‘Word from outside?’
‘Major firefight at the gate,’ Theiss replied.
Pasha paced. Waiting was always the worst. She’d give the vent parties ten minutes, then she’d re-open the compression door and storm the Repository bay. Cut the devils off at both ends.
She eyed the room. The four skitarii still stood motionless, weapons aimed at the hatch. Two of the adepts logis had left to activate the facility’s automata weapon servitors. The one who had remained seemed most concerned that Sindre was leaking pints of blood onto the polished, sterile surfaces of the laboratory zone. Elam and the other Ghosts were just waiting, checking weapons and slotting fresh powercells. The firefight had keyed them up. They didn’t want to crash. They wanted to manage the stress so it was ready the moment the fighting resumed.
She knew how they felt. She’d lost four men. Four fething men. And the Archenemy devils had reached the stones before her. She would not allow them to leave the site with such a precious cargo.
She would not allow them to leave the site alive.
Several of the laboratory’s wall screens suddenly fluttered and started to crawl with odd, rapid lines of code script.
‘What is that?’ she asked. ‘Is that data? Do we have new data?’
The adept logis stared at the screens.
‘I do not recognise the code,’ he said. ‘I do not recognise it. Non-standard. Source unknown. Type unknown. Codeware has entered neosync. Codeware has penetrated internal cogitation. Codeware has penetrated the machine-spirit core. Codeware has–’
‘What?’ asked Pasha. ‘Codeware has what?’
The adept logis didn’t reply. He turned to look at her. There was something very wrong with his eyes. Watery blood was trickling from his sockets and the augmetic optic implants had hazed with roiling fields of static. A substance like treacle was oozing out of his breather mask.
‘Berserker,’ he said in a flat tone. ‘Berserker. Berserker. Berserk. Berserk. Zerk. Zerk. Zerk. Zerk–’
He headbutted her with savage force. It took her by surprise, and she fell, clutching her face. The adept logis knelt on her and began to throttle her. He started screaming a high pitched stream of obscenities.
Asa Elam rushed forward and tried to pull the adept logis off her. It was like trying to shift a boulder. The adept logis had locked solid like a piece of machinery. His grip on Pasha’s throat tightened. Her eyes bulged. Her tongue, protruding from her spittle-flecked mouth, went blue.
Elam smashed the butt of his rifle into the adept’s head. The adept went limp and let go. Elam wrenched him off her. Pasha lay on her back, gasping, trying to breathe again. There were red hand marks around her neck.
The sagging adept logis suddenly came to life again and broke Elam’s sturdy grip. Screaming further obscenities, he lunged at Elam and clawed at his face.
‘What the feth is wrong with you?’ Elam snarled, trying to fight him off. He threw a fast punch, the snap-jab special that had seen Asa Elam triumph in many garrison sparring bouts. Elam cursed as he broke a finger on the adept’s brass faceplate.
‘Throne’s sake! Help me here!’ he yelled.
The other Ghosts, aside from those fighting to save Sindre, were already hurrying to his side.
‘Shit!’ said Kadle.
The robot arms on all the benches had suddenly started to twitch and writhe. Blade limbs and cutter dendrites gouged blindly at the steel work surfaces, making metal-on-metal squeals that hurt their ears.
The four skitarii at the hatch turned. Facing into the lab, they started shooting.
The first sleetgun blast exploded Kadle’s head and upper body in a cloud of meat and bone. The second, another tight cloud of micro flechettes, blew a hole through Mkjaff’s torso, almost removing his entire right side. Gore painted the wall screens behind him. He gazed down in disbelief at the missing part of his torso, then his spine splintered and he folded and fell.
The others ducked for cover. There was little of it. A galvanic shot-cloud grazed Captain Theiss, and stippled the wall beside him with a thousand tiny punctures. He blinked and saw he was bleeding from dozens of small wounds across his right thigh, hip, and right arm. The pain was excruciating. The micro ’chettes were still boring into him. He began to scrape frantically at his skin.
The skitarii officer thumped a pulse from his stave. The bubble of hyper-dense gravity bent light and air as it crossed the room. It hit Theiss while he still scrabbled at his own flesh, and pulped his head like an invisible jackhammer.
Ludd wheeled from Sindre’s body. His bolt pistol boomed and the explosive shell struck a skitarius at very short range. The warrior’s torso blew out. Ludd fired again, and knocked the Cult Mech officer sideways in a bloom of flame. On the far side of the lab, Konjic, Mkget and Dickerson unloaded on auto, side by side, hosing skitarii and the area around the hatch with a storm of las. Another skitarius fell, shorting out at every joint. The remaining two – a warrior-caste and the officer Ludd had damaged – kept advancing, firing, las-fire clipping and puncturing their armour. Caught in the middle, Kolding ducked his head and continued working on Sindre as las shrieked past him in one direction and galvanic bursts burned past in the other.
Pasha rose and spat blood. She started blazing at the skitarii with her sidearm. Elam, snarling in frustration, punched the frenzied adept logis in the gut and then the neck. As the adept staggered backwards, Elam swung up his lasrifle and shot him twice. Elam’s right cheek was raked with claw marks. A graviton pulse shivered the air right in front of him, and then punched a dent the size of a medicine ball in the lab’s metal wall. Elam threw himself flat. He fast-crawled, reached the nearest workbench, and got to his knees, using it as cover. He started to hose at the skitarii too.
The multiple flailing cyberlimbs serving the bench grabbed him, like a spider seizing its prey. Elam yelped. The limbs had his wrist, forearm and shoulder, and the digital claws were drawing blood. Mechadendrites slashed and whipped, trying to loop his neck. An additional servo-arm reached in, servos purring, extending a gleaming titanium scalpel towards his face.
Elam tore free, leaving most of his sleeve and part of his cape behind him. He landed clumsily on the polished floor. The manipulator limbs began to mercilessly dissect the scraps of fabric they had captured.
A galvanic shot-burst went through Dickerson and exited in a giant mist of blood and disintegrated meat. The spray drenched Mkget and blinded him for a moment.
Ludd heard Setz shriek. The manipulator arms on all the work benches were thrashing and clawing wildly. Drill-limbs and flashing surgical blades were ripping into Sindre’s helpless form. They skinned and butchered him in a matter of seconds, dividing him into bizarre, geometric pieces.
Setz had still been trying to compress Sindre’s wound. The limbs had seized him too.
Kolding tried to grab him. The hyper-mobile limbs slammed Setz face down into Sindre’s steaming remains. Mechadendrite cables lashed around him, and constricted him, binding him to the bench. The cutting beams, shuttling side-to-side along rapid and precise lines, did the rest, slicing Setz from crown to shoulders into dozens of wafer thin cross-sections.
Kolding backed away, utterly dazed by the horror of it. Ludd body-slammed him, bringing him down out of the crossfire.
Elam and Konjic concentrated fire on the remaining skitarii warrior. The barrage of las-bolts ripped off its arm and destroyed its face. It fell, fluid jetting from the impact cracks crazing its bodyplate.
The last skitarius, the officer with the engraved skull, came to a halt. Cerebral fluid and hydrodynamic synthetics gushed from a large hole in the middle of its forehead. It died standing up, augmetic limbs locked.