His Last Command (Gaunt’s Ghosts Book 9) by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett [Abnett, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The Black Library
Published: 2006-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

04.02 hrs, 197.776.M41

Fifth Compartment

Sparshad Mons, Ancreon Sextus

Rawne’s team had been back amongst them for nearly two days, and Wilder was now convinced they should never have returned. It wasn’t that he didn’t know them – and by the Throne, he didn’t – but he had been counting on the Tanith men to absorb them back into the company, to smooth over the transition, to welcome the squad’s return. And that just wasn’t happening.

There’d been an attempt at greeting on the first afternoon. Once they’d cheered and applauded their arrival, the Ghosts had mobbed forward around their long-lost comrades, shaking their hands, embracing them, asking the first of a thousand questions. Rawne’s team had, for the most part, simply suffered this attention. They’d smiled back thinly, accepted the handshakes and embraces stiffly, quietly said hello to old faces.

Gol Kolea had marched straight up to his old friend Varl and squeezed the smaller man in a big hug. Varl had grinned an empty grin and patted Kolea on the back until he stopped.

‘All that, and they still didn’t get you?’ Kolea said.

‘So it seems,’ said Varl. ‘I suggested they tried harder, but their heart wasn’t in it.’

‘Holy Throne, it’s good to see you,’ Kolea admitted.

‘Yeah,’ Varl seemed to agree. He was simply looking around at the camp, anywhere but at Kolea’s face.

‘So… when do we hear all about it?’ Kolea asked.

‘Not much to tell,’ Varl replied.

The Tanith scouts had surrounded Mkoll and Bonin. From what Wilder could overhear, those greetings were oddly muted too.

‘What did you see, sir?’

‘What happened?’

‘Gaunt’s alive, right?’

‘What happened to Ven?’

‘Good to see you all still breathing,’ Mkoll had replied. This Mkoll, the famous Mkoll the scouts had boasted proudly about, didn’t look like much to Wilder. Small, unprepossessing, tightly wound.

‘But what did you see out there?’ Leyr asked.

‘Not much worth speaking of,’ Bonin replied.

‘Somebody give me a sit rep,’ Mkoll had said, as if he’d just wandered in from a routine, half-hour sortie.

Trooper Caffran had pushed his way through the huddle towards Tona Criid, and stopped short in front of her. He started to move to embrace her, but there was something in her manner that seemed to persuade him not to.

‘Tona,’ he said.

‘Caff.’

‘I knew… I knew you’d make it back.’

‘Glad someone did.’ Then she’d moved on past him, heading towards the billets, leaving him alone, a puzzled expression on his face, the muscle in the corner of his jawline working tightly.

Only Brostin, Rawne’s flame-trooper, had seemed in a remotely expansive mood. Greeted by company flame-troopers like Lubba, Dremmond, Neskon and Lyse, Brostin had accepted a lho-stick from a proffered pack.

‘What was it like, Bros?’ Dremmond asked.

‘Well,’ Brostin had replied, looking down at his smoke, ‘there weren’t enough of these for a start.’

A despondency had settled in. The returning ‘heroes’ appeared to want nothing more than to be left on their own. The day’s celebratory mood ended up fizzling away as pathetically as a badly connected det-tape.

The following morning, Wilder had called them all to a briefing at his field tent.

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