Anarch - Dan Abnett Read online

  ‘Shit,’ said Urienz.

  ‘Call them in!’ Van Voytz ordered.

  ‘Reporting small arms discharge in Albarppan,’ the section chief called back.

  ‘Sustained weapons fire, possible rocket grenades, East Vapourial into Millgate,’ shouted the woman at six.

  ‘Tracking mortars, two possible three, region of Antiun Square,’ called out an adept at eight. ‘Rapid, sustain, ongoing.’

  ‘Gunfire, harbour-side. Gunfire, Lachtel Rise. Gunfire, Shelter Slope.’

  ‘Vox activity, tight band, tight chatter, region of Kaline Quarter. Chatter reads as Sekkite.’

  ‘Detonations in Plade Parish and adjoining arterial. Habs ablaze.’

  ‘Movement reported, Millgate and surrounds. No confirmation of hostiles, but no ID tagging and no call response.’

  ‘Coordinate response primary!’ Van Voytz bellowed. ‘Marshal, tracking now. I want target solutions for the city batteries.’

  ‘At once!’ Tzara replied.

  ‘Air cover, up!’ Van Voytz shouted, turning to station two. ‘Call it in, call it in! Suppression and containment! Support divisions mobilise in five minutes or I’ll have heads on sticks!’

  He looked at Urienz.

  ‘Get Macaroth out,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going with the evac?’

  ‘This isn’t a damn coincidence, Vitus. Get a bird ready to take him out of the city.’

  Urienz nodded and made off across the floor. Van Voytz turned back to his station. ‘I want direct vox with Grizmund, Kelso and Bulledin in three! Advisory signals to Cybon and Blackwood. Tell them to stand by for instruction. And find me Lugo!’

  He reached for the keypad. His screen flickered and went dark.

  ‘What the hell? Technical here!’

  He looked up. There was a thump and a dying moan of power as the strategium nearest to him shut down. The holomaps it was displaying shivered and vanished. One by one, the strategiums around the war room floor blinked, sighed and shut down. As the tables failed, the main screens went dark in rapid succession.

  Then the overhead lights strobed and went out.

  ‘Power down! Power down!’ an adept yelled.

  ‘No shit!’ barked Van Voytz above the tumult of voices. ‘Auxiliary power now!’

  ‘Switching,’ the adept replied. ‘No automatic. Re-trying… Auxiliary, failure! Back-up generators, failure!’

  ‘They can’t fail,’ Van Voytz snarled. ‘Re-initialise and re-start! Fire them up!’

  ‘Technical reports… the reserve batteries have drained,’ the adept said. ‘Support generation systems are experiencing a critical loss of capacity. No power to palace systems. No power to core-vox. No power to war room reserve and safety. Auspex is down. Detection grid is down. Fire control is down.’

  She looked at Van Voytz in the half-light.

  ‘Void shields are down,’ she said.

  ‘Holy shitting Throne,’ whispered Van Voytz.

  Ferdy Kolosim put the unlit lho-stick to his mouth and clasped it between his teeth, grimacing. A night this dark, he couldn’t light it in the open.

  The sky was a huge swathe of reddish black cloud, low and menacing. It spread out across the unlit city like a shroud. Kolosim could barely make out the outline of Eltath. Blackout conditions were still in force. He located a few spots of light; the twinkle of a pylon beacon, small building lights like distant stars, a floodlight washing something to the southwest, the brief vent flare of a gas plume at Millgate.

  The rain had stopped. There was a smell of wet soil in the darkness. A slight breeze had lifted, stirring litter in the waste ground to his left. The breeze felt like the prelude to something stronger, maybe a big storm that would roll in from the bay by dawn.

  Heat lightning growled in the low cloud. There wasn’t much spark to it, but the mumbling sheet-flashes let him see the city for a fraction of a second every few minutes, the climbing skyline rising to the east, a key-tooth silhouette of spires and habs.

  Sergeant Bray approached, effortlessly making no sound on the rough scree.

  ‘Are we set?’ Kolosim asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. All four companies, left and right of the approach road. Wire’s cut back. We’ve got support teams set up, decent, broad field with a focus on the road. Fire positions in a string off that way for about a kilometre.’

  ‘Transports?’

  ‘All off the road. Got them side-on, in case we need fall back cover. Scouts out on both flanks. It’s mostly bomb-site ruins on both sides for five kilometres.’

  Kolosim turned and looked back up the approach road towards EM 14. It was the only vaguely lit thing around. He could see the glow of the gatehouse lights. The road was dark. The steel fenceposts stood out starkly where they hadn’t been pulled down. The oblong shadows of some of the transports were just about visible, rolled back on the rough slip.

  ‘Quiet order?’ Kolosim asked.

  ‘Everyone’s behaving,’ replied Bray. ‘Pretty decent alert level, actually.’

  ‘An active purpose refines the mind,’ said Kolosim.

  Bray nodded at the Mechanicore complex.

  ‘Taking a while,’ he said.

  ‘Red tape. Reluctance,’ said Kolosim. ‘The priests don’t like to cooperate. Pasha’s probably reading them the riot act.’

  His micro-bead pipped.

  ‘Kolosim, go.’

  ‘Caober. You pick that up?’

  ‘Be more specific.’

  ‘Uh, mortars. Mortar fire. South-west.’

  Kolosim glanced at Bray.

  ‘Nothing here,’ he said into the link. ‘Crossing to you.’

  They moved down the shallow slope and jogged across the road into the waste scree on the other side. Kolosim could see Ghosts hunched around him, the folds of their capes making them blend with the stone heaps and slabs of broken rockcrete they were using as cover. He and Bray moved along behind the outer line of them. Caober emerged from the darkness.

  ‘Mortars?’ asked Kolosim.

  ‘Sounded like,’ Caober told the big red-head.

  They listened for a moment, and heard nothing except the breeze stirring litter. There was a faint flash of heat lightning.

  A second later, a slow, soft peal of thunder.

  ‘Not mortars,’ said Bray.

  Caober shook his head. ‘It wasn’t thunder just now. More punctuated. A little trickle of thumps. I’d put money on mortars.’

  ‘Well, that could be coming up from the line,’ said Kolosim. ‘It’s active beyond Tulkar.’

  ‘We wouldn’t hear it,’ said Caober. ‘Not at this distance, in these conditions. It was closer.’

  Bray frowned. ‘Listen,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ asked Kolosim.

  Bray raised a finger, his head tilted to hear.

  Pop-pop-pop.

  ‘That’s not mortars either,’ said Kolosim.

  Pop-pop-pop.

  ‘That’s fething small arms,’ said Bray. ‘Autogun.’

  Kolosim reached for his bead.

  ‘Stand ready,’ he said.

  The distant popping stopped. About a minute passed, and they started to hear much louder cracks, like branches snapping.

  ‘Las,’ said Bray.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Caober.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Vadim from his position nearby. ‘Insurgents?’

  ‘Must be,’ said Kolosim. ‘Can’t be Sek packs this deep in.’ He hoped he was right. The city edge was far from secure, but they were well inside the inner ring. If it was a company strength of the Sons, someone somewhere had made a big tactical error. Insurgents were bad enough. The small raid-cells were still pocketed throughout Eltath, lying quiet. They’d found that out to their cost at the Low Keen billet.

  They
couldn’t see the first few shots. Then a ripple of bright bolts flashed in high, looping into the scrub behind them. Two or three at first, then a sudden riot of them, incoming from a dozen sources. They flashed and zipped across the highway bank, hitting rocks, raising tufts of dust from the edge of the slip, and spraying pebbles off the front portion of the scree. A volley stitched across the mouth of the approach road, and Kolosim heard a sharp twang as a fence pole was cut in half.

  ‘Hold,’ he said into the micro-bead. He flicked channels. ‘R Company lead, R Company lead, this is rearguard. Be advised, we have contact at the gate at this time.’

  ‘Copy, rearguard.’

  Kolosim switched channels.

  ‘All positions, hold fire. Let’s see how busy this gets.’

  A second flurry came in, stinging the night air with bright darts. The las-fire began to chop at the forward positions, cracking and splitting rock cover.

  ‘They’re correcting,’ said Bray. ‘Cutting in closer now.’

  Somewhere out in the dark, a support weapon started to chatter. A hard round .30, crew served. The shots licked along a line from the outer fence post to the nearest transport. They heard the slap as the heavy rounds punched through bodywork, then a smash as a windscreen blew out. The firing stopped, then they heard it begin again, the distinctive clattering cough of a belt feeder. It was spitting blue tracers this time, every tenth round. The illuminated rounds seemed to float and drift as they came in, feeling the range.

  ‘Seena,’ said Kolosim into the link.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘They’re giving us tracers. Are you sourcing that?’

  ‘Angle’s wrong from here, sir.’

  ‘Melyr?’ Kolosim said.

  ‘Sir. If he keeps chucking that at us, I can narrow it down to about a ten metre zone.’

  ‘Don’t be greedy, Melyr. Just make a mess of the whole area.’

  ‘Pleasure, sir.’

  ‘Pour it on, please,’ said Kolosim.

  Forty metres from him, one of the support positions opened up. The .30 howled for about ten seconds.

  When it ceased, the tracers stopped skimming in.

  ‘Thank you, Melyr. Do it again if he starts back up.’

  Kolosim didn’t hear Melyr’s reply. The night opened up with an intense barrage of small arms fire. A rain of las and hard rounds swept across their position. The combined roar felt extreme after the long quiet. If these were insurgents, there were a lot of them, and they had coordinated with alarming effect. Kolosim guessed at eighty or ninety shooters. How did cells link up to deliver this?

  For thirty seconds, the barrage was so intense it kept them down. The noise seemed deafening. A sheet of smoke and lifted dust rolled off the scree.

  Kolosim rolled onto his back, and adjusted his bead.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘They’re determined to have this out.’

  He lay on his back for a moment, watching las-bolts flit over him, dazzling against the black sky.

  ‘Full contact, full contact,’ he ordered. ‘All positions. Light them the feth up.’

  The moment he spoke, four prepped and ready companies of Ghosts opened fire. The light-shock lit the entire gate area.

  Now the noise was truly deafening.

  Major Pasha strode down the burnished arcade of the Mechanicus station behind the two adept wardens. Elam and Ludd led a squad of Ghosts in her wake. Behind them, Criid, Theiss, Spetnin and the other company officers were deploying squads to cover the front half of the complex.

  The place was vast and the layout complicated. There were floors of polished brass and ornate walls dry with rust. Deep turbine halls throbbed with energy, and were criss-crossed by suspended walkways that would easily hinder standard practices of cover. Machine shops thrummed with power tools, dancing with sparks. Side vaults gave access to cryonic bays, and were bathed in cold blue light.

  Everywhere they went, servitors and cowled adepts stared at them in curiosity and suspicion. They could hear the muted tick and chatter of machine cant as the adepts gossiped to each other. Newcomers, outsiders…

  Halfway along the arcade of the inner court, Pasha was met by a senior tech-priest and a slender young man in black. The two adept wardens stepped back and stood to attention, their dendritic fingers holding their stave weapons upright.

  ‘Pasha, commanding Tanith First,’ Pasha said, snapping the sign of the aquila.

  ‘Sindre, interrogator, Ordo Hereticus,’ the pale young man replied. ‘I present Versenginseer Etriun, the study lead.’

  The cowled priest nodded. Mandelbrot-pattern electrodes in the flesh of his throat rippled with light. He emitted a soft buzz of code.

  ‘You are aware of our business here?’ asked Pasha.

  ‘The gatehouse relayed the details,’ said Sindre. ‘The Mechanicus formally objects to this invasion by the Astra Militarum.’

  ‘Invasion?’ asked Pasha, amused.

  ‘All these Guardsmen. So many. How many companies did you need to bring into the sanctity of the Mechanicore?’

  ‘Sufficient,’ said Pasha. ‘I note that the priesthood objects to the intrusion of the Militarum, but not to the presence of the Inquisition.’

  ‘You’re not terribly good at politics, are you?’ said Sindre.

  ‘Don’t have much call for it,’ said Pasha.

  ‘Well, for one thing, I haven’t trooped a regiment in here,’ said Sindre. ‘For another, I am attached to the study. The ordo has a fundamental interest in the items. And for another, the versenginseer requires my assistance as an intermediary. Unless you speak mechmata hyper-bineric?’

  ‘I do not,’ said Pasha.

  ‘That’s a shame, captain.’

  ‘Major,’ said Pasha. She tapped her collar studs. ‘Just dots. Not hard to remember. If you can’t tell dots from dots, I wonder how you can tell heresy from a hole in the ground.’

  The tech-priest made an urgent, buzzing sound. Sindre nodded.

  ‘We find your tone aggressive, Major Pasha,’ said Sindre.

  Pasha shrugged. ‘Aggressive? I am soldier. Aggressive is my mother. She would bite your throat right out. Grrrr! Bite it.’

  Pasha clutched her own throat for emphasis.

  ‘Now, eagle stones please, thank you,’ she said.

  ‘This is untoward,’ said Sindre. ‘The stones are xenos artefacts, under safekeeping. Neither the Mechanicus nor the Ordo Hereticus has yet determined their potential or use. It was clearly understood that they should remain in our hands for the duration. This was a given, signed off by the Militarum, the office of the warmaster, the Intelligence Division, your company commander Gaunt, and my associate Sheeva Laksheema.’

  Pasha nodded, as if chewing this over.

  ‘I tell you what is untoward,’ she said. ‘I am here, asking you for thing. It is not a matter of negotiation. My rearguard is already in hot contact with the Archenemy on your doorstep. My company commander, “Gaunt”, as you speak him with shocking lack of respect, is Lord Executor. Lord Executor? You know this thing? My orders are his will, and his will, it cannot be challenged by Ordo Hereticus, Mechanicus of Mars, Intelligence Division, my fething mother, whatever. Also, I have asked you very nicely, please. Now get me the eagle stones, ready for transport, or I will stick my boot up your arsehole and go get them myself.’

  ‘I’d do it if I were you,’ said Ludd. He was standing at Pasha’s side, his arms folded. ‘I’d run and do it. She doesn’t feth around.’

  Sindre glared at them.

  ‘I will take this up with the ordo senior,’ he hissed.

  ‘And he will take it up with the Lord Executor,’ said Pasha. ‘Then every­one will be happy, as long as they are the Lord Executor.’

  The tech-priest’s actuators buzzed.

  ‘This way,’ said Sindre, gesturing behind him.
>
  Pasha grinned.

  ‘You are lovely man,’ she said. ‘No matter what the other boys in the ordo say about you.’

  They followed Sindre and Etriun along the arcade. As he walked, Sindre gestured to one side and then the other. The two adept wardens stayed where they were, but six skitarii emerged from the shadows and fell in beside the Ghost party, three on each side. They moved in perfectly synchronised step.

  ‘Expecting trouble?’ asked Ludd.

  ‘Security is elevated,’ replied Sindre, ‘the Urdeshic Palace issued an amber status advisory for Eltath this afternoon. The skitarii are a precaution. We’re lucky to have them. Few remain on Urdesh these days.’

  The skitarii were the martial division of the Cult. They were as tall as the adept wardens, but seemed bigger because of their armoured mass and their breadth of shoulder. They were skitarii of the Cult Mechanicus Urdeshi, and wore the traditional double robes: short black coats over longer red mantles. Little of their original organics remained. Their augmetic hands were bare metal claws, clutching weapons across their chests. Their faces were silver masked, polished to a mirror sheen. Green pinpricks glowed in the deep recesses of the eyeslits. Four carried archeo­tech firearms across their chests: antique galvanic sleetguns. The other two – members of an officer caste, denoted by the intricate etching that covered their steel craniums – brandished black metal staves that were a metre and a half long, plainer versions of the ceremonial staves the adept wardens carried.

  Without breaking stride, Etriun waved his actuator, and opened a massive golden blast hatch, then a second, and then a titanium iris valve six metres in diameter. Cold, sterile air blew out at them. They descended a metal ramp into a grand laboratory hall. Polished chrome workbenches gleamed in pools of stark, directional light. Each bench was equipped with manipulator robotics: long, delicately articulated alloy limbs that curled over each work surface ready to activate and begin work. They looked like huge metal whip-spiders clinging to the end of each workstation. They were dormant, shut down, limbs raised and splayed like hands raised in greeting.