‘May be difficult,’ Khazad warned, inspecting the power unit on her sword. ‘Has many followers, down there. How many, do not know. Some trained well.’
‘How long have they been preparing?’
‘Long time.’
‘For what?’
‘Do not know. But you know Feast is almost here.’
Spinoza adjusted the fit of her gauntlet, knocked off-kilter during the combat. ‘Have you ever seen a ritual?’
‘Flesh-cutting? I see evidence. In underhive. They leave bodies.’
‘What purpose? For strength? Some kind of sorcery?’
Khazad laughed. ‘You are asking me? I was running, the whole time. Maybe they like it. Some do, and that is all.’
The Nighthawk picked up speed, angling further into the dive. The crew-bay vibrated, shaking the troops in their restraint harnesses. Those troops riding in the main bay with Spinoza kept their gaze somewhere else, studiously ignoring the assassin in their midst.
‘So what is this place?’ Spinoza asked.
‘Underground,’ said Khazad. ‘Where else? They move here just soon, driven out somewhere else. They learn lessons. Is guarded.’
‘I want him alive,’ said Spinoza.
‘No doubt he wants same for you.’ Khazad chuckled, a surprisingly gritty rasp behind her vox-mask. ‘I can get us close. But there will be fighting. They are not fools.’
A clunk from the hull signalling lumen power-down was followed by the engine pitch changing. Hegain had pushed the Nighthawk into approach mode, and the angle of the deck began to swing back towards horizontal.
‘Coming in close to it now, lord,’ came Hegain’s voice over the internal comm.
‘Prepare for full deployment,’ said Spinoza. ‘We seal the craft.’
‘As you will it.’
The Nighthawk spun around on its central axis, then crunched to the ground, its landing gear flexing under its weight. The bay doors hissed open, and Spinoza leapt out at the head of the exiting storm troopers. Hegain was last out, sealing the Nighthawk’s cockpit before hefting his hellgun and catching up.
They ran on into the dark. Enormous metal vanes marched away from them, each one the size of an Imperator Titan, ranked a hundred metres apart. Vast snarls of power ducting hung in tangled silos from the high roof, patched, re-patched and welded. The floor was a tight metal lattice under which an empty gulf fell away into the deeps below. The air was fervid, parched, swaying with heat, and the walls growled with the expulsion of subterranean energies.
‘Heat processor,’ said Khazad, running hard.
The weight of a hive-spire soared over their heads, floor after floor of it. The coolant shafts, some of them kilometres long, ran along the entire height of the structure. Vast power plants churned vats of viscous fluids through the arteries of the towers, channelling the excess into great exhaust vents placed high up in the wind-ripped summit zones. Down here was the core machinery itself, fuelled by arthritic old promethium furnaces and driven by pile drivers the height of a multistorey hab-unit.
Hegain issued battle-sign signals, and the ten-strong squad fanned out. Below them, masked by the lattice floor, plumes of flame flared up in the chasms — discharge from the great engines. A spire-class heat exchanger system matched the size and complexity of a line battleship enginarium, and had the crew to match. Thousands toiled in the sweaty dark, slaved to the arcane machines that kept the air above from becoming completely toxic and the temperatures from becoming routinely lethal.
Khazad led them further on, further down, and they passed between buttress-columns encased in scaffolding. Labour gangs looked up blearily from their work, holding sputtering arc-welders in calloused, unprotected hands. Industrial servitors lumbered blindly out of their path, hauling sleds piled with girders.
They reached the edge of a wide circular shaft, its rockcrete lip eroded into fragile chunks. ‘Down there,’ Khazad said, uncoupling a clamberwire feeder. ‘Old cooler wells.’
Spinoza nodded, gesturing to the squad to retrieve rappel wires. ‘How far down?’
‘Thirty metres. No more.’
The storm troopers activated grappling hooks, primed the counters for distance and clamped them to the shaft’s edge. Spinoza could see internal ladder-cages snaking down into the gloom, clinging to the inside curve in spidery lattices of steel. She leaned over the edge for a split second, studying the pattern of the ladders and gauging a route down. The base of the well shaft was lost in shadows.
Her fingers flickered battle-sign to Hegain — two charges, blind-flash, three second delay — then she gave the order to go in.
The two flash-charges spun down into the well, tumbling out of view. The storm troopers leapt over the edge after them, their rappel lines pulling taught and paying out fast. Spinoza kicked out against the inner wall as she shot down, one eye kept on the rolling timers.
The charges went off in a flare of pure white, lighting up lichen-encrusted foundation stones. The storm troopers were protected by their helm-visors, but howls of sudden pain from below gave away the presence of unshielded guards.
Spinoza dropped to the ground, cutting free of the wire and sweeping around with her weapon. Six human-normals and an abhuman writhed on the rockcrete floor, their eyes streaming. Storm troopers dropped down among them, finishing them off with pinpoint shots to the head. A locked metal portal had been cut into the north wall of the shaft, and Hegain was already laying charges down the centre groove.
The limpet-mines blew with a muffled crump, and the right-hand slide-door collapsed in a shower of glowing chunks. Hegain was first through the breach, hurling a nerve-charge through the jagged opening and then piling in after it. Spinoza was next, shadowed by Khazad.
They emerged into a long corridor cut from solid rock. The walls around them were vibrating, as if some massive machine were turning under their feet. Three more guards lay on the floor, choking on the green blooms of nerve gas and scrabbling at their bloated throats. The squad raced on, their lenses glowing amid the luminous clouds. Another gate was blown, another guard-point swept aside before the defenders even knew what was coming. They passed chambers bored deep into the rock on either side, some piled high with ration crates, others lined with racks of weaponry. Most of it looked to be scavenged hive-ganger grade, but there were Militarum-issue lasguns too, plus strongboxes for krak and frag charges.
They pushed on, breaking down a long sloping tunnel before an ogryn-breed abhuman suddenly reared up ahead of them out of the gloom, bellowing, filling up the narrow corridor with its unnatural, stimm-swollen bulk. This one had chainblades clamped over its fists, the power lines running directly to cortex-boxes implanted in its hunched spine. The monster roared with drug-spiked fury, dropped its bulbous shoulder and charged. One of Hegain’s troops sent a shot into its neck, tearing a slice through its flapping flesh, but that barely slowed it. The creature crashed into another trooper, slamming him against the tunnel wall and sending its blades whirring into his twitching body.
Spinoza opened fire with her laspistol, hitting it direct in its drooling face and making it stagger. Hegain powered ahead, switching from his gun to a combat knife and leaping up into the reeling mass of slab-muscle. The blade slashed left, right, then up, carving into the abhuman’s ribs and spraying them both with black blood before he dropped back to evade the mutant’s flailing fist-saws. More las-beams whickered out, then Khazad darted in close, slashing her power sword. The bloodied mutant, half-blind and flecked with its own blood, reached out to grasp her in its growling blade-hands, but she darted inside its reach, angled her blade up vertically and pushed, sending the tip up through its chin and into its skull.