Crowl hunkered down, keeping his body low to the ground. The pain in his calves flared, and he considered another gland-burst of heiloquat. He was about to move when Revus’ call sign flitted across his audex feed.
‘Anything?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. Ahead of him the squad of storm troopers crouched in the dark.
‘Subject’s name is Hieron Valco,’ said Revus. ‘Stationed at a Triad watchtower. Disappeared six days ago.’
‘Well done. Anything else?’
‘I have the location of Valco’s hab-unit from the spire’s central allocator. Do you know the name Phaelias?’
Crowl thought for a moment. ‘No. Why?’
‘Valco’s superior had been questioned already. Someone else is interested in our corpse. ’
‘Irritating.’ Crowl shifted position slightly, easing the burn in his legs. ‘Go to the hab, get what you can. We’ll speak back at Courvain.’
‘By your will.’
The link cut. Crowl’s attention snapped back to his surroundings.
Ranks of empty promethium tanks led away into the gloom, overhung with a low ceiling of rusting iron. Empty cables swirled like entrails over a greasy floor. At the far end of the echoing hall was a fortified slide-portal, unmarked and unlit. Crowl observed the approach carefully, his eyes flickering from point to point. The storm troopers, a full squad of ten this time, led by Hegain, remained spread throughout what remained of the old manufactornm node, sheltering behind the tanks that had once held chem-solutions for the Jeroda Deredian industrial cluster away to the north. The node’s walls were heavy slabs of buttressed adamantium, built to be sufficient to contain an explosion and shield the inhabited zones above and below.
Crowl activated a proximity scan, but it was baffled by the heavy layers of shielding. He opened a channel to his sergeant. ‘Has all been put in place?’
‘As you commanded,’ Hegain replied, his voice low. ‘Nerve-charges in place, spider-pattern, covering all ingress routes. A tidy job, now it’s done. You’ll be pleased when you see it. If you see it. If we do it.’
‘Then I think it’s time, don’t you?’
‘Absolutely, yes, I do.’
Hegain gestured — a brief finger-ripple that sent five of the squad creeping up close to the portal, covered by the rest. Crowl advanced more steadily, shadowed as ever by the servo-skull.
‘Burn-bu-’
‘Hush,’ voxed Crowl sternly. ‘Not now.’
Gorgias dropped a little, its eye dulling to a sullen brown. Crowl silently drew Sanguine, running his finger down the curve of the long trigger, enjoying the weight of it in his palm. The lead trooper reached the portal, dropped down close and placed a tumbler-cracker over the lock-unit. The cracker hissed as it worked, spinning through the combinations, then clanked open. The portal’s clamshell doors shivered as the bolts shot back.
‘Go silent,’ said Hegain, moving up to point, his hellgun trained at the central join. He looked back at Crowl, bringing up the rear, who nodded, then motioned for two of his squad to haul the doors open while the others formed a semicircle around the portal, all guns aimed at its centre.
The chamber on the far side was pitch-black, stinking, silent. Hegain was first in, his hellgun-mounted lumen sweeping across a narrow, dust-thick space. Four more followed, then Crowl stepped across the threshold, his cloak sliding smoothly over the oxidised edge.
‘No one home,’ voxed Hegain, pushing further inside.
‘Don’t be hasty,’ said Crowl, sweeping the area with Sanguine’s ornate muzzle. ‘You smell it?’
Blood — the old metallic tang over a background fug of mould and decay.
The chamber was low-ceilinged, claustrophobic, unlit and stuffy. It had once been a storage cell, fit for little better than heavy STC tox-crates, but hadn’t been in service for a very long time.
They pressed deeper, going carefully around the carcasses of old transporter platforms, keeled over and caked in dust. Crowl looked down and saw cracks between the floor panels. The space was hollow beneath, its original underpinning having rotted away.
‘Watch your step,’ he warned, following Hegain’s careful progress, taking time to scan into the void below.
They moved into a further chamber, a little wider, just as decrepit. The smell of humans was stronger here. A series of plasteel crates had been shoved together in the room’s centre to act as some kind of table. Open storage cylinders lined the walls, some still containing ration-packs, most empty.
‘What do you suppose that is, lord?’ asked Hegain, looking up at the far wall. ‘Never seen that before. I mean, I reckon I may have, of a kind, but there’s a bit more art to it, I think? Or maybe not.’
Crowl angled his armour-halo towards the indicated spot, flooding cracked plasterwork with a severe light-pool. The painted angel had been slapped on the wall in red, and for a moment he thought that might have been the source of the blood-stench, but spectral scans said otherwise. The figure took up the entire wall space. It was a messy, gauche daub — semi-abstract, like some tribal scratching on the curve of a cave-edge. It needed the dance of firelight to complete the effect.
He took a pict-record of it, and turned his attention to the table. Images were stacked on its surface, dozens of them. They were cheap lithochromes, pulled out from any one of a thousand picter workshops in the vicinity, rendered onto mouldering paper in watery colours. He leafed through them, taking in the catalogue of horror they documented — body parts extracted, eyes pinned open, ribs exposed, shutter-frozen screaming.
He put them down distastefully, letting the images flutter to the ground. Committing the crime to lithochromes was just another imposition of violence.
‘Take these,’ he ordered. Crowl moved away from the central table, into the gloomier corners, and stooped low. The floor — a badly laid screed of cheap ceramic tiles — was shiny with a black film. This was what he had smelt. He ran a finger through the film, lifting its glossy scrapings to the light. The blood was congealed, perhaps a long time ago. Whatever had taken place here, they could not have intervened in time to prevent it.
‘And samples of this,’ Crowl added, getting back to his feet.
‘By your will,’ said Hegain, gesturing to one of his troops to comply.
Gorgias had adopted a holding position directly in front of the painted angel, scanning repeatedly as if it could decipher something about the image from looking at it. Crowl moved his scrutinising gaze around the rest of the chamber. The place had the stench of desperation about it — a black hole, buried under the crust of civilisation, a place where elaborate pain had been curated. And yet…
‘Hold,’ he voxed, suddenly tensing again.
The storm troopers complied instantly, dousing all lumens and switching to void-sight scanners. Crowl cocked his head a little, relying on his natural hearing for a second, then switching to the ironwork augmetic implanted under his right lobe.
Wait… he signalled in ordo battle-sign. Wait…
He gestured to the floor, where greater cracks gaped between the tile edges. Some of those cracks were packed with grey-black dust, some were hollow. Seamlessly, every soldier in the chamber angled their gun towards the crevices.
Crowl narrowed his eyes, holding Sanguine two-handed now. He might have been mistaken. The narcotics could do that, which was why Palv’s ghost disapproved.
Then he heard it again.
‘Flush it out,’ he snapped, and opened fire.
A volley of lasfire in a confined space gave none of the sensory overload of a bolter volley, but it had a sinister whisper and an eldritch light-flash. Sanguine’s projectiles made the only solid sound, cracking up the tiles and spinning the fragments.