Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  The door shook again, and a crack rippled across the chamber. She could hear panting from the other side now, urgent and wet, like animals’ voices.

  Gorgias hovered at her shoulder, his needle gun swivelling towards every scrape and scratch.

  ‘Maximum spread, please,’ Spinoza asked, as politely as she could. She had never really addressed the skull much before – he was Crowl’s creature, sharing some link that obviously went back a long way. It felt inappropriate to be giving him orders, somehow.

  Gorgias ducked down a fraction, his spinal trail flexing. ‘Fortias, Interrogatrix,’ he said, in as companionable a tone as his primitive vox-emitter ever really managed. ‘Kill-kill, instantus, very soon.’

  The door panels shivered. Another great bulge, like the clenched fingers of a fist, swelled out, pushing the mangled steel close to the shatter-point. The hissing got louder.

  The windows behind her rattled, whipped against by the driving wind. The entire structure seemed to be shaking, as if the furious elements outside were capable of rocking it down to its ancient foundations.

  Another crack opened, and the metal shrieked. More hammer-blows came in now, faster and faster.

  ‘In His name,’ she said through gritted teeth, bending her knees and preparing to meet the first wave, ‘bring them down.’

  The broken doors burst apart. What seemed like a single massive creature swarmed through the breach, splitting rapidly into a close-pressed scrum of nightshade-clad adepts, their black eyes wide and staring, their bloody mouths open to gnaw.

  Every lasgun opened fire, filling the chamber with neon spears. Some of the corrupted were caught, spilling over themselves, though others quickly pounced through the gaps, shoving their own kind aside to get at the raw flesh ahead.

  Spinoza rose up, spinning to gather momentum and smashing Argent into a flying, black-eyed adept. The maul-head smacked into it, driving fragile ribs in. A second horror lurched up, and the maul slammed back down, boiling with blood and plasma.

  From the corner of her eye, half-lost in the whirl of movement, she saw a storm trooper borne down by several horrors at once, fingers scrabbling for her throat. She heard Revus roaring in fury and pain, and smelled the acrid tang of plasma weaponry burning through flesh. The room thundered with noise, a gathering crescendo that vied with the whines and bullet-impacts and shrieks. Even amid the confusion and adrenaline of the assault, she thought that was strange – where was it coming from?

  She lashed out again, cutting down another corrupted adept, only to see one of the brain-swollen psykers coming right at her. She felt a tightness around her neck, and immediately black stars crowded her vision. She tried to shake it off, to break free and bring her maul back to bear, but the constriction grew.

  She let rip with a half-strangled cry, struggling to stay on her feet, attempting to drive the crozius with arms that now felt like they were sunk into a swamp. Other adepts capered towards her, taking advantage of her sudden lethargy, their pupil-less eyes blazing.

  Then the windows blew in. Every pane shattered at once, throwing armourglass across the chamber in a racing horizontal rain. The roar became a scream – a crashing, driving growl that drowned out everything else.

  The grip on her throat disappeared. Its architect collapsed in on itself amid a flurry of blown glass shards. Hot wind scoured through the chamber, bringing with it ash-flakes and flecks of still-burning metal. She whirled around, just in time to see the first of them crash through the open window frame.

  She had forgotten just how big they were. She had forgotten just how heavy, how intimidating, how magnificent, they were.

  The Imperial Fists Space Marine landed perfectly, denting the floor with his weight but never losing poise. He was firing even before he landed, filling the space ahead of him with a blistering rain of mass reactive bolts. More Space Marines smashed through the window alongside him – first two, then three – just as huge, just as fast. Behind them, half-lost in the squalls, hovered the massive shadow of a Thunderhawk gunship.

  Spinoza dropped face-down to the floor, crawling out of the path of the bolt-shells. She could see the others doing the same, slithering away from the hurricane that had been unleashed at her request.

  The Imperial Fists strode through the wreckage of the chamber, the storm-surge flying about them in a welter of fire and filth. They were not so much fighting the enemy as grinding it away, bludgeoning the corruption aside and crushing it back to the metal. Psychic blasts or pressure-waves were shrugged off, then punished with eye-burning volumes of retributory bolt shells. The brutality of it, the unremitting violence of it, was breathtaking.

  The first Space Marine reached her position. Already his bolter-barrage was slowing, shorn now of targets to hit. The entire far end of the chamber smouldered, a crater-pitted wreck of bent and blasted ironwork, laced with scraps of cooking mortal matter.

  A huge, pitted, snarled-faced helm angled down at her, its lenses glowing faintly. He smelled like something industrial – a smelting furnace, a turbo-hammer.

  ‘You were the one?’ he asked, his voice a low-timbre growl through his helm’s systems.

  She got to her knees, shakily. ‘Interrogator Luce Spinoza,’ she said, showing him the crozius. ‘Gifted by Chaplain Erastus on Forfoda.’

  The Space Marine regarded it carefully. ‘Argent,’ he said. ‘That was how your signal reached the Keep.’

  ‘It came with an oath. A promise of aid.’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘For this place,’ she said, a little stung. ‘For the Beacon.’

  The Space Marine took another look at the crozius, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was there, in her hands, in this place. As he did so, more of his warriors broke through the gaping wall-breach. Soon there were ten of them there, a full tactical squad. That alone was astonishing. They were busy finishing off the last dregs of the enemy now, moving up towards the bolt-cracked doorway and preparing to lumber through it.

  The Space Marine reached down to help her up. His gauntlet swallowed hers, enclosing her hand in a heavy sheath of ceramite.

  ‘Brother-Sergeant Haessler,’ he said. ‘Reinforcements are incoming, interrogator, but will take time to get here. You can still fight?’

  The words alone made her heart swell.

  ‘By His will,’ she said, activating Argent’s disruptor again. ‘Yes, I can.’

  Khazad had been struggling the whole time. After the psychic clamp placed on her limbs outside the portal, the woman had allowed her to move again, but an invisible straitjacket still lingered over her movements. She could feel the weight of it, just beyond true sensation, a denseness poised and hanging out of the reach of her fingertips.

  She had not spoken during the long walk through the heart of the machine. Every step she had taken had been a testing of boundaries – an uncoiling and alignment of certain muscles, an imposition of mental energy. Crowl had seemed fascinated the whole way in, caught up in the spectacle of it all, or perhaps with his own mortal obsessions. For her, it had meant very little – just a transition to where she needed to be.

  Now, placed at the heart of it all, surrounded and enveloped by that numinous chorus of pain, she prepared herself. She observed how the bodies on the rock spur were arranged. Crowl had gone ahead of her, speaking to the man he called the Master, who she now knew was the murderer she had been seeking ever since her own inquisitor had been killed. The Resonance stood to one side, keeping Khazad tightly in check, holding her on her invisible leash. Four of the Fortress guards stood a little further back. Their presence seemed more for the sake of protocol than anything else.

  Crowl’s first words to the Master had felt hollow, rather than bold, as if the necessary formalities had to be observed but that all of them knew where the true power balance lay. Suitably enough, the man had smiled coolly, his eyes creasing above the line of his rebr
eather.

  ‘How gallant,’ he had said, glancing perfunctorily at Crowl’s rosette. ‘But you have come a long way. Come, let us talk.’

  And then they had both moved further down the length of the spur, one walking easily, the other failing to conceal his limp.

  Khazad watched them go, aware the whole time of the Resonance’s eyes on her.

  ‘Your hatred is impressively focused,’ the woman said. Her lips still did not move – a cheap trick that Khazad found more irritating than daunting. ‘He is here out of duty. With you, it is personal.’

  Khazad ignored the observation – one hardly needed to be ­psychic to detect her degree of hatred – and paid greater attention to her surroundings. She tested the bounds of her psychic shackles again. She could move her head, her shoulders, even her limbs, just a little, but beyond that the heaviness was deadening. If she attempted sudden movement, she knew the clamp would return instantly, freezing her fists before they could fly into the woman’s face.

  She glanced upward, out across the gulf where the giant orb of light pulsed. It was truly immense, that thing – a sphere of pure energy suspended within the empty core of the greater physical sphere, radiating steadily like the heart of a cold sun.

  ‘The physical emanation of the ecstatic souls,’ the Resonance said, noticing her interest. ‘It is majestic, is it not? And yet, it is but a shallow reflection of the true power of this place. That power is unseen, generated by those who serve, and guided by Him alone.’

  The woman’s seeming need to talk was also an irritant. It was almost as if, having spent her entire life here and been suffused into its mysteries, she was compelled to share something of it, to justify her existence to those who had now stumbled through its broken gates.

  ‘Failing,’ Khazad said.

  The woman frowned. ‘The empyrean is in great turmoil,’ she said. ‘These are, as you can see, dangerous times.’

  Khazad’s eyes scanned across the distant sphere’s inner wall, and she witnessed more signs of damage. Flecks of darkness played over the orb’s translucent surface, blotting its purity for a few seconds before being swallowed up again by the gelatinous churn. The thousands of iron thrones, all hanging in their long serried ranks, were marred with what looked like burn scars – some of them were missing entirely, their place taken by empty apertures that fizzed and crackled with wild force.

  The people here were deluded. They were insane. They had spent so much time gazing into the maw of the deep that they were no longer capable of seeing the physical catastrophe unfolding around them. Their adepts were dead or dying, their great machine was clanking out of control, and still they nodded and smiled, maintaining the icy demeanour of men and women used to presiding over the elements of eternity, confident it would all be back as it should be soon.

  This was Terra in microcosm. This was a world on the edge of annihilation, washed by the first shockwaves of a greater conflagration to come, and still its people busied themselves with their age-old rituals and functions. They lived, they fought, they laboured, and all the while their doom crept steadily closer, in full sight, undisguised yet ignored.

  In that respect, Khazad was no better than any of them. She had come here, not for the sake of the Throneworld, but to get close to one man, a man who now stood less than a single leap away from her, unarmoured, his neck exposed.

  It would be good to keep the woman talking.

  ‘You will die here, I think,’ she said.

  The Resonance looked briefly startled. ‘Do you think we have never seen turbulence before?’ she asked. ‘We regret the bloodshed, that is true. So much careful training, wasted. But the balance will be restored, the harmonics will align, and then the gates will open, the ships will return. The thrones must be filled. That has always been the way of it.’

  As the Resonance reeled off her platitudes, Khazad entered the Shoba discipline of kao-kokoro – one face, two minds. She maintained a façade of careful attention, while inwardly she prepared to move. Every sinew tightened, her weight shifted by a fraction. Her blade was gone, but she still had her hands, which in their lightweight armour casing were as deadly as claw-hammers.

  ‘This comes from far away,’ the Resonance said, looking up at the dome. ‘This is the result of distant wards breaking, ones that have been in place for millennia. It shall be endured, though. We have always endured.’

  The ground beneath their feet began to tremble. The Resonance’s attention was briefly diverted, and Khazad felt the pressure lift. She was on the edge now, her strength gathered up, her recovery complete. It felt as if everything that had happened since waking up in Crowl’s apothecarion had led her here, step by step, for this. Something like joy flooded through her. Psychic clamp or no, the crisis was coming, and when it did, she would be ready.

  ‘I would not expect you to understand,’ the Resonance went on. ‘Nor your master. These are learned matters, and your time here will be, I am afraid, brief.’

  Steadily, Khazad turned her face back towards her.

  ‘Tell me, though,’ she said, selecting the place where the first bone-break would occur. ‘I am very fast learner.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Revus watched the new arrivals get to work. Once the chamber was secured, they brought over equipment from their hovering gunship – power-units, long-range comms-bundles, heavy coils of ammunition. They moved quickly, methodically, barely saying a word to one another.

  Some of what they did was just insane. Their gunship remained at station a few metres out from the comms tower, its massive engines burning hard. In order to retrieve some of the heavier items, the Space Marines would casually leap across the gap, momentarily suspended hundreds of metres up, before coming back the same way, heavy equipment swinging in their fists that would have torn his muscles just to lift.

  Soon the chamber was fully lit again, its equipment pulsing with power. One of the warriors consulted with Hegain, summoning up fresh hololithic schemas of the labyrinth within. The one who had called himself Haessler – a sergeant of the Third Company, by his markings – spoke with Spinoza.

  Revus got up, feeling the stiffness in his limbs, and went over to them.

  ‘The outer Fortress is completely overrun,’ Spinoza was telling Haessler. ‘The inner sanctuary seems to have been sealed off, but that may not help if the corrupted gain access to the main power generators.’

  The Imperial Fist nodded, studying the hololiths. ‘Those can be secured, here,’ he said, pointing to a narrow choke-point many levels down, close to where the psionic conduits docked with the main citadel. ‘But we’ll need to get inside the centre, too.’

  ‘My master, Inquisitor Crowl, aimed to reach the cordon before they shut the doors. He believed the Master of the Astronomican was in there.’

  ‘Then we shall endeavour to reach both of them.’

  Just listening to the Space Marine speak gave Revus a curious kind of reassurance. It was not a gentle voice – it was bone-hard, perfunctory, the kind of voice that had been giving orders for decades – but it was solid, where all else around them seemed to be collapsing into flux. If warriors such as these could be mobilised in numbers, if they still had their vigour and faith when all others lost theirs, then it became possible to believe the situation was still salvageable.

  Revus had served for eight years in Salvator. In that time, he had proven equal to anything the Throneworld had hurled up at him. Now, in quick succession, fate had thrown him alongside different warrior-species of legend, each capable of performing feats that dwarfed anything he could hope to achieve. If this constituted some kind of providential injunction to remember his place in the scheme of things, the lesson was at risk of being quite heavily overstated.

  Spinoza, in contrast, carried herself with a freedom that he had seldom seen since her arrival at Courvain. In her full battle-plate, carrying her crozius, she
did not look much out of place alongside the giants of the Adeptus Astartes. When they spoke to her, it was almost as if they spoke to one of their own.

  ‘Ready, captain?’ she asked him.

  The storm troopers who had made it into the chamber were still capable of fighting. All of them were on their feet again now, recharging, reloading, flexing fatigue-tight limbs.

  ‘On your command, lord,’ Revus said.

  ‘We shall need to move swiftly,’ Haessler said, motioning for his squad to take up position before the shattered doors. He glanced at Revus. ‘You must try to keep up.’

  Revus smiled dryly under his helm. ‘We’ll do our best.’

  Then the Imperial Fists moved off into the gap. Haessler led the assault, barging aside the tattered sheets of metal and plunging into the dark.

  Once on the far side, everything changed. Their progress previously had been a matter of running for cover, seizing any islands of protection they could find before fleeing onward again. This was entirely different – the Space Marines made no attempt to hide, no attempt to trace hidden and tortuous routes, but burned the straightest path towards their goal, contemptuous of danger.

  They split into two squads of five. The second squad headed down towards the Fortress’ principal power convertor, buried deep where the psionic trench met the inner walls. Spinoza, Revus and the other survivors went with Haessler and four of his battle-brothers, and together they struck out towards the centre.

  Their presence soon attracted attention. The dregs and scraps of the corrupted screamed up out of the pits and vaults towards them, throwing themselves at the armoured monsters who had violated their realm. The Space Marines took the brunt of every assault, never slowing, sheltering the storm troopers with their own bodies and loosing bolter-fire in vicious, unrestrained volleys.