Severed fibre bundles rendered his armour heavy. His movements grew sluggish, precision lost. The temperature regulator had shut down. He didn’t know how much longer his power unit would function. If it died, so would he, his armour becoming a coffin inside the tomb of the locomotive.
And there, ahead, a glimpse of light that did not flicker: day shining through the egress. He pulled himself forward, managed to rise to his feet as the weight of the wreckage on his back lessened. He heard something very large crack overhead. He tried to run, but moved at a lethargic stumble instead. He reached for the sides of the doorway, grabbed them and propelled himself through as tonnes of metal crashed down behind him.
He fell to the ground. Victory when on his knees would be as unacceptable as defeat, and he forced himself to stand once more. Moving at a glacial pace, feet dragging, he walked away from the locomotive towards the spot where Thaene still lay. ‘Brother Akrallas,’ he voxed.
Silence.
‘Dvarax?’
Nothing.
He looked to the right. Orks were emerging from the last of the cars. There were many, but many were injured, and they were moving with rare caution. They were gazing at the locomotive.
Krevaan turned to see its end. Its armour was cracking like an egg, an angry, molten red shining through the fissures. Incredibly, it still had power. The defence turrets and the cannon were firing, though without direction.
The moment of the great death came. The locomotive did not explode, but a sun blazed through its wounds. The machinic scream was almost sentient. Then the glow was that of ordinary fire. The engine seemed to slump on itself, transformed from monster to wreck.
And suddenly there was calm. Shooting and movement ceased. The sky over the train cleared, the shimmer of the force field gone.
‘Eighth Company,’ Krevaan said, ‘destroy this abomination and all its vermin.’
The orks fought back as the wrath of the Raven Guard descended upon them. They did not fight long.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shadows followed wind. The eldar were fast. Behrasi didn’t expect to catch up with them. It was enough to track them, and he knew where they were heading. The Saim-Hann riders slowed down once they reached Reclamation. They still moved quickly, but with frequent stops, and uncertain, changing direction. Picking up their trail was not difficult. Neither was following them undetected. The xenos warriors’ attention was entirely on their search.
The ork shells started hitting shortly after the Raven Guard entered the city. The ordnance was colossal. Each blast was strong enough to level a building. The streets filled with rubble and dust, the bodies of the dead and the injured, and crowds of the mourning, the panicked, and the rescuers. Consumed by their immediate terror and grief, the civilians were unaware of the wind and its shadow that passed near them. Behrasi glanced at the mortals on a few occasions. Avoiding their sight was a simple matter, so automatic that it barely required thought. He wondered briefly what it must be like to be at the centre of a conflict, yet be irrelevant to its stakes and its result. Then he dismissed the thought as a distraction.
Irrelevant.
The bombardment was destructive, but brief. After a few minutes, the distant boom of the great gun ceased. The dust still rolled through the streets. The figures in crimson armour sped up. They appeared to have direction again.
‘I think they’ve found what they’re looking for,’ Rhamm voxed.
‘So it would seem,’ Behrasi agreed. He didn’t contact Krevaan. He would wait until he was sure. If the command was going to be sent, he wanted to be sure that it would not be as a result of an error.
If it had not been for the destruction rained down on the humans by the orks, Alathannas thought that it might have been hours, perhaps longer, before the idea had come to him. But the dust was thick, darkening the day in the city. He had seen lights on behind the steel shutters over the hab windows. After one strike, the power had gone out for a moment. The flicker had made him think of the city’s energy source, and that was when the realisation had hit.
He knew where he had to look.
He knew why the earlier attempts to locate the goal had been foiled.
The irony that the Saim-Hann encampment had been so close to that goal the whole time did not amuse him. It was too redolent of the perpetual tragedy that haunted his people.
The humans had built their power plant in the north-west of the city, a short ride from the square that the eldar had used as a base. Alathannas and his escort stopped outside it. A colossal aquila rose over the ornate mosaic of the containment dome, the tips of its wings touching the twin cooling towers. Alathannas dismounted from his jetbike and contacted Eleira.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked when he had told her what he had deduced.
‘It would explain our difficulty,’ he said. ‘The human technology is crude, but it is very powerful. The combination of the radiation and the shielding could have interfered with our attempts.’
‘There is something fated about the humans building their power source there,’ Eleira agreed. ‘Search it quickly, ranger. Time is short.’
‘The orks have the upper hand?’
‘Worse. The humans have joined our fight. They have destroyed the rest of the foe. This battle is almost over. You have only a little longer to end the war.’
‘I understand.’
The interior of the control block was deserted. The humans had fled their posts when the shelling had begun. The plant was automated, and though Alathannas saw warning lights flashing on some of the consoles he moved past, there were no klaxons sounding, and the power was still on.
Alathannas passed through a large, high-ceilinged hall. The architecture had the same prefabricated crudeness of the habitation complexes. The walls were grey, their bas-relief sculptures of the double-headed eagle looming on all sides in perpetual judgement. He found a staircase at the rear, and descended the levels of the complex. If he was correct in his surmise, the control centre would, like so many buildings of the human city, have been constructed atop eldar foundations. He had to find his way into them. He was following hope and a guess. The success of the mission depended on luck.
At the lowest level, he found himself in a maze of service corridors. He paused, frustrated again by the irony that human interference meant that he could not hear the call that was turning the orks into monsters of war. He relied on his skills instead. He chose the corridors that moved away from the core of the plant. He headed into areas that had seen little use since the construction of the building. He followed dust and disuse. At last, he found himself in a chamber at the western edge of the building. Whatever function it might once have had, it had become a storage space of construction leavings, discarded tools, and failed equipment. The lower half of the outer wall was wraithbone.
Alathannas cleared away the detritus. The wraithbone ended a few arm’s lengths from the north-west corner. The human portion of the wall was rougher than elsewhere in the room. It was not structurally integral. It was filling a gap. He placed a plasma grenade at its base and retreated to the hallway.
After the flash and the concussion, there was the sound of collapsing rubble. And then, something else. Before Alathannas could step forward, a wave of inchoate aggression slammed him to the ground. It was familiar, yet alien, and as he gasped for breath, struggling to remain conscious and to keep his thoughts coherent, he understood that he had released nothing. He had opened the way for a call to be answered. The actions needed to complete the mission created the possibility of catastrophic failure.
The exultation of war shook the foundations. The earth groaned. The hallways fell into darkness.
A hab in the block nearest the power plant had been felled by the bombardment. Squad Behrasi watched from the rubble as Alathannas entered the plant’s control block. The other eldar turned their jetbikes to face away from the plant.
They hovered in a semi-circle near the door, guarding all approaches.
‘What do they think they’re doing?’ Rhamm growled.
‘Don’t try to tell me they’re protecting the building,’ Gheara said.
‘The Shadow Captain says they’ve been searching,’ said Behrasi. ‘That might still be the case. Only one has gone in.’ He only half-believed his own words. The conviction was growing that Krevaan and Caeligus had been correct about the eldar’s perfidy. He waited, though. He would not act without true certainty.
The wait and the doubts ended with the violent rumble beneath his feet. The entire square heaved. Cracks ran up the façade of the power plant. The eldar on watch reacted with startled gestures. One of them doubled over as if in pain.
‘Sabotage,’ said Rhamm.
Gheara readied his bolter. ‘I’ll give the xenos this,’ he said. ‘Their performance was convincing. I almost believed that they might be honourable.’
‘So did I, brother,’ Behrasi said. ‘So did I.’ Though he was puzzled by the reaction of the eldar to the upheaval, he could not let that distract him from the need to act. Another front had opened in the war. He raised Krevaan on the vox.
As Eighth Company regrouped near the corpse of the train, Krevaan knelt beside Thaene. The Techmarine was conscious. ‘You have earned your rest, brother,’ Krevaan said to him. ‘But you are needed.’
‘Good.’ The Techmarine tried to rise.
Krevaan put out a hand. ‘Stay as you are. Heal. The struggle is not here. I have heard from Brother Behrasi.’
‘I see. The eldar have betrayed us.’
‘Yes. Send the signal.’
Thaene made no movement. Yet Krevaan could sense the passing of a fatal instant.
‘It is done,’ Thaene said.
The Space Marine gunship roared over the gully network, its missiles raining down on the remaining ork vehicles. Caught between the cliffs, the orks had nowhere to run. Eleira and Passavan raced away from the marching detonations. They climbed up out of the network to join what was left of their forces. They had broken the back of the ork army, but the toll had been enormous. There were only four other skimmers left now. Too few.
‘Is Alathannas too late?’ Eleira asked the farseer.
‘We have to try,’ Passavan said.
‘That is not an answer.’
She received her answer a moment later. The jetbikes exploded. There was a flare of intense heat at the base of each one’s engine, followed by a larger blast as the anti-grav motors disintegrated, their energy uncontained and wild. Passavan and his mount vanished in a fireball. Eleira was thrown from her jetbike. She hit the ground so fast that there was no sensation of flight. She had been riding, and then she was lying on packed earth. She was broken. She couldn’t move, but she could feel the pain of her ending.
Her head rested against a slight rise, and she could see the squad of black shadows arriving on jump packs to the site of the wrecks. The humans, those creatures of darkness and war, had come to finish their work. Night seemed to be falling with their arrival, and she realised it was her vision that was failing. She hoped that her spirit passed into her waystone before the Raven Guard reached her.
She struggled against the agony and the fading light, finding the breath for one last task. She called across the distance to Alathannas. ‘We are betrayed,’ she said. ‘Hurry. You are the mission’s last hope.’
‘Let it fail,’ he cried. ‘Let the humans face the consequences of their actions.’
‘And if they are defeated here, too, what then? The consequences will pursue us all. You know your duty, Alathannas.’
‘I do, autarch.’
The ranger’s agreement was enough. She held on to the knowledge that she had done all she could, and took that with her into the night.
The melta bombs detonated, destroying the jetbikes. One of the eldar died instantly. The other two survived the explosions, one just barely. The other, limping, took cover inside the station. Behrasi moved forward, his squad following. ‘Leave the one inside to me,’ he said.
He approached the doorway. He was greeted by silence. The eldar might have retreated into the structure. Behrasi acted on the presumption of a dangerous foe. The lumen strips inside the plant were dark. A glance at the way the sunlight fell through the doorway told Behrasi where the shadows were at their most concentrated, where the best position for an ambush would be. He charged inside and swung to the left, firing.
A stream of monomolecular discs greeted his entrance. They sliced deeply into his armour. Blood coursed down from his right shoulder and the side of his throat.
The arc of Behrasi’s attack found his target. His shells slammed the warrior back, shattering armour and bone. Behrasi advanced, unwavering death, ignoring the last of the eldar’s fire. The xenos fell.
Rhamm entered the station. ‘Is that all of them?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Behrasi said. ‘Now we find the ranger. Stop him before he destroys the plant.’
‘I’m surprised he has the means to do so.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t.’ There had been no repetition of the initial quake. ‘Either way, he dies.’
Behrasi glanced at the bloodied eldar once more before beginning the search. The sight of the fallen enemy gave him no satisfaction. He was troubled by something more than a sense of waste. The thought that they had made a tragic mistake was half-formed.
But it was persistent.
EPILOGUE
The war paused on Lepidus Prime, but the shadows occupied Reclamation. The Raven Guard transferred their encampment to the square that had been the eldar base. Every paving stone of the city was once more under Imperial rule. The mortals gathered enough courage to venture out of their habs, though they avoided the square. They were frightened of the iron shadows.
Krevaan was alone in the command tent. Field repairs to his armour had given him back a fair bit of mobility. He stood, vox-unit in hand, and spoke to the captain of the Verdict of the Anvil. ‘Our mission is complete, Captain Mulcebar,’ he said. ‘The xenos taint has been purged from Lepidus Prime.’
‘I thought so,’ the Salamander said. ‘Our augurs have detected something massive heading for the system. It would seem that the Overfiend has taken the bait.’
‘Then the hour has come for your forces to bring this war to a close. Good hunting, brother.’
‘Thank you. I am still curious as to the orks’ obsession with this system.’
‘As am I. We have been unable to determine the cause of their strength.’
‘And what of the eldar? I understand the White Scars encountered them too.’
‘Another mystery. But we have defeated them as well.’ His answers were bitter on his tongue. The triumph of Eighth Company was ringing hollow. There was so much information that had been denied to him. He had acted as was necessary. If the eldar had managed to destroy the plant, they would have razed Reclamation to the ground. Perhaps they imagined that the Imperium would then have given up on this world, returning it to eldar control. But he had stopped them. His decisions had led to the destruction of all the Emperor’s foes on the planet.
But his information was incomplete, and he knew it. He had erred. He had been arrogant, too quick to act on his hatred. The unanswered questions made him doubt the truth of his victory. He could not shake the suspicion that somehow, he had won the wrong war.
And the last of the eldar, the ranger, still had not been found. Alathannas had disappeared into the ruins beneath the power plant. The xenos labyrinth had defeated the search. Eighth Company faced hundreds of kilometres of tangled corridors. The paths spiralled off in meaningless directions and disorienting intersections. Alathannas could evade the best part of an entire Chapter indefinitely in that maze. In the end, Krevaan could do little more than station sentinels at the entrance to the ruins. No further harm h
ad come to the plant. As far as Krevaan could tell, Alathannas had been neutralised. But he had vanished.
Krevaan’s doubts grew.
The psychic shriek of the slaughter had pursued Alathannas into the underground tunnels. The terrible silence that followed pushed him even further into the depths. He ran on instinct, not quite blind, but without conscious decision. His spirit writhed beneath the lash of rage and grief.
The object of the search, so long concealed, became unavoidable. Alathannas was caught in a whirlpool, racing down a wraithbone vortex. He knew where he was going. He knew what awaited him. Yet, after days of flight into the dark, when he saw the thing, dread drove him to his knees.
Alathannas trembled at the entrance to the chamber. In the centre of this room, at the centre of the serpentine coil of the tunnels, at the centre of the system-wide struggle, was what the Saim-Hann had come to find. He gazed upon the terrible object. He had fulfilled Eleira’s final command. He had found it. But he was alone, and there was nothing he could do. He could not remove it from the planet.
Nor did he wish to any longer. His trembling was from anger as well as horror.
The humans had betrayed them. He had deluded himself with the belief that it was possible to forge real links with some individuals of that species. He had hoped, to his eternal shame, that the humans would come to the planet and defeat the orks. He had been wrong. Even if he had the power to take this thing from the planet, what would he do except complete the humans’ victory?
Shadow Captain - David Annandale Page 11