Bleeding Chalice Part 9

The shuttle c.o.c.kpit was bathed in eerie blue-grey light. It shone on the bra.s.s fittings of the servitor-pilot and turned the deep red upholstery a velvet black. The viewscreen swam with swirls of white, blue and grey as the servitor applied a touch of pres-sure to the engines, nudging the shuttle forward. Many of the c.o.c.kpit's alarm readouts were incon-gruous beads of red on the instrument panels - the shuttle had not originally been designed for these conditions, but Thaddeus knew it would hold together. Colonel Vinn had pulled a few of the right strings with the Guard units seconded to the Caitaran command and acquired an exceptional craft for the mission. The shuttle had been fitted with reactive armour plates that even now were flex-ing under the abnormal pressure and cold, and the stealth mode of the engines worked on a jet propul-sion principle that enabled the shuttle to be propelled underwater.

Or, in this case, under liquid hydrogen.

'Surface?' asked Thaddeus quietly.

Three hundred metres.' came the mechanised voice of the servitor-pilot. The armatures plugged into its shoulder sockets eased into the controls in front of it and the shuttle's steering fins were angled upwards a touch, sending the craft on a gentle upwards arc through the unnaturally cold ocean.

Thaddeus switched on the ship vox. 'Lieutenant, to the bridge.' he said. A few seconds later the door at the rear of the c.o.c.kpit slid open and Lieutenant Kindarek looked in.

'Inquisitor?'

'We'll hit the sh.o.r.e in about seven minutes. Are your men ready to go?'

'Standing by, sir.'

'Keep the grenade launchers slung until we get well away from the edge. There'll be dampening fields to prevent the liquid exploding but we'll still have a h.e.l.l of a bang if it goes off. I don't want us losing anyone to accidents, it's dangerous enough in there.'

'Yes, sir. h.e.l.lguns only until your order.'

'Good.' Thaddeus paused, watching the liquid swirling in front of him. "What do you think of this mission, Kindarek?'

Kindarek barely thought for a second. 'High-risk and vital, inquisitor. Our kind of operation.'

'And why do you think that?'

'Because Colonel Vinn selected us, inquisitor. He doesn't risk his recon platoon without a good rea-son, and good reasons always involve risk.'

'No one has ever done this, Kindarek. Some have tried, but no one's ever succeeded.'

I'd imagine no one has ever tried taking this way in, sir.'

Thaddeus smiled. You're quite right, Kindarek. I hope.'

Two hundred metres.' said the servitor.

'Prepare your men, lieutenant. I want men on point as soon as we hit the sh.o.r.e.'

Kindarek saluted briskly and headed back towards the crew compartment. Since Thaddeus wasn't an officer the gesture was inappropriate, but Thaddeus didn't point it out. It was probably force of habit.

Kindarek seemed a soldier who learned his habits early and never strayed from them - it had made him asoldier trusted by Vinn to lead his recon pla-toon, as professional and unshakeable a body of men as the Ordo Hereticus could make out of mun-dane troops.

Shapes loomed past, half-glimpsed through the near-opaque liquid, picked out briefly by the flood-lights mounted under the nose of the shuttle. Leaning columns and shadowy, submerged struc-tures, set in precarious shapes by the extreme cold, formed a lattice of obstacles for the servitor-pilot to negotiate.

The light became paler as the shuttle ascended. An undersea shelf composed of drifts of silvery machine-shavings rolled out of the gloom - where it broke the surface was a shining horizon, the beach on which the shuttle would land.

Perhaps the shuttle had already been spotted. Per-haps combat servitors were writhing their way through the ocean or were waiting for the shuttle on the sh.o.r.e, ready to turn the liquid hydrogen into a localised, short-lived inferno that would incinerate the shuttle and crew. But these were the risks you took when you tangled with the Adeptus Mechani-cus head-on.

Pharos was an asteroid, part of the remains of a world that had been destroyed millions of years before. It hung in a broken necklace around a dead, blood-orange star. Across those asteroids were scat-tered mining colonies and hard-bitten missionary outposts; the system was almost completely forgot-ten.

A thousand years before, the Adeptus Mechanicus had followed their complex fate-equations and tech-priest divinations and arrived at the asteroid chain. They selected the region to be the seat of Stratix sector command, which in an emergency would serve to coordinate Adeptus Mechanicus troops, s.p.a.cecraft and expertise. But information was most critical of all - the Adeptus Mechanicus was a priesthood, and its religion was knowledge. Information was the stuff of holiness, and the sec-tor command had built a cathedral to learning that would hold all the information generated by the many adepts throughout the sector.

The cathedral jutted from the surface of one of the largest asteroids, the iron-heavy Pharos, bored out by giant tunnelling machines and plated in sacred metals - purest iron, solid carbon, bronze and zinc.

It took the form of a cl.u.s.ter of immense cylinders, arranged like the pipes of an organ, connected by thousands of gla.s.s bridges.

Several floors were below the surface of the aster-oid, rooted into the super-dense core. Endless floors of knowledge and chapels of unfettered learning filled the cavernous s.p.a.ces, and a regiment of com-bat servitors were hardwired into the structure to keep out the ignorant.

The delicate datastacks had to be kept cold to ensure their stability and the immutability of the information they contained. A whole ocean of liq-uid hydrogen flooded the lower levels, drowning the underground portion of the cathedral in the impossibly cold depths, fed by giant intakes that opened onto the asteroid's rocky surface. The cap-tive ocean was regularly refilled by Mechanicus tanker craft in the never-ending cycle of holy main-tenance that formed an act of worship for thousands of adepts and menials.

Inside, galleries of data-cubes were arranged above the freezing lake, almost alive with the immense volume of information they contained. A small body of tech-priests was permitted to live inside, sharing the cathedral with the maintenance servitors, bathing in the holiness of so much knowledge. They were adepts blessed for their devo-tion and service to the Machine-G.o.d with the opportunity to live out their extended lives in the icy splendour of Pharos.

When circ.u.mstances required, Pharos was a repository of vital knowledge that sector command could plumb for the good of the Imperium - the archives of its medical tower were at that moment being combed for solutions to the terrible plagues erupting throughout the Stratix warzone. But only tech-priests understood its real purpose - holy ground, created by the Mechanicus as a monument to the Omnissiah and a model of the Machine-G.o.d's ideal universe where immutable knowledge was the only reality.

There was no Chaos here, no evil randomness to pollute the sacred knowledge. And the Adeptus Mechanicus intended to keep it that way. No one was permitted access to Pharos except on the express order of the Archmagos Ultima, and he was known as a man not to be hurried. Only a handful of the Emperor's most trusted servants had been given access to the holy ground of Pharos, and then for the briefest periods of research under strict supervision. Some misguided souls and outright heretics had tried to force their way in, of course, but the holy ground had been kept inviolate with combat servitors and monitor ships.

No one had successfully stolen information from the cathedral of Pharos. But then again, no one had tried going in through the liquid hydrogen vents before.

'The seal is loose. Let me.' Lieutenant Kindarek reached over and adjusted the seal between Thad-deus's helmet and the neck ring of his hostile environment suit. Normally issued to explorator pioneers or engineersworking on ships' hulls, the suit could keep extremes of temperature or noxious atmospheres from harming the occupant. All mem-bers of the recon platoon wore them, their faces appearing subtly warped through the square, trans-parent faceplates and their bulk increased by the thick, spongy dark grey material of the suits.

There was a hiss as the seal tightened and Thad-deus felt the air around his face turn cold and chemical.

'My thanks, lieutenant.'

The suited-up platoon was crammed into the rear-ward deployment airlock in front of Thaddeus, h.e.l.lguns at the ready. Four storm troopers had grenade launchers slung on their backs and heavy garlands of frag grenade rounds looped on their belts. Neither the HE suits nor the fatigues under-neath bore any Inquisitorial insignia, and Thaddeus himself didn't carry his Ordo Hereticus seal of authority - if the mission failed, there would be lit-tle to suggest that the Inquisition had been behind the infiltration.

None of them spoke. Thaddeus's own voice had sounded unwelcome and incongruous. How many battles had these men fought in? How many times had they waited in a Chimera APC or a Valkyrie airborne transport, not knowing if they would be dropped into a fire-fight?

Thaddeus knew several of these men had been at the Harrow Field Bridge where daemons of the Change G.o.d were emerging from the ground with the summer crops. Many had been part of the path-finding force that had found the tomb of the Arch-Idolator on Amethyst V. Some had scars and low-grade bionic eyes visible through their face-plates - all were silent and grim. Thaddeus's own nerves were tempered by his faith in the Imperial vision and the critical nature of the mission. Each man coped with the tense last few moments in their own way.

The shuttle tilted as the servitor-pilot in the c.o.c.kpit turned it around. There was a metallic grat-ing on the underside of the hull as the shuttle beached itself, braking jets pushing it up onto the sh.o.r.e.

'In position.' came the servitor voice over the vox.

'Open us up.' ordered Thaddeus. There was a squeal of hydraulics and the back wall of the pas-senger compartment dislocated, hissing downwards as the deployment ramp lowered.

Bright, cold, fluorescent light flooded in. The hydrogen lake filled the lower levels of this particu-lar cylinder of the cathedral, and heaps of metallic cast formed piles under the surface that became sandbanks of silvery filings. It was against one of these that the shuttle beached. The beach glowed silver in the light and the ripples on the surface of the lake were as bright as knife blades.

The pointmen jumped onto the beach before the ramp was down, the huge boots of the HE suits splashing in the liquid hydrogen at the sh.o.r.e's edge. The photoreactive faceplates darkened in the glare as they panned the barrels of their h.e.l.lguns over the area.

Kindarek's head tilted to the side for a moment as he received their voxes. 'All clear,' he voxed on his squad frequency. 'Move out.'

The platoon poured rapidly from the shuttle, boots kicking up the drifts of metallic shavings as they moved.

Thaddeus followed, autopistol heavy in his hand and his mouth and nose already raw from the treated air.

The light surrounded him as he stomped down the ramp onto the sh.o.r.e and he saw that the far wall was a single vast light source, phos-ph.o.r.escent gases trapped behind panes of transparent crystal, wrapping around the inside of the cylinder.

This cylinder of the cathedral was three kilometres across and perhaps ten high, with the lit section a hundred metres high. Access ladders wound their way in double helixes up to the first gallery levels.

Columns hung from the distant ceiling, matt-grey so they drunk the abundant light. Between them were webs of gla.s.s walkways and platforms, thou-sands of filaments that turned the light flooding from below into a bright shimmering forest. It was like being inside a polished diamond, with a mil-lion faces looking up at the broken light of a new star.

Cl.u.s.tered around the pillars and forming star-bursts of light at the intersections of the web were intricate crystalline sculptures in complex geometric shapes, mathematical prayers coded into the angles and faces, each sculpture a crystal information repository holding enough information to fill a hundred cogitator engines.

Further up, the curved walls were hung with ban-ners, rust-red cloth embroidered with binary prayers in gold thread. The brightness gave way to shadows towards the ceiling, incense-stained dark-ness swallowing the cathedral's light where Thaddeus could just make out the control structures looking down on the cathedral, where tech-priests might even now be watching intruders violating the Omnissiah's temple.

The technology of this place was the old kind, the kind they couldn't make any more, salvaged from the forgotten madness of the Dark Age of Technol-ogy and put to a new use in the worship of the Omnissiah.

This was a sacred place indeed, where the Adeptus Mechanicus kept technology they could not - some said would not - replicate.To Thaddeus, it was beautiful. To Lieutenant Kin-darek and his men it was just another warzone. Kindarek barked an order and the platoons fanned out behind the pointmen, who were rapidly scan-ning the ridges of the metal sandbar. The platoon dissolved into its component squads, each overlap-ping fields of fire.

'What's our entry point, sir?' came Kindarek's voice.

Thaddeus glanced around. They couldn't spend more than a few moments down here, where they had no cover and where gunfire could make the hydrogen lake erupt. There were several mainte-nance stairwells hanging down from the columns above, where adepts or servitors could descend to the lake surface.

Thaddeus pointed towards the closest. 'There. Keep it simple.'

'Sir.' At Kindarek's order the platoon jogged towards the stairwell, a spindly spiral of pale silver metal that seemed impossibly fragile against the sheer size of the cathedral cylinder.

The pointmen ascended rapidly, taking two of the grenade launcher troopers with them. The squads went up after them, Thaddeus jogging alongside them as they took the stairs two at a time in their hurry to get out of such a vulnerable position. Thaddeus glanced down and saw the rear of the shuttle disappearing from view as it slid back under the surface to minimise the chances of detection.

The webs of light above fractured and reformed as Thaddeus ascended, as if the whole cathedral had been constructed to appear radically different from each possible angle, mirroring the billions of facets of information it contained. He almost stumbled as he stared up at the sight and remembered that he was a soldier, too, just like these men who were ignoring the splendour, their minds only on the mission.

The pointmen were at the first level of the web-like walkways, picking their way warily along the transparent crystal. The base of one of the sus-pended columns was nearby and they gathered there, one consulting an auspex to check for move-ment, others checking cautiously around the giant smooth pillar.

Kindarek waved the first of the platoon's squads onto the walkways. They spread out into a mobile perimeter, h.e.l.lguns ready to fire, moving around the abstract geometric shapes that formed the crys-talline information vaults.

Several men carried bundles of equipment slung at their waists or backs - basic interface equipment, guaranteed to survive the intense cold, that would enable the user to jack into a simple information system.

Many of the more technically-minded storm troopers had been quickly trained in its use, and Thaddeus himself could perform the vital task if need be.

Kindarek himself had got to the walkways. For a moment he paused and looked towards the troop-ers by the pillar - Thaddeus saw one of them, one of the pointmen with an auspex, mouth a single word as he voxed the lieutenant.

Movement.

That was all the warning Thaddeus had.

The trooper turned as he tried to gauge the source of the movement signal on his auspex scanner. He faced the pillar behind him and dropped the scan-ner to bring his h.e.l.lgun to bear as he realised the movement was inside the pillar.

The pillar's surface fractured into hundreds of dark grey ceramic tiles. The column broke apart and the tiles were revealed as the flexible armoured cara-paces of giant metal-limbed beetles that hung in the freezing air as a host of glowing metal eyes lit up on the scanner arrays jutting from their thoraxes.

The lower half of the pillar had broken into more than twenty combat servitors, each three times the bulk of a man, highly advanced and hovering with in-built grav-units. Metallic limbs folded into mul-tilaser barrels and circular diamond-toothed power saws emerged on metallic armatures. In the few sec-onds before the servitors were battle-ready Thaddeus realised they had indeed been observed as soon as they had made it to the sh.o.r.e - the cathe-dral's defences had waited until the storm troopers were spread out between the walkways and the stairwell, vulnerable and out of formation.

Stupid. How could Thaddeus have believed he could succeed in infiltrating the Pharos archives when it had been proved impossible so many times?

No. That was the thinking of someone without faith. Fight on, for death in service of the Emperor was its own reward.

'Open fire!' yelled Kindarek over the squad vox. 'Launchers, now!'

The frozen air erupted into laser fire, searing red streaks from the overcharged power packs of the h.e.l.lguns lashing from every trooper able to shoot, multi-lasers pumping volleys of white fire through the bodies of the troopers closest to the pillar. The screech and hiss of laser fire filled Thaddeus's ears and the vox was suddenly a mess of static and din, men shouting as they opened fire or screaming as they died. Men were shredded, their blood freezing into a hail of red shrapnel, chunks of flesh shatter-ing against the crystal. One fell backwards as his leg was sheared clean off by the slash of a power saw, beads of frozen bloodglittering as he tumbled off the walkway down towards the hydrogen lake. Another was picked up by the razor-sharp mandibles of the beetle-servitor and pulled apart, his body erupting in a shower of crimson shards.

White-hot laser fire slashed through the stairwell and the man directly above Thaddeus was. .h.i.t, his torso shattering as a laser bolt punched through his chest. White fire screeched through the stairs beneath him and the structure came apart, metal steps raining down along with half of the last squad.

Thaddeus reached out and grabbed the railing as the steps under his feet disappeared. The bulk of the .

dead man above buffeted him as it fell, and Thad-deus was dangling one-handed nearly a hundred metres above the lake. The blinding light swallowed the men as they fell, reducing them to ripples in the silvery surface as they hit the lake.

Grenade rounds exploded above, sending clouds of shrapnel ripping through the servitors. The damage was minimal but the explosions scrambled their sensors, and one of the insectoid servitors fell wreathed in strange blue flame as a dozen high-powered h.e.l.lgun shots tore up into its underbelly.

'Paniss! Telleryev! Make for their flank, pin them down!' Kindarek was yelling - Thaddeus saw Kindarek, back against one of the information-sculptures, firing with his h.e.l.lpistol as he shouted orders over the vox.

A hand reached down and Thaddeus grabbed it -a trooper hauled him up onto the still-stable top end of the stairwell. Thaddeus was about to breathe a word of thanks when a laser shot seared through the air between them and sliced a deep furrow through the trooper's faceplate - Thaddeus saw him choke as the cold air he inhaled turned his lungs to chunks of ice. The man's eyes froze into white crys-tals and his body turned rigid, the heat fleeing from inside his suit and his muscles turning solid.

Thaddeus pushed the dead man to one side and let the corpse fall. He stumbled forward a few steps and pulled himself onto the walkway, the dizzying drop still yawning beneath him. The pa.s.sage was only wide enough for a couple of men abreast and troopers were scrambling for the junctions where they could gather in gaggles of three or four, using sculptures as cover and concentrating h.e.l.lgun fire on one servitor at a time.

Thaddeus drew his autopistol, feeling it click as an executioner round chambered itself in response to his hand around the grip. He sprinted the few steps towards the closest sculpture as laser blasts scored deep gouges into the crystal of the walkway beneath him.

He slid into cover beside two storm troopers, one [ of them hefting a grenade launcher and using it to lob occasional shots over the sculpture towards knots of servitors.

The trooper with the h.e.l.lgun nodded curtly at Thaddeus as the inquisitor scrambled to a half-sitting position, back against the crystal.

'Musta lost half the lads!' shouted the trooper, voice m.u.f.fled by the HE suit's faceplate. 'Do we have extraction?' Thaddeus recognised Trooper Telleryev, one of the platoon's sergeants.

Thaddeus shook his head. 'We break out the hard way'

Telleryev spat a word from his homeworld that Thaddeus a.s.sumed was profane, then flicked his h.e.l.lgun onto full power and sent a bright lance of laser into the body of a servitor drifting ominously over to flank them. Thaddeus took aim with his pis-tol and loosed off three shots, the microcogitators in the rare executioner rounds sending the bullets curving as they flew, punching into the servitor with mechanical accuracy.

The servitor juddered and listed suddenly as one of its grav units burst in a shower of sparks - Thad-deus sighted down the barrel at the bundle of sensors that made up its head and pumped the rest of the autogun's ten-round magazine into it. Like swift metal insects the rounds looped towards their target and shattered the servitor's metal face, send-ing arcs of electricity spitting from the broken machinery and exposing the biological core of the machine, the part that had once been human.

Without anything to guide it, the servitor yawed aimlessly, exposing the underbelly to which its jointed limbs were attached. The other storm trooper swung the barrel of his grenade launcher around and fired a single frag grenade into the servi-tor's belly, ripping it clean open and spilling machine parts and pulped flesh down towards the lake.

The grenade trooper allowed himself a grim smile of triumph as he racked another round into his weapon.

'Get us to Kindarek!' shouted Thaddeus. Telleryev nodded and the two men broke cover at a run. The grenade trooper waved them forward, pumping a volley of grenades into the walkways above them to send hot shrapnel bursting through the air and momentarily blinding the servitors as Thaddeus and Telleryev ran.

Kindarek was trying to organise a strongpoint around a couple of sculptures and a length of walk-way that had fallen down from above, with seven or eight troopers keeping up fields of fire and prevent-ing the servitors from surrounding them. There were still a dozen of the machines left, spraying multilaser fire across the width of the cylinder - but they were avoiding blasting directly at the sculp-tures, and so they hadto close to use their power saws while keeping the walkways between clear. Kindarek was trying to punish the servitors that drifted towards them and, though he would proba-bly not succeed, he was at least buying time.

Thaddeus reached Kindarek's position, Telleryev beside him.

'We need to get men upwards.' voxed Thaddeus breathlessly. We have to get a link set up.'

Kindarek paused as his soldier's mind rifled through the possibilities - stay here with at least some cover and a plan, or throw men through the gauntlet in an attempt to drag some information screaming from the cathedral's archives.

'We're dead here anyway.' he replied. Then, on the squad frequency - 'Suppression fire and break cover!

Head for the upper walkways and concen-trate fire:. Move, move!'

Thaddeus slipped a single sh.e.l.l from one of his waist pouches into the breech of the autopistol. A single heavy sh.e.l.l, it was more expensive than many s.p.a.ceships and a handful of them had cost Thaddeus a lot of favours. Now, he was immensely grateful he had shown the prescience to have brought them along.