Spinoza ran to the next platform in the sequence, jumped up onto it and punched an activation rune. The chains around the edge slammed tight, the wheels squealed, the whole structure shuddered, and then she was moving, swaying up the shaft as motive generators rumbled into smoke-choked life. Soon the walls were speeding by, a mass of old pipework and embedded machinery, most of it silted up and heavily oxidised. Spinoza knelt down between the carcasses of two empty supply hoppers, taking what cover she could, and tried to get a clean shot on the lead platform, but all she saw was the cross-braced underside of the thick slab shaking along, ten metres up.
They pursued one another for a few more seconds before the shaft walls on the right-hand side suddenly peeled away, exposing a vast hall stretching off into barely lit darkness. The target leapt from her platform, letting it rattle up the now-exposed chain-pulls, and sprinted out along a long, raised central gantry. Once she reached the shaft’s lip, Spinoza did the same, racing hard, her lungs hammering, her armour systems whining at full-assist.
The hall was huge, a kind of food-processing nexus, and on either side of the raised gantry boiled enormous vats of protein broth, scummy and noxious. The air stank, and clouds of greasy vapour roiled up to the gothic-arched heights. In the slaughterpens below, skeletal servitors looked up in dumb surprise, their aprons stiff with blood, as the carcasses of emaciated battery beasts twitched limply in their metal hands.
The target was still running. Her cameleo-shroud was malfunctioning, and coated her in a swirling mess of fractured lens artefacts, but she could still run. Spinoza fired twice, nearly hitting her. They both raced out along the gantry, now arching precariously over the vats themselves — a slender line of metal hanging above the seething pits of boiling nutrient-swill.
At the far end of the hall were two pairs of massive doors, one closed, the other closing, grinding down on fat-streaked tracks as angled pistons hissed into extension. The target might make that gap — Spinoza wouldn’t.
She fired again, nearly losing her footing on the gantry’s sloping surface, and finally hit the target, sending a bolt fizzing into her right knee and sending her tumbling. Spinoza ran harder, now just twenty metres away. The quarry slipped as she struggled to rise, and nearly slithered over the edge.
‘Surrender yourself!’ Spinoza shouted, keeping her pistol aimed at the target and preparing to drag her back to safety. A boiled-alive corpse was no good to her.
But she never got close. With startling speed and strength, the target managed to wrench herself back to her feet, spin around and draw what looked like some kind of blade. The last set of doors slammed closed, sealing them in.
Spinoza drew her crozius, and kindled the energy field. Electric light flooded out, illuminating the full squalor of the glistening, dripping landscape around them. Noisome vapours swirled around them both, sickly and grease-pocked, while the screams of blind beasts being fed into the rendering jaws just kept on coming. Alarms had been activated somewhere, and far down below menials were running, but that meant nothing — the sole object of her attention stood before her, cornered at last.
Flecks of cameleo-effect still shimmered across a suit of black armour enclosing a taut physique. There were no marks of identification, just plates of matt ceramite, and her face was hidden behind a smooth helm.
‘I serve the Holy Orders of the Emperor’s Inquisition,’ Spinoza declared breathlessly, holstering her laspistol. The crozius flared on a spike of disruptor charge, flashing savage blue across the pressed metal of the gantry floor. ‘Submit now, if you wish to live.’
But then the target’s sword kicked into a life of its own, and the steel blade crackled with a sheath of lurid yellow-gold plasma.
‘Good for you,’ said the woman, crouching into combat readiness. ‘And likewise.’
Moments after dousing down the clamberways and climbing up from the chem-storage chambers, the signal came in. Crowl blinked it up to his retinal feed, and immediately knew what it meant.
‘Sergeant,’ he said, turning to Hegain. ‘I require two Nighthawks, full complement, immediate dispatch. I’ll shunt you the data.’
‘As you command. If I may, what is-’
‘Revus,’ said Crowl, striding along the tunnel leading to the planned rendezvous, reloading Sanguine as he went. The captain’s repeater-life sign had suddenly veered far from where he had been hunting, then switched to an automatic crisis signal. ‘Someone has been stupid enough to interfere with one of my people.’
‘Oh yes. You have the right of it. By your will, and done with all swiftness. But, can I venture it — the interrogator?’
‘Inform her when you can. For now, the priority is the captain.’
They walked out into a circular space, the base of a long shaft bored deep down into the underhives, its length strung with chains and swaying cabling. A Nighthawk hovered ahead of them, its engines already ramped up to full thrust, its crew-bay doors hanging open. Once the squad was inside, the gunship boosted upwards, its thrusters spitting flickers of gaseous flame.
They thrust clear of the shaft’s upper lip, booming out into the inhabited levels again. The Nighthawk swung round, pushed north, switching thrust to horizontal to gain speed. A series of high-arched bridges passed overhead, thronged with ground traffic. Massive braziers had been lit along the ceremonial transitways to an Imperial Cult oratory, three hundred storeys high and festooned with holographic images of the Angel Sanctified, and the air was shaky with heat, soot and flame. The chanting was audible over the transporter’s rumble — ‘For Him was he slain, for Him was he slain’ — over and over and over.
They climbed and banked, screaming through the bovine mass of slow-moving air traffic, shunting aside any too slow-witted to take evasive manoeuvres. Block clusters passed in a blur of velocity, tower after tower, their vast faces studded with a million grime-flecked viewportals. A few seconds later, the two backup Nighthawks came streaking out of an adjoining spire-canyon, swinging in behind Crowl’s lead ship and falling into support formation.
‘Something has gone awry,’ voxed Crowl, using an open channel to all troopers within the three transporters. ‘The captain has been detained by agents of the Adeptus Arbites. I don’t know why, but the insult will not be borne. We will take him back. That is all.’
Ahead of them, flanked by two massive Administratum archive towers, the objective became steadily visible through the haze — a night-black spire, shot like a burned spear into the eternal city’s clamour, lit by pale blue floodlights and encrusted with running columns of ebon skull-forms. Watchtowers crowded atop battlements atop heavy bolter batteries, all overhanging a lattice of intersecting transit causeways. A vast sigil cast from pure iron had been hammered into its crown — a set of scales, clenched by a gauntlet, superimposed onto a dark column. Watcher-drones circled around the summit, sweeping its precipitous shoulders with cycling detector-beams.
No civilian traffic went anywhere near it, and even the omnipresent columns of banner-bearing pilgrims veered away from its hundreds of jawlike gates. The floodlit mantras Lex Imperialis Supremis and Iustitia non Dormitat blared out in letters ten metres high from veined marble entablatures, backed up by the immense rolls of the guilty hammered on age-tarnished plates of bronze. Imperial aquilae gazed out from every corner and every turret-tip, carved from obsidian, their eyes glinting blackly, watching all, seeing all.