“Quite,” Amberley said, cutting him off before he could bore us all into a coma, “but that still doesn’t tell us who they were.”
“The records have all been wiped,” Yanbel reported from his station at the data-lectern, his tone clearly adding a non-verbal “I told you so”, and I nodded slowly.
“Just like Perlia,” I said. Whoever had been here clearly didn’t intend coming back, but then given the circumstances in which they’d left, that was hardly a surprise. Amberley nodded grimly.
“Search this place thoroughly,” she said, then grimaced at me. “I can’t believe I just said that. It’s not as if we’ll find the shadowlight just lying around the place, but we’d better make sure before we go. I don’t want to give Lazurus the chance to claim we frakked up.” She activated the vox unit built into her suit. “Flicker, we’ve found a bolthole. Looks like Metheius has been hiding out here.”
“Are you sure?” Even over the vox link, the incredulity in Pelton’s voice was palpable. “Why would a techpriest be consorting with psykers?”
“I’ve no idea.” The edge of irritation in Amberley’s voice was growing again. “When we catch up with the gretch-frotting boltbag and put him to the question you can ask him, all right?”
“Fine, boss.” Pelton’s voice was conciliatory, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. Hacking off an inquisitor isn’t among the brightest of things to do, even if you work for her. “We’ve got you on auspex, be with you in five.” The link went dead, and Amberley sighed, glancing at the techpriest with a faintly apologetic air.
“Sony about the boltbag remark,” she said. “It’s getting to be a rather stressful day.” Of course it was about to get a great deal more so, but at that point, mercifully, we were all still blissfully ignorant of the fact. Yanbel glanced up from the lectern, still muttering prayers and tapping keys in the hope that he might be able to coax a shred of forgotten data back into existence, but Metheius had known the system well, and had evidently covered his tracks just as skilfully as he’d done in the Valley of Daemons so many years before.
“No offence taken,” he assured her, no doubt reflecting that a servant of the Omnissiah was supposed to be beyond such petty reactions as annoyance, even if the tone of his voice hinted otherwise.
“Pelton does have a point, though,” I ventured cautiously. “Even if Metheius is a renegade, would he really be associating with a Chaos cult? Those loonies are about as far from the ideal of the machine as it’s possible to get.” Amberley sighed deeply, and appeared to count to ten under her breath.
“In my experience, enemies of the Emperor take whatever help they can get. Maybe he traded them the weapons for a place to hide.” I nodded in a conciliatory fashion.
“That sounds reasonable,” I conceded. It still didn’t sound right to me. I would have thought a mere handful of bolters would hardly be sufficient inducement to provide a facility as lavishly equipped as this, but she was the expert, and if her fuse was getting shorter I didn’t want to be the one to press the detonator.
“I’m getting movement on the auspex,” a voice cut in on the vox, and after a moment I recognised it as Pontius’. It seemed our pilot had been doing more than just putting his feet up while we’d been strolling around Hell’s Edge admiring the scenery. His intonation took on a trace of puzzlement. “Northwest sector. That’s on the lava side.”
“Back to the shuttle! Move!” Amberley’s voice took on the ring of command, no doubt drawing exactly the same conclusion as I had, and, to my inexpressible relief, reacting in exactly the same manner as I would have done (though no doubt from far nobler motives than mere self-preservation.)[1] “Flicker, get your team aboard now! Pontius, get ready to lift!” [1. In all honesty, looking back, none spring to mind.]
“Powered up and ready for dust-off,” the pilot assured her, while Pelton acknowledged the change in our plans in a few terse words. Pausing only to rip the now obvious door off its hinges, Amberley led the way back through the labyrinth of corridors and idle machinery towards the open air at a pace that left me gasping in the warm and foetid air. I wasn’t about to lag behind, though, having more than an inkling of what we would find waiting for us on the surface of this barren spur of rock, and knowing all too well that to be trapped inside the building would mean certain death.
At length, however, we entered the echoing hall by which we’d first entered the complex, and the breach in the wall left by our mysterious predecessors gaped ahead of us, the stench of brimstone getting stronger all the time as we approached it. Without pause or hesitation Amberley swung off to our left, making straight for the wide open doors, the welcome silhouette of our Aquila waiting patiently for us beyond them.
As we left the shelter of the building the tainted air punched me in the chest, gouging its way into my lungs. Amberley sealed her helmet at once, but there was no time to waste tying a rag around my face again.
I glanced around, taking in the scene surrounding us, instincts honed on battlefields throughout the segmentum kicking in and assessing the immediate threat. Pelton’s group had almost made it back to the shuttle, double-timing it as though Horus himself was after them, little puffs of grey dust being kicked up by their hurrying feet, and their weapons at the ready. Simeon was clearly in full combat mode, his movements preternaturally quick, his head snapping around in all directions so violently I half expected it to come clean off his neck and begin rotating like the auspex sensoria of a command Chimera.
It was hard to be sure over the shriek of our Aquila’s engines and the constant low rumble of the geothermal activity, but I thought I could hear an ominous scuttling sound away to our right, and turned my head to face the main cluster of industrial buildings. As I did so a flicker of movement caught the corner of my eye, almost hidden by the clouds of noxious fumes drifting from the fumaroles littering the ground beneath our narrow spire of rock.
“Simeon, five o’clock high!” I shouted, barely in time, but his reactions were boosted to preternatural levels by whatever foul alchemy was polluting his blood and he turned faster than I would have believed possible, bringing up his shotgun as he did so. The flat boom of it echoed across the open landing field, and a ball of something cartilaginous, trailing tentacles like some languid aquatic invertebrate, burst messily in midair, spraying some sort of loathsome ichor all around itself. Where it hit the thin carpet of ash the ground sizzled, exuding foul fumes. An instant later another pair of detonations echoed from the buildings ranged around us, as two more of the vile constructs exploded into oblivion without finding targets of their own.
“What the hell was that?” Zemelda asked, her voice understandably a little shriller than usual.
“Spore mines,” Amberley replied tersely, clearly not wanting to waste any more time in idle conversation.
“Some kind of bio acid, by the look of it,” Mott added helpfully. “Fortunately every one in a cluster tends to detonate at the same time, which means they’re relatively easy to guard against if one remains sufficiently alert—”
“Duck!” I snapped at him, cracking off a shot with my laspistol, which took out another deadly balloon swooping at his head. Once again the rest of the swarm went off with it, sending a few shards of something hard and dangerous-looking pinging off Amberley’s armour and making the rest of us flinch.
“And that would appear to be a form of frag analogue.” Mott sounded no more than mildly intrigued by our close brush with death. “I’d need an intact specimen to examine to be sure, of course, but my guess would be that the outer shell consists of small segments of chitin, bonded together with cartilage, or perhaps muscle fibres—”
“Shut up and run,” I suggested, suiting the action to the word, and not a moment too soon. The sight I most dreaded, a heaving mass of chitinous armour and razor-sharp talons, was bearing down on us from the direction of the manufactoria, so dense and so shrouded in the dust being raised by innumerable claw-edged feet that it was virtually impossib
le to tell where one malevolent life form ended and its neighbour began.
“Keep an eye out for the larger ones,” I counselled, breaking into a sprint towards the distant shuttle. “If you can take them down the swarm will lose cohesion.”
“Fine idea in theory,” Pelton said, his team taking whatever cover they could in the shadow of the boarding ramp, and beginning to shoot enthusiastically in the general direction of the approaching tide of talon and mandible. “Picking them out might be a bit more difficult, though.” He was right, of course, but that was hardly helpful. The mass of chittering predators was bearing down on us like a tsunami, the fusillade of covering fire from the direction of the shuttle, welcome as it was, seemed about as effective as lobbing pebbles. The horde of nightmarish creatures carried on scuttling towards us at a rate that would have seemed impossible had I not seen it with my own eyes all too often before (and run like a star-tied sump rat too when I could, but that’s beside the point).
On the other hand the swarm was so densely packed that there could be no question of missing, even at a range so extreme that normally there would be no chance at all of acquiring a target. Following our comrades’ lead we began shooting too, pouring lasbolts and explosive projectiles from Amberley’s heavy bolter into the middle of the scuttling swarm; to no real effect if I’m honest, but it took no extra effort and made us feel better (if that were possible under such dire circumstances). Jurgen’s melta might have made a difference, I suppose, but if he’d stopped running long enough to fire the cumbersome heavy weapon he’d have been gaunt chow for sure within a second. Why he didn’t just ditch the thing and un-sling his lasgun I have no idea, but that was Jurgen for you, once he’d got an idea stuck in his head that was that (and lucky for us too, as things turned out).
“They’re not going to make it!” Zemelda said, an edge of panic beginning to enter her voice, which was hardly helpful, I thought, although it was hard to disagree with her. The horde of slavering killing machines was hideously close now, a front line of hormagaunts bounding clear of the pack, their scything claws extended eagerly to rend our flesh as they leapt towards us. The termagants behind them were moving a little more sedately, and my bowels spasmed at the sight of their fleshborers swinging towards us, taking clear aim in our direction. Behind them a larger silhouette loomed, rending claws and a deathspitter ready to do their deadly work, but the real danger the warrior form represented was its ability to focus the will of the hive mind, co-ordinating all these disparate creatures into what amounted to a single entity, fixated on our destruction.
“Pontius,” Amberley said, with what I thought was a surprisingly pettish cast to her voice considering the peril we were in. “If you’re quite ready?”
“Just waiting for you to get a little closer,” the pilot responded calmly, and I felt a sudden flare of hope. The Aquila’s primarily a workhorse, of course, but it’s also a mainstay of the Navy auxilia. Amberley’s might look like a standard civilian model, but that was no guarantee that it was unarmed, as I’d assumed from its external appearance. Almost as soon as the thought had formed, concealed gunports slid smoothly aside to reveal the welcome silhouettes of twin lascannons, flanking the stubby snout of the sturdy little shuttle. “Targets coming into optimum range… now.”
The lascannons spat their heavy bolts, smashing into the onrushing tide of chitinous death, felling half a dozen of the vile creatures in an instant, but the rest came on with undiminished fury.
“Flicker! Board now!” Amberley snapped, and with a final volley that actually succeeded in downing another couple of gaunts, which were promptly mashed flat by the onrushing horde behind them, Pelton’s team scurried up the ramp to safety. My lungs burning and my feet slithering in the thin drift of ash, I pounded towards the blessed sanctuary offered by the Aquila’s hold, intent on nothing more than reaching it alive. The lascannons fired again, reaping another bountiful harvest of tyranid flesh, but as always the relentless monstrosities came on regardless, indifferent to their own losses.
“Hurry!” Zemelda was hovering at the top of the ramp, sending laspistol bolts whining around our ears, her commendable desire to help somewhat diminished by the reflection that she could well end up doing the ’nids’ work for them. Yanbel and Mott clattered up the incline to join her, and I flinched as a volley of fleshborer bugs missed me by centimetres, spattering off the portside landing skid, where in the absence of anything to devour they twitched feebly and expired.
“Still with you, commissar,” Jurgen reassured me, pausing on the lip of the ramp to turn and aim his melta. My own bootsoles rang on metal at last, and I turned to see what had happened to Amberley.
It wasn’t good. The warrior directing the swarm had evidently determined that she was the greatest threat, and concentrated most of their ranged fire against her power suit. The intricate engraving had been scored by a myriad of tiny abrasions where innumerable flesh-borer and deathspitter shots had struck, mercifully without finding a weak spot that would allow their living ammunition to work their way inside, but they’d clearly been chewing away at the armour’s joints. She was moving stiffly now, more slowly than she had been, and the bolter on her arm had expended all its ammunition. A crowd of hormagaunts was pressing her hard, their scything claws scoring visible rents in the ceramite beneath the ornate decoration on the surface of the suit, and once again the image of the Reclaimer terminators being ripped to shreds aboard the Spawn of Damnation rose to the surface of my mind. These were no ’stealers, of course, but their sheer weight of numbers was beginning to tell, and it could only be a matter of time before they found a weak point and managed to get at the woman inside.
A second later, to my vague astonishment, I found myself moving into the attack, my laspistol picking off the nearest of the biological constructs as my trusty chainsword left the scabbard, howling like one of the tyranids themselves as its teeth bit deep into chitin, and my boots crunched once again in the carpet of volcanic ash. What was uppermost in my mind then, I honestly couldn’t say. I’d like to believe that, just for once, my innate pragmatism had been outweighed by the affection I felt for her, but I’m bound to admit that it had also occurred to me that Pontius wouldn’t get the Aquila off the ground until Amberley was safely on board it, and every second we delayed was another chance for the tyranids to cut me down too.
“Jurgen, the big one!” I shouted, blessing the fact that the warrior seemed to be holding back, content to let the cannon fodder wear Amberley down before it closed for the kill itself. My aide nodded, and, forewarned, I closed my eyes for a moment as the actinic flare of the melta burst like a second sun a few metres to my left. When I opened them again the warrior had vanished, along with a handful of its attendant minions, to be replaced by a few gobbets of steaming meat and a stench of charred flesh that even managed to punch its way through the all-pervading stink of Hell’s Edge.
“Nicely done,” Amberley said, ripping a gaunt’s head off with her power fist. I disembowelled another with my chainsword, and the swarm surrounding her fell back, all sense of purpose draining away. I dispatched another with a quick lasbolt to the thorax, and they began to break, scuttling away in the manner of their kind when the controlling influence of the overmind is removed. Amberley followed me back up the ramp, and into the welcoming bowels of the shuttle. “Pontius, you can lift when ready.”
“Very well, ma’am.” The note of our engines deepened, and the ground began to fall away beneath us. The survivors of the swarm were heading for the corner of the plateau by which they’d entered it, and glancing down through the gap left by the closing ramp I just had time to catch a brief glimpse of a narrow isthmus of rock stretching across the lava flow before the thick slab of metal slid smoothly into place. No doubt that was how the swarm had been able to cross the lake of liquid rock and surprise us. Amberley discarded her helmet with a hiss of breaking atmosphere seals.
“Thank you, Ciaphas,” she said, shaking her hair free. “I thought I wa
s in trouble there for a moment” I shrugged, still unsure of my motives and uncomfortable with her gratitude, which I felt I didn’t really deserve.
“Glad to help,” I said, taking refuge in the pose of modesty that had served me so well for so many years, and she smiled at me with what looked like genuine affection. Fortunately I was spared any further awkward exchanges by Yanbel, who scooted forward to examine the armour with an audible intake of breath.
“You won’t be wearing this for a while,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll need to strip it down completely, bless the components, and Omnissiah alone knows where I can find a new fluid link this side of the Gulf.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” Amberley said, shrugging her way clear of the breached exoskeleton and stretching gratefully, in a manner that showed off her skin-tight bodyglove to considerable advantage. She smiled at me again, and led the way through the bulkhead to the lounge.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, reaching for the decanter, “but after all that excitement I could do with a drink.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” I replied gratefully.
“What I don’t understand is how they knew we were there,” Zemelda said, dropping into a nearby seat, and staring out of the viewing port. The survivors of the swarm had scuttled down the face of the plateau with their usual alacrity, and were already almost halfway along the narrow causeway they’d crossed to reach us. Pontius swung the shuttle round a few degrees, and hovered in place.
“They must have seen the shuttle land,” I said. “They’re bright enough to know that our arrival meant more people to consume, so they sent out a small scouting swarm to finish us off. After taking the miners so easily they wouldn’t have expected us to be as well armed as we were.”
Amberley nodded, sipping her amasec with every sign of satisfaction. Below us the narrow spine of rock disintegrated under the impact of a fusillade of lascannon shots, and the remaining ’nids vanished under the lava flow, flaring briefly into patches of greasy smoke as they did so.
[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls Page 17