‘Say nothing, listen with utmost care,’ said Crowl. ‘I will take this one back with me. You will speak to your scribes and your dispatch menials. I will send a squad here in two hours, and I want a report for them to act upon by the time they arrive. If there’s nothing for them to excise, I’ll come back myself. I doubt that you want that to happen.’
Gulagh wasn’t chuckling now. He shook his head, looking a little bewildered. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. But there’s no record…’
‘Two hours,’ said Crowl, turning away from him and stalking back down the corpse-hall. ‘That’s all you have. Use the time well.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Revus had not been made available, so Spinoza had been directed to the services of his sergeant-at-arms, Ergor Hegain. At first she had feared that might be some kind of slight, but on meeting the man, she began to think it a turn of good fortune. He’d greeted her smiling, his expression less dour than either of his masters’.
‘Greetings, lord,’ he’d said, saluting her. ‘Welcome to the bloodline.’
‘The what?’
‘Been lords in Courvain since before the Beast.’ He was still grinning. ‘You’re the latest.’
Spinoza regarded him, searching for any sign of disrespect, but didn’t find any. Throne of Earth, he was being friendly.
‘Not the last, I hope,’ she said, as warmly as she was able, which was just as stiff and formal as the schola had drilled her and warfare had made her.
Hegain laughed. ‘No doubt of it, lord. No doubt of it. I see that bloody great maul, and I heard the captain talk of it. You’ll smite them, lord. You’ll smite them to dust, Emperor keep you hale.’
He’d come with two of his standing troop — a man and a woman, both clad in ordo battle-armour marked with the skull-figure in white on grey. Together the four of them marched down once more to the hangars.
‘Orders to escort you to Malliax Quintus, middle deep, cross-grid 45-45S,’ said Hegain, his hellgun swinging from its belt-shackle as he walked. ‘Best to take the near-end tunnels. A Shade, if you will it. I can pilot it, if you wish that, but if not, I’d like to see you take the controls. If that is not to say too much. They told me you fought with the Angels of Death. Is that so, lord? I can imagine it, seeing the way you are.’
Spinoza smiled faintly. ‘You do not fight with them, sergeant,’ she said. ‘They suffer you to be present.’
Hegain laughed. ‘Is that it? Now you say it, but I do not believe it. I reckon you’d have given account of yourself. With that maul. By the Nine Wounds, I’d have liked to have seen it. You wish to pilot this? It is your command. But I can, if you have no desire for it.’
They reached the anchor station for a DF-08 Shade squad transporter, all angles and ramjet-housings. It was being prepped by a cadre of servitors and menials, fuelled and weapon-loaded. Unlike the Nighthawk it had been built for stealth, and was as sleek and ugly as a flensing knife.
Spinoza looked up at it. ‘I’ll take it, sergeant,’ she said.
Hegain grinned again, and clambered up into the co-pilot’s throne. The others hoisted themselves up into the cramped rear crew-bay, and the servitors withdrew, yanking hissing fuel lines with them.
Spinoza took her place, taking in the control mechanisms. She placed her hands on the two flight columns and pressed down, feeling the heavy machinery clunk back in response.
‘You run this down the tunnels?’ she asked.
‘If the demand is there, lord. Only if the demand is there. They never see it coming. Not much fits down the catacombs, but this will. Quick as a whip, keep the lumens down, silent burn. You taken one of these before? You’ll like it. Made for Courvain, like everything he uses. He knows his business, does Crowl. I took a bad hit on the last action, and he asked after it, and he knew all about it, and now I’m back to service. He’ll look after you, he will, though you wouldn’t know it, not when you meet him.’
‘No,’ said Spinoza. ‘No, that’s not obvious.’
She activated the engines, and the transporter rattled into life, belching blue-edged flames from the twin exhausts. Ahead of them, the outer hangar doors cantilevered open.
‘The machine-spirit has the location,’ said Hegain, clicking down a series of system-initialise switches. The cockpit shuddered briefly, and the clusters of picter-screens started to run with schematic readouts. False-colour targeting reticules swam across the forward viewports, linked directly to the chain-linked cannons slung under the hooked prow. ‘You can follow this seeker-readout?’
She could. Imperial battle vehicles all shared the same basic template designs, most of them forged millennia ago, designed to make it possible to switch between equipment with next to no preparation. For one with Inquisition training and experience on the front line there was little in the Munitorum’s colossal inventory that couldn’t be mastered, and it took only a moment’s mental adjustment to comprehend the Shade’s location-marker system.
‘At speed, then, sergeant,’ said Spinoza, lifting off and angling the thrusters to power them forwards. ‘You have the bio-overlay of the one we seek. The rest are irrelevant.’
‘Understood, and that suits us well, lord. You already have a fine command of this, if I may say it.’
Spinoza applied the initial boost, and the Shade blasted clear of Courvain’s black walls, shooting out into the smog beyond. She angled it down and over, tilting hard and dropping like a lead bolt. Just as before, the other air traffic scrambled to get clear, and a narrow path opened up for them through the tox-haze.
‘Ha!’ cried Hegain, enjoying the plummet. ‘Very good.’
Spinoza gained full velocity quickly, sweeping and sliding among the massed craft before swooping down below the level of the lowest. The Shade skated along just above street level, scything over the heads of startled crowds. The foundations of the ever-present towers blurred past, shadow-wreathed and colossal. Ahead of her, targeting schematics flickered and updated, guiding the transporter deeper into the labyrinth.
‘Approaching catacomb entrance point, lord,’ reported Hegain. ‘Beware it, if you please — the ingress can be.’
‘I see it,’ said Spinoza, beginning to enjoy herself. ‘Like I said, sergeant — at speed.’
The Shade dived towards a long banking ramp, hemmed on either side by retaining walls. Above them soared stacked arches and transit spans, rising like thrown web-silk over the chasms below. At the terminus of the ramp was a gaping hole, a black shaft that seemed to swallow the light into itself.
The Shade plunged straight into the dark, its powerful forward lumens picking out a blackened, crusted tunnel that shot down steeply before angling back on itself and splitting into dozens of threaded ways. There were crowds even in there, skulking in the stale underworld, and they screamed and ran as the Shade boomed over their heads.
‘Into under-Malliax,’ reported Hegain, rocking against the thrust of the transporter. ‘Coming in close now, lord.’
‘I see that too.’
They were powering down a narrow capillary, the walls closing in on them quickly. Huge clusters of cabling hung like vines from the tunnel roof, thick with luminous growths. Old machinery, long abandoned, half sunken into the sodden floor, eaten by rust and smashed by tech-looters. Glimpsed in the rapid flash of the Shade’s lumens, the carcasses looked like skeletons of vast, broken beasts.
‘Now,’ said Spinoza, hauling back on the control column. The Shade juddered to a halt, hovering over the edge of a deeper well, fifty metres across, that dropped down vertically in a series of shrinking concentric rings. The crew doors slammed open, and the two storm troopers leapt out, crouching down and sweeping the vicinity.