Blenner walked over to Wilder. His heart was pumping harder than he really liked.
‘Time for work, captain,’ he said.
Wilder looked at him.
‘Really? Another munition restock?’
‘No, something much more stimulating. We’re going in to support Gaunt. Select eight drivers and five spotters.’
‘Five?’ asked Wilder.
‘The others will be you, me and the boy there.’
‘Shit, commissar!’ Wilder hissed. ‘Gaunt’s son? Really?’
‘He needs to do something before his confidence withers and dies entirely,’ said Blenner.
‘Come on now!’ he called to the bandsmen. ‘Let’s look like we know what we’re doing. Perday? You’ll be my driver.’
Felyx approached him.
‘You want me for this?’
‘It’s just a little trip. You’ll enjoy it. Something to do, Meritous.’
‘I’ll ride along,’ said Maddalena.
‘There’s no room, so you can’t. Sorry and all that. I’ll bring him back in one piece. Promise.’
‘No,’ said Maddalena.
‘Yes!’ Felyx exclaimed.
‘You are bound by Imperial Guard law,’ Blenner told her. ‘It was a basic condition of you remaining with this regiment. I know that as a fact. So I have authority and I’m exercising it. Go away. Let the boy do something today so that when it’s all over he can look his father in the face without feeling ashamed.’
Maddalena Darebeloved stared at him. Her jaw was tight.
‘I do not like you, Vaynom Blenner,’ she said.
‘They all say that at first,’ he replied. He stared right back at her. ‘My dear mamzel, if I worried about all the things in this fething galaxy that didn’t like me, I’d never get out of bed in the morning.’
He turned away.
‘Shall we go?’ he asked.
Criid shone her lamp pack into the darkness overhead. Her clearance team had entered a vast cavern that seemed to be a natural formation because time and compression had crumpled the walls and ceiling so much. Micas and alloys glittered and wrinkled like rock. The deck beneath their feet was rusting plates forming a path across oil-stained rockcrete surfacing.
‘Hold up,’ Mklaek called out. He tuned the dial of his sweeper. ‘It’s mined,’ he said. ‘Under the floor plates.’
Banda wiped sweat from her forehead.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘How do I shoot out the trigger, then?’
‘Can we lift the plates up?’ asked Leyr. ‘Disable the mines manually?’
‘That sounds like a gigantically bad idea,’ said Criid.
‘We go around then,’ said Leyr. ‘Off the path, onto the rockcrete.’
Mklaek shook his head.
‘I’m getting nothing at all off the rockcrete. Too dense for a clear return. There could be filament charges or remote triggers that I’m just not picking up.’
Criid breathed deeply.
‘So we find another way,’ said Chiria, easing the weight of her flamer pack. ‘Go back to that last junction, take the other spur.’
Banda put down her rifle and leaned against the cavern wall. She was trying to regulate her stress.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You never mine an area you can’t disarm. That’s a scratch company basic rule.’
‘That’s not always true,’ said Leyr.
Banda shrugged. ‘All right. Maybe not on an open world where you’ve got the luxury of space. Space to go around. Space to detonate from a distance. But not here.’
She looked at Criid.
‘Think about it, Tona,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t wire up a main route like this if they couldn’t unwire it again later. In case they needed to. It stands to reason. They couldn’t set this off safely to clear it. The concussion would blow right through the tunnels.’
Criid thought about it.
‘Which means,’ said Banda, ‘these charges must be defusable. We can lift the plates.’
Mklaek nodded eagerly. ‘Because they won’t have pressure releases,’ he said. ‘They won’t be triggered by weight coming off them. Just weight being applied.’
‘Can you do it?’ asked Criid.
Mklaek nodded again.
‘It’ll make a change from taking pot shots,’ said Banda.
Criid looked at Chiria. ‘Go back to the troop support and get them to back off at least fifty metres,’ she said.
‘That won’t do any good if we set this off,’ Chiria objected.
‘It’ll make me feel better,’ snapped Criid. She looked at Banda and Mkleak.
‘You’re up,’ she said.
They put on gloves and got down on their hands and knees. Mklaek slid the sweeper set alongside him as they crawled along, keeping an eye on the auspex unit.
‘This is the first one,’ he said, halting.
Criid and Leyr stood watching, intent.
Banda drew her warknife and fitted the tip of the blade under the edge of the corroded deck plate.
‘Steady,’ said Mklaek.
‘Really?’ Banda replied. ‘I was just going to flip it up.’
Mklaek got right down so the side of his head was on the ground. The moment the plate lifted, even a finger width or less, he could see under it.
‘Do it,’ he said.
Banda began to lever up the edge of the plate. It was thick and very heavy, and the knife blade was polished so finely the plate looked in danger of slipping off it. She prised the edge of the plate up about two centimetres, and very quickly got three fingers under it before it fell back onto the pressure trigger.
‘Throne alive,’ muttered Leyr to Criid. ‘I can’t bear this.’
Banda swallowed, adjusted her grip, and slid the knife out. Mklaek still had his head pressed to the ground.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
He nodded.
She started to lift. It was heavy. She wouldn’t be able to hold it for very long.
‘Stop,’ said Mklaek.
‘What?’ Banda asked. The plate was no more than three centimetres clear on the side she was lifting.
‘Don’t move it any higher,’ said Mklaek.
‘Oh right, just sit here? Holding it?’
‘The underside is wired,’ said Mklaek quietly. ‘It’s got a pull-away wire hooked to the trigger cap. Lift it any higher and it’ll fire.’
‘Now you tell me,’ said Banda.
Raess took a sip of water from his flask. His throat was as dry as Jago. There was a soreness in his right arm that he didn’t like.
‘Fit?’ asked Mktass.
‘I’ll do,’ said Raess. He stoppered his flask, put it away, and got up. ‘Where is it?’
Mktass’s team had advanced into another engine room, a giant, rusting metal box full of rusting metal machines. It was the third in a row that they had slowly picked their way across. Preed speculated that they were all parts of a ship, a shiftship, that had been compacted into the mass of Salvation’s Reach centuries before. It reminded them of the corroding, jury-rigged hulks the greenskins used. Every surface was a drab, flaking autumnal shade of rust.
They were coming out on a gantry halfway up the height of the chamber. The gantry became a metal bridge that stretched out to a hatch on the far side. Support was from metal bars that descended from the ceiling. It was a long way up and a long way down.
Brennan had swept the chamber and located an electrical source on the bridge, halfway along. The central span was wired up to pressure plates under the approach span. A major charge lurked under the bridge, secured in a fuel barrel and lagged with swathes of oilskin sheet.
Raess chambered a round. He had officially lost count of how many shots he’d taken that day.
‘Line me up,’ he told Preed.
The scout took out his scope and put the tagger beam on the trigger mechanism, which stuck out of the bundle under the bridge like a spigot.