SABBAT WAR

by Edited by Dan Abnett

  Leaving Tavish a little down tunnel from the skin, the three men moved the rest of the way up to the tunnel face with practised silence. Each step was separated, the rhythm broken between them so that they did not fall into the march rhythm that Guardsmen so often adopted without even realising they were doing it. They stepped lightly and hunched over, the pools of glow gas growing more frequent and broader as they neared the face, sometimes lapping over the duckboard completely. Those sections of the tunnel required extra care with foot placement, the man behind watching the one in front.

  Reaching the face, Lyhan slid into position. He had counted the measure markers on the way up: there was still another six metres to dig before target. They had twelve hours to do it.

  He held up his fingers, giving the count to Hacquet and Coppet, who signed their understanding. It was going to be tight.

  Bracing himself against the wedge of sandbags, Lyhan positioned his feet on the shoulders of the spade and pushed it into the clay.

  First cut.

  As Hacquet bagged the cut and Lyhan moved, automatically, to the next, he thought on what they would do if they got to sixty minutes before zero hour and they were still short of the target area.

  Should they set and blow the mine there?

  Lyhan knew that if they blew the mine short of the target – the great bastion on the Scar – the effect would merely be to open a huge crater in front of the bastion, creating an instant glacis up which the men of the Roane Deepers would have to struggle: they would then have succeeded in making the ideal kill-zone for the enemy. No, they had to tunnel to the target. Only then could they blow the mine.

  The team settled into their rhythm: cut, bag, tram. Cut, bag, tram.

  Lyhan moved the distance marker forward with each spade length he removed from the face, counting off the distance to target. Down to four metres now.

  Cut, bag, tram.

  Cut, bag, tram.

  Muscles that had barely had a chance to rest began to cramp. On the floor, Lyhan could see the pain in Hacquet’s face as, again and again, he had to twist almost in two in the confined space to move the bagged clay back to where Coppet could reach it. Lyhan, lying on the sand wedge, could not see the trammer, but he could hear his soft movements as he ran the bags of clay spoil back down the tunnel on the trolley. On the return leg of those trips, Lyhan knew that Coppet would be moving the demolition charges, packs of strapped-together fyceline that Deeper procurers had acquired from the stores of better-equipped Imperial regiments, up the tunnel to the load-out space.

  Cut, bag, tram.

  Cut, bag, tram.

  Marking off the distance. Down to three metres now.

  It felt as if someone was slowly pouring acid into his bones, down into their marrow, and from there it was leaching into his muscles, eating them out from the inside. Lyhan felt himself a bag of blood; his vision was beginning to red over.

  The kicker signed a break. There was no time, but he could not continue.

  He lay back, not moving, staring at the ceiling just above his face but not seeing it. At his feet, Hacquet lay unmoving too, unable even to twist the other way to relieve the cramping of his back. Only Coppet kept going, tramming the spoil back down the tunnel, bringing the demo charges up it.

  Lyhan reached beside him, found the water bottle and, unhitching the rebreather for a moment, raised it to drink. But so fogged had his vision become that he did not see the ceiling was too near: the bottle struck against the support, jerked its contents over his chest and then fell, clanging, onto the floor.

  The kicker froze. Hacquet, previously unmoving, was now tense, straining to listen. Behind them, Coppet’s stealthy motion had also ceased.

  They listened. Lyhan, the shock having cleared both mind and sight, eased his head round and looked at the motion trays – the bowls of water – that he could see from his digging position. The ripples his dropping the water bottle had caused on the surface of the trays were dying away. But even as he watched, Lyhan saw new ripples start.

  As one, kicker and bagger reached for their listening tubes and pushed the metal into the clay. They lay there, tuning out the repeated thump of the artillery that was drawing towards a crescendo far above them, tuning in to the thrash-cut of the enemy’s digging machine, the staccato thrum of the enemy speaking and the thump of its footfalls.

  They were all getting closer, following the sound trail that Lyhan had left them. Now, with the Deepers all lying silent and unmoving, the enemy had no further clues as to their direction but it seemed that he was sending his tunnelling machine boring into the clay in the remembered direction of the noise.

  It was coming closer.

  But they could not lie there, waiting. The artillery barrage was moving towards its final climax. After that, there would be the briefest of pauses while the Deepers moved out of their shelters, and then the attack.

  Lyhan eased over onto his side so that he could sign Hacquet and Coppet in closer. He needed to speak to them.

  ‘We carry on. Three metres to go now.’

  Hacquet pointed to where the sound of enemy digging was coming from: it was close enough for it to be heard without the listening tubes.

  ‘They’re making too much noise to hear us,’ said Lyhan.

  Hacquet nodded. He glanced again in the direction of the sound. It was nearby. The three men all scanned up and down, trying to tell if the digging was on line to intersect with their tunnel: digging in three dimensions meant that there was always a good chance of going over or under an enemy tunnel. The noise sounded as if it came from above, but whether it was high enough they could not tell.

  Lyhan picked up the spade and braced himself. Hacquet lay down again in the clay on the tunnel floor, made into a slurry by the water that Lyhan had spilled. Coppet, bent over, hefted the clay onto the tram.

  Cut, bag, tram.

  Cut, bag, tram.

  The shock of detection had sent awareness surging through Lyhan’s body. He dug now with all the urgent precision that his years excavating the habs back on Roane had given him. Beneath him, Hacquet lay ready, making sure that no stray wedge of clay or occasional stone intrusion dropped from the face to give the enemy any further information as to their position. Behind them, Coppet moved the spoil in what was as close to silence as it was possible to achieve, the fat-greased wheels of his trolley making virtually no sound.

  And while they dug and bagged and trammed, with the part of their minds and their senses not turned to the task in hand they listened to the enemy, approaching.

  They worked like this for a further four hours. The air, scrubbed through the rebreathers, had gone from tasteless to acidic: it rasped the lungs with each breath. Their soak pads were dry now, and with no time to resoak them each breath was painful. However, the initial onrush of the enemy tunnelling machine seemed to have slowed. Although it was still approaching, the note of its digging had changed, as if the nature of the material it was tunnelling through had changed also. It was a harsher sound, more strident, almost resonant.

  And then Lyhan slowly realised that he could taste iron in the air he was sucking in through his rebreather. For a moment he wondered if he had bitten his tongue and not even realised it. But his mouth was dry, gritty with clay dust.

  The iron was in the air. And as his spade stopped, suddenly, brought short by an unyielding mass ahead, he realised that the iron was ahead of them too.

  He got up off the sand wedge and scraped away the clay with his hand, grabbing the snap-lumen and bringing it closer to the face. Hacquet, seeing what he was doing, got up on his knees to see better.

  They both saw the dull grey-red gleam of ore, iron ore, where Lyhan had rubbed away the clay.

  The kicker shook his head. No. No, no, no.

  Getting down low, he scraped frantically away at the clay at the bottom of the face, Hacquet helping him to clear it. But, again, they came up against the unyielding hard surface of iron ore.

  Lyhan looked at Hacq
uet. Even with the rebreather covering most of the bagger’s face, he could see the despair. It was a despair he was certain was reflected in his own face. To come so far and then to meet an intruding seam of ore… Yes, they could dig through it, but ore took longer to excavate than the grey clay they had been cutting their way steadily through, and it was much harder to cut quietly. There was almost no chance that they could get through it in time – particularly as there was no way of knowing how broad the seam was.

  Hacquet signed a suggestion. They could go down and around. Such a seam was often narrow; if it was, they could avoid it and go around it to the target.

  Lyhan checked his timepiece. Even assuming the seam was narrow, there was no time to go the long way round it. They had to go through the seam, however much noise that made.

  The kicker reached down beside the sandbags and picked up the spike – no more than a scavenged iron bar that he had sharpened at one end – and, looking to Hacquet, he pointed the spike at the face. The bagger paused, then nodded. But now, rather than lying down he got on his knees, close up to the face, as Lyhan searched over the ore face and, finding a seam, pushed the spike in as far as it would go.

  Hacquet nodded.

  Lyhan pulled, heaving, levering, until a lump of ore the size of an ork’s head came tumbling from the face. Hacquet caught it, but even with his clean catch the sound of the breaking ore was loud in comparison to their previous working. They both unconsciously stopped, listening, but the enemy continued his thrashing, cutting approach, apparently oblivious to any other sound.

  Lyhan remembered the sense he had had that those infernal flesh machines could smell through the earth. Maybe it did not need to hear them. Maybe it could smell them.

  With silence now less important than speed, Lyhan probed for another opening and, finding it, levered another lump of ore from the surface. This seemed to be going well. As this rate, they might even get through the ore faster than they would have tunnelled through the clay.

  An hour later, he had come to realise the stupidity of that thought. Those initial lumps of ore had been outliers, parts of the seam that had been broken off by the immense pressures underground. Now they were into the seam proper and it was welded as tight as the stores of the Munitorum, and he had resorted to using a pickaxe to break it apart. The only blessing was that the ore seemed to have slowed the enemy’s tunnelling machine too.

  Lyhan checked his timepiece again. There were only four hours until the artillery was due to fall silent. Up above his head, it was night on Hisk, but a night rendered explosive, incandescent daytime by the intensity of the artillery bombardment. Still, the tunnellers of the Deepers knew better than anyone else above ground how well earth and rock absorbed even the most powerful explosions: in the deep, it was still. The enemy was sheltering in his own deep places, waiting for the bombardment to stop, ready to emerge and man the lasguns and plasma weapons and bolters that waited on the emergence from the trenches of the Deepers. Then the slaughter would begin.

  They were too late.

  There was still another metre and a half to the target. Even if they cut through to the other side of the iron seam with the next pass, it was still too far to reach the target and prepare the mine in the time remaining.

  Lyhan saw Hacquet looking at him, wondering why he had stopped digging.

  ‘It’s too late.’

  Too late even for silence.

  ‘Why have you stopped working?’

  That Coppet’s question was in words told that he already knew the answer.

  ‘We should go back,’ said Hacquet. ‘Join the attack. It’s not right for us to stay down here and let the rest of them do it.’

  ‘We can’t,’ said Lyhan. ‘We’re sealed. No contact with the surface.’ The kicker stared, without seeing, at the ore seam that had defeated them. ‘Better go back and tell Markwell we ain’t going to be able to blow the mine.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Hacquet. ‘He tells them up top, they all know they’re going to die. This way, they won’t know ’til it’s over.’

  ‘Wait.’ Coppet held up his hand. ‘What in all hells is that?’

  The three men turned and looked back down the tunnel. Coming to them, through the pools of light cast by the snap-lumens, bouncing in refracting waves off the supports, tripping over the pockets of glow gas, was a song. A melody of quicksilver notes, trills, squeaks, pops and drills, as if all the improvised instruments of a Deepers marching band were playing the most intricate sections of their respective musical lines all at the same time. It should have been a cacophony but behind it was a musical intelligence, profound and deep in time, playing a song carried in its blood.

  ‘It’s bloody Tavish,’ said Hacquet. ‘He’s singing.’

  ‘Bobbins don’t sing,’ said Coppet. ‘That’s why I got him.’

  ‘This one is,’ said Lyhan. ‘He’s singing loud enough for the enemy to hear him.’ The kicker looked down the tunnel, suddenly stricken with a thought. ‘The skin place. They’ll hear his song through it, and realise they can cut through.’

  Although it was impossible to run in the confines of the tunnel, the trammer, bagger and kicker scuttled back towards Tavish, not caring now if they bumped against support or prop. As they got closer, Tavish’s song grew louder, reverberating through the narrow tunnel, notes of cascading silver and squeaks so joyous it seemed as if the small bobbin made merry at the darkness of the galaxy that had confined him to a cage in the depths.

  They could see Tavish now. Perched in the centre of his cage, chest puffed out, his whole body turned into a resonator for his song. Coppet, reaching Tavish first, slapped the cage, sending it swinging, but the little bobbin’s song did not falter.

  ‘Shut him up,’ hissed Hacquet, following.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Wring his sodding neck, I don’t care, just shut him up.’

  ‘Not Tavish.’

  ‘If you won’t, I will.’

  Hacquet reached forward to grab the cage but Lyhan stopped him.

  ‘Too late.’ He pointed.

  A push pick was boring through the gap between the supports. As they watched, another pick, wielded with great force, broke through above and began levering the supports apart. Through the gap, they could hear screams, babbling, an incoherent mess of sound.

  Lyhan pushed himself tight against the near wall, making himself as invisible as he could to the enemy. Hacquet and Coppet did the same on the other side of the break. The kicker glanced across the opening gap, and the tools breaking it wider, to where Hacquet and Coppet were waiting, pushing knuckledusters onto their fists.

  Right in front of the break point, as if they had been drawn to him, Tavish stood oblivious in his cage, head thrown back, beak wide, singing as if the world was new and he was greeting its first morning. And as the gap widened, Lyhan began to see hands and arms, scarified and self-mutilated, reaching through the gap, reaching out. Reaching for Tavish.

  Tavish?

  Suddenly, the chaotic sounds he could hear from the enemy’s tunnel began to resolve themselves into something coherent. Among the screams and growls and wails of things no longer human, some vestige of language and thought remained, and it was moaning, muttering, gibbering the same refrain, over and over and over.

  ‘Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.’

  Lyhan’s sights snapped to the bobbin. The enemy could not bear its song. He gestured to Hacquet and Coppet, pointing to Tavish, and the bagger and trammer signed their understanding.

  Wait.

  Arms were reaching through, up to the elbow.

  Wait.

  To the shoulder, fingers scrabbling at the air next to Tavish’s cage.

  Wait.

  A head, pushing through the gap.

  Now.

  Lyhan drove his knife into the back of the enemy’s neck, then used the dead man’s own momentum and the knife to lever the corpse forward, sprawling into the tunnel. Other hands, arms followed, sprouting from the w
idening gap like some monstrous anemone, and Hacquet and Coppet slashed and stabbed with their knives, the serrated edges sawing through flesh and tendon and bone.

  Another head thrust through the gap, jaw extended, mouth screaming, ‘Make it stop, make it stop.’ A knife thrust in under the jaw made it stop.

  And then it did stop.

  Tavish stopped singing.

  Lyhan waited, poised, expecting a new attack, but all was quiet. He glanced across the gap, and the bodies lying sprawled in it, to Hacquet and Coppet. Coppet nodded and, retrieving the mirror he carried, cautiously held it in front of the break in the wall.

  It was clear. No more enemy were coming through.

  Lyhan counted five dead. But they were all still recognisably human; the enemy cutting machine was not there.

  Advancing cautiously, Lyhan went to the edge of the hacked-open passage between the two tunnels and waited there, listening. But he could hear nothing. Even the enemy tunnelling machine had fallen silent. He glanced back at Tavish. The bobbin, still silent, was preening his feathers as if it were perfectly usual for him to fill the tunnels with song.

  Putting his face up against the hole, Lyhan scanned one way down the enemy tunnel while, from the other side, Hacquet looked the other way.

  Clear.

  But as he looked down the length of the tunnel, Lyhan saw how it tracked the bearing of their own attack tunnel.

  It was sunk from beneath the enemy bastion.

  Lyhan leaned over, kissed Tavish’s cage and turned to Hacquet and Coppet. ‘Get the demo charges. We’re going to blow the mine from the enemy’s tunnel.’

  Understanding, sudden and complete, dawned in their faces.

  ‘We’ve got…’ Lyhan checked his timepiece. ‘An hour. Coppet, bring up the rest of the demo charges.’

  ‘Tavish, you brave bobbin, you,’ said Coppet, before turning and rushing back down the tunnel.