Defender of the Imperium Omnibus, page 91
‘Better make it fast,’ I suggested, following him through the door. I glanced back at Jurgen and the cadets. ‘Cover the end of the corridor. That’s where they’ll come from.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Jurgen said, already directing the melta down the passageway, while the quartet of cadets took what cover they could behind convenient doorways, or the occasional tables scattered along the length of the hall.
‘Is your niece on the premises too?’ I asked Trevellyan, as he began to shoulder aside an over-ornamented wardrobe, which looked as though it had been standing there since the Emperor was in short trousers. If she was, she was on her own so far as I was concerned, but there was no harm in making a show of interest in our secondary objective. The huge lump of timber seemed in no hurry to budge, so I put my shoulder to it as well, and between us we managed to shift the blasted thing just far enough to reveal a genecode scanner and the faint outline of a narrow doorway set into the wall.
‘Illyria?’ Trevellyan shook his head. ‘No, she’s gone hunting. She’s staying at the lodge on the Marksell estate.’ I hadn’t a clue where that was, but no doubt Rorkins could send someone to pick her up or look after her, as soon as I got the chance to tell him; I wasn’t about to trust information that sensitive to the vox.
‘Well, that’s something, anyway,’ I said, while Trevellyan slapped his hand to the reader plate. For an agonising moment nothing seemed to be happening, then the panel in the wall swung back, releasing a cloud of dust and the faintly cloacal smell which told me beyond all reasonable doubt that somewhere the passageway behind it connected to the sewers.
‘Commissar, they’re here!’ Kayla called, her voice tightly controlled, and echoing a fraction of a second later in my comm-bead. Cursing, I drew my laspistol, and hurried across to the door. Running footsteps could be heard approaching along the corridor, and I aimed carefully at the intersection, around which our pursuers would be coming. To my relief, though, the tread was of booted feet, not the ponderous thudding of power armour, and I began to relax a little.
‘Hold your fire until you’re certain of a target,’ I said, holding my weapon on aim regardless. My caution seemed justified a moment later, when the PDF troopers we’d last seen manning the barricade behind us pelted into view. Disconcerting that they’d apparently turned and fled so precipitously, but under the circumstances I was prepared to make allowances: even Imperial Guard troopers would have thought twice about standing their ground in front of the Traitor Legions, although I’d have hoped that they’d have retreated in rather better order. Still, if I could bring them to heel and take them along with us, that would be no bad thing: I’ve never been averse to a bit more cannon fodder standing between me and harm’s way.
Even so, I kept my pistol up, the palms of my hands itching more strongly than ever, although, as so often, I couldn’t have pinpointed the exact reason for my disquiet.
‘It’s all right, they’re ours!’ Briel said, his voice ringing with relief, and moving out into the corridor just as the running troopers brought their lasguns up. That was what had been bothering me, I suddenly realised, they’d been holding them like men advancing to contact, not running from an enemy behind them. Before I could shout a warning, however, they’d opened fire. Briel took four or five las-bolts in the chest, which practically cut him in half, and staggered back, an almost comical expression of astonishment on his face. No point in risking anyone’s neck dragging him back into cover; he was quite clearly on his way to the Golden Throne even before he hit the carpet, which was now considerably messier.
‘Death to the servants of the Corpse-God!’ the sergeant shouted, and we returned fire with a will, eager to avenge our own. At least the surviving cadets were; Jurgen and I were too seasoned a pair of campaigners to take Briel’s loss personally, at least while the more pressing matter of our own survival was taking up most of our attention. The front rank of onrushing traitors faltered under the barrage of las-bolts we unleashed, a couple in the front rank falling, where they tripped the charging troopers most closely behind, and Jurgen’s melta accounted for a small group at the back.
‘Disengage!’ I shouted, beckoning our survivors into the Governor’s bedroom. We’d slowed the enemy charge, but I was under no illusion that the next wave would be so easily dealt with, nor, for that matter, that our erstwhile allies were completely out of the fight either. Whatever had turned their minds seemed to have left them as fanatical as the Madasans I’d encountered before, and even as Jurgen and the others began to pull back to join me my worst forebodings were confirmed. The troopers who’d escaped injury, or had only suffered superficial wounds, opened fire again almost without pause.
Almost, but not quite. Kayla and Nelys had just had time to scurry to safety before the barrage resumed, and my nose told me that Jurgen was all right even before my eyes had registered his presence, but Donal hadn’t been so lucky. He’d been halfway across the corridor from his refuge in the opposite doorway when the enemy had begun firing again, and a couple of rounds hit him in the chest and knee. He fell, dangerously exposed in the middle of the expanse of carpeting.
‘Cover him!’ I snapped, hoping he’d be able to crawl to safety, but the lad was twitching like a freshly-landed fish, unable to rise, and leaking like a colander. Bright red blood was staining the front of his greatcoat, turning the black fabric an unpleasant mushy rust colour before dripping to the floor, and his face was greying.
‘Very good, sir.’ Jurgen poked the melta round the doorframe, and sent a blast of ravening heat down the hallway. This time his shot drifted a little high, setting fire to the wood panelling, but sending the turncoats attacking us scrambling back to the junction of the corridor, leaving their dead and wounded lying where they’d fallen.
I hesitated for a moment, but even as I overcame my reluctance to move, I knew I had no choice. If I just left the lad to bleed to death, or worse, fall into the hands of the enemy, I’d lose the respect of the surviving cadets, and I needed them to follow my lead without hesitation if I was going to get out of this with a whole skin. And then there was Trevellyan to consider. So far as he was concerned, I was the legendary Liberator, the warrior who’d saved his planet once before, and even the merest hint that I was just as fallible as anyone else would probably end any chance we had of using him to rally the populace against the invader. Taking a deep breath, I loosed a couple of las-bolts in the general direction of the enemy, and popped out of the doorway as abruptly as my mechanical replica on that ghastly timepiece in Liberation Square.
Time seemed to slow, as it so often does when I’m in imminent danger of death, and I had plenty of time to note my surroundings while I hoisted Donal to his feet and sent another couple of shots down the corridor for good measure. Satisfied that the only enemy still moving that I could see was a trooper who’d been too severely singed by Jurgen to last more than a few minutes in any case, I began to back away, keeping the wounded cadet between myself and any more incoming fire. After all, he’d already been shot twice, so another dent or two probably wouldn’t make that much difference to him, whereas I was still up and running, and had every intention of keeping it that way.
It was only as I made it to the doorway that I realised the expiring trooper a handful of metres away wasn’t just twitching at random, he was still moving with evident and malevolent purpose; something I should have expected after my encounter with the Madasans at Rytepat. I shot him at once, but it was already too late, the grenade he’d been priming rolling along the carpet towards us.
‘Grenade!’ I yelled, rotating Donal and myself around the doorframe to seek sanctuary against the other side of the wall (and knocking a filigreed nightstand to the floor in the process, but I was past worrying about taking good care of the furniture by that time). Jurgen reacted instantly, flattening himself against the wall on the other side of the doorway, while Kayla and Nelys flung themselves to the floor behind the well-upholstered bed. (No doubt grateful for the thick carpeting.)
Only Trevellyan stood still in bemusement, trying to comprehend what was going on around him. Emperor only knows what he was still doing there, rather than scuttling down the escape hole like he was supposed to: perhaps he thought protocol demanded that he be the last to leave. If so, it was a gesture of good manners which was to cost him dear. He just had time to ask ‘What did you…’ before the frag charge exploded, fortunately for the rest of us in the corridor outside, rather than inside the room. Shards of shrapnel hissed through the air, and the luckless Governor, who folded like a sack of grain that’s been used once too often for bayonet practice.
‘He’s in a bad way,’ Nelys told me a moment later, quite unnecessarily. I’d seen enough battlefield trauma in my life to be quite certain that the Governor was well beyond any help we could give him in the time we had available.
I turned to Jurgen, who was applying a pressure bandage to an ugly hole in Donal’s chest; by the greatest piece of bad luck, it seemed, one of the noncoms among the turncoats had a stubber for a sidearm, and had been using that in preference to the lasweapons of his compatriots. Las-bolts are nasty enough, it’s true, incapacitating, often fatally, by thermal shock, but the upside is that if you survive a hit, they usually cauterise the wounds they inflict. Bullets, on the other hand, don’t, leaving you to bleed, with fatal consequences if someone can’t staunch it for you. ‘How’s Donal?’ I asked.
‘I’ve felt better,’ Donal said, with a touch of his old insouciance, although it was obvious to me how hard he had to work at maintaining it.
Jurgen shook his head. ‘He needs a chirurgeon,’ he told me bluntly. Well he wasn’t about to get one around here.
‘Just do the best you can,’ I said. ‘Patch him up enough to get moving.’
Jurgen nodded, although his expression told me all I needed to know about what he thought of that idea.
Fortunately, Donal saved him the bother of putting his thoughts into words.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’m bleeding like a stuck grox, and even if I last long enough to get down the hole, I’ll only hold you up.’ It seemed I’d misjudged the lad after all. He hauled himself into a sitting position, a trifle woozily, and hefted his laspistol as though it weighed twice as much as it usually did. ‘I’ll buy you as much time as I can, but it won’t be much. Make the best of it.’
‘We will,’ I promised him, and turned to Nelys. ‘Can his excellency be moved yet?’
‘Don’t patronise me, young man,’ Trevellyan said, looking and sounding his true age at last. ‘I’m past help, and we both know it. The least I can do is follow the good example of your protégé.’ He coughed, spraying his immediate vicinity with a thin dusting of blood. ‘You’ll find a bolt pistol in that cabinet over there. If you’d be kind enough to load it for me, I’ll be honoured to assist him.’
‘Nelys,’ I said, ‘get the Governor his gun. I’ve something else to take care of before we leave.’
Moved by an impulse I couldn’t quite explain, I unwound the crimson sash from around my waist, and handed it to Donal. ‘I think you’ve more than earned this today,’ I told him. ‘Well done, commissar.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Donal swallowed, his voice taking on an unfamiliar huskiness. ‘I’ll try to be worthy of it.’ We stared at one another for a further moment of inarticulate embarrassment, then to our mutual relief Kayla called out from the doorway.
‘Here they come!’ She sent a volley of las-bolts down the corridor, and ducked back inside the room just ahead of a barrage of return fire.
With a tingle of apprehension I felt the floor flexing gently beneath my feet, in the rhythm of an unhurried stride, and knew we were out of time. A few seconds later the unmistakable thudding of power-armoured feet echoed down the passageway.
‘Aim for the joints,’ I advised Donal and the Governor, putting a las-bolt through the genecode reader by the hidden door as I spoke; it was all too easy to picture Trevellyan, or more likely his corpse, being hoisted up by augmented muscle to trigger it. Not that I expected so flimsy a barrier to delay a Traitor Marine for very long, but even that minor advantage would be worth having. ‘It’s the best chance of getting through their armour.’ I turned to Kayla and Nelys. ‘Go, now.’
For a moment I thought they might argue, but they complied straight away, disappearing through the gap into the darkness beyond. I followed, not needing to look to be certain that Jurgen was hard on my heels, and glanced back into the room. Enough light fell through the portal to illuminate the closing mechanism, which my aide triggered with the butt of his melta, keeping the weapon aimed through the narrowing gap as it started to swing shut behind us.
The last sight I had of the room beyond was Donal and Trevellyan levelling their weapons, and shadows moving in the doorway beyond them, too bulky to be anything other than what I’d feared. Then the hidden panel thudded into place, and darkness swallowed us completely.
NINETEEN
Fortunately, as I’d expected, Jurgen had a luminator somewhere about his person, and a moment later, to my pleased surprise, Kayla produced another one from the pocket of her greatcoat, enabling us to get our first clear view of our surroundings. The hidden room adjacent to the Governor’s chambers turned out to contain nothing but a spiral staircase, to my vast relief too narrow for anyone in power armour to negotiate, which descended vertically for a dozen metres or so, before opening out into a passageway just wide enough for us to hurry along in single file, our shoulders almost brushing the walls, and our footsteps echoing from the bare brick hemming us in.
Jurgen led the way at a rapid trot, the luminator he’d found among his profusion of webbing pouches attached to the bayonet lugs of his lasgun, and the butt of the hastily-shouldered melta thudding rhythmically against the crumbling masonry. Every time it struck the wall, a cloud of dust and powdered brickwork stung my eyes and scratched the back of my throat; clearly the Governor hadn’t been exaggerating about the length of time that had passed since the passageway had last been used. I followed hard on my aide’s heels, then Kayla, with Nelys bringing up the rear, the bulk of his body obscuring the lights we carried from any pursuers behind us. I strained my ears for any indication that the wall panel had been breached, but either Donal and the Governor were managing to hold off the enemy for longer than I’d expected, or the hidden portal had been strongly reinforced against just such a contingency as this.
After a few minutes we entered the undercity proper, a warren of service ducts, sewage tunnels, and built-over cellars from long-forgotten structures, which felt reassuringly like the lower hive levels I’d played in as a child. Once or twice we even found ourselves running along recognisable streets, the porticos of ancient buildings, now metres below the dwellings of their builders’ descendants, crumbling around us.
‘I never knew there was anything like this down here,’ Kayla said, a tinge of awe entering her voice as she swept the beam of her luminator along the entablature of a sagging chapel, from which the dust-shrouded image of Him on Earth glowered down at us, as though cranky about being disturbed. Nelys bowed his head and made the sign of the aquila as we passed, but the rest of us just kept going as quickly as possible. I still hadn’t heard any signs of pursuit, just the usual scufflings of rodents and the occasional human outcast, both equally startled and keen to avoid a group of people carrying weapons with evident purpose, but that didn’t mean Varan hadn’t dispatched a search party after us; just that they hadn’t caught up yet.
‘You’ll find something like it under most Imperial cities,’ I told her, more to keep my mind off the worrying possibility of potential pursuit than anything else, but if it gave her and Nelys something to think about other than the loss of Donal and Briel that would be no bad thing. At least her curiosity about the unfamiliar environment was an encouraging sign that she was staying focussed. ‘As they grow and develop over the millennia, the lower levels get built on and forgotten about. Some of the places I’ve been have undercities more than a kilometre thick.’
‘It’s amazing to think no one ever goes down there,’ Nelys said.
‘But they do,’ I told him. ‘You’ll find tech-priests and maintenance workers in the upper levels, of course, looking after the infrastructure of the city, and all sorts of lowlifes too: gangers, illegal gambling dens, crims on the run, anyone whose business is better carried on out of sight. Below that, you come to the deep levels, where things get really bad. That’s where you’ll find the mutants and heretic cults, fugitive psykers, and worse.’
‘What could be worse than that?’ Kayla asked, and I silently reproved myself for spooking her any more than she already was. Pushing away the sudden mental image of blank-faced metal killers, I shrugged.
‘Plenty. But I doubt you’ll find anything like that below Havendown, even at the bottom levels.’ I tried to make my voice as reassuring as I could. ‘Besides, I grew up in the deeps of my old hive before the schola took me in, down near the sump, and I survived. Got off-world, too, which is more than most tunnel rats can say.’ I injected a note of slightly forced levity into my tone. ‘This is all quite homely, really.’ Then I broke off, suddenly aware of a change in the echoes around us. ‘Down here, and douse the lights.’
I led the way into a narrow cleft between two slabs of fallen rockcrete, which a faint draught had already informed me concealed a wider space behind, and the others followed at once, Jurgen and Kayla clicking off their luminators with commendable promptness. In the sudden darkness I heard the faint susurration of sliding fabric as Jurgen unslung his melta, holding it ready for use, and I drew my laspistol.
‘What is it?’ Nelys whispered, then subsided as Kayla elbowed him in the ribs.
