[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “It is,” Amberley concurred after a moment, no doubt spent consulting the enhanced senses built into her power suit. Jurgen prodded the gashes in the seat with the barrel of the melta.

  “Bit big for a gaunt,” he said. “Lictor, you reckon?”

  “It’s possible,” I said, having recognised the distinctive pattern of talons in the slash marks. Despite the furnace heat of this desolate place, my blood ran cold. None of us had any doubt that we’d found the reason Hell’s Edge had fallen silent, but an even more disturbing possibility kept insinuating itself into my mind. I turned to Amberley. “Can Rakel detect ’nids as well as ’stealers?”

  “I assume so,” Amberley said, which wasn’t exactly the resounding reassurance I’d been hoping for. “She says she can feel the shadow of the hive fleet, but we’ve never faced a swarm on the ground together before.” Her voice altered slightly, taking on the timbre of command. “Flicker, stay alert. We’ve found signs of tyranid activity.”

  “Confirm that,” Pelton voxed back. “We’re inside the hab units. No sign of anyone, but plenty of personal effects. It’s as if they all just got up and left.”

  “Look out for any signs of battle damage,” I put in helpfully. “If the ’nids have hit the place, they’re bound to have left traces of some sort.” I tried to picture ten score civilians mounting any kind of effective resistance to an onrushing swarm of scuttling death, and dismissed the possibility at once. They’d all have been slaughtered within moments, their corpses devoured on the spot, or dragged off to be broken down into raw biomass for the hive fleet.

  “Eew!” Zemelda’s voice broke in suddenly, her disgust audible in the wordless syllable. “The floor here’s covered in bugs. All dead.”

  “Fleshborers,” I said, my guess confirmed. Realising she wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about, I went on to explain. “Ammunition from their guns. They shoot these little insect things that eat their way through you. Luckily they die almost at once.”

  “Mucoid,” Zemelda said, which I took to be an expression of revulsion, and a perfectly understandable reaction under the circumstances.

  “Quite,” Amberley agreed dryly. “Keep looking, and stay alert.”

  “Got it,” Pelton confirmed.

  Since the pallet-shifter wasn’t going to tell us anything more we moved on towards the manufactorium we’d originally been heading for, Amberley leading from the front, which was fine by me. I trotted behind her, feeling the need to show willing and reflecting that at least that kept her heavy bolter between me and any trouble that might be lurking up ahead, while Jurgen stuck close to me as always, his melta tracking steadily as he swept his eyes back and forth in search of any threat to our wellbeing. The savant and the cogboy trailed in our wake, Mott prattling endlessly about tyranid anatomy and physiology, and bemoaning the fact that the ubiquitous scattering of ash had obliterated any tracks that might have let him estimate their numbers and subspecies, while Yanbel glanced at our bleak surroundings as though wondering what an Omnissiah-fearing servant of the Machine God was doing in a place quite so untidy as this.

  I don’t mind admitting I’d felt uncomfortably exposed during our trek across the landing field, and a sense of relief began growing in me as soon as we reached the main portal of the manufactorium. Intellectually, of course, I knew that the ’nids could be lurking in ambush just as easily within as out here in the open, but my primitive hindbrain equated inside with safety, and I hurried through the gaping metal doors after Amberley as quickly as I could.

  The air inside was surprisingly clean, and I wound the sash from around my face with an exquisite sense of relief, despite getting a full-strength blast of Jurgen’s halitosis in the process. The vast hall was astonishingly quiet, the complex machinery filling it shut down completely, although who had done so, and why they would have taken the time to deactivate them in the middle of a tyranid attack, was beyond me.[1] [1. More likely they’d been switched off by automatic systems, in the absence of any fresh raw material to process.]

  “What’s this?” Jurgen asked, prodding what looked like a random accumulation of scrap metal scattered around the floor with the barrel of his melta. Yanbel scooted over to join him, the wheels on his feet apparently working a great deal better in here than in the thick layer of dust outside, and apparently indifferent to the thickening miasma that was beginning to surround my aide now that we were being spared the worst of the brimstone. He picked up the nearest piece of twisted orichalcum, and examined it carefully, nodding to himself.

  “Biometric relay.” He scooped up another piece of metallic detritus. “Lymphatic interface link.” He nodded decisively, sure of his conclusion. “It’s a servitor, or it was, before something ripped out all the sanctified parts.”

  “Or spat them out,” I said, feeling distinctly uncomfortable at the thought. Something had consumed the biological components of the melded flesh and metal construct completely, picking the non-organic parts clean in the process.

  “Probably.” Amberley’s voice was still steady, although I thought I could detect an undercurrent of uncertainty in it that was far from reassuring. “But the ’nids are only of secondary importance right now. We’re here to look for evidence of a Chaos cult, remember?”

  I nodded soberly. The chitinous horrors were at least a known quantity, however perturbing their presence, but whoever had sent the rogue psyker after me wasn’t, and we couldn’t afford any more surprises that might undermine our ability to defend this world. If there was any indication at all to be found here of who the mysterious assassin had been, and who had sent him, uncovering it had to be our main priority.

  I activated my comm-bead. “Pelton, find anything yet?”

  “A whole lot of nothing,” the former arbitrator told me cheerfully. “If there really was a Chaos cult hiding out here, it was the most Emperor-fearing one I’ve ever come across.”

  “What do you mean?” Amberley asked, and Pelton’s voice instantly became more businesslike.

  “We must have checked out thirty accommodation units by now, icons of the Emperor in all of them. Devotional pamphlets and lives of the saints in going on half. If there were any Chaos worshippers here, they must really have liked living dangerously.”

  “Are miners usually that pious?” I asked. I hadn’t met that many, of course, but somehow I doubted it. On the other hand, I could readily appreciate how living in a place like Hell’s Edge might incline someone to invoke the Emperor’s protection with a little more enthusiasm than usual.

  Amberley shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll look into it.”

  We pressed on, passing through a labyrinth of mechanisms larger than a Chimera, the purpose of which I couldn’t even begin to guess at, our voices and Amberley’s resonant tread echoing around us as we moved.

  “What the frak?” I asked, taken by surprise as we rounded the corner of one such mysterious device, and a stinking waft of sulphurous air washed over me. At first I thought that someone must just have left a door open, then as my eyes focused again after filling with water as the rank smell punched its way into my sinuses, I realised the truth. A hole had been blasted through the thick rockrete wall, large enough to drive our Salamander through, littering the floor with chunks of detritus in the process. I glanced at Amberley. “I think we’ve found a bit of that battle damage I mentioned,” I said.

  “Me too,” Jurgen confirmed, as constitutionally immune to sarcasm as always. He eyed the breach appraisingly. “Someone’s taken a couple of heavy bolters to it. Melta too, by the look of things.”

  “Not something you’d normally expect to find in a civilian facility,” Amberley agreed, clanking forward to examine the breach more closely.

  Yanbel nodded, taking in the scene with whatever augmented senses lay hidden beneath his cowl. “Someone was certainly desperate to get in,” he remarked.

  As he spoke the memory of the violated Mechanicus shrine I’d found in the Valley of Daemons on Perlia rose t
o the surface of my mind, and I nodded too, my mouth going dry. Then the thought dissipated almost as soon as it had come, as something about the pattern of debris forced its way out of my subconscious and into my forebrain.

  “Desperate to get out, more likely,” I said. “The damage was inflicted from this side of the wall.”

  “You’re right.” Amberley nodded in turn, putting the picture together in her own mind, and glanced around the high, echoing chamber. “We’d made our way to this point by a series of zigzags, keeping as much of the machinery as possible between ourselves and any wide open space where a ’nid swarm might mass. I’d seen the value of channelling them into narrow firelanes, where they could only come at you a few at a time instead of taking full advantage of their numbers to overwhelm you, often enough to have followed Amberley’s lead in this without argument, although I must admit to having kept my eyes open for ambushing ’stealers or the like as we’d followed our winding path through the thickets of ironmongery. Now she took a few paces back from the gaping hole in the wall, and pointed. Thought so. Look.”

  I joined her, the others clustering round too, and glanced in the direction she was indicating. A wide, clear corridor between the banks of hoppers, control lecterns, riveted iron, and Emperor knew what else stretched from where we were standing to the doors by which we’d entered, through which I caught a comforting glimpse of our shuttle still sitting patiently on the pad. Rather less comforting was the condition of some of the machinery bordering the open area. Scorch marks and dents abounded, and in a few places holes had been punched clean through the thick metal plate.

  “Bolters,” I said, recognising the pattern left by the explosive armour-piercing projectiles, and Amberley nodded sombrely.

  “Flamers too, by the look of it,” she said, indicating a wide, scorched area on the floor, about twenty metres beyond where we stood.

  As I took a step towards the nearest damaged machine, intending to examine it more closely for some clue as to what had happened here, something on the floor crunched beneath my bootsoles. I glanced down, with a shiver of apprehension, already certain of what I was about to find. The carcasses of tiny beetles, too many to count (although no doubt Mott could have given me a reasonable estimate of their numbers if I cared enough to ask), were scattered everywhere I looked. “Fleshborers,” I said unnecessarily.

  Amberley nodded tightly. “It’s pretty dear what happened here,” she said, and I nodded too, concurring with her assessment. Someone had been attempting to leave the building, and found their way blocked by a swarm of onrushing gaunts, too many to fight through even with the impressive amount of firepower they’d clearly had at their disposal. So they’d laid a temporary barrier of blazing promethium, buying enough time to blast their way through the wall behind us in order to escape.

  “Whoever fought their way out of here was impressively well equipped,” Mott said. “I would estimate that, judging by the impact patterns left on the machinery surrounding us, at least half a dozen bolters were employed in addition to the heavy weapons, the traces of which are all too obvious.”

  I felt another shiver work its way down my spine. “That sounds like a fully-equipped Astartes squad!” I said in horrified astonishment. A dreadful possibility began nagging insistently at my forebrain. “Could the witch have been in league with one of the Traitor Legions?”

  “I doubt it,” Amberley reassured me. “Their presence tends to be rather more obvious.”

  “Skitarii, perhaps?” Yanbel offered. That sounded plausible. I nodded, recalling again the crimson-garbed bodies of the Mechanicus foot soldiers littering the hidden laboratory on Perlia.

  I looked at Amberley again. “Does Lazurus have a bodyguard with him?” 1 asked. I couldn’t imagine any other reason why a squad of skitarii would be on a planet as far from the major warp lanes as Periremunda.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” she said.

  Jurgen coughed loudly, and hawked a gobbet of phlegm into a corner. “Besides,” he said, as though the point was obvious (which I suppose it was as soon as he’d verbalised it), “the clockwork soldiers carry hell-guns, don’t they?”

  “Usually,” I agreed. I’d seldom seen one with a bolter, that much was true. “And what would they be doing in a midden like this in the first place?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Amberley said. After a moment she turned, and began plodding deeper into the complex. “They must have come from this direction.”

  Well I could have told her that, of course, there was only one obvious avenue of approach to the point where the battle with the tyranids had occurred. Further speculation would be pointless, however. The only way to find out who the mysterious warriors were, and what they were doing in Hell’s Edge, would be to find out where they had come from. With a rising sense of foreboding I took a tighter grip on my laspistol and set out after her, hoping that the answers we sought wouldn’t have to be paid for in blood.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  We found it after another half an hour or so of poking into corners and, in my case at least, jumping at shadows, wondering if a lictor was about to leap out on us from some place of concealment, its jaws slavering, but we were all still uneaten when Amberley paused in front of a section of wall that looked to me like any other, and regarded it quizzically.

  “Nice work,” she said, then without warning she drew back her power fist and punched a hole clean through the solid rockrete partition, revealing a thin metal lining beyond. After a moment or two she’d enlarged the breach to a ragged hole, and shouldered her way inside, dislodging a small cascade of rubble as she stepped over the uneven lip of the gap she’d made. After a moment, sure the place had been abandoned, she popped the seal of her helmet, apparently intent on examining the place with her own eyes.

  Yanbel and Mott followed, bounding over the obstruction easily with their augmetic legs, and after a moment’s hesitation I scrambled awkwardly after them. There was, after all, safety in numbers, even if that just meant keeping the sage and the cogboy between me and a hungry ’nid. Jurgen followed, of course, manhandling his clumsy heavy weapon through the hole with his usual expertise and a deal of sotto voce profanity, but I had little attention to spare for my aide’s travails. I was too busy standing in dumbstruck astonishment, like some hick from the sump getting his first look at an uphive trading post.

  The chamber we’d found ourselves in was much smaller than the halls full of machinery that we’d been labouring though until now, but no less choked with the Omnissiah’s bounty for all that, data-lecterns and cogitator banks lining the bare steel walls, and arcane mechanisms I couldn’t even begin to guess the purpose of littering the floor in a fashion that seemed both functional and virtually random. Yet again I was reminded of the hidden laboratory I’d stumbled across on Perlia, and the grisly secret it had concealed, but this place was mercifully devoid of eviscerated corpses to mar its air of pristine functionality.

  Picking my way carefully over the rat’s nest of cables linking everything together I went to join Amberley and Yanbel, who were discussing our discovery in hushed tones. They both seemed as surprised as I was at what we’d found, which I wasn’t quite sure how to take. On the one hand it dispelled the conviction that had been growing in me from the start of this little jaunt that everyone else in the party (apart from Jurgen, of course) knew a great deal more than I did about what was going on, but on the other I’d been deriving a certain amount of solace from the assumption that at least Amberley was on top of things, and the idea that she was as far out of her depth as I felt hardly seemed reassuring. So, as usual in this sort of situation, I just adopted an air of calm self-confidence, and tried to make sense of what they were saying to one another.

  “It certainly looks as if he’s been here,” Yanbel agreed, a trace of doubt still audible in his voice. He gestured to the analytical engines surrounding us. “This is the kind of equipment he’d need to continue his researches, no doubt about that. But
why would a mining colony be hiding him?”

  “Emperor alone knows,” Amberley said, a trace of asperity entering her voice, “but he must have gone to ground somewhere away from the main population centres, and why else would all this stuff be here?” A faint whine of servos underlined a sweeping gesture, which nearly took the techpriest’s head off. “It’s got his presence written all over it!”

  “Metheius, you mean?” I asked, being able to add two and two as quickly as the next man, and Amberley turned to look at me with a faint air of surprise, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

  “It’s beginning to look that way” she said.

  “I’ll see what I can recover from the cogitators,” Yanbel said, “but don’t hold your breath.” He moved away, and started the ritual of data retrieval at a nearby lectern.

  Mott coughed diffidently. “This chamber appears to have been abandoned at the same time as the rest of the facility,” he pointed out, “and in something of a hurry, too.” He gestured towards the door to the hidden chamber, clearly visible on this side, a metre or so from the makeshift one Amberley had so thoughtfully provided us with. “I can see a genecode scanner and an intrusion alarm linked to the access point, both of which whoever left here last neglected to set.”

  “I imagine they had other things on their minds,” I pointed out dryly, “what with the whole place swarming with ’nids and all.” I should have known better, of course. Mott nodded thoughtfully.

  “That’s highly probable,” he conceded. “Given the human brain’s response to abnormal levels of stress, particularly in a life-threatening situation, I would have thought it extremely likely that the individuals in question had no immediate goal beyond simple survival. On the other hand, the residue of the skirmish we found would seem to indicate that they were extremely resourceful, and highly motivated—”