Adalbrect shivered and used his right hand to grip the steel aquila token that hung from his left cuff. The sharp points around its edges dug into his palm and he concentrated on the pain.
The engine shifted and growled as they rolled up a brief slope, skirting the wreck of a Coffin-Worm slumped as though exhausted and brooding, its head down, the canopy behind which its crew would have sat shattered, its legs buckled and splayed out on either side of it. Its armoured back hunched up above its main hull. Behind it another one lay on its side, the plates of its flank flaring outward from the explosion that must have gutted it. Adalbrect started again as the remains of the armourglass in its canopy flashed the light from the carrier’s own windows back at him. For a moment it looked like eyes had come to life under the low metal brow. He twitched his gaze away, as if there really had been something in the hulk looking back at him, and looked to the skyline ahead. Two Flensing-Wheels leaned together in silhouette against the red smears of dusk like conspirators whispering plans. Half of a third lay in front of them, he saw as the carrier drew closer, and he imagined that what they were whispering about was revenge for it. He watched them draw nearer, took in the spikes that studded their surfaces and the hooks that reached out from their rims, saw the pocks of high-density stub-rounds that stippled one from edge to edge and the great crater in the centre of the other where the cockpit had been torn or blasted out, gimbals and all.
This didn’t feel like a graveyard to Adalbrect. It felt like the game parks that had surrounded the Suzerain’s spring palace on Engatto Minoris, full of feral beasts that had watched their all-too-fragile little carriage convoy go past with resentful, watchful stares.
They crested the rise, saw the graveyard plain in the ebbing light, and Adalbrect shuddered. The unease that had been seeping into him all trip had soaked through his tense muscles and twitching nerves, and reached his bones.
The dead Woe Machines swarmed the plain, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank. The high-backed Coffin-Worms leaned this way and that, and the hooks studding the Flensing-Wheels seemed to claw at the sky as though they wanted some of Ashek’s bloody sunset for themselves. Ahead of them towered a cairn of wrecked Blight-Balls, all caved in or ripped open or perforated with lascannon craters, sagging and spilling against the flank of a ruined Skybreaker gun-train whose torn-off tread mountings gave it a staggering lean. Jammed in between the greater machines were ungainly rows and piles of the lesser, whole or in fragments: bulbous Stalk-Tanks, thick-shouldered Murdernauts, batrachian Rackmouths. Adalbrect spent a moment puzzling out an incongruously neat stack of intermeshed girders until he realised he was looking at the severed scaffolds from one of the infamous Abattoir Trees. He remembered the name from the shuddering Guard sergeant who had begged to be allowed to throw himself off the roof from which three orderlies had just dragged him.
Once he’d made the association Adalbrect found his gaze riveted to the stained and dented metal meshes. He fancied that as the lights moved over them he could see the points of the harpoon-barbs, although he knew that that was impossible. The Guard had been meticulous about smashing every weapon mount on the Trees before they had allowed the wrecks to be dragged away. The tech-priests had been furious about it.
The meshes passed out of sight, behind the buckled steel ruins of some building-sized engine now so utterly crushed that Adalbrect couldn’t identify it at all. He closed his eyes for a moment, and realised that in the back of his mind he could still hear that sergeant’s voice, hoarse and low and begging. His mind started to lay in the other sounds of the depot hospital, the sounds the men had made as they fought against their memories of what the Ashek war had done to them, and then his eyes were open again and his nails dug into his palms as he looked around for something to distract him from the memory.
But the burst of gunfire from the nose of the second carrier-eight was not what he had had in mind.
It took a moment for him to realise what he’d heard and jolt upright, and he could see the same reaction from the others as they broke out of the reveries lulled upon them by the rumble and rock of the vehicle and the parade of dead metal grotesqueries past the windows. Then someone in the driving cabin woke up too, flicked the lights from white to battle-stations red, and another flurry of shooting burst out on their tail, a quick whicker of las-shot and two coughing booms from a single-action stubber over the top of a man’s voice screaming in anger and pain.
Sister Sarell was already half out of her seat, her arm across her body to where the lacquered bolt pistol hung at her hip. Vosheni, Kinosa and their two clerks had gone into a huddle in the front seats, and for a moment Adalbrect wondered if they were closing up for protection or trying to console each other. Then the huddle broke and he realised that they had been reciting a prayer over the mag-cells that they now snapped home into slender-barrelled laspistols. Adalbrect looked around to see Haffith, the Colonel’s man, kneeling in the aisle between the seats, his eye glasses shining animal red in the lights, calmly readying a short Guard-issue stub carbine. Finally goading himself into motion, Adalbrect jerked himself into the aisle and snatched his own laspistol out of its holster.
‘Stay low and breathe easy, brother,’ said Haffith behind him. ‘Never any sense in charging out until we know... wait...’ Haffith’s voice trailed off and his head cocked: he was listening to something over his vox-bead. Adalbrect nodded, realising how hard he was slamming his breaths in and out, and made himself relax. After a few more moments of quiet he remembered his office, re-holstered his gun and reached for the aquila-headed rod of rank that rested at the window where he’d been sitting. If he was going to step out of here into a fight then his enemies would know they faced an ordained servant of the Imperial Cult. One fingertip stroked the collar beneath the aquila’s claws where pressure would set the combat blade sliding up through the mount.
The stub gun boomed again, right outside the carrier’s windows, but Adalbrect’s head was clear now and he didn’t jump. He was about to ask Haffith what he’d heard when the speaker link from the driver’s cabin crackled.
‘Tosk. Stowaways from the second carrier. Three have cover by our right side, giving support for another element following the convoy. Step on them, please. Tosk out.’
Haffith was already moving to the right-hand hatch, but Sarell was there before him and Adalbrect hastily fell in behind. With only a little hesitation Vosheni made to lead the other Administratum officers to join them but Haffith shook his head. He motioned Vosheni towards the hatch-handle, whipped two fingers across his lips when the Demi-Lector made to speak, then gave a thumb-up when the man nodded, stayed silent and took a grip.
Haffith jabbed out four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then Vosheni hauled on the handle, lurched back as the hatch slid towards him faster than he’d expected, collided with a seat and overbalanced.
There was a moment of pure anticlimax as a cool breeze spilled gently into the cabin, and then Sister Sarell swung out of the hatchway by one arm, bolt pistol held out in the other and shouting a battle-blessing from some feral world in a voice that had no business coming from such a small frame and narrow mouth.