Duty Calls, page 16
I activated my comm-bead. ‘Pelton, find anything yet?’
‘A whole lot of nothing,’ the former arbitrator told me cheerfully. ‘If there really was a Chaos cult hiding out here, it was the most Emperor-fearing one I’ve ever come across.’
‘What do you mean?’ Amberley asked, and Pelton’s voice instantly became more businesslike.
‘We must have checked out thirty accommodation units by now, icons of the Emperor in all of them. Devotional pamphlets and lives of the saints in going on half. If there were any Chaos worshippers here, they must really have liked living dangerously.’
‘Are miners usually that pious?’ I asked. I hadn’t met that many, of course, but somehow I doubted it. On the other hand, I could readily appreciate how living in a place like Hell’s Edge might incline someone to invoke the Emperor’s protection with a little more enthusiasm than usual.
Amberley shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’ll look into it.’
We pressed on, passing through a labyrinth of mechanisms larger than a Chimera, the purpose of which I couldn’t even begin to guess at, our voices and Amberley’s resonant tread echoing around us as we moved.
‘What the frak?’ I asked, taken by surprise as we rounded the corner of one such mysterious device, and a stinking waft of sulphurous air washed over me. At first I thought that someone must just have left a door open, then as my eyes focused again after filling with water as the rank smell punched its way into my sinuses, I realised the truth. A hole had been blasted through the thick rockrete wall, large enough to drive our Salamander through, littering the floor with chunks of detritus in the process. I glanced at Amberley. ‘I think we’ve found a bit of that battle damage I mentioned,’ I said.
‘Me too,’ Jurgen confirmed, as constitutionally immune to sarcasm as always. He eyed the breach appraisingly. ‘Someone’s taken a couple of heavy bolters to it. Melta too, by the look of things.’
‘Not something you’d normally expect to find in a civilian facility,’ Amberley agreed, clanking forward to examine the breach more closely.
Yanbel nodded, taking in the scene with whatever augmented senses lay hidden beneath his cowl. ‘Someone was certainly desperate to get in,’ he remarked.
As he spoke the memory of the violated Mechanicus shrine I’d found in the Valley of Daemons on Perlia rose to the surface of my mind, and I nodded too, my mouth going dry. Then the thought dissipated almost as soon as it had come, as something about the pattern of debris forced its way out of my subconscious and into my forebrain.
‘Desperate to get out, more likely,’ I said. ‘The damage was inflicted from this side of the wall.’
‘You’re right.’ Amberley nodded in turn, putting the picture together in her own mind, and glanced around the high, echoing chamber. We’d made our way to this point by a series of zigzags, keeping as much of the machinery as possible between ourselves and any wide open space where a ’nid swarm might mass. I’d seen the value of channelling them into narrow firelanes, where they could only come at you a few at a time instead of taking full advantage of their numbers to overwhelm you, often enough to have followed Amberley’s lead in this without argument, although I must admit to having kept my eyes open for ambushing ’stealers or the like as we’d followed our winding path through the thickets of ironmongery. Now she took a few paces back from the gaping hole in the wall, and pointed. ‘Thought so. Look.’
I joined her, the others clustering round too, and glanced in the direction she was indicating. A wide, clear corridor between the banks of hoppers, control lecterns, riveted iron, and Emperor knew what else stretched from where we were standing to the doors by which we’d entered, through which I caught a comforting glimpse of our shuttle still sitting patiently on the pad. Rather less comforting was the condition of some of the machinery bordering the open area. Scorch marks and dents abounded, and in a few places holes had been punched clean through the thick metal plate.
‘Bolters,’ I said, recognising the pattern left by the explosive armour-piercing projectiles, and Amberley nodded sombrely.
‘Flamers too, by the look of it,’ she said, indicating a wide, scorched area on the floor, about twenty metres beyond where we stood.
As I took a step towards the nearest damaged machine, intending to examine it more closely for some clue as to what had happened here, something on the floor crunched beneath my bootsoles. I glanced down, with a shiver of apprehension, already certain of what I was about to find. The carcasses of tiny beetles, too many to count (although no doubt Mott could have given me a reasonable estimate of their numbers if I cared enough to ask), were scattered everywhere I looked. ‘Fleshborers,’ I said unnecessarily.
Amberley nodded tightly. ‘It’s pretty clear what happened here,’ she said, and I nodded too, concurring with her assessment. Someone had been attempting to leave the building, and found their way blocked by a swarm of onrushing gaunts, too many to fight through even with the impressive amount of firepower they’d clearly had at their disposal. So they’d laid a temporary barrier of blazing promethium, buying enough time to blast their way through the wall behind us in order to escape.
‘Whoever fought their way out of here was impressively well equipped,’ Mott said. ‘I would estimate that, judging by the impact patterns left on the machinery surrounding us, at least half a dozen bolters were employed in addition to the heavy weapons, the traces of which are all too obvious.’
I felt another shiver work its way down my spine. ‘That sounds like a fully-equipped Astartes squad!’ I said in horrified astonishment. A dreadful possibility began nagging insistently at my forebrain. ‘Could the witch have been in league with one of the Traitor Legions?’
‘I doubt it,’ Amberley reassured me. ‘Their presence tends to be rather more obvious.’
‘Skitarii, perhaps?’ Yanbel offered. That sounded plausible. I nodded, recalling again the crimson-garbed bodies of the Mechanicus foot soldiers littering the hidden laboratory on Perlia.
I looked at Amberley again. ‘Does Lazurus have a bodyguard with him?’ I asked. I couldn’t imagine any other reason why a squad of skitarii would be on a planet as far from the major warp lanes as Periremunda.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ she said.
Jurgen coughed loudly, and hawked a gobbet of phlegm into a corner. ‘Besides,’ he said, as though the point was obvious (which I suppose it was as soon as he’d verbalised it), ‘the clockwork soldiers carry hellguns, don’t they?’
‘Usually,’ I agreed. I’d seldom seen one with a bolter, that much was true. ‘And what would they be doing in a midden like this in the first place?’
‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Amberley said. After a moment she turned, and began plodding deeper into the complex. ‘They must have come from this direction.’
Well I could have told her that, of course, there was only one obvious avenue of approach to the point where the battle with the tyranids had occurred. Further speculation would be pointless, however. The only way to find out who the mysterious warriors were, and what they were doing in Hell’s Edge, would be to find out where they had come from. With a rising sense of foreboding I took a tighter grip on my laspistol and set out after her, hoping that the answers we sought wouldn’t have to be paid for in blood.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We found it after another half an hour or so of poking into corners and, in my case at least, jumping at shadows, wondering if a lictor was about to leap out on us from some place of concealment, its jaws slavering, but we were all still uneaten when Amberley paused in front of a section of wall that looked to me like any other, and regarded it quizzically.
‘Nice work,’ she said, then without warning she drew back her power fist and punched a hole clean through the solid rockrete partition, revealing a thin metal lining beyond. After a moment or two she’d enlarged the breach to a ragged hole, and shouldered her way inside, dislodging a small cascade of rubble as she stepped over the uneven lip of the gap she’d made. After a moment, sure the place had been abandoned, she popped the seal of her helmet, apparently intent on examining the place with her own eyes.
Yanbel and Mott followed, bounding over the obstruction easily with their augmetic legs, and after a moment’s hesitation I scrambled awkwardly after them. There was, after all, safety in numbers, even if that just meant keeping the sage and the cogboy between me and a hungry ’nid. Jurgen followed, of course, manhandling his clumsy heavy weapon through the hole with his usual expertise and a deal of sotto voce profanity, but I had little attention to spare for my aide’s travails. I was too busy standing in dumbstruck astonishment, like some hick from the sump getting his first look at an uphive trading post.
The chamber we’d found ourselves in was much smaller than the halls full of machinery that we’d been labouring though until now, but no less choked with the Omnissiah’s bounty for all that, data-lecterns and cogitator banks lining the bare steel walls, and arcane mechanisms I couldn’t even begin to guess the purpose of littering the floor in a fashion that seemed both functional and virtually random. Yet again I was reminded of the hidden laboratory I’d stumbled across on Perlia, and the grisly secret it had concealed, but this place was mercifully devoid of eviscerated corpses to mar its air of pristine functionality.
Picking my way carefully over the rat’s nest of cables linking everything together I went to join Amberley and Yanbel, who were discussing our discovery in hushed tones. They both seemed as surprised as I was at what we’d found, which I wasn’t quite sure how to take. On the one hand it dispelled the conviction that had been growing in me from the start of this little jaunt that everyone else in the party (apart from Jurgen, of course) knew a great deal more than I did about what was going on, but on the other I’d been deriving a certain amount of solace from the assumption that at least Amberley was on top of things, and the idea that she was as far out of her depth as I felt hardly seemed reassuring. So, as usual in this sort of situation, I just adopted an air of calm self-confidence, and tried to make sense of what they were saying to one another.
‘It certainly looks as if he’s been here,’ Yanbel agreed, a trace of doubt still audible in his voice. He gestured to the analytical engines surrounding us. ‘This is the kind of equipment he’d need to continue his researches, no doubt about that. But why would a mining colony be hiding him?’
‘Emperor alone knows,’ Amberley said, a trace of asperity entering her voice, ‘but he must have gone to ground somewhere away from the main population centres, and why else would all this stuff be here?’ A faint whine of servos underlined a sweeping gesture, which nearly took the techpriest’s head off. ‘It’s got his presence written all over it!’
‘Metheius, you mean?’ I asked, being able to add two and two as quickly as the next man, and Amberley turned to look at me with a faint air of surprise, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
‘It’s beginning to look that way,’ she said.
‘I’ll see what I can recover from the cogitators,’ Yanbel said, ‘but don’t hold your breath.’ He moved away, and started the ritual of data retrieval at a nearby lectern.
Mott coughed diffidently. ‘This chamber appears to have been abandoned at the same time as the rest of the facility,’ he pointed out, ‘and in something of a hurry, too.’ He gestured towards the door to the hidden chamber, clearly visible on this side, a metre or so from the makeshift one Amberley had so thoughtfully provided us with. ‘I can see a genecode scanner and an intrusion alarm linked to the access point, both of which whoever left here last neglected to set.’
‘I imagine they had other things on their minds,’ I pointed out dryly, ‘what with the whole place swarming with ’nids and all.’ I should have known better, of course. Mott nodded thoughtfully.
‘That’s highly probable,’ he conceded. ‘Given the human brain’s response to abnormal levels of stress, particularly in a life-threatening situation, I would have thought it extremely likely that the individuals in question had no immediate goal beyond simple survival. On the other hand, the residue of the skirmish we found would seem to indicate that they were extremely resourceful, and highly motivated–’
‘Quite,’ Amberley said, cutting him off before he could bore us all into a coma, ‘but that still doesn’t tell us who they were.’
‘The records have all been wiped,’ Yanbel reported from his station at the data-lectern, his tone clearly adding a non-verbal ‘I told you so’, and I nodded slowly.
‘Just like Perlia,’ I said. Whoever had been here clearly didn’t intend coming back, but then given the circumstances in which they’d left, that was hardly a surprise. Amberley nodded grimly.
‘Search this place thoroughly,’ she said, then grimaced at me. ‘I can’t believe I just said that. It’s not as if we’ll find the shadowlight just lying around the place, but we’d better make sure before we go. I don’t want to give Lazurus the chance to claim we frakked up.’ She activated the vox unit built into her suit. ‘Flicker, we’ve found a bolthole. Looks like Metheius has been hiding out here.’
‘Are you sure?’ Even over the vox link, the incredulity in Pelton’s voice was palpable. ‘Why would a techpriest be consorting with psykers?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ The edge of irritation in Amberley’s voice was growing again. ‘When we catch up with the gretch-frotting boltbag and put him to the question you can ask him, all right?’
‘Fine, boss.’ Pelton’s voice was conciliatory, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. Hacking off an inquisitor isn’t among the brightest of things to do, even if you work for her. ‘We’ve got you on auspex, be with you in five.’ The link went dead, and Amberley sighed, glancing at the techpriest with a faintly apologetic air.
‘Sorry about the boltbag remark,’ she said. ‘It’s getting to be a rather stressful day.’ Of course it was about to get a great deal more so, but at that point, mercifully, we were all still blissfully ignorant of the fact. Yanbel glanced up from the lectern, still muttering prayers and tapping keys in the hope that he might be able to coax a shred of forgotten data back into existence, but Metheius had known the system well, and had evidently covered his tracks just as skilfully as he’d done in the Valley of Daemons so many years before.
‘No offence taken,’ he assured her, no doubt reflecting that a servant of the Omnissiah was supposed to be beyond such petty reactions as annoyance, even if the tone of his voice hinted otherwise.
‘Pelton does have a point, though,’ I ventured cautiously. ‘Even if Metheius is a renegade, would he really be associating with a Chaos cult? Those loonies are about as far from the ideal of the machine as it’s possible to get.’ Amberley sighed deeply, and appeared to count to ten under her breath.
‘In my experience, enemies of the Emperor take whatever help they can get. Maybe he traded them the weapons for a place to hide.’ I nodded in a conciliatory fashion.
‘That sounds reasonable,’ I conceded. It still didn’t sound right to me. I would have thought a mere handful of bolters would hardly be sufficient inducement to provide a facility as lavishly equipped as this, but she was the expert, and if her fuse was getting shorter I didn’t want to be the one to press the detonator.
‘I’m getting movement on the auspex,’ a voice cut in on the vox, and after a moment I recognised it as Pontius’s. It seemed our pilot had been doing more than just putting his feet up while we’d been strolling around Hell’s Edge admiring the scenery. His intonation took on a trace of puzzlement. ‘North-west sector. That’s on the lava side.’
‘Back to the shuttle! Move!’ Amberley’s voice took on the ring of command, no doubt drawing exactly the same conclusion as I had, and, to my inexpressible relief, reacting in exactly the same manner as I would have done (though no doubt from far nobler motives than mere self-preservation[56].) ‘Flicker, get your team aboard now! Pontius, get ready to lift!’
‘Powered up and ready for dust-off,’ the pilot assured her, while Pelton acknowledged the change in our plans in a few terse words. Pausing only to rip the now obvious door off its hinges, Amberley led the way back through the labyrinth of corridors and idle machinery towards the open air at a pace that left me gasping in the warm and foetid air. I wasn’t about to lag behind, though, having more than an inkling of what we would find waiting for us on the surface of this barren spur of rock, and knowing all too well that to be trapped inside the building would mean certain death.
At length, however, we entered the echoing hall by which we’d first entered the complex, and the breach in the wall left by our mysterious predecessors gaped ahead of us, the stench of brimstone getting stronger all the time as we approached it. Without pause or hesitation Amberley swung off to our left, making straight for the wide open doors, the welcome silhouette of our Aquila waiting patiently for us beyond them.
As we left the shelter of the building the tainted air punched me in the chest, gouging its way into my lungs. Amberley sealed her helmet at once, but there was no time to waste tying a rag around my face again.
I glanced around, taking in the scene surrounding us, instincts honed on battlefields throughout the segmentum kicking in and assessing the immediate threat. Pelton’s group had almost made it back to the shuttle, double-timing it as though Horus himself was after them, little puffs of grey dust being kicked up by their hurrying feet, and their weapons at the ready. Simeon was clearly in full combat mode, his movements preternaturally quick, his head snapping around in all directions so violently I half expected it to come clean off his neck and begin rotating like the auspex sensoria of a command Chimera.
