Dead Men Walking

by Steve Lyons

  The second morning since his encounter with Hanrik. Two nights in a row, Gunthar had expected Krieg soldiers to burst in, to drag him from his bed, force him to his knees and shoot him in the head. But it looked as if Hanrik wasn’t going to press charges, perhaps for Arex’s sake. Perhaps because he had bigger worries.

  Arex…

  Commissar Costellin’s team would be heading into the city today, following a map that Gunthar had prepared, but he wouldn’t be going with them. It didn’t matter, he told himself. There would be other chances, as Hanrik had said. He was certain of that now, and that certainty was a cold, hard glint in his dull, grey eyes.

  And that was it, he realised: the greatest change in that reflected face, his face. It wasn’t the hair, nor the cheeks, nor the bruise from the Governor’s knuckles. It was those grey eyes, so full after so short a time of hard-won experience, of memories.

  Mine overseer Gunthar Soreson was looking into the eyes of a stranger.

  The eyes, he thought with a nervous tingle, of a soldier.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The expected necron attack to the south hadn’t materialised.

  This meant that Costellin had no distraction to cover his subterranean mission. It also called the purpose of said mission into question. As the commissar said to Colonel 186, ‘What if the necrons have no need for our power, and the timings of the previous attacks were coincidence after all?’

  He had planned to depart at noon. Instead, he put his team on standby and waited at his desk, tensely monitoring vox-traffic until Colonel 103 reported that it was over, the south-side generatorum razed and not a sighting of the enemy.

  Hanrik, however, was reluctant to abandon the plan his genius had inspired. ‘It could be,’ he conjectured as the senior officers gathered once more, ‘that the necrons are still weak, and have chosen not to fight a battle they can’t win.’

  ‘The mission will proceed,’ Colonel 186 decided. ‘We can’t overlook the chance that our original thesis is correct, that the destruction of the city’s main generatorum could give us a decisive advantage in this war, and even if we are wrong…’

  ‘Then, what are we risking?’ concluded Costellin, tight-lipped.

  ‘Indeed,’ said the colonel, oblivious to the irony in the commissar’s words.

  ‘Of course,’ said Costellin, ‘if the necrons have indeed reprioritised their objectives, then they might have chosen to defend the primary generatorum at the expense of the smaller ones. We could find ourselves walking into an ambush.’

  The colonel nodded. ‘At least, in that case, we will have confirmation that the generatorums are important to them, and we can strategise accordingly. With the Emperor’s favour, however, the necrons won’t have anticipated a sneak attack such as this one, and will only have posted a token defence.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Costellin conceded, ‘though that would rather invite the question, where might the rest of their force be?’

  The western edge of Hieronymous City was a good distance further from the space port than it had been. Costellin’s half-track carefully traversed a canyon between looming heaps of rubble, almost to where the Death Korps’ siege engines were still grinding out their destructive charges, edging inexorably forwards.

  Here, an old mine shaft had been uncovered, a space cleared around it. The Termite boring vehicle requisitioned from the troop ship had already been lowered into the pit, a task that had required a full platoon of Guardsmen and a jury-rigged pulley system to perform. The Termite could have drilled its own way down, of course, but in so doing it could easily have collapsed the mine tunnels beneath itself.

  Costellin was an hour early, but still one grenadier platoon had arrived before him, and the second now approached in a convoy of Centaurs. He had brought along a tech-priest named Lomax, a skinny man with watery eyes, who bristled with so many mechadendrites that he looked almost like a gigantic metal spider. Lomax was here for two reasons, the first and lesser of them being that Costellin didn’t trust the ancient Termite not to fail on him.

  He formed up his troops, and gave them a cursory pep talk, a hundred skull masks staring dispassionately back at him. He knew that Krieg grenadiers were the elite of the elite, the best possible men to have at his back, but it had long been said that, when a Guardsman was promoted to their illustrious ranks, it was because he had lived too long. Grenadier squads had a brutal mortality rate even for the Death Korps, and the skulls they wore over their regulation rebreather masks were a symbol that they accepted, and were honoured by, their impending martyrdom.

  When the speech was done, the grenadiers began to lower themselves into the mine shaft on ropes, two at a time. Once enough of them were down to secure the cavern below, Costellin sent the designated two-man crew of the Termite to join them and to get a feel for their vehicle while the others descended.

  His turn came, at last, and although a Guardsman respectfully offered to winch him down with the still-extant pulley system, Costellin followed his men’s example and swarmed down the rope under his own strength. He regretted his vanity as ageing muscles struggled to support his weight. He persevered, however, and dropped into a lifter cage, the gate of which had been wrenched open. Concealing his breathlessness, he stepped from this into a frigid, high-roofed cavern, dark but for the pale glows of forty or so lamp-packs.

  He activated his own light and studied a data-slate in its beam, orienting himself with the map programmed into it. He identified the tunnel down which he needed to proceed and sent a pair of scouts ahead, ensuring first that their comm-beads were operational. Costellin cursed under his breath as the Termite’s engine caught with a raucous roar; if there were necrons anywhere in these mines, then he feared they would be on their way here by now.

  It took the squat Termite a few attempts to align itself with the tunnel mouth before it could heave itself forwards. It set a steady walking pace, crushing loose rocks beneath its caterpillar tracks, so the last of the grenadiers had plenty of time to descend the shaft and catch up with it. They had to trail along behind the vehicle because, apart from a few places where the tunnel briefly widened, there was no room to pass it: a problem for the scouts, Costellin noted, should they run into trouble ahead; a problem for everyone else should it creep up behind them.

  He kept his eye on the map, voxing directions ahead of him. Fortunately, the mine tunnels tended to branch rather than turn, and only once did the Termite have to employ its heavy, roof-mounted drill in order to widen a junction and ease its passage. Less than ninety minutes later, however, the tunnel they were following made a sharp northward curve, away from their objective.

  ‘This is it,’ Costellin voxed, inspecting the map. ‘Right here. We need to go through that wall at an angle of either fifteen or thirty-five degrees to the direction of the tunnel – our cartographer isn’t quite sure which. I suggest we try fifteen to begin with, and a downward slope of about, oh, ten, and if we don’t hit another tunnel within five hundred metres, pull out and we’ll try an alternative trajectory.’

  The Termite’s drill began to spin, its back end rising on rusty hydraulics, and as the bit made contact with the rock wall, an ear-piercing shriek made Costellin wince.

  They were lucky, this time. Only a few minutes after the Termite’s back end had vanished into a hole of its own making, its crew reported that they had found the adjoining tunnel. Unfortunately, they had broken into it from above, requiring them to reverse some way and then increase their angle of descent for a second attempt. The consequence of this was a larger connecting tunnel than planned, and of course it collapsed almost at once.

  Costellin retreated from a thick cloud of dust and dirt. The masked grenadiers, however, went straight to work on the instructions of their watchmasters, one squad retrieving entrenching tools from their backpacks while another collected mine props from side tunnels. They didn’t have to dig too far as much of the tunnel was still passable, albeit by clambering over mounds of rubble or by squeezing t
hrough snake-thin gaps between them. Even so, it was an hour or more before the first of them emerged into the second mine at last, where the Termite sat waiting for them.

  It was then that their problems really began.

  The map of the second mine was hopelessly inaccurate, leading them in circles. Costellin checked every tunnel with a compass, paced out its length and marked amendments on his slate, but it was impossible to tell which of two walls he had to break through next. His first choice proved to be the wrong one and, as close to necron territory as they now had to be, he rued the wasted use of that deafening drill.

  The second wall, however, yielded with surprising speed, and the Termite’s short, straight tunnel held up long enough for everyone to rush through into the third and, so long as the map was correct on this point, final mine. They had no further need of the Termite now, so Costellin took some pleasure in having its engine stilled, though it took almost a full minute for the grumbling echoes to subside.

  It was largely with this next task in mind that he had requisitioned the tech-priest. Lomax stepped forward, ducked under the back end of the Termite’s drill and opened a compartment there. He flexed his fingers, then plunged them into the vehicle’s exposed arcane workings, all the time speaking litanies and prayers to the God-Emperor in his aspect of the Deus Mechanicus. Costellin couldn’t hope to understand the tech-priest’s esoteric rituals, but he watched all the same, until Lomax stepped back from the Termite, having extracted from it a rusted grey box in a tangle of wires, which he held reverently a servo-arm’s length away from himself.

  They moved on then, and this time the map brought them soon enough to a sizeable cavern, similar to the one into which they had first dropped. Six lifter cages stood silently in its centre, and Costellin pointed Lomax towards these and asked if he could bring them to life. The tech-priest confirmed that, with enough time and peace, he could, by lashing the Termite’s power source up to their mechanisms.

  In the meantime, at Costellin’s suggestion, the grenadiers unravelled bedrolls and stole a couple of hours’ sleep, in their masks, although each platoon left a ten-man squad on watch. Costellin checked his chrono. After all their tribulations, they had actually made good time for a pre-dawn assault on the generatorum above them.

  He didn’t sleep himself. He used this quiet time to commune with the Emperor, to make what he suspected would be his final peace with Him.

  The tech-priest’s rites had been successful. With a clashing of metal, a bright blue glow and an ozone stink, the lifters lurched into life. Only four platforms were present but, after a few minutes, the remaining two dropped into their metal-mesh cages. Costellin was relieved to see them. If the lifter shafts had been blocked, then their mission would have ended right there and then.

  By now, the grenadiers were all on their feet, bedrolls packed away, and Costellin marshalled three squads into the cages and sent them surface-ward, along with a lieutenant from Gamma Company. Twenty minutes later, a vox from the lieutenant confirmed that the mine entrance was secure, that there was no sign of necrons in the vicinity and that he had sent the lifters back to collect another load.

  He was interrupted by Colonel 186, cutting in on the command channel. He requested an update, which Costellin gave, then the colonel advised that there had been a development at his end too. ‘The necrons are amassing a force,’ he said, ‘even larger than the one they sent north. Scans suggest it is heading our way.’

  ‘Just as you approach the west-side generatorum,’ Costellin breathed. ‘Hanrik was right.’

  ‘This is good news, Costellin. It means they do care about the generatorums. You are doing the Emperor’s work in there.’

  ‘They must have chosen to sacrifice the south-side facility rather than divide their forces and risk losing both. But, colonel, how many…?’

  ‘I have requested reinforcements from the other three regiments, but of course they are under-strength too, and they each have their own line to hold.’

  ‘The 42nd barely managed to hold off the necrons last week. If their army has grown since then… Eighteen hundred men, colonel. We lost eighteen hundred men.’

  ‘But those losses taught us much about the enemy’s abilities. The generals have run the numbers, Costellin. They say we can prevail even against these increased odds. We can beat those horrors back into the ground where they came from.’

  Costellin sighed. ‘I pray you’re right,’ he said. ‘May the Emperor be with you.’

  ‘And with you,’ returned the colonel.

  Costellin turned to give the ‘good news’ to his team, opening a vox-channel so that those on the surface could hear it too. He focused on the fact that, with the necron army heading west, they had been given their hoped-for distraction after all. ‘We have a chance,’ he said, ‘to strike a resounding blow against–’

  He never got to finish speaking. Nightmarish figures loomed in the dim glow of the grenadiers’ lights, and Costellin whirled to find that they were behind him too, streaming from the walls of the cavern. Like ghosts, he thought, and immediately he knew what he was facing, remembering the descriptions of these half-formed creatures he had heard after their attack upon the 42nd regiment.

  They were even more gruesome, more horrifying, in the flesh – in the metal, rather – than the commissar could ever have imagined they would be. They descended upon the Death Korps grenadiers, their elongated spinal cords snapping around to deliver lethal electric stings, but when the grenadiers fired upon them in return, their las-beams passed through the necron ghosts’ semi-transparent forms.

  Costellin drew both his weapons, the plasma pistol to discourage the creatures from closing with him, the chainsword to combat them when, given their unique abilities, they inevitably did. He was comforted to feel the vibrations of the latter, trembling through the bones of his hand, and hear the buzz of its whirling blades like that of an enraged swarm of Catachan blood wasps.

  ‘Remember your briefing,’ he voxed to his team. ‘These things can become intangible at will. Wait until they attack and fire at them while they’re solid.’

  A ghost homed in on a Krieg watchmaster, long arms lashing out like whips towards his face. Its scalpelled fingers burrowed into his mask and gouged out thick streams of blood from his eyes, but the watchmaster’s squad followed Costellin’s orders and chose that moment to pepper it with hellgun beams. The necron flinched with each strike but recovered, until one good shot – and Costellin wished he could have told which one it was, could have worked out where this thing’s weak spots were, if indeed it had any – knocked it out of the air to land in a coiled heap, inert.

  Another ghost was flying at Costellin, and he greeted it with a bolt of super-heated plasma, which passed straight through it. Having anticipated this, he swung his chainsword at the moment it reached for him, and parted its metal skull from its shoulders. The next attack came from behind, and Costellin didn’t have time to swing his sword around to defend himself; he could only leap for cover as a ghost sailed over his head, bringing up his pistol as it wheeled around and made a second dive for him. A grenadier beat him to the punch, and his attacker was liquefied in a burst of melta fire, the periphery of which washed over Costellin and left his cheeks feeling sunburnt, the odour of his own singed eyebrows in his nostrils.

  It was no use. There were too many of these creatures, at least thirty of them, and their intangibility gave them a distinct advantage over the admittedly more numerous grenadiers. Not only that, but their fallen were rising again. Temporarily unmolested, Costellin fired from the sidelines in support of his men, but although his aim was more often true than not, at least two in three of his shots passed harmlessly through their targets, and the grenadiers were falling one by one, stunned by those spine-tails or butchered by metallic fingers.

  The voice of the remaining Krieg lieutenant hissed over Costellin’s comm-bead. Even he had accepted the hopelessness of the situation, and his suggestion was that they evacuate thirty m
ore men in the now-returned lifters, for the good of the overall mission. ‘You should go with them,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here, buy you as much time as I am able.’ He was right, and indeed Costellin had come to the same conclusion himself. Still, he hesitated for a second before he approved the lieutenant’s self-sacrificial gesture, because he was still human.

  Then, a new sound was added to the hubbub around him: a rustling sound, like a million leaves blown on a strong gale. Suddenly, from the tunnel openings around the cavern walls, erupted great hordes of flying metal insects, each one of them larger than one of Costellin’s hands.

  There was no time to lose now. The lieutenant ordered the closest grenadiers into the lifter cages, and Costellin backed into one too. His pistol was still flaring and, gratifyingly, its plasma bursts consumed whole areas of the swarm, but always the gaps were soon filled as more insects streamed inward from the tunnels. The grenadiers’ melta guns – the few they had between them – were having a similar effect, while their hellguns destroyed what they hit, but their focused beams could only take out two or three of their scores of targets at a time.

  Another man fell, borne down by six smaller bodies. Costellin thought he might have been suffocated by them, but as the victorious insects took flight once more, he saw that their victim was bleeding from a hundred shallow cuts.

  The necron ghosts, of course, could pass through the insect swarm with impunity to blindside the grenadiers. They were cutting down victim after victim, almost before any of them could react. Costellin’s lifter cage was now full, four grenadiers crowded onto the platform beside him, still shooting back into the melee, and he holstered his chainsword and smacked his palm into the glowing activation rune. A phalanx of the swarm came surging towards him, as if some gestalt mind had sensed his attempt to escape, and the gate of the cage was heaving and rattling, sliding too slowly shut. But it made it across and the latch slid home at the exact moment that the first of the insects slammed into it with sledgehammer force. They were clinging to the metal mesh, straining their claws in vain, too fat to squeeze their bodies through the gaps, but it wouldn’t be long before they tore that metal mesh apart. And in the meantime, of course, the necron ghosts were faced with no such obstacle.