Death or Glory, page 23
‘You think humans did this?’ Felicia stared from one of us to the other in blank incomprehension. ‘But why?’
‘I haven’t a clue,’ I admitted, ‘and right now it doesn’t matter. We’ve a job to do here, and a lot of lives depend on us getting it done.’
To her credit, Felicia rallied quickly, no doubt inured to atrocity by her time among the orks and the battles we’d fought since her liberation. She nodded, only the paleness of her face betraying the effort of maintaining her composure.
‘Then we’d better get on with it,’ she said. ‘Whoever’s responsible will be long gone by now.’
That was true enough, although I wasn’t to become privy to the answer to that particular riddle for more than a decade, and when I did find out what had happened there I can’t honestly say that it eased my mind at all.
‘Upwards, you said?’ I began to lead the way towards the moving staircase, my senses heightened by the sense of imminent danger that the discovery of the corpse had triggered, and it was as well that they were. As I approached it, I noticed a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, and threw myself reflexively behind another of the lumps of metal littering the hall. As I did so, the unmistakable chatter of a heavy autocannon echoed through the space, the machine (whatever it was), behind which I was sheltering clanging like a temple bell from the impact.
‘Tayber!’ I yelled. ‘We need backup, now! Heavy weapons! Move!’
‘On our way,’ the veteran sergeant assured me, and I stuck my head up as much as I dared, trying to get a glimpse of whoever was trying to kill us. Felicia had taken cover too, her white robe visible behind a plinth a couple of rows away, and the sudden crack of a las bolt ionising the air was enough to let me locate Jurgen (a moment or two before my nose could do the job). The bolt reached its target and expended itself harmlessly against an amalgam of augmetics and flesh, tall and wide as an ogryn and probably twice as smart.
‘It’s a combat servitor,’ I voxed Tayber. No point in letting our backup come charging in blind. ‘One autocannon, one chainfist.’ I shot at it too, more in hope than expectation, and the thing’s head swung slowly in my direction. That was stupid, I thought, I should have let Jurgen draw its fire. Oh well, too late now. ‘It’s taken some heavy damage,’ I added, getting a closer look at the thing. It looked as though someone had hosed it down thoroughly with a heavy bolter, but not nearly thoroughly enough from where I was standing, its carapace pitted and scarred by the explosive detonations. Its close combat weapon seemed to be out of commission entirely, which was something at least, but it could still inflict enough impact damage with its arm alone to pulp an unarmoured human.
‘Terminate intruders,’ the thing grated through some kind of implanted voxcoder, obsessively repeating the last instruction it had been given in the irritating manner of such devices. ‘Protect the sanctum.’ It unloaded another burst of autocannon fire in my general direction, and took a heavy step towards me.
For a moment, I thought it was going to charge, but Jurgen shot it again and it halted, with something as close as a mindless automaton could come to an expression of confusion. Then its head turned in his direction and repeated the same phrase: ‘Terminate intruders. Protect the sanctum.’
‘Keep it busy!’ I called to my aide as it fired again, in his direction this time, and turned to take a hesitant step towards him. There was a slim chance, I thought, but once again it was better than none; by the time our kill team arrived, we could all be dead, so there was no point waiting for them to save our necks. Powering up my chainsword, I ran at it as fast as I could, before I had the chance to think about what I was doing and change my mind.
I almost made it, before the thing sensed my approach and turned to face the more immediate threat. My humming blade glanced off the power cables sheathing its back, which a few seconds’ rational thought would have told me were bound to be armoured anyway, raising a shower of sparks. It swung its chain fist, which thank the Emperor was still malfunctioning, and I ducked under the punch at the last possible minute, feeling the sudden chill as the wickedly serrated cutting teeth flicked the cap from my head.
I struck upwards with my chainsword, finding a fleshly component more by luck than judgement, and was rewarded with a torrent of foul-smelling ichor, which cascaded down the neck of my shirt. The thing swung back at me, but now its movements were stiff. I seemed to have disabled that arm, at least.
‘Back off, commissar! We can’t get a clear shot!’ The feminine voice sounded vaguely familiar, but there was no time to worry about that now, I was fighting for my life against a machine designed to take it, and attempting to disengage would only give it the perfect chance. It staggered as Jurgen placed another shot squarely into its back, and I took advantage of its momentary distraction to spin round behind it and slash at those power cables again. A move, which had the same lack of success as before, I might add.
‘Terminate intruders. Protect the sanctum.’ The thing turned towards me again, and I dived for cover as it started to bring the autocannon to bear, knowing even as I did so that I’d never make it, and that there was no way in the galaxy it could possibly miss at this range… I heard a faint, derisory click, and rolled behind another pile of scrap, blessing every saint I could think of. The thing was dry. Whatever battle it had been in before must have depleted its ammunition almost completely. A moment later, I thought I must have been mistaken, as the distinctive thudding of an autocannon opened up again, but this time there was no whine of ricochetting bullets in my immediate vicinity, so I stuck my head out to see what was going on.
The servitor was staggering now, taking a hail of autocannon rounds at point-blank range, Demara and Tamworth hosing it down with the assurance of the veterans they’d become. The rest of Grenbow’s team was with them, backing up their efforts with lasgun fire, and the former vox operator broke off shooting for a moment to wave a greeting to me. Damaged as the thing was, it couldn’t stand up to that sort of sustained abuse for long. Abruptly its knee gave way and it fell heavily to the floor, where it shuddered like a freshly-killed corpse.
‘Cease fire.’ Felicia stood cautiously, edging out from behind her lump of metal, and after a nod from me the militia team complied. The servitor continued to twitch, attempting to rise, and the young enginseer took a few cautious steps towards it. Its head turned, apparently taking in her presence, and she held up her cogwheel talisman where the thing could see it (or register its presence in whatever manner it normally used).
‘Terminate intruders,’ it grated again, sounding vaguely confused this time. ‘Protect the–’
‘Cancel instructions,’ Felicia said, slowly and clearly, her mechadendrite flexing behind her like the tail of a nervous cat. ‘Power down.’ She hesitated, seemingly on the verge of bolting if the thing failed to recognise her as being authorised to be there, but it made no move to attack her.
The moment stretched.
‘Powering down,’ the thing echoed suddenly. ‘Entering standby mode. Some maintenance may be required.’ It stopped moving.
‘What the hell’s something like that doing in a hydro station?’ Demara asked.
‘A good question,’ I said, retrieving my hat, and placing it on my head with as much insouciance as I could muster given that my shirt was now soaking wet and smelling worse than Jurgen. I turned to Felicia. ‘Any idea?’
‘None whatsoever,’ she replied, looking as baffled as I felt.
‘Well we haven’t got time to debate it,’ I said. ‘We need to get the sluices open.’ I turned to Grenbow. ‘You and your people escort her,’ I added, ‘in case there are any more of these things running around in here.’ I had no intention of remaining inside myself, of course. I returned my attention to the vox. ‘Piers, I want three more squads in here now. Search this place from top to bottom. If there are any more unwelcome surprises, I want to know about them.’ I half expected Felicia to object, but she just nodded, tight-lipped.
‘I’ll get on it right away,’ she said, turning towards the staircase.
‘Already sweeping,’ Tayber’s familiar voice reassured me. ‘We’re on the lower level now.’
‘What lower level?’ Felicia’s head snapped round. ‘According to the plans, this is the ground floor.’
‘Well we’ve found one,’ her brother assured her. ‘Behind that moving staircase.’
We hurried in the direction he’d indicated, which Felicia needed to do anyway to get to the sluice controls, and sure enough there was a big hole in the wall behind it.
‘What could have done that?’ Felicia asked. The edges were ragged, the rockcrete seared and scarred by immense heat.
I shrugged. ‘A plasma gun, maybe a melta,’ I said. At that point, I hadn’t seen either used on the battlefield, but I was familiar enough with their effects from the occasional demonstration at the schola to take a reasonable guess at it. ‘Whoever did this wanted access, and wasn’t taking no for an answer.’
‘Access to what, though?’ Jurgen asked. There was a stairwell behind the wall, presumably accessed through a hidden doorway of some kind, which had effectively concealed its existence until someone or something had decided to remove the obstacle.
‘There’s a whole lot of rooms down here,’ Tayber reported. ‘Full of technical stuff.’ He hesitated. ‘And dead people. Well armed, most of them.’
‘We’d better take a look,’ I decided. I couldn’t very well avoid whatever trouble this presaged unless I had the best possible idea of what was going on, and it was the sort of thing the people around me expected me to say anyway.
I glanced at Felicia. ‘I hate to ask, but you might just spot something the rest of us would miss.’
‘I agree.’ She nodded. ‘The sluices will just have to wait a few more minutes. Let’s hope the greenskins do the same.’
‘They seem to have ignored this place so far,’ I said. The comely tech-priest nodded.
‘That was before you led an army here,’ she pointed out.
The mysterious lower level was pretty much as Tayber had described it. He met the three of us at the bottom of the staircase (Grenbow and the others having been left to guard our rear), with an expression of extreme disquiet. The other members of Bravo squad were with him, glancing around with a mixture of awe and apprehension.
‘This is the central point,’ he said, indicating corridors branching off in three directions (the fourth would simply have led straight into the reservoir, of course). There were bodies lying at the entrances to all three, ripped apart by bolter fire, but with enough remaining for me to be sure of their identities. Their crimson uniforms, their high proportion of augmetics, and the hellguns they were armed with were all the confirmation I needed.
‘Scutarii,’ I said. Tayber looked blank. ‘Adeptus Mechanicus footsoldiers. They garrison forgeworlds, support the titan legions, that sort of thing. The question is – what were they doing here?’ I glanced at Felicia, who looked as baffled as her brother.
‘Guarding something, I suppose.’ She looked around. ‘Are there any tech-priests down here?’
‘Yes.’ Tayber nodded. ‘All dead, mostly in that wing.’ He gestured down the left-hand corridor. The chambers along it were large, well lit, and full of arcane devices, which, apart from the ones full of bolter holes, appeared to be fully functional. Most of them also held the corpses of tech-priests, in a similar state of disassembly as their erstwhile bodyguards.
‘Any idea what they were doing?’ I asked Felicia, as we stepped cautiously into a large room full of the usual collection of technological mysteries, and a couple of dead acolytes of the Omnissiah.
She looked around at the equipment surrounding us, the only parts of which I recognised being hololithic displays and a couple of pict screens.
‘They seem to have been studying something,’ she said. ‘Most of these are analytical engines of one sort or another. I can’t tell what they were researching though.’
She padded across to a control lectern, and activated a nearby hololith. The display flickered into life, projecting icons which meant nothing to me, but which left her frowning in consternation. ‘Their databanks have been wiped. All the records are missing.’
‘Very helpful,’ I said dryly.
The enginseer stared at me, her expression grave. ‘Perhaps that’s just as well. If it was worth killing them to suppress whatever they’d discovered, I don’t think I want to know what it was.’
‘Neither do I,’ I agreed, turning to leave the chamber. ‘Let’s do what we came here to do.’
‘Commissar.’ Luskins was waiting outside, Jodril with him as usual, his bulky rocket launcher slung across his shoulder where it continued to get in the way for as long as we were stuck in the narrow corridors. ‘We’ve found something. Looks like a vault.’
That was precisely what it was, the thick impermium doorway leaving little doubt of that. It had clearly been forced. The mark of the energy weapon, which had been used to breach this place was unmistakable, what had evidently once been an elaborate locking mechanism melted to slag by its ravening heat. There was no clue as to what it might have contained, however, just bare metal shelves reflecting the overhead lights.
‘We’ve wasted enough time here,’ I decided, after another cursory sweep had turned up nothing more than a handful of additional corpses. ‘Let’s go get the sluices open and move out as quickly as we can.’
‘You won’t get any argument from me,’ Felicia agreed, and we hurried up the stairs from that charnel pit as quickly as we could.
Once we’d regained the gently lit hall we’d entered by, I felt an undefinable sense of oppression lift from my soul, and we made straight for the moving staircase, our minds now completely focused on our primary mission. The other search teams had failed to find any more combat servitors lurking about the place, so I thought I might as well stick with the tech-priest for the time being, in case my presence was required in the control chapel after all.
My improved sense of well-being wasn’t to last much longer, however. Almost as my boots hit the rising treads my commbead hissed into life again.
‘Commissar,’ Piers reported. ‘The orks are here.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
For a few more moments, I was able to cling to the hope that it was only a scouting party which had found us, but that comforting illusion wasn’t to last for long. The control chapel Felicia led us to had a wide, clear window looking out over the valley below, no doubt for proper reverential contemplation of the dam and reservoir, tech-priests in general being too far removed from the realms of the flesh to do anything as human as simply admiring the view (which under less stressful circumstances I would undoubtedly have found quite spectacular). Ignoring the wide banks of brass dials and countless switches inlaid in slabs of age-darkened timber, I hurried to the sheet of armourcrys and looked out and down, my breath stilling in my throat.
‘There’s thousands of them,’ Jurgen said at my elbow, and for once I had to concede that he wasn’t exaggerating. The entire valley mouth was choked with lurching vehicles, packed with howling greenskins, beginning to swarm towards us like a tyranid horde. Their sheer numbers were impeding their progress, as they funnelled into that narrow defile, but they were sorting themselves out in their usual brutally efficient fashion, the most aggressive and heavily-armed among them already pulling ahead of the pack. Those on the road were making the best time, but to my horror I noticed that the vast majority were simply not bothering to jostle for position on the highway, fanning out instead across the entire valley floor, trusting to the rugged construction of their vehicles and their hardy constitutions to forge across the relatively open ground at a rate I would scarcely have believed possible.
I was about to order the Basilisk to fire, when the unmistakable thud of an Earthshaker going off told me that Sautine had beaten me to it. Our artillery piece flung three shells in quick succession, all detonating in the heart of the onrushing throng, but we might just as well have been throwing stones into a pond for all the good it did, the tide of howling green death closing as fast as ever.
‘How long have we got?’ I voxed Piers, wishing I’d headed straight for the command Chimera and its array of instrumentation, instead of coming up here to keep an eye on the tech-priest. Watching this on an auspex screen would have been far less bowel loosening than being faced with the sight of the greenskins themselves.
‘The first wave should close with us in about twenty minutes,’ the young captain informed me, in surprisingly calm tones. ‘They can’t get the vehicles up here without coming across the dam, but we’ll be vulnerable to their foot troops climbing the slope.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ I said. ‘If Sautine can keep the causeway clear, we can pick them off as they disembark.’ Even that was a forlorn hope, though, the sheer number of the greenskins was bound to tell in the end. It looked from here as if all the groups trailing us had consolidated into a single formation, outnumbering us by at least eight to one[88]. If they’d had even half that number waiting for us in the pass we’d never have survived an attempt to run it, although I had to admit the alternative wasn’t looking all that attractive at the moment either. I turned to Felicia. ‘How long until the tunnel’s clear of water?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was abstracted as she looked over the control lectern in front of her, ignoring the terrifying sight beyond the window with what seemed to me to be bordering on superhuman self-control[89]. ‘It depends on how long it takes me to get the sluices open. The rituals are fairly simple, but it’ll take a while before I can get it done on my own.’ She glanced around the room, looking vaguely baffled. ‘Now if I was an incense burner, where would I be?’
‘Tayber,’ I voxed, trying hard not to sound too impatient. ‘Get the artisans up here. Felicia needs a hand.’ I glanced at her a trifle apprehensively, wondering if I’d crossed some kind of line, but she simply nodded.
