The Beast of Calth - Graham McNeill Read online

  Lerato saw a mix of pride and dignified sorrow on the faces of his soldiers, and knew that they would perform this job with as much dedication as they would were it a combat operation. Every soldier in the Ultramar Defence Auxilia knew that were he to fall, his mortal remains would be returned to his loved ones, and it was this surety of remembrance that made each soldier fight with courage and honour.

  ‘Trooper Lorz, I want you to take Sergeant Joelle’s Chimera. We’ll load the bodies in the back. Make sure to strap them down properly, I don’t want them rolling all over the place when we ride over some rough ground. Remember, these are our comrades we’re talking about. You’ll show them some respect.’

  ‘Who’s going to drive Azurite Fist?’ asked Lorz, and Lerato hid a smile at the man’s proprietary attitude. The Chimera was not his property, but he treated it as though it were, regularly checking the work of the enginseers and (though he was careful not to be too obvious) working his own modifications to the controls and onboard logisters. Since they actually seemed to improve the vehicle’s functionality, Lerato turned a blind eye to the man’s tinkering, and was careful to let him know when he was pushing it too far.

  ‘Luta will drive the Fist,’ he said. ‘We’ll follow Calth’s Light back to the surface through Guilliman’s Gate.’

  Lorz shrugged and turned to Luta. ‘Return the Fist to the depot with any new dents, and we’ll be needing another body bag, you read me?’

  Luta pretended to be offended and said, ‘You’re the one who put all those dents in her in the first place.’

  The squad laughed, and Lerato held up a hand to forestall an angry response from Lorz.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Now everyone get a move on, I want to be back in the field before they find the bastard that did this. I want us back at Highside City, refuelled and ready to fight by the end of the day. Understand?’

  ‘Understood,’ said his squad, and they began the solemn task of loading their comrades into the back of the Chimera that had brought them to their deaths.

  Suzaku surveyed the smouldering remains of the fuel relay with a cold, dispassionate eye. The structure was little more than a way station, mostly unmanned, but – in this case – home to a Mechanicus adept and a trio of servitors. All four were dead, burned black by the searing flames that had consumed the relay when it had exploded.

  Constructed around a circular conduit three metres in diameter, the structure of the building was built hard against the wall of the cavern and fashioned from steel and heavy blocks of carved stone. Though it was little more than a functional structure, it had been built with typical Calthian attention to detail and robustness that was said to have been the hallmark of an exterminated race of Ur-folk.

  Three of the four walls were scorched black by fire, but were still standing, though the conduit pipe had been severed. Thousands of insulated and sheathed cables flopped like artificial intestines from the shattered conduit, sparking and whipping like angry snakes fighting over a choice morsel.

  ‘Looks like you were right,’ said Dante.

  ‘About what?’ asked Suzaku.

  ‘That the Iron Warrior is heading for Aries Pyros.’

  Suzaku nodded, taking measured steps towards the structure as she let her eye wander at random over the destroyed fuel relay. Something about this destruction struck her as strange, but it wasn’t immediately apparent what it was. Milotas Adelmo came alongside her, but said nothing, recognising her introspective mood.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why attack this place?’

  ‘Because it controls the feed lines away from Aries Pyros,’ said Milotas. ‘It’s one of the relays that ensures the power levels being distributed from the generating station are kept in equilibrium.’

  ‘Sounds like it makes perfect sense that this place was attacked,’ added Dante, running a hand through his white hair as flakes of settling ash landed on his head and the shoulder guards of his armour.

  Suzaku moved closer to the broken conduit pipe, noting the blast damage and spread of twisted metal where the explosion had occurred. At first she had assumed that the pipe had been destroyed in an attack, but now another possibility began to rear its ugly head. Suzaku imagined a lone Iron Warrior approaching this structure, putting herself in the roof of his mind as he plotted to destroy it. Vast amounts of electrical energy were pouring through the building, and it would be easy to cause a huge amount of damage.

  ‘Why here?’ she asked. ‘He could easily have disrupted the flow elsewhere without coming close to somewhere that might have been occupied.’

  ‘He’s an Iron Warrior,’ said Dante. ‘He wants us to know what he’s doing. He’s taunting us that we won’t be able to stop him. This bastard thinks he is going to destroy Aries Pyros and he wants us to know that we’re always going to be too late.’

  ‘You could be right,’ agreed Suzaku. ‘You probably are. The Archenemy are nothing if not arrogant. In all likelihood, you are one hundred percent right.’

  ‘So why do you sound like you don’t believe it?’

  ‘Because it seems just so… obvious.’

  ‘Do I need to remind you of the Lex Parsimoniae?’ asked Milotas.

  ‘No, you do not,’ said Suzaku, bending down to go beneath the conduit. The rock on the far side of the pipe was blackened with primary impact damage, indicating that whatever had caused this blast had been on the cave side of the conduit. Standing on portions of the fragmented steelwork and broken rocks, she reached up and scraped some blast residue onto her fingernail.

  She dropped back to the floor of the cave and held her hand out to Milotas, who scraped the greasy black residue from beneath her fingernail with a thin-bladed scalpel. He then fed the blade into the side of his mirror slate and tapped a complex series of binaric commands.

  ‘What is he doing?’ asked Dante.

  ‘Running a chem-analysis on the blast residue,’ said Suzaku.

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘I want to know what manner of explosion this was,’ said Suzaku, turning to face the ruined structure. She set off towards the building, noting the direction of fall of the scattered debris and the blast patterning on the surrounding rock.

  ‘Two of the servitors were found inside the building, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dante.

  ‘The Mechanicum adept and the third servitor were found in the middle of the tunnel.’

  ‘Again, yes,’ said Dante. ‘What does that prove?’

  ‘I don’t think this was an attack,’ said Suzaku. ‘I mean, it was clearly an attack, but I don’t think the attacker was here when it happened. Look, imagine you’re a lone infiltrator in the depths of an enemy planet, what’s your priority all through your mission?’

  ‘To wreak as much damage on the enemy as possible,’ said Dante.

  ‘No, that’s a secondary concern,’ said Suzaku. ‘The first priority is evasion of capture, and the best way to achieve that is to keep your enemies looking in the opposite direction of where you’re going.’

  ‘I’m not following you,’ said Dante. ‘I am a direct man, speak plainly to me.’

  ‘Very well. Look at the positioning of the bodies. The adept and his servitors came here on a regularly scheduled maintenance check, the logs confirm that. The damage caused to this conduit is the result of a bomb, not a gunfight or collateral battle damage. When those bodies are examined, there won’t be a single bullet hole or combat injury on any of them, I’ll stake my reputation on it.’

  ‘So what does the positioning of the bodies have to do with anything?’

  ‘Any adept worth his title would have detected the presence of a foreign object on the conduit almost immediately and gone out to check to see what it was. He left two servitors in the fuel relay and took another out to see what was wrong. Perhaps he tried to remove it or it was rigged to detonate just before the next maintenance check. Either way, it blew him and his servitor across the cavern,
broke the conduit and blew down the facing wall of the relay building.’

  Dante nodded as he followed her logic and took in the details of the blast damage.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Milotas, as his slate buzzed at the completion of the chem-analysis.

  Suzaku rejoined her savant as he held out the slate.

  ‘Summarise it for me,’ she said.

  ‘Very well, I won’t bore you with the exact chemical composition, but suffice to say that this is Adeptus Astartes grade explosives, mixed in with numerous chemical additives more commonly found in agricultural products. From chemical and spread density, it’s safe to say that this was a big bomb, one that was fabricated with a great many items purloined from the supply depots of Calth along the way. This wasn’t an attack of opportunity, whoever did this knew how to craft a powerful explosive compound and took their time in doing it.’

  ‘So far that just proves it’s our Iron Warrior,’ said Dante. ‘What else does it tell us?’

  ‘It tells us that he had time to set this up,’ said Milotas.

  ‘And it tells me that we’re up against a very cunning individual who has had time to plan out exactly what he’s doing,’ added Suzaku.

  ‘Then it is even more imperative that we find him.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Suzaku. ‘I just hope we’re looking in the right place.’

  Of the many duties an adept of Aries Pyros could be assigned, the security detail that kept watch on the surrounding tunnels, caverns and approaches to the geo-thermal facility was amongst the dullest and yet most sought after. This deep in a world of Ultramar, there was little need for security, for there were few guardians more thorough in their diligence than the Ultramarines.

  It was a task of unremitting monotony, which allowed the adepts stationed there time to pursue their own projects, contrivances and passions. Tech-Priest Dettela relished the time he could spend in the security hub. Between running diagnostics on his own internal systems he spent his time compiling statistical comparisons on the magnetic flux patterns within the unimaginable heat of the planet’s mantle.

  To keep a facility like Aries Pyros operational required precise attention to detail, as the slightest miscalculation in the shield harmonic matrix could have disastrous consequences. The deep magnetic flux of Calth’s mantle was chaotic and unpredictable, and every Mechanicus adept sought to compute an exact logarithmic proof that would allow the force shield harmonics protecting the facility to be generated more efficiently and thus earn the approbation of the High Magos.

  The power consumption of the field generators was ruinously high, taking up over half of the energy produced by the station. If that figure could be reduced, even by as little as ten percent, then the surplus power would be incredible. Using code fragments collated in the decades he had spent in the libraria of Mars, Dettela had developed a methodology based on topological mixing to better calculate the function of systems in a constantly varied-state environment. He hoped that this would lead to a predictive logarithm he could present to the conclave of Magi at the next symposium.

  With his internal systems dedicated to running trillions of calculations, it took Dettela a few seconds to identify the intrusive warning sound offering stimuli to his auditory receptors. He had never heard this sound before and it did not immediately register with him as to what it might be.

  Dettela paused the logarithmic equations and reorganised his brain chemistry to process outside stimuli. The world of calculus, algebra and calm ordered arithmetic fell away as the geometry of the physical world intruded on his senses. The security hub was a small chamber, buried in the heart of a tall tower that jutted from the semi-submerged geo-thermal facility like a lone lighthouse on a storm-lashed island in a sea of fire.

  Writhing mechadendrites disengaged from the brass-cogged output ports of difference engines one and two, but Dettela kept himself plugged into number three. The simpler base calculations of the lower powers could be kept running in the background. Info-spikes slid home in the logisters processing the surveyor inputs. The machinery that swept this cavern was necessarily specialised, as conventional apparatus would simply register an overload of electromagnetic hash and false returns from the electrically hostile environment of this depth.

  The display was a cascading waterfall of binaric shapes that transformed the void of the cavern into geometric areas, each one a precise volume and dimension. Any variance in either ratio would trigger an alarm and allow simple algebraic equations to form an exact shape of any intruding object. Dettela quickly scanned the lower levels of the cavern, but nothing untoward registered until he brought the upper levels into focus.

  Immediately he saw the disturbance in the uppermost reaches of the cavern, a darting shape that flitted between geometric zones like a migrating electron between two competing nuclei. The station’s systems had never detected any such intruder, and Dettela assumed that this was some form of glitch, the machine spirit reminding its users that it had been some time since its last appeasement.

  Then the dusty slate before him winked to life, the groaning cathode tube taking a tense six point four seconds to warm enough to display the extrapolated wire-frame image of the intruder. Dettela looked at it, knowing exactly what it was, but finding it hard to process the knowledge and reality of it.

  Its form was unmistakable, a remote surveyor drone used in forward reconnaissance, but of a design that was unfamiliar to him.

  ‘Identify,’ he said.

  The machine buzzed and spat a garbled blurt of binary until Dettela bowed his head and paused the background calculations he was running. The surveyor gear needed finesse and the full attention of its operator, and so singular an event demanded that he properly honour its discovery. Dettela switched from organic speech, letting the invocation pour from him in a ritualised form of binaric cant.

  ‘Holy Machine whose blessed workings are most exacting, grant me the boon of your wisdom. In sacred binary I honour you, with hexadecimal praises I offer my devotion, and with the voltaic light of my existence I offer galvanic energy to your inner processes.’

  Dettela sent a jolt of current into the machine, and the pict-slate brightened as its inner workings whirred with activity. A clattering of internal magnetic meme-plates shook the machine, and a whining squeal built until a shimmering image appeared on the slate, together with a warning in red-lit binary.

  ‘Fabricator’s Mercy…’ whispered Dettela, unconsciously switching back to the language of his birth.

  The wire-frame image was replaced by a grainy representation of what looked like a daguerreotype of an ancient book. The pages were faded and yellowed, with no indication as to its origin or authenticity. The pages were obviously from some form of armourers’ treatise, and the drone was clearly labelled with meticulous, yet simple clarity.

  Bartizan Class Remote Seeker Drone, Olympian Pattern.

  Dettela opened a vox-link to the skitarii barracks in the tunnels surrounding Aries Pyros.

  ‘This is Tech-Priest Dettela, designation 445355-919/Lambda.’

  ‘Proceed,’ answered a growling, atavistic voice in his ear.

  ‘Full alert,’ said Dettela with as much calm as he could muster. ‘There is an Iron Warriors seeker drone flying over Aries Pyros.’

  Though it was utterly inimical to human life, the surface of Calth was a place of savage beauty, and Sergeant Lerato often wished he could see it first hand, as opposed to viewing it through the Azurite Fist’s cupola viewing blocks. The horizon was a mixture of blue and yellow streaks, like a spill of paint across an artist’s canvas. Purple and orange hues bled into the mix as his eyes roamed higher until they blended into the black of the heavens and the tiny pinpricks of light from the stars.

  The planet’s blue sun was setting just over the mountains, and long, stark shadows knifed over a rad-swept surface that had once, according to legend, been amongst the most fertile of Ultramar; a garden to match Prandium or Espandor. That was all gone now, and the surfac
e of Calth was an irradiated wasteland, lashed by toxic winds from the poisoned sun that glowered like an unblinking cyclopean eye upon the world it had once nourished.

  With Sergeant Joelle’s squad loaded and strapped down, the mood had remained sombre, and everyone kept their thoughts to themselves. Luta kept them steadily on course, following in the dust wake of Calth’s Light. Aside from being forced to refill Calth’s Light’s tanks at the fuel depot housed in Guilliman’s Gate after a faulty gauge had informed Lorz he had a full reserve when the engine had clearly run dry, the journey had been without incident.

  Though life on Calth was lived underground, and its caverns were as light and airy as they could be made, Lerato had always believed there was something in the human soul that needed the expanse of an open sky. When he had finally been posted off-world, he had been surprised and a little disappointed to find he suffered from a mild agoraphobia whenever he went outside for any length of time. Not enough to prevent him performing his duties, but enough to make him crave the sight of a rocky ceiling over his head.

  He shook his head at the memory, and consulted the map scrolling across the hololithic display beside Luta’s raised chair. They were making good time across the steel roadway that cut across the Bakkerian Plain, and were in sight of the fitful glow of Highside City on the edge of the mountains.

  It had been a long day, and the rocking motion of the Chimera was lulling him towards sleep, but another hour should see them through the gates of Highside City. Then it was a short drive to where their eagle-fronted regimental headquarters stood on the edge of the vast, grav-compensated landing platforms.

  There they would bear their fallen comrades to their final rest in the company chapel, and honour their sacrifice for Calth. A full requiem would come later, but Lerato desperately needed to sleep before that. It would be an uplifting ceremony, as Prelate Justian wasn’t given to sentimentality; he was more a fire and damnation kind of preacher. The Chimera rounded a corner, and the silver-walled expanse of Highside City sprawled out before them.