Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  Crowl hesitated. ‘I don’t remember this one.’

  Gulagh hovered at his side. He looked a little paler. ‘It was a firefight, they told me. With guns. You really noticed every–’

  ‘Everything,’ said Crowl, reaching out to turn the head to one side. ‘He’s not from the chamber we cleared. Where’s he from?’

  Gulagh reached to the foot of the slab and pulled a cracked roll of parchment from an iron clasp. As it unravelled, the dry brown scratchings of scribe auto-quills became visible. ‘Dispatch 56-76a-ed3/G, Malliax, your reference, your seal,’ read Gulagh. ‘Like I said, they came in with this batch, all together, piled on a grav-slab with their chests still hot. I don’t know how you–’

  Crowl turned to face the apothecary. His gaunt face had darkened, and Gulagh stopped talking. The fat man put the parchment down quietly.

  ‘Say nothing, listen with utmost care,’ said Crowl. ‘I will take this one back with me. You will speak to your scribes and your dispatch menials. I will send a squad here in two hours, and I want a report for them to act upon by the time they arrive. If there’s nothing for them to excise, I’ll come back myself. I doubt that you want that to happen.’

  Gulagh wasn’t chuckling now. He shook his head, looking a little bewildered. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. But there’s no record–’

  ‘Two hours,’ said Crowl, turning away from him and stalking back down the corpse-hall. ‘That’s all you have. Use the time well.’

  Chapter Four

  Revus had not been made available, so Spinoza had been directed to the services of his sergeant-at-arms, Ergor Hegain. At first she had feared that might be some kind of slight, but on meeting the man, she began to think it a turn of good fortune. He’d greeted her smiling, his expression less dour than either of his masters’.

  ‘Greetings, lord,’ he’d said, saluting her. ‘Welcome to the bloodline.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Been lords in Courvain since before the Beast.’ He was still grinning. ‘You’re the latest.’

  Spinoza regarded him, searching for any sign of disrespect, but didn’t find any. Throne of Earth, he was being friendly.

  ‘Not the last, I hope,’ she said, as warmly as she was able, which was just as stiff and formal as the schola had drilled her and warfare had made her.

  Hegain laughed. ‘No doubt of it, lord. No doubt of it. I see that bloody great maul, and I heard the captain talk of it. You’ll smite them, lord. You’ll smite them to dust, Emperor keep you hale.’

  He’d come with two of his standing troop – a man and a woman, both clad in ordo battle-armour marked with the skull-figure in white on grey. Together the four of them marched down once more to the hangars.

  ‘Orders to escort you to Malliax Quintus, middle deep, cross-grid 45-45-S,’ said Hegain, his hellgun swinging from its belt-shackle as he walked. ‘Best to take the near-end tunnels. A Shade, if you will it. I can pilot it, if you wish that, but if not, I’d like to see you take the controls. If that is not to say too much. They told me you fought with the Angels of Death. Is that so, lord? I can imagine it, seeing the way you are.’

  Spinoza smiled faintly. ‘You do not fight with them, sergeant,’ she said. ‘They suffer you to be present.’

  Hegain laughed. ‘Is that it? Now you say it, but I do not believe it. I reckon you’d have given account of yourself. With that maul. By the Nine Wounds, I’d have liked to have seen it. You wish to pilot this? It is your command. But I can, if you have no desire for it.’

  They reached the anchor station for a DF-08 Shade squad transporter, all angles and ramjet-housings. It was being prepped by a cadre of servitors and menials, fuelled and weapon-loaded. Unlike the Nighthawk it had been built for stealth, and was as sleek and ugly as a flensing knife.

  Spinoza looked up at it. ‘I’ll take it, sergeant,’ she said.

  Hegain grinned again, and clambered up into the co-pilot’s throne. The others hoisted themselves up into the cramped rear crew-bay, and the servitors withdrew, yanking hissing fuel lines with them.

  Spinoza took her place, taking in the control mechanisms. She placed her hands on the two flight columns and pressed down, feeling the heavy machinery clunk back in response.

  ‘You run this down the tunnels?’ she asked.

  ‘If the demand is there, lord. Only if the demand is there. They never see it coming. Not much fits down the catacombs, but this will. Quick as a whip, keep the lumens down, silent burn. You taken one of these before? You’ll like it. Made for Courvain, like everything he uses. He knows his business, does Crowl. I took a bad hit on the last action, and he asked after it, and he knew all about it, and now I’m back to service. He’ll look after you, he will, though you wouldn’t know it, not when you meet him.’

  ‘No,’ said Spinoza. ‘No, that’s not obvious.’

  She activated the engines, and the transporter rattled into life, belching blue-edged flames from the twin exhausts. Ahead of them, the outer hangar doors cantilevered open.

  ‘The machine-spirit has the location,’ said Hegain, clicking down a series of system-initialise switches. The cockpit shuddered briefly, and the clusters of picter-screens started to run with schematic readouts. False-colour targeting reticules swam across the forward viewports, linked directly to the chain-linked cannons slung under the hooked prow. ‘You can follow this seeker-readout?’

  She could. Imperial battle vehicles all shared the same basic template designs, most of them forged millennia ago, designed to make it possible to switch between equipment with next to no preparation. For one with Inquisition training and experience on the front line there was little in the Munitorum’s colossal inventory that couldn’t be mastered, and it took only a moment’s mental adjustment to comprehend the Shade’s location-marker system.

  ‘At speed, then, sergeant,’ said Spinoza, lifting off and angling the thrusters to power them forwards. ‘You have the bio-overlay of the one we seek. The rest are irrelevant.’

  ‘Understood, and that suits us well, lord. You already have a fine command of this, if I may say it.’

  Spinoza applied the initial boost, and the Shade blasted clear of Courvain’s black walls, shooting out into the smog beyond. She angled it down and over, tilting hard and dropping like a lead bolt. Just as before, the other air traffic scrambled to get clear, and a narrow path opened up for them through the tox-haze.

  ‘Ha!’ cried Hegain, enjoying the plummet. ‘Very good.’

  Spinoza gained full velocity quickly, sweeping and sliding among the massed craft before swooping down below the level of the lowest. The Shade skated along just above street level, scything over the heads of startled crowds. The foundations of the ever-present towers blurred past, shadow-wreathed and colossal. Ahead of her, targeting schematics flickered and updated, guiding the transporter deeper into the labyrinth.

  ‘Approaching catacomb entrance point, lord,’ reported Hegain. ‘Beware it, if you please – the ingress can be–’

  ‘I see it,’ said Spinoza, beginning to enjoy herself. ‘Like I said, sergeant – at speed.’

  The Shade dived towards a long banking ramp, hemmed on either side by retaining walls. Above them soared stacked arches and transit spans, rising like thrown web-silk over the chasms below. At the terminus of the ramp was a gaping hole, a black shaft that seemed to swallow the light into itself.

  The Shade plunged straight into the dark, its powerful forward lumens picking out a blackened, crusted tunnel that shot down steeply before angling back on itself and splitting into dozens of threaded ways. There were crowds even in there, skulking in the stale underworld, and they screamed and ran as the Shade boomed over their heads.

  ‘Into under-Malliax,’ reported Hegain, rocking against the thrust of the transporter. ‘Coming in close now, lord.’

  ‘I see that too.’

  They we
re powering down a narrow capillary, the walls closing in on them quickly. Huge clusters of cabling hung like vines from the tunnel roof, thick with luminous growths. Old machinery, long abandoned, half sunken into the sodden floor, eaten by rust and smashed by tech-looters. Glimpsed in the rapid flash of the Shade’s lumens, the carcasses looked like skeletons of vast, broken beasts.

  ‘Now,’ said Spinoza, hauling back on the control column. The Shade juddered to a halt, hovering over the edge of a deeper well, fifty metres across, that dropped down vertically in a series of shrinking concentric rings. The crew doors slammed open, and the two storm troopers leapt out, crouching down and sweeping the vicinity.

  ‘Take the controls,’ ordered Spinoza, reaching for the door release.

  ‘As you will it, lord,’ said Hegain, maintaining the transport’s position as the cockpit canopy slid open.

  Spinoza pushed clear and dropped down next to her troops. ‘Keep moving,’ she ordered her escorts, breaking into a run and drawing her ordo-monogrammed Accatran laspistol.

  They were on the edge of the topmost tier of the well. Overhead, lost in the darkness, was the roof of the chamber, a hulking mass of rockcrete and natural spoil from the spire construction. To her left, just a few metres away, was the fall to the next tier down, overlooking the chasm. Eroded stairs, carved into the rockcrete, led to the levels further below, spiralling ever deeper like the bore-gauge of some immense drill.

  Lost in the dank and the dark, hundreds eked out an existence there in gnawed-out hovels, a nocturnal realm of desperation. Most scattered like animals as Spinoza emerged, their rags swaying from skeletal limbs. She caught flashes of ghoulish faces, drawn with malnutrition and marked with pox-scars, before they raced off into the gloom.

  Spinoza ran for the first stairwell and tore down it two steps at a time, feeling the slime-covered stone slip under her tread. She jumped down to the base and raced out across rotting rockcrete. The location marker on her retinal feeds turned red, zeroing in on the destination given by the abhuman’s testimony. She reached a steel doorway to an old storage chamber driven back into the curved wall, crowned with a heavy lintel marked with faded Divisio Malliax administratum runes.

  Spinoza located the door’s locking mechanism – a heavy iron box with an intact bolt-unit – and blew it out with a single shot. The door creaked open, its hinges straining, and she kicked it in, applying a morsel of power-boost from her armour’s battle-matrix to lend the movement extra heft.

  ‘Surrender yourself,’ she warned, striding into the chamber beyond, scanning with the laspistol.

  The unit had been clawed into the bedrock of the shaft’s edge, running back straight from the entrance portal. Its roof was low and arched, and damp spores clung thickly to ancient walls. Spinoza’s scanning augurs picked up trace heat signatures, but the place was empty. Towards the distant rear of the chamber, another metal door swung lazily on rusted hinges.

  ‘Secure the entrance,’ she ordered one of the storm troopers, the male, and gestured for the other one, who had a squad callsign of Zeta-8, to follow her.

  She reached the listing door, wrenched it open and ran down a narrow corridor beyond. The tunnel was barely tall enough for her to fit through without stooping, and her breath echoed hard in her earpiece. A sudden mental image of millions upon millions of tonnes of earth, rock, plasteel and adamantium, all bearing down on her, briefly intruded into her mind, and she dismissed it.

  ‘Surrender yourself!’ she warned again, kicking through foetid pools of oily matter, her armour lumens rendering the walls of the tunnel in stark flashes of white.

  The air grew even hotter. Sweat ran down Spinoza’s collar-seal; Zeta-8 nearly lost her footing amid the treacherous clutter strewn across the tunnel floor. They broke into another chamber, square-shaped and low-roofed, daubed with bloody angel-shapes on the mouldy walls. A shaft ran upwards from the far corner, accessed via an iron ladder welded to the walls. Spinoza skidded over to the opening, angling her weapon up at it, and saw a pair of boots ten metres above, just cresting the end of the ladder.

  She fired twice, sending las-beams scything up the well, but her prey disappeared over the exploding edge and into another chamber beyond. Spinoza clambered up, reached the summit and hauled herself over the edge. She emerged into a larger hall, still subterranean but now lit by dirty lumen-strips hung on long chains. There were people again around her, hordes of rat-like underhivers, blinking at her sudden appearance before they realised the danger and broke into a confused stampede. Off in the crowd, one man was already running, his tattered cloak fluttering as he barged his way clear.

  Spinoza and Zeta-8 pushed their way through the press of scrawny bodies, shoving them aside to gain a clear shot. Spinoza punched out with her free hand, feeling the snap of fragile bone, gaining a split-second avenue. She took aim at the man’s thigh and fired. The las-bolt ripped through flesh in a puff of blood, and he staggered, crashing into those about him.

  Spinoza was about to go after him when Zeta-8 suddenly called her up. ‘Lord,’ she voxed. ‘New target – two nine four.’

  Spinoza dropped to one knee, sweeping her laspistol up to the coordinates given – a high gallery some six metres overhead, running along the left-hand edge of the underground hall. She caught a glimpse of what looked like carapace armour, close-fitted, cameleo-coated, blending almost perfectly into the dank rockcrete wall.

  ‘Hold!’ Spinoza warned, but the figure was already moving – a confident sprint, far faster than the stampeding crowds down below.

  She fired, taking out the gallery a metre ahead of the running figure. Without missing a stride, the figure vaulted across the collapsing struts and landed on the far side.

  ‘Attend to the subject,’ ordered Spinoza to Zeta-8, moving to the new quarry. She ran along the length of the hall, veering through the panicking masses. At the end of the gallery was an open circular portal. The figure dived through it. Spinoza reached the gallery’s only access stairwell and raced up the corroded rungs. She plunged through the empty hatch and out into a much wider roofed thoroughfare, still deep below nominal street-level but high enough up to be clogged with hundreds more bodies – pilgrims, beggars, priests, onlookers. Some enormous procession was taking place along the avenue, and crude effigies of the Angel Sanguinius swayed drunkenly above the throngs. Ecclesiarchy devotion-pods droned overhead, gouting incense and blaring out tinny audio recordings of sanctioned sermons.

  Spinoza spun around, trying to see where her quarry had gone. Pilgrims blundered up to her, their eyes glassy and their faces streaked with blood, insensible to anything but their ecstasy. She pushed past them, searching desperately, and caught a glimpse of the cara­pace armour, now mottled with red-and-gold blotches, heading up through the crowds. She went after it, shoving and pushing and kicking out. The press of bodies grew closer and tighter. She smelt the stale wash of sweat and fervour, the sickly top-note of Ministorum censers, and reached for her crozius. Another pilgrim – a woman, her grey hair sticking out like thatch, her eyes black-edged and crazy – tried to embrace her, crying out something about the sacrifice of the beloved primarch. Spinoza smashed the butt-end of the crozius into her stupid, wrinkled face, not bothering to activate the disruptor field, and barely saw her crumple into a wailing heap.

  It was no good. The downed woman was replaced by more of her kind, trampling over themselves, crashing up against her like a buffeting wind. Spinoza came to a halt, defeated by the crowd.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she voxed, sourly. ‘Your location.’

  Hegain’s voice hissed back over the link immediately. ‘Closing in, lord. Coming in well enough. Tight tunnels, some of them, but we have a route. Hold fast, I approach.’

  Spinoza shoved back, clearing enough space for her to break free of the main tide of bodies. Somewhere up ahead, now too far to pursue, the armour-clad interloper was no doubt making their way to safety. Every
thing indicated a capable operator – an agent of Adeptus Terra, an arbitrator, or maybe something more dangerous. What had they been doing there? Shadowing them? Or after the same quarry?

  ‘Zeta-Eight – report,’ she voxed.

  ‘Subject terminated,’ came the reply. ‘Heartburst capsule, ingested immediately after immobilisation.’

  Spinoza closed the link and sank back against an ouslite column. She shackled the crozius again and waited for her pulse rate to stabilise.

  The multitudes paid her no attention. No doubt most were drugged, either by the priests handing out sacred devotion-amplifiers or through the food they scavenged from the resident gutter-scrapers. All they thought of was the prospect of making it to the Palace in time, and all they saw were lurid dream-visions of the beloved primarch swimming in front of their addled eyes. There must have been a thousand of them there, packed tightly together like herd groxes. Statistically, the chances were that none of them would make it. They were easy pickings for the predators of the underhives, or the rampant diseases of the subterranean levels would overwhelm their off-world constitutions, or they would never find the path that led them through the warrens in time.

  She tried not to scorn them. Their faith was direct, untroubled by nuance. Most of them knew what the odds were, on some level. They still came, and they still strived. Better to die in purity than live in corruption, as the old dictum went.

  Overhead, the close air stirred. The boom of atmospheric thrusters began to compete with the drone of the crowds, and soon the cloaks and cowls of the supplicants were rippling and flapping. The Shade emerged from the north end of the huge hall, dipping low to avoid the suspensor-lumens. Spinoza watched it come, marvelling at how little attention even the hovering transporter got from the chanting crowds.