‘What the Throne was that?’ asked Auerben.
‘It sounded like… a surgical saw,’ Curth said.
‘A bone saw,’ said Daur. ‘That’s what Elodie said. Whatever attacked at Low Keen, it sounded like a bone saw.’
Gaunt took a step towards the undercroft doors and drew his power sword. The blade powered up with a fierce hum.
‘No, my lord!’ Laksheema cried.
‘My daughter’s down there,’ Gaunt said. ‘My daughter and my regiment.’
‘And my fething wife!’ Daur snarled at the inquisitor. ‘Step the hell back!’
‘Please, my lord,’ Laksheema protested.
‘Do it,’ said the Beati quietly. ‘There is death down there. The child is weeping. All the children. Every soul.’
‘Positions!’ Sancto growled. The Scions raised their hellguns and fanned out to flank Gaunt. Auerben and Sariadzi hoisted their assault weapons. Daur had drawn his sidearm.
Gaunt swung the power sword of Heironymo Sondar at the doors with both hands. Wood splintered and billowed out, burning. A bloom of flickering, sickly energy surrounded the blade as it slashed across the panels, as if the blade was biting not just through ancient wood, but through the skin of some subspace membrane. There was a flash, and Gaunt staggered back a few steps.
This time, damage had been done. The centre panels of the ancient, heavy doors were blackened and crumbling. Arcane energy fizzled and spat frothing residue from the collapsing wood.
Sancto and Daur moved in, tearing at the ruined wood, dragging sections of the damaged doors away.
‘Be careful!’ Laksheema warned.
‘Are you all right?’ Curth asked Gaunt. He flexed his grip on the power sword.
‘It nearly overloaded,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never known it fight and buck in my hands like that.’
Stendhal, one of the other Scions, moved in to assist Sancto and Daur. The other two raised their weapons to their cheeks, and sighted the centre section of the door.
Daur, Stendhal and Sancto hauled the doors apart. Both doors fell away in their hands, disintegrating into hot dust and embers that the men threw aside.
‘Something’s awry–’ Beltayn began to say.
‘Oh, Emperor protect us!’ Curth exclaimed, clasping her hands to her mouth.
Behind the burned and shattered doors, there was no doorway. Just the solid, white-washed stone of the wall, perfectly intact, as though no door had ever existed.
By the time the trucks rolled onto the rockcrete apron of Eltath Mechanicore 14, visibility had dropped to thirty metres.
Major Pasha peered out of the cab, then looked down to check the rumpled chart in its plastek sleeve.
‘Grim place,’ murmured Konjic at the wheel.
Pasha nodded and held out her hand. The adjutant passed her the vox handset without hesitation. Pasha held it to her mouth and thumbed it on.
‘R Company lead,’ she said, ‘let’s see who’s home, and make our purpose clear. Elam? Please to do honours.’
She took her thumb off the button.
‘Loud and clear, lead,’ said Elam over the link.
She held the button down again.
‘Convey my respect,’ she said. ‘Everybody else, stand by. This runs according to pattern agreed. Kolosim? Hold the rearguard on the approach road. No one get twitchy until I say they get twitchy.’
Konjic’s vox set, on the seat between them, pipped out a little flutter of vox signal-bursts as each company leader in the convoy behind her acknowledged.
Pasha had the full muscle of the Tanith First with her, packed up in canvas-backed cargo-10s behind her. Only the first three trucks had pulled onto the apron: hers, Elam’s, and a second strength from R Company. They’d come to a halt side by side, their headlamps on. Rain danced like digital static in the beams.
The rest of the convoy was on the long slope of the approach road, lamps hooded and set to dark-running. They were arranged in a double column, filling both lanes of the road. At the back of the formation, Kolosim deployed four sections to hold the road and form a rear guard. They set up crew-served weapons in the gutters. Bannard, Kolosim’s adjutant, walked down the road a little way and scattered pencil-flares that fizzled in the rain. The flickering green glow of the flares illuminated little except the empty road behind them, and the dead ruins on either side.
The approach road was flanked by sheet-wire fencing. Mkflass eyed the fencing dubiously. Beyond it was just scrub wasteland. It was impenetrably dark. He could smell wet vegetation and rain-swilled earth.
He glanced at Kolosim.
‘Get some cutters,’ Kolosim told him. ‘Get two sections through, one each side.’
Mkflass nodded. The men in his section started to cut the fence and drag it wide enough to let men pass.
Bannard returned.
‘Ugly spot, sir,’ he said. ‘Feels wide open.’
Kolosim knew what he meant. They were boxed in on the road by the fence, the rain and the darkness. It was hard to see anything. But it felt unpleasantly exposed.
‘With luck, we won’t be sitting here long,’ Kolosim replied. He keyed his micro-bead.
‘Rearguard,’ he said. ‘Sit tight but get combat-light. Stow your packs. Exit on my word, not before. And let’s kill the engines, please. If we can’t see, let’s hear at least.’
One by one, the idling engines of the big transports shut down. The low grumble was replaced by the sound of rain, hissing off the strip of road and pattering on the canvas truck-tops. It wasn’t a great improvement. The sound of the rain seemed to magnify the emptiness to an unnatural level that suggested it wasn’t empty at all.
Up on the apron, Pasha saw three figures dismount from Elam’s transport: Captain Elam, Captain Criid and Commissar Ludd. Elam walked through the cold puddles of headlamp light and came up to her side door.
She pulled the window down and handed him the waiver certificate that Daur had sent through. It was a heat-printed flimsy produced by Konjic’s vox-caster. Pasha had slipped it in a clear-plastek chart cover to keep the rain from turning it to mush.
‘Don’t take any shit, Asa,’ she told him.
‘I never do,’ he replied with a smile.
Elam turned and walked across the apron, his rifle strapped across his chest. Criid and Ludd fell in step with him. The row of headlamps bleached the backs of them bone-white and stretched their shadows, long and thin ahead of them.
‘Let’s be confident about this,’ Elam said to his companions. No one liked dealing with the Mechanicus, even when they had the authority of the Lord Executor to back them.
Criid glanced ahead at the ominous bulk of Eltath Mechanicore 14. Air raid regulations had placed it in blackout, like the rest of the city. The only lights came from the fortified gatehouse, a rockcrete bunker at the top of the apron that was protected by huge hornwork demi-bastions. The night was so black and the rain so sheer, she couldn’t make out the main site beyond, but she had the impression of something invisible and vast. It had to be a big place. The scale of the demi-bastions told her that much. She’d seen smaller outworks on Militarum fortresses. Eltath Mechanicore 14 – EM 14 – was one of the many Mechanicus strongholds in the city, occupying a stretch of lowland hillside in Klaythen Quarter on the eastern flank of the Great Hill, surrounded by extensive worker habitats and just below the vast spread of the shipyards. It wasn’t one of the principal forges, the huge structures dominating entire districts she’d seen on her first day on Urdesh. Indeed, even they were minor forge sites, she’d been told. Eltath was the subcontinental capital, an administrative centre. The giant forge complexes within its territory were nothing compared to the mass forge installations elsewhere on the planet. Pasha’s briefing had described EM 14 as a research facility, one of the old tech-dynast manufactories that had been absorbed by the Mechanicus occupation and repurposed with a specific role.