First and Only by Dan Abnett

They are as much a weapon as the guns. They are meant to wear us down.’
    Corbec nodded. The war had pooled bitterness in his great, hoary form. There was a touch of weariness to his look and manner.
    ‘What’s our plan? Do we wait for the barrage to stop and retreat?’
    Gaunt shook his head. ‘I think we’ve come in so deep, we can do some good. We’ll wait for the scouts to return.’
    The recon units returned to the shelter within half an hour. The scouts, some Vitrian, mostly Tanith, combined the data from their sweeps and built a picture of the area in a two kilometre radius for Gaunt and Zoren.
    What interested Gaunt most was a structure to the west.
    T HEY MOVED THROUGH a wide section of drainage pipelines, through rain-washed concrete underpasses stained with oil and dust.
    The cordite fog drifted back over their positions. To the west rose the great hill line, to the immediate north the shadowy bulk of habitat spires, immense conical towers for the workforce that rose out of the ground fog, their hundred thousand windows all blown out by shelling and air-shock. There were fewer drum-mills in this range of the enemy territory, but still no sign of a solitary living thing, not even vermin.
    They began passing blast-proofed bunkers of great size, all empty except for scattered support cradles and stacking pallets of grey fibre-plast. A crowd of battered, yellow, heavy-lift trolleys were abandoned on the concourses before the bunkers.
    ‘Munitions stores,’ Zoren suggested to Gaunt as they advanced. ‘They must have stockpiled a vast amount of shells for this bombardment and they’ve already emptied these sheds.’
    Gaunt thought this a good guess. They edged on, cautious, marching half-time and with weapons ready. The structure the reconnaissance had reported was ahead now, a cargo loading bay of tubular steel and riveted blast-board. The bay was mounted with hydraulic cranes and derricks on the surface, poised to lower cargo into a cavity below ground.
    The guardsmen descended on the metal grilled stairway onto a raised platform that lay alongside a wide, well-lit tunnel that ran off out of sight into the impacted earth. The tunnel was modular, circular in cross section, with a raised spine running along the lowest part. Feygor and Grell examined the tunnel and the armoured control post overlooking it.
    ‘Maglev line,’ said Feygor, who had done all he could to augment his basic engineering knowledge with off-world mechanisms. ‘Still active. They cart the shells from the munitions dump and lower them into the bay, then load them onto bomb trains for fast delivery to the emplacements in the hills.’
    He showed Gaunt an indicator board in the control position. The flat-plate glowed green, showing a flickering runic depiction of a track network. ‘There’s a whole transit system down here, purpose-built to link all the forge factories and allow for rapid transportation of material.’
    ‘And this spur has been abandoned because they’ve exhausted the munitions stores in this area.’ Gaunt was thoughtful. He took out his data-slate and made a working sketch of the network map.
    The commissar ordered a ten-minute rest, then sat on the edge of the platform and compared his sketch with area maps of the old factory complexes from the slate’s tactical archives. The Shriven had modified a lot of the details, but the basic elements were still the same.
    Colonel Zoren joined him. ‘Something’s on your mind,’ he began.
    Gaunt gestured to the tunnel. ‘It’s a way in. A way right into the central emplacements of the Shriven. They won’t have blocked it because they need these maglev lines active and clear to keep the bomb trains moving to feed their guns.’
    ‘There’s something odd, though, don’t you think?’ Zoren eased back the visor of his helmet.
    ‘Odd?’
    ‘Last night, I thought your assessment of their tactics was correct. They’d tried a frontal assault to pierce our lines, but when