Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  Varl saw the keys lying on the floor. He picked them up and reached for Mabbon’s cuff.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘These fethers are all over the place. It’s fething murder outside. Shift your arse.’

  ‘I am not sure why you’re saving me,’ said Mabbon.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Varl. ‘Gaunt’s orders.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Come on,’ Varl said, stripping off the remaining cuff.

  ‘I am resigned to die, Sergeant Varl,’ Mabbon said, not moving. ‘I have been waiting for it. Longing for it, probably. All of this is entirely unnecessary. You’ve risked your life and wasted your time–’

  ‘Come. The feth. Along,’ said Varl.

  Mabbon looked at him.

  ‘Please, I… I’ve had enough,’ said Mabbon.

  ‘Yeah? Really?’ asked Varl. ‘Then why did you step in? You sat there like a dozy fether while all of that went down, then at the last moment, bang, in you come. Why do anything if you want to fething die?’

  Mabbon hesitated.

  ‘I don’t care about my life any more,’ he said. He looked at Varl. ‘But you were always decent to me, Sergeant Varl. Fair. One of the very few who were. My submission would have meant your death too.’

  ‘Oh, gee,’ said Varl. ‘I’m touched. I’m getting a nice warm feeling in my… no, that’s vomit. Move your fething arse now, Mabbon. We are leaving and it’s not going to be pretty.’

  They left the cell and headed down the dank blockway, Varl in the lead with his weapon ready. Tatters of gunfire continued to echo.

  ‘I don’t even know where we are,’ said Mabbon.

  ‘Camp Xenos,’ said Varl. ‘Used to be a civilian jail, but it got turned Prefectus pen during the occupation.’

  ‘Where is that?’ asked Mabbon.

  Varl glanced back at him with a frown.

  ‘Plade Parish,’ he said. ‘East Central Eltath.’

  Mabbon nodded. ‘They brought me in blindfold,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what Eltath looks like. Is it a pleasant city?’

  ‘Not right now,’ said Varl.

  Mabbon looked down at his hands. He flexed his fingers. ‘I have only known the inside of cells for a long time. I have not been without manacles or leg irons for years–’

  ‘Just keep it down and keep it tight,’ Varl hissed. They passed through a rolling cage divider into another gloomy bay. Two corpses lay on the stone floor surrounded by puddles of blood that looked as shiny and black as tar in the low light. Their poses were clumsy, as though they had been frozen in the middle of restless sleep. One of them was Garic, the leader of the execution watch.

  ‘Grab a weapon,’ said Varl. Mabbon didn’t.

  The prison was old, just a series of rockcrete blockhouses. Most of the paint-scabbed cell doors were open, and Mabbon saw weeds growing between the floor slabs.

  ‘Are there other prisoners?’ Mabbon asked.

  ‘No,’ said Varl. ‘They cleared the place to make it all special for you.’

  ‘Me and six guards?’

  ‘No, a garrison of thirty plus a six-man prisoner detail.’

  They approached an open yard twenty metres wide. The area was roofed in with chain mesh. Above the high wall, Mabbon could dimly see the stacks of a vapour mill blowing slow, silent columns of pale steam up into the night air.

  Varl made Mabbon wait before stepping out into the yard. Rawne appeared at a doorway on the far side.

  He gestured, Tanith hand-code.

  ‘Got him, colonel,’ Varl said, signing back.

  ‘Colonel?’ asked Mabbon.

  ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of shit been going on,’ said Varl.

  On the far side of the yard, Rawne edged a little way out of the doorway, lasrifle ready, peering up at the rooftops that overlooked the chain mesh layer. Trooper Nomis got in beside him, forming a V cover. They drew no immediate fire.

  Apparently satisfied, Rawne signalled to Varl.

  ‘With me, double time, now,’ Varl told Mabbon.

  They started out across the yard. Within seconds, las-bolts slammed down around them, steep plunging fire from above and behind. The shots dug scorch-holes in the yard’s rough ground, and left glowing, broken holes in the mesh above.

  Rawne and Nomis both opened up, squirting shots up at the roof, and pinging more molten holes through the mesh. Varl got his arm around Mabbon and bundled him towards the door they had just left by.

  Something landed hard on the mesh, making it jingle and undulate like a trampoline. The Qimurah had jumped from above. He turned, balanced in a low, splayed crouch on the wobbling mesh, and fired rapid, angled shots at the retreating Varl and Mabbon.

  Rawne and Nomis hailed fire at the exposed figure. Hit multiple times, the Qimurah tumbled forwards, rolling and bouncing on the metal net. It was tearing in places where his weight combined with the heat-tear damage of gunfire. He wasn’t dead. He was trying to regain his balance to shoot again.

  Rawne and Nomis stepped out into the open, training their fire at him. Spurts of neon fluid spattered down through the mesh.

  Brostin stomped out of the doorway behind Rawne. He was hefting up his flamer’s nozzle.

  ‘Feth him up!’ Rawne yelled. ‘We’ll be all day killing the fether at this rate!’

  Brostin’s flamer belched, and hosed a broad, yellow cone of flame up at the netting. The Qimurah was engulfed. They saw him thrash and twist, fire encasing him.

  The damaged security mesh tore with a series of sharp metal whip-cracks. Part of it flopped down, spilling the burning Qimurah down onto the yard.

  ‘All right,’ said Varl, dragging Mabbon back out of the doorway where they had almost fallen. ‘Brostin’s cooked his–’

  ‘No!’ Mabbon warned.

  The Qimurah got up again, flames still licking and swirling off his body. His clothes had burned off entirely. His flesh, from head to toe, was a bubbling mass of yellow ooze, blistering and dripping.

  He raised his lasrifle. His hands and the rifle were swathed in fire. He got off three shots. One hit Brostin, fusing and snapping the buckle of his tank pack and knocking him backwards. The other two hit Nomis in the face and throat and killed him outright. Then the intense heat made the Qimurah’s rifle jam.

  The Qimurah tossed it aside like a burning stick and began to limp towards Varl and Mabbon.

  ‘Shitty shit shit!’ Varl gasped, and started firing. Brostin was trying to wrestle with his now un-anchored tanks so he could let rip again.

  ‘Trooper Brostin! Tight squirt! Tight squirt!’ yelled Mabbon over Varl’s head. ‘Pull your flames tight!’

  Brostin frowned, but obediently screwed the nozzle choke as tight as it would go. Varl had no idea how Brostin wasn’t burning his hands on the metal of the flamer spout. Rawne had run forwards to help brace the heavy tanks swinging off Brostin’s shoulder.

  Brostin hosed again. His flamer made a much wilder, higher shriek. He shot a narrow, focused spear of nearly white-hot flame that struck the advancing Qimurah in the back.

  The Qimurah staggered, seared from behind by the intense surge. He re-combusted in a rush of furious light, the flesh on his back rippling away in blackened flakes like paint stripping under the tongue of a blow torch. He became a column of fire in which they could see his ribcage and long bones in silhouette as meat and muscle transmuted into billowing clouds of ash and droplets of burning fat.

  He collapsed, his remains making a heap like a pile of burning sticks. His skull, black as anthracite and steaming, rolled clear.

  Varl pulled Mabbon out of the doorway. Brostin put the tanks down, panting. Rawne crossed to Nomis to check for a pulse, but one look at the man’s wounds told him it was futile.

  ‘Nice trick,’ said Brostin to Mabbon.

  ‘Qimurah secrete mucus through their skin,’ said M
abbon. ‘It makes them highly resistant to energy fire and to strong levels of heat. Blanketing them in flame is ineffective, but even they can’t withstand a sustained, focused blast at the very highest temperature.’

  ‘Good to know,’ said Brostin, trying to cobble a make-do repair on his tank-straps. ‘Because they’re awful fethers.’

  ‘What did you call them?’ asked Rawne.

  ‘Qimurah,’ said Mabbon. ‘The Anarch’s chosen ones. Elite and very rare. Hello, colonel. I gather it’s colonel, now. On your way to making etogaur at this rate.’

  Rawne looked at him.

  ‘Not really the time or place for a catch up,’ he said. ‘Varl, get him under cover. There could be more of the fethers up there.’

  Varl led Mabbon by the arm towards the door Rawne had emerged from.

  ‘How many are they, colonel?’ Mabbon asked over his shoulder.

  ‘We’ve seen six,’ said Rawne.

  ‘And killed two,’ said Varl.

  ‘I am flattered they sent more than one,’ said Mabbon. ‘Colonel, there will be eight of them. They either come alone, or in squads of eight.’

  ‘Eight? You sure?’

  ‘Please, colonel,’ said Mabbon. ‘It’s the holy number. Only sixty-four Qimurah ever exist at one time. Eight times eight, you see? There will be eight. How many men are with you?’

  ‘One section,’ said Rawne.

  ‘One?’

  ‘Just the Suicide Kings. B Company, first section.’

  ‘Then, with respect, you are dead,’ said Mabbon. ‘Six remain. It is unprecedented for the Anarch to deploy eight Qimurah together in this day and age.’

  ‘You’re clearly high on his to-do list,’ said Rawne.

  ‘But the pheguth’s not the primary target, is he?’ said Varl.

  ‘What?’ asked Rawne.

  Varl shrugged. ‘Their primary target is gonna be the same as ours,’ he said. ‘Collecting Mabbon’s just a courtesy. We sent the bulk of our lot after the eagle stones. And if they sent eight here–’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Brostin. ‘Sixty-four minus… that’s fifty-six. Fifty-fething-six of these bastards?’

  ‘To field all the Qimurah on one world at one time,’ said Mabbon. He was clearly stunned. ‘That’s unheard of. That’s never happened. It–’

  ‘It means Pasha and the Ghosts are totally fethed,’ said Rawne. ‘Oysten! Get me the vox. Now!’

  From the blockhouse ahead, gunfire renewed in serious, frantic blurts.

  ‘Oysten!’ Rawne yelled. He looked at Brostin and Varl. ‘Close on him,’ he said, pointing at Mabbon. ‘We’re going to take him straight through and out. Staying here is not an option.’

  Lunny Obel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He shook his head.

  Finally, he said, ‘Fethed if I understand any of this.’

  He put another las-round into the already dead adept warden, just to be certain.

  He looked around.

  ‘How many?’ he called out. ‘How many did we lose?’

  ‘Eight,’ said Maggs quietly.

  ‘Nine,’ said Larkin. ‘Nine. Etzen’s over here behind the… the thing.’ He waved his hand wearily at one of the turbine hall’s control desks.

  Tona Criid rose from the body of the other adept warden. She had picked up the ornate stave he had, without warning, used to kill three of the Ghosts. She turned it over in her hand. Then she looked around the hall. Fyceline smoke was still hanging in the air. Zhukova had just managed to manually close the outer hatch, locking out a Mechanicus automata that was now standing outside, emptying its munition hoppers against the hatch plate. The impacts were making a noise like a machine-hammer, and flecks of green paint were scabbing and flying off the inside of the door. Behind that immediate thundering, Criid could hear other gunfire. The automata, a squat gun servitor, had been one of several that had started shooting in the arcade outside the Turbine Hall just seconds before the adept wardens had gone berserk. By the sound of it, there was now a full-scale rolling battle tearing through EM 14, as the companies of Tanith Ghosts who had entered the facility with Major Pasha tried to fend off the Cult Mechanicus personnel who had turned on them for no reason.

  Criid took a quick head count: Obel, Larkin, Zhukova, Mkhet, Boaz, Falkerin, Galashia, Cleb, Ifvan, Maggs, Lubba… all told thirty-one Ghosts from the two teams that she and Obel had assembled were left.

  ‘What do we do?’ Lubba asked.

  ‘We go in,’ said Obel. ‘We go in now, as per Pasha’s orders.’

  Criid nodded.

  ‘I think the situation has changed wildly since she issued that order,’ said Larkin. ‘The fething Mechanicus freaks are trying to end us.’

  ‘I don’t think they know what they’re trying to do,’ said Maggs. He gestured at the data screens that covered one wall of the imposing hall. They were rolling with broken codeware and half-formed runes. The hall’s lights were flickering, and the huge turbine didn’t sound as though it was running well. Even a tech-novice could tell that something catastrophic had swept through the Mechanicus facility.

  ‘They didn’t turn on us,’ Zhukova agreed. ‘They just all turned insane, like a switch being thrown.’

  ‘How could you tell?’ asked Larkin. ‘They’re freaks at the best of times.’

  ‘You could tell,’ said Zhukova. ‘They went feral. Central system corruption. Maybe part of the Archenemy attack. I don’t know. But if they’d simply decided to kill us, for whatever reason of logic, we’d be dead.’

  She looked at the corpses of the two adept wardens. It had taken the combined, desperate efforts of all of them to drop the wardens, and only then because the wardens had attacked without any regard for their own safety.

  ‘They went mad?’ Larkin asked. ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘Because they behaved like humans,’ said Criid. ‘Emotion. Frenzy. That’s not Mechanicus.’

  ‘Well,’ Larkin pouted. ‘Whatever, are we still going in?’

  ‘Orders still stand,’ said Criid. ‘Orders from Pasha, given to her by Gaunt. The objective is still essential, even if the game on the ground just turned bad.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ifvan. ‘But how do we get in? And how do we know where to go? Those murdering shit-heads were supposed to show us.’

  Zhukova pointed to an embossed metal sign bolted to the marble wall. It looked like a circuit map.

  ‘That seems to be a schematic of the vent systems,’ she said.

  ‘Make some sense of it,’ Criid ordered. ‘Everybody get kit-light. We’ll be moving fast because we’ve already lost time. Weapons, torches and ammo. And water. Check your reloads. Strip extras from the dead.’

  Several of the Ghosts looked at her.

  ‘They’d want us to have them,’ she said flatly. ‘They’d want us to use them. Lunny, see if you can raise Pasha. Or anyone.’

  Obel nodded, and started trying his micro-bead. Criid crossed to where Zhukova and Maggs were studying the metal sign.

  ‘Is that a plan?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Zhukova. ‘This is us here. Turbine Hall One.’ She pointed. ‘So access is that duct over there. It’s a bit of a maze, but if I’m reading this right, we can follow the ducts down to the main geotherm shaft here. If the bastards got in this way, then that’s the way they’re coming out. It’s the main spur to the city power system. So if we can get down here as quick as we can, we can block their route. Their only way out will be through us. That is, if I’m understanding this correctly.’

  ‘You’re our best hope,’ said Criid. ‘And our best chance for finding the way.’

  Zhukova nodded grimly. The scouts in both Criid and Obel’s team sections were amongst the dead, their flesh and bone demolished by the wardens’ grav pulses. Ornella Zhukova was the closest thing they had to a fully fledge
d scout.

  ‘Finding the way’s not going to be our problem,’ said Maggs. ‘Stopping the bastards is. Pasha and Kadle reckoned they were like bullet proof or some shit.’

  ‘We’ll just have to pack as much punch as we can,’ said Criid. ‘Flamers–’

  ‘And fire-retardant,’ said Maggs.

  ‘We’ve got Larkin and Okain, so we’ve got hotshots,’ said Criid. ‘We can bring the .20.’

  ‘Snipers and a crew-served? In a tunnel?’ Maggs said, mocking.

  ‘We’ve got grenades and tube charges,’ Criid went on firmly. She looked at the stave in her hand. ‘And we can improvise.’

  Maggs sighed. He looked at the sign. ‘If I had some paper, I could make a rubbing of this. Or a data-slate, we could copy it.’

  ‘All the data-slates have crashed too,’ said Criid. ‘Central link. The noospheric thing. And I don’t think the Mechanicus uses paper.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Zhukova, staring at the sign and moving her right index finger around her left palm as though she was sketching. ‘I can memorise it.’

  Criid, Lubba and Ifvan opened the duct cover. Automation was off, so they had to force the heavy bolts manually. They were sweating by the time they’d finished. It was work a power-assisted servitor would normally have performed. Lubba heaved the circular hatch open, and a wall of heat and gas fumes rolled out.

  It made them all step back.

  ‘Shit,’ said Ifvan. ‘That’s gonna kill us.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ said Criid.

  ‘Do we need masks?’ asked Lubba. ‘You know, rebreathers and stuff?’

  Criid looked around. There were plenty of equipment racks in the hall’s workspace, but no masks or rebreather hoods. The adepts of the Cult had no need of such things.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ she repeated. She peered into the duct, and shone her stablight. It was a circular metal tube three metres in diameter, the interior black with soot and mineral deposits. Every three metres, it was banded with a big iron reinforcement ring. The duct stretched as far as her beam could reach.

  ‘Let’s go!’ she called out.

  Obel was gathering his kit, still trying his bead.