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Blinking, he looked up to see the face of Gaunt. Gaunt looked at him with a solemn, yet inspiring gaze.
    ‘Sleeping after a good breakfast?’ the commissar enquired of the bewildered trooper.
    ‘No sir… I… I…’
    The crack of lasguns and needle lasers began to whip around them from the armoured loopholes on the trench head. Gaunt wrenched Caffran back to his feet.
    ‘I think the time has come,’ Gaunt said, ‘and I’d like all of my brave men to be in the line with me when we advance.’
    Spitting out grey mud, Caffran laughed. ‘I’m with you, sir,’ he said, ‘from Tanith to wherever we end up.’
    Caffran heard the whine of Gaunt’s chainsword as the commissar leapt up the scaling ladder nailed into the trench wall above the firestep and yelled to his men.
    ‘Men of Tanith! Do you want to live forever?’
    Their reply, loud and raucous, was lost in the barrage of shells. But Ibram Gaunt knew what they had said.
    Weapons blazing, Gaunt’s Ghosts went over the top and blasted their way towards glory, death or whatever else awaited them in the smoke.
    Four
    T HERE WAS A sizzling thicket of las-fire a hundred paces deep and twenty kilometres long where the advancing legions of the enemy met the Imperial Guard regiments head on. It looked for all the world like squirming nests of colonial insects bursting forth from their mounds and meeting in a chaotic mess of seething forms, lit by the incessant and incandescent sparking crossfire of their weapons.
    Lord High Militant General Hechtor Dravere turned away from his tripod-mounted scope. He smoothed the faultless breast of his tunic with well-manicured hands and sighed.
    ‘Who would that be dying down there?’ he asked in his disturbingly thin, reedy voice.
    Colonel Flense, field commander of the Jantine Patricians, one of the oldest and most venerated Guard regiments, got off his couch and stood smartly to attention. Flense was a tall, powerful man, the tissue of his left cheek disfigured long ago by a splash of tyranid bio-acid.
    ‘General?’
    ‘Those… those ants down there…’ Dravere gestured idly over his shoulder. ‘I wondered who they were.’
    Flense strode across the veranda to the chart table where a flat glass plate was illuminated from beneath with glowing indication runes. He traced a finger across the glass, assessing the four hundred kilometres of battlefield front-line which represented the focus of the war here on Fortis Binary, a vast and ragged pattern of opposing trench systems, facing each other across a mangled deadland of cratered mud and shattered factories.
    ‘The western trenches,’ he began. ‘They are held by the Tanith First Regiment. You know them, sir: Gaunt’s mob, what some of the men call “The Ghosts”, I believe.’
    Dravere wandered across to an ornate refreshment cart and poured himself a tiny cup of rich black caffeine from the gilt samovar. He sipped and for a moment sloshed the heavy fluid between his teeth.
    Flense cringed. Colonel Draker Flense had seen things in his time that would have burned through the souls of most ordinary men. He had watched legions die on the wire, he had seen men eat their comrades in a frenzy of Chaos-induced madness, he had seen planets, whole planets, collapse and die and rot. There was something about General Dravere that touched him more deeply and more repugnantly than any of that. It was a pleasure to serve him.
    Dravere swallowed at last and set aside his cup. ‘So Gaunt’s Ghosts get the wake-up call this morning,’ he said.
    Hechtor Dravere was a squat, bullish man in his sixties, balding and yet insistent upon lacquering the few remaining strands of hair across his scalp as if to prove a point. He was fleshy and ruddy, and his uniform seemed to require an entire regimental ration of starch and whitening to prepare each morning. There were medals on his chest which stuck out on a stiff brass pin. He always wore them. Flense was not entirely sure what they all