Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  Spinoza saw a storm trooper stumble, dropping to his knees, before blood burst from his helm-seals and armour-joints. Another one bent double, caught in the pressure-wave, crushed to the ground and burst apart like ripe fruit.

  She hurled herself into the nearest psyker, heaving Argent into its stomach where the disruptor blazed and boiled. Revus got a shot away at the second, pinging its shoulder and sending it spinning. Gorgias flew in hard overhead, spraying needles and shrieking ‘Diabolis extremis!’ at the top of his vox-emitter.

  Another storm trooper, possibly Hegain, leapt atop the first corrupted adept, stabbing up and down in a frenzy. The second creature recovered itself in the swinging dark, baring a black-toothed mouth and hissing. It threw its arms out again, and the metal walls around them flexed. A pressure-wave hurtled down the hallway, catching two more storm troopers and kicking them over in sprays of blood.

  Spinoza lurched with effort towards it, fighting the skirts of the effect, punching Argent two-handed into a spike-crusted chin. Its neck snapped cleanly, and she whirled back around, trying to see if any more had emerged.

  None had. One of the downed troopers got back up, clutching his side, still bent double. The others did not.

  ‘Keep moving,’ she ordered again.

  She broke back into a run, reaching the stairs and vaulting up them two at a time. Revus came close behind, followed by the rest. They clattered up the stairway, and unearthly screams followed them.

  An adept was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. Spinoza didn’t even break stride, lashing out with the full force of the disruptor charge, breaking its limbs and sending the bloody pieces careening into the shadows.

  Across another vaulted hall, then up more spiral stairs, through an antechamber, and there it was – the slide doors to the communication tower. The panels were wedged open by a corpse that had got caught in the mechanism.

  Spinoza dropped to her knees.

  ‘Blind them,’ she ordered. Hegain pulled a flare-grenade from his belt and threw it through the gap. They both averted their eyes as the flash went off, a microsecond of retina-burning illumination. ‘Now, inside.’

  They raced to make the gap, just as the first of the pursuing adepts crested the summit of the stairs behind them. Revus and another storm trooper stooped to drag the body from the gap and piled inside. Others shot the momentarily blinded adepts blundering about within, and once the last of the storm troopers had staggered over the threshold, Spinoza kicked the close mechanism. The doors slid jerkily together, just as the chasing creatures scampered across the antechamber towards them. The two panels fused with a hiss and a clunk, followed by multiple thuds as frustrated fists hammered on the other side.

  Spinoza turned around, panting hard. Seven of them had made it in, including Revus and Hegain. They were hauling in breaths now, reloading, edging ahead warily.

  The chamber was a large one, maybe fifteen metres across. On the far side were high armourglass windows, each more than ten metres high, lined with gothic arches in lead tracery. Banks of communication equipment covered every surface, extending up into the vaults above them, where large copper vanes hung amid entrail-like coils and signal-enhancers. Just as elsewhere, the excruciated bodies of those unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the bloodletting were everywhere, and the console tops were scratched with desperate fingernail trails.

  The view outside was almost as troubling as the one within – the skies were black-red now, underlit by the raging infernos. The lightning was frenzied, snapping against the external walls as if trying to prise its way in. After so long in the oppressive darkness, to see the surfaces lit up by the flash and flicker of the storm made her eyes sting.

  Revus stalked ahead with two others, prodding every static body with the muzzle of his hellgun. Spinoza signalled for two more to stand guard at the doorway, which was already being thumped hard from the outside. It might have been her imagination, but the metal looked to be flexing, as if some enormous force were being applied. She motioned to Hegain, and together they went up to the main comms station. She deactivated Argent’s energy field, and adjusted a set of runes on its haft.

  Hegain fiddled with the station controls before bringing out another portable power cell, connecting it and coaxing the transmitters into life. Far above them, out of sight but within hearing, the immense external emitters slowly turned westward.

  ‘Full spectrum broadcast,’ Hegain announced. ‘All channels, maximum power. I can set it to auto-cycle, if you will it.’

  Spinoza knelt down in front of the control console. ‘Very good, sergeant. I shall require a closed input link.’

  Hegain rummaged around in the hopper at his feet, before unravelling a wrist-thick cord. One plug went into the comms console, and he proffered the other to Spinoza.

  She inserted it into Argent’s shaft, just below the maul-head, then adjusted a control dial. Lights flickered into life along the crozius’ length, and corresponding strobes lit up on the console.

  Now there could be no mistaking it – the doors had began to bulge. A sound like the scrape of metal on metal rang out, as if knives had been brought to bear, or maybe claws.

  Spinoza glanced up at Revus, who gave her the signal for all-clear.

  His troops slowly took up positions behind cover, their guns facing the swelling door panels.

  ‘Now then,’ said Spinoza to herself, turning the other way, looking out across the burning city beyond the tower’s edge, ‘we shall see what an oath is truly worth.’

  Once inside the inner defence circuit, things got better. The power was functional here, feeding lines of blue-tinged lumens. The air smelled less of blood and more of incense. The oppressiveness did not go away though. The pressure at the temples did not lessen. With every step, it grew a little stronger, pressing down, exerting its uneasy and unquantifiable sense of dread.

  ‘Can you tell me your name?’ Crowl asked the woman as they walked down a long, bare passageway.

  ‘I am one of his Resonances,’ she said.

  ‘Are there many of you?’

  She turned to him. ‘Just what is it that ails you, inquisitor? You took your helm off, and I thought I was looking at a corpse.’

  Crowl smiled grimly. ‘It’s been a long journey.’

  Khazad was sullen and withdrawn. Losing her blade was, Crowl guessed, a major blow to her sense of self. Perhaps she was regretting her decision to accompany him.

  He was in a somewhat similar position. His earlier euphoria was wearing off. Erunion’s last doses were losing their potency. Or, maybe, as they moved out of the worst of the psychic maelstrom, things were settling down a little. He wondered how Spinoza was faring, back in those horror-drenched chambers, and the thought of her, back there, pained him.

  They passed through more sets of doors. As they went, somewhat against expectation, the decoration became less ornate. The first portals were silver-inlaid riots of dream-images and astrological allegories, as if the architects had tried to conjure up the inner life of their charges in stone and steel. The ornamentation gradually fell away until they were back in an industrial milieu. The muffled grind of great machines rose up through the grilles of floor-decking. Surfaces became bare metal again, stamped with Astronomica sigils, but chipped, worn, and edged with corrosion.

  The temperature began to drop. Surfaces were first clouded with condensation, then frosted with brittle spikes. The edges of things – doorways, lintels, lumen-casings – seemed somehow sharper, as if the air had become thinner, or perhaps electrically charged.

  They reached the most mundane set of doors yet, a pair of beaten-iron slabs on rail-runners. Heavy levers controlled the cog-mechanisms to open it. The sharp stink of engine-oils now rivalled that of the incense.

  As if sensing his thoughts, the Resonance turned towards him. ‘This is a machine,’ she said, her lips still perfect
ly static. ‘Never forget that.’

  The doors ground their way open, squealing on their rails. On the other side was an immense gulf, across which the way ahead shot straight as a spear, suspended high above a steam-choked void.

  Crowl looked all around him, up and down, left and right, marvelling at the complexity of the devices cloistered below and hanging above. Everything had the stamp of Mars on it – the bronzed casings, the heavy frames, the old rust, the raw and brutal functionality. Great engines hammered, connected to drivetrains and gearing arrays, in turn connected to generators, power converters and energy-fins. Sparks of static flew across the chasms between the elements, half-lost in the fogs of vapour. Some areas flickered with greenish energy, snaking and writhing around conductor-spikes. Others were entirely lost amid noxious fumes, spilling from exhaust vents the size of orbital lifters. Some constructions, the largest of them all, defied interpretation entirely. There were ranks and ranks of wafer-like gold mesh, all crackling with wriggles of raw force and ringed with iron torcs. There were black spheres, suspended by electromagnetic force above receiving dishes, studded with snaking cables and input-whirls. There were crystals, each tens of metres high, glowing with eerie inner light, held in place by webs of sensor-whips. Nestled amid all those gigantic elements was an astonishingly complex system of gantries, scaffolds and ladder-cages. Some movement was detectable in the very deepest reaches – servitors, perhaps, or maybe tech-priests, shuffling about agitatedly in the smoke-choked gloom.

  It took a long time to cross that gulf. By the time they reached the far side, it was almost possible to forget about the horrors in the outer chambers. It felt as if they had passed into another world again.

  A final doorway loomed. This had almost no adornment at all – it was a circular hatch, four metres in diameter, studded with rivets and cross-barred with adamantium braces. The impression of extreme age leaking from it was striking. A faded, worn-away sigil could just be made out on the curved surface – a raptor’s head, maybe, over a jagged lightning strike. Somehow, perhaps due to the unnatural energies lashing and flaring all around them, Crowl could almost taste its antiquity – this thing had been there, in that position, for longer than a Palace had stood on Terra.

  The roar, the thrum, the constant ramp-up of pressure, it all came from the other side of that door. Even if he had known nothing of the Astronomican at all, not even the rudimentary fragments that any schola child was taught, he would have known then that something colossal was on the other side, something perilous, something lethal and elemental, something so grotesquely powerful that a single soul, set against it, counted for less than a speck of dust against the arc of eternity.

  The Resonance glanced at him as the bolts were drawn back. For the first time, her lips twitched.

  ‘I would tell you to prepare yourself,’ she said. ‘But there really isn’t much you can do.’

  Then the door swung open, and they went inside. A long tunnel followed. Crowl ran his finger along the wall as he walked – it was naked rock now, worn smooth and polished to a high sheen. A rectangle of light waited for them at the far end, glowing so brightly that his eyes watered. Every step brought them closer to that light, and with the light came a melange of noises – the roar he had been hearing since they first set foot in this place, mixed with a whole array of other, harder-to-place sounds. Crackling, maybe, like flames? Murmuring, as if a crowd of thousands was talking to itself? Singing, even?

  They reached the end, and stepped out into the light. A long spur ran straight ahead, composed of the same rock as the tunnel walls, extending far into the gulf beyond. In all other directions, the ground fell away to nothingness. They stood against the inner curve of a gigantic sphere. Its lower half was hewn from the stone of the mountain; the upper half looked like glass.

  The scale of it was hard to process – the zenith and nadir stretched so far overhead and underfoot that both were lost in the haze of distance. All across the sphere’s inner surface were points of light, thousands of them, some blazing brightly, others dim. Murmuring, shouting, chanting filled the entire space, reflecting and echoing back and forth until it seemed that there must be millions of sources there, fissured, overlapping, interplaying.

  At the very centre, far out beyond the end of the spur, was a huge orb of light, dancing, spinning, whirling like a neutron star. It was not static, but it vibrated to an uncertain rhythm, contracting and expanding like a lung taking in air. Tendrils of ephemeral force ran into the orb, connecting it to the thousands of lights at the sphere’s edge. Pulses travelled down the tendrils, all moving in the same direction – towards the centre.

  It should have been beautiful. The light was blue-white, dazzling in its purity, making the glass dome ripple like sunlight on water. The singing was harmonious, the proportions of the sphere were perfect.

  Instead, it was hateful. It was abominable. Crowl looked up at it, and felt his soul tugged away. He could barely maintain his focus. The light played around him, dancing in concentric circles, winking and sliding from the rock facets and the frost-mottled crystal, and it made him want to scream out loud. Every one of those brilliant points contained, at its heart, an iron throne. On every throne writhed a mortal man or woman, locked down by iron collars, their skin punctured by control jacks, their temples weighed down by psy-resonant tiaras, burning themselves to death.

  This was a furnace. A cold, hard furnace. Each point of light was slowly being drained to nothing, sucked into the orb in order to generate the signal that burned through the warp itself.

  ‘This is a place of pain,’ he said out loud, his lips moving unbidden.

  The Resonance inclined her head, walking beside him out on to the spur. ‘A fraction of the pain He endures,’ she said. ‘Consider that.’

  He had to keep moving. Now that he was here, he had to keep placing one step in front of the other. A part of him wanted nothing more than to crawl away, to turn his face from the pristine light and return to the world of shadows and deterioration. Nothing should have been that… stringent.

  A single figure was waiting for them at the far end of the spur. Initially it was almost invisible, lost in the nimbus of the orb above. As they got closer, a black silhouette formed against the amorphous light, firming up, solidifying into the profile of a mortal man.

  Certain features emerged. He was tall, very tall, thin as a javelin, and dressed in a dark, thigh-length, tailored coat. Like all the denizens of this place, his skin was pearl-white. As the man turned to face them, he revealed a plain black rebreather covering the lower portion of his face. Tiny black tubes snaked from his earlobes, from plugs at his cranium, from behind his eyes. He looked neat, precise, composed. His hands were clasped in front of him, clad in a pair of sleek silk gloves.

  Crowl came to a halt. Everything hurt. Everything ached. Khazad stood silently at his side, staring with raw distrust at the dancing lights. The Resonance hung back, as did her guards.

  ‘Inquisitor Crowl,’ the man said, inclining his long face a little.

  Slowly, haltingly, Crowl reached for his rosette. He brought it up into the light, his hand shaking as he did so.

  ‘Say nothing,’ he said, his voice hoarse and cracked against the terrible beauty of the celestial choir. ‘Listen with utmost care. High Lord Leops Franck, Master of the Astronomican, I charge you in the name of the Emperor of Mankind with treachery against the Throne, consorting with aliens, and conspiracy to pervert the course of Imperial justice. You shall be taken from this place and subjected to just interrogation in order to establish the degree of your undoubted guilt. How do you plead?’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  They were going to get in.

  Spinoza backed away from the doors, Argent crackling, watching the metal dent and flex.

  ‘On my command,’ she said, tensing.

  It sounded like there were dozens now on the far side, scraping a
nd thudding. They might have had a battering ram, for all that the steel was being tortured, but she had seen enough of their ­psychic prowess to guess what was really hurting the structure.

  If the messages had ever got through, there was no guarantee that the recipients would be in a position to respond. Spinoza found it hard to believe that no prior messages at all had made it out, given the vastness of the Fortress and its importance. If its Master had truly kept his failure quiet out of some misplaced sense of pride, then that was as damnable an offence as any. The entire world was burning. Its guardians, those who still answered the call of duty, were being run ragged. She had warned Crowl about the growing anarchy often and early, but he had been blind, so it seemed, to the signs. Perhaps he had been on Terra too long, learning to hate the world that kept him prisoner within it. Perhaps, when it had all started to come apart around him, he had no longer cared enough.

  The door rattled on its pistons.

  The surviving storm troopers had done what they could to find cover, and now crouched behind instrument banks and cogitator chassis. Revus, as ever, had taken the position of most danger, kneeling less than four metres from the doorway behind an overturned metal bench. Hegain was similarly positioned forward, with the rest of the survivors scattered across a loose arc facing the doors.

  There was no way out now. The communications spire was hundreds of metres up the sheer western face of the Fortress, and flames and ash billowed up outside. The windows themselves were darkening, filling with the spread of sooty filth, cutting off even a visual link to the rest of the planet.

  Spinoza began to wonder, dryly, whether her chosen way to die was any worse than her master’s. At least he had acted consistently throughout, running down the scent they had uncovered together, never deviating from it even when it seemed the entire world was succumbing to insanity. Perhaps that was what an inquisitor needed to be. Perhaps that was what separated them from the rest of the Adeptus Terra, with its messy compromises and necessary imperfections. Perhaps that was not madness, but something to be admired.