by Dan Abnett
Milo had seldom heard the True Names of Chaos spoken aloud. They were forbidden sounds, utterances that human mouths should not make.
He tried to forget it. He was terrified he would remember the name and speak it, or have it burn into his memory. Gaunt had once taught him there were four great names of darkness, that might arise alone, or in combination. Milo had made it a point of personal honour not to know any of them.
“Praise the warp! The warp is the one true way! The names of the warp are a billion and one, and each name is the lament of mankind! Worship the warp! Praise be the warp! Through the power of the warp, the Lord of Change will transmute the galaxy! The warp will engulf all things in a tide of blood!”
Milo sensed Nessa was shaking, and realised with an unexpected pang of fear that she was responding to the sounds even though she couldn’t hear the words. He pushed her on through the crowd. He prayed to the God-Emperor of Mankind that the tannoy wouldn’t utter that awful word again.
Cardinale had reached the gateway of the yard, where workers pressed in to approach the bascule. He tried to block out the sounds, his hand clamped so tight around his little silver aquila, the wingtips were puncturing his palm. He suddenly registered the pain, and flexed his hand.
Cardinale looked back, trying to find the other members of the team without raising his head. He spotted Adare, and Doyl. There was no sign of the boy or the female sniper.
The gate joined the causeway via the bascule, a massive ironwork drawbridge lowered on thick chains from the winch house overhanging the drop. As its great bulk dropped down with a shuddering crash, Blood Pact slavers started to whip the workers into line. They opened the gate’s barred shutter.
An electro-lash caught the back of Cardinale’s calf and he fell to one knee as his leg spasmed.
“Up! Up!” a nearby slaver roared, though his hoarse snarls were mainly directed at the workers who had been completely knocked down by the whip.
Cardinale felt a strong hand support his arm and he got to his feet. Doyl was right next to him.
“Your leg?” the scout whispered.
“It’ll be fine. We have to get through this gate.”
“I know.” Doyl turned and saw Adare a few rows behind them.
“First fifty!” yelled a slaver, speaking, like the tannoy, in a language unfamiliar to him. “First fifty to Beta dome!”
Whips cracked and they spilled through onto the bascule and the causeway beyond. The causeway was a rockcrete thoroughfare broad enough to take a cargo track. It was roofed with pressurised, wire-reinforced glassite and lit by crude strip lamps buried in the walls.
“Are they with us?” Adare whispered.
“Yeah,” replied Doyl. “Don’t look round. Milo and Nessa are about twenty metres back. I saw them both.”
There was a hold-up. Slavers drove the work gangs against the causeway wall in single file to let a cargo transport speed through. Cardinale took the opportunity of the pause to stoop and rub his aching calf.
“Oh shit,” he said suddenly, “that?”
Cardinale started to search his pockets and the folds of his clothing. The slender chain was still wrapped around his hand, but it was broken. The silver aquila was gone.
“Move! Move!” a slaver screamed now the transport had passed. The workers resumed their march over the causeway.
“It must have snapped off,” Cardinale said.
“Never mind that. It doesn’t matter,” Adare said.
“What if they find it?” Cardinale said, rubbing at the wingtip punctures in his palm flesh.
“Shut up, all right? Let me worry about that.”
They were halfway across the causeway.
Okay? Milo signed surreptitiously to Nessa.
I’m fine. That was scary.
True.
They were coming up on the entry porta to Ouranberg, the cyclopean gate house that defended the causeway and the northern approaches. Blood Pact banners fluttered from the batteries.
Nearly there.
In the assembly yard, with the tannoy still screaming out its noxious sermon, one of the slavers yanked on his hate-dog’s chain. It was worrying at the filthy flagstones.
It had found something.
The slaver hunched over and raked his scarred fingers through the greasy muck. Something silver glittered.
A tiny double-eagle. An aquila. An Imperial totem.
“Alarm!” he screamed, ejecting spittle from between his rotten teeth. “Alarm! Alarm!”
Sirens began to whoop. The mass of slaves on the causeway looked round in panic as the strip lights in the wall started to flash amber. The porta into Ouranberg was so close.
“Keep going!” Adare said.
“What do we do?” Cardinale stammered.
“Keep going, like I said. We’re nearly there! Keep going and lock and load!”
The trio elbowed their way through the milling workers, closing on the gateway.
Behind them, Blood Pact soldiers were surging out across the bascule onto the causeway, pushing aside mill workers, or simply gunning them down. There was a terrible howling. The hate-dogs had been unleashed.
“Come on!” Milo urged Nessa, squeezing her arm. She surprised him by pulling back.
“No!” she said aloud. She dragged him back against the causeway wall amongst the cowering workers, and pulled his hood down over his head.
Nessa had fought the Verghast hive war as a scratch company guerilla. She knew how to mingle in the ordinary, how to hide in plain sight. Though his gut instinct told him to run, Milo remembered that, and trusted her.
He bowed his head.
Blood Pact troopers and slavers rushed past them, kicking down anyone foolish enough to get in their way. The hate-dogs, trailing ropes of drool, bounded ahead of them, baying, making the air stink with their rancid pelts.
Two confused mill workers were gunned down right in front of Milo and Nessa by the Blood Pact. Their bodies lay crumpled in spreading lakes of blood, kicked and trampled by the Chaos troopers who rushed after.
Inside the porta, alarms were also ringing. Enemy troops, their iron masks glaring, were corralling all the slaves who had crossed the causeway to one side of the entrance hall. They were shouting and gesturing with their weapons.
“Feth!” said Adare as they came through the gateway, setting foot on Ouranberg proper for the first time.
“Go with the flow,” Doyl urged. “Get in line and don’t draw attention to yourself.”
They could all hear the howling coming closer.
“The dogs! The damned dogs!” Cardinale whined. “They’ve got my scent—”
“Forget it!” Doyl said as loudly as he dared.
“We have to go active,” Cardinale said, fear in his voice.
“You fething well won’t until I say, Phantine!” Adare growled. “Get over! Over to the side with the other workers!”
“But the dogs!”
The dogs were on them, bursting through the screaming workers in the gateway, surging in towards them.
“Holy Emperor!” Cardinale yelled. He pushed Adare aside.
“Oh feth! No! Don’t! Don’t!” Adare shouted. “In the name of the Golden Throne, Cardinale—”
Cardinale threw back his cloak disguise and wheeled round, firing his lasrifle on full auto at the bounding hate-dogs.
He blew three of them apart, two in mid-air. The fourth, a two hundred pound cyber-mastiff, barrelled into him and smashed him to the floor. Its steel jaws tore into the left side of his face.
“Active!” Adare bellowed, all hope lost. “Go active, Doyl! We’ve no fething choice!”
Sergeant Adare wrenched out his lasrifle and blasted the dog off Cardinale point-blank.
Doyl swept round and raked the nearby Blood Pact guards with his own rifle.
Cardinale was screaming. Blood was pouring out of his torn neck. Adare grabbed him, his hands becoming slick with the Phantine’s gore.
“Go! Go!” Doyl yelle
d, shooting dead two more of the approaching dog-pack. A third hate-dog fled, howling, dragging a foreleg.
“Get him clear, sarge! Get him clear!” Doyl cried. He blasted his weapon in a wide arc that toppled two Blood Pact sentries out of an autocannon nest overlooking the porta’s entrance hall.
The slaves were shrieking and running in panic. Adare dragged Cardinale to his feet and fired his lasrifle one-handed. Doyl started cutting a desperate path for them through the frenetic mob. If they could get clear and just find somewhere to hide…
Doyl recoiled as a las-round creased his forehead. Blood started to trickle into his eyes. Cursing, he pulled out a tube charge, ripped off the det-tape and hurled it to his left. The concussive blast hurled three Blood Part infantrymen into the air and added to the wild confusion.
Firing indiscriminately at anything that looked like a Chaos trooper, Adare cut a swathe through the press towards the north-west exit of the entrance hall. He was virtually carrying Cardinale by then. Mill workers fled in terror before him.
“Doyl! This way! Out this way! Come on!” Adare shouted.
Doyl, half-blinded by his own blood, followed Adare’s voice. He had to push and kick slaves out of his way. Several of them collided mindlessly with him.
“Adare!”
“Come on, Doyl!”
Autocannon fire chopped into the crowd, and felled a dozen workers. Doyl could smell fycelene and the metallic scent of blood. The cannon rattled again.
Wiping the back of his sleeve across his eyes, Doyl turned back, dropped to one knee, and aimed at the source of the heavy fire. Blood Pact troopers were shooting their way through the pandemonium of slaves. One had a support cannon on a bipod, and a slaver ran beside him, feeding belts of ammunition. The jagged muzzle flashes of the cannon illuminated the gun’s brutal work like a strobe light. Each flare froze a snapshot of lurching figures, slaves falling, knocked off their feet, crashing into one another Doyl managed to shoot the gunner through the throat before his wound blinded him again. Adare had reached the north-east exit, and stumbled into the doorway, spilling Cardinale over. He scrambled up and lobbed a grenade high over Doyl’s head into the mob of enemy troopers.
“Come on!” Adare screamed at Doyl over the crump-whoosh of the grenade. “We can still do this! First and Only! First and fething Only!”
Doyl ran towards Adare’s cry.
Together, they broke out into a wide stone tunnel leading off from the entrance hall. Smoke from the main hall was blowing in and pooling under the arched roof. Slaves were staggering, stunned, everywhere.
“We’re clear!” Adare said to Doyl. “Help me with him!”
They each seized one of Cardinale’s wrists and started to drag him. Doyl tried not to look at the Phantine’s rained face.
“Which way?” Adare asked.
“Left,” said Doyl.
They had only gone a few metres when a las-round caught Adare in the knee and knocked him over. Blood Pact squads were clattering into the tunnel from a side passage ahead of them.
“Feth!” Doyl despaired. He let go of Cardinale and fired from the hip and scored two hits. There were so many Blood Pact and so little cover they weren’t hard to hit.
Neither am I, Doyl thought.
The enemy squads were firing as they charged. Hard rounds and las-bolts cracked and whined around the three Imperials. Doyl felt one pass through his cape and another kiss painfully across his thigh. Stone chips peppered his face from a ricochet off the tunnel wall.
Adare started shooting from a prone position, and the sergeant’s efforts were suddenly bolstered by Cardinale. Soaked in his own blood, ignoring his wounds, the Phantine had snuggled to his feet. He stood, swaying slightly, at Doyl’s side, mowing down the cult warriors with haphazard bursts.
“Brace for det!” Doyl cried, and tossed another tube charge down the tunnel into the charge. The fireball collapsed part of the roof and buried the Blood Part squads in masonry. A crimson bowl-helmet came spinning out of the blast and bounced off the tunnel wall.
“Cardinale! You hear me? You hear me? We can still make this!” Adare urged, trying to rise.
Cardinale nodded, unsteady on his feet.
“Back that way,” Adare ordered. “Back down the tunnel!”
“Okay,” said Doyl. “Okay, but we need to go to ground. We can’t survive out in the open like this.”
“Agreed!” said Adare. He turned, his next words drowned by a buzzing roar.
Adare’s chest exploded and he was slammed back against the wall with enough force to splinter bone. Hundreds of tiny, secondary impacts simultaneously peppered the stonework.
Doyl staggered backwards, trying to shield Cardinale. The Phantine had collapsed again. Doyl was sure Cardinale was dead. The scout could suddenly smell an odour of rancid milk mixed with mint.
The beast was moving so fast the Tanith scout could barely follow it. Using its dewclaws to grip the stones, it skittered along the tunnel roof, upside down. An armature frame of augmetic servo-limbs clamped around its torso automatically racked the xenos-pattern flechette blaster it had used to slay Adare. A crude leather bandolier dangled from its gleaming, mottled body. It gazed down its wattled snout at Doyl, doubled han lids flickering across its milky eyes protectively.
Doyl raked it with las-fire.
It barely flinched.
Doyl screamed and fired again. He emptied his size three clip into the beast until the power was gone.
It grabbed him by the throat with one of its powerful fore-limbs and lifted him up. He gagged.
“The Emperor protects,” Doyl choked just before the loxatl pushed the muzzle of its flechette blaster into his eye and fired.
“Move through! Move through!” the slavers raged, making free use of their goads and lashes. Rounded up again, the slave details filed through into the entrance hall. The place was littered with debris and blood. Heretic troopers were dragging corpses away. Are they…? Nessa signed.
Don’t think about it, Milo replied. It’s down to us now. Following the crowd, heads down, the two survivors of Larisel 3 shuffled into the city.
Varl’s team progressed steadily down through Ouranberg’s main vapour mill complex, following back stairs and sub-corridors. Several times, they had to conceal themselves to avoid roaming patrols or hurrying work-gangs.
Bonin led the way. They’d ditched their extra jump kit, helmets and mail smocks, and the Ghosts had put on their stealth-cloaks. Varl had draped scrim-nets over Unterrio and Jagdea and smeared a little camo-paint on the pilot’s face.
From all directions, the mill rang with the sounds of heavy labour. Drills chattered. Hoists whirred. Turbines rambled and shook.
The tactical briefing had presumed Slaith to be secure somewhere in Alpha dome. Varl considered it a priority to obtain more specific information. Twice they stopped while Unterrio tried patching his data-slate into a city-system terminal, but it was futile. Slaith’s forces had corrupted the Imperial database and flooded it with incompatible, unreadable sequences.
They crossed a series of storage halls, and skirted the edge of an air-wharf. Here, they had to wait in hiding for almost fifteen minutes while servitors loaded a cargo carrier. Only when the carrier lifted off the pad and flew off in the direction of the Alpha dome did the wharf clear, allowing them to continue. Banda paused to check a roster board hanging from one of the wharf’s roof supports.
“Regular shipments to the Alpha dome,” she said. “Every couple of hours.”
Varl nodded. He glanced at Jagdea. “Could you handle one of those bulk carriers?”
“Yes,” she said.
They pressed on, but the way was blocked. Work-gangs under armed guard were clearing bomb damage from the next manufactory space. Bonin doubled them back, only to hear more escorted gangs tramping down the access tunnel in their direction.
“Feth!” Varl said. They were boxed in.
“Here! In here!” Bonin hissed. He’d forced the lock on a side d
oor. They hurried through and he closed it behind them. They were in a small storeroom for machine parts. It stank of oil-based lubricant. Varl and Bonin flanked the door, weapons ready, listening to the feet marching past outside.
They could hear rough voices, and a series of vox-exchanges. Several individuals had stopped to converse just outside the door.
Vadim pushed to the back of the store. He quietly cleared some plyboard boxes from a grubby bench and hoisted himself up to reach a small fan-light window high in the wall. The window was crazed with dirt, and he had to use his pry-bar to move the latch.
Looks promising, he signed. Varl and the other Ghosts nodded. Jagdea and Unterrio, unfamiliar with gestures, frowned.
You first, I’ll cover. Get those three through and Vadim after them, Varl’s hands wrote in the air deftly. Bonin gave him a thumbs-up and went to the back of the room, taking Vadim’s place on the bench. He squinted through the fanlight and felt cool air on his face. The little window looked out onto a circulation space between mill houses. He wedged the window open as wide as it would go with his warknife, and slithered through head first.
At the door, Varl watched Bonin’s boots disappear. The voices outside were still arguing, but seemed to be moving away.
Bonin’s face reappeared at the window and he reached an arm down. Banda got up, pushed her long-las through the gap and hauled herself after it. Vadim boosted her feet to help her on her way.
He turned and waved Jagdea up.
With Vadim pushing her feet, she was nimble enough, but the scrim-net Varl had insisted she wear snagged on the edge of the window frame.
She struggled, pinned. Vadim got up on the bench next to her and tried to unhook the netting. His efforts shook the old bench and wobbled the tall, spares-laden shelving next to it.
Varl kept glancing back. Hurry the feth up! he mouthed at Vadim. He was sure the harsh voices outside were getting closer again. He flexed his augmetic shoulder and adjusted his grip on the heavy U90.