by Dan Abnett
In the night, they came to kill us.
Once Aemos had downloaded the chart - and several other files of data besides - we resolved to get a few hours' sleep before making our move.
I had been asleep for about a hour when I woke in the dark to find Medea's fingers stroking my cheek.
As soon as I stirred, she pinched my lips shut tight.
'Spectres, invasive, spiral vine/ she whispered.
My eyes became accustomed to the half-light. Aemos was snoring.
I rose off my cot and heard what Medea had heard: the stairs outside the rec-room creaking. Medea was pulling on her flight suit, but keeping her needle pistol aimed at the door.
I pulled my laspistol from its holster on the floor and then leant over to Aemos, putting my hand over his mouth.
His eyes flicked open.
'Keep snoring but get ready to move/1 whispered into his ear.
Aemos struggled up, snorting out fake snores as he collected up his robe and cane.
I had stripped down to my vest. My jacket and motion tracker were on the floor at the foot of the cot. There was no time to reach for them.
Someone kicked the door in. The bright blue lances of two laser sights stabbed into the rec-room, and a tight burst of stubber fire blew holes in my vacated cot and puffed padding fibres up from the wounds in the mattress.
Medea and I returned fire, bracketing the doorway with about a dozen shots between us. Two dark shapes toppled backwards. Someone screamed in pain.
A flurry of gunfire from ground level outside slammed up in through the windows, blowing one of them right out of its mounting in a shower of glascite. Ruined slat-blinds rippled and jiggled with the impacts.
'Back!' I cried, firing twice at a shape in the doorway. A triple pulse of answering las-fire scorched past my head.
But light flooded in behind us as a rear door crashed open. Medea swung around, lithe and long-limbed, and broke in the face of the first intruder with a high kick that sent him reeling back.
Figures charged in from the doors before and behind us. I shot two, but then was carried over onto my back by two more who struggled frantically to rip the laspistol out of my hand. I kneed one in the groin and shot him through the neck as he coiled away.
The other one had his hands on my throat.
I speared my mind right into his and triggered a massive cerebral haemorrhage that burst his eyeballs and sent him slack.
The smell of blood and cordite and the miners' unwashed bodies was intense. Medea danced back, and delivered a forearm slam to the face of another assassin that made him stumble and gasp.
She flexed and delivered a spin-kick which hit him so hard he smashed back out of the window.
Another was coming at her from behind. I saw a knife blade flash in the gloom.
Aemos, slow but steady, swung round and broke the knife-man's neck with a single punch. Another thing too easy to underestimate about my old savant was the inhuman strength his augmetic exo-chassis provided.
There was a little more wild gunfire, and then the spitting sound of Medea's Glavian pistol.
I curved my back and sprang back onto my feet in time to gun down a man with a shotgun who was coming in through the door.
Silence. Drifting smoke.
Voices were shouting below on the plaza.
'Grab your things!' I ordered. 'We're going right now!'
Half-dressed and lugging the rest of our kit, we scrambled down the back stairs. The body of one miner shot by Medea lay crumpled on the steps under the first landing. The front of his Ortog Promethium overalls was soaked with blood.
There was a livid birthmark on the side of his awkwardly twisted neck.
'Look familiar?' asked Aemos.
It did.
'Didn't that creep Bandelbi have a birthmark too?' Medea asked.
'Most certainly/1 replied.
We broke our way through a series of cluttered storerooms and came out in an access alley behind the shops adjoining the welfare. A ginger-haired miner posted as rearguard for the ambush turned in surprise as we emerged, his hands fumbling with the shotgun slung over his shoulder on a leather strap.
Drop it and come here! I said, using my will.
He tossed the weapon down and trotted over to us, his eyes glazed and confused.
Show me your neck! I willed again.
He brushed up his tousled hair with one hand and tugged his worksuit's neckline down with the other. The birthmark was there, centred on his nape.
'We haven't got time for this!' Aemos said. Running footsteps were pounding through the building behind us and we could hear shouts and curses.
"Where did you get this mark?' I willed at the ginger-haired man.
'Kaleil gave it me/ he said slackly.
What does it mean?
Driven by my undeniable will-force, he tried to say something that the rest of his mind and soul simply forbade. It sounded like 'Lith' but it was impossible to say for sure as the effort killed him.
'Dammit, Gregor! We have to go!' Aemos roared.
As if to prove his point, two miners burst out of the doorway we had come through, aiming autorifles. Medea and I whipped around as one and dropped them both, one kill shot each.
Aemos's faultless recall led us through the winding sub-streets of Cin-chare Minehead to the massive, dank bulk of Imperial Allied. There was a hue and cry behind us, mixed with the whine of electric buggies.
We ran across the plant's wide, metal drawbridge, through a rockcrete gatehouse festooned with razorwire, and on down through the echoing entrance hall.
Footsteps followed.
The excursion terminal was a semi-circular barn of corrugated steel overlooking the mouth of the main working. Six prospecting pods sat in oily iron cradles under the barn's roof. They were slug-shaped machines, painted in the silver and khaki colours of Imperial Allied. Each one had a rack of flood and spotlights mounted above the cockpit, and several large servo arms and locator dishes arrayed under the chin.
That one!' Medea yelled, heading for the third in line. She was still trying to fasten her flight suit properly. I carried my jacket and motion tracker. There had been no time to stop and get dressed.
'Why this one?' I yelled, following her.
The power hoses are all still attached and it's showing green across the board on the telltales! Unclamp the hoses!'
I threw my stuff to Aemos, who hurried aboard behind Medea through the small side hatch, and ran to where three thick power cables were attached to the multi-socket in the flank of the pod. Just as Medea had noticed, all the indicator lights above the socket were green.
I twisted the valves and pulled them free, one by one. The last one was reluctant and needed a moment of brute force.
Las-shots spanked into the hull casing beside me.
I jerked the hose free and then turned, firing back down the length of the barn terminal. The pod's attitude thrusters began to cough and wheeze as Medea brought the craft to life.
Solid and las-shots peppered around me. I ran to the hatch and climbed in. Medea was at the helm in the cramped cockpit.
'Go!' I cried, slamming the hatch shut.
'Come on! Come on!' Medea cursed at the pod's controls. The over-urged engines whined painfully.
'Cradle lock!' Aemos spluttered desperately.
Realising her mistake, Medea swore expertly, eased the power down a tad, and threw a greasy yellow lever on the right-hand bulkhead. There was a jarring clank as the locking cuff that held the pod tight in the cradle disengaged.
'Sorry,' she grinned.
Freed, the pod lifted out of its landing cradle, swayed to the right as gunfire hunted for it, and then accelerated away, into the lightless mouth of the mine tunnels.
The upper workings of the Imperial Allied mines were huge excavations reinforced with rockcrete and filled with abandoned mining machines. Medea kicked in the pod's lamp array and illuminated our path with hard spot-beams of clear white light. At t
he far end of one reinforced spur, the lamps picked out a sudden, wide gradient where the horizontal incuts of the surface mines began their descent. Running down the steep slope were derelict cable-trams of filthy ore-hoppers and a funicular railway for transporting workcrews to the lower faces.
Aemos sat behind us in the pod's small cabin, reviewing the charts he had obtained from the security office. 'Continue down,' was all he said.
The steep access bore descended for about a kilometre and a half, occasionally flattening into work-shelves with entries to side seams. The view through the front screen seemed to be in black and white: the fierce white light piercing the blackness and revealing only pale grey dust and rock, and the occasional sparkle of druse.
Medea slowed us as we passed over more fragmented and extensive piles of breakdown and then, under Aemos's instruction, manoeuvred us down into the throat of an almost vertical chimney. This chimney - a pitch in mining terms - was a natural formation, possibly an ancient lava tube. Slowly revolving laterally, we hovered down into it. Flowstone caked the walls like swathes of creamy drapery and quilled bushes of volcanic glass sprouted from outcrops. The space was small, even for a compact pod like the one we had borrowed. Occasionally, Medea would nudge or clip an out thrust of quills and the glass fragments would fall silently, glittering, into the pit below.
About two kilometres down, the pitch opened out into a complex series of curving tubes, sub-caves and sumps. It was like moving out of an oesophagus into the complex chambers of an intestinal tract. The flow-stone started to show more colour: steely blues with milky calcite swirls, mottled reds glinting with oolites. Flinty black druse and other clastic litter covered the smoothed folds of the ancient floor.
Medea pointed my attention to the small scanner box mounted below the main petrographic assayer. The little screen was awash with an almost indecipherable graphic of ghosting strata layers and reflecting lithic densities. Three bright yellow cursors showed clearly in the upper quadrant.
They're coming after us,' she said.
They seem to know where we are right enough. How are they tracking us?'
'Same way we're getting such a clean return on their position.'
'Are the locators on this crate that powerful?'
Medea shook her head. They're fine for the immediate locality, but they've got nowhere near enough gain to penetrate the rock.'
'So?'
'I think all these prospector pods have high-powered beacons, probably built into flight recorders. They'd need them for routine search and recovery.'
'I'll take a look.'
I swung out of my seat and moved back down the pod, stooping, and using the overhead hand-rails to support myself. Aemos was still at work. He'd fired up the pod's mineralogicae auspex, and was running a complex cross-search for the spectographic fingerprints that appeared on the Adep-tus Mechanicus transmissions. He didn't even have the scrolls open any more: the complex subtleties of the colour bars had long since been committed to memory.
Every few minutes, he consulted the main chart and called a course-correction to Medea.
At the rear of the pod, between racks holding old rebreathers with perishing rubber visor-seals, I found a small crawl space into the engine bay.
I stuck my head and shoulders inside, and shone around with a lamp-pack I'd unbuckled from one of the rebreather sets. A simple process of elimination directed me to a fat metal drum clamped to the underside of the gravitic assembly and the housing for the kinaesthetic gyroscopes. Adeptus Mechanicus purity seals secured its cover.
I slid back out into the cabin, selected a medium plasma cutter from the tool web, and went back in. The hot blue tongue of the cutter sliced the drum's cover off and fused its pulsing innards.
Back in the cockpit, I saw we were now travelling down a wide cavern that was barbed with oily dripstones and varnished with incandescent blooms of moon-milk and angel's hair.
'They look lost already/ Medea remarked, nodding at the scanner box. She was right. The yellow cursors were moving with nothing like the same confidence. They were milling, trying to reacquire our signal./
We travelled for two more hours, through small flask-chambers gleaming with cavepearls, across vast low seas of chert and lapilli, between massive stalactites that bit tunnels in two like the incisors of prediluvial monsters. Domepits and sumps sheened with brackish alkaline water and the smoke snaking from nests of fumaroles betrayed the fact that there was now a rudimentary atmosphere: methane, sulphur, radon and pockets of carbon monoxide. Venting cases from Cinchare's active heart and the gas-products of chemical and gravito-chemical reactions built and collected here, far below ground, leaking only slowly up to the airless surface. Hull temperature was increasing. We were now about fifteen kilometres down, and beginning to feel the effects of the asthenosphere.
'Hey!' said Medea suddenly.
She slowed the pod, and swung it around, traversing the lights. We were in a gypnate chamber where the chert-covered floor was scalloped by several gours formed by water eons before. Several side spurs led away into tight pinches or were revealed on the chart to pinch out no further than twenty metres in.
What did you see?' I asked.
There!'
The spot-lamps framed a black shape that I thought for a moment was just a jagged pile of boulders and stalagmite bosses. But Medea roved us in.
It was a prospecting pod, similar to ours, but bearing the crest of Ortog Promethium. It had been crushed and split like an old can, the stanchions of its cabin protruding from the metal hull like ribs.
'Hell...' Medea murmured.
'Mining's a dangerous job/ I said.
That's recent/ Aemos said, appearing at our shoulders. 'Look at the tephra/
The what?' asked Medea.
'It's a generic term for clastic materials. The dust and shale bed the wreck's lying on. Move the lamp round. There. The tephra's yellowish-white gypnate all around, but it's scorched and fused under the wreck. Mineral smoke from the fumaroles we passed just now vent back down here and cover everything with oxidised dust. I'd wager if it's been there more than a month, the powder would have overlaid the scorching... and coated the wreck.
'Pop the hatch/1 said.
The subterranean atmosphere seemed scalding hot and I began to sweat freely the moment I jumped down from the sill. I could hear nothing except my breath rasping inside my rebreather mask. I trudged round to the front of the hovering pod into the cones of its lights, and saw Aemos and Medea in the lit cockpit, both hidden behind rebreather masks of their own.
I waved once and crunched off over the dusty sill, my bootcaps catching the occasional geode which scattered and flashed in the light.
There was no mistaking the blast holes in the wreck's hull. Sustained fire from a multi-laser had split the pod wide open. I shone my hand torch in through the rents and saw a blackened cabin space, burned out.
The three crew members were still in there, at their posts, reduced to grimacing mummies by the acidic air, and by the hundreds of glistening white worms that writhed and burrowed as my light hit them. It figured that with its hot, wet, gaseous interior, Cinchare was a far from dead world.
More troglobyte things scurried and squirmed around my feet. Long-legged metallic beetles and inflated, jelly-like molluscs, all drawn to this unexpected source of rich nutrients.
Something moved beside me and slammed into my left hip. I fell hard against the broken hull, cursing that I hadn't been wearing my motion tracker. It came in again, and this time I felt a sharp pain in my left thigh. I kicked out with a mask-muffled curse.
It was about the size of a large dog, but longer and lower, moving on lean hind limbs. Its skin was nearly silver, and its eye-less head was just a vast set of jaws filled with hundreds of transparent fangs. All around the maw, long sensory bristles and tendrils twitched and rippled.
It lunged again, its thin, stiff tail raised high as a counterbalance. This thing, I guessed, was top of the food chain in C
inchare's lightless cavities. Too big to force its way inside the wreck to get at the corpses, it had been lurking outside, feeding on the carrion worms and molluscs that had congregated on the crash.
With a twist of its head, it had a good grip on my left ankle. I could feel the tips of its teeth biting through the heavy leather of my boot.
I managed to tug my shotgun from the scabbard on my back and shoot it through the torso at point black range. Viscous tissues and filmy flesh scattered in all directions and the thing flopped over. By the time I had prized its jaws off my boot with my knife, the carrion-eaters had begun to swarm over it and feed.
We moved off again, down a gour-lined spur and into a cavern breathtak-ingly encrusted with glass-silk and billions of cavepearls.
'There's been fighting down here/ I told Aemos and Medea, raising my voice to be heard over the re-cycling cabin air as we pumped the last of the coarse Cinchare gas-soup out.
'Who's fighting who?'
I shrugged, and sat back to tug one of the predator's broken fangs out of my boot leather.
"Well/ said Aemos, 'You'll be interested to know that the cavern with the wreck in it matched one of the spectroscope traces from the Mechanicus transmissions exactly'
'How long ago?'
'About two weeks.'
'So... Bure could have been the one who did the shooting/
'Bure... or whoever's sending transmissions back to the annex/
'But why would he take out a prospector pod?' I wondered aloud.
'Rather depends on what the prospector pod was trying to do to him/ said Medea.
Aemos raised his tufty eyebrows. 'Most perturbatory/
Another three hours, another two kilometres down. It was damn hot, and the air outside was thick with venting steams and gases. Fumaroles, some large, some in scabby clusters, belched black smoke into the caves, riddling some areas like honeycomb. Several caverns and domepits were home to luminous acidic lakes, where the geothermals steadily simmered
the water. Gorges and the occasional pitch showed flares of red light from lava rivers and asthenospheric cauldrons of molten rock.