The thunderous boom of bolter discharge startled the servo-seraphs to flight. The contents of Mesring’s head and shoulders sprayed over the suddenly screaming arch-confessor holding on to the arm of a now headless torso.
Wienand opened her mouth to say something. Her gaze slid from the dead Ecclesiarch on the floor to the pistol in Koorland’s hand and she shut it again. Wise. Vangorich leaned across the table to look at the body, a strange smile on his face. Everyone else looked too stunned to react. Except for Kubik, of course. Kavalanera turned to Koorland with an arch expression, as though to question whether summary execution was now commonplace on Terra.
Koorland’s bolt pistol slid back into its mag-holster with the faintest of sighs.
He shook his head.
‘Brother,’ said Thane, still positioned by the doorway, blood on the grey hem of his habit. ‘What have you done?’
Four
Black water boiled across Kjarvik’s faceplate, the thunder it made no longer separable from that of the explosion. His body banged against light alloy walls and any fixed machinery bulky enough to have stood up to the flood. His pack lights slashed the walls. White metal. Dark corridors. The beams speckled dirty water. Reflective strips shone back. Section markings. Hazard stripes. Kjarvik saw it fleetingly, the way a pebble might see the villages it was carried through when spring thaw burst the great rivers’ banks. The water turned him, spun him like thread on the wyrd-spinners’ wheel, so far beyond his superhuman ability to resist that his vaunted genetic lineage seemed like a joke of wyrd.
Punch a hole in the skin of a voidship, and every man knew that what was inside was going to come out. Inflict the same on the outer shell of an island hive under a thousand atmospheres of pressure, and the luckless enemies of man might see the first bitemark of the Wolves.
A length of metal cracked him on the back of the head. A ladder. He felt the aluminium alloy bend, and on preternatural reflex snapped out an arm. He missed. The torrent had already swept him past. His wolf-clawed gauntlet dug instead into the wall and screeched through until it struck a horizontal rebar and he stopped.
He began to draw himself up.
Water hammered against his huge, barrage-like pauldrons. The current dragged on his feet with a grip of void-cold iron, the wight-fingers of so many wolf-brothers lying on Ullanor’s red snow.
Not him. He was the unlucky one.
With a howl of defiance, he broke the surface. The wall he had latched on to was part of the bulk housing of an effluxer, one enormous pump slaved to a greater assembly installed millennia ago to keep the submerged levels of the underhive dry. They had been designed to mop up pressure leaks. This was a flood fit to drown a city.
The section was a vertical maze of catwalks and gangways, vast power coils towering up through the levels. Horizontally, there was little to see before hitting a wall or an effluxer station. At its best, it would have been dank and claustrophobic, but now, floodwaters rising, it was a thousand ways in which to suffocate and die in the dark.
His arm shook, armour servos whining, and with fangs biting into his bottom lip he managed to haul his trailing arm out of the water, the Sister of Silence still held firmly in his deactivated power fist. That was the hard part.
A flick of his shoulder sent the Sister arcing over the effluxer. The warrioress flipped mid-flight to guide herself feet-first onto the catwalk. It rattled on loose fixings. The woman immediately began shedding the layers of her pressure suit to reveal ornate crimson and gold armour with a high gorget that concealed her face up to the eyes. She activated her power blade and moved off. Torquing his body against the wall, Kjarvik vaulted after her, coming down in a feral hunch where the Sister had just been.
An ork came pounding down the gantry. It looked like a worker, but was still as big as an armoured Space Marine with biceps the size of demolisher shells straining at its short leather sleeves. A toolbelt clanked at its thighs like an armour skirt as it ran, a thick-toothed metal wrench held high above its head. It blinked, dazzled by Kjarvik’s pack lights as he turned towards it. The Space Wolf shot it once through the head. The mass-reactive detonation blew out the back of its skull and flung the wretched body forward as though some part of its corpse remained desperate to bury its wrench in an Adeptus Astartes helmet.
The walkway was clear.
Reaching up to his gorget ring, Kjarvik disengaged the seals and removed his helmet with a depressurising hiss. He tossed out his hair and took a deep breath of rust, gunpowder, alien sweat, and salt corrosion. Better. His Imbiber organ could usefully extract oxygen from seawater, but the pressure of the ocean trench would have crushed his head like an eggshell. That was not to say that he would rather have his helm on.
A burst of bolter fire drew his attention away and up. All he could see of it was muzzle flare, greasily reflected by a section of wall about ten metres above. The howls of dying orks rang out from a few metres further along from that.
‘Follow,’ the Sister signed. She broke into a run, angling against the wall and then, remarkably, shifting her feet across so that for the next few strides she ran along it. Using her momentum she leapt across, grabbed hold of a hanging rung on the opposite side, twisted her body around, kicked out, and swung into a kind of backwards roll that took her up onto the next level. Her power blade whickered out, silver-blue; there was a guttural roar, and an ork’s arm bounced down between the walls.
With a snarl, Kjarvik hauled himself up the wall. At about his own height, he pivoted at the waist and leapt, free arm out wide, legs tucked in, and slammed two-footed onto the previously hidden companionway.
A solid slug winged his elbow joint and deflected into a slag chute. He turned. A flex of his hand activated his power fist. A thrumming blue disruptor field surrounded the gauntlet, and with a roar he punched it through the shooter’s belly and wrist-deep into the backing wall. The ork looked at the arm buried in its gut with brute surprise, and died.
A short way ahead, Phareous backhanded his shield across an ork’s mouth and forced it back into another. The rapid-fire flash of his shield’s storm bolter mount lit the dingy walkspace and pulped the ork with the bloody mouth. The second bellowed, covered by its kin-thing, and shoved the corpse off. The second Sister of Silence tucked in lightly behind.
Kjarvik did not know their names. Names were powerful and the Vow of Tranquility made before the Golden Throne of the Emperor protected them. But names were also useful, and Kjarvik called this one Sommer, for her warmth, and to distinguish her from Rós and her open heart. That he could make light of their presence made it no less unnerving.
A dozen deftly guided slashes from Sommer’s power blade left a half-dozen orks in ruins.
More ran around the opposite corner, war-axes flashing, barking their guttural cries. A blizzard of bolter and plasma fire cut them down. Iron Father Bohr stomped through the red mist, boltgun steaming hot. A gout of flame from his servo-harness drove the following wave back out of sight.
It was hard-fought, vicious, but that was why Thane had summoned Kjarvik Stormcrow to get it done, and why he in turn had assembled Kill-Team Umbra.
An ork with a bare chest strapped with ammo belts and an autocannon-style weapon mounted on a line of toolbins held the end of the next corridor. Spent casings clattered across the metal floor as it pumped rounds into Phareous’ shield. The mob of orks in garish red wargear that had been lying in wait just around the corner took advantage of the big gun’s suppression fire to pile in, and then the fighting really became ugly.