The agony of an hour’s crawl followed – Mortensen’s splattered flashlamp revealing metre after endless metre of cramped and corroded horror as he edged it through the detritus of the duct. Acid-soaked muscles blazed along with the ghastly gulps and gasps of lungs desperate for clean air. The crawl gave Mortensen more than enough time to contemplate the job ahead.
Rask’s mission was simple. Evade the inevitable obstruction of bulkheads, firefights and a barracks block in lock-down by traversing the transport’s keel along one of the many bilge channels that ran the length of the vessel. Conklin had suggested working their way over to and hooking up with some of the isolated groups of loyalists scattered throughout the starboard decks but Rask had advised against it. He had told the sergeant that the pockets of resistance were largely unarmed and those that weren’t were certainly low on ammunition. Most were also pinned down by much larger groups of aggressors and were more than likely injured, which would offer more of a handicap than an advantage to the Redemption Corps.
Rask’s operation relied much more on mobility and infiltration. Mortensen could hardly disagree. In their current predicament his storm-troopers were hardly outfitted for a spearhead. The captain actually favoured a single, bold, unanticipated strike right at the heart of the insurrection – to ‘cut the head from the angry serpent’, as he put it. Rask had faith that such an action held the best chance of success – success determined as the retrieval of any remaining hostages and the unconditional surrender or destruction of rebel Shadow Brigade forces. Then, and only then, would Waldemar, Deliverance’s lord and captain, authorise his naval troops in to secure the barrack decks.
Acquiring the hostage takers would be another thing entirely. Rask didn’t even have confirmation on their identity and location. The most likely candidates were a triumvirate of Shadow Brigade officers, two lieutenants and a captain, whose platoons had become the prime focus of Commissar Fosco’s wrath.
Company Captain Obadiah Eckhardt, First Lieutenant Diezel Shanks and Lieutenant Nils Isidore had all lost men to Fosco’s campaign to purify the men of the 1001st of their hiver ways and customs. Instead of immersing himself in Shadow Brigade culture and using it to unify the men – as Rask had done in tithing them – Fosco had attempted to eradicate it. He claimed that the strength of the Imperial Guard was based upon uniformity: billions of souls all pulling in the same direction, and had little time to pander to the fighting strengths of individuals, their units or their regiments.
This approach did not sit well with Mortensen – whose own inimitable style of leadership marked him out as a target for such accusations. Without Rask’s silver-tongued diplomacy and tact the Redemption Corps would have long become a target for Fosco or some other bloodthirsty puritan. The schola progeniums were brimming with creed-thumping sadists like the commissar and Mortensen refused to have such men in his unit – which unfortunately made the Redemption Corps appear ever more irregular against the backdrop of the uniform billions that men like Fosco were attempting to cultivate.
Regardless of the major’s feelings, the predicament demanded a rescue attempt and Eckhardt, Shanks, Isidore and their compatriots had to be neutralised. It was a storm-trooper’s lot. To be better. To be above common regimental concerns and do the good work of the Emperor – wherever it took them.
At that moment the Emperor’s good work took Mortensen from the crippling confines of the drain and out through a gash in the floor of the pipe, splashing him down head first in a petrochemical sinkhole.
Beneath the oily surface Mortensen heard the thud-gush of others, freshly baptised in the bilgewater filth. The major’s lamp struggled to penetrate the blackness, blinking a ghostly beam that brushed the thrashing of boots and limbs as his fellow storm-troopers fought to right themselves in their new surroundings. As the soles of his boots touched down on something reassuringly solid the major pushed for the surface and treated himself to a lungful of foetid air. Like everyone else, he retched, bucked and coughed as his throat refused to admit the rancid stench.
Tearing off his mask Mortensen tossed the useless thing away and gradually – back rising and falling like a wounded animal – acclimatised himself. One by one the others followed suit, before hawking and spitting their stomach-churning disgust into the still black waters around them.
Lamplight sheared through the inky darkness: probably the first light down there for hundreds of years. They were right in the bowels of the ship, in one of the foul bilge drains into which every drop of piss, oil, blood, sweat and everything else descended – wrenched keelward by the irresistible force of Deliverance’s artificial gravity. The air – if it warranted such a description – was acrid and stale, hanging as it had in the compartment amongst a forest of quietly corroding pipes and the bubble of fermenting bilge-slime.
Mortensen turned his lamp on his squad. They were a sight: like septuplets yanked from a womb of filth.
‘Sass?’
‘Best probably to avoid the deeps: we don’t really want to be swimming through this muck.’
‘Agreed.’
The corpsman turned his lamp back on the conduit from which they’d fallen and the gaping hole that had admitted them. The conduit was riddled through with rust and decay and the entire bottom section from the point of their exit onwards had been eaten away by the corrosive powers of the toxins they had been crawling through.
‘It’s simple really,’ the adjutant told them, between retching and spitting. ‘We need to follow the path of this conduit until it meets the steam trunk demi-juncture. Then we’ll know for sure that we’re under the barracks deck.’
‘And this steam juncture thing: you’ll know it when you see it?’
Sass nodded.
The bilge was like another world and it was hard for Mortensen to imagine such a place existed hundreds of metres below the soles of his boots as he went about his normal regimental business. Solid blackness reigned here above the equal blackness of the percolating petrochemical slime. The corpsmen’s flashlamps brought light to the denizens of the deep here: probably the first time the bilge space had experienced light since its original dry-dock engineering, when Deliverance had been a sprightly young carrier, eager for action and a taste of the void. With millennia to develop and evolve, the bilge sections now boasted their own ecosystems.
Hydrocarbon-hungry bacteria swarmed the oily waters to a primordial sludginess, which in turn was feasted upon by tiny lice and other chitinous micro-arthropods, both flitting above and below the inky surface. Stoolies dribbled from every conceivable solid surface, including the thickets of thin rusty pipes that ran up into the darkness, like slinking flypaper, mopping up the lice and absorbing them through their fecal skin. The descendants of the original rats on board, now all but pinkish, translucent tails with a vice-like pair of jaws on one end, slithered their horrible way through the black waters. Mortensen got to wondering what fed on the highly mobile and muscular rat-tails, hoping that the disgusting food chain ended firmly there.
They were into their second hour of a jogging trudge along the shallows of the bilge lake when he had his question answered.
A fat, broken pipe ran out of the wall, its smashed end hanging over the still, glassy surface of the oil, seeping rusty effluence into the bilge. As his lamplight glanced off the horrible paleness of a form at the pipe Mortensen froze, bringing his autopistol up to meet the threat. The surprise came mostly from its size: a spindle-limbed crustacean, myriad twitchy legs and slender pincers, reaching, snatching and cutting at something in the pipe. It towered above them, its many limbs terminating in a clear shell that exhibited the ghastly inner workings of its body. The shell was shaped like an obscene flower, fat at the bottom, the underside of which was a mincing mouth, constantly supplied with scraps of flesh from the wicked claws that thrashed back and forth to supply it with food. The top of the shell tapered to a twisted funnel, which widened again like the e
nd of a bugle or blunderbuss.
As the storm-troopers neared, Mortensen held up one arm indicating a full stop. The gargantuan thing seemed very invested in its activity, which upon inspection appeared to be slicing up and devouring a nest of bloody, swarming rat-tails. The major approached slowly, his pace steady and even, clambering over the pipe with deliberate movements. At one point the crustacean experimentally reached out a large pincer and plucked at the storm-trooper’s boot, but Mortensen dashed the claw-tip aside with a swipe of his pistol. The creature became a wall of pincers, all retracted and ready to slice, the rest of its body still as the pipe disgorged mauled rat-tails into the shallows about it. Vedette and Gorskii primed their pistols, but Mortensen held up a free hand, before swiftly indicating with his fingers that they should cross the pipe behind him.
Minghella and Sarakota scuttled swiftly over the conduit, followed closely by the others as the creature tiptoed left and right, reacting to the new activity along the shoreline. With the squad across, Mortensen backed down the other side and retreated, boot behind boot. Within moments the hideous thing was back to tearing apart the squirming nest. A few hundred metres further on and Sass mercifully stopped them.
‘I think this is it.’
‘You think?’ Conklin grumbled.
The adjutant was flashing his light into the gloom above; it was joined by the rest of the available beams.
‘The steam trunk demi-juncture,’ Sass announced.
Mortensen nodded: he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, but mostly it resembled one rusty throng of pipes and conduits running into another throng. Many of the pipes were shattered and broken so only the stubs of channels running vertically up into the ship were visible.
‘Boss,’ Conklin murmured: his was the only flashlamp not on the encrusted ceiling. Mortensen followed the beam and the line of his pistol muzzle until he found the gangly legs of another hulking crustacean. This one was holding still in the shallows, the blunderbuss snout of its shell pointed at the ceiling. Its body chugged horribly until suddenly a bloodied fountain of vomit-splatter spouted skyward from the opening. Most of the regurgitated mess decorated the ceiling, but some of the muck hit its intended target, one of the broken pipe openings. As the shell heaved its last, the spidery thing crawled off into the thick waters, dipping below the surface, the trumpet end of its shell top now serving as a snorkel.
‘Major,’ Sass called. He’d been prancing around in the shadows, his own lamp exploring the insides of similar conduit openings above. The storm-troopers took several exhausted steps towards him and stared ceilingward. ‘Unspark your lamps for a moment,’ the adjutant advised.
‘Is he friggin’ crazy?’ Conklin growled.
‘Do it,’ the major ordered, snapping off his own in good example.
The bilge compartment returned to its vast darkness and although there was black, open space all around him, Mortensen couldn’t help but feel the claustrophobia of the creepy sensation that there were things all about him in the void. Then he saw it: the reason Sass had asked for the lamps to be shut off, the reason for their neck craning and idiot stares.
Light. Tiny pinpricks of dim light, filtering in from the vertical termination of a pipe opening above their faces. The opening was just wide enough to admit a corpsman. Gorskii uttered something in her thick Valhallan dialect, which could have been anything, but sounded like a thanks or blessing. As always Conklin was the first to rain on their parade.
‘Is that something moving?’ he put to the group. He wasn’t wrong – occasionally individual dots of light were momentarily eclipsed, giving the impression that something had already made its home in the pipe. The sergeant grunted and cocked his pistol. ‘We’ll soon sort that out.’
‘Sarge, can we really risk gunfire this close to the insertion?’ Vedette put evenly into the darkness. As a Mordian she’d lived on a nightworld and so the lightless environs of the bilge had been less of an ordeal for her. Of all the storm-troopers she’d slipped and stumbled the least through the hellish murk. She displayed no less deftness and precision in the correction of her superior, ‘I mean – we could be right under them. Yes?’
Conklin’s disappointment was obvious, even in the dark and without visual confirmation from his face: ‘Probably.’
With the lamps snapped back on the storm-troopers set about making their ascent. Without the kinds of specialist equipment they habitually relied upon for the wide range of infiltration scenarios in which they were usually involved, the corpsmen had to go back to basics. Mortensen unclipped his belt and wrapped it tautly around two emaciated pipes running parallel and ceilingward. Stuffing his pistol and cog-hammer into his blood stripes he pulled hard on the belt and settled his boot, one on each rusty pipe, crushing and squelching stoolies underfoot. Sliding the belt up through the stoolie slime he clambered up the pipes, the inside edge of each boot fighting to find purchase on the corroded metal surface. Each of the Redemption Corpsmen followed suit, struggling up behind their major, up into the gloom.
Apart from Pryce slipping and giving Conklin a faceful of stool-caked boot, the ascent went without hitch. Mortensen then used the wicked claw of his cog-hammer to smash back and forth inside the confines of the pipe, the fragile metal caving and providing the major and successive climbers with ready-made hand and foot holds. Reclaiming his belt, he climbed into the opening, up towards the beckoning barracks above.
Twenty minutes into the pipe climb Mortensen came face to face with the obstruction his sergeant had identified earlier. Requiring both hands for the climb Mortensen had ordered his men to abandon their lamps and simply scramble for the light. He could barely make out their forms with his eyes and their ghastly movements were lost on his nerve-insensitive skin, but as the illumination increased, so did his disgust. With every heave upwards more of the wretched things moved from their home, clinging to the pipe walls, and scuttled up his arm, nipping at his neck and cheeks with under-developed claws.
Their shells were soft and their pincers stubby, but they could still draw blood or take out an eyeball. His rising revulsion made him angry and Mortensen slammed his muscular back into the pipe wall, splitting open several larger specimens. This tactic proved ultimately fruitless, however as the swarm built around him and only dropped the thrashing bodies of half-crushed beasts down on his compatriots.
The strange behaviour of the spindly crustacean below, mulching up its prey and fountaining the regurgitated blood and guts up into the pipes, made more sense now that they had discovered the monster’s spawnlings up there. Food for the masses. Now the little bastards had thought that Mortensen and his storm-troopers were their next serving.
Thirty metres of sickening trauma later, the major cleared the swarm, which was good for all concerned. The downside was that he’d hit fresh piping, clean and rust-free, that resisted the persuasions of his cog-hammer. Using the filth that soaked his clothing and smeared his body, he spread himself agonisingly across the diameter of the pipe, knees pushing against one side of the smooth conduit, shoulder blades against the other – his body writhing and shimmying up in between. It was the final, punishing ordeal of their nightmare negotiation of the carrier’s bilge. With limbs aflame with exertion and only twelve dots of light for a target, the Redemption Corps pushed relentlessly up the pipe and back to the sanity of deck-level.
IV
As his filthy forehead touched the clean metal of what turned out to be a drain grating, Mortensen allowed himself a moment of silent relief. Looking up through the holes that had offered him those hopeful pinpricks of light, he could make out a barracks shower room. He smiled. Rask and Sass had been dead on target. His limited field of vision revealed no occupants and this was supported by the fact that the drain, which usually collected the overflow, wasn’t raining water down on them.
Bracing the cog-hammer’s claw against the grate it took little force to pluck off. Slid
ing it to one side, Mortensen clambered out of the drain, slipping and sliding momentarily on the clean shower-room floor. Taking a couple of low steps forward he scanned the length of the communal wash-room while the remainder of his team extricated themselves and drank deep the fresh air of the barracks.
Mortensen took them in, catching a glimpse of himself in a battered mirror. They all looked like hell. Their blood stripes and jackets were black and sodden and their flesh was painted with filth, unintentionally camouflaged, with only the whites of their eyes peering out from their soiled skin. Most of them, including Mortensen, still retained their berets, which seemed quaintly ridiculous bearing in mind what they had just been through. Vedette even fell to straightening hers as soon as she was out of the conduit and cleaning down the soles of her boots. Mortensen did likewise: they didn’t want to betray their presence with filthy footprints.
Extracting the length of a fat silencer from his holster pouch Mortensen screwed the barrel into the muzzle of his grubby autopistol. The storm-troopers followed suit with a sense of purpose at odds with their fatigue and taking a few more lungfuls of sweet air, the squad stalked their way through the showers and out through the locker room.
Holding the autopistols in both hands for greater control and accuracy the troopers padded through between lockers and benches, scanning the walkways for Guardsmen at rest or lying in ambush. In fact, Rask couldn’t have picked a better entry point: what kind of Guardsman would be pre-occupying himself with personal hygiene during a full-scale military revolt?
Out on the main corridor, the column of storm-troopers hugged the walls, making swift but deliberate progress into the starboard barracks. The ghostly echoes of distant firefights haunted the passageways and several times the soldiers had to throw themselves to the walls as Sarakota, on point, gave the signal. The sniper had exceptional hearing, giving the squad ample time to conceal themselves as ragged groups of Volscians ran across junctions, whooping like madmen and firing celebratory las-bolts off around them.
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 27