‘We should wait,’ Straton said.
‘For what?’ Warfist asked, his patience stretching taut.
‘A frequency of traffic might point us to the correct route.’
‘That’s leaving things to chance at best,’ Warfist scoffed. ‘And wait how long? The success of the other two operations depends on us.’
‘Five minutes,’ Thane said.
Two minutes passed. Koorland’s voice came over Thane’s helm vox. ‘Squad Gladius, this is Sword. What is your status?’
‘Still searching.’
‘We have found the power source. Awaiting your action.’
‘Understood. What about the gate?’
‘Squad Crozius is also in position.’
‘We will take the target shortly.’ He vowed they would, if he had to punch his way through the interior walls of the moon.
‘Good. The Emperor protects.’
‘The Emperor protects.’
In the fourth minute, brutish voices sounded closer in the far left passageway. Thane held up an arm, waiting a few seconds more. The noises came closer. The other paths were silent. Warfist was right — Straton’s surmise was barely more than a guess. But the direction of the tunnel was correct, and there was little else to go on.
The bobbing glow of portable lamps appeared in the tunnel.
Thane lowered his arm.
Warfist shot forward, fists tight, arms extended, lightning claws at the ready. Thane and Straton followed, each with gladius drawn. The kills had to be silent. Forcas and Abathar brought up the rear.
Warfist rounded a curve in the tunnel. The voices became snarls of alarm. As Thane reached the curve, a shout was cut off, turning into a wet gurgle. He heard a sound like heavy bags of meat slapping against rock.
He made the turn. Warfist was in the centre of a group of about a dozen orks. Two lay dead. He had plunged into the centre of the greenskins and was fighting the largest. It was taller than Warfist, its head brushing against the roof of the tunnel. A huge wound gaped in its throat and its jaws were wide in near-silent, choking fury. It swung a massive hammer at the Space Wolf. Warfist jabbed with his left claws, sinking them deep into the greenskin’s arm at the elbow. He twisted. The greenskin’s hand opened, nerveless, and the hammer fell to the tunnel floor. A second later, so did the ork’s lower arm.
The other orks charged the kill-team. Thane pulled back his blade, then struck forward with servo-aided force. The gladius stabbed all the way through his target’s throat and out of the back of its neck. Thane slashed sideways. The ork’s head, half-severed, lolled back. Blood geysered; the body fell. Thane leapt over it and grasped another ork by the face. The beast jerked back in surprise and Thane yanked it forward. The greenskin chopped futilely at his armour with a heavy cleaver before Thane rammed the gladius into its chest. He angled the blow upward, drove the blade higher, cutting through gut and heart.
Beside him, Straton took down two more orks in swift, cold, precise strikes. A handful of others were still rushing forward. They were snarling in rage, and in their fury they were not shouting in alarm. Anger was the norm among orks. Even if those snarls reached others, they would not pay attention as they would to a summons.
Abathar’s plasma cutter burned through a pair of skulls. Warfist gutted the giant and turned back to impale the last of the attacking greenskins through the spine. That left the smaller, scuttling creatures. Their squeals were drowned out by the snarls of their masters. They fled, scrambling over the corpse of the monster, fast in their panic. Just a few metres ahead, Thane saw what looked like burrows in the stone. If the tiny xenos reached those holes, they would be impossible to follow. He reached for his boltgun, willing to risk the noise of concussion blasts.
Forcas stepped forward, right hand outstretched, energy crackling from his psychic hood and down his arm. Lightning flashed from his fingertips and struck the vermin, searing them to ash. There was a sharp crack of thunder. The smell of burned ozone filled the tunnel. The air rippled with the after-effects of dissipating warp power. Warfist’s wolf-headed helm turned from the smoking remains of the creatures towards Forcas. If he was disgusted by the Blood Angel’s sorcery, he refrained from saying so.
‘We have gained some time,’ Straton said. ‘But we have little to spare.’
‘Agreed,’ said Thane.
They moved quickly down the corridor. The pounding of machines and the violent discharge of energy grew louder, covering the sound of their boots as they ran. The tunnel twisted, then came to a stop.
It opened into a huge cavern. From this position, Thane could see only a small portion of its upper reaches. Ahead was a rough metal ramp leading up to what appeared to be a massive promontory that jutted out into the space of the cavern. At the top of the promontory was a roofless structure. The tops of its walls were angular, as if it were a jagged iron crown and energy coils rose from the corners, leaning out over the void. Innumerable cables ran from the base of the structure and into the air below the promontory, or down its slope into other tunnels opening up on the wall along its base. Some were as thick as Land Raiders. Searing light flashed from inside the structure. Energy arced and snapped from the coils, and the booms of the discharges were deafening.
In the gaps in the walls, figures moved back and forth, silhouetted by the pulsing light within. They were large. Their forms were strange, built up with something artificial that had the wrong shape for armour.
There was activity up and down the ramp as hordes of the tiny greenskins hauled wagons of equipment up, and burned-out debris back down. The creatures were urged to greater efforts by orks wielding shock prods.
‘A clear run to the top,’ Warfist said over the vox.
Thane eyed the traffic on the ramp and agreed. These orks were not a serious obstacle. ‘The alarm will be raised,’ he warned. ‘Our time will be limited.’
‘What time we have will depend on Squad Crozius,’ said Straton.
‘The timing of all three squads is critical,’ Forcas said. ‘We must have faith in them, and they in us.’
‘For Terra and the Emperor, then,’ said Thane. ‘For the Deathwatch!’
‘For the Deathwatch!’ the squad shouted, voices amplified by vox-casters.
Warriors in black stormed out of the tunnel and up the ramp, into the rising shriek of orks.
‘Ingenious,’ said the Blood Angels Techmarine Gadreel. ‘Despite the damage the Last Wall inflicted, the orks have managed to amplify the power of what remained.’
‘I have had more than enough of their ingenuity,’ said Iairos.
The Ultramarines sergeant had led Squad Crozius to a small tunnel that ended three metres up from the floor of the gate chamber. Based on the reports of the first engagement, a large portion of the cavern must have fallen in. It was still well over a kilometre wide, but to the right of the kill-team’s position was a massive collapse. It looked as if a mountain had fallen on the machinery that powered the gate.
Where there had been three Titan-sized horns, now there was only one, a monstrous patchwork that appeared to have been assembled from the wreckage of the previous three. Its balance was precarious, its upper half thicker than the lower, and its peak was a colossal, trifurcated claw. Countless support chains now ran from the horn to the walls and slope of rubble. The horn trembled and vibrated from the energies fed to it and summoned by it. Eldritch light exploded and imploded in the centre of the claw. Every time the burning force collapsed in on itself, there was a cave-filling flash on the platform at its base, and another war party of orks appeared.
‘There is our primary target,’ said Gadreel. He pointed.
To the left of the tunnel, an enormous power cable six metres thick entered the cavern. A short way to the right, it split into myriad smaller cables, running power to the hulking machines that, in turn, provided energy and direction to the functioning of the gate.