Read Online First and Only by Dan Abnett - Free Book Online

matter, and your oath.’
    Oktar willed himself to live for seventeen minutes more, as an Administratum clerk was found and the proper oath ceremony observed. He died clutching Commissar Gaunt’s hands in his bony, sweat-oiled claws.
    Ibram Gaunt was stunned, empty. Something had been torn out of his insides, torn out and flung away. When he wandered out into the anteroom, he didn’t even notice the soldiers saluting him.

PART THREE
FORTIS BINARY
FORGE WORLD
    One
    I T WASN ’ T THE drums that Corbec really detested, it was the rhythm. There was no sense to it. Though the notes were a regular drum sound, the beats came sporadically like a fluctuating heart, overlapping and syncopated. The bombardment was still ever-present but now, as they closed on the source of the beating, the drumming overrode even the roar of the explosions beyond the front trenches.
    Corbec knew his men were spooked even before Sergeant Curral said it. Down the channel ahead, Scout-Sergeant Mkoll was returning towards them. He had missed the signal to put on his respirator and his face was pinched, tinged with green. As soon as he saw the masked men of his company, he anxiously pulled on his own gas-hood.
    ‘Report!’ Corbec demanded quickly.
    ‘It opens up ahead,’ Mkoll said through his mask, breathing hard. ‘There are wide manufactory areas ahead of us. We’ve broken right through their lines into the heart of this section of the industrial belt. I saw no one. But I heard the drums. It sounds like there are… well, thousands of them out there. They’re bound to attack soon. But what are they waiting for?’
    Corbec nodded and moved forward, ushering his men on behind him. They hugged the walls of the trench and assumed fire pattern formation, crouching low and aiming in a sweep above the head of the man in front.
    The trench opened out from its zigzag into a wide, stonewalled basin which overlooked a slope leading down into colossal factory sheds.
    The thump of the drums, the incessant and irregular beat, was now all-pervading.
    Corbec waved two fire-teams forward on either flank, Drayl taking the right and Lukas taking the left. He led the front prong himself. The slope was steep and watery-slick. By necessity, they became more concerned with keeping upright and descending than with raising their weapons defensively.
    The concourse around the sheds was open and empty. Feeling exposed, Corbec beckoned his men on, the front prong of the attack spearheading out into a wide phalanx as men slipped down the slope and joined them. Drayl’s team was now established to his right covering them, and soon Lukas’s was also in position.
    The drums now throbbed so loudly they vibrated the hard plastic lenses in their respirator masks and thudded against their chest walls.
    Corbec scurried across the open space with eight men accompanying him and covering every quarter. Sergeant Grell moved another dozen in behind them as Corbec reached the first of the sheds. He looked back and saw the men were keeping the line well, although he was concerned to see Drayl lift his respirator for a moment to wipe his face with the back of his cuff. He knew the man was ill at ease following that unhappy injury, but he still disliked undisciplined activity.
    ‘Get that fething mask in place!’ he shouted at Trooper Drayl and then, with seven lasguns covering the angles, he entered the shed.
    The gabled building throbbed with the sound of drums. Corbec could scarcely believe what he saw. Thousands of makeshift mechanisms had been set up in here, rotary engines and little spinning turbines, all in one way or another driving levers that beat drumsticks onto cylinders of every shape and size, all stretched with skin. Corbec didn’t even want to think where that skin had come from. All that he was aware of was the syncopated and irregular thudding of the drum machines that the Shriven had left here. There was no pattern to their beat. Worse still, Corbec was more afraid