Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Kolea. ‘That’s good.’

  He looked at the Beati. When he spoke, just the one word, there was a tiny break in his voice.

  ‘Now,’ he said.

  The Saint’s green wings reignited with power, brighter than before, and she plunged her blade into the shadow.

  The darkness exploded.

  Deaf, blind, dumb, insensible, they were all hurled backwards into the consuming void.

  Fifteen: Into Fire

  Zhukova gestured, and Criid moved the fire teams forwards. The air in the vent stank of sulphur and it was so warm and close, it made their lungs tight. All of them were streaming with sweat.

  The entire environment felt toxic in the worst way. Every now and then, a rank breath of air would rumble along the duct from far below. Criid kept expecting a super-hot vent of gas to come boiling up and roast them where they stood.

  ‘Down from here,’ Zhukova said. A wide vertical duct connected to the horizontal one they had been following. Rusted grip rails ran down one side, for use by servitor work crews. The drop glowed with bio­luminescent algae.

  ‘You sure?’ asked Obel.

  Zhukova had been tracing the pattern on her palm with her index finger. She coughed and nodded.

  Maggs peered down the drop.

  ‘Straight down?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zhukova. ‘Fifty metres or so. It meets the main thermal outflow. We can intercept the hostiles.’

  ‘How do we get the support weapons and flamers down that?’ asked Ifvan.

  ‘Carefully,’ said Criid.

  She swung over the lip, got her feet on the first grip rail and looked at them.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  Pasha stopped pacing. She looked over at Spetnin at the arcade hatch.

  ‘It’s getting quieter out there,’ he said. ‘No more assaults in the last few minutes.’

  Pasha nodded. ‘We’ve given them long enough. Ready up. We’re taking that Gnosis Repository.’

  Her squads prepped weapons. Pasha re-checked the antique sleetgun she had spent the last few minutes examining. She was confident that she understood its function. She’d taken a satchel of shells from one of the skitarii corpses. She was going to need decent stopping power.

  At the compression hatch, Mora’s squad was ready, lined up for fast assault. At her nod, Ludd punched the hatch key.

  The compression hatch sighed on its hydraulics and opened.

  The Gnosis Repository was quiet. The bodies of their dead lay where they had fallen. Mora’s team led the way, moving quickly, weapons hunting for movement. Elam’s first squad followed, with Ludd. Pasha led the third assault element inside.

  Nothing moved. No fire came their way from the ducting network at the far end.

  Ludd glanced into the open crypt-safe.

  ‘Etriun,’ he said.

  Pasha glanced in at the versenginseer’s corpse, face up on the crypt floor. Her brow crinkled with distaste.

  ‘Keep moving,’ she instructed.

  Mora’s squad approached the Repository’s far end. Steam guttered from several sub-ducts that had been forced to release pressure. The heavy lid of the main down-duct had been forced, and lay on the deck. Broken locking bolts were scattered on the ground around it.

  Pasha pushed forwards and leaned over to peer down the duct.

  ‘Feth’s sake,’ said Elam. ‘Don’t just go sticking your head in there!’

  She regarded him sarcastically.

  ‘Head still attached,’ she told him, gesturing to her neck. ‘The enemy is in there, and running. I pray to Throne that Tona and Lunny have got their strength down in front of them. We box them in like rats in a pipe. So, Asa, I am going to stick more than just my head in there.’

  She heaved herself out onto the duct’s access ladder, a metal frame that ran down into the darkness below.

  ‘You coming,’ she asked, ‘or have I got to do this alone?’

  A light rain had started to fall out of the low, ink-black sky. Behind them, the last crackle of exchanged fire with the insurgents echoed from the end of the approach road.

  Bray signalled, and the first of the squads moved out, running low and quiet across the rockcrete apron towards the gatehouse. Chiria and Haller brought up the rear, lugging a .20 and ammo box between them, moving at a shuffling trot.

  Bray threw a stop signal, and tossed a rock towards the gatehouse. It clattered across the open yard, in range of the gatehouse sensor net.

  Nothing stirred. No lights kicked in, no hum of auto-aiming weapons.

  The place was dead.

  Bray let his breath out. If the gatehouse had been live, it would have probably stopped them cold. Cracking that kind of bunker was tread-work. Besides, if the gatehouse had opened up, the slaved weapons in its embrasures would easily have had enough reach to hit the bomb truck they pushed up out of range of the insurgents behind the highway rise.

  They moved in. Bray waited, edgy, as Mkoyn burned through the outer door’s lock with a cutting torch. He toed open the heavy door, the lock mechanism still glowing and dripping gobs of molten steel.

  The Ghosts made entry, clearance style.

  Gatehouse command was dead, and so were the two Urdeshi Steelsiders in it. The whole place was torn apart by intense gunfire. The walls were peppered with blast holes, and the floor was covered in drifts of spent brass. Smoke fumed the air. Monitor screens hung, shattered and crazed. Those still linked and functional displayed dead-air feeds. A noxious smell wafted from dead things caged in each of the bunker’s gun embrasures.

  They checked the bodies. Both Steelsiders had been riddled with bullets at close range. The smashed ruin of a gun-servitor lay near the door. One of the dead automata’s cyclic cannons was still rotating, a dry, grinding whirr. It had emptied its entire munition canisters.

  Chiria set down the heavy .20 and relieved one of the dead Urdeshi of his .30 short-snout, strapping the hip-mounted onto a gyro-stable body-frame.

  ‘Easier to carry,’ she said. Haller nodded, and secured the other short-snout. They straightened out the fat, armoured feed belts. The slaved auto-hoppers were dead too, but Chiria found the release catches and lifted the hoppers from their mountings. They were heavy, but she and Haller hefted them up like buckets.

  Bray moved through the inner door and entered the walkway across the ditches. Rain pattered down, jingling the chain mesh. He led the fire team advance. There was a caged inner run beyond the ditches. The meshing here had been torn down.

  ‘Something was penned here,’ said Mkeller.

  Bray nodded. Whatever it was, it was loose.

  Trooper Armin called to Bray there was something on the ground near the door to the main wall. It looked like a large dog. They approached carefully.

  It was a bio-mech thing, a quadruped defence servitor of canine build. What organics it possessed had originally been human. The sight of it disgusted them both.

  It was sprawled on its side. They could tell it was still alive, though its vitals were collapsing.

  ‘Shot?’ Armin asked.

  Bray shook his head. Thick black mucus was welling from the creature’s steel jaws, and films of it crusted the thing’s eyes. Its systems had crashed. It had been compromised and corrupted, and that corruption was now killing it.

  Bray keyed his bead.

  ‘Bray to Kolosim.’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘We’ve reached the inner gate. The place is dead. No contacts. Can confirm signs that the Mechanicus elements turned. Probably some kind of mechanical infection. I don’t know the right word, but it got in their system, drove them mad, and then shut them down.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Looks like it, sir. Burned them out really fast, but they went down feral. No signs of gunfire from inside
.’

  ‘How long to main entry?’

  Bray and Armin tried the massive blast door. It was sealed tight.

  ‘Three, maybe four minutes to cut an entry.’

  ‘Copy that. Get it done.’

  Behind the transports on the approach road, Kolosim looked at the men behind him ready to deploy.

  ‘Move up,’ he said. ‘Bray’s about to let us into the place. It’s gone quiet, but stay sharp.’

  He turned to look at EM 14.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he ordered.

  Behind him, two full companies of Ghosts began to advance on the gatehouse.

  Eli Rawne’s plans always erred towards the simple. Life had taught him that much. The more moving parts, the more chance there was for something to go very wrong. He liked lean plans that were supple enough to absorb nasty surprises.

  His plan for Camp Xenos had been so lean, there wasn’t a scrap of body-fat on it. Get in, grab Mabbon, get out. But life, or some great external power that Rawne didn’t choose to believe in, was laughing at him from the void. It had other ideas.

  He’d been anticipating Sekkite insurgents or, at the very worst, packson units. He’d chosen to move light, with just one section, to make the most of speed.

  The things he was facing instead – ‘Qimurah’, the pheguth had called them – were the sort of freaks that made that Great External Power In The Void positively hoot with glee. The Great External Power In The Void wasn’t something Rawne had any plans to get to know on a personal level. For a start, the Great External Power probably had a face like a grox’s puckered arse. But sometimes – times like this – Rawne felt a burning desire, like an ingot of foundry-fresh steel sinking deep down in his gut, to meet that laughing fether face to face and have words.

  Strong words. Strong words punctuated by straight silver every time Rawne made a salient point.

  With Varl and Brostin in tow, he’d barely got Mabbon into the main guardhouse when the yard-front area lit up. Cardass called out four shooters, minimum. They were pinned down. Their transport was sitting in the yard, near the gate block. Just thirty metres, but the rockcrete yard was wide open all the way. It might as well have been parked on Balhaut.

  Rawne reviewed his situation fast. Most of the Camp Xenos garrison had been dead by the time he’d arrived. He’d lost several good men of his own just getting inside. In the time it had taken him to secure Mabbon, Troopers Okel and Mkfareg had been butchered too. Oysten, his adjutant, had also taken a hit. She’d survived, but the las-bolt had destroyed her vox-caster set.

  That meant no warning was getting out. No message to Pasha that the frighteningly resilient things currently killing his men were also probably coming for her. In larger numbers.

  It also meant there would be no calling for help. Oysten was pissed off about it. If there had been time, Rawne would have enjoyed seeing his normally meek and precise adjutant getting riled.

  ‘I’d just got that fether tuned up!’ she snarled. He helped her pull the smashed vox-caster unit off her back. More shots ripped in through the windows and outer door.

  ‘It seems your exit route is blocked?’ Mabbon asked.

  Rawne glared at him.

  ‘Strangely enough, prisons aren’t built with multiple exits,’ he replied.

  He signalled Brostin forward to join the Ghosts defending the front of the guardhouse. Varl was sticking tight beside the pheguth.

  ‘We could do with another shooter, you know?’ Varl said to Mabbon.

  ‘I don’t want a gun,’ Mabbon replied.

  ‘Not really your choice,’ said Rawne, snatching fire through a window slit.

  ‘Oddly, it is,’ said Mabbon. ‘I’ve been a prisoner for too long. Colonel, how many years has it been now? And every day, you and your Ghosts actively preventing me from having anything, anything at all, that could remotely be used as a weapon?’

  ‘I let you keep your mouth, didn’t I?’ Rawne spat.

  Trooper Kaellin uttered a grunt as a well-placed las-round found his forehead and threw him back from the window slot. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  Rawne cursed. The Archenemy were incredibly effective, and his team were penned in a target building that was being demolished around them one las-bolt at a time. The Suicide Kings, his fine first section, had been reduced to eight: him, Oysten, Varl, Bellevyl, Brostin, Cardass, Laydly and LaHurf.

  End of an era. End of the infamous Kings. He was damned if this was how he was going to go out.

  Then again, he reflected, I’m probably long since damned anyway.

  ‘I told Sergeant Varl this, and I’ll tell you too, colonel,’ said Mabbon. ‘It’s me they want. They don’t care about you, except to kill you on their way to me. Let them have me and spare–’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rawne–’

  ‘No, Mabbon,’ said Rawne. ‘I’ve got orders. A duty. And duty only has two endings. Accomplishing it or–’

  ‘I know the other one,’ said Mabbon.

  Rawne got in beside Laydly, who was burning through his ammo at another of the window slots.

  ‘Cardass says four,’ said Rawne.

  ‘That’s what I count, sir,’ said Laydly. ‘One on the roof of that bunker there. Two in the blockhouse beside it, the other one up by the gate–’

  A burst of las bracketed the slot. Laydly stopped pointing, and he and Rawne ducked. Rockcrete chippings and metal fragments rained down on them.

  ‘You’ll have to take my word on the last one,’ Laydly said.

  ‘What did that bunker look like to you?’ Rawne asked.

  Laydly shrugged. ‘A silo, maybe?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he replied. Xenos was a prison, not a fortress. It wasn’t designed to keep attackers out, it was designed to keep people in. Vital elements, like the guardhouse and any garrison areas or arsenals would be securely distanced from the cell block compound.

  ‘Bellevyl!’ Rawne called out.

  Trooper Bellevyl was holding another window slot several metres left of Rawne.

  ‘Sir?’ the Belladon called back.

  ‘Think you can lob one onto that bunker?’

  Bellevyl pulled a face, assessing his very limited angle of fire.

  ‘Dunno, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Let me re-phrase,’ said Rawne. ‘Lob one onto the bunker, Bellevyl.’

  Bellevyl nodded. First section, B Company – the Suicide Kings – were Rawne’s personal squad. Every Ghost in it had been hand-picked by him. In the early days, they’d all been Tanith, because Rawne had nursed an antipathy to any new influx from Verghast or Belladon. But he had mellowed. Skill-sets and raw talent mattered more to him than some notion of loyalty to a world that no longer existed. That, and the fact that so many of the original Tanith in first section had been smoked over the years he’d needed replacements.

  Like the First’s scout cadre, B Company first section followed its own rules. It was part of the privilege of membership. Rawne allowed greater discretion in weapon choice. He liked the idiosyncratic adaptability of variety. The Suicide Kings went to work packing a range of firepower normally found in elite storm troop platoons. Okel, Throne rest him, had carried a large calibre autogun that chambered armour-piercing rounds. Conglan, now dead out on the yard somewhere, had favoured a hellgun. Oysten, along with her vox-caster, lugged a stock-less riot gun and a bag of breaching shells. Cardass carried a box-fed .20 stubber with a pump shotgun cut-down bolted under the primary barrel.

  LaHurf and Bellevyl had standard pattern lasrifles like Varl’s, but both had increased the carry-weight by a third through the addition of under-barrel grenade launchers.

  Bellevyl slotted in a chunky krak grenade and lined up at the slot, scooting around for the best angle. Heavy enemy fire kept licking at his position, making him duck.

  ‘Tak
e your time,’ Varl said. ‘No fething rush.’

  The ceiling collapsed.

  A Qimurah dropped down onto them in a shower of flakboard and masonry debris. He landed on LaHurf, breaking both of the man’s legs. LaHurf was still screaming when the Qimurah struck him with a fist-full of talons. The blow lifted LaHurf off the ground, spinning him in mid-air, blood jetting in all directions from his torn throat. He landed hard.

  The Qimurah reached for LaHurf’s weapon.

  Ignoring the tight confines, Cardass opened up across the room with his .20. The deafening hard-round burst tore chunks out of the Qimurah’s chest and shoulder, and threw him against the guardhouse wall. Despite severe wounds that would have killed a standard human instantly, the Qimurah lurched forward again with a roar, neon blood pouring from his injuries, and opened fire with LaHurf’s weapon. Bellevyl was killed at his window slot. Oysten was winged. Cardass was hit in the left hip, and overbalanced.

  Brostin hit the Qimurah in the side of the head. He was using one of his flamer tanks as a club. Two blows knocked the creature down, and Brostin kept beating, slamming the heavy metal cylinder into its skull over and over again.

  ‘There,’ he said, finally tossing the tank aside. It was slick with neon blood. The Qimurah had nothing left above the neck except a spatter of yellow paste and bone shards. ‘Knew there’d be more than one way to kill these bastards with a flamer.’

  Oysten was already up, blood oozing from her shoulder. She and Rawne ran to Cardass.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Cardass said. He wasn’t. His hip was a ragged mess. Oysten reached for field dressings, but Cardass told her where she could stick them. He heaved himself back to his window slot and started to fire his stubber again.

  Varl had dashed across to Bellevyl’s position.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to Bellevyl’s corpse. Varl felt bad about it. No man deserved to be mocked the instant before his death. Varl set down his own rifle, and hoisted Bellevyl’s. He checked the grenade was still set in the tube launcher.

  ‘Call it! Bunker?’ he asked, peering out of the slot.