They made good progress for a couple of hours — but eventually, inevitably, they ran into more cultists. The further they went, the more they saw, no matter how many detours Grayle took to avoid them. Their comings and goings appeared to be centred around a large, black building. It was obviously a manufactorum, and its great steaming chimneys signified that it was in use.
He performed a U-turn, heading back into the dark residential sector. He pulled up in the shadows just out of range of a sputtering light, and when Barreski asked him why, he explained, “There are just a few too many heretics out there for my liking. Someone’s bound to notice us soon, and start asking questions.”
He had been intending to consult Colonel Steele, to ask his permission to abandon the truck. He was surprised to find his comrades already disembarking onto the street.
“I think you’re right, Grayle,” Steele said — and Grayle realised that, thanks to his augmented senses, he had been well aware of everything that was happening outside the vehicle, had probably heard its driver’s every word. “It’s far too much of a risk to go through that crowd. It’s time we headed upwards.”
It was Palinev who found the lifter.
On Gavotski’s orders, the Ice Warriors had spread out in search of a way up to the hive’s higher levels. Creeping down an unlit street, Palinev had found himself uncomfortably close to the manufactorum that Grayle had described. He had seen cultists thronging in the lit area before it, but so long as he kept close to the wall they couldn’t see him — and there had been a ladder in front of him.
He had climbed it carefully, disappointed to find that it led only to a high bridge. He had decided to scout along it anyway — but before he could do so, his attention had been drawn to the scene laid out beneath him.
The manufactorum had no roof. This appeared to be by design rather than the result of battle damage, as all six of its walls were whole. Palinev was looking down into an enormous, round vat filled with what he could only describe as liquid fire. Suspended above this were a number of thick chains, attached to pulley systems, many of them trailing into the vat itself-and surrounding the vat were hundreds of cultists, cheering and chanting while some of their number operated the levers of squat grey machines in precise, arcane sequences.
Palinev could feel the heat of the fire, but that wasn’t the only thing that made his throat dry.
This, then, was the Chaos war machine at work, extracting iron from Cressida’s fertile ore as the Imperium had done before it, using foul practices to fashion that iron into weapons, armour, vehicles of destruction. Cressida had fallen, but its occupiers were already equipping themselves for the next conquest.
The lifter doors were tucked around the corner of a narrow walkway, out of sight of the evil below. The summoning rune was lit, so Palinev pressed it and took cover as, with a grinding and a screeching of gears, the cab rose from what sounded like it must have been the lowest level of the underhive. The lifter was functional, and empty, so Palinev returned to the others to report his discovery, being sure to keep low as he crossed the bridge again.
A few minutes later, the nine Ice Warriors packed themselves into the cramped cab, and Steele activated one of the highest runes on its wall.
The journey upward took an age. The wall runes lit in sequence as they passed each of the hive’s hundred-plus levels. Palinev was uncomfortably aware, as he was sure the others were, that were anyone to hear their noisy approach, were they to stop the lifter for any reason, then its occupants would be sitting ducks.
His heart sank as they bumped to a halt and, although the doors failed to open, the cab was filled with a soft but insistent chime.
Gavotski sighed. “I was afraid of this. We can’t go any higher without an access code. It’s to keep the underhive dwellers from the higher levels.”
“Let me,” said Barreski. He produced a knife, and inserted its blade into a vertical seam beside the runes. With some expert manipulation, he was able to flip open a section of the wall to reveal a jumble of wires. Palinev gasped as his comrade cavalierly plunged his hands into them.
Barreski pulled on several wires, tearing them from their mountings, seeming not to care as the machine-spirits spat their disapproval. He grinned as the chiming sound cut out and the lifter began to rise again.
“A little trick I picked up as a boy,” he said.
They reached their destination at last, and the doors rumbled open, allowing nine grateful soldiers to spill out onto a wide, empty street.
The contrast with the ground floor was extreme. Although the Ice Warriors were still surrounded by buildings, there were open walkways and squares in between, into which some natural light fell from translucent panels in the hive’s roof some ten levels above them. Below, the architecture had been strictly utilitarian, but up here there were statues and fluted columns and fountains and gargoyles.
Many of the buildings sported eagle crests over their doorways — administrative offices — but Barreski could also see an apartment block with wide windows opening onto balconies.
Not that Chaos hadn’t left its mark here too. Many of the walls had been defaced with hateful sigils, most of the buildings looted and some burned out. And the air was cold, far colder than it had been below — almost as cold as it had been outside.
Steele had found something: a rectangular, white-framed data panel, mounted on a free-standing, pivoting base. He motioned Barreski to join him at it, and had him confirm that it was a public terminal. The interface was designed to be accessible, the inlaid runes simple to interpret, and Barreski was soon able to punch up a plan of the hive, and to show Steele how to select more detailed views of each of its levels and sectors. Then he watched in fascination as the colonel scrolled through map after map, hardly pausing at some long enough to read their labels, but — Barreski felt sure — somehow committing the details of each one to his augmented memory.
“Spaceport,” Steele muttered, as he lingered briefly over one map. “That’s good to know. Could be a way out of here for us, if we’re lucky.”
“No mention of an Ice Palace though, sir?” asked Barreski.
“I wouldn’t have expected one. I should think the Ice Palace is a recent addition, something Mangellan has had built for himself.”
“It was Gavotski who suggested sending someone further upwards, to the roof of one of the taller buildings. We must be close to the centre of the hive,” he said. “If the palace is on this level, it should be visible from up there. If not, then we’ll know we’re wasting our time here.”
Palinev volunteered to be the scout, of course. Everyone was surprised when Steele sent Grayle instead.
“Get up there,” he instructed, “take a quick sighting and come straight down again. You still have your cloak, so if any heretic does spot you he should think you’re an ally. Still, I’d rather not take that chance.”
Grayle disappeared into the apartment building, emerged a few minutes later onto one of its topmost balconies, and began to find handholds in the brickwork, hauling himself all the way up to the roof. It was only then that Barreski realised why it was that his fellow tanker had been assigned to the task. Grayle was the only one of them who had a solid alibi for when the vox-caster was destroyed, an alibi that Barreski had provided. He was the only one Steele trusted to stray so far from the squad on his own.
A few minutes later, Grayle was back, flushed and breathless.
“It’s on this level, all right,” he reported, “the Ice Palace. It’s on all the levels, all the ones up here. Its foundations are a couple of floors down, but it reaches all the way up to the roof. It looks like… like it’s almost organic, like it wasn’t built or carved or whatever, like it must have… grown.”
“Like the so-called trees in the forest,” said Mikhaelev.
“Like them, yes,” said Grayle. “It’s huge, at least a kilometre square, and the area around it is in ruins, as if the palace just… as if it burst through from below, destroying every
thing in its path as it sprouted upwards. I could see bridges, great bridges of ice, leading across to it from the streets.”
“How far?” asked Steele.
“It was hard to tell,” said Grayle, “with the sheer scale of the thing. Another three or four hours, I’d say, on foot. But there are patrols in the streets: Traitor Guard, lots of them, between the Ice Palace and here. I don’t think it’s safe to take a vehicle.”
“Mangellan is well protected,” said Steele. “I’d expect no less. The sound of an engine won’t go unnoticed up here, and I can’t see a couple of cultists’ robes fooling anyone either.” This was good news for Barreski, whose borrowed cloak had been making his skin crawl where it touched his bare neck. He ripped it from his shoulders, bundled it into a ball and flung it into a nearby gutter.
“We have to face the fact,” said Gavotski, “that we have come almost as far as we can on stealth alone. I think we all knew from the start that our chances of surviving this mission were slim. Once we learned that Confessor Wollkenden had been brought here, to this hive… well, that’s when this turned into a suicide run. Most of us will die here today, but remember: if just one of us can beat the odds, if one of us can escape with the confessor, then we will have won the kind of victory that men sing about. We will have secured the memory of the Valhallan 319th for a thousand years, and I think that’s a cause well worth fighting for.”
The first patrol, they heard coming.
They took cover on the portico of a great librarium, crouching behind its pillars as the well-drilled ranks of a traitor platoon marched through the bordering public square. While the other Ice Warriors were watching the traitors, Blonsky watched his comrades. Would this be the moment, he wondered, when one of them would make his move, give them away? Or just lose his nerve and run?
And then the traitors had passed them by, and the Ice Warriors let out a collective sigh of relief — all except for Pozhar, who was itching for a fight as always — and they moved on.
It seemed to Blonsky that the further they went — the deeper into the hive — the colder it became, in defiance of all logic. It had already been a long, tiring day, but Steele set his usual brusque pace — and Gavotski, in particular, was starting to flag, although he tried not to show it.
And then it came, at last. The moment they had all been dreading.
Steele must have heard something, seen something, sensed something, because he threw himself at Palinev an instant before they all heard the crack of a lasgun, and knocked him out of the path of its beam. The sniper had to have been on a nearby roof, but Blonsky didn’t have time to locate him. Steele was running, yelling at the others to follow him. Two more las-beams stabbed into the street like lightning bolts, but then they were around a corner, out of the firing line.
“We can’t just let them get away with that,” protested Pozhar, “with firing at the Emperor’s troops. We have to—”
Gavotski interrupted him firmly, saying, “We can’t kill every heretic in this place, much as we’d like to. We have to concentrate on reaching the Ice Palace — which means getting out of this area before that sniper calls in reinforcements.”
They ran across another public square, through an ornate archway, and down another wide street. Steele was leading the way, but he suddenly came to a halt, listened for a moment, reversed direction. They rounded the corner of a generatorium relay station — and this time, even Blonsky could hear the footsteps tramping towards them, forcing them to revise their course again.
They made for a wide flight of steps leading up to the next hive level. But four Traitor Guardsmen appeared before them, dropped to their knees and fired. The Ice Warriors plunged into a network of side streets, making so many twists and turns that Blonsky had soon lost all sense of direction. Then Steele stopped again, listened for a second, and growled, “This way!” He ushered his squad through the gaping doorway of a residential block as Blonsky too heard the whine of a vectored thrust engine and saw a thin grey shadow flitting across the ground behind him.
He suppressed a shiver. Someone… something out there was using a jump pack to search for them. And they all knew that no mere Imperial Guardsman, traitor or otherwise, had the strength to bear such a device.
They raced along a carpeted corridor. To each side of them, the doors of once-luxurious rooms had been smashed open. The furniture in those rooms had been trashed, and more than a few dead bodies had been left behind. Imperial citizens, thought Blonsky, who had tried to hide in their homes once the fighting had started, who had died in them. Cowards, all of them. They had got what they deserved.
They emerged into the street again, but the sounds of footsteps were all around them.
“They’re everywhere!” breathed Anakora.
“Not quite,” said Steele. “We’re dealing with a single traitor platoon — perhaps forty men, fifty at most — but they know this ground and they know where we’re heading. They’re cutting off all our routes to the Ice Palace — and at the same time, they’re closing in behind us, making sure we can’t turn back.”
“Then we have to go through them!” Pozhar declared.
Steele looked at him, then sighed and nodded.
“The palace is in that direction,” he said, pointing. “Just remember, all of you, that to reach that palace, to find Confessor Wollkenden, is our only objective. If that means leaving heretics alive behind us, then so be it. Let the virus bombs take care of them.”
“Yes sir,” chorused the Ice Warriors.
“We hit the traitors hard and we hit them fast,” said Gavotski. “We break through their circle, and we keep on running. We don’t stop for anything.”
“Comrades,” said Steele, “prepare for the fight of your lives.”
Blonsky was just close enough to Pozhar to hear the young trooper’s murmured exclamation of, “About damn time!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Time to Destruction of Cressida: 17.12.41
They took their foes by surprise.
The traitors had probably expected the Ice Warriors to go to ground, to find a defensible position — a secure building, maybe — from which they could sell their lives dearly. The last thing they had considered was that they might come out fighting.
Several of them died in that first barrage of las-fire, some marching right into the beams before they could stop. A few turned and fled — which made sense, thought Anakora, as these one-time Guardsmen wouldn’t have defected in the first place had they possessed any real moral fibre.
The rest of them rallied and returned fire even as they looked for cover. A frag grenade hurled into their midst by Steele shredded two more bodies and left the rest reeling, more disoriented than ever. And then, before the debris from the blast could settle, the Ice Warriors surged forwards, knowing that to do so was to leave themselves wide open, but also knowing that to stay still was to invite certain death at the hands of the rest of the traitors, who were still closing in around them.
They kept their heads down, relying on speed and surprise — and the las-beams they were pumping out to each side of them — to carry them through. Anakora trampled over traitor corpses, and was alarmed to find one of them still alive, a gloved hand lashing out to seize her by the ankle. She stumbled, putting out her hands to arrest her fall. She kicked at the traitor’s fingers with her free foot, and luckily he was injured, his strength drained, because he let out a groan and let go of her.
She saw that Palinev had stopped, half-turning, to come to her aid. She shook her head firmly, didn’t need his help, didn’t want him to risk his life for her. This was what she had feared, after Pozhar had revealed her secret to the others: not that they would suspect her motives, but that they would think her weak.
Palinev seemed to get the message, though, and he ran on, pausing for a second to snatch a lasgun from a fallen traitor. Anakora realised that he wanted its power pack, and this seemed like a good idea — so she saw to it that, by the time she caught up with her comr
ades, she was carrying two extra guns. She detached the pack from one of them and tossed it to Pozhar, who seemed like the trooper most likely to need it soon.
And then the second wave of traitors was upon them, moving in from either side, threatening to trap them in a pincer movement.
Pozhar was the first to react, running left, ploughing into the oncoming ranks, swinging his lasgun wildly, one-handed — but most of the others were right behind him. Anakora found herself plunged into the chaos of the melee, and looked for her nearest comrade — Mikhaelev — and she stood back to back with him, as they fought with knives, bayonets and even fists against odds that were swelling by the moment, becoming almost overwhelming.
Only Palinev held back. Palinev, who had slipped into a deep doorway before he could be seen by the newcomers. Palinev, who now raised his long-las.
He took his time, choosing his targets well. His eight comrades were under attack by over twenty traitors, but they had formed into a tight knot so that only one or two men could attack any of them at once. Their more numerous enemies were also providing them with cover, and more than one traitor fired into the skirmish, aiming for an Ice Warrior but striking an ally instead. Palinev didn’t share that problem.
A traitor landed a punch to Gavotski’s chin, sending him reeling, so Palinev blew a hole in his head before he could press his advantage. He picked off another figure on the periphery of the battle before anyone knew he was there, and another two while they were trying to find him in the confusion. And then, when the traitors did start to fire back at him, las-beams blasting chunks from the stonework by his head, at least he knew that four or five of them were no longer focused upon his comrades.
[Imperial Guard 05] - Ice Guard Page 12