Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  ‘Hold,’ he voxed, suddenly tensing again.

  The storm troopers complied instantly, dousing all lumens and switching to void-sight scanners. Crowl cocked his head a little, relying on his natural hearing for a second, then switching to the ironwork augmetic implanted under his right lobe.

  Wait… he signalled in ordo battle-sign. Wait…

  He gestured to the floor, where greater cracks gaped between the tile edges. Some of those cracks were packed with grey-black dust, some were hollow. Seamlessly, every soldier in the chamber angled their gun towards the crevices.

  Crowl narrowed his eyes, holding Sanguine two-handed now. He might have been mistaken. The narcotics could do that, which was why Palv’s ghost disapproved.

  Then he heard it again.

  ‘Flush it out,’ he snapped, and opened fire.

  A volley of lasfire in a confined space gave none of the sensory overload of a bolter volley, but it had a sinister whisper and an eldritch light-flash. Sanguine’s projectiles made the only solid sound, cracking up the tiles and spinning the fragments.

  It was running. Spinoza’s shadow-figure, the one he knew would come, taking the darker road to remain hidden yet unable to resist the chance to get closer.

  ‘Follow it,’ ordered Crowl, running back the way he had come, firing down all the time, angling bullets between the narrow cracks and into the cavern beneath.

  They pursued it all the way out, hearing the panting of human breath and the thud of boots on earth. As Crowl burst back out into the tank-chamber, he saw it break from cover, leaping from wall to wall, its body marred with the shimmer of cameleo coating. He fired again, his arm tracking the shadow-flicker, and the bullet grazed the curve of a chem-holder in a furrow of sparks.

  Hegain’s squad was close on his heels, and they laid down a soak-pattern of lasfire. The shadow-form kept running, dancing between the glowing fire lanes and bounding off towards the way back out – a web of metal clamberways that twisted up towards a well of diffuse artificial light. By the Holy Throne, it was fast.

  Crowl held up his gauntlet then, halting the volley, and the last of the lasfire aura faded away. ‘Subject is entering the prepared zone,’ he voxed as Hegain came to join him.

  As the last word left his lips, the clamberways dissolved into cascades of nerve gas explosions, green-edged and puffy. He caught a final glimpse of the shadow-figure racing ahead of the explosions before its outline was lost in the daisy-chaining bursts. Hegain had laid the charges carefully, funnelling anything caught in their matrix into a narrow kill-zone.

  ‘Now then, Spinoza,’ Crowl voxed, observing the sequential charges go off with some satisfaction. He wasn’t surprised that they hadn’t downed it, but that hadn’t been the objective. ‘Subject is running and heading for your position. You wanted a chance to take it down – here it comes.’

  Valco had lived in the same spire as Holbech. Everyone who worked at the Triad communication towers lived in the same spire as Holbech. For all that vast crowds of people forever made their way across the causeways and transit lanes, the majority on Terra never once left the enclosure of their own giant spires over the course of an entire lifetime. They would be born in the industrial natal units, ripped from their mothers at the earliest opportunity to be sprayed with disinfectant and branded with time-and-location stamps. They would be educated in the spire’s indoctrination units in classes five hundred-strong, where priests and scholars bearing electro-prods would bellow out the lists of the fallen for memorisation and impress the sacred trinity of fears: the alien, the heretic, the mutant.

  At the age of ten standard, most would be assigned work-details, taking into account any particular aptitude: a position in low-level manufactoria, food tank processors, engineering squadrons or refuse collection. The more gifted would be given assignments in the spire’s myriad security and control organisations, or service the tower’s colossal internal life-support systems. The most gifted of all would end up in Hieron Valco’s position – tiny cogs in the Adeptus Terra’s unimaginably vast web of administrators. Many more again would fall between the cracks entirely, living a precarious life in the grimy shadows, feeding on the unwary, hunted by the overburdened arbitrators, an existence little better than that of the beasts which had once shared Terra’s poisoned biosphere.

  No matter their station, when death claimed them their bodies would be taken down into the furnaces, the organs extracted and the hair stuffed into sacking, and the rest fed to greedy flames that never went out. Their eyes, now floating in preservation vials and dispatched via servitor to recycler apothecarions, would never have seen a sunrise unfiltered by dirty plexiglass. Their skin would never have felt the brush of the world’s wind, their ears would never have been free of the endless hum of the spire’s engines and its forges.

  So it was not far to travel from Holbech’s relatively well-appointed hab-unit to his inferior’s more mundane cell. Revus took the priority turbo-lifts down from the supervisor-grade tiers and into the bulk-living combines below. The elevator chamber ground its way down a centuries-old shaft, shuddering as it came to a halt at the requested stop. When the doors jerkily slid open, they revealed a standard artery corridor, ten metres across, its walls blotched with grease and lit by faltering orange lumen-strips. A few wary souls looked up to see who had arrived, and immediately looked away when they caught sight of Revus’ dun-grey armour. The only ones who didn’t shuffle off into the dark were the lame, draped across the floor with hands cupped for food donations, their milky blind eyes staring up at the ceiling. Old Missionaria posters curled from the walls over their heads, spotted with mould, blaring out He Watches All and Hears All and Suspicion is Your Greatest Virtue – Feed It!

  Revus made his way along the arterial, turning down a smaller feeder corridor, then another, with every turn moving deeper into the gloom and the grime. Eventually he halted before a nondescript door bearing the marker SD-Erati-Mov-B 3458. A long brown stain ran the length of the plasteel, terminating in a pool at the door’s base. Revus ran a brief scan for body heat on the far side, detected nothing, and deactivated the standard lock. The door’s motor wheezed and puttered out, so he grabbed the edge and hauled the slide-unit across on its rail, closing it after him.

  The space was empty. It was a single cell, windowless, a few metres square, a standard single-person living module. A cot ran along the far wall, over which hung the main storage units. Food-preparation stacks leaned against the right-hand side, and a small comms-unit took up most of the left. A low table was stacked with documents – bundles of Administratum-standard vellum sheets bound with snapwire and thick with official seals.

  Revus squatted down and rummaged through them. All the bundles were schedules for lifter-touchdowns, meticulously written out longhand, with marginal notes and a few corrections in what he presumed was Valco’s own script. Here and there, the reams of numerals were punctuated with snippets of text – I find fulfilment in service, The greatest of His servants would not function without the diligent labour of the least, the usual stuff.

  He rose, blink-activated a trace moisture filter for his right eye, and scanned the chamber interior. He saw the faint impressions of boots on the metal floor. They would not have been Valco’s – probably arbitrators. Even the clumsiest of them would have taken anything of interest away, whether working for this Phaelias, or working for someone else, or perhaps – you never knew – just doing their job.

  Revus switched to an infrared filter and moved towards the cot. A dirty blanket, chewed by lice, lay disturbed on the thin mattress. A few pict-books – The Authorised History of Astra Militarum Auxiliary Regiments in the Geres Subsector Vol. XXXIIa, a disease symptom primer from the spire’s Departmento Contagio, and a romance set on the reputed paradise world of Krieg with the convoluted title My Wish to Generate Children with You is Only Exceeded by My Devotion to Him.

  Idly, Revus snapped ope
n the cover of the latter, looking down at age-bleached images of starry-eyed lovers exchanging words of devotion as they sailed across a crystal-blue lake. He was about to close it again, when he noticed the narrow strip of parchment wedged between the cartridge and the plasboard cover. Working carefully, he teased the slip out from where it had been jammed. The leathery surface was creased and broken, no bigger than his thumb, but a single line of text could just be made out.

  Rhadamanthys.

  Revus pondered that for a moment. It was written in the same script as the margins of the lifter schedules, but hastily, as if to serve as an aide-memoire.

  Then he heard the crunch of boots from outside. The noise was barely audible, a mere tread of synthrubber against pressed metal, but it was enough, for none of the combine’s inhabitants would have possessed such footwear.

  Revus rose, stowed the parchment and drew his hellpistol, keeping an infrared trace overlay on his helm’s display. He turned to face the door again, taking a flash grenade and priming it. For few seconds, he heard nothing. Then it came again – treads, at least three or four, possibly more, moving down the corridor outside. He flicked the grenade’s flash-delay down to a second and linked the timer to his visor’s photosensitive coating.

  They waited. Perhaps they were unsure of themselves. Revus did nothing, standing poised, one hand on his laspistol, the other on the grenade’s pin. He heard his breathing, closed inside his helm, and relaxed it.

  Then something grabbed the door from the outside and began to pull. Revus casually tossed the grenade through the gap and closed his eyes.

  The flash puffed out, making his lids flare red even through the chromatic shield, and shouts of pain rang out. By then he was already moving, bursting through the doorway and out into the corridor beyond. He spun around, opening his eyes to see four troopers from the Adeptus Arbites, all clad in black, all reeling and scrabbling to get their focus back. He kicked in the visor of the closest, cracking the trooper’s head back against the wall, then swung round and punched his flattened hand into the larynx of another. Even before the bodies had hit the deck he’d loosed two las-bolts into the gun-hands of the remaining two troopers, causing them to drop their shotguns from shredded gauntlets. Four more shots followed, taking out their kneecaps, and then he was running.

  Even before he’d cleared the next intersection he knew more were coming. He picked up the pace, running forward scans through the spire’s immense interior to plot a route back to his docked Nighthawk. As he rounded a tight corner he caught sight of two arbitrators – more heavily armoured, carrying both mauls and long-barrelled pistols – taking aim. He ducked instinctively, and was showered with blown rockcrete as the corridor wall blew apart. That had been a kill shot.

  Revus skidded down to a fire-crouch. ‘That’s how it is?’ he muttered.

  He fired in rapid sequence, hitting the lead trooper in the armpit-joint and knocking him onto his back. The second trooper withdrew behind a blown-open doorway and fired back, raking the corridor floor. Revus’ proximity scanner picked up more signals coming from both behind and ahead. He bounced a shock grenade down the corridor and raced out after it. It went off just before the open door, slamming the metal back on the trooper sheltering behind it. As the arbitrator staggered out from his smouldering cover, Revus grabbed him by the helm and slammed him to the floor, finishing him with a crunching stamp on the neck.

  Then he was running again, aiming for one of the main turbo-shafts leading upwards out of the combine zone. He reached the secondary shaft, where an open-doored cargo elevator stood waiting. Revus hit the chain-summons and activated the door-lock. Soon the metal box was clattering up the shaft. Revus knelt down to swap power packs, when suddenly the lift clanged to a halt. Something very heavy crashed onto its roof, denting the steel.

  Revus snapped the power pack in and retreated to the far side of the elevator, angling his hellpistol at the concave ceiling. Whatever was coming through would be met by a fresh volley, and there wasn’t much that could take concentrated hits at such range.

  Then there was a crackle of hot energy, and half the roof sheared away in a blaze of light. Revus fired, but realised instantly that whatever was after him was not worried at all about las-bolts. He scrambled for the doors, getting his hands on the lock mechanism, but all too late. The chamber screamed with energy, the floor drummed, the walls flexed like skin.

  He stayed conscious for a second, just long enough to see what had got him.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he slurred.

  Chapter Seven

  Nerve gas ballooned out of every crevice, rushing into overlapping bursts of sickly green and boiling across the cracked floors. Spinoza, her face enclosed in a rebreather-helm, watched the deluge spill out.

  She crouched at the confluence of three great subterranean corridors, hollowed out aeons before when the chem-works were still burning with industry. Unused grav-train tracks were scored into the upward-sloping floor, marking the paths through the maze. Crowl had set charges along all the routes, driving anything within them up towards her position.

  For a moment Spinoza began to think that her master had been too zealous and that the nerve gas had enveloped the subject entirely, but then she caught sight of it – a dark speck against the emerald bursts, leaping from wall to wall like some enraged arachnid.

  She took aim, and las-bolts seared into the gathering nimbus, slicing the gas clouds apart and smacking into the armoured shell of the oncoming target.

  That hurt it. The cameleo-clad outline plummeted, disappearing under a rolling mass of green. Spinoza leapt to her feet, scanning for a follow-up hit amid the bluffs of dissipating gas. The target still occluded, she fired blind into the clouds, tracing the path the toppling body had taken.

  Just as the last gouts blew themselves out, though, she caught sight of the target again, jumping back up against the tunnel wall, latching on to the greasy stone with handheld claw-locks and racing above the dissipating gas-tide. Spinoza fired, hitting it again – a glancing blow that shattered over its spine armour but didn’t bring it down. Her quarry seemed to be able to defy gravity, and scampered along the curve of the tunnel’s edge, near to the roof, over her head and into the confluence chamber.

  ‘Damn,’ spat Spinoza, racing after it, chasing it up the slope to the three-way intersection.

  It should have been dropped. The gas should have got to it, and the las-strikes should have shredded it. What kind of damned armour was that?

  Spinoza gained ground, getting a better look at what she was chasing. The target was a woman, shrouded in a scatter of cameleo-distract but still recognisably human-form. It was hard to make out her profile with any detail, but she must have been using claw-locks as part of her armour, and they must have been light enough not to slow her down.

  Spinoza ran, firing again, trying to blast her from the walls. One bolt nearly did it, smacking into the target sideways and making her scrabble down the inner tunnel curve. Spinoza aimed again, this time for the head, only noticing the micro-frag charges spinning towards her at the last possible moment.

  She threw herself over to her right as the first one went off, and the blast hit her like a kick from an equine. More cracked out, and she was thrown across the rockcrete, smacking hard into the ground and rolling with the shock wave. Cursing, she skidded to a halt and sprang back up firing – but she’d lost ground. By then the target was scrambling up a steep incline towards octagonal hatch-portals leading up into the levels above.

  Spinoza sprinted up the steep incline, firing as she ran, trying to wing her quarry before she made the portals, but the target slipped through the first of them and disappeared. Spinoza raced up the last of the slope, grabbed the metal rim of the same portal and dragged herself up.

  On the far side was a clanging, clanking world of pendulums, chain wheels and grinding gear-housings. She had emerged into the base of a mech-ha
uler – an industrial elevator column running hundreds of metres up, scything through the close-packed underhive and travelling on up into the mass-dwell zones. The platforms that clattered up and down its length had been built for bulk supply delivery, and despite their decrepitude seemed to be still in use. Spinoza’s target had already pulled herself atop one of the chevron-edged slabs and was now climbing further up the shaft.

  Spinoza ran to the next platform in the sequence, jumped up onto it and punched an activation rune. The chains around the edge slammed tight, the wheels squealed, the whole structure shuddered, and then she was moving, swaying up the shaft as motive generators rumbled into smoke-choked life. Soon the walls were speeding by, a mass of old pipework and embedded machinery, most of it silted up and heavily oxidised. Spinoza knelt down between the carcasses of two empty supply hoppers, taking what cover she could, and tried to get a clean shot on the lead platform, but all she saw was the cross-braced underside of the thick slab shaking along, ten metres up.

  They pursued one another for a few more seconds before the shaft walls on the right-hand side suddenly peeled away, exposing a vast hall stretching off into barely lit darkness. The target leapt from her platform, letting it rattle up the now-exposed chain-pulls, and sprinted out along a long, raised central gantry. Once she reached the shaft’s lip, Spinoza did the same, racing hard, her lungs hammering, her armour systems whining at full-assist.

  The hall was huge, a kind of food-processing nexus, and on either side of the raised gantry boiled enormous vats of protein broth, scummy and noxious. The air stank, and clouds of greasy vapour roiled up to the gothic-arched heights. In the slaughterpens below, skeletal servitors looked up in dumb surprise, their aprons stiff with blood, as the carcasses of emaciated battery beasts twitched limply in their metal hands.