by Steve Parker
The lieutenant’s brow furrowed, but he bit back whatever reply was forming on his lips. Instead, he asked tersely, ‘And what would the inquisitor have us do now?’
‘I have told you already that I am an interrogator. In terms of relative authority to your own, it hardly matters, but I’ll ask you to stop making the error.’
Borges was flexing his fists now. He was not a man used to being commanded. Nor was he used to being chastised. Who was this bloody woman to show up here and start running the show? And that aristo-fool, Sannra. Since when did he mess in Civitas matters? Better the man lock himself away with his addictions. Lord High Arbitrator in name only, that one. It was the Administratum men and the tech-priests that kept this place running. They left the Civitas to their business, and rightly so. This woman, though…
‘My apologies, interrogator,’ he offered insincerely. ‘What would you have us do now?’
Varlan noted the lack of apology in the man’s tone, but it hardly mattered. ‘The tunnel at the back,’ she told him, pointing. ‘If we’re to know more, we’ll have to go deeper.’
‘It means leaving guards with the vehicles,’ replied Borges. ‘I’ll not have those Vipers fall into the hands of this supposed cult.’
‘I leave force disposition to you, lieutenant, but let us move quickly. We’re not here to sight-see.’
Borges grunted and turned away. When he was out of earshot, Myrda leaned in and spoke to her principal. ‘Don’t think he likes you much, ma’am.’
‘I expect not, Myrda. These people have had it their own way for far too long. That’s the problem with fringe worlds. Too much freedom, not enough scrutiny. Come, let’s mount the platform.’
She called Oroga over and addressed the twins together. ‘We’re going deeper. Stay sharp. Asset 16 never went beyond this point. From here, we break new ground. I want any observations you care to make. Anything at all, clear?’
‘Clear, ma’am,’ said both in unison.
Lieutenant Borges had posted guards on the LAVs by now and had organised his platoon-strength force to move out – forty men minus the guards he’d posted, all in las-proof plate with heavy riot-guns locked and loaded. With a barked command, they all set off, two of Borges’s best scouts up front, followed by a six-man fire-team. Behind the fire-team, Varlan and her aides walked with Borges and his second, a big sergeant called Caradine. Behind them came the rest of the force, all in combat helmets and carapace armour. The lieutenant was the only one dressed any differently. Eschewing a helmet, he had opted for a black beret with a golden Civitas crest on the front, a privilege of his rank, but one liable to get him killed if he wasn’t careful, Varlan thought. Some of the men muttered from beneath their integrated rebreathers about being sent down into the freezing dark on a bloody ghost hunt. Others hushed them, glad of any change to the routine of daily duty on the city streets.
Varlan registered all this with growing irritation. A good officer would have stamped it out. Even better, a good commissar.
Up ahead, the torchlight of the scouts played across curving tunnel walls. The rock had been plastered over, giving everything a smooth surface that glittered with ice crystals. In the ceiling, some two-and-a-half metres above them, there were regular lume-globe fixtures, but there was no power to light them. Some had been broken, but how recently? Fragments of transparent plastek lay on the tunnel floor. They could have been there a day, a year, a century.
‘Halt,’ hissed one of the scouts from up ahead.
Varlan looked up the tunnel and saw the fire-team in front of her squat down suddenly. The scout who had spoken was pointing something out to his companion. His left hand was raised in a fist to stop everyone behind him.
‘Signs of a struggle here,’ he said at last over the vox-net. ‘Looks recent. Days, maybe a week. Difficult to tell with everything getting frozen so fast. Scuffs on the wall. Boots, fingers. There’s a little blood on the left side and on the floor.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Borges.
The scouts were silent for a few more moments. ‘Nothing, sir. Proceeding.’
The platoon continued down the tunnel. They passed several broad chambers – junctions, really – where decisions had to be made. Tracks in the frost led off in every direction. Myrda and Oroga worked with the scouts where there was any doubt. Together, they managed to keep the party on the path most recently used.
‘Your people don’t need any light,’ Borges said to Varlan as they strode through the gloom together. It was an observation, not a question. He had been watching how surely and effortlessly they moved in the gloom. The tunnel currently being traversed was, unlike most so far, wide enough to accommodate two or three people walking abreast. It was five minutes into this particular tunnel that he had decided to break silence with her. Perhaps, she thought, he was coming to terms with her authority now. Perhaps he regretted his earlier manner. Rightly so.
‘A little,’ she told him, ‘but not much.’ She did not tell him that she, too, boasted low-light vision capability, though hers, unlike the night-vision of the twins, was monocular, provided as it was by her opticom.
‘Have they much experience with this sort of thing?’
‘This sort of thing?’
‘I… I’m not sure what to call it, ma’am. You’ve spoken of a cult down here. And you’re not mistaken about disappearances, but that’s always been a hazard of mining on Chiaro. People get lost. There are cave-ins, machinery accidents, all sorts. There are dangerous creatures down here, too. Nightside has its indigenous life. The miners run into them from time to time: tunnel-jellies, volpiad swarms, kinefrachs, all dangerous in their own way. There haven’t been any sudden spikes in missing persons. Those reported seem to turn up alive after a few days. I can’t speak on the subject of births, mind, but I don’t see how that would relate to a cult way down here in the deep tunnels. What the heck would they eat down here? How would they survive? You think they’re cannibals?’
Varlan didn’t answer that. Speculation was useless right now, and what she did know was not for a mere lieutenant’s ears. Instead, she answered his earlier question. ‘My people have the highest level of training and the very best military grade augs, lieutenant. Experienced? Let me say this: were I forced to choose between them and an entire company of Imperial Guard, I should still choose the twins. That’s not lip-service, I assure you.’
Borges went silent for a while. Varlan could guess what he was thinking:
Who are these bloody people and what are they doing on my planet?
Local law-enforcement were always the same. An inflated sense of importance. They’d know little of the Inquisition or its work. Borges would have checked the Civitas archives and found that no inquisitor had ever set foot on Chiaro before. At least, none that had ever been recorded in the archives to which he had access. All he’d know is that Varlan’s authority superseded even Lord Sannra’s. Exactly how or why would be bothering the breeches off him right now. She saw him studying Myrda and Oroga.
‘I should like to see them in action,’ the officer said at last.
‘Better for all concerned, lieutenant, that you never get the chance.’
Myrda and Oroga overheard. Not difficult. Their hearing was superb. Varlan thought she saw them throw each other a glance. She grinned beneath her rebreather. They had every right to a little shared pride. She had told the Civitas officer no lie when she had said she would choose them over an entire company of Guard. They had proven themselves equal to her expectations in every regard during the three years she had been their principal.
The men in front of her suddenly halted again. Borges’s hand flew to the large autopistol at his hip. ‘What is it?’ he hissed through his throat-vox. ‘Gormund, report.’
Varlan fingered the grip of the ornate plasma pistol holstered on her right thigh. On her left, her golden sabre hung, a deadly vibrablade so valuable and steeped in old glory she often felt unworthy of it. His Lordship had made a gift of it, but a
gift that came with a warning and a price.
Let it remind you to always give your best, he had told her. Because any less will not be tolerated. The Ordo has no place for second-raters, Shianna.
Varlan had made living up to the gift her personal mission.
‘End of the tunnel, sir,’ one of the scouts voxed back quietly.
Varlan noted how stealthy the enforcers had suddenly become. Good vox discipline, too.
Not as sloppy as I thought, Varlan admitted to herself. Good.
‘What can you see?’ Borges asked his scouts.
‘A cavern or a hall, sir. It’s massive. Dome-shaped, by the looks of it. Our flashlights aren’t quite reaching the far wall.’
‘Give me an estimate,’ Varlan interrupted.
The two scouts conferred in whispers for a moment.
‘Six hundred metres in diameter, we reckon, ma’am. Maybe two hundred metres to the ceiling. Looks like it might be an old shift-station.’
Varlan turned to Borges. ‘A shift-station?’
Borges shrugged. ‘Back before the train systems were properly installed, work-crews would come into the mines for months, even years, at a time. The tech-priests set up shift-stations for them – a sort of small town for them to live in while they worked down here. They were mostly a mix of habitation, maintenance and ore-processing facilities. After the transport systems were completed, they just started shipping workers in and out for each shift. There’s not much call for such places any more.’
‘But there are others?’
‘Aye, a few. Well spread out. I don’t see how anyone could live in them, though. No power to them now. The tech-priests used to use geothermal transfer sinks to power them, but when the shift-stations were abandoned, they removed the fusion cells. Honestly, interrogator, if we’re looking for people down here, it can’t be many, and they’re living on a knife-edge. The cold would surely kill them if starvation didn’t. None of this makes any sense.’
Varlan didn’t contradict him, but she knew better. They weren’t looking for people as Borges thought of them. Normal men and women couldn’t run any kind of rebellion from down here. No, there was nothing normal about the cult that Ordimas Arujo had uncovered.
‘What do you think, Caradine?’ Borges asked his second-in-command.
Caradine’s voice was gruff. It had a hoarse whispering quality to it, the result of having had his throat cut during a skirmish outside a Rockhead bar.
‘Sweep-and-clear, sir,’ he said. ‘Jus’ like it were a sector purge topside. Safest way forward, I reckon.’
Borges nodded, then remembered himself and looked to Varlan for confirmation.
‘Do it,’ said the interrogator.
Borges addressed his force over the vox. ‘Right, gentlemen. You know the drill. I want a good, swift sweep-and-clear of the entire chamber. Safeties on unless we have contact. Six-metre spacing. Watch your corners and your angles. A-Squad, take left. B- and C-Squads on centre. D, take right. You report anything to me at once, and I mean anything. We don’t know what we’re looking at down here, so I want eyes sharp. Squad leaders?’
The four squad leaders, all corporals, voxed back their acknowledgement, and the party moved out of the tunnel mouth and into the gaping space of the dark, silent dome.
Varlan could feel the tension on the biting air. The men didn’t talk. Some were afraid. They were used to breaking up wage-riots and drunken brawls. Here in the inky blackness, their imaginations began to work on them, pricking their minds with icy needles of fear.
Bars of torchlight swung to and fro as the men marched steadily forwards. The light picked out scores of squat prefab structures, long abandoned and rimed in ice. Their metal walls shimmered as if encrusted with a billion tiny gems. Here and there, doors hung open like the slack mouths of long dead men. Anxious enforcers peeked into these, sweeping flashlights and gun muzzles from corner to corner, satisfying themselves perhaps a little too quickly that they were unoccupied.
Varlan and the twins walked between and a little behind Squads B and C, accompanied by a tense, tight-lipped Borges and Sergeant Caradine. She watched the men in front as they entered and exited each structure, always in twos. There were several structures to which no easy entry could be gained. The doors and shutters were frozen solidly in place. These, the men swiftly abandoned and moved on, asserting with good reason that they had not been in recent use.
‘What’s this building?’ Varlan asked Borges, gazing up at the tallest structure, a gargantuan monolith of plasteel plate, frosted concrete and broad metal pipes.
‘This will be the main power node, ma’am.’
‘I want it checked, thoroughly, lieutenant. And these look like storehouses and silos on either side. I want them checked out, too.’
‘We can do a cursory sweep, ma’am, but anything else will take bloody hours. You can see for yourself that no one has been in or out of them. Not with those doors frozen solid. We’ve been down here half a day as it is, and my men are getting tired and hungry, not to mention bloody cold despite the thermasuits. Now, we’re with you, have no doubt of that. But we’re just thirty-odd men, and I think it’s time my lads had a break. We’ll finish the first sweep, set up a perimeter, and give them a bit of down-time before we crack open the bigger structures and go room-to-room. What do you say?’
Varlan was about to lash him with an angry reply when someone called out from the darkness, the voice clear and penetrating and chilling beyond even the icy air.
‘It sounds like an excellent idea, lieutenant, but I wouldn’t worry about that perimeter. It seems you’ve found what you were looking for. Or rather, it has found you. Welcome, Interrogator Varlan. May I call you Shianna? We’ve been so looking forward to your arrival. Word travels fast on Chiaro.’
The sudden hard glare of powerful spotlights stabbed at Varlan’s organic eye. Her augmetic eye whirred softly, racing to compensate. She threw a hand up, squinting against the brief pain. The speaker gave a cold, clear laugh.
‘And now we have you. The Master will be pleased.’
16
Karras sat in the Refectorum, halfway through his gruel, part of his mind occupied by the age-browned pages of the old tome in front of him, the other part turning over the events of the last exercise.
For seven hours, he and nine others had endured the caustic air, strange smells and harsh light inside one of the great pavilions. Eighty kilometres long on a side, the glittering pavilions were no mere botanical gardens, though many of them did contain vast forests of alien vegetation. Instead, each was a kind of reserve with its own special atmosphere and cogitator-controlled gravity, home to a variety of deadly alien organisms that had been brought to Damaroth and, in some cases, bred here.
Incredibly, the tencycle had involved running sniper operations against an entire four hundred-member tribe of imprisoned kroot.
The aliens were armed with the weapons favoured by their kind – powerful, long-barrelled rifles and vicious curving blades. They were well organised, highly skilled, supreme hunters with a long tradition of war. Karras couldn’t guess how long they had been at Damaroth, but he suspected most had been born here, raised knowing the reserve as home. They were fiercely territorial. They had established a village in the centre of the pavilion encircled by an abatis made from the trunks of the trees that had stood around it. There was no hope of them ever breaking out, of course. Deadly automated defence systems were in place at every possible exit. The kroot had learned long ago that getting too close to the pavilion’s inner walls was a waste of one’s life.
They had learned the Gothic tongue of the Imperium, and the vox-speakers fitted throughout the reserve warned them of their intruders and told them they were being hunted. This stirred them into forming furious and excited hunting parties of their own. Karras and the others had to locate, identify and eliminate their pre-assigned targets without becoming prey themselves.
Had he not been burdened with the suppression implant, K
arras could have employed his gifts to guide him, cloak him, divert the kroot hunting parties, even to eliminate his target. But all he’d had was a set of camouflaged combat fatigues, a bolter with a single magazine and a standard combat blade.
And knowledge.
Using all he had learned so far at the Watch fortress, he was able to avoid detection, get a good line-of-sight on his mark, and end another alien life.
The kill-shot had snapped that beaked head backwards, spraying the dirt with foul purplish blood.
In truth, his own performance during the exercise was not what occupied Karras as he numbly spooned cold nutriment into his mouth. It was the Ultramarine’s performance that held his thoughts. Solarion had been in the same training group once again – the first time since their now infamous confrontation. Today, he had shown himself to be in a different class entirely. Even the Watch sergeant in command of the exercise – one Brother Bastide of the Sable Swords, a combat-proven hard-reconnaissance specialist himself – watched with thin-lipped disbelief as Solarion struck targets that ought to have been well out of range. That he had done so using the fin-stabilised, gas-propelled Stalker stealth rounds – something he had never used before, and whose density, balance and aerodynamic qualities he was thus unused to – proved him beyond a mere natural. He was, at least in terms of his specialisation, a legitimate prodigy.
Karras wished his respect for the Ultramarine could be pure and untainted, but he was certain it would always be overshadowed by what had passed between them. Perhaps, with the taking of Second Oath, it would no longer matter. They would soon be assigned to kill-teams. Throne willing, the day would soon come after which he’d never see the Ultramarine again. Unless…
He frowned and consciously attempted to centre himself, pushing bitter thoughts from his mind. He focused on the exercise itself and on the lessons it had reinforced, things he had made a habit over countless hard hours spent in the kill-blocks.
