[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand

by Sandy Mitchell

  'The heretics,' I said. 'They must be trying to raise the crawler.' Which at least meant they hadn't got a call off before Paola toasted them. But since they were too busy being dead to reply, it wouldn't take their friends long to realise something had gone seriously ploin-shaped. Sulla looked at me, an expression of eager expectation on her face, and I nodded slowly. 'We've run out of time.'

  'Move in,' she ordered, and the Chimera jerked violently as the driver floored the accelerator. I grabbed the chart table for support and enlarged the scale again to the point where we, the other Chimera, and the trio of sentinels appeared as separate runes. She started to hoist herself up into the cupola, then hesitated.

  'Commissar. Would you care to…'

  'Ladies first,' I said. 'And I wouldn't want to inhibit your ability to command in any way.' Not to mention stick my head out from inside a nice solid box of armour plate while we engaged Emperor knew how many heavily-armed heretics.

  'Thank you.' She shot me a grin and scrambled up into the top hatch. I glanced at the tactical display again. The walkers were pulling ahead, splitting to flank the heretics' position and transmitting what data they could back to our command transport. Grainy images began to form on three pictscreens above our heads, snow and static mingling to render them almost incomprehensible.

  'I'm picking up heat sources,' Shambas reported after a moment. 'Could be humans.' Or something like them, I found myself thinking. Not all followers of Chaos qualified any more, if they ever had to begin with. 'No sign of habitation though.'

  'I'm guessing it's that.' Jek's pictcaster twisted to settle on a large snowdrift, far too regular to be a natural formation.

  One of the Valhallans next to me snickered and hefted her lasgun. 'Shoot the camo party,' she said. I could understand her amusement. If even I thought the mound looked suspicious, to the natives of an ice-world the heretics might just as well have painted it orange and put up a neon sign saying 'We're over here!'.

  'I'm sure somebody will,' I assured her, getting a wide grin in return.

  'Could just be,' Shambas responded to his subordinate. 'Paola, find anything?'

  'They've been busy.' She was over on the other flank, with Jek between her and the captain, which explained why he'd seen the mound first. 'Don't ask me why, but there's a cleared space here the size of a shuttlepad.' Her pictcaster showed me she hadn't been exaggerating - someone had gone to a lot of trouble to clear a large area of rock and level it off. Of course it was knee deep in drifting snow by now, which on a sentinel is roughly up to the chest, but even so it had obviously been prepared with great care. Determining why it had been done, though, would have to wait until we'd taken the place.

  We struck with a gratifying amount of surprise, the two laser-armed sentinels striking the dome from the flanks while both Chimeras opened up with their heavy bolters. As the covering of snow boiled away, flashing instantly to steam from the laser hits, I could see the unmistakable outline of a prefabricated hab dome identical to Emperor alone knows how many others scattered across civilised space.[42]Jagged rents were appearing in the rockcrete surface as our bolter shells gouged and chipped away at it.

  'Found the main entrance,' Paola voxed, the image from her pictcaster showing a swarm of thickly-bundled figures boiling from it like ants from a kicked-over nest. A bright orange flare of burning promethium gouted from somewhere below the imager, sending them scattering and plugging the gap. I found myself hoping that there was nothing too inflammable beyond it, like another ammo dump. That would be all we needed, another pile of smouldering wreckage in lieu of answers.

  'It won't be the only one,' I cautioned, having seen enough of the structures facing us to be familiar with its layout. There would be four in all, equidistantly spaced around the circumference, access to the cargo area opposite the main personnel door Paola had just blocked and two auxiliary ones between them. All, I knew, would be heavily defended; a guess which was confirmed a moment later as our Chimera slewed to a halt, small-arms rounds pattering from the armour plate of its sides. Our turret-mounted bolter traversed to return the favour and the familiar dull roar echoed through the interior of the transport.

  'We have to get inside,' Sulla voxed. 'Second squad, disembark and prepare to assault the side entrance.' She was right, unfortunately, the success of our mission depended on penetrating the building and recovering what intelligence we could, but the price was going to be high. Lustig's troopers were going to take some heavy casualties getting past the guards on the door. Worse still, I'd have to go in with them or lose the good opinion of the lord general. I debated internally for a moment whether to join them now and hope I could hang back enough to keep out of the way of the worst of it, or try to make some work for myself in the command Chimera until they'd cleared the way and risk giving the heretics a chance to regroup while I floundered through the snow once the noise had stopped.

  Then my nose caught the familiar scent of Jurgen, approaching to retrieve his tanna flask, and a third alternative occurred to me. He was carrying a melta, as was his custom whenever we were expecting to run into trouble (which seemed to be most of the time these days).

  I cut into the command circuit. 'Wait a moment,' I said. 'I've had an idea.' After a brief exchange of words with Sulla and the sentinel pilots, I steeled myself as best I could and piled out into the bitter cold, pausing barely long enough to adjust my snow goggles. (I'd been caught in the open without them once before, on Simia Orichalcae, and I wasn't about to make that mistake again.)

  The shock of it punched the air from my lungs and left every exposed part of my face stinging like the aftershock of a neural whip, but I kept going by sheer force of will, slogging through the knee-deep snow as if my life depended on it (which of course it did). Jurgen waded after me, sure-footed as only an iceworlder could be in these conditions, and I found his presence as reassuring as always. I glanced around, seeing the looming bulk of second squad's Chimera a few metres away, which felt like kilometres to traverse, and plodded doggedly towards it. So focussed had I become on reaching my goal that I had almost forgotten the presence of the heretic defenders, until a gout of snow flashed into steam a few centimetres ahead of my foot.

  I whirled, drawing my laspistol and seeking a target, grateful for once for the black uniform of my office, which would be nicely blurred in the all-pervading darkness. A flicker of motion caught my eye as a heavily-muffled heretic raised a lasgun and I shot him or her through the chest. The heretic fell back, wounded or dead, I couldn't tell and didn't care, and a moment later I gained the lee of the Chimera and the welcome cessation of that pestilential wind.

  'We're ready when you are, commissar,' Lustig said, his voice attenuated by the perpetual howling of the gale and the crackle of small-arms fire which told me the sentinels were doing a bang-up job of keeping the defenders busy. I'd got them circling the dome, moving fast so they'd be difficult to hit, and laying down fire as they went. Chances were they wouldn't hit much (except possibly Paola), but that wasn't the point; they'd keep the heretics' heads down nicely, well dug in by the doors, sure they could keep us out indefinitely, which they probably could, under most circumstances. Unfortunately for them we didn't need a door to get inside.

  'Whenever you're ready, Jurgen,' I said, after a short dash (for the Valhallans anyway, my progress was a bit slower and a lot less elegant) had brought us level with the gently curving wall.

  'Commissar.' He levelled the melta and triggered it, while the rest of us flinched back and protected our eyes from the actinic flash of activation as best we could. The rockcrete burst into vapour, leaving a rapidly-cooling hole just wide enough for a trooper to get through.

  'Pyk, Friza.' Lustig directed a couple of troopers through, and they took up position inside covering the corridor in each direction. Nobody shot them so I was next into the building, grateful for the sudden warmth despite the agonising cramps of returning circulation as my sluggish blood rushed back to my extremities. I began to take
in our surroundings.

  I wasn't sure what I was expecting to find inside, but this certainly wasn't it.

  Soft carpets covered the floor, growing soggy from the snow flurrying in through the gap, and the walls were covered with murals depicting acts of sensuous depravity which left my mouth momentarily hanging open in stunned surprise. Most of the troopers seemed hypnotised by them, with the single exception of Jurgen; which, given his fondness for porno slates, was quite an astonishing feat of self-control.

  'I don't believe that's possible,' Penlan said, with a trace of envy.

  'It's not,' I assured her, 'and even if it was it would be against regulations.' A thick, cloying scent was in the air, wrapping itself around my senses like the flimsiest of gossamer scarves, and a nagging sense of familiarity began trying to surface at the back of my mind. As my aide raised the melta and took up his accustomed place at my side, I found my head beginning to clear, although whether this was due to him masking the narcotic musk with his own earthier bouquet or his innate gifts blocking some insidious miasma of warpcraft I couldn't be sure.

  In either case the priority now was to get the squad moving, and Jurgen was the key.

  'Stay close,' I ordered, getting everyone organised around us, so that however Jurgen was doing it we all got the benefit. As a bonus, that put a fireteam on either side of me, so I wouldn't be the first in the firing line whether the heretics hit us from the front or behind. I got them moving fast enough after that, albeit with a few furtive glances back at the pictures as we left, and to my relief they began to focus on the mission again. 'And stay sharp. We could be facing warpcraft in a place like this, so be ready for anything.' As I'd expected, the prospect of facing sorcery had them so keyed up that I don't think they'd have been distracted by the living embodiment of the murals other than to chuck a frag grenade into the room. 'This reminds me of something,' Jurgen remarked as we advanced cautiously along a corridor decked with soft, colourful wall hangings. 'There's an odd smell in the air I think I recognise.' As always the irony of his words was lost on him.

  'Can't quite place it, though.'

  'Slawkenberg,' I said, with a sudden rush of realisation. The scent in the air was like the perfume Emeli the Slaaneshi sorceress had worn the night she tried to feed my soul to the monstrosity she worshipped, and a cold chill of dread squeezed my heart. Even after more than a decade (or now, after more than a century, if I'm honest) I still woke from my slumbers occasionally with images of that baleful seductress trying to lure me to my doom resonating in my head, as if the tendrils of Chaos were still reaching out to try to draw me in. I hadn't had that dream in months, though, and an irrational flash of petty resentment at the prospect of further nightmares rippled through my mind.

  'Clear.' Penlan ducked back into the corridor after investigating a room full of cushions and pillows which had no discernable function that I could see,[43]and motioned us onwards. I'd been heading directly for the centre of the dome, on the assumption that whatever was going on here would be well protected, and the lack of resistance so far had me on edge. Of course that could just mean that our diversion was working far better than I'd expected it to, but in my experience battle plans seldom survived contact with the enemy.

  'That's it. Nothing.' Penlan waved us forward into an empty storage area, bare save for a single luminator and the stained glass mobile beneath it which shifted with the air currents sending ripples of rainbow light around the room. It had clearly been used quite recently, though, as it was free of dust.

  'Damn.' I hovered by the doorway, mildly irked to find my deduction proven hollow, and nagged by a vague sense of something being wrong about the shape of the room.

  It was probably this moment of indecision which triggered what happened next, as I was in Penlan's way as she stepped back, still keeping the space covered like the good soldier she was. Lost in thought and trying to decide which new direction to try, I failed to move out of her way fast enough, nudging her elbow. Her finger tightened reflexively on the trigger of her lasgun, sending a hail of las bolts flying across the room and the rest of the squad diving for what cover they could.

  'Sorry.' Her face flamed scarlet, bringing out the old flash burn scar she'd acquired on Gravalax, while her subordinates scrambled to their feet, grinning at the sight of her living up to her nickname.

  'No need,' I said, seeing the need to restore her authority without delay. 'It was my fault entirely.'

  From somewhere up the corridor I could hear the sound of running feet as someone came to investigate the noise. Great. So much for sneaking around and getting what we'd come for without anyone noticing. 'Everyone inside!'

  I spoke not a moment too soon, as las bolts and stubber rounds began to pepper the rockcrete around the doorway and the troopers deployed to meet the new threat. A knot of armed cultists either extravagantly dressed or hardly dressed at all spilled out of the side corridors, getting in each other's way to a most satisfying extent and providing us with a target-rich environment of which my companions immediately took full advantage.

  'Overlapping fire lanes. Keep their heads down and we can hold out here indefinitely,' Lustig said.

  'That's a comfort,' I told him. 'But I don't think we're going to have to.'

  Judging by the voices in my comm-bead, fourth and fifth squads, along with their escorting sentinels, had finally arrived to join the party outside. With the cultists drawn away from the doors to meet the unexpected threat within, Grifen and her troopers were already sweeping aside the sporadic resistance left around the main cargo bay and pouring into the dome.

  I motioned to Jurgen. 'If you wouldn't mind clearing the corridor?'

  'With pleasure, commissar.' My aide grinned at me as he levelled the melta. 'I'm afraid I forgot the marshmallows again, but heretics toast better anyway.' He squeezed the trigger and a gout of thermal energy ravened its way down the narrow passage, vaporising everything in its path in a most satisfying manner. The few surviving heretics shrieked and ran, and a moment later a crackle of lasguns told me they'd stumbled into fourth squad.

  'Try to take a couple alive,' I reminded everyone again, and was reassured a moment later by Magot's cheery tone.

  'Don't worry, sir. Got one here in one piece. She's leaking a bit, but she'll survive.'

  'Good,' I said, feeling that things were finally beginning to go our way. Lustig and the troopers were already following up the opening Jurgen had made, running up the gently steaming passageway heedless of the damage the occasional greasy patch of heretic residue was doing to their boots, eager to fall on the defenders at the main door from behind. I was happy to leave them to it; I had no intention of putting myself in the way of any stray rounds at this stage of the game if I could help it.

  I was just turning away to follow a little more sedately when I noticed something odd about the wall where Penlan's las bolts had hit. They'd penetrated it completely, whereas the las-bolts the heretics had been shooting at us had been stopped completely by the outer wall of the room. Suddenly the nagging sense of wrongness I'd felt about the shape of the space made sense to me; there was a false partition here, designed to conceal something.

  Dismissing my first impulse to let Jurgen solve the problem with his melta, in case it took any crucial evidence directly to the Emperor along with the wall, I cast about carefully for some kind of panel or catch, feeling absurdly like the hero of a haunted house melodrama. I could find no trace of one, however, and at last I motioned him forwards, hoping that the weapon wouldn't do too much damage to whatever was behind the partition.

  'Wait,' I said, just as he raised the melta and prepared to fire it. For some reason, perhaps the way his shadow fell across the wall, the outline of a panel had suddenly become visible.[44]I looked at it more closely, wondering how I could possibly have missed something so obvious, and within moments had determined the method of opening it.

  'Emperor on Earth!' We both reeled back, gagging from the stench which poured out of the n
arrow space, and after a moment spent recovering our breath we leaned forward cautiously to peer inside. Jurgen produced a luminator from somewhere and shone it round the room thus revealed.

  The first things we noticed were probably the bodies, how many we couldn't tell, flesh and bone seared and warped by sorceries I didn't want to imagine. Most disconcerting of all was that what remained of the faces bore expressions of what I can only describe as insane ecstasy. Jurgen, imperturbable as ever, swept the luminator beam around the walls, picking out arcane sigils which made my eyes hurt and compelled my gaze to skitter away like waterfowl bouncing from a frozen pond.

  'Don't think much of the decor,' he said, with commendable understatement.

  I nodded, swallowing hard. 'There have been foul sorceries done here,' I said. 'The question is, what and why?'

  'I'm afraid I wouldn't know, sir,' my aide replied, taking the remark as literally as he did everything else.

  'Neither would I, thank the Emperor,' I said. This was a job for Zyvan's tame psykers, and no business of honest men. Or me. I turned away with a sense of profound relief. 'Close it up and leave it for the experts.'

  'With pleasure, sir,' Jurgen said, leaving the chamber of horrors as rapidly as he could and helping me manhandle the access panel back into place with almost indecent haste. Recalling the trouble I'd had finding it in the first place, I unwound the scarlet sash of my office from around my waist and wedged it into the gap before closing it, so that it hung from the wall like a jaunty flag.

  'There,' I said. 'That should do it.' To my surprise the simple job had left me trembling with reaction, as though exhausted.[45]I had little time to muse on this, though, because Sulla was yelling in my comm-bead.

  'Commissar! They're abandoning the dome.'

  'Say again?' I asked, unable to credit what I'd been hearing. There was nowhere else for the surviving heretics to go out here, and insane as they undoubtedly were, choosing to freeze to death rather than surrender or die fighting didn't make any sense at all. Then the idea of a suicide bomb flashed into my mind, and I was running full tilt for the nearest exit. 'Everybody outside!' I yelled. 'They may have rigged the place to blow!'