corbec pulled the Second back from the lagoon where they were stymied. They were outgunned and partly circled. The Tanith fell back, quickly and silently into the trees, leaving tripwires and tube rounds in their wake.
A quick vox-exchange brought the Second round alongside the first platoon and Gaunt himself, holding the line of a wide creek.
'Thick as flies!' Corbec yelled to Gaunt as his men reinforced the first. 'Big numbers of them, determined too!'
Gaunt nodded, directing his men forward a metre at a time trying to out-mark and topple the enemy possession of the fat-bank.
Explosions crackled through the trees in the direction of Corbec's retreat as the advancing foe tripped the first of the mines. Gaunt cursed. 'This terrain was meant to give the Ghosts the advantage with their stealth skills, but the enemy was everywhere, as if milling and confused. And though that meant they were not working to a cohesive plan, it also meant the larger enemy force was splintered, unpredictable and all around them.
Raglon was firing from cover and Gaunt ducked in behind him, waving Corbec over. Corbec sprinted across the open ground, his tunic and face splattered with pulverised leaf flecks and sap. He looked like the Old Man of the Woods in the traditional least of Leaves, back home on Tanith, whe—
Gaunt froze, startled and confused. Back home on Tanith! What tricks was his mind playing now? He'd never heard of any Feast of the Leaves, yet it had seemed to bob up from his memory as a truth. For a moment, he could even smell the sugared nal-fruit as they roasted in their charcoal ovens.
'What's up, sir?' Corbec asked, trying to squeeze his bulk into the scant cover as las-rounds whipped around
