by Xenos (lit)
'Did they go past or in?' I asked.
'In?' barked Maxilla, incredulously.
'In! Did they go in?'
Aemos was leaning over the servitor at the sensor station. 'The drive wake ebbs and disappears here. Either they were vaporised en masse at this point or they indeed went inside/
I looked at Maxilla. The Essene bucked again, thrown by a gravity pool, and the bridge lights went out briefly for a second time.
'This is a star-going ship/ he said softly, 'not built for surface landing/
'I know that/ I replied. 'But neither were theirs. They have more information than we do... and they have gone inside/
Shaking his head, Maxilla turned the Essene down towards the vast wound.
The rift cavity was dark, and limitless according to the sensors, though in my opinion, the sensors were no better than useless now. A dull red glow suffused the darkness far below us. The violent shaking had stopped, but still the hull creaked and protested at the gravitational stress.
We had the sudden impression of moving through some structure, then another, then a third. The display revealed the fourth before we passed under it: an angular hoop or arch eighty kilometres across. Beyond it, more in the series, towering around us as we progressed, as if we were passing down the middle of a giant rib-cage.
'They're octagonal/ said Aemos.
And irregular/1 added.
No two of the rib-arches were the same, but they displayed the same form and lack of symmetry as their companions - the shape we now instantly associated with the sarathi.
These can't be natural/ said Maxilla.
We continued in under the cyclopean spans, passing through a dozen, then a dozen more.
'Light sources ahead/ a servitor announced.
A dull, greenish glow fogged into being far away down the avenue of octagonal arches.
'Do we continue?' asked Maxilla.
I nodded. 'Send a marker drone back to the surface/
A moment later, the rear display showed a small servitor drone straggling back up the vast channel towards the surface, running lights winking.
We ran on past the last arch. There was another judder.
Then we were riding clear into light, smooth, pale, green light.
There seemed to be no roof or ceiling to whatever we were in, though inside the planetary cavity we undoubtedly were. Just hazy green light, and below, a carpet of wispy cloud.
All turbulence stopped. We were like a ship becalmed.
* * *
The atmosphere in this place - logic battled to make us remember we were inside the crust of a planet - was thin and inert, a vaguely ammoniacal vapour. None of us could explain the source of the pervasive luminescence or the fact that the Essene sat comfortably at grav anchor in the serene quiet. As Maxilla had pointed out, it was not a trans-atmospheric vessel and it should have been impossible to stabilise it this close to a planetary body without severe stress damage.
From its system registers, the Essene seemed happy enough, happy to have ridden out the vile stellar storms of KCX-1288 into this safe harbour.
Apart from minor impact damage, only two of the ship's systems were inoperative. The sensors were blind and giving back nothing but odd, dead echoes. And every chronometer on the ship had stopped, except two that were running backwards.
Betancore and Maxilla studied the imperfect returns of the sensor arrays and concluded land of some sort lay beneath us, under the cloudbank. We estimated that it was six kilometres straight down, though in this vague, hazy rift it was difficult to say.
If Glaw's heretics were here, they had left no trace. But with our sensors so badly occluded, their advance fleet could be anchored just on the other side of the clouds.
We dropped to the cloudbank from the Essene in the gun-cutter shortly afterwards. All of us had buckled on hard-armour vacuum suits from Maxilla's lockers. Lowink, Fischig, Aemos and I shambled about the crew bay, getting used to the heavy plate and bulky quilting of the suits.
Bequin was in the cockpit with Betancore, watching him take us down. The pair of them wore borrowed vacuum suits too, and she was pinning up her hair so it would not interfere with the helmet seal.
'Good hunting, inquisitor/ crackled Maxilla from the Essene above us.
'He'll be down there, won't he?' asked Bequin, and I knew she was referring to Mandragore.
'It's likely. Him... and whatever this is all about/
'Well, you heard what Pontius said/ she replied.
How could I not have? The Necroteuch. One doesn't hear a word like that and forget it. It had taken her weeks to gain the confidence of our bodiless prisoner, to play the part of a disaffected traitor. I hadn't been sure she was up to it, but she had performed with patience and a finely gauged measure of play-acting. It had been a risk, letting her slip in to see Pontius alone. She had assured me she could do it and she had not been wrong.
The Necroteuch. If Pontius Glaw was telling the truth, our enterprise had even greater urgency now. I had wondered what could be so precious, so important as to galvanise our enemies so, make them risk so much. I had my answer. Legend said the last extant copy of that abominable work had been destroyed millennia before. Except that by some means, in antique ages past, a copy had come into the hands of the
saruthi race. And now they were preparing to trade it back to Glaw's Imperial heretics.
We came down through the clouds and saw the land below, a wide, rolling expanse of dust sweeping down to what seemed to be a sea. Liquid frothed and broke along a curved shoreline a hundred kilometres long. Everything was a shade of pale green, bathed by the radiance that glowed through the wispy clouds. There was a misty softness to it all, a lack of sharp focus. It seemed endless, toneless, slow. There was a calm, ethereal feel that was at once soothing and unnerving. Even the lapping sea seemed languid. It reminded me of the seacoast at Tralito, on Caelun Two, where I had spent a summer recuperating from injuries years before. Endless leagues of mica dunes, the slow sea, the balmy, hazy air.
'How big?' I asked Midas.
'Is what?' he asked.
This... place.'
He pointed to the instruments. 'Can't say. A hundred kilometres, two... three... a thousand.'
"You must have something!'
He looked round at me with a smile that had worry in it. 'Systems say it's endless. Which is, of course, impossible. So I think the instruments are out. I'm not trusting them, anyway.'
Then what are you flying by?'
'My eye - or the seat of my pants. Whichever you find most reassuring.'
We followed the slow curve of the endless bay for about ten minutes. At last, details emerged to break up the uniform anonymity.
A row of arches, octagonal, jutting from the sand a few hundred metres back from the waterline, ran parallel to the water. They were each about fifty metres broad, in everything but scale the twins of the arches Maxilla had guided the Essene through. They extended away as far as we could see in the green haze.
'Set us down.'
We sat the gun-cutter on the soft dusty-sand half a kilometre from the shore, clamped on our helmets and ventured out.
The radiance was greater than I had expected - the cutter's ports had been tinted - and we slid down brown-glass over-visors against the glare.
I hate vacuum suits. The sense of being muffled and constrained, the ponderous movement, the sound of my own breath in my ears, the sporadic click of the intercom. The suit shut out all sounds from outside, except the crunch of my feet on the fine, dry sand.
We shuffled down to the water's edge in a wide file. All of us except Aemos carried weapons.
It looked like a sea. Green water, showing white at the breakers.
'Liquid ammonia/ Aemos said, his voice a low crackle over the vox.
There was something strange about it.
'Do you see it?' he asked me.
What?'
'The waves are moving out from the shore.'
I look
ed again. It was so obvious, I had missed it. The liquid wasn't rushing in and breaking, it was sucking away from the shore and rolling back into itself.
It was chilling. So simple. So wrong. My confidence withered. I wanted to strip off the claustrophobic suit and cry out. And I would have, except for the stark red warning lights on the atmosphere reader built into my suit's bulky left cuff.
What was it Maxilla had said? The saruthi had tormented the men of the Promethean? I didn't know for a moment if the unnatural behaviour of the sea was their doing - how could it have been? But I understood how insidious, distressing torment might have played upon them.
Fischig and Betancore had approached the first of the arches. I looked across and saw them dwarfed by the unsymmetrical structure. The next in the line was three hundred metres away, and they seemed regularly spaced. Each one, as far as I could see, was irregular in a different way, though the size and proportions were identical.
Bequin was kneeling on the shoreline, brushing the sand aside gently with her gauntlet. She had found what was perhaps the most distressing detail so far.
Under the sand, a few centimetres down, the ground was tiled. Tessellated, irregular octagonal tiles, just like the ones she had found on the floor of the mine working at North Qualm. Once more, they fitted perfectly, impossibly, despite their shape.
The more of them she uncovered, the more she brushed the sand away.
'Stop it/ I said. 'For our sanity, I don't think it's worth trying to discover if they cover the entire beach/
'Can all of this... be artificial?' she asked.
'It can't be/ said Aemos. 'Perhaps the tiles and the arches are part of some old structure, long abandoned, that has since been flooded and covered with the dust... due to... to...'
He didn't sound at all convincing.
I crossed to Fischig and Betancore and stood with them gazing up at the first arch. It was wrought from that odd, unknown metal we had seen on Damask.
What do we do know?' Fischig asked.
'Well, I hate to state the obvious/ said Aemos from down the beach, 'but the last row of these we found formed a deliberate pathway that led the Essene in here. Should we assume this serves the same purpose?'
I stepped forward, through the broad, towering shape of the first arch. 'Come on/1 said.
We walked for what I estimated was perhaps twenty minutes. Estimated. All of our chronometers were dead. After the first few minutes we began to
hear a distant, repetitive boom; a low, almost sub-sonic peal like thunder that rolled out from somewhere far away over the sea. Or seemed to. It came every half minute or so. There were long intervals of silence, and just when we'd thought we'd heard the last, another boom would come. Like the crunch of our own footsteps, we could hear it through the suits, even with our vox circuits switched off.
I voxed to Maxilla. 'Can you hear that?'
There was a crackle, and no immediate reply. Then a sudden burst of transmission. Maxilla's voice:'... as you instruct, Gregor, but it's not going to be easy. Say again... what did you say about Fischig?'
'Maxilla! Repeat!' I began, but his voice continued over the top, incoherent. It wasn't a reply. I was just picking up his voice. I felt my spine go cold.
More static.
Tell Alizebeth, I agree with that! Ha!'
It went dead.
I looked back at the others. Their pale faces gazed out of the tinted brown faceplates like ghosts.
"What... was that?' I murmured.
'An echo?' Aemos whispered. 'Some kind of transmission anomaly caused by the atmosphere and the-'
'It's not a conversation I've ever had.'
Another boom of thunder rolled across the dry, softly lit shore.
After my estimated twenty minutes, we passed through what was suddenly the last arch. We all stopped. Ahead of us, the land rose more steeply, into hills and low ridges. The terrain there was darker, inhospitable. The overall radiance had dulled, and the sky was a deep green, oozing into blackness over the hills. There... there were more in the row!' Fischig exclaimed. 'More arches!' He was right. The octagonal colonnade had disappeared as we passed through the last arch. I stepped back through, imagining perhaps that from the other side the arches might reappear. They didn't. The booming continued. We set off towards the hills. Bursts of static hissed through our vox units. Transmissions/ said Lowink. He fiddled with his vox-channels. 'I can't tune them in, but they're chatter. Military. Back and forth.' Our quarry, perhaps.
'Look!' said Betancore, pointing behind us. Beyond the shore and the retreating line of arches, three ominous dark shapes hung under the clouds, out over the sea. Two Imperial frigates and an old, non-standard merchantman, floating at grav-anchor. 'How did we not see them when we passed?' 'I don't know, Midas. I'm not sure of anything anymore.' When I turned back to the rest of the group, I saw Aemos unclasping his helmet.
Aemos!'
'Calm yourself,' he said, uncovering his wizened old head. With the wide locking collar of the suit around him, he looked like a tortoise, pushing its gnarled head from its shell. He raised his left arm and showed me the atmosphere reader. The lights were green.
'Human-perfect atmosphere/ he said. A little cold and sterile, but human-perfect/
We all unclasped our helmets and pulled them off. The chilly air bit my face, but it was good to be free of the suits. There was no scent to the air, none at all. Not salt or ammonia or dust.
We helped each other fasten our helmets to our shoulder packs. The booming was duller and more distant now it didn't have our hollow helmets to resonate through. We could hear each other's footsteps, each other's breathing, the suck and lap of the ocean. I could suddenly smell Bequin's perfume. It was reassuring.
I led the group on, and we climbed slowly into the rising land. Now free of the helmet, I understood our ponderous progress was a result of more than our heavy suits. It was somehow difficult to gauge distance and depth. We stumbled every now and then. The whole place was profoundly wrong.
We came upon them very suddenly. The sudden resumption of the vox-traffic was our only warning. Our speakers burst into life simultaneously.
'Run! Move up! Segment two!'
Where are you? Where are you?'
'Cover to the left! That's an order! Cover to the left!'
They're behind me! They're behind me and I c-'
A fierce hiss of static.
Ahead, coming down the ridges and slopes of the dark rise, we saw soldiers. Imperial Guard, wearing red and gold combat armour. Gudrunite riflemen.
'Cover!' I ordered, and we dropped down into the shelter of the rising dunes, readying weapons.
There were sixty or more of them, hurrying down the upper slopes towards us in a wide straggle, running. There was no order to it. They were fleeing. An officer in their midst was waving his arms and shouting, but they were ignoring him. Many had lost helmets or rifles.
A second later, their pursuers came over the rise and fell upon them from behind. Three black, armoured speeders in the livery of navy security, and a following line of thirty troopers in their distinctive black armour, ordered, disciplined, marching in a spaced line, firing their hell-guns into the backs of the fleeing conscripts. The landspeeders swept in low, drizzling the slopes with cannon fire. The shots threw up plumes of dust, and the mangled bodies of men. A second later and all three land-speeders passed over us at what seemed like head-height, overshooting across the ammonia sea and banking round to follow in on another pass.
Some of the Gudrunites were firing back, and I saw one trooper topple and fall. But there was no co-ordination, no control.
What the hell! Do we stay hidden?' gasped Bequin.
They'll see us soon enough/ said Fischig, sliding open the feed slit of his heavy stubber's box magazine.
The odds were terrible, and ever since the incident on the Essene, I'd had a morbid loathing of the black-clad troopers.
But still...
I pulled out my heavy autop
istol and tossed it to Aemos, freeing my las-carbine from the fastener lugs on my pack. Bequin drew her own weapons, a pair of laspistols. Lowink and Midas had their firearms - a las-carbine and a Glavian needle-rifle respectively - already braced in their hands.
'Look to the troops,' I told Fischig, Lowink and Bequin. 'Do what you can, Aemos. Midas - the fliers are down to us.'
We bellied forward through the dunes, and then came up firing. Fis-chig's big gun smashed into the lip of the high ridge, kicking up dust, before he found range and demolished three of the stalking troopers.
Lowink's carbine cracked out, and Aemos fired the autopistol hesitantly.
Bequin was amazing. She'd used her time well during the thirty-week passage, and Midas had clearly instructed her carefully. A laspistol in each hand, she whooped out a battle-cry of sorts and placed careful shots that dropped two more of the troopers.
The troopers balked in their ruthless advance, realising the situation had suddenly changed. The scattering Gudrunites also wavered, and some of them, the officer included, turned and began to confront the killers. I had been counting on this. We couldn't take them alone. I had trusted that our sudden intervention might galvanise the guardsmen.
Still, many ran.
A fierce firelight erupted along the ridge between the halted troopers and those Gudrunites below who were turning to fight. Lowink. Fischig, Aemos and Bequin moved forward in support.
The landspeeders swept back, hammering the shore with shells.
Betancore dropped to one knee, raised his exotic weapon and fired. The long barrel pulsed and made a sound like a whispered shriek. Explosive splinters tore through the nearest speeder as it crossed down over us and it blew apart in the air.
Burning wreckage scattered across the sand.
I chased a second with my carbine. It was turning to present on us, and the turn made it slow. My shots missed or deflected from the armour. As its heavy cannon began to fire, pulverising the sand in a stitching row towards me, I shot the pilot through the face plate.
Still firing, it plunged suddenly and hit the beach fifty metres behind me. It bounced, shredding apart, struck again and crashed into the breakers in a spray of debris that threw up thousands of mis-matched splashes.
