Shadowbreaker Read online

  Ganeen’s memory of all the forks they had to take and tiny spaces they had to scramble through had not dulled even a little in all the years since he’d gained his liberty. Again and again, the old man surprised Copley and her team. Every time she was sure she was looking at a dead end, he would push past her with a cackle and shuffle straight over to some utterly invisible gap in the rock. And they’d all be moving again.

  Without him, depending on his map and his notes alone, Copley and her infiltration team would have lost hours scouring the walls of each of these false dead ends for the way forward.

  Back at the Kashtu base, she had almost insisted that he stay. Ganeen was physically frail, and would almost certainly be a burden to her team. A younger, colder Copley would have denied him his request for a last trip on the spot. His intel, she had thought at the time, would be enough. So why did she concede? On the flight south, staring at his lined and weathered face in the back of the Stormraven, she had searched herself for an answer and found none that satisfied her. Was she growing sentimental?

  Now, with the need for his guidance so apparent, she put it down to some intuition, something her subconscious mind had caught but that her conscious mind was too arrogant and judgemental to see. She was damned glad he’d come along.

  Up ahead, Triskel, currently on point, pulled to a halt and threw up his right hand.

  She moved up to stand beside him and found herself on the very edge of a gaping black chasm.

  She shone her flashlight down towards the bottom of it. Nothing. The light hit nothing.

  She heard Ganeen chuckle behind her. ‘This was the hard part,’ he said. ‘This was the part where I was surest I was doomed to die.’

  Triskel was shining his light to either side. The chasm filled the tunnel completely. No ledges. He turned it to the walls, looking for handholds. They were smooth.

  ‘Lower, boy,’ said Ganeen. ‘We have to go down a bit to go across.’

  ‘You crossed this?’ asked the trooper with some doubt.

  ‘I didn’t have a choice.’

  ‘We don’t either,’ said Copley. She smiled at him. ‘But we have the Lizard-in-Shadow, and he’s done it before.’

  The old man grinned up at her, a gummy smile with just a handful of remaining teeth. ‘I have to go first. I can’t tell it to you, not so as you’d make it alone. I have to show you.’

  ‘Do you still have what it takes?’ she asked him dubiously.

  He thrust his chin at the far side, shrouded in blackness even the squad’s night-vision goggles couldn’t penetrate from this distance.

  ‘For all our sakes, let’s hope so,’ he replied.

  Ganeen led. Copley followed. Then Ryce, Grigolicz, Morant and Triskel. Grig was the strongest so, with everyone roped together, he was in the middle, the better to help out if anyone on either side of him fell. And if he fell, he’d have both Ryce and Morant to pull him back up.

  It was beyond difficult. Without Ganeen, it would have been truly hopeless. How many times in his mind, in his dreams, had he relived this deadly crossing? His old, big-knuckled hands unerringly found each invisible handhold, exactly as he remembered them. Twice he almost fell, but due to frailty, not to any mistake in his memory.

  Both times, Copley moved forward beside him, drove a piton into the rock wall to secure both of them, and made sure he was good to go on. The pitons and lines would give them a chance to recover if one or two members slipped at once, but if more than that went down, she knew they’d all die. The rock was just too brittle to support the pitons if three fell.

  And so it went, metre by metre, with the old man methodically leading them from hand- and foothold to hand- and foothold, his eyes closed, feeling his way, remembering, until at last they rounded a final bend in the wall and began the climb up the chasm’s far edge.

  Sweating, breathing through clenched teeth, Grigolicz and Morant pulled Triskel over. For a moment, they all sat or lay sprawled on the rock.

  ‘I never want to do that again,’ murmured Ryce.

  Copley looked at the old man. In the torchlight, his eyes were bright, like shining black gems. He looked vibrant, like the years had suddenly, miraculously dropped away from him.

  ‘Feel more alive than I have in decades,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Thank you, Ganeen,’ said Copley.

  ‘That was really something, old man,’ said Grigolicz, grinning broadly.

  ‘Still a little ways left,’ Ganeen told them, ‘but it gets a lot easier from here.’

  It did.

  He had them scramble up a few walls to ledges that were invisible from the tunnel floor. He showed them around rocks to apertures that were just big enough to squeeze through. But then something about his energy, his demeanour changed, and Copley felt that this was a moment the old man had been waiting for.

  ‘This is the last one I need to show you,’ he said as he pointed along a narrow fissure in the rock she hadn’t even seen until he had drawn attention to it. ‘After this, you just follow the map I drew. There’s nothing hidden from here. It’s just about choosing the right tunnels now.’

  She glanced at her men then back at Ganeen. ‘You can come with us into the base,’ she said. ‘You’d have to stay in the tunnel underneath it, but when we extract, if you’re quick enough to get out and get on one of the Stormravens…’

  The look in his eye stopped her. ‘That’s not how this is meant to go,’ he said. ‘This place has been waiting for me, just like I’ve been waiting for you. Speaker said so. I’d have died years ago ’cept he told me I had to live on till you people showed up.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Got the rot in here. Six years now. But the Speaker told me. He said, The Lizard-in-Shadow must wait for the coming of the resh’vah. The Imperium has a need for you, Ganeen. You cannot die until you fulfil it. So I lived. But now I get to rest.’

  ‘Here?’ said Copley.

  ‘I’ll go back a ways. Sit by the chasm’s edge a while. See if the God-Emperor will spare me a word or two now that I’ve done my duty.’

  He chuckled, turned and pushed past the troopers, all of which towered over him.

  As he passed them, each put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Ganeen.’

  When he was a dozen metres away, he half-turned and spoke one more time. ‘Never met a woman who was more warrior than a man before, major. Reckon those blue-skins have no idea of the storm that’s about to hit them.’ He laughed and turned back in the direction of the chasm. ‘Give them hell, girl!’

  Then he was gone, swallowed by shadow, off to make his final peace with himself and see out the last moments of a long life.

  For a few long seconds, Copley stared at the curve of rock around which he’d disappeared. He’d looked peaceful. Ready. She wondered if she would feel like that when her time was up. She and her men were about to enter a base crawling with t’au forces. Nothing they hadn’t done before, of course, but any time could be the last. No one on her task force expected to retire.

  ‘Ma’am?’ said Ryce.

  She looked up and found him staring at her. ‘Lead on, Ryce.’

  He nodded and set off along the narrow path Ganeen had shown them they must take. The rest of the squad followed in silence.

  They edged along in the close confines of the tunnel like worms, the rocks scraping at them and their loadouts, forcing them to adjust their kit frequently, to exhale and push hard to get through the narrower spaces. Packs and weapons often had to be dragged along behind them, with one of the operators at the back to help push them through whenever they got caught or stuck, which was more frequently than Copley would have liked. And all the time, the mission chrono kept ticking off crucial seconds.

  Talon Squad and the rest of the assault force was counting on her. She couldn’t afford to fail. Karras and the others couldn’t rush the facility while the defensive batteries were still in
play. They’d be shot down without any chance to fight.

  In truth, Copley was anxious – not about gaining access to the facility, not so much about any resistance she and her team would face, but more about getting into the t’au electronics systems and shutting them down. Reading and operating t’au holo-menus systems was one thing. She’d done that before in the field. But an ultra-secure facility like the Tower? Surely there would be encryption, and not light encryption either. With the possible exceptions of spaceports, fire caste headquarters and t’au intelligence hubs, the systems at the Tower were probably the most secure on this planet. She had brought her best people for this, but there was no guarantee it wouldn’t be beyond them. So much could go wrong.

  So what’s new? she thought.

  Sigma had made sure Copley and her people were superbly equipped for Shadowbreaker. The inquisitor lord knew these were long odds. Some of the new toys her people had been assigned were impressive. That thing Morant was carrying. That hacking module. Her task force had not been given access to something like that before. It was something new, at least to her. Great if it worked. But she knew better than to trust mission success to tech. It was people who carried the day. All the advanced gear in the galaxy wouldn’t mean a damn without the right people for the job. She looked ahead at the back of Sergeant Morant and was reassured. The short, surly former drop-trooper had been extensively trained by the tech-priests of the Mechanicus in the use of the module. In fact, just in case Morant went down, several team members had been educated in its use, but Morant had a natural talent for the thing. She was counting on him to secure the t’au security and control networks at the Tower when the time came.

  Such rare technology. If only she’d had it in her Militarum days. So many lives…

  It paid to be part of the Ordo Xenos.

  Even so, she thought. Even so…

  This whole op still hung by such a fragile thread. Common sense told her it was madness for Talon Squad and the others to try to force their way in if she and her squad failed in their infiltration, but the importance of acquiring Epsilon, knowing she was here, was so paramount that, even if Copley and her four-man unit died before taking out the anti-air batteries, the Deathwatch Stormravens would still launch their assault.

  They’ll be swatted out of the damned sky, but they’ll fly in and try for it anyway. We can’t risk giving the t’au a chance to move Epsilon. We take her here and now.

  The point man, Sergeant Grigolicz, voxed her from up ahead.

  ‘The tunnel opens out here, ma’am. Room to stand. A little cavern about two metres high, three metres across. Just like the old man said.’

  ‘Understood,’ Copley replied as she pushed forward through yet another tight bottleneck in the rock walls. ‘Start checking the cavern roof. Ultraviolet. Infrared. From what he said, the seam can’t be discerned with the naked eye.’

  Grigolicz was still searching for it when Copley, Ryce and Morant joined him. Morant hung back at the entrance to the little chamber, helping Triskel get the kit through the last gap. When it was done, Morant turned his goggled eyes to the ceiling with the others and helped search. Triskel unhooked the squad’s portable auspex scanner from his webbing and adjusted the dials, eyes glued to the tiny lambent screen.

  ‘The old guy must’ve been good in his day,’ said Morant. ‘He did this in complete darkness, right? I can’t find a damned thing, even with the goggles at max, ma’am.’

  ‘Nothing on the auspex either,’ added Triskel.

  Copley stopped what she was doing. ‘Turn them off.’

  Morant turned to her. ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Your goggles. All of you. Turn them off. He didn’t depend on his eyes. Neither will we. Use your hands. Just feel for it – a tiny seam with the slightest give. It’s here somewhere.’

  Unless it was discovered and sealed.

  No. She wasn’t about to accept that. It had to be here.

  She pulled off her combat gloves, reached up to the ceiling and let her fingertips probe the rock inch by inch.

  Eight minutes later, Morant muttered, ‘Wait. Ma’am, I think I’ve got something.’

  He didn’t move until she was right by him. Even then, he kept his fingers exactly where they were lest he lose the seam.

  Copley reached up, her fingers tracing the rock in a small circle around his own. And there it was. There was the slightest give in a part of the rock when she applied upward pressure. This was what the old man had talked about. This was the aperture through which, malnourished and blind in the dark, he had dropped, not knowing what was below. Luckily for him, and now for Copley and her people, he had not plunged to his death but instead had found a narrow, twisting path to freedom.

  He had found his way out and back into the hands of the tribe that had counted him among the Vanished.

  And there he waited… for us to come. Thank you, old man.

  Too early for thanks, perhaps. The aperture could still have been sealed from above in the intervening years.

  Thinking this, Copley freed her knife from its shoulder sheath and worked the point into the seam, then dragged it along, clearing it.

  ‘It’ll be heavy,’ she told her squad. ‘I want the four of you right underneath it, pushing directly up. When it comes free, shift it gently to the right. Take your time. If any of the blue-skins are in earshot…’

  Carefully, the squad pressed the slab-like rock free and, with great care and patience, moved it out of the way. At first, it was silent, but as the space opened further, Morant and Triskel had to let the stone go. It was up to Ryce and Grigolicz to push it aside, and that meant the unavoidable sound of heavy stone scraping on stone. They took it as slow and steady as they could. When they were done, all five members of the unit waited, breath shallow, ears attuned to the slightest noise.

  Triskel took the auspex from his webbing again and slowly swung it full circle.

  ‘Nothing showing, ma’am.’

  ‘OK,’ said Copley with a nod. ‘Looks like we’re still good to go. Grig, back on point. Get up there.’

  ‘Aye, ma’am,’ said the soldier, and he hauled himself up into the darkness of the space above the chamber. Seconds later, his gloved hand appeared, thrusting downwards to grab his weapon and pack. Triskel handed them up.

  ‘How is it looking?’ asked Copley.

  ‘Cramped,’ said Grigolicz. ‘Water and power lines everywhere. Looks like the t’au didn’t change any of this. No sign anyone has been down here in a long time.’ He was silent a moment, then added, ‘Nope. Nothing running through them now. Obsolete. The blue-skins must’ve installed their own systems on the upper levels. Looks clear, ma’am. Not seeing any laser trip-lines or monitor lenses. No electronic signatures.’

  The blue-skins are confident, thought Copley. And why wouldn’t they be? Since they’d arrived, this planet has been theirs. With the exception of a token rebel force they could obliterate at any time, there was nothing on this world to make them think an assault on the Tower would ever come.

  Not that she was about to get complacent.

  ‘I’m up next,’ she said. She moved underneath the opening. Again, Grigolicz thrust his hand down. She grabbed it and jumped, and was swiftly pulled up. A moment later, she reached down and Triskel passed up her kit.

  In the unnatural green hues of her goggles’ vision enhancement, Copley made out a low-ceilinged tunnel filled with a jumble of old pipes and cables. It reminded her of dense jungle strewn with creepers. She wondered if cutting through any of the tangled cables would give her and her people away, because it looked like they may well have to do so in order to press further. The floor of the tunnel was natural rock, but unlike the little cavern below, this had been cut by las and plasma tools. It was easy to see that by the melt marks. The ceiling was smooth and angular – thick blocks of grey rockcrete reinforced with girders of riveted iron.
There was just enough room to walk hunched over, but the profusion of pipes meant dragging their packs behind them in some places.

  ‘Tris?’ she murmured.

  The trooper checked his auspex. ‘Lot of interference here, ma’am. But again, nothing showing. No movement.’

  She activated the holo-compass on her left wrist then tapped it off again. ‘The old man said to go north from here, about two hundred yards. There should be an access hatch, but it’s not the one we want. Another hundred yards after that, the tunnel swings east. We’re looking for the first access hatch in the ceiling after we turn that corner. You got that, Grig?’

  ‘Moving off now, ma’am.’

  By the time they found the hatch they were looking for, Copley had noted the sweat running from her hairline and down the back of her neck. It was getting warmer the further they went.

  Good. It meant they were closing on an energy source somewhere above them. They were pushing deeper into the complex.

  Carefully, her men opened the hatch, senses hyper-alert. There were no xenos awaiting them above. This part of the complex seemed to be more or less abandoned, or at least infrequently patrolled. One after another, Copley and her team hauled themselves up.

  After handing his pack and weapon up to Triskel, Ryce was the last to ascend. He, Triskel, Morant and Grigolicz replaced the stone hatch as carefully and quietly as possible while Copley surveyed their surroundings and checked her holo-compass again. With the hatch back in place, the squad stood in a rough circle, backs to the centre, weapons raised, awaiting Copley’s command. To the north and south, the corridor ran off into pitch darkness. There were work-lumes set in the walls, glowing a dull red, enough light that the squad no longer needed their goggles.

  The air was alive with the deep humming of some kind of power generator. Copley moved to the wall on her left – the west wall – and pressed her cheek to it. The rockcrete was warmer than the air temperature suggested it ought to be. Listening hard, she thought she recognised the sound. That particular tone and frequency was familiar.