“Arex!” Gunthar exclaimed. “You mean Arex?” The description could have fitted any number of women, but somehow he just knew it had referred to her.
The soldier had reached him, and Gunthar saw what he had missed in the dark, last night, from above: the flashes on his greatcoat shoulders, the aquila symbol on his helmet. “You… you’re Imperial Guard,” he stammered. “You’re human?”
“We are searching for Lady Hanrik. Have you seen her?”
“No, I… I heard she might have been here, but I haven’t… I thought you were them. Those masks you wear, I thought you were the creatures.”
The Guardsman wasn’t listening. He cocked his head as if in response to a voice that Gunthar couldn’t hear, then he turned and strode away, but Gunthar had to know more. He lunged after the Guardsman, and took him by the shoulder. “Wait,” he cried, “how did you know… Is Lady Hanrik still alive? Has she been in touch? Has she—?”
A flash of green light, and his words were swallowed by an involuntary scream.
The Guardsman had disintegrated, like the servitor in the mine tunnel had been disintegrated, layer by layer in a fraction of a second. Gunthar had been looking into the empty eyes of his metallic skull mask, then at his crumbling skeleton and in between, a searing, flash-frame image of a human face, as expressionless as the mask had been, its muscles only just beginning to contract in pain and horror.
The cadavers were back, and they were marching upon the Guardsmen, their heavy weapons spitting out jagged forks of green energy. The Guardsmen returned fire instantly. Their las-beams glanced off their attackers, but a few of them were armed with bigger guns and these proved far more effective. Two of the four cadavers were vaporised, as Gunthar saw the enginseer scuttling for the cover of the flyer and did likewise. He blundered into a Guardsman’s sights, and was pushed aside roughly. “Where do you think you’re running to?” the Guardsman growled. “You have a weapon in your hands, don’t you? For the Emperor’s sake, use it!”
The last thing Gunthar wanted to do was to use his lasgun, call attention to himself, but cowed by the Guardsman’s words he crouched beside the flyer’s landing struts, steadied the weapon’s butt against his shoulder and rested his finger on its trigger.
The gun was shaking too much, to begin with, for him to find anything through its sights. He took a deep breath, held it, and tried to steady himself. Secretly, he hoped—and expected—that the fighting would be over before he could get off a shot. The cadavers were outnumbered, after all, and down to half strength already. Surveying the battlefield, Gunthar saw a third of them incinerated, a fourth, and…
More of them. He didn’t know where they had come from, hadn’t seen them arriving, but at least three more… no, four, and the Guardsman that had snapped at him was the next to be struck by their emerald beams, to die at Gunthar’s side, the stink of ozone and burnt flesh filling his nostrils.
One of the cadavers turned his way and, unexpectedly, a dead calm settled over him.
He had been in this situation a thousand times before, in his dreams. He knew exactly what to do, what the Emperor expected of him, and no longer was there any fear attached to that proposition. Gunthar’s old life seemed a long way behind him, as if it had been lived by somebody else. His home, his job, Arex: all gone. His local bar, the emporium, the eatery to which he had taken her…
The image of the lex-scribe, Kreuz, popped unbidden into Gunthar’s head. He would probably never see her again either. He hoped she had made it to safety.
Everything he had done, everything he had ever strived for, the floors he had climbed, it all amounted to nothing. The lasgun in his hands and the enemy in his sights, they were all that mattered now, they were his life. He had nothing left to lose.
So, he squeezed his trigger and, although his first shot missed, he fired again and again and again. Then he remembered from the newsreels that lasguns had a Full Auto setting and found the relevant switch, thumbing it over. He peppered the cadaverous creatures with las-beams until at last they began to fall—and although Gunthar couldn’t tell if his own efforts were contributing at all to that outcome, he took a certain grim satisfaction in being there, in taking part, in fighting back.
Suddenly his lasgun let out a plaintive whine and died on him; he was left purposeless and afraid again. He rattled the power pack, pulled it from its housing, thrust it back in, tried to coax a few extra beams out of it, all in vain. He could have howled with frustration. Why hadn’t he thought to take Weber’s spare packs?
Fortunately, only one of the cadavers remained standing, and now, with a fierce inrush of air, it disappeared and took the bodies of the others—those that had not been melted—along with it. Gunthar was at once relieved to see them go, and appalled at this further display of their power. He wasn’t sure how many Guardsmen had perished in the brief combat—the green guns had left behind no corpses to count—but there were only five survivors, not counting the enginseer and the flyer pilot, a boggle-eyed servitor that was just emerging from beneath its seat.
The Guardsmen wasted no time getting their breath back. They resumed their search of the skyway, and the man whom Gunthar took to be their sergeant motioned to the enginseer to join them, which he did. He had taken out his handset again, and Gunthar saw now that a wire ran from it and was plugged directly into the enginseer’s eye.
Little more than a minute later, the Guardsmen converged upon a particular spot, and sifted through the rubble until one of them recovered something small and red. He showed this to the enginseer, who nodded grimly. Then the sergeant gave an order, and the soldiers came tramping back towards Gunthar at double-time.
“I don’t understand,” he said, “where’s Arex? I thought you were looking for her.”
“Lady Hanrik is not here,” said the sergeant.
“How can you be so sure? She could be hiding in one of these buildings.”
“She is not here.”
The flyer’s engines were starting to whine again. The last of the Guardsmen disappeared into its rear, and the sergeant made to follow. “Wait,” said Gunthar. “Take me with you. Please, take me with you.” The sergeant regarded him for an intolerable moment, and Gunthar felt sure his request would be refused.
Then he heard a familiar inrush of air, and he whirled around to find the cadavers returning in force. There were four more directly in front of him, another four appearing along the skyway, more emerging from the remaining buildings. Gunthar brought up his lasgun, though he knew it was useless, but found himself grabbed from behind, yanked off his feet and bundled into the flyer. The air outside crackled green as the sergeant leapt after him, screaming at the pilot to take off.
As the flyer lifted sluggishly into the air, something slammed into its side, throwing the Guardsmen off their wooden benches and Gunthar into the midst of them. The vehicle listed, its engines spluttering and groaning. Gunthar thought it might crash, but then it pulled upwards and away.
“We were lucky,” said the enginseer. “That was just a glancing blow. If those gauss beams had struck the engines, they would have torn right through them.”
Gunthar perched on the end of a bench, and squirmed beneath the blank stares of four skull-masked Guardsmen, each of them doubtless wondering what he was doing here in the place of one of their fallen comrades. He didn’t dare question them about their mission, although he ached for news of Arex. Then he saw that the enginseer was holding in his lap a red amecyte necklace—the object from the rubble—and he recognised it at once. “Where did you get that?” he demanded. “That was Arex’s necklace. It was a gift from her late mother, she always wore it.”
“This is what we were sent here to find,” said the enginseer. “There’s a tracking device inside one of these gemstones, which the governor hoped might lead us to his niece. Unfortunately, as you can see, she isn’t wearing it now. We found the necklace on the skyway. Its clasp was broken.”
“Then she was here!” cried Gunthar. “
Don’t you see? This means she was here, and she… She can’t have gone far. We have to turn back. We can still find her.”
The sergeant shook his head firmly. “Even if the girl has survived—”
“She’s alive. She has to be. I’d have felt it if… Trust me, Arex is alive.”
“Even if she has survived,” the sergeant repeated, “it has been almost twenty hours since her position was last verified. She could have reached almost any point in the city in that time. We do not have the resources to locate her, and the risk—”
“Take me back down there,” said Gunthar. “It’s safe for me, the creatures were ignoring me. I can search the buildings until… Just take me back down!”
He was being unreasonable, he knew that, and the sergeant chose not to dignify his pleadings with a response. Still, Gunthar ached with the knowledge that he had been so close to the woman he loved only to have turned his back on her. He had been tested, he thought, and his faith and his courage found wanting. He had failed her.
He held tight to the lasgun in his lap, clenched his teeth and, as the flyer carried him away from the city that had once been his home, further and further away from Arex, he made a silent vow to her, to himself, to the Emperor.
He swore that, somehow, some day, he would return.
Chapter Twelve
They were close to the source of the green light now.
Every time it pulsed over them, Trooper Carwen felt a strong wave of nausea. He could see from the grimaces of his three remaining squad mates that they felt it too. The masked Krieg grenadiers, however, gave away nothing as always.
They had holed up in an empty hab-block for most of the morning. Carwen hadn’t been able to sleep for nightmares, and when he had dozed off for an hour or two, he had been woken by a powerful earth tremor that had shaken the plaster off the walls. Shortly after this, the Krieg lieutenant had received new orders.
His briefing had been short and to the point. The platoon and its four new recruits were to investigate reports of a new necron construct at the heart of the city. Outnumbered as they were, they were to avoid engagement with the enemy.
They began by climbing to the highest floor they could. Intelligence gathered by their Command HQ from PDF squads on the ground had suggested that the necrons were concentrated on the lower floors and around the central sector, so they had been able to move relatively freely throughout the day.
As night had fallen, however, progress had become slower. The grenadiers had sent scouts ahead of them and, when a necron patrol had been sighted, they had melted into nooks and shadows and waited until the way was clear again. They had rested just once during this time, for less than twenty minutes, and Carwen was footsore and light-headed with exhaustion but he didn’t dare complain.
A voice buzzed through the comm-bead the quartermaster had provided for him: a sub-vocalised report to the platoon from their current scout. “I can see it,” he said.
A minute later, they reached the end of the skyway they had been following, and a row of six lifter cages with platforms inside three of them. The waiting scout indicated the cages with a flick of his hellgun, though it was already apparent to Carwen that the green light emanated from beyond these. The soldiers crowded onto the platforms to look down through the metal mesh behind them, and now Carwen really did want to vomit, his eyes tearing as he suppressed the reflex.
He could hardly take in the scale of what he was seeing. The pyramid was at least a kilometre away from him, laterally speaking, but its sheer size made it appear far closer. It was probably as tall as the city’s shorter towers, though it was difficult to estimate its height with any accuracy because the towers around it had been razed. In the green light, Carwen could see all the way down to the ground, and to the colossal heaps of rubble stacked around the pyramid’s base.
The pyramid was fashioned from a smooth, black stone, apparently unweathered by its millennia underground. Its four walls didn’t quite meet at their apex, providing instead a square hollow for a ball of green flame, from which intermittent sparks lashed out to ignite the dark sky. Stamped into the elevation facing Carwen was an enormous gold symbol, a circle with lines emanating from its radius, akin to a stylised drawing of a sun, and beneath this there was an opening, a gateway in the black wall, through which burnt more of that hateful green light.
There were figures moving before the gateway, too distant for Carwen to identify. They swarmed over the rubble and appeared to be clearing it away, hauling much of it into the pyramid in barrows.
He had to turn away, turn his back to the light. He was relieved when, a moment behind him, the rest of the platoon pulled back too. “I’ve reported our findings to Command HQ,” came the lieutenant’s voice through Carwen’s comm-bead. “They want the beacon atop the pyramid destroyed. I have advised that it is beyond the range of our weapons, and I see no obvious way of climbing up to it.” Carwen was glad to hear it. The last thing he wanted was to get any closer to that monstrous construct. Then the lieutenant continued: “We are left, therefore, with a single option: to find a way up from the inside.”
They trudged back the way they had come for a couple of kilometres before they broke into a luxury-hab that must have belonged to a lord. He had left his furnishings behind when he left, and as Carwen sank into a bed in the servants’ quarters he reflected ironically that he had never experienced such comfort. He didn’t expect to be able to sleep, but exhaustion soon claimed him. Even so, his dreams were haunted by glowing green ghouls.
He was woken late in the morning for watch duty. For three hours, he was stationed behind the blown-out window of an eatery across the skyway, his orders to lead any too-curious necrons away from the luxury-hab entrance. This, he knew, would have cost him his life, so Carwen was relieved to reach the end of his shift without incident.
They planned to head out at sunset, so that night would cover them as they headed downwards, deeper into the necrons’ heartland. Carwen and the other three PDF men passed the remainder of the afternoon, and distracted their minds, with a few hands of cards. They invited the grenadiers to join them, but each of them declined.
Carwen had expected that, by now, he would have known the men of Krieg a little better, established a bond with them, but he felt as uneasy around them as he ever had. They didn’t make small talk; they hardly spoke at all. They ate by smuggling ration bars beneath their skull masks, so that after almost two days with them Carwen still hadn’t seen their faces. He didn’t even know their names.
Too soon, they were on the move again, descending into the bowels of the city. Forty floors down, they disturbed a handful of deformed figures that skittered off into the night, but two grenadiers hunted down the slowest of them and confirmed that it wasn’t a necron, just a frightened mutant that had been climbing this tower to escape a worse horror than itself. The lieutenant satisfied himself that the mutant had no information worth knowing before he shot it dead, but the incident left Carwen more apprehensive than ever.
The mutants had done one favour for the soldiers: in their desperation, they had broken through the barriers on the staircase that would normally have kept them below. Even so, Carwen knew when he was stepping into mutant territory. A rotten stench pervaded the air, and the walls were thick with graffiti, much of it scrawled in blood or faeces. After a few flights, he was breathing shallowly through his hands, envying the Krieg men their rebreather units.
An hour or so later, they left the staircase and moved into a row of small, shabby habs. Most of the windows were boarded up, but they found one where a corner of the wood had rotted away and it was possible to see through the shattered pane to the pyramid below. The lieutenant designated this as his platoon’s sentry point and, for the rest of the night and the following day, they took turns to observe the activity at the pyramid’s entrance. Carwen was spared this duty, and so never got to see what was outside the window. However, lying on a flea-bitten bunk a few rooms down, he could hear the unceasing
sounds of activity from outside and he imagined the necrons were right beside him, right on the other side of a thin outer wall.
The conclusion of the sentries was disappointing. They had been unable to discern a pattern to the necrons’ movements, and certainly there had been no time in the past twenty-five hours when the gateway had been left unattended. Moreover, the necrons’ numbers had been swelled by an army of mutant slaves. Their purpose was unclear—no one could understand what the necrons would want with those filthy aberrations—but it added to the odds against the Krieg men and their allies all the same.
If Carwen had hoped, however, that the lieutenant would report this fact to Command HQ, that this insane operation would be called off, then he was to be disappointed too. “We will divide into our three squads,” the Krieg officer decreed, addressing his platoon in the cramped confines of the hallway outside their rooms, “two to attack the necrons simultaneously from opposite directions, to divert as many of them as they can from the tomb. Once this has been achieved, I will lead my command squad through the middle, and we will attempt to penetrate the gateway.”
Carwen had been assigned to a squad three days ago, but he couldn’t tell their watchmasters—the Krieg equivalent of sergeants—apart, so it was only when one of them snapped his name that he knew who to assemble with. Parvel followed him, while the other two PDF troopers went to the far end of the hallway. The command squad, left standing in the middle, was Krieg only, a little larger than the others, and it had the lieutenant, the quartermaster and the majority of the melta guns.
It was only now that Carwen realised his seven-man squad’s true purpose. They were like the men with the bayonets in the combat with the ghouls. The lieutenant expected them to die, and the Krieg grenadiers were certainly aware of this, but as Carwen had come to expect by now they had nothing to say on the subject.
09 - Dead Men Walking Page 13
