Soldiers of the imperium, p.42
Soldiers of the Imperium, page 42
‘Bring them to me when they have recovered and you have ascertained that they are free from the virus.’
The World Mind assured him that it would do so. But as Nebusemekh arranged the sand, he was contemplating the unusual prospect of talking to another living, breathing creature. It had been a long time since he had done so.
Even if they were free from the virus, they would undoubtedly be vectors for any number of pathogens.
‘Prepare an anti-bacteriological suit for me,’ Nebusemekh told the World Mind. ‘I will wear it when I welcome back the expedition. After all, one can’t be too careful.’
‘Absolutely,’ said the World Mind. ‘I have successfully brought the expedition back into the citadel. They seem a little disorientated at the moment, but that will no doubt wane as I carry out the necessary medical checks, master. I will tell you when they are ready for you to see them.’
‘Yes,’ said Nebusemekh. He was distracted. The sand was divided. Time to try again. ‘I look forward to speaking to them. Now, I really think this time it might work.’ He raised his staff.
Lifting from the table, moving in their stately, immemorial dance, the planets and the suns and the stars rose at his bidding and took their places in the celestial masque, their sand surfaces shimmering yellow-green under the play of the stasis fields Nebusemekh was wielding.
It was whole. A perfect model of the heavens, dancing to the music of gravity and the gentle melody that Nebusemekh introduced, turning their motion towards him that the very stars might bow before him in their dance. For, after all, he was as old as the stars.
He lifted his arms to acknowledge their obeisance. But as he did so, the stasis fields holding the stars and the suns and the planets in place slipped and, one by one, they crumbled and fell back to the ground.
‘Never mind, master,’ said the World Mind. ‘It will work next time. Or the time after.’
‘Or the time after that. Nothing worthwhile was ever achieved without effort.’ Nebusemekh remembered the child who had played with sand on the shore of the sea many, many, many years ago. If the child could make buildings with sand, he, so much stronger and wiser than that child, would be able to make castles in the sky. He simply had to find the right sort of sand.
Besides, it meant that the memory would play again. And he enjoyed the memory more than anything in his current life. It somehow seemed more real, more vital.
Nebusemekh began to divide the sand again.
CHAPTER 6
‘Throne!’
The curse came through on Obeysekera’s vox. He wanted to curse too, but he held his silence and turned, slowly, trying to see something, anything, in the dark.
‘Where the frekk are we?’ Another voice, the pitch rising, edging towards panic.
‘Quiet!’
Obeysekera snapped the order over the squad vox-channel, looked to see if he had any auspex readings, but it was still all over the place: it seemed to think he was in among an apparently infinite set of energy sources, spreading to the limit of its detection capabilities. With the auspex providing no useful information, Obeysekera killed its light: even the faint illumination it used served to stop his eyes responding to the darkness into which they had been plunged.
‘Who’s here?’ Obeysekera said into the vox. ‘Call your names.’
‘Gunsur.’
‘Ensor.’
‘Ha.’
‘Lerin.’
Then, silence.
‘Roshant, Malick, are you here?’
As Obeysekera spoke, there was a discharge of light, green and vivid, that left him more blinded than the darkness.
‘Throne. Throne, Throne, Throne – Throne, Throne.’
The voice, coming through the vox and audible close by, was Roshant’s. It was coming from where the darkness had been split by light.
‘Roshant, quiet.’
‘C-captain, is that you?’
‘Yes. Anyone else with you?’
‘Malick here. We have the general. Can’t see nothing, sir.’
‘None of us can. Stay where you are.’
Obeysekera turned slowly, looking, waiting for his eyes to adapt to the darkness. But there was nothing, not even the deeper shadows of a dark night. They were somewhere where there was no light.
‘Not getting anything, captain.’
That was Malick.
Obeysekera listened. With no light, he could tell the rough direction from which Malick’s voice came but not its depth: he could be below or above or level with him. There was something about the way the sound trailed away that told him they were in a large space.
A thought, nagging and unsettling. If he and all his men had been brought down here into the dark then what of the xenos they had been charging towards at the moment when the world cracked open in front of them and they fell through? Were they down here in the dark, too? Listening, fixing on the sound of him and his troops? From the brief details of their physiology that Obeysekera had seen, he suspected that the kroot had excellent eyesight.
But no eye, no matter how sensitive, could function in absolute darkness. If they were down here, the kroot were as blind as he was.
A sound. Bat-squeak high, rising to a silence beyond the range of his hearing. Obeysekera looked around, trying to locate its direction. In the dark it felt far, but he had no means of checking that. The darkness was so complete that his own body seemed disconnected; it was as if he were a disembodied point of view, a bodiless consciousness floating in the void.
The sound, however, was answered by another squeak rising out of the range of his hearing.
Obeysekera whispered into the squad vox-channel. ‘Anyone else hear that? A high-pitched sound.’
‘I heard it,’ said Lerin. ‘Can’t tell from where.’
‘Sounded a long way off,’ said Roshant.
‘I heard nothing.’
Obeysekera did not recognise the voice, but its tone suggested a man accustomed to being heard when he spoke: the general.
‘Anyone else?’ asked Obeysekera, ignoring the general’s interjection for the moment.
‘This is nonsense,’ said the general. Not being connected to the squad vox-channel, he was speaking loudly to be heard.
If the kroot were here, Obeysekera thought, they would now have confirmed that they were not alone. If he were their commander, he would deploy into a firing arc to allow concentrated fire when they got some light.
‘Quiet. Listen for movement.’
Without sight, Obeysekera put all his attention into hearing.
A rasp, like rough skin crawling over stone. Close.
He turned, searching for the source. Then, he realised he was hearing the sound of his clothes moving over his skin as he breathed, the faint creak of carapace plates shifting as his chest rose and fell.
He could hear his heart beat.
He could hear his blood beat.
In such silence, he should be able to hear the slightest movement, but there was nothing.
If he were the kroot commander, he would not even know which direction to send his troops, nor whether they walked on a plain or above an abyss.
Without light, he and his men were helpless. But unless the kroot had some other sense akin to a natural auspex, they would be helpless too. Without such a sense, not even the kroot could move in this absolute dark. Obeysekera scanned his memories in the hypnocache, but nothing came up from the xenos manuals suggesting that the kroot had such a facility.
If they were in the dark, they were lost as well.
A clang, metal on metal. Obeysekera and the rest of the Kasrkin spun towards the sound, bringing their hellguns to bear.
‘Throne! Sorry, sorry, that was me.’ It was Roshant’s voice. ‘I dropped something.’
‘We need some light.’ Obeysekera did not recognise the voice, but its air of command told him whom it belonged to.
‘General Itoyesa?’
‘Any of you soldiers have a lumen?’
Obeysekera felt himself twitch with annoyance at the general’s insouciant assumption of command. That was something else that would have to wait until they had light.
‘No, they’re back with the Venators,’ said Obeysekera.
He heard the tsk of the general’s disapproval.
‘At least I have a data-slate,’ said Itoyesa. Obeysekera heard fumbling sounds as the general searched for it. ‘Got it.’
The screen light stuttered on, bright – although Obeysekera knew that anywhere else it would be barely visible – illuminating the general’s hand and face. But before their eyes could adjust, the light faded away again.
‘Throne,’ said Itoyesa. ‘Cell’s dead.’
‘What about this?’ The voice belonged to Amazigh.
The light flared, flame high, from the cloth-wrapped torch he held up. Eyes, light-dazzled, looked outwards blearily, trying to see through the momentary blindness.
‘Throne of Terra.’ That was Malick.
He was saying what the rest of them were all thinking.
They were standing on a plain, a flat metal surface stretching further than the light could reach in every direction. But the plain was studded with vertical towers, reaching up beyond the light into the interminable dark, and the towers were slotted with sarcophagi, some head-on, some sideways-on. The light cast from Amazigh’s torch was bright enough to shine through the crystal of the nearest sarcophagi. It shone through and then broke upon the creature within.
It was a creature of metal, a metal of silver and grey that, at the touch of the light, seemed to wrinkle and flow as if it were living skin. The head was a skull, bare of flesh, the body a cage of metal ribs and its limbs struts of steel. Beside it in the clear coffin was a weapon: the label Gauss flayer presented itself to Obeysekera’s mind from a suddenly activated hypnocache. Stacked above the sarcophagus was another, and another, and another, on up into the dark above them.
‘Necrons.’
The voice was Roshant’s; the name, redolent with death, came from them all.
As if in response to the pool of illumination cast from Amazigh’s torch, the space in which they found themselves began to light up. It was dim at first, a faint green fluorescence from the clear caskets in which the metal shapes lay. Then lights started to switch on above the sarcophagi, illuminating the strange characters that were inscribed upon the heads of the caskets. The livid green light reflected off the gun-grey metal, giving it a sheen of viscous life like the scum upon a stagnant pool, and then reached out into the great space of the hall.
One by one, the tomb towers started to light up. Huge columns of necrons, ascending to heights beyond their sight: heights lost in the green glow that began to spill from every surface, reflected and refracted. Staring upwards at the tomb towers that rose above them, Obeysekera thought he could see movement in the heights – many-limbed creatures crawling over the stacks of sarcophagi, stroking the crystal caskets with their metal limbs.
Tomb spyders. He had fought them before. Non-organic creatures with somewhat limited artificial intelligence that saw to the maintenance and defence of the necron tombs and their inhabitants. Their function was similar to the white blood cells in a human body: to identify intruders and destroy them.
Looking up at the tomb tower disappearing above his head, each step containing another necron warrior, Obeysekera realised that they had virtually no chance of getting out of this alive.
He turned round, looking into the distance, searching for whether the hall stretched as far horizontally as it seemed to stretch vertically. Through the ranks of tomb towers he could see no sign of a wall, nor of any ending to the hall.
‘Where in the Emperor’s name have you brought me?’
Obeysekera brought his gaze back from the distant green reaches of the hall to the man, also green-tinted, standing in front of him, bristling with disdain.
‘General Itoyesa,’ said Captain Obeysekera. ‘I would appreciate you keeping your voice down.’
‘You have no authority to tell me what to do,’ said the general, bristling even more. He was a stockily built man with the marks of some of his campaigns visible in livid scar tissue on his cheek and an augmetic left hand that was opening and closing convulsively, as if wishing to crush Obeysekera’s windpipe. ‘I say again, where the frekk have you brought me?’
‘I have not brought you anywhere,’ said Obeysekera. ‘We have all been brought here.’ He gestured around him. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, we appear to have been brought down into a necron tomb.’
‘How are you going to get me out then?’ asked General Itoyesa. ‘You were sent to find me and bring me back to headquarters. Carry out the second part of your orders, captain.’
‘Those were not all my orders, general.’
‘What else do you have to do?’
Captain Obeysekera stared at the general, not retreating before his indignation. ‘Obeysekera,’ he said slowly.
The general stared at him. ‘Pardon?’
‘My name is Obeysekera. Captain Obeysekera.’
‘Whatever your name is, what are you going to do to get me out of here?’
‘What we Kasrkin are trained to do, general – recon, plan, act.’ Obeysekera gestured towards the rising tomb towers. ‘We are at the recon phase here, general. If you would excuse me.’
The captain turned away from the general. It was a calculated movement, designed to either silence Itoyesa or to draw him into a confrontation that only Obeysekera could win.
‘Sergeant Malick.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Behind him, Obeysekera could hear the general puffing with impotence but choosing to hold his peace for the moment.
‘Form a perimeter – we don’t know if the kroot were brought down here too.’
While Malick dispatched Lerin, Ha, Ensor and Gunsur to sentry positions, Obeysekera turned to Amazigh. The Kamshet was still holding the torch in his hand, although the light from it was no longer necessary. He stared up at the towers, with wonder turning to dread.
Feeling the gaze, Amazigh brought his gaze down and looked at Obeysekera.
‘Now I know why the mountain is tabu.’
‘It also explains the anomaly that affects the machine-spirits of all our equipment around here.’ Obeysekera stepped closer to the Kamshet. ‘You have served me faithfully since the Mother gave you to me – now I ask a further service. You are light of foot and skilled in remaining unseen – see if the kroot are here too.’
The Kamshet looked around at the tomb towers rising into the dark, and the livid light that filled the spaces in between them.
‘You want me to go out into that? On my own?’ Amazigh shook his head. ‘They are tabu. I cannot go among them.’
Obeysekera saw General Itoyesa turn towards them, his mouth opening to speak, so to forestall him the captain stepped closer to the Kamshet and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. Leaning close to Amazigh, so that he could see the man’s eyes beneath his cheche, their blue tinted ocean green by the tomb light, Obeysekera whispered, ‘We are all scared here. If we are to escape, we must accept the fear, for it will stop us doing anything stupid, but we must not let it master us. I know that the fear will not master you, Amazigh.’
‘The Mother sent me with you as punishment. It is become a greater punishment than I ever feared.’
‘Then when I return you to her, she will learn what you have done, and she will give you due place among your people.’
As Obeysekera whispered, Amazigh began to nod his head, understanding what was asked of him and the honour that would be his should he achieve it and return to the tribe. Obeysekera saw him looking sidelong at the rising tomb towers. It was the returning back to his tribe that was difficult to envisage, surrounded by countless sleeping necrons.
‘They are sleeping. You are quieter than the wind – you will not wake them. Now, go, but not far – any movement will carry a long way in this silence. If the kroot are here, you will soon hear them.’
Amazigh nodded again. ‘I-I will go,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ said Obeysekera. ‘For you go of your own will and not by my order.’
The Kamshet drew his cheche tighter around his head and then turned. Like a wisp of mist, he disappeared among the tomb towers, passing out between the silent guard of Obeysekera’s remaining men.
Obeysekera turned to see General Itoyesa staring at him.
‘I have never seen an officer of the Astra Militarum ask one of his men to do something before, Captain Obeysekera.’
‘As you might remember, Amazigh is not one of my men, general. I have no authority to order him to do anything.’
General Itoyesa snorted and drew his bolt pistol. ‘This is the only authority these tribals respect or understand, captain, and the sooner you realise that the better. Most of them are only one step from barbarism. Without our presence, before you knew it they would be offering up children as sacrifices to heathen gods. A good taste of bolter fire is what they need to keep them honest. Not like our Guard.’
As the general spoke, Obeysekera was scanning their surroundings, still looking for movement. There was nothing on the ground level, but above he could see the spyders moving up and down the columns, wicked-looking creatures of metal and spikes. So far, they were showing no signs of moving towards them, but he was wary. Killing a creature that was not in any real sense alive would be no easy task, even for a Kasrkin hellgun. Living creatures bled out; wounds slowed them down or incapacitated them. It was not the same with those made of metal. They had to be disassembled, blown apart piece by piece, and even then they could continue operating far beyond the limits of any organic creature.
