by Ian Watson
An astropath on board a barge bound on the long slow haul from Karkason to the dwarf partner star, Karka Secundus, had chanced to eavesdrop on a telepathic message from the mining world to one of those agri planets that Sagramoso had seduced, using pirates paid with power crystals as his emissaries – pirates who had made themselves scarce with their illicit starships when the crusade had come through the warp to Karka’s Sun.
Lord Fulgor Sagramoso had escaped to that insignificant mining world apparently known as Antro.
The ship which had blasted upward out of the ziggurat palace only to explode, had propelled a life-capsule onwards, a stasis casket disguised as wreckage…
The crusade was incomplete. Fists must punch their way through the warp once more.
Yet this was very life itself. What other life was there? To pray was to slay.
Righteously.
That the human galaxy might be free from all manner of evil, both of alien and of corrupted human origin, and also of unmentionable source.
The yeast must be pure, or the stars would be poisoned.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BIFF AWOKE FROM his demi-brain dream of the tunnels.
Instantly he checked his bolter, confirming that the magazine was indeed half-empty. The cracketty sound he’d heard in his trance wasn’t issuing from either entrance to the little cave his reconnaissance squad was sheltering in, but was propagating through the solid rock from roughly mid-way along, up by the roof.
Perhaps it was the sound of a fire-fight on another level. Perhaps not…
Maybe another cyborged Ambull was coming their way, clawing its way through the stone with one of the damned dwarfs saddled on its back, operating it.
The dream! What did it mean?
In a vast dream-cavern, squads of the Imperial Fists in their pus-yellow, blue-chevroned armour had been fighting with red-bearded dwarfs wearing quilted red flak-jackets and coveralls. At the selfsame time, in that selfsame place, Marines from a different Chapter entirely, who wore blood-red armour with black flashings, were in conflict with green-clad dwarfs. All four contending groups milled in fury. Innumerable stalagmites reared, defining criss-crossing routes. Yet Fists only fought the dwarfs in red – and vice versa – while those Blood Marines only fought green-costumed dwarfs.
It was as though two entirely different battles were superimposed chaotically; or perhaps as if one single battle was utterly out of focus, stereoscopically ruptured, so that the pattern of events was a nonsense… Thus, in the dream.
Likewise in reality the three-dimensional pattern of all these twisting tunnels and sudden caverns and shafts and abysms eluded any easy comprehension. The subterranean maze must sprawl for hundreds of kilometres laterally as well as for several vertical kilometres.
Damn this treacherous world of Antro where Lord Sagramoso lurked.
Did Biff need a dream to tell him of danger and deceitful labyrinths?
No… The dream was more urgent in its prompting.
All of a sudden he felt convinced that those hypermobile Marines and darting dwarfs in that phantasmal cavern were ikons representing processes in his own grey matter as his brain cells tried to come to terms with this place. Tried to intuit its likely map.
In effect it was an undercity – not consisting of bowing plasteel vaults choked with dreck and polluted wastes and drifts of metallic scurf and broken rusted machines to be sure – no, but buried underground nonetheless: a maze of stone intestines and bowels. These must possess a pattern that the bearded little troglodytes understood like the hairy backs of their hands, like the lines of their tough palms…
But not Biff. Not yet. Though the right hemisphere of his brain was struggling to savvy.
That cracketty sound was becoming louder, and Biff’s armoured companions were alert too. Lex and Yeri and Sarge Stossen. No peace for the virtuous.
A crunching, pulverising noise…
Stossen signalled for silence with his power glove, and cocked his heavy bolter.
Something was going to break through into the cave – unless whatever it was altered direction.
And they would destroy the something.
Maybe this would prove to be a diversion to mask an onslaught into the cave from either existing entry…
Biff noted that Yeri was at least keeping watch to the leftward, and Lex to the rightward.
Maybe a new tunnel was simply being bored slyly, to increase the already labyrinthine complexities and provide a new route for ambush and attack… In which case, their reconnaissance squad might seize an advantage and penetrate through to a new, forward position. Beyond, above, or below.
So long as the new route didn’t prove too narrow. So long as it didn’t kink and cramp after starting out adequately.
Power armour was invaluable here. Booby-traps menaced the Marines. Deadfalls and pitfalls abounded. Even doughty eagle armour could be buckled or imprisoned by a ton of rock falling down a shaft upon it. Camouflaged hatches of rock could spring open, to disgorge dwarfs.
Electroflambeaux that lined the tunnel walls were being kept doused by some distant engineers – though those illuminations might blaze up selectively to spotlight Marines at a moment of attack from out of deeper darkness. Generally darkness prevailed, redeemed only by phosphorescent violet lichens faintly blotching the walls. Even a Marine’s keen eyesight might have grown weary but for the extra enhancements afforded by the helmet.
Without oxygen tanks, the air would often have been far from breathable. Some tunnels contained mere stale nitrogen. Poison gas choked others. Arcane, treacherous machinery would exhaust the atmosphere from some areas, and pour caustic vapours into others as the Marines advanced.
Yet power armour was bulky in such confined spaces. Main galleries, with railway lines laid along them, were wide – yet also deserted. Most passages were considerably narrower. A while since, they had come across one battle-brother who, through over-eagerness or due to enemy deceit, had become jammed in a cleft. His boots – and feet – had been burnt off wickedly from behind, crippling him.
Up above, in the ruddy light of Karka Secundus, the surface of Antro was a harsh, barren wasteland of scree and talus and spoil heaps from which rocky pinnacles soared. Very little of attackable value was up there, beside a small spaceport for ore freighters and various shafthead buildings, which the Fists had easily seized. Below was another matter. A whole subterranean domain of fierce abhumans inhabited the excavated intestines of this stark little world.
The inhabitants, of course, were squats – members of that rotund little race which had evolved away from the human norm inside the cavernous entrails of precisely such planets as Antro during millennia when those worlds were isolated by Warp storms. Tough, technically adept, they remained outside of the Imperial writ thereafter, pursuing their own devout form of ancestor worship.
Most Squats were staunch allies of the Imperium.
Not those of Antro, so it seemed.
Quite the opposite.
From prisoners captured during the taking of the spaceport, it was plain that Fulgor Sagramoso, the upstart godling, had played upon the Squats’ passionate sense of independence and upon their religion. He was their bastion against that distant, miscomprehended Imperium which would swallow them up and force them to adore a crippled immortal Emperor on Earth rather than their own sacred forebears. Or so Sagramoso had persuaded them.
Did not Fulgor worship his own forefathers too? Had he not shown his Squattish allies holograms of multitudinous, oft times dusty statues of the Sagramoso clan dating back for thousands of years?
Did Fulgor not sacrifice his enemies in chains to those same ancestral busts and sculptures?
Aye, he did! He was almost a squat in his devotion. Or so the fools thought. And that was why Sagramoso had declared himself to be a god – so as to divinise his forebears too.
For this act of reverence the Imperium aimed to destroy him – and would root out any such brand of worship from the caves of
Antro likewise, as well as slaughtering the venerable old folk whom Squats revered as Living Ancestors…
So said the perfervid prisoners, before they were executed. Nothing could persuade them otherwise.
And before the Fists descended into the endless vaults and vents and crannies of Antro, full of aberrant clever tech, Lo Chang had preached a hasty battle sermon.
“We of the Adeptus Astartes shun genetic deviants, do we not?” he had declaimed. “For the mutant is the melter of Mankind into misshapenness! Whereas we are Mankind Plus, the perfected ideal, are we not? For its own wise reasons our Imperium tolerates such dwarfs because their mutation is stable, and for the mineral wealth they produce, and their cunning dexterity, and their tenacity as fighters. So do not underestimate these little men, brothers! But do not trouble your souls about ravaging this whole world of shrunken traitor dupes in order to reach Fulgor Sagramoso. Otherwise our Crusade is in vain, and Sagramoso will return with savage Squattish war-brethren to Karkason. Delve, and destroy…”
Below ground, this strategy proved less easy to implement.
Sagramoso’s own strategy here plainly mirrored that in Fidelis City, where he had hoped to funnel the Fists into the reach of Titans – which had been renovated for him, without a doubt, by these tech-minded Squats of Antro.
Here inside Antro his trap, and his defence, consisted not of seven adamantium giants but of thousands of angry dwarfs, buzzing and stinging like fire-bees as their nest was invaded…
ABRUPTLY, A SECTION of the cave wall crumbled.
Purulent yellow light washed into their temporary sanctuary as a toothed power-saw sheared through rock like flesh. A hammer-drill erupted outward, withdrew, punched another hole. Metal-jacketed teeth tore at lumps of stone. Jutting jaws crunched and ingested, the greed-crazed mandibles gulping the shattered rock into…
…a broad, tungsten-plated head…
…from which orange eyes glared, recessed within plasteel-reinforced orbits akin to skewed spectacle frames.
Tubular nostrils inhaled dust vigorously.
Twin torches, welded to the beast’s brow ridges, projected that sickly light.
It was an Ambull, of course – and the hideous creature had been radically cyborged to make it an even more potent, swift tunneller.
Since it had halted its forward motion on encountering the great pocket of vacant space – and was now chomping around to neaten the aperture it had opened – the Marines, lurking motionless, held their fire a while longer, awaiting a full view, captive to a certain fascination.
Saw and drill, slotting into grooved elbow-chucks, replaced the creature’s original forearms. Control cables corded its plated body like external muscles standing proud; nor could much of its original face remain…
More significantly, as regards dwarfish expertise, it was stealthed – by some noise-suppression field. Its excavation work produced no deafening reverberations, only the cracketting of chewed-up stone.
And as for the debris which it gulped into its cavernous throat…
Why, that throat must conceal a secondary, artificial gullet – a mini warp portal which could transmit the pulverised material to another location, to some distant goaf or gob where waste accumulated.
Else, how could the adapted creature have proceeded through the new tunnel it had drilled and cut and devoured?
This spoke of valuable, ancient wizardry.
The transformed, slaved Ambull reeked of rancid oil, hot vulcanised rubber, bestial alien sweat, and bitter breath – a whiff, almost, of the warp itself.
Even foreshortened by its mining implements, its reach was long; while its massive legs were short, a splay of claws…
As the creature stooped, its rider appeared to view in the penumbra behind the torches, backed by the profounder dark of the tunnel.
The engineer was ensaddled upon the Ambull’s lower back just behind a bulging spur of polished bone inset with brass control knobs – a surgically metastasised excrescence from the Ambull’s spine. Pewter-beaded thongs fringed the dwarf’s scuffed brown leathers, which were studded with tiny steel hammers. His greased, fiery hair swept back to a knotted short pigtail. His monkey boots rested in stirrup-pedals which flared out from his mount’s ribs.
And he was well armed.
An antler-like bracket sprouted from the Ambull’s right shoulder. Presumably in normal times this served as a rack for other auxiliary tools. Now a tasselled ochre banner dangled from it, displaying a hammer rune. The antler supported a gimballed heavy bolter gun…
But this engineer was no warrior, for a warrior might have raked the cave with explosive bolts as soon as could be, prior to exposing himself.
Sleek rockfaces moved – became saffron power armour – and fire spat economically at the rider and his tunnelling beast.
The leather-clad dwarf flew backwards out of his saddle, bloodily tunnelled through with bolts even before those exploded in mid-anatomy, wrenching the abhuman askew.
Bellowing, the cyber-Ambull lurched forwards. Its saw shrieked. Its mandibles clashed, grinding out sparks. From its gaping mouth belched a hail of pebbles which pinged off Biff’s suit. However, the beast was already fatally injured, its armour and inner organs ruptured, its mech-components short-circuiting…
Its torch light a-dying, the Ambull sprawled out of the tunnel mouth.
Lex was the first to climb over its back to peer.
The new tunnel curved away into utter obscurity at the limit of his suit light. “Ample enough,” he drawled by way of report and proceeded, crouching somewhat.
Yeri thrust himself into the passage so as to stay directly behind he whom he still loathed – notwithstanding brotherly courtesy and the intimacy forged by combat. Aye, loathed – and therefore must safeguard; else how could he retain a target for his bile? A cynosure for his contempt?
So the case seemed to Biff, at least…
But then, Biff never had leisure for such sophistries during his own formative years. For thunking, yes. But squirm-feelings, no way. Nor did he nurse any desire to indulge himself in such digressions nowadays. Knowledge – and pattern – were what figured in the sticky spiders web of the cosmos that entrapped and consumed all of its denizens in the end. Knowing how to walk the Way of the Knight.
Blood, of course, too. The sacramentally spilled blood of enemies.
That Ambull’s blood, staining the stone, was a rusty haematitic orange.
Maybe Yeri’s peculiar relationship to Lex made sense to Yeri, and gave him a pattern, of sorts.
Sarge Stossen’s mech-voice grated out an order to Biff to bring up the rear, behind Stossen. So far as the Sarge was concerned, Lex could stay in the lead.
The first shall be first, mused Biff, and the last shall be last…
His powered boot crushed one of the dead dwarf’s hands.
“Sarge,” said Biff into his microphone, “air ain’t too foul here. Dwarf was breathing it. Should we maybe pause to… eat his brain? He’s gotta have known the layout. Mebbe he savvies where Lord Sag’s lair is. We erase him, and the abs don’t matter much.”
“You really think that was uppermost in the ab’s mind when he died?”
“No,” admitted Biff.
“I’m well aware of your exploit with the Titans, Tundrish. We hail you for it. Fact is, though, you three all lucked out on Karkason… You know why? Because when you killed those Moderati and their Princeps those guys were absolutely concentrating on how to use that Emperor machine. That was uppermost in their brain-pans, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Our engineer dwarf would be thinking mostly about operating his beast-machine.”
“I just have a feeling I might suss the Tao of these tunnels. The Ley of the layout. If I had a little more to digest.”
“Maybe our Biff should eat the Ambull instead?” suggested Lex from up front. “More his style, I’d have thought…”
Stossen guffawed harshly, a slurry of razor blades being sucked d
own a drain.
“I tell you, you three lucked out. And those guys you ate on Kark were true human. What Marine wants to pollute himself with the brain of an ab unless it’s absolutely vital? So just forget about being Corporal of a Cannibal Corps…”
Biff was aware by now that Sergeant Faust Stossen regarded even friendly Squats with a passionate nausea as caricatures of the true human species. No use trying to persuade him. Maybe it wasn’t such a bright thunk, after all. Repetition was insectoid. Flexithunk spelled survival.
Those animated ikons would need to race around inside Biff’s own brainpan a while longer, trying to suss out the Tao of the Tunnels, to spy the Way of the Web…
Biff’s spider tattoo itched, as it hadn’t in a long while. The newly hewn tunnel cramped itself around the advancing recce squad as if intent on squeezing shut, encasing them in it as metal fossils. The hulking, crook-legged Ambull had created enough clearance for its rider-master as well as itself. Yet the eagle power armour still scraped from time to time.
The route cut a lazy, descending arc for a kilometre – to the northward, according to the compass runes projected upon Biff’s faceplate – then it wended eastward. Dimly they lit the way with their suit-lamps, only allowing enough leakage of radiation so that their enhanced eyes could spy the lineaments of the tunnel. Less light, and even Marines would have been whelmed in absolute darkness, for here in the bowels of Antro – in a new passage where no phosphorescent lichen yet grew – their straitened surroundings were more profoundly obscure than during the darkest moonless night, when always some faint illumination leaks upon the senses from any natural sky whatever.
This sensory deprivation was compounded by electromagnetic isolation – it had been quite some while since the Sergeant could raise any comprehensible radio response from Lieutenant Vonreuter. Before, radio waves had at least bounced capriciously through the maze of tunnels, however much hexed by static. No longer was there any channel to higher command. Only feedback howled. A few distant audio crumps and crackles… even those died away.
