Death or Glory, page 22
The lake was at the head of a long, narrow valley, which had been dammed at the top end to form a vast artificial reservoir. A thin trail wound up it, following the line of a riverbed in which a trickle of water still flowed, no doubt fed by the sluices, but the banks were a great deal further apart; clearly it had carried far more water in the past. As the road approached the dam, it diverged from the depleted watercourse, rising up the valley side in a series of steep switchbacks, to run across the top of the vast structure, before terminating in front of the building I’d first noticed on the map. This too appeared to be huge, almost large enough to house a titan[87], and I couldn’t imagine what its purpose might be.
Norbert frowned, something obviously striking his innate sense of order as out of place, and indicated the partially dried-up riverbed.
‘Where’s the rest of the water going?’ he asked.
Now he came to point it out, it was obvious that the upper reaches of the river above the lake were feeding far more into it than was appearing through the sluices at the bottom of the dam.
Felicia smiled. ‘Under the mountains,’ she replied. She reduced the scale of the map again, and indicated another Mechanicus shrine on the lower slopes of the range, this time on the far side from us. I drew in my breath. It was almost on the coastal plain, barely a hundred kilometres from the peninsular. If we could somehow reach it without going through the pass we’d outflank the orks, and take the main force no doubt still massing next to the land bridge completely by surprise. For the first time there seemed to be a real chance of getting across it to safety. ‘There’s a generating station there, powered by the water from this reservoir, and an aqueduct connecting the two.’
‘That’s all very well,’ I said, my head reeling. ‘But it would take us days to get everyone that far on foot. And if the greenskins find the tunnel before we get through…’
Felicia laughed, no doubt deducing the image I had in my mind of something akin to the concrete channel Jurgen and I had waded through in Prosperity Wells. ‘We’ll take the vehicles, silly,’ she said. ‘The aqueduct’s meant to feed a whole temple of turbines, not a couple of kitchen taps. It’s ten metres across at least.’
‘But isn’t it full of water?’ Jurgen asked, homing in on the obvious flaw in the plan.
Felicia nodded. ‘Of course it is. That’s the whole point. But we can drain it.’ She pointed to the dam again. ‘Once we open the sluices, the water level in the reservoir will drop rapidly. Within a couple of hours the intake vents will be exposed. Getting them off won’t be too much of a problem.’ She shrugged. ‘They’re designed that way, so the repair crews can get in for routine maintenance.’
‘Sounds good,’ I conceded, beginning to feel cautiously optimistic for the first time since this impromptu conference had begun. ‘How do we get the vehicles down there?’
‘The same way the repair crews do,’ Felicia said, with a trace of asperity. ‘You don’t think they walk all that way, do you?’ Well, it was a fair point, so I nodded in agreement.
‘I think we’ve got a plan,’ I said.
It still looked good the next morning, despite my paranoid streak worrying away at it all night, trying to find the catch. There was only one that I could see, and I confided it to Felicia over breakfast.
‘The valley’s a dead end,’ I pointed out. ‘If the orks find us before we’re ready to go, we’ll be boxed in.’
‘That’s true.’ She chewed her toast thoughtfully, and plucked another slice from my plate with her mechadendrite. After a couple of months of decent food she’d filled out nicely, and in all the right places, but still hadn’t shaken the habit of eating everything she could at every opportunity. ‘But we’d only have to hold them off for a short while. And the terrain would be with us.’ Like everyone else in the convoy, she’d acquired a thorough grounding in the practicalities of infantry combat. I nodded in agreement.
‘That’s not what worries me,’ I said. ‘Suppose they come after us, or just flood the tunnel once we’re down there?’
Felicia nodded, and accepted another mug of recaff from the attentively hovering Jurgen, who was barely able to suppress a shudder at the thought of all that water.
‘Blow the tunnel behind us,’ she said. ‘By the time they dig through the rubble we’ll be long gone. And if we wreck the sluices before we leave, they won’t be able to raise the water level enough to flush us out.’
‘That sounds good,’ I said. We had enough explosives with us to do the job, neat as you please, so I couldn’t see a problem with that. Now my last reservation was gone I was almost looking forward to the venture. ‘It’s a shame we can’t stick around to enjoy the expressions on their faces when they realise we’ve given them the slip.’
We resumed our journey in something approaching high spirits. True, we’d have to consolidate our scattered forces again, but I could comfortably leave that to Piers and Tayber to sort out. Confident that the closest enemy patrol was some kilometres away, I stuck my head out of the top hatch of the Chimera, enjoying the crisp morning air while I could. Felicia’s plan might just get us around the main choke point, but while we were passing through the mountains we’d still be vulnerable to ambushes, and I’d be spending most of the trip behind the comforting solidity of armour plate.
In the event, things went practically without a hitch, unless you count a couple of our foraging parties running into firefights with isolated groups of greenskins, which both ended with gratifying suddenness as soon as Sautine arrived on the scene, and before the week was out I found myself trundling up the narrow valley leading to the dam.
The mountain scenery was even bleaker than I’d envisaged from the topographical display we’d studied, but not without grandeur. High peaks loomed over us, capped by snowfields which Jurgen stared at longingly, but he was to be disappointed on this trip; our destination lay below the snowline, and the opposite end of the aqueduct was a couple of thousand metres below us, almost at sea level. Beside the road, the trickle of water from the sluices in the dam ahead rippled and chuckled in its oversized channel, and thick scrub stained the valley sides with mottled shades of brown, green, and the occasional vivid patch of yellow or purple.
The dam itself loomed over everything, a vast wall of dull, grey rockcrete, which cut across the valley ahead of us like the outer defences of a fortified city, and I tried not to think about the sheer volume of water it held back. Intellectually, I knew that it had held solid for decades, but I couldn’t help picturing the scene in my mind of what it would be like if it were to suddenly give way. Shuddering at the image, I turned in the turret of our carrier, and waved to Felicia, who was pacing us easily in her modified Sentinel.
‘How do you know so much about this place, anyway?’ I asked. When she replied, her voice was as warm as ever, despite the attenuation of the vox link.
‘It’s one of the great marvels of the planet,’ she said. ‘Every tech-priest knows about it. We study the systems in the seminary.’
‘How very fortunate for us,’ I said dryly.
Felicia laughed. ‘It’s fascinating stuff, even if you ignore all the local superstition about the place.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Surely the shrine is properly sanctified in the name of the Emperor?’ I’m not the most pious of men, as I’d be the first to admit, but even in those days I’d seen enough of the malevolence of the galaxy to think twice about tempting fate, and trespassing on unhallowed ground definitely qualified as that in my book. (Of course that was nothing to some of the sights I was to see in later years, the inside of an eldar reiver citadel, a necron tomb world, or a city tainted by the touch of Chaos being far more blasphemous abominations than anything my callow younger self could possibly have envisaged, but I digress.)
‘The Omnissiah,’ Felicia corrected, her voice amused, ‘but yes, of course it is. The stories go back long before the dam was here, though.’
‘They do?’ Despite its obvious artificiality I found that hard to believe. Somehow, that gigantic wall looked as though it had always been there.
Felicia nodded. ‘Thousands of years. How do you think it got its name in the first place?’
‘What name is that?’ I asked, trying to fight down a growing sense of foreboding.
Felicia’s voice took on a familiar sense of mischief. ‘The Valley of Daemons,’ she said cheerfully.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Despite the myriad claims on my attention, I couldn’t quite shake the sense of foreboding Felicia’s casual words had stirred up in me, but there was no time to quiz her further on the matter, as our convoy finally reached the vast citadel looming over the dam and began to spread out around the piazza which fronted it. Fully as large as a parade ground, it was surfaced in tiles the size of my thumbnail, which made up a vast mosaic of images sacred to the cult of the Machine God. I’d have expected work so delicate to be ground to powder under the tracks of our war machines, but to my surprise they weren’t even scratched.
‘Set up the heavy stuff to cover the road,’ I ordered Sautine, who I’d put in charge of our armour detatchment. She nodded.
‘Already on it.’ She gestured towards the Vixen, its turret and lascannon pointing across the valley towards the narrow ribbon of rockcrete clinging to the slope on the other side, flanked by the other Leman Russes. ‘And I’ve got the Basilisk set up to drop some heavy ordnance on the valley mouth if the greenskins try to get through before we’re ready to pull out.’
‘Good thinking,’ I complimented her. The mobile artillery piece would be better employed in that role, where its greater range could be used to its fullest effect. A couple of Earthshaker shells ought to disrupt any ork advance through that narrow choke point very nicely, I thought.
‘Shame we can’t blow the dam,’ Sautine commented, with a regretful look at the causeway running along the top of the two hundred metre-high wall to where we now stood. ‘That’d stop them from following right enough.’
‘It would,’ I agreed, but there was no chance of that;we didn’t have enough explosives in the entire convoy to put a dent in that vast expanse of rockcrete. ‘You could try mining the causeway.’
‘I’ll get someone on it,’ Sautine agreed, turning away.
Well, that was our defence taken care of. Time to find out whether Felicia was right, and salvation lay a few metres below the surface of the huge and placid expanse of water stretching away into the distance, or whether I’d just led us into a dead-end deathtrap.
I turned and made my way through the throng of soldiers and irregulars, exchanging a word or a joke with a few random faces, dispensing morale boosting platitudes to a handful more, and kept an eye out for a familiar white robe.
The tech-priest was waiting for me at the entrance to the shrine, which loomed over us, votive statuary encrusting its surface, which still seemed somehow to retain a purity of line and form in the best aesthetic traditions of the Mechanicus. Jurgen was with her, a lasgun in his hands, and I have to admit that I was glad to see him. Felicia had made it very clear that the control shrine was consecrated ground, on which only ordained tech-priests were supposed to tread, and that accompanying her was a rare privilege for anyone outside the Adeptus Mechanicus. (To tell the truth I’d have been perfectly happy to leave her to deal with whatever needed doing inside, but she’d pointed out that command decisions might need to be taken, and I could do that most effectively if I was on the spot at the time.)
Her artisans hovered nearby, expressions of envy on their faces, no doubt hoping that their presence would also turn out to be required inside the towering temple of technological marvels.
‘Ready?’ she asked, glancing in my direction, and I nodded, wondering if that was entirely true. ‘Good. We might as well get on with it, then.’ It was only at this point I realised that she was a great deal more nervous than she would have liked me to know, and somehow that increased my own confidence again. Leaving Jurgen to fall in at my shoulder as usual, his distinctive aroma assuring me that he’d done so without me having to turn my head to check, I led the way towards the massive bronze portal sealing the entrance to the shrine. After a moment, Felicia joined me, keeping roughly a pace ahead of us, as befitted an excursion onto consecrated ground.
‘That’s odd.’ Her voice held a note of puzzlement rather than alarm, but I found myself loosening my weapons in their holster and scabbard, nevertheless. If push came to shove, I’d use them first and argue about the theological implications later.
‘What is?’ I asked, noting out of the corner of my eye that Jurgen had followed my lead, flicking off the safety catch of his lasgun. The doors loomed over us, thick slabs of bronze embossed with the cogwheel sigil of the Adeptus, fully four times the height of a man. One of them stood slightly ajar, just wide enough to admit our little party, and Felicia indicated it, frowning in puzzlement.
‘That ought to be sealed. Only a consecrated tech-priest should be able to open it.’
‘Maybe the staff left it like that when they evacuated,’ Jurgen suggested. Felicia shook her head.
‘That’s just it. They should still be here, carrying out the rituals of operation. This is a sacred site, they wouldn’t just abandon it.’
‘Then why didn’t they come out to meet us?’ I asked. I gestured behind us, to the scores of troopers and refugees and our ragtag collection of vehicles. ‘They must have noticed us coming.’
‘Maybe the greenskins got here first,’ Jurgen suggested, looking around warily for something to shoot at. I shook my head.
‘Look at the place. It’s still intact. The orks would have wrecked it.’ There was no sign at all of the wanton destruction an ork assault would have wreaked. Not so much as a single pockmark in the immaculate white stonework from a stray stubber round. The only creatures that seemed to have left their mark on the building were the local birds. Curiously, however, I found the lack of evidence of foul play even more sinister than its presence might have been. I fought down a rising sense of unease. ‘They must just be hiding,’ I added, decisively. ‘Once they realise we’re friends they’ll come on out.’
‘Unless the daemons have got them,’ Jurgen suggested gloomily.
‘That’s just local superstition,’ Felicia snapped, a little too hastily, and my aide subsided.
‘Nevertheless,’ I said, drawing my laspistol, ‘perhaps we should go first.’ I was expecting her to object, of course, or I’d never have suggested it, but to my well-concealed surprise she nodded.
‘That might be more prudent,’ she agreed.
Well, there was no help for it after that, I couldn’t risk losing face, so I levelled the weapon and slipped through the gap, my nerves wound up tighter than harp strings. Jurgen followed, his lasgun seeking a target, and a moment later Felicia joined us.
‘It’s not too late to bring a squad along as escort,’ I suggested, taking stock of our surroundings as I did so. Nobody seemed to be shooting at us, but there were plenty of places that might have concealed a sniper, so I kept my gun in my hand in any case.
We were in a wide, high room, artfully lit by concealed luminators, which filled the space with a diffuse glow, no doubt intended to seem both functional and meditative. Arcane mechanisms I couldn’t identify were mounted on plinths, for display or veneration, and Felicia stared at them with wide, wondering eyes, although to me they just looked like so much scrap metal.
‘No,’ she said, her voice hushed. ‘We can’t profane this place any more than we need to.’
‘Fine,’ I agreed. ‘You’re the expert.’ Nevertheless, I voxed Tayber. ‘Get a couple of kill teams together,’ I ordered. ‘Ready to come in the moment we call, but not a second before.’ I glanced across at the unnaturally subdued tech-priest. ‘Is that all right with you?’ To my relief she nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If we need to call them in, this place will already have been desecrated far more than it would be by their presence.’ Which was pragmatic, I suppose, though hardly comforting.
‘All right,’ I said, trying to get orientated, ‘where to?’
‘The control chapel should be that way.’ She pointed towards a staircase at the far end of the entrance hall. The treads were moving, tending upwards, and we moved towards it as quickly as we could, Jurgen and I remaining alert for any sign of movement among the display cases.
‘Commissar.’ My aide came to a sudden halt, although an intervening lump of ironmongery prevented me from seeing what had attracted his attention, for a moment. As I rounded the thing and saw what lay on the polished marble floor at his feet, I turned, hoping to block Felicia’s view, but it was too late. She was standing right behind me, staring at the dead tech-priest with an expression of slack-jawed horror.
‘Do you know him?’ I asked, and she shook her head slowly, trying to take in the enormity of it: a member of her own order, slain in the middle of a shrine.
‘I’ve never been here before,’ she reminded me. ‘Just studied the plans.’
‘He’s been dead for a couple of weeks,’ Jurgen added helpfully. Not killed during the invasion, then. ‘Looks like the greenies have been here after all.’
‘I don’t think Felicia’s daemons would have used a bolter,’ I agreed. The explosive projectile had detonated inside the man’s ribcage, killing him instantly, despite the signs of heavy augmentation packing his chest cavity. ‘But the orks would have taken the place apart.’
‘They would,’ Jurgen agreed. ‘And they wouldn’t have been so accurate.’
It was only after he spoke that I realised he was right. The tech-priest had been killed with a single shot. Greenskins would have blazed away on full auto, leaving the floor and machine parts surrounding him pitted with impact craters.
