by Nick Kyme
Keeping pace with the fleeing boy wasn't easy. He moved nimbly and took the Salamanders on a winding path through darkened tunnels strafed by their luminators. Grainy white beams criss-crossed, cutting frantic sweeps through the gloom with the urgent movements of Dak'ir and his squad.
'Stay vigilant,' he warned, voice low over the comm-feed.
Pyriel was on the sergeant's heels. Emek followed closely with Apion and Romulus keeping a few paces distant deliberately, in case of an ambush.
Despite his prodigious strength, hefting the heavy flamer rig was slowing Ba'ken down, especially in the close confines of the tunnel complex. The hulking Salamander brought up Dak'ir's rearguard.
Dak'ir lost the boy from sight as he emerged from around a tight corner into a much wider cavern. He slowed to a cautious tread, checking out the debris left either side of a steadily narrowing channel. Piled rocks, steel-bucketed mining carts, metal crates, discarded lume-lamps and other detritus flanked the Salamanders as they formed a single file.
Detecting movement to his right, Dak'ir was about to order his squad to repel ambushers, when Pyriel stopped him.
Let them come, he warned his brothers psychically, and keep your weapons low.
Dak'ir wanted to protest, but this was not the time. He had to trust his squad to the Librarian's instincts and hope they weren't flawed.
'Follow Brother Pyriel's lead,' he ordered quietly over the comm-feed.
Emek's voice replied in a whisper.
'Five targets to the left, tracking us.'
Apion chimed in after him…
'Four more, static, in my fire arc.'
…then Romulus…
'I detect another six slowing to envelop.'
…and finally Ba'ken.
'Threats spotted, ten of them to our rear.'
Dak'ir knew there were five more up ahead, lying in wait at the tunnel's junction. The Salamanders could have neutralised them in seconds.
Within fifty more metres, the watchers lurking in the shadows sprang their ''trap''. Concealed light rigs blazed into life around the tunnel, throwing off a harsh sodium glare. Groups of men, armed with archaic-looking lasguns and solid shot rifles, emerged from hiding places behind crates and under dusty tarpaulins. Each of the Salamanders covered an enemy squad, though the humans' formation was anything but uniform. They were organised, their ambush-craft rudimentary though not beneath a well-drilled PDF regiment, but their movements suggested well-trained amateurs not soldiers. Dressed in coarse grey fatigues that were patched and worn like the boy's had been, they were hard-looking men with dark skin, who lived even harder lives if Scoria's harsh environs were anything to go by. Some carried anachronistic armour plates over the rough material: dull steel pauldrons and plastrons. Every man wore a pair of photo-flash goggles, evidently hoping to disadvantage their opponents by blinding them with the sudden light glare. They had not reckoned on facing Space Marines, whose occulobes reacted instantly to the shift in conditions.
A pair of what appeared to be mining engines rumbled into position on thick track-beds either side of the tunnel, effectively blocking it. Tripled-headed drilling apparatus comprised much of the front facing of the machines, with thick armour-plates and plastek glacis shielding the operators from view.
'Stand down and relinquish your weapons,' a stern voice echoed. 'Youare surrounded and outnumbered fivefold.'
Dak'ir followed the source and saw a figure step forward out of the group of men in front of him. The human was attired like the rest, but he also wore a short, ragged cloak that felt oddly familiar to the Salamander. Thick, ribbed boots almost went up to knees that sported rounded metal plates. He carried a lasgun low-slung with the ease of a man who knows his troops are watching his back for him. When he lifted the goggles from his face, Dak'ir saw the man was in his middling years. Wrinkles eked from his eyes and gave him a perpetual frown. Rock dust smothered his close-cropped hair, but much of the grey patina was his own. Despite his age, the human leader possessed undeniable presence and his muscles were still taut, his body and jaw solid.
'Remove your battle-helms, too,' he added. 'I want to see if you all look like this one.' The human leader gestured towards Ba'ken, who glowered at him.
We could disarm them with minimal casualties, thought Dak'ir, hesitating to consider the next course of action.
Pyriel intruded on his musings.
Do as he asks, brother-sergeant. Stand down your squad.
Dak'ir heard the grip of his chainsword tighten as he squeezed it impotently.
'You can't be seriously suggesting we yield to this rabble?' he hissed through the comm-feed.
'That is precisely what I'm suggesting. Do it now, before they start to twitch.' The Librarian turned his head slightly to regard the brother-sergeant. 'We must earn their trust.'
It went against his instincts and his training, but in the end Dak'ir gave the order to stow weapons.
The Salamanders obeyed instantly, despite their obvious misgivings, following suit as their brother-sergeant removed his battle-helm.
'I am Brother-Sergeant Hazon Dak'ir of the Salamanders Chapter, 3rd Company,' Dak'ir told the human leader, who smiled without it reaching his eyes.
'Sonnar Illiad,' he replied, gesturing to another of his group, a tall man with a blunt-looking head, facial scars and a pepper-wash of stubble colonising his broad jaw and pate. 'Overseer Akuma and his men will take possession of your weapons.' The tall man and four others came forwards warily.
Ba'ken bristled behind his sergeant.
'No Astartes relinquishes his weapon unless it is prised from his cold, dead hand,' he snarled through gritted teeth.
From the demeanour of his battle-brothers, it was clear that they agreed with him. Throne, Dak'ir agreed too. Pyriel had insisted they stand down, and stand down they had. This he would not accede to.
'You may take my blade and pistol, as a gesture of good faith,' Dak'ir told the one called Illiad. The overseer stopped at once, looking back to his leader for guidance. A battle of wills was begun, between Dak'ir and the human. It played across Sonnar Illiad's face as clear as a plasma flare.
'Very well,' he conceded at last, before motioning to the one called Akuma. 'Take them.'
Dak'ir unsheathed and unholstered his weapons, proffering them to the overseer.
'Treat them reverently,' he warned, 'For I will be taking them back very soon.'
Akuma tried not to let his fear show, but was obviously intimated by the red-eyed Salamander and was swift to back away once he had his weapons.
The brother-sergeant then faced the man who called himself Illiad.
'We surrender,' he said. 'What now?'
Tsu'gan battle-signed for his squad to surround the trapdoor concealed at the back of the giant hall. Forged in thick iron, the gate looked sturdy, unashamedly designed to keep things out… or in. Dust-clogged and veneered in rust, it was invisible to a cursory examination of the area. Empty ammo crates and munitions tubes had been piled on top of it, draped over with a ragged tarpaulin. The fact that the stores of ammunition were exhausted revealed much about the Iron Warriors' desperate defence. They had used up almost everything they'd had to repel the attackers. Tsu'gan didn't doubt that the belt feeds and drum mags wedged in the sentry guns were their last.
He held up a fist, ordering his squad to wait.
Praetor and Brother-Captain N'keln were close by with weapons drawn.
Auspex was wretched with interference, bio-signatures seemingly appearing and disappearing like smoke on a stiff breeze, so Tsu'gan had ordered Iagon to shut the device off for now. Instead, he used his own senses to discern the presence of his enemies and found them when he detected the faintest clank of metal on metal through the iron door.
Pointing to his ear, Tsu'gan indicated that very fact to the others. He made a chop and pull motion with one hand - the other gripped his bolter. Brothers S'tang and Nor'gan heaved the gate open, its locks sheared by a plasma-torch from one of the Rhin
os' equipment bays. Scraping back the entrance to the lower level as silently as possible, the two Salamanders moved aside quickly to allow Tsu'gan and the flamer-wielding Brother Honorious to cover the now gaping portal.
The din of striking metal grew louder but there were no enemies lurking in the shadows, only a steel-runged ladder extending into blackened depths.
Tsu'gan made his hand into a flat blade, giving the all-clear, then splayed his fingers and made another fist. Half of his squad would accompany him into the darkness; the rest would remain on the surface and protect the exit. Praetor and N'keln would remain too; the Terminator too bulky and cumbersome to fit into the tight confines suggested below, the captain too valuable to risk on a scouting mission into the unknown.
Extending two fingers, Tsu'gan chopped down twice in rapid succession. Tiberon and Lazarus, waiting at the periphery, took the ladder one-by-one and plunged below. Once the two Salamanders were down, he raised one finger, made a fist, and then raised two and chopped down twice again. Tsu'gan descended next, knowing that Honorious and Iagon would follow as rearguard.
Keeping luminators snuffed, the Salamander combat squad moved slowly down a tight corridor that reeked of dank and copper. A strange pall pervaded the air: invisible but tangible, as if a second skin was forming over their battle-plate.
Tsu'gan followed the clamour of metal, still persisting, but seemingly farther away than when he'd first heard it in the hall above. Though his optical spectra were set to night-vision and then infra-red, the dark was oddly impenetrable as if subsuming any and all ambient light. Only sound guided him and his squad as they ranged cautiously through cloying shadows.
'Sire,' hissed Honorious.
Tsu'gan whirled around to face him, incensed that he had broken vox-silence.
The flamer trooper had stopped dead and was aiming his weapon down a sub-corridor branching off from the one the combat squad was traversing.
'You break vox-silence at my command only, trooper,' Tsu'gan snarled in a low voice.
Honorious turned, nonplussed.
'I didn't speak, sergeant.'
'Sire,' rasped Tiberon.
The battle-brother was at point, intent on the way ahead and seemingly oblivious to the fact that a large gap was developing between him and the rest of the squad.
A reprimand formed on Tsu'gan's lips, but he didn't give it voice.
'Squad halt,' he said into the comm-feed, instead. Iagon's auspex blazed into life, multiple signatures plaguing the hazy screen at once.
'Contacts!' he snapped, swinging his bolter around to aim at shadows.
'I have movement,' hissed Lazarus.
'Over here…' whispered a voice that Tsu'gan didn't recognise. He trained his combi-bolter in its direction, finger poised over the jet-release for the weapon's flamer.
'Sire,' Honorious's voice came again, far away this time, but the battle-brother was crouched right next to him in a ready-position. There was no way he could have actually spoken and it sound that distant.
'Sir, multiple contacts closing…' said Iagon, jerking his bolter back and forth as he sought targets.
The reek of dank and copper grew stronger.
Tiberon was still going. He was almost lost from Tsu'gan's sight altogether. For a moment the brother-sergeant gave in to something approaching fear, filled with a deep knowing that if Tiberon was swallowed by the darkness, he would never come back and they would never be able to find him.
'Hold, brother. Hold!' Tsu'gan cried, but his shout was smothered by the maddening din of hammered metal and the warnings of his squad.
'Over here…'
Clank!
That voice again; the one Tsu'gan didn't know…
'Enemy movement! Engaging!'
Clank!
Tiberon fading into the darkness ahead…
'Contacts closing, no target!'
Clank!
His mind spinning…
'Sire…'
Clank!
The sudden compulsion to make it stop… 'Sire, help us…'
Clank!
The bolter in his hands, pressed against his temple, tool of his salvation…
Clank!
The only way to end it…
'Please, make it stop,' Tsu'gan gasped. The muzzle felt cold against his sweat-drenched forehead. The sound of the slowly squeezing trigger was as deafening as thunder.
'Vulkan's fire burns in my breast,' a powerful voice intoned, eclipsing the beat of hammered metal. 'With it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor!'
Sensation, vague and indistinct at first, returned to Tsu'gan. He was faintly aware of a reassuring presence nearby, a lodestone to which he could anchor himself.
'For we are the Angels of the Emperor, servants of the Golden Throne, and we shall know no fear.'
Tsu'gan caught hold of the voice, stentorian and commanding, grasping it like a rope of salvation. A refulgent figure stood beside him, a crackling stave held in his outstretched hand.
'From the fires of battle are we born.'
No, not a stave - the warrior, sable-armoured with a face of death, held a hammer.
'Upon the anvil of war are we tempered.'
A blazing aura roiled from it like a fiery wave, chasing down the darkness and burning back the apparitions that tried to clench to them like parasites.
'Speak the words!' Brother-Chaplain Elysius snapped. 'Speak them and find your courage, Salamanders!'
Tsu'gan and his squad uttered the words as one, and the fog of insanity lifted.
The Chaplain smacked a reassuring hand against Tsu'gan's pauldron.
'Good enough, brother-sergeant,' he said. 'I will take the lead from here. Restore your battle-helm and follow me.'
Tsu'gan looked down at the battle-helm cradled in his grasp, agog. He hadn't even realised he'd removed it. Wiping away the sweat that was very real, he set his helmet back on and obeyed. The rest of his brothers had come to their senses as well, and followed with weapons ready. Even Tiberon had stopped. He let the Chaplain catch up to him before falling in behind.
Elysius had secured Vulkan's Sigil to his belt, though the artefact still glowed faintly with remembered power. Undoubtedly, the Chaplain had saved their lives. Whatever malfeasance preyed upon these lower catacombs had very nearly forced Tsu'gan and his squad to turn their guns on themselves. A few moments more and they would have done.
'Heretics are close,' Elysius rasped, his crozius arcanum igniting like a flaming torch in his mailed fist.
Tsu'gan realised that the heavy metal clank had returned to normal. It was still loud, and emanated from a sealed hatch ahead of them.
A few steps from the hatch, the Chaplain brought up his bolt pistol.
'Steel yourselves,' he warned.
The strange malaise affecting the tunnel returned but lingered at the periphery of Tsu'gan's thoughts as if unwilling to press further. The brother-sergeant gripped his bolter for reassurance, running a gauntleted finger over the flame icon embossed on the stock. Muttering a litany of warding, Tsu'gan opened his eyes and saw that the Chaplain had stepped aside from the hatch.
The entrance was locked and barred.
Tsu'gan beckoned Tiberon and Lazarus, who came to the front of the squad with krak grenades primed. After affixing the explosives with a dull, metallic thunk, the two Salamanders fell back. Honorious moved ahead of them, but kept low and at a safe distance. Tsu'gan pressed his body against the wall. He noted the Chaplain did the same on the opposite side, trusting to solid steel rather than his rosarius this time.
Squad in position, spread either side of the tunnel and outside the blast funnel, Tsu'gan drew his hand across his gorget in a slashing motion.
Aiming down his bolter's targeter, Iagon fired a single shot into one of the mag-locked krak grenades. A second later the hatch exploded.
Smoke and fire surged down the corridor in a plume, sending pieces of shrapnel brushing against the Salamanders' armour.
Stalking through the dirt
cloud, Chaplain Elysius was the first to enter the room beyond the hatch, Tsu'gan close behind him. They emerged into a metal-bound vault, dimly lit and filled with the stink of copper and iron. Rust streaked the walls like blood. Barbed hooks embedded in the metal resonated with remembered agony. Pitted manacles dangled slackly like hanged men.
This was a place of death and horror.
Crunching servos heralded a sudden attack by a quartet of ghoulish drones. Grey-faced, skin webbed by livid red veins, the automatons were an analogous but twisted variant on the servitors from the Archimedes Rex. The wretched parodies screamed in agony as they came at the interlopers, as if their bodies were still in pain from the invasive techno-surgeries employed to fashion them. Pain synapses flared with every motion, fuelling a terrible rage, only leavened by the shedding of blood and the rending of flesh.
Swollen with grotesque musculature, the monstrous ghoul-drones were the size of ogryn. They barrelled for the black-armoured warrior suddenly in their midst. Elysius ignored them, bent on an ironclad figure toiling over some device at the back of the chamber, apparently oblivious to the fight.
Tsu'gan only caught flashes of the mysterious artificer between the gaps in the Chaplain's body as he moved: a servo-arm attached to the generator on the figure's back; the colour of the dirty steel; yellow and black chevrons framing the armour; gilded greave plates fringed with rust around the bolts; pipes and cables, serpentine and alive; hydraulic gases venting and spitting like a curse.
Evil emanated from this being. Every blow from its incessant hammering was like the beat of a fell heart. Even as he closed, Tsu'gan couldn't tell what the Warsmith laboured at so furiously, smothered as it was by thick shadows and an even thicker sheet of coal-black plastek.
A bolter flare lit up Tsu'gan's left flank as a ghoul-drone was torn apart in a welter of oil and viscera. His battle-brothers were covering him as the sergeant shadowed his Chaplain, knowing that he couldn't leave Elysius to face the Warsmith alone.
Another ghoul-drone was destroyed, engulfed by Honorious's flamer. Its biologically unstable frame collapsed hideously in the intense heat. It muscles cooked and burst in blood-red torrents. A third beast dragged lengths of saw-toothed chain from the stump of its arm. Hot bile rose in his throat as Tsu'gan realised the chains were actually part flesh, part sinew and that some of the teeth were human bone. Boltgun roaring, he sundered the abomination and stamped over the remains. Punching a fourth, he knocked the creature aside to try and stay in the Chaplain's wake. Gore and charred meat peppered Tsu'gan's armour in a grisly spray. Maintaining momentum, Iagon had punctured the ghoul-drone's cranium with a bolt round that exploded it from within and obliterated the eight-pointed star branded onto its face.