by Dan Abnett
They reached a vertical communications shaft, down the centre of which ran a great wrought-iron spiral staircase. The air was damp and smelled of wet brick and the sea. Shock damage was evident here too, and the bolts securing the metal stairway and its adjoining walkways to the shaft-sides had sheared off or snapped. The entire metal structure, hundreds of tonnes of it filling the shaft, creaked uneasily with each shuddering impact from the guns of the distant Basilisks.
The Ghosts stepped across the metal landing of the stair-coil to where the tunnel resumed beyond. It squealed and yelped with every step, sometimes threatening to tilt or fall.
Caill and Flaven were last across. A metal bolt-end the size of a man’s forearm rang off the gantry, just missing Caill. It had come loose far above.
“Move!” yelled Caffran.
With a protesting, non-vocal scream, the staircase collapsed, tearing itself apart and rattling away down into the black depths of the bottomless shaft. Where larger parts of the structure remained intact — a few turns of steps laced together, a long section of handrail, a series of stanchion poles — they fell with heavy fury, raking sparks and hideous shrieks from the shaft walls.
Empty, the stairs fallen away, the brick shaft seemed immense, uncrossable.
Domor looked back at the tunnel they had come along, out of reach now across the gulf. “No going back now…” he muttered.
“Good thing that’s not the way we’re going,” Caffran replied, pointing into the darkness to come with the barrel of his lasgun.
Wide cisterns opened up around them. The cement floors were painted with glossy green paint and the wall bricks matt white. The walls tapered upwards so that the ceiling was narrower than the floor, and the whole tunnel turned a few degrees to the left. The entire passageway was following both the line and the profile of the wall it ran through. Grilled lighting panels, glowing phosphorescent white, hung at intervals from the roof. They looked like a giant stream of tracer rounds, arcing off down the line of the tunnel, frozen in time.
Caffran’s Ghosts — and indeed now they were “his” Ghosts, bonding to him as leader now that they were cut off from outside without asking or deciding — haunted the long passageways, hugging the walls in the fierce white glow of the lights. Every sixty metres, tunnels bisected the main route on the inland side: deep, wide throats of brick and concrete that sloped downwards. Mkendrik thought they might be drainage channels, but if that was true, the size alarmed Caffran. They were big enough to take a man walking upright and just as broad. If that kind of liquid quantity flooded these tunnels from time to time…
Domor believed the channels to be for personnel movement, or for running carts of ammo and supplies up to the emplacements buried in the sides and along the top of the great sea wall. But they’d seen no vertical cargo shafts for munitions lifting, and Caffran doubted sheer manpower could roll enough shells up the sloping channels without mechanical assistance.
And they had met no one, not a trace of the Kith soldiery, not even a corpse.
“They’re all fully engaged, deploying on the defences,” Caill suggested.
Caffran thought it a fair bet. “We wanted to get inside, I figure we might get further than we expected.” They had just reached the latest of the mysterious sloping shafts. Caffran nodded to it. “It leads into the heart of the island itself. Let’s try it.”
“And then what?” Bude asked.
“Then?”
“I mean, what’s your plan, Caff?”
Caffran paused. Getting in, that had been everything. Now… “We’re inside,” he began, “no one’s got this far.”
Bude and others nodded. “But what then?” Flaven asked.
Again, Caffran was lost for words. “We… we… we see how far we can get. Inside.”
None demurred. Lighting in the sloped tunnel was built into the wall and hidden behind transparent baffles. The concrete floor had a mesh grill set into it, providing greater purchase for walking.
They moved in formation. Half a kilometre, by Domor’s gyro-compass. A kilometre. The air became damp-cold. The tunnel began to level out. The distant thump and shudder of the sea-wall assault dimmed behind them.
They heard the humming before they saw the end of the tunnel. A low, ululating throb that bristled the air. It reminded Caffran of the heavy fruit-wasps in the nal-forests of Tanith, crossing glades on iridescent wings to bury their long ovipositors into soft bark in search of nal-grubs to use as living kindergartens.
Adare, at the head of the pack with Mkallun, called out. The tunnel was sealed fifty metres ahead by a vast metal hatchway. A thick ironwork seal surrounded a man-sized hatch closed with lever-latches and greased hydraulic hinges. The door and its frame were painted matt green with rust-proof paint, all except the clean steel inner rods of the extended hydraulics, which glittered with filmy brown oils.
The throbbing was coming from the far side of the hatch.
Adare checked the hatch seals, but they were wound tightly shut and locked, it seemed, from the other side. Caffran shouldered his way forward and reached out a hand to the metal barrier. It was wet-cold but it tingled, vibrating gently with the reverberations behind it.
“How do we get through?” Caffran murmured.
“Do we want to get through?” Bude returned.
Domor knelt down and started to open the clasps of his sweeper pack. Caffran noticed with some concern that Domor was regularly pausing to fidget and scratch at his eyes now, as if irritated by persistent flies. Domor pulled the head of the sweeper broom out of the pack, removed the soft cloth bag it was wrapped in, and carried it to the wall with his set unit and his headphones. He plugged the headphones and the sweeper head into the unit and switched it on, listening patiently to the clicking returns in his ear-pieces as he moved the flat pad of the sweeper head across the metal door surround. Three or four times he stopped, went back to check, and then marked the green painted metal with a graphite cross, using a stick he kept in his bicep pocket.
Domor turned back to Caffran, pulling his headphones back down around his neck. “The main internal lock for the hatch is buried inside the frame. Those crosses mark the threads of the gears.”
Caffran let Tokar do the honours. He put a point-blank las round through each of the crosses, leaving round puncture holes with sharp metal edges.
The latches and locks spun free easily now their mechanisms were ruined. Adare and Haven hauled the green hatch open and the Ghosts crept forward into a blue, gloomy realm of smoke.
Caffran knew they were emerging on the land side of the great sea wall, deep in the refinery complex of Oskray Island. They were exiting onto a lattice walkway of scrubbed iron that jutted out of the fastness wall and crossed a gulf whose depths he had no way of judging. Above, below and around, everything was smoke. The walkway was five metres wide, with a low handrail, and reached across forty metres to a tower that rose skeletally out of the haze.
The air smelled of cordite and salt. It was cold and clammy suddenly.
Caffran scanned around. Behind them, the way they had come, he was just able to make out the back of the vast sea wall rising up, lost in the fog. The throbbing and pulsing was much louder now and Caffran knew it must be coming from the fuel-mills, the promethium pumps and the other working systems of the vast refinery.
Domor was next to him, prying into the smoke with his prosthetic eyes. The focus rings were buzzing now, and he strained with them. Thick, discoloured tears trickled down his stubbled cheeks. The salt water had really done its devious work.
“This smoke is backwash from the enemy guns along the wall top,” Domor said. “The sea air and the downdraft of our ships is blowing it back over the wall and it’s pooling here in the inner basin of the refinery.”
All the better for them to move unseen, thought Caffran, but… to where? Adrenaline had brought them so far. Where was the plan?
They were nearly at the tower, a vast red-painted skeletal needle of girders with dull flash
ing lamps at the corners. Other walkways stretched away from it into the soupy air. Caffran was beginning to make sense of the place, and picked out other catwalks and walkways above, below and parallel to the one the Ghosts used, through the billowing smoke.
Laser fire peppered down at them suddenly, rebounding from the iron walkway or punching through it. Bude stumbled as a round hit him in the top of the left shoulder and exited through his right hip. Caffran knew he was dead, but he tried desperately to get to him nevertheless. Bude leaned on the rail for a moment, upright, then pitched over and fell away into the smoke below silently.
There were dark shapes on a catwalk forty metres above and to the left of them. More zinging fire spat down through the clouds. The Ghosts opened up in return, pasting shots up into the roof of the smoke. A body fell past them. Mkendrik swivelled his flamer and vomited huge curls of fire up at the enemy position. The catwalk above them collapsed and spilled four fire-streaming comets down into the chasm: burning, screaming, flailing human forms.
Caffran led the way to the tower at a run and entered a grilled-off section that faced an open-sided elevator car. Caill and Mkallun joined him first, the others close on their heels. A steep stairwell of open-backed mesh steps led both down and up the tower alongside the open elevator shaft.
More las-fire, and stub rounds, started spanking off the ironwork and tinging around the metal cage of the tower.
“Which way?” bellowed Caill.
“Up!” Caffran decided.
“Where’s the sense in that? We’ll be trapped like rats at the top of the tower with nowhere to run!”
“No,” Caffran countered, trying desperately to think.
He was trying to bring back the briefing. The commissar had shown them aerial views of the Oskray facility, concentrating on the sea wall area they were meant to assault. He tried to picture the other, inner derrick areas he had glimpsed. Towers, dozens of them, just like the one on which they stood, bridging to each other at various levels, including some higher than the sea wall. If that was true — if the memory was true — they could cross to other towers higher up as well as lower down.
“Trust me,” Caffran said and started up the stairs, blasting las rounds over the side at distant walkways where muzzles flashed in their direction.
They ascended.
Caffran fought the panic in his mind. The way in, the chance to sneak inside, had seemed a good plan, a brave plan, but now they were here, eight men alone in a city of the enemy, he had no idea what they had even expected to be able to achieve. There was no plan, not even the raw materials for a plan. He dreaded any of the others asking him to explain their purpose here.
Tire from below; three or four storeys down, squads of Kith soldiery were moving up the tower, blasting upwards. Las-rounds popped and thumped through the mesh steps around them. Mkallun lost the front of his foot and toppled, screaming in pain. Adare, just a few steps below him, arrested his fall and hauled the whimpering man up with him. The others blasted downwards and an odd vertical firefight began, laser salvos spitting up and down the tower structure. Mkendrik, last of the ascending Ghosts, hosed the stairs below them with his flamer and belching clouds of fire drizzled down through the open metal edifice and torched the closest of the pursuers.
Six more flights up, a bridging walkway opened to their left, crossing the smoky chasm to another tower. There seemed to be no one on the other structure, and Caffran gestured the men across, stopping to help Adare with Mkallun. Adare grabbed Caffran’s shoulder and pointed to the swiftly ascending elevator in the tower they were leaving. It was packed with enemy troopers, climbing far faster than those on the stairs. Caffran sent Adare hobbling onwards with Mkallun, then pulled a pair of tube-charges from his pack. He set short fuses and rolled them along the bridge onto the tower deck, then ran to join the others.
The blast tore through the tower assembly, blowing out stanchions and main-supports all around. With a deafening howl, the tower crumpled and collapsed, hundreds of metres of steeple section from above sliding down with almost comical slowness, splintering the body of the tower below. The packed elevator car fell like a stone. Power servos tore out and exploded. Secondary explosions rippled out into the gloom.
The collapse tore away the bridge they had just crossed by, and ripped the bridge supports out of their side of the crossing, shearing metal and girders around them, shaking the other tower. Heavier impacts shook them as bridges higher up tore loose with the descending tumult and came slamming or dragging down the length of their tower.
From below, as the tower mass crashed to the ground, other explosions fluttered out as fuel stores and pumps detonated under the impact. Plumes of fire gusted around them.
“What the Feth have you done?” bellowed Flaven.
Caffran wasn’t sure. In desperation, he hadn’t really thought through the consequences of mining the tower. One simple thing occurred to him.
“I’ve bought us some time,” he whispered.
Now they moved downwards, partly because down seemed to make sense, and partly because none of them trusted the stability of the tower now that its neighbour had been torn so brutally away. They descended into thicker, blacker smoke. Bright cinders floated on the wind and there was a deep, rank smell of burning fuel and spilt promethium. Even from here, they knew the collapsing tower had done vast damage to the plant.
Down, thought Caffran. Still he had no plan he could speak of, but down seemed to be instinctively right. What could they do here except perhaps some small, specific act? Like… take out the Kith’s command cadre.
He laughed to himself as he thought the words. Bold, ridiculous words. As if they could even find Sholen Skara and his seniors in an island-hive this size. But it was a notion worth hanging on to.
A few hundred metres from the ground, he instructed his men to work stealthily, to do what the Ghosts did best. They blackened their skin with soot from the handrails, and pulled down their camo-cloaks, melting into the darkness of the smoke and the blackened tower-scaffold.
Below them, around the base of the tower, twisted, burning wreckage lay scattered five hundred metres in every direction Flames leapt from small lakes of petroleum and mineral gels The debris from the fallen tower, some of it great chunks of tower-section intact and twisted on the concrete, crushed beneath it smaller buildings and storage blocks, cranes and other rig service vehicles. Charred bodies lay crumpled or burst here and there. They passed at least one section of walkway dangling from their tower like a loose flap, clanking as it swung back and forth against the girders. Reedy klaxons barked through the smoke like the sound of yapping guard dogs.
They strode out from the base of the tower into the wreckage in fire-team formation, Caffran and Tokar at point. Domor supported the hopping Mkallun; Caffran wasn’t going to leave him behind.
Spools of chain, frayed wire hawsers, splashes of oil and metal litter covered the concourse. Caffran skirted around a pair of Kith corpses, men who had clung together as they fell and been mangled into one hideous ruin by the ground.
Sending Mkendrik ahead in his place, Caffran dropped back to check on Domor and Mkallun. A hefty shot of analgesic had left Mkallun vacant, lolling and useless. Domor was blind. The iris shutters on his bionic implants had finally failed and shut tight. Filmy fluid leaked around the focussing rings and wept down his face. It hurt Caffran to see his friend like this. It was like Menazoid Epsilon all over again, when Domor had lost his eyes and still fought on without them, playing his part with a valour and tenacity even Gaunt had been awed by.
“Leave us,” Domor told him. Caffran shook his head. He wiped away the sweat that beaded his brow and trickled down the blue dragon tattoo on his temple. Caffran opened Mkallun’s pack and took out a one-shot plastic injector of adrenaline, stamping it into Mkallun’s bare forearm. The injured trooper roared as he came out of his stupor. Caffran slapped him.
“Domor will be your legs — you have to be his eyes.”
M
kallun growled and then spat and nodded as he understood. The adrenaline rush was killing all his pain and refortifying his limbs.
“I can do it, I can do it…” he said, clutching hold of Domor hard.
They moved on. Beyond the area of debris, the hive complex was a warren of drum silos and loading docks, red-washed girder towers marked with the Imperial eagle and then defaced with sickening runes of Chaos.
In one open concourse there was a row of fifty cargo trucks, flatbeds, smashed and burned out. Along one wide access ramp, millions of sections of broken pipe and hose, scattered in small random mounds. Inside one damaged silo, countless pathetic bodies were piled and jumbled: a mass grave of those Oskray workers who would not join Skara’s cause.
So Flaven suggested. “Perhaps not,” Caffran said, covering his mouth and nose with the edge of his cloak as he looked in. “Enemy insignia there, and armour. These aren’t long dead.”
“When have they found time to gather and pile their dead? There’s an assault going on!”
Caffran agreed with Flaven’s incredulity, but the signs were there. What purpose… what peculiar intent lay behind this charnel heap?
They heard shots, a ripple of las-fire from beyond the silo and swung in close, moving with the shadows. More shots, another almost simultaneous volley. Perhaps… a hundred guns, thought Caffran? He ordered them to stay down and crept forward with Adare.
What they saw beyond the next bunker shocked them.
There was wide concourse, almost a kilometre square, at the heart of this part of the island complex. From the markings on the ground, this had been a landing pad for the cargo lighters. Across the centre, a thousand Kith soldiers stood in ranks of one hundred. Facing them was a messy litter of bodies which tractors with fork shovels and dozer blades were heaping into freight trucks.
Caffran and Adare watched. The front rank of the Kith took twenty steps forward and turned to face the other rows. At a signal from a nearby officer, what was now the front rank raised their weapons and cut the file of a hundred men down in an uneven burst of gunfire. As the tractors pushed the bodies aside, the rank that had fired stepped forward and marched to where their targets had been. They turned, waited. Another order. Another ripple of fire.