First and Only by Dan Abnett

armoured strike.
    By six that evening, as the light began to fail, Flense had a strike force ready in the splintered streets below a bend in the river. Eight Leman Russ siege tanks, the beloved Demolishers with their distinctive short thick barrels, four standard Phaethon-pattern Leman Russ battle tanks, three Griffon Armoured Weapons Carriers, and nineteen Chimeras carrying almost two hundred Jantine Patricians in full battledress.
    He was at the ducal palace, discussing operational procedures with Dravere and several other senior officers, who were also trying to assess the losses in terms of Tanith and Vitrians sustained that day, when the vox-caster operator from the watchroom entered with a sheaf of transparencie that the cogitators of the orbital Navy had processed and sent down.
    They were orbital shots of the barrage. The others studied them with passing interest, but Flense seized on them at once. One shot showed a series of explosions going off at least a kilometre inside the bombardment line.
    Flense showed it to Dravere, taking the general to one side.
    ‘Short fall shells,’ was the general’s comment.
    ‘No sir, these are a chain of fires… the blast areas of set explosions. Someone’s inside there.’
    Dravere shrugged. ‘So someone survived.’
    Flense was stern. ‘I have dedicated myself and my Patricians to taking this section of the front, and therein taking the world itself. I will not stand by and watch as vagabond survivors run interference behind the lines and ruin our strategies.’
    ‘You take it so personally, Flense…’ Dravere smiled.
    Flense knew he did, but he also recognised an opportunity. ‘General, if a break appears in the bombardment, do I have your signal permission to advance? I have an armoured force ready.’
    Bemused, the lord general consented. It was dinner time and he was preoccupied. Even so, the prospect of victory charmed him. ‘If you win this for me, Flense, I’ll not forget it. There are great possibilities in my future, if I am not tied here. I would share them with you.’
    ‘Your will be done, Lord Militant General.’
    F LENSE ’ S KEEN opportunistic mind had seen the possibility – that the Shriven might retarget their bombardment, or better still a section of it, to flatten the activity behind their old lines. And that would give him an opening.
    Taking his lead from the navigation signals transmitted from the fleet to an astropath in his lead tank, Flense rumbled his column out of the west, along the river road and then out across a pontoon bridgehead as far as he dared into the wasteland. The Shriven bombardment dropped like fury before his vehicles.
    Flense almost missed his opportunity. He had barely got his vehicles into position when the break appeared. A half-kilometre stretch of the bombardment curtain abruptly ceased and then reappeared several kilometres further on, targeting the section that the orbital shots had shown.
    There was a doorway through the destruction, a way in to get at the Shriven.
    Flense ordered his vehicles on. At maximum thrust they tore and bounced and slithered over the mud and into the Shriven heartland.
    Six
    T HE VOICE OF Trooper Caffran floated out of the fox-hole darkness, just audible over the shelling.
    ‘Tanith was a glorious place, Zogat. A forest world, evergreen, dense and mysterious. The forests themselves were almost spiritual. There was a peace there… and they were strange too. What they call motile treegrowth, so I’m told. Basically, the trees, a kind we called nalwood, well… moved, replanted, repositioned themselves, following the sun, the rains, whatever tides and urges ran in their sap. I don’t pretend to understand it. It was just the way things were.
    ‘Essentially, the point is, there was no frame of reference for location on Tanith. A track or a pathway through the nal-forest might change or vanish or open anew overnight. So, over the generations, the people of Tanith got an instinct for