‘Do we take this?’ he asked the prisoner.
‘Take it all if it’s portable,’ said Mabbon. ‘A great deal of the material here comes from salvage efforts in the Reach. The weaponwrights plunder the debris field, harvesting material from a thousand cultures and a billion years. There are several more side chambers like this. Strip them all, along with the written material.’
‘Do it,’ said Gaunt.
Ewler and his men started to clear the shelves.
Mabbon had crossed to the central display stand.
‘Look here,’ he said.
Gaunt went over to him.
Inside the glass-topped case lay eight damaged stone tablets. Each one was about the size of a data-slate, and they had been cut from a heavy, gleaming red rock. All of the tablets were chipped, and one had a significant piece missing. They were covered with inscribed markings, a language that Gaunt had never seen before.
‘These are important,’ said Mabbon. ‘We must take them.’
‘Why?’
‘I remember them being brought in, years ago. They were found at another site. One of the Khan Worlds, I believe. Xenos script, very old. The weaponwrights were very taken with them. They considered them to be important. They described them as the Glyptothek. A library in stone.’
‘Then we’ll take them for Imperial savants to study,’ said Gaunt.
‘Good,’ said Mabbon. ‘Look where they are.’
‘In that case, you mean?’
‘They’re being studied. See? The analysis devices. The transcriber? This alcove was the workplace of a senior weaponwright. A magir hapteka. He was concentrating his studies on this.’
‘Your point?’
‘Think about it. These objects were brought in years ago, and were considered significant then. They’re still under close and detailed examination. They are important.’
Mabbon looked at Gaunt. His eyes were fierce.
‘Your Emperor must be with us today. Your Emperor or your beati. In the act of undertaking this mission, he has led us to a discovery of singular value.’
‘Maybe,’ said Gaunt. ‘I’m not convinced, but we’ll remove them too.’
He nodded to Ewler, who opened the case and packed the stones into his crate one by one. Gaunt watched for a moment, and then went to the analysis console. It was a battered but recognisable Imperial cogitator. Gaunt pulled out his data-slate and connected it to the console’s memory socket. He began to export the console’s archived data. The screen of the slate flickered as information flowed into it.
He’d almost finished when the first shots rang out at the far end of the college precinct. A few single blasts at first, then sustained fire.
Mkoll appeared in the doorway of the annexe.
‘Sons of Sek. Full order, eight companies, moving this way to secure the college,’ he said.
Gaunt drew his bolt pistol.
‘Deny them,’ he said.
Baskevyl lobbed a grenade around the hatch and stood aside.
There was a hard bang and two cult fighters were thrown headlong into the open in a spurt of debris and smoke.
Baskevyl swung back into the doorway and fired his lasrifle into the smoke. He spitted two other cult fighters, dazed and bloody from the grenade, and cut them down before they could react.
On the far side of the hatch was a machine bay and a loading ramp. Baskevyl killed another fighter on his way down, and then came under fire from a fireteam of Sons.
Gansky’s squad was moving up to his left. They covered the fire team with rifle fire and drove them back from behind a row of punctured, dented fuel drums. Baskevyl reached for another grenade, and realised he’d just used his last.
‘Flamer!’ he yelled.
‘Waiting for refill tanks, sir,’ Karsk shouted back.
‘Damn,’ Baskevyl muttered. They’d advanced, hard and fast, behind the Space Marine assault, but the Archenemy forces had native knowledge of the facility’s layout and kept striking at them from the flanks, weaving their way through the complex and cluttered geography of the depots and engineering spaces. The Sons of Sek had laced Salvation’s Reach with sally ports, false walls, blind hatches and artificial dead ends. The junk architecture of the ramshackle site was working to the enemy’s advantage, allowing them to sidestep, double-back and ambush.
It was costing the Tanith First men, and the munition expenditure was immense. Baskevyl didn’t think they’d ever lit off so much firepower in such a short space of time. The lighters had just jockeyed back in with a second ammunition restock.
The Sons fireteam had found new cover and was firing at a steady rate. Baskevyl hoped they didn’t have any grenades, or fresh throwing arms.
A sudden burst of lasfire split the air from above. Baskevyl glanced up to see that Dalin’s squad had found a way up onto a raised gantry. They had an almost unobstructed view of the Sons’ position, and were making best use of it. Nine of the Sons of Sek died where they stood. Two more broke and ran, and Baskevyl’s squad knocked them flat.
In the middle distance, a series of hefty explosions tore across the compartment, knocking down several cargo-lift gantries. Brother-Sergeant Eadwine and his weapon servitors had finally vanquished and destroyed a grotesque and ugly war construct, something that scuttled along on black wire like an arachnid as it fired its belly-slung lascannons. Baskevyl heard some of the Vervunhivers describe it as a ‘woe machine’. It wasn’t the first one they’d seen that day, and the Vervunhivers claimed it was like a small version of the constructs they’d fought during the Zoican War.
Huge flames sprayed up from the dying machine, scorching the compartment roof. Eadwine was already moving on. From his position, Baskevyl could still see the White Scar fighting his way forwards, but he’d lost track of the Iron Snake.
Kolea’s company began moving up alongside him. They’d brought fresh rockets and grenades with them, and at least four re-tanked flamers.
A shout went up. Two more large woe machines had rattled into view, supported by light stalk tanks and a detachment of Sons of Sek. They had come in through a bulk hatch from a derelict hangar and were punching the Ghosts back with the speed of their strike.
Kolea and Baskevyl called their tread-feathers up, and began to advance through the jumbled yards of the machine shop to get a better angle on the deadly constructs. Baskevyl could hear the chugging crack and whicker of their heavy guns. Something was on fire, weeping a curtain of thick, black smoke across the yards. Dalin’s squad switched to dealing with an enemy sniper who was taking potshots over the line of advance.
Kolea and Baskevyl reached an archway, hoping it would give them a good shot at the woe machines, but the sound of heavy gunfire had stopped. There was no sign of the lumbering machines or their support.
‘Where have they gone?’ asked Kolea.
Several runners arrived, bringing reports of a significant fall-away in the enemy resistance. Sons of Sek units had been seen breaking off and retreating.
‘Could they have been pulled back deliberately?’ asked Baskevyl. ‘Redirected?’
Kolea looked at him. He didn’t like where Bask was going.
‘I think it’s possible they’ve just discovered they’ve got a more vital problem to deal with,’ Baskevyl said with a shrug.
‘How would they know that?’ asked Kolea.
‘Sensors? Detectors? Plain bad luck?’ Baskevyl suggested. ‘Maybe Gaunt’s forces have got right inside, and it’s kicked off? We can’t know.’
‘If they know what we’re doing,’ murmured Kolea, ‘they know we’re just the sound and fury. They’ll know what’s really at stake.’
He called to the nearest runner.