Caffran could hear Bray yelling commands nearby.
He slipped into a drain culvert and sloshed along through the ankle-deep muck. Trygg was saying something behind him, but Caffran wasn’t really listening.
It was beginning to rain. With the Shield down, the inner habs were exposed to the downpour. The wasteland became a quagmire of oily mud in under a quarter of an hour. Caffran reached the ruins of a habitat and searched for a good firing point. A hundred metres away, Tanith launchers barked and spat rockets at the rumbling Zoican advance. Every few moments, there would be a plangent thump and another tank round would scream overhead.
Caffran was wet through. The rainfall was cutting visibility to thirty metres. He clambered up on the scorched wreck of an old armchair and hoisted himself up into an upper window space, from which he could get a good view of the rubble waste outside.
“Toss me a few live ones!” he called down to Trygg.
Trygg made a sound like a scalded cat and fell, severed at the waist. Ochre-armoured stormtroops flooded into the ruin below Caffran, firing wildly. A shot hit Trugg’s belt of grenades and the blast threw Caffran clear of the building shell and onto the rubble outside.
Caffran clawed his way upright as Zoicans rushed him from three sides. Pulling out his Tanith dagger, he plunged it through the eyeslit of the nearest. He clubbed the next down with his rocket tube.
Another shot at him and missed.
Caffran rolled away, firing his loaded rocket launcher. The rocket hit the Zoican in the gut, lifted him twenty metres into the air and blew him apart.
There was a crack of las-fire and a Zoican that Caffran hadn’t seen dropped dead behind him.
He glanced about.
Holding the laspistol Caffran had given her as a gift, Tona Criid crept out of cover. She turned once, killing another Zoican with a double shot.
Caffran grabbed her by the hand and they ran into the cover of a nearby hab as dozens more Zoican troopers advanced, firing as they came.
In the shadows of the hab ruin, Caffran looked at her, one soot-smeared face mirrored by the other.
“Caffran,” he said.
“Criid,” she replied.
The Zoicans were right outside, firing into the ruins.
“Good to know you,” he said.
The cage elevators carried them up as far as Level Sub-6 before the power in the Low Spine failed and the cars ground to a screeching halt. Soot and dust trickled and fluttered down the echoing shaft from above.
They exited the lifts on their bellies, crawling out through grille-doors that had half missed the next floor, and they found themselves in a poorly lit access corridor between water treatment plants.
Gaunt and Bwelt had to pull Pater bodily out of the lift car and onto the floor. The old man was panting and refused to go on.
Gilbear and his troops had fanned down the hallway, guns ready. Daur had guard of Kowle and Sturm was trying to light a shredded stub-end of cigar. Grizmund and his officers were taut and attentive, armed with shotguns they had taken from the VPHC dead.
“Where are we?” Gaunt asked Bwelt.
“Level Sub-6. An underhive section, actually.”
Gaunt nodded. “We need a staircase access.”
Down the damp hallway, one of Gilbear’s men cried out he’d found a stepwell.
“Stay with him and move him on when he’s able,” Gaunt told Bwelt, indicating the ailing Pater.
He crossed to Grizmund. “As soon as we reach the surface, I need you to rejoin your units.”
Grizmund nodded. “I’ll do my best. Once I’ve got to them, what channel should we use?”
“Ten ninety gamma,” Gaunt replied. It was the old Hyrkan wavelength. “I’m heading up-Spine to try to get the Shield back on. Use that channel to co-ordinate. Code phrase is ‘Uncle Dercius’.”
“Uncle Dercius?”
“Just remember it, okay?”
Grizmund nodded again. “Sure. And I won’t forget your efforts today, colonel-commissar.”
“Get out there and prove my belief in you,” Gaunt snarled. “I need the Narmenian armour at full strength if I’m going to hold this place.”
General Grizmund and his men pushed on past and hurried up the stairs.
“Sounds like you’ve taken command, Gaunt,” Sturm said snidely.
Gaunt turned to him. “In the absence of other command voices…”
Sturm’s face lost its smile and its colour.
“I’m still ranking Guard commander here, Ibram Gaunt. Or had you forgotten?”
“It’s been so long since you issued an order, Noches Sturm, I probably have.”
The two men faced each other in the low, musty basement corridor. Gaunt wasn’t backing down now.
“We have no choice, my dear colonel-commissar: a full tactical retreat. Vervunhive is lost. These things happen. You get used to it.”
“Maybe you do. Maybe you’ve had more experience in running away than me.”
“You low-life swine!” Gilbear rasped, stomping forward.
Gaunt punched him in the face, dropping him to the floor.
“Get up and get used to me, Gilbear. We’ve got a fething heavy task ahead of us, and I need the best the Volpone can muster.”
The Volpone troops were massing around them and even Pater had got up onto his feet for a better view.
“The Shield must be turned back on. It’s a priority. We’ve got to get up into the top of the hive and effect that. Don’t fight me here. There’ll be more than enough fighting to go around later.”
Gaunt reached down with his hand to pull Gilbear up. The big Blue-blood hesitated and then accepted the grip.
Gaunt pulled Gilbear right up to his face, nose to nose.
“So let’s go see what kind of soldier you are, colonel,” the Blueblood said.
They climbed the dim stairs as far as Level Low-2 and then found a set of cargo lifts still supplied with power. The massive Spine shuddered around them, pummelled from the outside by the enemy.
Crowded into a lift car, the Volpone checked weapons under Gilbear’s supervision. Sturm stood aside, silent. Gaunt crossed to Daur and his prisoner.
“Ban?”
“Sir?”
“I need schematics of the upper Spine. Anything you can get.”
Ban Daur nodded and began to resource data via his slate.
“Salvador Sondar has total control of the Shield mechanism,” said Kowle suddenly. “He exists on Level Top-700. His palace is protected by obsidian-grade security.”
Gaunt looked at Kowle bemused.
“It sounded for a moment there like you were trying to help, Pius.”
Kowle spat on the floor. “I don’t really want to die, Ibram. I know this hive. I know its workings. I’d be the callous bastard you think I am if I didn’t offer my knowledge.”
“Go on,” said Gaunt cautiously.
“Salvador Sondar has been borderline mad since I first met him. He’s a recluse, preferring to spend his time in an awareness tank in his chambers. Yet he has absolute control of the hive defences. They’re hard-wired into his brain. If you intend to turn the Shield back on, you’ll have to deal with the High Master himself.”
The lift cage lurched as a Shockwave passed through the Spine. Gaunt looked out of the cage door as they ascended and he saw a flickering procession of empty halls, then some thick with screaming habbers beating on the cage bars. They rose past fire-black levels and ones where twisted skeletons, baked dry by the heat of incendiaries, clawed at the lift doors.
One level was ablaze and they flinched as they passed up by its flames.
Daur handed Gaunt the slate with a plan of the upper Spine loaded onto it.
Another four hundred levels, Gaunt thought, watching the lights on the lift’s indicator panel, and the High Master and I will have ourselves a reckoning.
* * *
Lord Chass and his three bodyguards had reached Level Top-700 and forced their way in through the
powerless blast doors.
Shots came their way the moment they emerged, killing one of the bodyguards outright with a head wound.
Chass pulled out his gun and fired it as his remaining bodyguards unshrouded their hand-cannons and blasted tracer strings down the plush, marble-walled atrium.
A las-round hit Lord Chass in the left knee and dropped him face down onto the carpet. The pain was extraordinary, but he didn’t cry out. His bodyguards ran to him and were both cut down by sprays of las-fire.
His lifeblood was pumping away through his leg wound. Lord Chass knew he was going to die very soon.
He crawled forward, a few centimetres at a time, soaking the priceless carpet with his blood. He couldn’t see who or what was firing at him. The atrium was made of green cipolin stone and decorated with House Sondar banners. Light globes hung on chains from the high roof. At the atrium’s far end, a wide arch led through into the audience hall, the Sondar chapel and the private residence.
He flopped over behind a sandstone jardinière and loaded a fresh shell into his compact handgun. He thought about reaching for one of the fallen bodyguards’ laspistols, but they were exposed in the open, and Sondar’s unseen protectors were raking the carpeted floor with steady fire.
Then the firing stopped. Three meat puppets swung into view in the archway: a cloaked female, a naked youth covered in gold body-paint, and something rank and emaciated that was only vaguely human anymore. All lolled wretchedly, eyes vacant, lasrifles wired into their hands. They came unsteadily down the atrium, wobbling on the feed-tubes and wires that played out from a recessed trackway in the ceiling. Though their eyes didn’t move, they seemed to sense him. Chass knew they were guided by heat and motion systems wired into the palace walls. They fired again, blowing chunks off the jardinière and hitting Chass in the foot and shin of his already wounded leg. He fired his single-shot piece and the heavy round took the youth’s head off. It continued to advance and shoot.
A sudden burst of autogun fire licked down the atrium and tore the puppets to pieces, leaving nothing but a few shreds of flesh trailing from the wires.
Four men came down the hall from the main entrance. Chass knew their maroon body-glove armour made them guards from Croe’s personal retinue. Their leader was Isak. He knelt by Lord Chass as his companions moved on to secure the archway. Isak bowed his respect to the nobleman, then reached into his harness pouches for field dressings.
“The marshal sent you?”
“I am instructed to take any action necessary to restore the Shield, lord. That includes the suppression of High Master Sondar and his forces.”
At last Croe is acting with the same purpose as me, thought Chass. He felt no pain from Isak’s work on his wounds. He was cold and everything seemed distant. “Help me up,” he told the bodyguard. “You’ll need the geno-print of a noble to activate the Shield systems.”
Isak nodded and hoisted Lord Chass up by the armpits, as if he was as light as a feather. From beyond the arch came the sounds of renewed gunfire.
In the colonnade beyond the atrium — a long cloister of wooden beams and inlaid upper balconies with a roof of stained glass — Isak’s men had encountered more servitor puppets. Some were appearing in the balcony galleries, others moving down the open length of the cloister. The House Croe guardsmen were pinned near the archway.
Lord Chass, leaning heavily on Isak for support, noticed a smell, a spicy taint that stung his nostrils, sweeter and more subtle than the sharp pungency of the discharged weapons. “What is that smell?” he whispered, half to himself.
“Chaos,” Ibram Gaunt said.
Chass and Isak looked round from the archway where they were sheltering and saw Gaunt leading the team of Blueblood elite down the atrium with silent precision. Daur, Kowle and Sturm were at the back of the line, Gilbear alongside the commissar. All weapons were drawn.
“It seems we share a mission,” Gaunt said dryly. He gestured to Gilbear and the Volpone moved three of his seven troopers round to cover the far side of the arch. In a moment, they were adding the considerable force of their hellguns to the dispute.
“Sic semper tyrannis,” Chass whispered and smiled at Gaunt. “I knew you would serve Vervunhive with true valour…”
His voice was faint. Gaunt looked at the wounds that mauled the nobleman’s leg. Isak had applied a tourniquet high up on the thigh, but his robes were soaked with blood.
Gaunt caught Isak’s look. They both knew how close to death Chass was.
Chass knew it too. “I’d like to see us victorious before my passing, colonel-commissar.”
Gaunt nodded. He shouted to the Volpone. “Let’s not waste any more time! Take the chamber now!”
Gilbear looked across and tapped the grenade launcher mounted under his hellgun’s barrel with a predatory grin. “Permission?”
“Given!” said Gaunt. “Tell your men in there to duck and cover!” he told Isak and the bodyguard snarled through his microbead.
Gilbear and one of his point men bellowed the Volpone battle-pledge at the tops of their lungs as they launched grenade after grenade in through the arch. The launcher mechanisms thumped and clacked as they pumped them.
The blast, a series of explosions piled on top of one another, ripped back down the colonnade and blew out the galleries and the glass roof. Debris and ash washed back through the arch.
Before the smoke even began to clear, the Volpone stormed the room, yelling and firing. Whatever else he thought about them, Gaunt had to give the Bluebloods their due. They were finely trained, ruthlessly effective heavy troops. He’d seen their worth on Monthax. Now they were proving it again.
With his bolt pistol and chainsword drawn, Gaunt ploughed into the colonnade after them, followed by Isak and the Croe guards, with Daur and Sturm left to assist Chass. Kowle simply wandered along behind.
The place was a ruin. Dismembered or support-severed servitors littered the wooden wreckage. One puppet, which had been standing on a now-collapsed balcony, swung above their heads like a corpse in a gibbet.
The Bluebloods fanned out, moving down side halls, exchanging fire with lifeless defenders.
“Which way?” Gaunt asked Chass, but the wounded man was only semiconscious.
“The audience hall is down to the left,” Isak said.
“What did you mean, the smell was Chaos?” asked Chass suddenly swimming awake.
“The filth that corrupted Ferrozoica is here. It’s got inside House Sondar, permeating everything. Probably why the bastard turned the Shield off. Kowle said Sondar was wired directly into the hive’s systems. I’d lay bets that’s how it got to him, infecting him like a disease.”
“You mean the hive systems are corrupted too?”
“No — but Sondar has listened to lies that have come directly into his mind. The fact they say he was mad to begin with can’t help.” He checked ahead and saw the large double-doors to the chamber. “With me!” Gaunt yelled, his chainsword buzzing murderously. The Volpone fireteam formed up behind him and had to run to keep up.
Gaunt burst through the doors and clashed directly with more servitor puppets in the entrance lobby. His chainsword cut through support wires and flesh. He hacked clear of their murderous attentions as Gilbear and his men came in behind, finishing the rest.
The audience chamber was large and softly lit. The air was warm and now so much thicker with the taint-smell. Muslin wall drapes twitched in the ventilator breeze. On the far side of the room sat a large, iron tank — its shell rich with verdigris from its brass fittings — fashioned with a single, baleful porthole in the front.
“I see you. What are you?” asked an electronic voice that came from all around.
Gaunt walked towards the awareness tank. “I am the agency of Imperial authority on this world.”
“I am the authority here,” said the voice. “I am the High Master of Vervun-hive. You are nothing. I see you and you are nothing. Begone.”
“Salvador Sondar — if yo
u still answer to that name — your power is ended. In the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind and for the continued welfare of this subject planet, I order you to surrender yourself to the Imperial Guard.”
“Surrender?”
“Do it. You will not enjoy the alternative.”
“You have nothing that threatens me. Nothing to tempt me. Heritor Asphodel has promised me this world in totality. The chatter has told me this.”
“Asphodel is the spawn of the warp, and his promises are meaningless. I give you one last chance to comply.”
“And I give you this.”
The servitor came into the room through a doorway concealed by muslin drapes. Sondar’s macabre fascination with his meat-toys was infamous in the noble houses, and many efforts had been made to curtail his surgical whims and clone-farming over the years.
This thing was far more than that, more even than the deluded creation of a mad flesh-engineer. The insanity of the warp was in it: eighteen hundred kilos of scarred meat and gristle, bigger than a Hyrkan antlerdon, a jigsaw of human parts fused into the carcass of a wild auroch from the grasslands. Limbs twisted and writhed around it, some human with grasping hands, some animal, some wet, glistening pseudopods like the muscular feet of giant molluscs. The massive head was an eyeless mouth full of needle teeth, that smacked slackly and gurgled. The donor auroch’s vast horns swept outwards from the low skull crest. A multitude of cables, feeds and wires suspended it, but unlike the other meat puppets, this thing moved of its own volition, pawing and stamping the soft carpet, writhing and pulsing.
The smell was overwhelming.
Gilbear and the Volpone backed off a few paces in astonishment. Sturm cried out in horror and one of the House Croe bodyguards turned and ran.
The meat-beast came for them, moving with a speed and fluidity that seemed impossible for something so vast. It howled as it came, a piercing, sibilant shriek of rage. Gaunt leapt aside and was knocked over by a flailing pseudopod. The slime burned through his leather coat where it touched.