Anarch

Sixteen: Close Quarters

Mkoll buckled the sirdar’s helmet back on. He glanced at the other three, made the Tanith hand-sign for mute, and walked off along the brig.

The interrogation he had observed on his way in was finished, and the cell door locked. He wondered if the Urdeshi colonel inside was still alive.

He hoped to the Throne he was not.

The two packson watchmen were still on duty in the security post. One opened the inner cage to let him through. The other stood leaning on the back grip of the sentry gun.

The packson with the key remarked that the sirdar had been a long time.

Mkoll replied that the best work often took a long time.

‘Harneth den voi?’ the packson asked. So you got what you wanted?

‘Den harnek teht,’ Mkoll replied. Everything it was possible to get.

With an open palm slap, he rammed the pain goad into the key-holder’s solar plexus. The man’s entire system shut down. His mouth opened to voice the unthinkable agony that was screaming through his nervous system, but his vocal chords and lungs no longer worked.

He buckled to the deck. The other watchman turned from the sentry gun in surprise as his comrade collapsed. Mkoll was already on him. The skzerret went in between his ribs.

Two kills, three seconds. No sound.

Mkoll used the watchman’s key to reopen the inner cage and dragged both bodies through. He stood in plain sight at the end of the brig corridor and made the hand-sign for clear.

Milo and Mazho hurried down to him. Holofurnace followed, limping.

‘Uniforms,’ Mkoll said.

Milo and the colonel stripped the packsons of their kit and pulled it on. The fit was poor, but it would have to do. Mkoll went back into the security post, and searched the area. Both packsons had been armed with old Fleet-pattern lascarbines, which were hooked on a wall rack. Mkoll took them down and checked them. Decent weapons, short-pattern for use in shipboard environments. The packsons had kept them clean and in good order. The more disciplined, Astra Militarum-style regimen observed by both Sekkite packs and the Blood Pact had some benefits. Milo and Mazho would have spare clips in the over-rigs of the uniforms they were acquiring, as well as ritual daggers. As they entered the cage in uniform, Mkoll tossed a carbine to each man.

‘Carry them down, over the crook of the arm,’ he said. ‘Packsons don’t shoulder weapons.’

Milo nodded.

Holofurnace appeared.

‘No disguising me,’ he said.

Mkoll knew there wouldn’t be. Most of what would follow was going to be improvisation, though Mkoll had talked them through a few basic plays.

Holofurnace took the big Urdeshi sentry gun off its tripod. It looked like a regular autogun in his paws. He picked up the ammo box and made sure the belt between box and weapon was slack enough not to jam with any sudden movement.

Mkoll opened the outer cage.

‘Someone will soon spot that the brig watch is unmanned,’ said Mazho. He was having difficulty getting his spectacles to sit comfortably inside the stolen helmet and its ghastly mouth-guard.

‘The plan isn’t perfect,’ Mkoll replied. ‘Sooner or later, someone is going to spot that not everything on board is the way it should be.’

They moved through the ship, rising to deck seven and then six. Mkoll led the way, and every time he heard movement or spotted personnel approaching, he signed to the men behind him, and Holofurnace pulled himself into cover: a bulkhead, a through-deck well, or an inspection bay. As soon as the contact passed, Mkoll moved them on.

At a junction on deck six they had to wait for almost fifteen minutes while work crews and servitor gangs moved machine parts through on trucks. Once it was clear, they hurried on, through a compartment airgate, and followed a shadowed walkway that ran along the side of a large processing bay. In the harshly lit space below them, they saw gun-crew servitors loading huge munition shells into the bare-metal clamps of conveyer trains. Tall figures in dappled golden gowns supervised the labour, shouting instructions through hand-held vox-horns. As each half-tonne shell loaded, the automated track rattled forwards and lowered them into deck shafts where they descended on hydraulic rotators into the autoloader magazines on the battery deck.

Mkoll and the others watched for a moment from the shadow of the rail. The enemy warship still had fight in it.

Mazho looked at Mkoll with one eyebrow raised. Mkoll shook his head. Due to their sheer size and power, shiftship munitions were remarkably stable and inert until selected for use. They could waste hours trying to force a shell to detonate, and even then there was no guarantee of a cascade in the magazines.

And they didn’t have hours.

On deck five, they waited as an excubitor strode past with two lekt psykers hobbling in his wake, then almost ran into a damogaur and squad of six packsons. Mkoll didn’t even have time to signal, but he knew Holofurnace must have slipped out of sight behind him because the damogaur started to question Mkoll and his two packsons about the location of an etogaur called Karane.

‘I haven’t seen him, damogaur,’ Mkoll replied. ‘Perhaps he is on the bridge with He whose voice commands the stars.’

The damogaur looked at him, annoyed.

‘The Holy Magister’s not on the bridge, you shit-stain,’ he snapped. ‘When was the Holy Magister last on the bridge?’

‘Apologies, damogaur, of course not,’ said Mkoll quickly. ‘I misspoke. I meant–’

‘No, I’ve tried there too,’ the damogaur replied. ‘The Oratory is closed to all at the moment. Karane must be ashore, then.’

He cursed.

‘What’s your name, sirdar?’ he asked.

‘Eloth, my magir.’

‘If you see Magir Karane, Sirdar Eloth, tell him the shipmaster needs those manifest orders by dawn. Dawn, you understand?’

‘Yes, my magir.’

The damogaur snapped his fingers, and his pack followed him away down the hall.

‘What was that?’ whispered Mazho.

‘Our objective’s no longer the bridge,’ Mkoll replied.

‘So where?’ asked Milo.

‘The Oratory.’

‘And where’s that?’ asked Mazho.

‘I have no fething idea,’ replied Mkoll.

They reached deck three, and almost immediately entered a large section that was undergoing heavy repairs. Work crews of industrial servitors were fitting new armour lining along a section of hull panel that ran for about sixty metres. Welding arrays sparked furiously. Slave gangs were wheeling out tubs laden with fused scrap metal and lumps of slag that had been stripped out from the failed lining.

Mkoll got his little squad in temporary cover, and then walked on through the repair zone alone. He spotted an open compartment where two provision officers in filthy golden robes were arguing about puncture sealant. The compartment was being used as a supervision post for the work. It was stacked with tools and rebreather sets. There was a small work table covered in junk and requisition dockets.

He strolled up to the provision officers, and as he did so, realised they weren’t packsons of the Sekkite host. They were V’heduak, companions of a different tribal order that served as the equivalent of Navy personnel for the Archonate Fleet. They were tall men, larger than Mkoll had realised when he first approached, their big-boned mass and heavy muscle speaking of many family generations serving in high gravity shift operations. He had encountered the V’heduak’s brutal tech-cannibal shock troops before, but not the ruling class. Their heads were shaved except for long, square beards, and they had dented blast visors lowered to their chests. Their faces were fetishistically covered in piercings, so many in the ears that the flesh was stretched. Their scalps were covered in complex tattoo work. Starmaps, Mkoll guessed. The realms and worlds they had made shift between.

They turned to look at him with augmetic eyes.

‘What do you want, soldier?’ one spat using a formal construction that emphasised disdain.

‘That his voice may never fade, I apologise, my magirs,’ he replied, throwing the Sekkite salute.

They returned it, grudgingly, glaring down at him.

‘My magirs, Etogaur Karane extends his respects,’ said Mkoll, trying to use the awkward construction of formal deference. He began to sweat. This had been a bad idea. His command of the Sekkite tongue was nothing like fluent enough to handle a strange accent and odd word-orders of the V’heduak sub-dialect. ‘Etogaur Karane wishes to express his concerns that the strenuous work here may disturb the Oratory.’

‘How?’ asked one.

‘We would not risk disturbing the Magir-Who-Speaks!’ the other exclaimed.

‘I merely express the concern, my magirs,’ Mkoll said. ‘The noise and commotion–’

One of the V’heduak sneered at him.

‘The Oratory is two decks hence, soldier,’ he said. ‘It would not be possible for us to interrupt the solace of the Magir-Who-Speaks.’

Two decks in which direction, Mkoll wondered.

‘Begone,’ said one of the V’heduak. ‘And tell your etogaur he is a weeping sore.’

‘I will at once, my magirs,’ said Mkoll, backing away.

He retraced his steps through the work area. The V’heduak had given him little, but the risk had been worth it. He had spotted something over their shoulders while they had been insulting him.

He passed a row of spoil bins that were packed with scrap plate and insulation materials. Without breaking stride, he dropped one of the grenades from the sirdar’s weapon’s belt into it. Red dot. He hoped that meant smoke.

It did.

In seconds, thick red signal smoke was pouring out of the spoil bin.

He hurried back to the V’heduak.

‘What now, you ulcer?’ one roared.

‘My magirs!’ Mkoll said, pointing. ‘A fire! In the waste tubs! Something has caught alight!’

Snorting with anger and surprise, the V’heduak pushed past him. Smoke was now clogging the back of the work space. He heard them shout for extinguishers, and begin to reprimand the servitors for using their fusing torches too close to scrap insulate.

With their backs turned, Mkoll stepped into the supervision post, snatched up the folded sheet of schematics he had seen lying on the table, and vanished entirely into the shadows.

‘What did you get?’ asked Milo.

Mkoll took out the thick fold of paper, and they opened it out.

‘Deck plans,’ he said. They were hand-drawn, a top plan and side elevation, and the work had been done with great skill. The ghostly traceries of the penmanship even revealed the intricate lines of principal power relays and coolant systems.

‘They were using it to supervise the repair work,’ he said.

‘No cogitators? No data-slates?’ Mazho asked.

‘They don’t trust digital records,’ Mkoll replied.

‘I think we can put it to better use,’ said Milo, and began to study it carefully.

‘I have a question first,’ said Mkoll. ‘Where the feth is Holofurnace?’

The hot, dark confines of the duct opened out into a long rockcrete gallery. It was a hundred and sixty metres long and thirty wide, an artificial ravine lit by the lambent glow of thick biolume algae. Steeply sloped rockcrete walls splayed out from the central channel, to form high and narrow overlook ledges that could be used as inspection walkways. By the phosphorescent light, Obel noted the large and heat-eroded stencil HALL 7816 on one of the rockcrete revetments. The channel bed running between the high, sloped banks was a mess of fused magmatic spoil through which ran a trickle of foul, liquefied waste. The air stank.

‘This is a better site for an ambush,’ Zhukova remarked.

Obel nodded. Meeting the Archenemy in the geotherm duct would have been a slaughter. The duct was only wide enough for two people, side by side. They needed room to deploy so they could bring more of their force to bear against a physically superior enemy.

Criid assessed the chamber quickly. It had clearly once served as an overpressure gallery to regulate geothermic flow at times of peak output. The remnants of huge ceramite gates stood halfway down the gallery. They had long since fused to immobility, but their purpose had been to stem or even shut off magmatic flow and geothermal pressure. Urdesh’s geothermic system was thousands of years old. Long ago, it had been a subtle system, expertly managed and regulated by dynast technicians who could acutely gauge, direct and govern the natural power.

Those delicate archeotech mechanisms had long since fallen into disuse. Now Urdesh’s power grid was an open network of tunnels that either fed or did not. Power modulation was done by the individual sites – the forces and facilities like EM 14 – that tapped into it.

But this now-defunct gallery had advantages. More space, more range. There was cover at their end, and further cover and firing positions provided by the open gates and the high rockcrete ledges. Criid could see the open mouth of the duct at the opposite end. That’s where they’d be coming from. It was the only vent out of the duct network serving the Gnosis Repository area.

That is, she hoped it was. If the adepts had lied to Pasha, if Zhukova had read the plan wrong, if there was another, redundant and disused spur they didn’t know about…

‘They’ve got to be close,’ she said to Obel. ‘Let’s make it here. It’s the best option we’ve seen.’

‘The only option,’ said Larkin.

Obel threw quick hand signs – defensive positions, here. The Ghost squads behind them began to fan out into the gallery, taking up firing positions around the duct mouth using the ends of the rockcrete revetments as cover. Mkhet and Boaz set up the .20. Lugging the support weapon and its firing stand all the way from the Turbine Hall had left them almost dead on their feet from heat exhaustion. Other squad members had carried the ammo boxes. Falkerin and Cleb prepped the two satchels of tube charges, and Ifvan handed the primed sticks out. In the tight confines of the chamber, explosives would be a last resort, and Criid made sure everyone understood that.

Lubba checked his flamer.

‘Keep it tight in here,’ Obel advised. ‘Backwash could cook our own people, especially if they’re up on the overlooks.’

Lubba nodded. He lacked Aongus Brostin’s gleeful love of fire, but he understood flames and flamers. He’d been a flame-trooper since he joined the regiment, and Larkin had once described him as ‘Brostin without the, y’know, nutso pyro aspects.’

Jed Lubba was a big man. Most flame troopers were. It took bulk and core strength to heft a full-size flamer-unit around all day. He was sweating profusely, his jacket off, his vest dark with sweat.

‘Nice and tight, sir,’ he promised.

Larkin and Okain clambered up the moulded foot-holds at the end of the revetments to reach the inspection walk, one on each side.

‘Feth, it’s high,’ Larkin complained once he was up.

‘Quiet,’ said Criid.

‘And narrow,’ Larkin added. He eased his way along, carrying his precious long-las carefully, and took up position at the top of the left hand gate, in among the rusted gears that had once opened and closed it. Okain had already set up on top of the right hand gate. Other Ghosts clambered up after them, taking up precarious firing positions along the ledges, some on their bellies. Obel wanted to maximise the number of guns they could bring to bear. Maggs and Zhukova picked their way along the channel, heading down to scout the remainder of the gallery and listen at the far-end duct.

‘This is recovery?’ Obel said quietly to Criid.

‘This is stopping them,’ she replied.

‘But they’re carrying the things,’ said Obel. ‘Gaunt wants the things, right?’

She nodded. ‘But he doesn’t want the bastards to have them. So if it comes to a choice, better no one gets them than they do.’

Lunny Obel didn’t look sure.

‘Pasha didn’t specify,’ he said.

‘I don’t think she knows either,’ said Criid. ‘Our orders were to secure and recover. That idea went up the wall. So now it’s recover or deny. Look–’

She dropped her voice low, and turned him aside.

‘Honest to Throne, I don’t rate our chances here. Just thirty-one of us, no support? These hostiles were cutting through skitarii fifteen minutes ago. We’ll be lucky to hold them. If we’re really lucky, we smoke them. Just pour it on. If there’s anything to recover after that, hooray for us. Bottom line, they don’t get past us with the stuff unless we’re all dead.’

‘These things are important, aren’t they?’ Obel said. ‘These eagle stone things?’

‘Feth knows why,’ she replied. ‘But yes. Clearly. They’ve sent in elites to get them. So if we have to destroy them to stop them taking them, so be it.’

Obel shook his head.

‘Hey,’ she said, nudging him. ‘Come on. Lunny? They’ve sent in elites, Gaunt’s sent us. The Lord Executor, no less. So what does that make us?’

‘Elites?’ Obel asked with a tired grin.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It makes us suckers and las-bait. But at least I made you smile.’

‘Feth you, Tona,’ he chuckled.

‘Sir!’ Sergeant Ifvan hissed.

Okain was hand signing from his position.

Maggs and Zhukova were returning down the channel. They were moving fast, dodging and sprinting along the dirty, uneven bed of the gulley.

Primary order, Obel signed.

Corrod raised his hand and the Qimurah halted. He peered ahead at a pale disc that showed where the duct opened into some grander chamber.

He looked at the detailed plans Ordinate Jan Jerik had given him.

Hacklaw glanced at him.

‘Damogaur?’

‘We’re approaching the gallery,’ he said. Hacklaw nodded. He remembered it from the way in.

‘If they’re smart and diligent, this is where they’ll try to stop us.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s the point I’d choose,’ Corrod said. He looked at the chart again. ‘Wide enough to deploy, tight enough to defend.’

‘I doubt our Imperial foe has the wit or ability to get a force down here fast enough,’ said Hacklaw.

‘And that is why we have been at war with them for ever,’ said Corrod. ‘That sort of thinking. We underestimate them. Our foe is smart and diligent. They sent soldiers to recover the stones. They wouldn’t have sent just anybody. Special troops. Trustworthy elites.’

Hacklaw nodded, chastised.

Corrod looked back at the duct mouth. He squinted, his neon-bright eyes searching. The vents were dulling his reworked senses badly. The mucosal resin excreted to protect his lungs from heat burn was clogging his normally hyper-sharp gifts of smell and taste, and the general heat elevation was making it hard for his eyes to detect human heat tracks.

But he could hear. The soft but urgent drumming of human hearts, elevated with tension. The skitter of loose stones. The clink of metal as clips were gently slotted into receivers.

‘They are there,’ he said.

‘We cannot go back,’ said Ulraw. ‘They will have secured the other end by now.’

‘I said nothing about going back,’ replied Corrod. ‘We are Qimurah, brothers. We ascend always. We follow the song of his voice.’

‘We rush them?’ asked Hacklaw.

‘Yes,’ said Corrod. ‘We will lose some. That is the price. But they will not be prepared for our speed or our fortitude. Remember why our magir wrought us thus?’

Hacklaw nodded. The Imperial preference for energy weapons, especially the las-form, had influenced the ritual evolution of the Qimurah. The ingeniants of the Heritor College had given earlier generations of their kind the ability to grow hardshell plates to absorb solid kinetic munitions. That had been back in the dim times of the First Human Wars. Now Qimurah were made to exude the resin coat that sloughed away energy fire. The ingeniants had developed the idea from the study of loxatl biomechanics.

Lasweapons were excellent tools against human flesh. But the Qimurah, while not invulnerable, were far more than that.

‘You remember the plan of the chamber?’ he asked.

The Qimurah nodded.

‘Hacklaw, take your warriors and scale the left side. Gehrent, yours to the right. Ekheer, charge the gulley.’

All the Qimurah hissed assent. They waited for a moment, neon light crisping in their eyes, as what once had been their sweat glands released more mucus to thicken the glistening coating of their flesh. Hacklaw, Gehrent and the warriors who would accompany them took off their boots. They focused with grimacing concentration, ignoring the pain, as they reworked to lengthen the talons on their fingers and toes. The chitin sprouted, cracking and growing, becoming ugly grey hooks.

Corrod settled the old, Guard-issue musette bag on his shoulder. It contained four of the stones. Ulraw had the other four secure in his satchel.

‘These get through,’ said Corrod. ‘That is all that matters. If I fall, if Ulraw falls, someone takes up the burden.’

‘Yes, magir,’ they whispered.

‘Now let us show this human filth how Qimurah fight,’ said Corrod. ‘For the Anarch, who is Sek, whose voice drowns out all others.’

It had been still and quiet for several minutes. The waiting tugged at Larkin’s nerves. He kept his eyes on the mouth of the duct, but had sighted his long-las at a rock in the channel bed some thirty metres in. That was a point nothing would cross without taking a headshot. His musette bag was open at his hip, restocks of over-charged cells ready to grab.

Come on then, let’s be having you…

Criid glanced at Obel. Sweat was running down his cheeks and neck, and it wasn’t just the merciless heat of the vent system.

‘Movement!’ Zhukova hissed.

Silently, without battle cry or howl, the Qimurah burst from the duct and came at them. The first glimpse of their enemy made the Ghosts flinch. They were inhuman. Tall as ogryn, thin as corpses, sprinting from the duct with astonishing stride-length, almost springing like bipedal game-bucks.

Their speed was the second shock. How could anything move so fast?

Criid felt fear flood through her. The enemy had flung themselves forwards to attack. They had known it was an ambush, a prepared position. Yet still they had charged.

The Qimurah bore in like a tide, like a cavalry charge, flowing down the channel, firing their lasweapons from the shoulder.

The first shots, the cracks echoing around the enclosed space, grazed and chipped the shoulders of the rockcrete revetment. Then the first two Ghosts dropped, knocked off their feet by inconceivably accurate strikes.

‘Fire!’ Obel yelled.

The Tanith guns began to blaze. A blizzard of las-fire ripped down the rockcrete ravine, countercut by fire from the overlooking ledges. Boaz opened up with the .20, pumping streams of rounds down the channel. The noise was painful.

The leading Qimurah buckled and fell. Those behind leapt over the fallen, firing. Some of the creatures struck down got up and began to run again.

‘Feth this,’ whispered Larkin. They’d outrun his pre-set sighting point before he’d even squeezed off a shot.

What the feth were they?

He fired, and the long-las barked. A Qimurah toppled as his skull exploded. His forward momentum kept his corpse tumbling and cartwheeling for several metres.

Larkin didn’t stop to enjoy his kill. He slammed in another cell and put a second hotshot into the face of another of the neon-eyed fiends. Okain had opened up too. The two snipers had dropped five of the creatures before the front of the charge had reached the rusted gates. The over-charged hotshots had true stopping power. Not even Qimurah bio-defences could block or soak up that kind of energy force.

The .20 was also taking a toll. The streams of heavy hard rounds were shattering limbs and shearing bodies apart.

They can’t get past this, Obel thought. Doesn’t matter what they are, doesn’t matter how fast they are, they can’t run this killbox. None of them are going to make it to us alive.

But the bulk of the Tanith firepower wasn’t the heavy crew-served or the two long-las weapons. It was standard lasrifles. Hits from them made Qimurah stumble and falter. Some fell, others took visible damage.

But they kept going. They soaked it up. Obel wondered how many times he’d have to hit the same target spot before he did any lethal damage.

The Qimurah came on. Their weapons were basic, but their supple, strong bodies allowed them to fire on the move with great accuracy.

And lasweapons were excellent tools against human flesh.

Four Ghosts were down. Five. Six. Boaz was hit in the throat and arm, and flopped back from the .20, which chattered into silence. Ifvan leapt in to take over, but the .20 had feed-jammed when Boaz lurched away from the tripod. He fought to unblock the receiver.

‘Clear it! Clear it!’ Obel yelled.

Larkin heard Okain scream out. Two more groups of the enemy were pouring up the revetments onto the ledge. They didn’t have to balance. Hooked claws on their feet and hands bit into the crumbling ’crete like pitons. Some were almost running along the wall on all fours like human spiders.

Larkin and Okain switched aim. They no longer had time to fire at the charging tide below. They began sighting over the gate mechanisms to fend off the horrors that were racing along the walls at their level.

Okain hit one, and the kill-shot hurled the scurrying scarecrow shape off the ledge, spinning and flailing. Larkin blew the head off the first one coming at him, then reloaded to greet the second.

On the far side, Okain missed with his third shot. Hacklaw vaulted over the corroded gears of the gate, and decapitated Okain with a slash of his fore-claws.

Down below, Maggs saw Okain perish.

‘On the walls! They’re up on the walls!’ he yelled. Several of the Ghosts at the duct mouth tried to angle up and fire at the Qimurah advancing along the edges. This further reduced the firepower concentrating on the main charge.

Hacklaw and two others had swept past Okain’s station, sending his corpse tumbling down the revetment, and fell into the Ghosts positioned on the ledge. The Ghosts tried to fight back, shooting point-blank at the unexpected attack, or trying to fend off the Qimurah with rifle butts or blades. The Qimurah killed some outright with their meat-hook claws, or simply threw the troopers off the ledge into the channel below, a drop that either killed or crippled them as they hit the rockcrete gulley below.

Ifvan got the .20 cleared, but the front end of the charge was already on them.

The Qimurah had left many of their kin dead and mangled in the rockcrete channel behind them. But with undimmed fury and unfaltering speed, the remainder of the reworked warriors swept into the Ghosts’ fragile line.