by Paul Kearney
‘Is that all?’ Calgar asked.
Drake blinked. ‘It is enough.’
‘Very well, Inquisitor Drake. I foresee no problems accommodating your mission. It jibes nicely with my own intentions. You need not worry about cyclonics, however. If need be, the Octavius is quite capable of taking care of the hulk on its own.’
Drake bowed. ‘I am relieved, and honoured to find us in agreement, Chapter Master.’
‘I wish that I could say the same,’ Magos Fane spoke up, the words hissing slightly as he uttered them.
‘The Adeptus Mechanicus takes a different view of this incursion, Lord Calgar,’ the magos went on. ‘My own Ordo, the Exploratorum, sees this as an immense opportunity. From what we have learned so far, the hulk named Fury is one of the most ancient to have penetrated Imperium space. There is no telling what remnants of archaeotech may yet be lurking aboard, dormant, damaged, hidden–’
‘Guarded,’ Lazarus Drake interrupted grimly.
‘That is as may be,’ the magos continued. ‘But the possibility of harvesting something unique and priceless must be set against the risks involved. There may even be a Standard Template Construct still intact–’
‘You tech-priests and your STCs,’ Drake snapped, his light manner gone in an instant. ‘The Fury is a clear threat to the security of the Eastern Fringe, and as such it should be neutralised forthwith. Forgive my candour, magos, but the dangers it represents grow with every passing day. No ancient technological gewgaw is worth jeopardising such an important sector of Imperial Space.’
‘The Inquisition’s attitude to such artefacts has often been blinkered, and short-sighted in the extreme,’ Magos Fane retorted, his voice rising like a nail scratched across iron. ‘As yet, the hulk is inert, harmless. It would be criminal to wantonly destroy the possibilities it embodies without further investigation – my Ordo must be granted access to it at once.’ Here he turned his scarlet eyes upon Calgar.
‘My lord, surely you must see this. You have at your command a fleet strong enough to destroy the hulk in a matter of minutes. It can pose no threat to Ultramar so long as it is monitored and warded.’
‘It can pose a threat to those of my brethren who are already on its surface,’ Calgar said in a low tone that silenced his guests at once.
‘Make no mistake,’ he went on in the same quiet voice, ‘I am Lord of Ultramar, and I shall do as I see fit in respect of this event. If I believe the hulk constitutes a clear and present danger to the Imperium, and more specifically to that portion of it which I am privileged to watch over, then I shall take the appropriate action without reference to any authority other than my own. Unless by some happy miracle the Emperor Himself intervenes.
‘I hope I make myself clear.’
‘Quite clear,’ the magos said frostily, though he seemed shaken. Drake only smiled.
‘Having said that,’ Calgar went on, ‘I do not see the premature destruction of such an important historical artefact to be beneficial to the ultimate good of the Imperium either. As long as the hulk remains dormant, it shall remain intact, and we will do our best to plumb some of its mysteries.’
Drake’s smile faded.
‘With that in mind, I would like you both to come up with a plan to penetrate the interior that will entail as little disruption or disturbance of the structure as possible. And Magos Fane, I would like to be kept abreast of any and all intelligence which the Adeptus Mechanicus can dig out of its archives with regard to this phenomenon.’
Calgar stared down both his guests.
‘The hulk came from the warp, but it did not originate there. From what we have discovered thus far, it would seem that it is a conglomeration of mostly Imperial vessels, of ancient design. How ancient, remains to be seen.’
There was a pause, and then the magos glided across the floor, his robes whispering on the stone flags.
‘I appreciate your candour, and your sentiments, Lord Calgar,’ the tech-priest said. ‘In a similar spirit, I can tell you that my own brethren on both Gantz and even on far-off Terra are trolling through the great archives of my Adept for a clue to the hulk’s genesis. As soon as I know something, it shall be relayed to you.’
A light appeared on the vox unit in one corner of the room. At once, Calgar strode over to it and thumbed the receiver.
‘Yes?’
By the rune on the vox display it was Brother Morent, one of his honour guard.
‘My lord, we have word from Captain Galenus on Fifth Company’s landing party.’
Calgar cast an eye swiftly over the inquisitor and the magos, who stood stock still in the firelight.
‘I shall take it in the briefing chambers. Have the senior officers meet me there.’ He turned to his guests. ‘Gentlemen, you must excuse me.’
‘We should perhaps repair back to our ships, now that the strategic situation has been clarified,’ Magos Fane said.
‘As you wish. Though you will have to file for a flight window with Orbital Control in the Magna Civitas Space Port. The skies above Macragge are rather busy at the moment.’
‘Perhaps we should wait,’ Lazarus Drake said with a shrug, and he drained his wine. ‘It looks as though there will be more information to analyse presently.’
Marneus Calgar looked down at the diminutive inquisitor, and cocked his head in his accustomed gesture to bring his human eye to bear.
‘What makes you think I will see fit to share it with you, inquisitor?’ he said, and the tone of his voice chilled the room. Then he left them, swift and silent as a giant shadow.
Lazarus Drake expelled air gently from his mouth, and poured another goblet of wine, finishing it off in a few swallows.
Magos Fane watched him, leaning on his axehead staff. ‘Is there a reason for your borderline impertinence towards the Lord of Macragge, inquisitor, besides mere devilment?’
Drake smiled thinly. ‘I have an exuberant personality. It must out, sometimes. Besides, when you press a man to the point of insolence, his response teaches you something about him.’
‘And what have you learned of the Chapter Master?’
Drake gave the magos a strange look. ‘That the more quietly he speaks, the more frightening he is.’
The magos swayed slightly, as if in acknowledgement.
‘Then you should beware the day he regards you in silence.’
Five
Brother Starn extended his arm and the crackling disruptor field that enwrapped his fingers made the dust rise in a grey cloud as he grasped the heavy plasteel girder and tossed it aside, the marks of his fingers embedded in the ancient metal as though it were impressed clay. The lights that blazed from his protective armoured hood illuminated a long dark passageway, a tunnel leading down into uttermost blackness. He checked the auspex readout in his heads-up display. It pulsed with meaningless chatter and he blinked on its rune, switching it off.
At once, things seemed quieter inside the helm of the tactical Dreadnought armour that enclosed him. He could hear the rasp of his own breathing, the ticking and whining of the armour’s systems, and the static of the company vox, which he had dialled back to end the distracting hiss in his ears.
He listened, staring down into the darkness. The ancient passageway had once been a corridor on a mighty Imperium ship. From his own knowledge of similar craft, he guessed he was in a maintenance walkway, created for the passage of the ship’s servitors. The plating that formed it was broken and buckled, and here and there it had collapsed entirely, but the four Terminators had punched their way through the debris and wreckage until he guessed that they were almost a mile from their entry point, and at least some two hundred feet lower down, deep in the fractured innards of the wreck.
It was slow going. They had taken some eleven hours to come this far.
The vox sputtered and spat in his ears. He could speak to his three squad me
mbers, but contact had been lost with the Rex Aeterna and with Brother Odyr in the Penitent Thunderhawk circling above. He checked his teleportation input. All systems green. If need be, he and his brothers could be out of here in the blink of an eye, so long as Brother Ulfius on the Rex could still maintain contact with their locator beacons. He had no way of knowing whether or not this was the case, but he was not greatly troubled. The hulk into which they were making their slow journey was as dead and lifeless as a grave.
Almost.
There were times, as they forged deeper into the wreck, that Brother Starn almost thought he had caught something on the vox, a whisper in his ear, the faint noise of far-off voices. Once, he had called a halt, convinced that a deeper shadow had moved in the blackness beyond his armour stablights. The infrared capabilities of his helm and his own augmented anatomy were little use, because there was no heat here, nothing to register in the spectrum. The hulk had a thin atmosphere, which was thickening slightly as the Ultramarines made their way underground, but it was still not far off the true vacuum of the void.
His gaze flicked again and again to the status rune of his storm bolter. He could feel the weapon sitting ready, a Hecaton-pattern he had used for years, attached to the wrist of his armour. But as yet it was unfired.
‘This tunnel should lead all the way back to the Drive Compartment, if it still exists,’ he told his brethren. ‘I would estimate we are barely halfway there. Threat indicators are all in the green. Let us pick up the pace, my brothers.’
The three runes of the rest of his squad blinked in sequential acknowledgement. They were using the vox as little as possible, and keeping to their own frequency, a narrow bandwidth that would be hard for any outside scanner to pick up. Terminators were not built for stealth, but if need be they could lower their signature to a surprising degree, and the crashing din that should have announced their progress was dulled by the lack of oxygen in the thin atmosphere.
A gap up ahead – more than that – a great absence. Brother Starn halted and swept his stablights across it. The wreck they were travelling through had broken in two – he knew now that it had come down stern first upon the surface of the asteroid, the impact burying it deep in the loose wreckage of the outer crust. But the spine of the vessel had been shattered in the collision, and now he was looking at the fracture.
The passageway ended in twisted rent plasteel plates and hanging conduits, snakes of cabling and wiring like the tendrils of vines dangling from the ceiling. Beyond that, the space opened out into vast, looming darkness, a sense of shifting air that the Terminator veteran felt as if upon his own skin as it passed across the ceramite plates of his armour. He called up a rune on his display, and sent a signal flare arcing out from his hood. Two yards out, it ignited, and went swooping into the abyss.
It guttered and flickered, going down into unreachable depths, lighting up broken compartments, shattered bulkheads, the massive connective keel-strakes of the ship broken and skewed like splintered bamboo. The wreckage staggered out in great steps of broken metal, jagged edges shining in the light of the descending flare.
There might be a path down, if one were a goat from the Hera’s Crown Mountains. For the giant Terminators, there would have to be another way.
‘The path ends here – for now at least,’ Brother Starn said, frustration hoarsening his voice.
One of his battle-brothers edged forward to the lip of the pit, the buckled plasteel plates giving slightly under his thousand-pound weight.
‘We have climbing cable,’ he said to Starn. ‘A full coil.’
‘I know, Antonus, but it would take too long, and we have been out of vox for hours now. My orders were to take no undue risk.’
‘We will go back knowing little more than when we arrived then,’ Brother Morenich said from the rear.
‘The upper levels are dead and empty,’ Brother Torian interjected. ‘If there is life on this hulk, then it is down there, Starn. In the pit.’
Brother Starn stood silent. It was wholly unlike him to hesitate so, to pause on the brink of action. He thought for a moment that he heard the distant voice clawing its way through his mind, a flitting shadow of whisper, no more. It angered him.
‘Very well, brothers,’ he said at last. ‘Brother Torian, uncoil the climbing cable. There is a stanchion about ten feet behind you that looks as though it will bear our weight. Brother Antonus, you will lower me down. You and Brother Morenich will then stand watch here on the edge, ready to haul me up again.’
‘How low will you go?’ Brother Torian asked, leaning to look down into the lightless void below.
‘We have three hundred feet of cable. We’ll go as far as it holds out.’
It took a quarter of an hour before they were ready to lower Brother Starn down. The Terminator armour was equipped with heavy carabiner-like loops that were housed in recesses set within the upper portion of the breastplate. The cable was looped through these, made fast, and then Starn was lowered down by his battle-brothers, foot by foot, turning slightly in the dark, his stablights wheeling cones of brightness at the towering tunnel of wreckage that enfolded him. It was like travelling down into the gullet of some huge beast.
He turned on his auspex, and to his surprise the sensors had begun to work again, though they only reached out some thirty yards. The atmosphere down here was murkier though, and grew more so as he descended; he watched his armour’s analysis of it change, and the temperature gauge rise degree by degree for every yard he was lowered.
‘Fifteen feet of cable left, brother,’ Antonus’ voice came over the vox.
‘Hold here. I see a ledge, and a tunnel leading off. I am–’ Starn grunted. ‘I am attempting to swing into it.’
He scrabbled for the edge, caught hold of a pipe, and dragged himself into the broken mouth of the tunnel. Holding the cable, he blinked on the hook rune on his display and the carabiners snapped open, releasing him. Then he looped the end of the cable round a protruding girder, and took stock of his surroundings.
Dust floated in the air, hanging like a mist in the low gravity. Starn switched off his stablights and went to preysight. Still nothing. The hulk was cold and dead as a stone in the Hera’s Crown Mountains, or so it seemed.
The passageway arced off into utter blackness. As Starn walked along it the plates creaked under his weight and at times he felt ceiling panels and drooping cables click and brush the hood of his armour, like cold fingers. He longed for a target, something to confront, the flash and roar of gunfire.
This barren wreck reminded him too much of the silence in the catacombs of Macragge, as the relief squads had made their way down to find the site of First Company’s last stand, some sixty-five years before.
Back to back the veterans had lain, in a vast ring, and all around them the tyranids had sprawled in heaped mounds of carnage yards high; a charnel house in which nothing had stirred, in which the elite of the Chapter lay massacred.
He shook his head in the brutish helm, banishing the ill-fortuned image.
Fifty yards in he found writing embossed upon the wall of the passage, and fired up his stablights again to read it. Low Gothic, an Imperial cipher with the eagle above it. Centurius Sol, it read, a ship’s name, below which there was a broken system slate, and below that a fragment of blueprint incised on the wall, a guide for the crew. He was in another maintenance passageway, but this one led abeam of the ship’s hull, down to the plasma batteries.
‘The ship definitely belonged to the Imperial Navy,’ he said aloud on the squad vox. ‘But which millennium is anyone’s guess. I am following this corridor, bearing eighty-six degrees.’
‘Locator is clear,’ Brother Antonus’ voice came back. ‘Shall I join you, brother?’
‘Negative. My weight is burden enough for these weakened floorplates. Were it not for the low gravity they would already have collapsed under me. If my signal we
akens, let me know, brother.’
‘Affirmative.’
He walked on, storm bolter primed on the back of his fist, his other hand crackling with energy as he fired up the power glove that enclosed it.
‘Atmosphere readout is still in the red. Radioactivity is growing, but well within safety parameters. There has been plasma leakage here. Damage is more severe – the plating has melted. Auspex range is limited, but scanning is functional. I will–’
The floor gave way under him with a groan of metal that screamed through the silence. He fell, tumbling, into the endless dark.
Brother Tersius was crouched in a firing position on the surface of the hulk. Were it not for the wiring and cables that writhed in rivulets and the buckled rectangular plates that lay scattered all around, one might almost believe oneself to be in some portion of the Macragge Badlands. Hills and mesas of heaped debris rose out of the undulating surface as far as the eye could see, broken by black fissures and upthrust jagged peaks and cliffs.
But these were not geological phenomena. There was no soil or stone underfoot; everything they trod upon had once been crafted and forged and welded. The sparkling dust that hung in the thin atmosphere was pulverised metal, shining in sparkling shoals of light, and the far-off glittering ripple that coursed along a distant gulley was not water, but lines of sheared-off ceramite reflecting back the light of Iax’s star.
And the horizon was curved, where it could be made out. Immense though the hulk might be, it was nowhere near the mass of a normal planetary body, for all that it had the gravity of one.
Tersius studied his heads-up display for a second, noting the position of his squad, Brother Salvator the Techmarine and Brother Ameronn the company banner bearer. These last two were conferring with Brother Sergeant Gaden near the vox amplifier array, which now stood blinking on its iron frame between them.
Behind the twelve Ultramarines, the great looming prow of the downed ship into which the First Company veterans had climbed reared up against the stars like some savagely broken mountain. Tersius cradled his bolter, wiping off the metallic dust that coated it.