Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  There were more dead Ghosts too. Men and women Kolosim knew well, lying where they had fallen, buckled and twisted. Some had died instantly from massive wound trauma. Others had died slowly, alone and in pain, caught in the open. Blood trails demonstrated that.

  ‘Feth this,’ Vadim muttered.

  ‘How do we know they’re dead?’ Bray asked.

  ‘Throne, look at them!’ Kolosim replied.

  ‘Not ours, sir,’ said Bray. ‘The Cult Mech.’

  Kolosim hesitated. Feth of a time to think that thought. They looked dead. Servitors and priests, cold and still, leaking black shit onto the floor.

  They’d been infected by something.

  But they had never been alive in the first place, not in ways Kolosim or his Ghosts understood. Cult Mechanicus were pretty cold and still at the best of times. How could he tell? The shot-up ones, sure, but the others? They knew a frenzy had overtaken them, a killing bloodlust. Then they’d shut down and dropped, spewing the black goop everywhere. Was that death? Or was it just another phase? Inertia? A dormant state while the infection progressed to the next stage?

  Kolosim looked around and swallowed nervously. There were hundreds of dead Cult Mech personnel and servitors littering the halls and arcades. He could see forty alone from where he was standing.

  What if they were about to come back? Switch the feth back on? Wake up and resume their kill-frenzy?

  He’d just walked two full companies in amongst them.

  ‘Feth,’ he breathed.

  ‘What?’ Caober asked.

  Kolosim fumbled for his bead.

  ‘Kolosim to all entry teams. I want confirm taps on every Mech body you see. Repeat. Kill-confirm every potential hostile. No exceptions.’

  His team leaders voxed affirmative. The shots started. The men around him spread out, aiming down at the heads or central processors of every dead adept, priest and servitor, and firing a point-blank round to destroy them.

  It was grim work. It was vital work. The Mechanicus kept its mysteries and secrets to itself. If there was even a slim chance any of them would revive, it had to be erased.

  Obel clambered to his feet and stumbled towards the duct. Criid and Zhukova had already taken off into the vent in pursuit of the fleeing Qimurah.

  ‘Tona!’ he yelled.

  There was no reply. He felt woozy, his lungs tight from the heat. The thing had hit him hard, and he was pretty sure he was carrying broken ribs or worse. But the adrenaline surge of the savage fight was still pumping through him.

  He glanced back at the devastation behind him. Smoke virtually filled the gallery’s rockcrete ravine, and fires were burning where both bodies and the chemical silt in the channel bed had caught. The enemy dead choked the gulley mouth, and the Tanith dead and injured were all around him.

  ‘Sergeant!’ he yelled.

  Ifvan limped to him, gashes on his face. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Check the dead. The enemy dead. None of these bastards can be alive, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then see to our wounded. Come on, Ifvan! Rally whoever’s left!’

  Ifvan nodded.

  ‘Where – where will you be, sir?’ he asked.

  Obel was already hurrying towards the vent.

  Tona Criid was a strong runner, but Zhukova was staying with her. The heat in the close confines of the vent was intense. Criid wasn’t sure how much longer either of them would last before dehydration shock or the stifling air overcame them.

  She wasn’t going to let the bastard go.

  And there were very few places he could go. This was the main vent spur, the route they’d followed to get in. It ran all the way out beyond the limits of the EM 14 site, and eventually joined the main geotherm shaft. No divisions, no sub-tunnels. At least that was what the chart had seemed to show. Two kilometres out to the main magmatic pipeway.

  The heat was bad enough. The noxious volcanic gases were burning her throat and binding her chest, as though her respiratory system was corroding. The duct was a tube, and the base was littered with magmatic residue and liquid spoil, making it treacherous under foot. She twisted her ankle twice, and then stumbled so badly she fell and slammed painfully into the curved wall of the duct.

  Zhukova pulled her up.

  ‘We can’t–’ Zhukova began.

  ‘We can,’ Criid insisted.

  It had been easier coming in, despite the weight of gear. They’d moved steadily, picking their way. Nothing like this blind, headlong rush. Chasing down a pipe into hell after one of its daemons.

  They started to run again. Zhukova had strapped her rifle over her back. Criid’s rifle was back in the gallery, but she still had the Mechanicus stave.

  ‘He was hurt–’ Zhukova said, coughing.

  ‘So are we.’

  ‘No, he was wounded. I don’t care how inhuman he was, he was damaged!’

  Criid knew she was right. She’d seen the Qimurah go past her, torso and arm torn and blistered from weapons-fire. She’d seen splashes of yellow fluid on the wall of the duct as they rushed into it. Maybe that was their only edge. Maybe they could overtake him, despite his speed, because he’d start to flag as his wounds slowed him.

  She saw a vertical beam of pale light ahead. It was the down-duct that led back to Turbine Hall One, the one they’d lugged the support weapons and ammo down, rung by rung.

  She ran straight under the opening and kept going.

  ‘Tona!’ Zhukova called.

  Criid looked back. ‘Not that way!’

  ‘He might have–’

  ‘No! He’s gone out the same way he went in! Right down to the main thermal line, Zhukova! That just goes back up into the Mechanicore!’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Come on!’ Criid turned and started running again.

  ‘Captain Criid!’ Zhukova yelled.

  Criid cursed and swung back around.

  ‘What?’ Zhukova was standing under the ceiling duct, looking up.

  ‘What, Zhukova?’

  ‘He would have gone up,’ Zhukova said, ‘if it was the easy way.’

  Criid stumbled back to her, panting.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘If he was wounded,’ said Zhukova. ‘Desperate. Knew he couldn’t make it all the way to the main line. Decided to hide.’

  Criid looked at her. ‘Is that a guess? Are you guessing?’

  ‘I’m trying to think as he might think,’ Zhukova replied. ‘I don’t think I can go much further. Not all the way along. And then how many more kilometres to get out of the city, the clave zones, back to enemy lines? If I was hurt, I’d hide. And this is the only hiding place. The only one.’

  Criid glared at her.

  Zhukova reached up and grabbed the lowest rung of the service ladder. She hauled her way up a short distance into the base of the down-shaft.

  She paused, and dragged her hand along the next rung up, then looked down at Criid and showed her palm.

  It was smeared with yellow fluid.

  ‘The bastard went up,’ she said.

  ‘Feth,’ Criid growled. ‘Jump down! Jump the feth down, Ornella!’

  Zhukova landed beside her. Criid raised the stave, aimed it up the down-shaft, and loosed a pulse of rippling gravitron force.

  They heard it strike something in the darkness far above. A dull metallic thump. Dust, pebbles and flakes of rusted metal showered down on them.

  Criid pushed the stave into her pack and grabbed the lower rungs, heaving herself up.

  Obel ran up, panting and coughing, from the duct behind them.

  ‘Criid? Where the feth are you going?’ he gasped.

  ‘Up!’ Criid yelled, disappearing from view.

  Zhukova looked at Obel.

  ‘Because he did,’ sh
e said.

  ‘Is it dead?’ he asked.

  The Beati Sabbat sighed. Gaunt had never seen her look so exhausted. Even the soft, inner light she seemed to generate had dimmed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  The billet hall of the undercroft was just a billet hall. All the reality distortions had vanished like dreams. The flood water had drained away swiftly, leaving only foul puddles and debris on the flagstones. Baskevyl’s men were lighting lamps so there was a little light at least.

  Gaunt slowly looked around. Just a cellar now: cold, damp, damaged, old. Just a place, a solid, ordinary reality, a set of deep chambers no one cared about. The malice that had infused the stones had fled with the woe machine’s death-shock. The undercroft had realigned with reality and returned to what it had always been.

  Gaunt checked himself. No, the place had changed forever. No one would come here now. It ought to be sealed, not because there was some lingering trace of immaterial evil, but because of what it was. A tomb. A scene of murder. A site so burdened with grief and loss it was hard to even stand there.

  The dead littered the ground between waste-water puddles and broken cots. Sancto’s men. Osket was moving from body to body, checking for life, though it was just a formality. They had been cut to ribbons. Sariadzi had been destroyed so completely, no trace of him remained.

  Gaunt wondered how many others had died here. Ghosts, men and women of the retinue, so devoured by the darkness that nothing had survived to show they had ever existed.

  Daur sat in a corner, his back to the wall. This loss, this slaughter, had scarred them all. Gaunt doubted he would ever see Ban Daur flash his eager smile again.

  And then there was Gol.

  Kolea was sitting on the ground, staring at the spot where Yoncy had been. Only a few fused black thorns remained, like a scatter of dead leaves. There was no expression on his face. Gaunt couldn’t begin to know what Gol Kolea was feeling.

  Except that part of him was afraid he could. Merity had been down here. She’d been caught in this. Gaunt barely knew her, and what little he did know was lies. In truth, he hadn’t known his daughter any better than Gol had known his. But the damage was primal. It defied rationalisation. A child was a child, no matter how estranged, no matter how false.

  Dalin Criid stood apart from the rest, leaning against a wall, staring at the whitewashed stones. His weeping had stopped, and his anguished denials had trailed into silence. Gaunt knew Dalin felt this more bitterly than anyone. Even more than Gol, he had been close to the girl. The conflict had broken him. Grief for the loss of a sister, rage at the sheer depth of the betrayal.

  Yoncy had never been Yoncy, but that hadn’t stopped them from believing she was real. For years, she had been part of them, part of the Tanith company, a survivor, a cheerful, quirky girl who had often been a welcome antidote to the grind of war. Caring for her, laughing with her, protecting her, amusing her… that had been part of their lives, simple human interactions that had allowed them to forget, once in a while, the struggle they were committed to.

  Except she had been the war all along. The war had been dwelling with them, within their ranks, inside their trust, inside their minds and their hearts, waiting to reveal its true nature.

  This was the greatest wound the Ghosts had ever suffered. It had cut the heart of them out, from the inside, striking from the single place that seemed safe. Gaunt had never doubted the devotion of his duty. He had never questioned his belief that man should fight against the Ruinous Powers with every fibre of his soul. Yesterday, he’d wanted the Anarch dead and defeated, just as he had the week before that, and the year before that.

  But this? Sek would die, not because it was Gaunt’s duty, not because it was the right thing, not because it was the Emperor’s will, and not because his death would protect mankind.

  Sek would die because of this.

  Stablights bobbed in the archway behind him. Colonel Grae appeared, leading a team of Urdeshi troops and palace staff.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘See to the survivors,’ Gaunt said. ‘Get them out of here.’

  Grae nodded, and his men moved forward, gathering up Sancto, who was bleeding out and could no longer stand or speak, and assisting Hark, who was still supporting the wounded Laksheema.

  Laksheema looked at Gaunt.

  ‘This area must be purged and sealed, sir,’ she said, her voice frail. ‘The entire level.’

  ‘It will be.’

  ‘I will assign ordo staff to undertake the purification rituals.’

  Gaunt nodded. Laksheema turned and allowed Hark to help her limp away.

  ‘What is the situation?’ Gaunt asked Grae.

  ‘All power and systems in the palace are out, my lord,’ Grae replied. ‘Defences are down, and all comms are non-functional.’

  ‘So no word from Rawne?’

  ‘None, sir. There are reports of attacks throughout Eltath. The enemy has made a play.’

  ‘I’ll be up directly. Does Van Voytz have command?’

  ‘He does, sir,’ said Grae. ‘He began evacuation, but then the power crashed. I believe he is working to restore the palace and war room to combat function as quickly as possible.’

  ‘We need it.’

  Grae nodded. He saluted, and turned to go, then looked at Gaunt again.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘your daughter is safe. I had her taken to a medicae station just twenty minutes ago.’

  Gaunt found he could not reply.

  ‘She was shaken, sir, but essentially unharmed. I’ll request further reports. I would say she acquitted herself well. Braved the ordeal with great composure.’

  ‘Thank you, colonel,’ said Gaunt. Grae made the sign of the aquila, and hurried off to oversee the recovery efforts.

  Gaunt had never, in his entire life, felt more like weeping. He looked at Gol, seated, silent, staring, and registered a stab of guilt at his own, selfish relief.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Curth.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Ibram,’ she said in a low voice. ‘This is something… this is… Throne, I don’t know. None of us will just walk away from this. It won’t just heal like a battle wound. And even when it does, it won’t be a scar any of us wear with any pride. And Gol, and Ban and poor Dalin–’

  ‘I know,’ he said. He hugged her quickly, to her surprise, then let her go. ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘Ana, I was thinking… I might be forced to step down.’

  ‘As Lord Executor?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘No one would question it,’ she said. ‘This trauma, it would break any–’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think I might step down because Macaroth will never permit his Lord Executor to lead a vengeance strike in person.’

  ‘Against Sek?’

  ‘Wherever he is. Yes. He dies for this. For this, above and beyond any part of his heinous catalogue of crimes.’

  ‘Don’t be rash,’ she said. ‘Bram? Bram, listen. You can do more against him as Lord Executor than as an avenger. This is what he wants. It’s the spite he uses to snap us. He weakens us by striking at our souls. He wants to break you, and if you step down, he will have succeeded.’

  She gripped his arm and stared into his eyes. Only she, it seemed, was not afraid to look into his eyes.

  ‘Sek doesn’t feel,’ she said. ‘He has no humanity. That’s why he can do this to us. Don’t let him turn your humanity against you. Feel this, and use it to help you prosecute this war to victory. Don’t squander it on some doomed gesture. You’re the Lord Executor. Worlds depend on you. And Sek should be fething afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘He’s made a mortal enemy even stronger.’

  There was a clatter. The Beati’s sword, scorched and buckled, had slipped from her hand. Auerben rushed to steady her
.

  ‘She’s passed out,’ Auerben cried out, her fire-scarred voice even more of a rasp than usual. ‘Help me here!’

  Curth and Gaunt rushed to the Saint’s side.

  ‘Just exhaustion,’ said Curth, examining her.

  Gaunt nodded. The Saint had come straight from days of battle at Ghereppan and Oureppan. Her divine strength had already been depleted before they’d even begun. These superhuman efforts in the undercroft had drained all the reserves she had left.

  ‘I see no major wounds,’ said Curth. ‘But then, I don’t begin to know how the warp may have wounded her in that fight.’

  ‘She is so pale,’ said Auerben. ‘Her light is gone–’

  ‘Get her up!’ Curth yelled. ‘Help me! Osket!’

  The Ghosts from Baskevyl’s team rushed to her, and lifted the Beati’s limp form between them.

  ‘There’s no weight to her!’ Osket exclaimed.

  ‘This way!’ Curth urged them, leading the men towards the exit.

  The Ghosts, in black, with their fragile pale burden, reminded Gaunt of pall bearers.

  ‘Ana?’ he called out.

  Curth looked back at him and simply nodded. The look in her eyes told him everything he needed to know. It was the same uncompromising determination he’d seen every time Medicae Curth had fought to save a wounded soul on the fields of war they had crossed together.

  There were very few of them left in the undercroft now. Daur, Kolea and Dalin lost in their own pain, Blenner lurking by the door, anxious, as if he was waiting for something. Gaunt was heartened a little to see Blenner show a simple, human response of sympathy for once.

  Baskevyl glanced at Gaunt. Shock was etched on his face too.

  ‘Should we try to move them?’ he asked Gaunt.

  Gaunt nodded. ‘Gently,’ he said. ‘They should mourn as long as they need to, but this place is–’

  ‘I know, sir,’ Baskevyl replied. Gaunt took a step towards Kolea, but Baskevyl stopped him. Bask and Gol were best friends. Bask would be a more welcome comfort.

  Gaunt crossed to Daur instead.