The connection was heavy — a thick crack that caught Falx on the side of the helm, felling her instantly. Spinoza followed up with a crunching blow to her torso, showering the reeling figure with plasma. The interrogator dropped down, driving her knee into Falx’s stomach and crunching the air from her lungs. She jammed the maul up against the operative’s neck, pushing it up against the vox-grille and maintaining pressure.
‘Submit,’ she panted, ‘or I will end you here.’
Falx remained pinned, but managed to indicate something with a curt nod towards Spinoza’s flank. Spinoza glanced down to see the tip of the operative’s sword resting against the rib-joint of her armour. If she pressed the maul down, the blade would slide in too.
Slowly, Spinoza relaxed the pressure, but did not deactivate the energy field. They remained intertwined, both of them with a killing strike available, locked in poises of mutual murder.
‘I have no wish to see you dead,’ said Spinoza, speaking carefully. ‘Know this — I have nothing to do with the loss of your master.’
The operative resisted for a moment longer, her eyes flashing defiant anger through the narrow slits of her facemask.
‘If you can trust,’ said Spinoza, ‘just a little, you will see the truth of it.’
Then, eventually, the woman relaxed. The power field over her blade crackled out, and the tip was withdrawn from Spinoza’s armour by a fraction.
Spinoza did likewise, though she kept the maul in hand. ‘I know he is gone,’ she said. ‘Dead, or missing, running after something brought in on orbital transfer. We are after the same thing, you and I.’ She tried to soften the hard edge to her voice, which didn’t come easily. ‘We need not be enemies.’
Still the operative said nothing. Then, going cautiously, she reached up for her helm and pulled the visor clear, exposing a copper-brown face with Shoba ritual tattoos down the right-hand cheek.
‘Maybe,’ Niir Khazad said. ‘Maybe not. Say what you have to say, and I decide.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Crowl stood, ensuring his rosette was prominent. The darkness in the chamber was near-absolute, but all participants had night vision of one form or another.
‘You have no authority over this,’ Crowl said, gesturing towards the sigil. ‘Withdraw now, lest I charge you with impeding the Emperor’s divine will.’
The magos did not withdraw, and its mechadendrites arched closer, like multiple scorpion stingers priming for the lash. ‘Is not Imperial territory here, inquisitor. Out of your element. Why come now?’
Gorgias was busy tracking the dizzying whirl of the serpentine killer-arms, while Revus calmly stood ready, his pistol trained on the magos’ eye-cluster.
‘You have no power to constrain me — not here, not anywhere,’ said Crowl. ‘I serve at His pleasure.’
‘Had enough. Destruction brought here. Enough of it. Still repairing damage, in main chambers. All busy.’
‘We caused none of it,’ said Crowl, carefully.
The magos reared up suddenly, its needle-drills whirring faster. ‘Unbelievers, though,’ it hissed. ‘You brought it here. You broke the pact.’
‘What pact?’
Strobe lights flickered down the magos’ truncated neck. ‘Do not listen. Not any more.’
‘Trammitare,’ warned Gorgias, looking at the flickering light patterns.
‘Skitarii in additio, rapid-rapid.’
Crowl gave Revus a battle-sign command, and they opened fire in unison. The storm trooper sent las-bolts shattering into the magos’ segmented face, while Crowl went for the closest needle-hammer, shattering it with his first shot, then taking aim at a scything claw.
The magos screamed — a high-pitched wail of binaric outrage — and rushed them, scuttling into contact like some immense arachnid. Its mechadendrites swung, and the circular saw shot millimetres over Revus’ ducking helm. It seemed to fill the entire chamber, a spiralling storm of limbs and blades and glittering adamantium.
Crowl threw himself against the wall to evade a claw-strike and fired again, hitting the magos’ neck and knocking it back into its own clutch of tentacles. Gorgias flew wildly, firing wicked slivers of neon before pulling clear of the saw blades.
Revus kept up the barrage, hitting it again with sharp, perfectly aimed salvoes, giving Crowl time to reload. Its torso aflame, the magos rushed the captain, enveloping him in a clutch of metal-linked arms, its claws scraping down his armour and the drills going for his helm. Crowl fired once, twice, hitting the base of its neck and blowing burn-holes in the billowing robes, but that didn’t halt it. Revus kept firing at point-black range until he ran out of space. Gorgias aimed another spike, but was hit by an electro-flail and sent spinning through the dark.
Crowl holstered Sanguine, glanding motovine, then hurled himself into the heart of the tentacle cluster. He reached out with both hands, grabbing the magos’ damaged neck-stalk and tearing at the vertebrae.
The tech-priest shrieked in alarm, whirling away from the assault on Revus and clawing its tools down the back of Crowl’s armour. The drills bit, the saws cut and ceramite flecks blew out in dust-plumes.
Crowl punched hard into the magos’ mandibles, smacking its head back, then seized a thicket of neck-cabling, yanking hard until the wires tore free in a welter of fizzing sparks.
The magos reeled, collapsing in on itself, its mechadendrites suddenly jerking. Revus, free to move again, joined Crowl in the assault, smashing his way through the forest of limbs with his pistol butt. Together they slammed the creature up against the wall, cracking it into the rockcrete and forcing it, blow by blow, to the floor. Revus shoved his pistol muzzle into the magos’ exposed ribcage and twisted it up against a metallic lung-sac, while Crowl restored his gauntlet-grip on the creature’s ravaged throat. He pressed hard, popping out rivets on the tech-priest’s augmetic spinal column.
‘What… pact?’ he asked again, panting.
The magos’ eyes flickered in and out, and snarls of energy rippled across its broken jawline. There was nothing like a human face there — just a gaggle of rebreathers, compound eye-lenses, sensory pores and heat filters. It wasn’t respiring properly now, and its metabolic internals clanked like a sclerotic Rhino.
‘You. know,’ it wheezed.
‘I do not,’ said Crowl. ‘I know very little. There was a ship — the Ohtar — is that right? It brought something down here. What did it bring?’
‘So many. inquisitors,’ blurted the magos, its machine voice close to garbled. ‘Who are you with? The first or the second?’
Revus pushed the pistol hard against lingering organics within the shattered ribcage, and the magos writhed in pain.
‘Is out now,’ the magos gasped, a rattling, white noise-infected squeal. ‘Cannot stop it. It was an error. Critical error.’
‘What is it? A soldier? A machine? There are worse things than termination, magos, so tell me now.’
‘Alarum,’ warned Gorgias, spinning high towards the blown portal. ‘More are coming.’
‘Think I fear dissipation?’ rasped the magos. ‘Fear nothing.’
‘Then for the sake of the Omnissiah, for the sake of the old treaty. We both serve the same source. Damn it, tell me something.’
The magos’ cracked lenses dimmed, then flashed in a broken sequence. Its whole structure twitched, and fresh sparks of power ran down its web of cabling.