‘Kolosim to all entry teams. I want confirm taps on every Mech body you see. Repeat. Kill-confirm every potential hostile. No exceptions.’
His team leaders voxed affirmative. The shots started. The men around him spread out, aiming down at the heads or central processors of every dead adept, priest and servitor, and firing a point-blank round to destroy them.
It was grim work. It was vital work. The Mechanicus kept its mysteries and secrets to itself. If there was even a slim chance any of them would revive, it had to be erased.
Obel clambered to his feet and stumbled towards the duct. Criid and Zhukova had already taken off into the vent in pursuit of the fleeing Qimurah.
‘Tona!’ he yelled.
There was no reply. He felt woozy, his lungs tight from the heat. The thing had hit him hard, and he was pretty sure he was carrying broken ribs or worse. But the adrenaline surge of the savage fight was still pumping through him.
He glanced back at the devastation behind him. Smoke virtually filled the gallery’s rockcrete ravine, and fires were burning where both bodies and the chemical silt in the channel bed had caught. The enemy dead choked the gulley mouth, and the Tanith dead and injured were all around him.
‘Sergeant!’ he yelled.
Ifvan limped to him, gashes on his face. ‘Sir?’
‘Check the dead. The enemy dead. None of these bastards can be alive, you understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then see to our wounded. Come on, Ifvan! Rally whoever’s left!’
Ifvan nodded.
‘Where – where will you be, sir?’ he asked.
Obel was already hurrying towards the vent.
Tona Criid was a strong runner, but Zhukova was staying with her. The heat in the close confines of the vent was intense. Criid wasn’t sure how much longer either of them would last before dehydration shock or the stifling air overcame them.
She wasn’t going to let the bastard go.
And there were very few places he could go. This was the main vent spur, the route they’d followed to get in. It ran all the way out beyond the limits of the EM 14 site, and eventually joined the main geotherm shaft. No divisions, no sub-tunnels. At least that was what the chart had seemed to show. Two kilometres out to the main magmatic pipeway.
The heat was bad enough. The noxious volcanic gases were burning her throat and binding her chest, as though her respiratory system was corroding. The duct was a tube, and the base was littered with magmatic residue and liquid spoil, making it treacherous under foot. She twisted her ankle twice, and then stumbled so badly she fell and slammed painfully into the curved wall of the duct.
Zhukova pulled her up.
‘We can’t–’ Zhukova began.
‘We can,’ Criid insisted.
It had been easier coming in, despite the weight of gear. They’d moved steadily, picking their way. Nothing like this blind, headlong rush. Chasing down a pipe into hell after one of its daemons.
They started to run again. Zhukova had strapped her rifle over her back. Criid’s rifle was back in the gallery, but she still had the Mechanicus stave.
‘He was hurt–’ Zhukova said, coughing.
‘So are we.’
‘No, he was wounded. I don’t care how inhuman he was, he was damaged!’
Criid knew she was right. She’d seen the Qimurah go past her, torso and arm torn and blistered from weapons-fire. She’d seen splashes of yellow fluid on the wall of the duct as they rushed into it. Maybe that was their only edge. Maybe they could overtake him, despite his speed, because he’d start to flag as his wounds slowed him.
She saw a vertical beam of pale light ahead. It was the down-duct that led back to Turbine Hall One, the one they’d lugged the support weapons and ammo down, rung by rung.
She ran straight under the opening and kept going.
‘Tona!’ Zhukova called.
Criid looked back. ‘Not that way!’
‘He might have–’
‘No! He’s gone out the same way he went in! Right down to the main thermal line, Zhukova! That just goes back up into the Mechanicore!’
‘But–’
‘Come on!’ Criid turned and started running again.
‘Captain Criid!’ Zhukova yelled.
Criid cursed and swung back around.
‘What?’ Zhukova was standing under the ceiling duct, looking up.
‘What, Zhukova?’
‘He would have gone up,’ Zhukova said, ‘if it was the easy way.’
Criid stumbled back to her, panting.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘If he was wounded,’ said Zhukova. ‘Desperate. Knew he couldn’t make it all the way to the main line. Decided to hide.’
Criid looked at her. ‘Is that a guess? Are you guessing?’
‘I’m trying to think as he might think,’ Zhukova replied. ‘I don’t think I can go much further. Not all the way along. And then how many more kilometres to get out of the city, the clave zones, back to enemy lines? If I was hurt, I’d hide. And this is the only hiding place. The only one.’
Criid glared at her.
Zhukova reached up and grabbed the lowest rung of the service ladder. She hauled her way up a short distance into the base of the down-shaft.
She paused, and dragged her hand along the next rung up, then looked down at Criid and showed her palm.
It was smeared with yellow fluid.
‘The bastard went up,’ she said.
‘Feth,’ Criid growled. ‘Jump down! Jump the feth down, Ornella!’
Zhukova landed beside her. Criid raised the stave, aimed it up the down-shaft, and loosed a pulse of rippling gravitron force.
They heard it strike something in the darkness far above. A dull metallic thump. Dust, pebbles and flakes of rusted metal showered down on them.
Criid pushed the stave into her pack and grabbed the lower rungs, heaving herself up.
Obel ran up, panting and coughing, from the duct behind them.
‘Criid? Where the feth are you going?’ he gasped.
‘Up!’ Criid yelled, disappearing from view.
Zhukova looked at Obel.
‘Because he did,’ she said.
‘Is it dead?’ he asked.
The Beati Sabbat sighed. Gaunt had never seen her look so exhausted. Even the soft, inner light she seemed to generate had dimmed.
‘Yes,’ she said.
The billet hall of the undercroft was just a billet hall. All the reality distortions had vanished like dreams. The flood water had drained away swiftly, leaving only foul puddles and debris on the flagstones. Baskevyl’s men were lighting lamps so there was a little light at least.
Gaunt slowly looked around. Just a cellar now: cold, damp, damaged, old. Just a place, a solid, ordinary reality, a set of deep chambers no one cared about. The malice that had infused the stones had fled with the woe machine’s death-shock. The undercroft had realigned with reality and returned to what it had always been.
Gaunt checked himself. No, the place had changed forever. No one would come here now. It ought to be sealed, not because there was some lingering trace of immaterial evil, but because of what it was. A tomb. A scene of murder. A site so burdened with grief and loss it was hard to even stand there.
The dead littered the ground between waste-water puddles and broken cots. Sancto’s men. Osket was moving from body to body, checking for life, though it was just a formality. They had been cut to ribbons. Sariadzi had been destroyed so completely, no trace of him remained.
Gaunt wondered how many others had died here. Ghosts, men and women of the retinue, so devoured by the darkness that nothing had survived to show they had ever existed.
Daur sat in a corner, his back to the wall. This loss, this slaughter, had scarred them all. Gaunt doubted he would ever see Ban Daur flash his eager smile again.