‘Your intelligence, it is good,’ Khazad said. ‘Up to point. He makes his base here, but it is not easy to penetrate. If it is, I try it already.’
‘If we are to do this,’ said Spinoza, ‘it must be now. I have troops, I am prepared. Show me the way, and this can be redemption for you. Crowl protects his bloodline.’
‘His what?’
She had slipped into the language so easily. ‘Will you show me?’
Khazad did not have to think long. The hammering whine of the returning Nighthawk began to beat from below, sending the wind-drawn clouds into fresh whirlpools of turbulence.
‘What choice do I have?’ said Khazad. ‘Yes, then, interrogator. I can take you to this False Angel. Then you will see what is what.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The skitarii caught up with them before they reached the precarious safety of the Shade. That was to be expected — they were heavily augmented techno-soldiers, used to the terrain and familiar with every twist of Skhallax’s dizzying innards.
Crowl had made it back across the landing stages when the first bullets skidded past, hitting the walls beyond in a blaze of green energy. He swivelled, still running, and fired Sanguine twice, hitting something that screamed and collapsed in a pile of bronze limbs and crimson robes.
More of them were following, loping like wolves, their galvanic flintlocks aimed and charging. Revus reached the portal that led back into the city’s innards, dropped down to one knee and let off a volley of las-bolts, sprayed in a horizontal arc at waist level. That sent the pursuers scrambling for cover, giving Crowl and Gorgias time to make the entrance door.
‘We kicked the nest,’ Crowl said, piling through the gap before reloading.
‘And the ants came running,’ replied Revus, loosing a final barrage before falling back through the doorway. Then they were sprinting across the vast empty floors of the abandoned halls. The desolate machinery lay just as it had done before, dark and sepulchral, and their bootfalls clanged on the rust.
Revus’ volleys didn’t keep them back for long. Before the three of them had made it halfway across the floor, skitarii swarmed through the portal. More appeared from hatches up in the high ledges, galloping along the walkways and kneeling to get a shot. More galvanic charges spun across the emptiness, cracking into bulkheads and old heaps of chain-links.
Crowl ducked, feeling a bullet zip over his shoulder. Revus was hit, a glancing blow on his armour-plate that nearly knocked him from his feet. He kept going, head low, still running hard. Crowl spun around to take out the two closest pursuers. He fired twice, letting his armour’s guidance systems find the target — one bullet found its mark, the other flew wide.
He turned and ran again, swerving to avoid the rain of projectiles now pinging and cracking into the corroded walls. Gorgias swooped erratically back and forth, firing all the while with his needle gun.
Once again Revus was first to reach the next bulkhead, sliding into a crouch and hammering down a wave of suppressive fire. Crowl ran on through it, trusting his captain not to hit him, before skidding down to join him.
They were near the junction that led into the long series of alleyways. Two empty hoppers shielded them from incoming fire, but their shells were too fragile to take many more hits, and already the rust-flecks were flying as the galvanic rifles found their range. At the other end of the hall came the skitarii, dozens of them now, racing across the echoing space.
Revus fired coolly, picking off the leaders. He moved his hellgun across the planes — horizontal for the ground-level assault, angled up into the walkways for those clambering down the ladders from the roof. Crowl didn’t join in, but pressed a series of call-runes on the inside of his forearm. Gorgias careened overhead, pursued by a flurry of bullets. One of them hit the skull, sending it spinning madly then crashing into the wall overhead.
‘Mamzeri!’ it shrieked, firing back.
‘This will not shield us long,’ said Revus, watching as their cover was steadily blown apart. The skitarii were getting closer with every second, heedless of the danger, and their green eyes glowed in the dark like a swarm of insects.
‘It doesn’t need to,’ said Crowl, completing the sequence and joining in with Sanguine. A fresh scatter of bullets scythed across the hall floor, downing three more tech-soldiers, before the judder of engines boomed up from the wall at their backs.
‘Keep down,’ warned Crowl.
Just as he spoke, heavy bolters smashed across the thick wall-plates overhead. Debris cascaded into the hall, thrown metres by the impacts, and the heavy profile of the Shade broke through the destruction. The gunship’s rotary cannons opened up, sending a brace of bolt-shells blasting into the oncoming ranks of skitarii.
Crowl leapt up and raced to the hovering gunship, grabbed a rail and hauled himself up to the cockpit door. The machine-spirit kept the machine aloft, auto-firing at the now-retreating skitarii, slowly rotating on a vertical axis to maximise the angle of destruction. Revus clambered up close behind, firing one-handed even as he leapt for the cockpit and pulled himself inside. The Shade spun round, Crowl at the controls now, and boosted back towards the breach it had just blown open. Gorgias ducked inside the still-open canopy at the last moment, tumbling to safety as the engines shuddered into full power.
The Shade smashed back out of the hall and down the narrow alleyways. The long pipes ran alongside them, so close they could scrape the edge of its folded-back wings, but they could not gain loft yet. A hundred metres ahead was the first opening — a narrow shaft of open night, flanked on all side by the heavy overhang of industrial architecture.
‘Incoming signals,’ reported Crowl, glancing at the tactical overlays.
Revus took control of the bolter-arrays, calibrating them for ranged air-to-air firing. ‘I see them.’
They reached the opening and angled steeply upwards, accelerating out into the open air. Skhallax’s inferno unfurled before them, angrier and redder than before, studded with lurid flames. Flyers had been scrambled from deep within — six of them, with more emerging beyond. They were servitor-drones, crab-shaped gun-pods skimming along on single-burner engines and armed with prow-mounted autocannons.
Crowl applied full power, sending the Shade kicking into the night. Its wings slipped open and the bolter-housings retracted. Revus took aim and sent a heavy bolter burst straight into the heart of the drone wing. One blew clean apart, its carapace splitting into fragments and its central capsule spinning wildly into the chimneys below. The rest scattered, running wide and high, their burners flaring into the night.
Skhallax’s border sped towards them, and Crowl pushed the Shade higher. Armour panels on the rapidly approaching walls slid open, revealing the unfurling bulbs of gun turrets.
‘They might cause some tro-’ began Crowl, just as Revus locked on, smashing the three closest with a rapid arc from the bolters. Then the Shade shrieked across the perimeter, barely higher than the wall’s spiked summit, before dropping down low on the far side.
A storm of fire pursued it — lascannon beams, bolter shots, most skipping just above the gunship’s tail fin or over the stubby wing tips. Crowl swung and jinked, throwing the vessel hard one way then jerking it back the other. A projectile smacked hard into the starboard wing, rocking the gunship over and nearly sending it careering into the approaching face of a hab tower. Crowl hauled on the control columns, dragging it high and left. The engines screamed, the cockpit shook, and they made the turn, their undercarriage cracking into the extremities of a comm tower and warping the struts.