The Emperor's Finest

TWENTY-ONE

DESPITE SEVERAL CLOSE calls with wandering greenskins, we eventually made it to the far side of their enclave without serious incident; and I must say I felt a strong sense of relief as the last lingering glow of its luminators faded into the darkness at our backs. True, we were forfeiting whatever protection from the genestealers we'd been deriving from its proximity, but every step we now took brought us closer to our goal. We were still some appreciable distance from the Redeemer-class wreck we'd first boarded, which meant I was having to find our way purely by luck and by instinct. But my old underhiver's affinity for environments like this seemed as reliable as ever, and I was fairly confident that another couple of kilometres would bring us to the area I'd seen magnified in the hololith on the Revenant's bridge. Brief as that glimpse had been, what now felt like a lifetime ago, I was sure that once we reached the area it delineated I'd be able to recall enough detail to accelerate our progress considerably, so I pressed on as quickly as seemed prudent, as anxious to reach it as you might expect.

I was still more than aware of the danger from genestealers, of course, and kept my ears open for any tell-tale scrabbling in the darkness, but the further we got from the greenskins the more my spirits rose. At the very least, it meant we could concentrate on one threat at a time.

'We'll have to go back, sir,' Jurgen said, from a few metres in front, sounding no more discouraged than if he was letting me know that my morning tanna was going to be a few minutes late. 'It's a dead end.'

'Frak,' I said, feelingly. We'd been making good progress over the last half hour or so, having hit on a relatively unobstructed passageway, but we'd passed few side turnings which looked passable, and none at all in the last ten minutes. To the best of my recollection, retracing our steps to a point where we could branch off with a reasonable chance of finding a parallel route would take us uncomfortably close to the orks again, not to mention losing rather more time than I felt we could afford.

I was about to turn away, when a faint, regular pattern flickered into view in the circle of light cast by Jurgen's luminator, all but obscured by the patina of rust and accumulated filth adhering to the metal wall in front of us. I moved closer and raised a hand to brush the worst of it away, rendering my glove almost as disreputable as my much-abused headgear in the process. 'Can you hold that light steady?'

'Of course, sir,' Jurgen replied, leaning a little closer to see what I was doing and bringing a strong blast of his unique aroma with him. Preoccupied, I barely noticed, tracing the faint Gothic lettering my efforts had made marginally more legible. 'What does it say?'

'Emergency bulkhead,' I picked out laboriously, in what had once been authoritative capitals, followed by a series of letters and numbers, presumably identifying the section of the vessel which lay beyond. 'It must have been tripped by whatever happened to the ship this once was.'

'Like the Hand of Vengeance,' Jurgen said, no doubt remembering the thick slab of metal which had slid into place to seal off the decompressing section we'd been trapped in when our transport ship had taken a hit off Perlia. I shuddered, the same recollection striking me. 'Can we get it open, then?'

'We can try,' I replied, a little dubiously. We'd manhandled plenty of obstructing hatches open on our unintended hike through the bowels of the space hulk already, but this one seemed heavier and more obdurate than most. I glanced around the litter of debris surrounding us. 'We'll need something to lever it open, though.'

Fortunately we found a metal bar some three metres in length, which seemed stout enough, after a few minutes of foraging, and I hefted it experimentally. 'This ought to do,' I concluded, returning to the obstacle, which Jurgen helpfully illuminated for me.

I examined the slab of metal carefully, searching for a suitable spot. There was no sign of a join down the middle, which meant it must have moved as a single piece. Not encouraging. I transferred my attention to the nearest edge, Finding only the narrowest of grooves where the bulkhead met the wall. It must retract into this side then, which would mean levering it from the other.

'Frak,' I said vehemently, discovering exactly the same thing after a cursory inspection on the other side of the corridor. 'It must have come down from the ceiling.'

'We won't be shifting that, then,' Jurgen said gloomily.

Even though the same thought had occurred to me, I shook my head. The sense of disappointment which had washed over me was abruptly pushed aside by a surge of anger, almost childish in its petulance, a fact I can only attribute to the hunger and exhaustion I'd been keeping at bay for some time now by willpower alone. I was damned if I was going to let a lump of scrap metal get the better of me now we'd come so close to our goal. 'Wait a moment,' I said, my voice sounding surprisingly level under the circumstances. 'Let's not give up just yet.'

I examined our surroundings in more detail, my eyes having long since adjusted to the level of light supplied by the Guard-issue luminator. It goes without saying, of course, that the decking under our feet had changed innumerable times since we set out on our interminable hike through the bowels of the Spawn of Damnation, from solid metal to mesh grating and back again, occasionally varied by way of carpeting, the odd slab of wood and, once, what seemed uncomfortably like bone[135]. Now we were standing once again on metal mesh, suspended a few centimetres above a gully running beneath the floor, through which cabling and pipework ran to mechanisms Emperor knew where, and which had no doubt ceased to function generations before.

I bent down and tugged hopefully at the section of mesh closest to the bulkhead; finding it sealed immovably into place by the rust of centuries, I gave up the subtle approach and freed it with a couple of swipes of my chainsword. The adamantium teeth ripped through the venerable metalwork within seconds, with a shower of sparks and a shriek which set my teeth on edge. After a few anxious moments, in which hordes of genestealers and curious orks failed to erupt from the shadows, I sheathed the weapon again, marvelling at my folly, which I can only attribute to the fatigue which was still threatening to overwhelm me. The utility gully was too shallow to squeeze through, of course, but I found what I was looking for, and smiled; the thick metal slab was resting in a groove cut into the floor, running from one wall to the other, lined by the decayed remnants of some flexible sheet material, no doubt intended to ensure an airtight seal. The rotting material had left a gap, into which I was able to thrust the end of the bar, and after a few moments of hopeful manipulation, I felt it catch against the underside of the lowered bulkhead.

'So far, so good,' I said, and the furrowing of Jurgen's forehead dislodged some of the grime adhering to it. (Although, to be fair, I can't have looked much cleaner myself by this point.)

'We'll never shift that with just the two us,' he said reasonably, illustrating the point by leaning his entire weight on the raised end of the pole. Beyond a faint, protesting creak from the edge of the mesh deck plate now acting as a fulcrum, his efforts had no discernible effect whatsoever.

'I know,' I said, leading the way back to the debris-choked side passage where I'd found the bar. Part of the ceiling had given way here, Emperor alone knew how long ago, and there were plenty of pieces of sheet metal, cabling and general clutter left lying beneath it. Nothing short of the arrival of a 'stealer swarm or an ork horde would have persuaded me to risk entering so obvious a death trap, but enough of the detritus was close enough to the main corridor to lay hold of without much danger to life and limb, and we'd soon accumulated a collection which would have netted us a small fortune if we'd been able to get it to a downhive trading post somewhere.

A few more moments of perspiration and profanity were enough to transfer our hoard to the barrier blocking our progress, and I looped some of the electrical cable I'd scavenged around the top of the bar, knotting it as securely as I could, before repeating the operation at right angles to the first. That left two loops crossing one another, hanging from the end, and I lost no time in wedging a flat sheet of metal into them, creating a short, but relatively stable, platform. After that, it was simply a matter of wedging the largest chunk of debris under the jutting pole, to create a higher fulcrum than before, and beginning to load the rest of the scrap onto the high end. I was just beginning to doubt that it would work after all when, with a heart-stopping groan, the whole thing shifted several centimetres, and I tensed, on the verge of leaping for my life. After an anxious second or two I became convinced that it wasn't going to collapse, and, somewhat nervously, resumed piling debris onto the makeshift counterweight.

'It's working, sir!' Jurgen said, unmistakably pleased, despite his habitual lack of excitement. But that was fine; I was anxious enough for the pair of us.

'Last piece,' I said, wondering if I was going to have to go back for more ballast, but the last lump of scrap was enough. With another shriek of ancient metal against metal, the whole mess tilted, raising the thick metal slab blocking our way about half a metre above the deck plates.

'It's open,' Jurgen told me, as though I might somehow have failed to notice, and ducked, to shine the beam of his laminator through the gap. The bulkhead turned out to be around thirty centimetres thick, and I marvelled at our good fortune in being able to shift it at all; had I realised quite how great its mass was, I suspect, I wouldn't have bothered even making the attempt. Jurgen sniffed the air beyond it suspiciously. 'It smells a bit,' he reported, as oblivious as ever to the irony, 'but it's breathable.'

'Good,' I said, dropping to crawl under the suspended slab of metal in my turn. I must admit to a strong sense of apprehension as I passed beneath it, but as I stood and surveyed our surroundings, that was replaced by a rush of elated relief. We'd overcome the obstacle after all, and although doing so had cost us a fair amount of time, it was still far less than we'd have squandered retracing our steps and looking for an alternative route. To say nothing of the risk of running into the orks.

The passageway here was just as clear and uncluttered as it had been on the other side of the bulkhead, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. It seemed I'd made the right decision after all. As I inhaled again, I noticed a faint tang in the air I couldn't quite identify, but which made my palms itch nevertheless. Suddenly, although nothing had changed, the shadows surrounding us seemed deeper, more threatening, and I urged Jurgen into motion again. 'Come on,' I said. 'The sooner we're out of here the better.'

IF ANYTHING, HOWEVER, my sense of unease grew ever stronger as we pressed on, despite the fact that we seemed to be making good progress. I started to hear the muffled scrabbling sounds I'd learned to associate with prowling genestealers again, and urged Jurgen to halt on several occasions while I tried to pinpoint the source. Every time I did, though, the sinister susurration either faded away entirely, or echoed so much that I found myself unable to narrow it down. In the end I just determined to proceed as cautiously as possible, and trust my instincts to warn us of any ambush up ahead. But when an attack did come, it was in a form it had never occurred to me to expect.

'There's an open space up ahead,' I told Jurgen, as quietly as I could, after another nerve-shredding half-hour or so had passed. The echoes of our footfalls and the air currents against my face felt different, and the odd, faintly acidic tang in the air seemed a little stronger now.

'The hangar?' my aide asked, and I shook my head.

'Fraid not. We're still a good couple of hours from that. Probably a hold.' I'm no expert on starship construction, of course, but I'd travelled on enough of them over the years to be fairly certain that the wreck we were currently picking our way through was a bulk cargo hauler of some kind - or at least it had been, before some catastrophe had overwhelmed it, leaving it marooned in the warp until the capricious currents of that hellish realm had washed it up against the Spawn of Damnation. The sounds in the dark around us were growing louder and more numerous now, and I drew my weapons again, tension winding tighter in the pit of my stomach. For a moment I considered ordering Jurgen to extinguish the luminator, but the 'stealers seemed to have no use for light, so I didn't suppose it would attract their attention any more than the sound and scent of us would[136].

As I've remarked before, I've generally found it helpful to be able to see anything trying to kill me.

'You're right, sir,' Jurgen told me, a few moments later, the beam of his luminator picking out an open door in one of the walls of the corridor. As we passed it the pervasive smell grew stronger, and I glanced through the portal, regretting the impulse at once; the space beyond was vast, and the floor so packed with the inert bodies of genestealers, their four arms curled protectively around their thoraxes, that not a millimetre of metal was visible.

'Are they dead?' Jurgen asked, and I shook my head, too shocked to speak for a moment.

'No,' I whispered at last, backing away fearfully, expecting the whole nest to rouse and tear us apart at any moment. I'd had merely the briefest of glimpses, but there must have been at least a thousand of the abominable creatures in there, probably more if I could be bothered with a proper headcount. 'Just dormant.' I tried desperately to remember the files Gries had shown me. 'The ones who attacked us before must have been revived to protect the others[137].'

Which meant we were in a very uncomfortable position indeed. I glanced round again, alert for any sign of movement, and withdrew to the far side of the corridor. We had to go on, there was no question of that, but the thought of those monstrosities at our backs was a terrifying one.

'Do we turn round?' Jurgen asked, and I shook my head slowly.

'No,' I said. The chances of running into an active 'stealer or two would be just as great whichever direction we took, and at least the hangar was a definite objective, as opposed to wandering around in the dark waiting to be torn to pieces.

'Very good, sir,' my aide replied, his matter-of-fact demeanour as obscurely heartening as it usually was in a crisis, and I felt a measure of confidence beginning to return. After all, the purestrains behind us were all dormant, so unless we did something catastrophically stupid to rouse them...

The distinctive hisssss... crack! of a bolter round impacting a few feet to my left, blowing a fist-sized hole in the metal wall beside me, galvanised me into action, and I brought my laspistol up in the direction it had come from, returning fire instinctively as I dived for cover. Jurgen responded too, the beam of his luminator picking out the distinctive lumpen profile of an ork as he brought his lasgun on aim. The greenskin ducked back behind a stanchion, as las-bolts peppered the metalwork around him, and I began to pick out other shapes moving in the shadows beyond.

'Pull back,' I ordered, trying to get an estimate of their numbers. This was hardly the best place to start a firefight, as I strongly suspected the genestealers would be rather cranky on first waking, and we were making a considerable amount of noise between us already.

'Right you are, sir,' Jurgen agreed, with a trace of reluctance, eager as any Valhallan to be killing orks, but this was hardly the time or place to indulge him. There seemed to be a dozen or so greenskins lurking in the darkness ahead of us, and a couple more of them began to shoot as well, though fortunately with no more luck than the first one was already having. 'They're trying to keep our heads down.'

'And they're succeeding,' I said testily, as a couple of heavy slugs ricocheted from the edge of the shrine to the Omnissiah atop the tool locker behind which I'd found refuge.

'Getting ready to charge, most likely,' Jurgen reminded me, a tactic we'd become more than familiar with on our Perlian odyssey, and I nodded grimly.

'Wait until they move,' I told him, unnecessarily, given how conversant he was with the best tactics to use against the creatures, and he nodded too, flicking the fire selector of his lasgun to full auto.

Without any further warning, a staccato rhythm of metal-soled boots began ringing off the deck plates, and a small knot of greenskins charged, brandishing the crude axes so many of them tend to favour in close combat. As they bore down on our position, a sense of foreboding washed over me; something was definitely not right about this. (Apart from the obvious point of an enraged mob of orks wanting to hack us to shreds, of course.) Then the hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle, as realisation dawned: the greenskins were running towards us in complete silence, none of them having made a sound since the skirmish began. On every other occasion I'd encountered them, they'd bellowed warcries, threats and exhortations to one another even before combat was joined, not to mention yelling their lungs out for as long as it continued, and they remained in any condition to do so.

'Don't let them get near you!' I yelled, as if Jurgen had been planning to offer them tanna and a florn cake, and he opened up at the same instant I did, spitting a fusillade of las-bolts down the corridor. There was no point in worrying about the genestealers in the hold now; the brood mind already knew precisely where we were, a deduction confirmed an instant later by a barely perceptible shifting in the shadows behind the orks with guns. Expecting to see something of the kind, I recognised it at once for what it was: a purestrain 'stealer, observing the actions of its implanted puppets with dispassionate interest.

'Grenade!' Jurgen yelled, lobbing another of the frag charges down the corridor, where it landed just ahead of the charging greenskins neat as you please. Both of us turned to run as it detonated, the concussion echoing in the confined space like an Earthshaker firing, and the pressure wave slammed into our backs as we took to our heels. The onrushing orks faltered, the leading ones shredded by the hail of shrapnel, and those behind either sufficiently incommoded by it or impeded by the resulting mess to allow us to open up a lead I hoped would prove sufficient.

'There was a genestealer with them,' I panted, praying that it would be prevented from pursuing us immediately by the tangle of perforated orks blocking the passage. We stood a reasonable chance of staying ahead of the lumbering greenskins for a while, until their greater endurance started to tell, but I was under no illusions about being able to outrun a purestrain.

Jurgen nodded. 'Saw it too,' he confirmed, before another bolt detonated uncomfortably close behind us; the phenomenal resilience of the orks was already allowing at least some of them to recover from the explosion.

We both turned, directing another hail of unaimed las-bolts back in their general direction, with the vague hope of putting them even more off their aim than usual, and for a second the air in my lungs seemed to freeze solid. Most of the las-bolts were impacting on the thorax of another genestealer, which had just entered the corridor from the cargo hold. It was moving sluggishly, rather than with the blinding speed and agility I usually associated with the creatures, and went down without even an attempt at seeking cover, but I knew we wouldn't be so lucky again. Even over the sounds of combat, and the ringing of our bootheels on the deck plates, I was beginning to hear a rustling, faint at first, like the wind in a forest, gradually rising to a muted roar, which reminded me uncomfortably of the tidal bore which had almost swept me to my death on Rikenbach. (And taken the feet out from under the heretic Dreadnought I'd been running away from at the time, luckily for me; I'd eventually washed up half-drowned on a sandspit, while our Hydra battery chewed it to pieces before it managed to get up again[138].)

'The whole nest's reviving[139]!' I shouted, finding I could run a little faster after all. The distinctive click-scratch of talons on metal echoed all around us, and I risked a quick glance back, regretting it at once. The pursuing 'stealers weren't just racing along the floor of the passageway, they were moving just as fast along the ceiling and the walls, their claws ripping purchase even from apparently smooth surfaces. The resulting fast-moving constriction in the dimensions of the corridor, beyond which more purestrains and a few implanted orks could be intermittently glimpsed, made it looked uncannily as though Jurgen and I were being swallowed - an impression I found about as comforting as you might expect. The creatures were still moving a little more sluggishly than usual, true, but they were gaining nevertheless, and I found myself trying to estimate just how long it was going to be before I felt claws in the back of my neck. The only result I could come up with was not nearly long enough, which was hardly helpful. The side passages we passed were choked with debris, and attempting to find refuge in any of them would be futile, simply slowing us down enough for the horrors in pursuit to catch up even more quickly.

As the breath began to rasp in my throat, made even worse by the dust our headlong dash was raising from the metal mesh at our feet, I sent a few las-bolts into the darkness at our backs entirely at random. The chances of an effective hit were minimal, true, but I was almost bound to strike something among so dense a concentration of xenos flesh, and even a token effort to fend them off fostered the comforting illusion that there might still be some action I could take to avoid a fate which now seemed inevitable.

Then, just as everything seemed lost, I felt a sudden flare of hope rise within me, as the beam of Jurgen's luminator picked out the rust-pitted surface of the bulkhead we'd so laboriously levered open, no more than a couple of hundred metres ahead of us. If we could only buy ourselves a few more precious seconds to reach it, before the onrushing horde reached us instead...

I risked another glance behind, to find that the swarm had closed the distance more rapidly than even my most pessimistic estimate; the recently roused genestealers were clearly feeling rather more chipper now, probably at the prospect of breakfast. We'd never even make it as far as the barrier at this rate, let alone manage to wriggle through the narrow gap beneath it, before we were overwhelmed.

The recently kindled flame of hope guttered and subsided, but I refused to let it be extinguished entirely. 'Jurgen!' I bellowed, over the rising noise behind us, and for a brief, hallucinatory moment, tasted seawater again. 'Any grenades left?'

'A couple, sir,' Jurgen said, rummaging through his collection of pouches. 'Frag or krak?'

'Frag!' I shouted, hoping he wouldn't take it for stress-induced profanity.

'Right you are, sir,' my aide responded, imperturbable as ever, and produced one with the air of having performed a successful conjuring trick. In a single deft movement, he primed and lobbed it over his shoulder, not bothering to look or care where it landed. In truth, neither did I. I heard the casing clatter resonantly against the metal mesh of the deck, felt my shoulder muscles tense instinctively for the shock of detonation, and hoped to the Throne that we'd be out of its area of effect by the time the hail of shrapnel was released. A second or two later I was punched hard in the back by a large, hot fist, and risked a glance behind us, being rewarded with a confused impression of thrashing limbs and tails receding further with each footstep I took. There was no time to see more, as we'd reached the bulkhead at last, and, praise the Emperor, it was still precariously raised by our makeshift lever.

Hearing the renewed skitter of fast-approaching claws, I lost no time in scrabbling under the thick metal slab, while Jurgen did his best to discourage the swarm with a final burst of his lasgun through the firing slit the gap created.

'Through you come, sir,' he said encouragingly, grabbing my forearm and yanking me the rest of the way, like a recalcitrant cork from a bottle. I half-slid into the utility conduit, where we'd removed the covering mesh, before recovering my balance, barking my shin painfully on the edge of the next section of deck plating as I did so.

'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said, turning to swipe the blade of my chainsword at the excessively clawed arm groping through the gap after me. The limb parted and fell into the channel beneath the deck plates, but if I knew 'stealers that wasn't going to be enough to discourage its owner from following, let alone its brood mates, so I turned, and severed the length of pipe holding the bulkhead up with a single stroke of the whirling blade. The thick slab of metal fell with gratifying speed, and a thud which made the deck plates shudder beneath our feet, crushing the first purestrains which were trying to follow us in the process. A couple of heads, an assortment of limbs and a generous dollop of mashed torso slithered down into the gully in the wake of the arm I'd cut off, making an unholy mess of my boots as they did so.

'That ought to hold 'em,' Jurgen said, an unmistakable note of satisfaction suffusing his voice, and I nodded, drawing deep draughts of the foetid air into my lungs to slow my hammering heart. The narrowness of our escape finally sank in, and I sat on the pile of scrap we'd used as a counterweight a little more heavily than I'd intended, heedless of the damage it was doing to my greatcoat. Right now I could hardly look much more dishevelled than I already did in any case.

'For a while,' I agreed, as a faint rasping began behind the bulkhead, and I belatedly realised that creatures capable of ripping Terminator armour apart weren't likely to be held back for very long by a mere few centimetres of steel. I regained my feet, having got enough of my breath back to start running again if I had to. 'Come on.' I started to lead the way down the tunnel.

'Won't that take us straight back to the orks?' Jurgen asked, falling in at my shoulder, and I nodded.

'I hope so,' I told him, ignoring the familiar expression of puzzlement falling across his features like a waning moon. 'Right now, they look like the best chance we've got.'