Vainglorious, p.16
Vainglorious, page 16
‘Then let’s assume I needn’t bother with anywhere Clode’s been,’ I said. ‘What other facilities would you recommend I concentrate my efforts on?’
‘Primary processing,’ Tezler trilled, after a moment’s hesitation likely intended to mimic the flow of a normal conversation. ‘That should afford you some relevant insights into the distribution chain.’
‘Sounds fascinating,’ I said, theatrically stifling a yawn. ‘Perhaps if you could get someone to arrange it?’ I yawned again, a little more blatantly. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps?’ I wondered if I’d have to repeat the trick once more, but Tezler had apparently taken the hint.
‘I’ll see that it’s all taken care of,’ they replied, rising smoothly to their feet, with another faint humming of servos. ‘And if you’ll permit me to make the suggestion, perhaps you should sleep and ingest nutriment. Your energy levels appear somewhat depleted.’
‘I’m afraid they do,’ I said, yawning more openly now. ‘Perhaps if we start mid-morning? The extraction process sounds fascinating, and I wouldn’t like to miss any of the nuances.’
‘That would be a shame,’ Tezler agreed, striding smoothly to the door. ‘I will see to it that you remain undisturbed until then.’ The door slid closed behind them, and Jurgen exhaled, releasing a degree of tension only someone who knew him as well as I did[104] could have spotted.
‘Still gives me the creeps,’ he commented. ‘Shall I get your bed ready, or would you like some supper first?’
I shook my head. ‘Neither. We’ve got about twelve hours while they think we’re asleep.’
‘To do what, sir?’ One thing I could always rely on Jurgen to do was miss the obvious. Notwithstanding that, he was already checking his lasgun, no doubt inferring that we might be needing it.
‘Take a look at these lower galleries,’ I said. ‘You heard the magos. They were doing everything they could to direct us away from them. And when I said I didn’t think we needed to check them out for ourselves, they couldn’t agree fast enough.’
‘Maybe I’d better take the melta, then,’ Jurgen said.
‘Couldn’t hurt,’ I agreed, after a moment’s consideration. Under most circumstances that wasn’t the sort of thing one could carry around the corridors unremarked, but in a Mechanicus shrine no one was likely to bat an eyelid at the sight – assuming they still had any to bat. And, if challenged, I supposed we could always claim we were taking it to a chapel for a blessing of accuracy.
On the other hand, that excuse would wear progressively thinner the deeper we penetrated into the mine, and we were hardly going to be inconspicuous in the first place – Throne alone knew how many of the cogboys were connected by some form of techno-sorcery to one another, and to the torrent of data invisibly suffusing our surroundings; not to mention whatever imagifers might be keeping watch on the corridors. We were going to stick out like an ork in a chorus line, which made our chances of sneaking into the lower galleries unchallenged minimal at best.
Well, we’d just have to take our chances, I decided, taking a couple of steps towards the door before I managed to talk myself out of the whole thing. I took a final, regretful glance back at my bed, which was looking by far the more appealing option despite the colour of the sheets; then a potential answer to our most pressing problem suddenly presented itself.
SEVENTEEN
‘I feel like Tobit the Tallarn,’[105] Jurgen grumbled, pulling his hood a little further forward to conceal a bit more of his face – which I’m bound to say came as a distinct improvement. If it bulged a little where his helmet was, like the odd protuberances around his shoulders where the bulk of the melta and his lasgun were concealed, it only added to the effectiveness of his disguise; most tech-priests were so heavily augmented that the silhouette beneath their robes varied to some extent from the human standard. For that matter my own weapons had a similar effect, and I’d drawn back one of the sleeves to leave my augmetic fingers visible, which I felt would add an extra degree of verisimilitude to our imposture.
I have to confess to feeling more than a little ridiculous myself, but to my relieved astonishment our makeshift disguises didn’t seem to elicit so much as a glance from any of the tech-priests we’d passed in the corridors since leaving our accommodation. It hadn’t taken us long to fashion a rough approximation of the robes most of them wore from a couple of bedsheets, although the hems were distinctly ragged where we’d hacked through the fabric with our combat knives, and the joins were rather less than workmanlike, held together as they were with chirurgical tape from the primary aid kit Jurgen habitually kept squirrelled away in one of his utility pouches. (Something for which both of us had been grateful on far too many occasions.) Fortunately, the cogboys’ taste for russet hues even on something as mundane as bed-linen made our deception relatively easy; I’d known a few acolytes of the Machine-God favour other colours over the years, chiefly white, but what that signified I had no idea,[106] and I’d seen none of them around Metallum Majoris in any case, so adopting any of those would probably have made us stand out almost as much as if we hadn’t even bothered.
Despite our unexpected success, I must admit to a distinct sense of relief when we left the more crowded corridors for the comparatively lightly travelled passages of the mine itself. As I’d expected, they connected directly to the main habitation area, funnelling us through a warren of utility zones filled with arcane mechanisms of quite stunning size and complexity on the way. Some of these I was familiar with from our tours of inspection, but many meant nothing to me at all, beyond the most tentative of guesses at what their purpose might be. I’d been paying enough attention on these earlier jaunts to be pretty clear where I was aiming for, though: a large and echoing cavern where the bounty from the lower shafts (or, to be more precise, a prodigious amount of rock fragments from which the bounty would later be extracted) reached the surface.[107] Warned by the increasing noise level we slowed our pace as we approached it, feeling the vibrations thrumming beneath our feet, and the booming roar of unloading rock plunging into the storage hoppers as an almost physical battering against our eardrums.
‘This way,’ I directed Jurgen, and he followed without question as I slipped down a side passage, content as always in an environment like this to let my instincts guide me. This wasn’t the direction I’d approached the chamber from while being ushered around by a tour guide, but I was as certain as I could be that it would connect with it, and in this I was to be far from disappointed. The passageway, hewn directly from the rock, was evidently intended as a utility conduit rather than pedestrian access, judging by the number of pipes and cables running along both walls and the ceiling, its narrowness (it was barely wide enough for us to walk in single file), and the fact that it was unlit. The latter was a problem we solved easily by kindling the luminators we’d brought with us. In some ways I’d have preferred to dispense with them, allowing our eyes to adjust to the pervading gloom, but time was of the essence, and the risk of concussing ourselves on a low-hanging pipe too great if we’d proceeded in total darkness.
We made good time, however, finding ourselves before too long on a catwalk suspended over the cavern I remembered: a vast space into which a number of tramway tracks emerged from irregularly positioned tunnel mouths. Far below us, tiny trains popped in and out, ministered to by artisans and tech-priests the size of my thumbnail, discharging their cargoes and scurrying back to their holes like startled rodents. Narrowing my eyes against the glare of the arc lights suspended below our vertiginous perch, and which, fortuitously, would render us invisible in the unlikely event of anyone down there glancing upwards, I was just able to make out the control chapel from which I’d watched the process a day or so earlier; in rather more comfort and silence than we were currently experiencing, thanks to the thick layer of armourcrys between it and the bustling junction.
‘How do we get down there, sir?’ Jurgen asked, and I pointed ahead of us, to where a gallery clung to the cavern wall. A series of staircases descended from it, several of the intermediate landings giving onto doorways leading Emperor knew where; we’d just have to hope no one emerged while we were passing. On the plus side, the ambient noise was so great there was virtually no chance of our footfalls being heard, even on the resonant metal mesh of which the treads appeared to be composed. He nodded, and fell in behind me, scanning our surroundings for any sign of a threat, although fortunately these seemed to be conspicuous by their absence.
We made it almost to the cavern floor before anyone noticed us – an unaugmented member of the workforce, who started climbing the staircase just as Jurgen and I began descending the second or third flight up. We slowed our pace, hoping the fellow would leave the stairs before we passed one another, and by the Emperor’s grace he did, disappearing through the door on the next landing just before we reached it; though not without glancing briefly in our direction with a faint air of surprise.[108] He was carrying a data-slate in his grime-ingrained hands, the contents of which appeared far more interesting than my aide and I, for which I could only be grateful, and the closing door cut off the beginning of some remark about a blockage in one of the hopper feeds. A quick glance downwards was enough to show me that the little knot of workers nearest the foot of the staircase were moving away, picking up crowbars and sledgehammers, and I picked up our pace. We’d never have a better time to get down there unobserved.
‘What now, sir?’ Jurgen asked, looking around with mild curiosity at the scurrying trains, and stepping back hastily as one rattled past close enough for the wind of its passage to billow his makeshift robe around him like a banner in a gale. A human driver would undoubtedly have had a few choice words for us, but to my relief it was piloted by a servitor, apparently embedded in the power car as thoroughly and permanently as the ones which had directed the rogue skitarii walkers that had come so close to abruptly curtailing my commission from Zyvan, and it gave no sign of having even noticed our presence.
‘We hitch a ride,’ I said, as the last wagon trundled past, already slowing, the head of the train clattering over a set of points a score or so metres ahead. It would take us a good couple of hours to walk to where we were going, not to mention back, and I was acutely aware that time was of the essence if we were to discover anything of use once we got there. The more time we could save, the better. I picked up our pace, using the slowly moving ore carriers to screen us from the control chapel’s observation window, and any other workers who might be in the vicinity – although given the luck we’d had so far, our faux robes should have blended us into the background nicely.
‘Very good, sir.’ My aide nodded, despite the risks clearly inherent in such a plan, and fell into his accustomed place at my shoulder. ‘How do we do that?’
‘Still working on that bit,’ I admitted. From what I remembered of my earlier visit to the control chapel, the process of dumping the collected ore was almost automatic. The trains pulled up next to one of several large holes in the floor, surrounded by waist-high metal barriers; then a pair of specialised servitors plodded down the line, lifting each wagon off the rails between them, inverting it, and shaking the contents into the receiving bin. At that point the newly extracted ore rattled down a chute to be crushed, graded and sent to the processing plant which, all being well, I would still be alive enough in the morning to be feigning an interest in.
And here they came, two hulking amalgams of metal and flesh, their footfalls sending vibrations through the rock beneath our boot soles that made the metal rails of the tramway whine with harmonic resonance. Relays clicked and hummed, hydraulics hissed, as they strode forwards, fully twice the height of a man, showing no sign at all that they registered our presence. Which hardly came as a surprise; work units like these were built and optimised for one purpose only.
‘Careful,’ I cautioned, motioning to my aide to step back, and we both did so, a trifle warily. I don’t know how Jurgen felt as the cyclopean servitors loomed over us like utilitarian Dreadnoughts, but I was certainly fighting the impulse to draw my weapons.
Taking one end of the ore wagon each, the two servitors lifted it off the rails and decanted its contents, which rattled away in a gout of dust and a faint metallic booming as a few of the larger rocks rebounded from the metallic enclosure. A few seconds later they dropped it back on the rails, and moved on to the next.
‘Now’s our chance,’ I said, determined to seize it, and scrambled up the side of the wagon, finding a plentiful supply of footholds among the dents and supporting struts. As my head came level with the top of the bodywork I glanced around furtively. No one seemed to be in our immediate vicinity, so I hoisted myself over the lip and slithered down into the bottom of the cart, which, predictably enough, was coated in dust and gravel. A moment later Jurgen joined me, accompanied as always by his distinctive bouquet, slithering down the slightly canted internal side in a flurry of dirt and profanity.
He glanced around at our surroundings, and the dust caking our improvised disguises, and his upper lip curled in disapproval. ‘Bit too grubby for my liking,’ he said, oblivious as always to the irony. Anything else he might have said was drowned out, perhaps mercifully, by an echoing metallic clangour as the servitors replaced the next wagon in line on the rails; a moment later our refuge shook as they recoupled it, and moved on to the next. ‘What do we do now?’
‘We wait,’ I said, hoping we wouldn’t have to for too long.
As it happened, we didn’t, although the minutes stretched alarmingly, my conviction that we were about to be discovered growing with every moment that we weren’t. At length, however, the train jerked and began to move, picking up speed and all but loosening the fillings in my teeth as it rattled over a series of points.
‘Here we go,’ I just had time to say as the glaring lights and the echoing void over our heads was abruptly displaced by a ceiling of rock, and darkness enveloped us.
EIGHTEEN
I’ve had more comfortable journeys, I have to admit; I had very little idea of where we were going, but wherever it was we were getting there a great deal faster than we would have done on foot. Though I’d decided against kindling our luminators again, in case any of the mine workers noticed the glow and halted the train to investigate, enough light entered the tunnel from side galleries to illuminate the rough stone ceiling just above our heads in intermittent flashes, revealing just how quickly we were moving.[109] Indeed, it was these flickering lights which most impressed me with the sheer scale of the mine workings. I soon lost count of the number of side passages we passed, although rattling around in a bone-shaking metal box during an aural artillery barrage wasn’t exactly an aid to concentration in any case.
One thing I could be certain of, though, was that we were descending quite rapidly, the growing pressure in my ears being more than sufficient evidence of that. I found myself having to swallow every few moments to relieve the discomfort, despite the way the gritty dust surrounding us kept insinuating itself into my mouth and throat, making the process remarkably uncomfortable. Jurgen, of course, ever the pragmatist, had filled our canteens with fresh water before we left our quarters, but there was no question of attempting to take a drink while we were being so comprehensively shaken around; any attempt to do so would only have spilled the contents everywhere, and we were bound to need it later. Not to mention the fact that we were now so thoroughly caked in dust and grit that any spillage would simply convert part of it into mud, which might impede the performance of our weapons just when they were most needed – something I hoped we’d never have to put to the test, although given my usual luck and past experience, that hope was tenuous at best.
It was only as the rattling and banging diminished in volume and the flashes of light from the side passages began to appear at less frequent intervals, indicating that we were approaching our train’s final destination, that it occurred to me I had no idea what that might be. Or where, for that matter. My old underhiver’s instincts were still good enough for me to have a rough idea of how far we’d come, and in which direction, but there were hundreds of sublevels down here, and thousands of galleries, which didn’t narrow it down nearly as much as I’d have liked. One problem at a time, though: before I could address that question, there was still the minor difficulty of leaving the rail wagon unobserved. An issue which suddenly became a great deal more urgent as our eyes were assaulted by the glare of powerful luminators, and the echoes of our passage abruptly diminished, indicating that we’d entered a large cavern. We were being jolted around a good deal less too, as the train slowed even more, rattling over several sets of points. A moment or two later it came to a halt, the squeal of brakes against its metal wheels setting my teeth on edge.
I raised my head cautiously, peering over the side of the wagon. Though smaller than the chamber we’d boarded the train in, the cavern was still vast, swarming with servitors, tech-priests and miners; all, to my relief, almost as grubby as Jurgen and I had become rattling around in the detritus at the bottom of the ore bin. Despite the increasingly threadbare nature of our makeshift disguises, which had both developed a rip or two, they might just continue to serve us for a little while longer. As before, everyone seemed too engrossed in their own affairs to pay much attention to us, although I resolved to disembark cautiously – a resolution swiftly discarded, as a line of heavy servitors plodded into view and began to lift the wagons bodily from the tracks. These were even larger than the ones we’d seen before, fully the size of Space Marine Dreadnoughts, and equipped with handling claws of prodigious length. Instead of pairing off to handle the railcars, each of these cyclopean constructs was able to lift one, striding with it towards a shadowed area near the cavern wall.
Fortunately they began at the front, affording Jurgen and I the opportunity to scramble out precipitously while the activity shielded us from the view of most of the workforce. I must admit to wondering at the time if that was the wisest course, and whether it would have been more prudent to wait and see where the wagons were being taken in the hope of being able to disembark somewhere more secluded, but it was just as well I hadn’t; we would both have been crushed to death almost at once, as the servitor bearing our former conveyance approached a heap of ore piled up in a corner of the cavern and scooped some of it into the wagon without so much as a pause.
