The Relentless Dead, page 13
Before the Termite had stopped juddering, its hatches were flung open. Captain Graven leapt out, followed by his squad. ‘Fan out,’ he instructed, ‘make sure nothing has seen us.’
Barely had the words left his lips when a shotgun blast rang out and a pair of snotlings – filthy, ratlike scavengers with green skin and orkoid features – took fright. They didn’t get far along the tunnel before more shells cut them down.
‘I don’t see any more, sir,’ said a Krieg soldier – Korpsman 319-938-25549-04, indistinguishable from the other three in his tunic jacket.
Graven nodded, seeming satisfied. Surprise was of the essence in this mission. As much of a racket as the Termite had made breaking in here, it was hoped the orks would be too far away – and too distracted – to notice one more reason why the earth beneath their feet was shaking.
A Korpsman consulted his dataslate. No map existed of the sewer system, only of the city above as it had been centuries before, their goal marked by a black skull icon. ‘This way, captain, bearing right as soon as we are able.’
‘Double time. We have a lot of ground to cover.’ Graven led the way along the musty tunnel, his Korpsmen falling into step behind him, focused on the task ahead of them, none of them thinking overmuch about the chance of failure.
Unaware as they approached their tragic destiny.
‘Maximus Arkanos!’ Idelax realised.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the engineer, ‘that was the planet’s name.’
‘You were there, with Colonel… Captain Graven.’
‘I had recently been transferred to his command squad.’
‘Explain your mission to me.’
The engineer obliged. ‘The orks had stumbled upon an ancient weapon, thought buried in the Age of Strife. A forbidden weapon.’
Idelax nodded. ‘A rad weapon.’
‘They were holed up in the city, its remains, but they had few defences there and were easily surrounded. Any flyers they sent up, we could shoot down. We had the orks contained, but they were belligerent and stubborn.’
‘Indeed.’
‘They would certainly fight us to the death. The concern was that, once they knew they were beaten, the xenos might activate the weapon, immolate themselves and take us with them. Captain Graven considered this improbable.’
‘Oh? Why so?’
‘As I understand it, sir, a tech-priest advised that the weapon was unlikely still to function, even less for such slow-minded brutes.’
‘But you chose not to take that chance.’
‘Captain Graven led his squad – my squad – to tunnel underneath the city. Orbital scans had told us roughly where the weapon was, as it was leaking radiation.’
‘And you were to capture the weapon? Just five of you?’
‘No, inquisitor, not capture it.’
‘Then what?’
‘Collapse the sewers underneath it. Seal the weapon in the earth again, along with any xenos set to guard it.’
Idelax sucked air between his teeth. ‘Would that not activate it?’
‘Not according to the tech-priest, sir, unless…’ The engineer took a breath himself. ‘Colonel Kleber judged the risk worthwhile. The orks were thought to have called for reinforcements, so we were compelled to act quickly. They had to be kept from escaping with the weapon, for on another world, an occupied world, it would have wreaked devastation.’
‘Indeed,’ said Idelax again.
‘At least if the bomb exploded on Maximus Arkanos, casualties would be limited.’
To the members of the Four Hundred and First Krieg Regiment, the inquisitor thought but did not say aloud. As always with the Krieg, his subject’s gas mask made him hard to read. He imagined, however, that the face beneath was equally impassive.
In a frank, unwavering tone, the engineer resumed his story.
They had reached their destination without hindrance.
Twice, they had thought they saw more snotlings. They had turned out, on inspection of their corpses, to be volelike local vermin.
‘This is the place,’ announced their navigator. ‘Directly underneath the orks’ stronghold in the city.’
‘And the weapon,’ Graven added in a growl. This was corroborated by rebreather units, which warned of hazardous radiation levels. Even protected as the Krieg were, they couldn’t safely stay here long.
They set about placing their mining charges. One Korpsman climbed onto a comrade’s shoulders to adhere a couple to the roof.
They heard the roar of engines long before they saw its cause. Something was speeding along the tunnel towards them. Something loud. More than one something, closing with alarming speed. They had no time to complete their task, nor reach the cover of another tunnel. ‘Kill the lights!’ the captain ordered.
In the dark, they raised their shotguns.
A blinding light came thundering towards them, and now they heard guttural, ecstatic whoops behind it. ‘Fire!’ yelled Graven as soon as the light was in range, and a quartet of shotguns barked, alongside the captain’s own laspistol, aimed in the voices’ direction.
The light spilled over Korpsman 319-938-25549-04, standing forward of his comrades as he was. At the same time, the light split into a pair of sources: two ungainly, oil-stinking vehicles. Motorised bikes, jolting along on shredded tyres, each with a single glaring headlight. Each with a goggle-wearing xenos rider and a side-mounted gun that, in all fairness, should have tipped it over.
Each undeniably, almost breathtakingly fast.
The engineer dived out of their path, but the tunnel gave him scant room to manoeuvre. He flattened himself against its side as the first bike veered towards him, then away as its slug-ridden rider slumped dead across lopsided handlebars. The bike slammed into the opposite wall and fell apart.
The second bike ploughed on through the debris and over the corpse. The ground struck sparks off its gun as, from within its tarnished depths, there burst a whirling spray of bullets, pinging off the tunnel’s sides but also clipping at least two Korpsmen that the engineer could see.
Delightedly, the rider bellowed, ‘Dakka, dakka, dakka!’ as if the gun were make-believe and needed sound effects providing.
The Krieg scattered as the bike careened between them, with just a couple managing clumsy bayonet stabs at the rider. The engineer wondered how it could possibly turn in these confines, but somehow it did. Attacking a wall with an oversized front wheel, it flipped itself around, landing with a bone-jarring thud – then it came roaring, spitting bullets at them again.
No doubt it had expected them to be intimidated, possibly to run. Instead the Krieg stood steadfast, once more bringing their shotguns to bear. A deadly hail punched into the ork, knocking it backwards from its saddle. It landed on its square green head, and they all heard the snap of bone.
The bike, now riderless, shot past them, somehow remaining upright, at least for a few hundred yards, covered in seconds, until, reaching a T-junction, it too struck the wall and a spark must have caught its leaking fuel tank. It exploded, bringing down the roof on top of it.
A wave of heat and dust buffeted the Krieg, their rebreathers sparing them from choking on it. The stretch of roof above them groaned but held – it would have been ironic had the orks done their job for them. With hindsight, it would have changed much.
A barking, rasping sound assailed their nerves. It took them a moment to pinpoint its unlikely source. An ork was laughing.
Clinging stubbornly to life, the second rider lay, its thick neck twisted, bone shards poking through its skin. ‘Boom,’ it grunted, then laughing again, it repeated, ‘Boom, boom, boom!’
Four shotgun barrels swung towards its head. ‘Put it out of our misery, captain?’ asked a Korpsman.
The xenos’ flat, brutish face crumpled in disappointment. ‘Small boom. No big boom, but soon,’ it grumbled in barely intelligible Low Gothic.
‘Wait!’ said Captain Graven. He glared down at the paralysed creature. ‘What “big boom”? What do you mean?’
Its red eyes were unfocused and it gave him no response.
Graven crouched by it, thrusting his laspistol under its snout. ‘Do the orks intend to use the ancient weapon?’ he demanded.
The engineer saw the ork’s hands twitching as if for Graven’s neck, but it couldn’t raise its arms. He thought it would continue to ignore him – what more could he threaten it with, after all? – but, clearing, its eyes swivelled to fixate upon him. The ork sneered, saliva dribbling along its tusks.
‘Big mek wired it up,’ it grunted, ‘so any jolt and boom! Bullets start flying? Boom! Shell blasts through the wall? Boom, boom! See skull-faced ’oomies coming? Then big mek stamps on casing and boom, boom, boom!’
The five Krieg looked at each other.
‘It’s lying,’ said one. ‘It has to be.’
‘But what if it isn’t?’ asked another.
‘I’ve been up close with orks before,’ said Korpsman 319-938-25549-04. ‘Dull-witted as they are, they have a knack for bodging tech.’
‘Look at the bikes,’ said the fourth. ‘Spare parts from a junk heap lashed together. No way they could function, but they did.’
‘Still, to rig up a vibration sensor trigger for a weapon they can’t understand… The tech-priest said it couldn’t work.’
‘But what if they have?’
‘Boom,’ said the stricken ork dreamily, its voice fading. ‘I want to see it. Let me live long enough to see it.’
‘No,’ Graven said, and shot it through the eye.
He straightened up but didn’t speak, staring down at the xenos’ carcass. His Korpsmen waited expectantly until one, having taken a bullet to his arm, was forced to step aside and staunch the bleeding.
‘Sir,’ someone said at last. When he seemed to go unheard, he prompted more urgently, ‘Captain Graven. Sir. What do we do?’
‘Is your commander often indecisive?’
Another disconcerting question. The engineer duly considered it. ‘I hadn’t seen it up until that point.’
‘However?’
‘Perhaps, yes, on a few occasions since. But on Maximus Arkanos,’ he hastened to add, ‘the captain faced an impossible choice.’
‘Had he not orders to follow?’
‘But also reason to believe that if he did… Inquisitor, there was an investigation into these events.’
‘A tribunal, yes, so I am led to believe. And you were called to testify?’
‘No, only the captain was, but I could have said no more than he did.’
‘Assuming, of course, that he held no details back.’
‘Why would he?’
The witch hunter rested his head against the wall, his eyes hooded. For a minute, neither of them spoke again. Then, quietly, he asked, ‘What would you have done, Korpsman? In that situation, had you been in command, what would have been your choice?’
Even as the engineer drew breath to answer, a sudden sound, a clinking of rock, jolted both men to their feet. ‘Behind me, inquisitor,’ the engineer whispered, and Idelax obliged but stayed close, drawing his gun.
A dim light had appeared along one of the tunnels. The engineer clicked off his own lumen cube and crouched in darkness, in the tunnel mouth, his shotgun levelled. Tentative footsteps approached, sounding like booted feet, not hooves. Four, maybe five people. He let them get a little closer, into range, before issuing a challenge: ‘Who goes there?’
The footsteps scraped to a halt and there was a short pause before a man’s voice answered, ‘Vostroyan Firstborn. Friend or foe?’
‘Friend, if you are who you say you are. Come forward one by one with weapons sheathed and let me see you.’
That prompted a brief exchange of whispers, before one set of footsteps resumed its approach, along with the light. The engineer relaxed, but not too much, as he made out a distinctive red Vostroyan greatcoat. Its wearer also seemed relieved as his lumen cube found the waiting Korpsman, although his splendid moustache twitched at the sight of the inquisitor behind him.
‘How many of you are there?’ the engineer asked.
‘Four. Just four left from two squads of five. We were attacked in the night.’
‘By beastmen?’
‘Witches. We found another of their secret temples. Empty, but clearly still in use. We set an ambush for them. Suddenly, through some… profane power, without us seeing their approach, there were three of them among us.’
‘You ran from them.’
The Guardsman bristled at such bluntness. ‘The witches wielded fire and lightning, and in the confines of that cave… Our captain was slain before we knew it. Our sergeant ordered a withdrawal, but he too was cut down from behind.’
The engineer said sagely, ‘Faced with overwhelming odds, there is no shame in living to fight again.’
The Vostroyan gave a curt nod. He called his comrades forwards, and the Krieg watchmaster had also heard the disturbance and quietly joined them. ‘Might you have been followed here?’ he asked.
‘No, we made certain of it.’
‘But the witches fooled your senses once before,’ said Idelax, to which the newcomers had no answer.
He offered to escort them to the surface so both Krieg could stay at their posts. He would wake Colonel Graven to hear the Vostroyans’ story.
Soon enough, the engineer was left alone again. He stood stiffly at the tunnel junction, determined to be more alert than ever. I resisted the spectre, he told himself, because my faith is strong. I will resist these witches too.
‘Sir,’ said Guardsman Bukharin, ‘if I may make a suggestion?’
Colonel Graven nodded.
‘I would wake your people and return to that profane temple right away. We wounded two witches and drained much of their power. Never will they be weaker than they are now, and… colonel, I fear they took some of us alive.’
Graven pursed his lips beneath his mask. ‘How long since you escaped them?’
‘Two and a half hours by now,’ another Firstborn said.
‘Then they can wait two more until dawn,’ he decreed.
‘Colonel, if it’s true what we are told, that the witches offer up the bodies of their prisoners to be–’
‘Dawn!’ restated Graven, and though his thick moustache twitched, Bukharin did not press his objection. ‘These witches too may have summoned reinforcements, and soldiers fight more efficiently when rested. An hour’s sleep would also benefit the four of you.’
‘We have stimms, sir,’ said Bukharin, but a couple of his comrades were eyeing up the soft grass on the hillside.
‘In the absence of your captain and your sergeant,’ Graven asked, ‘which of you has served longest?’
The Vostroyans exchanged awkward glances. A sharp-featured woman spoke up: ‘Sir, that would be me.’
Bukharin said, ‘But I am higher born and so have seniority.’
Yes, thought Graven. Yes, of course. ‘Then you are acting sergeant of your squad, which I am taking under my command. Be ready to move out – and lead us to these witches, so that we may destroy them – at dawn.’
The engineer was not surprised when Inquisitor Idelax returned.
This time, they didn’t sit. He kept his eyes fixed on the tunnels and was glad of the excuse. Idelax stood at his shoulder, an ominous shadow in the corner of his eye. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what did Captain Graven do?’
‘On Maximus Arkanos, sir? I thought you knew.’ He had thought everybody knew.
‘Did he or did he not set the explosive charges?’
‘He… We did not. We returned to the Termite instead. It was forty-five minutes away, and the captain had to send an urgent message to Colonel Kleber. With hindsight, we ought to have taken a vox-caster with us, but we had to move quickly and quietly.’
‘This message?’
‘A warning that the weapon was still active, and the orks prepared to use it.’
‘Or so a single ork claimed. A dying ork.’
‘The captain believed it a credible threat,’ said the engineer. ‘He recommended pulling back our infantry companies until the situation could be reassessed. At least, that would have been his recommendation.’
He remembered:
Huddled in the metal tube of the passenger compartment. Knee to knee with his nervous comrades, the odour of their sweat in his nostrils. The captain, losing his usual composure as he tried to make a vox-connection. His gloved fist hammering the console in frustration.
He remembered the explosion.
It had felt incongruously minor, rattling the Termite’s hull, but it had rumbled on and on, and even after it was over, the five Krieg had sat in stunned silence, the only sound a harsh static crackle from the console. Each of them knowing just what the explosion portended. Contemplating their own failure.
‘Inquisitor,’ said the engineer, ‘you asked a question earlier. You asked me what I would have done that day, in Captain Graven’s place.’
‘You have an answer for me?’
‘Yes. I’ve always known. That same question played on my mind as we raced through the sewers, to the Termite, before… before we learned…’ He took a breath. This time, he felt the answer he was giving was the wrong one. He also felt it needed saying. ‘I believe I would have done the same as he.’
‘And regretted it as sorely?’
‘Respectfully, inquisitor, we don’t know – we can never know – the outcome had the captain chosen differently.’
‘Had he carried out the orders he was given and collapsed that roof?’
‘Most likely, the weapon would have gone off all the same.’
‘But earlier,’ said Idelax, ‘before your ground forces were so close to it.’
The engineer couldn’t deny that. Another bitter irony, he thought, was that his squad had been among the few survivors, protected by the Termite’s armour plating and their depth beneath the surface.
