09 - Dead Men Walking

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  The tunnel was wider than he had expected, and the five men and Kreuz proceeded along it two abreast. The miners dropped back to allow Gunthar to take the lead beside Herriksen, a courtesy he could have done without. Even with their six luminators, he could see only a couple of metres ahead of him through the ever-present dust. Whenever the tunnel forked, which it did a couple of times, he almost walked into the walls. He was glad of Herriksen’s assured presence by his side, guiding him.

  Gunthar knew they were nearing their destination when he heard the heavy clunks of pickaxes and the shrieking of drills from ahead. Shortly, his group’s little bubble of light merged with another, and in that light he saw the glint of augmetic body parts.

  “I think I mentioned when we spoke,” said Herriksen, “that most of the men won’t work this tunnel anymore. I’ve been forced to rely on the servitors, and you know what they can be like. If I don’t watch over them constantly…”

  Gunthar nodded, not really caring. There were ten servitors present, semi-human drones, probably grown in vats. Little better than mutants, he thought, though at least these creatures were programmed to serve the Imperium.

  As mining servitors, these particular creatures had also been augmented to suit the conditions down here. Their rebreathers were bonded with their flesh, welded to their bones, replacing the bottom halves of their faces. In place of arms, they had rock drills and piston-driven hammers, while muscle stimulants and growth hormones had given them strength enough to cope with back-breaking work that would have killed a normal man. Gunthar was careful to keep his distance from them.

  He was more interested in the column.

  It stood at the right-hand edge of the tunnel, just a metre or so back from the end. About two metres tall—no, a little less than that, a bit shorter than Gunthar. It was like a miniature obelisk, with a pyramid shape at its top, about the size of Gunthar’s head, and a square, stepped base still partially embedded in the tunnel wall.

  The column was carved out of a smooth, polished stone—and Gunthar couldn’t be sure in the dust and the dim light, but he thought it had a pale green tint.

  “What type of stone is that?” he asked Herriksen, but the foreman just shrugged. “And what are those markings on it?”

  Kreuz leaned in closer, so her luminator beam fell onto the column.

  “We thought maybe some kind of writing,” said Herriksen.

  “It doesn’t look like any language I know,” said Gunthar. He could see Herriksen’s point, though. The runes did look like some kind of script: a sequence of symbols, the same ones often repeated. There were four rows of them, stretching around the column, and a fifth along its base. Many of the letters—if that was indeed what they were—were based on the shape of the circle, but with tangential or extended radial lines connecting them in an intricate pattern.

  “I think it’s starting again,” said one of the miners in a low, foreboding voice.

  “What’s starting?” asked Gunthar.

  Herriksen scowled. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just the men’s imagination.”

  “You can’t feel that?” the miner protested. “That… that pressure in your head? Like it was before, the last time I looked at those… those…”

  And Gunthar could feel it now. Like something was growing inside his skull, straining to get out—and with that thought, he wanted to be sick.

  He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and the symptoms receded somewhat. Herriksen was right, he thought. The miners were imagining things, and he was reacting to their fear, doing the same.

  He looked again, in time to see Kreuz reaching for the column, too late to shout a warning before her flesh made contact with the stone.

  He felt a little foolish as she traced the outline of a glyph with her ever-present stencil. What had he expected to happen? The miners had dug the column out of the wall, he thought, their hands must have touched it a thousand times.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” said Gunthar quickly, hoping his voice didn’t sound too weak, too plaintive. “Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. I… Let me speak with my superiors about this, and I’ll let you know what we decide to do. In the meantime… In the meantime, the artefact isn’t harming anyone, so I would carry on as you are, let the servitors mine this tunnel. We have our quotas to keep up.”

  Herriksen nodded, and turned to lead Gunthar back out the way they had come. Kreuz, for her part, seemed strangely reluctant to leave the column behind, but she straightened up, made a final few notes on her slate and followed her boss dutifully.

  They had barely taken six steps back up the tunnel when one of the miners stiffened and halted. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “Tell me you can hear that. That humming noise.” They all stood in silence, listening, and Gunthar was about to protest that he couldn’t hear anything when Kreuz spoke.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, “I can hear it.”

  Herriksen shook his head. “The acoustics in these tunnels can play some pretty odd tricks on a man, and with the servitors drilling down here…”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” agreed Gunthar. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” He started forward again—but suddenly, he could hear it too.

  He thought it was a mechanical noise at first, maybe a piece of mining equipment in an adjacent tunnel. As the hum grew louder, however, it became higher in pitch and took on a more organic quality, until it sounded like a chorus of ethereal voices.

  He didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want to see the stone column again, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked back over his shoulder, even as a servitor, unperturbed by the events unfolding around it, lifted a barrel of metal ore and wheeled it down the tunnel towards Gunthar and his party.

  As the servitor shuffled past the column, it brushed the surface with its left arm.

  Gunthar was blinded by a bright green flash. He stumbled backwards, gasping, blinking, his retinas imprinted with the image of a skeletal silhouette crumbling into dust in that terrible light. Then, as his vision began to clear, he saw a half-melted augmetic arm lying in a pool of slag, but no other remnants of the hapless servitor to whom the arm had once been attached.

  The humming was even louder now, and shrill like the whining of the drills. Herriksen made the sign of the aquila, and Gunthar boggled as two of the servitors—then a third, then a fourth—abandoned their work to sink to their knees in front of the stone column. He had never seen a servitor behave that way before.

  “What… what just happened?” one of the miners stammered.

  “What do we do?” Kreuz whimpered. “Mr. Soreson, what do we do?”

  “No one is to touch that thing,” commanded Herriksen, while Gunthar was still trying to think of a single word to say. “We need to back out of this tunnel now, slowly and calmly, and we need to seal it off until the PDF can get here.”

  “The column,” cried another miner. “Look at the column. It’s glowing!”

  He was right. The strange stone was pulsing, impossibly, with an internal light. The glow was a putrid shade of green, and Gunthar felt sick again at the mere sight of it. Or perhaps his nausea was fuelled by the thought that the dust he was inhaling, even through the rebreather, might well have contained traces of the disintegrated servitor.

  They were all doing as Herriksen had said, backing away. “What if it’s a bomb?” ventured one of the miners. “What if that thing is juicing itself up ready to explode?”

  They exchanged worried glances at that, all six of them.

  Then, Gunthar turned and ran out of the tunnel as if all the daemons of the warp were on his tail—and, in the heart-racing terror of that moment, he didn’t care that he might be thought of as a coward, didn’t care what Arex would think when she heard about this. He didn’t even care how many times he ran into a rock wall in his half-blind flight. All that mattered to Gunthar was that he put as much distance between himself and that unholy artefact as was humanly possible.

  And, apparent
ly, this was all that mattered to the others too—because, as Gunthar quickly realised, they were all right behind him.

  Gunthar was the first to emerge, in a flurry of dirt and dust, into the main cavern.

  “We need to evacuate this mine,” he yelled at the world in general. “Everyone needs to get out of here. There’s a… There’s…”

  Words failed him, but Herriksen came to his rescue. “A safety issue has arisen in one of the tunnels. Mr. Soreson here is from the Officio Primaris, and he has decided—”

  Gunthar nodded impatiently. “We need to contact the foremen of the neighbouring mines too, warn them—”

  “Mr. Soreson,” protested Kreuz, “do you have the authority to order—?”

  “I don’t care,” Gunthar snapped, surprising himself with his directness. “We’ve no way of contacting the Governor’s office for permission from down here, and by the time we reach the surface…” His voice tailed off as he looked at the lifters and remembered how long his journey down here had taken.

  Herriksen was marshalling the confused miners in the cavern, sending them into the tunnels to spread the word. He took Gunthar by the shoulder, and propelled him firmly to the nearest of the metal-mesh cages, Kreuz scuttling along beside them.

  Gunthar turned to Herriksen, and asked, “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  Herriksen shook his head. “There are over two hundred workers in this sector of the mine, servitors excepted, and the lifters will only carry five at a time. It will take over an hour to clear everybody out, and I’m not leaving any men behind.”

  Gunthar didn’t know what to say. He was relieved when Herriksen let him off the hook. “Go,” he said. “Someone needs to get up there, get on the comm-link, and let people know what we just saw.”

  The first miners were beginning to stream into the cavern from the nearest tunnel. Herriksen ushered three of them into the cage with Gunthar and Kreuz, then dragged the door shut behind them and sent the lifter on its way.

  Their upward journey was endured in deathly silence, and it seemed to take forever.

  Chapter Four

  Arex hadn’t planned to listen in on her uncle’s conversation.

  She was passing by his office. She heard his voice, muffled by the oak door, talking to someone on the comm-link. She was almost out of earshot when she heard a name that made her stop and take notice.

  “…Gunthar Soreson…”

  She tiptoed to the door and pressed her cheek against it. She couldn’t hear anything at first for the sound of her own heart thumping in her ears.

  “…can’t ignore us now,” Uncle Hanrik was saying. “This time, it’s more than just a few lumps of marble. This artefact, this column…”

  He was answered by an indistinguishable buzz from his comm-link terminal, whereupon his voice grew louder and thus clearer to the eavesdropper. “I’m talking about the safety of my people, of my entire world. I won’t risk having a miner disturb something else down there, not until there has been a thorough investigation.”

  The comm-link buzzed again, and Hanrik replied, “As I told you, this latest incident involved the mine overseer for that sector. I have his statement right here.” So, Uncle Hanrik had spoken Gunthar’s name. Had something happened to him?

  “I have already given the order,” said Hanrik. “Every mine within a hundred kilometres of Hieronymous City is being evacuated and sealed off. Mining operations will not resume until I am convinced it is safe for them to do so.”

  More frenetic buzzing from the comm-link. Then, more calmly, so that Arex had to strain to catch his words again, Hanrik muttered, “Well, maybe now the Administratum will appreciate how serious… some colonel on his way here… what he has to say about the whole business.”

  Arex heard shuffling footsteps: a servitor, climbing the staircase from the kitchens. She jumped away from her uncle’s door and proceeded along the hallway, hardly able to stop herself from breaking into a run.

  Something was happening, something big. Something to inject some interest into the boring life of a Governor’s niece. The sort of thing Uncle Hanrik would normally have kept from her—only, this time, Arex had someone on the inside.

  Dinner was served early that evening.

  Arex sat across the polished table from her Uncle Hanrik, and picked at her meal without enthusiasm although the lobros had been freshly caught that morning. She asked Hanrik about his day, but he gave his usual vague, dismissive answer, shaking his head until his double chin wobbled. She wanted to ask him about Gunthar. She had tried to contact him at his office, but he hadn’t been there.

  “I… heard some of the staff talking,” she said, “about some trouble… in the mines.”

  Hanrik frowned at this, and grunted that it was none of her concern. “However,” he said, “we do need to talk. I’m going to be busy for the next week or two. I have some people coming tonight, and I… It’s been a while since you last visited your aunt.”

  Arex protested, “No!”

  “Please, Arex, don’t argue with me. I think it would be best for you to spend some time with your aunt in Imperial Cove.”

  He always treated her like this, as if she were a child. Arex was twenty-one now, more than old enough to make her own decisions. She had been telling him that, though, since she was fourteen, and it hadn’t worked so far. That was the trouble with having an uncle who ruled a planet.

  Hanrik had had sons of his own once, three of them. They had joined up with the Imperial Guard, and—like his brother, Arex’s father—died on a distant battlefield. In her more understanding moments, she could see why he was so overprotective of her. This, however, was not one of those moments.

  Arex pushed her plate away, stood up and marched out of the room.

  Outside, she leant her head to the wall and trembled with frustration. She knew what would happen next. She knew that, tomorrow if not tonight, there would be a knock on her door and she would find a personal escort waiting for her in the hallway. Uncle Hanrik didn’t take no for an answer.

  Sometimes, their suite in the High Spire felt like a prison. Sometimes, Arex thought she should have left home long ago, perhaps accepted one of the many suitors her uncle had lined up for her. The problem was, she hadn’t much liked any of them.

  Arex didn’t know what had drawn her to Gunthar Soreson. He hadn’t even been able to say two words to her when first they had met. Perhaps it was that very shyness, though, that unassuming nature, that had made him such a welcome change from the privileged braggarts her uncle tended to pick out for her. The problem was that she couldn’t foresee a future in which she and Gunthar could be together.

  Right now, though, that didn’t matter.

  She was going to find him. She would go to his hab first. If he hadn’t returned there yet, she would wait for him. She would tell Gunthar what she should have told him last night: that she loved him.

  Then, before she was packed off to Imperial Cove out of harm’s way, Arex would at least know what Uncle Hanrik was trying to protect her from this time.

  Arex took the stairs down to the exit, because she had anxious energy to expend and didn’t want to be cooped up in a lifter. She told the doormen she was taking a stroll around the gardens and wanted to be alone. As soon as she was out of their sight, she hopped over a wall and dropped down onto a public skyway.

  There was an embarkation point a block and a half away, where two autocabs sat waiting. Arex climbed into the first of these, swiped her identity tag through the reader and found Gunthar’s address on a scrolling hololithic city map. The engine started with a judder and an ozone whiff, and the cab moved off.

  Almost immediately, it turned onto a lifter platform and stopped again. Through its broad, curved windshield, Arex could see the flat tops of the shorter towers around her for a moment before she was lowered into their midst.

  Then a shrieking sound turned her eyes upwards, and she saw an exhaust trail bright against the darkening sky. A troop ship, comi
ng in to land at Hieronymous Port. Her uncle’s visitors, no doubt. At any other time, Arex would have stayed at home, eager for whatever titbits of information she could overhear from them. Tonight, she had more important things on her mind.

  Arex had never been to Gunthar’s home before, so she followed her progress on the map. A dotted red line showed the cab’s intended route through the city; it had dropped some way below Gunthar’s floor in search of the closest-running skyway. It was reduced to crawling speed at this level, nuzzling its way through slow-moving knots of people, too many of them to stick to their own lanes.

  Then the hololith blinked out, and the autocab came to a gentle halt.

  At first, Arex thought the vehicle itself must be at fault. She muttered a dark oath under her breath, cursing the enginseers whose job it was to keep it running.

  It occurred to her, then, that the world had grown darker.

  It wasn’t yet time for the public luminators to come on, but a moment ago there had been lighted windows and business signs outside. Now there was nothing, no man-made light at all, and Arex was beginning to appreciate just how much earlier dusk came to the lower floors than it did to her High Spire window.

  She stabbed at the door rune by her knee, once, twice, three times, to no avail. She twisted around in her seat and kicked at the door instead, putting her full weight behind each blow until the latch gave way.

  The air outside the autocab was far colder than it had been above.

  A moment ago, the strangers on this skyway had been moving with direction and purpose. Now, they milled uncertainly, looking at each other as if somebody else might have the answers they craved. Arex kept her head down, irrationally afraid that if she made eye contact with any of them she might be recognised.

  Murmurs reached her ears, certain repeated words confirming what she had already begun to suspect: “…power outage… whole of the neighbourhood, maybe beyond… can’t see any lights on the upper floors…”