Ezra shook it off. It was disconcerting, but then, the galaxy was disconcerting. His life had, for all of his early years, been sheltered in the grey gloom of the Untill. Then he had joined with Gaunt and his men, and with them seen the marvels of the galaxy: space full of stars, cities and deserts, vistas he could not dream of and creatures he could never imagine.
Nothing surprised him. He had long ago accepted that anything was possible. Around any corner, anything might await. Including, he knew, death… from the least expected direction.
The disturbed gravity was disconcerting, but he refused to be disconcerted. Let the floor become the wall, or then the ceiling.
Danger was the only thing that needed to occupy him.
Sparks fluttered from wall panels that had shorted out. Overhead lighting rigs, suspended on chains, bellied out and swung in slow, wide, oval orbits, betraying the strange, sluggish rotation of the vessel.
He reached one of the main access gates into the engineering core. It was a huge structure, like a triumphal arch, decorated with brass seraphs and cherubs. Steel rail tracks ran through the archway, allowing for the process of wagons carrying stoking ore from the deep bunkers to the furnace mouth. The iron blast-gates filling the archway were ominously open.
Ezra took an iron quarrel out of his leather quiver, and dropped it nock-down into the muzzle of his upright reynbow. He heard it clink into place, then felt the slight hum and tension as the magnetic fields generated by the magpods at either end of the recurve bow assembly activated and locked the bolt in place.
He stalked forwards.
Beyond the towering archway lay a huge turbine hall. Part of the ceiling had come down, layering the deck with sheets of metal panelling and broken spars. Other torn shreds of panelling hung down on fibres and tangled wires, exposing dark cavities in the roof-space where flames swirled and guttered. Small fires burned amid the debris on the deck too.
The great chrome-and-brass turbines lining the room were silent. Oil ran out of several of them where seams and seals had burst. The dark liquid ran like blood, pooling on the deck in wide, gleaming lakes, like the black mirrors the elders of the Nihtgane used for glimpsing the future. Some were raining drops up from the floor towards the roof.
Ezra could see the future. Another hour or two and the spreading slicks would reach the fires… or the fires would burn to the slicks. An inferno would follow, and it would consume the turbine halls.
Where were the stokers? Where were the men of Artifice? Ezra moved forwards, bow ready, stepping silently and cautiously across the piles of debris and broken panelling. He realised that several of the dust-caked objects at his feet were the bodies of engineering crew, felled and crushed by falling wreckage.
Too few, though. Where was everybody else? He had observed this part of the ship on several occasions during the long voyage, marvelling at the scale and industry. Ordinarily, hundreds of workers toiled here, in rowdy, straining work gangs.
He followed the rails. The trackway ran down the centre line of the hall, between the turbine arrays. Passing between the first leaking turbine structures, Ezra came upon a row of forty bulk rail wagons that had been physically thrown off the tracks. They lay on their sides, ore loads spilling out like black landslides, like a giant, broken centipede. The mass of them had crushed and destroyed a great many of the brass condensers and sub-turbine assemblies on the starboard side of the chamber.
Ezra heard movement. He tucked himself in behind one of the overturned wagons. There was a rush towards him: raised voices, thundering footsteps. Panic.
Engineering personnel began to flood past, heading up the tracks. They were running, some hauling injured comrades. Ezra saw master artificers, junior engineers, huge ogryn stokers black with soot, servitors and robed adepts. Dozens went past, hundreds.
Then the shooting started.
It came from the rear of the chamber, in the direction Ezra had been heading. It was a ragged mix of las-fire and hard-round bursts. Ezra saw some of the fleeing engineers turn to look, then run faster. Others dropped, struck from behind by searing blasts. A bulky stoker was cut down just as he passed Ezra’s hiding place. He staggered, turning awkwardly, and crashed against the side of the wagon, blood pouring from two hard-round exit wounds in his side.
The ogryn gazed at Ezra with uncomprehending, piggy eyes as he slowly slid down the wagon edge and thumped to the deck.
The firing became more fierce. A heavy stubber opened up. Looking from cover, Ezra saw dozens of the running engineers drop as the chewing impacts stitched across them. Men buckled and fell, or were knocked off their feet. Two, hit hard, were dismembered by the hefty rounds. Stray shots punched into the brass-work of turbine cylinders and copper venting kettles.
Ezra clambered up the end gate of the wagon, using the huge, oily coupling hook as a foothold, and bellied up onto the wagon side. He was about four metres off the ground. He crawled along to get a better vantage point.
The attackers were entering the turbine hall from the far end, where the hall opened into one of the ship’s principal stoking chambers. They were clambering over mounds of debris and wreckage, firing as they came.
They were human… humanoid, at least. Men, but not men. They were dressed in ragged combat gear that mixed ballistic padding with plasteel breastplates and chainmail. Most had their faces covered with featureless metal masks that looked like dirty welding visors. The single, extended eye-slits glowed soft yellow with targeting arrays.
Their weapons were old, but clearly well maintained and effective. They were of the general kind that had been carried by the Astra Militarum for centuries.
But the emblems displayed on the breastplates and foreheads of the attackers were unmistakably the toxic sigils of the Archenemy.
Ezra sighted his reynbow. He took down his first target with a quarrel to the head.
The reynbow made only the slightest metallic whisper as the magpods charged and spat the dart. It was inaudible over the roar of gunfire.
The attackers only noticed they were being hit when the second and third of them went down, iron barbs staked into their chests and throats. Yellow visor arrays flickered in confusion.
Suddenly, sustained gunfire hosed along the wagon, hunting for Ezra.
He rolled fast and dropped to the deck, slipping to another point of concealment. He let the heavy framework of the wagon absorb the hard-rounds and las-bolts. Several large calibre shots punctured the belly of the wagon, punching holes through which beams of dusty light speared.
Ezra reached the inter-wagon coupling, knelt down and tracked one of the attackers with his bow. Stock to shoulder, he fired, clean-sighted. The quarrel penetrated the warrior’s visor slit, and exploded the display reticule in a flurry of sparks. Gurgling and clawing at a visor that was now pinned to his face, the figure dropped to his knees.
Ezra reloaded. He tried a long shot at a bulky attacker with a heavy stubber, but missed. More gunfire spat his way, and he moved again, running back along the line of fuelling wagons, his feet crunching and slipping on the slopes of spilled ore.
One of the attackers suddenly appeared between wagons in front of him. Ezra’s reynbow was loaded, and he fired instinctively from the hip. The quarrel went clean through the man’s plasteel plating and his torso, spraying blood and specks of meat in the air. He fell.
A second attacker was right behind him.
There was no time to reload.
Ezra hurled himself into the warrior, using his reynbow as a club. He knocked the warrior’s head sideways with the blow, but the man struggled with him. Ezra lost his grip on the bow. The warrior struck him, and Ezra fell on his arse. In a sitting position, he swung the reynbow again, this time more frantically, and managed to hook the warrior’s legs out from under him. They slithered and struggled in the sloping spill of ore.