Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Retrieve the Shade,’ Spinoza said, her mind already on what came next. ‘He’ll be missed soon enough – we’ll need to strike within the hour.’

  From behind them, a dull crack rang out – a revolver discharged in a confined space.

  ‘As you will it, lord,’ Hegain said, his expression blank, stowing the data slug and calling up the transport on his helm’s tactical readout. ‘Of all things, it shall be done.’

  Chapter Six

  Crowl took an unmarked atmospheric transport east. He pulled it high, out of the greater mass of traffic and up into the zone where the summits of the lesser spires grazed the clouds. From such a vantage, one could see wide areas of the cityscape unfurl – a drear, majestic clutter of competing pinnacles, striving towards the light that never quite broke through the stratospheric cover. Over to the north, a long way distant, was the steadily rising continent-mass of the Imperial Palace. To the south was the wide, open sprawl of the major worker conurbations – kilometre after kilometre of tightly packed habitation units. Ahead of him lay more industrial zones, some derelict, some very much in operation, all adding to the snarls of coal-black grime whispering up through the high, hot airs.

  ‘Tumultus,’ observed Gorgias gloomily, floating up to the transport’s viewport and gazing downward. ‘More of it.’

  Crowl said nothing, but the skull was right. The period of Sanguinala had been restive and unruly, but that was part-deliberate – a chance for the long-suffering populace to let off a little steam. Now that it was all over, things should have reverted to the long-run type – a dull, suppressed tension, locked down by fear and hard labour. Instead, the Arbites were out in force everywhere, and there were fires burning on the southern horizon.

  Or perhaps he was imagining things. He felt slow from lack of sleep, and glanding narcotics could only go so far to remedy that. Perhaps he should have brought Revus with him, or even Spinoza, but then the subterfuge would have been that much harder. It was best, in general, to keep things as simple as possible. A part of him was even looking forward to it – a return to older, more secret ways, unable to rely on the terror-inducing power of his rosette and dependent on older powers of deception and misdirection. He had equipment and resources to aid him, of course, but at its foundation this was a human skill, one that had existed for as long as the species had.

  After a few hours of sustained flying, the object of his journey appeared on the eastern horizon. Just as the Imperial Palace itself emerged from the press of lesser buildings like a grand massif rising up from a tangled forest, so the Nexus Axiomatic swelled up into vastness from the urban confusion around it. There was no beauty to this place, even of a dilapidated sort – the Nexus was a pale, grey rockcrete hunk, obese and streaked with old dirt, sunk heavily amid its feeder-slums like some grotesque nursing mother. A brace of massive comms towers soared above it, great skeletons of wind-blasted iron studded with sensor clusters and relays. Its summit was further disfigured by jumbled layers of landing stages, some very ancient, some merely centuries old.

  Terra’s air-traffic, always congested, thickened around that monolithic structure like flies on a carcass. Big orbital landers processed from the upper landing pads in regulated columns, punching through the clouds above the Nexus and making them curdle and split. Unusually, there were few Arbites craft present in those airways, though there were plenty of other armed vessels prowling the perimeters, most liveried in the midnight-blue of the Speaker’s own security forces.

  Just as was the case elsewhere on the Throneworld, this was another kingdom in all but name, a fiefdom carved from the eternal city by immortal precedent and timeless statute. Many institutions on this world were older then the Imperium itself, and the Nexus Axiomatic was one of them. Its ancestor-bodies had existed in the time before recorded history, stretching back into the legendary age before the Great Crusade when humanity’s soul had rotted amid a heretical age of technological wonder. The very first charters given to merchant fleets were still preserved under stasis fields in there, it was rumoured, each one tens of thousands of years old. Every hereditary charter since had been ultimately issued from the same location, and over the millennia the numbers had exploded exponentially, such that the Nexus now housed billions of individual screeds and documents and testimonies and amendments, all cross-referenced and counter-stamped and stored in vacuum-sealed depositories. Every void-capable civilian ship in the entire Imperium, save for those esoteric leviathans falling under the purview of Mars, had its legal origin here, no matter where its hull had been laid down or where it plied its trade. Every prescribed trade route was fixed here. Every statistic on transportation, tithe-collection and inter-system trade eventually found its way here too, where the data was pored over and scrutinised by teams of adepts a thousand strong, all to ensure that raw materials found their way to forge worlds, foodstuffs found their way to ravenous mouths, commercial goods found their way to rich hive worlds and weaponry found its way to the Imperium’s endlessly shifting battle-fronts.

  The original Nexus had been built on this site, it was believed, though no trace of that first building remained. Subsequent iterations had been constructed atop scoured walls, rising, like so many of the great edifices on this world, over the bones of their predecessors. During the inferno of the Great Heresy, the Nexus had been almost completely destroyed, though such was the institution’s importance that many of its records had been spirited away long before the Arch-Traitor had made planetfall. In the centuries afterwards, in that strange twilight age when so much was at once lost and reborn, its current colossal foundations were laid and the gargantuan chambers slowly erected. The records returned to the inner vaults, where they had remained ever since, and the mind-bending task of renewing and reissuing and revoking charters re-commenced.

  The Speaker, who had long since been a powerful figure in the politics of the early Imperium, took up residence within this ­rapidly expanding palace-garrison-archive, and, conscious of what had almost been lost, created an army of guardians to police their new realm. In an Imperium already swollen with overlapping and competing armed bodies, the Praeses Mercatura emerged to oversee this high cathedral of trade and commerce, taking command of old weapons and old technology and hoarding it all jealously. It was not perhaps the most prestigious of the high offices of state, but, due to its proximity to the enormous system of tithe collection, the Speaker’s kingdom was wealthy beyond imagination, and competition to succeed the current incumbent was always fierce and often bloody.

  Crowl had known all this for a long time. Over the course of his long career, he had had occasional dealings with charter-holders and their masters – the captain of a big void hauler was a power­ful person, and to lose one to corruption was a serious matter. That being the case, he had never had reason to probe the source itself. If he had, even in more normal times, he might have thought twice about how to proceed. A High Lord was a High Lord, and for all Spinoza’s protestations of rectitude, none of those occupying a place at the high table in the Senatorum had got there by being shy of deploying lethal force – whatever the rhetoric, that was not how the Imperium had ever operated.

  ‘Immanis,’ remarked Gorgias, sounding a little cowed, for once.

  ‘Yes, very big,’ agreed Crowl, staring out of the forward viewers. ‘Some coin’s been spent here.’

  By then they were heading toward one of the many ingress points. The pale grey walls filled the entirety of the sky before them, blotting out the jagged towerscape beyond. Several artificial canyons had been gouged into the outer perimeter, each overlooked by ranks of anti-vessel gunnery. Incoming transports filtered into those canyons, watched the whole time by tracer drones and Mercatura gunships. Once across the threshold, the natural light cut out, plunging them into an artificial dusk broken only faintly by blinking route beacons.

  The transport shuddered faintly, and a scrutiny-lock momentarily took control of the engin
es. Runes darted across the main console as a watcher-script inveigled its way into the vehicle’s machine-spirit cortex. A few moments later, the transport’s hololith column atop the flight console blurted into life, and the ghostly head-profile of a Mercatura official spiralled into instantiation.

  ‘Declare,’ it commanded.

  ‘Inspector Ferlad Calavine, Sol Sector Command,’ said Crowl. ‘Inward-bound for scheduled appointment with Signals-adept Majoris Harker Bajan. Request entry at berth gamma-fifty-six as arranged by prior communication.’

  There was a pause, a faint click over the comm-line, some evident processing of a cogitator.

  ‘Granted, inspector,’ came the eventual response. ‘Proceed to nominated berth. Welcome back to Terra.’

  The hololith flickered out. Crowl smiled. ‘Thanks very much,’ he murmured, and guided the transport further in, following a blinking line of guide-nodes that now sprung up across the forward scanner lens.

  The last of the grey sunlight fell away, leaving them in near-total darkness. Their allotted berth swam up towards them, just one of hundreds ranked against the walls ahead. The berths held transports inside clawed metal fingers, from which umbilicals led back into a complex lattice of metal and stone beyond. This canyon alone could have held more than a thousand vehicles, and there were many others. Spider-like servitors crawled across the entire surface, their spines sprouting lasguns, probing and testing. Great booms and crashes rang out, echoing up the long cleft, as larger craft docked or were released. And then it was their turn, as metal struts unfolded to greet them, sucking them in towards a circular aperture, enclosing them in prehensile iron fronds crowned by sensor-spikes and hull-drills. The transport shuddered, its engines extinguished, and then it clanged to a halt, locked fast against the canyon’s inner wall.

  Crowl waited for a moment, letting the remote systems do their work. The transport’s machine-spirit was still being interrogated hard, and no doubt the spiders would be paying a visit to the outer hull soon enough. Gorgias darted back and forth across the cabin interior, angling his oculus to try to get a view of the outside.

  ‘Doing damage,’ he hissed, watching a hull-drill scrape across the transport’s flank. ‘Careless. Ridicolo.’

  Crowl got up, pulling the black jacket of his Inspectorate uniform down and donning the high-peaked cap. His face had been rearranged with surface prosthetics and a gesture-lattice that would fool all but the most determined scrutiny. His garb was nowhere near as protective as his usual armour, but the chainmesh under-layer and stiff outer surface offered at least a modicum of reassurance. He had an Inspectorate-issue laspistol in open display on his belt, and other, certainly not Inspectorate-issue, weapons hidden in sensor-reflective caches within.

  He was as prepared as he would ever be, and managed to walk up to the transport’s outer doors with only the faintest limp evident. The shielding cracked open and rolled away, to reveal a blue-light-tinged interior and a pronounced smell of antisepsis chems.

  A circular umbilical lay ahead, polished and clean, but there was no one in it to welcome him as there should have been. Crowl stood alone for a moment, wondering if something had gone wrong. If he had been discovered so soon, this was the last chance to retreat back into the transport and attempt to break out again.

  Eventually, though, a circular portal revolved open at the far end of the umbilical, and five figures emerged into the lumens – four masked soldiers of the Mercatura, and a single official in dark blue robes. The official had a smooth, young face with little sign of augmetics. His forehead bore the tattooed mark of the Speaker’s kingdom – the ancient star-and-quill of the old void-charterers. He looked disturbingly similar to his ultimate mistress, Dandha, though right now he was failing to hide a certain degree of agitation, and his skin was flushed at his collar.

  ‘Welcome to the Nexus, inspector,’ said the man who Crowl recognised from Calavine’s private records as Harker Bajan. ‘I apologise for the delay – we are busy, my private secretary has been taken ill, we are still catching up.’

  ‘You don’t have a replacement?’ Crowl asked, sceptically.

  ‘As of two days ago. She is still learning.’ Bajan stepped aside, gesturing for Crowl to join him. ‘I trust your journey was satisfactory. Warp-stage from Altera-Commodus, was it, this time?’

  ‘Vorlese,’ said Crowl snappily, striding out ahead, knowing more about Calavine’s actual and intended movements than anyone living and supremely unconcerned about such cursory attempts to trip him up. ‘And it was filthy as ever, so let’s get this started – I do not have time to waste.’

  Raw commodities were the lifeblood of the Throneworld. It was often said, and widely believed, that Terra made nothing and consumed everything, and though that maxim captured the fundamental balance between humanity’s birthplace and the rest of its domains, it was not quite correct. Manufactoria on Terra still produced plenty of specialised items, but given the all-devouring press of the choking conurbations across such limited land-space, they rarely had direct access to the raw materials they needed. There was no agriculture or extractive industry to keep them fuelled – all such primary inputs had to be shipped in by the colossal merchant fleets that forever plied the voidways of the Sol System. Primary amongst these were, of course, the ores and the alloys required for the maintenance of the nigh-infinite urban fabric, as well as the freeze-packed carcasses ready to be rendered down for consumption by the equally infinite tide of workers. A bewildering array of other items were imported daily, the sustained lack of any one of which would have swiftly crippled life on this uniquely thirsty, greedy and insatiable world.

  One object of particular importance was scarcely present in the imaginations of that ignorant citizenry. Young charges of the scholae, when asked to guess which was the seventh-most-vital import to Holy Terra by weight, almost never landed on the right answer. And yet, the chances were that the product of that importation was staring them in the face, marked with their own scrawl and stamped with the crest of their particular educational establishment.

  Parchment. Vellum. Animal-hide. For millennia, it had been the choice material of record throughout the scriptoria of the Imperium. Far more durable than paper, much cheaper than crystal-plate or dataslab, less ideologically suspect than cogitator-wafer and harder to tamper with than audex screeds, parchment remained the medium trusted by scribes on worlds from Ultramar to Hydraphur. It was inefficient, to be sure, and prone to error in onward copy-transmission, and yet still it persisted, clung to by a savant-class so wedded to its smells, its texture, its permanence and its cheapness that the mere suggestion of another method of record-keeping skirted close to a kind of heresy of its own. After so long in use, the infrastructure of vellum-creation had become mind-bendingly vast, spread out across every industrial world in mankind’s sprawling possessions. There were whispers in the Imperium’s famed archive-worlds of entire wars fought over its production and distribution. Five hundred years ago, the great Master of the Administratum, Skito Gavalles, had been asked what would make his onerous job more bearable.

  ‘Pigskin,’ he was said to have replied. ‘More pigskin.’

  Of course, few living humans had ever laid eyes on a porcine. Unless they worked on an agri world, they would never have encountered one of those bloated and obese sacks of stimm-injected muscle and sinew, too colossal to walk without breaking their spindly legs and force-fed high-nutrient chem-soup to keep them growing in the pens. They would never have come across a bovine, either, unless you counted the thready strands of protein-extract pumped into their ration-trays during sanctioned rest-breaks. Such things were legends, in much the same category as relics of the Saints, the Angels of Death or Manifest Acts of the Emperor – things that definitely existed, but were unlikely ever to be encountered.

  The bulk of vellum used throughout the Imperium was not, of course, taken from such sources. Most of it was grown from stock
genetic material in bio-tanks, then cured in kilometre-long reams before being sliced, rolled and pressed for delivery. Such stuff was hardy, inexpensive and plentiful – the perfect qualities for a culture that prized quantity and uniformity above all things. For a few senior scribes, though, that was not quite good enough. They wanted to run their auto-quills across the hide of something once-living. They wanted the iron tips to snag and catch on patches where hair had grown, or where a blood-vessel had wriggled. They wanted their documents to look like the ones in the mighty tomes of the past, bound in real-leather and lined with gold before being locked into vacuum-capsules and buried deep in alarm-rigged vaults.

  Whether bulk-produced or specialised, Terra alone sucked in more imports of vellum than an entire subsector of less exalted territory. Its scriptoria were the oldest and the most famed, steeped in traditions so ancient that their origins had taken on the lustre of true myth. In the greatest of such places, entire spire-pinnacles were given over to the business of inscribing, illuminating, copy­ing, re-copying, redacting, interpreting and compiling. Rows of lamplit desks stretching far into the smoky darkness were fully occupied by cowled scribes, their scrawny grey hands clutching steel-tipped quills, their augmetic eyepieces zooming and panning before committing ink to parchment. Every tithe paid was recorded, every report from every battle was recorded, every court-hearing was recorded and every heretic’s confession was recorded. It was all then stashed away in the mountainous repositories, tended by skulls and servitors, where it slowly mouldered, part of the landslide of unread testimony that would one day stifle its creators.

  For the connoisseurs, the final processing of real vellum was done on Terra. Batches of unfinished stock were airlifted to the few remaining manufactoria, where they were unloaded, scrutinised for quality, doused, scraped, then hung on iron hooks until the characteristic stretched surface was obtained. Entire families were devoted to such work, and in some places production could be reliably dated back thousands of years at the same site, with the same bloodline and the same equipment.