He held up a fist, ordering his squad to wait.
Praetor and Brother-Captain N’keln were close by with weapons drawn.
Auspex was wretched with interference, bio-signatures seemingly appearing and disappearing like smoke on a stiff breeze, so Tsu’gan had ordered Iagon to shut the device off for now. Instead, he used his own senses to discern the presence of his enemies and found them when he detected the faintest clank of metal on metal through the iron door.
Pointing to his ear, Tsu’gan indicated that very fact to the others. He made a chop and pull motion with one hand — the other gripped his bolter. Brothers S’tang and Nor’gan heaved the gate open, its locks sheared by a plasma-torch from one of the Rhinos’ equipment bays. Scraping back the entrance to the lower level as silently as possible, the two Salamanders moved aside quickly to allow Tsu’gan and the flamer-wielding Brother Honorious to cover the now gaping portal.
The din of striking metal grew louder but there were no enemies lurking in the shadows, only a steel-runged ladder extending into blackened depths.
Tsu’gan made his hand into a flat blade, giving the all-clear, then splayed his fingers and made another fist. Half of his squad would accompany him into the darkness; the rest would remain on the surface and protect the exit. Praetor and N’keln would remain too; the Terminator too bulky and cumbersome to fit into the tight confines suggested below, the captain too valuable to risk on a scouting mission into the unknown.
Extending two fingers, Tsu’gan chopped down twice in rapid succession. Tiberon and Lazarus, waiting at the periphery, took the ladder one-by-one and plunged below. Once the two Salamanders were down, he raised one finger, made a fist, and then raised two and chopped down twice again. Tsu’gan descended next, knowing that Honorious and Iagon would follow as rearguard.
Keeping luminators snuffed, the Salamander combat squad moved slowly down a tight corridor that reeked of dank and copper. A strange pall pervaded the air: invisible but tangible, as if a second skin was forming over their battle-plate.
Tsu’gan followed the clamour of metal, still persisting, but seemingly farther away than when he’d first heard it in the hall above. Though his optical spectra were set to night-vision and then infra-red, the dark was oddly impenetrable as if subsuming any and all ambient light. Only sound guided him and his squad as they ranged cautiously through cloying shadows.
“Sire,” hissed Honorious.
Tsu’gan whirled around to face him, incensed that he had broken vox-silence.
The flamer trooper had stopped dead and was aiming his weapon down a sub-corridor branching off from the one the combat squad was traversing.
“You break vox-silence at my command only, trooper,” Tsu’gan snarled in a low voice.
Honorious turned, nonplussed.
“I didn’t speak, sergeant.”
“Sire,” rasped Tiberon.
The battle-brother was at point, intent on the way ahead and seemingly oblivious to the fact that a large gap was developing between him and the rest of the squad.
A reprimand formed on Tsu’gan’s lips, but he didn’t give it voice.
“Squad halt,” he said into the comm-feed, instead. Iagon’s auspex blazed into life, multiple signatures plaguing the hazy screen at once.
“Contacts!” he snapped, swinging his bolter around to aim at shadows.
“I have movement,” hissed Lazarus.
“Over here…” whispered a voice that Tsu’gan didn’t recognise. He trained his combi-bolter in its direction, finger poised over the jet-release for the weapon’s flamer.
“Sire,” Honorious’ voice came again, far away this time, but the battle-brother was crouched right next to him in a ready-position. There was no way he could have actually spoken and it sound that distant.
“Sir, multiple contacts closing…” said Iagon, jerking his bolter back and forth as he sought targets.
The reek of dank and copper grew stronger.
Tiberon was still going. He was almost lost from Tsu’gan’s sight altogether. For a moment the brother-sergeant gave in to something approaching fear, filled with a deep knowing that if Tiberon was swallowed by the darkness, he would never come back and they would never be able to find him.
“Hold, brother. Hold!” Tsu’gan cried, but his shout was smothered by the maddening din of hammered metal and the warnings of his squad.
“Over here…”
Clank!
That voice again; the one Tsu’gan didn’t know…
“Enemy movement! Engaging!”
Clank!
Tiberon fading into the darkness ahead…
“Contacts closing, no target!”
Clank!
His mind spinning…
“Sire…”
Clank!
The sudden compulsion to make it stop… “Sire, help us…”
Clank!
The bolter in his hands, pressed against his temple, tool of his salvation…
Clank!
The only way to end it…
“Please, make it stop,” Tsu’gan gasped. The muzzle felt cold against his sweat-drenched forehead. The sound of the slowly squeezing trigger was as deafening as thunder.
“Vulkan’s fire burns in my breast,” a powerful voice intoned, eclipsing the beat of hammered metal. “With it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor!”
Sensation, vague and indistinct at first, returned to Tsu’gan. He was faintly aware of a reassuring presence nearby, a lodestone to which he could anchor himself.
“For we are the Angels of the Emperor, servants of the Golden Throne, and we shall know no fear.”
Tsu’gan caught hold of the voice, stentorian and commanding, grasping it like a rope of salvation. A refulgent figure stood beside him, a crackling stave held in his outstretched hand.
“From the fires of battle are we born.”
No, not a stave — the warrior, sable-armoured with a face of death, held a hammer.
“Upon the anvil of war are we tempered.”
A blazing aura roiled from it like a fiery wave, chasing down the darkness and burning back the apparitions that tried to clench to them like parasites.
“Speak the words!” Brother-Chaplain Elysius snapped. “Speak them and find your courage, Salamanders!”
Tsu’gan and his squad uttered the words as one, and the fog of insanity lifted.
The Chaplain smacked a reassuring hand against Tsu’gan’s pauldron.
“Good enough, brother-sergeant,” he said. “I will take the lead from here. Restore your battle-helm and follow me.”
Tsu’gan looked down at the battle-helm cradled in his grasp, agog. He hadn’t even realised he’d removed it. Wiping away the sweat that was very real, he set his helmet back on and obeyed. The rest of his brothers had come to their senses as well, and followed with weapons ready. Even Tiberon had stopped. He let the Chaplain catch up to him before falling in behind.
Elysius had secured Vulkan’s Sigil to his belt, though the artefact still glowed faintly with remembered power. Undoubtedly, the Chaplain had saved their lives. Whatever malfeasance preyed upon these lower catacombs had very nearly forced Tsu’gan and his squad to turn their guns on themselves. A few moments more and they would have done.
“Heretics are close,” Elysius rasped, his crozius arcanum igniting like a flaming torch in his mailed fist.
Tsu’gan realised that the heavy metal clank had returned to normal. It was still loud, and emanated from a sealed hatch ahead of them.
A few steps from the hatch, the Chaplain brought up his bolt pistol.
“Steel yourselves,” he warned.
The strange malaise affecting the tunnel returned but lingered at the periphery of Tsu’gan’s thoughts as if unwilling to press further. The brother-sergeant gripped his bolter for reassurance, running a gauntleted finger over the flame icon embossed on the stock. Muttering a litany of warding, Tsu’gan opened his eyes and saw that the Chaplain had stepped aside from the hatch.
The entrance was locked and barred.
Tsu’gan beckoned Tiberon and Lazarus, who came to the front of the squad with krak grenades primed. After affixing the explosives with a dull, metallic thunk, the two Salamanders fell back. Honorious moved ahead of them, but kept low and at a safe distance. Tsu’gan pressed his body against the wall. He noted the Chaplain did the same on the opposite side, trusting to solid steel rather than his rosarius this time.
Squad in position, spread either side of the tunnel and outside the blast funnel, Tsu’gan drew his hand across his gorget in a slashing motion.
Aiming down his bolter’s targeter, Iagon fired a single shot into one of the mag-locked krak grenades. A second later the hatch exploded.
Smoke and fire surged down the corridor in a plume, sending pieces of shrapnel brushing against the Salamanders’ armour.
Stalking through the dirt cloud, Chaplain Elysius was the first to enter the room beyond the hatch, Tsu’gan close behind him. They emerged into a metal-bound vault, dimly lit and filled with the stink of copper and iron. Rust streaked the walls like blood. Barbed hooks embedded in the metal resonated with remembered agony. Pitted manacles dangled slackly like hanged men.
This was a place of death and horror.
Crunching servos heralded a sudden attack by a quartet of ghoulish drones. Grey-faced, skin webbed by livid red veins, the automatons were an analogous but twisted variant on the servitors from the Archimedes Rex. The wretched parodies screamed in agony as they came at the interlopers, as if their bodies were still in pain from the invasive techno-surgeries employed to fashion them. Pain synapses flared with every motion, fuelling a terrible rage, only leavened by the shedding of blood and the rending of flesh.
Swollen with grotesque musculature, the monstrous ghoul-drones were the size of ogryn. They barrelled for the black-armoured warrior suddenly in their midst. Elysius ignored them, bent on an ironclad figure toiling over some device at the back of the chamber, apparently oblivious to the fight.
Tsu’gan only caught flashes of the mysterious artificer between the gaps in the Chaplain’s body as he moved: a servo-arm attached to the generator on the figure’s back; the colour of the dirty steel; yellow and black chevrons framing the armour; gilded greave plates fringed with rust around the bolts; pipes and cables, serpentine and alive; hydraulic gases venting and spitting like a curse.
Evil emanated from this being. Every blow from its incessant hammering was like the beat of a fell heart. Even as he closed, Tsu’gan couldn’t tell what the Warsmith laboured at so furiously, smothered as it was by thick shadows and an even thicker sheet of coal-black plastek.
A bolter flare lit up Tsu’gan’s left flank as a ghoul-drone was torn apart in a welter of oil and viscera. His battle-brothers were covering him as the sergeant shadowed his Chaplain, knowing that he couldn’t leave Elysius to face the Warsmith alone.
Another ghoul-drone was destroyed, engulfed by Honorious’ flamer. Its biologically unstable frame collapsed hideously in the intense heat. It muscles cooked and burst in blood-red torrents. A third beast dragged lengths of saw-toothed chain from the stump of its arm. Hot bile rose in his throat as Tsu’gan realised the chains were actually part flesh, part sinew and that some of the teeth were human bone. Boltgun roaring, he sundered the abomination and stamped over the remains. Punching a fourth, he knocked the creature aside to try and stay in the Chaplain’s wake. Gore and charred meat peppered Tsu’gan’s armour in a grisly spray. Maintaining momentum, Iagon had punctured the ghoul-drone’s cranium with a bolt round that exploded it from within and obliterated the eight-pointed star branded onto its face.
The ghouls were all dead, but their hellish master endured still.
At last, the Warsmith seemed to realise his peril and reached for a combination melta-bolter on a work-slab alongside him. Lightning arcing from his crozius arcanum, Elysius severed the clutch of cables linking the weapon to the Iron Warrior’s fusion generator. Undeterred, the Warsmith spun about, revealing a reaper cannon morphing from the constituent parts of his right arm. It glowered evilly as the long-gun corporealised, a hot yellow line searing from the vision slit in the angular battle-helm encasing his head.
Elysius swung again, but the Warsmith swatted the blow away with his left arm, a bionic limb like one of its legs — this thing was more machine than man. Pistons heaved, spewing gaseously as power was fed to the augmetic. The arm ended in a razor-edged claw that the Iron Warrior used to split the Chaplain’s battle-plate.
Gasping in pain, Elysius brought up his bolt pistol only for the servo-arm, curled over the Warsmith’s right pauldron, to snap down viperously. The Chaplain screamed as his wrist was seized and slowly crushed. All the while, the reaper cannon was slowly resolving. Coagulated flesh and iron blended into solid, dull metal. Inner mechanisms were forming, the hellish strain of the obliterator virus rapid and pervasive. If fully forged and allowed to fire, that weapon could shred the Salamanders into flesh and chips of battle-plate.
Determined that wouldn’t happen, Tsu’gan reached Elysius and waded into the melee with a roar.
Unloading a full clip into the Warsmith’s body, he watched between the sporadic flash-bang of explosive rounds as the Iron Warrior bucked and jerked against the fusillade. The transmutation halted, the need for self-preservation briefly outweighing the desire to kill.
Elysius staggered, dropping his pistol as his wrist was released. Battered, the Iron Warrior fell back, howling in pain and fury. The sound resonated metallically around the vault. There was something ancient and hollow about it, images of jagged metal and age-old rust surfacing in Tsu’gan’s mind. The brother-sergeant followed up, ramming in a fresh clip as he moved, and was about to issue a lethal head shot when Elysius stopped him. “Hold!”
Tsu’gan’s blood was up; he wasn’t about to relent. “The traitor must be executed.”
“Hold, I will not be merciful if you disobey,” the Chaplain retorted. Dark fluids were running down a gash in his plastron, flowing more vigorously as he staggered forwards, and his wrist hung limply at his side. “Lower your weapon, brother-sergeant.” Though laboured and rasping, Elysius’ tone made it clear this was an order as he approached the supine Warsmith. The Iron Warrior’s breastplate was wretched with holes and scorch marks. Inert and unconscious, he was barely alive. “I want to interrogate him first,” the Chaplain added, “To find out what he knows about this bastion, its purpose and what happened to the garrison.”
Tsu’gan stood down, aware that behind him his squad had the room secured.
Elysius spoke into the comm-feed.
“Brother-captain, have flamers brought down to the vault. We need to scour the taint from its walls,” he said, spitting the last remark. “And I need my tools,” he added. “The prisoner and I have much to discuss.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I
Those Who Lived…
There was something strangely familiar about the human settlement under the earth. It was based on a series of honeycombed chambers of varying height and depth, resembling a shantytown in part, replete with hab-shacks, corrugated work sheds and lived-in tubular pipes appended to some of the larger chambers, the makeshift structures layered upon each other like the strata of some half-developed world. Exposed metal and plastek peeked out from beneath calcified layers of rock and decades, perhaps centuries, of ingrained grit. This melding was incongruous, much like the attire of the humans that led Dak’ir and his brothers through the settlement’s main thoroughfare.
Staring at the green-armoured giants from the shadows of humble dwellings, behind the corners of bucket-carts and atop sturdy-looking towers were men, woman and children. Like Sonnar Illiad’s ambushers, they were dressed in coarse grey fatigues, patched and shabby from the rigours of daily use. Some, the bold or stupid, stood in open defiance of the newcomers, challenging with their upright postures. Dak’ir noticed they stood in large groups, these men, and that the boldness did not extend to th
eir eyes where fear dwelt instead; and that they took an involuntary half-step back as the Salamanders passed them.
Flanked by Illiad’s troops, Dak’ir wondered again at how easy it would be to subdue these humans and take the settlement in a single attack. Lesser Chapters, those with a bloodletting bent and a shallow disregard for innocent life, might have slaughtered them. Salamanders were forged from different stock. Vulkan had taught them to be stern and unyielding in the face of the enemy, but he had also encouraged compassion and the duty in all Fire-born to protect those weaker than themselves.
Only now, watching the scared faces flit by as he considered that calling, did Dak’ir start to understand Pyriel’s rationale in surrendering. By capitulation, the Salamanders had showed they were not a threat, or at least that they did not intend to pose one. Proud and possibly noble, Illiad’s people might hold the key to the fate of Vulkan and the significance of Scoria to the primarch. The Salamanders would not discover that through intimidation and duress, they would only learn of it if given willingly.
Sadly, not all his brothers shared in Dak’ir’s epiphany.
“To give up without a shot fired, it is not the way of Promethean lore,” Ba’ken growled. He kept his voice low over the comm-feed, now coming to Dak’ir through his gorget since he had removed his battle-helm, but made his discontent obvious by his body language.
“This isn’t Nocturne, brother.” As he gave voice to the rebuke, Dak’ir paused to acknowledge the truth of his remark, conceding that Scoria was actually extremely cognate with their home world. Even the settlement, bunker-like and rendered in stone and metal, contained an almost atavistic resonance. “Nor will we learn what we need to from these people with fiery retribution.” He looked to Pyriel for support, but the Librarian appeared oblivious, locked in some half-trance as he trod automatically through the numerous dwellings and holdings.
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