Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Read online

  Mordant was one such place. It was housed in a run-down industrial zone overlooked on all sides by the soaring flanks of promethium refineries, making the air more smuts than oxygen. Its antiquarian buildings were ramshackle and overlapping, a confusing jumble of steep-pitched, iron-tiled roofs and piped extractor housings. Gouts of steam from the settlement tanks rose up above them all, before pooling in a fug of milky condensation, swirling about the sensor-vanes like the mists of some primordial forest.

  Revus took his Shade in close, setting it down amid a berth already occupied by several big orbital landers. Each of those was marked with the gothic ‘M’ of the Mordant brand, and were as well-appointed and maintained as any such vessels ever were. A few service menials and servitors were working in the semi-darkness as he got out, hammering at open engine-hatches or guiding in heaps of unfinished material on grav-loaders. None of them paid him much attention, and he walked into the facility without challenge.

  Inside, the air was humid and stinking. Orderlies bustled along high gantries wearing stiff aprons, their faces hidden behind environment masks. Enormous vats bubbled, over which hung chains and hook-lines in a seething atmosphere of chemical vapours. Servitors with engorged upper bodies lumbered past him, hauling drums of solvents and metal pallets for onward distribution, their faces riveted with blinkers and their mouths clamped closed with permanent tox-filters. The far end of the chamber was entirely lost in hissing palls of steam, but Revus guessed this was just the start of the production line. From somewhere, he could hear what sounded like animal screams, which indicated, however improbably, that some living creatures had been brought here for slaughter and processing.

  He made his way up pressed-metal stairways, higher and higher until he was far above the vat-level. Long rows of administratum chambers ran under the eaves of the facility’s steep roofline, angled between the tangle of bracings and loader-crane supports. One of them, slightly larger than the others, was marked with a sodium-lumen panel indicating the site foreman. Revus headed for that one, and pushed the door open.

  The room beyond was occupied by a single figure – a fat man with a bald pate and bottle-lenses suckered over his eyes. He was surrounded by tottering heaps of rotting vellum, most of which had been shoved around and atop a single creaking cogitator unit housed in a chipped pea-green metal casing. Old protein-ration casings littered the floor, and the place smelled strongly of meat. An electro-date reckoner hung on the far wall, showing the Standard Terran Measure from forty years ago. There was a plastek figurine of Saint Alicia Dominicia on a side table amid a few burned-out tallow candles, and a greasy pict-screen showing cycle-images of sun-drenched paradise worlds.

  As Revus entered, the fat man looked up, and went white and sweatier.

  ‘Look, I spoke to the adept from the sector-tithe office last week,’ he said. ‘We explained everything then.’

  ‘I am looking for Elija Roodeker,’ said Revus. ‘One of your technicians.’

  The fat man blanched even more. His chubby fingers, stained with ink, pressed together into a cat’s-cradle. ‘Roodeker?’ he repeated. ‘Who are you, then? I’ll need to see an ident.’

  Revus let his gaze run idly over the clutter. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said, and waited.

  It didn’t take the man long, even in the murk, to spot the storm trooper insignia on his breast, and that made things quicker. ‘Ah, I, then she must be in her hab still,’ he offered, uncertainly. ‘She’s not reported in for several days. I meant to arrange a discipline schedule, but we’ve been overwhelmed with this tithe misunderstanding, and so–’

  ‘You did not enquire after her welfare?’

  The man squirmed. ‘I meant to, but–’

  ‘Where is her hab?’

  ‘Next level along, unit forty-five, thirty-four, though–’

  ‘I was not here. We did not have this conversation.’

  ‘But I–’

  ‘You have a successful operation here. You do not want to waste it.’

  ‘No, it–’

  ‘Clean this place, and yourself, up. Both are a disgrace.’

  Revus turned on his heel and walked out of the chamber, closing the door behind him firmly. From there, he walked along the gantry corridor, glancing down at the churning vats below. Further down the production lines, sheets of bleached and hairless hides were being hauled out of the chemical baths by creaking knuckleboom cranes, then swung around to be pinned to ranks of drying racks, each one mounted on mobile gurneys and propelled by more bulked-up servitors. High-ranking workers with shiny black protective suits and whirring oculi patrolled the long rows with flensing knives, scouring the pinned parchment sheets. Further on still, members of another labour-caste prepared dyes and branding irons for the finished pieces. None of them looked up. For all they were concerned, this crucible of curing and stretching and pinning might have been the entire world.

  Revus’ route took him away from it all soon enough, following a bridge over the industrial chasm below, a hundred metres down a connective gangway and back into the more utilitarian surroundings of a standard hab-block. After passing through a stuffy transition hall and taking a elevator six levels up, he found himself in one of those corridors that could have been anywhere on Terra – lightless, airless, stained with the smells of refuse and pockmarked with individual hab-unit doorways. He walked along until he found the one he wanted. As he went, the lone flyblown lumen popped on and off, as if marking time. A door slid open further down, and a straggle-bearded, emaciated face emerged. Its owner looked at him for a moment with startled, red-rimmed eyes, before blurting ‘And shall He be ever-watchful in these times!’ and retreating rapidly.

  Alone again, Revus faced the doorway to unit 45-34. He ran a quick scan for heat signatures on the far side, and got nothing. He stood to one side and pressed the entry chime. Still nothing. He drew his laspistol in his right hand and took out a lock-tumbler with his left. The device clamped on to the cheap fittings of the doorway, whirred for a second or two, then clicked it open.

  He went in. The layout was standard for a worker of Roodeker’s station – living chamber, bed-chamber, hygiene chamber. The lumens were out, so he activated his night-sights and closed the door behind him. The first room – the living chamber – was intact and tidy. A single table stood against the far wall with the remains of a meal on it. A single plasfibre couch, threadbare from use, faced a picter-unit that had been powered down. Hired vid-capsules were arranged on top of it – nothing unusual, just the standard motivational fare.

  He could hear thudding footsteps from the unit above, only barely muffled by the poor soundproofing. From somewhere below came the tinny hiss of a music-player running through military-band standards. It smelled, badly – a smell Revus was all too familiar with.

  Keeping his laspistol tracking ahead, he gently eased the door to the bed-chamber open. A double-width cot stood in the far corner, its sheets tangled. Elija Roodeker lay half propped up against a broken headboard, her grey face slumped onto her chest. Her tunic was soaked with blood from a single torso shot. She had a gun of her own in her right hand – a Callax R4 single-action revolver. Revus looked around, seeing a messy burst of blood on the opposite wall, and a spotty trail of it on the floor leading to the hygiene chamber.

  He went over to the corpse and blink-clinked for a helm-scan of her exposed right arm. The flesh was grey, cold and still stiff, indicating death within the last few standard days. He twisted the revolver out of her grip, and checked the chamber. A single bullet was missing.

  He took picts of the scene, then moved towards the hygiene-chamber. The door mechanism was faulty, and he had to manually haul it open. The space on the far side was tiny – a washstand, pulse-shower unit and lavatory. Roodeker had draped her lumen housing – also blown – with a collection of prayer-beads. Grainy printed picts of what Revus took to be her legal parents and work acquaintances ha
d been pinned around the cracked mirror. They looked vivacious and agreeable. The dead man lying in her pulse-shower cubicle, on the other hand, did not.

  Revus stowed his weapon and squatted down to examine the corpse. This one, too, had a single gunshot wound just below his shoulder. He had dropped his own weapon – a more powerful Hammerglaive VX projectile-pistol – into the shower pan, where it lay atop a dry pool of his own blood. He was wearing basic mesh protective gear, but nothing extravagant, and evidently insufficient to stop a Callax fired at close range. His head had rolled back, exposing the snow-grey flesh of his neck under a close-fitting helm. No sigils adorned his armour. The pattern was not distinctive – any hired operative would have access to similar. Revus lifted the man’s jacket, searched the pockets of his fatigues. Nothing. He pulled a glove off and took a fingerprint scan, then removed the helm and did the same with the eyeball.

  It was unlikely anything here would find a match with Huk’s records. This had very evidently not been a sophisticated hit, and the man almost certainly was not known to Courvain’s systems. He was, in all probability, some underhive trash gifted a gun and a mission, as anonymous in death as he had been in life. The chances of getting something substantive out of it all were slight, and there were other avenues still to check.

  And yet, Roodeker had been an informant for both Crowl and Gloch, and Roodeker was now dead.

  Revus activated the secure link to Courvain.

  ‘Yes, captain,’ came Aneela’s crisp voice.

  ‘Clean-up team to my coordinates,’ said Revus, standing up and activating his loc-beacon. ‘Two bodies to bring in. Prime Erunion for study when we get back – we’ll need to take a closer look at this.’

  Chapter Seven

  You did not see the Hall of Judgement until you were close to it. That was one of the surprising things about the ultimate home of the Adeptus Arbites, whose palaces throughout the Imperium were often the largest and most imposing constructions on any world. On Terra, however, the haunt of the most senior Judges of all did not tower over its surroundings like the Imperial Palace or the Nexus Axiomatic, for it was sited in a region of already gargantuan Administratum spires and was far older than any of them. As if preferring to slump in their shadows, the Hall’s onyx-black walls crept up almost unawares, before suddenly looming over you in a glittering facade of semi-mirrored darkness. Its sheer, steep sides were carved with the likeness of hook-beaked eagles, staring with obsidian-hard gazes through the drifting smog. The symbol of the Arbites – a clenched gauntlet holding a pair of scales – was engraved in lozenges twenty metres high on every facing panel. Pale blue lumens underlit the overhanging eaves of the great halls, interconnected by tightly crenelated walkways. A few scrawny pinnacles rose up into the higher airs, studded with advanced comms-nodes and sensor-spikes, but the greater mass of the place was set heavy, tomb-like in aspect, a warren of dense, lightless coffins spreading like an infection through the surrounding urban zones.

  They said that the Hall had been delved far deeper than it had been raised high, and that its true size was carefully hidden to avoid giving away the scale of the Arbites’ grip on temporal power. They said that its gaols still housed prisoners from the oldest ages of humanity, kept alive through their madness and decay to rave secrets into the ears of patient examiners. They said that there were secret courts buried at the very base of its internal labyrinth in which the face of the Emperor Himself would appear, reflected dimly in tarnished mirrors, to pass judgement over the living just as He did for the dead.

  They said so many things about the Hall of Judgement that some of them, surely, must have been true.

  Search-lumens swept across its many facets endlessly, tracing pools of hard white light over glossy, razor wire-topped battlements. Hunter-killers swarmed in packs, hovering low over guarded landing stages. Its cavernous hangar-maws were clogged with incoming and departing craft of all shapes and sizes – windowless felon carriers, talon-like Scrutiny gunships, gaudy formal transports bedecked with images of blindfolded angels. Every ship was tracked coming in, and every ship was tracked going out. Servo-skulls flocked like wingless sparrows around each ingress point and lumen bank, trailing their spinal segment-chains behind them as they darted and wheeled.

  At ground level, the many gates were all of the same design – high gothic arches raised atop long, wide stairways. Crowds were forever braving the gunsights of the enforcers to climb those stairs, whether to report wrongdoing, to plead innocence before the austere pulpit of the magistrates within, or perhaps to inquire after the fate of a relative or friend hauled into the cells. Such was the scale of the place that even finding the right gate could be the work of months. Once inside, navigating through the coal-black warrens was a task of similarly daunting magnitude. Hundreds of thousands of scholar-adepts shuffled through the innards of the Hall, its subordinate chambers and its auxiliary precincts, ferrying docu­ments between courtrooms and investigation-silos, shadowed at all times by the ever-present enforcers.

  The reputation of the Hall was so fearful that the mere mention of it was often enough to cow the renegade and reform the sinful. Its inhabitants were the ultimate guardians of the Lex, that impenetrable thicket of laws and precedents that bound every living human so tightly that even a scream was impossible. As a keen student of the law herself, Spinoza had always admired its agents – they had a purity of purpose about them that made them worthy of respect. Less numerous than the Astra Militarum, less powerful than the Adeptus Astartes, less specialised than the Inquisition; nonetheless, for the average citizen the Arbites were perhaps the most enduring and potent symbol of the Emperor’s power, the one they were most likely to come into contact with or know just a little about.

  Now dressed in the black armour-plate of a proctor, with Hegain kitted out as her attendant enforcer, she had a flavour of what it meant to wear the uniform in public. As the two of them strode up the high stairs towards the gate plaza, the many citizens clustered around her scampered to get out of the way. Unlike her Inquisition rosette, which only generated terror when glimpsed up-close, this night-dark kit – all heavy angles and exaggerated, ostentatious weaponry – was a clenched fist-crunch to the face, unsubtle and remorseless. The thick plates were unpowered, making her movements ponderous in comparison with her usual physical fluency. Even Hegain, whose standard storm trooper carapace plate was of much higher quality, looked like he was wading through mud.

  ‘I do not, as it is, much like the looks of all this here,’ he voxed to her on their closed comm system.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Spinoza said, forging a laborious path up to the gate level before striding out across the plaza. ‘Has there been some triggering event? Something to provoke them?’

  ‘Nothing at all, not a thing that I have been aware of,’ said Hegain grimly, keeping close, his hand resting on the handle of his shock baton.

  The mob was restive and numerous, pushing up towards the arch like a surge-tide, before breaking and ebbing under the attentions of the enforcers lined up ahead. Some of them seemed to be shouting, though the words were lost in the general roar of noise and movement. Several gunships dropped low, blasting their turbines straight into the thickest knots of bodies, but even that aggressive move failed to drive them back by much. As Spinoza and Hegain neared the gates, where the enforcers waited with weapons drawn, the air of ugliness got more intense.

  ‘It is like an illness,’ Spinoza mused, studying them all from behind the anonymity of her full-face helm. ‘They should be driven from the gates.’

  But that might not have been easy, not without considerable violence, and even then it was a large crowd to cow. For now, the assembled security forces seemed content to hold the Hall’s perimeter, merely preventing things from becoming worse. In all likelihood, watch officers were using servo-skulls to pinpoint the ringleaders, ready for surgical strikes from the gunships if needed. The Arbites would not
want to provoke an all-out riot on their doorstep if they could help it – better to let the cattle burn off their energy now and enact considered retribution later.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Hegain, shoving aside a robed, face-swaddled woman who hadn’t seen him until too late. She whirled to face him, her eyes flashing angrily, before realising who had pushed her. Even then she held her ground, staring at the two of them as if they were the worst devils of the outer dark, her fists balled. ‘And glad of it, I will say,’ he muttered, pressing on. ‘This is madness.’

  Spinoza barged more citizens aside to reach the open ground before the lines of enforcers. ‘Now we see how good the information from Revre was,’ she murmured. Maintaining her stride, she approached the regulator in charge of the defence lines and snappily displayed her credentials. ‘What is this all about?’ she demanded.

  The officer made the aquila. Despite his bulk and armour, he gave off a faint air of indecision. ‘Unknown, proctor,’ he replied, his voice muffled behind the wadding of his helm. ‘Awaiting orders to disperse.’

  Spinoza glanced back over her shoulder. It looked like even more were coming to join the mobs, streaming out from the ranked hab-towers beyond. ‘Do not wait too long, regulator,’ she said, taking her ident-wafer back.

  ‘No, proctor,’ he replied, distracted by the gathering unrest, his trigger-finger looking itchy. ‘In His service.’

  She passed through the line of troopers, Hegain close at her heels. Once across the gate threshold, under the shadow of the yawning arch, it became easier to move. The giant Arbites sigil hanging over them seemed to stare defiantly outward, as if daring the mob to follow them in. They would not have got far, had they tried to, but the fact that they were there at all was concerning.