Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  Spinoza tried to follow the reasoning, which seemed convoluted to her still. ‘Then we would have been better,’ she ventured carefully, ‘not to have gone after Gloch at all.’

  ‘No, no, not at all. We had to be sure. We had to know he was out of the picture, and now we do.’ Crowl went over to Erunion, checking over the work he was doing and nodding with approval. ‘They did not set out to destroy this place from the outset, though they plausibly had the power to do so. They wanted information. They wanted to know whether we had him in our cells. Or Rassilo, even. They wanted to talk to me, to find out what we had uncovered, and if we had discovered the links that led back to them.’

  Spinoza drew in a deep breath. That was, in all likelihood, true. It didn’t alter the facts, as far as she could see. ‘Then, are we–’

  ‘Consider it, Spinoza!’ Crowl blurted, clapping his hands together. ‘They were monitoring Gloch’s contact web. They were monitoring all the links he had established, in Salvator and elsewhere. As we must assume, they still are. Not just his. Rassilo’s, too.’

  Suddenly, she realised why he had asked her to wear her armour. ‘I… see,’ she said, warily.

  ‘Instruments prepared, lord,’ Erunion reported, stepping back from the batteries of machines. From up above them, a gantry shifted, aligning a series of receiver dishes on the outside of the observatory. A flash of neon strobed up the length of the comms towers, and static jumped between the brass spheres perched at their limit.

  ‘Even now, they cannot be sure,’ Crowl said. ‘They did not get what they wanted here, so their surveillance must still be in place.’ He limped back up to her. Now there could be no doubt – the animation in his eyes was of chemical origin. Had he slept at any time over the past few days? Before that, even? ‘They will be monitoring every link, every scrap of communication that Rassilo ever had. Everything will be tripwired, of course, but that hardly matters, since we have already sprung the trap. So you see why I needed you here?’

  ‘I do, lord.’

  ‘So you can still make contact? You still have the means?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘But you can try.’

  She glanced at Erunion, who avoided her gaze, keeping himself busy with the monitoring equipment. ‘If I may ask,’ Spinoza said, ‘what good will opening the link do us? Even if someone is monitoring her old network, how does that help?’

  ‘Because it was a two-way link, was it not?’ Crowl asked, wringing his hands again and pacing some more. ‘You had a reply to your communication? If we know of that in advance, if we have access at this end, there are things we can do. Provoke a reply, any kind of reply, and we may learn where it came from.’

  Hence the observatory. Hence the sensor arrays all being activated, the cogitators already running algorithms, the menials getting into position to process encoded data-gluts.

  He had worked quickly. He might even be right.

  ‘What do you want me to do, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Just as you did before,’ Crowl said. ‘Open the link. Give whatever code-phrase you were asked to before. Let the vox verification do its work. The operator at the other end will be different, but they’ll know the protocols. And that’s it. All we need is a reply.’

  ‘It might be dormant now.’

  ‘It might.’

  ‘They might not respond.’

  There was a faint sheen of desperation in his eyes. ‘If they’re there, they’ll respond. They have to. Why are you resisting this?’

  Why was she? Was it the injunction from Arx, the command that she wanted to obey in favour of this increasingly obsessive quest? Or was it just the prospect of Crowl being right, and using what had been her original weakness to gain a weapon against an enemy whose face they had yet to see?

  She unclipped the seal around her gorget, exposing the secure comm-bead used before. Erunion came up to her, bearing a long snaking input spike, which he slid into a receiver nodule just above it. The cogitator lenses filled with status runes, dotting the transmission protocols one by one.

  Crowl fidgeted the whole time, hanging back, then half-stepping forward, his lips twitching.

  ‘Ready?’ Erunion asked, when all had been connected up.

  Spinoza nodded.

  ‘Keep it open as long as you can,’ Crowl said. ‘Any feedback will be routed to the main console.’

  Spinoza looked up at a large semi-circular lens with its overhanging lumen pod. Its glassy surface was empty as yet, but a lime-green cursor blinked, ready to scroll with data.

  She reached up and depressed the bead.

  The first time she had opened this link, a duty officer under ­Rassilo’s command had answered. Now, all she got was white noise. The lenses filled with routing data, all encoded, but no substantive content.

  ‘Spinoza, Luce,’ she said, just as before. ‘Code sequence beta-beta-chimeric.’

  Still nothing. The quality of audex received fluctuated, as if something was getting in the way.

  Erunion frowned, reaching out for his equipment controls. ‘We have a thread into something,’ he mumbled, pulling at a jewel-tipped lever. ‘Nothing solid yet.’

  Spinoza looked at Crowl.

  ‘Again,’ he urged, pressing his fingers together too hard.

  ‘Spinoza, Luce,’ she repeated. ‘Beta-beta-chimeric.’

  The white noise grew in volume, fluctuating, then rippling as if it were liable to shear away entirely. They listened for a few moments more. Erunion made more adjustments. The lenses remained empty.

  Spinoza raised her hand, poised to cut the link. Just as she did so, the main lens suddenly scrawled with runes. They were gibberish – routing information and frequency parameters. Crowl, who had started to become distracted, suddenly snapped his chin up.

  ‘This is–’ he started.

  Then the screams began. They crowded into the feed, overlapping and incoherent and incredibly loud. Erunion scrambled for the volume controls, but they just kept coming.

  Spinoza recoiled, her finger hovering over the bead, but Crowl gestured frantically for her to keep it open.

  ‘Mercy of the Throne! Mercy of the Thr–’

  It was a woman’s voice, perhaps, or some distorted version of one, or maybe a man’s that had been ramped up the registers by fear. Other voices crowded in, guttural, bestial. There were words in a language Spinoza didn’t understand, ones that made her ears ring.

  The lens filled with random data, picking up speed. The chronometers started to clatter round. Crowl stared up at them in alarm, and menials scrambled to isolate the main input jacks.

  Spinoza found herself recoiling. There were other noises on the feed – fleshy, squelchy noises. High-pitched, porcine shrieks in the background went on and on, crowded out only by the foreground cries. She heard what sounded like gun shots, and heavy crashes.

  A new voice broke through the cacophony, a man’s this time, shouting over the tumult in another unfamiliar language. Solid-round gunfire broke out, hammering into a crescendo and drowning out most of the agonised screams.

  Someone got close to the transmitter and spilled out more desperate injunctions. ‘Help us! Help us! Help–’

  Then there was a scrape, a snarl, an animalistic snap of aggression. More gunfire hammered out, growing in volume.

  The link cut out.

  She found that her heart was beating faster. Gingerly, she reached up to her comm-bead to ensure the audex could not re-establish. The lenses around her flickered with whole screeds of rune-data.

  Erunion looked shocked. He drew in an unsteady breath and looked over at Crowl.

  The inquisitor was lost in thought.

  ‘Did you get anything… useful?’ Spinoza asked Erunion.

  The chirurgeon stared up at the lenses. ‘Ah, well…’ he started, before steadying himself. ‘These a
re all vox-containing elements. Nothing I can use yet. No location markers. Not yet.’

  ‘You must have something.’

  Erunion shot her an irritated glance. ‘What did you make of the screams, interrogator? Your department, I would think.’

  The insolence stung her. ‘I would advise you to watch your tongue, chirurgeon,’ she snapped, clenching her gauntleted fist and taking a step towards him.

  ‘Enough,’ came Crowl’s distracted voice. His brow was still knotted. ‘An unpleasant surprise. We must reflect on it, not fight over it.’

  ‘What is there to reflect on?’ Spinoza asked, feeling her patience fraying. ‘Whoever was at the other end of this long-dead link has been caught up in the madness overtaking this whole world. The madness we should be doing something about. You heard it! Those were proscribed words, or they were gibberish.’

  ‘Some of it was.’ Crowl looked up at her. ‘Some was anguish. Some was indeed proscribed. But some was battle-language. Of a secret kind, of course, but it has always been my business to uncover secrets.’

  Erunion stared at him. Spinoza realised the truth then, and her heart sank.

  ‘I know precisely where it came from,’ Crowl said, looking almost dazed. ‘And so I know, now, at last, where we have to go.’

  The two Spiderwidow gunships were the only aircraft in the citadel’s armoury still fit to fly. Being orbit-capable vehicles with limited atmospheric manoeuvrability, they had not been scrambled during the assault, and so were now hastily prepped and loaded by teams of menials.

  The lead vessel now stood on the apron, gouting with steam, its access hatches open and every intake valve trailing fuel lines. All non-essential items were being carried away by servitors, lightening it and creating room for the storm troopers that would soon be encased within.

  ‘We can barely guard the citadel as it is,’ Revus said as they entered the hangars, not as a complaint, but as a bald statement of fact.

  ‘I know,’ Crowl told him. ‘If times were otherwise, we might be able to make arrangements, but they are not, and so we can’t.’ He halted, placing a hand on the captain’s arm. ‘But it has all come down to this, Revus. One gamble, made possible by fate. We would never be forgiven if we did not take it.’

  It was impossible to miss the signs now. Crowl’s eyes were too bright, his movements too jerky. Even Gorgias seemed uncertain, keeping his distance and saying nothing.

  ‘I’ve done what I can,’ Revus said. ‘The gates must be guarded – there will be underhive trash to ward off, if nothing else.’

  Crowl started walking again, his steps halting in his armour. ‘They don’t matter,’ he said, waving one hand breezily in the air. ‘There have been riots before. There will be again. This is the true danger.’

  The hangar’s far end was mangled and open to the elements, flying with filth and dust blown in from outside. The launch ramps had been cleared, but rubble and smashed metal still littered the spaces on either side of the gunships’ launch trajectories.

  Spiderwidows, despite their bulk, did not have large crew compartments. Ten storm troopers would go in one; five, plus Revus, Khazad, Spinoza, Hegain and Crowl, would go in the other. The fact that such a paltry complement was enough to strip Courvain’s defences to the marrow was a crushing indictment of the damage that had already been caused.

  All remaining space was taken up with ammo-loops for the prow-mounted bolters, auxiliary generators for the lascannons and stowed replacement weapons for the infantry on board. In addition to the usual hellguns, the squads also packed plasma guns and bolt pistols.

  Spinoza and Khazad were waiting for them on the apron, both fully armoured. The assassin looked lithe and lethal, Spinoza stolid and immovable. They were both helmed, as were the storm troopers clambering up into the gunships. Spinoza carried her crozius arcanum with her now, which Revus thought, not for the first time, made her complete.

  ‘The time for secrecy has passed,’ Crowl announced, greeting them both. ‘We succeed in this, or perish in the attempt. The Emperor knows the righteousness of our cause, and will judge us if we fail.’

  ‘By your will,’ Spinoza replied curtly. Khazad bowed floridly. Revus had not spoken to her since their last encounter, and she did not make eye contact with him at all. She looked ready, though – bristling with energy and spoiling to make up for the perceived failures of the last engagement.

  Then Crowl was climbing to take his place in the cockpit, next to Aneela. Revus hauled himself into the crew bay behind, followed by the interrogator and the assassin. As the hatches slammed closed, sealing them in, the fuel-lines slithered loose and the giant engines snarled into shaking, roaring life.

  He reached for the restraint harness, snapping the locks home. Hegain was sitting opposite him in the dark, and nodded in greeting.

  ‘Back into action, captain,’ the sergeant said, cheerily enough. ‘Something to welcome, in the truth of it.’

  Revus said nothing. He had fuelled up on protein-sticks and carb-bars in the short time he had been given, and had a stock of stimms to keep him alert when they arrived, but he still felt drained, hollowed out. Perhaps he was getting too old for this. Perhaps the fires were on their way to dying now, and this was how military careers – and lives – came to an end.

  The gunship’s structure shook, and the engine-whines rose in pitch and volume. From outside the gunship’s armoured exterior, shouted voices could be heard completing the pre-flight checks, and heavy chocks slid across the rockcrete.

  Then, with an accelerated growl of turbines booming into full power, the last of the shackles slammed clear, and the alert klaxons broke into throaty life. Menials scampered out of danger, servitors trundled out of the blast-zone. The hangar’s shutters came down, and the Spiderwidows lifted off the ground on cushions of driving thrust. Through the narrow viewport, Revus watched the hangar walls drop lower, then slide by, faster and faster, before they were out, thundering into the night.

  The aircraft swung wide immediately, tilting over hard and boosting for a slender gap between hive spires. It was hours yet before dawn, and the skies were still as dark as pitch. In normal times those skies would have been punctuated with a billion lumen points, gaudy against the deep velvet of the overcast heavens. Now, though, everything was stained red from the many fires. They were burning along whole avenues now, upwelling in the sheer chasms between towers, flooding a crimson glow up the long ranks of deep-set windows. The airspace above them was thick with smoke, a choking pall that masked out the lightning-danced nimbus of the ever-present cloud cover.

  It looked hellish. It looked ripe to boil over, to spill up and out and cover the world in an angry tide of blood and darkness. The storm winds made the Spiderwidows shake, throwing them both around in a mess of turbulence and unnatural thermals. One moment they would be screaming along at full tilt, the next dropping like a stone. The panels within the crew bay shook hard, rattling as if they would pull the rivets with them.

  The volume of noise made talking next to impossible. Revus thought he caught Khazad and Spinoza shouting at one another over the din.

  ‘He is sure?’ the assassin was asking.

  ‘He is sure,’ Spinoza replied, her helm making it impossible to know what she thought of that.

  The spires swept past them, one after the other, streaks of lumen-dappled black against the flames. He saw mighty warehouses, each one the size of a Mechanicus coffin ship, slumping into ruin as the fires tore through them, leaving skeletal lattices of iron across the booming heart of the inferno. He saw whole urban sectors seemingly without power, their towers and their transitways like the twisted forests of some forgotten nightmare-world. The only other aircraft abroad now were military or Arbites, struggling against the ash-laden winds just as they were. A big Militarum gun transport roared its way north, its grav-plates glowing white and its leviathan engines labouring. The sound
of gunfire ebbed and waxed within the symphony of other sounds, giving evidence of the running battles taking place across half the sector’s streets.

  After a while, they flew over more sparsely inhabited areas. Great refinery complexes reared up on either side of them, flanked by cooling towers that belched steam into the cauldrons of dirty smoke. A subsector power reactor was still evidently in operation, its vast rockcrete walls studded with a maddening complexity of pipes and feeder-lines, its bulbous roof floodlit and pinned by a hundred sensor vanes. Tox-stained wastes emerged, studded with empty carcasses of old manufactoria, their empty windows lashed by the storm’s wrath.

  They were headed north-east, climbing steadily as the land rose. It was almost impossible to tell by eye, since Terra’s horizons were never clear of competing turrets and towers, but Salvator had been built in something of a depression. The great structures of the central core were raised atop ancient mountains. The centuries of delving, elevating, re-delving and scouring had erased their primordial magnificence and interred it all under ranked layers of rockcrete, but the altimeters still betrayed evidence of the first contours of the Imperial capital.

  Away north, beyond sight and across a flaming horizon, loomed the mighty Palace itself – its temples, its bastion walls, its sarcophagi of administration. The lightning storms seemed strongest there, as if forces within the heavens above had launched themselves at one another and now crunched into ruinous contact, each unable to drive the other into submission.

  Their course took them east of that, out past the industrial wastes and further into clearly impoverished districts, with half-ruined walls standing like tombstones amid cheap-looking conurbs and hab-ziggurats. The reason for the destitution became clear soon enough – a mighty ravine had been gouged straight through it all, a kilometre wide and two hundred metres deep. The canyon was lined with iron-black metalwork, banded and ridged like a mortal spine. A cluster of massive cables, each the diameter of a Warlord Titan and surrounded in layers of protective scaffolding, ran along its base, snaking like some gargantuan powerline amid the semi-derelict structures on either side. Mournful watchtowers rose up at regular intervals, each one a fortress in its own right and surmounted by rotating lascannon emplacements. The telltale flicker of void shielding shimmered over the canyon’s roof, sealing in the semi-buried conduits below. Every so often, enormous tangles of machinery erupted out from the sloping walls of the trench, bearing the unmistakeable mark of the Mechanicus – power transformers, plasma-sinks, electro-magnetic flux absorbers, psy-coils.