Gaunt looked back at the STC. ‘Rawne!’
‘Sir?’
‘Destroy it! Now!’
Rawne looked at him, wiping the blood from his lip.
‘With respect, colonel-commissar… is this right? I mean – this thing could change the course of everything.’
Gaunt turned to look at Major Rawne, his eyes fiercely dark, his brow furrowed. ‘Do you want to see another world die, Rawne?’
The major shook his head.
‘Neither do I. This is the right thing to do. I… I have my reasons. And are you blind? Do you want to greet these sleepers as they awake?’
Rawne looked round. The cold blue stares seemed to stab into him too. He shuddered.
‘I’m on it!’ he said with sudden decisiveness and moved off, calling to Mkoll and Caffran to bring up the explosives.
Gaunt yelled after him. ‘These things are heresies, Rawne! Foul heresies! And if that wasn’t enough, they’ve been sleeping here on a Chaos-polluted world for thousands of years! Do any of us really want to find out how that’s altered their thinking?’
‘Feth!’ Dorden said, from nearby. ‘You mean this whole thing could be corrupted?’
‘You’d have to be the blindest fool in creation to want to find out, wouldn’t you?’ Gaunt replied.
He stared down at the remains of his friend Fereyd. ‘It wasn’t me who changed, was it?’ he murmured.
Twenty-Six
HELDANE WAS totally unprepared for the death of his pawn. It had been such a victory to identify and capture Mac-aroth’s little spy, and then such a privilege to work on him. It had taken a long time to turn Fereyd, a long time and lot of painful cutting. But the conceit had been so delicious: to take the greatest of the warmaster’s agents and turn him into a tool. Heldane had learned so much more through Fereyd than he would have through a lesser being. Duplicity, deceit, motive. To use one of the men the warmaster had been channelling to undermine him? It had been beautiful, perfect, daring.
In his final moments, Heldane wished he could have had time to finish with Rawne. There had been a likely mind, however blunt. But the Ghosts Corbec and Larkin had cheated him of that, and left Rawne merely aware of his influence rather than controlled by it.
It mattered little. Heldane had miscalculated. Impending death had slackened his judgement. He had put too much of himself into his pawn. The backlash when the pawn died was too much. He should have shielded his mind to the possible onrush of death-trauma. He had not.
Fereyd suffered the most painful, hideous death imaginable. All of it crackled down the psychic link to Heldane. He felt every moment of Fereyd’s death. In it, he felt his own.
Heldane spasmed, burst asunder. Untameable psychic energies erupted out of his dead form, lashing outwards indiscriminately. Impact resounded on impact. Above in his command seat, Hechtor Dravere noticed the shuddering of the deck, and began to look around for the cause.
In a mushroom of light, the unleashed psychic energies of the dying inquisitor blew the entire Leviathan apart, atom from atom.
Twenty-Seven
‘WE’RE CLEAR!’ Rawne yelled as he sprinted across the chamber with Caffran next to him. Gaunt had marshalled the others at the doorway. By now, the huge machine was rumbling and the gas-venting was continuous.
‘Mkoll! Come on!’ Gaunt shouted.
On the far side of the chamber, a section of the ancient grille finally gave way. Iron Men stumbled forward out of their alcove, their metal feet crunching over the fallen grille sheet. All around, their companions rattled and shook at their pens, eyes burning like the blue-hot backwash of missile tubes, murmuring their sonorous hum.
The metal skeletons spilling out of the cage began to advance across the chamber, bleary and undirected. Mkoll, fixing the last set of charges to the side of the vibrating STC, looked round in horror at their jerking advance.
There was a sudden rush of noise beside him and a hatch aperture slid open in the side of the STC maker, voiding a great gout of steam. Caught in it, Mkoll fell to his knees, choking and gagging.
‘Mkoll!’
Kneeling with his back turned to the hot steam, the coughing Mkoll couldn’t see what was looming out of the swirling gas behind him.
A new-born Man of Iron. The first to be produced by the STC after its long slumber. As soon as it appeared, the others, those loosed and those still caged, began keening, in a long, continuous, piteous wail that was at once a human shriek and a rapid broadcast of machine code sequences.
There was something wrong with the new-born. It was malformed, grotesque compared to the perfect anatomical symmetry of the other Iron Men. A good head taller, it was hunched, blackened, one arm far longer than the other, draped and massive, the other hideously vestigial and twisted. Corrupt horns sprouted from its over-long skull and its eyes shone a deadened yellow. Oil like stringy pus wept from the eye sockets. It shambled, unsteady. Its exposed teeth and jaws clacked and mashed idiotically.
Dorden howled out something about Gaunt being right, but Gaunt was already moving and not listening. He dove across the chamber at full stretch and tackled the coughing Mkoll onto the floor a second before the newborn’s larger arm sliced through the space the stealther had previously occupied.
The respite was brief. Rolling off Mkoll and trying to pull him up, Gaunt saw the new-born turn to address them again, its jaw champing mindlessly. Behind it, in the reeking smoke of the hatchway, a second new-born was already emerging.
Two las-rounds punched into the new-born and made it stagger backwards. Caffran was trying his best, but the dully reflective carapace of the new-born shrugged off all but the kinetic force of the shots.
It struck at Gaunt and Mkoll again, but the commissar managed to roll himself and the scout out of the way. Its great metal claw sparked against the algorithm-inscribed floor, incising an alteration to the calculations that was permanent and insane.
Gaunt struggled to drag Mkoll away from the shambling metal thing, cursing out loud. In a second, Dorden and Bragg were with him, easing his efforts, pulling Mkoll upright.
The unexpected blow smashed Gaunt off his feet. The new-born had reached out a glancing blow and taken a chunk of cloth and flesh out of his back. How could it–
Gaunt rolled and looked up. The new-born’s massive forelimb had grown, articulating out on extending metallic callipers, forming new pistons and extruded pulleys as it morphed its mechanical structure.
The monstrous thing struck at him again. The commissar flopped left to dodge and then right to dodge again. The metal claw cracked into the floor on either side of him.
Rawne, Larkin and Caffran sprang in. Caffran tried to shoot at close range but Larkin got in his way, capering and shouting to distract the machine. A second later, Larkin was also sent flying by a backhanded swipe.
Rawne hadn’t had time to load another barbed round into his lance, so he used it like an axe, swinging the bayonet blade so that it reverberated against the creature’s iron skull. Cable-sinews sheared and the new-born’s head was knocked crooked.
The machine-being swung round with its massive fighting limb and smacked Rawne away, extending its reach to at least five metres. Gaunt dived across the floor and came up holding Rawne’s barb-lance. He scythed down with it and smashed the Iron Man’s limb off at the second elbow, cutting through the increasingly diminished girth of the extending limb. Then Gaunt plunged the weapon, point first, into the new-born’s face. The blade came free in an explosion of oil and ichor-like milky fluid.
The monstrosity fell back, cold and stiff, the light dying in its eyes.
By then, six new demented new-borns had spilled from the STC’s hatch. Behind them, forty or more of the Iron Men had burst from their cages and were thumping forward. The others rattled their pens and began to howl.
‘Now! Now we’re fething leaving!’ Gaunt yelled.
Twenty-Eight
IT HAD TAKEN THEM close on four hours to find and fight their way in; four hou
rs from the bottom of the chimney shaft on the hillside to the doors of the Edicule. Now they had closed the doors on the shuffling blue-eyed metal nightmares and were ready to run. But even with the simple confidence of retracing their steps, Gaunt knew he had to factor in more time, so in the end he had Rawne set the tube-charge relays for four and three-quarter standard hours.
Already their progress back to the surface was flagging. Domor was getting weaker with each step, and though able-bodied, both Bragg and Larkin were slowing with the dull pain of their wounds from the firefight. Most of their weapons had been dumped, as the power cells were now dead. There was no point carrying the excess weight. Rawne’s barb-lance was still functioning and he led the way with Mkoll, whose lasrifle had about a dozen gradually dissipating shots left in its dying clip.
Dorden, Domor, and Larkin were unarmed except for blades. Larkin’s carbine, still functioning thanks to its mechanical function, was of no use to him with his wounded arm, so Gaunt had turned it over to Caffran to guard the rear. Bragg insisted on keeping his autocannon, but there was barely a drum left to it, and Gaunt wasn’t sure how well the injured trooper would manage it if it came to a fight.
Then there was the darkness of the tunnels, which Gaunt cursed himself for forgetting. All of their lamp packs were now dead, and as they moved away from the Edicule chambers into the darker sections of the labyrinth, they had to halt while Mkoll and Caffran scouted ahead to salvage cloth and wood from the bodies of the dead foe in the cistern approach. They fashioned two dozen makeshift torches, with cloth wadded around wooden staves and lance-poles, moistened with the pungent contents of Bragg’s last precious bottle of sacra liquor. Lit by the flickering flames, they moved on, passing gingerly through the cistern and beyond.
As they lumbered through the stinking mass of enemy corpses choking the cistern, Gaunt thought to search them for other weapons, mechanical weapons that were unaffected by the energy-drain. But the scent of meat had brought the insect swarms down the passage, and the twisted bodies were now a writhing, revolting mass of carrion.
There was no time. They pressed on. Gaunt tried not to think what wretchedness Mkoll and Caffran had suffered to scavenge the material for the torches.
The torches themselves burned quickly, and illuminated little but the immediate environs of the bearer. Gaunt felt fatigue growing in his limbs, realising now more than ever that the energy-leaching affected more than lamp packs and lasgun charges. If he was weary, he dreaded to think what Domor was like. Twice the commissar had to call a halt and regroup as Mkoll and Rawne got too far ahead of the struggling party.
How long had it been? His timepiece was dead. Gaunt began to wonder if the charges would even fire. Would their detonator circuits fizzle and die before they clicked over?
They reached a jagged turn in the ancient, sagging tunnels. They must have been moving now for close on three hours, he guessed. There was no sign of Mkoll and Rawne ahead. He lit another torch and looked back as Larkin and Bragg moved up together past him, sharing a torch.
‘Go on,’ he urged them, hoping this way was the right way. Without Mkoll’s sharp senses, he felt lost. Which turn was it? Larkin and Bragg, gifted with that uncanny Tanith sixth sense of direction themselves, seemed in no doubt. ‘Just move on and out. If you find Sergeant Mkoll or Major Rawne, tell them to keep moving too.’
The huge shadow of Bragg and his wiry companion nodded silently to him and soon their guttering light was lost in the tunnel ahead.
Gaunt waited. Where the feth were the others?
Minutes passed, lingering, creeping.
A light appeared. Caffran moved into sight, squinting out into the dark with Larkin’s carbine held ready.
‘Sir?’
‘Where’s Domor and the doctor?’ Gaunt asked.
Caffran looked puzzled. ‘I haven’t passed–’
‘You were the rearguard, trooper!’
‘I haven’t passed them, sir!’ Caffran barked.
Gaunt bunched a fist and rapped his own forehead with it. ‘Keep going. I’ll go back.’
‘I’ll go back with you, sir–’ Caffran began.
‘Go on!’ Gaunt snapped. ‘That’s an order, trooper! I’ll go back and look.’
Caffran hesitated. In the dim fire-flicker, Gaunt saw distress in the young man’s eyes.
‘You’ve done all I could have asked of you, Caffran. You and the others. First and Only, best of warriors. If I die in this pit, I’ll die happy knowing I got as many of you out as possible.’
He made to shake the man’s hand. But Caffran seemed overwhelmed by the gesture and moved away.
‘I’ll see you on the surface, commissar,’ Caffran said firmly.
Gaunt headed back down the funnel of rock. Caffran’s light remained stationary behind him, watching him until he was out of sight.
THE ROCKY TUNNEL was damp and stifling. There was no sign of Dorden or the wounded Domor. Gaunt opened his mouth to call out and then silenced himself. The blackness around him was too deep and dark for a voice. And by now, the awakened Iron Men could be lumbering down the tunnels, alert to any sound.
The passage veered to the left. Gaunt fought a feeling of panic. He didn’t seem to be retracing his steps at all. He must have lost a turn somewhere. Lost, a voice hissed in his mind. Fereyd’s voice? Dercius’s? Macaroth’s? You’re lost, you witless, compassionate fool!
His last torch sputtered and died. Darkness engulfed him. His eyes adjusted and he saw a pale glow far ahead. Gaunt moved towards it.
The tunnel, now crumbling underfoot even as it sloped away, led into a deep cavern, natural and rocky, lit by a greenish bioluminescent growth throbbing from fungus and lichens caking the ceiling and walls. It was a vast cavern full of shattered rock and dark pools. His foot slipped on loose pebbles and he struggled to catch himself. Almost invisible in the darkness, a bottomless abyss yawned to his right. A few steps on and he fumbled his way around the lip of another chasm. Black, oily fluid bubbled and popped in crater holes. Grotesque blind insects with dangling legs and huge fibrous wings whirred around in the semi-dark.
Domor lay on his side on a shelf of cool rock, still and silent. Gaunt crawled over to him. The trooper had been hit on the back of the head with a blunt instrument. He was alive, just, the blow adding immeasurably to the damage he had already suffered. A burned-out torch lay nearby, and there was a spilled medical kit, lying half-open, with rolls of bandages and flasks of disinfectant scattered around it.
‘Doctor?’ Gaunt called.
Dark shapes leapt down on him from either side. Fierce hands grappled him. He caught a glimpse of Jantine uniform as he fought back. The ambush was so sudden, it almost overwhelmed him, but he was tensed and ready for anything thanks to the warning signs of Domor and the medi-kit. He kicked out hard, breaking something within his assailant’s body, and then rolled free, slashing with his silver Tanith blade. A man yelped – and then screamed deeper and more fully as his staggering form mis-footed and tumbled into a chasm. But the others had him, striking and pummelling him hard. Three sets of hands, three men.
‘Enough! Ebzan, enough! He’s mine!’
Dazed, Gaunt was dragged upright by the three Patricians. Through fogged eyes, across the cavern, he saw Flense advancing, pushing Dorden before him, a lasgun to the pale old medic’s temple.
‘Gaunt.’
‘Flense! You fething madman! This isn’t the time!’
‘On the contrary, colonel-commissar, this is the time. At last the time… for you, for me. A reckoning.’
The three Jantine soldiers muscled Gaunt up to face Flense and his captive.
‘If it’s the prize you want, Flense, you’re too late. It’ll be gone by the time you get there,’ Gaunt hissed.
‘Prize? Prize?’ Flense smiled, his scar-tissue twitching. ‘I don’t care for that. Let Dravere care, or that monster Heldane. I spit upon their prize! You are all I have come for!’
‘I’m touched,’ Gaunt said and one of
the men smacked him hard around the back of the head.
‘That’s enough, Avranche!’ Flense snapped. ‘Release him!’
Reluctantly, the three Jantine Patricians set him free and stood back. Head spinning, Gaunt straightened up to face Flense and Dorden.
‘Now we settle this matter of honour,’ Flense said.
Gaunt grinned disarmingly at Flense, without humour. ‘Matter of honour? Are we still on this? The Tanith-Jantine feud? You’re a perfect idiot, Flense, you know that?’
Flense grimaced, pushing the pistol tighter into the wincing forehead of Dorden. ‘Do you so mock the old debt? Do you want me to shoot this man before your very eyes?’
‘Mock on,’ Dorden murmured. ‘Better he shoot me than I listen to any more of his garbage.’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know the depth of the old wound, the old treachery,’ Flense said spitefully.
Gaunt sighed. ‘Dercius. You mean Dercius! Sacred Feth, but isn’t that done with? I know the Jantine have never liked admitting they had a coward on their spotless honour role, but this is taking things too far! Dercius, General Dercius, Emperor rot his filthy soul, left my father and his unit to die on Kentaur. He ran away and left them. When I executed Dercius on Khedd all those years ago, it was a battlefield punishment, as is my right to administer as an Imperial commissar!
‘He deserted his men, Flense! Throne of Earth, there’s not a regiment in the Guard that doesn’t have a black sheep, a wayward son! Dercius was the Jantine’s disgrace! That’s no reason to prolong a rivalry with me and my Ghosts! This mindless feuding has cost the lives of good men, on both sides! So what if we beat you to the punch on Fortis? So what of Pyrites and aboard the Absalom? You jackass Jantine don’t know when to stop, do you? You don’t know where honour ends and discipline begins!’