Inferno Volume 2 - Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘We have felt nothing here,’ Astolyev noted.

  ‘Minor seismic activity, inquisitor. Small quakes, but frequent. The power source continues to build, at a heightened rate.’

  ‘Interesting. Keep me updated.’

  The road gouged in the crater’s base led to a sizeable secondary quarry half a mile from the station’s shadow. Cliffs of black rock jutted up around them, and small cylindrical dwellings shared space with heavy-duty tracked vehicles. All of them were torn open, deep rents ripped in their hulls. The mutilated remnants of servitors and Adeptus Mechanicus personnel were scattered about, left open to the void. As the Inquisitorial acolytes and Space Marines picked through the wreckage, they discovered many more bodies littering the impromptu streets of the chasms, and hidden away in the structures.

  ‘They tried to hide.’ Vemek’s voice chirped through the vox. ‘Or they tried to run. Neither worked.’

  ‘Strange,’ the inquisitor muttered. ‘I highly doubt we’ve seen more than a few hundred corpses. This station had a crew of seven hundred.’

  The comment only added to the sense of unease as the team followed Astolyev’s lead down a small road towards the centre of the excavation site. The road broke out into a massive quarry, with many tiers of levelled rock cut directly into the crater. It resembled an amphitheatre of immense scale, one hundred and fifty feet deep and nearly a thousand wide. More cylindrical structures and cargo vehicles sat abandoned, interspersed with the massive excavator engines.

  At the centre, Achairas saw the structure that was the goal of this entire endeavour.

  The apex.

  The pinnacle of a pyramid, jutting forty feet into the air, jet-black and reflectionless. Scaffolding scaled its smooth flanks, and as the team approached, moving down the switchback road that descended into the dig, Achairas noted the strange green symbols adorning its sides. Arrayed in columns, the alien glyphs glowed with a faint but unsettling emerald light. Green lines radiated out from the glyphs, arranged over the slopes in a pattern that Achairas could not understand.

  The Space Marine felt cold pinpricks on his skin, and heard the faint sound of trickling water. He shuddered. His growing disquiet was not something he was used to.

  Even though the structure itself seemed relatively small, their knowledge of the immensity that lurked below only added to the sense of foreboding. The acolytes gripped their weapons tighter as Astolyev cautiously strode forward, ahead of them.

  Between the scaffolding, Achairas saw a molten wound in the side of the pyramid. A ten-foot-wide circular gap had been blown, at ground level, through the thick metal skin of the apex.

  The inquisitor shook his head. ‘Idiots. Overambitious fools…’ He stalked forward.

  Achairas and Vemek’s servo-skull followed. The Death Spectre kept his bolt pistol trained firmly on the entrance, and double-checked his auspex. The energy readings it picked up were bizarre. He’d never seen anything like them.

  ‘Intriguing…’ the servo-skull chirped. ‘The pict records of the breach created by the vortex charges show a far larger gap than this one.’ A crackling noise emerged from the skull as it flitted up to investigate the gap. ‘Marvellous! The wound appears to be healing! Self-knitting metal!’

  ‘Healing?’ Achairas cut in, kneeling before the ruin, and zooming his auto-senses into the molten metal edge of the breach. Another shiver travelled up his spine as he saw tiny trickles of dark liquid pooling in the rough gouges. He watched as they solidified, becoming the same glossy, black metal of the pyramid itself. It was self-repairing. Before his very eyes.

  ‘Imagine the potential!’ Vemek’s skull chirped again. ‘If the Mechan– the Imperium were to acquire this technology, the boon to our war engines and voidships would be immense… Not to mention the benefits the power source itself might provide. It is a growing source of energy, exponentially so. And the scans showed no power being fed to it from external sources. Can you imagine, inquisitor? Infinite energy! We must retrieve it, or make visual contact. I possess the necessary sensory equipment to make a full diagnostic scan of the energy source, and would very much like to collect data.’

  Achairas shared a glance with the inquisitor. The magos’ claims sounded an awful lot like lunacy, and he sincerely hoped the inquisitor felt the same.

  Astolyev hissed. ‘Yes. Then we go inside.’

  Achairas agreed on that, at least. They needed answers. He cared nothing for the vague boons this discovery might provide. He did, however, care about the threat contained within the ruin. He needed to know what, exactly, the inquisitor’s project had awoken in the dark, and how to destroy it.

  ‘Be prepared,’ Achairas whispered to his brothers over their private vox-net. ‘The magos is clearly delusional. He will not have access to this technology if I deem it too dangerous. If the inquisitor disagrees, and stands in our way, we take action.’

  ‘The permanent kind?’ Nym inquired.

  ‘There is no other kind,’ Achairas retorted grimly.

  ‘Against an inquisitor?’ Even Nym sounded hesitant.

  ‘If necessary. Yes.’

  ‘Check your weapons,’ Astolyev ordered. ‘Say your prayers. We enter the belly of the beast. We are here to acquire answers. If our erstwhile Adeptus Mechanicus allies have awoken something down here with their impertinent ingress, then we need to know what it is. Get visual contact, and if possible, kill what we find, so we can take samples back with us. Understood?’

  A series of affirmations returned to him.

  Achairas turned to his battle-brothers, the sound of running water clear in the back of his mind. ‘Death is coming. It is waiting. Today, we meet it.’

  Silence was all that answered him.

  And with that, the Death Spectres took the first steps into a darkness that even they could not find solace in.

  Achairas was awestruck by the black, cyclopean architecture within. The chamber in which they stood connected to a descending passage that spiralled downward, following the interior slope of the pyramid like an inverse gyre. Faintly glowing, emerald geometric panels were splayed on the walls, bearing symbols that he could not even begin to guess the meaning of. A dull rumbling hum began to sound as they advanced, accompanied by a series of light tectonic shudders.

  Streaks of dust, which Achairas’ auto-senses identified as organic residue, created something of a trail for them to follow, though there were no side passages to lose themselves in. Unfortunately, the settled dust was far too degraded to quickly determine its origin.

  ‘The power source,’ Vemek’s servo-skull muttered. ‘Its growth is escalating further. I speculate that you entering the ruin has triggered some manner of response. I advise haste.’

  The further they descended, the more expansive the passage became, even if the feeling of claustrophobic oppression only worsened. It reached a point where even the Death Spectres felt tense, and utterly unwelcome in the unwholesome, alien darkness of the place.

  ‘The geometries of this… tomb are incorrect.’ Vemek’s skull crackled, the voice growing even more distorted.

  The dusty trails led to where three almost skeletal corpses, part-machine, had been scattered across the obsidian floor.

  ‘More station crew,’ Astolyev muttered, prodding one of the tattered red rags with his augmetic foot.

  ‘They were dragged down here,’ Achairas observed, understanding the origin of the dusty trails, now easily identifiable as flaking blood and viscera.

  They continued down the ever-widening passage into a monolithic chamber filled with randomly spaced obelisks of black metal, and faintly glowing green nodes on the wall. Emerald prisms, pulsing softly, stuck out of almost every flat surface, even as the geometrics of the structure became more complex.

  Deeper down, the oppressive darkness began to play tricks on them. Phantom auspex blips flickered and ceased periodically, app
earing around them, sometimes in the walls, sometimes clustered behind them. Out of the corner of his field of view, Achairas was almost certain he saw movement, here and there. For an instant, he thought he’d seen a shape, large and sinuous, flitting across the wall. But when he turned, it was gone. Judging by the jittering movements of the acolytes, they were seeing things as well.

  More dismembered corpses dotted the way. Dozens had been dragged down here and abandoned in the darkness. It was only when one of Astolyev’s acolytes cried out that the true danger was revealed. Achairas whirled to see a darting shadow vanish into the unwholesome angles of the wall. An acolyte at the rear of the group fell to the ground in gory pieces.

  ‘Ambush!’ Achairas shouted. Weapon raised, he saw a strange pulse flicker through the glowing runes just as a shape erupted from the wall once more, giving him his first clear view of the phantom that stalked them. Its sinuous, metallic form was somewhere in between that of a mantis, a centipede and a scorpion, but shimmering as if it were hardly even there. Brother Charason managed to fire a few shells into it, but they passed straight through, striking the wall behind. The phantom ghosted towards him, snaking coils of barbed metal erupting from its form to ensnare the Death Spectre.

  Las and bolter fire ripped across the apparition, some striking Charason, even as three of the thing’s six talon-like appendages scythed through the Death Spectre’s gorget. Phasing back into reality, the wraith-like creature slipped away, tearing its claws free from Charason’s throat in a spray of crimson. Achairas rushed to intercept its erratic escape, slashing with his power sword. The creature coiled away like a serpent, avoiding the swipe. Achairas’ momentum took him around the thing as it lashed out with its tendrils. He spun backwards, feeling his sword connect with its centre of gravity. It fell to the ground, partly bisected, three of its limbs and half of its tendrils sheared off. Seizing the opportunity, he drove into it.

  He uttered no war cry, no words as he fought. He was locked in the deathly silence of battle’s murderous focus. A talon raked his greave, while several of the creature’s tendrils coiled around his neck. All he heard was the sound of rushing water. The river flowed around him, its cold, black currents threatening to take him along.

  Not yet, he thought, and delivered a series of economic stabs, his blade passing through the creature several times as it flickered out of material existence. Then a blinding burst of dark energy struck the thing’s metal ribcage, vaporising part of it and sending it clattering against the far wall. The tendrils slackened and fell away. Achairas staggered back, severing the talon still latched around his knee for good measure.

  And then there was silence. Astolyev stood there, his elegant xenos carbine held in his hands, aimed at the remnants.

  ‘Clear!’ Astolyev shouted, and his acolytes responded. The Death Spectres remained quiet.

  Achairas knelt beside the near decapitated body of Charason. Several of Astolyev’s men bowed their heads out of respect, or reverence, evidently unsure of how to react to a dead Space Marine.

  ‘Drink deep of the Black River, brother,’ Achairas said, switching off his vox so none could hear. The rushing water quieted to a steady trickle. The other Death Spectres said nothing. There was nothing to say. Death was silent, and so were they who embodied it.

  Astolyev moved to inspect the fallen creature. Two of his acolytes were dead, another slain by an off-hand swipe of the creature’s talon during the fray. He bade one of his men, wearing confessor’s robes over his armour, to administer rites to the fallen.

  Achairas joined the inquisitor.

  ‘Machines,’ Astolyev remarked, impassively watching it twitch and shudder, as if it was still partly functional.

  He was kneeling to study it more closely when Achairas again heard the rushing water, and shoved the inquisitor aside, delivering a savage decapitating strike to the creature even as it lurched to life again. His blade passed through it, and it snaked away, coiling through the darkness in a revolting manner as the startled acolytes fired again. Whether any shots connected was unknown, as the thing slipped into the obsidian ceiling of the hall some thirty feet up, as if it weren’t even there.

  Rising, the inquisitor nodded to Achairas. ‘Not dead…’ he rasped. It sounded like a laugh. ‘Wonderful. Self-repairing walls. Self-repairing machines. What next?’

  With no remains to study, and nothing to be done for the dead, the team advanced, more cautiously than before. The spiralling descent came to an end as they entered some manner of narrow chamber composed of dozens of passages, honeycombing the walls at various heights. Half-liquefied pillars, part black chrome, part quicksilver, connected to a high ceiling, and the trails of dried blood continued through it. The strange alien glyphs on the walls seemed to flicker, sporadically. Dozens of small xenos creatures drifted about, some clinging to the walls and ceiling, with others erratically flitting around the pillars. A central obelisk, covered in glowing nodes, was tended by another dozen of the things. They were no larger than a man’s torso, fashioned from glinting black metal and scarab-shaped. They hardly showed on his auspex at all.

  Achairas set his sights on one of them; it registered as a minimal threat, even with its clacking, bladed mandible apparatus. It chewed through the small pylon it hovered around, piece by piece, before drifting a short distance right and seemingly regurgitating the liquefied metal into the form of a brand new pylon.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Astolyev inquired. The scarabs seemed to be randomly rearranging pieces of the interior for an unknowable purpose. They ignored the advancing team, and each other, as they periodically collided, before righting their course and moving about their erratic business.

  ‘Strange…’ Vemek’s servo-skull hissed. ‘I can extrapolate some manner of preset routine among them. They appear to be moving about in a loop, taking matter from one pillar and rearranging it into another. The loop appears to be redundant. A repetition. I believe they are… glitched.’

  ‘Glitched?’ Astolyev turned to the servo-skull.

  ‘Like malfunctioning servitors. But different. Caught in a cycle of endless assembly and reassembly… Horrible…’

  ‘Right,’ Astolyev muttered. ‘If they’re not a threat, then we can come back and capture one later.’

  ‘That would be most excellent,’ the servo-skull agreed.

  ‘In the meantime, any news on the power source?’

  ‘It was building the last time I observed it, but fluctuating in a similarly erratic manner. Most peculiar.’

  Passing through the increasingly labyrinthine network of pillars, obelisks and prisms, the team followed the sporadic trail of corpses until the passages became so dense as to be tunnel-like. They reached what was clearly a damaged area of the structure. Cracks ran through the dark metal like infected veins, and the crystals pulsed more rapidly, causing the emerald light to flicker across the alien geometry in an unsettling manner. Achairas felt the ground shake several times, and he heard a deep rumble coming from somewhere below. They moved on, descending further.

  His auto-senses detected the stench before they saw the atrocity appear in the darkness before them.

  ‘We found the rest of the station’s crew,’ Nym announced as they strode into a blanketed mess of desiccated, mutilated remains.

  Heaps of dead, hundreds, were scattered about the passage.

  ‘God-Emperor…’ Astolyev said. ‘Why drag them all down here just to leave the scraps behind?’

  ‘Does not cogitate,’ Vemek’s skull crackled. ‘Artificial life forms and automata only act upon existing protocols. Either this serves some alien function we are not yet aware of, or the creators of these machines were mad…’

  Achairas saw Astolyev’s acolytes tighten their grips on their weapons. Mortals were not as adept at channelling their fear into focus as Adeptus Astartes were, but these men and women were performing admirably.

 
‘Advance. We should not dally here unless we discover something relevant,’ Achairas commanded.

  The Death Spectres led, their weapons shifting from each new passage to the next. As Achairas panned his bolt ­pistol right, he saw, some ten feet from him, a form rise up from a pile of corpses, its shimmering outline barely even disturbing the dead. It was bipedal, as tall as he was, and built like a skeletal scarecrow of dark metal. Emerald light burned in its empty eye sockets, and its fingers ended in two-foot-long talons, sizzling with energy. A crude cloak of mangled, tattered flesh, severed limbs and rotting viscera was coiled around it.

  Achairas’ trigger discipline stopped it before it could advance, and he turned its metal skull to metallic pulp with three bolt shells. More gunfire sounded around him as his brothers and several of the acolytes unleashed their fury. Shouts of alarm went up from the acolytes as more of the flesh-clad things emerged from the nooks and crannies of the labyrinth, as well as materialising out of the corpse piles. The thin air became thick with crimson sprays, screams and the sickening crackle of dead static. As Achairas dodged a raking swipe from another flesh-clad horror, he shot it in the jaw and lashed out with his power sword, severing its arm and then its head with the backswing.

  ‘To me, acolytes!’ The inquisitor disintegrated most of an advancing xenos with a burst of dark energy, before wheeling around to dodge a slashing blow that shredded part of his robe. He drew a short knife that hummed with sonic disruption, and plunged it into the xenos’ ribcage. It lunged further into him, its talons flashing but deflected by a halo of shimmering energy. A fusillade of las-fire from a squad of his acolytes, covered by Nym and Celaeno, sent the creature staggering back into an alcove.

  Achairas slashed the limbs from another, ignoring the distractions, focusing on the sound of running water. It staggered back, its severed appendage skittering across the ground to cut the legs from underneath an acolyte.

  Sevrim bashed his bolter repeatedly into one xenos as it tore at his armour, as another plunged its talons through the seals under his arm. Even with such a wound, the Death Spectre said nothing, merely wheeling around with combat blade drawn to plunge it through the eye of another xenos behind him. Achairas reloaded in his moment’s respite and blasted the first from his brother.