‘Then, with respect, you are dead,’ said Mabbon. ‘Six remain. It is unprecedented for the Anarch to deploy eight Qimurah together in this day and age.’
‘You’re clearly high on his to-do list,’ said Rawne.
‘But the pheguth’s not the primary target, is he?’ said Varl.
‘What?’ asked Rawne.
Varl shrugged. ‘Their primary target is gonna be the same as ours,’ he said. ‘Collecting Mabbon’s just a courtesy. We sent the bulk of our lot after the eagle stones. And if they sent eight here–’
‘What’s that?’ asked Brostin. ‘Sixty-four minus… that’s fifty-six. Fifty-fething-six of these bastards?’
‘To field all the Qimurah on one world at one time,’ said Mabbon. He was clearly stunned. ‘That’s unheard of. That’s never happened. It–’
‘It means Pasha and the Ghosts are totally fethed,’ said Rawne. ‘Oysten! Get me the vox. Now!’
From the blockhouse ahead, gunfire renewed in serious, frantic blurts.
‘Oysten!’ Rawne yelled. He looked at Brostin and Varl. ‘Close on him,’ he said, pointing at Mabbon. ‘We’re going to take him straight through and out. Staying here is not an option.’
Lunny Obel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He shook his head.
Finally, he said, ‘Fethed if I understand any of this.’
He put another las-round into the already dead adept warden, just to be certain.
He looked around.
‘How many?’ he called out. ‘How many did we lose?’
‘Eight,’ said Maggs quietly.
‘Nine,’ said Larkin. ‘Nine. Etzen’s over here behind the… the thing.’ He waved his hand wearily at one of the turbine hall’s control desks.
Tona Criid rose from the body of the other adept warden. She had picked up the ornate stave he had, without warning, used to kill three of the Ghosts. She turned it over in her hand. Then she looked around the hall. Fyceline smoke was still hanging in the air. Zhukova had just managed to manually close the outer hatch, locking out a Mechanicus automata that was now standing outside, emptying its munition hoppers against the hatch plate. The impacts were making a noise like a machine-hammer, and flecks of green paint were scabbing and flying off the inside of the door. Behind that immediate thundering, Criid could hear other gunfire. The automata, a squat gun servitor, had been one of several that had started shooting in the arcade outside the Turbine Hall just seconds before the adept wardens had gone berserk. By the sound of it, there was now a full-scale rolling battle tearing through EM 14, as the companies of Tanith Ghosts who had entered the facility with Major Pasha tried to fend off the Cult Mechanicus personnel who had turned on them for no reason.
Criid took a quick head count: Obel, Larkin, Zhukova, Mkhet, Boaz, Falkerin, Galashia, Cleb, Ifvan, Maggs, Lubba… all told thirty-one Ghosts from the two teams that she and Obel had assembled were left.
‘What do we do?’ Lubba asked.
‘We go in,’ said Obel. ‘We go in now, as per Pasha’s orders.’
Criid nodded.
‘I think the situation has changed wildly since she issued that order,’ said Larkin. ‘The fething Mechanicus freaks are trying to end us.’
‘I don’t think they know what they’re trying to do,’ said Maggs. He gestured at the data screens that covered one wall of the imposing hall. They were rolling with broken codeware and half-formed runes. The hall’s lights were flickering, and the huge turbine didn’t sound as though it was running well. Even a tech-novice could tell that something catastrophic had swept through the Mechanicus facility.
‘They didn’t turn on us,’ Zhukova agreed. ‘They just all turned insane, like a switch being thrown.’
‘How could you tell?’ asked Larkin. ‘They’re freaks at the best of times.’
‘You could tell,’ said Zhukova. ‘They went feral. Central system corruption. Maybe part of the Archenemy attack. I don’t know. But if they’d simply decided to kill us, for whatever reason of logic, we’d be dead.’
She looked at the corpses of the two adept wardens. It had taken the combined, desperate efforts of all of them to drop the wardens, and only then because the wardens had attacked without any regard for their own safety.
‘They went mad?’ Larkin asked. ‘How could you tell?’
‘Because they behaved like humans,’ said Criid. ‘Emotion. Frenzy. That’s not Mechanicus.’
‘Well,’ Larkin pouted. ‘Whatever, are we still going in?’
‘Orders still stand,’ said Criid. ‘Orders from Pasha, given to her by Gaunt. The objective is still essential, even if the game on the ground just turned bad.’
‘All right,’ said Ifvan. ‘But how do we get in? And how do we know where to go? Those murdering shit-heads were supposed to show us.’
Zhukova pointed to an embossed metal sign bolted to the marble wall. It looked like a circuit map.
‘That seems to be a schematic of the vent systems,’ she said.
‘Make some sense of it,’ Criid ordered. ‘Everybody get kit-light. We’ll be moving fast because we’ve already lost time. Weapons, torches and ammo. And water. Check your reloads. Strip extras from the dead.’
Several of the Ghosts looked at her.
‘They’d want us to have them,’ she said flatly. ‘They’d want us to use them. Lunny, see if you can raise Pasha. Or anyone.’
Obel nodded, and started trying his micro-bead. Criid crossed to where Zhukova and Maggs were studying the metal sign.
‘Is that a plan?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Zhukova. ‘This is us here. Turbine Hall One.’ She pointed. ‘So access is that duct over there. It’s a bit of a maze, but if I’m reading this right, we can follow the ducts down to the main geotherm shaft here. If the bastards got in this way, then that’s the way they’re coming out. It’s the main spur to the city power system. So if we can get down here as quick as we can, we can block their route. Their only way out will be through us. That is, if I’m understanding this correctly.’
‘You’re our best hope,’ said Criid. ‘And our best chance for finding the way.’
Zhukova nodded grimly. The scouts in both Criid and Obel’s team sections were amongst the dead, their flesh and bone demolished by the wardens’ grav pulses. Ornella Zhukova was the closest thing they had to a fully fledged scout.
‘Finding the way’s not going to be our problem,’ said Maggs. ‘Stopping the bastards is. Pasha and Kadle reckoned they were like bullet proof or some shit.’
‘We’ll just have to pack as much punch as we can,’ said Criid. ‘Flamers–’
‘And fire-retardant,’ said Maggs.
‘We’ve got Larkin and Okain, so we’ve got hotshots,’ said Criid. ‘We can bring the .20.’
‘Snipers and a crew-served? In a tunnel?’ Maggs said, mocking.
‘We’ve got grenades and tube charges,’ Criid went on firmly. She looked at the stave in her hand. ‘And we can improvise.’
Maggs sighed. He looked at the sign. ‘If I had some paper, I could make a rubbing of this. Or a data-slate, we could copy it.’
‘All the data-slates have crashed too,’ said Criid. ‘Central link. The noospheric thing. And I don’t think the Mechanicus uses paper.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Zhukova, staring at the sign and moving her right index finger around her left palm as though she was sketching. ‘I can memorise it.’
Criid, Lubba and Ifvan opened the duct cover. Automation was off, so they had to force the heavy bolts manually. They were sweating by the time they’d finished. It was work a power-assisted servitor would normally have performed. Lubba heaved the circular hatch open, and a wall of heat and gas fumes rolled out.