Old Soldiers Never Die - Sandy Mitchell Read online

  “All clear,” I murmured, and Jurgen rekindled our light, sending the boldest of the local vermin, which had edged closer to investi­gate our unfamiliar sound and scent, scuttling for the refuge of the shadows.

  “Frakking disrespectful to the Omnissiah,” my aide commented, as the doorway we’d entered the tunnel by swung closed, to reveal another Mechanicus sigil on the outer side, along with an age-browned prayer slip adhering to it with the aid of a dollop of sealing wax. It looked just like an access panel to some part of the city’s infrastructure, of interest only to a tech-priest assigned to minister to that particular system; and as none actually existed, no one would ever glance at it twice. “Asking for trouble, I reckon.” A request which might well have been answered, given the fate of the man it had been constructed for.

  Further conversation being superfluous, I led the way at a rapid trot in the direction of our destination, conscious that time was of the essence; if we delivered the vaccine too late to relieve our comrades, my reputation for inspiring improbable last-minute victories in the face of certain defeat would take an embarrassing knock. Besides, I liked Kasteen and the others, and had no desire to see them reduced to revenant fodder. After a few moments the smell of the sewer got considerably more pungent, and I noticed the access shaft off to our left: a floorless niche in the stained brick wall, into the depths of which a ladder descended. A faint sound rose from it too, which at first I attributed to fast-flowing water, but as I became more aware of the pattern of the echoes, it began to sound suspiciously like voices.

  “Is someone down there?” Jurgen murmured, clearly having heard it too, and without waiting for orders he switched off his luminator again. I halted abruptly as we were plunged into darkness, and waited for my eyes to adjust. Sure enough, a faint glow was seeping up the shaft from beneath our feet.

  “Looks like it,” I replied, equally sotto voce. “But that’s not our con­cern at the moment. We need to get the vaccine delivered.” Not to mention the fact that I had absolutely no inclination to go looking for even more trouble. We’d report it when we checked in at the 12th, and send a squad of storm troopers to check it out. Chances were it was just a gaggle of civilians who worked down here looking for somewhere to hide from the revenants, in any case.

  “Right you are, sir,” Jurgen agreed, and snapped the light on again. Then pulled the trigger of his lasgun.

  For which I could hardly blame him. A group of the motile cadav­ers were blocking the tunnel ahead, at least a dozen strong, shuffling towards us, their hands outstretched. I cursed, blaming myself for having become so fixated on the sounds drifting up from below that I’d missed the noise of their approach. Then the crackle of the lasgun firing a full burst drowned out everything else anyway.

  “There’s too many of ’em, sir,” Jurgen told me, unnecessarily, as the leading revenant staggered under the blizzard of fire which was chewing its chest away. “I can’t get to the melta.” Which was also depressingly obvious; the moment he stopped firing to switch weap­ons, the whole pack would surge forwards. If we turned and fled, we could outrun them easily, but our way back into the palace was now blocked; and if I failed to deliver the vaccine, I’d never live it down. The sewer, on the other hand, was running in more or less the right direction, and if we took to that, we stood a good chance of evading the cadavers without adding too much time to our journey.

  “Down the ladder!” I shouted, hoping that the ghastly things couldn’t climb.

  To think was to act, and I scrambled down the rusting rungs in a heartbeat, landing ankle deep in a slick of foetid water. I hadn’t paid much attention to the layout of the sewerage system, not antici­pating a diversion through it, but my sense of direction proved as reliable as always, and I found it easy enough to visualise the way we needed to go. The light was stronger in that direction, enough of it leaking towards us to let me dodge hastily out of the way as Jurgen descended, with rather more speed than elegance[35] .

  “That’s shaken ’em off,” my aide opined, as the revenants milled uncertainly around the aperture in the ceiling, apparently unable to comprehend our sudden disappearance.

  “Unless any of them fall down the hole,” I added, unwilling to wait and find out if chance and gravity would achieve what volition couldn’t. I began to lead the way towards the light in the distance. “Mind your feet,” I added. “The main channel looks deep.”

  The sewer itself was about three metres high, with a vaulted rockcrete ceiling, the noisome water flowing down it confined for the most part to a channel down the middle; on either side the floor was raised to just below the surface, enabling us to make relatively rapid progress despite the bow wave which sloshed over our boots each time either of us took a step. Jurgen hesitated a moment, switching his weapons while he had the chance, and waded after me, his melta charged and ready for trouble. Deprived of the light attached to his lasgun, I switched my own on, and briefly regretted it as I caught sight of the flotsam swirling around my feet.

  We’d barely gone a hundred metres when a loud, echoing splash warned me that the inevitable had happened, and at least one of the cadavers had tumbled down the hatch after us. I glanced back, just in time to see another dim shape plummet into the stinking fluid beneath the hole, jostled in the wake of its fellow by the press of bodies above. Alerted by the sound, Jurgen swung round and dis­charged the melta, but whether he hit one of them I couldn’t say; the thermal backwash boiled the sewage around the target point, raising a cloud of rancid steam, which clawed at my throat and nasal pas­sages, and left my eyes stinging.

  “Should have stuck with the lasgun,” he said ruefully.

  “Just keep moving,” I said, with an apprehensive glance at the artifi­cial fog bank filling the sewer pipe. Within seconds it rolled over us completely, reducing visibility to a handful of metres and rendering our luminator useless, the light merely scattering back at us from the enveloping mist. I doused it, preferring to rely on the pattern of echoes to keep me close to the wall, and just hope that the shallows didn’t abruptly narrow, or disappear altogether. With our own light extinguished, the one in the distance pushed through the cloud of vapour in a fitful glimmer, which at least gave me something to aim for.

  Hearing the irregular splashing of faltering footfalls somewhere in the murk behind us, I drew my weapons and picked up the pace as much as I dared. With the sounds muffled by the surrounding fog, there was no telling now how many of the revenants were behind us, although at least the worst of it was beginning to clear. After a few more metres, the light I was aiming for began to shine more brightly, and I was able to pick out the dim shape of the lichen-slick wall beside me. The murmuring of voices was louder here too, and I strained my ears, grateful for the extra help it gave me in remaining orientated. I still couldn’t make out any individual words, but there seemed to be several people conversing.

  “Hadn’t we better warn them?” Jurgen said.

  “I suppose we should,” I agreed, as if the thought had occurred to me too, instead of the obvious one of just slipping past while the revenants were distracted with fresh prey. Then again, whoever was down here probably knew the tunnel system well enough to guide us to our destination more quickly than we could reach it by discov­ering an alternative route for ourselves. So thinking, I turned aside at the niche in the crumbling wall through which the light was shin­ing, as decisively as if that had been my intention all along.

  As I’d expected, the gap led to a metal door all but indistinguisha­ble from the counterfeit one through which we’d entered the tunnel complex in the first place, except that this one stood ajar, allowing the light and the voices of the occupants to leak out into the sewer. I was about to push it open, when my aide jerked a disapproving thumb in its direction.

  “Tech-priests aren’t going to like that, either.”

  “No, they aren’t,” I agreed, pausing to look at the Mechanicus icon embossed on the door. It had been defaced, apparently by repeated hammer blows
, but whether the vandalism had been deliberate or was simply a by-product of an attempt to force entry, I couldn’t have said. Nevertheless, instead of flinging it open and striding through, as I’d intended, I widened the gap just enough to admit us, and stepped into the space beyond, my weapons ready.

  It appeared to be a surge chamber, intended to accommodate a sudden increase in the water flow; a large, rectangular tank, with a steel mesh walkway running around it roughly two-thirds of the way up the wall. A ladder close to where Jurgen and I were standing gave access to the upper level, and, according to my instinctive affinity for environments like this, the metal door leading directly onto the catwalk probably opened straight into the tunnel from which we’d been forced to divert. All this, however, was peripheral to what we found inside.

  It was harder to say who was the most startled, us or the room’s occupants; Jurgen and I, because we’d been anticipating a party of sewerjacks cowering down here until either the emergency was over or the revenants found them, or the nest of heretics we’d blundered into, because, in the manner of their kind, they were delusional enough to think they were clever and safe from discovery. Be that as it may, you can be sure Jurgen and I recovered first, probably because our lives were punctuated by such unpleasant surprises so frequently we were almost used to them.

  “Intruders!” the nearest fellow howled, presumably in case the rest had failed to notice a couple of heavily armed men standing right in front of them. He was dressed in rags, and so caked with filth that he made Jurgen seem positively fragrant by comparison; and for a moment I found myself wondering if he and his fellows might be no more than harmless toshers after all. Then I noticed the inverted triangle of buboes suppurating in the very centre of his forehead, and all doubt was banished. I’d seen enough of the twisted works of Chaos by that point to recognise the mark of a willing worshipper of Nurgle, and struck out with my chainsword, decorating our immedi­ate surroundings with the degenerate’s entrails.

  Which, I’m bound to say, could only improve them. The floor was covered in ordure, just a few centimetres deep where we were stand­ing, but elsewhere heaped and moulded into drifts and mounds with some clear purpose behind them; repellent as the sight was, to say nothing of the stench, I felt a nagging sense of familiarity as I beheld it. I had no time to ponder its significance, however, as more of the madmen were running into the attack, slithering a little on the dung-slick floor, rusted blades and sharpened bones whirling in their hands. I downed one with a flurry of laspistol shots, and turned to parry the strike of another, whose flaking blade exploded in a shower of oxidised shards as it met the spinning teeth of my own. Before I could dispatch him, the vivid flare of Jurgen’s melta dis­charging lit up the room, dazzling me as it so often did in a confined space, and the wretch slipped under my strike, taking advantage of my momentary disorientation to stab up between my ribs with the sliver of broken metal remaining to him. I evaded the clumsy thrust easily, taking his arm off at the elbow for his pains, and he collapsed, howling, while my aide cremated another of his brethren.

  “Shut up,” I said, irritably, “I can’t hear myself think,” and silenced him with a swift kick to the throat which crushed his larynx, leaving him to thrash about for a few minutes until he expired from lack of breath.

  “Most impressive,” a voice drawled, and the magister of the coven strode forwards to challenge us, with the lazy deliberation of a tarocchi player who thinks he holds all the Inquisitors. Despite a body so deformed with tumours and buboes he seemed less human in countenance than an ork, he moved with the easy grace of scarcely contained abhuman strength; one eye was swollen shut and weep­ing pus, while the other was bright and febrile. He barely gave the remains of his dismembered and vaporised acolytes a second glance as he picked his way through the heaps of filth with surprising fas­tidiousness, pausing to reposition a rotting fruit or a decomposing rat corpse here and there as he came. “But I wield our Grandfather’s gifts directly.”

  “And I wield a laspistol,” I said, in no mood to bandy words with a madman, pulling the trigger as I spoke and putting a las-bolt through the middle of his head. A gout of corruption gushed from the site of the wound, and he staggered, a look of almost comical astonishment on his face, then, to my dismay, the diseased flesh began to flow back together, knitting seamlessly around a fresh, pus-leaking canker.

  “Another bloody wyrd,” Jurgen muttered, bringing the melta to bear. “Why does it always have to be wyrds?”

  “It doesn’t always,” I reminded him. “Sometimes it’s ’stealers, or necrons, or mutants, or... something.”

  “Every time we go down a hole,” Jurgen persisted, with the distemperate tenacity he generally exhibited when he felt hard done by. “It ought to be against regulations.”

  “That was unforgivably rude,” the heretic said, sounding as though I’d just committed some social faux pas at a cotillion he was host­ing. He reached down and plucked a human skull, still decorated with scraps of rotting flesh, from one of the piles of filth in the middle of the room, and the reason for the nagging sense of famili­arity I’d felt on entering suddenly snapped into place. The whole chamber was a three-dimensional map of the city, like the one in the hololith back in the operations room, but sculpted in ordure and waste instead of light. And the skull had been resting on the mound representing the governor’s palace. “I had been willing to let you share in the joys of Grandfather’s blessing, but you don’t deserve such an honour. So I’ll just bring a few of his pets here to tear you apart instead.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said, the whole thing making sense at last. That must be why the walking dead had flocked to the palace; this lunatic had found a way of directing them. Samier had told me he’d seen the same thing on Ferantis, although I hadn’t expected to wit­ness it for myself. “You really think you can use one of the revenant heads to order them about?”

  “And why not?” I could say that the light of insanity blazed up in his one good eye as he spoke, but it had actually been blazing pretty noticeably from the first moment we saw him. If you’re going to sell your soul to the embodiment of physical corruption, and beg it to riddle you with disease, you’re hardly playing cards with a full deck to begin with, if you ask me. “Their resurrection is a gift of Nurgle, to his handful of faithful followers. After years of hiding our true alle­giance from the lackeys of the corpse god, he has at last rewarded us by sending his blessing to our world.”

  “I hate to burst your bubble,” I said, “but it was pure chance the plague carriers ended up on Lentonia. They could have been reas­signed anywhere. And I doubt there’s a planet in the Imperium without a few deluded fools trying to suck up to the lord of the mid­den[36] . You’re nothing special.”

  “Special enough to commune with our ever-living brothers,” he retorted, clearly stung. “And now this conversation is at an end.”

  Warned by a sound behind me, I turned, to find the revenants which had followed us down the hole from the upper level entering the chamber. Both of them looked pretty much the worse for wear, particularly the one Jurgen had winged with his melta shot back in the sewer, which groped its way in with one arm reduced to a fused and smoking stump. I decapitated it with a single swipe of my chainsword, then turned to finish off its companion with a flurry of blows before it could get within arm’s reach of me. Throughout the brief burst of action, my aide kept his melta pointed squarely at the wyrd in front of us.

  “You were saying?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Then it seems I must take care of you myself,” he said, with a faintly irritated snap. He opened his mouth impossibly wide, the jaws cracking audibly as they distended, and a torrent of foul-smelling vomit spewed towards Jurgen and I, far too much of it to have been contained in a single body. Where it touched the floor, or the piles of filth, everything dissolved with a sinister acidic hiss. I leapt instinctively behind my aide for cover, a good call as it turned out; the torrent of corruption parted around him, f
lowing harmlessly on either side, to leave us both standing unscathed.

  “My turn,” Jurgen said, pulling the trigger of the melta, and oblit­erating the stupefied expression of the magister along with the rest of his face, head, and upper torso. The twitching body fell into a tower of reeking corruption, intended to signify one of the inner hab-blocks if I remembered the streets in that quarter right, with a liquescent squelch, and flailed around blindly. Its hands twitched, grabbing handfuls of filth, with which it seemed to be trying to patch itself up. Jurgen took a couple of steps closer, and the thing’s motion became more frantic and erratic. Then, as it came fully within his warpcraft-nullifying aura, it finally lay still. “Regenerate this,” Jurgen said vengefully, and vaporised the rest of the body with a point-blank shot.

  “Good man,” I said, feeling he deserved a pat on the back, and made for the ladder I’d first noticed on entering. The rungs were rusty, but seemed solid enough, and I scrambled up them as quickly as I could, eager to put as much distance as possible between myself and our nauseating surroundings.

  As I’d anticipated, the door on the catwalk led us back out into the service corridor we’d been forced to divert from, and I cracked it open cautiously; or as cautiously as possible, given that both hinges and locking mechanism were thoroughly rusted, and it squealed like a bayoneted gretchin as I pulled it ajar. Given our surroundings, I had no olfactory warning of my aide’s approach, and the groaning of the door drowned out his footfalls, so I must admit I jumped a little when he spoke.