‘Right.’ Sergeant Grifen nodded, her clipped tones calmly professional. ‘When we hit the deck, secure the ramp. Team one with me and the commissar. Team two follow us inside as soon as the Valkyrie lifts, while we cover you. OK?’
‘You’ve got it,’ Magot assured her, visibly pleased to have the first chance to take a crack at the orks. She and Grifen were close, personally as well as professionally, and could be relied on to anticipate one another’s moves in the heat of battle without any discussion, an easy rapport which had made them my first choice of squad leaders for this assignment.
As we spiralled in, however, it looked as though Magot was going to be disappointed. There were no traces of occupying orks that we could see, just the communication and distribution towers60, and the squat bulk of the turbine sanctuary looming out of the flurrying snow like an image on a badly-tuned pict-caster. A snow-choked landing pad drew our attention to its presence with a ring of flashing lights, a small blockhouse on the periphery providing access to the bulk of the complex, which, like almost everything else on Nusquam Fundumentibus, had been hollowed out underground, away from the ferocious conditions on the surface.
‘No obvious signs of damage,’ I reported, the vox-unit in the cockpit relaying my words to Izembard, listening in from the warmth and comfort of Primadelving, and the other squads in the platoon, who were supposed to be in position around the installation by now to intercept any greenskins making a break for it. (And come to our aid as fast as their transports could carry them if the barbaric xenos turned out to be there in greater numbers than we’d anticipated.) The palms of my hands tingled briefly as I spoke; if the orks had indeed invaded the complex, there should have been clear traces of their presence: scarring on the walls from the stray stubber and bolter rounds, which would have been shot off with their usual abandon, at the very least.
‘No vehicles parked, either,’ Jurgen added. His face contorted for a moment with the effort of ratiocination. ‘Could they have come on foot?’
‘It’s a long way to walk if they did,’ I said, although, given the hardiness of the average ork, that didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility. ‘And if they didn’t have vehicles, that would have made it a lot easier to slip through our lines undetected.’
‘So we’ll only have a small group to worry about,’ Grifen said, with the assurance only a Valhallan could bring to a discussion of orkish strategy and tactics. ‘Bad news is that if they made it this far undetected, we’re up against infiltrators, and good ones at that. We’ll need to keep an eye out for ambushes and booby traps every step of the way.’
I nodded in agreement. ‘So we go in cautiously, checking for tripwires.’ I took another look at my chronograph, and wished I hadn’t; the time to Izembard’s earliest estimate was far shorter than I would have liked, and if we had to waste time pussyfooting around instead of heading straight for the objective, our margin for error was going to be gobbled up rapidly. There was no help for it, though, so I voxed the pilot again. ‘Take us in,’ I said, hoping for the best, but bracing myself for the worst as usual.
We grounded in the middle of the pad, the rear loading ramp dropping with a clang on the retro-blackened ’crete, and the cramped passenger compartment suddenly became full of flurrying snow. Gritting my teeth against the razor-edged wind which billowed in with it, I took my place behind Grifen, and followed her hurrying form out into the blizzard. Magot’s team had fanned out around the ramp, peering over their lasguns at the snow-shrouded hummocks which surrounded the pad, and which for a moment my imagination insisted were greenskins lying in ambush. Then reason reasserted itself, and I realised they were nothing more threatening than fuelling points, their hoses retracted, waiting for shuttles to arrive with supplies and rotating staff.
Which reminded me... ‘Weren’t we told there were seventeen people here when the orks attacked?’ I asked.
‘We were,’ Grifen confirmed.
‘And not one of them got to a vox.’
Which was disturbing, to say the least. However stealthily the orks had approached it, the installation itself was too big to have been taken in a concerted rush, and most of the cogboys working there would have had several minutes to raise the alarm before falling to the barbarous invaders.
‘The greenskins must have moved fast, then,’ the sergeant said in response to my vocalised musings. ‘Or there were more than we thought.’
‘There are always more than you think,’ Magot said cheerfully, her enthusiasm for a target-rich environment as keen as ever.
Grifen, a quartet of troopers, Jurgen and I double-timed it across the bare rockcrete, our bootsoles splashing in the refreezing slush where the covering of snow had been blown clear or melted by the Valkyrie’s landing jets, and made it into the lee of the blockhouse without attracting any incoming fire. Which wasn’t all that surprising, as any orks on the surface would have announced their presence by blazing away at the Valkyrie on its final approach, but by that point in my career I’d found it safest not to take anything for granted.
‘The door’s locked,’ Grifen reported, with an air of surprise.
It was true, as a couple of experimental tugs was enough to confirm, and I felt a shiver of unease displacing the one engendered by the bitter cold. The rune pad was intact, with no sign of the blast damage I’d have expected if the orks had succeeded in forcing an entry.
While I was pondering the implications of that, the shriek of the Valkyrie’s engine rose to a pitch which threatened to strip the enamel from my teeth. I glanced back to see it rising from the ground, Magot and her troopers hunkering down against the scorching backwash, their eyes narrowed.
‘We’ll keep circling,’ the pilot voxed, ‘in case the greenskins show themselves.’
‘Don’t go too far,’ I cautioned, and the pilot chuckled.
‘We’ll be there when you need us,’ he promised, and disappeared into the murk above our heads, the sound of his engine slowly blending in to the unending wind.
‘So how do we open it?’ Grifen asked, looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face, no doubt as uneasy as I felt.
‘I can get us in,’ Jurgen said confidently, raising his melta, and sighting on the lock.
‘Wait.’ I raised a hand to forestall him. ‘They might have rigged charges to it.’ Not a problem if the melta vaporised them before they went off, of course, but very bad news if the thermal shock of a near-miss made them detonate. I fumbled in a pocket for my data-slate, with clumsy, cold-numbed fingers. ‘The magos gave me a schematic. Maybe the codes are in the map keys.’
Fortunately they were; I tapped in the numerals, and to my relieved surprise the runes on the pad suddenly changed colour from red to green, before being replaced by the words ‘access authorised’.
‘It worked,’ I said, replacing the slate, along with an overly-generous portion of melting slush, in my greatcoat pocket, leaning against the door as I did so. To my surprise it suddenly moved, squealing aside on poorly-greased runners, sending me staggering into the corridor beyond.
‘Commissar?’ Grifen said, almost as taken aback as I was. I held up a cautioning hand as I recovered my balance. Nothing had blown me up or shot at me, and no axe-wielding greenskin berserkers had come howling out of the darkness, so I might as well look as though I’d taken point on purpose.
‘Wait a moment,’ I said, fumbling a luminator out of my pocket, and flashing it around. ‘Let’s just make sure it’s safe before anyone else comes in.’ I seemed to be in a tunnel, which was no surprise, angling gently downwards, wide enough for a pallet loader to trundle along, or for four people to walk in line abreast.
‘Luminator controls are usually next to the door,’ Magot put in helpfully, and, directing the beam back towards the rectangle of daylight fringed with curious faces, I was able to pick them out with little difficulty.
‘There you go, sir,’ Jurgen said, slapping the activation plate with the heel of his hand, and a line of overhead lumina
tors began to flicker on ahead of us, lighting the way down into the heart of the complex.
‘Want me to close it again?’ Magot asked, as she passed through the portal with the four troopers under her command.
‘Better not,’ I said. We were as sure as we could be that there were no orks on the surface ready to follow us down, and my paranoia was always a little less acute for knowing we had a fast line of retreat open behind us; especially on this occasion, when, if something went wrong, we’d need to get out before the plant blew up. ‘The flyboys’ll pick off any greenskins who get near it anyway.’
‘Works for me,’ Magot agreed, trotting past to take point, with her team at her heels.
The rest of us followed, ever wary, our bootsoles ringing on the rockcrete floor despite our efforts to make as little noise as possible. We kept our eyes open for ambush or booby traps, checking every shadow, but seeing nothing, the absence of any concrete threat somehow even more disquieting than a charge of bellowing orks would have been. At least then we’d have known what we were dealing with. (Although, of course, if I’d really known what we were dealing with, I’d have been halfway back to the Valkyrie by now.)
At length we came to another door blocking the end of the passage; I was about to consult the data-slate again when it slid smoothly aside, revealing a neatly whitewashed wall beyond, embellished with a frieze of miscellaneous machine parts, which no doubt meant something in the iconography of the Adeptus Mechanicus. We instantly raised our weapons61, seeking a target, but no one came through, and after a moment we relaxed again, seeing the unmistakable hand of the Omnissiah at work. Clearly the machine-spirits of the power plant recognised us as friends, and were working to aid us, a realisation which heartened us all.
‘Clear left,’ Trooper Vorhees reported, levelling his lasgun down the corridor, while Drere, his inseparable companion, aimed in the opposite direction, the faint click! hiss! of her augmetic lungs echoing eerily in the stillness.
‘Clear right,’ Drere echoed a heartbeat later, and the rest of us followed, the map on the screen in my hand leading us ever deeper into the heart of the complex.
‘Still no sign of any damage,’ Grifen murmured, clearly as perturbed by that as I was.
‘Or of any of the cogboys,’ I agreed.
‘Then the greenskins must have killed ’em all,’ Magot said, as though that were a foregone conclusion.
‘Unless they took the survivors prisoner, so they could keep the plant operating,’ I suggested. Orks commonly enslaved humans who seemed to possess skills they could use, although the unfortunate captives seldom lasted long.
‘Why would they do that?’ Grifen asked, and I shrugged, unable to find an answer.
‘Found something,’ Vorhees reported from further up the tunnel, holding up a hand to check our progress, and glancing down at the floor a few metres ahead of where he stood. ‘Looks like blood.’
‘A lot of it,’ Drere agreed, trotting up to join him.
They were right, a large splash of it staining the grey rockcrete floor a rusty brown, around a still tacky centre, which shone with a sickly crimson sheen in the light of the overhead luminators. I scanned the walls, seeing no sign of any pockmarks or cratering; if someone had been shot here, it had been with a precision and accuracy completely foreign to the greenskins.
‘Must have taken them down hand to hand,’ Grifen said, having come to the same conclusion.
‘Then where’s the body?’ I asked rhetorically. Orks would have looted the corpse of their victim and left it where it fell, unless they were hungry, and in that case we’d have found a lot more mess than just a pool of blood.
‘Dragged it away?’ Jurgen suggested, and I shook my head.
‘Then there’d be a trail of blood on the floor,’ I pointed out. The stain was clear-edged, unelongated.
‘Carried it, then,’ my aide said, unperturbed.
That was possible, I supposed; an ork would certainly be strong enough to carry a cadaver, but what would be the point? ‘That seems remarkably tidy for an ork,’ I said, but Jurgen just nodded, his constitutional immunity to sarcasm serving him as well as it always did.
‘There are scratches on the floor here,’ Drere reported, another handful of metres down the tunnel. The hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, as I squatted down to examine them. ‘Some sort of cart, you reckon?’
‘Could be,’ I said, my old underhiver’s survival skills letting me read the faint pattern of blemishes on the floor as easily as a sheet of print. Innumerable trolleys or carts had been wheeled along the corridor, as you’d have expected in a complex like this. But something about the marks Drere had found looked familiar, and different from the rest. Faint parallel scratches, as though something large, with clawed feet, had strolled through here not too long ago.
Vorhees spread his fingers, spanning the inner and outer scratches, finding his splayed hand fit comfortably between them. He flexed his fingers thoughtfully, and glanced at Drere, the two of them evidently coming to the same conclusion.
‘Do they have ambulls on Nusquam Fundumentibus?’ he asked, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to me. The last time we’d been on an iceworld we’d come across a whole colony of the creatures, which definitely shouldn’t have been there62, and if it happened once it could probably happen again. Drere and Vorhees looked at one another, no doubt remembering that it was an ambull which had torn half her chest away on Simia Orichalcae, and that she’d been damn lucky to get back to the mining hab’s sanitorium fast enough to get the damaged organs replaced.
‘Could be an ambull track,’ I agreed. It hardly seemed likely, but if they wanted to look out for ambulls as well as orks that was fine by me.
As we moved on, I took a final glance at the faint parallel scratches, and found Jurgen doing the same, his brow furrowed. ‘Reminds me of something,’ he said, coughing raucously, and marking the spot with a generous deposit of mucus, ‘but I can’t think what.’
‘No, me neither,’ I said, taking a firmer hold of my chainsword and laspistol. In the years we’d served together we’d faced so much that it was hardly surprising some of the details had got blurred along the way63. Nevertheless, we both kept our weapons readily to hand, and our progress, when it resumed, was even more cautious than it had been.
We were to find about a dozen more of the disquieting bloodstains before we reached the heart of the complex, but no other signs of the tech-priests who were supposed to be manning the place. In a couple of instances the spilled blood had been adulterated by lubricants and hydraulic fluid, indicating that this was where some of the larger servitors had met the same fate as their masters; which sparked another echo of memory. Since it stubbornly refused to come into focus, however, I merely shrugged and let it go, knowing from experience that the more I tried to force it, the more elusive the thought would become.
From time to time we came across more of the scratches in the floor, too, and ever since Vorhees had raised the matter, I’d found myself wondering if we ought to be looking for some kind of beast on the loose as well as the orks. Perhaps, in retrospect, this was why I didn’t recognise the true nature of the threat we were facing until it was almost too late; my mind running along predetermined pathways, instead of remaining open to the evidence around me.
‘This must be it,’ I said at last, pausing outside a door which, unlike the others we’d passed through, refused to open at our approach. The temperature had risen steadily as we descended, so that by now I felt quite comfortable, and my Valhallan companions had opened their greatcoats to reveal the body armour beneath them, clearly wishing we were back on the surface where it was a nice comfortable thirty below.
‘Looks like it,’ Grifen agreed, scowling at another runeplated locking mechanism.
‘Hang on,’ I said, squinting at the data-slate again. But before I could find the codes I needed, Jurgen simply pushed the door open with his grubby fin
gertips, and poked the barrel of his melta through in search of a target.
‘It’s unlocked,’ he said.
‘Well it shouldn’t be,’ I said, recalling the instructions Izembard had given me. ‘The power core and the control chapel are the most sanctified areas of the entire shrine. Access is supposed to be restricted to the most devout acolytes.’
The squad of troopers around me began to look at one another uneasily. It was one thing to be making a recon sweep through the main body of the complex, especially with the prospect of an ork or two to bag, but quite another to be trespassing on its most hallowed ground.
‘And us,’ I added cheerfully, raising a few nervous smiles in response.
‘Then let’s get in there, and get on with it,’ Magot said, looking a great deal happier.
‘Quite,’ I said, with another glance at my chronograph. We had only a handful of minutes remaining before the short end of Izembard’s estimate expired, and I wanted to be in the control chapel well before it did. I have to confess to finding our slow progress to this point irksome in the extreme, but, under the circumstances, proceeding with caution had been the only sensible option; and now was hardly the time to abandon it. The enemy we’d failed to contact on the way in would almost certainly be in or around our objective: I could think of no other reason for them not to have engaged us in combat before now.
We edged our way warily inside, me hanging back as much as I decently could, and looked around, orientating ourselves. I’d visited the inner sanctums of Mechanicus shrines on several occasions before now, almost invariably with equal reluctance, so I had some idea of what to expect; the burnished metal surfaces of control lecterns, reflecting the lights and dials which were supposed to tell their operators Emperor alone knew what, were all in place, but instead of the gleaming steel or brass walls embossed with the sacred cogwheel I’d expected, the chamber was bounded with naked rock, which had been hewn into a high-ceilinged cavern. (And into which the devotional icons of the tech-priests had been duly chiselled.)
The Last Ditch Page 12
