by Paul Kearney
Drake stood very still, as if he knew that also. Finally he clasped one armoured fist in the palm of the other, and looked up at the Lord of Macragge.
‘That was good of you,’ he said. ‘To send the message without an attempt at decryption.’
‘It was necessary.’
‘You will be glad to know, my lord, that this is not information I mean to keep to myself. The tech-savants on Talasa Prime have made contact. They have sent me a positive ident on the registration runes of the helm Brother Starn found.’
‘The Inquisition works swiftly. I congratulate you, Drake.’ Calgar waited.
Lazarus Drake patted the Locke boltgun he wore at his waist. ‘The helm is Adeptus Astartes – but we knew that. About three thousand years old or more. A Chapter once known as the Viridian Consuls.’
Calgar’s mind ranged instantly through a whole mass of lore and history which he had read and heard over the years. Within half a second, he had recalled the necessary information.
‘Throne,’ he said, the word a curse. ‘The Abyssal Crusade.’
‘Even so,’ Drake said. ‘I congratulate you on your knowledge of Imperium history.’
‘So this is where they ended up? Ah, my poor brothers.’ Grief tinged Calgar’s voice. The Abyssal Crusade was a dark episode for his Adeptus in the history of the later Imperium – one that had led to the almost complete destruction of thirty Space Marine Chapters, sent into the Eye of Terror on the word of a False Saint.
‘I had not thought to find anything quite like this here,’ Drake said in a thoughtful voice. ‘But it makes our mission all the more vital.’ He lowered his voice.
‘This hulk has come from the Eye of Terror.’
It was most likely true. And it strengthened the inquisitor’s case for immediate destruction of the structure. Calgar re-weighed the possibilities, and went over his strategy once more.
As of yet, no real threat had been detected on board. Not so much as a stone had been thrown at the Ultramarines and their allies.
He could not simply turn them around and evacuate – it would be an act of pure cowardice.
No – the hulk must still be explored – it no doubt held some dark filth within it, but the Adeptus Astartes did not retreat without good reason. Until the hulk gave him one, Calgar intended to continue with the mission as it stood.
But he had forgotten something – he was sure of it. Something had been overlooked. The feeling was maddening to him – his mind was able to range in a dozen directions at once, devoting stringent analysis to all of them – but he had left something out, and it was something to do with the Abyssal Crusade.
‘Chapter Master,’ Magos Fane voxed him. ‘Can you join us up the side tunnel? I think there is something here you should see.’
‘I will be with you presently, magos,’ Calgar answered. He blinked up the Command Vox. ‘Tigurius, do you read?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Remote search the Librarium for information on the Abyssal Crusade, anything you deem worthy of interest – and also on – on –’
He remembered. Suddenly he realised what it was he had forgotten.
Insanista in tenebris. It was part of a sermon, once promulgated across the Imperium. Notorious in its day, it had never quite been forgotten, even though three millennia had passed since it had been written.
‘And send me anything you have on Saint Basillius.’
‘The heretic?’
‘Yes. His life, writings and especially the sermon he wrote which condemned the Thirty Chapters.’
‘The information you request is probably extant within the Noctis Sanctorum, the sealed chamber of Ptolemy’s Librarium, Chapter Master – but should such unholy texts be transmitted to you when you are in the company of the Ordo Hereticus?’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Calgar snapped with unwonted asperity. ‘Just do it, brother.’
‘As you wish, my lord. Tigurius out.’
Drake was watching him, though he had not heard the exchange. Calgar did not need the inquisitor’s shrewd flippancy right now. He strode off without a word to join Magos Fane and see what the Adeptus Mechanicus had found.
Nine
The rubbish-strewn passageway was some two hundred yards long, with half-blocked openings in its sides that had been cleared by Magos Fane’s servitors. At its terminus was a tall, gothic arch, beautifully forged out of plasteel sections, but pocked with what might have been old bullet holes. Calgar ran his gaze over them as he passed through it, and saw the familiar shape made by the explosive impacts of boltgun rounds. One long slew of them drew his attention particularly; it had obviously been fired at a high rate on full automatic. The work of a heavy bolter. Other agencies of the Imperium used such weapons, but all the same, it was more than likely that the Adeptus Astartes had fought in this corridor, long ago.
A large, domed chamber met him as he passed under the arch. The servitors had set up portable lumens all over it, and they illuminated banks of cogitators, data terminals, vid-screens, most ruined and broken, but some now winking and gleaming with operative lights. Magos Fane met Calgar by a bank of terminals that seemed to be in something approaching working order. The magos had tucked aside his robe to let the mechadendrite limbs that festooned him operate freely; he seemed like some metallic undersea octopoid with red lights for eyes. But as Calgar approached he folded his limbs decorously and twitched his scarlet robe back into place about his inhuman form.
‘Take a look, my lord,’ the magos said, and gestured to one shimmering screen in particular.
It was a rolling blueprint, intensely complicated, shapes overwriting other shapes, lines overlaid and reworked, becoming ever more complex until the schematic was a tangled mass. An ordinary man might have studied it for hours before finding any sense in it, but Calgar recognised what it was in seconds.
‘This is a revised design. It is a map of the hulk’s upper levels, as they are today – or very recent in any case.’ He straightened, the light from the screen scrolling across reflecting facets of his armour.
‘The hulk is not simply a thing of chance. It has been worked and reconstructed, to a great extent.’
‘Even so,’ Magos Fane said. ‘New access tunnels have been dug, power conduits re-routed, whole shipwrecks incorporated into the overall pattern. The scale of the labour involved is immense. It must have taken many centuries.’
‘That they had, whoever they are,’ Calgar murmured, still looking at the scrolling blueprint. ‘They had time, and materiel – and obviously, they had a labour force to do the heavy work. But where is it? Who did this?’
‘I would hazard that the deeper compartments of the hulk are even more extensively reconfigured,’ the magos went on. His voice lowered, but he could not conceal the excitement that filled it. ‘My lord, in the logi-stack of this terminal there is a tech-ritual for the architecture of mass construction – one which I have never encountered before. We are inloading it now. It is ancient beyond my reckoning – and it should prove invaluable, an empirical rethink of the way we approach large manufacturing projects. And this is only the beginning!’
‘The beginning, but not the end,’ Calgar muttered. He looked around the chamber. Something about the place made his skin crawl, though there was nothing threatening or special about it; a room filled with old tech and metal dust and wreckage.
And something else. He bent, and picked up a shining object. It was a shell-casing from a bolter round, the brass green with age.
‘Pack up, and rejoin the column as soon as the cogitator program is secure,’ he told Magos Fane sharply. ‘And copy this schematic. It will speed our penetration of the hulk. You have fifteen minutes.’
The magos raised one clawed hand as if to remonstrate, then dropped it again. There was no arguing with Calgar’s tone. A burst of binharic issued from Fane’s mouth-grille
, and was acknowledged by clicks and nods from the other Mechanicus personnel who were still rooting round the chamber.
The column moved on. The tunnel they were following now branched out until it became part of a vast maze of passageways, some original to the ships that made up the hulk, others of later construction. Huge pistons from the drive compartments of lost vessels supported the roof, like vast glinting pillars, and they passed over roughly welded bridges, crossing chasms in which there was the howl of wind passing far below, currents moving in the depths of the hulk and the foul miasma of whatever was at the bottom of them drifted up with the hot air. It was as though the heart of Fury were a stinking swamp and they were travelling deeper into it with every step.
At last they came to a vast open space which bloomed out in the darkness and soared up far above them. Here, the Adeptus Mechanicus lit up tripod-based stablights to aid them as they examined the debris piled up all around, and their ranks broke as they skittered off in all directions. Captain Galenus set up Fifth for all-round defence, a perimeter a hundred yards across, and sent out reconnaissance teams to explore the far side of the chamber.
The stablights reflected off the roof, and they saw that it was composed of one whole side of a star-going ship’s hull, half a mile across, pitted and broken, but still with the Imperial aquila emblazoned across it in dull rust-streaked paint, fifty yards high.
Underfoot, the metallic plates which had constituted the floor were now interspersed with black gaps that went down into unguessed depths, black as the void between stars. Through these gaps a foul stench issued, and here and there it thickened into steaming gouts of fog of all colours.
Captain Galenus called Calgar over to one crevice, and drew his Chapter Master’s attention to the metal that bordered it. It was ceramite – ship-armour – and it had bubbled and bled like melted wax, pustules of near-transparent alloy clustering upon it like risen blisters. And yet there was no sensation of heat apart from the thickening humidity in the atmosphere.
Gravity was near Terran standard now, and radiation levels had steadied. The air, though foul, was close to breathable – for Space Marines at any rate.
‘Auspex is working normally again, my lord,’ Galenus told Calgar. ‘That damned dust seems to have been left behind.’
‘Kill the lights,’ Calgar told him. ‘Sweep with infrared. You have the blueprints, Galenus. There should be three exits from this chamber, all on the far side. As soon as they are located I want them secured, Devastators posted at each. How is the vox?’
‘Workable, but not optimal, Chapter Master.’
‘Very well. Set up another relay in the middle of the chamber and booby-trap it like the rest. I have a feeling this is some kind of assembly area.’
‘It’s certainly big enough,’ Galenus ventured.
‘Do not let the squads become too scattered,’ Calgar told him. He would have said more, but bit back the words. Galenus was a capable officer and did not need his superior telling him how to dispose his company.
‘Brother Ulfius has become aware of life movements in the passages beyond this chamber,’ Galenus went on. ‘Psychic signatures.’
‘Can he be more specific?’
‘Definitely non-xenos – that is all he can make out.’
‘Many evils in this universe are non-xenos,’ Calgar said. ‘Mankind has become the progenitor of its own enemies over the millennia, including those who are our bitterest foes.’
‘Chaos walks here,’ Galenus said.
‘I fear so, captain.’
‘I wish it would show itself. This endless marching in the dark–’ Calgar could sense the smile in Galenus’ voice. ‘It becomes tedious after a time.’
‘Brother, you have no disagreement from me on that score.’
Magos Fane leaned in close to one of his tech-priests.
The tech-priest still had one vaguely human eye with an eyelid that blinked behind a thick lens full of salve.
Calgar was conferring with Drake and Galenus. He called up the blueprint of the upper levels in his mind’s eye and ran through it.
‘We should take the middle exit,’ he said. ‘It runs down to a further complex of passageways which lead deeper into the core. Most of the rerouted and repaired conduits go that way.’
‘Like following the veins,’ Galenus said.
‘And thence to the heart of the thing,’ Inquisitor Drake added. ‘I would be grateful, Chapter Master, if you would perhaps enlighten me as to your larger strategic plan. My men are the hardiest of their kind, but they are not Adeptus Astartes, and they cannot march forever.’
Calgar turned the beak of the Corvus helm he wore towards the inquisitor.
‘I wish to gain control of the systems which are still powered up aboard the hulk. Life support, gravitics, the Geller field generator, and the drives, if they are in any way operational. Until we control them, we are at the mercy of whatever intelligence is aboard this thing. Once they are ours, I shall begin the exploration in earnest.’
‘A sound strategy,’ Drake said. ‘Let us hope it is tenable. For now, we are like fleas creeping through the fur of a canid. Any moment now, we will irritate it enough to warrant some scratching.’
‘Which is why we must keep moving,’ Calgar said simply. ‘The more quickly we can reach the control areas of this structure, the less risk we will have to face. In the long run.’
‘I thought the Ultramarines cared not what they risked, in the Emperor’s service,’ Drake said, his voice almost a sneer.
Calgar looked down on the diminutive inquisitor. One fist clenched slowly in the power gauntlet that enfolded it.
‘He who chooses to ignore all risk is a fool,’ he said shortly. ‘Even you should know that, inquisitor.’
The expedition took the central exit from the great chamber. As they were leaving, one of the grav-sleds slowed down and lagged behind. Magos Fane promised the Ultramarines that it would be repaired within minutes; a few incantations and a quick blessing would revive the flagging machine-spirit. Calgar was ahead with Brother Starn’s veterans, so Captain Galenus let it go at that, chafing at the slowness of the Adeptus Mechanicus personnel.
Had the expedition consisted of Space Marines alone, they would have made twice the distance they had, and the Chapter Master had impressed them all with the need for speed in their penetration of the core of the hulk. So the Mechanicus party was left to bring up the rear and told to catch up as soon as they could.
As the last of the column disappeared into the chamber exit, Alt-seven straightened from his work on the grav-sled’s propulsion system and nodded to those who surrounded him. A pair of enginseers and a quartet of hypaspists.
There followed a further burst of machine-speak. The Adeptus Mechanicus personnel followed him without a word as he tapped on the grav remote, and then followed him back the way they had come, across the huge echoing chamber with its steaming vents and broken flooring, to the tunnel mouth that had brought them down here.
Ten
Brother Malthus was so perfectly still that he had become invisible. He could feel it settle down upon him, that sense of blending in with his surroundings. Even though he wore a light vacuum helm, he controlled his breathing until it was inaudible, slowed the beating of his two hearts, and let his eyes work for him.
He lay beside Brother Huthor, his spotter, and the two Ultramarines were under the overhang of a broken tangle of wreckage which threw them into deep shadow every time the light came round on Fury’s slowly turning surface. A cameleoline tarp covered them both, and they were nothing more than a grey hummock of dust upon which more dust settled as they lay.
They were perhaps three hundred yards out from Seventh’s perimeter, watching over an open avenue in the massed, contorted heaps of debris that piled up in jagged bluffs around them. The two o’clock position – millennia after the invention of digital timepieces, the ancient description still stood.
They had orders to monitor an arc of some thirty-five degrees. Other brethren from Tenth were off to their left and right, keeping an eye on other open approach routes to the Ultramarines position, and the cleared landing pads in its midst which were the expeditionary force’s lifeline back to the Rex Aeterna and the rest of the battlegroup.
Malthus lowered his head fractionally until he was looking down the sight of the M40/A1. The long-barrelled rifle was covered in strips of fabric so that it looked like just another piece of broken wreckage, and the end of the flash-suppressed muzzle was still in the overhang’s shadow.
Beside him, Brother Huthor had the spotting scope set up on a broken girder, overlooking their arc.
They had been lying like this for some sixteen hours.
