‘Got it?’ Preed asked.
‘Yes,’ said Raess, setting his rifle scope.
Mktass waited behind them, with Sairus. Sairus had turned his flame unit right down to the slowest rate. Mktass glanced back to the troop element, waiting a hundred metres back down the corridor. The Belladon sergeant, Gorlander, at the head of the column, shot Mktass a quick nod.
Brennan edged forwards beside the shooting team and swept again. Just his weight and movement on the gantry made it stir and creak.
‘Feth!’ Mktass breathed.
Small scabs of rust fluttered down from the pins supporting the structural bars. Most of them billowed away like dead leaves. Preed gently caught one of the largest before it could land on the wired bridge span. He was pretty sure it would have been too slight to activate the pressure plate, but there was no sense tempting fate.
‘Take your shot, please,’ said Mktass.
Raess lined up.
‘Wait,’ said Brennan. His scope was showing something else. ‘There’s a second charge at the other end of the bridge. It’s wired up to the same pressure pads as the first.’
‘Feth,’ Raess whispered.
‘What do we do?’ asked Preed.
Brennan took a deep breath, thinking.
‘Take out the first as you were,’ he said. ‘Reload fast, take out the second. In between times, pray that the impact of the first shot doesn’t throw the second trigger.’
Raess took out a second saline round and stood it on its brass base beside his knee.
‘Line up both shots in advance,’ he told Preed. ‘We’ll plug both sets of range parameters into our scopes so I can take the shot, load and switch to the second.’
Preed nodded.
Raess’s palms were sweating.
The blast hatch was scarred and coated with dust, but it held power. Mkoll touched the release and raised his weapon as it whirred open.
Silence.
He took a step forwards, weapon still aimed. Bonin and Ezra were by his side, with Brostin just behind them.
Mkoll felt warmth on his face. Heated air, circulating, an atmospheric pump. There were pendant lights in wire cages hanging from the brushed metal ceiling of the hallway. Some were lit. Some were dead.
He stepped through the hatch. The hallway was ribbed. The wall panels, battered old slab-cut metal sheets, had been painted with crude yellow symbols that made him feel uneasy. He could smell foul biological waste, oil and heated metal. He could hear a generator chugging close by, and deeper more faraway sounds of major machines at work. Patches of the floor were scorched as if fires had been lit and left to go out. Piles of discarded junk, unidentifiable fragments of rubber and metal salvage, were heaped in the corners.
Bonin edged down to the first junction. Ezra checked the nearest doors. The metal swing doors opened into little stone cells, like a jail without locks, sleeping quarters, monastically simple and spare. There were dozens of them, and then others above them, accessed by makeshift metal ladders, and others above that; a honeycomb of cells that stretched away into the darkness of the roof space.
They advanced a little further. Gaunt had followed them through, trailed by Rawne and Varl and the pheguth.
Gaunt shot Mabbon a look. The etogaur nodded and pointed ahead.
Gaunt holstered his pistol and drew his sword. He signed for silent approach. The Ghosts slung their rifles over their shoulders and drew their blades.
Two figures emerged from a hatchway up ahead of them. They were soldiers in brown leather webbing and yellow coats. Sons of Sek. They paused to mutter at each other. They turned to head in different directions. Mkoll took one down with his knife, cradling the corpse all the way to the deck. Ezra put a reynbow quarrel through the spine of the other.
Gaunt approached and glanced at the bodies as Bonin checked the hatch the enemy troops had emerged from.
The Sons were big and corded with muscle built from punishing training regimes. They stank of spices and dust. Their uniforms were bleached faded Guard surplus, patched up and dyed yellow. The belts and leatherwork they wore were finely made and polished. Their weapons were freshly stamped lasrifles, probably from some hijacked forge world shipment heading for the front line.
The masks were curious, the helmet chinstraps ornately broadened to cover the mouth with a life-sized simulacrum of a human hand.
Gaunt looked again, more closely. The leather hand had fingernails. It wasn’t a simulacrum. The ornate boots, belts, straps and other leatherwork worn by the Sons was tanned and cured from skinned victims or enemies.
Gaunt got up, and they moved on. The chambers felt like crypts. Wall paint was flaking and only half the light sources worked. There was a litter of junk and signs of scorching everywhere. Somehow, Gaunt had been imagining something more organised, something less like a slum or a derelict hive-hab occupied by vagrants.
All the metal surfaces flaked with rust, scabs of brown and black and yellow. Old wire braziers fluttered with open fires. Wires hung down from the galvanised metal ceiling frame.
They crossed a broad area like an open yard that was piled almost knee-deep with old, worn, faded and discarded rebreather masks. The cracked eye-slits seemed to stare at them. Then there was another bank of monastic cells, climbing like a cliff-face into the mangled junk vault of the chamber. A hatch opened into another hall. The space was filled with huge zinc baths, glass sinks, glass flagons and metal cooking pots. They were placed side by side on the floor, as if they had been arranged to catch drips from a leaking roof. All of the vessels, large or small, were filled to a greater or lesser extent with blood. The stink was terrible. Much of the blood was old, decomposing, clotted with rafts of mould and decay. Some of it seemed fresh.
Beyond that there were more of the monastic cells.
Leading the way, Bonin, Mkoll and Eszrah had silenced two more Sons along with some kind of robed official who was dressed like a hierophant. This creature’s malnourished, pallid form, replete with tattoos, was wrapped in a crude wire-and-metal armature under his robes, a frame that seemed designed either to support him or torture him. The joints had chafed and cut his flesh. The frame reminded Gaunt a little of the wirewolves of Gereon.
Gaunt glanced at Mabbon, quizzical.
A weaponwright, Mabbon wrote on his data-slate. Mabbon had told Gaunt that the weaponwrights were a fraternity of technical adepts who operated the Reach manufactories and had served the malign Heritor, Asphodel. They would now be serving a new Heritor, enabling him to function as Sek’s principal arms provider. Their prowess was likened to the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, though they relied far less on augmetic body modification and far more on esoteric and forbidden lore.
Gaunt nodded. He checked behind him. The troop element was advancing into the active section at their heels. Mkoll had made sure that the bodies of the Ghosts’ kills were dragged out of sight and thrown in the cells.
Mkoll signalled. He and the scouts fanned out.
‘These cells are where the weaponwrights rest and meditate,’ Mabbon whispered to Gaunt. ‘We are remarkably close to one of the main colleges. The colleges of heritence.’
‘The manufactories?’ Gaunt whispered back.
‘Yes, but more like labs,’ said Mabbon.
Mkoll returned.
‘There is a suite of chambers up ahead,’ he reported. ‘An extensive complex. Bad light in there, a weird light. There are people at work, men like the one in the robes. Servitors too, but not like any I’ve seen. There’s stuff there. Benches of it, shelves, alcoves. I saw artifacts, books, charts, data-slates.’
‘That’s the target,’ Gaunt replied. ‘Decide the order of attack. We need this to be discreet.’