‘The sky, lord,’ Hegain observed, sounding shocked.
It was impossible not to notice it. Slivers of lightning danced far above them. The clouds that spilled and split through the hive pinnacles were blotched too, like ink spilled into water. Sparks flew and drifted across the moving belts of brown-black, spiralling like loosed fireworks. A pungent aroma rolled with them – hard to place, powerful as cathedral incense-clusters.
Spinoza headed straight to the wall’s edge and peered through a gap in the flak-screen. On their initial approach to the Hall of Judgement, those spaces had been crowded. Now they were rammed tight, filled to bursting with a carpet of bodies. The owners of those bodies were not merely surly and restive, as they had been before. Now they were furious, and they were charging the Hall’s defences.
For a moment, despite all her training, she looked on in shock. The attackers were dying rapidly, for the Arbites had been forced to respond, and that response was suitably and professionally brutal. Ranks of enforcers all across the walls were opening up with autoguns and bolt-pistols, carving great swaths through the mobs rushing the defences.
It wasn’t deterring them. For every desperate citizen felled at the front lines, it seemed that more were prepared to surge forward, welling up out of the urban sumps to run, witless and furious, straight into the fire-lanes.
It was madness. It was beyond madness.
‘Take your positions,’ Spinoza ordered the troopers who had come with them, gesturing towards vacant slots in the ramparts. Those already stationed there kept on doing what they had been doing – picking leaders and knocking them out, adding the fizz and flash of ranged las-fire to the crack and smack of solid-round ordnance.
She turned to one of the gunships. Its crew were pulling on their helms and preparing to board. Two ugly rotary cannons under its slab-wings had been loaded with feeder-boxes of ammunition, and it looked like spasm-gas canisters had been clamped along its flanks.
‘I’ll take this one,’ she said, pushing the pilot aside and holstering her sidearm.
The pilot looked up at her, startled, but withdrew quickly enough once he saw her badge of office.
Spinoza clambered inside, with Hegain taking the other cockpit seat. The gunship’s two auxiliary gunners were already in place behind them, clamped into the vehicle’s augur systems and linked up to their cannons’ machine-spirits.
‘Er, do you know, lord, in truth, how to fly this?’ Hegain asked, over the private channel.
There was very little in the colossal Imperial arsenal that Spinoza didn’t know how to control, or couldn’t work out with a little time in the pilot’s seat. This was a Brawler T8 – a typically blunt but otherwise capable ground-attack unit, one that major Adeptus Arbites stations used through the sector and beyond. It was not entirely dissimilar, though far smaller and less powerful, to a Navy Vulture, a machine Spinoza had flown very many times.
‘That was an uncharacteristically stupid question, sergeant,’ Spinoza said, activating the power unit. ‘Buckle up, now.’
The turbines blasted into life, throwing waves of grit across the platform. The gunship belched, gave a squeal of poorly aligned gears, then roared into motion, swinging upwards in a semi-drunken lurch. Hegain held on to the chassis, saying nothing. Spinoza worked the controls, compensating for the hard slew to starboard and pushing more power to the main engines. The Brawler found its equilibrium, dipped its nose and swooped low over the bastion perimeter.
Once past the Hall’s outer walls, the full scale of the assault became apparent – the crowds stretched back for kilometres, filling every causeway and approach gradient. Most of them looked to be ordinary workers, still clad in their production-line drab, somehow roused to take on a fortress designed to resist the assault of entire armies. Hundreds of them had been cut down by repeated volleys from the enforcers at ground level and up on the ramparts. Even as Spinoza pushed the gunship out further, a column of Repressor troop-carriers bludgeoned its way down a long access ramp and into the centre of the throngs, gradually slowing up as the press of bodies around them got thicker.
‘I can’t see a command group,’ Spinoza voxed, the thunder of the engines making the cockpit shake violently. ‘But this can’t be spontaneous.’
Hegain peered out of the narrow armourglass viewport, scanning the boiling masses below. ‘The arch, lord,’ he offered, doubtfully. ‘Concentration’s greater there.’
Spinoza nodded, and pulled the gunship around. The two Arbites seated gunners behind them were by now firing in controlled bursts, targetting any figures in the crowd that they deemed to be leading the mania. Towards the rear of the plaza, where the knots of bodies were thicker than ever, a triumphal arch had been erected celebrating the heroic sacrifice of the Adeptus Arbites throughout the galaxy. A stylised enforcer carrying a power maul had been rendered in granite, thirty metres high, notched and soiled by the punishing Terran atmosphere.
Spinoza powered the gunship closer, staying as low as she could. Grey faces gazed up at them, blasted by the downdraught. Rocks and masonry thunked and clattered against the vessel’s underside armour. The gunners stayed busy, thinning out the numbers but doing little to stem the fury.
‘Target acquired,’ said Spinoza calmly, picking out a woman standing under the arch’s apex. She was swinging what looked like a long metal flail over her head, wheeling it around and around. Those about her were screaming, goading the others, and the crowds surged past them like a river in storm-flood.
‘Confirmed,’ reported Hegain, taking control of the Brawler’s nose-mounted bolter and lining up the reticules.
The woman must have seen them coming. Even amid that noise and clamour, she must have seen the heavy gunship swagger its way out of the night, its lights glaring, its flank-weapons discharging. She never made a move to evade the danger. By the time her face swam into visual range, Spinoza could see that she was laughing hard, her eyes alight with fervour. She was shaking, winding the flail harder, shouting out words that could not be made out over the gunship’s roar but which were clearly driving those around her to an ever-greater pitch of frenzy.
Hegain fired just once, sending a tight burst of bolt-shells right at her. They exploded on impact, ripping her apart and sending the flail-segments spinning into the night. As the gunship banked, the rear gunners kept up a steady rate of fire, crippling and maiming.
Spinoza watched it all from the pilot’s seat. Nothing changed. A man leapt up to take the woman’s place, clambering over her shredded body. Others took up pieces of the flail and began to lash it against themselves and those about them. The drum of rocks against the gunship’s armour picked up. The lightning raked against the spires. The screams, the roars, they never let up.
‘We could empty the magazines,’ Spinoza murmured, pulling the Brawler higher. ‘It wouldn’t make a dent.’
Hegain nodded grimly. ‘Never seen the like of it, lord,’ he said.
Spinoza found herself caught between instincts. In truth, there was little to be done here now, save to add to the futile rain of shells punching through this insensate crowd. The Hall itself was probably impregnable, but whether even the assembled enforcers there had the ammunition to break the will of such numbers was doubtful. This would be a slaughter before the end, and not a glorious one. Even so, her sense of duty pulled her towards staying in position and rendering what assistance she could.
In the end, she didn’t have to make the choice. She hauled the gunship away from the arch, heading back to the Hall perimeter, when Revus’ call-sign flashed up on her visor.
‘Priority recall: the Lord Crowl, Interrogator Spinoza, all personnel in the field. Courvain security compromised. Repeat: Courvain security compromised, priority recall, all personnel.’
Hegain looked up at her sharply. She pulled the control-column, swinging the gunship back towards the citadel. Once on the correct trajectory,
she opened up the power, sending the Brawler burning hard across the crowded plaza. After a few moments, they were out of the exposed spaces and back within the narrow twilit canyons between hive-spires.
Once beyond las-fire range, Spinoza set the gunship down briefly atop a hab-tower’s landing stage, keeping the engines thundering. Hegain leaned over into the rear cabin.
‘Out. Now,’ he ordered the gunners, gesturing to the rear access hatch.
They didn’t comply immediately. One even protested. Hegain had to draw his sidearm, then flash the sigil of his storm trooper detachment, before they saw sense, detaching their augur-cables and dropping cumbersomely from the hatches.
‘Not the brightest stars in the night sky, if I may say it,’ Hegain muttered, holstering his weapon as the gunship gained loft again.
Then they were back to full power, charging along the slender gulfs between the towering spires. Once given its head, the Brawler could pick up tremendous speed, and the turbines were soon screaming.
‘So then, what do you think it can be?’ Hegain asked, shuffling down into his seat and re-clipping his restraint harness.
‘I have no idea,’ said Spinoza, watching the sky get steadily blacker. ‘But I fear, from the evidence before us, it cannot be anything good.’
Chapter Nine
He was Calavine now, to all intents and purposes. It wasn’t just the uniform and the prosthetics, or the security passes, or knowledge of the man’s history, duties and mannerisms. There were subtler changes, too – he could pass a retinal scan, or feed a blood-tester the required type. After a while, consumed by the mission, you could begin to forget yourself entirely, and let the mimicry take over.
Apart from the pain, of course. And apart from the visions of that other inimitable face, buried at the heart of the world, grinning, grinning. No amount of masks and guise-methods could make that go away.
Still, externally he went confidently, mimicking the inspector’s strident gait. Gorgias, stripped down to resemble a typical Mercatura servo-unit, bobbed along with a degree less surety than usual – Gorgias hated deception, and would have happily taken a more basic approach to this mission.
‘You are doing very well, my friend,’ Crowl murmured, keen to maintain the skull’s uncharacteristic restraint.
‘Unworthy,’ Gorgias hissed back. ‘Indignus in maxima.’
‘For the cause, Gorgias. For the cause.’
Bajan had given them what they needed. That, and the research compiled from Huk’s files, meant that they could travel with certainty. The layout of the Nexus was not as steeply classified as some of the more famous fortresses in the Imperial capital, and it was pleasing to discover a close correspondence between what they had predicted and what was presented to them in reality.
For all that, there were regular checkpoints. At each one, he presented credentials, or gave an account of his business, or issued one of Bajan’s passcodes, and then went deeper into the labyrinth.
The Nexus’ gleaming upper levels concealed an older kernel. The walls became a little less polished, the floors a little more pocked and cracked. Machinery, welded and bolted into the structure of the building, gained the patina and aspect of age. Signs of repair were everywhere – panels riveted over earlier work, pipes soldered with webs of metal.
It became hotter, as the air filtration struggled to compensate. The officials he passed in the corridors went more furtively, and their numbers thinned. It was a world away from the bright-lit halls with those galactic maps, the calm and efficient processing of signals from all corners of the sprawling empire of mankind. This was the true centre. This was where the core work of the Speaker’s court was done, the real decisions made and the real concessions adopted.
This was the world of the Magisters Calculo Horarium, those select souls chosen to guide and interpret the passage of trade across mankind’s far-flung dominions. Few living souls had ever encountered such creatures, and the stories, as ever in the Imperium, ran wild. Some said they were immortal, born in the earliest years of humankind’s evolution and kept alive through the regular transfusion of blood from younger bodies. Others maintained they were mutants of such vileness that the Nexus’ defences had been constructed entirely to keep them from being discovered by the Inquisition. Most believed that they were ciphers, their role long since taken over by magna-cogitators, but of all the rumours, Crowl knew that one was certainly false. The Imperium trusted cogitators as little as possible, hemmed in by ancient fears and more recent Mechanicus doctrines. Machines were employed when they had to be, but where it was possible to use a human mind, a human mind was used.
Crowl had often reflected on this, when inclined to consider the limitations of the institution he served. In some ways, only the blindest of fools could fail to see that much that had once been pristine and powerful had degraded over time, falling in disuse and disrepair. In other respects, the Imperium’s power had never been greater, not even during the fabled ages long past. Where its mechanical inventiveness had long since faded, its biological prowess had remained dazzlingly proficient. A man with sufficient coin could extend his life beyond the dreams of ancient humankind. A woman with enough power could maintain her health even within the thickest of toxic smogs. Humanity might have forgotten much, but it could still manipulate cells and tweak synapses, tug at chromosomes and splice limbic systems.
The reliance on the mortal, on flesh over silicon, was not, like so much else, simply a product of desperation. It was more of an aesthetic choice, born out of long and deep-held antipathies. The human mind, whether psychic or no, had capabilities that no cogitator had ever truly matched, and if that power were combined with the dark arts of the neuropath and the chirurgeon-philosophical, then the potentialities were virtually limitless. The Navigator, the savant, the Space Marine, the sanctioned psyker – all of these opened doors and performed functions well in excess of any unaugmented mortal mind. In a galaxy of extraordinary fecundity, where a billion billion lives began every moment, stringent utilisation of the biological made a perfect, if typically ruthless, sense. Effective cogitator STCs were rare; brain-tissue ripe for surgical extension was as common as dirt.
For all that, a Nexus Magister remained a mystery. Crowl began to allow his imagination to play a little. Would it be a monster? Or a mortal? Or one of the many stages in between?
Soon, a high portal rose above him, verdigris-speckled and dripping with a faint sheen of glistening fluids. The floor below was hidden in a low fog of condensation, and the air smelled strongly caustic. All pretence at glassy refinement had long gone – this was a place of old and esoteric construction, studded with brass rivets and engraved with a riot of astrological symbols. Prominent among the images was the star-and-quill sigil, though of an older, more elaborate design than that reproduced in the upper reaches. The hands that had carved these shapes had been consigned to the grave a very long time ago.
Beyond the portal lay a long corridor, tall and vaulted, glowing from floor level with a soft, green light. The chemical smell was stronger down there, wafting up from a metal grid under which gurgled dark fluids. Crowl paused on the threshold. The last few checkpoints had been catered for by Bajan’s passcodes, but gaining access to the chambers after this point would be less simple.
‘Prepared?’ he murmured to Gorgias.
‘In perpetuo,’ the skull affirmed, and dropped away into the plentiful shadows, bobbing carefully.
Crowl’s boots sunk into the layer of mist. He walked past bas-relief panels depicting various stellar milestones. There was a geometrical representation of the first warp engine, with a robed figure resting one hand on its casing while raising the other to the starlit skies above. Next came what appeared to be a schematic of a prototype Geller generator, with flows of rune-marked energy around a symbolic unpacking of the core shield harmonics. The same figure was depicted there too, an austere character with sombre
eyes, gesturing across the circuit diagrams as if pointing out some potent theological truth. After that came further images, some hard to make any sense of at all. There was a throne, seemingly placed in the heart of the void and connected to a figurative galactic map of swirls and tunnels, then a foetus curled up in a cartouche-shaped vial with a flame burning in the midst of its forehead. It was all rather more reminiscent of a Ministorum chapel than a temple of commerce.
At the end of the vault, the corridor took a sharp turn to the right. Heavy cables hung from the ceiling, wrapped about one another like iron snakes, all of them glittering with the same strands of moisture.
‘No further,’ came a vox-filtered voice from the far end.
Crowl halted. Just ahead, dimly visible through a green haze, stood a heavy brass door. On either side of the door stood two brass pillars etched with hieroglyphs, and over its lintel were carved the words Per Sacrificium Ad Astra and the single figure IX. In front of the door stood two figures, robed in deep green and masked with blank, bronze faceplates. Both carried staffs studded with electro-vanes, and the faint stink of ozone hung around them.
‘State your business,’ one of the guardians said, in a soft, almost whispering voice.
‘Inspector Ferlad Calavine, Sol Sector Command,’ Crowl said, bowing and making the aquila. ‘Pursuant to inquiries concerning major irregularities in scheduling, as directed by the Speaker’s representatives.’
‘The Inspectorate has no jurisdiction here,’ the guardian said. ‘Go back to where you came from.’
Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Page 11