Then she drew closer, placing her hand on Spinoza’s, the leather glove over the ceramite gauntlet.
‘I respect your master,’ she said, her voice lowering. ‘More than you know, and I will not oppose him either openly or in secret, but know this — if you need anything, if you need greater force of arms for this purpose, which is vital, then you have the means to contact me. Do not hesitate — you promise me this?’
Spinoza looked back into Rassilo’s calm, severe face.
‘If it is needed,’ she said, finally reaching out for some of the food, ‘yes, I promise.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
These are projectile impacts,’ said Revus, squatting down to examine further.
The sky, such as it was, had long since disappeared. They were travelling down long alleys overlooked by the hulks of old storage hoppers. Above them rose abandoned conveyor belts, criss-crossed over one another with the old tracks hanging like entrails from the racks. Dust and debris had settled everywhere — scales of rust, clots of old ash from the forges, swarf from the machining sheds.
Crowl limped over to the captain. It was not the first sign of fighting they had seen — a turbine housing had been almost completely destroyed, its protective shell melted into grotesque stalactites.
‘But not ordinary bullets,’ he said, studying the marks.
‘Galvanic charges,’ Revus said, running his finger down the impact edge.
Crowl ran a trace heat-scan over the marks, and received the same answer as before. ‘A couple of weeks old,’ he said, looking at the results. ‘Maybe more.’
They pressed on. The chambers, dark and hot, echoed with emptiness. Infrared overlays on their helm-feeds showed vast halls soaring away, most empty, some clogged with old machinery of unguessable purpose rotting in the shadows. Massive, static chains hung from track-lifters mounted on the distant ceiling.
They reached a pair of doors, jammed open with the skeletal remains of something — a servitor, perhaps, wedged amid the crushing jaws. Its body was a mess of blown metal and burned organics. They stepped over it, and the dark grey clouds became visible again, framed between jagged ziggurat flanks.
The first landing stages were up ahead — a valley floor a hundred metres wide, nestling between mountainous overlooking parapets and dotted with observation towers. More platforms rose up beyond, elevated on lattices of heavily oxidised girders.
Crowl deactivated the infrared scans and swept the area ahead for movement. A mournful wind, breath-warm and stagnant, stirred the clutter underfoot.
‘More of it,’ he said, pointing to a series of blast-marks on the nearside walls.
Revus nodded, venturing out onto the first of the stages. The red-brown dust reached his ankles. Gorgias swayed up into the air, his sensors clicking.
‘Up ahead,’ it voxed. ‘Pulpitum superus.’
Crowl and Revus moved across the empty stage, then the next, before reaching a ladder scaffold leading up to the first of the elevated platforms. Once up on its lip, Crowl immediately saw the difference — the debris had been blown clear of this one, exposing a bare, blast-charred rockcrete apron. The platform was as empty as the rest, but a ship had come down recently, leaving the carbonised scars of its landing.
Crowl scanned the residue while Revus scouted ahead, shadowed by a wary Gorgias.
‘Same time-marker,’ Crowl noted. ‘Give or take.’
‘This is where they unloaded it,’ agreed Revus.
Crowl looked up. On the far side of the stage were two great hangar doors of corrugated metal, marked with flaking chevrons and still partially open. The doorway led back into the enclosed interior, a chasm cut into the heart of a mountain.
‘Then we follow the trail,’ said Crowl, setting off.
The opening was just big enough for them to squeeze through. More blast-marks discoloured the exposed adamantium panels, clustering more thickly now. Crowl reactivated his infrared overlay once enclosed by the dark again, and saw the thick streaks of black glistening on the floor.
‘Blood?’ he mused.
‘Oil,’ said Revus.
‘Much the same thing, here.’
They crept through the shadows, back within the caves of iron. Hauler-claws hung immobile, though their joints were no longer fused rigid from inaction — some of them had been employed recently. Another doorway beckoned, its frame twisted and broken. From the chamber beyond came the echoing growl of active machinery.
‘Now we go carefully,’ said Crowl, leading the way, holding Sanguine ready.
They went down, following the orthogonal lines of the regular corridor-patterns. Signs of struggle grew more frequent — they passed the contorted remains of skitarii guards, their cloaks ripped apart and their innards scattered. Long-barrelled guns lay discarded, some still clutched by their operator’s claws.
‘It’s getting more intense,’ said Revus.
‘Fighting among themselves?’ Crowl speculated, skirting a decapitated Mechanicus foot-soldier. ‘Or fighting what was brought down?’
‘The voidship couldn’t have been that big. How many troops could they have crammed in?’
Crowl remembered Spinoza’s unease. Chem-weapons?
‘The Mechanicus receives one of its own ships,’ he said, ‘carrying something men are prepared to die to protect. Wherever it goes, there is blood.’
Gorgias, high above them, voxed a sharp warning. ‘Proximus,’ it whispered. ‘Martians.’
They went on in silence. The next chamber was truly colossal, opening up to a high shaft that rose and rose, its eventual terminus indistinct. Narrow ledges ran around the shaft’s rectangular walls, one after the other in series. As they crept across its chamber’s base, Crowl detected movement and froze. Revus had already trained his pistol, but the targets were too far away — a pair of stilted figures limping along one of the ledges, two hundred metres up. They gave no indication of having spied them, and eventually disappeared into a portal on the far side of the shaft.
‘Skitarii?’ Crowl asked.
Revus nodded. Then they slipped through another portal and into a much smaller space — a chamber in the form of a geometric interior, its walls and roof angular and highly finished. The walls were covered with more blast-marks and black stains. On the other side of the chamber, twenty metres away, was a further portal, this time barred and sealed.
‘I can break it,’ Revus said.
‘Hold.’ Crowl looked around, scanning the walls. The vertices glimmered back at him in grainy false-colour. ‘There’s something here.’
He moved closer to the left-hand wall, stooping low, before running his fingers over the surface. In the metal, barely detectable, was a shape, scraped into the paintwork. Amid the rest of the debris it was easy to miss, but then it had been designed that way — a relic-sigil, one of several hundred used by members of the Inquisition’s various branches.
Revus backed up, watching over the two portals. Gorgias floated over Crowl’s head, observing.
Crowl pulled a combat knife from a sleeve at his calf and pressed it against the panel edge. Dust cascaded, but it remained solid. He tried the other side, probing carefully. Eventually the tip of the knife slipped into the join, and he carefully levered it open. On the far side was a narrow void, hollowed out by what looked like plasma-burns. Nestled within the melted metal was a skull-shaped bead the size of a thumb, carved from what appeared to be onyx.