Guard mindset regarded Urdesh as simply a contested world, a battleground to be cleared and secured. Criid reminded herself that it was contested because of what it was: a forge world. A place of industry and manufacture, the largest and most important of its kind in forty systems. To her, it was a place to be fought for. To the Priests of Mars, it was holy ground, a precious outpost of their far-flung technomechanical empire.
That’s why it had survived. Other worlds so bitterly disputed would have been obliterated long before by the ultimate sanction of fleet action. Whoever held Urdesh held the most vital munition source in the rimward Sabbat Worlds. She knew that it had been held, lost and retaken by both sides many times in its past. She wondered if any world anywhere had suffered under so many temporary masters. Reign after reign, Archenemy and Imperial, changing hands with each occupation, claimed and reclaimed. No wonder it bred such ferocious warriors. She had often felt that the Urdeshi troops she’d met had been fighting for Urdesh above and before any other cause.
There was a furnace smell in the wet air that reminded her of Verghast, but she knew that Verghast, for all its mighty hives, was a minor industrial world compared to this.
They heard a sudden, throaty rush of air that sounded like the mother of all flamer units. The three of them halted in their tracks, bathed in an infernal glow. Above them, the sky burned for a few seconds, a massive, boiling rush of churning flame-clouds.
Not an attack. EM 14 had just vented a gas plume burn-off from its vapour mill. The burning clouds died back into blackness, but before they did, they briefly revealed EM 14 in red half-light. Criid glimpsed the outlines of vast rockcrete ramparts and cyclopean galvanic halls, heavy casemate defences, and outer thickets of razor-wire. Criid sucked in her breath. She wondered what the hell Gaunt thought was coming that a place like this would not be a sufficient defence.
The massive gatehouse straddled two defensive ditches lined with wire. Inside that was another ring of dead earth sandwiched between a heavy chain fence and the outer wall.
‘What’s that?’ Ludd asked.
‘What?’
‘It sounds like an animal,’ Ludd said.
Criid and Elam listened. They could hear the constant sizzle of the rain, which was dancing silver splashes on the rockcrete around their feet. Beyond that, they heard a bark, a growl somewhere in the night. It was a deep, ugly sound, full of pain and rage.
‘Feth knows,’ said Elam, lowering his hand to the grip of his strung weapon.
The growl died away, then others answered it, yaps and snarls that faded into scraps of noise. They were weird sounds, a blend of deep-throated reverberation and higher pitched whining.
Lights snapped on, blinding the three of them. They had tripped the gatehouse auto-sensors. Automated weapon mounts in the gatehouse’s deep-set embrasures rotated to target them, whirring softly. Criid could see the targeting lasers moving across their soaked battledress like fireflies.
‘Astra Militarum! Tanith First!’ Elam called out. He held up the waiver in its plastek wrap. ‘We require access!’
The laser dots continued to drift. The guns stared, occasionally micro-shifting with the pulsed hums of platform gears. There was a thump, and the gatehouse projected a fierce blue scanning beam. The horizontal blue bar tracked up and down them from head to foot and back. It shut off.
An outer hatch clanked open in the side of the bunker. Two men appeared, large, armed and armoured. They stepped out into the rain and approached. They were Urdeshi Heavy Troops from the infamous Third Brigade, the Steelside Division. They wore full ballistic plate and grilled helmets, all finished in puzzle camo. Each one wielded a .30 ‘short-snout’ hip-mounted on a gyro-stable bodyframe. Fat, armoured feed belts ran from their weapons to auto-delivery hoppers inside the gatehouse. Both of them had stylised Mechanicus emblems fused to their breastplates, denoting their proud secondment to the protective service of the forge.
‘Explain your business,’ said one, his voice amplified by his vox-mask.
Elam held up the waiver again.
‘My business is the business of the Lord Executor,’ he said. ‘Here’s my waiver authority. I have an infantry regiment under transport on the road behind me. My commander seeks access and immediate conference with the facility senior.’
‘Not tonight,’ the Urdeshi said.
‘Oh yes, tonight,’ said Ludd.
‘The seniors of the forge will take no audience with the city on lock-down.’
‘Then I’ll take names,’ said Ludd. He stepped right up to them, eye-to-eye with the massive troopers, and fished out his black pocket book. ‘You wear the sigil of Mars and you do loyal work,’ he said, ‘but you’re Astra Militarum, and I will have your names.’
With a gloved fingertip, Ludd casually wiped raindrops off the name tag bolted to the chest-plate of the man he was facing. He did it with such matter-of-fact calm it made Criid smile.
‘Erreton. Captain,’ Ludd said, and wrote the name down. ‘And you?’
The other Steelsider didn’t reply, so Ludd studied his name tag too.
‘Gorsondar,’ he said. ‘I suppose you boys know who the Lord Executor is?’
‘We do,’ replied Erreton. ‘We–’
‘Find yourselves hurtling at near light speed towards a pile of shit for this, captain,’ said Ludd. ‘I’ll give you a moment to reconsider and verify the waiver. Out of courtesy. The Mechanicus is a mighty institution, but it won’t protect either of you from the Prefectus.’
‘In,’ said Erreton, jerking his head at the bunker.
They followed the men inside. The gatehouse command was lit with amber panel lights. A third Urdeshi Heavy manned a control station of multi-level display screens. Each screen showed a different low-light image of the apron outside. The slack of the sentries’ ammo-feed belts retracted into the big autohoppers as the men entered.
Criid stood with Ludd, water dripping off them onto the deck grille. She saw the inside of the automated gun-points, the subhuman forms packed foetally inside tiny turret cages, wired by spine, hand and eye-socket into the weapon systems. Each of the embrasure weapons that had tracked them outside had been guided by a vestigial flicker of human consciousness. Mechanicus gun-slaves, the lowest and most pitiful order of the infamous skitarii.
Erreton took the waiver from Elam and passed it to the Steelsider at the station desk.
‘Check it,’ he said.
The desk officer took the waiver flimsy out of its wrapping, and slid it under the optical scanner. A digital version, instantly verified by the Urdeshic Palace war room, appeared on one of the monitors surrounded by a vermilion frame.
‘My apologies,’ Erreton said to Elam.
‘None taken,’ smiled Elam as though he was responding politely. ‘Get your transport gates open so we can bring the regiment inside. And have a senior of this facility summoned to meet with my commanding officer.’
‘Do that at once,’ Erreton said to the desk officer, who began speaking rapidly into his vox-mic.
‘Follow me,’ Erreton told them.
He walked to the rear hatch of the gatehouse and opened it. The ammo-feed of his rig-weapon buzzed as it played out behind him. When it reached the limit of its tension, the whole hopper, an armaplas container the size of a fuel drum, detached itself from the wall and scuttled after him on short, thick insectiform legs.
They followed Erreton and his obedient, mobile ammo hopper out of the rear door and onto a caged walkway that ran across the ditches to a blast hatch in the main wall. Flood lights had come on, catching the spark of rain falling through the wire. Beyond the second ditch, the walkway bisected the ring of caged, dead earth outside the wall.