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.Victory was theirs.Sergeant Biane caught the first Jantine over the lip of the ditch in the belly with his bayonet and threw him over his head as he rolled.The man screamed as he died.A second bayoneted Blane's left thigh as he followed in and the sergeant bellowed in pain, swinging his lasgun so that the blade ait open the man's throat under the armour of the helmet.Then Blane fired a single shot point blank into the writhing man's face.Coline shot two Jantine on the lip of the line and then fell under a hammer-blow of fixed blades.Fighting was now thick, face-to-face, close-quarter.Symber shot three of Coline's killers until a loose las-shot took the top of his head off and dropped his twitching body into a narrow ditch already blocked by a dozen dead.Killing another Jantine with a combination of bayonet thrust and rifle butt swipe, Blane saw the vox-caster spin from Symber's dying grasp, and wished he had the time to grab it and send a signal to Gaunt or Corbec.But the top of the ridge was a seething mass of men, stabbing, striking, firing, dying, and there was no pace to give and no moment to spare.This was the heat of battle, white heat, hate heat, as it is often spoken of by soldiers but seldom seen.Blane shot another Patrician dead through the chest at a range of two metres and then swung his blade around into the chin of another that lunged at him.Something hot and hard nudged him from behind.He looked down and saw the point of a Jantine bayonet pushing out through his chest, blood gouting around its steel sheen.Snarling with glee, Major Brochuss fired his las-gun and let the shot blow the stumbling Ghost off his blade.Sergeant Blane fell on his face without a murmur.SeventeenIt was as hot as Milo had ever known it.The main column of the Ghost were slowly advancing though the tumbled stones of the necropolis, and had emerged into a long valley of ancient colonnades which rose on either hand in sun-blocking shadows.The valley, a natural rift in the mountain on either side of which the primitive architects had built towering formations of alcoves, was nearly eight kilometres long, and its floor, half a kilometre wide, was treacherous with the slumped stone work and rockfalls cast down from the high structures by slow time.The energetic feedback of the defence grid had exploded ruinously in here as well and the fallen rocks, tarry-black and primeval, had soaked it up and were now radiating it out again.It was past sixty degrees down here, and dry-hot.Sweat streaked every Tanith man as he crept forward.Their black fatigues were heavy with damp and none except the scouts still wore cloaks.Trooper Desta, advancing alongside Milo, hawked and spat at the gritty black flank of a nearby slab and tutted as his spittle fizzled and fried into evaporated nothingness.Milo looked up.The gash of sky above the rift sides was pale and blue, and bespoke a fair summer's day.Down here, the long shadows and rocky depth suggested a cool shelter.But the heat was overwhelming, worse than the jungle miasma of the tropical calderas on Caligula, worse than the humid reaches of Voltis, worse than anything he had ever known, even the parching hot-season of high summer at Tanith Magna.The radiating rocks glowed in his mind, aching their way into his drying bones and sinuses.He longed for moisture.He teased himself with memories of Pyrites, where the stabbing wet-cold of the outer city reaches had seemed so painful.Would he was there now.He took out his water flask and sucked down a long slug of stale, blood-warm water.A half-shadow fell across him.Colonel Corbec stayed his hand.'Not so fast.We need to ration in this heat and if you take it down too fast you'll cramp and vomit.And sweat it out all the faster.'Milo nodded, clasping his bottle.He could see how pale and drawn Corbec had become, his flesh pallid and wet in the deep shadows of the rift's belly.But there was more.More than the others were suffering.Pain.'You're wounded, aren't you, sir?'Corbec glanced at Milo and shook his head.'I'm fine and bluff, lad.Yes, fine and bluff.' Corbec laughed, but there was no strength in his voice.Milo clearly saw the puncture rip in the side of Corbec's tunic which the colonel tried to hide.Black fabric showed little, but Milo was sure that the wet patches on Corbec's fatigues were not sweat, unlike the patches on the other men.A cry came back down the rift from the scout units and a moment later something creaked on the wind.Corbec howled an order and the Ghosts fanned out between the sweltering rock, rock that afforded them cover but which they dare not touch.The enemy was counter-attacking.They came at them down the valley, some on foot, most in the air.Dozens of small, missile-shaped airships, garish and fiercely-bright in colour and adorned with the grotesque symbols of Chaos, powered down the rift towards them, propellers thumping in their diesel-smoking nacelles, their belly-slung baskets, gondolas and platforms filled with armed warriors of Chaos.The swarm of airships drifted down across the Ghosts, raking the ground with fire.Now it was all or nothing.EighteenDravere, his face angry and hollow-eyed, pushed aside the medics in the isolation sphere and yanked apart the plastic drapes veiling Inquisitor Heldane's cot.The Inquisitor gazed up at him from beneath the clamped medical support devices covering him with fathomlessly calm eyes.'Hechtor?'Dravere flung a data-slate on the cot.The inquisitor's one good hand carefully put down the small mirror he had been holding and took up the slate, keying the data-flow with his long-nailed thumb.'Madness!' Dravere spat
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