‘Not after what you’ve led us through,’ Moren snarled. ‘Even your own father doubted you. He told me he wished I could inherit the warrant, instead of you.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ Trayn said, trying and failing to control the anger in her voice.

  ‘I have the vox recording, Anjelika. The crew all agree. I should be the master of this expedition.’

  ‘He was delirious by the end,’ Trayn snapped, taking a step towards Moren.

  ‘He knew you would squander everything he had spent his life building up.’

  The Space Marines didn’t seem to be listening to the exchange. They’d begun to move off through the left-hand tunnel branching away from the chamber.

  ‘I’m going with the Carcharodons,’ Trayn said, doing her best not to lose control in the face of Moren’s insults. ‘And if any of you are fool enough to think you can get out of here alive without them, feel free to take one of the other tunnels.’

  ‘I will retrieve the periapt first,’ Moren said, turning towards the remaining tunnel entrance. ‘And when I do, I’m not handing it over to anyone, Anjelika. Who else is with me?’

  ‘Statistically, he is correct,’ Ghould said after a moment, his vox-voice as monotone as ever. ‘We have no hope of attaining the periapt for ourselves alongside the Adeptus Astartes, and I suspect the chances of becoming involved in a combat engagement are severely increased by remaining in their presence. It is highly unlikely that they have divulged the entirety of their mission to us yet either. Those are not variables I will place any faith in.’

  ‘Go, then,’ Trayn spat. ‘Take Rubio with you. Dros?’

  The lexographer began stuttering, his eyes darting from Trayn to Moren. After a moment, Trayn made a disgusted noise and turned away from the group, moving after the Space Marines. A second later, Dros followed her.

  ‘I didn’t want it to be this way, Anjelika,’ Moren called after them. ‘Throne willing, I’ll see you again on the surface, far away from this forsaken temple.’

  ‘This isn’t a temple,’ Trayn said. ‘It’s your tomb, Moren.’

  The scan-map led them through an empty sub-vault and down into a series of winding tunnels. Every so often, Trayn caught a glimpse of Kordi checking his auspex, clearly doubting her suggested route. Trayn ignored him and pushed on. Eventually, the tunnels led them to the edge of a wide, low chamber. They halted. It was far larger than the last one they had passed through. Columns of black metal arched up to form a ribbed dome overhead. There were dozens of sarcophagi lining the walls, all still sealed, their shells bearing the xenos letters of warding and vengeance. Hundreds of slender channels had been cut into the walls and floor between the alien script, each strip emitting a baleful green light that seemed to pulse slowly with some distant, slumbering heartbeat. The channels all ran together in the chamber’s centre, where an obsidian pedestal bore their objective, bathed in eye-aching jade luminance.

  The periapt was on top of the pedestal. It looked small – a shard of red stone that would’ve fitted comfortably in Trayn’s palm. It floated in a stasis just above the black stone, and green light glittered from its ruby surface.

  ‘Stop there,’ Kordi ordered Trayn as they reached the edge of the tunnel.

  ‘That’s the periapt?’ Trayn asked.

  ‘It is,’ Kordi agreed, and gestured towards the Carcharodon beside him. The Space Marine took a step out into the chamber. As soon as his heavy boot settled on the floor there was a thud. The sarcophagi surrounding the vault shuddered. Kordi placed a gauntlet on the Carcharodon’s pauldron and pulled him back.

  ‘As the auspex suggests,’ he said. ‘This place is heavily protected. If anything above a certain weight sets foot upon the floor of the chamber they will trigger its guardians.’

  ‘Guardians?’ Trayn echoed. Kordi nodded towards the sarcophagi but said nothing more.

  ‘You’re too heavy to enter?’ Dros said to the Space Marine.

  ‘We are. I suspect the master of this tomb built this to stop rivals of its own kind seizing its prize – few other than the necrons themselves know of this place’s existence.’

  ‘So we turn back?’ the lexographer asked, clearly fighting not to sound overly eager.

  ‘No. One of you must go.’

  ‘What?’ Trayn demanded.

  ‘It is probable that you are light enough – you are neither armoured, nor composed of xenos metal.’

  ‘It’s exactly because I’m unarmoured that I don’t want to go,’ Trayn said.

  ‘If any of us enter, we will wake them immediately, and none of us will leave here alive.’

  ‘Or we could just go back now,’ Dros said hopefully. ‘While we still have the chance?’

  Trayn looked from Dros to Kordi, and sighed.

  ‘Oh, Throne,’ Dros murmured, probably recognising the same look of determination Trayn’s father had given him before so many foolish undertakings.

  ‘Take this,’ she told the lexographer, pulling off her coat and tossing it to him.

  ‘Move slowly to start with,’ Kordi advised. ‘There are likely to be sensors that will detect sudden motions as well.’

  ‘Is something going to happen when I grab the periapt?’

  ‘We aren’t reading any fatal snares around the item itself.’

  ‘Nothing fatal… Anything else?’

  ‘When you retrieve it, just run.’

  Trayn shook her head and held her breath as she took her first step out into the chamber.

  Nothing happened. She eased the breath out. Her heart was hammering, and the knowledge that she was stepping into an arcane xenos trap made her skin crawl. The green light emanating from the channels in the floors and walls was giving her a headache. It took every bit of self-restraint not to simply sprint for the pedestal.

  She took another step. Again, nothing happened. She could feel the expectant gaze of the Space Marines burning into her back. She wondered if they would seize it off her once she’d retrieved it. Could she find her way out of here without them?

  Step by step, she approached the periapt, her whole body shaking. A few paces away, her footfall triggered something. The perfect stillness of the chamber was disturbed by a tremor that ran through it, and the sickly green light dipped for a moment.

  She froze. Behind she heard the faint scrape of ceramite as the Space Marines readied themselves. The sweat sliding down her spine made her shudder.

  Still, nothing happened. The tremor passed without incident, the lights returning to their burning green glare. Trayn took another few steps until the pedestal was within touching distance. She reached out, hesitated, then snatched the stone.

  Immediately, the chamber was plunged into darkness. For a second, there was nothing but the rasp of breather units in the icy air. Trayn heard Dros whimpering. Then, with a surge of eye-aching brilliance, the lighting returned. The whole chamber shuddered twice, as though a massive subterranean force was slamming into it. The throbbing in the metal around them rose to an audible pitch – a hum of freshly charged energy that vibrated in every surface. There was a thud and, in unison, the lids of the upright sarcophagi around them began to slide open.

  ‘Withdraw,’ Kordi ordered. Trayn didn’t need his instruction. She was already sprinting for the tunnel. She didn’t reach it. Kordi blocked her, a hand clamping over her shoulder.

  ‘The periapt,’ he demanded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now.’

  The Space Marine didn’t shift. After a moment of angry denial, Trayn fumbled with the shard and shoved it into his gauntlet, glaring furiously up at him.

  ‘There. Now in the name of the God-Emperor, get out of my way.’

  The Carcharodon slipped the periapt into a mag-pouch and moved aside. The rest of the squad were already pulling back, Dros stumbling with them. Behind them, she heard the first sonorous thumps of metal footsteps and the crackle of igniting energy weapons.

  All around, the tomb was waking.

  The tunnels they retreated through had changed. The millions of alien letters now glowed with the sickly green light that had suffused the periapt’s chamber. The vibrating in the black metal had also grown more intense, shuddering up through Trayn’s boots and throbbing through the whole underground complex. Worse, several of the caskets they had passed earlier had levered open. Necron warriors blocked their path, silver skeletal constructs with rifles that hissed and snapped with green energies as activated.

  The Space Marines cleared the way. The tunnels thundered with the report of bolter fire, making Trayn’s ears ache. She drew her plasma pistol as she ran, but there were no targets – the necrons she passed had been cut apart by the Carcharodons, their silver remains twitching and sparking. Trayn shot those she past, reducing the broken pieces to molten slag.

  Kordi took up the rear, pausing occasionally to send streams of bolts back the way they had come. Dros was struggling to stay ahead of him, panting with wide-eyed terror in the oscillating flashes of gunfire. Trayn snatched him by the collar of his robes and dragged him after her.

  The tomb spider was waking as they passed back through its nest. The massive metallic construct twitched and shuddered on its black plinth, half of the green optic clusters that constituted its head blinking on and off. Power throbbed through the thick cabling linking it to its dais.

  ‘Krak charges, thirty-second fuses,’ Kordi ordered as the squad spread through the room, heading for the tunnel on the far side. As the Space Marines set grenades around the creature’s twitching form, one metal limb snapped free of its wiring, lashing one of the Carcharodons. The blow cut deep into his pauldron and sent him staggering back, but did not draw blood. Trayn raised her pistol and fired, averting her eyes from the brilliant flash of the point-blank plasma shot. The bolt immolated one of the construct’s limbs in a gout of searing blue flame. Kordi pushed her aside before she could shoot the shuddering thing again.

  ‘Move,’ he ordered. The Carcharodons abandoned the chamber, the two humans in tow, just as the spider began to raise itself from its nest. There was a flash and a thud of detonations. Trayn didn’t look back. The voice of one of the Space Marines called down from ahead.

  ‘The tunnel is closing!’

  ‘Keep going,’ Kordi ordered, his words interspersed by another thunderous bolter discharge. Trayn and Dros fled, trying desperately to keep pace with the Carcharodons ahead. They were right – the tunnel had started to artificially collapse, sections of the ceiling lowering down. Another minute and they would be crushed or, even worse, trapped.

  Trayn could see daylight ahead, over the backpacks and helmets of the Space Marines. She dared to snatch a glance back down the tunnel, past Kordi. Behind them, the green lighting had failed, replaced instead with the crackle of flayer-weaponry and the hateful, burning, emerald glow of eyes in the dark.

  The ceiling connected with Kordi’s backpack, scraping sparks. At this stage, Trayn was practically carrying Dros, the aged lexographer almost insensible with terror. The light ahead was growing stronger, but ever-narrower. The first members of the squad were already out into the temple beyond.

  ‘We’re so close,’ Trayn panted to Dros, desperately trying to close the last few paces.

  Dros plunged through the opening, sprawling on the temple floor. Trayn flung herself at the light, bolts of energy snapping at the air behind her. She and Kordi slammed out of the tunnel together, hitting the roughly cut rock of the surface temple. The impact drove the air from her lungs and scraped the Space Marine’s armour silver in several places as he hit his side. She’d barely found her knees before the entranceway slammed shut behind them both with an earth-shuddering boom.

  Catching her breath, Trayn looked up at the destruction around her. The temple was even more ruinous than before. The melta charges rigged by the Carcharodons to the sarcophagi had detonated when their occupants had tried to leave them. Fused slag and bubbling, molten rock was all that remained of large sections of the ancient place of worship, along with the necrons entombed there. A tremor in the rock underfoot caused one of the damaged side chambers to collapsed in on itself, forcing the Space Marines to trigger their stabilisers.

  ‘The tomb is continuing to wake,’ Kordi said as Trayn rose to her feet, pulling up Dros alongside her. ‘The Void Revenant will be locked and primed above us. We must hurry. Extraction is inbound on the clearing.’

  Trayn and Dros fled through a jungle alive with the rising dead.

  ‘Come on!’ she shouted at the lexographer, hauling him along by his robes. He was weeping and babbling, drenched in swamp scum. She’d have abandoned him if he hadn’t chosen to stay while all the others had deserted her.

  Ahead, the Space Marines were almost out of sight. They ploughed through the mulchy undergrowth with terrifying speed, battering rotten bark and low-hanging boughs out of the way without breaking stride. Occasionally, the jungle would resound with the crash of a bolter and the harsh clang of metal-on-metal. Sometimes, too, there was a response – lightning would crack like a whip in the air, blasting apart timber and igniting undergrowth. Another of the Space Marines had been struck, his arm reduced to a bloody stump. Still he carried on, firing one-handed.

  There were other figures moving in the gloom of the jungle all around them, and they were closing in. They were shuffling and sluggish, their exoskeletons dripping with the slime of the swamps. Their weapons crackled with terrible energies, green ghost lights that played through the turgid darkness all around the fleeing band.

  Another bolt of alien fire struck a tree high up to Trayn’s right, causing her to stumble amidst the hail of burning splinters. Dros staggered after her. The swamp underfoot was alive, bubbling and rippling with subterranean disturbances.

  There was a crash. Trayn saw the Space Marines ahead stumble, seconds before the shock wave hit her. This time it was Dros, hand clutching a bough, who reached out to catch her before she fell. The entire jungle was shuddering with some sort of vast release. Through the black canopy Trayn caught sight of a construct rising into the heavens, shaped like a vast, wicked sickle. After hanging in the air shortly, it darted away with a burst of incredible speed, followed by two smaller, similarly shaped craft. Where they had come from she had no idea. Presumably, they had been buried beneath the temples and had now risen at some terrible command, unseen and unheard by the mortals who had intruded on their master’s slumber.

  They stumbled on. Dros yelled as he negotiated a patch of trailing vines and pitched forwards into the swamp, surfacing with a gasp. Trayn dragged him up by his drenched robes, cursing his clumsiness, before realising that there was more to the lexographer’s fall.

  ‘My leg!’ the old scribe was screaming. ‘My leg!’

  A metallic hand, black with swamp water, had burst from the ground and gripped Dros’ ankle like a vice. Even as Trayn watched, more of the assailant unearthed itself. A cranium rose from the bog, followed by hunched, armoured shoulders. A set of green eyes flickered to life amidst the ooze, unblinking and hateful.

  ‘Shield your face!’ Trayn screamed and levelled her plasma pistol. Dros, sobbing, was trying to drag himself away from the necron’s unyielding grip. Its skull swivelled to face Trayn as she took aim from barely two feet away, finger pressed hard against the trigger.

  ‘Die, xenos scum,’ she spat.

  The plasma pistol cracked and a bolt of brilliant blue energy struck the necron warrior, immolating its upper half in a blaze of light. The grip on Dros relaxed as the thing’s remains slumped back in the ooze.

  ‘Up,’ Trayn said, blinking away the afterglow of her pistol’s discharge as she hauled Dros to his feet once more. All around them more necrons were rising from the swamp, filth sliding from their immortal bodies as they moved to intercept the intruders. A minute more and the xenos would have fully freed themselves from their graves, and Trayn and Dros would be surrounded. The two stumbled to a halt, Trayn’s pistol up, turning in a tight circle as the rogue trader searched for a way out. There was none.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Trayn saw two of the Space Marines turn back. They had returned for the humans, and the sudden activation of their chainaxes made the fronds and boughs nearby shudder. Sparks and swamp slime flew as the weapons connected with alien metal, great strikes decapitating the nearest necron warriors before their long energy rifles could activate.

  ‘Go.’ The word snarled from the vox-grille of one of the Space Marines, breaking their murderous quiet. Neither Trayn nor Dros needed to be told again. They ran past, trying to catch the rest of the gigantic, silent grey killers. Behind them, the broken remains of the necron warriors started to drag themselves together once more, circuitry reknitting and limbs clacking back into place.

  Trayn tried to reach the Saint Justinian again as she ran. The comm-bead came back with only static. The communications issues that had plagued the temples seemed to have been spread by the necron’s wakefulness. What if Contin was under attack from the three sickle-like craft that had risen above the jungle earlier? What if he’d already fled?

  There was light ahead now, not the ghastly death-glow of the alien’s flayer weaponry, but actual daylight. The Space Marines were pausing at the edge of the treeline, waiting to be joined by the two who had rescued Trayn and Dros.

  ‘Keep going,’ Kordi told them as they hit the clearing. They pushed past, into the daylight, while behind the jungle echoed with the whirr and crash of more rising necrons.

  Trayn only got a few paces into the open ground before she came up short. The camp was gone. The enviro-domes had simply disappeared. There was no sign of destruction – someone, presumably Moren, had dismantled them.

  ‘Incoming,’ one of the Space Marines voxed as they moved into the clearing. Trayn noticed a sound rising above the crash of the approaching necrons. She recognised it immediately. With a screech of turbofans, Berkut swung down over the clearing, sunlight gleaming from the gun-cutter’s weapons and the autocannon carried by Dorkin in the side hatch.

 

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