Then he heard the crunch of boots from outside. The noise was barely audible, a mere tread of synthrubber against pressed metal, but it was enough, for none of the combine’s inhabitants would have possessed such footwear.
Revus rose, stowed the parchment and drew his hellpistol, keeping an infrared trace overlay on his helm’s display. He turned to face the door again, taking a flash grenade and priming it. For few seconds, he heard nothing. Then it came again — treads, at least three or four, possibly more, moving down the corridor outside. He flicked the grenade’s flash-delay down to a second and linked the timer to his visor’s photosensitive coating.
They waited. Perhaps they were unsure of themselves. Revus did nothing, standing poised, one hand on his laspistol, the other on the grenade’s pin. He heard his breathing, closed inside his helm, and relaxed it.
Then something grabbed the door from the outside and began to pull. Revus casually tossed the grenade through the gap and closed his eyes.
The flash puffed out, making his lids flare red even through the chromatic shield, and shouts of pain rang out. By then he was already moving, bursting through the doorway and out into the corridor beyond. He spun around, opening his eyes to see four troopers from the Adeptus Arbites, all clad in black, all reeling and scrabbling to get their focus back. He kicked in the visor of the closest, cracking the trooper’s head back against the wall, then swung round and punched his flattened hand into the larynx of another. Even before the bodies had hit the deck he’d loosed two las-bolts into the gun-hands of the remaining two troopers, causing them to drop their shotguns from shredded gauntlets. Four more shots followed, taking out their kneecaps, and then he was running.
Even before he’d cleared the next intersection he knew more were coming. He picked up the pace, running forward scans through the spire’s immense interior to plot a route back to his docked Nighthawk. As he rounded a tight corner he caught sight of two arbitrators — more heavily armoured, carrying both mauls and long-barrelled pistols — taking aim. He ducked instinctively, and was showered with blown rockcrete as the corridor wall blew apart.
That had been a kill shot.
Revus skidded down to a fire-crouch. ‘That’s how it is?’ he muttered.
He fired in rapid sequence, hitting the lead trooper in the armpit-joint and knocking him onto his back. The second trooper withdrew behind a blown-open doorway and fired back, raking the corridor floor. Revus’ proximity scanner picked up more signals coming from both behind and ahead. He bounced a shock grenade down the corridor and raced out after it. It went off just before the open door, slamming the metal back on the trooper sheltering behind it. As the arbitrator staggered out from his smouldering cover, Revus grabbed him by the helm and slammed him to the floor, finishing him with a crunching stamp on the neck.
Then he was running again, aiming for one of the main turbo-shafts leading upwards out of the combine zone. He reached the secondary shaft, where an open-doored cargo elevator stood waiting. Revus hit the chain-summons and activated the door-lock. Soon the metal box was clattering up the shaft. Revus knelt down to swap power packs, when suddenly the lift clanged to a halt. Something very heavy crashed onto its roof, denting the steel.
Revus snapped the power pack in and retreated to the far side of the elevator, angling his hellpistol at the concave ceiling. Whatever was coming through would be met by a fresh volley, and there wasn’t much that could take concentrated hits at such range.
Then there was a crackle of hot energy, and half the roof sheared away in a blaze of light. Revus fired, but realised instantly that whatever was after him was not worried at all about las-bolts. He scrambled for the doors, getting his hands on the lock mechanism, but all too late. The chamber screamed with energy, the floor drummed, the walls flexed like skin.
He stayed conscious for a second, just long enough to see what had got him.
‘Oh, shit,’ he slurred.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nerve gas ballooned out of every crevice, rushing into overlapping bursts of sickly green and boiling across the cracked floors. Spinoza, her face enclosed in a rebreather-helm, watched the deluge spill out.
She crouched at the confluence of three great subterranean corridors, hollowed out aeons before when the chem-works were still burning with industry. Unused grav-train tracks were scored into the upward-sloping floor, marking the paths through the maze. Crowl had set charges along all the routes, driving anything within them up towards her position.
For a moment Spinoza began to think that her master had been too zealous and that the nerve gas had enveloped the subject entirely, but then she caught sight of it — a dark speck against the emerald bursts, leaping from wall to wall like some enraged arachnid.
She took aim, and las-bolts seared into the gathering nimbus, slicing the gas clouds apart and smacking into the armoured shell of the oncoming target.
That hurt it. The cameleo-clad outline plummeted, disappearing under a rolling mass of green. Spinoza leapt to her feet, scanning for a follow-up hit amid the bluffs of dissipating gas. The target still occluded, she fired blind into the clouds, tracing the path the toppling body had taken.
Just as the last gouts blew themselves out, though, she caught sight of the target again, jumping back up against the tunnel wall, latching on to the greasy stone with handheld claw-locks and racing above the dissipating gas-tide. Spinoza fired, hitting it again — a glancing blow that shattered over its spine armour but didn’t bring it down. Her quarry seemed to be able to defy gravity, and scampered along the curve of the tunnel’s edge, near to the roof, over her head and into the confluence chamber.
‘Damn,’ spat Spinoza, racing after it, chasing it up the slope to the threeway intersection.
It should have been dropped. The gas should have got to it, and the las-strikes should have shredded it. What kind of damned armour was that?
Spinoza gained ground, getting a better look at what she was chasing. The target was a woman, shrouded in a scatter of cameleo-distract but still recognisably human-form. It was hard to make out her profile with any detail, but she must have been using claw-locks as part of her armour, and they must have been light enough not to slow her down.
Spinoza ran, firing again, trying to blast her from the walls. One bolt nearly did it, smacking into the target sideways and making her scrabble down the inner tunnel curve. Spinoza aimed again, this time for the head, only noticing the micro-frag charges spinning towards her at the last possible moment.
She threw herself over to her right as the first one went off, and the blast hit her like a kick from an equine. More cracked out, and she was thrown across the rockcrete, smacking hard into the ground and rolling with the shock wave. Cursing, she skidded to a halt and sprang back up firing — but she’d lost ground. By then the target was scrambling up a steep incline towards octagonal hatch-portals leading up into the levels above.
Spinoza sprinted up the steep incline, firing as she ran, trying to wing her quarry before she made the portals, but the target slipped through the first of them and disappeared. Spinoza raced up the last of the slope, grabbed the metal rim of the same portal and dragged herself up.
On the far side was a clanging, clanking world of pendulums, chain wheels and grinding gear-housings. She had emerged into the base of a mech-hauler — an industrial elevator column running hundreds of metres up, scything through the close-packed underhive and travelling on up into the mass-dwell zones. The platforms that clattered up and down its length had been built for bulk supply delivery, and despite their decrepitude seemed to be still in use. Spinoza’s target had already pulled herself atop one of the chevron-edged slabs and was now climbing further up the shaft.