Anarch - Dan Abnett Page 18

  Pasha had the full muscle of the Tanith First with her, packed up in canvas-backed cargo-10s behind her. Only the first three trucks had pulled onto the apron: hers, Elam’s, and a second strength from R Company. They’d come to a halt side by side, their headlamps on. Rain danced like digital static in the beams.

  The rest of the convoy was on the long slope of the approach road, lamps hooded and set to dark-running. They were arranged in a double column, filling both lanes of the road. At the back of the formation, Kolosim deployed four sections to hold the road and form a rear guard. They set up crew-served weapons in the gutters. Bannard, Kolosim’s adjutant, walked down the road a little way and scattered pencil-flares that fizzled in the rain. The flickering green glow of the flares illuminated little except the empty road behind them, and the dead ruins on either side.

  The approach road was flanked by sheet-wire fencing. Mkflass eyed the fencing dubiously. Beyond it was just scrub wasteland. It was impenetrably dark. He could smell wet vegetation and rain-swilled earth.

  He glanced at Kolosim.

  ‘Get some cutters,’ Kolosim told him. ‘Get two sections through, one each side.’

  Mkflass nodded. The men in his section started to cut the fence and drag it wide enough to let men pass.

  Bannard returned.

  ‘Ugly spot, sir,’ he said. ‘Feels wide open.’

  Kolosim knew what he meant. They were boxed in on the road by the fence, the rain and the darkness. It was hard to see anything. But it felt unpleasantly exposed.

  ‘With luck, we won’t be sitting here long,’ Kolosim replied. He keyed his micro-bead.

  ‘Rearguard,’ he said. ‘Sit tight but get combat-light. Stow your packs. Exit on my word, not before. And let’s kill the engines, please. If we can’t see, let’s hear at least.’

  One by one, the idling engines of the big transports shut down. The low grumble was replaced by the sound of rain, hissing off the strip of road and pattering on the canvas truck-tops. It wasn’t a great improvement. The sound of the rain seemed to magnify the emptiness to an unnatural level that suggested it wasn’t empty at all.

  Up on the apron, Pasha saw three figures dismount from Elam’s transport: Captain Elam, Captain Criid and Commissar Ludd. Elam walked through the cold puddles of headlamp light and came up to her side door.

  She pulled the window down and handed him the waiver certificate that Daur had sent through. It was a heat-printed flimsy produced by Konjic’s vox-caster. Pasha had slipped it in a clear-plastek chart cover to keep the rain from turning it to mush.

  ‘Don’t take any shit, Asa,’ she told him.

  ‘I never do,’ he replied with a smile.

  Elam turned and walked across the apron, his rifle strapped across his chest. Criid and Ludd fell in step with him. The row of headlamps bleached the backs of them bone-white and stretched their shadows, long and thin ahead of them.

  ‘Let’s be confident about this,’ Elam said to his companions. No one liked dealing with the Mechanicus, even when they had the authority of the Lord Executor to back them.

  Criid glanced ahead at the ominous bulk of Eltath Mechanicore 14. Air raid regulations had placed it in blackout, like the rest of the city. The only lights came from the fortified gatehouse, a rockcrete bunker at the top of the apron that was protected by huge hornwork demi-bastions. The night was so black and the rain so sheer, she couldn’t make out the main site beyond, but she had the impression of something invisible and vast. It had to be a big place. The scale of the demi-bastions told her that much. She’d seen smaller outworks on Militarum fortresses. Eltath Mechanicore 14 – EM 14 – was one of the many Mechanicus strongholds in the city, occupying a stretch of lowland hillside in Klaythen Quarter on the eastern flank of the Great Hill, surrounded by extensive worker habitats and just below the vast spread of the shipyards. It wasn’t one of the principal forges, the huge structures dominating entire districts she’d seen on her first day on Urdesh. Indeed, even they were minor forge sites, she’d been told. Eltath was the subcontinental capital, an administrative centre. The giant forge complexes within its territory were nothing compared to the mass forge installations elsewhere on the planet. Pasha’s briefing had described EM 14 as a research facility, one of the old tech-dynast manufactories that had been absorbed by the Mechanicus occupation and repurposed with a specific role.

  Guard mindset regarded Urdesh as simply a contested world, a battle­ground to be cleared and secured. Criid reminded herself that it was contested because of what it was: a forge world. A place of industry and manufacture, the largest and most important of its kind in forty systems. To her, it was a place to be fought for. To the Priests of Mars, it was holy ground, a precious outpost of their far-flung technomechanical empire.

  That’s why it had survived. Other worlds so bitterly disputed would have been obliterated long before by the ultimate sanction of fleet action. Whoever held Urdesh held the most vital munition source in the rimward Sabbat Worlds. She knew that it had been held, lost and retaken by both sides many times in its past. She wondered if any world anywhere had suffered under so many temporary masters. Reign after reign, Archenemy and Imperial, changing hands with each occupation, claimed and reclaimed. No wonder it bred such ferocious warriors. She had often felt that the Urdeshi troops she’d met had been fighting for Urdesh above and before any other cause.

  There was a furnace smell in the wet air that reminded her of Verghast, but she knew that Verghast, for all its mighty hives, was a minor industrial world compared to this.

  They heard a sudden, throaty rush of air that sounded like the mother of all flamer units. The three of them halted in their tracks, bathed in an infernal glow. Above them, the sky burned for a few seconds, a massive, boiling rush of churning flame-clouds.

  Not an attack. EM 14 had just vented a gas plume burn-off from its vapour mill. The burning clouds died back into blackness, but before they did, they briefly revealed EM 14 in red half-light. Criid glimpsed the outlines of vast rockcrete ramparts and cyclopean galvanic halls, heavy casemate defences, and outer thickets of razor-wire. Criid sucked in her breath. She wondered what the hell Gaunt thought was coming that a place like this would not be a sufficient defence.

  The massive gatehouse straddled two defensive ditches lined with wire. Inside that was another ring of dead earth sandwiched between a heavy chain fence and the outer wall.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ludd asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It sounds like an animal,’ Ludd said.

  Criid and Elam listened. They could hear the constant sizzle of the rain, which was dancing silver splashes on the rockcrete around their feet. Beyond that, they heard a bark, a growl somewhere in the night. It was a deep, ugly sound, full of pain and rage.

  ‘Feth knows,’ said Elam, lowering his hand to the grip of his strung weapon.

  The growl died away, then others answered it, yaps and snarls that faded into scraps of noise. They were weird sounds, a blend of deep-throated reverberation and higher pitched whining.

  Lights snapped on, blinding the three of them. They had tripped the gatehouse auto-sensors. Automated weapon mounts in the gatehouse’s deep-set embrasures rotated to target them, whirring softly. Criid could see the targeting lasers moving across their soaked battledress like fireflies.

  ‘Astra Militarum! Tanith First!’ Elam called out. He held up the waiver in its plastek wrap. ‘We require access!’

  The laser dots continued to drift. The guns stared, occasionally micro-shifting with the pulsed hums of platform gears. There was a thump, and the gatehouse projected a fierce blue scanning beam. The horizontal blue bar tracked up and down them from head to foot and back. It shut off.

  An outer hatch clanked open in the side of the bunker. Two men appeared, large, armed and armoured. They stepped out into the rain and approached. They were Urdeshi Heavy Troops from the infa
mous Third Brigade, the Steelside Division. They wore full ballistic plate and grilled helmets, all finished in puzzle camo. Each one wielded a .30 ‘short-snout’ hip-mounted on a gyro-stable bodyframe. Fat, armoured feed belts ran from their weapons to auto-delivery hoppers inside the gatehouse. Both of them had stylised Mechanicus emblems fused to their breastplates, denoting their proud secondment to the protective service of the forge.

  ‘Explain your business,’ said one, his voice amplified by his vox-mask.

  Elam held up the waiver again.

  ‘My business is the business of the Lord Executor,’ he said. ‘Here’s my waiver authority. I have an infantry regiment under transport on the road behind me. My commander seeks access and immediate conference with the facility senior.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ the Urdeshi said.

  ‘Oh yes, tonight,’ said Ludd.

  ‘The seniors of the forge will take no audience with the city on lock-down.’

  ‘Then I’ll take names,’ said Ludd. He stepped right up to them, eye-to-eye with the massive troopers, and fished out his black pocket book. ‘You wear the sigil of Mars and you do loyal work,’ he said, ‘but you’re Astra Militarum, and I will have your names.’

  With a gloved fingertip, Ludd casually wiped raindrops off the name tag bolted to the chest-plate of the man he was facing. He did it with such matter-of-fact calm it made Criid smile.

  ‘Erreton. Captain,’ Ludd said, and wrote the name down. ‘And you?’

  The other Steelsider didn’t reply, so Ludd studied his name tag too.

  ‘Gorsondar,’ he said. ‘I suppose you boys know who the Lord Executor is?’

  ‘We do,’ replied Erreton. ‘We–’

  ‘Find yourselves hurtling at near light speed towards a pile of shit for this, captain,’ said Ludd. ‘I’ll give you a moment to reconsider and verify the waiver. Out of courtesy. The Mechanicus is a mighty institution, but it won’t protect either of you from the Prefectus.’

  ‘In,’ said Erreton, jerking his head at the bunker.

  They followed the men inside. The gatehouse command was lit with amber panel lights. A third Urdeshi Heavy manned a control station of multi-level display screens. Each screen showed a different low-light image of the apron outside. The slack of the sentries’ ammo-feed belts retracted into the big autohoppers as the men entered.

  Criid stood with Ludd, water dripping off them onto the deck grille. She saw the inside of the automated gun-points, the subhuman forms packed foetally inside tiny turret cages, wired by spine, hand and eye-socket into the weapon systems. Each of the embrasure weapons that had tracked them outside had been guided by a vestigial flicker of human consciousness. Mechanicus gun-slaves, the lowest and most pitiful order of the infamous skitarii.

  Erreton took the waiver from Elam and passed it to the Steelsider at the station desk.

  ‘Check it,’ he said.

  The desk officer took the waiver flimsy out of its wrapping, and slid it under the optical scanner. A digital version, instantly verified by the Urdeshic Palace war room, appeared on one of the monitors surrounded by a vermilion frame.

  ‘My apologies,’ Erreton said to Elam.

  ‘None taken,’ smiled Elam as though he was responding politely. ‘Get your transport gates open so we can bring the regiment inside. And have a senior of this facility summoned to meet with my commanding officer.’

  ‘Do that at once,’ Erreton said to the desk officer, who began speaking rapidly into his vox-mic.

  ‘Follow me,’ Erreton told them.

  He walked to the rear hatch of the gatehouse and opened it. The ammo-feed of his rig-weapon buzzed as it played out behind him. When it reached the limit of its tension, the whole hopper, an arma­plas container the size of a fuel drum, detached itself from the wall and scuttled after him on short, thick insectiform legs.

  They followed Erreton and his obedient, mobile ammo hopper out of the rear door and onto a caged walkway that ran across the ditches to a blast hatch in the main wall. Flood lights had come on, catching the spark of rain falling through the wire. Beyond the second ditch, the walkway bisected the ring of caged, dead earth outside the wall.

  Criid peered through the chain link at it as they walked by, presuming it was a firefield, a boundary margin left deliberately open so that nothing could cross it without becoming a target for the main wall guns. Were the high chain fences and wire roofing just there to slow down an invader’s progress?

  A shape slammed into the chain link, making it shiver. Criid recoiled. Something feral was glaring at her, clawing at the chain link separating them.

  ‘Keep back from the wire,’ Erreton said. ‘We keep shock-dogs in the inner run.’

  It wasn’t a dog. It wasn’t even an animal, though it was making the animal growl the three of them had heard outside. It was a form of attack servitor, a grim fusion of cybernetic quadruped and human flesh. It barked and snarled at them, dragging its steel foreclaws across the mesh. Its steel jaws looked like they could bite a man’s arm off. Criid couldn’t see its face. Its scalp and nape were covered with a thick mane of cyber cables that draped across its deep-set eyes like dreadlocks.

  Other shock-dogs appeared out of the darkness behind it, drawn by the lights and the smell of unmodified humans. They padded forwards, growling, hackles raised. Some sported spikes, or body-blade vanes, or saw-edge jaw augmetics. They were feral kill-servitors, permanently goaded to madness and hyperaggression by neuro-psychotic implants, most of their humanity long since surgically excised and replaced with biomimetic augmentation. Criid had heard of such inhuman monsters, but she had hoped never to see one.

  Erreton waited while the inner blast door opened, then led them through the portal into the inner gatehouse. His hopper scuttled after him diligently. A full squad of Urdeshi Heavies and two towering adept wardens of the Cult Mechanicus Urdeshi were waiting for them. The wardens were robed in embroidered rust-red silk and stood almost two and a half metres tall. They carried ornate stave weapons, and their cowled faces seemed like nightmarish cartoons of Guard-issue gas-hoods: big, round ocular units staring out above pipework rebreather masks. Their duty was the protection and security of the forge facility. They turned to look at the visitors in perfect neurosync unison.

  ‘This is unorthodox,’ said one. His voice was a modulated arrangement of digital sounds emulating human words.

  ‘You’ve seen the authority,’ said Erreton.

  ‘It has been relayed by the manifold,’ said the other warden. ‘Noospheric verification is complete. However–’

  ‘–this is unorthodox,’ the first finished. One voice, speaking through two bodies. ‘We serve the Omnissiah.’

  ‘Right now, you serve the Lord Executor,’ said Ludd, ‘who is protecting your interests on this world. My regiment is a Special Task Deployment sent by the Lord Executor himself. You will cooperate fully.’

  The adept wardens looked at each other, a perfect mirror of movement, and exchanged a burst of machine code.

  ‘Signal your commanding human officer–’ said one.

  ‘–the gates will open now,’ the other finished.

  There was a deep rumble of heavy machinery.

  ‘Move in,’ Elam’s voice crackled over the vox.

  ‘Understood,’ replied Pasha. A bloom of light appeared through the rain, as the main gate hatches unlocked and yawned open, dragged by immense hydraulics. Outer defence barriers beside the gatehouse retracted into the ground, and a long metal ramp extended across the ditches like a tongue.

  ‘Pasha to Kolosim,’ she said. ‘Please to hold back one quarter strength and take up a broad defensive position around the access road and surrounding waste-ground, as per pattern. Please also to cut damn fence down and get all transports off the road. I want a clear, unimpeded run when we come out. I’ll want to be moving fast. Do it by book, Ferdy, and keep me
advised of anything.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘I mean anything.’ Pasha looked at Konjic. ‘Start her up,’ she said.

  Konjic nodded and woke the big engine of the cargo-10.

  ‘Engines live,’ Pasha said into the vox handset. ‘Recovery detail, orderly fashion, single file, follow me in, please.’

  A voice in the darkness, a whisper barely loud enough to hear, told him, ‘Stay still and don’t make a sound.’

  Domor obeyed, dumb. The firm hands that had grabbed him pulled him back against the cellar wall. He could feel the rough brick of it.

  ‘Who is that?’ he managed to hiss.

  ‘Shhhhh!’ the whisper replied.

  The bone saw sound died away. Near silence settled like a stifling weight in the impenetrable blackness. All Domor could hear was the blood pounding in his ears and the water lapping around his knees. The quiet pressed in on him, robbing him of the ability to fill his lungs.

  It wasn’t the quiet doing it, it was fear. He tried to focus. He knew his cortisol levels had ramped right up. He wondered what his heart rate was. Higher than 140, and his motor skills would be eroded. Higher than 160 or thereabouts, he’d have tunnel vision and begin to slide into the decayed, non-rational world of fear.

  He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t see to tell if his vision was tunnelling down. But he knew for a fact he’d never been so scared. Ever. And that was saying something, because he’d been through some wicked feth in his time. Domor knew fear. They all did. The story of their lives was punctuated by regular spikes of terror: the threat of death, the insanity of combat, the gnawing in-between times of waiting that whittled away the soul.

  Domor had known men, strong men, freeze or panic, or lose the ability to speak, or perform simple motor skills. There was no hierarchy to fear. It bit everyone who came near it. The best of the Ghosts had learned, with only brutal experience as a tutor, to tame it. They had honed intuitive mechanisms to channel the adrenaline and the hindbrain threat responses, to overcome the drastic shifts in blood pressure and biological process, and remain operational. Gaunt was a master at it. Some, like Mkoll and – Domor fancied – Rawne – had been born with the knack. Others, like Baskevyl and Varl, had acquired the skills over time and hard use.