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.
Three: And Back
They had so very nearly got away with it. Got away with it and survived to tell the tale.
So very nearly.
Hell and back. That’s how someone had described the Salvation’s Reach mission. It sounded like the sort of thing Larkin or Varl would say.
Hell and back. They’d gone into hell and come out on the other side, and not for the first time. But after everything they had endured, it seemed as though they weren’t going to make it home after all.
Four weeks out from the Rimworld Marginals, and the target rock known as Salvation’s Reach, the doughty old warship Highness Ser Armaduke had begun to limp.
‘How far are we from the intended destination?’ Ibram Gaunt asked the Armaduke’s shipmaster.
Spika, leaning back thoughtfully in his worn command seat, shrugged his shoulders.
‘The estimate is another fifteen days,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t like the look of the immaterium. Bad patterns ahead. I think we’ll be riding out a proper storm before nightfall, shiptime.’