Mkoll handed him the dagger. Holofurnace leaned forwards with a grunt and started to hook the goads out of his paralysed legs.
Mkoll rose.
‘What did you mean when you said opportunity?’ Mazho asked, rising too.
‘I’m here by blind luck. You’re here by bad luck. Luck alone led me to you,’ replied Mkoll.
‘Not sure it was luck,’ whispered Milo. ‘The influence of the Beati flows–’
‘Not here it doesn’t,’ said Mkoll.
Milo looked at him.
‘This ship is sitting at the heart of the Archenemy’s primary stronghold on Urdesh,’ said Mkoll. ‘The enemy is here in brigade strengths, all around us. The nearest Imperial force is ninety plus kilometres from here, and no one on our side knows of this location.’
‘So we’re behind enemy lines, cut off, without support?’ asked Holofurnace, yanking a goad out of his knee. ‘In the heart of a nest of devils?’
‘The odds are not in our favour,’ said Mkoll.
‘Is there a way out?’ asked Mazho.
‘No,’ said Mkoll simply.
‘So all that matters is what we do while we’re here?’ asked Milo. ‘What we accomplish before they find us and take us out?’
‘Yes,’ said Mkoll.
‘And you’ve already decided what that could be, I’m guessing?’ said Holofurnace.
‘Yes,’ said Mkoll.
The Iron Snake pulled out the last of the goads, and hauled himself to his feet. He grimaced as locked muscles eased and flexed. He got upright, then immediately slumped, leaning hard on the hatch door of his tank. Mkoll darted to support him and stop him toppling.
‘Thank you, brother,’ said Holofurnace, his voice laced with pain. ‘I’ll be myself again in a moment, I promise.’
‘Lean on something,’ growled Mkoll through gritted teeth. ‘You’re too fething heavy to hold upright.’
Holofurnace chuckled, and shifted his weight, getting a better grip on the rim of the heavy hatch. Mkoll straightened up.
‘So tell me,’ Holofurnace said.
Mkoll frowned thoughtfully.
‘We have three choices,’ he said. ‘One is to try and annihilate this stronghold from inside. I think finding the means to do that will be near impossible. The second is more viable. We try to commandeer a communications station or similar. Get a message out. Alert crusade command to this location in the hope that air strikes or orbital bombardment can level it.’
‘That works,’ said Holofurnace. ‘Astartes code can verify us and emphasise the significance of our signal. If high command isn’t asleep at the helm, fleet elements could have this site triangulated and locked in seven or eight minutes.’
‘Loss of this stronghold would cripple Sek’s efforts on Urdesh,’ Mkoll agreed. ‘So that strategy has a lot going for it.’
‘What’s the third idea?’ asked Mazho.
‘Sek,’ said Mkoll. ‘He’s the key. Whatever damage the crusade does to his armies, they will continue to be a threat all the while he’s alive. And he’s here. On this vessel.’
‘But a fleet strike–’ Mazho began.
‘There’s always a chance he could escape,’ said Holofurnace.
‘He can’t escape if he’s dead,’ said Milo.
‘So if we can only attempt one thing, and we want it to have the maximum effect…’ said Mkoll. He let the rest hang, unsaid.
No one spoke for a moment.
‘Whichever we chose,’ said Mazho, ‘we’re dead.’
Mkoll looked at him.
‘You need to grasp, sir,’ he said, ‘that we’re dead already.’
Sixteen: Close Quarters
Mkoll buckled the sirdar’s helmet back on. He glanced at the other three, made the Tanith hand-sign for mute, and walked off along the brig.
The interrogation he had observed on his way in was finished, and the cell door locked. He wondered if the Urdeshi colonel inside was still alive.
He hoped to the Throne he was not.
The two packson watchmen were still on duty in the security post. One opened the inner cage to let him through. The other stood leaning on the back grip of the sentry gun.
The packson with the key remarked that the sirdar had been a long time.
Mkoll replied that the best work often took a long time.
‘Harneth den voi?’ the packson asked. So you got what you wanted?
‘Den harnek teht,’ Mkoll replied. Everything it was possible to get.
With an open palm slap, he rammed the pain goad into the key-holder’s solar plexus. The man’s entire system shut down. His mouth opened to voice the unthinkable agony that was screaming through his nervous system, but his vocal chords and lungs no longer worked.
He buckled to the deck. The other watchman turned from the sentry gun in surprise as his comrade collapsed. Mkoll was already on him. The skzerret went in between his ribs.
Two kills, three seconds. No sound.
Mkoll used the watchman’s key to reopen the inner cage and dragged both bodies through. He stood in plain sight at the end of the brig corridor and made the hand-sign for clear.
Milo and Mazho hurried down to him. Holofurnace followed, limping.
‘Uniforms,’ Mkoll said.
Milo and the colonel stripped the packsons of their kit and pulled it on. The fit was poor, but it would have to do. Mkoll went back into the security post, and searched the area. Both packsons had been armed with old Fleet-pattern lascarbines, which were hooked on a wall rack. Mkoll took them down and checked them. Decent weapons, short-pattern for use in shipboard environments. The packsons had kept them clean and in good order. The more disciplined, Astra Militarum-style regimen observed by both Sekkite packs and the Blood Pact had some benefits. Milo and Mazho would have spare clips in the over-rigs of the uniforms they were acquiring, as well as ritual daggers. As they entered the cage in uniform, Mkoll tossed a carbine to each man.
‘Carry them down, over the crook of the arm,’ he said. ‘Packsons don’t shoulder weapons.’
Milo nodded.
Holofurnace appeared.
‘No disguising me,’ he said.
Mkoll knew there wouldn’t be. Most of what would follow was going to be improvisation, though Mkoll had talked them through a few basic plays.
Holofurnace took the big Urdeshi sentry gun off its tripod. It looked like a regular autogun in his paws. He picked up the ammo box and made sure the belt between box and weapon was slack enough not to jam with any sudden movement.
Mkoll opened the outer cage.
‘Someone will soon spot that the brig watch is unmanned,’ said Mazho. He was having difficulty getting his spectacles to sit comfortably inside the stolen helmet and its ghastly mouth-guard.
‘The plan isn’t perfect,’ Mkoll replied. ‘Sooner or later, someone is going to spot that not everything on board is the way it should be.’
They moved through the ship, rising to deck seven and then six. Mkoll led the way, and every time he heard movement or spotted personnel approaching, he signed to the men behind him, and Holofurnace pulled himself into cover: a bulkhead, a through-deck well, or an inspection bay. As soon as the contact passed, Mkoll moved them on.
At a junction on deck six they had to wait for almost fifteen minutes while work crews and servitor gangs moved machine parts through on trucks. Once it was clear, they hurried on, through a compartment airgate, and followed a shadowed walkway that ran along the side of a large processing bay. In the harshly lit space below them, they saw gun-crew servitors loading huge munition shells into the bare-metal clamps of conveyer trains. Tall figures in dappled golden gowns supervised the labour, shouting instructions through hand-held vox-horns. As each half-tonne shell loaded, the automated track rattled forwards and lowered them into deck shafts where they descended on hydraulic rotators into the autoloader magazines on the battery deck.