Hero of the Imperium, page 52
‘Ernulph!’ I whispered, revulsion twisting my stomach, as the creature inside his skin staggered backwards. I made sure of it with a flurry of follow-up shots, then turned my attention to the monstrosity behind it. The magos had been a pompous fool, it was true, but no one deserved a fate like that.
‘They’re behind us!’ Hastur warned, before his voice rose in a throat-rending scream. I turned just in time to see him borne down by one of the razor-wielding automata, eviscerated in seconds, his blood left streaming down the sides of the bulky metal cabinet from behind which, a heartbeat before, he had been pouring hellgun fire into the main body of our vile assailants. A moment later the flayed one rose from a crouch, the still wet skin of the deceased storm trooper clinging to its metal torso by the stickiness of its own blood.
‘Frak this!’ I shouted. ‘Jurgen!’ On cue my aide unleashed another blast from his melta into the centre of the group, cutting a swathe through them as efficiently as before. Once again the necrons caught by the full force of the blast were simply annihilated, flashing into vapour as thoroughly as the victims of their own terrible weapons, while the ones at the fringe of that ravening burst of energy staggered, limbs and torsos seared and softened like candle wax. For a moment I expected them to rally, restoring themselves in that unnerving fashion I’d seen before, but the survivors simply vanished into thin air. For some reason Hastur’s body went with them, but why they would want it was a mystery I was sure I would never want to know the answer to.70
‘How far to the objective?’ Welard asked, as the surviving storm troopers regrouped. Beyond a single glance at the coating of blood on the metal surfaces marking the spot where Hastur had died he seemed utterly unperturbed by the terrible fate which had befallen his comrade, and the rest seemed equally focussed on the outcome of our mission, scanning the halls around us for any sign of renewed necron activity. I was grateful for their vigilance, but I was beginning to find their complete lack of emotion somewhat unnerving.
‘About three hundred metres,’ I said, forcing my mind back to the issue at hand. Welard nodded, and waved to his remaining squad mates to move out. Jurgen and I fell in behind them as before, although I was now acutely aware that an attack could come from any direction, and you can be sure that I scanned our surroundings with even more diligence than before. I got Logash moving again with a relatively light tug on the arm, and he trotted along with us, apparently perfectly happy to follow whatever orders I gave now I’d been proven to be right about the inadvisability of being here in the first place.
After a few moments I caught sight of a bright glow from beyond the concealing bulk of one of those vast machines, and indicated it to the sergeant.
‘That’s it,’ I said, watching it pulse like the beating of a diseased heart, and fighting down the surge of dread which suddenly suffused me. ‘The portal.’ The glow intensified for a moment, with an accompanying thunder crack of displaced air which rumbled and echoed through that city-sized cavern as though presaging a tropical downpour. ‘And it’s active.’ I tried not to think about how many reinforcements had suddenly arrived; rather too many, judging by the amount of air that had been elbowed out of their way as they materialised.
‘Not for long,’ Welard said, his confidence apparently undiminished by the loss of a third of his squad already.
‘Movement,’ one of the troopers cut in, as blandly unemotional as before. ‘Eleven o’clock, thirty metres.’ We turned to face this new threat, the quartet of storm troopers raising their hellguns, while Jurgen lifted the melta into a firing position. Logash was trembling violently.
‘Omnissiah protect thy circuits,’ he mumbled, ‘let this unworthy relay speed the electrons of thy great computation, preserving us from burnout...’ and other tech-priest gibberish. I glanced back at the storm troopers, and was astonished to see them quivering almost as badly.
‘Emperor be with us,’ the closest was muttering under his breath, ‘protect us with the shield of thy will...’
Something was seriously wrong, I thought. After everything they’d already shrugged off it was hard to credit that they would be spooked so badly by a single group of warriors who barely outnumbered us. But Willard’s jaw was clenched, bisecting the cheroot, most of which had fallen unnoticed to the floor. The hellgun jittered in his hands, wavering almost too wildly to aim, and he was muttering too, one of the catechisms of command which had evidently been drummed into him by the schola tutors, and rather more effectively than it had been with me judging by his demeanour up to this point.
He began firing wildly at the approaching warriors, and as if that were a signal the others opened up too, badly-aimed las-bolts detonating all round the necrons with barely a single hit scored, almost as inaccurate as orks. There was something about these warriors which was different from the others we’d seen, a more resolute, self-aware quality, which sent shudders down my spine as I took in more of the details of their appearance. Less skeletal than the others they seemed composed of ceramics as much as metal, and with writhing pipes and cables corded around their metallic bones which flexed like living muscles as they moved. Thin tendrils of despair seemed to wrap themselves around my very soul as they approached us, bringing not mere death but annihilation in their wake. Fear I was used to, could master and control at least to some extent, but this was different, a primal terror which rose up from somewhere deep within me, and threatened to swamp my very sense of self. Levelling the laspistol in my hand, and ironically grateful for the augmetics which steadied my grip in spite of the treachery of my own body, I fired at the leading one, gouging a neat crater in the centre of its forehead.
‘The horror! The horror!’ Logash was going foetal on me again, clinging to my ankles, and the storm troopers were breaking, fleeing in all directions with cries of terror. ‘The horror returns!’
‘Jurgen, get him off me!’ I yelled, restrained from following only by the dead weight of the gibbering tech-priest. I fought against that rush of primal emotion, feeling my very sense of self under threat in a way I hadn’t experienced since the Slaaneshi witch tried to sacrifice my soul to her perverted deity on Slawkenberg over a decade before, and shooting entirely by instinct now. The green lance of a gauss flayer beam missed me by a couple of centimetres, and punched a neat hole through the smooth-sided cabinet beside me. I shot back, taking my assailant in the chest, and making it stagger for a moment before resuming its unhurried advance.
‘Come along, sir.’ My aide was at my side now, prising Logash’s fingers away from my boot, which wasn’t easy given that they were closed by a rictus of terror and augmetic into the bargain. The pressure against my soul eased abruptly, as though cut off by the slamming of a door. I hustled Logash to his feet, and moved behind Jurgen as he aimed and fired the melta.
Once again the powerful weapon did its work, taking down our most immediate assailants, but this time there was to be no reprieve from them teleporting out to lick their wounds. The group had scattered to hunt down the fleeing storm troopers, and we only got a couple of them. As I looked around for some sign of our erstwhile companions I saw two of them taken down with gauss flayer shots, screaming into vapour even as I watched. Welard was backed into a corner between two blocky structures the size of Chimeras, eyes unfocussed, his mind clearly gone, hellgun hanging forgotten from his hand, babbling incoherently. He was still crying out to the Emperor for help which never came when the leading automaton swung the heavy blade of its polearm-like weapon and took his head off cleanly with a single sweep, spraying itself with a thick coating of his blood.
‘Come on,’ I said urgently. ‘We have to get out of here!’ Logash was beginning to recover whatever was left of his wits, and shook his head slowly.
‘What happened?’ he asked. I was beginning to understand, but there was no time now for lengthy explanations, and at our last meeting Amberley had impressed on both Jurgen and myself the paramount importance of not revealing his gift to anyone, so I just grabbed him by the arm to get him moving.
‘Stay close to Jurgen,’ I instructed, and we went to ground between a blank-faced metal cabinet about three storeys high and a loop of conduit which resembled a glowing green intestine. A faint shriek, abruptly cut off, confirmed the loss of the last storm trooper.
With pounding pulses we stayed put for some time, as Logash had undoubtedly done before, while those ghastly apparitions began what had every appearance of a methodical search for us. To my relief, however, they seemed to become mildly disorientated every time they approached our hiding place, veering off before they had come within a handful of metres of us, a deliverance I could only attribute to Jurgen’s peculiar qualities.71
At length, when everything seemed quiet again, I decided it was time to move. The evacuation must be well under way by now, and I meant to be on a shuttle and safe aboard the Pure of Heart before anything else had a chance to go wrong.
‘What about the portal, sir?’ Jurgen wondered aloud. I shrugged.
‘Nothing we can do about it now.’ Which was actually true, as the storm troopers had been carrying the melta charges which were the only things which might have stood some chance of destroying it, and they’d been vaporised along with the soldiers. ‘We’ll just have to call in the Navy after all.’ Tough luck on the galaxy, of course, but it’s a big place, and even a necron army couldn’t put that big a dent in it. I hoped. So we made our cautious way back to the tunnel we’d come in by, scurrying from cover to cover as we had done before, and freezing into immobility at every sign of movement.
To my immense relief we encountered no more of those terrible apparitions, catching sight of the more common warriors only at a distance. The aperture left by the ambulls was unguarded, to my delighted surprise, and I regained the sanctuary of the ice tunnels with a lightness of spirit which was almost intoxicating.
It was too good to last, of course, and inevitably it didn’t.
Editorial Note:
As Cain began to make his way back to the surface, things were beginning to take an unfortunate turn there too. The tech-priests’ incursion into the necron tomb had indeed, as he feared, drawn their attention to the existence of the human colony above their heads, while the orks, outmatched as they were, had begun to break, only to find the Valhallan defences weakened or abandoned altogether as they fell back. Not unnaturally many of the routing greenskins took advantage of the new line of retreat thus opened up, and began to threaten the refinery itself.
Under this renewed pressure the evacuation began to falter. Even though almost two full companies had thus far been ferried up to the orbiting starship the converted civilian shuttles aboard the Pure of Heart simply weren’t up to the challenge of embarking an entire regiment in a matter of hours. As the following extract from Captain Durant’s log makes clear, the loss of well over half the men and women deployed just a few days before seemed almost inevitable.
++Vox-log record of Captain Durant, Merchant fleet freighter Pure of Heart, 651.932 M41.+++
Still stuck in orbit around this miserable iceball. At the last count we had most of the civilian staff and their families stowed away somewhere, only a couple of hundred still cluttering up the corridors with their carcasses and personal effects, but Bosun Kleg has promised to sort that out so I’m leaving him to it.
The Guardsmen have started arriving back up here too, although at least they’ve got somewhere to bunk. The officers are having a hard time keeping order, as most of them seem concerned about the majority still stranded planetside. Can’t say I blame them, as Mazarin says there’s no way our shuttles can get many more runs in before the refinery’s overrun by the greenskins or these metal creatures, or possibly both. She keeps checking the sensor net and calling the surface with updates, but so far she says the gropos72 keep losing ground, and I can’t see any way of stopping that.
But then I’m only a starship captain, thank the Emperor, so what I know about soldiering you could write on the back of a holocard. I told Mazarin not to worry, that colonel looks as though she knows what she’s doing and their commissar’s supposed to be some kind of hero, but I can tell she wasn’t convinced...
FIFTEEN
After making our way through the ambull tunnels without so much as a sniff of the necrons I began to think we might just be lucky enough to rejoin our comrades without further incident, and I must confess to a sensation akin to euphoria as we scrambled up the rope to emerge into the lower galleries of the mine itself. After the cramped ambull runs the high ceiling and the wide tunnels of the man-made workings seemed as broad and open as a city boulevard. We made good time back towards the surface, proceeding in line abreast at a rapid trot. Logash seemed to be a little more rational now we’d left that hive of the damned behind us at last, although being a tech-priest that was only relatively speaking of course, and he kept up with Jurgen and myself without any obvious difficulty.
Jurgen and I had set our luminators to full refulgence now we were back on what I fondly imagined was safer ground, and the beams were lighting our way some considerable distance in front of us. The surrounding ice was bouncing the light as it had before, throwing back the photons in the shimmering blues and star cluster sparkles I remembered so well, so it was a second or two before I realised that the gleam up ahead had come not from the walls but from a reflective metal surface.
‘Kill the lights!’ I shouted as the coin finally dropped, and twisted to the side as I did so, a reflex which undoubtedly saved my life. A bilious green beam cut through the space in which I’d been standing an instant before, illuminating for an instant the darkness which now enshrouded us, Jurgen having followed my lead, and throwing the three of us into sharp relief before it vanished again, evanescent as lightning. The situation was as grim as any I’d faced; to remain where we were would make us sitting targets as the necrons advanced, whereas the slightest glimmer of light would betray our position. A couple more dazzling green flares flickered past us to emphasize the point. Fleeing blindly down the tunnel would merely ensure we were shot in the back, if we didn’t simply slip and fall on the icy surface. Our only option seemed to be to stand and fight, although judging by the positions of their weapon flashes the metal warriors were too spread out to make an obvious target for Jurgen’s melta, negating the only advantage we had.
I had just drawn my laspistol, preparing for a bit of speculative fire myself in the no doubt vain hope that the necrons would think twice about rushing us (from what I’d seen of them before they didn’t strike me as being easily intimidated), when I felt a light tap on my arm.
‘This way,’ Logash whispered, and I heard the faint scurrying sound of rapid crawling movement to my left. A moment later I heard the same murmur from somewhere in Jurgen’s immediate vicinity (which wasn’t hard to pinpoint, as my sense of smell was still unimpeded), and I realised with a thrill of hope that the young tech-priest’s augmetic eyes were somehow able to function in the darkness which enveloped us.
Having nothing to lose I crawled rapidly in the direction of his voice, guided by occasional murmurs of ‘straight ahead,’ and ‘left a bit... No, the other left, I meant mine...’ until I found myself against the frozen surface of the wall. I was just about to ask what now when a gloved hand accompanied by Jurgen’s unmistakable odour reached out to seize my arm.
‘In here, commissar,’ he whispered, giving me the full benefit of his halitosis, and I found myself squeezing through a narrow crevice in the ice. After a few metres it angled sharply, concealing us completely from the main shaft, and we held our collective breath as a clatter of metal feet echoed past our hiding place.
‘Well spotted,’ I said, when I was sure it was quiet out there, and adjusted my luminator to minimum refulgence. My companions’ faces emerged out of the gloom, Logash’s pale, and Jurgen’s as impassive as ever. The tech-priest nodded.
‘Praise the Omnissiah for our deliverance...’ he began, and I hushed him quickly.
‘Yes, good, thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Any idea where this goes?’ It wasn’t on the chart I’d seen before, but that was hardly surprising, showing as it did every sign of being a natural fault rather than having been dug.73 Logash pondered a moment.
‘It seems to be bearing towards the main processing area,’ he said at last. ‘Assuming it doesn’t just peter out.’ Well that was a risk I was willing to take, since the alternative was be facing Emperor knew how many necron patrols. I hoped they were simply scouting the mine rather than invading it in force, but I wasn’t keen to hang around and find out one way or the other. At least this way we stood a better chance of avoiding them.
An hour or so later I was beginning to think we’d have done better taking our chances playing tag with the necrons. The fault was narrow and jagged, so we were climbing up slopes or slithering down them more often than we were walking, and chunks of ice kept catching at our feet or projecting from the walls at heights and angles calculated to bruise or worse. On several occasions we had to crawl, as the ceiling descended too low for us to walk, and once we were forced to worm our way forwards on our stomachs as the passage became too constricted even for that. Jurgen’s bulky melta became wedged with monotonous regularity, requiring some laborious chipping away of the ice with our combat blades before we could free it. (My chainsword would have done the job in a tenth of the time, of course, but in that confined space one of us could all too readily have lost a limb by accident, so it remained in its scabbard.) Each time it happened I considered simply abandoning the cumbersome weapon, but it had proven its use too often to be lightly discarded, so I simply gritted my teeth at the delay and carried on.
