Seven hundredths of a cycle later, an explosion rolled out down the endless tunnels and ways of the Imperial Palace, their planned diversion. She smiled behind the mirror bowl of her mask. Everything was going to plan.
Three
Krule’s dance
The Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis was in pandemonium at the explosions in the Palace, moments after the departure of the ork ambassador. Fearing a new offensive against them, the nerve of the great and good of the Imperium broke. Prefectii and consularies wrestled with menials and aides as the exits clogged with human bodies. They scrambled over each other, trampling their fellows in their rush to escape.
Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, grabbed Mercado and shook him.
‘Where are the eldar?’ demanded Vangorich.
Mercado looked at him dumbly. ‘The Viridarium Nobiles, five levels down.’
‘That’s only five kilometres from the Sanctum Imperialis.’
Mercado nodded. His eyes were still wide, his fingers limp around his vox-horn. Vangorich came close to killing the captain of the Lucifer Blacks there and then.
‘How many?’
‘Reports are confused—’
‘How many?’ spat Vangorich through gritted teeth.
‘A handful, seven or eight. Brightly coloured.’ The man was rallying himself. ‘I’ll direct all my men to the defence of the Throne Room, and inform Captain-General Beyreuth.’
‘I’m sure he’s well aware of this breach,’ said Vangorich. ‘Send your men, but they’ll be too late.’
‘Where are you going?’ called Mercado as Vangorich shoved his way through the crowd.
‘To deal with this myself.’ He lifted his sleeve to his mouth and spoke into the vox-bead hidden in a button there. ‘Krule, I need you. Now.’ He changed channels. ‘Veritus, if you can hear me, meet me at the Sanctum.’ No reply was forthcoming.
Vangorich headed for the ablutorials. Near the exits from the main chamber the press of the crowd was slackening as the cream of the Terran adepta flailed at each other in their panic to escape. At the centre the crush grew as men and women shoved their way down from the stacked ranks of seats. The Twelve had already gone from the High Table, whisked away by their bodyguards. At least, thought Vangorich, the Lucifer Blacks can do something correctly.
He wove his way through the crowd with smooth and occasionally violent efficiency, his habitual insouciant amble cast away in favour of a predator’s fluid movement. Many recognised him and did their best to get out of his way. Where they did not, he helped them along with fists and sharp elbows. By a wash fountain he depressed an insignificant cherub’s elbow. A hidden door slid open. Vangorich slipped into the tunnel it revealed. He hurried along its dark length, emerging into dim sunlight high on the south wall of the Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis.
He hurried groundwards through a network of concealed maintenance ladders and catwalks. Overhead the ork moon hung pale in the washed-out sky. He glanced at it periodically. No activity there, for the moment. Perhaps the ork ambassador had not yet returned. What the result of his embassy would be was anyone’s guess. Events were getting ahead of Vangorich.
Still, he thought. One thing at a time.
At the bottom, Krule awaited him in the groundcar of a rich man. The blood of the prior owner was still wet on the dashboard.
‘We need to get to the Sanctum,’ he said.
‘The roads are blocked,’ said Krule, getting out of the car. ‘I know a way. We need to take the high-lines.’ He pointed to a transport hub some hundred yards away. Pods rolled automatically into the station from their wire tracks as calmly as if this were any other day.
They ran through the crowds spilling from the Grand Chamber into the plaza, and down onto the Daylight Way. The transit terminus sat in the shadow of the high wall. People bunched around the terminus, fighting to get onto its boarding platforms. Krule battered his way through, Vangorich behind him. They hurled the people clambering into a waiting pod aside. The crowd recoiled, then surged back towards the open door, until Krule caved in the face of the lead man with a deadly punch. The crowd shrank back again, and Krule slammed the door shut.
Vangorich activated the pod with his signum, and it rose rapidly on creaking cables, leaving the boiling crowds below.
Through yellowed plastek windows, they looked down on the Senatorum sector of the Imperial Palace. The highways were choked with the private vehicles of dignitaries and the nobility. Lesser streets were filled with civilians on their knees, wailing out panicked prayers and blocking the way for those trying to escape. Fights erupted, threatening riot. With nowhere to go, people simply ran back and forth madly, driven by adrenaline to do something, anything, in the face of the inevitable. The sky was crowded with aircraft and flocks of servo-constructs as thick as the crowds on the ground. The ork moon loomed high overhead, intent unknown, its brutal face frozen in mirth at the uproar it had caused.
‘Emperor help us if this is the best we can muster to save ourselves,’ said Vangorich. He was no believer in the faith, but it truly would take a god to solve this mess.
Beast Krule remained mute. It was weirdly calm in the pod, the violence beneath played out in silence. The wire the pod depended on headed up and down the multi-layered hives seemingly at random. Vangorich overrode the system, preventing the pod from halting. At transit stops horrified faces whipped by. The pod plunged on, drawn on by the vast, mountain-sized edifice of the Sanctum Imperialis. The heart of the Imperium grew, dominating everything, a prison and a lens for the might of the being trapped within. The pod shifted lines, following a high track that led up and up. The wrinkled skin of the city dropped rapidly away.
Krule stood. ‘Vent spire,’ he said, pointing to a cathedral-tower chimney that pointed vaingloriously at the attack moon.
The Assassins stopped the pod as it passed over a balcony jutting from the spire. They smashed the door and dropped down, broke their way into a maintenance portal, pushed their way past the herd of servitors who lived within the tower, and descended down into the upper levels of the endless inner hives of the Imperial Palace.
They descended many levels, flying down stairs, ignoring elevators and lift platforms, heading always for the chatter of military vox and reports of the intruders. Eventually, they found their prey.
Vangorich emerged into a machine hall thundering with the business of renewing the throneworld’s atmosphere, deep below the false metal surface of Terra. Stale air hooted down plasteel tubes, drawn by pistons driven by giant flywheels, to be bubbled through lake-deep tanks of ancient glass clotted with algae. On the gantries over them a sole, gaudy alien battled single-handedly against a company of Astra Militarum.
‘There!’ said Vangorich.
A hundred men were set against the eldar. They crept towards it along the grid of catwalks. Following any law of engagement, it should have been overwhelmed many times over. Corpses littered the mesh over the water, their blood staining the algae black. All of them were human.
‘We must question it,’ said Vangorich.
‘It will die before we can get to it,’ said Krule.
The eldar executed a flawless leap. Its form broke into a confusing trail of glimmering diamonds that twisted twenty metres over the soupy mess of the tanks. Its weapon hissed, and a stream of discs cut down three men before its feet touched steel again. The human commander shouted, directing his men to block the alien’s escape routes. Las-beams cut through the air, but the alien danced over them.
‘I doubt that,’ said Vangorich. ‘Those men are outmatched.’