Karras bowed, ready at last, seeing the need.
‘There is another important change you should know about,’ continued Lochaine. ‘Kill-team allocations have been finalised. After Second Oath, they will be announced. You will begin training exclusively with your kill-team, and unit cohesion will be key.’
That, at least, was welcome news. The quirks and moods of just four or five battle-brothers would be far more manageable than dealing with those of almost a hundred.
Lochaine glanced out the window again, his face revealed in profile to Karras as he added, ‘You’ll return to training in power armour, too, and with a full loadout. Second Oath gives you the right to don the black at last. The Watch sigil will grace your shoulder. Be proud to wear it. So few earn that right. Fewer still wear it for long.’ He turned his eyes back to Karras. ‘We do our best to recover those that fall and send their remains back to their Chapter worlds. Would that the number were higher.’
‘Brother Stephanus,’ replied Karras. ‘It meant a lot to his company that they were able to inter him in the sacred catacombs.’
‘He died well,’ said Lochaine. ‘As did the Death Spectres who served the Watch before him. May we all meet such a worthy end when the time comes.’
‘I fear not death,’ said Karras resolutely.
‘For you embody it in His Name. It is a fine motto. The name of the Death Spectres is less renowned than some, but know that it is well honoured here, despite your misgivings. I would not have sought you out otherwise. We expect great things from you, Lyandro Karras, despite the special challenges you will most certainly face.’
Lochaine pushed himself from the wall then and strode to the archway leading to the stairs.
‘What does that mean, brother?’ Karras asked the Storm Warden’s broad back. ‘Special challenges?’
‘Just a few more tencycles, Death Spectre,’ said Lochaine as he began his long descent. ‘We shall speak again after Second Oath.’
The flashlights of the enforcers cast broad beams through the glittering, frost-filled air. Neither Varlan nor her trusty aides needed much light themselves – even the darkest shadows surrendered detail to their top-of-the-line augmetics – but the enforcer squads Lord Sannra had ordered to escort her would have been as blind as earthworms down here without their gear. It was a flustered Sannra, too, who had ordered the railways cleared so that several Viper LAVs
[20]
could push deep into the mines unhindered, carrying Varlan and her escort. And here they were at last, in the very hall where Ordimas had witnessed the ceremony of the strange and seedy cult.
No bodies, no lit lamps, no sign that anyone had been here recently save recent ash in the wall sconces and braziers, and a profusion of tracks on the icy stone floor.
Yes. Lots of foot traffic.
Oroga was crouched over, studying it while Myrda stood watching Varlan’s back, her awareness electrically charged to every sound around them. Both the twins were on
code orange,
ready to respond to any threat.
Oroga looked up and nodded at Varlan.
The tracks are recent, then. They fit Ordimas’s experience exactly.
Varlan’s gaze moved to the black mouth of the tunnel that led away from the rear of the hall’s elevated stage. It was along that tunnel her answers lay.
Looking at the stage, she shuddered, remembering all too sharply the sights she’d seen through Asset 16’s opticom.
Here. It all happened right here.
Footsteps sounded behind her, and Varlan turned to find Lieutenant Borges approaching, breath misting from the muzzle filters of his rebreather. He stopped a few steps in front of Myrda, who had automatically positioned herself to block his approach. ‘You were right, ma’am,’ he said, speaking past the deceptively slim bodyguard, voice muffled by his apparatus. ‘Recent activity. Too many tracks to make head or tail of.’
Varlan removed her own rebreather to reply. She needn’t have, but the strap was pulling painfully at her hair and she wanted to adjust it. The next breath was icy sharp in her lungs, but not intolerable. The powered thermasuit the enforcers had lent her kept her body at a steady temperature, but that too bothered her. It felt close and hot, even in the airy, ice-rimed hall. The control module was belted at her lower back. In a moment, she decided, she would ask Myrda to adjust it.
‘I did not expect to find anyone here, lieutenant, but you will take the matter more seriously now, I presume.’
The officer stiffened. ‘I assure you, ma’am, I never take my duties any less than that. As I told you, this section of the Underworks has been abandoned for centuries. It was listed as stripped and locked down. Only a mine administrator or a tech-priest could have reopened it.’
‘Then a mine administrator or a tech-priest is clearly part of the insurgency.’
‘Insurgency? Come now, ma’am. Surely this is just a group of religious nuts who’ve breathed in a little too much soledite dust.’
‘How many people have been reported missing in the last year, lieutenant? How many of those resurfaced soon after. How many children were born in Cholixe? More or less than in preceding years? How much equipment and provision went mysteriously unaccounted for? You see accidents, population increase and theft as all quite separate. I tell you now that they are not. The Civitas here on Chiaro have been caught sleeping. You are damned lucky I arrived when I did. Who can say how close the enemy’s knife was to your own throat?’
The lieutenant’s brow furrowed, but he bit back whatever reply was forming on his lips. Instead, he asked tersely, ‘And what would the inquisitor have us do now?’
‘I have told you already that I am an interrogator. In terms of relative authority to your own, it hardly matters, but I’ll ask you to stop making the error.’
Borges was flexing his fists now. He was not a man used to being commanded. Nor was he used to being chastised. Who was this bloody woman to show up here and start running the show? And that aristo-fool, Sannra. Since when did he mess in Civitas matters? Better the man lock himself away with his addictions. Lord High Arbitrator in name only, that one. It was the Administratum men and the tech-priests that kept this place running. They left the Civitas to their business, and rightly so. This woman, though…
‘My apologies, interrogator,’ he offered insincerely. ‘What would you have us do now?’
Varlan noted the lack of apology in the man’s tone, but it hardly mattered. ‘The tunnel at the back,’ she told him, pointing. ‘If we’re to know more, we’ll have to go deeper.’
‘It means leaving guards with the vehicles,’ replied Borges. ‘I’ll not have those Vipers fall into the hands of this supposed cult.’
‘I leave force disposition to you, lieutenant, but let us move quickly. We’re not here to sight-see.’
Borges grunted and turned away. When he was out of earshot, Myrda leaned in and spoke to her principal. ‘Don’t think he likes you much, ma’am.’
‘I expect not, Myrda. These people have had it their own way for far too long. That’s the problem with fringe worlds. Too much freedom, not enough scrutiny. Come, let’s mount the platform.’
She called Oroga over and addressed the twins together. ‘We’re going deeper. Stay sharp. Asset 16 never went beyond this point. From here, we break new ground. I want any observations you care to make. Anything at all, clear?’
‘Clear, ma’am,’ said both in unison.
Lieutenant Borges had posted guards on the LAVs by now and had organised his platoon-strength force to move out – forty men minus the guards he’d posted, all in las-proof plate with heavy riot-guns locked and loaded. With a barked command, they all set off, two of Borges’s best scouts up front, followed by a six-man fire-team. Behind the fire-team, Varlan and her aides walked with Borges and his second, a big sergeant called Caradine. Behind them came the rest of the force, all in combat helmets and carapace armour. The lieutenant was the only one dressed any differently. Eschewing a helmet, he had opted for a black beret with a golden Civitas crest on the front, a privilege of his rank, but one liable to get him killed if he wasn’t careful, Varlan thought. Some of the men muttered from beneath their integrated rebreathers about being sent down into the freezing dark on
a bloody ghost hunt
. Others hushed them, glad of any change to the routine of daily duty on the city streets.
Varlan registered all this with growing irritation. A good officer would have stamped it out. Even better, a good commissar.
Up ahead, the torchlight of the scouts played across curving tunnel walls. The rock had been plastered over, giving everything a smooth surface that glittered with ice crystals. In the ceiling, some two-and-a-half metres above them, there were regular lume-globe fixtures, but there was no power to light them. Some had been broken, but how recently? Fragments of transparent plastek lay on the tunnel floor. They could have been there a day, a year, a century.
‘Halt,’ hissed one of the scouts from up ahead.
Varlan looked up the tunnel and saw the fire-team in front of her squat down suddenly. The scout who had spoken was pointing something out to his companion. His left hand was raised in a fist to stop everyone behind him.
‘Signs of a struggle here,’ he said at last over the vox-net. ‘Looks recent. Days, maybe a week. Difficult to tell with everything getting frozen so fast. Scuffs on the wall. Boots, fingers. There’s a little blood on the left side and on the floor.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Borges.
The scouts were silent for a few more moments. ‘Nothing, sir. Proceeding.’
The platoon continued down the tunnel. They passed several broad chambers – junctions, really – where decisions had to be made. Tracks in the frost led off in every direction. Myrda and Oroga worked with the scouts where there was any doubt. Together, they managed to keep the party on the path most recently used.
‘Your people don’t need any light,’ Borges said to Varlan as they strode through the gloom together. It was an observation, not a question. He had been watching how surely and effortlessly they moved in the gloom. The tunnel currently being traversed was, unlike most so far, wide enough to accommodate two or three people walking abreast. It was five minutes into this particular tunnel that he had decided to break silence with her. Perhaps, she thought, he was coming to terms with her authority now. Perhaps he regretted his earlier manner.
Rightly so
.
‘A little,’ she told him, ‘but not much.’ She did not tell him that she, too, boasted low-light vision capability, though hers, unlike the night-vision of the twins, was monocular, provided as it was by her opticom.
‘Have they much experience with this sort of thing?’
‘This sort of thing?’
‘I… I’m not sure what to call it, ma’am. You’ve spoken of a cult down here. And you’re not mistaken about disappearances, but that’s always been a hazard of mining on Chiaro. People get lost. There are cave-ins, machinery accidents, all sorts. There are dangerous creatures down here, too. Nightside has its indigenous life. The miners run into them from time to time: tunnel-jellies, volpiad swarms, kinefrachs, all dangerous in their own way. There haven’t been any sudden spikes in missing persons. Those reported seem to turn up alive after a few days. I can’t speak on the subject of births, mind, but I don’t see how that would relate to a cult way down here in the deep tunnels. What the heck would they eat down here? How would they survive? You think they’re cannibals?’
Varlan didn’t answer that. Speculation was useless right now, and what she did know was not for a mere lieutenant’s ears. Instead, she answered his earlier question. ‘My people have the highest level of training and the very best military grade augs, lieutenant. Experienced? Let me say this: were I forced to choose between them and an entire company of Imperial Guard, I should still choose the twins. That’s not lip-service, I assure you.’
Borges went silent for a while. Varlan could guess what he was thinking:
Who are these bloody people and what are they doing on my planet?
Local law-enforcement were always the same. An inflated sense of importance. They’d know little of the Inquisition or its work. Borges would have checked the Civitas archives and found that no inquisitor had ever set foot on Chiaro before. At least, none that had ever been recorded in the archives to which
he
had access. All he’d know is that Varlan’s authority superseded even Lord Sannra’s. Exactly how or why would be bothering the breeches off him right now. She saw him studying Myrda and Oroga.
‘I should like to see them in action,’ the officer said at last.
‘Better for all concerned, lieutenant, that you never get the chance.’
Myrda and Oroga overheard. Not difficult. Their hearing was superb. Varlan thought she saw them throw each other a glance. She grinned beneath her rebreather. They had every right to a little shared pride. She had told the Civitas officer no lie when she had said she would choose them over an entire company of Guard. They had proven themselves equal to her expectations in every regard during the three years she had been their principal.
The men in front of her suddenly halted again. Borges’s hand flew to the large autopistol at his hip. ‘What is it?’ he hissed through his throat-vox. ‘Gormund, report.’
Varlan fingered the grip of the ornate plasma pistol holstered on her right thigh. On her left, her golden sabre hung, a deadly vibrablade so valuable and steeped in old glory she often felt unworthy of it. His Lordship had made a gift of it, but a gift that came with a warning and a price.
Let it remind you to always give your best
, he had told her.
Because any less will not be tolerated. The Ordo has no place for second-raters, Shianna.
Varlan had made living up to the gift her personal mission.
‘End of the tunnel, sir,’ one of the scouts voxed back quietly.
Varlan noted how stealthy the enforcers had suddenly become. Good vox discipline, too.
Not as sloppy as I thought
, Varlan admitted to herself.
Good.
‘What can you see?’ Borges asked his scouts.
‘A cavern or a hall, sir. It’s massive. Dome-shaped, by the looks of it. Our flashlights aren’t quite reaching the far wall.’
‘Give me an estimate,’ Varlan interrupted.
The two scouts conferred in whispers for a moment.
‘Six hundred metres in diameter, we reckon, ma’am. Maybe two hundred metres to the ceiling. Looks like it might be an old shift-station.’
Varlan turned to Borges. ‘A shift-station?’
Borges shrugged. ‘Back before the train systems were properly installed, work-crews would come into the mines for months, even years, at a time. The tech-priests set up shift-stations for them – a sort of small town for them to live in while they worked down here. They were mostly a mix of habitation, maintenance and ore-processing facilities. After the transport systems were completed, they just started shipping workers in and out for each shift. There’s not much call for such places any more.’
‘But there
are
others?’
‘Aye, a few. Well spread out. I don’t see how anyone could live in them, though. No power to them now. The tech-priests used to use geothermal transfer sinks to power them, but when the shift-stations were abandoned, they removed the fusion cells. Honestly, interrogator, if we’re looking for people down here, it can’t be many, and they’re living on a knife-edge. The cold would surely kill them if starvation didn’t. None of this makes any sense.’