No time to breathe easy, though.
It was almost that time in which stealth would have to be abandoned.
Almost, but not quite.
The door was a large, solid-looking disc of advanced t’au super-ceramics set deep in a thick, blast-proof wall. A seam ran down the middle where the door would split in two and retract into the frame on either side. There was no point trying to blow it or cut it. Too strong. She’d assumed from the start that success would come down to hacking. There was no other way she was getting in there.
She whispered to her team, the sound picked up by her throat mic and transmitted to their earpieces over the squad’s encrypted, short-rage vox-net. ‘This is it. Morant, take a look at that panel and tell me what you think.’
‘If I can pry off that housing, ma’am, and get access, then the module could–’
Grigolicz cut in. ‘If that thing is rigged with anti-tamper alarms, man…’
‘What would you do?’ said Ryce.
Grigolicz pointed to the ceiling.
Above them, the corridor was lined with pipes and cables, all threaded through solid ceramic support struts. Some of those lines carried power and data. Others as thick as a man pushed fresh air in and pulled stale air out. Nothing they could crawl through, but…
‘We wait up there,’ said Grigolicz. ‘When one of the blue bastards goes in or comes out, we drop, kill him and storm the room while the door is still open. Smoke or gas – lady’s choice.’ He looked at Copley. ‘Me? I’m for smoking it and shooting them all, but if you’d rather put them to sleep, ma’am…’
Copley processed her thoughts for all of three seconds. The door access panel’s casing might well have alarms attached. Fifty-fifty. Grig’s idea had better odds. ‘We gas them,’ she ordered. ‘I might want some of them alive at some point. Any fire caste, though, we kill outright. Clear?’
‘Crystal, ma’am,’ said Triskel, standing on her left. He patted one of the nerve-gas grenades on his webbing. ‘I knew these babies would come in handy.’
‘Up!’ said Copley. She leapt and grabbed one of the support struts above her, then hauled herself up and over the thickest bundle of pipes. The others, looking up, saw her disappear completely from view. ‘Ryce and Morant will make the kill together. One in front, one behind. No noise. Grig, you and Triskel drop with me and go in hard. Triskel covers the right, Grig, you’re on my left. I’m taking centre. The second we’re in the room, throw. A good spread. By the look of these outer walls, we’re probably talking about a large, split-level chamber. We’ve seen how the t’au like to configure their control rooms. Security will be the upper control banks. General operations will be the lower.’
‘And the door?’ asked Triskel.
‘Morant, I want you on that before the gas clears. The second you and Ryce are done with the kill, I want the body dragged in and the door locked up tight again. Use the module if you need to. Work fast. Once we’re all in, I want absolute control. Let’s make it so they’ll have to cut the door to get to us.’
As they listened to her, the four men hauled themselves up over the pipes and cables until they were perched there, hidden from the view of any that might pass below. Then they waited, bodyweight spread out as much as possible, looking down through gaps in the cabling, ears attuned for the first sound of footsteps or disengaging locks.
Copley thought of Talon Squad and the rest of her men waiting for the signal she had promised. Time was getting on. Every one of them knew just how much depended on her taking down the anti-air systems here.
The whole operation was so damned tenuous. A single mistake and they’d all be flying to their deaths. And after that? The t’au would know. They’d know that the ordo had located Epsilon. They’d know that Tychonis had been put on the Imperial map again. And they’d start locking the planet up. They might even move Epsilon off-world depending on her value to them, on how much she was giving them.
Just stay switched on, she told herself. Stay focused.
There was a click and hiss from below. The ceramic circle split in two. Yellow-white light spilled into the corridor. A shadow appeared, cast on the corridor floor by light from the control centre. A second later, the short, stocky earth caste tech to whom it belonged emerged, moving briskly.
Ryce and Morant didn’t need to be told.
They dropped with barely a sound, one in front of the t’au engineer, the other behind.
The alien’s eyes went wide for the briefest instant. Its mouth began to open, ready to cry out in alarm.
Too late.
From the xenos’ rear, Ryce’s arm snaked around to the front. He clamped his hand over the blue-skin’s mouth.
At that same moment, Triskel thrust his blade up and under the alien’s ribcage, cleaving the heart as Triskel yanked hard, upwards and backwards, on the handle of his blade.
The t’au shuddered in Ryce’s grip and went slack. Together, the two operators lowered the body to the floor. Barely three seconds. They hadn’t bent even halfway before Copley and the other two dropped and bolted through the open control centre door.
‘Gas,’ Copley barked.
At her voice, the aliens inside turned from their consoles.
Too late.
Three small cylindrical canisters rolled into the room, each coming to a stop a good four metres away from the others. Even before they stopped rolling, clouds of thick yellowish vapour began to hiss and billow out.
Copley watched along the barrel of her lasgun as shocked t’au began clutching at their throats. One after another, in rapid succession, they started dropping to the floor. Behind her, Triskel and Ryce had already dragged the earth caste tech’s body inside.
With the gas thickening, obscuring her view, Copley switched her goggles to infrared and ran to the upper level. There she found the prone forms of several fire warriors. She put a single lethal round through each of their skulls.
From down below, she heard the door hiss shut and the locking bolts engage. ‘That’s us locked up nice and tight, ma’am,’ Morant said, ‘unless they built in a bypass code. I’ll need time to find it.’
‘Get to it,’ she said. ‘Triskel, Ryce, hog-tie the blue-skins down there and gather them in the middle of the room. Tris, you’ll keep them covered in case they wake up.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Grig, get up here with me. Morant, you too once you’ve finished with the door. We’ll need the module up here if the control systems are all encrypted. Ryce, you’ll stay down there with Tris. Stay by the door. You hear any movement outside it, I want to know about it.’
‘Aye, ma’am.’
Orders given, Copley went straight to a central console and started working her way out from there, checking the main function of each. The control system for the installation’s defences had to be here. It had to be on one of these panels.
The gas had cleared now, pulled out by the room’s extractors. She switched back to standard optics.
It took around three full minutes for her to find the t’au cogitator station she was looking for.
She allowed herself a moment – a brief, bursting moment – of relief. Then she started tapping on the glowing holographic glyphs of the station’s runeboard. Menu after menu flashed up. She didn’t have time to read them all. She was looking for one particular string of glyphs. Just as she was starting to think she’d never find it, there it was.
‘Got you!’
Finally, after all the sneaking around, all the tension of trying to get here undetected, she had it. She tapped her way carefully through a series of prompts. Red glyphs flashed in front of her, asking for confirmation. Did she really want to power down the auto-defence systems?
She jabbed her finger on a small square of projected light.
Immediately, other monitors around her started displaying power-level data as ener
gy was cut off from the weapon emplacements on the walls and rooftops. More typing, and Copley had control of the locks on the facility’s main gates and security doors.
A failsafe query shimmered in the air before her.
One more glyph to press.
Her finger stabbed hololithic light.
Outside, set in the facility’s thick walls, locking mechanisms disengaged. From another console, Grigolicz called out to her. ‘That’s done it, ma’am. Lots of activity out there.’
It was inevitable. She’d known that the very moment she powered down the defences and unlocked the gates, the vipers’ nest would rouse.
‘Well done, gentlemen,’ she told her four-man squad. ‘This facility is now open to visitors.’
The Deathwatch would be watching from afar. They’d have seen the defences power down. Reaper flight would be inbound within minutes. Copley and her people had to keep control of the room until the birds were on site. Those anti-air batteries had to stay dead. Already, t’au forces would be racing towards the control room. She couldn’t let them retake it. She and her men had to dig in hard.
‘Don’t be too long, Deathwatch,’ she muttered as she turned from the console to oversee the defence of the control centre.
Three kilometres away, from the mouth of the high cave, Karras watched by the light of the planet’s two bluish-silver moons as the glow of targeting displays and status panels on the t’au defence turrets suddenly started winking off, one after another.
Awareness of the sudden shutdown spread from tower to tower, the fire caste soldiers becoming abruptly active, though not frantic. There was no obvious sign of an assaulting enemy, after all. It must be a technical issue. Then a Fireblade squad leader, broader and more muscular than the rest, burst out of a tower door and began barking and gesturing at the others. The t’au snapped into action, racing to the edge of the walls, raising the blue-skin equivalent of magnoculars to their eyes to scan the canyon.
‘She’s done it,’ Karras rasped on the task force channel. ‘Arcturus, lock and load. The turrets are down. We’re going in.’
‘About bloody time!’ Zeed replied.
Barely two minutes later, three heavily modified and unmarked black Stormravens screamed in along the canyon floor, kicking up great clouds of dust as they tore towards the objective, their metal bellies filled with Ordo Xenos stormtroopers and Deathwatch Space Marines.
No more hiding. No more waiting.
Time to kick down some doors.
Twenty-six
Canyon walls, blackened by the new night, whipped past Karras as he leaned out of the starboard-side hatch of Reaper One.
Up ahead, the walls and towers of Alel a Tarag stretched towards a sky now pricked with bright stars. Reaper flight was closing on those walls fast.
Archangel and her team had secured the Stormravens their approach window. Karras hoped she was still alive. Heavily armed response teams would be converging on her position in the control centre by now.
With the Stormravens roaring into visual range of the t’au on the high walls, a dense barrage of pulse rifle and burst cannon fire began blazing out, lighting up the night. Little threat at this range, but things would get nastier in a few seconds. The t’au would be scrambling to get heavier man-portable weapons out on the walls in lieu of their disabled batteries. The Stormravens were too high and too fast to worry about the current barrage, but they’d have to hover in an aerial kill zone just long enough to make their individual drops. They’d be highly vulnerable when stationary. Before that, the t’au had to be taught to keep their heads pulled in.
Fire warriors were streaming from their barracks into the installation’s central courtyard, their armour lit in sharp relief by the muzzle flashes of their companions already firing up at their uninvited guests.
A missile from Reaper Three streaked past Karras, so close he almost felt the wash of heat from it. He watched it arc in towards one of the deactivated defence emplacements, this one bristling with t’au seeker missiles. It struck dead centre. Seeker warheads detonated in a rippling series of secondary explosions that tore the entire top of the tower to pieces. Rubble rained down on those below. Fire warriors scrambled out of the way. Fireblade leaders yelled at them to stand firm, to keep firing. A dozen or so were crushed, others had bones shattered. They collapsed to the ground in agony. Their comrades pulled them into cover, calling out for earth caste medical techs.
So much fire was pouring into the air now as more and more infantry filled the open spaces below that it seemed the Stormravens were flying into a blizzard. Pulse rounds hit Reaper One’s wing just in front of Karras, smacking into the underside and leaving little black burn marks. But although those inside could feel the impacts, the assault craft shrugged them off, utterly undaunted, and swung around, levelling its nose-mounted twin-linked heavy-bolters at a cluster of fire warriors on the roof of the north cell block.
A familiar deep drumming sounded over the muffled rumble of stealthed jet engines. Explosive bolts poured down at the t’au, punching through armour and ripping into blue-grey flesh beneath. T’au blood sprayed dark patterns on moonlit rockcrete as dozens were gunned down.
In seconds the roof was cleared of all but smoking corpses.
‘North landing zone clear. Moving in for the drop,’ reported Ventius from the cockpit.
‘Watcher, you’re up!’ barked Karras.
‘I should be storming the main block with you,’ growled Rauth.
It was the second time he had protested the splitting up of the kill-team for the assault. It was the second time Karras denied him.
‘No! You will secure the north block, brother. We can’t be sure Epsilon is in the sub-levels. I need you to take this block and hold it. If she is here, it will be on you to get her to one of the Stormravens. Do not fail me.’
‘Witchblood,’ said Rauth, ‘I never fail.’
After unleashing a suppressing torrent of lethal fire at t’au on the nearest wall walk, Reaper One dipped into position, as low as possible. Rauth kicked out a zipline, ordered his fire-team of five stormtroopers to line up ready for the drop, then stepped out into open space.
The stormtroopers clipped themselves to the zipline and dropped after him, each a study in cool efficiency, not speaking, no hesitation, resp-masked faces unreadable.
Having watched the last of them drop from across the hold, Karras turned and looked down from his side hatch at the rooftop below. He watched as Rauth stormed towards the stairway access door, the stormtroopers chasing hard to close ranks on him. At a run, they descended into the section of the prison reserved for human inmates. Karras tested his witchsight, trying to send his astral vision down into the block. He could dimly sense human souls there, but the barrier to his power, whatever it was, resisted his attempts to project his awareness out of his body. Here, this close to its source, he was locked inside himself.
A fresh fusillade of glowing plasma and pulse rounds stabbed through the air in Reaper One’s direction. Rounds struck the thick plate of the closed assault ramp at the front of the craft. The Stormraven shuddered.
Ventius’ voice was tense. ‘Taking heavy fire from the walls, Talon Alpha. Need to move!’
‘Clear the central block rooftop and get me in,’ replied Karras. ‘Missiles at your discretion.’
‘There may be structural damage. Risk of collapsing the only access.’
‘Take it. Archangel is in there. If she’s still alive, she’s going to need support fast. The longer she holds the main control centre, the better our chances. Get me in.’
‘M’lord.’
The gunship’s nose swung twenty degrees right, giving Karras a view down into the busy courtyard where fire caste officers and sergeants were trying to marshal their troops. Some were directing fire up towards Reaper One. Glowing rounds whipped past Karras as he watched. Other fire cadres w
ere running for vators to take them up to the wall walks, hoping to pour additional fire on the assaulting aircraft from there. Earth caste techs were working frantically at the disabled turrets, trying to bring them back online.
Karras cursed. The t’au engineers might find a way to override Copley’s hack. If those anti-air batteries came back online, no one was getting out of here alive. Not by air.
There was a great roar to his left. He watched Reaper Three swing in from about two hundred metres away, angling its nose at the upper levels of the south cell block. Front-mounted heavy-bolters blazed. The muzzle flash lit the whole roof. The t’au forces there were chewed apart, turned to dark smears and shattered plate. Some were hit close to the roof’s edge. They tumbled backwards, out into the air, their bodies plummeting to the ground below.
A massacre.
The Stormravens were shadows of death in the night, cutting down xenos like wheat before scythes.
Suddenly, blinding streams of blue light lanced up towards Reaper Three, missing by what must have been centimetres.
Karras tracked the trajectory back to its source and saw two Crisis Battlesuits – XV8s – stalking out of the armoury doors on the south-west side of the base, their massive rail rifles aimed at the sky.
Their strange gait, both machine-like and alien at the same time, immediately brought back memories from the sensorium feeds at Damaroth and the vid-picts he had studied on the Saint Nevarre.
Highly mobile and with serious hardware – he had seen how deadly the blue-skin battlesuits could be.
‘Reaper Three,’ Karras voxed over to the other aircraft, ‘make your drop and pull back. You’re drawing heavy fire. Two XV8s down below.’
‘I see them, Talon Alpha!’
As the pilot swung his craft over the lip of the south block, the battlesuits fired upwards again, this time striking the corner of the building. Reaper Three had shifted out of their line of sight just in time. Where the hyper-accelerated rounds struck the prison block walls they erased the reinforced rockcrete completely.
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