Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

Spinoza cut power to the main turbines, forcing the Brawler into a dizzying plummet, before sweeping back up barely twenty metres away from Courvain’s steep-angled sides. Hegain worked the bolter again, striking another fighter but this time failing to pierce its armour.

  By now, Courvain’s few remaining Nighthawks were being picked off, and more of the grey fighters were turning inward to mop up the remains. Even as the Brawler thrust hard to gain loft, a Shade cartwheeled away down into the canyon depths, its back aflame and leaking ink-thick smoke. The fires below raged more intensely, slapping the knees of the citadel, fanned and fuelled by the dropping carcasses of downed aircraft.

  They were hit again, a salvo from the left-hand side that nearly slammed them straight into the citadel’s outer skin. Spinoza grabbed the control column two-handed and wrenched them back on course, pushing over the raking attack from one fighter before wheeling away from a pincer movement from another.

  ‘If I may say it, lord…’ Hegain began calmly, now firing steadily at anything in range.

  ‘I know, sergeant,’ Spinoza spat, riding the judder and spinning them away from a combined las-spear. ‘Almost there.’

  Now they were getting hit hard. The gunship’s left wing perforated, the engines shrieked. Even as they shot up towards the citadel’s summit, a scatter of las-bolts peppered their undercarriage, cracking the outer hull open and spearing up into the rear compartments. The cockpit filled with whistling air as the pressure-seals failed.

  Hegain took a final shot, emptying the main bolter’s ammo feed and managing to smash the wings from a banking fighter, but by now the consoles were smoking and the armourglass was spidered with cracks. More fighters tilted, coming around for the final attack, far too many to stop.

  Spinoza cut the engines’ power completely. The gunship, which had been streaking near-vertically, slammed to a near-halt. A whole swarm of las-bolts punched into the citadel’s armour above them, lancing through the volume of airspace they would have occupied a split-second later.

  The drop in momentum was impeccably timed – they drew up alongside the last of the unencumbered hangar entrances, and Spinoza kicked the power back in. The gunship swivelled, toppling back to horizontal. The hangar bay opened up before them – a metal-strewn mass of burning chassis – before they were hit again, knocking them inside and sending the Brawler tilting crazily over on its side.

  ‘Brace!’ Spinoza shouted, grabbing the cockpit’s inner frame.

  They hit the apron, dragging along and tumbling over, smashing a wing and sending the cannon-barrels flying. They smashed into the remains of a downed Shade, which brought their skid to a shuddering halt. The engines blew in a welter of superheated propeller blades, and the last panes of armourglass exploded into shards.

  ‘Still with me, sergeant?’ shouted Spinoza, feeling the hot trickle of blood down the inside of her helm.

  ‘Absolutely, lord, yes, I very much am,’ said Hegain groggily, pushing the remains of his control column from him and trying to clamber out of the mishmash of metal.

  ‘Good,’ said Spinoza, reaching for her weapon and pushing the cockpit door-release. ‘We are alive, we are inside – this isn’t over yet.’

  The chamber hummed with the muffled throb of many machines. Every surface vibrated. The air felt soup-thick and resonant. Cables lay everywhere, coiled together, tangled up, lashed into bundles and piled high across the mist-wreathed floor. Some were the thickness of a child’s waist, ribbed with iron bands and studded with glowing status monitors. Others hung from the distant roof in loops, or slithered down the bare metal walls amid rows of hooks, glistening in the darkness with coiled ophidian reflectiveness.

  The only light was a faint green tinge, welling up from hidden floor-level sources and barely scraping across the mass of iron and plastek. The entire place was choked and claustrophobic, like the space-spare interior of some starship engine, wrapped up with conduits, valves and feeder lines. Every tread risked stepping on another slippery length of cabling or sinking into an oily pool of coolant. From up ahead, hidden by the steam and the darkness, came the echoing sound of breathing, slow and halting.

  Gorgias bobbed gingerly, his lumens casting white pools across the jumbled ephemera, illuminating very little.

  ‘Obscura,’ he murmured, keeping his needle-gun extended.

  Crowl activated night-augmentation across both his implant lenses, sharpening things up a little, but still the gloom was suffocating. Breathing was hard. The place seemed as much like a natural cavern as a manmade space, a relic of some old water-gouged sinkhole that had somehow erupted up into the guts of the Nexus’ rockcrete foundations.

  ‘Ahead,’ he said, ignoring a number of orifices that led both left and right through the jungle of pipework. ‘Follow the breathing.’

  Progress was slow and treacherous. One enormous fibre-bundle had to be clambered over with effort, and Crowl’s gloves slipped from its greasy surface. By the time he slid down the far side, his uniform was smeared with gelatinous stains.

  The breaths became louder, welling up through the narrow passages ahead, neither speeding up nor slowing down. After a while, something else underpinned it – the thud-thud, thud-thud of a deeper heartbeat, slightly staggered, as if heard through a faulty stethoscope. The chamber’s loops and coils shivered in time with it, such that the entire labyrinth began to feel like some vast internal organ, lubricated with bodily fluids, all as hot as blood.

  Eventually they crept through a final aperture and emerged into what felt like a much larger space, though its true extent could only be guessed at due to the immense volume of cabling that now clogged and criss-crossed its entire volume. Every one of the hundreds of strands and fibres met here, wrapped around one another and plaited up and hung and plugged into a gaggle of reason-defying complexity. Every surface was draped in the arachnid twists, an orgy of coupling and decoupling, its moist uniformity broken only by the faint pulses of green light that darted down the carriage of the greater trunks.

  All inputs terminated ahead, drawn together and gathered up into an organ-like screen of hammered iron. Mechanical devices ticked and chuntered in front of it, interposed with ancient-looking chronometers and timepieces. A hundred picter lenses flickered and scrolled, each one displaying screeds of minuscule runes, though there were no servitors or adepts to tend them.

  Beyond the clots of webbing, a high arch rose up more than ten metres. Under the arch was a thick screen of what looked to be plexiglass, and behind the screen was a boiling, green-hued miasma. The cables entered the tank through a series of heavy iron plugs, disappearing into the liquid murk beyond and thereafter drawn, blurrily, towards a hidden central point behind the glass.

  Crowl looked up at the screen, studied it for a moment, then bowed respectfully.

  ‘Magister,’ he said, crossing his arms. Then he waited.

  Within the tank, the blurred cables twitched. A line of bubbles rose up from the depths, rising slowly through thick liquid. The heartbeat, which still sounded oddly layered, picked up, just a little, as did the echoing breaths that went with it.

  Gorgias hung back warily. ‘Monstroso.’

  The liquid stirred, and sediment filtered up from the tank’s depths. A shadow swam lazily out of the haze, first indistinct, then thickening and broadening, dragging cables with it. More bubbles churned, spiralling in clusters against the inner surface of the glass. The shadow darkened further, became more defined, drifting forward and upward, until an outline became properly discernible.

  It had been a man, once, perhaps. Or more than a man, possibly – it was hard to tell in the brackish murk. Surely more than one set of atrophied limbs hung there, swaying gently in the tank’s currents. Everything was swathed by the thick sediment, but it seemed as if more than one body hung in suspension, tightly bound up and wrapped in its amalgamated filaments. The input fronds spread out from the tangle of
flesh like the spokes of a great wheel, at once holding it up and tying it down, shackling it deep within its translucent nutrient broth.

  A withered, puffy mass of flesh loomed up towards the glass barrier. Its skin was folded and crumpled, like a drowned corpse, so much so that the individual features were difficult to pick out. There was an impossibly high forehead, bulging and swollen to more than five times the size of a mortal cranium. The bone mass looked to have grown exponentially, erupting in a grotesque series of bulbous ridges. Under knots of gristle, a pair of deep-sunk eyes blinked slowly. Further down the sliding crevices of pale skin, another pair of lids remained closed, lodged within a gnarled, tumescent tangle. Atrophied arms hung like tentacles in the mire, their elongated fingers slack and half-webbed. A bony, twisted torso was punctured with dozens of input jacks, each one strobing gently with tiny motes of electric discharge. The entire spectacle resembled nothing so much as a carrion-flesh jellyfish dragged up from one of Terra’s mythical, pollution-acrid oceans.

  It did not speak. It wasn’t obvious where its mouthparts were. Its active pair of eyes blinked slowly. A rattle-ribbed chest shuddered, drawing in oxygen through ironwork gill-filters carved into what might once have been a throat. The heartbeats, now clearly distinct and overlapping, maintained an echoing rhythm. Other life-support machinery could be dimly made out within the tank’s depths, wheezing, bubbling, filtering.

  One of the picter lenses cleared, becoming briefly black and empty. Then a new line of text scrolled across it.

  Who are you?

  Crowl glanced up at the screen, before returning his gaze to the monster hanging over him. ‘Inspector Ferlad Cala–’

  Who are you?

  ‘It’s as good a name as any other.’

  A pause. My input streams have been terminated.

  ‘Yes. My doing.’

  Such a thing has not happened in a hundred years.

  ‘Many strange things have happened recently.’

  The spectral outline within the tank twitched, making its trailing limbs wobble. There were definitely more than two legs there.

  This is death for you.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  What do you want?

  Crowl let his eyes run over some of the half-hidden equipment in the chamber as he spoke. Everything smelled foul, like chlorine mixed with excrement. The heat, the dark, the stink. It was hard to see how the thing before him, if had ever been a baseline human, could have maintained its sanity in such a place. Perhaps it hadn’t.

  ‘I toured your realm a little,’ Crowl said. ‘I saw things that greatly interested me. A galactic chart, showing a wound drawn across the stars. Do you know of this?’

  I know of everything. That is my function.

  ‘What is it?’

  An anomaly.

  ‘Can it be corrected?’

  The eyes blinked. Fresh pulses scampered down the web of cables, making the nutrient-soup shimmer briefly.

  I hear the voices of a thousand worlds in every breath I take. I feel the passage of fleets through the abyss with every heartbeat. I dream of emptiness, and I then I dream of the lines we draw across it. I calculate what must be calculated. I compass the void.

  Crowl’s eyes narrowed. ‘Not quite the answer I was hoping for.’

  You should not be here.

  ‘But I am. That is a fact. You deal in those, I take it? And this is important, so please summon up what remains of yourself, and listen.’

  The spectre hung there, unsteady on its web.

  ‘There was a ship,’ said Crowl. ‘A rogue trader’s galleon, plying the Laurentis subsector. It was lost, but when salvaged, records of communication were found, directed to an adept named Cassandara Glucher, who was linked to this departmento. No such woman existed at the time the messages were sent. I believe, as a result of inquiry, that those messages came to you.’

  I hear the voices of a thousand worlds.

  ‘Did you hear the voice of Naaman Vinal?’

  The void shall be compassed.

  ‘Insanus,’ muttered Gorgias, getting agitated.

  ‘You know why the messages were sent,’ Crowl pressed. ‘A xenos was to be brought to Terra. It was collected in the Torquatus Nebula, before being taken onto Vinal’s ship. Then your forces ensured he and his crew were erased, and another conveyer was pressed into service. One under the Speaker’s direct control, a bulker named Rhadamanthys with a more pliant captain.’

  Do you know how many signals I process every hour? Can you even conceive of it? It is breathing to me. It is the blood in my veins.

  ‘That ship was intended to carry the creature all the way here, but word got out. A loyal subject within this Nexus, perhaps? Or maybe just carelessness. The authorities were alerted. A search was begun. It might have succeeded, had it not been for the intervention of the Mechanicus vessel Ohtar, which carried the subject out of harm’s way. Two great offices of state, both implicated. But I know there was another involved. You know this too. Tell me the name. Tell me the purpose of it all, and I will leave you to your schedules.’

  A billion ships. All moving. All in peril. Who should mark it, if they fail? Who should mark it, if they arrive? The cargo must be landed. The blood must flow. The void must be compassed.

  Crowl drew his weapon. Not the borrowed pistol with its tranq-setting, as used on the guardians, but Sanguine, his favoured revolver, taken out from its hiding place under his inspector’s coat. He aimed it at the glass before him.

  ‘Cease this babbling,’ he said. ‘I came here for answers.’

  We hear all. We process all. As we are ended, all is ended. The head cannot endure, if the heart be stopped.

  Gorgias began to rove around the edge of the tank, getting impatient, looking for something more promising to interrogate.

  ‘I will not leave before I have a name,’ Crowl said, patiently.

  I hear the voices of a thousand worlds.

  Crowl cocked the pistol, choosing a spot at the base of the armourglass. The volume of liquid within the tank was hard to gauge, but the chamber was substantial. On the balance of probabilities, the creature would suffer more from its destruction than he would.

  ‘Tell me the name,’ he said again.

  You are wasting your time.

  Gorgias spun around, startled. Crowl kept his revolver trained on the glass. Another terminal had activated. Within the nutrient broth, the second pair of eyes flickered, twitched, then opened.

  Luna-made. It should have a twin, too. A fine piece, inquisitor.

  Crowl lowered his revolver. ‘To whom am I speaking now?’

  The same. We have been together a long time. His mind is devoted to the great lattice, mine to the minor lattice. I sleep, when I can. He never does.

  Gorgias swept in close again, scanning harder. ‘Fratres,’ he murmured, intrigued. ‘Conjuncta.’

  How could it be otherwise?

  ‘But you are lucid,’ Crowl said. ‘And you know your weapon-marques.’

  I understand a great deal. Such as your name and rank, Lord Phaelias of the Ordo Xenos.

  ‘Ah. Well, there you have me.’

  I am impressed you are still alive.

  ‘My questions remain the same.’

  The Magister twitched in the tank. Its greater half, with the swollen cerebrum, appeared uncomfortable, and a withered limb slapped against the glass, leaving a long smear.

  As I told you, this is a waste of your time. If my mistress ever had much of an interest in this scheme, it is over. The instigators have moved on, the moment has passed. Records of her involvement will be impossible to retrieve now, here or elsewhere.

  ‘I find it hard to believe this was just a passing fancy.’

  She has more pressing matters to attend to.

  ‘Such as the missing signals from the north
galactic arm.’

  So you may suppose.

  ‘What is that?’

  Something that does not concern you.

  Gorgias hissed in frustration. Crowl walked up to one of the major cable-clusters, and ran Sanguine’s muzzle idly down its spine. ‘It must be a living nightmare,’ he said, lifting the barrel and watching the watery slime trickle down it. ‘Force-fed all this data, hour after hour.’

  You cannot comprehend it.

  ‘Try me.’

  The eyelids blinked in the broth, sending tiny bubbles rising up again. Every major convoy reports every hour. Determinations are sent to astropathic choirs. They are relayed to sector commands. Collations are transmitted here, interpreted and ordered. He sees it all. He sees it as a mortal man sees a painting – all in one glance.

  We process all.

  And when you understand the Imperium in this way, when you see it as a single organism, unified within time and space, you understand where its deficiencies lie, where its needs are greatest, where scarce coin maybe be best employed.

  ‘And you would see it preserved.’

  For eternity.

  ‘Then help me,’ Crowl urged, spinning back to face the glass. ‘I need a name, the purpose behind it, then I will leave you in peace.’

  Why do you care so much? It was a failure. If a High Lord can walk away from it, why can’t you?

  In a flash, he saw the dream-face superimposed there, projected on to those warped and melded features, licking its lips, goading him, never letting him sleep.

  ‘You have your duty,’ he said stiffly. ‘I have mine.’

  The creature rose up, its web pulling taut. No more of this. Go now. I already told you – there is nothing for you here.

  A billion ships. All moving.

  Crowl withdrew a few paces, taking cover behind a heap of cabling, and aimed Sanguine again, picking a spot near the base of the armourglass.

  ‘A name,’ he said.

  The Magister withdrew into its nutrients, trailing black lines behind it.

  Go now.

  Gorgias took cover. ‘Do it now!’ the skull shrieked. ‘Rapido, quick-quick!’