Hero of the Imperium, page 48
From somewhere up ahead, at the end of that cyclopean thoroughfare, we could now discern a glow brighter than the rest but no less repellent in its hue, and something about the shape of the mechanisms surrounding us seemed vaguely familiar. I began to feel a formless sense of recognition, which hardened into certainty as we approached that vivid corpse-light, and the source came into view in the centre of a broad open space the size of a starport landing pad.
‘It’s an active warp portal,’ I breathed, making the sign of the aquila by reflex. Not that I expected to invoke any additional protection by doing that, of course, but believe me, under those circumstances every little helps.
‘Are you sure?’ Grifen asked, clearly awestruck at the prospect. Feeling this wasn’t the time for lengthy explanations I simply nodded.
‘Absolutely,’ I said.57 Ahead of us the flayed ones, as I later learned the Inquisition classified the trophy-takers, stepped into that eldritch glow and vanished, no doubt to some hell hole elsewhere in the galaxy. I must admit to wondering, for a panic-stricken instant, if they were merely teleporting to some starship in orbit, but a moment’s reflection was enough to reassure me that no vessel could have emerged from the warp early enough to be here already without registering on the Pure of Heart’s sensor array long before we set out on our ambull hunt, what seemed like a lifetime ago now. (But which my chronometer stubbornly insisted had been less than a day.)58 A moment later the warriors followed suit, evaporating from our sight like the vestiges of a nightmare on waking, and the warp portal dimmed back to the level of the ambient illumination.
‘Emperor on Earth!’ Magot said, a faint trace of her old bravado beginning to return. ‘How’s that for an exit?’
‘It’ll do me,’ Grifen said grimly. ‘Especially if it’s permanent.’
‘Maybe the greenskins were too much for them,’ the redhead said hopefully.
‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ I said. ‘This was just a scouting party. They’ll be back.’
‘How soon?’ Jurgen asked, his tone, as usual, no more than mildly curious. I shrugged.
‘Emperor alone knows,’ I said. ‘Long enough for us to get the frak out of here I hope.’
‘Amen to that,’ Magot muttered. I stole a glance at the portal, which, though dormant now, seemed to pulsate with malevolence, as though ready to vomit a tidal wave of metal warriors across the planet at any moment. I thought briefly of trying to rig up something to destroy it from our remaining stock of explosives, but dismissed the idea at once. For one thing, if it was as robust as the equipment I’d seen on Interitus Prime we’d barely be able to scratch it with what little we still carried, and for another, the time it would take us to try would be far better spent looking for an exit. (If I’m honest, the thought of lingering for even a moment longer, certainly for the amount of time it would take to set the charges, was almost enough to start me running in panic; only the realisation that such a course would probably doom us prevented it.) And any attempt to interfere with the mechanisms here would most likely draw attention to us, which would be best avoided to say the least. Though many of the machines around us appeared to be powering down with the departure of the scouting party, which suggested we were alone down here now, there could be any number of alarms or sensors an explosion might trigger, and necron guards or their mechanical lackeys lurking in a corner somewhere prepared to deal with us if alerted to our presence.
‘Which way, sir?’ Jurgen asked, as though we were simply in the middle of a park somewhere looking for the quickest way back to the barracks. I hesitated. My instincts hadn’t entirely deserted me, however arcane our surroundings, and after a moment’s thought I pointed off to our left.
‘The mines should be over that way, if I don’t miss my guess.’ Jurgen had been down enough holes with me to trust my sense of direction underground, and even if he didn’t it was close enough to an instruction for him to follow without thinking about it, so he nodded, and began to move off in that direction. Grifen and Magot began to drift after him so I picked up my pace and fell in between my aide and the two women, feeling a little more secure (if that were even remotely possible considering where we were) now that I had armed troopers on either side of me.
Despite my growing conviction that we were unlikely to meet any more of the metallic monstrosities unless we did something to attract their attention I wasn’t about to let my guard down, you can depend on that. In fact the closer we came to safety, or at least the promise of it, the more paranoid I became, starting at every minute sound, real or imagined. I scanned every shadow we passed, increasingly certain that every crevice concealed a swarm of scuttling metal insects or that a vast arachnoid construct lurked above our heads, but every time my apprehensions proved to be groundless.
‘I can see the cavern wall,’ Jurgen voxed, and we picked up the pace a little, an unspoken agreement sparking among us to quit this hellish place as quickly as we could. I began to see patches of smooth finished stonework ahead of us through the tangle of incomprehensible mechanisms and tried to estimate how far away we were, but my sense of perspective was confused by the strange geometries around us and I was still taken by surprise when we slipped through a grove of pipe-work the breadth of trees and found ourselves up against naked bedrock.
‘It’s completely smooth,’ Magot said, running her hand along it, a tint of wonder entering her voice. She was right, the surface was sheer as glass, and I found myself trying to picture how the work had been done with such precision. The only explanation I could come up with was sorcery of some kind, which fitted right in with everything else I’d seen here since we arrived. I glanced to the left and right, hoping to find some sign of a tunnel, but in this I was predictably disappointed.
‘Which way now?’ Grifen asked. I didn’t have a clue, to be honest, but I had a vague memory of the projected run of the ambull tunnels on Logash’s auspex being more numerous off towards the right of where I estimated us to be, so I gestured in that direction with all the authority I could muster.
‘That way,’ I said. ‘And pray to the Emperor for a miracle.’
‘This whole place is a miracle, is it not?’ a new voice asked. I whirled, bringing up my laspistol, and froze an instant away from pulling the trigger. The speaker sounded vaguely familiar, and a moment later I caught sight of a human figure in an emerald robe (which was actually white, of course, out of that ghastly illumination), whose eyes flashed dazzlingly green as they caught the light. ‘All praise the Omnissiah, whose bounty has been revealed to the worthy despite the worst efforts of the unbeliever.’
‘Logash,’ I said, not quite sure if he’d gone barmy or not. ‘We thought you were dead.’ But he wasn’t, worse luck; the treacherous little weasel had given us the slip in the snowstorm and come scuttling back here as fast as he could. Emperor alone knows what he was hoping to achieve with a couple of tonnes of rubble sealing the entrance to the tomb, but fanatics are like that, no common sense at all, and our stray ambull had solved the problem for him anyway. Of course he took that as a sign from His Divine Majesty, or the clockwork parody they worship, that he was intended to get in here all along, and didn’t he just crow about that.
‘The Omnissiah guided my steps,’ he said, ‘and the barriers were thrown down ahead of me. All praise the Omnissiah!’ His voice rose, and I cringed inwardly, certain that he’d attract unholy attention. I hushed him with a gesture, and turned to find Magot’s lasgun pointed straight at him.
‘How come the tinheads didn’t get you?’ she asked, her finger a little too tight on the trigger for my peace of mind. Frankly, the way I felt now she could have shot him and welcome, but the sound of gunfire would echo around here like an Earthshaker barrage and I wasn’t prepared to risk it. I deflected her aim gently with a hand on the weapon’s barrel. Logash didn’t seem to take offence, though, beaming broadly at the question.
‘The holy guardians failed to notice me, as I would expect given my unworthiness. There are mysteries here far beyond my abilities to fathom, but no doubt those of greater wisdom can commune with the machine spirits of this wondrous place.’
‘Assuming we ever manage to get out of here to tell them,’ Grifen chipped in sourly.
‘The Omnissiah will provide, you can depend on it,’ Logash said, completely siggy beyond a doubt. (Even though with tech-priests it’s often hard to tell.) I found it hard to credit that the necrons had simply ignored him, but I suppose it was a vast complex and it wasn’t entirely unfeasible that they had simply failed to notice him as they had the rest of us, even though I had no doubt that he’d been wandering around in the open gawping like some hick up from the sump on his first trip to a guilder trade station instead of hiding like anyone with a micron of sense would have done.
‘They certainly noticed the orks,’ Magot pointed out. Logash nodded eagerly.
‘Vile desecrators of these holy precincts. The guardians cut them down as they deserved.’ There he went again, I thought, with a tingle of unease. Anyone who could use the word ‘holy’ to refer to this chamber of horrors had clearly become unhinged. I suppose the sight of all that technology lying around had overloaded his brain or something.
‘Well that’s good,’ I said, a little too heartily, and prodded him experimentally in the back. To my relief he fell into step beside me. ‘It’ll still be safe when we tell the others all about it.’
‘Oh yes, we must do that.’ Logash nodded eagerly, and pulled out his auspex. It’s probably a measure of how far gone I was that I was actually glad to see it. The rest of us clustered around anxiously as he called up the image of the ambull tunnels we’d mapped before, the ones in red extrapolated from the ones we’d actually walked.
‘Is there another tunnel near here?’ Magot asked, raising herself onto her toes to peer over the tech-priest’s arm. He nodded, pointing off to the left.
‘There should be another ambull run about two hundred metres in that direction.’ Luckily no one said anything to me, although to be fair there did seem to be some other tunnels a bit further away in the direction I’d originally chosen. This wasn’t the time to stand on my pride, however, so I nodded and patted the tech-priest on his shoulders (which were hard under the robe, and thudded dully under the blows).
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then let’s find it.’
Editorial Note:
Despite my understandable reluctance to resort to this secondary source again I’m afraid it’s necessary to fill a gap in Cain’s narrative, which breaks off at this point only to resume after some time has passed. No doubt he felt nothing of significance had occurred in the interim, despite the passage of several hours.
As ever, my apologies for the style (or lack of it), and my assurance that readers with a refined appreciation for the Gothic language are perfectly at liberty to skip it.
It is, however, mercifully short.
Extracted from Like a Phoenix From the Flames: The Founding of the 597th, by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 097.M42.
Vital as the task with which we had been entrusted undeniably was, it could hardly be described as challenging. Once the miners had directed Captain Federer’s sappers to the part of the workings where the flaws and stresses in the ice ensured our planned booby trap would work to best effect, there was little for us more practical soldiers to do other than fan out through the galleries to secure our perimeter against the remote possibility of infiltration by the orks. This we did, and although I have to admit that the task was a tedious one, to the credit of the women and men under my command they remained as alert after half the day had crawled by as they had at the commencement of our vigil.
This was disturbed at length by a vox message from deep in the lower galleries, so attenuated by the layers of intervening ice that I could scarcely discern it; and a moment’s perusal of the tactical slate was enough to confirm what I’d already deduced. The source of the message was far deeper than the most far-flung of our patrols.
There could be only one explanation, and taking my command squad with me I made haste to respond, finding as we descended and the vox signal became clearer that my suspicions were correct; this was indeed a message from none other than Commissar Cain himself, returning with news of dire import, and demanding, as soon as communications became reliable enough, to be put through to Colonel Kasteen at once.
While my vox operator made haste to comply, his powerful backpack transmitter easily able to boost the tenuous signals of the commissar’s comm-bead, I directed my troopers to his aid as rapidly as I could. Though the conversation had moved to a command frequency of a far higher level than those to which I, as a lowly lieutenant, had access, it was clear from the urgent tone of his voice that the tidings he brought were of such importance they must be disseminated as rapidly as possible.
The carrier wave was enough to lead us to the commissar’s party, however, and I must confess to a moment of shock as I beheld the bedraggled survivors of what must surely have been a journey of epic endurance. Commissar Cain was, of course, the very picture of martial heroism he always presented, his bearing erect and eye steady, undaunted by whatever horrors he had faced, although his companions all too clearly showed the terrible ravages of the perils they’d fought their way through. The commissar’s aide, in particular, looked as though he had come through hell, dishevelled in a way I had seldom seen in a trooper still living.59 The other soldiers with him stumbled with exhaustion, horror written across their faces, and only the tech-priest at the rear of the party appeared to be in good spirits, doubtless because his augmentations had protected him from whatever had so afflicted the others.
‘Help them,’ I ordered, and my troopers made haste to obey, providing much-needed support for all.
It was only after I’d spoken that the commissar appeared to recognise me, looking in my direction for the first time, and I must confess to an overwhelming sensation of pride as he spoke my name, quite overcome at the confidence he so evidently had in my qualities as an officer.
‘Sulla,’ he said, in a voice clearly meant for no ears other than his own. ‘Of course. Who else would it be?’
TWELVE
As you’ll readily appreciate, all I wanted to do when we finally made it back to the refinery was eat, sleep, and grab a hot shower (preferably aboard the Pure of Heart while it was heading for deep space as fast as its engines would take it), but events were moving too fast to allow any such luxury. I managed to get rid of Sulla, who’d picked up my increasingly frantic attempts to contact the surface and been predictably unable to resist sticking her nose in, by asking her to make sure Grifen and Magot got to the medicae as fast as possible (which didn’t hurt my reputation for taking care of the troops either, never a bad thing), and staggered off to meet Kasteen and Broklaw. At least I’d been able to get a tactical update from Sulla before she went, so I could concentrate on the immediate problem secure in the knowledge that the orks were still being held at our outer defensive line and the gargant was still too far away to open fire on us. For the time being at any rate.
‘You look like hell,’ the major said cheerfully as I entered the command post, but he held out a mug of tanna leaf tea as he said it, so I let him live.60
‘You should see me from this side,’ I told him, and dropped into a seat at the conference table. Now I was back in the warmth and relative safety of the refinery all the fear and accumulated fatigue of the last day or so bludgeoned me between the shoulder blades, and it was all I could do to keep my head from dropping onto the glossy wooden surface. As I tilted my head back to try and ease the tension in my neck something struck me as odd about the ceiling. ‘Merciful Emperor! Did the greenskins get in here?’ Broklaw followed the line of my gaze to the bolter holes filigreeing the plasterwork above his head.
‘Just a small crowd control problem,’ he said, smiling at some private joke. Well if he wasn’t too bothered about it neither was I, and asking any more questions might complicate my life even further, so I returned my attention to the matter at hand.
‘You should get some rest,’ Kasteen said, looking at me with evident concern. I nodded.
‘I should. Just as soon as we’ve dealt with the current situation.’ I drank deeply, feeling the cobwebs lift a little from my mind as the tanna started to kick in. ‘Did you get the old survey reports I asked for?’
‘Right here.’ She skimmed a data-slate across the surface of the table. I glanced at it, but the charts and technical data meant nothing to me. ‘Scrivener Quintus has been remarkably helpful.’ Broklaw grinned and winked at me, but in my dazed state I hadn’t a clue what he was getting at.
‘What does it all mean in plain Gothic?’ I asked. Kasteen shrugged.
‘I ran it by a couple of the engineseers in the transport pool.’ That had been a calculated risk; they were cogboys, of course, so their first duty would be to the Adeptus Mechanicus, but they were our cogboys, and had fought alongside the rest of us for long enough to feel at least as loyal to the regiment as to their tech-priest colleagues. So long as we didn’t force them to pick sides they’d tell us what we needed to know, or so I hoped. ‘It’s not really their field, but they seem to think you’re right. There are other deposits of refinable ice on Simia Orichalcae much richer than this one.’
‘Then why build the refinery here?’ Broklaw asked. I shrugged.
‘The magos would undoubtedly reel off a dozen different reasons why this particular deposit was easiest to process, or the topography of the valley made construction simpler, or why it was the will of this clockwork Emperor of theirs. He might even believe it himself. But if it smells like a sump rat and it squeaks like a sump rat...’
