‘Something is happening in the Apex, right at the top,’ he said. ‘Men who go up there do not come back. We hear screaming, all the time, even when the nox chimes have gone off and everything is locked down.’
‘And the Guard regiments?’ asked Valien. ‘All corrupted?’
Kilag tried to laugh, but couldn’t generate enough movement in his throat to summon up more than a croak.
‘Everything is. There’s nothing left.’
‘Who is in charge?’
‘I don’t know! I don’t know. But there are angels up there, and they laugh at us.’
‘Angels?’
Kilag’s face took on a strange, almost demented, look of rapture.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, and the foam trembled on his lips. ‘Angels. Those ones, they have hell in their eyes – layers of hell, all piled on top of each other. We scream, we scream, and they laugh at us.’
Valien drew a fresh needle from its sheath, tiring of the man’s babble. Kilag seemed to see what was coming, and a broken grin cracked across his face. A film of blood collected under his nostrils.
‘Are you going up there?’ Kilag asked, looking eager to know. ‘Up into the Capitolis?’
Valien nodded.
‘I’m going ahead,’ he said. ‘The Emperor’s armies are hard on my heels. Soon this whole place will be purged.’
Kilag’s nostrils flared, and the shaking in his hands grew worse.
‘You have not seen what I have seen,’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ agreed Valien, filtering the toxins into the needle.
Kilag moved fast. He should have been incapable of it, but still he moved. He sprang up, pushing himself free of the walls and straight at Valien.
Valien nearly let himself be caught. He scrambled out of the way at the last moment, ducking under Kilag’s flailing hands. He felt the adept’s fingers snap shut just above him, clutching at air.
‘I will save you!’ screamed Kilag, coming after him.
Valien crunched back into the wall of the tunnel behind him, cricking his neck against the curve of it. The narrow space hampered him, and his weapon arm caught under a jutting length of metal.
Kilag’s face swooped after him. The man’s jaws were open, and his rotten teeth glittered in the dark.
Valien shrank back, too slow to prevent Kilag’s hands gripping him around the neck. The adept’s thumbs pressed into his throat, squeezing hard. Valien gagged, still unable to free his arm. The adept’s strength was astonishing – he should hardly have been able to move, let alone wrestle with a trained killer of Valien’s calibre.
‘I will save you!’ Kilag shrieked again, clambering on top of Valien and pushing him down into the filth. His eyes blazed with fervour, and he squeezed harder. Valien recoiled as the man’s foul breath wafted across his face. ‘You will not go!’
Valien relaxed the muscles in his arm, and his wrist came free. He snapped it round, punching the tip of the needle gun into Kilag’s back.
For a few seconds, nothing changed. Valien felt himself begin to lose consciousness, and stabbed again. A terrible fear surged up within him.
So strong! How is it possible?
Then the grip on his throat relaxed. Kilag looked suddenly uncertain, then nauseous. Yellow fluid ran from his nostrils.
‘Do not go!’ Kilag cried, and his hands released Valien.
Kilag rolled over, withdrawing into a foetal position like a crushed beetle. He started shaking violently.
Valien shoved his way free, breathing heavily, keeping his gun in position. A sharp pain broke out behind his eyes.
Throne, that was too close. What has been done to him? How is he so fast?
Kilag stared up at him. The man’s expression was imploring.
‘Do not go there,’ he said.
Valien stared back. Kilag’s voice had become lucid again, despite all the junk coursing around his bloodstream. The adept’s face was drained of colour, and a dreadful expression of warning hung over his harrowed features.
‘You have not seen what I have seen,’ he said, and his voice trembled with fear. ‘Your soul is intact. For the love of the saints, of the Holy Primarchs, of all the blessed souls of sacred Terra, do not go in there.’
Valien remained silent. Something in the man’s pleading chilled him.
Then Kilag’s face changed again. The horrified expression of warning melted away. Blood replaced the fluid weeping down his mouth and chin, and his hands unclenched into open claws.
His mouth, puffy and bleeding, split into a wide smile. His eyes glowed pink, as if lit from behind.
‘Your soul is mine, assassin,’ came a voice from Kilag’s lips that wasn’t his – a throaty rasp, mottled with loathing.
Valien moved. He drew a knife from a sheath on his thigh and struck out, flicking the blade back and forth across Kilag’s neck.
The man’s face was smiling even as his decapitated head hit the ground. Kilag’s eyes stayed glowing for a few moments, dwindling like embers in the shadows. Then they died out, and the tunnel sank into darkness.
Valien stayed poised for much longer, waiting for his breathing to come under control. His blood coursed around his body, pumped by his thudding heart. He could feel a film of sweat on the palms of his hands.
For the love of the saints, do not go in there.
Still he didn’t move. It felt as if his limbs had been given a transfusion of adamantium. His pulse remained high, his fingers trembling.
You have not seen what I have seen.
Slowly, the fear ebbed. Valien looked up ahead, along the narrow tunnels where his objective lay.
The Capitolis waited for him. He had to find a way up to the top, a path through all the many hundreds of levels, avoiding the mutants and the filth and the living metal. He would have to remain hidden. He would have to be more careful, less arrogant.
Valien looked down at the pool of blood collecting under the headless body of Kilag. Another time he might have stooped to drink, but he knew what the poisons in Kilag’s system would do to him if he did.
He stowed the needle gun, brushed his suit down and recalibrated his visor. He was thirsty, hot and tired. Then he left Kilag’s body behind and began to lope soundlessly along the tunnel, stooping as before. His black-suited outline melted quickly into the endless dark of the underworld, disappearing like memory.
Soon, nothing remained but the cooling blood of the adept on the floor, the faint bubbling of his body expiring, and a pair of red-rimmed eyes, open in death and still locked in terror.
Lopi’s head jerked up, snagging on the cables in his neck. The inflections in Killan’s binaric shunt were minor-negative.
Lopi felt suddenly uneasy. He’d granted Rauth operational control of the Warhounds on the understanding the three Titans would work as fire support platforms for the main body of troops. He hadn’t expected them to be taken into the front line.
The dull rumble and crack of unleashed weaponry from below barely registered. His mind began to race.
Lopi looked out across the wasteland ahead, his view mediated by the Warlord’s visual relays. By then the immense bulk of Melamar Primus was a long way behind him. Vindicta and Castigatio had made steady progress out int
o the industrial filth between the outer ring of spires and the central summit of the Capitolis. The northern face of the three Axis spires loomed closest, flecked with slow-burning fires and dotted with artillery placements. The last of Axis’s protective tank divisions was near destruction, after which Lopi had planned to advance into the spire complex itself.
Killan worked hard at his console for a moment, and Lopi felt the subtle shifts of power coursing through Vindicta’s transmission systems.
Lopi began to feel angry – with himself, mostly. It was a dangerous emotion to entertain while at the helm of a god-machine in the full throes of war-fury.
He said nothing. Yemos and Jerolf remained active, keeping an eye on Vindicta’s weapon status as it created more carnage at ground level. Lopi remained dimly aware of the fruits of their actions through the feedback mechanisms in the Manifold – crushed vehicle carcasses, demolished wall sections, torched bunkers full of cremated, half-mutated defenders.
It took a lot to make a princeps feel vulnerable.
As he canted, he felt the dull rumble of Vindicta’s machine-spirit. It didn’t want to stop killing. It never wanted to stop killing.
Jerolf looked up from his station quizzically.
‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
Lopi unclenched his fists slowly.
He summoned up schematics of the battle theatre, and they whirled up at him through the overlapping skeins of the Manifold. He saw himself at the epicentre of a huge map of interconnected trajectories. The lines indicating Rauth’s progress were faint, and trailed off at the edge of auspex range. For all that, it was clear enough where he had to be – he’d gone into the tunnels, and he would be somewhere under the wasteland between the Melamar spires and the looming edifice of the Capitolis.
Jerolf looked for a moment like he would protest, but bit his tongue. Killan and Yemos kept their heads down, already busy with the calculations needed to extract them from the active firefight.
Lopi felt the enormous treads of the Titan start to shift on to the new trajectory, and his growing sense of unease abated a little. Deep down, though, he remained angry – angry, and worried.
Vindicta’s mood was getting to him. His face creased darkly.
Heriat swung round in his seat to face Nethata.
‘We have another comm,’ he said. He let some reproach bleed into his voice. ‘It’s been relayed, stored in a buffer for delayed transmission.’
Nethata nodded absently. Malevolentia rocked as it crushed something big beneath its tracks, and both men rocked with it.
‘I know what it says,’ said Nethata.
‘You can’t keep ignoring them,’ said Heriat, irritated.
Nethata lifted his head from the short-range auspex display.
‘Any change?’ he asked.
‘Rauth has ordered his forces into assault,’ said Heriat. ‘He’s advancing along the tunnels towards the Capitolis.’
Nethata looked briefly surprised.
‘Underground? I thought he took the Warhounds?’
‘They’re underground too.’
Nethata let slip a low whistle.
‘Throne,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe Lopi let him do that.’
‘I’m not sure the princeps knows.’
Nethata turned back to the auspex display.
‘So he’s taking the direct route,’ said the commander. ‘I should have guessed. He’ll lose thousands, just as before.’
‘It’ll be fast.’
Nethata shook his head wearily.
‘Do you understand this obsession with speed, Slavo?’ he asked. ‘Tell me if I’m missing something.’
Heriat looked at Nethata carefully. He’d always admired the man’s flexibility, his willingness to change course when the circumstances demanded it. That was something that he himself found difficult – a commi-ssar’s training cultivated a rigid mindset, one more suited to following a restricted set of commands to the letter.
Heriat had long been aware of the limitations of that way of thinking, even as he’d worked hard to purge the emotions from his psyche that endangered it. It was one reason why he’d never sought a command position in the regular military – he knew that he’d have run an army in the way he ran the Commissariat, something that would never have brought the results that Nethata’s imaginative, instinctive command had done.
Heriat, by contrast, would have followed Rauth’s orders completely. He’d have sent the armoured columns into Melamar Primus for the muster on schedule, and by now they’d have been filing into the tunnels in support of the vanguard units.
If Nethata had been any other man, Heriat would have overruled him long ago. Still, though, he resisted the urge. Nethata was not any other man, and that was all that kept things together.
‘I do not,’ he said, feeling the sores around his mouth jostle like a reminder of that. ‘I do not need to understand. Rauth is in supreme command; when he issues the order, you are bound to obey.’
Nethata met his gaze steadily.
‘We are making progress,’ he said. ‘The Apex hive is on fire. Our tanks have already destroyed the outer defences, and I can deploy troop carriers within the hour. All standard procedure tells me I am doing the right thing. Tunnels or not, Rauth will regret pushing on to the centre before taking out the periphery.’
His voice shook a little as he spoke, but his eyes remained dark and unmoving.
‘This is Imperial Guard doctrine, Slavo,’ Nethata said. ‘That is what we are bound to obey. It is what you are bound to enforce.’
‘You have a creative interpretation of my job.’
Nethata smiled.
‘Creative?’ His smile faded quickly. ‘Are you having doubts?’
Heriat didn’t reply immediately. He knew his expression would give nothing away – he’d worked hard at perfecting the stony, unflinching expression he knew the men expected of him. He looked the same when he was pinning medals on officers’ breasts, and he looked the same when he executed those who’d deserted their posts.
For all that, he felt torn inside, pulled apart by two old, immovable loyalties – one personal and contingent, one impersonal and eternal.
‘If I ordered you to turn back, sir, invoking Commi-ssariat’s privilege,’ he said, speaking slowly, ‘would you do it?’
Nethata pursed his lips.
‘Is this a hypothetical question?’
‘I don’t know. Is it?’
The two men sat facing one another for some time, neither one speaking, neither one yielding.
As he waited, Heriat felt the slow grind of Malevolentia’s enormous motive units as it thrust deeper into the warzone. He heard the distant crump of artillery discharge, and the endless percussive thuds of the tank groups unleashing their payloads against the reeling flanks of the Axis hive spires. He knew that, far underground and to the north-west of their position, similar firefights were taking place under Rauth’s direct control.
We should be there. We should be at the speartip.
‘Let me ask you a question in turn,’ said Nethata, and his expression was strange – hurt, perhaps, or merely playful.
‘If you invoked such privilege, and I resisted, what would you do?’
Heriat felt the weight of the bolt pistol at his belt. He knew from experience that he could draw it far quicker than Nethata could respond. That was what it was for – the enforcement of discipline. That was what he was for.
‘You didn’t answer me, sir,’ said Heriat.
‘Nor you, me.’
Another awkward silence descended. That time, Heriat looked away first. Another comm-signal scrolled across his console, flickering red in the gloom of Malevolentia’s command module.
‘Lopi’s withdrawing his Warlords,’ he said, half-relieved at the distraction, half-annoyed by it. ‘He’s heading for the Melamar muster-point.’
Nethata smiled.
‘Perhaps he is learning, in his own time, what Rauth is capable of.’
Heriat didn’t return the smile.
‘We should join him.’
Nethata glanced down at the tactical displays, showing the progress his tank divisions were making against the Axis hives. Heriat studied the same data, and saw how carefully executed the advance had been. Nethata had used his resources skilfully, opening up a separate flank and damaging the enemy’s power to encircle.
He remembered his words about pride, and regretted them. Nethata had acted within the spirit of the Guard’s doctrine, if not the letter, and the battlefront leading to the Capitolis looked far healthier than it had done only hours previously.
‘We’ll pull back when the last of the artillery points has been taken down,’ said Nethata at last. He looked up. ‘You’re right, Slavo. You’ve always been right. We’ll join up with Rauth for the assault on the Capitolis – he’ll need our guns for that.’
Heriat nodded. He realised how close his hand had strayed to his sidearm, and slowly moved it away.
‘That puts my mind at rest, sir,’ he said.
Nethata looked equivocal.
‘Good,’ he said.
Nethata turned to the cogitator array before him. His fingers moved expertly across the brass-lined input columns, each one of which controlled the movements of whole tank formations.
‘Perhaps, though, while I attend to this,’ he said, making it sound like an afterthought, ‘you could arrange a hololith-feed to Princeps Lopi?’
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