‘You coming,’ she asked, ‘or have I got to do this alone?’
A light rain had started to fall out of the low, ink-black sky. Behind them, the last crackle of exchanged fire with the insurgents echoed from the end of the approach road.
Bray signalled, and the first of the squads moved out, running low and quiet across the rockcrete apron towards the gatehouse. Chiria and Haller brought up the rear, lugging a .20 and ammo box between them, moving at a shuffling trot.
Bray threw a stop signal, and tossed a rock towards the gatehouse. It clattered across the open yard, in range of the gatehouse sensor net.
Nothing stirred. No lights kicked in, no hum of auto-aiming weapons.
The place was dead.
Bray let his breath out. If the gatehouse had been live, it would have probably stopped them cold. Cracking that kind of bunker was tread-work. Besides, if the gatehouse had opened up, the slaved weapons in its embrasures would easily have had enough reach to hit the bomb truck they pushed up out of range of the insurgents behind the highway rise.
They moved in. Bray waited, edgy, as Mkoyn burned through the outer door’s lock with a cutting torch. He toed open the heavy door, the lock mechanism still glowing and dripping gobs of molten steel.
The Ghosts made entry, clearance style.
Gatehouse command was dead, and so were the two Urdeshi Steelsiders in it. The whole place was torn apart by intense gunfire. The walls were peppered with blast holes, and the floor was covered in drifts of spent brass. Smoke fumed the air. Monitor screens hung, shattered and crazed. Those still linked and functional displayed dead-air feeds. A noxious smell wafted from dead things caged in each of the bunker’s gun embrasures.
They checked the bodies. Both Steelsiders had been riddled with bullets at close range. The smashed ruin of a gun-servitor lay near the door. One of the dead automata’s cyclic cannons was still rotating, a dry, grinding whirr. It had emptied its entire munition canisters.
Chiria set down the heavy .20 and relieved one of the dead Urdeshi of his .30 short-snout, strapping the hip-mounted onto a gyro-stable body-frame.
‘Easier to carry,’ she said. Haller nodded, and secured the other short-snout. They straightened out the fat, armoured feed belts. The slaved auto-hoppers were dead too, but Chiria found the release catches and lifted the hoppers from their mountings. They were heavy, but she and Haller hefted them up like buckets.
Bray moved through the inner door and entered the walkway across the ditches. Rain pattered down, jingling the chain mesh. He led the fire team advance. There was a caged inner run beyond the ditches. The meshing here had been torn down.
‘Something was penned here,’ said Mkeller.
Bray nodded. Whatever it was, it was loose.
Trooper Armin called to Bray there was something on the ground near the door to the main wall. It looked like a large dog. They approached carefully.
It was a bio-mech thing, a quadruped defence servitor of canine build. What organics it possessed had originally been human. The sight of it disgusted them both.
It was sprawled on its side. They could tell it was still alive, though its vitals were collapsing.
‘Shot?’ Armin asked.
Bray shook his head. Thick black mucus was welling from the creature’s steel jaws, and films of it crusted the thing’s eyes. Its systems had crashed. It had been compromised and corrupted, and that corruption was now killing it.
Bray keyed his bead.
‘Bray to Kolosim.’
‘Go.’
‘We’ve reached the inner gate. The place is dead. No contacts. Can confirm signs that the Mechanicus elements turned. Probably some kind of mechanical infection. I don’t know the right word, but it got in their system, drove them mad, and then shut them down.’
‘Dead?’
‘Looks like it, sir. Burned them out really fast, but they went down feral. No signs of gunfire from inside.’
‘How long to main entry?’
Bray and Armin tried the massive blast door. It was sealed tight.
‘Three, maybe four minutes to cut an entry.’
‘Copy that. Get it done.’
Behind the transports on the approach road, Kolosim looked at the men behind him ready to deploy.
‘Move up,’ he said. ‘Bray’s about to let us into the place. It’s gone quiet, but stay sharp.’
He turned to look at EM 14.
‘Let’s go,’ he ordered.
Behind him, two full companies of Ghosts began to advance on the gatehouse.
Eli Rawne’s plans always erred towards the simple. Life had taught him that much. The more moving parts, the more chance there was for something to go very wrong. He liked lean plans that were supple enough to absorb nasty surprises.
His plan for Camp Xenos had been so lean, there wasn’t a scrap of body-fat on it. Get in, grab Mabbon, get out. But life, or some great external power that Rawne didn’t choose to believe in, was laughing at him from the void. It had other ideas.
He’d been anticipating Sekkite insurgents or, at the very worst, packson units. He’d chosen to move light, with just one section, to make the most of speed.
The things he was facing instead – ‘Qimurah’, the pheguth had called them – were the sort of freaks that made that Great External Power In The Void positively hoot with glee. The Great External Power In The Void wasn’t something Rawne had any plans to get to know on a personal level. For a start, the Great External Power probably had a face like a grox’s puckered arse. But sometimes – times like this – Rawne felt a burning desire, like an ingot of foundry-fresh steel sinking deep down in his gut, to meet that laughing fether face to face and have words.
Strong words. Strong words punctuated by straight silver every time Rawne made a salient point.
With Varl and Brostin in tow, he’d barely got Mabbon into the main guardhouse when the yard-front area lit up. Cardass called out four shooters, minimum. They were pinned down. Their transport was sitting in the yard, near the gate block. Just thirty metres, but the rockcrete yard was wide open all the way. It might as well have been parked on Balhaut.
Rawne reviewed his situation fast. Most of the Camp Xenos garrison had been dead by the time he’d arrived. He’d lost several good men of his own just getting inside. In the time it had taken him to secure Mabbon, Troopers Okel and Mkfareg had been butchered too. Oysten, his adjutant, had also taken a hit. She’d survived, but the las-bolt had destroyed her vox-caster set.
That meant no warning was getting out. No message to Pasha that the frighteningly resilient things currently killing his men were also probably coming for her. In larger numbers.
It also meant there would be no calling for help. Oysten was pissed off about it. If there had been time, Rawne would have enjoyed seeing his normally meek and precise adjutant getting riled.
‘I’d just got that fether tuned up!’ she snarled. He helped her pull the smashed vox-caster unit off her back. More shots ripped in through the windows and outer door.
‘It seems your exit route is blocked?’ Mabbon asked.
Rawne glared at him.
‘Strangely enough, prisons aren’t built with multiple exits,’ he replied.
He signalled Brostin forward to join the Ghosts defending the front of the guardhouse. Varl was sticking tight beside the pheguth.
‘We could do with another shooter, you know?’ Varl said to Mabbon.
‘I don’t want a gun,’ Mabbon replied.
‘Not really your choice,’ said Rawne, snatching fire through a window slit.
‘Oddly, it is,’ said Mabbon. ‘I’ve been a prisoner for too long. Colonel, how many years has it been now? And every day, you and your Ghosts actively preventing me from having anything, anything at all, that could remotely be used as a weapon?’