‘Take the controls,’ ordered Spinoza, reaching for the door release.
‘As you will it, lord,’ said Hegain, maintaining the transport’s position as the cockpit canopy slid open.
Spinoza pushed clear and dropped down next to her troops. ‘Keep moving,’ she ordered her escorts, breaking into a run and drawing her ordo-monogrammed Accatran laspistol.
They were on the edge of the topmost tier of the well. Overhead, lost in the darkness, was the roof of the chamber, a hulking mass of rockcrete and natural spoil from the spire construction. To her left, just a few metres away, was the fall to the next tier down, overlooking the chasm. Eroded stairs, carved into the rockcrete, led to the levels further below, spiralling ever deeper like the bore-gauge of some immense drill.
Lost in the dank and the dark, hundreds eked out an existence there in gnawed-out hovels, a nocturnal realm of desperation. Most scattered like animals as Spinoza emerged, their rags swaying from skeletal limbs. She caught flashes of ghoulish faces, drawn with malnutrition and marked with pox-scars, before they raced off into the gloom.
Spinoza ran for the first stairwell and tore down it two steps at a time, feeling the slime-covered stone slip under her tread. She jumped down to the base and raced out across rotting rockcrete. The location marker on her retinal feeds turned red, zeroing in on the destination given by the abhuman’s testimony. She reached a steel doorway to an old storage chamber driven back into the curved wall, crowned with a heavy lintel marked with faded Divisio Malliax administratum runes.
Spinoza located the door’s locking mechanism — a heavy iron box with an intact bolt-unit — and blew it out with a single shot. The door creaked open, its hinges straining, and she kicked it in, applying a morsel of power-boost from her armour’s battle-matrix to lend the movement extra heft.
‘Surrender yourself,’ she warned, striding into the chamber beyond, scanning with the laspistol.
The unit had been clawed into the bedrock of the shaft’s edge, running back straight from the entrance portal. Its roof was low and arched, and damp spores clung thickly to ancient walls. Spinoza’s scanning augurs picked up trace heat signatures, but the place was empty. Towards the distant rear of the chamber, another metal door swung lazily on rusted hinges.
‘Secure the entrance,’ she ordered one of the storm troopers, the male, and gestured for the other one, who had a squad callsign of Zeta-8, to follow her.
She reached the listing door, wrenched it open and ran down a narrow corridor beyond. The tunnel was barely tall enough for her to fit through without stooping, and her breath echoed hard in her earpiece. A sudden mental image of millions upon millions of tonnes of earth, rock, plasteel and adamantium, all bearing down on her, briefly intruded into her mind, and she dismissed it.
‘Surrender yourself!’ she warned again, kicking through foetid pools of oily matter, her armour lumens rendering the walls of the tunnel in stark flashes of white.
The air grew even hotter. Sweat ran down Spinoza’s collar-seal; Zeta-8 nearly lost her footing amid the treacherous clutter strewn across the tunnel floor. They broke into another chamber, square-shaped and low-roofed, daubed with bloody angel-shapes on the mouldy walls. A shaft ran upwards from the far corner, accessed via an iron ladder welded to the walls. Spinoza skidded over to the opening, angling her weapon up at it, and saw a pair of boots ten metres above, just cresting the end of the ladder.
She fired twice, sending las-beams scything up the well, but her prey disappeared over the exploding edge and into another chamber beyond. Spinoza clambered up, reached the summit and hauled herself over the edge. She emerged into a larger hall, still subterranean but now lit by dirty lumen-strips hung on long chains. There were people again around her, hordes of rat-like underhivers, blinking at her sudden appearance before they realised the danger and broke into a confused stampede. Off in the crowd, one man was already running, his tattered cloak fluttering as he barged his way clear.
Spinoza and Zeta-8 pushed their way through the press of scrawny bodies, shoving them aside to gain a clear shot. Spinoza punched out with her free hand, feeling the snap of fragile bone, gaining a split-second avenue. She took aim at the man’s thigh and fired. The las-bolt ripped through flesh in a puff of blood, and he staggered, crashing into those about him.
Spinoza was about to go after him when Zeta-8 suddenly called her up. ‘Lord,’ she voxed. ‘New target — two nine four.’
Spinoza dropped to one knee, sweeping her laspistol up to the coordinates given — a high gallery some six metres overhead, running along the left-hand edge of the underground hall. She caught a glimpse of what looked like carapace armour, close-fitted, cameleo-coated, blending almost perfectly into the dank rockcrete wall.
‘Hold!’ Spinoza warned, but the figure was already moving — a confident sprint, far faster than the stampeding crowds down below.
She fired, taking out the gallery a metre ahead of the running figure. Without missing a stride, the figure vaulted across the collapsing struts and landed on the far side.
‘Attend to the subject,’ ordered Spinoza to Zeta-8, moving to the new quarry. She ran along the length of the hall, veering through the panicking masses. At the end of the gallery was an open circular portal. The figure dived through it. Spinoza reached the gallery’s only access stairwell and raced up the corroded rungs. She plunged through the empty hatch and out into a much wider roofed thoroughfare, still deep below nominal street-level but high enough up to be clogged with hundreds more bodies — pilgrims, beggars, priests, onlookers. Some enormous procession was taking place along the avenue, and crude effigies of the Angel Sanguinius swayed drunkenly above the throngs. Ecclesiarchy devotion-pods droned overhead, gouting incense and blaring out tinny audio recordings of sanctioned sermons.
Spinoza spun around, trying to see where her quarry had gone. Pilgrims blundered up to her, their eyes glassy and their faces streaked with blood, insensible to anything but their ecstasy. She pushed past them, searching desperately, and caught a glimpse of the carapace armour, now mottled with red-and-gold blotches, heading up through the crowds. She went after it, shoving and pushing and kicking out. The press of bodies grew closer and tighter. She smelt the stale wash of sweat and fervour, the sickly top-note of Ministorum censers, and reached for her crozius. Another pilgrim — a woman, her grey hair sticking out like thatch, her eyes black-edged and crazy — tried to embrace her, crying out something about the sacrifice of the beloved primarch. Spinoza smashed the butt-end of the crozius into her stupid, wrinkled face, not bothering to activate the disruptor field, and barely saw her crumple into a wailing heap.
It was no good. The downed woman was replaced by more of her kind, trampling over themselves, crashing up against her like a buffeting wind. Spinoza came to a halt, defeated by the crowd.
‘Sergeant,’ she voxed, sourly. ‘Your location.’
Hegain’s voice hissed back over the link immediately. ‘Closing in, lord. Coming in well enough. Tight tunnels, some of them, but we have a route. Hold fast, I approach.’
Spinoza shoved back, clearing enough space for her to break free of the main tide of bodies. Somewhere up ahead, now too far to pursue, the armour-clad interloper was no doubt making their way to safety. Everything indicated a capable operator — an agent of Adeptus Terra, an arbitrator, or maybe something more dangerous. What had they been doing there? Shadowing them? Or after the same quarry?
‘Zeta-Eight — report,’ she voxed.
‘Subject terminated,’ came the reply. ‘Heartburst capsule, ingested immediately after immobilisation.’