‘Keep me appraised,’ he said.
He suddenly realised the drill had shut up.
‘We’re through,’ said Mkoll.
Gaunt walked back into the hold. Servitor crews were pulling back the protective baffles. The troop company of Strike Beta was on its feet.
Gaunt waved the lead team forwards. Mkoll, Domor, Larkin and Zered. Each one carried the tools of his trade. They buckled on rebreathers and adjusted lamp packs.
The chief artificer was staring at Gaunt, waiting.
Gaunt took the vox horn from the set operator.
‘This is Strike Beta,’ he said. ‘Be advised, we are beginning insertion. Hull is breached, repeat, hull is breached.’
‘The Emperor protect you,’ Spika’s voice replied over the link.
Gaunt nodded to the chief artificer. The man turned and beckoned urgently with both hands. With a mechanical grumble, the Hades backed into the hold again, treads clattering on the deck. Its retreat unplugged the hole it had bored, a huge tunnel in the hull of the Reach the size of a decent hatchway. The edges of the cut were bright silver metal, whorled and flaked like shredded foil. Approaching, Gaunt could see the cut was under four metres deep. Cold and undisturbed air leaked out towards him from the darkness inside, like the slow bleed of heat from a tomb.
Artificers and servitors were fussing around the hole with tanks of sealant.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Gaunt.
‘The edges will be razor-sharp in places,’ replied the chief artificer, ‘hazardous to touch. We are preparing to seal them with–’
‘No time,’ said Gaunt. ‘We’ll just be careful.’
The artificer’s crew backed off.
Mkoll and Domor led the way, and Gaunt fell in behind them with Larkin. Zered brought up the rear, his flamer lit.
Gaunt drew his boltpistol. Larkin carried the old solid-round rifle he had been training with. His longlas was in its cover across his back.
Mkoll stepped forwards into the gloom, lasrifle ready. Beside him, Domor adjusted his headphones and extended the sweeper broom of his detector set. Gaunt could hear the sweeper’s little portable auspex ticking like a radiation counter.
They advanced down the cut, through the bored hole, carefully avoiding the razor-sharp sides. The skin of the hulk was dense and thick. Light from the hold winked off the milled and sawn edges of the tunnel.
Beyond lay darkness and silence.
They moved slowly. Even by Mkoll’s wary and calculated standards, they were being cautious. Gaunt’s eyes slowly began to adjust to the gloom.
A greyish half-light was revealed ahead of them, a dusk. They were coming through into a cavity that had the dimensions of a hold space, but none of the regularities. The ceiling sloped down at one end. This wasn’t a space that had been designed, it was a chamber that had been partially crushed into its current shape: the internal compartment of one of the ancient vessels that had fused to form the Reach, deformed by slow gravitational pressure.
The deck was uneven. Panels had popped their rivets and sat like displaced flagstones. Cables, ancient and powerless, hung down from busted roof plates. The air was ominously dry. Gaunt noticed that Zered’s flamer began to suck hard, and the trooper had to adjust the mix rate to compensate for the oxygen-poor atmosphere.
Domor swept steadily to and fro, passing his broom across the walls and low ceiling. Gaunt could see the blue glow of his set’s display screen. The ticking was steady.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘I’m calibrating,’ said Domor. ‘There’s a lot of bounce. So many different densities and intermixed alloys.’
Gaunt didn’t envy Domor’s task. A quick look at the walls and ceiling showed extraordinary levels of gross compaction, with structural fabric and mechanisms crushed along with circuits and energy filaments into scrap filler. Getting any meaningful discrimination through the auspex was going to be a challenge.
‘Steady,’ said Mkoll. They climbed over a fallen beam and ducked around a fractured metal arch, the remains of some giant hatch, which stuck up out of the mangled deck like a broken tooth. Mkoll waited while Domor scanned both, and marked them with yellow chalk as items to be cleared from the route. Beyond the arch, the compartment seam had ruptured open like a scar. The metal looked molten. Through the rupture lay a service-way.
They went through. The service-way was long, and only slightly deformed. It was wide and high enough to drive a cargo-6 along. It had been built for humanoids, but not by any human. Curious designs along the wall sections had been defaced and over-marked by Archenemy sigils.
‘This area’s in use,’ said Mkoll. ‘The dust on the deck shows footprint scuffs. Not recent. I’d say six months, though environmental conditions are so stable, it could be six years.’
‘Or six hundred,’ said Larkin.
‘They come this way often enough. They didn’t like looking at these markings,’ said Domor, nodding at the defaced walls. ‘They scratched them out, changed them.’
‘Or altered them to leave instructions of their own,’ said Gaunt. ‘Like “Keep out”. Check the deck. Wires, anything.’
Mabbon Etogaur had been quite specific about the ways in which the extremities of the Reach were protected. No wards or warp magic, no infernal devices or daemonic mechanisms. Anything like that might be too easily triggered by the sensitive study and development being undertaken at the facility.
At the Reach, the Archenemy was relying on good, old-fashioned mechanical booby traps: mines, explosives, lethal anti-personnel defences.
Domor scanned ahead, adjusted his settings, and then did it again.
‘Nobody breathe,’ he said. ‘I’m getting something now. The deck plates ahead are hollow. Wait… yes, feth. I’ve got cables, active-fluid hydraulics and an electric charge. We’ve got a pressure trigger. The deck’s live.’
Mkoll pulled a scope that matched the one screwed to the top rail of Larkin’s rifle. The chief scout put it to his eye, and Larkin raised his weapon, hunting.
‘Cable wire comes out eight metres down, to the left,’ said Domor.
‘I see it,’ said Mkoll. ‘That look like storage drums to you?’
‘In the alcove?’ asked Larkin, squinting through his rifle scope. ‘Yes, it does.’
‘The sniffer’s getting fyceline and promethium gel,’ said Domor. ‘About a tonne volume.’
‘Throne,’ said Zered, genuinely appalled.
‘Detonator?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Looking for it now,’ said Mkoll, training his scope. He had it set to low light. ‘Got it. I see the trigger pin. The cable’s cleated up the wall along the bulkhead seam. It goes in at the top of the left-hand drum.’
‘Yes, I see it,’ said Larkin, aiming.
Gaunt wondered if they should back off. The target was tiny and the light levels were poor, but eight metres was comfortably within Larkin’s effective range. If the shot failed, and the device detonated, no amount of shelter or cover would save them. A tonne of fyceline compound explosive would create an overpressure blast in the confined environment that would suck through the narrow apertures of the compartments, pulp their internal organs to soup and their bones to jelly, and probably burst the improvised atmosphere seal between the Armaduke and the Reach. Even the rest of Strike Beta, waiting in the later hold, would probably be killed by focused atmospheric concussion.
Hiding in cover when Larks took the shot might make them feel better, but it would have zero practical safety value.
‘Let’s get this done,’ said Gaunt.
Larkin knelt on one knee, settling his position, shaking out his shoulders. He chambered a single saline round, slammed it home, and then took his aim. Mkoll crouched beside him, and activated the passive tagger on his scope, so that the pencil-thin light beam indicated the precise target. As shot caller, Mkoll wanted to make sure he and Larkin were both appreciating and agreeing upon the same exact spot.