Choose Your Enemies, page 19
‘Inquisitor. We were told to expect you.’ A somewhat nervous-looking young man in a defence force uniform, the aquila (with a slightly dyspeptic expression, clutching something vaguely rodentine in its talons) adorning his helmet marking him out as a captain if I remembered the local rank insignia correctly, raised a hand in greeting, thought better of it, lowered it again, then saluted me with an air of palpable relief at being back on familiar protocol terrain. I returned it, and he looked back at Amberley with the faint air of a puppy hoping for a biscuit. ‘Any assistance we can give you, you only have to ask.’
‘Thank you.’ Amberley inclined her head graciously, while Pelton and Zemelda took up position at her shoulders, apparently alert for any unexpected threat despite the relative safety of our position. ‘Perhaps a summation of your people’s disposition down here?’
‘Morale’s quite good, for the most part,’ the young officer said, before belatedly realising that wasn’t quite what she’d meant. ‘I mean, we’re well established here, with reasonable defensive lines.’ He pulled out a data-slate, and called up a crude two-dimensional map. ‘This is our position, with two other forward posts here and here.’ His confidence was clearly increasing as he began to warm to a subject he was comfortable with. ‘We’ve sent recon units deeper into the hive, but none of them have reported contact with the enemy yet.’
‘Have any of them not reported back at all?’ I asked, since that would be fairly definite confirmation of where the enemy was.
The young officer shook his head. ‘None of them have missed a routine check in,’ he said, looking faintly troubled, although the possibility must have occurred to him by now. ‘We’ve had a couple of anxious moments, though.’
‘Anxious how?’ Amberley asked, an instant before I could.
‘Temporary comms failures,’ the officer said. ‘The vox signals get weaker the deeper our patrols penetrate into the underhive.’ Something I could have told him from personal experience, although I suppose it might have come as an unwelcome novelty to the Ironfound Defence Force, used as they were to operating in the higher levels where there were plenty of vox-relays to boost and channel a signal. Down in the lower depths, the tumbled masses of ’crete, metal and bedrock would attenuate and distort them unpredictably.
Reminded of the fact that we’d soon be out of contact ourselves, I tapped the vox-bead in my ear.
‘Cain to command,’ I said. ‘We’ve arrived at the Ironfound Defence outpost.’ I raised my voice a little, over the growling of our Chimera, which was churning up the ground under its tracks as the driver spun it on the spot[133] preparatory to setting off back the way she’d come. ‘We’ll be moving out shortly.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Kasteen said, her voice still reasonably clear after being bounced through the armoured personnel carrier’s far more powerful vox-system. By the time it got back to the gates, though, it would probably be too far away to pick up the relatively weak signal from my comm-bead. We might still be able to get a message back to the command centre for a short while by using the local defence force network, but judging by what we’d just been told I somehow doubted that. ‘Anything we need to know?’ Which, I suppose, was a little more tactful than Any last messages?’ would have been.
‘Still no contact with the eldar,’ I said.
Even over the deteriorating vox-link, Kasteen’s resigned exhalation sounded loud in my ear. ‘I wish I thought that was a good thing.’
‘You and me both,’ I said, returning my attention to Amberley and the officer in front of us.
‘Right,’ Amberley said decisively. ‘We’re moving out. I think we’ve got all the information we’ll need.’ She nodded at the young man, who looked faintly relieved, not realising she meant ‘all the information we’re likely to get out of this one.’ She glanced at Mott. ‘Any recommendations?’
The savant nodded. ‘I’d recommend retracing our previous line of descent, as that would be the fastest route to the webway portal. We’re thirteen point one seven nine kilometres from it at the moment, but we should intersect with it at the trading post where you shot the Redemptionists who tried to burn Rakel as a witch.’
‘Not so,’ Zemelda said, with a contemptuous sniff, ‘they tried singeing everyone.’
‘She was the only one they thought was a witch,’ Pelton said, in reasonable tones. ‘They only wanted to burn the rest of us because we were with her.’
‘Sounds like a fascinating story,’ I interjected, before anyone could start telling it, particularly Mott. ‘Perhaps Jurgen and I could hear it on the way to the trading post.’
‘If it’s still there,’ Amberley said, shrugging the straps of her rucksack into place. ‘It was pretty deep down. Probably overrun by the eldar days ago.’
‘You’re making this sound more and more fun with every second,’ I said, and Throne help me she actually laughed.
SIXTEEN
After leaving the Ironfound Defence Force post we followed one of the main trade routes for a while, but rapidly became weary of forging against the flow of upward-bound travellers – not to mention periodic firefights with gangers and scavvies protective of their territories, made even more trigger-happy than usual by the influx of downhive refugees. Accordingly, we left the well-travelled paths and the larger settlements they linked at the earliest opportunity, striking off into the smaller tunnels, where we were less likely to encounter anyone.
Which wasn’t the same as not encountering anyone at all, of course, although most of the locals we came across seemed to be giving us a wide berth, betraying their presence only by the scuffling sounds they made as they retreated into the many side passages and long-abandoned chambers surrounding us.
‘Scavvies setting a bushwhack?’ Zemelda asked, the first time this happened, and I shook my head; there was still enough light seeping through from the main tunnels for me to be confident that she’d pick up the gesture, even though we were barely visible to one another as anything more than silhouettes by now.
‘Doubt it,’ I said, though I kept my hands close to my weapons from force of habit. Judging by the pattern of echoes there were only three of them, and they were definitely moving away. ‘There aren’t enough of them to take us all, and they’re in the wrong place to set up a crossfire.’
‘You can really tell that just by listening?’ Pelton shrugged, trying not to sound too impressed. ‘For all I know it could just be rodents out there.’
‘Too loud, and no squeaking,’ I said. The truth was, I couldn’t have told him how I knew even if I could have been bothered; it was just something I’d grown up doing, in a place not too dissimilar to this.
‘Three people, moving away,’ Amberley confirmed, her face illuminated by the glow of the portable auspex she’d produced from a pocket while Pelton and I spoke. ‘No other life signs in the vicinity.’ Which wasn’t entirely true, as there were indeed rodents scurrying around not far from here if my ears and nose were any judge, but the little machine-spirit was only on the lookout for anything human sized or thereabouts.
‘Neat trick,’ Zemelda said, with a glance of approval in my direction, ‘but seeing would zenith.’
Mott nodded. ‘Visual acuity in this environment would speed our progress appreciably,’ he agreed.
‘Luminators, then,’ Amberley said, ‘we’ve got no time to waste. Although I was hoping to hold off using them for a while, to conserve the powercells.’
‘Don’t worry, miss,’ Jurgen said, patting one of his webbing pouches, ‘I brought a few spares.’
‘And we don’t all have to carry one,’ I said. ‘That would save some light for later, in case we need it.’ And possibly my neck, if I hung back towards the rear of the group, as whoever was out in front lighting the way would be the first target of an attack from ambush.
A fear which failed to materialise, however, as we continued on down into the gathering darkness, which began to wrap itself around us like a suffocating cloak, seeming all the denser the moment we kindled the luminators. Mott had been right, we did move a lot faster once we could see where we were putting our feet, but the down side to that was that everything outside the narrow cones of light[134] was now blanketed in impenetrable gloom. Every now and again I skipped through the frequencies of my vox-bead, but as I’d expected I picked up nothing but static, or the occasional planetary defence force transmission, too faint and distorted by distance and intervening obstructions to make out anything beyond a word or two. Frustrating as this was, I found these fragments of contact with the wider world obscurely comforting, a reminder that we weren’t entirely alone down here, and when we eventually stopped for a rest I took my turn to sleep with the faint, indecipherable murmuring still susurrating in my ear.
Only to wake abruptly, with the familiar dream images of my encounter with the daemon Emeli aboard the Adumbrian mining barge fading from my conscious mind, though not nearly fast enough to suit me, and an urgent, clearer voice echoing across the vox-channel: ‘Contact! Contact! Contact! Xenos moving uphive, zone zero nine zero, plural red alpha. Engaging.’
The reply was too faint to make out, although I found myself hoping the defence force vox-operator was having better luck in that regard than I was;[135] it would have been ironic, to say the least, if one of the scouting parties had finally found the enemy and no one further up the command chain was able to make use of the information.
A familiar odour washed over me, and I sat up, grabbing my weapons. Jurgen had stowed his lasgun in favour of the melta, which never presaged anything good.
‘Gunfire,’ he said, gesturing with a grubby thumb in the direction of a tunnel mouth leading off at an angle from the direction of our march so far, which Mott had assured us was the most direct and efficient route towards where we needed to be. Sure enough, the savant was shaking his head.
‘If we take that direction, we’ll add a minimum of twelve and a maximum of thirty-seven hours to the time taken to reach our objective,’ he said, ‘depending on the number and nature of obstructions and other delays we encounter.’
‘Would that include an army of eldar?’ I asked, rhetorically, only to regret the flippant remark at once as Mott shook his head.
‘Not an army,’ he said, ‘as our chances of surviving such an encounter are too low to constitute a meaningful numerical value. A patrol or scouting party small enough to overcome or evade, however, would account for the higher end of the range of probable delays.’
‘Good enough for me,’ I said. I pointed to the tunnel mouth we’d originally been intending to take. ‘Let’s stick to the plan.’ Especially as blundering into the middle of a firefight wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.
‘Yes, we should.’ Amberley glanced thoughtfully at the side passage through which the faint echo of combat was still permeating, and my heart skipped a momentary beat, anticipating a sudden change of mind. ‘Might be useful to see how far they’ve got, but…’
‘The local troops can take care of that,’ Pelton said, and I nodded, as though I’d been considering going to take a look myself.
‘They’ve already called it in,’ I said, skipping over any lingering doubts I might have had about whether their message had actually been received. ‘They’ve probably got reinforcements on the way by now.’ Or they were retreating as fast as they could manage to disengage.
‘So let’s go and happen to some pointy-ears,’ Zemelda said, with what seemed to me to be an unhealthy amount of enthusiasm.
‘So long as it’s not the other way round,’ Pelton replied dryly, which pretty much summed up my own feelings on the matter.
The sounds of distant combat had long faded away, along with the voices of the planetary defence force in my comm-bead, when Zemelda held up a cautioning hand, slowing and sweeping the beam of her luminator across the floor of the tunnel ahead. Something dark and indeterminate was lying there.
‘Step easy,’ she said. ‘Something’s not rising over there.’
‘Looks like a body,’ Jurgen supplemented, before adding ‘a dead one,’ in case we hadn’t got the point.
‘Dead of what?’ Amberley asked, while we closed in on one another in sudden mutual apprehension, drawing our weapons as we did so.[136]
‘Hard to tell,’ Zemelda said, circling the corpse cautiously, keeping it centred in the beam of her luminator as though offering it for sale, or expecting it to get up and perform a comic monologue. She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s been here a while. No shuriken or las-bolt wounds that I can see.’
‘Looks like a scavvy,’ I said, feeling I ought to contribute and remind everyone that I was the expert on underhives around here. ‘And a long way up hive from where you’d expect him to be.’
‘Her,’ Zemelda said, moving around to the front of the corpse, then shying in instinctive revulsion which, coming from an Inquisition operative, was hardly comforting. ‘Eeew. Gorge raising.’ She kicked the body, rolling it over, and I must confess to flinching momentarily myself. A bloodied skull was leering at me, tattered shreds of flesh still clinging to parts of the bone, one eye socket clogged with congealed blood. I took a firmer grip on my weapons, flicking the laspistol’s safety off, and resting my thumb on the activation stud of my chainsword.
‘Interesting.’ Amberley bent down for a closer look. ‘The scalp’s still intact. And most of the neck.’
I felt the familiar tingling in the palms of my hands, which usually means my subconscious is trying to remind me of something I didn’t know I knew, or some threat my conscious mind hasn’t recognised yet is lurking in ambush.
‘Whatever killed her, it moved fast,’ Pelton said, picking up something just outside the cone of light Zemelda was splashing about, and Mott obligingly swung his own luminator towards the former arbitrator, peering with interest at the object in his hand. ‘She didn’t even have time to get off a shot.’ He held out a crude autopistol, apparently pieced together from the remaining working parts of several others.
‘Lacerations on the hands, too,’ Amberley said. ‘Mainly on the palms. Defensive wounds?’
‘Highly unlikely,’ Mott said. ‘Typically, those would be on the backs of the hands, or the forearms, if she’d been attempting to ward off a blow.’
‘Grasping something, then,’ Amberley said. ‘Trying to pull off whatever was attached to her face, perhaps.’
‘Looks like ’nids if you ask me,’ Jurgen said.
I nodded slowly, fighting the impulse to dart nervous glances into the darker recesses surrounding us in search of a lurking lictor. The wounds did indeed look like the kind of damage inflicted by a glancing hit from a tyranid fleshborer, but if it had been one of those, our boots would have been crunching on the carapaces of the now deceased ammunition[137] from the moment we first approached the corpse. ‘Great,’ I said, trying to hide my apprehension behind a flimsy screen of laboured sarcasm, ‘rampaging eldar and a Chaos cult aren’t nearly enough to be going on with. A side order of tyranids is just what we need to round things off.’
To my relief, however, Amberley was shaking her head in manifest scepticsm. ‘Can’t see it,’ she said. ‘If a hive ship was anywhere in-system the shadow in the warp ahead of it would have given every astropath on Ironfound a nose-bleed by now.’
‘That doesn’t rule out a genestealer cult,’ Pelton said, just as I was starting to feel a bit better.
Amberley shook her head again. ‘If there’s one of those anywhere on Ironfound it’ll be concentrating on seeing off the eldar. After generations of getting ready to feed this world to the tyranids they wouldn’t want to start all over again with an entirely new species.’
‘There’s another one over here,’ Jurgen called, having wandered a little way further down the passage, away from the lights, to let his eyes adjust. With his back to the luminators his night vision would work a little more efficiently, hopefully allowing him to see any threats approaching from deeper in the underhive in time to react to it. ‘Man this time.’
‘Killed the same way?’ I asked, moving to join him; like my aide, I preferred to give my senses as much time as possible to detect trouble coming.
‘Think so,’ Jurgen said. ‘Most of his face is missing too.’
Which was pretty conclusive if you asked me. I circled round the corpse, a little warily, looking for anything which might provide a clue as to what had done this. Now my eyes were adjusting to the lower light levels we were standing in, I could make out a couple of other indistinct shapes in the darkness ahead, and I didn’t need the tingling of my palms to apprehend what they might be. I peered into the gloom, hoping my guess was wrong, but uncomfortably certain that it wasn’t. Preoccupied, I failed to notice where I was putting my own feet until I stumbled, my right boot stubbing against something hard and faintly yielding.
‘What’s that?’ Amberley asked, her attention attracted by my muttered profanity, and Zemelda obligingly redirected her luminator, momentarily dazzling me and frakking up my almost-restored night vision in the process.
‘Looks like a bag,’ Jurgen said, taking the question as literally as ever, and poking it with the barrel of his melta as he spoke – which I suppose was one way of finding out whether the contents were toxic or explosive, though not one I’d have chosen to use myself. ‘Seems to have pebbles in.’
‘Really.’ Amberley seemed surprisingly interested in the prospect. She gestured to Mott. ‘Could they be what I think they are?’
‘That would depend on what you’re thinking,’ Mott said, predictably enough, ‘but given the similarity of these garments to the ones worn by the scavvies we encountered at the site of the webway portal, there’s an eighty-seven per cent probability that these are indeed spirit stones.’ Which meant nothing to me, of course.
‘Spirit stones?’ I asked. I knew that the eldar generally carried a jewel of some kind as a good luck charm,[138] and would make strenuous efforts to recover those of their fallen comrades, but the strength of their attachment to their trinklets meant that I’d never seen one up close.
