Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne Page 17

  ‘Not too close,’ said Crowl, shunting a precision-mark from the Shade’s machine-spirit. ‘Take us down here.’

  Revus dropped yet further, now virtually skimming the tops of the cracked rooflines below, before reaching the dropsite. Swinging the Shade’s engines over on their axes, he set the gunship down in a deep shaft between the forest of horizontally aligned pipelines. The largest of them was over ten metres in diameter, and snaked off into the distance, bound by enormous brace towers.

  The engine hissed out, and the cockpit vibrations shuddered away. Crowl took up Sanguine, Revus his hellpistol. Down at ground level it was as dark as night, and the hunched shells of the architecture loomed into a fire-tracked sky.

  Crowl descended, touching down lightly onto a stained deck of riveted iron. Revus crept ahead, his helm’s lenses lit faintly with a blush of blood-red. A revived Gorgias swayed into the air above them both, its lumens glowing softly.

  Crowl sniffed. All he got was the thick stink of promethium, tight and caustic. The place didn’t look like Terra. It didn’t sound or feel like Terra, and it certainly didn’t smell like Terra. Less than two hours’ flight from Courvain and they might have been on a different planet.

  ‘Extraordinarius,’ whispered Gorgias.

  Crowl activated the location markers on his retinal feed, triggered a proximity detector and glanded a small amount of a moderately effective painkiller.

  ‘No argument,’ he said, moving out into the dark.

  The Titan staggered down the long avenue, its weapon-arms festooned with pennants and its motive-units growling with steam and smoke. Rockcrete rippled under its crushing tread, the air around it shimmered with engine-heat. Its dog-snarl head hung low, slung under a thick cowl-carapace. Mega bolter and turbolaser arms swung in counterweight rhythm, encrusted with a boiling coating of ritual oils.

  Behind the Titan came the battalions – first skitarii, macroclades arrayed in phalanxes of gold and red, an eerie precision to their massed marching. Behind those, esoterica from the Martian auxilia, secutors and myrmidon destructors, gouting steam of their own from closed mouthguards. And then, to emphasise the essential unity of the bipartite domains of mankind, the Astra Militarum, whole regiments of them in their varied, chequerboard livery, crawling in squares of infantry, flanked by the shaking hulls of mobile armour and followed by rows of tracked artillery pieces, their high-ratcheted gun barrels daubed red and their turrets bedecked with flags.

  They moved up from the fortresses of the Lion’s Gate space port, through the great avenues overlooked by the requisitio-basilicae of the Departmento Munitorum, cheered on all the way by thousands of carefully choreographed citizens. Every viewing balcony was taken, thronged with generals in ceremonial robes, adjutants with augmetic monocles, commissars-general in real-leather greatcoats and high-peaked dress hats.

  Flights of Thunderbolt heavy fighters scored overhead, their engine-roar making the spire flanks shudder, booming through the inter-tower chasms before releasing clouds of vivid red ink bombs that tumbled earthwards in bloody tentacles.

  The procession marched on, moving into the sacred Ways of Mourning, passing the linked citadels of the Estates Imperium, the pleasure palaces of the Courts Exquisite, the hyper-habs of the Administratum Centrum Subsector Solar, and the saturnine relay hubs of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. From there it headed out towards the many-columned processionals angling towards Dorn’s Redoubt, the plazas of the Nine Primarchs, and then along the arrow-straight road towards the Outer Palace, where the assembled prefects of the Imperial Household were waiting to formally greet them in ranks a thousand deep.

  From high up, Spinoza watched them march. The air around her was fragranced with something floral, the chamber filled with the soft chiming of a mirrorharp. Menials glided between the guests with empty expressions on plastic faces, decked in sharp-hemmed robes of nightshade. The viewing window was a crystalflex portal rimmed with butter-yellow gold. All those present at the spire’s summit were senior officers in the Terran court hierarchy – Administratum directors general, Novators of the Houses, subsector ambassadors. They looked down on the crawling columns in the streets below with idle disinterest. The hum of conversation, hushed to mask a hundred conspiracies, went on unabated as the Mars-pattern Warhound led the crushing display of Imperial strength onwards to its destination.

  ‘I was not sure whether to come,’ Spinoza said, looking uncertainly at the plate of sucrose-dusted sweetmeats handed to her by a golden-eyed youth with flawless pale blue skin.

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ said Rassilo, chewing steadily, her hair glimmering under the soft lighting. ‘That was why I left the contact details in the file. So you’d have an outlet, if you needed it.’

  ‘And you thought that I would.’

  ‘I didn’t know. Have some of this food. It’s real, all of it.’

  Spinoza put the plate down. ‘Did you know he is sick?’

  ‘He’s been in loyal service for over a century. We can postpone the drain of time, we can’t destroy it.’

  ‘Is it known?’

  Rassilo shook her head. ‘Not for certain, not by me. I did wonder, but then we’re all carrying secrets, are we not?’

  ‘Why did he want an acolyte?’

  ‘He did not have to specify a reason.’

  ‘And has he always been alone, then? The files were redacted.’

  ‘He has not always served on Terra.’

  ‘And… relations?’

  Rassilo raised a plucked eyebrow, and her rejuve-stiff face creased a little. ‘Family. Now you say it, it sounds quaint – something a hive-worker would cherish. Do you think that likely, having met him, knowing what he does?’

  ‘And yet he is flesh and blood. Such things have been known.’

  ‘Why would you ask it, child?’ Rassilo reached for a silver goblet in the shape of a diving cetacean, and took a delicate sip of a clear liquid. ‘You look tired. I trust he is not working you into the ground.’

  Spinoza looked back out at the procession, still grinding its way towards the distant Palace heights. At such a distance the individual soldiers were impossible to make out, merging into regimental squares, like immense human tiles sliding over an iron-grey ground.

  ‘I care not for rest. I have not hunted well, not yet. I must adjust to this terrain.’

  Rassilo laughed, but not unkindly. ‘What’s your quarry?’

  ‘A False Angel to set against the true one. His gangs are running through the underhives. We kill a few, we discover more. They are ritual killers, some kind of blood cult, but their master eludes me.’

  ‘They mutilate their victims,’ said Rassilo. ‘They leave the excruciated bodies to be found by the authorities. Something in the pain of it – a rite? – fuels their devotion.’

  Spinoza turned to look at her. ‘You are tracking them too.’

  ‘The Feast brings them out of the dark. Maybe the same ones as yours, maybe an allied cabal. But I’ve not seen work quite like this, not here.’

  ‘I encountered an operative – Aido Gloch. You know of him?’

  ‘Quantrain’s interrogator. Yes, by name,’ said Rassilo.

  ‘He was hunting a woman he called Falx. She was well trained, well equipped. If there are more like her, then it is to be taken seriously.’

  ‘If Quantrain is involved, then it already is.’

  ‘I do not feel we are close enough to them. Time is running out.’

  Rassilo’s gloved hand hovered over a plate of sweetmeats before deftly selecting one of the more outlandish – a lurid green confection studded with nuts. She ate it, slowly chewing, her attention taken by the spectacle of the procession.

  ‘There was a time when I enjoyed Sanguinala,’ she said. ‘A celebration of dominance over the dark. That’s why they light the fires, to push the shadows back. Now even this is threatened,
and it angers me. For one day we should be able to rest, eh?’ Rassilo smiled grimly. ‘A void-hauler exploded in orbit. Destroyed completely. An accident, they’re saying – a plasma drive breach that flooded the engines. To have these accidents now… I don’t have much faith in accidents. There’s fate, there’s will – these are the drivers.’ She put her goblet down. ‘I think you’re right, child. I think your judgement’s sound, which is no doubt what he wants from you. For what it’s worth, my agents believe the Boreates hives are at the heart of it, and I’ve sent more in. Consider hunting there – you may have better luck.’

  Then she drew closer, placing her hand on Spinoza’s, the leather glove over the ceramite gauntlet.

  ‘I respect your master,’ she said, her voice lowering. ‘More than you know, and I will not oppose him either openly or in secret, but know this – if you need anything, if you need greater force of arms for this purpose, which is vital, then you have the means to contact me. Do not hesitate – you promise me this?’

  Spinoza looked back into Rassilo’s calm, severe face.

  ‘If it is needed,’ she said, finally reaching out for some of the food, ‘yes, I promise.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  These are projectile impacts,’ said Revus, squatting down to examine further.

  The sky, such as it was, had long since disappeared. They were travelling down long alleys overlooked by the hulks of old storage hoppers. Above them rose abandoned conveyor belts, criss-crossed over one another with the old tracks hanging like entrails from the racks. Dust and debris had settled everywhere – scales of rust, clots of old ash from the forges, swarf from the machining sheds.

  Crowl limped over to the captain. It was not the first sign of fighting they had seen – a turbine housing had been almost completely destroyed, its protective shell melted into grotesque stalactites.

  ‘But not ordinary bullets,’ he said, studying the marks.

  ‘Galvanic charges,’ Revus said, running his finger down the impact edge.

  Crowl ran a trace heat-scan over the marks, and received the same answer as before. ‘A couple of weeks old,’ he said, looking at the results. ‘Maybe more.’

  They pressed on. The chambers, dark and hot, echoed with emptiness. Infrared overlays on their helm-feeds showed vast halls soaring away, most empty, some clogged with old machinery of unguessable purpose rotting in the shadows. Massive, static chains hung from track-lifters mounted on the distant ceiling.

  They reached a pair of doors, jammed open with the skeletal remains of something – a servitor, perhaps, wedged amid the crushing jaws. Its body was a mess of blown metal and burned organics. They stepped over it, and the dark grey clouds became visible again, framed between jagged ziggurat flanks.

  The first landing stages were up ahead – a valley floor a hundred metres wide, nestling between mountainous overlooking parapets and dotted with observation towers. More platforms rose up beyond, elevated on lattices of heavily oxidised girders.

  Crowl deactivated the infrared scans and swept the area ahead for movement. A mournful wind, breath-warm and stagnant, stirred the clutter underfoot.

  ‘More of it,’ he said, pointing to a series of blast-marks on the nearside walls.

  Revus nodded, venturing out onto the first of the stages. The red-brown dust reached his ankles. Gorgias swayed up into the air, his sensors clicking.

  ‘Up ahead,’ it voxed. ‘Pulpitum superus.’

  Crowl and Revus moved across the empty stage, then the next, before reaching a ladder scaffold leading up to the first of the elevated platforms. Once up on its lip, Crowl immediately saw the difference – the debris had been blown clear of this one, exposing a bare, blast-charred rockcrete apron. The platform was as empty as the rest, but a ship had come down recently, leaving the carbonised scars of its landing.

  Crowl scanned the residue while Revus scouted ahead, shadowed by a wary Gorgias.

  ‘Same time-marker,’ Crowl noted. ‘Give or take.’

  ‘This is where they unloaded it,’ agreed Revus.

  Crowl looked up. On the far side of the stage were two great hangar doors of corrugated metal, marked with flaking chevrons and still partially open. The doorway led back into the enclosed interior, a chasm cut into the heart of a mountain.

  ‘Then we follow the trail,’ said Crowl, setting off.

  The opening was just big enough for them to squeeze through. More blast-marks discoloured the exposed adamantium panels, clustering more thickly now. Crowl reactivated his infrared overlay once enclosed by the dark again, and saw the thick streaks of black glistening on the floor.

  ‘Blood?’ he mused.

  ‘Oil,’ said Revus.

  ‘Much the same thing, here.’

  They crept through the shadows, back within the caves of iron. Hauler-claws hung immobile, though their joints were no longer fused rigid from inaction – some of them had been employed recently. Another doorway beckoned, its frame twisted and broken. From the chamber beyond came the echoing growl of active machinery.

  ‘Now we go carefully,’ said Crowl, leading the way, holding Sanguine ready.

  They went down, following the orthogonal lines of the regular corridor-patterns. Signs of struggle grew more frequent – they passed the contorted remains of skitarii guards, their cloaks ripped apart and their innards scattered. Long-barrelled guns lay discarded, some still clutched by their operator’s claws.

  ‘It’s getting more intense,’ said Revus.

  ‘Fighting among themselves?’ Crowl speculated, skirting a decapitated Mechanicus foot-soldier. ‘Or fighting what was brought down?’

  ‘The voidship couldn’t have been that big. How many troops could they have crammed in?’

  Crowl remembered Spinoza’s unease. Chem-weapons?

  ‘The Mechanicus receives one of its own ships,’ he said, ‘carrying something men are prepared to die to protect. Wherever it goes, there is blood.’

  Gorgias, high above them, voxed a sharp warning. ‘Proximus,’ it whispered. ‘Martians.’

  They went on in silence. The next chamber was truly colossal, opening up to a high shaft that rose and rose, its eventual terminus indistinct. Narrow ledges ran around the shaft’s rectangular walls, one after the other in series. As they crept across its chamber’s base, Crowl detected movement and froze. Revus had already trained his pistol, but the targets were too far away – a pair of stilted figures limping along one of the ledges, two hundred metres up. They gave no indication of having spied them, and eventually disappeared into a portal on the far side of the shaft.

  ‘Skitarii?’ Crowl asked.

  Revus nodded. Then they slipped through another portal and into a much smaller space – a chamber in the form of a geometric interior, its walls and roof angular and highly finished. The walls were covered with more blast-marks and black stains. On the other side of the chamber, twenty metres away, was a further portal, this time barred and sealed.

  ‘I can break it,’ Revus said.

  ‘Hold.’ Crowl looked around, scanning the walls. The vertices glimmered back at him in grainy false-colour. ‘There’s something here.’

  He moved closer to the left-hand wall, stooping low, before running his fingers over the surface. In the metal, barely detectable, was a shape, scraped into the paintwork. Amid the rest of the debris it was easy to miss, but then it had been designed that way – a relic-sigil, one of several hundred used by members of the Inquisition’s various branches.

  Revus backed up, watching over the two portals. Gorgias floated over Crowl’s head, observing.

  Crowl pulled a combat knife from a sleeve at his calf and pressed it against the panel edge. Dust cascaded, but it remained solid. He tried the other side, probing carefully. Eventually the tip of the knife slipped into the join, and he carefully levered it open. On the far side was a narrow void, hollowed out by wh
at looked like plasma-burns. Nestled within the melted metal was a skull-shaped bead the size of a thumb, carved from what appeared to be onyx.

  Crowl took it, rolled it in his palm. ‘Vox-capsule,’ he said.

  Gorgias hovered lower, fascinated. ‘Ordo Xenos,’ it voxed.

  But then Revus was backing up further, his weapon trained on the closed portal. ‘Incoming signa–’ he started.

  The doors slammed open, squealing on corroded runners. Something serpentine writhed on the far side before bursting towards the gap, a hydra of metal links, thrashing in a frenzy. The tech-priest magos swelled into focus, multi-limbed, clad in thick bronze-plate armour over a hollowed-out skeleton of iron, and swathed in robe-strips of Martian-red. Multiple eyes, green as burning emeralds, glowed in the dark from under a tattered cowl – and then the creature was inside the chamber, unravelling, uncoiling and extending until it towered over them. Mechadendrites unfurled, revealing circular saws, rotating claws and needle-hammers.

  ‘Remain static!’ it bellowed, the sound coming from grilles implanted across the creature’s chest. ‘Weapons down! Surrender selves!’

  On return to Courvain, Spinoza did as she was bid and took the esoteric readings from her auspex and handed them to the chirurgeon Erunion, who seemed, in addition to his role as flesh-flenser, to be the one to whom anomalous tech was submitted.

  ‘I am a lover of systems,’ he told Spinoza, taking up the auspex data and feeding it with some care into his own diagnostic apparatus. ‘Human bodies, cogitator innards, binaric sequences. They’re all the same to me.’

  Spinoza had smiled, or attempted to. There was something wholly unsavoury about the old man, with his pink eyes, his wattle-neck, his unwavering stare. ‘If you unearth anything,’ she said, ‘you have my vox-access.’

  Then she left him to his slabs and his machines, happy to be away from the smell of antiseptic and ritual oils. She went next to her own chambers, where more files awaited her attention. Some were the ones from Huk, some she had brought from Rassilo detailing actions in the Boreates sector. After ingesting a regulation nutrient-boost to maintain alertness, followed by a caffeine slug, she started to work through them, reading official report after official report. All were in the format she was used to – headed with devotional mottos, followed by cross-references to other investigations in other archives, most untraceable, then transcripts of interrogations punctuated with redacted sections and unintelligible responses. The latter became more frequent as the transcripts went on, until, with grim inevitability, they ended with the formal expression qui exspiravit and the monologues terminated.