by Ian Watson
Rakel swayed, aghast.
‘It is pointless,’ said Lex, ‘for any of you to eat brains in the hope of acquiring new skills. You lack an Astartes’ omophagea organ. That is essential for digesting the facts of a person’s life from their flesh.’
‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘I was once advisory engineer with a consignment of Titans shipped out of Mars. So, big boy, I’m already well aware how complicated they are.’
‘I said,’ Jaq said loudly, ‘that we shall commandeer a Titan, not try to climb up one and force entry and kill the crew. The crew will obey us. In my righteous office as inquisitor I am assuming the duties of Imperial commissar, and appropriating that rank. How can the Emperor’s forces be losing here unless there is lack of faith?’
Unarguable logic.
‘So you see,’ said Grimm to Rakel, ‘there’s nothing to worry about. By my ancestors there ain’t! We simply sneak into the valley of death. He flashes his epaulettes. If we haven’t already been evaporated or boiled wasted or blown to pieces we can all take a ride in a colossal target.’
SEVENTEEN
Me, Lindi!
HOW LONG HAD the battle already been raging in the valley? Since dawn? By now sheer exhaustion must have been taking a toll as well as casualties – exhaustion of men and of weaponry too.
Cacophony resounded. Titans still strode and stamped. Outpourings of energies cut swathes through men and machines. Tanks rolled. In many respects the mingled armies were more like a pair of punch-drunk pugilists locked in a clinch, each equipped with several hundred thousand arms. As Lex analysed the situation, some form of disengagement must occur. The Imperial forces had lost the day, yet the rebels could not hope to annihilate such a multitude – unless all discipline and all faith collapsed. Disentanglement would hardly be easy or quick; any more than if those pugilists, or wrestlers, were smeared in strong glue.
A combination of battle fatigue and luck – and Jaq’s aura of protection – finally allowed the four to approach an Imperial Titan. On the way they had been obliged to kill rebels. Jaq’s borrowed greatcoat was a provocation. He himself took several hits, which his mesh armour withstood. Lex caught a flesh wound in the upper arm. His welling blood hardened immediately to cinnabar, as if Lex had received a humble chevron of rank.
Ahead towered a largely intact Titan. Skulls and double-headed eagles adorned the splayed fairings of its legs. Its remaining tattered banner displayed a militant white angel slicing off the head of a green serpent. This Titan was partly equipped for close support. One weapons arm consisted of a power fist – and the other was a laser blaster. On the carapace above its turtle-like head a defence laser pivoted proudly, though a companion weapon was unidentifiable slag.
Jaq clambered upon the burned-out wreck of a superheavy tank. He spread his arms wide in the commissar’s greatcoat. He semaphored.
The turtle-head took note. The Titan’s lurid green eye-shields seemed to glare directly at Jaq, though of course these eyes were of almost impenetrable adamantium. Behind those eyes, in the armoured control bubble, the princeps of the Titan would be staring at two slanted oval screens which faithfully reproduced the outside view.
Crushing corpses with its huge cleated feet, the Titan paced towards the tank, then halted. Its defence laser covered the forward terrain, and the frontal right energy shield ceased to glimmer. Large as a land raider, the unprotected fist began swiftly to descend. Usually a crew would board from a gantry. Jaq had expected a flexible metal ladder to snake down from the rear. Clearly the princeps of this Titan was an officer who could improvise. Urgently Jaq motioned the others to join him. Lex carried Rakel bodily up on to the tank.
The metal fist opened its fingers invitingly. The four climbed upon the palm. Already the hand was rising, carrying them up into the smoky air. The weapons arm locked horizontally. Along that titanic arm they scrambled. Ducking under the shield of the carapace, they negotiated a narrow maintenance catwalk round to the entrance hatch.
INSIDE THE HEAD of the Titan, the temperature was almost worthy of Sabulorb en route to incineration. Hot fumes mingled with the reek of pious incense. Sweat broke out at once all over one’s body. This despite the laborious inhaling and exhaling of ventilation gargoyles.
Grimm stayed with Rakel in the red-lit escape chamber at the rear, while Jaq and Lex made their way into the forward cabin to confront the princeps. For four people to cram up front right away would be confusing.
Graffiti decorated any spare surface of the escape chamber: Death’s the Destination! Evisceration to our Enemies! To right and to left, short fat passages led to those pods in the shoulders where four moderati controlled the power fist, the lascannon, the defence laser up on the carapace, and... the fourth weapon was slag. Synched to it by servo-motorized fibre-bundles, its moderatus might have been fatally injured by feedback.
If the Titan’s reactor overloaded, the pods of the moderati would cannon pneumatically into this escape chamber just prior to the whole head blasting free. Should this happen, Grimm and Rakel would be pulverized – unless, at the moment that a klaxon shrieked its warning, they instantly scrambled forward. Servos whirred. Stabilizing jets hissed. Gargoyles gulped and whistled.
STRAPPED IN THE gimballed control seat, protected by padding and armour, the princeps faced those great slanting eye-screens. Bronze bones framed the screens. Across an array of lesser data screens diagnostic icons scuffled like phosphorescent beetles. A spaghetti of cables led from his reinforced mind-impulse suit into ducts. Cables coiled from his shoulder pauldrons, and wires from his impulse-helmet – which now swung round to scrutinize the newcomers.
Behind a goggle-visor: weary blue eyes. Below the visor: a hooked nose with sapphire rings through each nostril, thin lips, and a depilated chin tattooed with tiny silver pentacles.
Jaq brandished his palm tattoo. ‘I am Imperial Inquisitor Tod Zapasnik,’ he declared. ‘Do you know what an inquisitor is?’ Blessedly the princeps nodded.
‘Commissar Zylov is dead,’ lied Jaq. Perhaps, by now, he spoke the truth. ‘I have assumed his authority, and his uniform. My companion is a captain of Space Marines, undertaking covert reconnaissance—’
‘Ah,’ breathed the princeps, looking at Lex. He admired that bare giant with the red sash over one eye, and with the boltgun. ‘I must not distract you long from controlling this Titan, princeps. I hereby commandeer your splendid machine, in nomine Imperatoris, as is an inquisitor’s right and privilege. It is vital that we locate a building resembling that former thudd gun emplacement up on the crag to the west. Have you detected any such place within thirty kilometres?’
THE OUTLOOK FROM the Titan was high. Although drifting smoke veiled much from ordinary observation, the eye-screens could operate in infrared. There was also radar.
The princeps summoned a holo-map upon a gridded screen. He willed a cursor to flash.
‘Maybe you mean the so-called Tower of Atrocity eighteen leagues east of here. There is little else.’
Lex released a breath. His eye might not need to be ravaged again. Destroying the optic chord would require the implanting of nerve-wires into his brain as well as the fitting of an artificial oculus. He did not wish to burden the chirurgeons of his fortress-monastery unnecessarily.
‘Take us there as swiftly as possible,’ ordered Jaq.
‘With respect,’ said the princeps, ‘it is well away from the battle zone. Well away from our main force. We may seem to be deserting. A reversal may become a rout. I ought to vox—’
‘No. The heretics may intercept your message – and then intercept us.’
‘Two hundred thousand men may die, lord. We may even lose our base on this world.’
‘Nevertheless!’ It anguished Jaq to deliver such a pronouncement. More gently he added, ‘There are higher considerations, princeps. The apparent defection of one combat unit cannot possibly be a pivot upon which so much hinges.’
Did he himself not behave as though major aspects of the future piv
oted upon his own actions?
‘In nomine lmperatoris!’ he repeated. He swirled his filched greatcoat. He rested his tattoo lightly upon the butt of Emperor’s Mercy. Surely only a person of sublime authority might carry such a precious ancient gun, plated with iridescent titanium inlaid with silver runes. Or an associate of that sublime person.
‘Princip’s heresy must be crushed!’ said Jaq. ‘The key may well be in that Tower of Atrocity!’
‘I will brief my moderati,’ agreed the commander of the Titan.
DISENGAGING FROM THE struggle required some use of the defence laser and lascannon, as well as the hurling aside of battle tanks by the power fist. At one time the Titan’s rear void-shields seemed likely to overload and fail. The temperature soared higher as energies radiated. Eventually the Titan was striding at its briskest pace towards the east. It stomped through a carbonized forlorn waste of former vineyards, deserted but for furtive grimy plunderers of corpses.
A sinking sun had at last pierced through the drizzly overcast to paint orange blood across the sky. The cabin was cooling somewhat – as was the escape chamber, where Grimm snored obliviously and where Rakel sat hunched, white-knuckled hands clasping her knees.
LONG EVENING SHADOWS made the tower of slabs, set upon an isolated knoll, seem even more sinister. Embedded in that windowless tower were hundreds of rusted up-curving iron spikes. From some of these, bleached skeletons dangled. A scree of white bones lay around the base of the tower. Its sides were streaked with brown trails. This tower was a place of execution for those who had committed atrocious crimes. It could not have been used as such recently, otherwise some body would surely still be decaying. Some dying malefactor might still be impaled high up, squinting afar in slow agony.
Was this disuse a symptom of Lucifer Princip’s heresy?
The tower had survived the ravages of war. No one must have wanted to climb the rungs of those spikes to mount a gun on top. The tower would not survive the attentions of a Titan – which now mounted the knoll.
The moderatus of the lascannon fired energy packets which blasted and shook the structure. He performed a kind of dentistry upon the tower, as if the erection were a vast barbed tooth which required drilling prior to capping with a ceramite crown. Masonry tumbled, blocks with long wicked hooks jutting from them.
The tower appeared to be solid throughout.
On instructions from Jaq, relayed by the princeps, the moderatus blasted repeatedly at the base. A cloud of bone-dust filled the air, swirling snow-like.
The Titan advanced closer. Its power fist punched the weakened remains of the tower repeatedly in the style of a wrecking ball. During this pummeling the princeps edged the carapace against the fabric as a massive lever. With a great groan, the ancient edifice finally uprooted itself and collapsed.
Stooping, the Titan clawed into the foundations. The power fist dragged out chunks of masonry and threw these aside. It excavated soil and stones. Bending almost double, hydraulics shrieking, lamps blazing, it smashed through the roof of a subterranean chamber.
As rubble tumbled into the chamber, murky antique iron machines jerked forth blades – and fell apart in rust. ‘You have served the Imperium nobly,’ Jaq congratulated the weary princeps.
THE TITAN’S LAMPS no longer glared. Upon the open palm of the power fist the four companions rode down into the breached containment chamber, and into a soft blue glow.
Above, dusk was gathering. Nobody staring down from above would be able to see the portal itself. During daylight hours the glow might not even be visible. By night a spectator would certainly notice. That spill of light would seem to be some baleful form of radiation.
A few thousand years ago, this portal might have been hidden deep in dense wild woodland – which was subsequently cleared. Jaq was sure that the knoll was artificial. Tonnes of stones and soil had been heaped up around the containment chamber to form a base for the Tower of Atrocity.
He would need to come back to this world once he had resurrected his sublime assassin. When he returned, the war of righteousness against the heretic Lucifer Princip would still be continuing. Unless the Imperial forces now present on Genost had been annihilated! Yet if so, others would come. Space Marines might arrive through the void, to cleanse such blasphemy. Eldar forces might sneak through the webway, hoping to seize a self-proclaimed Emperor’s Son – or to bargain with him.
Jaq needed the route to remain open, yet protected. Therefore he had told the princeps that with a finger of the power fist the Titan should gouge radiation hexes on the sides of the knoll, amidst the rubble; and never reveal what he had done. Knowledgeable people would believe that a burrowing missile or mole torpedo had destroyed the tower, leaving a stew of lethal long-life radioactivity buried in the site. The ignorant would be too superstitious to investigate.
Thus, once more, they entered the webway, Jaq leading with his monocle.
THE MISTY BLUE tunnel branched several times. And then it opened out, upon immensity.
To right, to left, and above was boundless blue mist. No, not exactly boundless. To left and to right the walls of the webway could be seen, now vastly enlarged.
The capillary-tunnel had pierced one of the major arteries of the webway. Here was a channel spacious enough for sizeable ships to fly through from one craftworld to another, or from star to star.
This was as the rune-lens had indicated. The reality was daunting. To hike across the bottom of that gulf without losing one’s bearings! To find the blue of the corresponding capillary against the greater blue!
‘We shall set out one by one,’ stated Lex. ‘We shall keep at a right angle to this wall. When the first of us is about to disappear, the second will set out. We shall shout out our names regularly in turn to identify where we are. We’ll stay in a straight line, linked by a rope of voices.’
With his enhanced hearing, Lex should be able to detect deviations, and to call out corrections to left or right.
Jaq would go first into the mist. Grimm, second. Rakel would follow. Lex, as anchor-voice, would bring up the rear.
PRESENTLY A CALL came: ‘Jaq here! I’ve found it.’ By heading for the beacon of Jaq’s voice presently they were reunited.
More branches ensued. Presently the capillary-passage entered another major artery. How close they were now to the place they sought! Cross this second gulf – and only three more forks remained.
JAQ WAS ACROSS. Grimm was across. Rakel was approaching. Soon Lex would loom.
An eerie throb was discernible at the very edge of audibility. Maybe it was not a sound so much as a vibration of the mist. The throb intensified quickly.
‘It’s some eldar ship in transit,’ yelped Grimm. ‘Wraithship rushing this way. Run, Rakel, run,’ he yelled. ‘Run, Lex! Wraithship coming!’
The mist began to billow and stream. The approaching ship would be out of phase. The sheer size and momentum of even the ghost of a wraithship was bound to have some impact.
What if two out-of-phase wraithships were to fly towards one another through the same artery? They might pass one another by. The artery was ample enough. Or might they pass right through one another? Detection equipment, or some exclusion principle, must surely prevent disaster. The crews of such sizeable vessels must experience drag and disorientation. How much more must travellers on foot experience, so tiny in proportion?
Rakel was arriving apace, her eyes wide with fright at the motion of the mist and the throb and the urgency of Grimm’s cry. Lex came pounding after her. ‘Run, run!’
Ever so briefly, a vast white butterfly, wings erect, seemed to rush past. This filled the view momentarily – almost too fast for its faint huge image to be glimpsed. Parting, the blue mists surged in a tsunami of vapours. Suction tugged at the three where they sheltered inside the tunnel.
Lex was bowled away, mist-borne. He was pulled in the wake of a ghost-ship. Turning over and over, he had vanished from view in a trice.
Grimm yelled Lex’s name p
eriodically for many minutes.
No answer came.
YET THEY WAITED. Undoubtedly more than one pair of capillaries joined this artery. How to tell one from another except by the presence of comrades who were in phase? What if another wraithship came rushing by? Lex might be carried away across half the galaxy. Yet they waited. Every now and then, Grimm gave a call.
TIME WAS ELUSIVE within the webway. Was it an hour or half a standard day before they heard a reply? Before Lex came loping out of the mist!
‘Huh,’ said Grimm, ‘the big brute’s back.’ He wiped a cuff across his eye.
Rejoining his comrades joyfully, Lex breathed deeply to replenish his lungs.
‘You took your time,’ piped the little man. ‘Pass many side entrances, eh?’
‘Six,’ said Lex. ‘Widely spaced. I reasoned that either you had waited, or you had not. The greater gamble was whether I was heading in the right direction. I had spun around so much that even I could not be sure which way I was facing finally. I prayed to Rogal Dorn to guide my choice.’
‘You could have tried sticking your finger in your eye.’
‘I should stick mine in yours, fool.’ Lex clasped Grimm. He squeezed the squat’s shoulders, roared a brief laugh, shook the abhuman rag-like, and released him.
THEY HAD COME to a place where four tunnels converged. This crossroad could be no other than the place. ‘We’re here,’ said Jaq, harsh triumph and tragic hope in his voice.
Jaq had shut the monocle and stowed it in a pocket. Two sets of eyes – and one lone eye – regarded Rakel binth-Kazintzkis. She fiddled with the only one of the three miniature weapons on her finger which was still loaded, twisting it this way and that. She trembled.
‘I feel wobbly,’ she said, as if it was high time for Jaq to reinforce the integrity of her altered body by scrutiny of the Assassin card. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an inquisitor.’
‘Rakel,’ said Jaq, ‘in the warp, just beyond the walls of this webway, there is a force of goodness and nobility and truth divine. There is a dynamic towards transfiguration. There is an embryo of a new god who may renew our blessed God-Emperor or who may even supersede Him – may He forgive my heresy! – and, in superseding, release Him from His eternal agony into blissful triumph.’ Jaq spoke awkwardly. Could he fully believe in the possibility of such a victory?
