No doubt warned by the echoes of my sprinting footfalls, Jurgen put on a burst of speed too, striking the door plate with his elbow as he passed it, and diving through the widening gap without slowing, his lasgun at the ready. No sounds of combat ensued, so I followed without hesitation, cracking off a few shots as I turned to close the hatch behind us. The bolts impacted on the snout of a 'stealer which had managed to get past the deceased Astartes and the tangle of its fellows still atop him, and got far too close to my unprotected back for comfort. It reeled from the impacts and lay thrashing on the floor of the passage, although whether I'd done enough to kill it I'll never know. The door slid closed, hiding the sight of the carnage beyond.
'We'd better get moving,' I said, picking my way through the chunks of genestealer decorating the room, a rather satisfying result of Jurgen's trick with the grenade. Now the creatures were dead, there seemed to be fewer of them than I remembered, although whether that was because the survivors had fled, or I'd simply been too busy for an accurate headcount at the time, I couldn't be sure. 'They'll be through at any moment.'
'Down here?' Jurgen asked, flashing his luminator along the passageway Drumon and the tech-priests had taken the first time we'd passed through the chamber. I listened for a moment and shook my head. An all-too-familiar scrabbling sound was echoing out of the darkness beyond the range of the beam.
'No,' I said. 'The 'stealers are ahead of us.' No doubt they were intent on slaughtering the salvage party at the moment, but I was certain they'd devote some of their attention to us if we were foolish enough to attract it. I hefted my weapons and struck the control plate of the sealed door opposite; we already knew the other exit led straight to more genestealers, so to my way of thinking this one was the best card in a rather poor hand. Despite my trepidation, however, the darkness beyond was reassuringly silent, so I lost no time in hurrying through; a moment later an increase in the ambient light levels, and a small but perceptible thickening of the atmosphere, told me Jurgen was at my shoulder once more, and I closed the portal again.
'Where are we?' he asked, flashing the beam of his luminator around our refuge. It looked like all the other corridors we'd seen so far, but that didn't bother me; I'd recalled enough of the internal layout I'd seen on the hololith display to remain confident of finding our way back to the hangar bay without too much difficulty, so long as there weren't too many genestealers around to get in the way.
I shrugged. 'Only one way to find out,' I said, leading the way into the darkness.
HOW LONG WE'D been wandering through the passageways I couldn't be sure, but it was certainly taking a lot longer to get back to the Thunderhawk than I'd expected. My innate sense of direction seemed to be working as well as ever, so I was pretty confident that I knew roughly where both we and it were relative to one another, but there was no getting around the fact that connecting the two points was a lot less straightforward than I'd hoped. I could still recall the images I'd seen in the hololith in reasonable detail, but the reality of the maze of intersecting passageways we found ourselves negotiating was considerably more complex than the clear lines of the diagram suggested. Some routes were blocked by debris, or unsafe decking, forcing us into time-consuming detours, while other routes were blocked by the echoes of an ominous scrabbling, which betrayed the presence of more genestealers lurking in the darkness ahead. Needless to say, I avoided these passageways entirely, even going so far as to retrace our steps for a while before turning aside, just to make certain we'd given these pockets of activity a wide enough berth to evade detection.
Just to complicate matters, it wasn't long before I realised that we'd passed beyond the section of the Spawn of Damnation I'd seen enlarged, so most of the corridors, ducting and cable runs we followed hadn't appeared on the reduced scale of the main map at alclass="underline" the only things I could be certain of were that we were deviating ever deeper into the core of the hulk, and that we'd passed from the relatively easy going of the derelict we'd first boarded to more decrepit surroundings entirely. On a couple of occasions I even felt a curious sensation of momentary vertigo, as level decks suddenly became slopes, or vice versa, while my eyes stubbornly insisted that nothing had changed[123]. As you can imagine, this was particularly disconcerting when we were traversing sections of the wrecks which were out of kilter with one another in any case; a couple of times Jurgen and I found ourselves picking our way through clumps of defunct luminators protruding from the floor like rusting undergrowth, and realised we were walking along what had once been a ceiling before the warp had claimed whatever luckless vessel this was, and on one particularly unpleasant occasion we traversed a section of ship turned at ninety degrees from its neighbours, where corridors had become abyssal shafts, plunging further than our luminator could plumb, forcing us to scramble around them on narrow ledges which once had been thresholds.
Everywhere we went there were doors, too, although once we'd left the environs of the ancient derelict and the venerable machine-spirit standing guard over it, these had to be manhandled open or closed, with a fair degree of sweat and profanity. (The former predominantly from Jurgen, and the latter from me, although I must own that we each contributed liberally to both.) In the main we left the portals we'd passed through open, unwilling to take the time and effort required to shut them again, and reluctant to cut off a known line of retreat, although I was more than aware of the risk this entailed; you may be certain I kept my ears well open for any suspicious sounds behind us, and we halted on innumerable occasions to listen more carefully and discount the possibility of being followed. Most of the corridors we wandered down were, of course, lined with doors too, but mindful of the effort required to get into them, and spurred on by the worrying possibility that the Thunderhawk would depart without us, we were disinclined to explore any of the side chambers.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about our present circumstances was that I'd lost contact with Drumon and the surviving Terminators. My comm-bead was certainly continuing to function, if the faint wash of static in my ear was anything to go by, but the fragments of signal traffic I'd been listening to, hoping to keep track of their progress (and, by extension, the whereabouts of the greatest concentration of genestealers, or so I devoutly hoped), had been getting progressively fainter for some time. Now it seemed that the sheer mass of metal between us was preventing the relatively low-powered signals from getting through at all. I found myself wondering if any of our companions were still alive, and hoping so, although the last few garbled transmissions I'd heard had been less than encouraging. Certainly more of the Terminators had fallen, although some had linked up with Drumon by the time I'd lost contact. But from what I'd seen, their chances of making it back to the hangar bay through the labyrinth of narrow corridors were slender at best.
I was roused from my sombre reverie by Jurgen, who was walking a few paces ahead of me, sweeping his luminator methodically across walls, ceiling and floor, paying particular attention to any areas of shadow cast by protrusions or recesses. We'd both seen enough by now to be well aware of how readily the purestrains could conceal themselves, and were by no means sanguine about the possibility of sudden ambush.
'Wait, sir.' He held up a warning hand and advanced a few more paces, the beam picking out a huddled mass on the deck plates ahead of us.
I drew my weapons as it came more clearly into view. 'Is it dead?' I asked. The genestealer remained inert, instead of bounding to its feet and charging us as I would have expected, but I remained alert nevertheless. I'd never seen one asleep before, if they even did, and the middle of the corridor seemed like an odd place to choose for a nap to say the least.
123
The usual Astartes designation for the twin-barrelled variant Cain noticed before; presumably he picked this up in conversation at some point, probably with Drumon.