'What is that place?' Mkoll breathed aloud. 'What is it you want?'
Still shrieking and exploding overhead, the storm didn't answer him.
The sky spasmed above them, stricken with electrical convulsions, first platoon, with the remnants of Corbec's unit and the stragglers of Lerod's who had joined them by accident in the storm's chaos, struggled on as they beat the retreat.
Gaunt came upon Corbec, who was clambering in the lead through the rain and the undergrowth. Trooper Melk was now on a stretcher carried in the rear of the retreat.
'What?' Gaunt gasped to his colonel, water streaming off his lean face.
'A river!' Corbec spat, surprised. Ahead of them, a thunderous torrent roared through the trees, foamy and deep and dangerously fast. It hadn't been there when they had come in. Gaunt stood, pummelled by the rain, and tried to make sense of the landscape in the flickering dark. He ordered Trooper Mktea forward and took one of his tube-charges. Corbec watched in disbelief as Gaunt taped it to the base of a massive ginkgo trunk and primed the fuse.
'Back!' Gaunt shouted.
the explosion cut the tree above the root and dropped its sixty metre mass across the boiling tide: a bridge of sorts.
One by one, the men crawled across. Corbec led them to prove it could be done, cursing as each handhold slipped and tore away from the sodden bark. Trooper Vowl lost his grip and dropped from the horizontal log. The flash-flood carried him away like a cork. A screaming cork.
On the far side, Corbec saw to the defence of the position, ordering each drenched man fresh from the crossing into place, lasgun aimed, creating a wide dispersal of ready soldiers in a fan to protect those still crossing the timber bridge.
Corbec moved forward himself, into the horsetail ferns and hyacinths, their fronded leaves lashed and shaken by the drum ming rain. There was movement ahead. He reported it via his micro-bead but got nothing back. The storm was playing merry hell with the vox-links. Clammy, cold hands tightening on his lasgun, Corbec inched forward.
A hellgun fired to his right, wide, a piercing distinctive report. He started forward and fell into the grip of three large figures which slammed into him out of the pulsing darkness. He lost his lasgun. A fist hit him in the back of the neck and he dropped, then recovered and punched out. One of his assailants went down in the mud. Another kicked at him and Corbec kicked back, breaking something crucial.
He was wrestling with the biggest of his opponents now, blind in the rain and the mud spray. Corbec got a glimpse of gold and grey carapace armour, an Imperial Eagle stud of precious blue. Underneath his rolling foe, he punched upwards into what should have been the face twice and then rolled his stunned aggressor over so that he was straddling him.
A flash of lightning. Corbec saw he was astride a Volpone Blueblood, a big man with a battered, bloodied face. A major. Corbec had his hands around the man's throat.
'What the feth?' he gasped. Hellgun muzzles were suddenly pressing to his head.
'You stinking bastard!' the major underneath him groaned venomously, trying to rise.
Corbec raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, wary of the guns around him. The major, released, threw Corbec back off him and rose, pulling out his hellpistol and aiming at Corbec's head.
'Don't,' said a voice, quiet yet more commanding than the thunder.
Gaunt stepped into the clearing, his bolt pistol aimed squarely at Major Gilbear's cranium. The Blueblood guns swung around to point at him but he didn't flinch.
'Now,' Gaunt added. His gun was unfaltering. Corbec looked up from the mud, lying on his back, conscious that the Blueblood major's gun was still pointed his way.
'Shoot him and I can assure you, Gilbear, you will be dead before any of your men can fire.' Gaunt's voice was low and threatening. Corbec knew that tone.
'Gaunt…' Gilbear murmured, not slackening his aim.
More Ghosts moved in around the commissar, guns aimed.
'Something of a stand-off,' Corbec muttered from the ground. Gilbear kicked him, his aim not leaving Corbec's head, his gaze not leaving Gaunt.
'Lower your weapon, Major Gilbear.' Inquisitor Lilith stepped into the glade, her cowl drawn up, a staccato roll of thunder eerily punctuating her words.
Gilbear wavered and then holstered his gun.
'Help Colonel Corbec to his feet,' Lilith added in the perfect, effete tones of the courtly dialect.
Gaunt's aim had not changed.
'And you, commissar. Put up your weapon.'
Gaunt lowered his bolt pistol.
'Inquisitor Lilith.'
'We meet again,' she said, turning away, a shrouded, sinister figure in the rain.
Gilbear held his hand down to Corbec and pulled him to his feet. Their eyes locked as Gilbear brought him up. Gilbear had the advantage of a few centimetres in height, and his broad shoulders, encased in the bulky carapace segments, eclipsed Corbec's shambling form, but the Tanith colonel had the benefit of sheer mass.
'No offence,' Gilbear hissed into Colm Corbec's face.
'None taken, Blueblood… until next time.'
