Criid immediately took Zhukova’s place, and hoisted the Verghast captain with her cupped hands. Mkoll grabbed Zhukova’s outstretched arms, and dragged her onto the roof beside him.
Keeping low, they looked around. The sloped roof led up to the lower main roof, which was flat and littered with the rusty wreckage of toppled vox-masts. Beyond that, there was a row of glassless windows. Mkoll pointed, and Zhukova nodded. She turned to look back at Criid, hoping to reach down and pull her up, but Criid had already moved around the corner of the block, looking for another way up.
Mkoll and Zhukova crawled up the slope towards the windows.
At the right-hand end of the building, Vivvo and Nessa shouldered open a rotting door, and slipped into the fabricatory’s interior. It was a vast, dark space, crammed with junk, lit only by the daylight that shafted in through holes in the roof. The floor was thick with birdlime, and old, galvanic generators, rusted solid, loomed like parked vehicles. Nessa got her long-las to her shoulder, and started to pan around the roof. Vivvo guided her forwards, his lasrifle ready at his chest.
They edged through a half-open sliding shutter into a larger space. More rubble, more burned-out machine units. The roof was partly glazed, and the glass was filthy and fogged. Their entry scared up a flock of roosting birds that broke in a rush, and began to circle and mob around the rafters. The movement made Nessa start, but she eased her finger off the trigger the moment she saw what it was. Vivvo could hear the dull thump of shots from above them. He knew Nessa couldn’t, but he signed to her, and indicated direction. She nodded. They stalked forwards a little further.
Another shot. Vivvo swung his head around, scanning the ceiling. Another shot, then another. This time, he saw the brief flash reflection on the dirty glass high above him. He pointed. They could just make out a heavy chimney assembly on the midline of the roof, through the filth coating the cracked windows. Was that a vent or…?
No, a figure, huddled down in position against the chimney block.
Nessa grabbed Vivvo, steering him until he was facing the distant shape. She rested her long-las across his right shoulder, using him as a prop, and crouched a little to improve her angle. Vivvo turned his head away, and plugged his right ear with his finger.
Nessa fired. One shot. A panel of glass blew out far above them, raining chips of glass down. A second later, the entire roof section collapsed, panes of glass and frame struts alike, as a body crashed down through it.
The falling body hit the rockcrete floor of the fabricatory with a bone-snapping thump. The rifle, a hard-round, Urdeshi-made sniper weapon, struck beside it, splintering the wooden stock.
They scurried over. Neither doubted the shooter was dead. Nessa’s shot had taken out his spine.
Vivvo rolled him over. He was wearing a filthy Munitorum uniform and a patched cloak. Around his throat, wet with blood, was a gold chain with an emblem. A face, made of gold, with a hand clamped across the mouth.
The Sons of Sek.
Criid stalked into a rubble-choked alley at the left-hand end of the fab. Her lasrifle was at her shoulder, ready to fire, and she swung slowly and carefully as she prowled forwards, hunting for movement and hiding spots.
The rate of fire coming from above her was still steady.
She heard movement behind her, and wheeled. Maddalena Darebeloved ran into view, gun in hand. Criid blinked. She didn’t know anything human could run that fast, or achieve that length of stride.
‘Go back!’ Criid hissed.
Maddalena ignored her. A flash of red in her bright body glove, the Vervunhive lifeward ran past her, vaulted onto the top of a fuel drum and sprang onto the roof. She’d cleared about three metres in one running bound.
Criid wanted to yell after her not to be an idiot, but shouting was just asking for trouble.
Furiously, she ran after her, scrambling up onto the drum, and then straining hard to drag herself up onto the roof. The augmetic, transhuman bitch had done it in one leap, and made it look easy.
Criid made the roof, and rolled into cover as soon as she got there.
‘Maddalena!’ she hissed. ‘Maddalena!’
Hunched behind a ventilation cowling, she surveyed the roof. It was a multi-gabled expanse, caked in lichen. Chimney stacks rose like trees from the ridges and furrows of ragged tiles immediately around her. Beyond, the incline of the roof grew steeper, forming the higher central section of the fabricatory’s structure. This section had been planked out with flakboard and metal sheeting, presumably at some point in the past when the old tiles had decayed. The building had been abandoned at some point after that, and even the planking was loose and sagging under its own weight. Criid saw exposed rafters where whole portions had collapsed.
Far ahead, she spotted another flash of red. Maddalena had made it as far as the main roof, and was darting like a high-wire performer along the parapet. She had to have vaulted several metres more just to get up there. She was fast, but holy gak, had she never heard of cover?
Criid shifted position, and then dropped down again fast. A las-bolt blew the pot off the chimney stack beside her. Dust and earthenware fragments showered her. She’d been spotted, which was ironic, as she wasn’t the one leaping about in the open, wearing bright red.
Another shot whined over her head. She grappled to get her lasrifle around, but she was crumpled in tight cover and the effort was too awkward. She let go of her rifle, and unbuckled her sidearm from the holster strapped to her chest webbing. Hunched as low as possible, she snaked her arm around the side of the chimney stack, and spat off a series of shots in the vague direction of the source of fire.
Two more heavy rifle shots came her way. Then she heard a clattering burst of fire from a large handgun.
Silence.
She risked a look. There was no sign of anyone, and no more shooting. On hands and knees, she wriggled forwards as fast as she could, heading for the next clump of chimney stacks.
Mkoll and Zhukova kept low and ran up the long incline of the roof. They reached a deep rainwater channel choked with waste, and then scaled the low ledge of the overhang and slid into cover behind a buttress. Spools of loose wire were staked along the lip of the roof, perhaps to deter roosting birds or perhaps just a relic of some previous phase of conflict. Feathers had caught on the wire, and the stakes were caked in birdlime. Mkoll worked one of the stakes free and made a gap that both of them could slither through.
Up ahead, repeated shots were ringing from the stout belfry that had once summoned fabricatory workers to their daily shifts.
Mkoll signed to Zhukova to move right. He went left. It was a poor and improvised way of staging a pincer, but the shooter in the belfry was clearly not going to stop firing into the yard until he ran out of munitions.
Zhukova crawled past the rusted drums and gears of machine heads that poked clear of the roof line, ancient bulk hoists that had once conveyed product from one of the fab’s interiors to the other. She could still see Mkoll, sliding low across a section of galvanised roof plate. She had an angle on the belfry, good enough to see the muzzle flashes lighting up the oval window on its north side, but she couldn’t get a draw on the shooter. She willed him to move, to adjust to a new position. Just a moment of exposure, that was all she’d need.