“Major Mortensen: like myself—you and your men have your orders.”
Rask’s flat ultimatum hung in the stale air of the apex.
Sarakota backed up a step, admitting his sergeant and Trooper Pryce. They carried between them an engineering tool crate that they unceremoniously emptied out on the metal floor beside Diederick’s body. As well as the servitor tool attachments and various blessing oils, Mortensen could make out some flashlamps, a few corroded power packs, a bundle of dirty rebreathers and a plasma welding torch. The major grunted.
“Do we have a plan?” he asked Rask finally.
“You’re going to love it.”
III
“This has got to be the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Wendall Conklin announced to anyone who would listen. “And I’ve heard some beauts.”
“Help me with this, will you?” Mortensen put to the master sergeant, as much to shut him up as anything.
Vedette was backing up with the plasma torch, after cutting a ragged hatch through the heavy metal decking. Lifting the solid slab of flooring clear with lungfuls of exertion, the two storm-troopers held it for the dangerous moments it took Gorskii and Minghella to get their fingers underneath the dead weight and help toss the improvised hatch aside.
Sass swept in quickly with a sparked flashlamp but was forced back by the liberated stench that rose like a physical force to meet him. It was an almost overpowering concoction of petrochemical smog and stale sewage.
Vedette’s handiwork had also cut free the top section of a rusted deck drain. Covering his nose and mouth with the cuff of his uniform, the major’s adjutant leaned back in with the lamp and flashed it both ways up the dribbling conduit. Satisfied, he pulled himself upright.
“Good work,” Mortensen muttered, going in for a closer look himself. Once again Sass’ arithmetical gifts had been a boon. With the most basic of descriptions Captain Rask could offer from the bridge cogitators and runeprints, the storm-trooper had located the pipe running underneath the cabin allocated to Pryce and Sarakota with little more than some grumbling and measured pacing.
“We’re going to need the masks,” Vedette ventured, abandoning the plasma torch.
“I’d say,” Minghella agreed, covering his mouth with his beret.
“One of them doesn’t work,” Conklin informed them.
“Well, then I guess that’s yours,” Mortensen returned. He looked up at Sass. “Leads to the bilge, you say?”
The adjutant nodded: “The bilge compartments run the length of the ship. If the data Captain Rask has given us is even half-accurate we should be able to access large areas of the lower barrack decks from down there.”
“The plasma?”
“Spent,” Vedette confirmed.
“We’d better hope for some kind of maintenance exit on the other end,” Mortensen mused miserably.
“Looks like a squeeze,” Minghella observed, his brutish features screwed up more hideously than usual.
“Yes,” the major agreed, “and it ain’t going be pleasant down there, so we’d best make it count on the other side.” Climbing into the pipe, Mortensen knelt down in the shallow pool of stagnant bilge water.
His crisp blood stripe trousers soon became sodden with muck and oil. His autopistol sat in his belt and holster, which he’d piled on the deck beside the opening. Dumping the leather harness in the stinking slime at his knees, he added a ready sparked flashlamp and a cog-hammer he’d requisitioned from the tool crate. The wicked claw that adorned one end had appealed to the major immediately as a suitable tool for both clearing obstructions in the pipe and skull-hooking potential adversaries.
“Any last words before we commit ourselves to this?” Mortensen put to the rest of the gathered Redemption Corps storm-troopers. When no one answered he added grimly: “Any better ideas?”
More silence.
Taking this as a signal Mortensen slid the pile forwards through the chemical sludge and slapped on a bulky, rubber rebreather before lying bare chest down in the pipe with his arms forward. Using his elbows and toes he began to squirm bilgeward. He wasn’t ecstatic about sitting his side arm in petrochemical slime but without room to actually draw his weapon he thought it best to have it up forward where it could still give a good account of itself in the confines of the conduit.
Claustrophobic just didn’t seem to do the experience justice. Mortensen braced himself against the cold metal of the piping—flexing his shoulders and back muscles—but the drain was fairly unforgiving and appeared to respond by squeezing back. That wasn’t the worst of it. The rebreathers were largely ancient and cracked and admitted much of the stomach-churning reek they were meant to circumvent. A few metres into the conduit crawl the pipe filled with the wretched echoes of both Conklin and Pryce throwing up in their masks. After a cacophony of spasms and spitting Mortensen checked with the pair, but the master sergeant simply swore and informed his CO that the smell of vomit was preferable to what they were squirming through.
The agony of an hour’s crawl followed—Mortensen’s splattered flashlamp revealing metre after endless metre of cramped and corroded horror as he edged it through the detritus of the duct. Acid-soaked muscles blazed along with the ghastly gulps and gasps of lungs desperate for clean air. The crawl gave Mortensen more than enough time to contemplate the job ahead.
Rask’s mission was simple. Evade the inevitable obstruction of bulkheads, firefights and a barracks block in lock-down by traversing the transport’s keel along one of the many bilge channels that ran the length of the vessel. Conklin had suggested working their way over to and hooking up with some of the isolated groups of loyalists scattered throughout the starboard decks but Rask had advised against it. He had told the sergeant that the pockets of resistance were largely unarmed and those that weren’t were certainly low on ammunition. Most were also pinned down by much larger groups of aggressors and were more than likely injured, which would offer more of a handicap than an advantage to the Redemption Corps.
Rask’s operation relied much more on mobility and infiltration. Mortensen could hardly disagree. In their current predicament his storm-troopers were hardly outfitted for a spearhead. The captain actually favoured a single, bold, unanticipated strike right at the heart of the insurrection—to “cut the head from the angry serpent”, as he put it. Rask had faith that such an action held the best chance of success—success determined as the retrieval of any remaining hostages and the unconditional surrender or destruction of rebel Shadow Brigade forces. Then, and only then, would Waldemar, Deliverance’s lord and captain, authorise his naval troops in to secure the barrack decks.
Acquiring the hostage takers would be another thing entirely. Rask didn’t even have confirmation on their identity and location. The most likely candidates were a triumvirate of Shadow Brigade officers, two lieutenants and a captain, whose platoons had become the prime focus of Commissar Fosco’s wrath.
Company Captain Obadiah Eckhardt, First Lieutenant Diezel Shanks and Lieutenant Nils Isidore had all lost men to Fosco’s campaign to purify the men of the 1001st of their hiver ways and customs. Instead of immersing himself in Shadow Brigade culture and using it to unify the men—as Rask had done in tithing them—Fosco had attempted to eradicate it. He claimed that the strength of the Imperial Guard was based upon uniformity: billions of souls all pulling in the same direction, and had little time to pander to the fighting strengths of individuals, their units or their regiments.
This approach did not sit well with Mortensen—whose own inimitable style of leadership marked him out as a target for such accusations. Without Rask’s silver-tongued diplomacy and tact the Redemption Corps would have long become a target for Fosco or some other bloodthirsty puritan. The schola progeniums were brimming with creed-thumping sadists like the commissar and Mortensen refused to have such men in his unit—which unfortunately made the Redemption Corps appear ever more irregular against the backdrop of the uniform billions that men like Fosco were attemptin
g to cultivate.
Regardless of the major’s feelings, the predicament demanded a rescue attempt and Eckhardt, Shanks, Isidore and their compatriots had to be neutralised. It was a storm-trooper’s lot. To be better. To be above common regimental concerns and do the good work of the Emperor—wherever it took them.
At that moment the Emperor’s good work took Mortensen from the crippling confines of the drain and out through a gash in the floor of the pipe, splashing him down head first in a petrochemical sinkhole.
Beneath the oily surface Mortensen heard the thud-gush of others, freshly baptised in the bilgewater filth. The major’s lamp struggled to penetrate the blackness, blinking a ghostly beam that brushed the thrashing of boots and limbs as his fellow storm-troopers fought to right themselves in their new surroundings. As the soles of his boots touched down on something reassuringly solid the major pushed for the surface and treated himself to a lungful of foetid air. Like everyone else, he retched, bucked and coughed as his throat refused to admit the rancid stench.
Tearing off his mask Mortensen tossed the useless thing away and gradually—back rising and falling like a wounded animal—acclimatised himself. One by one the others followed suit, before hawking and spitting their stomach-churning disgust into the still black waters around them.
Lamplight sheared through the inky darkness: probably the first light down there for hundreds of years. They were right in the bowels of the ship, in one of the foul bilge drains into which every drop of piss, oil, blood, sweat and everything else descended—wrenched keelward by the irresistible force of Deliverance’s artificial gravity. The air—if it warranted such a description—was acrid and stale, hanging as it had in the compartment amongst a forest of quietly corroding pipes and the bubble of fermenting bilge-slime.
Mortensen turned his lamp on his squad. They were a sight: like septuplets yanked from a womb of filth.
“Sass?”
“Best probably to avoid the deeps: we don’t really want to be swimming through this muck.”
“Agreed.”
The corpsman turned his lamp back on the conduit from which they’d fallen and the gaping hole that had admitted them. The conduit was riddled through with rust and decay and the entire bottom section from the point of their exit onwards had been eaten away by the corrosive powers of the toxins they had been crawling through.
“It’s simple really,” the adjutant told them, between retching and spitting. “We need to follow the path of this conduit until it meets the steam trunk demi-juncture. Then we’ll know for sure that we’re under the barracks deck.”
“And this steam juncture thing: you’ll know it when you see it?”
Sass nodded.
The bilge was like another world and it was hard for Mortensen to imagine such a place existed hundreds of metres below the soles of his boots as he went about his normal regimental business. Solid blackness reigned here above the equal blackness of the percolating petrochemical slime. The corpsmen’s flashlamps brought light to the denizens of the deep here: probably the first time the bilge space had experienced light since its original dry-dock engineering, when Deliverance had been a sprightly young carrier, eager for action and a taste of the void. With millennia to develop and evolve, the bilge sections now boasted their own ecosystems.
Hydrocarbon-hungry bacteria swarmed the oily waters to a primordial sludginess, which in turn was feasted upon by tiny lice and other chitinous micro-arthropods, both flitting above and below the inky surface. Stoolies dribbled from every conceivable solid surface, including the thickets of thin rusty pipes that ran up into the darkness, like slinking flypaper, mopping up the lice and absorbing them through their fecal skin. The descendants of the original rats on board, now all but pinkish, translucent tails with a vice-like pair of jaws on one end, slithered their horrible way through the black waters. Mortensen got to wondering what fed on the highly mobile and muscular rat-tails, hoping that the disgusting food chain ended firmly there.
They were into their second hour of a jogging trudge along the shallows of the bilge lake when he had his question answered.
A fat, broken pipe ran out of the wall, its smashed end hanging over the still, glassy surface of the oil, seeping rusty effluence into the bilge. As his lamplight glanced off the horrible paleness of a form at the pipe Mortensen froze, bringing his autopistol up to meet the threat. The surprise came mostly from its size: a spindle-limbed crustacean, a myriad of twitchy legs and slender pincers, reaching, snatching and cutting at something in the pipe. It towered above them, its many limbs terminating in a clear shell that exhibited the ghastly inner workings of its body. The shell was shaped like an obscene flower, fat at the bottom, the underside of which was a mincing mouth, constantly supplied with scraps of flesh from the wicked claws that thrashed back and forth to supply it with food. The top of the shell tapered to a twisted funnel, which widened again like the end of a bugle or blunderbuss.
As the storm-troopers neared, Mortensen held up one arm indicating a full stop. The gargantuan thing seemed very invested in its activity, which upon inspection appeared to be slicing up and devouring a nest of bloody, swarming rat-tails. The major approached slowly, his pace steady and even, clambering over the pipe with deliberate movements. At one point the crustacean experimentally reached out a large pincer and plucked at the storm-trooper’s boot, but Mortensen dashed the claw-tip aside with a swipe of his pistol. The creature became a wall of pincers, all retracted and ready to slice, the rest of its body still as the pipe disgorged mauled rat-tails into the shallows about it. Vedette and Gorskii primed their pistols, but Mortensen held up a free hand, before swiftly indicating with his fingers that they should cross the pipe behind him.
Minghella and Sarakota scuttled swiftly over the conduit, followed closely by the others as the creature tiptoed left and right, reacting to the new activity along the shoreline. With the squad across, Mortensen backed down the other side and retreated, boot behind boot. Within moments the hideous thing was back to tearing apart the squirming nest. A few hundred metres further on and Sass mercifully stopped them.
“I think this is it.”
“You think?” Conklin grumbled.
The adjutant was flashing his light into the gloom above; it was joined by the rest of the available beams.
“The steam trunk demi-juncture,” Sass announced.
Mortensen nodded: he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, but mostly it resembled one rusty throng of pipes and conduits running into another throng. Many of the pipes were shattered and broken so only the stubs of channels running vertically up into the ship were visible.
“Boss,” Conklin murmured: his was the only flash-lamp not on the encrusted ceiling. Mortensen followed the beam and the line of his pistol muzzle until he found the gangly legs of another hulking crustacean. This one was holding still in the shallows, the blunderbuss snout of its shell pointed at the ceiling. Its body chugged horribly until suddenly a bloodied fountain of vomit-splatter spouted skyward from the opening. Most of the regurgitated mess decorated the ceiling, but some of the muck hit its intended target, one of the broken pipe openings. As the shell heaved its last, the spidery thing crawled off into the thick waters, dipping below the surface, the trumpet end of its shell top now serving as a snorkel.
“Major,” Sass called. He’d been prancing around in the shadows, his own lamp exploring the insides of similar conduit openings above. The storm-troopers took several exhausted steps towards him and stared ceilingward. “Unspark your lamps for a moment,” the adjutant advised.
“Is he friggin’ crazy?” Conklin growled.
“Do it,” the major ordered, snapping off his own in good example.
The bilge compartment returned to its vast darkness and although there was black, open space all around him, Mortensen couldn’t help but feel the claustrophobia of the creepy sensation that there were things all about him in the void. Then he saw it: the reason Sass had asked for the lamps to be shut
off, the reason for their neck craning and idiot stares.
Light. Tiny pinpricks of dim light, filtering in from the vertical termination of a pipe opening above their faces. The opening was just wide enough to admit a corpsman. Gorskii uttered something in her thick Valhallan dialect, which could have been anything, but sounded like a thanks or blessing. As always Conklin was the first to rain on their parade.
“Is that something moving?” he put to the group. He wasn’t wrong—occasionally individual dots of light were momentarily eclipsed, giving the impression that something had already made its home in the pipe. The sergeant grunted and cocked his pistol. “We’ll soon sort that out.”
“Sarge, can we really risk gunfire this close to the insertion?” Vedette put evenly into the darkness. As a Mordian she’d lived on a nightworld and so the light-less environs of the bilge had been less of an ordeal for her. Of all the storm-troopers she’d slipped and stumbled the least through the hellish murk. She displayed no less deftness and precision in the correction of her superior, “I mean—we could be right under them. Yes?”
Conklin’s disappointment was obvious, even in the dark and without visual confirmation from his face: “Probably.”
With the lamps snapped back on the storm-troopers set about making their ascent. Without the kinds of specialist equipment they habitually relied upon for the wide range of infiltration scenarios in which they were usually involved, the corpsmen had to go back to basics. Mortensen unclipped his belt and wrapped it tautly around two emaciated pipes running parallel and ceilingward. Stuffing his pistol and cog-hammer into his blood stripes he pulled hard on the belt and settled his boot, one on each rusty pipe, crushing and squelching stoolies underfoot. Sliding the belt up through the stoolie slime he clambered up the pipes, the inside edge of each boot fighting to find purchase on the corroded metal surface. Each of the Redemption Corpsmen followed suit, struggling up behind their major, up into the gloom.
[Imperial Guard 08] - Redemption Corps Page 3