The Warmaster

Two: Ghost

Silence.

Nothing but silence. A weightless emptiness. The pale yellow light of other stars shafted in through unshuttered window ports, and washed slowly and uniformly up the walls and across the ceiling.

The Ghost opened his eyes.

He was floating, bodiless, an outsider observing the life he had left behind through the fog of mortality’s veil. He had no name, no memories. His mind was cold. Death had robbed him of all vital thoughts and feelings. He was detached, freed forever from sensation, from weariness, from pain and care. He haunted the place where he had once lived.

He was not part of it any more. He could only look at the world he had left, dispassionate. The things that had mattered so much when he had been alive were meaningless. Duty had ceased to be a concept. Hope was revealed to be a laughably perishable quantity. Victory was an empty promise someone once made.

The light of the heedless stars moved slowly. Across the deck, along the walls, across the ceiling, around and around like the morning, noon and night of a fast-running day. Perhaps this was how a ghost saw the world. Perhaps time and the day-night rhythm of life ran fast to the dead’s eyes, to make eternity more endurable.

Except, no.

The stars weren’t moving. The Armaduke was. Powerless, dead, inert and gravity-shot, it was tumbling end over end in real space.

The Ghost considered this with glacial slowness, forcing his frosted mind to think. The ship was moving. How had it come to this? What doom had overtaken them? Had death come upon them so swiftly and so traumatically that the memory of life’s end had been ripped entirely from his recollection?

How had he died?

The Ghost heard drumming. It was getting louder: steadily, progressively louder.

He saw something in front of his eyes. It was a metal washer, a small one. It was hanging in the air before him, rotating very slowly, not falling at all. Light winked off its turning edges. Two more washers and an oil-black restraining bolt drifted across his field of vision from the left in perfectly maintained formation. They passed behind the first washer, creating a brief astrological conjunction before drifting on.

The drumming became louder.

The Ghost felt pain. Slight, distant, but pain nevertheless. He felt it in his phantom limbs, his spine, his neck. The aftertaste of the agonies he had suffered in death had come with him to the other side of the veil, to haunt his shade.

How fitting. How true to the universe’s treacherous nature. Only in death does duty end, but pain does not end with it. That’s the thing the priests and hierophants don’t tell you. Death is not a final release from pain. Pain stays with you. It clings to you forever.

What other lies had he been taught in his brief existence? The revelation made him want to curse the names of the ones who had given him life, the ones who had pretended to love him, the ones who had demanded his loyalty. It made him want to curse the Throne itself for telling him that death was some kind of serene reward.

It made him want to curse everything.

The Ghost opened his mouth.

‘Feth you all,’ he said.

His breath smoked the air. His skin was cold.

Wait, breath?

The drumming became louder.

It was the blood pounding in his ears.

Suddenly, he could hear again. His world was abruptly full of noise: his own ragged breathing, the cries and moans of those nearby, the wail of alarms, the mangled shriek of the ship’s hull and superstructure.

Gravity reasserted itself.

The washers and the restraining bolt dropped to the deck. The Ghost dropped too. He hit a surface that was slick with frost, and he hit it hard. All the airspaces and blood vessels in his body realigned to gravity. He half choked as his windpipe flexed. His lungs panicked. His gut sloshed like a half-filled skin of sacra. All around him, he heard other impacts, and realised it was the sound of every other loose and un­secured object aboard the old ship falling to the deck. Inside the Armaduke, it was raining things and people.

The Ghost got to his feet. He was not steady. A ghost was made for floating, not walking. Every part of him hurt.

He found his lasrifle on the deck nearby. He picked it up with hands that did not work as well as he would have liked. Could a ghost touch things? Apparently so.

Perhaps this was some penance. Perhaps he had been called back to mortality for one final duty. Another lie, then. Even in death, duty did not fething end.

The Ghost moved down the companionway. He heard whimpering. He saw a young Belladon trooper, one of the new intake, sitting on the deck with his back to the wall, his teeth clenched like a rat-trap, nursing a broken wrist. The boy looked up at the Ghost as he loomed over him.

‘What happened?’ the boy asked.

‘Am I dead?’ asked the Ghost.

‘What?’

‘Am I dead?’

‘N-no. No, sir.’

‘How do you know?’ asked the Ghost.

He saw terror in the boy’s eyes.

‘I d-don’t know,’ the boy said.

‘I think I am dead,’ said the Ghost. ‘But you are not. You can walk. Get to the infirmary. Consider us at secondary order.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The youngster winced, and clambered to his feet.

‘Go on, now,’ the Ghost said.

‘What are you going to do?’

The Ghost thought about that.

‘I don’t know. But I reckon the God-Emperor has some purpose reserved for me, and this gun suggests it will involve killing.’

‘S-something you’re good at, then,’ said the boy, trying to seem braver than he actually was.

‘Am I?’

‘Famously, sir.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Thyst, sir.’

‘Get to the infirmary, Thyst.’

The boy nodded, and stumbled away.

Nearby were two of the ship’s crew personnel, deck ratings. One was bleeding profusely from a deep cut across the bridge of his nose. The other was trying to pick up all the labelled machine spares that gravity had inverted out of his push-cart.

‘What happened?’ the Ghost asked them.

The bleeding man looked up at him.

‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘It has never happened before.’

The left side of the Ghost’s upper lip curled slightly in a frustrated sneer. He turned away. He knew pretty much nothing about voidships, but he was sure that this was what the commander had warned them about. The commander. The commander. What was his name? The Ghost was having such difficulty remembering anything about his life. It hadn’t ended that long ago.

Gaunt. That was it. Gaunt.

What was it Gaunt had said? ‘The Armaduke is experiencing drive issues. It might not bring us home. If we fall short or explosively de-translate, I want the fighting companies ready for protection duties.’

The Ghost tried a wall-vox, but nothing but static came out of it. They had light and they had gravity, but the ship was stricken. They were dead in the water. If something came upon them, they’d be helpless.

If something tried to board them, how would they even know?

The Ghost suddenly hesitated. He looked up at the ceiling. There was too much noise, far too much: the fething alarms and damage klaxons, the squealing of the hull de-contorting, the babble of voices.

It was probably his imagination, conjured by the trauma of his violent death, but the Ghost could swear he had just heard something else.

Something wrong.

Up. It was coming from above him, high above.

How did he know that? How could he discriminate one noise from the chaotic swirl of sounds coming from all around him?

Because he could. It was something else he was good at.

He clambered up a deck ladder. The soreness in his limbs was ­fading. Just bruises. Bruises and bone-ache. He felt a deep chill in his heart, in the very core of him, as if he were a slab of grox meat that had been dragged out of the vittaling freezers and left on a kitchen block to thaw. His fingers were working, though. The clumsiness was fading. Any minute now, he’d get back some useful faculty.

Like the ability to remember his own fething name.

He began to climb. He had purpose at least. Duty. A fething unasked for duty, whether he wanted it or not. That’s why the Holy God-Emperor of Mankind, thrice cursed be His whim, had brought him back, dead from beyond death, to serve his regiment and his commander. It had to be him. That much was clear. It was a purpose, a duty fit only for him. Something he was good at. Otherwise, why would the Master of Terra have requisitioned his soul, and pulled him back through the veil for one last miserable tour in the life-world? But why did the God-Emperor need a dead man when there were evidently many living around him?

He clambered up. Ceiling hatch. Standard iris. He yanked the lever, and it dilated open. He knew how to do that. He didn’t even have to think. He knew how the mechanism worked.

Loose objects fell past him. Broken machine parts, a couple of hand tools. A small wrench bounced off his shoulder on the way down. All things that had fallen onto the hatch when artificial gravity realigned.

The Ghost pulled himself through the hatch. He was in a service-way. The bulkhead lights flickered uneasily, like the sense-disturbing strobes of an interrogation chamber. Noises still, from above. Tapping. Scratching. He cradled his weapon and prowled forwards. He needed another vertical access.

He found a dead man. Another dead man. Unlike the Ghost, this one hadn’t been reanimated and sent back to serve, so the God-Emperor clearly saw little value in his talents. He had been a fitter from the ship’s Division of Artifice. He must have been floating upside down when gravity reset. The fall had driven his head into the decking like a battering ram, breaking his neck and crushing the top of his skull. The Ghost looked up and saw where the fitter must have fallen from. An engineering space above the service-way, a shaft that rose up through four decks of the ship at least. It was a tunnel of cabling and pipework.

The Ghost used the footholds inset in the service-way wall to reach the open bottom of the shaft, and then began to ascend the small-rung ladder.

He climbed at a pace, knowing that ghosts didn’t tire. It occurred to him that immunity from fatigue was a benefit of death. He would miss food, though.

He reached the top of the shaft, and swung over the lip into a gloomy machine space. His breath fogged the air. Breath. Why was he respiring? Ghosts didn’t breathe.

No time to wonder about the laws of the afterlife. He could smell something. Burned metal. The molten stink of a cutting lance. The Ghost moved forwards, soundless, like all ghosts.

He saw a glowing orange oval, a slice cut through the skin of the ship. The edges of the metal were bright like neon. The cut section, slightly dished, lay on the deck, surrounded by droplets of glowing melt-spatter. There were two figures in the gloom – men, but not men. The Ghost could smell the feral stench of them despite the hot stink of the burned metal.

One of them saw him.

It said something, and raised a weapon to fire.

The Ghost fired first.

But his rifle was dead.

Malfunction? Dead cell? No time to find out. Two las-bolts spat at him, deafening in the confined space. The Ghost lunged to the side, falling among oily bulky machinery. The shots banged off the wall behind him like hand slaps.

The Ghost had fallen awkwardly, hitting his head against a ­piston or bearing. The pain came as a surprise. He felt his head, and his hand came away bloody.

Ghosts bled. Odd. Unless…

The men-but-not-men came for him, shouting to each other in a foul language. The Ghost ditched his rifle, and drew his warknife. It fit his hand perfectly. The feel of it filled him with assurance, with confidence. He knew it. It knew him. They would help each other. Later, it could tell him who he was.

A man-but-not-man came out of the darkness to his left, leaning down to peer under the machinery. The Ghost reached out, grabbed the intruder by the throat and pulled him onto his blade. It sank deep into the man-but-not-man’s chest. He shuddered violently, kicking the deck as though he were throwing a tantrum. Then he went limp.

The Ghost slid the blade out, let go of his prey and rolled clear. He crawled along the length of the machinery and came up against a work cart laden with tools. Pliers? No. Hammer? Perhaps. Cable hatchet? Better.

It was about the length of his forearm, with a slightly curved steel grip and a single-headed drop-blade. The blade was curved along its edge and had a long chin, perfect for hacking through burned-out cabling during emergency repairs. He took it in his left hand, straight silver in his right.

The second man-but-not-man appeared from nowhere. The Ghost silently commended his adversary for his stealth aptitude. He side-swung the axe, chopping the man-but-not-man’s lascarbine aside. It fired uselessly, sparking a las-bolt along the machine space. The Ghost, legs braced wide, delivered a double blow, slashing from the outside in with both hands. The axe in his left hand and the warknife in his right passed each other expertly, so that the Ghost finished the move with his arms across his chest.

Both blades had cut through the man-but-not-man’s neck. He ­toppled, blood jetting from the half-stump as his head hinged back like the lid of a storage hopper.

A third man-but-not-man appeared, running at him. The Ghost ducked, spinning as he did so, avoiding the spiked boarding mace that the man-but-not-man was swinging at him. He turned the spin into a gut-kick, and smashed his opponent back into the bulkhead. The man-but-not-man grunted as the air was smashed out of him. The Ghost hurled the axe, and skewered the man-but-not-man to the bulkhead by the shoulder.

Pinned, the man-but-not-man screamed. The sound was only approximately human.

The Ghost got up in his victim’s face, straight silver to the intruder’s­ throat. A little pressure from his left forearm tightened the angle of the firmly planted axe, and elicited more screams.

‘Who are you?’ the Ghost demanded.

He got a jumble of noises, half pain, half words. Neither made any sense.

He leaned again.

‘What is your strength? How many of you are there?’

More words-but-not-words.

He leaned again.

‘Your last chance. Answer my questions or I will make it very slow indeed. Who are you?’

The man-but-not-man wailed. The Ghost wasn’t getting anything. In frustration, he tried a different tack.

‘Who am I?’

‘Ver voi mortek!’ the man-but-not-man shrieked.

Mortek. The Ghost knew that word. No, he was not death. That was wrong. The man-but-not-man was lying.

The Ghost knew that because his thawing brain had finally remembered his name.

He was Mkoll. Scout Sergeant Oan Mkoll, Tanith First.

He was Mkoll, and he was alive. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t a ghost at all.

Not that kind, anyway.