by Ben Counter
According to the briefing, he’d had over three hundred years to do it.
‘Prophet was right this time,’ Voss muttered. ‘Whole operation is another mess on a knife’s edge.’
Sigma should have sent them in with bikes or a speeder. Perhaps his psyker hadn’t foreseen the ork invasion any more than the locals had. An infested space hulk had broken from the warp and crashed into Cyrria’s only moon while the Saint Nevarre was still in transit. By the time the inquisitor’s ship had reached orbit above the capital, the planet below was a warzone.
Right now, Prophet was somewhere above ground, up in a Stormraven, designation Vampire, waiting for Voss to mark the target in case he and Striggo weren’t able to secure Zenezeca before the tech-priest made his run to the evacuation fields.
Voss pulled the pin on his grenade and leaned out from cover.
Let’s hope it works as well as it’s supposed to, he thought.
Mad-eyed greenskins were surging towards his position, their massive bodies clad in crude armour plate, stubbers barking, axes waving.
Voss tossed the grenade. There was a sharp crack. A reddish cloud filled the alley, wall to wall. There was a pause the length of one long breath, then the howls and screams started. Weapons clattered to the ground. Orks dropped to their knees. Green hands pressed hard on eyes being eaten away by a powerful bioacid adapted from tyranid samples.
The grenade type was nothing Voss had seen before, but working under the Ordo Xenos, he was getting used to that. Sigma had added it to the mission loadout without any explanation beyond what it was expected to do. According to the inquisitor, it attacked the sensitive tissues first – eyes, nasal membrane, gums – before it went to work on the lungs, eating them away quickly from the inside out.
The red mist dispersed, leaving a carpet of twitching green bodies. Voss allowed himself the briefest moment to appreciate the weapon’s effectiveness, then he grabbed Culcaven and shoved him out in front.
‘Move!’
Striggo took point, the mutant running between him and Voss. They’d have gone a lot faster without the mutant, but there were no maps of this place, and since this vast cavern had originally been carved out from exhausted rad mines, the background radiation made scans and even vox-comms an impossibility.
No maps. No contact with Vampire or Prophet.
We could have used seismic, thought Voss. Mapped it that way.
That was an oversight. Whose oversight, though, he didn’t take the time to consider. Around him as he ran, ugly, ramshackle tenements gave way to larger, better constructed hab-blocks interspersed with small processing facilities. Gas lamps and electric lumens still lit the empty streets. Light glowed in hab windows and spilled into the narrow alleys from doorways left open in the rush to flee.
According to the pre-drop briefing – which had been notably scant on details – Zenezeca had fled here after Al Rashaq vanished. Fled here or crashed here – that wasn’t known.
Al Rashaq, thought Voss, and he snarled as he thought of the mess they’d faced on Tychonis. According to Scholar on his mysterious return, in the seconds before he’d been marched off and isolated, Al Rashaq had been a Mechanicus black site – one they’d tried to hide from the greater Imperium. The Martian Priesthood had made it disappear when the Inquisition started getting close. That was three hundred years ago. It seemed like Sigma and the Ordo Xenos were closing in on it again. He and Striggo wouldn’t have been sent here otherwise.
Zenezeca, being a witness to the existence of the site, would have known he was being hunted by the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus both. No wonder he’d chosen to come down here where Imperial eyes never looked. According to Culcaven, for as long as any still living remembered, their mechanical messiah had been promising his mutant devotees a city of their own one day, a place in daylight where they could live without persecution. As his power base as the head of the underworld here on Cyrria had strengthened, along with his subsequent influence on the ruling class above ground, the mutants of Jura had gone from fearing him to adoring him. He was the healer, the fixer. He amputated vestigial limbs, grafted over secondary mouths and eyes, installed mechanical arms and legs, saved many from illness… He had even managed to make some of them passable enough that they could infiltrate the society above.
To the mutants – the secret, illegal offspring of those men and women who had been forced to work in the planet’s rad-mines since the Imperium had taken this world – Zenezeca was not just some renegade tech-priest. He was the only cure for pain and misery and despair they had ever known.
He was hope.
He was their messiah.
‘We need a vehicle,’ Voss told Culcaven as they ran. ‘If the orks reach Zenezeca’s sanctum before we do, he’ll run early.’
‘Look around you, m’lord Space Marine,’ gasped Culcaven between pounding footfalls. ‘Every single vehicle in Jura is being used to get our people to the rendezvous points for exodus.’
Culcaven had already told them as much as he knew. From the gathering points at the cavern-city’s easternmost edge, and from Zenezeca’s compound at the city’s centre, the mutants would surge aboveground and launch their assault on the Cyrrian Guard forces overseeing the evacuation fields. Zenezeca was planning on hijacking a warp-capable transport in order to get his people off-world and away. Just one would do it, but he’d have to slaughter a lot of troopers and Naval personnel to succeed.
On his own, Zenezeca could easily have bought his way off Cyrria. Strange that a tech-priest, usually so sentiment-free, would risk his own escape for these subhumans.
Striggo stopped at a junction up ahead, back to the wall, and dipped out to check for hostiles.
‘Clear. Which way, mutant?’
Culcaven barrelled past him, out into the middle of the junction, then turned right, calling over his shoulder, ‘This way! Through the market streets and into the manufacturing zone!’
There was a sharp screech of brakes. Culcaven dived, hitting the ground hard on his belly. A flatbed halftrack had come charging out of an alleyway on the left. The driver had swerved just in time to avoid Culcaven, missing him by inches.
The halftrack halted and sat idling noisily. Striggo looked over at Voss.
‘The Emperor provides.’
The Imperial Fist nodded. As one, they raised their bolters and stalked towards it.
Back then…
The boy, Maximmion, thumbed the switch and the welding gun’s flame vanished. The edges of the plate with which he’d just patched the pipe still glowed hot orange, but the glow was dimming.
‘Done here,’ he said to the boy on his right.
His brother, his twin, didn’t answer. Not at first. He was still intent on his own work. Then his repairs were finished too, and he turned to Maximmion and nodded.
His name was Kassus. Apart from the dark scar on his left cheek, the permanent mark of a tech-priest’s electro-whip, he and Maximmion looked identical. When he smiled over at his brother, Maximmion felt he was looking at himself smiling in a mirror.
‘We need to get out,’ Kassus said, tapping the timer on his wrist. ‘Two minutes.’
It would be enough. Repairs like this were their life now. At eight years old, their small bodies could fit down pipes and ducts that none of the adult slaves could fit into. Maximmion guessed that was why the tech-priests had paid his parents for the two boys, though he’d never know the meagre price they’d fetched. Both he and Kassus had shown above-average aptitude for technical work in the tests. They’d been put to work almost immediately. That had been two years ago. They had been just six years old.
‘Race you back to the hatch,’ said Maximmion.
Without waiting for an answer, he pushed his brother against the wall and ran past him at a half-crouch. The pipe was too narrow to run upright.
Kassus laughed and g
ave chase.
One minute thirty. Still plenty of time.
Morten, a listless adult slave who was often assigned to aid the boys, would be at the hatch, jaw slack as always, waiting to seal it up as soon as they were both out.
Kassus caught up to his twin, and they tussled a moment as they ran, but Maximmion was very slightly stronger, and he pulled ahead again.
One minute.
That the tech-priests had kept the twins together was something both felt must be a blessing of the Omnissiah Himself. There were other children here at the factorum, brothers and sisters, who had been split up on day one and sent off to work in entirely different sections of the complex.
Maximmion didn’t know that the decision had been made based on data gathered over long millennia about the marginally greater efficiency of identical twins set to work as teams.
Forty seconds.
Maximmion was still in the lead. He laughed as he ran, sure he’d maintain it.
The work was grim, and their life of slavery and punishment even more so, but there were always moments each day for play. He and Kassus made the best of the life their parents had sold them into.
Twenty seconds. The last bend.
Maximmion was running so fast he had to push himself off the far wall of the bend as he came around it. Just up ahead, barely five yards away, lumen-light marked the hatch.
He heard Kassus pound after him, rounding the bend just behind him. Maximmion put on a last burst of speed, but a sudden scream stopped him dead. He whirled, almost toppling over, and saw Kassus on the floor of the pipe holding his ankle.
Maximmion immediately started back towards him.
‘No!’ shouted Kassus. ‘Fifteen seconds! Just get out!’
Maximmion wasn’t hearing him. He reached Kassus, grabbed his left arm with both hands, and began pulling him backwards towards the hatch, shouting, ‘Morten! Morten! Shut off the steam! We need help!’
Even as he shouted himself hoarse, he knew it was too late, but he wouldn’t stop. He grunted and pulled harder.
Suddenly, Kassus lashed out with his good leg and kicked him away. Maximmion staggered and landed on his back, sprawling, looking up to see Morten’s face creased in anger, his big hands reaching down into the pipe.
‘No,’ shouted Maximmion, but he could do nothing. Morten hauled him out and tossed him onto the metal floor.
Maximmion hit his head hard. Blobs of white light flickered in his vision. He tried to get up, but his body wasn’t moving fast enough.
Dimly, he saw Morten throw the hatch cover into place just as the flow of superheated steam blasted down the pipe. He thought he heard a scream suddenly cut off.
It could have been his own. It could have been his brother’s. He’d never know.
Darkness swallowed him and he hit the floor again hard. He wasn’t conscious enough to feel it.
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Cover illustration by Grant Griffin.
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