The column was moving again.
About bloody time, too, thought Wulfe. Reports from the spotters at the very rear put the ork forces almost within striking range, and the scar on his throat had begun to itch like crazy in the last few minutes. That was never a happy sign.
It was good to be moving again, but, from his position in the rearguard, it was difficult to work out exactly what was going on. As Wulfe sat high in his cupola guiding Metzger around another bend in the trail, he listened carefully to the regimental vox-channel, trying to learn as much as he could. All he could really draw from the broken chatter was that scouts had found a way forward, and that, inexplicably, a good many of the troopers didn’t seem to like it much.
That doesn’t make sense, he told himself. Everyone with half a brain knows we’ve got to keep moving if we’re going to stay ahead of those bastards. What’s got everyone so damned twitchy all of a sudden?
Soon enough, he found out first-hand.
“By the bloody Golden Throne,” he gasped as Metzger followed the tank in front between two eerily symmetrical columns of red stone. Beyond the weathered pillars, the ancient alcove with its kneeling gods was revealed in all its glory. “We’re going inside that?”
There was a crackle on the vox.
“Company Command to all tanks. Keep your pace up. I’m talking to you, Holtz. Keep your crate in line. Why have you stopped? Get moving.”
Wulfe heard Holtz growling back, “Sorry, lieutenant. Just caught us a bit off-guard. I mean, it’s alien, isn’t it? I don’t like it, sir. We shouldn’t be going in there. Throne knows, we shouldn’t. We could be walking right into a xenos trap, sir.”
The link spat a harsh burst of static in Wulfe’s ear for a few seconds before he heard van Droi’s answer. “It’s not exactly my first choice either, corporal, but we’re out of options. If you’d rather stay here and face the orks on your own, I can petition Captain Immrich for you. Of course, the commissars have already made it very clear that they’ll execute anyone who refuses to enter on charges of cowardice.”
Holtz managed to sound angry and chastised at the same time. “I’m no frakking coward, sir. Of course, I’m going in. I just don’t like xenos abominations, that’s all.”
Van Droi’s voice, on the other hand, had a hint of humour in it as he replied, “That’s all I thought it was, corporal. That’s all I thought it was.”
As Wulfe was listening to this, he watched more and more of the vehicles in front being swallowed up by the gaping black maw of the ancient tunnel. As soon as each vehicle went in, its driver hit the headlights, but, from Wulfe’s vantage point, it didn’t seem as though the lights were doing much to illuminate the path ahead.
Last Rites II rolled nearer and nearer the tunnel mouth. Wulfe looked from side to side at the huge stone guardians as he passed them. What in the warp were they supposed to be? He might have said ogryn, but they were too misshapen even for that. They didn’t look like orks, either. In fact, they didn’t match the appearance of any xenos race that Wulfe had ever encountered or read about.
All too soon, the tunnel swallowed him. Black walls cut off his view and he was plunged into darkness. The air that moved around him was immediately cooler. He noted this as a breeze played over the hairs on his forearms and on the back of his neck. He noted, too, that the featureless black floor of the tunnel was sloping downwards.
The tanks on either side lit their headlamps, and cones of light shot forward, striking the clouds of oily exhaust fumes put out by the machines in front. There didn’t seem much else to see, at least for now, just featureless tunnel walls, blue-grey clouds of exhaust smoke and the backs of the machines in front.
“Metzger,” said Wulfe over the intercom, “hit the lights.”
“Aye, sir,” said Metzger, and Last Rites II added her own illumination to the darkness. It didn’t make much difference.
On the vox, van Droi’s voice sounded again. “Are we all in?”
Wulfe turned and looked over his shoulder at the shrinking square of red daylight behind him. Silhouetted against it were the dark hulls of the last machines in the column. “Looks like it, sir,” he reported to van Droi. “I see the last of the Conquerors coming in now.”
“Good,” voxed van Droi. “Then I want all of you to move in to the sides of the tunnel, nice and slow. We don’t need any accidents. There’ll be a Chimera coming back through here in a couple of minutes, heading up towards the entrance.”
“What the devil for, sir?” voxed Sergeant Viess. “We can’t send men back out there.”
Wulfe noted the hesitation in van Droi’s voice, and the weariness when he said at last, “It’s a demolitions team, sergeant. General deViers has ordered the entrance sealed behind us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Cadian column moved slowly and carefully through the dark, for the best part of three hours, guided by Sentinel walkers with searchlights fitted. They discovered a plethora of side tunnels as they went, smaller passageways that branched from the broad one they were following. Each of these was given a cursory inspection, but they twisted away in countless directions and were far too small to accommodate the tanks. With little choice, the expedition force found itself committed to a single path that led ever downwards, deeper into the darkness.
DeViers marked the passing of time on the antique pocket-chronometer his grandfather, for whom he had been named, had bequeathed him over eighty years before. It was an exquisite piece of Agripinaan craftsmanship, inlaid with emeralds and white diamonds, finished in platinum, and decorated across the face with a filigree of the most delicate gold. It had been with him a long, long time. Looking at its pristine face always brought feelings of peace and comfort. He had been turning to it more and more often since his arrival on this accursed planet.
Did they think he didn’t know what was going on, those damned Mechanicus? Did they think he was so easily used? Warp blast and damn them, he was Mohamar Antoninus deViers, Saviour of Thessaly IX, Protector of Chedon Secundus, decorated with the Iron Star for his overwhelming victory at Rystok, awarded the Platinum Skull 1st Class for exemplary leadership at Dionysus. Then there were Modessa Prime, Phaegos II, and a host of other glories. Age hadn’t addled his mind that much. He knew all too well that they had an agenda. He knew they were guiding him along the path that best suited their purposes, but what could he do? He needed them to help find Yarrick’s tank. Their Machine-God didn’t speak to normal men, even men as worthy as him.
He hadn’t missed the looks his senior officers had been giving each other, either. They were losing confidence in him. That much was evident. Even Gerard Bergen seemed ready to question him these days. That stung deViers particularly sharply. Prior to that mess on Palmeros, he had started to consider the handsome officer something of a protégé.
Well, they’d all see the error of their ways in the end. This wasn’t over, not by a long shot. The Fortress of Arrogance was still out there somewhere. It couldn’t be far. Orks had taken it, and it was his job to get it back. The Imperium depended on him. Whether the Mechanicus had initiated this expedition or not, it was a Munitorum operation now, and he was in charge. Not one man, not one ounce of Guard materiel would leave this blasted world until he had his prize. There was still everything to play for. His place in the history books was still within reach. He would join the list alongside Yarrick, Macaroth and Harazahn. He would be forever remembered as one of the great men of his age.
He looked down at the chronometer’s ticking hands. There was still time enough for that.
“Caffeine, sir?” asked Gruber from the other side of the Chimera’s passenger compartment. “It’s hot.”
“No thank you, Gruber. I’m wound up enough already.”
Gruber looked at the chronometer in the general’s hand and let out a snort of laughter. “Good one, sir. Wound up. I get it.”
DeViers smiled weakly. He hadn’t meant to make a joke at all, but fine. Let his adjutant think what he
would. Laughing in the face of such desperation made him seem strong in the eyes of others. Let them think him unfazed by the frustrating turns the expedition had taken.
What lies ahead, he wondered? What obstacle will test me next?
He was about to find out.
“Vox is flashing, sir,” said Gruber, indicating a blinking green light on the wall-mounted unit above the general’s left shoulder. “Let me get that for you.”
Even though deViers was closest to the device, he let Gruber take care of the call. It was the man’s job, and it didn’t do to have the other officers think they could bother their general directly with every little detail. He had enough on his mind. Over the years, Gruber had learned to screen the general’s incoming vox-calls with great intuition.
Absently, deViers half-listened as Gruber spoke into the vox-caster’s mouthpiece. Then the adjutant turned and said, “It’s Colonel Marrenburg, sir. He says his scouts have found the end of the tunnel.”
DeViers felt his pulse quicken.
“I’ll speak to him,” he said, and accepted the mouthpiece from Gruber, who immediately returned to his seat and his flask of hot caffeine.
“General deViers, here. Go ahead, colonel.”
“Yes, sir,” said Marrenburg. “I’ve just had it confirmed. About three hundred metres ahead, the main tunnel levels out. It straightens there, too. I’m told it ends another two hundred metres after that.”
“I see, colonel. And just how does it end.”
“Well, sir, I’m not sure how to say—”
“Let’s not play guessing games, man. I don’t have the patience.”
Marrenburg’s voice was suddenly brusque as he answered. “My apologies, general. From what I understand, it opens onto some kind of city, sir. An underground city.”
Of course it does, thought deViers sarcastically. Let’s see how the magos explains this one.
When Gerard Bergen’s Chimera, Pride of Caedus, emerged from the end of the tunnel and into the huge open space under the mountain, half of the force’s vehicles were already there, the crews gaping, staring wide-eyed at what lay before them. The other half were still moving down through the last stretches of the main tunnel. The rearguard would enter within the hour.
Bergen stood in his cupola, turning his head from left to right, taking it all in. The air around him was thick with exhaust fumes, but they were less dense than they had been in the confines of the tunnel. There was more space for them to dissipate here. The air pressure had changed. He could feel it on his skin. It was cooler here, too.
With the vehicles spreading out in an ever-widening perimeter, there was plenty of light, though not nearly enough to illuminate the cavern’s ceiling or the far walls. Bergen still couldn’t begin to estimate the size of the excavation. What he did see, however, stole his breath away.
A city of smooth, dark metal stretched out from the mouth of the tunnel into the blackness beyond. It was a dead city, a city without movement or sound or energy of its own, but a city nonetheless.
“So this is Dar Laq,” Bergen muttered to himself.
The buildings framed in the headlights of the Cadian vehicles shone back at him. Every single surface, every corner, every wall, was made of a shimmering, iridescent metal the likes of which Bergen had never seen before. As his eyes moved from one structure to the next, the colours seemed to shift and change like sunlight on the surface of an oily pool. It was beautiful in its own way. It reminded him of a shell he had once found on the south-western shores of the Caducades Sea. He had been practically an infant back then. The memory had been lost in the recesses of his mind until this very moment. Suddenly it was as sharp as a high-resolution pictograph.
Troopers were spilling out of trucks and halftracks around his Chimera. The beams from their torches cut like sabres through the murk as their sergeants led them down alleys and avenues, each footstep kicking up little puffs of dust. “Safeties off!” he heard one sergeant call out as he passed within a few metres of Pride of Caedus. “If there are any bloody xenos here, we’ll be ready for them.”
Bergen doubted the barking sergeant would find any xenos alive down here. This place was as dead as the desert they had ridden through to get here. He could feel it. More so, in fact, for there was life in the desert if one only knew where to look. This place had all the atmosphere of a mausoleum.
That was changing even as he watched. After the-Throne-knew how many millennia of utter silence and stillness, Dar Laq was filling with bustle and noise. It seemed an almost sacrilegious intrusion. Bergen watched the troopers march off until they were lost behind the rows of blocky alien structures.
Each of the buildings he looked at raised the same questions in his mind. Where were the doors? Where were the windows? There seemed no obvious access points to any of them.
General deViers had questions, too. Bergen heard him bark out a short order on the vox, and powerful searchlights came on one at a time, reaching out for the ceiling and the far walls with their brilliant white beams. For the first time, Bergen saw massive towers standing tall over all the other structures. He looked up in wonder at the nearest, approximately three hundred metres away. It recalled to his mind the famous Cadian pylons that protected his home world from the vicious warp storm known as the Eye of Terror. As an officer-cadet, he had once visited the base of one of the Cadian pylons, a rare privilege largely forbidden to those of the noncommissioned ranks. He remembered the aura of power he had sensed around that inexplicable monolith. He had imagined at the time that some kind of living force resided there, something of incredible energy and potency. The Cadian pylons and the towers of Dar Laq were certainly both ancient and mysterious, but the latter exuded no sense of power or presence, only an aura of death and decay, and of a splendour lost forever to the ages.
The towers looked to be constructed of the same nacreous metal as the lower structures, but there the similarities ended. They were less blocky, less angular, suggesting that they had been conceived with a sense of the artistic at least as much as the functional. A few of them were broken, the outer shells rusting or tearing away, revealing themselves to be stuffed full of what looked like clockwork on the most massive scale. Great black cogs sat unmoving, frozen in the glare of the searchlights, teeth bared at the human interlopers. Bergen’s natural curiosity kept throwing up questions in his mind and it took some effort to quash them. What feats of science or wonders of sorcery might the creators of Dar Laq have been able to work in their day? It was dangerous to ask, more dangerous still to actively seek such knowledge. Heresy lurked at the boundaries of such thinking. It was natural, too, though. It was part of the human condition to revel in discovery, despite the warnings of the Imperial Creed.
The tech-priests were guiltier than anyone of that. Bergen imagined they would be readying their bands of slaves and servitors to go out and search for answers. They must have planned all this from the very beginning. Had they ever intended to help find The Fortress of Arrogance? Or did their real interest in Golgotha begin and end with Dar Laq?
He watched the white discs thrown out by the searchlights as they climbed the far wall, and his jaw dropped open. He had the measure of the cavern now, and it was vast, easily two to three kilometres across at its widest, and a kilometre high where the cavern walls curved inwards to meet at a single point. Every inch of the walls had been worked by alien hands. There were alcoves within alcoves, pillared walkways, exquisitely wrought galleries of metal and so much more, all with the same sharp, angular aesthetic of the ground-level buildings. How many had lived here? How had they fashioned such a place? And why had they chosen to live down here inside the mountain, shunning the light and the sky above?
As the searchlights reached for the ceiling of the chamber, Bergen gaped. There above him hung the most incredible feature of all, perhaps a score of inverted black ziggurat-type structures linked by metal gantries and platforms. They seemed to be floating in the air.
They can’t be, he t
old himself.
He dropped back down into his Chimera and pulled his magnoculars from their stowage box. Returning to his cupola, he pressed the magnoculars to his eyes and looked up again. It was only when he squinted hard through the lenses that he realised they truly were floating as they had no right to.
“Emperor protect us,” he muttered. “What the devil is going on here?”
A sudden burst of loud static from his vox-bead almost made him drop his magnoculars. A sharp, familiar voice said, “Bergen, come in. I’m calling a session of my senior officers at once. Meet me at the rear of my Chimera in three minutes. I’m calling on the tech-priests to account for all this. It’s about time we had some blasted answers.”
“I’d say so, sir,” said Bergen, thinking he had a few questions of his own.
Wulfe didn’t like this one damned bit, and neither did any of his crew. Tanks didn’t belong underground. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. What if there was a cave-in or something? He wasn’t claustrophobic. No tanker would last very long with that particular affliction, but something about this whole place made his scar itch like crazy. No human hands had built it.
Damned xenos, he thought. Nowhere is safe from them.
Things could have been worse. Emperor protect all the footsloggers who’d gone off down those dark alleyways looking for signs of alien occupation, and he wouldn’t have swapped places with the Sentinel pilots and Hornet riders that were out mapping the cavern’s extents, but sitting and waiting wasn’t much fun either.
He and his crew, like most of the other tankers, had got out to stretch their legs after the long journey up the mountainside and down through the tunnel. Wulfe still felt stiff, but he tried to shake it off. Metzger was sipping water from one of the jerrycans, while Beans and Siegler were standing by the front of the tank speculating about what they saw.
Wulfe heard footsteps behind him.
“Your lot doing all right, Oskar?” asked Lieutenant van Droi, stopping right in front of him.
[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Page 28