by Paul Kearney
The cameleoline of the Dark Hunters and these vicious ambush tactics served them well. Soon the main roads leading to the Armaments District and the citadel were clogged with burning vehicles.
But the Hunters paid for their temerity. Fifteen more of them died on that retreat, and only six of these had their gene-seed retrieved. Apothecary Passarion fought through squads of the enemy to harvest the precious genetic material, but sometimes, in the flash of promethium fire or the all-consuming holocaust of heavy ordnance, there was nothing left to bring back.
So it was that these brothers had their legacy taken from the Chapter forever, and the gene-pool of the Hunters was irrevocably diminished.
The cloaked eldar grav-ships were sleek as spearheads, and they made barely a whisper as they dived through the atmosphere, bypassing the lumbering Chaos transports, the Stormbirds and attack-fighters which now clogged the skies above Ras Hanem. When they appeared on augur, they were dismissed as an atmospheric blip, a glitch, and the war went on around them while they glided to rest within the walls of Askai a scant kilometre from the Imperial lines, their landing so soft it barely disturbed the dust.
‘Now, to survive initial contact,’ Ainoc said, and as one, he and his guardians drew their weapons. The wicked edge of his sword gleamed with a light like the sun seen through deep water. It was a Witchblade, a rune-marked relic of the Il Kaithe craftworld, and it had tasted the blood of every race known to the eldar – including that of those they were here to meet.
‘No weapons will be drawn, or they will shoot us out of hand,’ Te Mirah said. ‘You will all walk behind me, and you will be humble, Ainoc. We must don the guise of supplicants with these animals – their pride is immense, and their tempers are famed.’
‘I obey,’ Ainoc said. But he bared his teeth as the words came out of his mouth.
Perhaps fifty eldar had come down in the grav-ship, and these now stood about in the dust, the spirit stones upon their armour alight, shuriken catapults ready in their hands.
‘Stay here under Callinall,’ Te Mirah said to the others. ‘I will call if I am at need.’
‘If they raise a hand against you, they will lose it,’ Ainoc said, his long face alive with murder. But he clicked his sword to his back-harness, and his followers slung their catapults.
‘I will speak – none other,’ Te Mirah warned them, and then led them off through the quivering ruins, the night alive with tracer-fire and artillery exchanges, an orange glow overhead which blotted out the stars.
Brother-Sergeant Orsus, the biggest Space Marine in the Chapter, was forward of the line when he saw the glimmer of white come gliding through the shifting smoke towards them.
His infared augmented the sight, and the slow-walking file of figures became clear. Orsus had a century with Mortai Company, and wore the platinum stud of long service – he knew instantly what he was looking at. He spoke to his squad over the fitful vagaries of the vox.
‘Tertius, look to your front. Hold fire until I give the word.’
The Space Marines were hidden and perfectly camouflaged in the broken remains of one of the outer warehouse districts, close by the wall which encircled the manufactoria.
‘Eldar,’ Brother Feyd hissed. ‘What are they doing here? And walking into our lines as brazen as a bronze snake.’
‘Something is coming on the net, sergeant – do you hear it?’
It was a woman’s voice, speaking in low tones that to a normal human being would have sounded surpassingly lovely in their music. To an Adeptus Astartes, it was alien trash – but the language could be understood. It was Gothic, archaic but intelligible, somewhere between Low and High, and spoken slowly and distinctly as though the hearers were considered halfwits or children.
‘We mean you no harm, and wish only to speak to your commander. We have news of great portent for him, and we must discuss it at once. Your enemy is our enemy also. We mean you no harm. We will touch no trigger or blade. Let us enter your lines in peace.’
The line of eldar was flagged up in Orsus’s targeting resolution. He could have shot down half of them in three beats of his twin hearts, and his finger was tense on the trigger of the bolter, drawing down the necessary pressure gram by gram.
Then he released it in disgust. It would not do. Xenos scum or not, such a development had to be run past the captain; it was potentially too important to wipe away in a flurry of bolter fire, no matter how satisfying that might be.
‘Keep them covered, brothers,’ he rasped. And to the leading xeno, he said:
‘Stand fast where you are.’
The eldar behind their female leader flinched as the giant Space Marine rose up out of the rubble, a curtain of dust falling from him. He had been well hidden, even to them.
There was a red gleam in his eye-lenses and he kept his bolter trained on Te Mira’s face.
‘Captain Kerne, this is Tertius squad.’
Amazingly, the company vox was entirely clear now, but that only made Orsus more suspicious than ever.
‘Orsus, send, over.’
‘We have a development here, brother-captain, that I think you will want to see.’
They met within the blast-walls of the Armaments District, with Brother Laufey’s best snipers lining the heights above them. With Jonah Kerne were most of Mortai’s command squad. Fornix, Elijah Kass and Jord Malchai flanked their captain, and even through the blank lenses of the Space Marine helms, Te Mirah could sense their utter mistrust, deepening to enmity.
They were more powerful than she had expected – all the Adeptus Astartes were formidable foes, but in the captain and his Reclusiarch especially, she sensed wills of absolute unyielding iron.
There would be no easy deception here, and one misstep would be the end of her.
‘Captain Jonah Kerne, of the Dark Hunters Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes – I am honoured,’ she began.
‘You are not,’ the psyker Space Marine, the one they called Elijah Kass, said. ‘You are afraid, and you have a question burning in your mind, a request which you must make, and it frightens you to have to make it of us.’
Te Mirah shielded her own mind, cursing her complacence. This psyker was good: powerful and focused. She chanced a lance of her own inquiry back at him but it was batted away.
‘Speak plain, and you shall have honesty itself in return,’ Jonah Kerne said. ‘Play us false, as is the wont of all your kind, and you shall never leave this place.’
‘They should be killed here and now, before they try to ensnare us in their schemes,’ the Reclusiarch said.
‘I chanced much by coming here,’ Te Mirah told him. ‘I placed my life in your hands. Does not that argue some honesty to my purpose?’
‘It may have escaped your attention, witch,’ the one called Fornix said, ‘but we have rather a lot on our hands at the moment without spinning word games. So you will forgive us if you find our welcome a little cold.’
‘Spit out your falsehoods, faithless xenos, and have done with it,’ Malchai added.
The potential for violence simmered in the air – these creatures radiated it. They were in the middle of a war for their own survival, and one more killing would be nothing to them.
She concentrated on the captain. If she could convince him, then the rest would fall in line. Te Mirah cleared her mind of all fear and apprehension, blocked out the roar of warfare which rose beyond the walls, ignored the spots of laser-sights which were hovering on her and every other member of her entourage.
Honesty, she thought. Perhaps that indeed is all that will work here.
‘I came here to deceive you,’ she said simply.
It took them aback. Fornix actually laughed. ‘An honest eldar at last!’
‘Be quiet,’ Kerne snapped. And to Te Mirah he said. ‘No word games, xeno. Be swift. I have other places to be today.’ He looked up at the smoke-shrouded sky, the tracer skeining across it.
‘Very well,’ the farseer said. She drew in a breath, and then lai
d her mind open – almost open. At once, she felt the mon-keigh psyker probe it, as hungry as a starved dog. She set aside her layers of protection, but kept one back to shroud those corners of her psyche and her plans that must remain hidden. And the shroud itself she rendered elusive, so that it might be missed. He might just pass over the lies she hid in his eagerness.
‘Deep in the fabric of this world is hidden an artefact of my people, an ancient heirloom, if you will. It is not a weapon, nor can it confer any advantage in war – it is purely a cultural icon of the eldar, a priceless remnant of our past.’ She exhaled slowly.
‘It is an Infinity Circuit, and it is the key to the construction of another craftworld such as my own, a spacefaring home which could accommodate thousands of my people, and keep their extinction at bay a little longer.’
‘She speaks the truth,’ Elijah Kass said in some wonder.
‘What do we care about the artefacts of her decadent species?’ Malchai demanded. ‘Our place in this universe is to cleanse the stars of such vermin, not allow them to multiply.’
‘Quid pro quo,’ Jonah Kerne said slowly, and when Te Mirah looked baffled, he said: ‘What is in it for us?’
Her face cleared.
He is sharp, this one. Now for the lie.
‘Several things, captain. I wish to have access to the deep mines of this world, to search for the Circuit. You guard access to those mines. In exchange for that access, and free passage off-world for the Circuit once it is retrieved, I am willing to offer several things.
‘Your vox is hopelessly compromised by the jamming mechanisms of the enemy, and the warp is in such flux at the moment that even a skilled astropath would have difficulty in relaying any information through to your home world. I can help you with that. I have covens of psykers on board my ship who will relay any despatch you care to send back to your base.
‘Things do not seem to be going well for you here on the ground, captain. If you are to hold this planet, you must call on help. I will enable you to do so. If we come to an agreement, I could have any message you wish relayed to your home world within the day.’
That made them think. Even the black-armoured Reclusiarch with his frightful skull-helm was silent. She decided to flip another small weight on the scales.
‘In addition, while my people are in the mines searching for the Circuit, I will lend the weight of my own forces to the defence. I have squads of cloaked sharpshooters all over the city, waiting for my word. Only let me give it, and you shall have powerful allies to aid you in your struggle to survive. I swear it.’
‘What oath does a xenos swear that we could recognise?’ Brother Malchai grated. But even in him, she could sense the seed of doubt growing. Good, good.
Jonah Kerne stood marble-still. Te Mirah left her own mind open, aside from the shrouded corners, and felt the psyker, Kass, fumble through it. He was not adept at such things, and she could sense his urgency, his need to believe.
‘I sense no deception in her – the offer seems to be genuine, captain,’ he said.
Kerne said nothing for a long time, but stood there as still and calm as a statue in the Reclusiam. The rest of them, Space Marine and xenos, waited, listening to the sound of the war which raged endlessly beyond the high walls of the Armaments District.
Finally, slowly, the Dark Hunters captain reached up and lifted his helm from his head with a hiss of atmospherics, and then looked down on the eldar farseer, eye to eye.
‘Your offer is accepted,’ he said, very quiet, his black eyes searching her face, the ocular implants in them glinting red as blood in the the pupils. ‘I will not hinder you in the search for this thing, or its passage off-world should you find it. I give you my word.’
Jonah Kerne stepped forward, until he was close to the farseer. The eldar woman was tall, but he still towered over her. She mastered the urge to back away from him.
‘Play me false, and you will die. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I know that,’ she said, and there was no falseness in her at that moment. This creature was no psyker, but there was a searching shrewdness in him that could not be fooled, not face to face at any rate.
‘I am hostage for my own word, captain. I will remain with you while my people make the search. If you are betrayed, it will not be by me, and I will pay for any betrayal with my life.’
She turned around. ‘Ainoc, witness me now. You will search for the Infinity Circuit, and you will bring it forth while I remain here on the surface. On your good faith rests my own life. Do you understand?’
The male eldar with the sword at his back bowed slightly. His face was white with a kind of helpless anger.
‘It shall be even as you say, lady. I will go down into the dark for you, and find this thing. It shall be done as you command.’
‘Not quite as she commands,’ Jonah Kerne interrupted him. ‘The mines are a dangerous place – all manner of things might be lurking down there. I will send my first sergeant, Fornix, to accompany you, along with a small escort of the Dark Hunters.’
He turned to Te Mirah again. ‘Just to keep an eye on things.’
TWENTY
Cor Tenebrosum
Above us, the war goes on: my brothers fight, and die, and win honour and renown before their peers, Fornix thought. And here am I, creeping into a hole in the ground.
The war raged on, but there was no inkling down here of that massive cataclysm. It was silent, dark, as dry and dead as a corpse’s throat.
Behind him, Brother Gad spoke. ‘Auspex is clear. We have left behind the upper levels. It seems the refugees did not make it down this far.’
Small wonder. There was nothing down here but the echoing dark. All the power to the lower levels had been shut off in the early days of the initial invasion, to save on energy, and the civilians who had fled the fighting in their tens of thousands had crammed into the upper levels of the mines, where there was light and air still being pumped in.
They did not dare venture further down into the blackness, where the air was bad, and the great mining engines stood stolid and silent, their beds still loaded with precious ore.
Some eighty thousand people had come down here in the first weeks of the war, and huge numbers of them had died of thirst and hunger and mere despair, their bodies tossed into the deeper shafts so that their corruption might not bring sickness among those who survived.
These unfortunates still crammed the upper levels, kept alive by a trickle of food and water from the hard-pressed workers who were still working, fighting and surviving in the manufactoria of the Armaments District.
Men fought and worked in hellish conditions above so that their families might survive in the hellish conditions below. Fornix did not know whether to admire or despise these folk.
It had been a near stampede of terror at first, as the eldar warriors and the Dark Hunters had entered the mines. Despite the warning messages over the voxponder system, the sight of the lean, masked xenos and the giant, camouflaged Adeptus Astartes had engendered something close to panic.
Many had been trampled underfoot before order had been restored. They had finally made way for the mismatched, fearsome company as a mouse might cringe back from the shadow of a hawk, and even in Fornix, the exasperation he felt at their weakness had become tinged with pity.
How pitiful, and frail, ordinary men were. And how lucky, how blessed was he to be something more, something which held in its flesh the very spark of the Emperor Himself.
Now they had left the upper levels with their packed, feral mobs behind, and were venturing into the deep mines. Here, there was no light, the air was thick as paint, and it was becoming hotter moment by moment.
The xenos up at the front spoke up.
‘The passage ends. Another elevator. We need your device again.’
The five Space Marines brought up the rear of the party; Ainoc and his six guardians were at the front. Now they drew together ahead of a great plascrete platform which rose in t
he shaft ahead. The controls in the wall were dead, and beams from the helm-luminators of the Space Marines went around the walls like will o’ the wisps, the passage rising above them, cavern-like. It was sandstone here, buttressed with plascrete beams and steel girders.
Brother Heinos stepped forward, his servo-arm rising at his back. Clipped to his powerpack was a plasma-fuelled generator. This he plugged into the elevator controls. There was a clank, and a whirring noise under their feet. The light on the generator at his back flickered and dimmed somewhat.
‘The machine-spirit of the mechanism can be revived for only a few minutes,’ the Techmarine warned. ‘We must be swift.’
They clambered onto the platform, Space Marines and eldar together, and with a lurch, it began to descend, dust rising in the beams of the helm-torches, the spirit stones on the cloaks and belts of the eldar glittering green and red and aquamarine.
They went down a long way, and the elevator rattled and clanked like a bad-tempered beast under their feet.
‘Nine hundred metres,’ Brother Gad read out, staring at the auspex. ‘One thousand metres.’
Shining veins of ore went past in the walls as they descended, catching the light. This was the wealth of Ras Hanem: adamantium in quantities so great that it was here the armour of Imperial Titans had been forged. It was for this ore that, ultimately, men were dying in their thousands on the surface above.
‘Fifteen hundred metres,’ Brother Gad intoned.
They stood unspeaking, the Space Marines with bolters ready, the eldar with their shuriken catapults and wicked-looking rune-chased swords. Ainoc’s Witchblade remained on his back, and the runes upon the sword glowed with a pale light which was both bewitching and hurtful to the eye.
Finally the elevator ground to a halt. Fornix looked at the information streaming on his helm display. The temperature had risen further, and the atmosphere in the mine was now unbreathable to normal humans. Even an unprotected Space Marine would find it harmful long-term, but in their power armour the Dark Hunters could ignore it as their atmospheric systems instantly adjusted.