by Xenos (lit)
Midas pulled a map-slate from his pocket and whirred through the index. 'North Qualm/ he said. 'One of the settler habitats, a mining town/
We watched for fifteen or twenty minutes, long enough to feel the ground shudder and see a gout of white hot liquid fire spit from one of the cones. Alarms sounded in the settlement below, but were quickly stifled. A rain of wet ash and glowing embers fluttered down across the township and settled like black snow on the flak-board screens.
Why would they persist in working this site with the constant threat of eruption?' Fischig growled.
'Let's take a closer look/1 suggested.
Covering the speeder with foliage, we set off down the forested valley. The ground between the feathery ferns and hard, dry thorn-trees was thick with fungal growth, some of it brightly covered and glossy. Though we worked carefully, we couldn't help kicking up puffs of spores and soredia.
I was wearing my button-sleeve black coat, Fischig his brown body armour, his helmet hooked on his belt, and Midas wore his regular outfit,
though he had replaced his cerise jacket with a short, dark-blue work coat. All of us melted into the forest shadows.
I still wasn't sure why Fischig had come along. After Gudrun, the remit given him by Lord Custodian Carpel seemed done with, but he had refused to return to Hubris. It seemed he trusted my instinct that the matter was far from done with.
We crossed a low stream bed, steaming with hot, pungent water that bubbled up from the vents, and came silently up along the north edge of the settlement. Now the judder of generators could be made out, the distant growl of rock-drills. Guards in khaki drill fatigues worn under spiked and blackened segments of metal body armour wandered the length of an earthwork wall that had been banked up at the edge of the trees, running great bull-cygnids on long chains. The canines were meaty brutes with lolling tongues and beards of spittle. The guards that pulled on their chains carried newly stamped, short-form lasguns on shoulder slings. Their faces were masked behind heavy black rebreathers. Workgangs, some stripped to their leggings in the heat, toiled to sluice the smouldering ash from the flak-board screens with hoses and bucket chains.
Midas pointed out where the edges of the settlement had been ringed with motion detectors and antipersonnel mines. All had been deactivated. The constant tremors had rendered both useless as defences. But there was no mistaking the aura I had felt since we had first begun to approach. A psychic veil utterly enclosed North Qualm.
I took out my scope and played it around the settlement. More guards, many more, and dozens of filth-caked workers, lounging by the entrance to one particularly large modular shed. Several supervisors moved back and forth among the resting work gangs, holding brief conversations and making notations on data-slates. Eight workers emerged from the shed carrying long, stretcher-like trays with high sides covered with clear-plastic wraps. I zoomed the magnification of the scope to get a closer look at the faces of the supervisors. I didn't recognise any of them. They were all dour, scholarly men in grey rainproof overalls.
Something vast suddenly crossed my field of vision. By the time I had reacted and adjusted the magnification, it had passed out of sight into the works shed. I had a brief memory of bright, almost gaudy metal and a shimmering, flowing robe.
'What the hell was that?' I hissed.
Midas looked at me, lowering his scope, actual fear on his face. Fischig also looked disturbed.
'A giant, a horned giant in jewelled metal/ Midas said. 'He came striding out of the modular hab to the left and went straight into the shed. God-Emperor, but it was huge!'
Fischig agreed with a nod. A monster/ he said.
The cones above roared again, and a rain of withering ash fluttered down across the settlement. We shrank back into the thorn-trees. Guard activity seemed to increase.
'Rosethorn,' my vox piped.
'Now is not a good time/ I hissed.
It was Maxilla. He sent one final word and cut off. 'Sanctum/
'Sanctum' was a Glossia codeword that I had given Maxilla before we had left the Essene. I wanted him in close orbit, providing us with extraction cover and overhead sensor advantages, but knew that he would have to melt away the moment any other traffic entered the system. 'Sanctum' meant that he had detected a ship or ships emerging from the imma-terium into realspace, and was withdrawing to a concealment orbit behind the local star.
Which meant that all of us on the planet were on our own.
Midas caught my sleeve and pointed down at the settlement. The giant had reappeared and stood in plain view at the mouth of the shed. He was well over two metres tall, wrapped in a cloak that seemed to be made of smoke and silk, and his ornately decorated armour and horned helmet were a shocking mixture of chased gold, acidic yellow, glossy purple, and the red of fresh, oxygenated blood. In his ancient armour, the monster looked like he had stood immobile in that spot for a thousand years. Just a glance at him inspired terror and revulsion, involuntary feelings of dread that I could barely repress.
A Space Marine, from the corrupted and damned Astartes. A Chaos Marine.
FOURTEEN
A tale of repression.
Rogue.
Return to the flame hills.
We've not been idle/ Bequin told me with a smirk when we returned to the gun-cutter. It was noon, and river basin was filling with bumping clusters of ball-trees driven off the flint plains by the wind. They drifted over the shingle and splashed trailing roots into the water.
Bequin was dressed in work fatigues, a rebreather slung around her neck, and she carried an autopistol. As Midas and Fischig stowed the speeder under the netting, she led me into the crew-bay and waved the weapon in the direction of a thin, filthy man chained to a cargo-loop with cuff restraints. His hair was matted and his clothes, an assemblage of patched rags, were stiff with caked mud. He looked at me with fierce eyes through a shaggy fringe of wet hair.
There were three of them, maybe more/ Bequin told me. 'Came to take a look at us using the ball-trees as moving cover. The others fled, but I brought him down/
'How?' I asked.
She gave me that look which told me not to keep underestimating her.
'Our intruders from last night?' I wondered aloud. Bequin shrugged.
I walked over to face the captive. 'What's your name?'
'He doesn't say much/ Bequin advised. I told her to move away.
'Name?' I asked again.
Nothing. I paused, collected my mind and then sent a gently probe into the shady recesses of his skull.
Tymas Rhizor/ he stammered.
Good. Another gentle push at his slowly yielding mind. The levels of fear and caution were palpable.
'Of Gillan His Acre, Goddes land.'
I switched to speech, without the psychic urge now. 'Gillan's Acre? You mean Gillan's Acre?'
'Seythee Gillan His Acre?'
'Gillan's Acre?'
He nodded. Theesey truth.'
'Proto-Gothic, with generational nuance shift/ Aemos said, coming near. 'Damask was colonised something over five hundred years ago, and was isolated for a lengthy period. The population may not have flourished, but the language has perpetuated vestiges of older linguaforms.'
'So this man is likely to be a native, a settler?'
Aemos nodded. I saw our captive was looking from my face to Aemos's, trying to follow our conversation.
'You were born here, on Damask?'
He frowned.
'Born here?'
Ayeam of Gillan His Acre. Yitt be Goddes land afoor the working.'
I looked round at Aemos. This would take forever. 'I can manage,' Aemos said. 'Ask away.'
Ask him what happened to Gillan's Acre.'
'Preyathee, howcame bye lossen Gillan His Acre?'
His story was painfully simple, and shaped by the ignorance of a man whose kind had worked the poor soil of a lonely edgeworld for generations. The families, as he called them, presumably the clan groups of the original settlers, had w
orked the land for as long as his memory and the memory of his elders went. There were five farming communities, and two quarries or mines, which provided building materials and fossil fuel in exchange for a share of the crops. They were devout people, dedicated to the nurture of 'Goddes land'... God's land, though there was no doubt that by 'God' they meant the God-Emperor. As little as four years ago, after the time of the last survey from which records we worked, there had been upwards of nine thousand settlers living in the communities of Damask.
Then the mission came. Rhizor reckoned this to have been three years before. A ship brought a small order of ecclesiarchs here from Messina. They intended to establish a retreat and spiritually educate the neglected settlers. There had been thirty priests. He recognised the name Dazzo. Archprieste Dazzo/ he called him. Other off-worlders came too, not priests like Dazzo and his brethren, but men who worked with them. From the way he described them, they sounded like geological surveyors or mining engineers. They concentrated their attentions on the quarries at North Qualm. After about a year, the activity increased. More ships came
and went. Settlers, mostly strong males, were recruited from the farm communities to work the mines, often brutally. The ecclesiarchs didn't seem to mind. As their populations drained, the farming settlements began to fail and die off. No help was given to sustain them. A disease, probably an off-world import, killed many. Then the volcanic activity began, suddenly, without warning. Everyone in the farmsteads was rounded up and pressed into service at the pits as if some great urgency was now driving the task. Rhizor and many like him toiled until they dropped, and later managed to escape, living like animals in the thorn forests.
So Dazzo and his mission had come to Damask, enslaved the population into a workforce, and were now hell-bent on mining out something from the territory around North Qualm. It seemed likely to me that the vulcanism had been triggered by incautious mining work.
I reached into his mind again... he trembled in fear as he felt the psychic touch... and showed him an image of Dazzo. Eagerly, he confirmed his identity. Then Locke, another face he knew and regarded with ill-concealed hatred. Locke had been chief among the men who had pressed the farmers into service. His cruelty had left a lasting mark. I showed him the faces of Urisel and Oberon Glaw, neither of which were known to him. At last, I visualised an image of the pipe-smoking man.
'Malahite/ he announced, recognising him at once. According to Rhizor, the obscura addict with the watery blue eyes was Girolamo Malahite, chief of the surveyors and engineers.
Fischig, who had joined us during the conversation, asked about the fibre-wood marker we had found at Gillan's Acre. Rhizor wrinkled his face with grief. That had marked the mass grave where the off-worlders had buried all those who had resisted.
Midas called me to the cockpit. 1 told Aemos to feed Rhizor and question him further.
Midas sat in the leather pilot's throne, his lap draped with spools of scroll paper stamped out of the electric press.
'No wonder Maxilla hid/ he said by way of an opening. 'Look here/
The scrolls were a transcription log of the astropathic and vox traffic Midas had been able to monitor from the ships in orbit. He slid a gloved finger down the jumbled columns of figures and text.
'I make out at least twelve vessels up there, maybe more. It's difficult to say an accurate figure. These here, for example, may be two ships in dialog or the same ship repeating itself/
'Coding?'
That's the interesting bit. It's all standard Imperial, the navy code called Textcept/
'That's common enough/
He nodded. And look here, the question and answer pattern indicates a capital ship checking that its fleet components have all arrived in real-space. It's a typical Imperial structure. Military... one of ours/
'A friendly fleet.'
'Not friendly, perhaps. Look at the command identifier here... that name translates as Estrum.'
The missing captain.'
The missing captain... perhaps not that missing after all. Perhaps... rogue. The whole incident at Gudrun anchorage, the mistaken recognition, the 'panic'... could have been an excuse to withdraw ships loyal to him.'
'But he's still broadcasting in standard Imperial code-form.'
'If his officers alone are party to the deceit, he won't want to alert the crews.'
An hour later, a large launch with fighter escort broke from the fleet and swung down to the surface of Damask. The transport set down at North Qualm, and the fighters circled the area twice before returning to their base ship. From the cutter, we could hear the booming roar of their thrusters rolling around the plateaux and valleys. Midas quickly switched the cutter's systems to minimum operation so they wouldn't make a chance detection of our instrumentation.
Aemos talked with Rhizor for most of the afternoon, and he seemed calmer and more willing to help once food had been given to him. As the light began to fail and evening approached, Aemos came to find me.
'If you want a way back in, that man might be able to help you.'
'Go on.'
'He knows the mines and the excavations. He worked there for a goodly while. I've spoken to him at length, and he seems certain he could show you to a cave network that links with the mining structure.'
We set out after dark in the speeder. Fischig drove, using the terrain scanner to see rather than the lamps. That made progress slower but more discreet. I sat next to him, and Bequin rode in the back with Rhizor. There had been some debate about which of us should go, but I had made the final selection. The speeder could hold four, and though Midas was the most able combatant in my group, more able than even the chastener in my view, I wanted him at the helm of the cutter, ready to respond. Besides, Bequin had uses of her own that I considered vital to our endeavour.
It took a long time to make the trek back to the North Qualm region, and we didn't arrive until well into the second half of the night. Clouds had masked the sky, hiding the moon and stars, and the only light was the flare of the volcanic hills, underlighting the low clouds with a fluctuating red haze. The air was thick with sulphurous smoke.
We left the speeder concealed in a hollow, its position flagged by a marker tag, and headed west around the outreaches of the area, the 'flame hills' as Rhizor called them.
Nocturnal creatures chattered and fluted in the darkness. Something larger and more distant howled. Pressing through the thorn-scrub, we
became aware of the harsh artificial lighting bathing the entire settlement. The volcanoes rumbled.
It took Rhizor a little time to find what he was looking for: a series of small, shallow pools, half-filled with geothermally heated water. The syrupy surfaces of the pools seethed and bubbled, and the site was plagued with insects drawn by the heat. Rhizor splashed cautiously into the largest pool, and worked his way around a massive boulder that was swathed in bright orange lichen. Behind it, masked by thorn and cycad, was a narrow cavity. This, he said, as best as I could understand him, was the route by which he had escaped from the slave-gangs.
We checked weapons and equipment and prepared to enter. I had opened the weapons locker on the cutter and provided us with as much efficient firepower as we could comfortably manage. I had my power-sword, an autopistol in a rig under my coat, and a las-carbine with a lamp pack taped under the muzzle. Other items of equipment filled the pack on my back. Bequin had kept her autopistol, and taken a flat-bladed knife, and she too had a lamp. I'd given Fischig an old but well-maintained heavy stubber, which seemed to please him enormously. He had his Arbites pistol, and a satchel full of spare ammo drums for the stubber. Rhizor had refused a weapon. I was certain he would leave us once we were safely en route anyway.
The cavity allowed us to enter single file. I led the way, with Rhizor behind me, then Bequin, and Fischig brought up the rear. It was damnably hot in the narrow rock passage, and the sulphurous gases forced us to wear our rebreathers. Rhizor had no breather, but tied a swathe of cloth around his nose and
mouth. This was the practice the slaves had used when working the mines.
The passage wound back and forth, and climbed for a while as it coiled into the hill. In places, it was so steep we had to climb up the ragged floor of the burrow. Twice we had to remove our equipment packs to ease through constricted sections.
After an hour, I began to feel the oppressive throb of the psychic veil shrouding North Qualm. As we penetrated it, I listened out for the sound of alarms or activity, but none came. Though she didn't know it, Bequin was already doing her job by creating a dead spot that allowed us to press on invisibly. I made sure none of us strayed too far from her aura of influence.
The lava flues were crawling with lifeforms adjusted to existence in the hot, chemical-rich environment: blind, toad-like hunters, transparent beetles, albino molluscs and spiders that looked like they were fashioned from white gold. A fat, pallid centipede as long as my arm spurred its way over the baked rock at one junction.
Every few minutes the earth trembled. Loose rock and dust showered down from the roof, and warm, reeking gases blew back along the winding rock halls.
The passage widened, and showed signs of excavation. Thorn-wood props supported the ceiling, and marker boards with numbers chalked on
them were nailed to every sixth post. Rhizor tried to explain where we were. He did his best, and I was able to ascertain we were in a section of mine that had been worked and then abandoned. He said other things too, but the meaning was beyond me. He led us to the end of one working, a low, propped tunnel, and I shone my light into a cavity that had been dug out of the loose shale and grit. Bequin knelt and brushed grit off the floor with her hand. She exposed old tiles, made of a dull, metallic substance I couldn't identify. The tiles were perfectly fitted, despite the fact that they were irregular octagons. They were strangely unsymmetrical, with some edges overlong. Yet they all fitted almost seamlessly. We could not begin to account for it, and the pattern they made was intensely uncomfortable.
At the rear of the cavity, ancient stonework had been exposed. I was no expert, but the stone, a hard pale material glittering with flecks of mica, didn't look local. There was evidence that parts of it had been cut away with rock drills and cutting beams.
