Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  Crowl tensed. This would likely be unpleasant.

  ‘You had your chance,’ he muttered grimly, and fired.

  Chapter Eleven

  Revus hit cover, crouched down, took aim, and fired his hellpistol.

  One of the grey-clad attackers took the shot in the chest and flew backwards, crashing into a cargo-crate and cracking its plasteel bracing. The warriors running with him scrambled for protection, skidding behind more piles of crates and chain-shackled metal tubes. Revus’ own squad – five strong – took up position around him and picked their targets.

  The chamber was a big one – a receiving depot for sundry goods ordered by the quartermaster’s department. At one end stood tall slide doors capable of receiving a beta-grade land-transport, all but one of which were closed and locked, the final one blown open and dangling on a single hinge. At the other end, where Revus had entered, was a row of smaller openings leading back into the citadel’s innards. In between was a heaped maze of containers, many piled up close to the roof. Between those containers and the various piles of items waiting for onward transmission were a series of narrow trackways for slaved servitors. A couple of mech-lifters, powered-down and dormant, stood up ahead, already blackened from las-burns.

  As he hunkered down, the las-fire scything overhead, Revus’ helm-feed swam with updates from elsewhere in the citadel. It was already looking bad. They had not been hit by a lone infiltrator, nor even a small group of them, but an entire army. It beggared belief that a force so capable and so large had been mustered and deployed so quickly – unless, of course, they had been held prepped and ready for this very eventuality.

  ‘Hold the refectory level,’ Revus voxed to the command-group stationed there. ‘Vaf’s heavy weapons will be there in moments.’ He switched scope to the main elevator-spine, where the fighting was already fierce. ‘Pull back to intersection five,’ he ordered. ‘You’re taking too many casualties.’

  He was firing the whole time, emerging from cover for split-seconds before pulling back again.

  The invaders filtered forward using the plentiful cover. Whatever else they might have been, they were well-trained. Having blasted their way in, they were now overlapping one another and advancing up the narrow passages. They seemed to be universally kitted out with lasrifles, perhaps not the equal of the storm trooper’s enhanced hellguns, but certainly on a par with Militarum-issue weapons. Their armour was light but effective. They wore closed-face helms with narrow eye-slits, all in dark grey with no livery visible. None of them had spoken or issued demands – they had just smashed through the air-cordon, landed troop-carriers and burst out across a whole gamut of the lower levels.

  Revus scampered down the length of the container, reached the far end, swung round, fired blind, then snapped back into cover. A pain-filled grunt from the end of the chamber told him he’d hit something, but the storm of las-bolts coming back at him, frying and chipping the container’s edge, also told him there were plenty more.

  He slid down to the ground, knocked the spent powerpack out of the holder and slammed a fresh one in. The air was beginning to smell of burning, and the chamber echoed to the strangely muted sounds of lasgun combat.

  Over to the right, two of his troops, a man named Jusdin and a woman named Ilu, were creeping forward under the protection of long, chained-up metal tubes. Behind him, the three others – Hafal, Pieter and Slovia – were attempting to edge left. Revus stayed where he was, hugging the container’s charred metal edging, trying to get an augur scan of numbers. The container must have held food supplies, for the stink of protein-sticks filled his nostrils.

  He heard a thud, a smack, and the clatter of boots – they were attempting to rush him.

  He spun back the way he’d come, dropping low and rolling face-down into the trackway. He got three shots off, hitting two invaders, before return fire forced him to wriggle back out of view. Jusdin managed to clamber higher and unleashed a volley down at the onrushers, dropping one of them. Slovia pulled the pin on a frag grenade and sent it spinning into the channel. It detonated in a cloud of metal shards, shredding through a three-metre tower of packing units and making the whole space echo from the explosion.

  Hafal and Revus took advantage of the blast to move forward again, holding their bodies low and firing through the debris. More cries from the tottering crates told of shots finding their mark, and the two of them reached the shadow of a mech-lifter stuck in the midst of a tarp-wrapped heap of sacking.

  The enemy troops fell back. Revus’ helm display lit up with detected heat signatures – more than two-dozen now, creeping closer. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed more shadows against the distant left-hand wall. He saw Pieter and Slovia sidling up to his position, and waved them back.

  Too many, he indicated in battle-sign.

  Then there was another explosion, and a column of cargo-crates blasted apart. Grey-armoured shapes charged through the wreckage.

  Revus ducked out of cover, still holding himself low. He heard Hafal cry out but had to keep moving, sprinting back towards the containers as more grenades detonated. One impact-wave caught him, nearly throwing him from his feet, but he crashed into the edge of the container and used it to keep him upright. He saw a flash of grey amid the tumbling fragments and took a snapshot, hitting an oncoming warrior in the visor.

  Then there were more of them, charging up through the splinters, firing as they came. Revus dived for cover again, feeling the hot ping of las-fire at his feet. He could hear Slovia shouting something, but couldn’t see where she was.

  He whirled around, glimpsing an enemy bursting out just ahead of him, no more than five metres away. He fired, striking him in the torso, but another leapt up behind the first and fired back. Revus was struck in the shoulder, knocked from his feet and sent skidding. He tried to brace, to get another shot out, but something else – something blurred with speed and movement and velocity – got in the way.

  Momentarily disorientated, it took him a moment to recognise Khazad, springing from the shadows, flinging herself out into the open without heed for cover or protection. She seemed to spin straight through the las-beams, arcing around and across them, before crunching in close to the grey-armoured soldier. Her blade flashed gold, and he toppled, his breastplate torn open. She pounced back, hitting another, slicing across his throat, before checking against the edge of the lifter and springing into contact with a third.

  Revus clambered back to his feet, his ears ringing. Hafal’s life-reading was gone, and he saw Pieter hobbling backwards, trying to reload even as fresh las-bolts whizzed past. Out on the far side of the chamber, where the broken slide-door remained open, he saw a personnel carrier rumble into the depot. It looked to have flamers mounted on its armoured back, already swinging round and looking for targets.

  He reached for his own frag grenade, primed it and threw it down the central trackway.

  Pull back, he signed, voxing the same command over the squad-comm.

  They responded instantly – he saw Slovia darting down the flank, weaving between crates. Jusdin fired a blistering las-volley down from his vantage before leaping away as the crates were blown apart, crunching to the floor then running.

  Revus was the last, retreating ahead of the advancing carrier and dropping any infantry that got too eager for the chase. Khazad loped past him, freed up by the covering fire laid down by Ilu and Pieter. They reached the first of the open portals, released a final mass of las-bolts, then piled through and slammed the blast-doors closed as the storm of return fire scorched the frame. Hafal wasn’t with them.

  Slovia ran down the corridor, locking the rest of the portals. Jusdin reloaded while Pieter pulled a reel of plastape from his medipac and wrapped it around a thigh-wound. Khazad leaned over, her armour splattered with crimson, panting hard.

  ‘Doors will not hold them long,’ she said.

  Already the
re were thuds from within the depot, the scrape of heavier weapons being drawn up. The carrier itself might not be able to come further in, but its contents were clearly being unloaded.

  Revus consulted his tactical scope. ‘We’ll rendezvous with Milo’s squads here,’ he said, transmitting the coordinates of the next choke-point up, the conjunction of three major passages into the main spine columns. ‘Keep moving.’

  Ilu laced each doorway with wire-spring charges, and then they were running again, back up, away from the ingress points. This was their third fighting retreat, and the same thing was happening all across the lower levels.

  ‘Too many,’ voxed Khazad, sounding disgusted. ‘Where are from?’

  ‘I do not know,’ replied Revus, his mind already turning to the next set of encounters. He didn’t have the numbers. It didn’t matter how many invaders they dropped, for they seemingly had the resources to spare, and his defenders were running out of room. A few more levels up, and they’d be into Courvain’s command structure, and after that the Lord Crowl’s own chambers. They were being forced upwards, squeezed like blood in a vein.

  ‘We hold them at the next one,’ Khazad urged, her activated power­blade swinging as she ran. ‘Bleed them good.’

  He wanted to agree. All across his feed, he could see the signals of his units being forced back, forced up, crammed into the dead-end that would see them all crushed up together.

  ‘Keep moving,’ he said again, grimly, feeling the wound in his shoulder start to burn. ‘We’ll do what we can.’

  Huk heard them coming before she saw them. That was often the way with her – tied-down into the structure of the citadel by her synapse cabling, she had come to think herself as a part of it, a spur jutting from its bones, a cell within its bloodstream. She might not be explicitly told much, nor get out to see for herself what was taking place, but she felt the tremors and listened to the echoes.

  So now she waited patiently as the vibrations grew. She felt the walls shudder, and knew that they must have broken through the airborne defences and through the outer walls. That was something that had never happened before, not in her experience at least. As far as she knew, there were no records of the citadel ever being successfully invaded, though even her tomes didn’t stretch all the way back to the place’s foundation, so you never knew.

  ‘Crowl will be angry,’ she said, tutting. She hoisted her ragged skirts and shuffled over to her ring of cogitator columns. ‘I wonder if he can be back yet.’

  The shelves above her, rising up to the summit of the archive’s vaulted ceiling, were empty of servitors. Some of the books had already been carted away, but most remained. There was no room elsewhere for the tonnes and tonnes of material that needed to be stored – the depositories here occupied a considerable portion of Courvain’s bulk, stretching deep into the dark recesses of its creaking structure.

  She reached the cogitators, and adjusted the chain across her shoulders. Her oculus whirred, giving her a scan-view of the chamber-floor. It smelled very musty. It smelled of decay. She hadn’t noticed that before, and wondered why she did so now. Perhaps it was the girl, Spinoza. Huk liked Spinoza, for all that she was a starched, stiff product of her education and breeding. Her instincts were in the right place.

  There was another crash, then a squeal of metal against metal. The floor juddered, throwing up little wavelets of dust. Huk frowned. It should never have got that dusty, not without her being aware of it. Had she slipped that far? Had she forgotten about the small things, amid all the constant demands?

  It had been different, in the beginning. Her robes had been finer, her sense of confinement less onerous. It was still a prestigious job, and Crowl had always made sure her contribution was recognised. Somewhere, though, somehow, things had become stale. She had retreated into herself, letting the high walls of the archive hem her in. For a long time, all there had been for her were the old parchments, the ragged leather spines, staring at her from their high eyries. Perhaps she had let that happen. Perhaps there should have been more.

  ‘The girl was right,’ Huk murmured. ‘This is disordered.’

  There was a boom, one that rang up along the high space and shook more dust down from the shelves. The great metal doors, the ones she had locked closed herself just a few moments ago, flexed inward.

  Huk turned to face them, a wry smile cracking her desiccated features. She placed her hands, with their long iron fingers, across her lap.

  A second boom, and the doors blew open. Smoke tumbled across the stone floor, and warriors entered through it. They were grim-looking, bearing no icon or sigil that she recognised. Their armour was dark-grey, their helms blank. They carried lasguns two-handed, treading warily into the open and scanning for threats.

  One of them, their captain presumably, approached her. She watched him come. His troops fanned out, pointing their gun-muzzles up into the high vault. She counted thirty, with more no doubt outside. She could hear the sounds of fighting from the corridors – the snap of las-fire, the thud of bodies hitting the deck, the cries of the wounded.

  He came to a halt, regarding her. It seemed he was trying to work out what kind of thing she was. That was understandable. For a long time, Yulia Huk had been engaged in much the same activity.

  ‘This is the main archive, boy,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘There’s nothing for you here. If you have a quarrel with the master of this place, I suggest you keep heading upwards. Though I can’t imagine why you’d have a quarrel with him, or any of us.’

  The captain looked up, peering into the distance. Then he swung his gaze around, scanning across the metres and metres of shelving. Although it was impossible to get a sense of his expression under all that grey plate, everything in his stance and manner indicated disdain.

  He looked back at her.

  ‘Of course,’ Huk said, tweaking the cables around her a little, ‘if you had a request for something specific, I’m sure I could find it for you.’

  He lifted his lasgun, pointing it right at her.

  ‘No?’ asked Huk, resignedly. ‘Very well. I was nothing if not polite.’

  She let the electro-pulse run down her cables and into the archive’s central retrieval lattice. The response was instantaneous, like a nervous system twinging. Plates blew open, chains rattled down, grapple-hooks flew. From every cubby-hole, every alcove, every storage hopper, the servitors burst out, capering on their over-muscled arms. Their eyes blank, their mouths gaping, they hurled themselves at the invaders, smashing into armour and tearing at it with their knife-sharp fingers. They scrabbled and scattered like grey-fleshed, metal-pinned primates, flailing and capering before ripping into those who had crossed the threshold into their hidden realm.

  Courvain’s archives were large and well-tended. Over a hundred retrieval drones worked here, built for access-speed and agility across the high places. Their cortexes were simple, but their bodies were unusually honed for a servitor-cadre, with digital augmetics that could serve just as well as combat-blades if the need arose. Huk controlled them all with absolute precision – one of the very few advantages of her unfortunate, locked-down status.

  The captain whirled away from her, switching his aim towards the bestial figures suddenly leaping at his men.

  Deftly, smoothly, Huk withdrew the old gun she’d used once as Crowl’s savant, the one that she’d had to relearn how to use with her new iron fingers. She aimed it at the man’s back, and fired. The las-beam burned a tight hole in his armour, felling him instantly.

  ‘Still got it,’ she murmured, with a definite air of self-congratulation, then picked her next target.

  Chapter Twelve

  The glass, taut under pressure from the liquid behind it, exploded into thick, spinning pieces.

  Crowl dropped to his knees as the heavy fragments smashed into him, crashing across his hunched body and nearly sending him careening in
to the walls behind. Amid the roar and foaming, he was dimly aware of Gorgias riding high above it all, shrieking something, as always, about traitors and vengeance.

  For a moment it felt like he’d be borne clear from his feet and dashed like a piece of flotsam on the tide’s fury. Everything smashed and whirled. He staggered, slipped back, fighting back against the swell, but then, mercifully, the worst passed.

  He steadied himself, drenched by the fast-draining torrent, only to see the Magister coming right at him amid the last dregs of its tank’s contents.

  Crowl fired again, winging the creature, but it was surprisingly fast, shrugging off its mooring strands and swinging down to attack him. It was still semi-tethered, borne up by its main electro-pulse cables, but out of its suspension fluid it was even fouler than it had been before – a half-rotted, blanched twist of puffy flesh and cartilage. Its huge cranial mass unbalanced it, toppling crazily like an infant’s head atop a withered scrap of sinew, but, for all that, its thick web of rope-ties kept it upright and directed. The core cables were steel-wound lengths with a prehensile strength of their own, making the Magister the central node of a whole network of lashing strands.

  Crowl fired a third time, retreating steadily. The stench of it was intense. It screamed – somehow, for no mouth-parts were visible – in a painful, gurgling wail, spilling fluids from its every gushing orifice.

  Gorgias flew in close, peppering it with shots before being swatted away by one of the flail-like cables. The skull smacked hard into a glistening bulkhead, its spinal trail sparking.

  Then the monster was on Crowl, sweeping down from its wrecked tank, reaching out to claw at him with its atrophied limbs. For an instant, just as he looked up into its combined, overlapping mess of once-human features, he saw the familiar, hateful dream-image imposed there, just as grey, just as foul, laughing.