“Too difficult to say, the tracks are vague, all but eroded. But the scouts say there is sign of at least one vehicle and a fair number of foot soldiers.”
“It has to be orks. According to the records, we’re the first Imperial troops to set foot here since the last war.”
“Maybe. But not everything goes into the records, does it? And it depends on whose records we’re talking about. There’s no way the tracks are thirty-eight years old. I can tell you that much.”
Bergen sat silent for a moment. It had to be orks. It just had to be, but, if the tracks were Imperial, it meant that someone else had got here first. Why hadn’t Exolon been told? By all accounts, theirs was the first officially sanctioned mission ever to attempt a recovery of Yarrick’s tank. If the tracks they followed belonged to an Imperial force, who the hell were they, and what were they doing here?
“Will you tell me the moment you know more?”
“Of course I will,” said Killian. “I don’t like this any more than you do.”
“You’ve told Rennkamp? General deViers?”
“About to,” said Killian.
Bergen thought about that. “Why did you come to me first, Klotus?”
Killian hesitated, perhaps checking for a second that the channel was properly encrypted. “Because deViers has been losing it for months. We both know it. And he’s closer to cracking right now than I’ve ever seen him. If he has some kind of breakdown, the mission will fall to you. And so will our survival. I want to get off this rock alive, Gerard. I’m not meant to die here and neither are my men.”
“Thanks for the update, Klotus,” Bergen said. “Keep me posted, won’t you?”
“You’ve got it. Killian signing off.”
The light on the vox-board blinked out.
In Tech-Magos Sennesdiar’s specially fitted Chimera, Tech-Adept Xephous hit a toggle and watched a similar green light die. He turned to his superior and said,
There was a moment of silence as each of the Martian priests processed the ramifications of this. It was Armadron who ultimately broke it.
answered Sennesdiar.
Wulfe growled as another wave of dust smothered him and his tank. If he didn’t know better, he would have said the New Champion was churning up the ground deliberately to impair his vision, but all the tanks were suffering the same problem. The trail was so narrow that the Imperial machines had to move in single file. As the convoy climbed higher and higher into the mountains, the danger increased.
Metzger was guiding Last Rites II carefully along a crumbling ridge while trying to keep her at a reasonable speed. Everyone knew that the orks weren’t far behind, though they couldn’t be sighted, hidden from view by the dust and the drop-off.
Wulfe took a look to his right and, not for the first time, felt something flip inside his stomach. A vast chasm yawned between the peak they were ascending and the next. He turned his eyes to the front again and felt his stomach muscles relax.
What the hell are we doing up here, he asked himself? High altitude is no bloody place for heavy armour.
Wulfe and the rest of the Gunheads were near the rear of the column, part of an armour detachment charged with defending the Thirty-Sixers and Heracles halftracks that carried most of the remaining supplies. As such, the orks were snapping at their heels. They were most at risk.
Behind Last Rites II came Old Smashbones and a few Leman Russ Conquerors from Major General Rennkamp’s 12th Mechanised division. Wulfe didn’t know the crews, but that didn’t matter. Whatever division they came from, the Cadians really had to stick together. There weren’t all that many left of them, just a few thousand men packed tightly into a few hundred machines. By contrast, scouts attached to the rearguard reported ork vehicles pursuing in the thousands. Turning to face them was not an option. The Cadians could only keep going while the tech-priests insisted that this was the way.
Orks or not, the mountain trail was proving enough of a challenge on its own.
Still looking ahead, trying to guide his driver as well as he possibly could despite the dust, Wulfe decided to vox Lieutenant van Droi. Van Droi had been too damned quiet since learning of Colonel Vinnemann’s death. It wasn’t like him.
“Sword Lead to Company Command,” he said. “This is Wulfe, sir. Please respond, over.”
“Company here, Wulfe,” replied van Droi. He didn’t sound well. “What can I do for you?”
Wulfe wondered how to say it without causing offence. “Just reporting in, sir. Still quiet back here. No sign of the orks so far. I don’t suppose it’s too much to hope that they called off the chase?”
“How long have you been a soldier, Wulfe?” said van Droi. “You know better than that.”
“I know, sir,” said Wulfe. “I know. Just wishful thinking. Listen… about the colonel, sir…”
“What about him, sergeant?”
The lieutenant’s tone told Wulfe he was treading dangerous ground. “I’ll miss him, sir. That’s all.”
Van Droi was silent for a good ten seconds. Wulfe thought the lieutenant had actually broken the link for a moment, but then van Droi said, “You know, Oskar, when young men get their first combat posting, it’s as if they’re suddenly children again. Doesn’t matter if they’re officers or grunts. They feel inadequate, confused and scared. They feel like they don’t belong. And the fear that builds up in them sometimes… Maybe you felt that way yourself.”
“I’m sure I did, sir,” said Wulfe. “It was a long time ago, but I’m sure I did.”
“I never forgot that feeling,” voxed van Droi wistfully. “I hated it more than anything, you know. I felt like a burden to those around me. I had so much to learn and they had no time to teach. It was Vinnemann that pulled me out of it. He was just a captain back then. It was before his injury. He was one hell of a leader.”
“He was a good man, sir,” said Wulfe.
“He was a great man,” said van Droi. Again there was a long pause. “It’s not looking good for us out here, Wulfe. But if we have any chance at all to make him proud, I say there’s nothing we shouldn’t do to honour him. Understand?”
Wulfe thought he did. It wasn’t about nice neat plans anymore. Things had gone way beyond that. Van Droi was looking for something to hold on to, something solid, and, in the honour of the regiment and his duty to Colonel Vinnemann, it was clear that he had found it, despite the mess they were in. Wulfe hoped he might draw a little strength from that himself. If it worked for van Droi, it could work for him, too.
He was a soldier. He was a Cadian.
“For the colonel, sir,” he told van Droi, “and for the regiment. If we go out, we’ll go out with a hell of a bang, sir.”
Van Droi sounded a little brighter when he answered. “That’s the stuff, Oskar. Not many of the Gunheads left now, but we’ll make our mark, by Throne.”
“You bet, sir,” said Wulfe. “You can count on me and my crew.”
“I know I can, sergeant. Van Droi out.”
“Major General Killian would like to speak with you again, sir,” said Bergen’s adjutant over the intercom.
&
nbsp; Bergen, up in his cupola again, immediately changed the channel on his vox-bead and said, “News, Klotus?”
“I’ll say. My scout leader just reported in. This trail takes us up into the clouds just a few hundred metres around the next curve and ends shortly afterwards. Visibility is poor, and the going is extremely treacherous. But that’s not all. The scouts… they’ve found something strange. I thought you ought to know.”
“Strange? What are we talking about exactly?”
“They had difficulty describing it to me. Look, Gerard, I’m not sure what we’re getting into here, but I know I don’t like it and neither do my men. According to my scouts, it’s something we’d better see for ourselves.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Human?” asked General deViers.
“I wouldn’t want to bet on that, sir,” replied Rennkamp. “I suppose it could be. Difficult to tell with all the erosion. All the same, it’s damned strange, if you ask me. What in blazes is it doing up here?”
The Cadian senior officers — deViers, his division commanders, and various attached staff — stood at the very end of the mountain trail, surrounded by anxious scouts from the 88th Mobile Infantry Regiment, the men that Marrenburg had sent forward to lead the column. Massive spurs of dark rock curved around them on either side, and the upper reaches of the mountain stretched high above them, peaks lost in the roiling clouds. The eyes of the Cadians barely lingered on any of these things, however. Instead, they were locked to the sight that lay straight in front of them.
It was ancient, that much was certain, and it was something that none of the Cadians had been prepared for.
A great rectangular space had been excavated in the side of the mountain, forming an alcove so wide and deep that one could have parked an entire Naval lifter inside it. The edges looked like they might once have been angular, squared off by the tools or machines of the masons that had carved it, but they weren’t very square now. Thousands of years of harsh weather had smoothed and rounded them, as it had also done to the twin godlike figures, cut from the same stone, which knelt below the alcove’s roof, taking the immense weight of it on their broad rocky shoulders.
The figures were vast and strange. They looked immensely powerful, but were they supposed to appear so distorted? Or had they just been badly rendered? Their huge block-like heads were preposterously oversized by comparison to their sturdy torsos. Each arm and leg seemed likewise exaggerated in its thickness, presenting the beings as having impossibly heavy musculature, and their hands and feet, much like their heads, seemed so big as to make the statues appear like some kind of grotesque caricatures. They were a strange sight indeed, and they looked like no statue of a man that Bergen had ever seen.
He wondered what had they looked like in their heyday. Had they been intricately carved? Had their faces been rendered in exquisite or terrifying detail? Had they been covered in glyphs or precious metals? How long had they knelt here, locked in a battle with gravity to prevent the side of the mountain from burying them? A great many millennia, surely.
The surface of each was pitted, their features long gone, lost in time. They were utterly faceless. In the millennia to come, they would crumble altogether and the roof of the alcove would collapse, burying all evidence that they had ever existed.
Thank the Throne, thought Bergen, that all that rock hasn’t come down already, or we’d be facing a dead end. The orks would have us properly trapped.
The expedition force wasn’t trapped. There was a way ahead.
The cavernous black mouth of a tunnel gaped between the two huge figures. It looked wide enough to take four or five Leman Russ tanks driving abreast of each other. This ancient structure was a gate, a doorway into the belly of the mountain. The mighty statues were its guardians.
“Abhumans, I’d say,” said Killian. “Maybe some kind of mutated human colonists. Who knows how old this is. It might date back to pre-Strife times.”
“Gruber, get the tech-priests up here,” snapped deViers. “We don’t have time to stand around discussing it, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lead us all down there before I know what we’re looking at.”
The general’s adjutant put out a hurried call for the senior Martian priests to move up the column.
Yes, thought Bergen, let’s see what the cogboys have to say about this. I’m sure this is where they’ve been leading us the whole time. Whatever the Mechanicus wants, I’ll bet my boots it’s in that tunnel somewhere, or on the other side of it, perhaps. One way or another, though, we’re going in. Emperor protect us.
He knew that the men wouldn’t like it. He didn’t like it much himself. Alien things were anathema. From the moment a child of the Imperium could understand Low Gothic, he or she was drilled to hate all xenos and everything they stood for, and, from the moment they joined the Guard, that hatred was fed and nurtured and beaten into them until, for many, it became a consuming passion.
Suffer not the alien to live.
Wonder not at its works, thought Bergen, reciting from the Imperial Creed. For such things weave their corruption into the minds of men and make us weak in the face of our foes.
Many a man with too much curiosity had been burned at the stake by commissars, members of the Holy Inquisition, or even by outraged civilian mobs. Heresy carried a high price.
A monotone voice, like metal rasping on metal, sounded from behind Bergen. He turned to see Magos Sennesdiar approach, face shadowed under his cowl, long red robes snapping at his ankles. In his own way, he was even more alien than the grotesque stone twins. The metal tendrils that sprouted from his back and his monstrous machine-bulk made the kneeling stone giants seem so much more human. He was flanked, as usual, by the equally disturbing Adepts Xephous and Armadron.
“Fortune favours us, general,” said Sennesdiar.
Bergen noted that, unlike the Cadians around him, the tech-priests did not wear goggles and rebreathers. They didn’t need them.
How fragile we must seem to them sometimes, he thought to himself. Do they pity us, or do they view us with contempt?
The officers had turned to greet the tech-magos, and he stopped in front of them. Raising his dark, unblinking eye-lenses, he gestured with long metal fingers towards the ancient structure up ahead. “Dar Laq lies open before us. Why do we not proceed? The ork legion will be upon us soon.”
“Dar Laq?” asked Killian. “Is that what you just called it?”
“May I assume, magos,” said deViers testily, “that this… this place is known to you?”
“In name only, general,” replied the magos. “Dar Laq was long rumoured to be somewhere in this region, though it was never located and catalogued while Golgotha belonged to us. At this altitude, the clouds render auspex scanners almost entirely useless, and, as you can see for yourself, we are shrouded from view up here. There were tales of other ancient settlements, too, of course, but, though my revered brothers searched, it seemed that time had hidden them too well. It is remarkable that this gateway still stands, and it pleases me that our expedition has led to its accidental discovery.”
“Gateway to what exactly?” asked Bergen.
The magos turned and looked straight at him. Bergen tried to read him, to search for some sign of deceit, a twitch perhaps, some hint of conspiracy, but the magos’ body language was impossible to read, for there simply was none. Bergen felt he might as well have tried to read the emotions of an automatic sentry-gun.
“We do not know the name of the sentient race that occupied Golgotha before us, major general,” Sennesdiar answered. “We found no remains of their dead, no written records. They were long gone when the Great Crusade came this way, and where they went remains a mystery. We of the Mechanicus do not like to posit suppositions without adequate data.”
“Meaning you can’t really tell us what lies ahead, right?” said Rennkamp, cutting in. He shook his head and turned to General deViers. “Could be walking into anything, sir.”
“I said t
hey were long gone, major general,” said Sennesdiar, “and I meant it. I doubt we shall find any cause for alarm within. If your concern is greenskins, on the other hand, perhaps I may offer some reassurance. By their extremely superstitious nature there is a very high probability that the orks will not pursue us. There is no sign that they have entered here. If they ever discovered it, they did not deface it as they usually do. No glyphs. No spoor, unless your scouts have uncovered some. I recognise that there may be some resistance to proceeding this way among the troopers. This is a xenos place, but I project that the most we shall encounter is rubble and ruins.”
“And an exit that will get us out on the other side,” said Bergen. “Or what’s the point in going down there at all?”
“I’m not leading this expedition into a dead end, magos,” growled General deViers. “We’ve got a critical mission to complete, by Terra. Tell me what this place has to do with The Fortress of Arrogance. And your answer had better satisfy me.”
Sennesdiar turned his hooded head from Bergen to deViers and back again. The threat inherent in the general’s words seemed not to register at all, either that or he judged it entirely beneath his attention.
“We can be sure there is a way out,” he said, “because the machine-spirit is our guide. Even were it not so, an exit must exist, for it would be illogical not to create one. Animals of the lowest forms know better than to build a lair with only a single exit. And we are not talking about a low-born animal species here. We are talking about an intelligent, technological race that dominated Golgotha for many ages. The scant evidence we have indexed tells us that much.”
Then the magos turned to deViers and added, “I calculate an extremely high probability, general, that this tunnel will lead us safely to the far side of the Ishawar range. For the sake of your grand quest, and for all our lives, that is exactly where we must go. You see, as my adepts and I learned from our communion with the machine-spirit, that is where The Fortress of Arrogance awaits us.”
[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Page 27