by Darius Hinks
Chapter Ten
‘Get down those steps,’ hissed Llourens, as Eskol looked back at her. He was crouching at the foot of a stairwell, clutching his lasrifle and staring up into the endless glare of the mine. Behind Llourens were the rest of the Sabine Guard. They were less than a hundred men, but this was everything that remained of the garrison. Not one of them had challenged her right to command; not one had refused to muster. To a man, the Grave Rats were ready to fight. All they had needed was a leader. She was determined not to fail them.
‘Lord Mephiston’s orders were simple,’ she said, waving her gun at the stairs. ‘We get to the gates of Infernum Primary, make a commotion, then leave with as much noise as possible.’
Eskol nodded, but made no sign of moving.
‘I told you I’d be happy to go first,’ she said, grabbing him by the arm.
Eskol looked back down the tunnel and winked at Ghadd.
‘I just thought you might want to hold me one last time,’ he said.
Llourens let go of him with a curse.
Eskol saluted with a grin and climbed slowly down the first rungs of the stairwell, his gun raised. He disappeared from view but a few seconds later he gave a low whistle to signal the all clear.
Llourens followed with Ghadd and the rest of the Guardsmen. They were accompanied by Varus and two other ogryns, all cradling their massive drill guns. The abhumans kept to the rear of the group, conscious of the Guardsmen’s wary glances as they squeezed their bulky frames down the stairs.
‘They make my skin crawl,’ said Ghadd, noticing that Llourens was watching the ogryns. ‘I wish we could have done this alone.’
Llourens shook her head. ‘You know why Mephiston sent them. Only the blistermen understand those mining charges.’
Ghadd grimaced. ‘They aren’t human.’
Llourens shrugged. ‘Elias is human. I’m starting to think the word is overrated. Elias would never have taken us into that cathedrum but the Blood Angels did. And are they human? I’m not sure. And if they had never arrived and spoken to the blistermen, we would know nothing of these bombs. We would be back at the barracks, snivelling into a bottle like Elias, waiting to die.’
Ghadd said nothing, but the look of distaste remained on his face as the ogryns followed them into the next chamber.
There was no sign of life so they continued, climbing down through dozens of levels in the same way, checking each gallery for signs of recent movement and then moving on.
The next chamber was centred around a mineshaft. It was little more than a tail of broken chains, hanging down through a bottomless hole.
‘I didn’t think any shafts came down this far,’ said Ghadd as they all gathered round the hole.
There was a vague rattling sound echoing through the shadows.
‘Is that a lift?’ asked Eskol, peering up into the lights glimmering further up the shaft.
Llourens shook her head. ‘The lifts stopped working centuries ago.’
‘Something is coming,’ said Ghadd, unslinging his lasrifle.
Varus and the other ogryns strode through the room, causing a chorus of muttered oaths as they shoved the Guardsmen back the way they had come. Some of the Guardsmen drew weapons and started yelling.
‘What the hell are they doing?’ cried Ghadd, turning his gun on the ogryns.
‘Gas,’ said Varus, barging his way towards Llourens.
‘Gas?’ Llourens shook her head. Then she held up a warning hand and glared at her men. ‘Lower those guns, damn you. There are explosives in here.’
Two of the ogryns continued shoving the soldiers back towards the door, and more of the Guardsmen drew guns, filling the room with a roar of curses and threats.
Varus barged his way to Llourens. ‘Gas from the surface,’ he growled.
Llourens paled as she finally understood.
‘Back!’ she cried. ‘It’s a dust storm! Coming down the shaft!’
The Guardsmen swarmed towards the exit, just as the noise became a deafening howl. Light and sound ripped down the shaft, filling the chamber with an explosion of irradiated rubble.
Llourens was nearest to the lift shaft and the blast hurled her from her feet, sending her rolling across the floor. Heat enveloped her as shockwaves rocked through the room. The glare became unbearable, knifing through the lenses of her mask and searing into her brain. Then a shadow fell over her and the heat faded. The noise was still there, but the pain was more bearable. A stench of burning meat filled the air.
After a few seconds, the light and noise ceased and Llourens wiped the dust from her goggles.
Varus was hunched over her. He had formed himself into a living shield to protect her from the blast. The smell of charred flesh was coming from his broad, smouldering back; he trembled and muttered as embers drifted up from his skin.
As the din faded, the other Guardsmen walked back towards her, staring in shock at the ogryn.
She crawled out from beneath his massive frame and gasped. His back had been destroyed, scorched away, leaving his spine clearly visible, a gleaming white line running through a mass of burned skin and blackened, exposed muscles. The other two ogryns rushed forwards but stopped a few feet away, hesitating to touch Varus, their faces twisted in grief.
Varus lowered himself slowly onto the floor, blood rushing quickly from his ruined back. He managed to turn his head on one side and look up at Llourens. His face was beaded with sweat and there was blood flowing from his mouth.
‘Kill them,’ he said, his voice little more than a choking sound. Then he closed his eyes and lay still. After a few seconds his breathing ceased.
Llourens and the other Guardsmen stared at the corpse in shock.
‘He saved you,’ muttered Ghadd.
The humans in the chamber all lowered their guns as they turned to look at the two remaining ogryns.
Llourens felt a rush of shame as she considered everything she had believed about the blistermen. The shame vanished as quickly as it came, replaced with a fierce determination.
She knelt next to the corpse and placed her hand on the charred, mutant skin. ‘We will not let you down,’ she whispered.
As they reached the levels beneath the mines, the Morsusian heat faded, replaced with a damp, bone-gnawing chill that formed frost on the burned skin of the abhumans. The phosphorescence that illuminated the rest of the mine started to fade, replaced by an impenetrable, green-tinged pall.
Soon, Llourens and the Guardsmen were forced to trigger lumens on their gun barrels, filling the night-black stairwell with thin shafts of light, picking out their way through the broken steps and rusted mine struts.
After nearly an hour of this, Llourens noticed the walls were much smoother than the ones above had been. It looked like polished basalt, but there was something moving in it. She stopped for a moment and ran her finger over the stone, removing a layer of soot. There were faint green lines beneath the surface, pulsing with heatless energy. The shapes were clearly not natural. It looked like a circuit board – grid lines and intersections, shimmering beneath her fingertips.
‘They made this place,’ she whispered.
Eskol paused and looked back at her, his brutish face underlit by the lumen on his gun. ‘We’re in the crypts.’ He grimaced behind his mask. ‘I can feel how old everything is here, can you? I can feel it in my chest. It’s like crawling into a grave.’
She nodded. The cold was pervasive. And strange. It felt like a spiritual chill, locking around her brain, filling her with dread.
‘Makes a change from slowly burning to death,’ said Eskol, shrugging.
His dry tone caught her off guard and she laughed, loud, then grimaced as the sound echoed up and down the stairwell, seeming to grow louder rather than fading.
Eskol paused for a moment, shining his lumen back down the stairwell, looking
for signs of movement. There were none, so he continued.
After passing through a few more levels, the steps finally came to an end in a broad, hexagonal passageway. Like the chambers above, it was built of smooth, jet black stone, polished to a sheen and flickering with emerald veins.
As they gathered at the foot of the stairs, crowding the passageway with their bulky rad-suits and weaponry, Llourens noticed that the green circuits were not the only sources of light. She nodded down the passageway. There was a warm, golden light licking across the walls in the distance.
‘Looks like we’re getting close to something,’ she said.
Eskol and Ghadd stared back at her from behind their filthy masks, their eyes gleaming with a mixture of fear and eagerness.
Llourens understood. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Bringing the fight to them for a change.’
Ghadd nodded, gripping his lasrifle a little tighter. ‘After a lifetime on the run, we finally get to be the aggressor.’ He shrugged. ‘Admittedly, we’ll only have a few minutes to enjoy it before they slaughter us.’
‘No one is getting slaughtered. The lord of the Blood Angels wants us to cause a commotion and then get the hell out. There’s no need for heroics. We take a few of them down, make a lot of noise, and then withdraw. If they try to follow us back up that stairwell they will be two-abreast at most. We can slow them down until we get back to the upper levels.’
‘And what then?’ asked Eskol, looming over her. ‘What about when we reach the open galleries back in the mine? They won’t be two-abreast then.’
‘When we get back to the mines,’ she replied, ‘we can run rings around them. We know those tunnels and shafts far better than the ancients.’
‘She’s right,’ said Ghadd. He tapped his gun. ‘And we can teach them how to dance while we’re at it.’
‘But remember,’ said Llourens, raising her voice slightly and looking back at all the other troopers. ‘Don’t lead a host of ancients to the Kysloth barracks. Or the blistermen’s cathedrum. Once we’re back in the areas of the mine we know, scatter and head for anywhere but home. Spend a whole day hiding if you need to, but make sure you are not being followed before you think about going home. Understood?’
Everyone nodded.
She jogged down the passageway, with Guardsmen and the ogryns right behind her. After a hundred feet or so, they reached a T-junction. The left passage led away into darkness, but the right one was the source of the light. It went a few feet and then broadened into some wide steps. This was very different from the stairwell they had just clambered down – here the steps were grand and impressive, opening out as they descended, and even from the passageway above, Llourens could see that the chamber below was a vast hall, filled with drifting fumes. Through the fumes, in the far distance, she could make out the silhouettes of giant, torch-lit statues, as tall as the domes of the ogryn cathedrum.
Carefully, waving for the others to follow, she descended the steps, revealing the hall in more detail. It was too vast for her to make out the ceiling but there were clusters of lights glittering in the smoke. This must be what it’s like to walk under the stars, she thought, impressed by the grandeur of the scene, despite knowing who had built it. The hall was rectangular and lined with the colossal statues she had glimpsed from the top of the steps. She realised she must be walking down the arms of one of them.
She scoured the floor, hundreds of feet below, through her gun scope. ‘No sign of ancients,’ she whispered. Her voice echoed strangely through the cavernous space and she grimaced, signalling for a halt.
There was still no sign of the enemy, so she carried on, crouching low and keeping to the darkest shadows at the side of the steps. The steps ended at a wide balcony, as broad as a major transitway and still hundreds of feet above the floor of the hall. It ran the whole length of the chamber, and placed at regular intervals along its length were large copper braziers – the source of the golden light that had led them to the hall. Plumes of smoke billowed up from them, heavy with incense, making a shifting roof over the hall below.
Llourens had no idea which way to go next. Both ends of the hall were too distant and smoke-shrouded to see clearly. She looked through her gun scope, but that only made matters worse.
‘Eskol,’ she whispered, trying to speak even more quietly this time.
He pulled out a scanner and tapped the screen, nodding in the direction of the nearest brazier. Llourens nodded back and set off in that direction, keeping as far from the edge of the balcony as possible.
As they neared the brazier she noticed that, beneath the scent of incense, there was another smell in the smoke – a thick, acrid tang that caught at the back of her throat. She had to struggle not to cough as she reached the copper bowl. It was as tall as she was and the heat it gave off was intense. She could not get very close, but even from a dozen feet away she could see what the ancients had used for fuel. The brazier was crammed with human corpses. Most had burned down to little more than charred skeletons, but some still wore their skin, bubbling and curling in the heat.
Llourens stumbled to a halt, horrified. She could see scraps of Imperial uniforms in the blaze. These were her fellow soldiers. They would have been people she knew.
As the others reached the brazier they halted, the colour draining from their faces.
‘Xenos bastards,’ muttered Eskol as he approached. He glared into the fumes beyond the brazier.
Llourens whispered a prayer for her fallen kin, then hurried past the brazier, struggling not to vomit as she inhaled the smoke.
Once she had passed beyond the blaze, Llourens saw the rest of the hall more clearly. The main entrance to the ancients’ fortress was ahead of them. It was a single, enormous door, as tall as the rest of the hall. The design of the door was like nothing Llourens had seen in Imperial architecture. It was built in the shape of an isosceles triangle, with the three corners rounded off to a bevel, and it was made from the same, gleaming black stone as the rest of the hall. In its centre there was an emerald-coloured gemstone, as big as a tank and alive with inner fire, casting a sinister green light across the billowing smoke clouds. A symbol had been engraved into the stone around the gemstone. It was a circle, radiating five lines from its bottom half and topped by a bowl-shaped half-circle. Llourens had seen the symbol countless times before, on the ancients’ chest-plates, but after seeing the contents of the brazier it filled her with more rage than ever before.
‘Soon,’ she muttered, trembling with suppressed violence. She waved the others on, and after another long sprint they arrived, breathless, at the door. This close, they could hear the hum of the circuitry embedded in the stone. The balcony ended at the wall beside the frame of the door, about halfway up its length.
Llourens leant out over the railing, into the clouds below. There was still no sign of any sentries, so she gave the signal to descend. They used ropes and grappling hooks to abseil slowly down the sheer walls of the hall. It took nearly fifteen minutes, the distance was so great, but finally they gathered at the foot of the huge door and unclasped their ropes.
‘Who has the charge?’ she whispered, glancing back at the remaining ogryns.
One of them stepped forwards with an ammo crate large enough to crush a normal man. The ogryn carried it as though it were weightless and held it out to her.
She laughed and shook her head. ‘You’ll need to put it in place.’
The creature nodded, placed it carefully on the floor and looked back at the other ogryns. One of them came forwards and handed over a small device, similar to an auspex but with no screen, just a mass of dials.
Llourens was about to speak when a resounding hammer-blow clang echoed down the chamber. They all backed away and looked up at the door, expecting to see it open, but there was no movement.
There was another boom of metal on metal, and this time Llourens reali
sed it came from behind them. Ghadd walked into the middle of the hall, staring into the smoke.
‘Everybody back,’ snapped Llourens, seeing movement in the smoke at the other end of the hall. They all hurried into the shadows.
Gradually, flashes of silver began to punctuate the fumes. As Llourens and the others watched in dismay, a vast phalanx of necron warriors marched into view. Llourens had never seen so many xenos in one place. Every form of ancient she could recall was there, from the mindless, skeleton-like foot soldiers to the hulking, heavily armoured elite troops, and behind the infantry came a terrifying array of war machines, all clad in ebon plate and gleaming with the same emerald lighting that hummed through the door.
‘They must have finished their manoeuvres on the surface,’ said Eskol.
‘What do we do now?’ whispered Ghadd.
‘Wasn’t our job to give the Blood Angels fewer ancients to fight?’ asked Eskol. ‘Now they’ll be facing an army.’ He looked at the ogryn beside him, hunched next to the ammo crate. ‘Should we blow the doors quickly? We could wipe out half of those bastards in one go.’
Llourens hesitated, looking pained.
Eskol shook his head. ‘What’s the problem? We blow the doors and kill a load of ancients into the bargain. It just makes the deal all the sweeter.’
‘You idiot,’ said Ghadd, looking from Eskol to Llourens, his expression grim. ‘I know what she’s thinking.’
‘What?’ asked Eskol, growing annoyed. ‘We blow the doors as planned, surely.’
The ogryn crouched by the ammo crate looked up at Eskol, waiting for an order.
Llourens licked her lips and closed her eyes for a second. Then she looked at Eskol. ‘Yes, we can blow the doors. But once we do, we’ll have no way of getting back to the stairwell.’
Recognition dawned on Eskol’s face.
‘We might kill the front ranks,’ said Ghadd. ‘But the rest of them will be between us and our escape.’
Eskol looked back up at the distant balcony. ‘We could–’
‘We’d never make it,’ said Llourens, her voice flat. ‘They’d pick us off before we climbed ten feet.’