09 - Dead Men Walking

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

They were ready, at last, and they stepped out into the cold afternoon, Costellin murmuring a short prayer to the Emperor. They headed for the second nearest mine entrance, the nearest being towards the city centre and thus towards the necron tomb. They consulted the map as infrequently as they could. Best, they thought, to appear as if their wanderings were without purpose.

  They encountered few people, although more than once they heard skittering sounds and saw shadows flitting away from them. As the afternoon drew on, and their map reached the limits of its usefulness, they took to searching a hab-block. They kicked open doors until they cornered a frightened, scraggly-bearded man who threatened them with a knife. Costellin calmed him down long enough to request directions but his reply was incoherent. Further down the same hallway, a pregnant teenage girl pleaded with them to take her away from here. She confirmed that the mine was close by, on the skyway above this one or maybe the one above that.

  Outside, they saw a patrol of four necrons, too late to hide from them. They shrank into an emporium doorway and the creatures marched by without a glance in their direction. Costellin could feel the young grenadier tensing, reaching inside his coat for his hellgun, and he warned him quietly to stand down.

  It was soon after this that they came upon a grizzled scavenger, too intent upon wrestling a shattered vidcaster from the rubble to detect their approach. He agreed to help them, for a price, and Costellin had to stop the grenadier from drawing his weapon again. In return for the commissar’s old chrono, the scavenger pointed the pair towards their goal, and advised them that they would have to drop ten floors en route, circumventing a fallen skyway, to reach it.

  He also warned them what they would find there.

  The slave’s work party had left him behind.

  He didn’t seem to have noticed. He kept on digging, obediently, mechanically, despite having escaped the sight of his baton-wielding masters. The grenadier seized him from behind, clamped a hand over his mouth before he could so much as squeal and hauled him into a hab-block, where the slave kicked and cursed and threatened his two captors with deific vengeance.

  At this, the affronted grenadier went for his gun again and, as there was no one to see this time, Costellin didn’t stay his hand. Cowed, the slave answered their questions, but regained his defiance as he spoke of a High Priest, Amareth, so esteemed by the necrons—the Iron Gods, he called them—that they had welcomed him into their High Temple. “His priests drove back last night with the glorious news,” he said.

  Costellin was more interested in the slaves’ shift patterns and, although he didn’t ask directly for fear of betraying the question’s importance, in learning when the mine entrance around which they laboured might be left unattended. Once he had his answer, he met the grenadier’s enquiring gaze with a nod, but added, “Make it quiet.”

  The slave let out an angry shriek when he saw the knife blade, and the grenadier had to stifle him again. He still managed to struggle, more violently than Costellin had thought possible given his scrawny frame, and to spit muffled insults and threats that his gods would revenge this assault upon their servant. The grenadier cut the slave’s throat, silencing him forever. As he looked down at the body, the grenadier’s lip curled in disgust; the closest thing to an emotion that Costellin had yet seen on that youthful face.

  They waited until sunset, then, for the pealing of bells to summon the remaining slaves and their masters. Costellin was glad of the rest, as his side had begun to hurt again. His Krieg comrade, however, was quick to point out their duty to execute every member, willing or not, of this Amareth’s heretical church. “Any other time,” said the commissar, “I would agree with you, of course. Today, we have greater concerns and cannot afford to be sidetracked.”

  The storage vault was situated to the rear of the smeltery, past a row of metal-mesh cages that taunted Costellin with the false promise of an escape route. Even if he had had a tech-priest to get those lifters working, if he could have been sure that no necrons lurked below, the shafts appeared to have been blocked.

  The vault door bore the marks of numerous attempts to pry it open. Costellin’s plasma pistol melted its locks in a heartbeat, and in the glow of the grenadier’s lamp-pack they found what they had come for: crate after crate of small, cylindrical explosives. They began to take as many as they could carry, but the grenadier was concerned about leaving the remainder for the necron cult to find.

  “I suggest we detonate them, sir,” he said, “blow this building sky high.”

  “Too risky,” said Costellin. “These charges have, what, a sixty-second fuse? We couldn’t get far enough away before the necrons came pouring down on us.”

  “I could set a booby trap, sir, wire the charges to trigger when this door is opened. That would give us forty minutes or more until the overseers return, and with the Emperor’s grace we might kill the whole damned lot of—”

  Costellin silenced him with a raised hand. “Do you hear that?”

  The grenadier listened for a moment, before nodding. “A combustion engine.”

  “A vehicle, coming our way. A large one from the sounds of it. Remember what our captive said about his priests driving back from somewhere? Your idea about the trap is a good one, Guardsman, but I think we can do better. I think we can take every one of these charges with us.”

  The truck nuzzled its way through the mine entrance, a pair of blazing headlights blinding Costellin to the shape of the chassis behind them. He felt certain those lights would find him, crouching behind a thick pipe, but they played over him and left him in darkness again. A moment later, the engine ceased its grumbling, though its noxious fumes still tickled the commissar’s throat and threatened to make him cough.

  Thanks to the lights, he hadn’t been able to count the bodies inside the truck, didn’t know if any of them were armed, but now doors were slamming and boots were ringing on plascrete and he had no choice but to act as planned. He sprang from cover to find the grenadier had beaten him to it by a footstep, emerging from behind the lifter cages. A hellgun barked, and a plasma pistol joined in the chorus once Costellin had taken time to ensure that his blasts wouldn’t hit the truck itself. Their targets, shadows in green cloaks, fell with gratifying ease—all but one of them.

  Suddenly, those headlights flared again, the engine revved, and Costellin was still blinking away stars when the truck came howling towards him. He stood his ground until the last possible second, steadied his aim, loosed off a single shot through the windscreen, then dived as the truck nose-butted a smelting tank behind him.

  The grenadier reached it first, yanked the smouldering corpse of the driver from his cab and discarded him like a sack of rubbish. The truck’s front end was mangled, venting steam, but its engine was still running, albeit throatily. “Do you know how to operate this machine?” asked the grenadier.

  “I’ve seen it done many times,” said Costellin. “I might need a few minutes to familiarise myself with the control runes, though.”

  “I’ll load up the mining charges.”

  In the event, it took Costellin almost fifteen minutes to pull the truck free from the tangled embrace of the protesting tank. He was still trying to orient it towards the exit, to master the pedals beneath its control wheel, when the grenadier, now occupying the passenger seat to his left, grunted a warning. Costellin ducked, and a las-beam sizzled over his head to blast a circular hole through the partition behind him.

  The service at the temple must have ended, because a small group of priests was suddenly framed against the night sky ahead. Two more las-beams stabbed into the truck through the melted windscreen, and one of them sliced through Costellin’s right sleeve and left a painful burn on his shoulder. He was more concerned with the beam that had missed him: one accidental strike to a single charge behind that partition, and they would all be blasted into very small pieces.

  He let the grenadier provide the answering fire, while he concentrated on getting them out of there. Fortunately
, only two priests were armed and one quickly fell, while the other dropped his gun and fled as Costellin stamped down hard on a pedal and the truck surged forwards, breaking a third priest’s body over its bonnet.

  They were outside, then, fitting and starting along the skyway, and Costellin was wrenching the control wheel back and forth to avoid the worst of the debris. In his mirror, he saw a priest racing up behind them, flinging himself onto the truck’s rear axle, but the commissar’s erratic driving shook him loose without his even having to try, and the grenadier’s hellgun ensured he stayed down for good.

  They had checked and double-checked the map, and the annotations Costellin had made to it, until there was no room for doubt. Fourteen blocks, straight along this skyway. “I should be the one to do it,” said the grenadier. “It would be wasteful for both of us to die, and yours is the more valuable life.”

  “You don’t know how to control this truck,” said Costellin.

  “You can teach me, sir. Once you have summoned the engine’s spirits again, I need only know which pedal to press down on.”

  “The way will be guarded, of course. Our target may be six floors above us, but the necrons would be foolish not to have anticipated an attack from below.”

  “This is the only way, sir. We can’t fight our way through them, but perhaps…”

  “Perhaps a single vehicle, moving at speed… If the necrons aren’t expecting us, if they have been depleted enough by the battle to the west…”

  “The impact should set off the mining charges, but I will keep one beside me in case of need. If the tower is collapsed down here, then the generatorum will fall with it.”

  “May the Emperor be with you, Guardsman,” said Costellin. He turned and, inadvertently, did something he hadn’t done in almost thirty years. He made eye contact with a soldier under his command, a soldier about to die.

  The grenadier must have seen the look in his eye and, remarkably, understood it, because he produced his ossuary box again. “I have my comrades with me,” he said, “and I will be granted a more noble death than this wretched soul deserves.”

  “Your sacrifice will not be forgotten,” said Costellin quietly, and for once he knew he was speaking the truth. Something tugged at the corners of the grenadier’s mouth, and the commissar thought he might have been trying to smile.

  He didn’t look back as the truck sped away from him. He couldn’t bear to watch. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his borrowed coat and limped in the opposite direction, favouring his injured right side. He heard the tearing-cloth sounds of gauss guns and he held his breath. He waited for the explosion, worried at first that it might come too soon, then that it might not come at all. When it did come, it shook the skyway beneath his feet, showered him with debris even at this distance, but Costellin kept walking. He thought about the soldier’s eyes, and he prayed that the truck had found its target if only so, in the final moments of his life, that young man might at least have had some measure of fulfilment.

  He trudged on, orienting himself by the position of the clouded moon. He knew that, eventually, he would come within range of the regimental vox-net and be able to request a pickup from a PDF flyer. Then, once he was out of this damned city, he intended to make a few changes in his life.

  He spent much of that night thinking back to earlier, happier postings, postings in which he had felt he was making a difference. It seemed a long time since he had felt that way. Costellin was old and tired, and wearied by the compromises he had made, the blind eyes he had turned. He was sure that Colonel 186 wouldn’t miss him, any more than would the generals above him. They would more likely question, as he questioned now, the very point of his presence among them.

  He had made up his mind. As soon as he was back at the space port, he would vox the Departmento Munitorum. He would put in for a transfer.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The passageway was cold, almost painfully so. Its walls were fashioned from black stone, like the outside of the pyramid, and the air was suffused with a familiar putrid green glow, which provided the only illumination.

  Arex’s hands were still cuffed behind her back, and her shoulders ached. She stumbled, fell against the cold stone, and allowed herself to slide to the floor. “I can’t go on,” she whimpered. “I just… There’s no hope, Tylar, none at all.”

  “I feel it too,” said Tylar, “like a physical sense of despair, but we have to—”

  “We don’t… Ever since that door slid shut behind us, we don’t even know the way.”

  “We’re almost out of here, I’m sure of it. And, Arex, we haven’t seen an Iron God in… I don’t know how long it’s been, but maybe they’re sleeping. Or maybe they’ve found something other than the two of us to concern themselves with.”

  “I just want to stay here, Tylar. I just want to curl up into a ball and—”

  “I know,” said Tylar, “but I think… I think we’ve wasted enough time hiding. The Emperor has given us this chance, and we must take it.”

  He waited for Arex to find her faith, to make the only choice she could. When she drew in a deep breath, gritted her teeth and made to stand, using the wall behind her for leverage, he smiled, and the smile strengthened her. “I would offer to help,” he said, “but…” He rattled his own cuffs ruefully.

  He led her onward, though she was deterred once more by a deep, throbbing sound emanating from somewhere ahead of them. They found themselves at the threshold of a cavernous chamber, filled with ominous, dark machinery with green light streaming from its control surfaces. Arex felt the urge to turn and flee, but fought it this time. She looked at Tylar imploringly, and read the worst in his dismal expression.

  “Just a little further,” he whispered. “Just… just through this room.”

  They threaded their way between the machines, Arex straining to hold herself in, not to brush against them for fear of what might happen if she touched them. “What… what do you suppose they’re for?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” said Tylar. “I don’t dare think about it. I feel that, if we could even begin to understand these contraptions, the knowledge would drive us insane.”

  At least, Arex told herself, they had plenty of cover in here. They were far less likely to be seen than they had been in the passageways outside. Even as she formed that thought, however, she started at a sound above her. The chamber had no roof that she could see, its black walls reaching into infinite darkness. She could make out nothing up there, but she was sure there was something. Something watching her.

  Then, an Iron God crossed their path.

  It was gone before they could do anything more than freeze, almost suddenly enough for Arex to believe she might have been seeing things except that Tylar had plainly seen it too. They waited for minutes in the gloom, straining for a sound of footsteps above the pervading mechanical hum and the rasping of their own breaths. Then Tylar whispered to Arex to stay back, he was going ahead to check the way was clear. She shrank between two hulking consoles, still careful not to touch either, and she peered out after him as he crept forward.

  The second Iron God stepped out, as silently as the first had done, between them. Tylar had his back to it, hadn’t seen it yet, but it had seen him. As it brought up its gun, Arex shrieked his name in warning, and he ducked beneath the emerald blast.

  The Iron God swung around, facing Arex now, and she wormed herself deeper into her bolthole and squeezed out into a gangway behind.

  She ran, not caring now if she brushed the machines, thinking only of the horror behind her, of what it would do if it caught her. She ran until she no longer knew which way she was going, couldn’t tell if she was running away from the cadaverous creature or towards it, then she stopped and she looked for a hiding place. She found one, beneath a mushroom-shaped console alight with xenos runes. Barely had she secreted herself beneath this when she heard something. Not footsteps, though. This was the sound from before: a scuttling, scrabbling sound
, and a shadow was cast on the wall, of a gigantic spider perching on the console above her head.

  Arex held her breath, and for a moment the spider was still and silent too, as if listening for her in turn. Then it jerked into motion, and she heard the thunk of a lever being pushed into place. Then the spider was scuttling away, across the tops of the infernal machines, and Arex breathed out with a tearful shudder.

  She levered herself to her feet again, with her bound hands, the struggle more fraught this time because if an Iron God had appeared now she would have been helpless before it, floundering. She didn’t know where Tylar was, didn’t know how to find him again or even if he was still alive, although she had heard no gunfire.

  A short, vertical stream of green energy flowed between a pair of jutting prongs, and Arex saw a chance to rid herself of her cuffs. She backed up to the stream, but had second thoughts as she felt her flesh tingling with its mere proximity. One millimetre out of place, and she was liable to strip her wrists down to their bones. She thought about Tylar, and took the risk anyway. Arex’s hands parted, and she slapped her arms to restore some circulation to them.

  She sensed rather than heard something stealing up behind her. She whirled around, but stumbled in the process, her flailing elbow just missing the deadly energy.

  Tylar was there, horrified by what he had almost made her do. Recovering her balance and her composure, Arex suggested he free himself as she had done, but Tylar shook his head. “Either of those things could return at any moment,” he whispered. He looked haggard, sickly, but Arex couldn’t tell if it just was the green light on his skin that made him appear that way.

  They abandoned the idea of stealth, to skirt the chamber at a half-run, their footsteps echoing around them. Arex’s eyes kept drifting upwards, searching for more spiders above her. At one point, she thought she detected a glimmer of compound eyes, but by the time she had pointed this out to Tylar, it had been extinguished.