Vainglorious, page 17
‘This way,’ I said, raising my voice a little over the resultant clangour, and hoping I was right. I could feel the ever-present grit crunching beneath my boot soles, but the din around us effectively drowned such a minor noise. Indeed, I’d almost collided with the tech-priest apparently supervising the process before I even noticed he was there, standing between us and a patch of deeper shadow all my instincts for the subterranean were telling me was most likely a cleft in the rock through which we might make an unobtrusive exit.
Suddenly becoming aware of our proximity, the fellow glanced up from the data-slate he’d been perusing and emitted a chirrup of binharic, although whether that had been intended as a greeting, a warning or an irritated outburst I had no idea. Not responding at all would only arouse his suspicions, though, if our tatterdemalion appearance hadn’t already done so, so I inclined my head in a creditable imitation of Vorspung.
‘Malfunction,’ I said, trying to keep my voice as uninflected as possible. ‘Verbal only.’
‘Commiseration,’ the tech-priest said, in what sounded to me like a tone of complete indifference. ‘Current production schedule now ready for inload.’ His attention returned to the slate screen. ‘Recommend corrective measures as soon as possible.’
‘As would be most efficient,’ I said, hoping that sounded cogboyish enough, and exerting a considerable amount of willpower not to pick up my pace as we moved away.
A rhythmic crashing began behind us as we reached the tunnel mouth, the rolling stock being returned, piece by piece, to the rails. Inevitably, as we entered the natural choke point we began to encounter more of the workforce, but our luck and disguises seemed to hold; once again the people we passed seemed too engrossed in their own affairs to pay us sufficient attention to penetrate our imposture, something the decreasing light levels no doubt helped with immeasurably.
Finding a secluded fissure some distance from the nearest luminator, I paused for a moment or two and fished my data-slate out of my pocket, finding, to my relief, that it had come to no greater harm during our loud and uncomfortable journey than acquiring a thin patination of the ubiquitous dust. (Which both of us lost no time in clearing the worst of from our mouths and throats with a quick swallow of water, now that the opportunity presented itself.) A brief perusal of the map was enough to allow me to locate our current whereabouts with a reasonable degree of certainty, and I nodded in quiet satisfaction.
‘We’re here,’ I told Jurgen, rather unwisely, as he leaned in to look, thereby giving me the full benefit of his halitosis. ‘One of the lower galleries.’ Which, according to Tezler, had been of such interest to Clode.
My aide nodded. ‘Practically at the bottom,’ he agreed, glancing round at our surroundings. ‘And it doesn’t look all that dangerous.’ Which was something of a relative term, under the circumstances, but an assessment I was inclined to agree with. There was certainly no sign of any of the hazards Tezler had alluded to, and for a born-and-bred underhiver like me, they would have stuck out like an ecclesiarch in a bordello.[110]
‘Well, we’re not quite there yet,’ I said, an entire lifetime of unpleasant experience continuing to insist that the longer something bad didn’t happen, the worse it would be when it did. Just quite how bad I still had no inkling, of course, which was probably just as well; if I had I would have run screaming for the surface at once, or just dug a hole with my fingernails to hide in until the local sun went nova and dealt with the problem on my behalf.[111] As it was, I simply shrugged, and memorised the shortest route to the lowest point in the mine, a handful of levels below where we were standing. ‘Should only take us about half an hour, though, Throne willing.’
Which, a quick glance at my chronograph assured me, ought to give us an hour or two to nose around down there before heading back to the upper levels with plenty of time to spare before our prearranged tryst with Tezler. Hitching a ride on a surface-bound train would be a little more difficult with the ore wagons full, but we’d got away with it before, so I saw no reason why we shouldn’t simply return the way we’d come – although leaving enough time to make the tedious trek on foot if we had to was only prudent.
To my relief, once we got away from the transport nexus the galleries we traversed were almost empty, and we encountered fewer and fewer workers the deeper we descended. The luminators we passed were spread out at ever-increasing intervals, which no doubt aided our rapidly degrading disguises on the rare occasions we still had to rely on them; if anything I welcomed the gradually encroaching darkness, not only for the concealment it afforded, but for the sense of familiarity and security it represented.
‘There doesn’t seem to be a lot down here,’ Jurgen opined, after almost an hour of fruitless wandering, and I nodded, on the verge of giving up. Whatever Clode had been hoping to find was conspicuous by its absence, and I was beginning to doubt that it had ever existed at all.
‘There doesn’t,’ I conceded. Perhaps it had only been coincidence that the mutinous skitarii had all served here after all. Perhaps Tezler had been telling the truth about the reasons for the fall in output causing the bottleneck in production I’d been sent here to look into, although there seemed to have been more than enough raw materials being extracted judging by the activity we’d seen. Perhaps the best thing I could do would be to sign off on the collection of bland platitudes I’d been compiling, get off this Throne-forsaken rock at the earliest opportunity, and palm the whole thing off on Amberley.[112] That’s what the Inquisition were supposed to be for, after all, looking into things that threatened the Imperium from the shadows.
The only trouble with that idea was the time it would take. All my paranoid instincts were insisting that something was seriously wrong on Eucopia, even if exactly what that was hadn’t quite come into focus yet, and by the time I’d got a message to Amberley and she or one of her colleagues had made the voyage from wherever they were, everything could have gone to the warp.[113]
Besides, if I’m honest, the idea that we could have gone to all that trouble for nothing rankled more than a little, making me determined to find something to justify our long and uncomfortable journey into the depths. I cast around hopefully, finding a bit more of nothing at all to attract my attention, yet still reluctant to leave without something to show for it.
‘Mind out, sir,’ Jurgen counselled, stepping to one side of the tunnel to allow a servitor to plod past us, pushing a barrow. Whatever it contained was emitting a faint greenish glow, which seeped out from beneath a shrouding cover, throwing diffuse shadows ahead of it. I followed my aide’s lead, having no desire to be trampled by the single-minded construct, feeling a faint shudder of apprehension as it passed, although I couldn’t have told you why at the time. All I knew was that it reminded me of something unwholesome, an association my forebrain was reluctant to dredge up from the depths of my memory.
‘That’s strange,’ I said, turning my head to follow it, and feeling an odd sense of relief as that eldritch glow disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. ‘This is supposed to be a dead end.’ According to the plan in my data-slate, the gallery we were in petered out a few hundred metres further on; we’d only entered it to avoid a party of miners heading for the main seam, and lingered a few moments to take the opportunity for a quick drink and a ration bar away from any more chance encounters.
‘So where did the servitor come from?’ Jurgen asked, as though I might actually know the answer.
I shrugged. ‘Only one way to find out,’ I said, leading the way deeper into the darkness.
NINETEEN
Had I realised what was waiting for us at the end of that tunnel, of course, I would simply have turned and run as fast as I could in the other direction, but as it was, I just led the way deeper into the enshrouding gloom. After a few more moments had elapsed I began to feel a growing sense of unease, although I couldn’t put my finger on why; only as we passed a side passage that shouldn’t have been there did I finally realise what my subconscious was trying to tell me. Rather than the dead end I had expected, the gallery continued for some distance ahead, as broad and high as ever, if the echoes around us were any indication. When I reached out to run my fingers along the wall it felt almost smooth, broken only by the faint striations left by the tunnelling process.
Either the extension was recent, or the map I’d been provided with was inaccurate; most likely the latter, given that the passageway we followed was so long, and intersected by more side galleries. I felt my hands drifting to my weapons, but resisted the impulse to draw them. I could discern no immediate threat, but the potential of one hung in the air all around us.
‘Clode was right,’ I confided to Jurgen, in a voice barely audible even to me. ‘They’ve definitely got something hidden away down here.’
‘Not well enough,’ my aide agreed, with a dismissive expectoration into the enshrouding darkness, although I must own to feeling a great deal less confident than he evidently did. All we’d discovered so far were some tunnels which weren’t supposed to be there, and though that was undeniably suspicious, especially given the average tech-priest’s horror at the very idea of falsifying data, that was hardly grounds for calling in the Reclaimers or Norgard’s skitarii to raid the place. Not that I liked the idea of relying on the skitarii very much in any case – something here had apparently caused several of their fellows to turn traitor, and there was no guarantee that any sent in to cleanse the shrine wouldn’t be equally vulnerable to whatever that was.
Such was my confusion, not to mention steadily increasing apprehension, that when I finally heard a faint echo of sound in the distance, my first reaction was one of relief. At last, it seemed, I was about to get some answers. Not that I expected to like any of them, and, I’m bound to say, that was an expectation in which I was to be far from disappointed.
At first the noise was too tenuous to discern anything comprehensible, but as it increased in volume I was able to make out the unmistakable sounds of distant activity – quite a lot of it, in fact. Which was something of a two-edged sword: it masked the sound of our footfalls nicely, but it meant that wherever we were going would be swarming with people, and I was under no illusion that our much-abused guisings could withstand much further scrutiny.
‘Lights,’ Jurgen said, a moment after I’d noted the slight diminution of the darkness surrounding us, and I nodded, becoming aware that the gesture would be visible to him by now. The glow in the distance was still very faint, but I could make out the walls of the passageway, and the mouth of one of the intersecting tunnels a score or so metres ahead of us. Up until this point I’d only been aware of their locations because of the way the echoes of our footfalls had changed as we’d passed them, but this one had become visible, and I couldn’t resist turning my head to glance down it as we drew level. An impulse I regretted instantly.
‘That doesn’t look good,’ Jurgen said, with commendable understatement, and I drew a couple of deep breaths before replying, determined to seem as calm about this unexpected development as he did – no mean feat under the circumstances, as I was feeling uncannily like I’d just been punched in the stomach by an ork. (Not an experience I’d recommend, on the whole.)
‘Not if it’s what it looks like,’ I agreed, recalling the eldritch glow of whatever the servitor we’d passed had been transporting, and trying not to jump to the obvious conclusion. If the faint greenish refulgence in the depths of the side gallery was what I thought it was, and I’d seen enough of it on Simia Orichalcae to have little doubt, then pretty much anywhere in the galaxy would be safer than here, with the Eye of Terror a marginally possible exception.
‘It looks like that necron tomb we found once,’ Jurgen said, putting my worst fears into words with his usual lack of subtlety. Then his brow furrowed, dislodging some of the coarser pieces of grit which had been adhering to it. ‘But they couldn’t have found one here, could they?’
‘Who knows?’ I said. The one thing I was certain of, despite all my instincts telling me to run the other way as fast as possible, was that we had to find out for sure. Because if it really was what we both feared, the consequences would be catastrophic. I’d barely escaped with my life from necron tombs before, and was under no illusion about the severity of the threat they posed. The mere fact that we were still alive, instead of being scoured from the face of Eucopia along with every other living thing, could only mean that its inhabitants were still dormant. A state of affairs unlikely to last for long.
Palms tingling, my breath catching uncomfortably in my throat, I edged into the side passage, finding it rather more constricted than the one we’d just left. There was, however, just enough room for us to proceed side by side, which was something of a comfort; Jurgen had readied his melta by now, accompanied by a loud ripping sound as the unwieldy weapon finally did for the last vestiges of his disguise, and the knowledge that he could unleash a ravening blast of thermal energy powerful enough to check even a necron at a moment’s notice was distinctly heartening. In fact I lost no time in following his example, discarding the remains of my own much-abused bedsheet with a distinct sense of relief, clearing the way to draw my weapons in a heartbeat if I had to. Come to think of it, why wait? My laspistol was in my hand before the thought was even completed, the familiar weight of it obscurely reassuring, despite the intellectual knowledge that if we actually found what I most feared down here, it would be about as much use against them as throwing rocks. (Which would at least be in plentiful supply, if the worst came to the worst.)
My chainsword I decided against drawing, preferring to leave my other hand free; the eerie glow ahead of us was still faint enough to make relying on it entirely to orientate ourselves problematic at best, and touching the wall periodically could still tell me a lot about the tunnel we were in. Like the way it had abruptly become less smooth under my fingertips, the fissures and protrusions I could now feel an eloquent testimony that this section had been dug in greater haste – as if the orderly extraction of minerals had suddenly been overtaken by another, more urgent purpose. Which, knowing how methodical tech-priests normally were,[114] could only have had one explanation. The sudden discovery of archeotech, or some equally tempting prize. The cogboys on Simia Orichalcae had been practically beside themselves at the prospect of looting the necron tomb we’d stumbled across there, though much good it had done them as soon as its denizens had started to revive, and I could well believe Tezler would have diverted every resource available to them to follow up even the most tenuous of hints at such a discovery here.
‘It’s getting brighter,’ Jurgen said, as if that were a good thing, although I suppose from his perspective it was; lacking my tunnel rat’s instincts, he had only his eyes to go on, and the more he could see, the more he could shoot.
‘It is,’ I agreed, with rather less enthusiasm, reflecting that the same thing would also be true for any necrons wandering around down here looking for something to kill.[115] I reached out to touch the wall again, and for a moment felt the breath freeze in my chest. In the handful of paces since the last time I’d done so, the roughly hewn surface had become as smooth as glass. My darkest suspicions immediately became cold, hard certainty, confirmed a moment later as my fingertips found a small groove in the slick, chill surface. Despite the darkness, I knew immediately what it was: an incised inscription, in the curiously rounded sigils I’d seen before on Interitus Prime and Simia Orichalcae.
‘Commissar?’ Jurgen must have noticed my hesitation, a faint trace of concern appearing in his voice. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Far from it,’ I said, feeling I might as well get all the bad news out of the way in one go. ‘There are markings here. Definitely necron.’
‘So it is a tomb, then,’ Jurgen said, with his usual phlegmatic acceptance of the worst the galaxy had to throw at us. ‘Do you think we should turn back?’
‘I’d like nothing better,’ I assured him truthfully, ‘but that’s not really an option, is it?’ Which may strike you as uncharacteristically bold of me if you’ve read much of my reminiscences, but in truth it was the only pragmatic course of action. As I’ve often observed, quite literally on the battlefield, it’s what you don’t know that can get you killed. Simply knowing that there was a necron tomb down here would have been enough to get me on the vox to Morie and Norgard in a heartbeat if there was even the remotest possibility of a message getting through, but my personal comm-bead had far too short a range to reach either, even without the megatons of intervening rock. If we were going to get out of here in one piece, I had to know just how bad a situation we were in. Just turning round and running for it wouldn’t do us a whole lot of good if all that got me was shot in the back by a gauss flayer. ‘We have to know if they’re still dormant.’
My aide nodded, a faint blur of movement in the greenish glow, which, Emperor help me, was growing brighter with every step we took towards it. ‘If they are, they won’t be for long,’ he opined gloomily. ‘Not with the cogboys swarming through the place, nicking everything that isn’t nailed down.’
‘You’re right there,’ I agreed, ignoring the irony as usual. The tunnel seemed to be coming to an end at last, and as the illumination grew to useful levels, I found my most pessimistic anticipations undeniably confirmed; it was indeed constructed of the eldritch black stone I’d seen before in necron tombs, into which light itself seemed to vanish like water into desert sand, the curious curve and stick sigils adorning it appearing simply as smears of even greater darkness. The sight of them stirred the hairs on the back of my neck, and I fought down the rising tide of hideous memories they recalled. If I was to survive this, I would need all my wits about me.
