by Dan Abnett
'You just downloaded this?' Bure said.
'I believe they thought they had no reason to hide it. It wasn't encrypted/
Bure threw back his chrome skull and laughed, a screeching, mocking cackle. 'Eleven weeks! Eleven weeks I have scoured and searched and fought my way through the bowels of this rock, hunting for clues, and the answer was up there all the time! In plain sight!'
He turned to Aemos and laid a steel hand on the savant's stooped shoulder. 'I have always admired your wisdom, Uber, and recognised why Hapshant valued you so... but now I realise that great wisdom comes from simplicity/
'It was luck, nothing more/
'It was bold simplicity, savant! A moment of direct, clear thought that quite dwarfs my labours down here/
'You're too kind...' Aemos mumbled.
'Kind? No, I am not kind/ Bure's eye-lights swelled and flashed. 'I will cut my way to the heart of the Lith, and then its spawn will see how unkind my soul can be/
Two hours later, after Bure's servitors had taken us to a sparely furnished cabin and provided us with flavourless, odourless nutrient broth and hard cakes of fibre bread, we were summoned back to the control chamber.
Outside, a small war was going on.
I had already sensed we had decelerated from tunnelling speed by the reduced throb of the impellers, and now I saw why. We had bored out of the rock into a towering vault lit by spurting pools of magma and flaming spouts of gas. On the chamber's holographic screen, I could see distorted, jarring images of the cavern outside. Silent laser fire was jabbing at us.
Bure was linked to the podium's lectern.
We've found their nest/ he said. They resist/
As I watched, two soot-stained prospector pods powered in towards us, firing small arms from their open hatches.
Bure nodded to one of his tech-adepts, and the shriek of multi-laser blasts rang through the hull. One pod exploded in a ball of light, the other tumbled away, shredded and burning.
I realised there were men on the ground too: miners in armoured work-suits scurrying forward and firing at the translithopede.
Bure increased magnification, and we saw that some of them carried pallets of mining charges, hoping to get close enough to breach our hull.
'Stalkers/ Bure said. It was evidently an order. There was a clank and a thud as hatches opened somewhere below us, and then new shapes began to move into view on the screen.
They were combat servitors. Heavyweight and burnished silver, they strode on powerful, backward-jointed legs, puffing black exhaust from their upthrust smoke stacks. Cannons in their upper limbs jerked with pneumatic recoil as they systematically targeted and cut down the cultists.
'Stalker 453, left and target/ Bure murmured. They were all slaved to his direct control.
One of the stalkers retrained its weapons and gunned four more cultists down. The charge-load they had been hefting exploded in a bright flash that blacked out the display for a second. When the holo-image returned, the stalker was already pacing on after new targets.
'Stalker 130 and Stalker 252, fan right. Opposition in cover behind that stalactite mass/
'Oh great Emperor/ said Aemos suddenly. 'Some of them are unar-moured/
It was true. A good many of the men assaulting us wore no shielding or environment armour. Their clothes were charred to black rags and their flesh was blistered and raw. Some force was keeping them active and functioning in this great infernal depth where no living thing should have been able to survive unprotected. Not the pressure, the extreme heat, not even the toxic, corrosive atmosphere was stopping them. The taint of the Lith had transmuted them into denizens of this underworld.
The wave of stalkers strode forward inexorably, and the translithopede followed them slowly, its impelling lines of adamantium cilia dragging it across the cavern rock. The multi-lasers fired again, destroying another vehicle - a large ore transporter that had been attempting to crash itself into our machine.
The mighty plasma screw churned again and ruptured apart a curtain of massive dripstones. Drizzles of dust obscured our picture for a few seconds.
When it cleared, we saw the true horror, and realised the ultimate, blasphemous fate of Cinchare minehead's population.
The blasphemy was huge, a writhing mound of baked, raw flesh and cooking bone. One by one, the tainted workers of Cinchare, even Bure's corrupted brethren from the Adeptus, had come down here to willingly contribute their organic matter to this mass.
As the translithopede came into view, it rose up, forming a great, rearing worm of red ooze and blackened meat fifty metres high. A ghastly mouth, big enough to swallow a prospecting pod, gaped wide in its cresting head, and it belched a vast ball of flaming gases at us.
The translithopede shook, warning hooters sounded, and the picture was lost. One control station below exploded, throwing its servitor to the deck. Smoke billowed through the chamber.
'Such power/ Bure marvelled, emotionless. The whole machine lurched again, more violently, and we stumbled, despite the internal gravity systems and inertial dampers.
The screen image restored, jumping, for a brief moment, enough to see that the blasphemy seemed to be coiling itself around us. The hull creaked and protested. Minor explosions rang out from lower decks. Plated seams bulged and several rivets flew out like bullets.
'Bure!'
'I will break it! I will cast it out!'
'Bure! In the name of the Emperor!'
He wasn't listening. All his efforts were focussed on the mind-impulse link driving the translithopede, on the orchestration of his stalkers as they rallied to counter-attack the monstrosity. His confidence in the supremacy of the Machine over all things was blinding him to the very real possibility that the formidable Cult Mechanicus had just met its match.
I turned to Medea and Aemos.
'Come on!' I cried.
We were halfway down the translithopede's main companionway, heading towards the rear of the great machine, when a still more violent impact shook it. Without warning, the inertial dampers failed and we tumbled as the burrower was rolled onto its side. The glass mantles of the gas lights smashed, and weak flame sputtered and danced along the walls. There was a further series of terrific impacts.
We got to our feet, now forced to use the curving wall as a floor. The pulsing shriek of the multi-lasers was by then a constant noise outside.
Red warning lights were flashing in the arched dock-bay. Our pod had been torn from its cradle by the latest impact and lay crumpled on its side, reclining against part of the roof arching. But the oxide-red pod was still safely locked in place.
Medea and I jumped down from the dock's inner hatch onto the ceiling, but Aemos called after us.
'I can't make that jump/ he protested. I knew he was right.
Then seal the hatch and get back to help Bure!'
The Emperor protect you both!' he shouted as the hatch closed.
Power cables that had once lain on the deck now dangled like ropes. Grabbing one each, we began to rappel up towards the pod in its cradle. We were halfway there when the world seemed to shudder again and the translithopede righted itself violently. Medea and I went sprawling, loose debris skittering all around us. I had barely enough time to dive and heave Medea aside before our own wrecked pod came crunching back down the wall, slamming sideways onto the floor.
Another lurch and the deck tipped the other way, out of true by about twenty degrees. The unanchored pod began sliding across the deck towards us.
'Get in!' Medea yelled. 'Get in!' She had the side hatch of the red pod open and dragged me halfway inside. A moment later, and the translithopede rocked back thirty degrees in the other direction.
The loose pod immediately squealed back across the deck and crashed into the wall bulkheads. I was dangling by my hands from the open hatch.
'Crap! Get in! Get the hell in!' Medea wailed, fighting to hold on to me. I grunted and swung my legs up so that my toe caps caught the door sill. With a furt
her effort, I managed to pull myself up, and Medea slammed the hatch.
There was still more shaking and rocking. We clambered in to the seats of the pilot station in the low cockpit, and strapped on the harnesses. Medea was keying the pod's drive ignition when the translithopede inverted again and left us hanging in our seats by the safety straps. The pod was now locked in its cradle on the roof.
This'll be fun/ Medea laughed aggressively. She had sent a remote command to open the dock-bay's shutter doors. Then she powered the pod's engines to full thrust and disengaged the cradle lock.
For a dizzying second, we dropped, upside down, like a rock. Then she hit the thrusters and looped us. We missed the dock-bay roof by a hands-breadth and flew out through the opening shutters even as the entire translithopede rolled over again.
The blasphemy had wrapped itself around Bure's great subterranean bur-rower with constricting coils. It thrashed and shook the machine, and I could clearly see the armoured hull beginning to buckle and crumple. There were smoking sockets where some of the multi-laser batteries had been ripped away. The stalkers were converging on the wrestling giants, strafing the Chaos worm with furious barrages. The remains of several lay crushed where the translithopede had rolled on them.
Medea banked us around, trying to speed-familiarise herself with the control layout.
'What do we do? I take it you've got a plan?'
I shook my head. 'I'm working on it.' Bure's pod was unarmed - I know this because I checked feverishly the moment we were airborne - and there was nothing that might be turned into an offensive weapon apart from a mining laser under the chin of the cockpit. A mining laser with fierce cutting power and a range of about five metres.
Take us deeper into the cavern/ I said, consulting the display on the pod's geologicae auspex.
'Away from the fight?'
'We can't engage that thing... so we find the Lith instead. And that return has got to be it/
There was a pulsing cursor on the screen: big, unmistakable.
Cultists on the cave floor blasted at us as we zipped over them and headed off down the long, volcanic cavern. Spumes of pyroclastic wrath detonated up from the lava lakes and threatened to envelop us.
Then we saw the Lith.
It had been buried in a plug of obsidian jutting from the cavern wall, but serious excavation work had been done to reveal it.
Heavy mining pods and anti-grav drill platforms sat on the ash slopes below it, and the ground was covered in fragments of obsidian.
It was, as Bure had described, a perfect decahedron four metres across, dark green and glassy like water-ice. It glowed with an inner light. Even from a distance, it felt malevolent. I sensed an unnerving tickling at the edge of my psychic range. Medea looked sick.
'I don't want to get any closer/ she said suddenly.
'We have to!'
'And do what?'
I wondered if we could cut it with the mining laser. I wondered indeed if that would do any good. I doubted we would make much of dent in it even if we power-dived the pod at it.
Yet, the cultists had shaved splinters from it to promulgate their evil. It was vulnerable... unless it had somehow allowed the splinters to be removed.
We certainly couldn't move it.
I could feel it now, whispering in my head. There were no words, just a murmur that chilled my spine. Insidious, slow... slow like eons of geological time, slow like a glacier or a tectonic plate. It spoke softly and without haste, gently unfolding its seductive message. It had no need to rush. It had all the time in the galaxy...
The pod yawed wildly. I started and looked around. Medea had lost partial control because she had turned to be violently sick over the side of her seat. Her skin was blanched and she was panting and sweating.
'I... I can't...' she gasped. 'Don't make me go any closer...'
She had reached her limits. I leaned over and put my hand against the side of her head. 'Sleep/ I said softly, using the will.
She sank into merciful unconsciousness.
I took the controls.
I was no flier like Medea Betancore, and for a moment, I thought I was going to dive us nose-first into the lake of bubbling magma as I fumbled with the actuators.
But Medea's late father had trained me well enough. I swooped low over the pool of molten rock, creating a Shockwave vortex in the brimstone, and banked around a massive anthragate column that rose up into the jagged roof. There was just a last wide lake of fire between me and the ash shore where the Lith was exposed.
It was whispering again, but I shook it off. I had trained my mind hard to resist the ministrations of Chaos and its psychic wiles. This was how it turned weak minds. This was how it had polluted and tainted the population of Cinchare minehead. The whispering... the formless, shapeless words of power that drew mankind into the embrace of the warp...
An idea struck me. I like to think it was an idea born out of the same pure simplicity that Bure had celebrated in Aemos. A perfect, simple possibility.
I shrugged from my mind my fears for the life of Aemos and the magos. The blasphemy might already have torn the translithopede apart in the cavern far behind me. If they were not beyond hope, then this was the best I could do for them.
Risking a free hand, I reached sideways and activated the pod's vox-ponder, setting it to record. Then, concentrating on my steering once more, I began to speak, clearly and loudly, dredging words up from my memory. Long ago, on my birth planet, DeKere's World, as a child, standing in the long hall of the primary scholam with the other pupils, reciting together...
A collision warning blared, and I veered to the left in time to glimpse a prospecting pod that filled my cockpit windows for a moment before racing past.
Two bright yellow cursors had appeared on my auspex display. The beacon locators of prospecting pods, like the ones that had chased us into the mine system.
The one that had tried to collide with me was turning wide over the lava lake. The other was coming in on an intercept course. I swung round to face it and then gulled away at the last minute. The pass was close, close enough to see the Ortog Promethium symbols on its flank. Close enough to see Enforcer Kaleil's face through fhe cockpit ports.
The first pod, an Imperial Allied symbol just visible through the heat-flaked paint, came in and blocked my route to the shore and the Lith. Its driver, unidentifiable, had smashed the window lights out and was firing a lascarbine out from the cockpit. Despite our comparative speeds, I felt several shots land home, banging into the pod's fuselage. I steered away, trying desperately not to break my recitation as I concentrated on the air duel.
I began to chant the words like a mantra.
As I turned from the Imperial Allied pod, I met Kaleil's vessel head on. I rolled hard to evade, but still we clipped and the whole pod shook.
Warning lights lit up across the control console. I had thruster damage and reduced manoeuvring ability. The lava lake flashed up to consume me but I climbed hard, away from the ash beach.
All the while, my recitation continued.
The Imperial Allied pod was on my tail, streaking the air with las-shots. We whipped hard around the anthragate pillar, but I couldn't shake him. I tried to think what Medea would do. What Midas would have done. For a moment, my words faltered as I planned and executed my frantic response.
The pod was right behind me. I braked hard, and managed to spin the anti-grav machine in place using the attitude jets, dropping my nose as if curtseying to my attacker. And I ignited my mining laser.
The Imperial Allied pod was far too close to my rear to effect a turn or a brake. I think he was trying for a collision, but I was just too high for him. He ran in under my hull at full thrust, so close he tore the lighting array and the auspex antennae off the underside of my pod.
He also ran straight through the incandescent spear of my mining laser. It sliced the Imperial Allied pod lengthways and sent the disintegrating halves spinning away into the white hot magma below.
My pod was half crippled now from the pair of impacts. I continued my recitation, hoping the brief lapse wouldn't matter.
With its antennae gone, the auspex was blind, but I could see Kaleil anyway. He was gunning across the lake straight for me.
I hovered in place. There was a time for action and, as I had already gambled, a time for words. I switched off the vox-ponder and keyed the open channel.
'Kaleil?'
'Horn!'
'Not Horn... Inquisitor Eisenhorn.'
Silence. He was two hundred metres and closing at a speed that would wipe us both out.
I pressed the vox-mic close to my mouth and used every shred of my will.
'Don't/1 said.
The Ortog Promethium pod veered and then dived straight down into the lava lake. A halo of fire broke up from the slow, undulating splash it made in the liquid rock.
I limped my pod over to the ash beach and set down about twenty metres short of the Lith. Medea moaned in her sleep. I dreaded the dreams that might be boiling through her subconscious.
'Get out of my head!' I snarled aloud at the Lith's persistent whispering.
It took me a moment to rewind the vox-ponder recording and set it to a continuous loop. Then I diverted its signal into the echo-sounding sonar system that the pod used to supplement its auspex in assay and location work. I twiddled the dials until the powerful sonar was aimed directly at the malevolent decahedron.
Conveyed in fierce ultra-sonic pulses, my recording blasted the Lith. The Emperor's Prayer of Abrogation Against the Warp, learned by rote by every good schoolchild of the Imperium. An innocent blessing against the darkness, a banishment of Chaos. I doubted it had ever been used so actively. I doubted my scholam tutors had ever conceived of such a use for that simple, sing-song declaration.
'Words,' I murmured. 'Your corrupt whispers against my words of power. How do you like that?'
I pushed the sonar gain to maximum. In terms of sonics alone, the pulses would have stunned a man to unconsciousness and snapped his bones.
For a good minute or more, I feared it was having no effect.
Then the whispering ceased. It became a subsonic moaning of rage and anguish, and finally agony.
