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

that there was a pattern, and he was too sane to understand it.
    A further sweep showed that the building was vacant, and scouting further they realised all of the sheds were filled with the makeshift drum machines… ten thousand drums, twenty thousand, of every size and shape, beating away like malformed, failing hearts.
    Corbec’s men closed in around the sheds to hold them and assumed close defensive file, but Corbec knew they were all scared and the rhythms throbbing through the air were more than most could stand.
    He called up Skulane, his heavy flamer stinking oil and dripping petroleum spill. He pointed to the first of the sheds. ‘Sergeant Grell will block you with a fire-team,’ he told the flame thrower. ‘You don’t have to watch your back. Just burn each of these hell-holes in turn.’
    Skulane nodded and paused to tighten a gasket on his fire-blackened weapon. He moved forward into the first doorway as Grell ordered up a tight company of men to guard him. Skulane raised his flamer, his finger whitening under the tin guard of the rubberised trigger.
    There was a beat. A single beat. For one incredible moment all of the eccentric rhythms of the mechanical drums struck as one.
    Skulane’s head exploded. He dropped like a sack of vegetables onto the ground, the impact of his body and the spasm of his nervous system clenching the trigger on his flamer. The spike of fierce flame stabbed around in an unforgiving arc, burning first the portico of the blockhouse and then whipping back to incinerate three of the troopers guarding him. They shrieked and flailed as they were engulfed.
    Panic hit the men and they spread out in scurrying bewildered patterns. Corbec howled a curse. Somehow, at the point of death, Skulane’s finger had locked the trigger of the flamer and the weapon, slack on its cable beneath his dead form, whipped back and forth like a fire-breathing serpent. Two more soldiers were caught in its breath, three more. It scorched great conical scars across the muddy concrete of the concourse.
    Corbec threw himself flat against the side wall of the shed as the flames ripped past him. His mind raced and thoughts formed slower than actions. A grenade was in his hand, armed with a flick of his thumb.
    He leapt from cover, and screamed to any who could hear him to get down even as he flung the grenade at Skulane’s corpse and the twisting flamer. The explosion was catastrophic, igniting the tanks on the back of the corpse. Fire, white hot, vomited up from the door of the shed and blew the front of the roof out. Sections of splintered stone collapsed down across the vestigial remains of Trooper Skulane.
    Corbec, like many others, was knocked flat by the hot shockwave of the blast. Cowering in a ditch nearby, Scout-Sergeant Mkoll had avoided the worst of the blast. He had noticed something that Corbec had not, though with the continual beat of the drums, now irregular and unformed again, it was so difficult to concentrate. But he knew what he had seen.
    Skulane had been hit from behind by a las-blast to the head. Cradling his own rifle, he scrambled around to try and detect the source of the attack. A sniper, he thought, one of the Shriven guerrillas lurking in this disputed territory.
    All the men were on their bellies and covering their heads with their hands, all except Trooper Drayl, who stood with his lasgun held loosely and a smile on his face.
    ‘Drayl!’ Mkoll yelled, scrambling up from the trench. Drayl turned to face him across the concourse with a milky nothingness in his eyes. He raised his gun and fired.
    Two
    M KOLL THREW HIMSELF flat, but the first shot seared down the length of his back and broke his belt. Slumping into the ditch, he felt dull pain from the bubbled flesh along his shoulder blade. There was no blood. Lasfire cauterised whatever it hit.
    There was shouting and panic, more panic than even before. Whooping in a strange and chilling tone, Drayl turned and killed the two Ghosts