by Paul Kearney
They found the side shaft, and Proxis left Brothers Antigonus and Kadare to cover the intersection, before continuing. The shaft here was narrower, but still wide enough for the vehicles, and it sloped downhill some fifteen degrees. The drivers in the loader cabs had their feet hovering over the brakes, and occasionally the wheels of the big vehicles locked and slid forward through the pale dust. The cursing, blinking militiamen jogged forward out of the way, while up ahead the Ultramarines walked on with a good deal less noise, despite their bulk.
They came to the end of the shaft and found themselves before a pair of tall doors, as well made as any blast door in Zalathras. The metal of these was dented and scored and they were surrounded by broken rubble. Before the doors, half a dozen of the ork maggot-folk known as gretchin were cowering. They held up their thin hands, weaponless and screeching in what might pass for Gothic.
Proxis did not waste ammunition. He and his brethren cut down the little creatures with their combat blades, breaking their skulls under their boots. Lascelle and his militia watched without a word.
Brother Valerian found the combination lock and punched in the code. The doors began to lift into the ceiling, showering the Space Marines with dust. Proxis turned to Lascelle.
‘You know what to look for?’
‘I’ve been briefed, yes.’
‘Then get to it.’ He peered into the storeroom beyond the doors, a vast silent darkness in which rows of crates and steel drums filed away in rows.
‘Brother-sergeant.’ It was Kadare up at the intersection.
‘Go ahead.’
‘We have noise coming from down in the main shaft. Nothing on auspex.’
‘We will join you in a moment, brother. Hold fast. Brother Valerian?’
‘As I said, we’re not alone down here,’ the Librarian told him.
‘Lascelle, get those vehicles up and loaded with all haste. We will meet you at the intersection. One load will do it, yes?’
‘These things can transport ten tons each,’ Lascelle told him. ‘I’ll take whatever is useful, besides what we came for.’
‘Do not be too long at it,’ Proxis said. ‘Come, brothers.’ He led the Ultramarines back up the steep slope of the shaft at a swift run. It was startling to see them move so fast, those shadowed giants.
Lascelle turned to his platoon. ‘Bring the loaders into the storeroom. You all know the sigils to look for. Kenning and Norblau, break out the winches.’ The engines of the loaders muttered and growled. The militia went to their work with a will. They did not wish to linger in that place; the shadows seemed ominous, and the cold killing of the miserable gretchin had chilled them all.
The Ultramarines reunited at the intersection. Antigonus and Kadare were facing into the mine.
‘We will be here an hour, by my reckoning,’ Proxis said. ‘Nothing?’
‘Listen, brother,’ Kadare said, gesturing into the darkness with his bolter muzzle.
They waited. After a few moments it came to them all, a far distant sound, like the rumbling gurgle of some great intestinal system. It echoed up the tunnel.
‘That is organic,’ Proxis said.
‘We should perhaps investigate it,’ Valerian told him. ‘I sense something I have not encountered before. I wish to know more.’
‘Dangerous thing, curiosity,’ Proxis grunted. ‘Very well, brother. You and I shall go, alone. Antigonus, you and the others hold this position. The mission remains key here – see to it that the vehicles get out to the ship, whatever happens.’
The Ancient and the Librarian stepped off into the darkness. The tunnel in which they walked was at least sixty-five feet high, a semicircular hole buttressed by pillars of plasteel and roughly worked stone. The dust of the floor had seen a lot of coming and going, and it muffled their footsteps. They advanced with the swift wariness of their kind.
Once, Proxis stopped and picked up a fist-sized fungus which looked as though it had been dropped there – there was a trail of them.
‘The beginnings of the infestation,’ he said, crushing it. And after a moment, ‘They eat them, too.’
‘I know, brother. I too have fought orks before.’
Another two hundred yards in, and the two Adeptus Astartes saw movement slithering across the floor and sliding up the walls. They stepped close, and saw strange life-forms, a snout and tiny black eyes attached to a slug-like body perhaps ten to twenty inches long. Many of them were sliding and wriggling through the dust. Proxis set his foot on one and settled his weight upon it until the thing exploded with a splash of green mucus and flaccid flesh.
‘More xenos filth,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The lowest rung of all ork ecology. Another foodstuff. I wonder if they have made some kind of supply depot out of this place.’
‘They have been up to something,’ Valerian told him. He had muted the blue light of his hood and helmed up. He maglocked his bolt pistol and took out his chainsword, but did not yet push the ignite button.
Further in they went. The vox was silent. They passed increasing numbers of the orkish creatures and had to kick them aside, rolling them in the dust like turds in flour. There was that long, gurgling rumble again, unmistakably the sound of organic life. It flooded up the tunnel, and along with it came the reek of excrement, not the familiar filth of the orks, but something more pungent.
‘There is something monstrous down here,’ Valerian said in a low voice. ‘A thing I have not encountered before.’
‘I see light,’ Proxis said. ‘How far in are we now?’
‘Eight hundred yards. The auspex is lit up like a torch. Somewhere up ahead there is a mass of the things.’
‘Easy does it, brother. Discretion is the watchword here.’ Valerian could hear the grin in Proxis’ voice.
The two Ultramarines crept forward. The tunnel kinked here, then split into three tall entrances. They went to ground at the sight of movement in the darkness ahead. The reek in the air would have been almost unendurable without auto-senses to alleviate it.
A sandbagged position, and in it half a dozen orks manning an autocannon, or something similar. They were alert and watchful.
‘They must have heard the gunfire earlier,’ Valerian said.
‘And yet they stayed at their post. They guard something important, then. What do your senses tell you, brother?’
Valerian reached out with his mind, gliding past the ork sentries, flitting down into the back tunnels behind them. It touched on others – some barely sentient, others a teeming gabble of primitive intellects, the lowest orders of the ork genus. They were present here in their hundreds – thousands, even. And finally it came up against a sudden wall of inchoate brute rage and physicality which staggered him.
‘We must get out of here,’ he said urgently to Proxis.
‘What is it? What have you discovered?’
A flash of fury blinking across his mind, closer to.
‘No time, brother. They know we are here. We must go – now!’
He straightened and was turning back up the tunnel when the orks at the autocannon set up a sudden roar and the weapon exploded into life. The muttering silence was slashed apart by the heavy rounds that arced towards them in bright lances of light. Valerian was shoved to his back by Proxis as they swept over the two Ultramarines and went shrieking up the tunnel.
But not all of them went high.
Proxis cursed, a profanity of Calth, where he had been born. An autocannon round had smashed the Ancient full in the chest, punching through his armour and knocking him backwards. Still swearing, he got to his knees, snapped off a few shots from his bolter pistol, and then levered himself to his feet again with the haft of his power axe.
‘I believe you were right, brother,’ he said. Over the helm vox his voice sounded as though his mouth were full of blood. ‘I may need some help here.’
Then Proxis toppled into the dust with a low groan.
Brother Valerian felt his head swim with anger. Orks were pouring up the three tunnels towards them now. He could not see them, but he could hear their bestial cries and sense the infant simplicity of their feral minds. Those at the autocannon were swinging the weapon to bear.
‘Throne take you,’ the Librarian muttered. He reached out his hand and the hood above his helm flared bright blue.
‘Now, burn,’ he hissed, and he called upon the latent energy that was bubbling up bright and hot as a reactor’s core in his mind.
A blistering white light sprang out of his fingers, veined like storm-bred lightning. It arced out of him and soared across the tunnel, grounding in the autocannon emplacement.
The orks there raised their fists to their eyes and shrieked. They burned from the feet up, the white fire consuming them, popping off autocannon rounds, careering off the tunnel walls and darting in blinding tendrils down the three other entrances. The packed earth of the tunnels quaked and broke and tumbled down in clods and boulders where it was not supported by the plasteel buttresses, half blocking the entrances. The earth smoked as the lightning ran through it, a thing almost with a life of its own, a mad, unshackled energy that ricocheted and sprang from wall to wall.
Valerian sagged, and staggered. He grabbed Proxis’ arm.
‘Come, brother. Things here are becoming far too interesting.’
The Ancient was hauled to his feet again. Valerian could see the naked torn flesh of Proxis’ chest through the splintered ceramite of the artificer armour – the power cables that ran into the aquila plate on his torso were severed and sparking with energy.
‘Turn down your power-pack, Proxis, or you’ll fry us both.’
The Ancient grunted, a bitten-down world of agony in the sound. The dangerous flashing rune in Valerian’s squad display steadied into mortal red.
‘Do not die on me, brother,’ he said as he hauled the Ancient up the tunnel. ‘Lord Calgar would never forgive you.’
Hester raised her face from the augur readouts, alarm written all over it. ‘Morcault, we have enemy craft inbound, heading straight for us and burning everything they have. They’ll be in our laps in ten minutes.’
Morcault swore. He thumbed the shipboard vox. ‘Jon, power up the engines for an emergency take-off. I don’t give a damn for your red lines. Push it with everything.’
The engineer acknowledged with a click of the vox.
‘Something else – I’m reading an energy spike underground, about a mile north-west. It just came and went,’ Hester said. She started flipping switches. ‘Get them out, Morcault.’
‘We don’t have time.’ The old voidsman stabbed his finger into the console. ‘Ground party, do you read?’
A crackle, and then Roman Lascelle’s voice came back to them. ‘Let me guess. Bad news.’
‘Time to go. In ten minutes we’ll have company – a lot of it. Get everyone out.’
‘We’re almost done, Morcault, but it’ll take more than that to get these vehicles back up the tunnel.’
A new voice – one of the Ultramarines. ‘The mission must be accomplished. Start the vehicles back up to the surface. We will cover the rear. There is fighting in the tunnel below us, and our brethren are involved.’
Morcault swore. ‘No time for heroics. Where is Proxis?’
‘Unknown. He is off vox. Leave him to us. Get the palladium out – that is the priority.’
Hester was shaking her head. ‘Fighter-bombers and transports. They’re really moving.’
Morcault rubbed his forehead. ‘They caught us cold. Take off – now. Get us in the air, Hester.’
‘But–’
‘Trust me, and do as I say. Gortyn, I want all the power you have. Jodi, light up the void shields they gave us, and pray the damn things work.’
The Mayfly’s boarding ramp came up with a crash, but even before the hatch doors were sealed the little freighter was off the ground, the retros hammering the quarry mud into a fat cloud. The ship shuddered and lurched in the air as it soared skywards atop a plume of flame.
‘Fifteen thousand feet. Eighteen thousand,’ Jodi Arnhal intoned. ‘We have an atmospheric breach in the hold.’
‘Ignore it. We’re not in vacuum,’ Morcault told the Navigator. ‘Haul back on those throttles, Hester. Give them a nice big signature to follow.’
Gortyn came over the vox from the drive compartment. ‘We’re losing her, Ghent – you have to ease back on power.’
‘Spit on it, for Throne’s sake. Flood the coolant, Jon – just keep her burning.’
‘They’ve changed course – the fighters will be on our tail in about a minute and a half,’ Jodi said, his voice shrill with fear.
‘You’re going to get us all killed, old man,’ Hester growled, one hand juggling the yoke, the other white-knuckled on the throttles.
‘Not for the first time – make for the storm to the north,’ Morcault told the pilot, staring into his chair readouts. The cogitator was plastering the slate with numbers almost too fast to follow, and red lights were flashing all over the bridge.
‘Lascelle, do you read?’
He heard the engine noise of the loaders in the background as the aristocratic young officer replied from the ground below.
‘We’re on the move – don’t know where in hell the Ultramarines are – still down the tunnel. We have a full load, Morcault. What’s your status?’
‘We’re drawing off the fighters, but there are at least two transports still inbound to your location. They’re slower – you have about seven minutes. You have to hold on against whatever lands out of them. We’ll try and get back to you.’
He heard the shock in Lascelle’s voice. ‘You’d better.’
Morcault leaned back. The G-forces were working on his old frame, pressing him back into the fabric of his chair, making his heartbeat thunder in his ears. Don’t go fainting on me now, he scourged himself.
The Mayfly roared off to the north like an arrow with its flights aflame. Arcing out of the west and south in pursuit came a dozen ork fighters, the swiftest of their kind. Light craft, they were buffeted by the thunderheads they were barrelling through, jumping up and down in the turbulence like spiders on the end of a windblown web.
Ahead of them, the storm in the north reared up like a wall, black anvils of cloud rising up to thirty thousand feet with lightning flashing at their base. The Mayfly was hurtling towards it with every ounce of power the drives could muster, but the ork craft were faster; they were gaining.
‘Missiles launched on our stern,’ Jodi said, wide-eyed.
‘Countermeasures,’ Morcault told him, labouring to breathe. ‘Hester, get us into that storm front.’
‘It’s as liable to break us apart as it is the orks,’ she told him.
‘The Mayfly can take it. She’ll not give up on us now. But those fighters–’
‘Throne, a missile – it’s going to hit–’ Jodi’s voice rose to a shout.
And then the explosion struck the freighter full on the starboard side.
Valerian sowed the tunnel behind them with grenades, set for proximity. He clicked them out of his belt and tossed them in his wake as he hauled Proxis up the tunnel. Fifty more yards, and he felt a bright wash of relief at the sight of his own brethren coming down towards him.
‘Get down, brother,’ Kadare said, and Valerian let himself and Proxis fall to the floor as the heavy bolter opened up, a bright flare of death pouring down the way they had come, streaming over their heads and producing a chorus of snarls and screams. One, then another, of the grenades went off.
The battle-brethren took a moment, and sent a torrent of fire down the tunnel, aiming by instinct as much as by the targeting cogitators in their helms. Then Proxis was seized up, and the six Ultramarines backed up the tun
nel, firing as they went.
‘How bad?’ Brother Antigonus asked Valerian.
‘Autocannon. The wound has sealed, but there is extensive internal injury. He needs an Apothecary.’
‘Enemy?’
‘Unknown. But there are quite a few of them down there.’
‘More above, from what I hear. The vehicles are on the surface, but the Mayfly is gone. Ork transports five minutes away.’
‘The odds seemed to have turned against us, brothers,’ Kadare said. He patted the heavy bolter he bore. ‘But we shall not go down without something to say about it.’
They made as best time as they could up the tunnel, and it was not long before there was a grey light ahead, and they came out into the endless rain to find the two loaders parked before the entrance, piled high with crates, and Lascelle’s militia platoon arrayed around them in a defensive perimeter. Lascelle was white-faced, tense, but in perfect control of himself, though many of his men were plainly terrified.
‘We make a stand here, and await Morcault’s return,’ Brother Valerian told them. ‘The orks are on their way. Our task is very simple – survive as long as possible and preserve the supplies on the vehicles. Take your positions, brothers. Lieutenant, see to your men.’
There was nothing more to say. When the ork transports appeared in the sky to the south-west, burning bright against the clouds, the defenders merely stared. Brother Kadare looked up at the pot-bellied craft with their ugly lines and garish paintwork, and laughed.
‘Plenty to go around.’
The transports touched down three hundred yards away, blasting up a choking wall of muck and rain. Their ramps crashed down, and out of their bellies poured a tide of orks. These were the big, well-armed killers of their race, dark green, howling, taller than the Ultramarines themselves. Perhaps a hundred leapt to the ground in the first wave and came charging towards the Adeptus Astartes and militia like a raging green avalanche.
