Hero of the Imperium, page 47
‘Jurgen!’ I shouted, pointing, ‘take out the flamer!’ He nodded, and sighted the melta carefully. I had no more time to consider his actions after that, or anyone else’s for that matter, because the greenskin was upon me, swinging its heavy blade at my head.
I ducked, bringing up the screaming chainsword to block it instinctively, and felt the sturdy mechanism shudder as adamantium teeth met crudely forged metal. Sparks flew, miniature orange suns melting tiny craters in the ice which coated the floor, before I turned my body, deflecting the brute’s headlong charge into the wall. It roared as its head impacted with the unyielding ice-coated stone, and turned back towards me, thick ropes of drool hanging from its tusks. Now it was really hacked off.
Good. I cut at its leg, slashing a wound that would have disabled a human, but which seemed to affect it little more than a scratch. It brought its cumbersome blade down to block the strike, as I’d anticipated, and I slashed upwards, taking the loathsome creature in the neck. It looked startled for a moment, as if wondering where all the blood was suddenly coming from, and dropped heavily to its knees. With any other species this would have been a mortal blow, but I’d faced greenies too often before to underestimate their resilience. I swung the blade again, laterally this time, and took its head from its shoulders.
The whole fight could only have lasted a second or two. As I turned away my eyes were stabbed by the searing flash of the melta.
‘Got him,’ Jurgen confirmed, as I tried to blink my retina clear of the dancing after-images, and cursed myself for my carelessness. That degree of disorientation could cost me my life down here.
‘Look out!’ The breath was suddenly driven from my lungs as Magot dived forwards, catching me around the waist, and barging me out of the way of a large and unfriendly rock which had become detached from the ceiling. It crashed to the ground where I’d been standing less than a second before.
‘Thanks,’ I said, still trying to pick out the image of the redheaded trooper from the bright green haze which seemed to float between me and the rest of the world. I thought I could make out a grin, and realised she’d switched her luminator on again.
‘Any time,’ she said.
‘The whole roof’s coming down!’ Grifen yelled, and I became aware of the creaks and rumblings which told me she was right. Apparently the explosion we’d touched off here earlier had left things even more unstable than we’d realised, something I suppose an old tunnel rat like me should have spotted if I hadn’t been too busy being terrified of the necrons.
‘Back!’ I shouted, my childhood instincts kicking in at last; the worst of it sounded as if it was ahead of us. So we ran back to the shelter of the fresh ambull tunnel, and waited for the noise to stop.
‘Emperor on Earth!’ Grifen said, when the dust had finally settled. I can’t say I blamed her. Of the nine troopers she’d set out with only Magot was now left, and she must have felt the loss of so many of her subordinates keenly. Scintillating ice motes danced in our luminator beams as we took in the full import of the sight ahead of us. Where half the passageway had once been blocked, an impenetrable wall of debris now barred our way. Of the orks, and our fallen comrades, there was no sign at all.
‘We’re frakked, aren’t we?’ Magot asked. I shook my head, afraid to speak. It looked to me as if she was right.
‘I can try another shot,’ Jurgen suggested. ‘See if that might clear it.’ More likely it would bring down even more rubble, and finish us off into the bargain. I shook my head again.
‘Probably a bad idea,’ I said, surprised at my restraint under the circumstances.
‘We could go back,’ Grifen suggested. ‘Try to get to the refinery overland.’ Over a mountain range, swarming with orks. In a blizzard. That would be suicide, and the dubious tone of her voice told me she realised that even as she spoke.
‘We’ve got one chance,’ I said, my mind skittering reluctantly away from the thought even as I voiced it. I tried to picture the map of the ambull tunnels Logash had been compiling on his auspex, and overlaid the mental image with the fresh one we’d just discovered. With a lot of luck it might intersect one of the others before too long, and allow us to bypass the blockage ahead of us.
On the other hand, it was also running more or less parallel with the passageway we’d been trying to block off in the first place, and it seemed pretty obvious that the necrons were already using it. If we went ahead we’d almost certainly die.
Well, almost certainly offers a bit more hope than definitely, which was what our other options amounted to, so in the end it was the only choice to make. It was a grim and silent group which started out, already half the size we had been when we passed this way before, and with the gravest peril we had to face still in front of us.
I averted my eyes from the mutilated orks as we filed past their silent and frozen bodies, and wondered if I’d doomed us all.
ELEVEN
By that point we’d given up any attempt at maintaining a proper skirmish formation, advancing instead as a single group, huddled together for protection like the natives of some feral world scared of the daemons beyond the circle of firelight. The difference, of course, was that we knew the daemons were real, and that we were walking straight into their infernal realm. (And speaking as someone who’s met a daemon or two in his time, I can assure you that the sensation was not at all dissimilar.)
We had by some unspoken agreement left all the luminators apart from Magot’s switched off, so that only a single beam of light preceded us down that narrow and forbidding passageway. As a result, the shadows closed in around us even more suffocatingly than before, despite the reflective qualities of the ice which still coated the walls, intensifying the sense of brooding menace surrounding us. Moreover, my tunnel rat’s instincts told me we were descending slowly once again, ever deeper into the bowels of the planet, and the deeper we went, the closer the enshrouding gloom seemed to wrap itself around us, until the air against my face seemed thick and warm, almost choking in its closeness.
Abruptly I became aware that the two phenomena were real, not psychological. The ambient temperature was gradually rising, and our single beam was reflecting less and less from the walls around us as dark rock began to emerge from behind its coating of translucent ice. The resultant humidity was making the air seem damp and thick, a faint mist rising from the floor ahead of us. It was still pretty chilly by any normal measure, you understand, but compared to the temperatures we’d been exposed to on the surface it began to feel almost tropical. The Valhallans certainly seemed to notice it, both women loosening their greatcoats and Jurgen removing his thick fur hat, which he stuffed into one of the equipment pouches he was habitually festooned with.
‘Wherever we’re going, I think we’re here,’ Magot volunteered, after an indeterminate period of silence during which we heard nothing apart from our cautious footsteps which seemed to ring like thunder with every pace, echoing all the louder in our ears for every pain we took to muffle them. I nodded, my mouth dry. A faint humming was discernable in the air now, hovering just on the edge of audibility, and a faint acrid tang tickled the membranes of my nose. All things I remembered only too well, and had hoped never to experience again.
‘Move carefully,’ I warned everyone, completely superfluously no doubt. I gestured to Magot. ‘Kill the light.’
She complied, and with a sense of mounting horror I realised that the darkness around us was no longer absolute. A faint luminescence was visible from up ahead, percolating into the tunnel; a sick, gangrenous hue which turned my stomach.
‘Down that way.’ There could be no doubt at all now: whatever secrets the necrons had buried down here were waiting for us, and there seemed no way to avoid confronting them.
‘I’ll go first,’ Jurgen offered, swinging the bulk of the melta up into a firing position. ‘This ought to clear a way for us if we need it.’ Frankly I doubted it, where we were going no amount of firepower would make a difference, but the thought that he might at least buy us a little time was a comforting one, so I nodded.
‘Good man,’ I said, somehow finding the time to enjoy the expression of perplexity on Grifen and Magot’s faces. Jurgen was an easy man to underestimate until you got to know him, and few people ever bothered. I tried to look calm, but I’d be surprised if I fooled them for a second; both women looked almost sick with apprehension, and knowing what awaited us I have no doubt my appearance was even worse. ‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘Ready.’ Grifen gave Magot’s upper arm an encouraging squeeze, and the redheaded trooper nodded.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ she confirmed, and snapped a fresh power cell into her lasgun, more for the comfort the familiar action afforded than because she needed to reload, I suspected.
We emerged into a vast shadowy cavern, full of machinery of strange design and incomprehensible function. Vast geometric slabs rose into the gloom about us, leaking that rancid illumination from vents and thick pipes of stuff which looked like glass but undoubtedly wasn’t, suffusing the whole space with shadows and flat, directionless light. In the pale green glow we looked like corpses, long dead and rotting, and I found myself wondering how I had ever hoped to come through this unscathed.
We probed forward cautiously, scuttling from one deep shadow to the next like mice on a cathedral floor, our minds assailed almost to the point of physical nausea by the sense of wrongness everything exuded. This was no place for the living, that much was plain.
‘Emperor protect us,’ Grifen breathed. We had come through a doorway high enough to admit a titan, hugging the walls of that vast chamber whose roof rose up beyond sight, and stopped short, our breath stilled by the prospect which awaited us. For those walls were composed of niches, each the height and width of a man, and in each stood a necron warrior, the sickly light gleaming from its metal surface. As we moved the shadows seemed to ripple across those blank, inhuman features, imparting expressions of utter malevolence.
For a moment we stood, transfixed by horror, until I realised with a surge of relief that this apparent motion was an illusion, and that each warrior stood utterly immobile.
‘They’re in stasis,’ I breathed, as though saying the words aloud might alone be enough to wake them.
‘Then they’re harmless?’ Magot asked, clearly not expecting the answer she wanted to hear.
‘No,’ I confirmed. ‘Just dormant. If they were to wake...’ I swept my eyes up and along that dizzying vista, seeing nothing but metal bodies receding to infinity, and gave up trying to calculate how many there were. Hundreds of thousands, at the very least, in this one chamber alone. I tried to envisage the havoc which such an army would wreak if it were ever unleashed upon the galaxy, and cringed inwardly at the scale of the carnage that would ensue. ‘They have to be destroyed.’
‘I think we’ll need bigger guns,’ Grifen said dryly, wrenching her eyes away from that all but infinite legion, and hefting her lasgun as though ready to fire. Nerves taut, we flicked our gazes left and right, alert for any sign of movement which might betray a threat, but the vast tomb seemed utterly empty apart from us.
‘Then we’ll get bigger guns,’ I reassured her. Nothing in our inventory would even come close to doing the job, but an astropathic message to the nearest naval unit would bring a task force here within weeks, and a flotilla of battleships ought to be enough to level the continent. A couple of barrages from their lance batteries would be enough to excise this cancer, however deeply it was buried.
Of course the planet would be rendered uninhabitable for generations, but no one in their right mind would be willing to set foot here once the necron presence was known in any case, so the question was pretty moot. And if anyone were foolish enough to demur, I had no doubt that Amberley would bring the full force of the Inquisition to bear on the objectors the moment I appraised her of the situation.54
We pushed on cautiously, trying to keep the outer walls of the cavern in sight as much as we could; if there was indeed a way out of here I intended to find it. I simply refused to consider the alternative, that the ambull tunnel we’d come in by had been the only entrance left, as that way lay nothing but madness and despair.
‘Movement!’ Jurgen warned, melting into the shadows at the base of some vast mechanism which hummed away to itself oblivious of our presence. The rest of us went to ground too, finding what concealment we could. I crouched behind some metallic outgrowth which looked both regular and organic, and which felt warm to the touch. A moment later I saw it too, harsh angular shadows at first, presaging our initial sight of the necrons themselves as they rounded the corner of the metal canyon in the depths of which we lurked.
As the monsters themselves came into sight I could scarcely suppress a gasp of pure horror. I’d seen terrors enough on Interitus Prime, but these monstrous creations exceeded even those. At first I took them for ordinary necron warriors, fearsome enough in themselves as I knew only too well, but these were something far worse. Their fingers ended in long, gleaming blades, smeared with a substance which looked black in this pestilential light but which I had no doubt was truly red. Most terrifying of all, their metal torsos were hidden from view. For a second, as my appalled mind refused to acknowledge the sight before it, I found myself wondering why in the name of the Emperor these unfeeling automata would have donned clothing against the cold; then the realisation hit me, along with a spasm of nausea. They were draped in the flayed hides of the dead orks we’d found. (If one of them was wearing the ambull I failed to notice it, which believe me was quite easy to have done under the circumstances. If the Emperor Himself had tapped me on the shoulder at that moment it probably wouldn’t have registered.)
‘Golden Throne!’ Grifen breathed, unable to contain her revulsion, and I froze, terrified that she might have been heard, but to my unutterable relief the hideous apparitions strode on oblivious,55 with the inhumanly fluid motion I’d come to associate with all their forms, and after a moment they slipped away down a wide boulevard between arcane devices the size of a warehouse.’
‘Should we follow them?’ Jurgen asked, phlegmatic as always, as though he’d seen nothing more disturbing than my morning’s messages, and I was instantly grateful for the sound of his voice in my comm-bead. It was a welcome touch of the ordinary which I seized on gratefully, and I felt my shattered sensibilities begin to stabilise. I glanced across at Grifen, who was breathing shallowly, her face pale in the ghastly light, and Magot, who was muttering prayers to the Emperor under her breath, all trace of her usual cockiness gone. If I didn’t do something to snap them out of it fast they were likely to lose it completely, or go catatonic on me, and neither was an appealing prospect at the moment. And Jurgen’s suggestion at least had the merit of keeping the monstrosities in front of us, so I nodded.
‘Good a plan as any,’ I conceded, then turned to Grifen. ‘Sergeant. We’re moving out.’ To her credit she responded almost at once, turning slowly to face me with wide eyes into which I could see a measure of hard-fought self control begin to return.
‘Right,’ she confirmed, and reached across to take Magot by the arm again. The trooper failed to respond. Grifen increased the pressure a little, forcing her to take a single step to retain her balance, and after a moment she broke off her muttering to look at the sergeant. ‘Mari. Mari, we’re going now.’
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ Magot said, an undercurrent of hysteria too close to the surface for my liking. ‘We have to get out.’
‘That’s just what we’re going to do,’ I assured her, with more confidence than I felt. ‘But we need your help to do it. We need you alert, all right?’
‘Right. Yes.’ She swallowed, incipient panic still bubbling under the surface, but fighting it now. She took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I’m on it.’
‘Good. Because we’re relying on you,’ I said, in my most sincere voice. ‘If we stick together we’ll make it, you have my word.’
‘I won’t let you down,’ she said, a hair’s breadth from hyperventilation, and Grifen patted her on the shoulder, a brief, supportive show of human contact.
‘I know you won’t,’ she said kindly. ‘So get your arse in gear and let’s try to make it back before hell thaws out, OK?’
‘OK, sarge.’ Whatever the bond between them it seemed to outweigh the terror of the necrons, at least for the time being, so I signalled to Jurgen.
‘Move out,’ I said.
How long we followed those ghastly apparitions for I had no idea, but it seemed like an eternity, time shifting and blurring until it had no meaning, a phenomenon I’d also noticed in the catacombs of Interitus Prime. At times we passed through forests of glowing tubes, uncannily reminiscent of plague-ridden trees, and at others we scuttled along in the shadows of blank-sided metal slabs the size of a starship. At least twice we passed through more stasis chambers, as full of dormant horrors as the one we’d first encountered, but looking back I find my recollections hazy, as though my mind was simply refusing to accept what it was seeing (probably just as well for my sanity). Abruptly I became aware of a fluttering of motion in my peripheral vision, and dived for cover again, with a sibilant warning to my companions.
And just in time, too. A group of ordinary necron warriors appeared from a side passage, which, like the one we travelled, seemed more like a street than a gap between warehouse-sized machines, and, turning as one with a precision which would have left any Imperial Guard drill instructor worthy of the name seething with envy had they been there to witness it, followed their charnel brethren towards whatever destination awaited them.
As I looked closer I could see faint traces of combat damage on their shiny metal torsos, the dents and craters left by the weapons of the orks already fading as the metal seemed to flow together, healing their wounds by some sorcerous process I was at a loss to understand.56
