Defender of the Imperium Omnibus, page 62
‘Can’t blame a man for trying,’ I said. I handed the slate, in its anonymous military field casing, to the tech-priest, who started fumbling with the catch, no doubt eager to see what the miraculous device his rival had apparently created looked like. ‘You just press it to open the case,’ I added helpfully.
Metheius froze, looking at the dull green box in his hand as if it had suddenly started ticking. ‘Of course, it’ll be booby-trapped,’ he said, glaring at me as if I’d almost succeeded in tricking him, which was exactly what I’d been hoping for, of course. If he’d realised what the box actually contained, things would have got very unpleasant. ‘Genetically coded to you, I suppose?’
‘You’re the expert,’ I told him, letting his paranoia do the work for me, and trying not to let my relief at the sight of him stowing the thing in the recesses of his robe without any further attempt to examine it show on my face. ‘Now I suppose you expect us to just hand the shadowlight over?’ I asked Killian.
The deranged inquisitor shook his head. ‘No, I expect to kill you both and take it from your corpses,’ he replied, clearly relishing the prospect.
Wondering just how much longer Amberley was going to be, I shook my head pityingly. ‘Well, if you’re sure it can take a plasma discharge at point blank range, go right ahead,’ I replied casually, keeping my hand as close as I dared to the butt of my laspistol. ‘Of course, if you shoot Jurgen first, I’ll have the chance to see if the nullifier works on your displacement field too. You must be standing well within its radius of effect.’ I glanced at my aide. ‘On the other hand, if you shoot me first, he’ll have time to drop the rock and open up with his lasgun.’ One of the chief advantages of a completely unmerited reputation for unwavering integrity, I’ve often found, is that the more outrageous the lie, the more likely it is to be believed, and Killian, don’t forget, was away with the cherubs to begin with. An element of doubt began to creep into his belligerent expression.
‘You.’ He switched his gaze to Jurgen, but kept the plasma pistol pointing unwaveringly at my chest. ‘Hand the artefact to Metheius, and place your gun on the floor, slowly. If I see even a hint of treachery, I’ll vaporise the commissar.’ Jurgen, as always, glanced at me for confirmation, and I nodded.
‘Do as he says,’ I said levelly. ‘We can always recover it later.’
Killian laughed. ‘There won’t be a later,’ he reminded me. ‘The tyranids are going to pick this plateau clean, and you along with it.’ That had hardly escaped my notice, of course, but as usual in that sort of situation I’d found it best to concentrate on the immediate problem, on the entirely reasonable grounds that if I didn’t I’d be comfortably dead by the time the next one rolled along.
‘Then you’d better get moving,’ I suggested, as Metheius reached out a tentative mechadendrite to take the shadowlight from Jurgen. As the mysterious artefact left his fingers my aide unslung his lasgun with a truculent expression, clearly sorely tempted to use it, but, as always, he followed my orders to the letter, allowing the weapon to fall to the floor. Metheius scooped it up with his other mechanical tentacle, and trotted over to join Killian, looking absurdly pleased with himself. ‘In my experience the ’nids aren’t all that likely to stick to someone else’s timetable.’
‘Drop your weapons too,’ Killian ordered, returning his attention to me. I unbuckled my weapon belt, feeling oddly disconcerted as the familiar weight fell away, and stepped out of the loop of leather as my pistol and chainsword clattered to the flagstones at my feet. Metheius hesitated for a moment, then, as I’d hardly dared to hope, handed the shadowlight to Killian in order to pluck my weapons from the floor without approaching me too closely.
‘Thank you.’ The deranged inquisitor tucked the small slab of stone under his free arm, and took a step towards the doorway. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting again.’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ I told him, hearing the clatter of bootsoles in the corridor outside at last. Before Killian even realised reinforcements had arrived Amberley was inside the room, her entourage at her heels, nodding a casual greeting to me while Pelton, Simeon and Zemelda aimed their lasguns at him. Jurgen strode forwards at once with a furious expression, to pluck his lasgun and my weapon belt from the mechadendrites of the stunned-looking tech-priest.
‘Ernst Stavros Killian,’ Amberley said loudly and clearly, holding up her hand to display the Inquisitorial electoo that flashed into visibility as she spoke. ‘You have been declared Excommunicate Diabolus by the Consilium Ravus of the triune ordos, and by their authority are ordered to surrender your person to answer to the charges of treason and heresy there laid against you.’ She pulled a roll of parchment that would have choked a grox from inside her greatcoat, and brandished it in his general direction.
‘Just what I might have expected from a pusillanimous puritan,’ Killian sneered. ‘Precisely the sort of tunnel-visioned weakling the Consilium would choose to send after me.’
‘A tunnel-visioned weakling with rather more guns than you’ve got,’ Amberley pointed out cheerfully, as I buckled my weapon belt and drew my laspistol to emphasise the point. Looking uncommonly pleased with himself Jurgen joined the ring of lasguns pointing at the cornered inquisitor, apparently unaware of the way Zemelda and Pelton widened the cordon a little as he stepped up to reinforce it. ‘And my Inquisitorial mandate does allow me the discretionary power of summary execution if you refuse to co-operate.’
‘Then you leave me with no other option,’ Killian said resignedly, lowering his plasma pistol at last. I barely had time for a sigh of relief before he pulled the trigger, blowing a hole through the floor at his feet, and sending us all reeling with the bright flash of combustion.
‘Down there!’ Amberley shouted, as I blinked my eyes clear of the dancing after-images. Without hesitation she leapt through the hole after Killian, Pelton and Simeon following almost at once.
I held out a hand to forestall Zemelda as she teetered on the brink. ‘Wait,’ I said. I pointed to Metheius, who was still staggering, disorientated and noticeably singed from his proximity to the detonation, but who would undoubtedly recover soon enough thanks to his augmetic components. ‘Detain him if you can, shoot him if you can’t. Jurgen, with me.’
Reasoning from the lack of any gunfire that Amberley and her friends hadn’t run into anything inimical in the chamber below, which appeared to be identical in size and shape to this one from what I could see of it, though completely empty, I leapt through the hole, which proved to be a trapdoor of noticeably thinner stone than that forming the rest of the floor. I landed with a jolt that I absorbed instinctively, reflexes honed on the assault courses of the schola progenium having been augmented by years of experience on the battlefield, rolling clear just in time to avoid Jurgen landing on top of me. He glanced around, levelling his lasgun, peering into the shadowed gloom that surrounded us. It seemed Killian hadn’t bothered kindling the luminators down here, presumably because he didn’t think he’d need to, but I trusted my old hiver’s instincts in a place like this, and listened carefully, disentangling the sound of running feet from the echoes overlapping them with little difficulty.
‘Which way, sir?’ Jurgen asked, just as the distant patter of footsteps was drowned out by an agonised scream that seemed to go on forever, before finally trailing away into reverberating silence.
I pointed towards the source. ‘That way, at a guess,’ I said, leading the way at a rapid trot. As I’d surmised, the layout of the corridors here was identical to that of the floor above, and my knack of orientation in an environment like this didn’t let me down. Within moments we’d caught up with Amberley and the others, who were staring at what was left of Killian in the light of the portable luminators they’d evidently had tucked away somewhere in their Guard-issue equipment pouches.
‘What happened?’ Pelton asked, his face almost as pale as a genuine Valhallan’s. ‘He was running ahead of us, and then he just stopped. It was like his whole body was twisting.’ He broke off, unable or unwilling to continue, but he really had no need to. Killian’s corpse was as deformed as the vilest of mutants, bone and muscle apparently having flowed like melting candle wax, until his soul had been wrenched from his body.
‘It was the shadowlight,’ I said, addressing Amberley directly, my words tumbling over one another in my desperate haste to convey the danger the thing represented. ‘It’s marinated in warp energy. They thought we’d deactivated it somehow because they saw us carrying it, but as soon as Killian got out of range of whatever Jurgen does to psychic phenomena, he became exposed to the full power of the thing.’
‘I see.’ Amberley nodded, understanding at once. ‘We’ll need proper shielding to carry it safely.’
‘Metheius was getting ready to pack it up for transit,’ I said. ‘There must be something in the laboratory that’ll do the job.’
‘Then we’d better get back there,’ Amberley said. She gestured towards the sinister black stone. ‘Jurgen, if you wouldn’t mind carrying it for me?’
‘Of course not, miss.’ My aide smiled broadly, and trotted off to retrieve the cursed artefact. I was just beginning to heave a heartfelt sigh of relief, when Eglantine’s voice crackled in my comm-bead.
‘Inquisitor Vail,’ she said. ‘The tyranids are attacking.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
The canoness was waiting for us in the chamber we’d entered the labyrinth by, standing next to the mangled power armour on its display pedestal, surrounded by a bodyguard of Celestians. The Sister Superior in charge of them looked vaguely familiar, but it was only when she spoke to me that I recognised her as the leader of the little troop that had got hacked to pieces on Aceralbaterra, and whose gung-ho imbecility had almost cost us the plateau. I returned her greeting cordially enough, however, as for some reason she seemed pleased to see me, and from what I could gather of the tactical situation through my comm-bead I’d need every well-disposed person in power armour I could find between me and the ’nids if I was going to get out of here in one piece.
‘I owe you a great debt, commissar,’ she told me, looking oddly embarrassed. ‘You recalled me to my duty, when I was so carried away by vainglorious zeal I would have neglected it.’
‘Well, that’s my job,’ I said modestly, but the woman just nodded seriously, taking the words at face value.
‘The Emperor sent you, of that I’ve no doubt. To have left his temple undefended while it was beset with xeno-spawned filth…’ She sighed. ‘It would have been a grave thing indeed to have had to confess before the Golden Throne.’
‘Well, let’s hope you don’t have to check in there for a long time to come,’ I said.
Eglantine, who until now had been pointedly ignoring me, glanced up from a huddled conversation with Amberley, her expression grave. ‘None of us expect to survive this battle,’ she said, as calmly as if she’d simply been commenting on the weather. ‘Nor do we deserve to. Our order has been the instrument of the vilest blasphemy. All we can do is seek to atone for that sin, and pray to the Emperor that our deeds will prove worthy of his forgiveness.’
‘Killian lied to a lot of people,’ I told her, wondering for a moment if the late and unlamented inquisitor’s insanity had been somehow contagious. ‘You followed his orders in good faith.’
‘That merely compounds our guilt,’ Eglantine said heavily. ‘We were so sure of our path, and so proud of doing His will, that we never thought to pray for the divine guidance that would have opened our eyes and hearts to the truth. Our arrogance was the seed of our own destruction.’ All of which sounded like the kind of sermon that was guaranteed to bore me into a stupor whenever we were herded into the chapel at the schola, and which has kept me out of temples ever since, except for those occasions on which protocol and my position within the Commissariat have combined to make my presence at some service or other unavoidable.
There was clearly no reasoning with her, so I wasn’t going to waste any more breath trying. Instead I simply nodded. ‘The Emperor protects,’ I said, falling back on the familiar infantryman’s platitude, and the canoness nodded too, apparently taking heart from the well-worn formula.
‘He’ll need to,’ Amberley interjected grimly.
Recalled to the matter at hand, Eglantine nodded. ‘The swarm is already overrunning the outer walls,’ she said. ‘Sister Bonica and her Celestians will escort you back to your shuttle. After that, all our fates are in the hands of Him on Earth.’ She glanced at the plain black carrying case hanging from Jurgen’s left hand, his right hefting his lasgun, which he’d slung from his shoulder so that he could shoot it from the hip with some semblance of accuracy. ‘Is that the abomination that so profaned our citadel?’
‘It is,’ Amberley confirmed.
Eglantine sighed. ‘It seems a very small thing to have done so much harm.’
‘Killian did the harm,’ I said, unable to resist glaring at Metheius, who was tagging along as good as gold, assisted by the occasional prod from the barrel of Zemelda’s lasgun. ‘With a little help. The important thing now is to undo it.’
‘Quite.’ The canoness returned her attention to Amberley. ‘As soon as you’re airborne we’ll regroup, and try to keep the swarm away from the town. We’ll delay it as long as we can.’
‘Emperor willing, that should be enough,’ Amberley said.
‘I pray so.’ Eglantine began to lead the way back through the wide corridors we’d traversed no more than an hour or so before, exchanging brisk messages with her subordinates, who were apparently fighting on several fronts. I listened in on my comm-bead as best I could, but little of what I heard made sense to me. I was unfamiliar with the layout of the convent, and the sisters used their own protocols and battle language. I was able to gather enough to infer that things weren’t going at all well, though.
After a while we deviated from the route I remembered, bypassing Killian’s guest quarters, and I began to see the first signs of damage: flamer burns on the frescoes, bolter holes in the statues and hangings, and the occasional body, left where it had fallen as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed. The deep gashes left in the ceramite of the first shredded sister we chanced upon looked uncomfortably familiar to me, and I wasn’t surprised to find the remains of several genestealers piled up at the next junction. It seemed the hive mind was sticking to its traditional tactics, infiltrating scout organisms ahead of the bulk of the swarm to disrupt the defences it faced, and I gripped my laspistol and chainsword a little tighter as we jogged along, surrounded by the comforting bulk of silver and black power armour.
‘That way,’ Eglantine said at last, pointing down a cross corridor we’d just come to. She turned and faced the Celestian sister, making the sign of the aquila. ‘Emperor be with you, Bonica.’
‘And with you,’ Bonica responded, ‘until we meet again before the Golden Throne.’ My last sight of Eglantine was a blur of motion, sprinting with all the speed her armour-enhanced muscles were capable of towards the distant tumult of battle, and the briefly glimpsed mayhem in the courtyard beyond her hurrying form. The wide corridor we stood in led to what, a short while before, had been an elegant formal garden, its wide lawns and flowering borders crushed to mud beneath a heaving sea of chitin, mandible, and doggedly resisting Sororitas, falling back slowly as that irresistible tidal wave of malign bio-forms broke against the shore of their bolter fire and expertly wielded sarissae.96
‘Pontius,’ Amberley voxed. ‘We’re going to need pickup fast.’
‘I’m on it, ma’am,’ our pilot’s voice reassured us, calm as always, and I began to feel a faint flare of hope. ‘There’s a courtyard about six hundred metres from your present position the ’nids haven’t reached yet. Big mosaic of one of the saints on the wall.’
‘I know it,’ Bonica assured him, and we began double-timing it away from the battle behind us, although several of the sisters looked distinctly disappointed not to be following their canoness into the jaws of death (quite literally in this case, probably).
‘Good.’ Amberley voxed our pilot again. ‘Keep scanning for us, in case we have to deviate.’ She hurdled another fallen battle-sister, who seemed to be missing most of her head. ‘There are signs of infiltration in the building already.’
‘I’ve got you on auspex,’ Pontius assured her, which sounded good to me.
We were passing through another atrium when the ’stealers jumped us, a whole pack of them flowing silently out of the shadows where statues stood in niches and ornately gilded doorways led off to silent chapels. That alone would have been intimidating enough, but towering over them all was the baleful silhouette of a brood lord, its scything talons and rending claws extended as it bounded forward at the head of its grotesquely twisted progeny.
‘Run,’ Bonica snapped, as the sisters opened up with their bolters, scything down the front rank as they closed. I didn’t need urging twice, breaking into a sprint for the only clear exit I could see, Jurgen at my heels. ‘We’ll hold them here.’
Not for long, I thought, there were too many of them, and Amberley evidently shared my opinion, running just as hard as I was for the open door and the rectangle of blue sky beyond. Zemelda hesitated, cracking off a shot at the onrushing horde, and Pelton dropped back to seize her arm, dragging her into motion again. While her attention was momentarily distracted Metheius made a break for it, sprinting away at quite an astonishing turn of speed. I assume he must have had augmetic legs, as he even managed to overtake me, which is something not easily done when I’m fleeing for my life.
