No! In the time it has taken for me to get to the gate, the battle has turned. A sick feeling settles in my stomach. The enemy flight was but a ruse to lure my troops into the killing ground between the temples. Their vehicles are being smashed by the superior firepower of the human batteries. The escaping crews are being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of human numbers. Who would have thought that a human would have the wit to turn his weakness into a strength or that an eldar commander would have turned a position of strength into a weakness.
There is nothing left but to flee. The only way out for me is through the Gate of Ancients. There is still a chance that I can claim the prize I came for and turn this situation around. I must take it. I must.
Drake swayed dizzily. He put a hand to his brow. ‘The Way is open.’
A messenger raced up to the blood-spattered Lord High Commander. ‘General Macharius,’ he said. ‘Reports from the labyrinth. The eldar attacked our position down there. They have seized the portal entrance.’
‘The last attack was a distraction,’ Macharius said. He smiled warily. ‘The enemy knew the portal was going to open and took advantage of the last big attack to seize it. Now we need to stop him before he finds whatever it is he is seeking.’
We raced through the vast depths of the temple complex, past the time-worn statues of forgotten alien gods, moving towards a gate that opened on we knew not what. Faint shivering passed through the rock, reverberations from distant explosions where man and xenos fought for their lives in the valley above.
We reached the gate room. Bodies were strewn everywhere, human and eldar. It had been a brutal fight with no quarter given by either side. By the looks of things, the eldar had not even slowed down to perform their ritual torture. They had been in too much of a hurry, and it was obvious why.
Where once there had merely been stone, now there was something else. The whole area within the carved arch shimmered. It was like looking onto the surface of a pool into which many different types of luminescent dye had been poured. The colours moved and swirled. The area where the rock had been seemed fluid. It felt as if you could dive into it, the way you could dive into water.
An officer raced towards Macharius. His green tunic was ripped, his face was marked by a dozen small cuts, his eyes had the haunted look I had come to recognise in the faces of those who had faced the eldar at close quarters.
‘Report,’ said Macharius. He tilted his head to one side to indicate he was listening. Over his headset, he was still giving orders to our forces outside the temple as they dealt with the xenos attack.
‘They came at us out of the tunnels, sir. About twenty of them. We had our weapons ready but they cut us down from behind.’ He looked deeply distressed. ‘There was one of them… He was so fast, nothing could stop him.’
‘You killed some of them,’ Macharius said. He counted corpses. ‘Most of them, if your numbers are correct.’
I saw at least a dozen eldar corpses. Grimnar sniffed the air. ‘About twenty would be correct. The surviving xenos vanished through the gate. Their scent track ends at this wall.’ His frown of distaste let us know how unnatural this was. ‘They had the Fist with them.’
‘They did, Lord High Commander,’ said the officer. ‘We thought we had them, there were only a few left, but they jumped into the colours and vanished like, like…’ Confusion showed on his face. He struggled to find the words to describe what he had witnessed.
‘Did you see what happened to them?’ Drake asked urgently.
‘They seemed to… recede, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance, although they did not look as though they were moving. It was very strange.’
‘The gate is open. Wherever it leads to.’ Drake said, looking at Macharius. ‘What do we do now? Wait for them to come back through?’
‘We don’t know how this thing works,’ said Grimnar. ‘They may not emerge here. They may find their way out somewhere else.’
‘This is the only way in or out that we know of,’ said Drake. He looked thoughtful and more than a little afraid. Grimnar sniffed the air and appeared to come to a decision. He sniffed the air once more. ‘They have the Fist with them.’ He spoke something in a tongue I did not recognise, a guttural, barking language that might have been his native tongue. He nodded his head as though receiving an answer over some sealed channel on the comm-net.
‘I cannot allow the Fist of Russ to fall into such foul hands.’
He bounded forwards into the shimmering surface of the wall, and I saw then the strangeness the officer had mentioned. It was as if he were falling away from us, moving at great speed while shrinking in size, down a long tunnel filled with a multicoloured mist. I caught sight of him less and less until finally he vanished. It felt as if I had been watching him for hours but in reality only heartbeats had passed.
‘We don’t know whether it is possible to survive in there without protective gear,’ said Drake. ‘Or whether there is any way back. Or what might happen if the gateway closes while we are still within.’
‘Lemuel,’ Macharius said.
‘Sir?’
‘Inspect the gate.’ He pointed and he could only mean one thing. For a moment only, I considered refusing, but that would have meant being shot. I took a step forwards, obeying Macharius almost instinctively, and touched the surface of the gate. I pulled down my rebreather and took another step.
It was cool and I passed through it. It was like stepping into liquid only for a moment, and then I found myself somewhere else, in a long corridor lit by a strange shimmering glow. I could see no source of it, but I could see ancient eldar statues reminiscent of those in the valley.
It was cold. I kept holding my breath, unwilling to breathe in air that might prove poisonous. My heart pounded in my chest. My lungs started to feel as if they would burst. I let out my breath and inhaled. The air tasted strange but it was breathable.
I took another breath and felt nothing. My lungs did not burn. I was not poisoned. I checked the hazard monitor on my wrist. There were no indicators of danger.
I turned to the wall and looked back. Through the polychromatic, oily shimmering I saw the others looking at me. They stood frozen like statues with no sign of motion.
I frowned. There was something odd about what I was seeing, but I could not put my finger on exactly what. It was like looking at a picture, a still-life, not at living, breathing people. I paused for a moment at once anxious to move and reluctant to do so. This would be the moment of truth. I tried to step back through the portal. Once again, the cold liquid surface of the gate closed around me. I felt resistance and wondered whether I was trapped in this strange place.
Everything seemed to speed up. Macharius and the others started moving again. ‘It’s breathable,’ I said.
‘How would you know?’ Anton asked. ‘You were only gone a second.’
Something must have shown on my face.
‘Time flows differently beyond the gate,’ said Drake. ‘Unless I am much mistaken.’
‘A heartbeat here was at least a minute there,’ I said.
Drake nodded as though I had confirmed something he had suspected. ‘It is often the case when you step beyond the normal boundaries of our continuum.’
‘What?’ Anton said. He clearly did not understand, but Drake was in no mood to explain it to him.
A thought struck me. ‘Sir, that means that the eldar may be hours ahead of us down the trail in there. Grimnar too.’
Macharius nodded, grasping the point at once. The longer we stood there, the bigger the lead the eldar would have over us. What seemed like minutes to us might be hours or even days in there.