A klaxon sounded and an array of strobe lamps filled the cavern with an intermittent amber glow. They started walking.
‘You look good,’ said Falka a moment later.
Jynn gave a wry smile. The ice concourse underfoot crunched as they moved. It was hard-packed by industrial presses to create a serviceable roadway for the mine entrance. Most of the light was artificial, though some natural light filtered down from the bore hole above them at the entrance’s threshold.
‘What I mean,’ Falka struggled to say, ‘is it’s good to see you back at the ice-face. I thought after Korve, you might–’
‘Honestly, Fal, I’m fine,’ she said, brushing a strand of errant hair behind her ears and pulling down her goggles.
Falka did the same – close to the vent a fine spray of ice chips saturated the air. Environment suits managed the worst. Get one in the eye and you’d know about it, though.
‘Just with the ’quake and all that…’
She stopped and glared at him. The other workers flowed around them to their riggers and crews. The first few cohorts had already begun descent.
‘Seriously, Falka – just drop it. Korve’s dead and that’s it.’
The big man looked distraught. ‘Sorry.’
She lightly gripped his shoulder. ‘It’s all right. I under–’
‘Rig-hand Evvers,’ a shrill, imperious voice interrupted.
Jynn had her back to the speaker and groaned inwardly before she turned. ‘Administrator Rancourt,’ she replied politely.
A hawkish man, trussed up in thermal gear and flocked by a retinue of scribes and aides, approached them. Despite the cowl drawn up around his small head and the padded mittens he wore, the administrator still shivered.
‘I had not expected to see you on shift,’ he said, fashioning a poor smile. It was meant to convey warmth but only exuded his awkwardness.
‘Nor I, you…’ she muttered.
‘I beg your pardon. I’m finding it hard to hear under all of this.’ He gestured to his cowl and thermal coat.
‘I said it’s rare to see you, administrator… at the ice-face, I mean.’
Rancourt moved in close to Jynn.
‘I’ve told you before,’ he said. ‘You may call me Zeph.’
Falka broke his stoic silence to grunt.
Rancourt’s gaze moved to the giant. ‘And Rig-hand Kolpeck. Don’t you have a shift to go to?’
‘We both do, administ… ah, Zeph.’ She tugged lightly on Falka’s arm, urging him to join her.
The big man looked like he’d rather stay and squeeze Rancourt’s neck, but he followed anyway.
‘Of course, of course,’ the administrator blathered, shooting a dark glance at Falka. ‘I have much work to attend to. In the Emperor’s name,’ he added, pretending to look at a data-slate proffered by one of his toadies.
‘May His glory watch over us all,’ Jynn replied.
Heading in the direction of the vent, the air suddenly felt as if it were actually getting warmer.
‘He still stalking you, then?’
‘Leave it, Fal. I can handle it. He’s harmless enough.’
Falka grunted again. He was prone to doing that. ‘Eyes and ears,’ he said, peeling off towards his rigger and crew.
‘You too,’ said Jynn, diverting to her vehicle. She’d put one boot on the boarding stirrup when the concourse trembled. She slipped, snatching a holding rail to steady herself. A second tremor shook some debris from the roof. More violent than the first, it sent men and servitors sprawling.
‘What the feg was–’ she muttered over the vox-bead.
A high-pitched keening cut her off.
She fell, the intensity of the sonic burst forcing her to press her palms to her ears. ‘Throne!’ Jynn gasped, grimacing against the auditory pain.
The keening became a hum, throbbing at the back of the skull, but at least she could stand. Around the ice cavern, the walls were shaking. Sections of the ceiling rained down on the labourers in a cascade. The cries of one man ended abruptly when a slab of permafrost crushed him.
Jynn staggered. It was just like with Korve. Memories came flooding back, but she suppressed them, focused on surviving instead. ‘Not yet, dear heart,’ she whispered, finding some resolve. ‘Not yet.’
Falka was on his feet too and rushing over to her.
‘You hurt?’ He had to shout to be heard above the ice-quake.
Jynn was about to answer when a massive cold cloud ripped through the vent in a bright white bloom. The rig-hands closest to the shaft were shredded by the host of shards within the cloud. Snow crystals fogging the air were tainted a visceral red.
A burst of hard, emerald light followed, refracted from the angular descent shaft beyond the vent. Shouting echoed from the icy dark, injured and desperate men trying to control some unseen catastrophe. The shouts became cries, and then screams. There was something else too… a sort of discharge, as of an energy beam or perhaps a heavy generator.
The winches slaved to the adamantite descent lines at the vent threshold started to retract. Someone was coming up.
‘We have to get out,’ said Jynn. Then, with greater urgency as the emerald light issuing from the vent intensified, ‘All of us – right now!’
Falka nodded.
‘No!’ she cried, seizing the big man’s arm as he made for the vent.
He looked back at her nonplussed. ‘People are down there, our people. They might need help.’
Jynn was shaking her head. ‘They’re gone, Fal. This way, come on.’
‘Wha… but…’
‘They’re dead! Now, come on!’ She heaved and he followed, reluctant at first but then with more conviction. Something was scurrying up the shaft. It sounded like a horde of giant, mechanical ants.
The first of the rig-hands from below made it to the ice cavern. He was dead. Men screamed, terrified, when they saw the flesh of his partly flayed corpse. Surgical, precise, horrific – it was as if the layers had been stripped anatomically.
More followed, equally gruesome.
Jynn and Falka were running, shouting at anyone who would listen to join them, yanking environment suits or shoving them bodily. Down tools and flee. This was not a rescue; it was a full-scale evacuation.
She found Rancourt cowering behind a rigger, getting his aides to peer around its armoured flanks and provide him with updates. Several of his entourage were dead, one from fright when the keening blast had struck; another to the sudden avalanche from the ceiling.
‘Get up!’ She seized his collar and pulled. ‘Get up! These people need guidance. The surface must be told what’s happening down here.’
‘What is happening?’ he shrieked, unwilling to stand at first, casting fearful glances towards the vent where the emerald glow was now spilling into the ice cavern.
Jynn looked over her shoulder, still hanging on to Rancourt’s suit. ‘Falka!’
The big man gently moved her aside and threw the administrator over his shoulder.
‘Unhand me! I am an officer of the Imperium. Release me at once!’
‘Shut up.’ Falka smacked Rancourt’s head into the rigger just hard enough to leave him dazed.
Then they were running again. The remnants of the administrator’s retinue followed without need for coercion.
The exit shaft and the rail-lifters were just a few metres ahead. The light from the surface was like a soothing balm as it touched Jynn’s sweat-slick face. She glanced back.
Several more rig-hands from below had made it to the ice cavern. Though they were far away and her view was unsteady on account of her fleeing for her life, she made out… creatures attached to the miners. The rig-hands were thrashing and squirming. Eventually they fell and the swarm dispersed, silver beetle-like creatures the size of Falka’s clenched fist, leaving a flensed corpse in their wake.
‘God-Emperor have mercy,’ she breathed.
Larger, bulkier shadows were reaching the end of the vent shaft. A coruscatin
g emerald beam lanced from the darkness, throwing a spider-like creature into sharp relief. Like the beetles it was metallic, but almost the size of a rigger. The beam, fired from one of the creature’s mandibles, struck a fleeing rig-hand and atomised him. The afterimage of the man’s flayed skeleton was seared into Jynn’s retinas just before it collapsed into ash and she looked away.
‘Move, move!’
They raced into the nearest rail-lifter. About sixty rig-hands had joined them on the access plate, and Falka gunned the engine as soon as they were all aboard.
Jynn gazed to the distant surface as the heavy winches began to drone. She willed the oval of light from the ground-zero bore point closer.
Below them, the other rail-lifters started up – fifteen in total, all screaming, engines hot, towards the upper world.
One of the cables snapped, lashing wildly with the sudden slack. A beam from one of the spiders had severed it. Rig-hands screamed as they plunged to their deaths. Others, clinging on, could only watch in horror as the beetles already scaling the shaft wall sprang from their perches and landed amongst them.
Jynn saw a few of the miners let go and embrace death by falling rather than face being flayed alive.
The hard drone of a warning klaxon sounded from farther up the shaft. The oval of light was becoming a rectangular strip, narrowing by the second.
Rancourt, having recently regained consciousness, put away his command-stave. Falka saw him do it and rounded on him.
‘What are you doing? The others will never make it.’
The administrator’s pupils were dilated, his eyes wide and haunted. ‘Those th-things…’ he stammered. ‘They can’t be allowed to get out.’
‘Bastard!’ Falka punched him, a solid blow to the chin that put Rancourt back on his arse, and then ripped the command-stave from the administrator’s trappings. ‘Show me how to stop it,’ he said, bearing down on him, threatening more violence.
‘Leave him.’ Jynn wrenched the big man’s shoulder. She had a strong grip and made him turn.
‘You’re defending this worm?’
‘He’s right, Fal.’ The sides of the shaft blurred past and the displaced air snapped at Jynn’s hair.
Falka shook his head. Those men and women were his friends. ‘No!’ He was about to beat down on Rancourt again when Jynn smacked him hard in the chest with the flat of her hand. It didn’t hurt the big man but it got his attention.
‘He’s right,’ she said again, continuing in a small voice when she looked below – her mind tried to blot out the carnage and horror. ‘We can’t let them get out.’
Falka’s grimace became a snarl as he pounded at the holding spar with impotent rage. ‘Hold on,’ he growled, moving towards the engine. ‘We’re about to breach the surface.’
The rail-lifter cleared the slowly closing shaft doors and after a few more metres broke into the pale Damnosian sun. Another miner called Fuge kicked open the exit ramp and the sixty or so survivors pounded it across to the arctic tundra of the upper world.
Though the sun was shining, an icy wind brought a chill and kicked up slurries of snow and frost eddies. The barren wastes of Damnos had never looked so bleak.
There was no need for conversation. What could any of them say, anyway? So the sixty survivors made for the distant comms-bunker, marching in file, heads bowed against the wind and ice. Behind them the shutting of the shaft door was like a death knell for the hundreds still trapped within.
850973.M41
There was still no word from Damnos Prime, and the Valkyrie gunships Lieutenant Sonne had deployed from Secundus to investigate were also quiet. It didn’t take a soldier’s instincts to realise that something was wrong.
‘We’re experiencing a full communications blackout in the northern regions all the way to the Tyrrean Ocean, colonel,’ he gave his report to Quintus Tarn. The commander of the Damnosian Ark Guard peered over steepled fingers into the shadows of his operations chamber. His mood was pensive. Leaning on the desk with his elbows, he hadn’t stirred the entire time Adanar Sonne had been in his presence.
Behind the colonel a planetary map showed the location of each and every manufactorum, drilling-station, mining complex, refinery, labour-clave and outpost on Damnos. Unlit lume-globes represented the stations that Kellenport, the planetary capital, had lost touch with. Precious few of the globes were lit.
The wave of darkness emanating from the north reminded Adanar of a slowly creeping shroud. ‘We picked up a group of refugee mine workers from one of the outposts near Damnos Prime,’ he offered.
Tarn looked up at Adanar for the first time since he’d entered the room.
‘How many?’
‘Thirteen, sir.’
‘Are they saying anything?’
‘I don’t know yet, colonel. They were picked up by a patrol. Apparently, they’d been trekking across the tundra for several weeks. Administrator Rancourt is amongst the survivors,’ Adanar added.
‘Inform the lord governor and bring them all to me as soon as they arrive at Kellenport.’
‘Yes, sir. Is there anything else?’
‘Do you have a wife and child, Lieutenant Sonne?’ asked Tarn. The colonel was staring right into his eyes.
‘Er, yes… Yes, I do.’
Though Tarn smiled, his eyes were despairing black gulfs.
As if seeing them for the first time, Adanar noticed the stubs of tabac in a silver tray to the commander’s left; on the right was a vox-unit. Its message received light was flashing silently.
‘Is something wrong, sir?’
‘Listen,’ Tarn answered simply.
He broke the steeple of his fingers and replayed the vox-message blinking insistently on the unit. The opening segment was fraught with static, natural interference on account of the distance and the weather conditions. Slowly, a voice resolved through the auditory crackle.
‘…found something, sir…’
Adanar recognised the hard timbre of Major Tarken. He didn’t know the man personally but his reputation preceded him as one of the most lauded combat veterans amongst the Ark Guard.
Colonel Tarn tapped a rune on the vox-unit and a grainy hololith issued from a projector-node. It took a few seconds to synch to the audio. Major Tarken appeared in jagged resolution.
‘Image-servitors accompanied the platoon,’ the colonel explained unnecessarily.
Major Tarken was speaking to the picter. ‘The manufactorums at Damnos Prime were silent, but there is definitely something here.’
The view swung downwards at the major’s request, revealing several skeletal remains.
‘Could be labour serfs or rig-hands…’
Adanar caught Tarn’s hooded gaze. ‘Was this a live feed?’
‘Up until about twenty minutes ago.’
The picter swung up again. Panning left and right, it showed Tarken’s men advancing in echelon formation. The sound kept cutting out, succumbing to crackling interference or the occasional hiss of static, but it seemed quiet. Mist from the cold exuded off the walls in a fine veil. Tarken’s kit and that of his men was wet with the moisture and crusted from it flash-freezing.
‘…moving into the main drilling area now…’ Tarken was whispering and brought up his lasgun. Somebody shouted from up ahead, a scout off-picter.
‘Where was this?’ asked Adanar, utterly enrapt on the hololith.
‘Dagoth Station, three hundred kilometres north of Secundus at Halaheim.’
A flash on the pict was too bright to be static. Someone had started firing.
‘Contacts! Contacts!’ Tarken was running and the whir of the servitor’s tracked impellers could be heard as it shifted gear to keep pace with the major. Though largely stable, the additional momentum made the image blur and haze. The whine of lasguns was getting louder over the audio, too.
Adanar leaned in closer. Tarken had reached his frontline and was taking up a position behind some riggers evidently in for repair. Around thirty men adopted simil
ar postures and hunkered down. Farther ahead, men were shouting. The scouts were discharging weapons and Tarken was trying to raise their sergeant on the vox.
Something garbled came over the vox-return, twice filtered for Adanar’s ears and totally indiscernible.
The picter was still shaking, although the servitor had stopped behind the major.
‘Can we steady it?’
Tarn didn’t answer. He was fixated on the hololith.
Something was appearing through the mist. An emerald glow coloured the fog suddenly, as if tainting it. Shots from the scouts ended with its arrival.
‘Holy Throne…’ Tarken was levelling his lasgun over the makeshift barricade. A beam snapped out of the dark, ugly and green, and one of the riggers was shorn in two. ‘Holy fegging Throne! All weapons, bring them down!’
The chamber lit up with over thirty las-bursts. Tarken’s troopers went to full automatic, draining their power packs with an abandon and urgency Adanar had never seen before in professional soldiers.
The things coming out of the fog, they were… nightmares. It was the only word Adanar could think of to describe them. Huge, broad-shouldered skeletoids with strange, glowing carbines attached to their arms. Energy coursed up and down the wide tubular barrels and was expelled in bright lances of dirty emerald.
They moved like automatons, neither speaking nor slowing as a barrage of las-bolts hammered them.
‘Increase fire!’
The picter zoomed in, blurring the image at first but then focusing in on one of the metal skeletons. Its eyes blazed with a terrible fire, suggesting a crude sentience that chilled the lieutenant’s blood even removed, as he was, from the firefight and the moment.
Adanar saw the creature jerk spasmodically as it was struck by countless las-shots. It must have taken over ten well-placed bolts to down it. Chunks of metal flew off its carapace body, fused rib-plate and punctured presumably vital systems before it fell.
The picter lingered. Horrified, Adanar watched the broken components slowly reknit as las-fire raged around the creature’s prone form. Wires snaked across the ground finding other wires and, like sewn flesh, drew the shattered pieces together. Metal became as mercury, dissolving into liquid before being drawn to the torso as if magnetised. Impossibly, the skeleton rose intact and fired its terrible beam weaponry again.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 102