Cains last stand, p.18
Cain's Last Stand, page 18
‘You mended that, then,’ Jurgen said, nodding sagely at his own statement of the obvious. The last time we’d been here, the concealed door had been blasted open by something not dissimilar to the melta he carried, and the staircase beyond had been visible to anyone who might have wandered in out of the rain.
‘We thought it best,’ Felicia said evenly, ‘given that what we’re doing here’s supposed to be a secret.’ Most men would probably have taken offence at the barely-concealed amusement in her tone, but, as ever, Jurgen remained constitutionally immune to sarcasm, and simply nodded judiciously.
I must confess to hesitating for a fraction of a second before beginning my descent, but it was hard to forget the sight of all the wanton carnage I’d discovered in the complex buried beneath the shrine the last time I’d ventured down those stairs. On this occasion, however, all the white-robed acolytes of the Omnissiah that I passed were alive and well, if that phrase can be properly applied to anyone more machine than human, and the red uniformed skitarii seemed as alert as I might have expected. A couple of them were stationed at the bottom of the flight, their hellguns ready, and if Felicia hadn’t been with us I’m sure they would have issued a challenge. As it was, they simply saluted as soon as they caught sight of her, receiving a friendly nod of the head in return, which seemed to disconcert them even more than a party of Chaotic raiders brandishing lasguns would have done.
‘You seem reasonably well protected,’ I admitted. I’d fought alongside the Mechanicus’s private army on a number of occasions, and in most cases they’d acquitted themselves well. The most glaring exception being the disastrous expedition to Interitus Prime, which I’d tagged along on completely by accident, and which had been wiped out to a man by the necrons. That thought brought scant comfort, and for a moment all my paranoid imaginings about the chamber I thought I’d glimpsed on the asteroid came rushing to the forefront of my mind again, before the more urgent demands of the here and now pushed them firmly away. We had Varan and his horde about to descend on us, that was an incontrovertible fact, and panicking about non-existent necron tombs was hardly going to help matters.
‘That’s probably what the last lot thought,’ Jurgen opined gloomily, and I nodded, grateful that someone else had voiced the thought before I could.
‘I think you’ll find we’re a bit better prepared this time,’ Felicia said, in a voice that was neither a threat nor a warning, but somehow managed to convey overtones of both. Clearly the Killian solution wasn’t going to be an option if diplomacy failed. She paused for a moment before a wide bronze door, did something to a locking plate with the old mechadendrite which still grew from the base of her spine, and stood aside as the portal swung open. ‘After you.’
‘Ladies first,’ I riposted; there was no telling what might be waiting inside.
Felicia laughed. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ she said, more accurately than she knew, and led the way into the room beyond. After taking a couple of paces, she glanced back at me, a challenging smile on her lips. ‘Come on then. As you’ve come all this way, you might as well see what we’ve managed to put together.’
‘Wait here, Jurgen,’ I said quietly. For one thing, I’d feel a lot happier with him watching my back, and for another, the Shadowlight had always lost its power whenever he’d got close to it. So far as I was aware, no one here knew he was a blank, and that was a secret I was determined to keep, partly because Amberley would get seriously snitty if her most precious asset became public knowledge[52], and partly because if I did end up having to steal the bloody thing to keep it safe, I didn’t want to blow the main advantage we had, which was that no one here knew Jurgen could handle it safely without taking all kinds of special precautions.
‘Coming,’ I replied, entering the chamber behind her, then stopped still, staring in wonderment. For the first time in sixty years I was close enough to the Shadowlight to have reached out and touched it, but I was so astonished by what else was in the room that I barely noticed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘Well?’ Felicia asked, stepping aside to afford me a better view. ‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted cautiously, taking another step forward to stand beside her. Mindful of the nausea which had assailed me whenever I’d got too close to the Shadowlight before, not to mention the mess that was left of Killian after he’d fallen under its baleful influence, I still kept a fair amount of distance between me and it, though, you can be sure of that. To my faint surprise I still felt no ill effects, but, determined not to push my luck, advanced no further. ‘What’s that thing it’s standing on?’
‘We’re still not entirely sure,’ Felicia acknowledged cheerfully, ‘but it’s impressive, isn’t it?’
‘Impressive is hardly the word,’ I agreed, as levelly as I could. Terrifying would be closer to the mark, if you asked me. The whole thing seemed utterly unnatural, and I could practically feel the presence of the warp in the room with us, coiling about the artefact like a serpent preparing to strike.
But I’m getting ahead of myself; I suppose I should have started out by describing the thing. Without setting down the unsettling effect that the sight of it had on me first, however, it would be difficult to convey how profoundly disconcerting it was to look upon; something no mere description of its physical form could possibly hope to do.
The first thing I recognised was the Shadowlight, of course, still looking like a slab of polished stone, roughly the size of a data-slate, into which light seemed to fall like water into a sponge. This time, however, it was resting in a narrow slot cut into the top of a pedestal of shining crystal, which held it upright, more or less level with my belt buckle, surrounded by three polished spheres of some strange blue mineral which looked uncannily like solid water, roughly the size of my fist. These all rested in circular depressions in the glowing surface of the crystal pillar; other holes, identical in size and shape, were left vacant, and I pointed them out, more to show I was paying attention than because I expected to understand what they meant. ‘Looks like you’ve got a few more of those ball things to find before you can complete the set,’ I said.
‘Hm,’ Felicia replied. ‘We thought that too, at first, but then we realised the spheres are controls of some kind. Look.’
Before I could protest, she’d reached out with a mechadendrite, and plucked one from its resting place, depositing it in another depression close to its original position. I couldn’t have said why, exactly, but my skin prickled, as though there was a static charge in the air, and for a moment I felt a faint throbbing against the inside of my temples, like the ghostly presentiment of a forthcoming headache.
‘What did you do?’ I asked, fighting the impulse to draw my weapons again in response to the air of untrammelled sorcery which had suddenly permeated the room.
Felicia shrugged. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she said. ‘But it’s interesting, don’t you think?’ The soft refulgence of the crystal pillar had changed, faint bands of colour rippling in the whiteness of it, like the patterns on a large body of water at sunset. The effect was almost hypnotic, and I dragged my eyes away with an effort, feeling the baleful influence of the warp reaching out for me through the strange device. It seemed incredible that Felicia hadn’t felt it too, but she seemed completely unconcerned: probably because by now she was more machine than human, and accordingly less sensitive to the presence of the abnatural.
‘We know that the Shadowlight could boost psychic powers all on its own,’ I said, conscious that I was prattling to try and calm my own nerves, and uncomfortably aware that the tech-priest knew me well enough to have probably noticed the fact.
‘That’s right, we do.’ She nodded in agreement. ‘So far as we’ve been able to determine, it collects and focuses energy directly from the empyrean, presumably for the rest of the system to make use of.’
‘Which makes it dangerous enough just on its own,’ I said. ‘Believe me, I’ve seen what that lump of rock can do, and it isn’t pretty.’
‘I don’t doubt that,’ Felicia replied dryly. ‘I’ve read the report of how you helped recover it.’[53]
‘Then you’ll know I’ve got valid grounds for concern,’ I shot back, taking in the rest of our surroundings for the first time. The peculiar xenos device had naturally attracted the bulk of my attention, but now I became aware that the walls were covered with flat shards of stone, polished almost as smooth as the Shadowlight, but, thank the Emperor, without any sign of its more unsettling properties. Each was covered in angular scratches, which I felt vaguely repelled by, without ever quite being able to put my finger on why that might be. I walked across to examine the nearest, not because I was particularly interested, but because it gave me a reasonable excuse to put a bit of distance between myself and the Shadowlight. ‘What are these?’
‘The instruction manual, we think,’ Felicia said, staring at them with a peculiar expression I can only describe as ‘hungry’ on her face. (At least, as much of her face as was still capable of expression, of course.) ‘But it’s not been that easy to translate.’
‘I imagine not,’ I replied, remembering the comments that Mott, Amberley’s savant, had made about the enigmatic records during our pursuit of the artefact on Peririmunda. A few similar finds had been made on worlds across the entire breadth of the galaxy, I recalled vaguely, left by a civilisation which had been gone for aeons even before humanity first evolved back on the primeval plains of Holy Terra, but without any common frame of reference very little progress had been made in translating them[54]. Struck by my earlier thought, that the only surviving presence from those days which we still knew about was the necrons, I looked at the slab a little more closely, finding to my inexpressible relief no trace of the peculiar tracery of circles and lines which seems to serve those hellspawned machine creatures as some kind of script[55].
‘So you still haven’t got a clue what this thing’s for,’ I concluded, and Felicia shrugged.
‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ she replied, in a manner which in most people I would have found distinctly evasive, ‘but I think you need to talk to the rest of the team before I tell you any more. The situation here’s a bit complicated.’
‘Of course it is,’ I said, sighing. For a moment I was almost nostalgic for my youthful days of dodging orks across the landscape of Perlia, which, though unpleasant enough at the time, had at least been straightforward; all I’d had to worry about then was going as fast as possible, and shooting everything green I came across along the way.
‘Well then, I suppose we’d better get to it,’ Felicia said, turning away from the infernal device at last, and leading the way towards the door. I followed as quickly as I decently could, inhaling the familiar odour of festering socks and unwashed hair almost gratefully as I gained the corridor, and the closing portal finally cut off the sight of that balefully glowing pedestal.
‘Commissar.’ Jurgen greeted me, his melta still held ready for action, to my mingled relief and amusement. Clearly, despite the unexpected appearance of an old friend, he was unwilling to discount the possibility of further trouble before we left. Quite wisely, too, in my opinion; everyone here would be well aware of what had happened the last time an inquisitor had demanded access to the Shadowlight, and would no doubt be on their guard for the slightest sign of treachery from either of us. Not that we had any intention of trying to seize the wretched thing by force, of course, particularly after seeing how bulky the assembled mechanism was now, but it’s what I’d be thinking in their position, so I could hardly blame them if they were as paranoid as I am. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Up to a point,’ I told him carefully. ‘Moving it would no longer appear to be a realistic option.’ Not now that Orelius and his ship, along with the heavy lifting servitors from the cargo holds we’d have needed to lug the wretched thing about in the first place, were well out of the system, and high-tailing it along the warp currents to wherever he was due to meet Amberley[56].
Overhearing the exchange, Felicia looked smug. ‘I’ve set up a meeting in the conference room,’ she said, although how she’d managed that while we’d been together I had no idea; presumably she had some kind of internal vox unit which she’d been able to use during our conversation, in spite of the distraction that must have afforded. (When I asked her later, she said it was something to do with her cerebral implants, which let her think about a multitude of things at the same time; a sacrament she referred to as ‘multitasking.’[57])
‘Good,’ I replied, masking my surprise as best I could. ‘The sooner we get things sorted out here the better.’
‘Do you want me to accompany you, sir?’ Jurgen asked, and I shook my head.
‘Best to stay outside and watch the door,’ I told him tactfully. I was going to have to work hard enough to bring the people here onside as it was, and having my aide at my shoulder brandishing a melta was hardly going to help win their confidence. ‘We won’t want to be disturbed while we’re discussing things.’
‘Quite so,’ Felicia agreed, keeping the fleshly part of her face completely deadpan.
After a few more words of little consequence she led me along a corridor I didn’t recognise (but then I hadn’t explored much of the underground complex when we first discovered it, and I was certain that it had been considerably enlarged in the eighty years or so since my last visit; something about the echoes and the circulation of the air felt different to my hiver’s instincts), eventually fetching up in front of a polished wooden door. This alone was enough to tell me that we’d crossed over into the Inquisition side of the complex, as cogboys prefer the all-metal look when it comes to matters of interior design, and I began to breathe a little more easily. I might not be about to find allies here, but at least they should be willing to listen to what I had to say.
I left Jurgen outside, accompanied by a couple of hellgun-toting skitarii (who were probably wishing they had augmetic noses by now, to go with the ocular implants they both sported), which left me in little doubt that at least the Mechanicus side of the partnership still harboured misgivings about the purity of our intentions. Felicia barely glanced at the scarlet-uniformed troopers before pushing the doors open and inviting me inside, though, so perhaps the guards were simply meant as a courtesy after all[58].
My first impression was a mixed one, of both familiarity and oddness. The basic layout of the room was conventional enough, with a long table down the centre, flanked by chairs, and a crimson carpet on the floor, into which the familiar barred I of the inquisition had been worked in grey, surrounded by the cogwheel of the Adeptus Mechanicus in white. Instead of wood, however, the table was of burnished bronze, with the interlinked sigils engraved into its upper surface, chased in gold. The only wooden furniture in the room was a small side table, containing a silver tray on which a couple of decanters and a handful of crystal goblets stood invitingly, and a lacquered cabinet, in which the mingled symbols of the two institutions had been incorporated, and which long experience of such places led me to believe was the normal resting place of the drinks. The seats around the table were of metal, but those on one side had been provided with cushions, so even if the room were empty, I would have been able to deduce quite easily that these were the ones generally used by the Inquisition delegates to the partnership.
In fact, though, it was pretty obvious which parties habitually sat where, since most of the seats were occupied. As Felicia and I entered the chamber, a dozen faces glanced up in our direction; those on the left showing clear signs of augmetic enhancement, those on the right generally unmodified, but almost as unreadable. All but one of the Mechanicus delegation were wearing the white robes of their calling, of course, but none that I could see were as elaborately ornamented as Felicia’s, so it hardly surprised me when they nodded in unison, with a respectful murmur of ‘Magos,’ and she took her place at the head of the table. There wasn’t a chair there, but it didn’t seem to bother her; another habit she seemed to have retained from the days when I’d known her rather better was to perch on the mechadendrite attached to the bottom of her spine, using it as a makeshift seat.
‘You told me you weren’t in charge here,’ I said easily, circling the table to get to the drinks. For one thing I needed one, after all the excitement since our arrival, and for another it gave me a chance to study the other people in the room without appearing to stall for time. I wouldn’t be able to tell much about most of them, of course, but if I could pick out a few individuals I could read easily, it would help me to get a feel for how well the meeting was going. Or, knowing my luck, how badly.
‘I’m not,’ Felicia said. ‘I’m supervising the technotheological side of the enterprise, but this concilium sets matters of policy, and the Inquisition scribes take care of the paperwork.’
The tech-priests were all looking at me blankly, with about as much expression as a necron, but the single exception on that side of the table I’d noticed before, a dark-haired man in the crimson uniform of a skitarii officer, was gazing in my direction with an air of wary respect, no doubt aware of my reputation. I nodded an affable greeting, which, after a moment, he returned; that was a good sign, so I made a show of pouring myself a measure of the rather indifferent amasec the decanter had disappointingly turned out to contain (after all my years as an occasional associate of Amberley’s entourage, I’d got used to the idea that Inquisition operatives tended to make the most of life’s little luxuries[59]), and smiled at the assembled company in the open and friendly fashion I was so good at feigning. ‘Anyone else like one while I’m up?’ I asked.
