Fear And Fire Part 21

Miriya nodded. That is fully my intention. With a clicking of oiled gears, the concertina-mesh gate on the cable car opened. 'But only after we have com-pleted our immediate mission.'

To find Vaun?' asked Verity, absently dabbing a counter-infective philtre on Isabel's bandages.

The Celestian shook her head. To kill him.'

The pyrokenes moved forward against the Sororitas skirmish lines in a tidal wave of unholy fire, the coil-ing stink of rotten, burning meat advancing ahead of them on the dry wind. Jets of orange prome-thium from heavy flamers on the front ranks arced outward to meet them, but the burning liquid splashed harmlessly about the witch-soldiers, lap-ping at their heels like breaking surf.

From her vantage point, Canoness Galatea saw the failure of the guns and barked an order into her vox.

'Bolters, forward! Projectile and energy weapons only. With unerring precision, the Batde Sisters with flamer weapons dropped back to let their comrades with boltguns and meltaguns take their places. The oncoming pyrokenes met a spread of heavy sh.e.l.ls and microwave beams as they boiled over the pa.s.s.

To Galatea's fury, the fusillade did not break their advance. Those hit by the incoming fire stumbled, some fell, but barely enough to make a difference. The swarming, burning figures overwhelmed a troop of Retributors and scorched the earth about them, then the fire-psykers ran over a silver and black Repressor tank, attacking it with their bare hands.

Abhuman fingers, clawed and shrouded by a nim-bus of flames, dug into the metal of the armoured vehicle's flanks and bulldozer blade. Theipsychic heat softened the plating, riddling the Repressor with gouges where the pyrokenes dug into its sur-face like hot pokers pressing into wax. The tank crew were firing in all directions, but the creatures seemed oblivious to the shredding barks of the guns. Galatea saw one of the burning men rip the hatch from the tank and throw it away, then seconds later a shriek of sound came from inside the vehicle as witchfire flooded into it.

The Canoness shouted a battle prayer at the top of her lungs and urged her troops into the melee.

Overhead, she heard the throaty roar of jet packs as Sister Chloe led the Seraphim, each woman borne up on streaks of white, each with a gun in either hand st.i.tching tracer fire across the advancing foe.

The speed of the witch-fiends was frightening: they moved like an insect swarm, tumbling and scrambling over obstacles and each other, setting alight to everything around them that could com-bust.

Galatea's bolter howled on full automatic, the sickle magazine clip emptying into the closest pyro-kenes she could target. The psykers danced and twitched beneath her fire but failed to fall. She saw great fat chunks of flaming meat being ripped from them and blown away, and still they came on. Whatever devilish force of will drove them, it was incredible.

At her side, a Battle Sister with hair the colour of granite joined the Canoness with her storm bolter. It was enough: the psykers exploded in concussive bursts of noise, detonating hot, fleshy fragments and needles of bone.

'Emperor's blood, these creatures take a lot of killing...' growled the Battle Sister.

Galatea shot her a look. 'Fortunate, then, that we have much of that art to provide.'

'Aye. snapped the woman, pivoting in place to engage more of the enemy line. Her gun flashed orange-red and more death screams filled the smoke-clogged air.

The cable car continued to rise through the deck of the keep, pa.s.sing through levels where tenders ran back and forth like frightened birds or darkened tiers that showed flashes of workings as old as the heavens.They moved too quickly to determine much, pa.s.sing into narrow channels wide enough that only two cars could fit within them, then sud-denly back out again into open voids strewn with curves of decking. The thin glow of aged biolumes gave the Battle Sisters little chance to see much more of their surroundings than glimpses, but they could hear the distant thrum of great machinery, and the faraway noise of gunfire.

Verity stayed close to Sister Isabel. The woman steadfastly refused to allow the Hospitaller to give her wounded arm anything more than the most cur-sory of examinations, or even to let her change the bandages that had become rust-brown with clotted blood. She had accepted nothing from Verity but a few dermal pads, small adhesive discs impregnated with pain nullifying agents. A trio of the white gauze circles ringed the neck of the injured Sororitas like a collar of dull jewels. Isabel's face was tight with denied agony, her skin pale and sallow.

Verity drew an injector carousel from the scent-wood box at her hip and dialled a dose of powerful restorative from the gla.s.s tubes inside it.

Isabel eyed her warily. What are you doing?'

You require medication,' replied Verity. 'It is my duty to give it to you.'

'I refuse. the Battle Sister responded. 'My wits must be sharp, now more than ever.

'Do as the Hospitaller says. Sister Miriya said gruffly. 'Pain is a distraction. I need you focussed.

Isabel grumbled under her breath, but let Verity give her the dosage. The woman glanced up as she withdrew the injector. A high-pitched humming tickled the edge of her hearing. That noise...'

There was little room inside the cable car, and the iron box rocked on its guide wires as Miriya came up with her plasma gun in her hand. She had heard it too.

'Look sharp-'

Lasers, thread-thin and red as hate, lanced out of the darkness and cut across the carriage. Verity yelped as a beam took a finger's length of hair from the end of her hair, but n.o.body was injured.

Miriya and Ca.s.sandra fired back into the black void and something exploded with a shattering crash, but the humming did not cease.

'Servo-skulls. explained Isabel, using Verity's shoulder to prop herself up. 'Guardians. We're get-ting close to the sealed levels.' Two more of the grinning silver orbs dogged the cable car as they ascended, moving between support stanchions as they kept pace.

Isabel fired, missed, and cursed. Ca.s.sandra's aim was true, and she clipped one of the skulls squarely in its anti-gravity drive mechanism. The automaton spun out of control and collided with its partner, destroying both of them.

Verity tried to peer out of the open cradle, but without warning Isabel dragged her down with a handful of her robes. There was a fleeting impres-sion of something huge and metallic dropping from the upper levels, and the cable car rang like a bell as a bra.s.s-clad gun servitor landed amid the Sororitas. The quarters were too close for the armed women to shoot at the machine-slave, and Verity choked in fear as the thing swung a multi-barrelled stubber gun at her head. Something clicked and whined inside the gun mechanism but it failed to engage.

This close to the servitor, Verity could see its one human eye glaring down at her and the ropes of spittle coating the helot's lips. It moved, trying to crush her against Isabel.

She struck out at the hybrid with the only weapon she had to hand - the injector - burying the needle in the wet jelly of its organic eye. The device dis-charged a ma.s.sive quant.i.ty of stimulant potion, and the gun servitor went rigid with shock. It gave a rat-tling gasp and sagged against its own leg pistons.

'Did you kill it?' ventured Isabel.

Verity swallowed hard to rid her mouth of the taste of bile. 'A heart attack. She glanced at the empty injector in her hand.

Ca.s.sandra frowned, examining the dead mecha-nism's casing. 'See here. It was already damaged. Looks like a glancing hit from a flamer.'

Miriya cradled her pistol, peering into the dark as they ascended through it. There should be more of them out there. Why aren't there more?'

Thank the Throne for small mercies. said Verity, as the cradle bounced over a set of points and began to slow. They turned, the carriage lurching from side to side, as a flat docking platform hove into view. The console ticking off the distance markers clicked to zero and without further surprises, they arrived at the secure deck.

The women disembarked in quick order. It was Ca.s.sandra who found the corpses of two more dead gun servitors and with them, a dark-skinned man in the grimy coverall of a prisoner. There was no flesh on the man's hands, just the burnt sticks of hisfingers. His clothes were crosshatched with lines of scorching.

'What does this portend?' demanded Isabel, irrita-bly.

Miriya glanced at a train of cargo carriages locked to one of the other docking rigs, her expression grim. 'It means we are not the first to arrive.'

The loud hailers bellowed out the words of Kather-ine's Lament, and Galatea felt the pa.s.sion swell in her veins. Unbidden, a savage grin broke out on her face. Yes, there was death and destruction about her, yes, her Sisters were fighting and dying in conflict with a ma.s.s of the most dire witches, but by the eyes of the Emperor, she felt alive with divine strength.

The Canoness waded into the sea of flames and dispatched any tainted souls that dared to stand against her. At her back, her bodyguard of elite Celestians marched with the battle hymn on their lips and b.l.o.o.d.y vengeance falling wherever they turned their guns.

A pyrokene freak scrambled from the basalt rocks, howling murder. The witch had been shredded by the near-hit of a frag grenade detonation, ripping the psyker's legs from his waist, and yet still the mutant came on, shouting through the aura of gold fire surrounding it, projecting itself forward on the spindly pins of its arms. It threw itself at Galatea, mouth yawning to present a throat full of fiery bile.

The Canoness reacted with preternatural speed, the adrenaline racing through her veins in a flood of holy quickening. Her bolter's breech clacked open, the gun empty, and she took a chain at her belt and whipped it upward. At the end of the pewter links was a golden ball the size of a man's fist: a censer, still fuming with a potion of consecrated oils and sacred herbs. Galatea brought it up and used the device as a mace, batting the pyrokene away with a single stroke.

The solution within the censer spilled across the pathetic creature's face and sent it scream-ing into the dirt.

There it lay, clawing and dying as the potent oils ate into it like acid.

Galatea reloaded and moved on, her Celestians shooting in controlled hurricanes of bolt fire. There had been a moment when the pyrokene attack had begun, when the momentum of the Adepta Sorori-tas advance reeled, but the Canoness had turned them through it and now the psykers were in disar-ray.

Broken from their wall of murderous fire, they were easier to kill in isolated clumps.

The constant rattle of heavy bolters and the ear-splitting hiss of meltas overwhelmed the rumble of unchained witchfire. Brute, ungoverned power was no match for the ruthless, unstoppable fervour of the Battle Sisters. To a woman, they felt the hand of the Emperor at their backs, the spirit of the martyr swelling in their hearts. There was no such crime as the dark horror of the witch in the eyes of an Adepta Sororitas, nothing so base and so vile as a mind that had eschewed the warmth of His light and turned their face away - toward avarice, toward G.o.dlessness and the anarchy of Chaos. Their unbreakable faith shielded them against the malice of these foes, such forces of inner will that the weaker of the witchkin would find their foul cantrips ineffectual, but what they faced today was of a very different order. If Sis-ter Miriya were to be believed, these were mutants fashioned by the hand of man, and worse, the hand of one who wore the garb of the High Church.

The tanks had been staggered by the enemy, but now they rode high and with steady pace, crushing the blackened bones of fallen witches into the vol-canic sands that coated the narrow valley approach. Hot tongues of energy from multi-meltas flashed, ripping into the battlements of the towering Null Keep.

Sister Chloe's voice called on the general vox channel, her words taut and urgent. 'Hear me below. The witches are drawing back. Be wary!'

'It's a trap.' The words came from her lips before Galatea was even aware she had spoken them, some deep-rooted battle sense drawing the conclusion before her conscious mind was even aware of it. 'All tanks, converge fire upon the entrance cavern to the keep. Ignore all other targets.

"What other targets?' began the grey-haired Battle Sister with the storm bolter, again at her side. Her words died in her throat as the last few witches came together and began to hurl fire in their direc-tion.

At the same instant, pockets of black sand about their feet bubbled and churned. Sooty pyrokenes, aglow with hate, dragged themselves from burrows beneath the ground, emerging behind the advanc-ing Sisters.

Galatea whirled and cut them down before they could get free of the basalt dirt. The Celestians fell into a combat wheel and released bolt fire to all points of the compa.s.s.

Too little, too late,' snarled Galatea to her ene-mies. 'Tactics first, force second,' she lectured. 'Whoever commands these wastrels is no soldier.'

The tanks drowned out the sound of the rout of the psykers as they fired in one destructive salvo. Beyond the thinning ranks of the witches, the guns of the Immolators found their mark. Dark obsidian stone and heavy iron split asunder as spheres of explosive force tore their way into the Null Keep. The holdfast was breached, and the Sororitas onslaught came on.

'The door's locked,' said the gangly woman, throwing Vaun a look over her shoulder. The old creep ain'tgonna open it just 'cos you ask nicely...' She flicked at her fingers where streaks of greenish fire clung across the rows of her knuckles, and spat at the black gates of phase-iron.

Vaun glanced around at the scattered corpses of the gun servitors, the broken pieces of the machine-slave force that the tenders had left to perish defending the engine chamber. He frowned, unable to find something suitable. The psyker turned his attention to the escapees. At last his eyes fell on a fat male, balding and sweating hard in the humid cav-erns. A line of acid drool lapped from his flabby lips, spattering at his feet.

'Flame-spitter, aren't you?' Vaun approached him, measuring the man's size. He seemed close enough for what was needed.

The fat man nodded once and more drool left his mouth as he spoke. 'Sometimes, I just can't keep it in.' He had a highborn accent, proof that it wasn't just Nevan commoners that LaHayn preyed upon. The other prisoners backed away, sensing danger. 'What's wrong?'

Vaun smiled warmly. 'Nothing. You'll do fine.' The psyker closed his eyes and turned a hammer of psy-chic force inside his mind which released itself in a thud of displaced air. The fat man went squealing away and slammed into the heavy doors.

'What... ?' The shock robbed the drooling witch of any other words. He tried to get up, but the force of the push had broken both his legs.

Vaun pictured the churning roil of psionic ecto-plasm simmering in the fat man's ample gut. His kind of pyrokene was a peculiar breed, manifesting their ability like mythic dragons spewing fire from an endless reservoir of incendiary bile. The fat man and his sort were walking flamethrowers.

The psyker let his mind create the reality. He pro-jected a boiling heat inside the wailing man, watching him twitch and moan. Chemical reactions made his body expand, the grey fleshy wattles on his neck stretching tight. Vaun's errant minions went for cover just as the fat man exploded. The wet concussion hammered at the phase-iron doors, chewing a ragged hole in them. The gates tilted and sagged off their huge hinges.

Vaun strode into the engine chamber with his head held high, and rough laughter in his chest.

The stinking wave of putrid concussion knocked LaHayn against the ornate gold control podium, and he reflexively s.n.a.t.c.hed at the argentium pep-perbox gun connected to his wrist by an onyx rosary. Lasers keened at the far end of the chamber as tenders and servitors alike fired on the new arrivals; but through the noise, the grating, hateful sound of one man's amus.e.m.e.nt told him immedi-ately who had dared to breach the sanctified hall.

The tech-adepts in the sub-pulpit beneath him tried to disengage themselves from their cogitators and flee, but the priest-lord struck out at them with savage blows. 'Cowardly fools. This is no time to abandon the work. Proceed as I command you and begin the commencement!'

They reluctantly followed his orders, and while the firefight raged on, a crackle of ancient cogs echoed about the chamber. LaHayn watched as one vast wall of the engine room grew a vertical fissure along its length, opening with ponderous speed to emit a cherry-red glow. The metres-thick doors drew back to allow a heavy tide of dry heat to roll in; beyond them was the open throat of the volcanic chimney at the Null Keep's heart, and just in sight the slow tides of the mountain's magma core.

The rings of the ancient device basked in the ruddy glow, picking up speed as the power from the geothermal tap increased. For a moment, LaHayn forgot the batde raging nearby and felt a childlike excitement blossom inside him. 'Dear G.o.d-Emperor, it is working!' Eyes shining, the deacon made the sign of the aquila and anointed the controls at his podium with a vial of sacred unguent. He looked up, barely able to hold back the tears of joy, as the shifting metal planes inside the spinning rings shifted and merged. They turned about and coalesced into something that could only have been a throne. LaHayn worked the controls, moving his fingers over them in complex patterns that he had made into personal rituals. 'Yes. he cried, 'at last, the conjunction of events comes to pa.s.s. As it was foretold, as it should be!'

The iron throne extended out of the spinning glow on a rod of brilliant white, cracking the black stone with the wash of its energy. The priest threw himself down and bounded towards it, the blessed radiation engulfing him in warm, soft clouds.

He was only an arm's length away when the fire-streak lashed into him. The burning thread of psy-force entered LaHayn's body from behind, just below his ribcage. It cut straight through him in a fountain of b.l.o.o.d.y steam, melting bone and organ meat. The deacon crashed to the basalt floor, the dull reflection of his agonised face star-ing back up at him.

Vaun made a tutting noise as he approached. 'Your problem has always been that you leave everything to the last moment, Viktor. The psyker waved his hand and let another salvo of flame lines hiss from hisfingertips, savaging the closest tech-adept. He paused over the priest as LaHayn struggled to drag himself across the stone. 'No, no. Too late now. You had your chance.

'Not... ready...' the deacon groaned. 'Until... now...'

That's just what I wanted to know. grinned Vaun. He glanced up, licking his lips. This is it, then? The Psi-Engine of Neva? The machine that will make me a G.o.d?'

'No...'

'Oh yes. retorted Vaun, 'and because I'm feeling so generous, I'm going to let you live long enough to see it happen. He left LaHayn behind and marched into the glowing aurora. 'Goodbye, Viktor. And thank you.

He settled into the steel throne, shud-dering with power.

The priest rolled on to his side and propped him-self up. 'Ah. No, dear boy. It... It is I who should thank you!

For the first time, uncertainty formed on the psyker's face. He opened his mouth to say some-thing, but the throne folded about him, wrapping him in flat planes of burning metal.

Vaun cried out, but it was Viktor LaHayn's laugh-ter that filled his ears.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

The sound of gunfire drew them in, the last point-less defences of the engine chamber echoing down the h.e.l.lish corridor to the cable car dock. Grim-faced, Miriya led her Sisters over the ugly wreckage of the iron doors. It was only then, when they were inside the cavernous hall itself, that they saw where the blood-coloured illumination was coming from. Rising above the torn remains of the dead tenders, of the butchered prisoner pyrokenes and the golden stump of the command pulpit, the great circling rings of the engine hurtled around one another in defiance of gravity. Miriya and the other women were struck silent by the sight of the machine. The thunderous roars of white energy crackling about it were mesmerising. In coils of actinic blue, strings of text in High Gothic emerged along the faces of the rings, detaching themselves to float in the air like windblown leaves. A rumbling pulse throbbed from the shifting planes of metal at the core of the impos-sible construction, and with every falling beat the Sororitas could hear the wailing plaintive cries of a man.

Vaun. The sound of his voice chilled her to the bone. It was not the arrogant, brutal confidence she had come to expect from the psyker, but a horrific cry of terror, as if his very soul were being stripped from his body.

The open flue of the volcano seared the air with great wavering sheets of heat, beating at their bare skin and sluicing sweat from their bodies. Miriya shook her head to break the spell of the fantastic machine and shouted commands to her Sisters. They reacted unhurriedly, blinking with lizard slowness.

Verity, Isabel, remain here. Ca.s.sandra, you and I will approach the... the device...' Miriya checked the charge of her plasma pistol and frowned. The weapon was close to exhaustion.

'With respect. ventured Ca.s.sandra, 'we need every able hand.' She gestured at the dead strewn about them. 'In smaller numbers, we guarantee we will share their fate.'

'Aye. Isabel added. Til not stand back and watch. The Hospitaller can see to me if I falter.

Miriya glanced at Verity. "What say you, Hospi-taller?'

But the sight of the machine entranced the golden-haired woman. 'Look. she said, raising her hand to point.

The deacon...'

The Sister Superior heard the resonance of LaHayn's voice carry to her and her face paled. 'G.o.d-Emperor, no... Please, no. He has already begun.' She was ashen. 'We are too late!'

'Release me!' screamed the psyker, every cell in his body alive with crackling energy that poured into him from the warp. 'The power...'

'Power?' mocked LaHayn, dragging himself to the top of his podium. 'But that's what you wanted, isn't it, Torris? Power beyond all avarice, power to rape, murder and pillage across the galaxy? Now you can taste it all.

Vaun cried out in agony, slamming himself against the seamless cowl of metal holding him inside the spinning rings.