The fury of the Imperial barrage increased. The Titans concentrated all of their firepower on the areas around the weak points in the keep’s defences. The tanks added their fire to the weight of hot metal death streaming towards the heretics. The roar of weapons crescendoed, drowning out even the sound of the Thunderhawk’s engines. Billowing clouds of smoke and the dazzling glare of explosions hid the keep from sight. It seemed impossible that anything could live amid that storm of death, but it did.
From out of the cloud came an answering hail of fire. Ragnar saw a Titan stumble and crash to the ground, for all the world like a vast wounded soldier. Dozens of Rhinos became blazing coffins for the brave men within. The Warhounds reached the outskirts of the shantytown surrounding the keep, crushing flimsy structures beneath their massive paws, their weapons spitting death towards the enemy.
Hundreds of heretics concealed within the hab bubbles poured out, blasting away at the huge machines with their pitiful weapons, trying to stop them with grenades and weapons intended only to take out tanks and other lesser engines of destruction. They were met by a host of Imperial Guard disgorged by the first wave of Rhinos. The fighting swiftly became close and brutal, fought with bayonets, blades and the butts of guns. All the while, the turrets on the side of Ironfang kept firing indiscriminately into the melee, wreaking havoc on friend and foe alike.
Still the rest of the Imperial army came on, smashing through the shacks and hab bubbles like a drunken man reeling through an insect hive.
Logan Grimnar’s calm, clear voice sounded over the comm-net. +Wolves, prepare for battle. Praise Russ.+
The Thunderhawk dropped downwards, lurching slightly as it sent rockets and heavy autogun fire scything into the enemy position. Ragnar grinned at Sven as he made ready to deploy. Already the hatch in the gunship’s side had slid open. Cold polluted air and strangely discoloured snowflakes drifted in. The ground rose to meet them. The swarm of men battled below. Ragnar clutched his weapons to his chest, readying himself for the leap into the fray.
Moments later the Thunderhawk halted a metre above the ground. Sergeant Joris sprang through the hatchway, followed by half a dozen Blood Claws. Sven joined him, then Ragnar and the rest of his pack. Ragnar flexed his legs slightly to absorb the impact, and glared around seeking a target. His keen eyes spotted a sniper moving along the domed roof of a nearby hab bubble. He raised his bolt pistol and sent a shell hurtling at the man. At the last second his target rolled back out of sight. Ragnar knew it was only temporary. Moments later the long barrel of the man’s rifle peeked into view, and then his head followed it. Ragnar did not miss this time.
He glanced around. Dozens of Thunderhawks had landed and were disgorging entire companies onto the ground. So far everything was going according to plan. They were exactly where they supposed to be, close to the manholes covering the access tunnels into the geothermal pipes shown on Trainor’s maps. The battle raging around them provided all the cover they needed. Already Marines were lifting the manholes and dropping into the darkness below. Ragnar kept hunting for targets as he prepared to join them.
For the first time he began to get a sense of how big the factory keep really was. It loomed like a mountain above them, its massive shadow falling for kilometres. It had a cold, monumental presence like the Fang back home. Great fountains of industrial slag had gushed down its side, like molten lava. As the slag solidified it became another layer of armour on the keep’s side, except where it had been mined by the scavengers who dwelled in the bubble towns. Looking up, Ragnar could see dozens of strange icons painted across its side, and fluttering banners descending from its towers.
This close, the keep looked most unlike a cube. Thousands of lesser structures, turrets, observation points, lift shafts and metallic pipes erupted from its side like a profusion of strange inanimate blossoms. Huge holes gaped here and there. Massive piles of hardened slag rose up the sides like waves frozen in the moment of battering a cliff-side. It seemed almost folly to contemplate attacking such a fortress, but not only were they doing so, they expected to succeed.
Already most of the Wolves had vanished down the holes, and into the darkness below. Ragnar knew it was time to join them.
Below ground it was dark, warm and humid. The air smelled of rotten eggs. Ragnar reached up and with his left hand touched the inside of the massive pipe. It was so hot it would have seared naked flesh; it felt warm even through his ceramite gauntlet.
Ahead of him, he could smell Trainor sweating. The militiaman had removed his greatcoat and jacket and was stripped to the waist. Conditions down here were exactly the opposite of those on the surface. Ahead of them long lines of Wolves disappeared off into the distance. Each man looked ready for battle. In theory, these tunnels were clear, but no Marine ever chanced such a thing. They were ready for combat at any moment.
They followed the main geo-thermal vent for only a few hundred paces, and then ahead of them some of the militiamen moved in to remove another manhole cover. This one was ancient and encrusted with grime. It led into a darker, narrower, lower tunnel that obviously had not been used for a very long time.
Ragnar had to stoop now, for the tunnel was built so that a native of Garm barely had room to stand upright, and the Space Wolf was a head taller than any of them. As he made his way through it, Ragnar felt a growing nervousness and tension within him that he recognised. He did not like being in this enclosed space. He breathed deeply, and offered up a prayer to the Emperor, and his racing heartbeat slowed.
It was not any cooler in this ancient tunnel, and a thick brown noxious-smelling sludge filled the corridor to knee height. Faint wisps of foul smelling smoke rose from it. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, this was toxic.
‘What was this place?’ Ragnar asked Trainor.
‘Who knows? The ancients built these corridors long ago. A web of them extends below the surface of the planet. Most believe they are the relics of ancient mining operations. Certainly some of them lead down into abandoned mineshafts and galleries. We found new ones all the time when we were doing maintenance.’
‘You don’t believe that? About the mines?’
‘I think it’s at least as likely as any other explanation. The first keeps predate the Imperium. They were here when Russ walked this world. A lot can be forgotten in ten thousand years.’
‘Why are they unwatched?’
‘Some of them are monitored. But no one can keep an eye on tens of thousands of leagues of tunnel, not when they are fighting a war on the surface, and with their own people. And most people have forgotten that these tunnels exist. The militias knew of them but up there, right now all is confusion. And anyway, not all of these tunnels are empty.’
That got Sven’s attention. ‘Really – who would be bloody stupid enough to live down here?’
‘Cannibal scavvies, outlaws, forbidden cultists, and it’s not just people. There are giant rats, starback spiders, tunnel dragons, all sorts of mutant beasts. Some say they are haunted by the ghosts of the ancients as well.’
‘Cheery place,’ said Sven glancing around.
‘It would be just my luck to be eaten by a tunnel dragon,’ said Torvald gloomily. ‘Maybe that way the curse will be fulfilled.’
‘The curse of Sven’s fist will be fulfilled if you don’t bloody shut up,’ muttered Sven.
‘Look up there,’ said Trainor.
‘What?’ Ragnar asked.
The militia officer was pointing to a moving clump of flesh that Ragnar had already scented but not paid too much attention to. When he looked closer, in the light of the pencil beam from his shoulder-pad lamp, he could see the clump was about the size of his fist and moved along on eight legs.
‘Starback,’ said Trainor. ‘One drop of its venom can kill a man.’
He moved extremely cautiously as he went below the spider. Sven raised his pistol as if to shoot it, and then restrained himself. Not even he was crazy enough to send a bolter shell ricocheting around in this confine
d tunnel. ‘Wonder what it tastes like,’ he muttered.
‘Its flesh is poisonous too.’
‘Can’t taste any worse than our field rations,’ said Sven.
‘I bet it would,’ said Torvald.
Suddenly the whole tunnel shook. The vibration caused the surface of the sludge to ripple and made the spider drop into the murky liquid. Ragnar imagined it swimming through the sludge close to his leg. The thought was fairly nauseating but did not frighten him. He doubted the beast’s fangs could penetrate hardened ceramite. Trainor obviously had the same worry. His face went even paler than usual, and the sweat fairly dripped from him. Hardly surprising really. He was not wearing sealed armour, and he did not possess a Space Marine’s immunity to poison.
‘What was that?’ he asked shakily.
‘Big explosion on the surface,’ said Ragnar. ‘Most likely a Titan got hit, or maybe a power core.’
He wished he had a clearer idea of what was happening above, but they were maintaining comm-silence, determined not to give the heretics within the keep any clue of their approach.
On the surface the forces of the Imperium might be triumphant or they might have fallen. They would have no way of finding out until they were out of these tunnels, and could get a decent view with their own eyes. The plan was for the Imperial forces to hold on to their gains if they could, break through if they could, but, if not, fall back until they got the signal from the Wolves.
‘I wish we were out of here,’ said Trainor nervously. His eyes kept scanning the sludge, looking for the spider. Sven groped about in the liquid and pulled out the struggling creature. He held the thing in his fist. Its long legs reached out and stroked his forearm. Long polyped feelers extended from its head.
‘Is this what you are looking for?’ he asked the militiaman. Trainor looked at him as if he were mad.
Sven opened his mouth as if he were considering eating the spider and then closed his fist, crushing it instead. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
‘Its blood is poisonous too.’
Sven looked at the remains covering his fist, and gave a look of fake horror before reaching out to smear them on the walls. ‘Best not touch what’s left then.’
They pushed on down the long dark smelly tunnels.
‘This is the bloody life,’ said Sven. ‘This is the true calling of Russ’s chosen heroes.’
The sludge was up to their chests now, and there were large and nasty looking centipedal things moving across the surface with a snaky undulating motion. Trainor had assured them these were poisonous too.
‘My mother said I was cursed,’ said Torvald from the gloom.
‘I certainly curse you,’ said Sven.
‘Look on the bright side,’ said Aenar. ‘We can’t have too much further to go. We’ve been down here for hours.’
Ragnar studied the rest of the Wolves up ahead. It looked like Aenar was right. The thin probe lights had begun to rise out of the murk, and as Ragnar closed the distance he could see that the Marines ahead of him were clambering up out of the sludge-filled trench onto a long stone platform.
‘Looks like our bath is over for the day,’ said Sven.
Ragnar climbed up behind the others. The walkway ran off into the distance, and he could see that lights glowed there. Like the others, he automatically cut off his shoulder-lamp. He reached down and helped Trainor up. This last section was not going to be too easy for the militiaman. He did not have the Wolves’ keen night sight and heightened senses. Like the rest of the men, he was going to have to be guided. ‘Grab hold of my belt,’ Ragnar told him.
The last section of the advance took place in eerie silence, considering there were hundreds of armoured men moving through the gloom. There was little doubt they were in the keep now. The walls around them were thick, and crusted with the accretions of centuries of hardened pollution and industrial effluent. The air had taken on the subtle hum of industry. Judging from the smells and the vibrations, massive machines were at work all around. And there were the signs of all the other creatures that shared man’s space wherever he went in the universe. Along the bronze pipes overhead, red-eyed rats scuttled. The whine of something suspiciously like a mosquito sounded close to Ragnar’s ears.
‘Civilisation at last,’ muttered Sven with heavy sarcasm.
‘Not yet, but we’re almost there.’
The section of the keep they had emerged into had seen heavy fighting. The corridors and tunnels here were as wide as the streets of many cities and as high as they were broad. Openings gaped everywhere; shutters lay buckled near the windows they had once protected; metal doors had been torn from their hinges. The remains of small food stalls lay half-melted in pools of congealed slag in the middle of the street. Masses of unburied, unburned corpses lay nearby. A few unbroken glow-globes burned in the ceiling overhead. By their light, Trainor saw his look.
‘Not enough people left alive to take them to recycling.’
‘Recycling,’ said Ragnar with some disgust. He knew customs varied on different worlds, but this was not one he thought he could ever get used to.
‘Aye, their bodies have not been sent back to production.’
Ragnar tried hard not to imagine how this worked, but failed. Images of huge dumpsters full of bodies being tipped into pools of recycling fluid to be broken down for their proteins and nutrients filled his mind. On hive worlds everything was considered a raw material, even the flesh of the dead. He must have muttered the words softly for Strybjorn said, ‘That’s one raw material of which there is no shortage around here.’
‘And doubtless we’ll be giving them a delivery of even more soon,’ said Sven, a cold grin twisting his ugly features. Down the tunnel, moving in single file on each side, spread out in case of booby traps or grenade attack, the Wolves advanced.
Scent told Ragnar that this place was empty. They had chosen the spot for their entrance well. The fighting had spread through these lower tunnels like a forest fire, and having consumed everything in its way had died out, or maybe simply passed on to where there was more fuel.
They were in, thought Ragnar, inside a place where they were outnumbered a thousand to one. Not that it mattered much. They were not expected, and those overwhelming numbers could not be brought against them at one time. Now it was simply a matter of making their way towards their objectives, reclaiming what was theirs and excising the cancer of the Chaos temple from the flesh of the city. Without their leaders, without central control, the heretics would collapse into dispersed undisciplined bands and be easy prey for the Wolves and their allies. If there still were any allies left in this dead, deserted place, he added mentally.
For a moment, the scale of the task seemed daunting. This was just one keep among thousands. Many more would have to be pacified. It was a task that could take a lifetime. Then his training reasserted itself. It might take the lifetime of a normal man, but he had many times that number of years, so what did it matter? And the chances were that it would not take that long.
If the Chaos temple were the source and inspiration of the rebellion, then destroying it would leave the whole heretical organisation headless. Seeing the Imperial victory, those who had sided with the rebels out of opportunism would soon change sides. It would have a snowball effect. The more rebels who repledged their loyalty, the more difficult it would be for the rest to keep fighting with any hope of victory. The whole rebellion was a flimsy structure that could be toppled with one good push.
Or so he hoped.
TWENTY-TWO
All around was silent. Ragnar felt the emptiness more now that the great companies had dispersed to their objectives. It was an eerie thought that all around him his battle-brothers were moving through the abandoned corridors and ventilation systems of the keep, cutting power lines, blowing up magazines filled with ammunition, destroying comm-centres, assassinating officers, and sowing the seeds of terror amid their enemies. He wished they were closer to their objective, and that he could find
release for his tension in battle.
He knew he should be proud. Berek’s company had been handed a prime role, taking out the main power-hub for the western wall. Ragnar knew this would cut the energy supply to the great turrets and beam weapons up there, put the supply lifts on manual operation, and force the whole sector to use back-up power batteries for life support functions such as air filtration and circulation, and water pumping.
It was a tactic calculated to strike fear into the heart of any keep citizen. They knew that once the power was off, they had only limited time before the storage batteries ran out, and life support went off-line for good. The time period would get shorter as the Wolves destroyed more of the reserve systems. The awareness of what was going on would be as deadly for morale as the knowledge than an implacable foe was within their defences, destroying their essential systems. And, if worst came to worst, it meant that the enemy would simply die of oxygen starvation, thirst, and all the other ailments that hit hive cities when their life-support failed. Hitting a hive this way was like stabbing a man so that his lungs filled up with blood. He might be able to last for a short while, but eventually he would stumble and fall. It might take weeks but it would work in the end, providing of course, the heretics did not manage to effect repairs. Ragnar doubted they would. When the Wolves destroyed something, it stayed destroyed.
And all the while the heretics were dying, the Wolves would be there – protected by their armour, moving silently and inexorably through the darkness, and killing, killing, killing.
Some aspects of this situation disturbed Ragnar. Any loyalists trapped in the keep would suffer as much as the heretics, as would any civilians. He tried reminding himself that the loyalists would be doomed anyway if the Imperium had not come, and that in war of this sort civilian casualties were inevitable. It did nothing for his peace of mind.
He glanced around as the company jogged along the silent deserted corridors, wondering what this place must have been like when it was occupied. From the residual scents, he could tell that it had teemed with people. They had lived and loved, eaten and drunk, bought and sold in the tens of thousands around here. Now there were only corpses.
The Space Wolf Omnibus - William King Page 78