They marched further into Courvain’s depths, always down. Revus and his squad followed close behind. Gorgias whined overhead, staying close to Crowl’s shoulder. A wicked-looking needle gun extended from a socket under its left cheekbone.
They reached a blast door, which slid back on their approach. A low hangar chamber opened up, lined with personnel carriers. Most were Nighthawk gunships, black liveried with Inquisition sigils, capable of carrying twelve and armed with rotary cannons under their stubby wings. They were squat, blunt things, designed to operate at close quarters in confined spaces, their twin-angled turbines giving them lift in any direction.
Spinoza clambered inside one, following Crowl. The storm troopers piled in after, shackling their hellguns to wall-mounted claws and buckling up. Before the outer hull doors locked closed, Spinoza glimpsed the entire hangar wall fold slowly outwards, exposing the grey haze of the Terran exterior.
She sat back as the turbos juddered into full power. Things were moving fast, but that was no bad thing. It was better to be in action than mired in sloth, and she mentally ran down the pre-battle litanies to aid her readiness.
May He guide my arm, may He guide my strength, may He keep me from the crime of hesitation, of weakness, of mercy.
The gunship lifted, then boosted clear of the hangar’s exit channel. They were out. Through a narrow real-viewer slit in the armoured hull, Spinoza watched man-made cliffs soar up around them, lit from within by sickly lumens. Then the gunship dropped, filtering through the lines of milling aircraft below. The pilot drove the Nighthawk hard, heedless of the other vehicles hurrying to get out of the way of the Inquisitorial transport. Soon the gunship was up to full speed and rattling along the canyons between the spires.
‘How far?’ Spinoza asked.
‘Closer than you’d think,’ said Crowl, allowing his body to sway with the gunship’s jerking movement. ‘We’ll be out of Salvator soon, into Malliax Profundis. It only gets dirtier.’
The further they went, the more the weak sunlight faded away. Spinoza glimpsed vast arches passing overhead, twinkling with watery light-points, and equally vast chasms below, yawning into blackness. Perhaps, she thought idly, there was no ground level here at all, just an endless procession of deeper foundations, spiralling down to the world’s core.
Despite the darkness, the press of humanity around them showed no signs of slackening. She could see crowds everywhere, cramming the causeways leading to the spires’ enormous gates, cramming the transitways that spanned the gulfs between them, cramming the plazas and cramming the dust-kicked railheads. Soon they were unindividuated — all she saw was a slowly oozing swamp of grey work-shifts, dirty synthwool cowls, head torches bobbing through the brume.
‘Locus approach, ten seconds,’ announced Revus, pulling his hellpistol from its holster and checking the power pack.
The boom from the gunship’s engines lessened as it spiralled to the drop-point. The storm troopers calmly took up their hellguns, adjusted their helmets, made final equipment checks.
‘Standard purgatus,’ Revus told them calmly. ‘Take the leader, the rest to be terminated.’
Spinoza looked over at Crowl, who had closed his eyes. It looked like he was meditating, his sidearm still holstered, his hands clasped loosely before him. She took up her own weapon. Even after it had been modified, a crozius arcanum of the Adeptus Astartes was a heavy piece. She looked down at Argent’s scrimshawed outer casing, the thick bone marked with battle honours, its charred disruptor black from a lifetime of energy dissipation. Despite her physical conditioning, the equal of any mortal human, without her armour she would not have found it possible to wield effectively. As it was, though, given her artificer suit of red-gold plate, forged on the anvils of Ophelia itself, the crozius made her deadly.
‘Five seconds,’ intoned Revus.
The gunship was dropping vertically now, exterior lights doused, whining down a well shaft into nothing. The storm troopers’ helm-lumens flickered into life, glinting from black visors. From outside the shaking hull, Spinoza could just about make out screams of panic, something crashing heavily, a siren wailing.
Then the Nighthawk’s hull doors slammed open, and the storm troopers spilled out, leaping down from the hovering gunship and into ankle-deep water. It was nearly pitch-black. Massive rockcrete columns rose up on all sides, each one as wide as a Titan, dented and pitted. Crowds were scattering, splashing and swarming like gutter rats into whatever crevice would take them.
Ahead of the dropsite was a gaping circular outlet, ten metres in diameter and rimed with a coat of ancient rust. The iron bars that had once prevented entry had either rotted away or been broken, and now the orifice gaped blackly, taller than a man and ringed by toothy oxidised stumps. Above it rose a riveted wall of black steel, clustered with clots of grime.
The storm troopers sprinted to the outlet, leaping over the frothing lip and into the thick dark beyond. Crowl and Spinoza brought up the rear.
‘Where is this?’ asked Spinoza, activating the disruptor on Argent and flooding the tunnel with electric-blue light.
‘This is the foot of Spire Malevolens et Diabolus Traitoris Nine,’ said Crowl, kicking up the foul water as he strode. He had still not drawn a weapon. ‘You are as close to the earth of Old Terra as most will ever come.’
The cold hiss of lasfire echoed from up ahead, distorted by the tunnel’s curve. The two of them pushed on, reaching a domed chamber twenty metres high. Cascades of water ran from cracks in the roof. Rows of pump stations, all inactive, sunk into the oozing mire, their valves and filters clogged. More chambers stretched off ahead, linked by arched roofs, clustered with more defunct machinery and tangles of corroded pipework.
The storm troopers were doing their work. Already the water underfoot had turned a murky red, and bodies floated face down in the foam. Revus had pushed on ahead, taking three of his squad into the chambers beyond. The remaining three skirted the dome’s edge, scanning for residual threats.
Spinoza went warily. The place stank of mouldering sewage. A hundred ambush points remained in the claustrophobic dark, but Crowl strolled after Revus as if he were ambling in the cloisters of a Ministorum oratory.
Then an explosion went off — a crack, muffled by distance and thrown-up water — followed by agonised screams. Then more lasfire snapped out, echoing and overlaid on itself, then nothing.
Crowl led her into the chamber beyond, and the one beyond that. The storm troopers stayed close, and the bodies piled up, more and more of them, punctured and bloody. Some of the corpse-faces stared out from the foetid pools, grey and luminous under the glare of armour lumens, shock still visible on their pallid features.
They reached a brick-lined arch, dripping with rivulets of oily liquid. As Spinoza ducked to pass under it, she caught a flicker of movement to her right. Instinctively, she swung out, thrusting the crozius protectively.
A man leapt out at her, rags sodden, his face contorted with loathing. He tried to slash out at Spinoza’s face with a knife.
Spinoza pulled back smoothly, letting the man fall out of balance, then swung the crozius down onto his neck. Her assailant screamed briefly, caught in the flare of corrosive energy, before his spine snapped open and his body slapped, limp, into the water.
Crowl glanced down at the mess, then up at her.
‘Easy to use, that thing?’ he asked.
‘Not very.’
‘Heavy, I’d guess.’
‘There are exercises, to develop speed.’
‘You must show me sometime.’
Then he was moving again, passing under the arch and into the chamber beyond. Spinoza followed him, stepping over the wet corpse at her feet.