Choose Your Enemies, page 20
Amberley nodded, as Mott picked up the bag. It seemed to fluoresce faintly in response, although I couldn’t be sure at first whether it really was glowing, or whether I was merely seeing the after-images of Zemelda’s luminator. Then he moved a layer of padding aside, and I was left in no doubt. The collection of fist-sized stones within really were giving off a soft refulgence, a breathtaking display which seemed oddly compelling, holding my attention until Mott closed the bag again.
‘Every eldar carries one,’ she said, although any Guardsman who’d ever faced the pointy-ears could have told me that. Her next statement came as a bit of a surprise, though. ‘Something to do with their funeral rites. No one’s sure why, but they seem to believe it protects their souls from Slaanesh.’
‘No wonder they trashed the temple on Drechia,’ I said. Come to that, it probably explained why the farseer was willing to offer the truce which had seemed so baffling at the time. Given the choice between slaughtering a few more humans and protecting the souls of his people, he could hardly have done otherwise.
‘That probably had something to do with it,’ Amberley agreed, while Mott redistributed the contents of his backpack to make room for the bundle of stones.
‘Two more dead ones,’ Pelton called, from a few dozen metres further down the tunnel. ‘Flesh eaten away on the front of the heads, no obvious cause of death.’ He paused. ‘Other than that, of course.’
‘Any more spirit stones?’ Amberley asked, and Pelton shook his head.
‘No. I’ve already checked.’ Of course he had, careful searches of a crime scene were second nature to him.
‘So,’ I said, glancing down at the corpse I was standing beside, ‘they were coming uphive from down the tunnel there. Something attacked them.’ I called across to Pelton. ‘Any weapons near those bodies?’
‘Both of them,’ he confirmed, ‘much good it seems to have done them.’
‘Right.’ A picture was beginning to emerge which I really didn’t like the look of. ‘They were ambushed. The two back there tried to hold off whatever it was,’ because as sure as the Emperor’s immortality it hadn’t been a who, ‘while these two made a run for it with the loot. Getting all of a hundred metres.’
‘Before whatever it was caught up with them,’ Amberley finished, and I nodded.
‘It definitely wasn’t the eldar, because they’d have taken the stones.’ I glanced at Jurgen. ‘And whatever it looks like it can’t have been ’nids, because it doesn’t make sense for them to be here in the first place. Mutants or gangers would have looted the bodies, and pretty much anything else I can think of liable to be down here would have eaten the whole corpse, not just the flesh on the heads.’ I shuddered at a very uncomfortable thought I wish I hadn’t had. ‘Which leaves the cultists.’
‘Nothing human did that,’ Zemelda said decisively.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But maybe they summoned something. Like that daemon on Drechia.’
‘I wish you hadn’t said that,’ Amberley said, echoing my own thoughts. ‘Because if there is a daemon on the loose down here, we’re walking right towards it.’ She took an uneasy glance down the tunnel ahead of us.
‘Maybe we should have brought Vekkman along,’ I said, regretting it the instant I saw the expression on Amberley’s face.
‘And maybe we shouldn’t,’ she said, in a tone I recognised as indicating that the subject was now definitively closed. She turned to Mott. ‘Got the stones packed?’
The savant nodded, and reshouldered his rucksack. ‘As safely as can be managed under the circumstances.’
‘Good.’ Amberley nodded decisively, and turned back to me. ‘Then let’s go and look for this daemon of yours.’
SEVENTEEN
As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, I was hardly keen to take point, but I found myself doing so anyway, half a pace behind my aide’s left shoulder, breathing as shallowly as possible through my mouth, my eyes and ears straining to pierce the gloom surrounding us. (Given the melta’s destructive capability there was no way I was going to get in front of it while Jurgen had the safety off, quite aside from the possibility of blocking his line of fire at a crucial moment.) Zemelda had extinguished her luminator, stowing it in favour of drawing her laspistol, which showed a keen grasp of priorities so far as I could see, leaving Mott’s the only source of light anywhere in our vicinity. By staying a couple of dozen metres ahead of the others, and keeping our backs to it, Jurgen and I were able to make out enough of our surroundings not to stumble too often on the detritus littering the ground.
As so often in this kind of environment, however, I found myself relying on my ears more than my eyes, starting at every creak and rattle of dislodged rubble, mentally sifting the echoes for any warning of a sudden attack. The first couple of scavvies we’d found had presumably been aware of what had killed their companions, and the woman had even had a weapon in her hand judging by the position it had fallen in, but whatever had killed them had still been too fast for her to react to in time. Not a thought I was comfortable with, under the circumstances.
‘Still nothing on the auspex,’ Amberley called, which she presumably intended to be reassuring, but which most definitely wasn’t. If it couldn’t even detect the vermin infesting the place, then I didn’t have an awful lot of confidence in its ability to pick up the abnatural.
And at that thought, my palms started to tingle again. The skittering and rustling in the shadows which I associated with the rodents I’d normally expect to hear in a place like this was unusually muted, and had been for some time. In fact, now I came to think about it, I hadn’t heard any squeaking for several minutes.
‘Something’s definitely wrong,’ I said, holding up my hand to halt our advance, then my boot crunched against something yielding. I froze, images of tyranid spores flooding my brain, despite being well aware that such a thing down here was quite impossible.
Jurgen glanced down. ‘Bones,’ he said, his eyes already moving on to the floor ahead of us. ‘Hundreds of ’em.’
He was right. The stretch of tunnel in front of where we were standing was already growing brighter as Zemelda and the others approached, revealing a veritable carpet of rodentine corpses. What was left of them, anyway, which was little more than skeletons, even the hide and hair only present in shreds and patches – and for someone as familiar as I was with the unpalatability[139] and impenetrability of underhive ratskin, that was a distinctly worrying prospect. Anything capable of gnawing through that – let alone consuming it – wasn’t something to take lightly.
‘Stay back,’ I said, gesturing to the others – not that I wouldn’t have welcomed a few more bodies between me and whatever had killed the rats, but it seemed to me that our best chance of survival was being able to see or hear it coming. To my vague surprise they complied at once, without argument, freezing in place and bringing their weapons to bear down the tunnel. Which, as it turned out, was just as well.
Now the cacophony of scuffling boot soles, rustling garments and heavy breathing was stilled, I was able to contemplate the tunnel ahead of us without distraction. It had evidently been an outflow of some kind millennia before, and probably still was on occasion judging by the erosion of the rockcrete and the lingering smell. But the surface underfoot was quite dry, the only damp to be seen condensing on the partially visible reinforcing bars protruding from the roof where sections of it had fallen away to form mounds of debris on the floor, through which we’d been picking our way for some time. Pipes or conduits had apparently run along the roof of the channel too, mostly now fallen, leaving the stubs of their supporting brackets, but the pipes themselves had long since been spirited away by enterprising hivesteaders; the few exceptions left clinging on grimly to the intact parts of the ceiling were no doubt too inaccessible to bother with. They were thick with the dust of centuries, their outlines blurred, as though wrapped in shreds of tattered cloth. As my eyes continued to adjust, it seemed as if that was actually the case – the last remnants of old insulating material perhaps, rustling faintly as they stirred in the air currents.
Then, with sudden sickening clarity, I realised what I was looking at. The faint whisper of circulating air against my face wasn’t nearly strong enough to move anything as much as that.
‘Back the way we came,’ I said, urgently. ‘Slowly.’
Matching the deed to the word, I began to follow my own advice, Jurgen keeping the melta trained down the tunnel as he retreated after me. Anyone else might have hesitated, or asked what the hell I was on about, but we’d been through so much together that he simply followed my lead without hesitation or question.
‘What is it?’ Amberley asked, still staring at the auspex, as though that was going to be of any use.
‘Face-eaters,’ I said. The Catachan predators had, like far too many unpleasant species around the galaxy, hitched a lift off their home world millennia before, nestled among cargo pods or deliberately relocated by idiots who thought they could contain them, finding a veritable home from home on a number of other death worlds or, in this case, the lower levels of the underhive.[140] The only time I’d ever seen one in the flesh before was in the jungles of Mychtarsh, when it decided to snack on an ork lurking in ambush ahead of us, and the ensuing firefight with the greenskins had left me little time to study the local wildlife.
For a moment, I thought we might actually make it, sneaking away before the ghastly things became aware of our presence, but of course we had no such luck. The nearest must have detected our body heat,[141] as without warning it suddenly sprang at Jurgen’s head. As so often my reflexes took over and I struck at it with the chainsword before I even knew what I was doing, cleaving it neatly in two. It looked like a large, ravenous towel, studded on the underside with far too many teeth, claws and diseased-looking nodules oozing acidic digestive juices. The back of it was almost as bad, bristling with spines, which probably explained the condition of the hands of the first corpse we’d discovered.
As the bisected sheet of viscid flesh splattered on the tunnel floor, an ominous rustling began to pervade the roost. ‘Run!’ I bellowed, suiting the action to the word and turning to let fly a flurry of las-bolts from the pistol in my hand as I broke into a sprint. I caught a couple as they sprang,[142] punching holes through their middles, and they dropped spasming to the pitted rockcrete. I’d hoped the others would have stopped to take advantage of the free meal, but apparently they had no appetite for cannibalism, carrion or both, launching themselves towards us in a wave of skittering horror instead.
Everyone opened up with whatever weapons they had in their hands, smacking down the vanguard, but there were plenty more where they’d come from. I took up a guard position with the chainsword, protecting my face, skewering another of the hideous things as it sprang at my head. I turned to flick the macerated remains from the whirling blade, avoiding one which passed through the space I’d just vacated more by luck than judgement as a second, possibly its mate, followed the first. The abominable creature just missed my head and smacked into the tunnel floor, where it lay wriggling, gathering itself for another leap. Before it got the chance I stamped down, feeling something squish, crunch and squirm under my boot sole. Only then did I remember the spines on its back, but fortunately they proved no match for the cured nauga hide of my Guard-issue combat boots, bending and snapping off as I kicked out at the vile abomination.
‘There are too many of them,’ Amberley said, matter-of-factly – and, in my opinion, far from helpfully. The others were still up and fighting, although not for much longer, probably. Pelton was blowing one after another to offal with his bolt pistol, as calmly as if they were nothing more lethal than targets in a shooting gallery, but each one he despatched was incrementally closer than the last, and the Emperor alone knew how many more shots he had left; the moment he ran dry, one of the hideous things would be on him before he had a chance to reload. Zemelda had one clinging to the arm she’d raised to protect her face, flailing wildly as she tried to keep it at a distance, bludgeoning at it with the butt of her laspistol – from which I inferred she’d already burned through the power pack[143] – while Mott ran to help her, the razor-edged glint of a combat knife in his hand. Me, I’d have dropped the luminator and gone for the laspistol still holstered below his shoulder, but I suppose he was worried about the possibility of hitting his fellow acolyte by mistake (the odds of which he’d no doubt calculated to the trillionth decimal place).
‘Hang on, sir,’ Jurgen said, his voice as conversational as if we were out for an evening constitutional, casually batting one of the predators aside with the barrel of his melta as he spoke. It smacked into the tunnel wall and clung there for a moment, before Amberley reduced it to offal with a pistol bolt. ‘I’ve got this.’
Forewarned, I closed my eyes just in time, seeing the flash of the melta’s activation punch through my eyelids, and blinked my vision clear of the dancing after-images. ‘That’ll slow ‘em down.’
And indeed it seemed to have done, tearing a ragged, smoking hole through the heart of the roost, from which patches of greasy, foul-smelling smoke rose in several places.
‘Indeed it has,’ I said, potting a somewhat singed specimen as it attempted to spring at me in a rather lopsided fashion. The rush towards us had subsided, the few surviving face-eaters now clinging to crevices in the walls and roof, rather than bounding in our direction. The odour of charred offal was almost stifling, thin curls of greasy smoke rising from unpleasant-looking patches of seared flesh littering the tunnel floor, and I fought down the gag reflex with a moment’s effort.
‘How’s Zemelda?’ I asked. Not that I was particularly bothered, of course, but it was the sort of thing I was supposed to say in the interests of morale.
‘I’ve felt better,’ the young woman said through gritted teeth, her face pale from delayed shock. Mott was supporting the arm he’d cut the face-eater away from – now a mangled mess of blood and flesh, with rather too much of the bone beneath visible for my liking.[144] ‘Just need to get this patched up, and we can move on.’
‘Not this way,’ I said, peering into the darkness ahead of us. The face-eaters had been driven back by our weapons, particularly the ravening power of the melta, but if my ears were to be trusted there were plenty more lurking further down the tunnel, the stirring and rustling growing in intensity as the whole damned roost became aware that there was prey in the vicinity. ‘There’s plenty more where that lot came from.’
‘We can take them,’ Zemelda said, wincing a little as Jurgen started working on her arm with the contents of the medicae kit he’d produced from somewhere among his collection of pouches.
But to my relief, Amberley was shaking her head. ‘We got lucky,’ she said. She turned away, back in the direction we’d come. ‘We’ll need to go round them. Take the other tunnel, and leave the face-eaters as a surprise for the eldar.’
‘The tunnel leading to the main line of their advance?’ I asked, trying to sound casual, and tapping the vox-bead in my ear as I spoke. ‘Where the defence force got into a firefight with them?’ There was still some vox traffic on the defence force frequencies, but as before it was too faint and distorted for me to gain any useful information by listening to it.
Amberley nodded. ‘That’s the one,’ she said cheerfully, and began leading the way back towards a different mortal danger to the one we’d just escaped.
EIGHTEEN
If you’ve read much of these ramblings of mine, you’ll no doubt appreciate that I found the idea of heading straight for the main concentration of the enemy far from appealing, but I knew from long experience that there was no arguing with Amberley once her mind was made up. So I made the best of it, hanging back a little with a show of concern for Zemelda, who by now was looking a little more chipper thanks to Jurgen’s ministrations, and understandably reluctant to remain too close to her benefactor. Now it seemed we weren’t stalking or being stalked by a daemon after all I was a little more sanguine myself about being further away from my aide, and was quite happy to let him lead the party alongside Amberley, his melta, as always, at the ready.
‘Any slang in the ear?’ Zemelda asked, and I nodded, mentally translating her idiosyncratic Gothic into an enquiry as to whether I was picking up any more transmissions from the Ironfound Defence Force.
‘Coming through more clearly,’ I said, with a mingled sense of relief and trepidation. On the one hand, it was distinctly comforting to know that we were getting closer to allies with guns, who’d pitch in to help us if we got into trouble; but on the other, most of the units I was listening to were already engaging the enemy, or getting ready to do so, which meant that we were just as likely to run into the eldar instead. I raised my voice a little, to get Amberley’s attention. ‘The enemy seem to be advancing up every tunnel the defence force are covering.’
‘Then we’ll just have to find another way down,’ Amberley said, as I’d expected she would but hoped she wouldn’t. By this time the webway portal would be positively gushing eldar, and however desirable cutting it off would be, getting close enough to try would be tantamount to suicide.
‘That won’t be easy,’ I said, trying to sound ruefully determined, rather than like someone trying to find a way out of the job entirely. ‘They’ll be swarming through every passageway they can fit down by now.’
‘Then we’ll look for a route only a few of them are using,’ Amberley said, meaning ‘we’ll have to fight our way through’ without actually saying so. Which I’m bound to say sounded like a truly terrible idea to me. Fortunately, before I could think of an adequate riposte, her attention became riveted on the auspex, which she’d continued to cling to as though it were an icon of the Emperor Himself. ‘I’m picking up movement ahead. Too many blips for an accurate count.’
