In the Depths of Hades - Nick Kyme Read online

  Between the blood pulsing thunderously in his ears, Ballack heard distant bellowing and gunfire as the orks embedded deeper in the slum revelled, oblivious to the lives ending at their gates.

  A second burst of fire and brutish revelry resounded. It came with a much louder bolter shot, deafening next to Ballack’s ear. Bone fragments and ruddy matter spattered noisily against his helmet, muddying his view through his retinal lenses. The ork stopped biting. Its head had been reduced to biological debris now scattered over Ballack and the wall.

  As the greenskin fell, Ballack saw Kastor finishing off the last of them. His hammer’s haft was pressed against the ork’s neck from behind as he slowly crushed its trachea and strangled it.

  ‘You still alive?’ he asked, releasing the dead greenskin to slump down with the others.

  There were two orks killed in the nests, another six on the wall and two of those were ranged executions.

  Ballack nodded, irritated, and pressed a hand against the jetting artery in his neck until his Larraman’s organ clotted the blood.

  ‘You owe Vathed a life,’ said Kastor.

  The appearance of a ninth sentry below interrupted Ballack’s reply. Looking up, the ork noticed its slain comrades and their killers but the realisation was slow to dawn as it went to draw a pistol.

  ‘Mine,’ snarled Ballack, now with something to prove. He cast his bloody knife, lodging it between the greenskin’s eyes. The creature stared dumbly at the Malevolent for a few seconds before collapsing dead.

  Kastor holstered his pistol and voxed the others.

  ‘The gate. Three minutes,’ he said, then turned to Ballack. ‘You’re getting slow.’

  Ballack scowled. ‘The beast was lucky.’

  Kastor didn’t answer as he made his way down from the wall.

  The blood had clotted. Ballack pulled out the ork teeth lodged in his neck, and followed.

  From beyond the wall, Vathed and Narlec were moving. Leaving his enfilading position in the distance, Sykar did the same.

  ‘You were saying?’ Vathed asked Narlec.

  The marksman shrugged.

  ‘I said it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t. Not for me.’

  Narlec then gestured towards their destination. The wall was getting closer.

  ‘I doubt Ballack will thank you, though.’

  Vathed frowned. He was still relatively new to the unit and had yet to fully appreciate and understand its dynamic. ‘I just saved his life.’

  ‘No, brother,’ Narlec corrected. ‘You just took his kill.’

  Vathed scoffed. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Tell that to the Black Templar whose armour Ballack’s wearing.’

  They spoke no further. They reached the gate and continued into the ork slum of Hive Hades.

  Kastor had only got a glance at the reconnaissance maps. It was all he needed. The configuration drawn on the map was a solid representation of the actual position of the crude structures within the cratered hive. Despite the obvious devastation unleashed by the asteroid strike and the subsequent depravations of the greenskins, much of the lower hive remained. Below ground it had survived some of the impact, even if its occupants had not.

  Charred bodies still mouldered, left out in the rain, their broken limbs difficult to differentiate from the industrial debris jutting from the morass of wreckage.

  Kastor moved low and quickly through the charnel fields, using the drifting palls of smoke to obscure his approach. The hammer on his back was an impediment, but it was the spoils of a much earlier conflict and one he did not plan to relinquish. Ork spoor was everywhere. It lay thick on the air, which was already heavy with heat and animal sweat. Something porcine resonated about the greenskins, especially the larger ones. Their close guttural grunting, their willingness to wallow in their own filth together with a propensity to herd gave the association weight.

  Kastor had studied the ork since before the incident aboard the Byzantine and months prior to the Third Armageddon War. He had watched their behaviour on the battlefield, paid attention to their habits and tactics, their hierarchy, even going so far as to observe apothecarion autopsy. It had made him a more efficient killer of the xenos, whilst also enhancing his chances of survival in every encounter with them. It was the same with all of his enemies.

  Know thine enemy.

  It was a maxim adopted by all Adeptus Astartes, but none more so than Kastor.

  He paused, dropping to his haunches as he signalled for the warriors behind him to emulate.

  A few seconds later, a sizeable horde of the beasts tramped by, snorting and grunting in their crude tongue. They were armed with guns and cleavers as before, and muscular bodies strapped with plate. They clanked noisily as they moved, making Kastor’s task easier by degrees. Even so, he stayed low until he was sure they were gone, hunkered down in a wreckage-strewn alleyway with high-sided corrugated structures on both flanks.

  Relaxing a little, Kastor signalled for the squad to resume their advance through the slum.

  When they had reached an abandoned hutment, Kastor moved inside and gave the order to halt.

  ‘We are close,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘Those orks we narrowly avoided are part of the ruling caste.’

  ‘One ork looks much the same as the other,’ said Vathed, without sarcasm.

  Kastor nodded. ‘Darker skin, a more pronounced brow,’ he gestured to his own physiognomy for emphasis, ‘and their size, of course. The larger ones dominate by strength, but are also more disciplined and intelligent. Don’t be fooled by their bestial nature.’

  Vathed nodded, grateful for the lesson.

  ‘How soon until the sentries we killed are discovered?’ asked Ballack, eager to be moving so he could expunge the stain on his honour. He had removed his damaged helmet and his thin face appeared gaunt in the shallow light.

  He, Kastor and Vathed were huddled in the middle of the dirty hutment, surrounded by greenskin detritus. A flickering lamp pack swung overhead that looked like it was jury-rigged on a whim. The air reeked of dung. Dark tracts of it streaked the rough walls. Whatever purpose the hutment had served previously, it now resembled a latrine.

  ‘Patrols were erratic,’ Vathed answered, but continued at Kastor’s silent urging. ‘I’d estimate no more than an hour before the sentries are missed.’

  ‘Even if the orks do find their dead before then, it’s not guaranteed they will sound an alarm,’ said Narlec, partially distracted as he affixed an underslung grenade launcher to his stalker-pattern bolter.

  His brother, Sykar, maintained watch by the hutment’s north-facing vision slit. The roof would have offered a better vantage, but it was too exposed and might have yielded beneath his power armoured weight. He kept quiet. Narlec knew his mind and could speak it in his absence.

  ‘Agreed,’ replied Ballack, nudging one of two greenskin corpses they had found inside. It was rank, recently dead. So too was the other one. Some kind of territorial dispute as far as anyone could tell. Ballack gave a low chuckle. ‘Leave them long enough and the orks will probably kill each other before we even need to fire a shot.’

  Kastor gave a derisory snort.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘these creatures clearly have leadership. Yes, they squabble, they fight and even kill each other, but they also patrol, arm themselves and mass in squads. It isn’t a horde – it’s an army. Organised, calculating and in numbers. Vinyar is a piece of filth I wouldn’t deign to scrape off my boot, but he was also right. We have to cleanse the hive. Quickly.’

  According to the reconnaissance map, they were standing close to the outer edge of the pit, ground zero for the asteroid strike. Several hundred metres below was where Imperial intelligence had placed the location of the prisoners.

  ‘Here is where we break ranks, brothers,’ Kastor told them. He gestured to Vathed. ‘Auspex.’

  Vathed proffered the handheld device. It was already engaged and flashing silently.

  One of the Imperial officers had been implanted with a loc-beacon. Command had the requisite ident frequency but it had only recently activated with the Vilifiers’ proximity to the pit.

  ‘We three will follow this down,’ said Kastor, eyeing Ballack and Vathed.

  Ballack was quick to object. ‘Two men are quicker and quieter than three.’ He jerked his chin at Vathed. ‘Let the fresh blood keep sentry. You and I can do the necessary killing.’

  Ballack had been a Vilifier for over three decades. He and Kastor went back a long way, but none of their history prevented Kastor from shaking his head.

  ‘You almost got yourself killed on the wall, brother. You almost threw this mission. I know the Templar clipped you, Ballack. The wound is slowing you down.’

  ‘That was months past,’ Ballack protested. ‘I am fine. I can–’ He stopped talking when he felt the knife edge touching his exposed neck.

  ‘Did you even see it drawn?’ Kastor asked, holding his blade in a steady, certain grip. ‘There was a time when you would have. If I thrust now, you would be dead.’

  Ballack’s hand gripped his own combat knife, but it stayed sheathed.

  He snarled through clenched teeth. ‘I can still serve.’

  Kastor nodded. ‘If I believed anything other than that, I would kill you myself at this very moment.’ He sheathed the knife.

  Ballack sagged a little, but did not reach up to touch the blood on his neck. He glared at Vathed, who looked utterly unfazed.

  Kastor had already moved on.

  ‘Narlec, Sykar…’

  Narlec spoke for them both. ‘We’ll se
cure egress for your return. Try not to tarry, though, sergeant.’

  ‘Noted,’ answered Kastor, without humour. The guttural cadence of greenskins grew louder as a patrol drew near. ‘We move.’

  At the heart of the impact crater, the proliferation of greenskin construction intensified.

  Crude gantries and ramshackle walkways crossed the mouth of the pit in an ugly web of corrugated iron and sheet steel. Barricades had been pressure-bolted to the sides of the larger concourses, and there were ladders trailing down to where the orks had fashioned rough landing platforms and salvage yards. Nothing was wasted, and in the light of hundreds of drum fires the Vilifiers saw an army of greenskins scurrying and toiling. Some were the large, brutish orks they had fought already. More numerous were the diminutive gretchin, shrieking and cackling as they laboured. Tracked cannons, half-finished tank chasses, the scratch-built fuselage of a lander; a great war machine was slowly taking shape in the pit, a horde of cannons, vehicles and aircraft that concerned Vinyar.

  Somewhere in the midst of all the heavy labour were the prisoners the Vilifiers sought.

  Without the auspex, Vathed could not determine exactly which of the hundreds of workshops, hangars or silos contained the Imperial officers. He suspected it would be deep, so he aimed his magnoculars down towards the nadir of the pit. The dark rock still squatted there, sharp-edged, black and bleeding radiation heat.

  His armour’s biometrics told Vathed that the radiation was sufficiently low level not to present a hazard. He assumed the orks were largely immune to the immense rock’s effects as they cut into it with drills, explosives and pneumatic picks. They were harvesting, cutting out the asteroid’s core and using it as fuel. The potential volatile reaction appeared not to perturb the greenskins in the slightest, who hewed away merrily.

  Kastor’s voice came over the vox-link through a minor ripple of radiation distortion.

  ‘There.’

  The three Vilifiers maintained a dispersed squad coherency, close enough to see one another but needing the audio feed in their helmets to communicate.

  Kastor had marked the position of the prisoners and fed the data to the retinal display of all three Vilifiers. It was close to where Vathed had predicted, and he smiled at the vindication of his instincts.

  ‘Descend and converge on marked location,’ said Kastor, before going vox-silent.

  Vathed assessed his first target, then looked across at his comrades expecting to see them doing the same but Ballack and Kastor were already gone.

  With no suppressor fitted to his bolter like Narlec and Sykar had, Vathed knew it would be blade-work all the way down to where Kastor had marked the hangar. Taking sight of his prey, he vaulted the short lip of the barricade surrounding the pit and drew his knife.

  Close kills were Ballack’s preference. To his mind, there was no surer way to confirm an enemy’s death than when you looked into its eyes and saw life depart. His weapon of choice, though, would have been the chainblade currently strapped onto his back.

  Anointed with transhuman blood, it was the weapon with which he had defeated Tiamed in an honour duel, claiming his armour as the prize and earning the eternal enmity of the Black Templars. That selfsame duel had left Ballack diminished, with a deep wound yet to properly heal.

  At night it discomforted him, but pain was a warrior’s only bedfellow, that and his memories of war. It was how the wound had made him slower that haunted Ballack. He knew Kastor was watching him now. He had to prove he was still worthy of the Vilifiers. No one ever left by choice or sanction; the only way out was the end of duty and Ballack was not yet ready to relinquish his.

  A brief flash of movement to his far left caught Ballack’s eye. He saw Vathed, and followed his bloody progress across the gantry.

  Ballack’s own kills were mounting up too and his knife blade was ruddy with smeared ork blood. He crouched, taking up a position behind a barricade, knowing he would not be seen. Vathed was oblivious to being watched. Cutting down a greenskin with a stealth and efficiency that Ballack had to admit was impressive, Vathed approached the edge of a junction. Two sentries loitered at either fork. A third stood in Vathed’s path, as yet unaware of the other Malevolent’s presence.

  ‘Kastor says I owe you a life,’ Ballack murmured, drawing his bolter and taking aim.

  He waited for a lull in the industrial clamour before executing the third sentry.

  Blood and matter spattered Vathed’s armour and faceplate as he was about to make the kill. The shot that took out the ork sentry was still resounding. Instinctively, he sought cover before realising it wasn’t a greenskin that had missed its mark – it was a shooter that had known exactly what he was doing.

  Several orks in the immediate vicinity turned, trying to pinpoint the sound. They looked in the shooter’s direction but he was already gone, dropped out of sight. Instead, their collective gaze was drawn to Vathed.

  As the two sentries bellowed their anger, three more orks nearby clambered from their own vantage points to join them. Through the grated metal under his feet, Vathed saw another two greenskins jabbing fingers in his direction and shouting gutturally to their comrades.

  He mumbled something under his breath, sheathing his knife and pulling out his bolter.

  Ballack, he thought, trying to focus his anger at the greenskins. It had to be.

  Vathed downed the first sentry, putting a round through the ork’s neck, before the solid slugs from the greenskins’ guns hammered around him in a storm of shells.

  Ballack smiled from below, quickly moving through the shadows now that his route had been miraculously cleared of sentries.

  ‘Debt paid,’ he muttered, glancing at Vathed retreating back along the gantry and drawing the orks on. ‘A life for a life.’

  Kastor had not been specific about whose.

  Ballack met Kastor at the north side of the hangar where the Imperial officers were being held. He had missed him at first, overshooting the sergeant’s clandestine position and only righting his error when Kastor had hissed from the shadows.

  ‘Over here.’

  Now they were both crouched on their hands and knees in a rusted section of ducting that fed directly into the hangar.

  Ballack observed the activity in the main hangar bay through a wire mesh, taking care to keep within the shadows.

  ‘The prisoners are here,’ he whispered to Kastor, who was leaning against the side of the duct to check his weapons.

  Even though the hangar was only lit by a single drum flame, Ballack discerned the Astra Militarum officers in the penumbral gloom. They were on their knees, heads down and hands behind their backs. Judging by the flecks of blood on the floor and the ragged bearing of the men, all six had been beaten.

  ‘Then let’s move quickly,’ Kastor replied. ‘That distraction you orchestrated with Vathed won’t last long.’

  Ballack gave the equivalent of a facial shrug. ‘He might survive.’

  ‘Even if he does, he’ll have to make a lot of noise. The greenskins will know we’re here.’

  Ballack nodded, turning his full attention back to the hangar. There were six ork guards, two hugging the main entrance, three directly below and one more occupying an improvised gun nest that overlooked the entire bay floor.

  That one would have to die first.

  Ballack did not bother to kick in the mesh, he just leapt through it.

  The mesh grate landed with a loud clatter. Humans and greenskins inside the hangar turned, surprised by the sudden clamour.

  By the time Kastor got through, Ballack had already executed the lookout with a three-round burst from his bolter. A hard, metal chank signalled that the gun had jammed. Ballack dropped the bolter to unhitch his chainblade. The teeth were already growling as Kastor’s booted feet struck the metal floor with a heavy thunk.

  He shot the two at the door, opting to strafe and incapacitate rather than kill. A kill-shot would be too slow. He needed the orks down immediately.

  Ballack was weighing in against the three who had been standing guard by the prisoners. He cut the forearm off the first before cleaving its leg in two. A second went at him with its already drawn cleaver, ork steel meeting Adeptus Astartes adamantium chain-teeth. Sparks cascaded in a violent cataract of light.