Hero of the Imperium, page 22
‘Good.’ Amberley looked satisfied. ‘I was hoping they’d think this way down had been blocked off.’
I wasn’t about to take anything for granted, though, so I assembled the squad quickly.
‘Kelp,’ I said, ‘you’re on point.’ He nodded, but didn’t look happy. ‘Then Sorel, Velade, Jurgen, me, the inquisitor, Holenbi. Trebek has the rear.’ That ought to keep the biggest potential troublemakers as far apart as possible, and separate the two lovebirds just enough to keep their minds on the job instead of each other. I hoped. Amberley caught my eye and nodded. Good, she wasn’t going to undermine my authority by contradicting me.
‘Whatever happened to “ladies first”?’ Kelp grumbled, and dropped into the dank-smelling darkness below.
Well, it might have been a consequence of my upbringing, but the labyrinth of service ducts we found ourselves in felt almost reassuring. I was careful not to let myself get too comfortable, though, as in my experience complacency is just a shortcut to a body bag. No one was shooting at us, and the auspex, now back in Amberley’s hand, remained reassuringly free of hostile contacts.
Or, indeed, contacts of any kind. Our footsteps echoed back at us, despite every attempt at stealth, and the beams of our luminators picked out nothing more threatening than the occasional rodent.
After a while, I noticed that the dust in the corridor ahead of us was undisturbed, a thick layer which puffed up under our footfalls before settling slowly back down again. I felt the residue tickling my eyes and the back of my throat, and fought the impulse to sneeze.
‘This isn’t the way you came before, is it?’ I asked, and Amberley shook her head.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I thought a detour might be prudent, given the welcome we got the last time.’
‘But you do know where we’re going, right?’ I persisted. She repeated the gesture.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ she said cheerfully. Something of what I felt must have shown on my face, because she smiled then, and qualified the remark. ‘I mean we should be heading roughly south-west, but all these corridors look alike to me.’
‘Then we need to bear off more in that direction,’ I said, indicating a side corridor that intersected the one we were in about thirty metres ahead.42 Kelp flattened himself against the wall next to it, and signalled the all clear.
I was beginning to pick up a clearer idea of Amberley’s destination, which, despite her claims of uncertainty, she manifestly had. If I still had my bearings we were heading in the general direction of the old quarter, which made some kind of sense. The tunnels would be closer to the surface there, making them more accessible to whoever else was down here. Who they might be, and what they might be hoping to achieve was still a mystery to me, however.
We proceeded in silence for some time, until Sorel held up a hand, warning us to stop. Amberley and I padded over to join him.
‘What is it?’ I asked. Kelp’s face, a pale disc in the gloom, stared back at us, waiting for the signal to proceed.
‘Movement,’ he said, pointing away into the darkness ahead of us. Amberley checked the screen of her auspex.
‘Nothing on this,’ she said. I didn’t care what the box said. Techpriests might have complete faith in their machines, but I’d been let down by them too often in the past. Sorel had a sniper’s instincts, and was as much a survivor as me, and if he was feeling spooked, then so was I.
‘Kelp?’ I asked. The point man made a negative gesture. No contact.
‘I didn’t see anything,’ he added verbally.
‘OK. Proceed,’ I said. Then quietly I added to Sorel, ‘Keep your eyes open.’ He nodded an acknowledgement and moved out, his gun at the ready. The others followed, a little more nervous now, and I waited until they’d all passed before dropping into line behind Trebek.
‘Taking the rearguard now?’ Amberley asked, falling into step beside me. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
It was, of course, the second most dangerous spot in the column, vulnerable to being picked off by an ambusher or a pursuer. But if Sorel was right, the enemy was definitely ahead of us now. I shrugged.
‘As opposed to the position of perfect safety that you’re in at the moment?’ I asked, and was rewarded with another throaty chuckle, which lifted my spirits in spite of myself. The mood didn’t last long, though; as we passed the mouth of a service duct, I noticed the dust around it had been disturbed, and not long ago, either. I pointed it out to Amberley, my voice low so as not to alarm the others. ‘What do you make of that?’
The duct was a good two metres above the floor, but the dust beneath it showed only the marks of our own boots. My palms tingled, and I swept the beam of my luminator across the tangle of pipework that hung from the ceiling over our heads. It was possible someone had lurked there, but why had they moved just as we approached? And how had they got up there in the first place?
‘Remind you of anything?’ Amberley asked quietly. Now that she asked, it did – a maddening sense of familiarity that refused to gel. The only thing I was certain of was that it had been something bad, but with all the horrors I’d faced up to that point, it didn’t help much in narrowing it down. I was about to say something sarcastic to Amberley about another clue helping when my attention was firmly distracted.
‘Commissar.’ Kasteen’s voice hissed in my ear, hazed with static. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Barely,’ I said. The metres of masonry and rockcrete over our heads were attenuating the signal, and if we went much further, we would be out of contact entirely. ‘What’s happening?’
‘The governor has ordered the arrest of Lord General Zyvan!’ Even through the static the outrage in her voice was palpable. ‘And he’s demanding the Guard move into the city right away!’
‘On what charge?’ Amberley said. Whatever vox gear she had was evidently a little stronger than mine, because Kasteen recognised her voice.
‘Cowardice!’ Kasteen sounded even more outraged than before. ‘How he has the nerve–’
‘Will be determined by the proper authorities.’ Amberley’s voice was crisp and commanding now. ‘Until such time as that can be arranged the armies of the Imperium will remain under the command of the lord general, and if the governor objects to that, he is more than welcome to take the matter up with the Inquisition.’
‘I’ll relay that message,’ Kasteen said, evidently relishing the prospect of the governor’s reaction.
‘Colonel,’ I added, before she could cut the link. ‘What’s the situation with the tau?’
‘Grim,’ Kasteen admitted. ‘They’re still engaging PDF units all over the city. Civilian casualties are already up in the thousands, and we have rioters choking the streets. But so far they’ve held off from attacking us. If the lord general and the diplomats can buy us a little more time–’
‘They’ll have to,’ Amberley cut in. ‘Whatever happens, the Guard must not get sucked into an open war with the tau.’
‘Understood,’ Kasteen said. It must have been galling for her, though, and the strain was clear in her voice. Being forced to stand by and do nothing while an imperial city burned, and xenos massacred the citizens with impunity was probably the hardest thing she ever had to do.
‘Well, that’s something,’ Amberley said, as the vox link went dead. ‘At least there’s still hope.’
‘Hope for who?’ I asked, trying not to think of the civilians who, even as we stood here, were losing their homes and their lives. I’d be the first one to admit that I’m a self-centred hedonist, but even I felt a surge of sympathy for their plight.
‘For half the segmentum,’ Amberley replied, sounding suddenly weary, and for the first time, I had an inkling of the terrible weight of responsibility her calling imposed. ‘You need to focus on the big picture, Ciaphas. Emperor knows, sometimes that’s hard.’ Moved by an impulse I couldn’t explain, I took her hand for a moment, imparting what moral support I could through simple human contact.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But someone has to do it. And today that someone is us.’
Amberley laughed, only slightly forced, and squeezed my palm for a moment before letting go.
‘That was completely ungrammatical, you realise.’
‘Never my strong point,’ I admitted. It was strange, now I come to recall it, but her use of my given name seemed so natural I never thought to be surprised.
Shortly after that, we lost contact with the surface entirely. Or at least I did, and if Amberley was still able to get a signal through she wasn’t saying. Even though we were beyond all realistic hope of reinforcement in any case, I found the sensation profoundly dispiriting, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand. It was in one of these moments of distraction that I collided with Trebek, who had stopped suddenly in the tunnel ahead of me.
‘What is it?’ I asked, knowing that she wouldn’t just freeze like that for no reason.
‘I thought I heard something,’ she said. I cocked my head, listening hard, but couldn’t make out anything over the scuff of our footfalls and our breathing. We were moving stealthily enough – these troopers had been hunting tyranids less than six months before in conditions not dissimilar to this, don’t forget, and if there’s anything in the galaxy more calculated to teach you caution than that, I’ve yet to come across it – but the multiplicity of hard surfaces around us magnified every sound we made, however slight, with dozens of overlapping echoes. And, paradoxically, the quieter we moved the louder we sounded to our own ears, straining all the harder to hear over it.
So I issued the order to halt, and we waited tensely for the echoes to die away.
‘There,’ Trebek breathed after a moment. ‘Hear that?’
I could. It was the sharp crack of lasguns, and a similar, deeper note which sounded both familiar and slightly wrong. At the time I put it down to the echoes, but we were to discover the real reason soon enough.
‘Gunfire,’ I confirmed. ‘About half a klom that way.’ I indicated the direction without thinking, before realising it lay almost dead on to Amberley’s preferred route. Just great. Trebek looked a little puzzled.
‘Are you sure, sir?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, before realising that no one else here would be quite so at home in these tunnels as me.43 Valhalla has its cavern cities, of course, but they’re quite different to the average hive, with wide open spaces under well-lit roofs of rock and ice. It was perishingly cold too, the way the locals like it, but it takes all sorts to make a galaxy, and you can always turn up the heat in your hotel suite. (Not too much, though, as I discovered once, or you can end up with bits of the wall dripping onto your belongings.) Amberley took another look at her auspex, which was as quietly unhelpful as before.
‘If you say so,’ she said. After a moment, the firing stopped, and a deeper, more unnerving silence descended. We listened for a little while longer, but it soon became apparent that we would learn nothing more by remaining where we were, and Amberley urged us to proceed. Not having a plausible reason to go back, I agreed, and we moved on as before, though not without a considerable amount of trepidation on my part.
It was about five minutes later that Kelp, who was still on point, held up his hand and halted.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Bodies. Lots of them.’ Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but there were at least half a dozen spread out across the large open space which the corridor had eventually led us into. It seemed to be a junction point of some kind because a number of other tunnel mouths led away from it, to all points of the compass, and by my estimation it had been used for storage or something quite recently. About a dozen stacking units had been broken open, though what they had contained was now a mystery, and the smashed remains of a glow globe showed that someone had been working here not too long ago.
‘Recognise this?’ I asked Amberley, who was looking around with obvious signs of familiarity. She nodded.
‘This was as far as we got before,’ she said. ‘We came in through that corridor there.’ She pointed to one of the other entrances. ‘We took them by surprise, but there were more of them than we’d anticipated, and then the reinforcements showed up.’ I spotlighted the nearest corpse with my luminator, a stocky fellow in work overalls with most of his chest missing.
‘Was he among them?’
‘I wasn’t waiting around to be introduced,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think so.’ Her eyes glazed over for a second with the effort of recall. ‘Rakel was having some kind of seizure, and then she took a las-bolt to the stomach. After that it got a little confusing.’
The troopers were acting like proper soldiers, I noted absently, spreading out to secure our perimeter as best they could without waiting for orders, which was something at least, so I returned my attention to what the inquisitor was saying. This was the most she’d let slip about her previous excursion into these tunnels since we started, and I hoped to find out a little more.
‘What kind of a seizure?’ I asked. ‘Like the one she had when she saw Jurgen?’ Amberley shook her head.
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘that was something quite different. I’m still not sure what it means.’ But she had her suspicions, I could tell, even if she wasn’t about to share them with me. She moved on rapidly, in a transparent attempt to change the subject, which vaguely surprised me, as I’d come to expect more subtlety from her than that. ‘We were standing over there.’ She pointed. ‘Rakel had been getting more agitated the deeper we came, sensing something, but not really able to tell me what it was. Then as we got closer to the people here, it got worse.’
‘They were psykers too?’ I asked, feeling even more uneasy, if that were possible. I’d encountered those before, and it had never ended well. Amberley shrugged, a delicate ripple of her shoulders.
‘Possibly.’ Whether she was uncertain, or just being non-committal, I couldn’t tell.
‘Sir. Inquisitor.’ Holenbi gestured diffidently from the side of one of the corpses. ‘I think you should see this.’
‘What?’ I moved to join him, Amberley at my side.
‘This one was killed by something else.’ He indicated the body, a young woman with a shaved head and a xenoist braid, who had apparently been eviscerated by a close combat weapon of some kind. I’d seen a lot of people killed the same way over the years, but the wounds the weapon had left were unfamiliar. That didn’t necessarily mean much, of course; there are plenty of ways of mounting a blade, but there’s usually a fair degree of consistency within a culture, and I hadn’t seen anything here which looked that unusual.
‘I’m still trying to work out what killed the others,’ I said. The wounds were too heavy for lasguns, even the hellguns we carried. I’d heard them being fired though, I was sure about that. By the insurgents, then; there were several lying around close to the corpses, so it didn’t need an inquisitor to join those dots.
‘It looks like plasma rounds to me,’ Jurgen volunteered. The doubt in his voice told me how unlikely he thought it, though; plasma weapons were big, bulky, and unreliable, and took an age to recharge between shots. You’d have to be mad to arm an entire squad with them. Not to mention being rarer than an ork with a sense of humour. ‘Plasma pistols, maybe?’
‘Maybe,’ I conceded. Those were even rarer, but suppose someone had found a whole cache of them from the fabled Dark Age of Technology? That would be worth going to almost any lengths to protect, wouldn’t it?
‘There’s... something else,’ Holenbi said, redirecting our attention to the dead woman. He looked a little green for a medic, I thought, then I noticed it myself. A large chunk of flesh had been ripped from her torso, as though by teeth.
‘Merciful Emperor!’ I made the sign of the aquila almost without thinking. I hadn’t seen wounds like that since my last encounter with the tyranids. Even then, though, a small dispassionate part of my mind recognised that this was different, something I’d never seen before. ‘What in the galaxy could do that?’
‘Whatever it was, it didn’t like the taste,’ Amberley said, directing her luminator beam to a detached chunk of bloody flesh lying a few feet from the corpse. Holenbi turned greener, and eating his discarded ration bar earlier turned out to have been a bit of a waste of time for him.
‘I’ve got movement!’ Sorel called from the entrance to one of the tunnels.
‘Are you sure?’ Amberley was looking at that bloody auspex again, and the screen was still blank. ‘I’m getting no human lifesigns at all.’
‘What about abhuman ones?’ I asked, and she shrugged.
‘It’s only calibrated for–’
A ball of light, eye-achingly bright, shot from the mouth of the tunnel Sorel was guarding, and exploded against an empty crate. Whoever the enemy was, they were upon us.
Editorial Note:
With the situation in the city deteriorating by the moment, Lord General Zyvan and the troops under his command were growing increasingly impatient to do something, notwithstanding the explicit instructions I had given to the contrary. Governor Grice’s heavy-handed attempt to seize control of the imperial expeditionary force had tried their patience to the limit, and, as a man of honour, Zyvan clearly felt the slight of the accusations levelled against him. His subsequent actions may therefore be understood, if not entirely condoned.
What follows is a summarised partial transcript of the meeting he held with the senior officers of the expeditionary force, taken from the hololithic recording made by the equipment in the conference room, supplemented by a few personal observations subsequently gleaned from some of those present: most notably savant Mott, who represented the Inquisition in my absence, Colonel Kasteen of the 597th Valhallan, and Erasmus Donali of the Imperial Diplomatic Service.
The lord general is clearly irritated at this point, but keeping his temper by focussing on the issue at hand. He begins by asking Colonel Kasteen to confirm the instructions I gave her over the vox link regarding the governor’s demands.
