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  A nagging suspicion grew in Biff as they proceeded, yet it was Yeri who voiced the doubt…

  “Much of this tunnel was made beforehand,” he commented. “The excavator beast couldn’t have cut so much since we seized the spaceport. See, this part’s more cleanly finished. Back where we started, the walls were rougher. Faster work.”

  “So?” asked Stossen.

  “So maybe the last part was punched through fast. Maybe that engineer intended to lure us along here at the cost of his life? Can you turn, Biff, if we’re attacked from the rear?”

  Biff paused.

  Yes, he could turn. Though only just, and to a certain extent courtesy of the smoothness of the tunnel walls in this vicinity.

  He gazed back along the pitchy tube of stone, imagining that lumps of darkness were dwarfs…

  Claustrophobia had never bothered Biff particularly. He had crawled through tubes before, never mind walking through one. Biff was a child of claustrophobia, to whom open sky presented an alien threat.

  Yet oh that in the vastness of the universe there could exist so many tight pockets which could so compress a man! Most of life was condensed by the narrowest of horizons. Biff’s own life used to be compressed in such a fashion – though he had always sussed that more existed, vastly more to which he could aspire…

  If only people could dwell everywhere throughout the cosmos – if only space itself was as habitable as land, if only vacuums were breathable, and if plants and creatures floated everywhere in the void, equally dispersed – why then, each living person could probably occupy as his own sole abode a volume equivalent to a whole large world. All to himself, to himself alone…

  Here he was instead, in a cramped passage tucked inside a harsh ball of rock. See the cosmos, and crouch…

  The cosmos was mostly a void of empty neutral lifelessness, within which the tiny businesses of life were so often none other than the dealing of death. Death! Thus spake life to a universe which at once harboured millions of swarming worlds yet at the same time essentially comprised… nothingness, vacuity. Thus life addressed that universe in its own terms – only, more loudly so, since life engaged in the trade of active death.

  Ach, philosophy…!

  Leave that to Yeri.

  Leave leadership to Lex? No…

  “Light up ahead,” reported Lexandro.

  “Douse all suit lights,” Stossen ordered immediately.

  The far light brightened gradually into a disc resembling an aqueous azure eye that was watching them approach: a file of flies walking towards…

  A spider shape writhed in Biff’s inner vision, superimposed upon that distant eye like branching carmine veins. The spider’s legs danced anticipatively – Biff’s guardian, yet also his nemesis.

  A faint heartbeat throbbed ahead; then many contrapuntal heartbeats. Liquids gurgled faintly.

  THEY EMERGED INTO a seemingly deserted hydroponics plant: a long low blue-lit cavern housing hundreds of shallow tanks from which vegetables burgeoned in vivid botanical eruptions. Thorny purple pumpkins, gloryberry vines, variegated gourds, velvety meatfruit trees…

  Fluted pipes gargled. Rune-dappled pumps throbbed softly. A generator of arcane design hummed. There was an alien aura to all the equipment, as if it were a hybrid of long-forgotten baroque human tech and of some sinuous, elegant, eldritch crafting by another species.

  Frescoes of ancient Squattish warfare decorated the broad vault and walls. Doughty bearded dwarfs, whose exo-armour was laden with chainwork and charms and pendants, and whose belts were clasped with ornate golden buckles, were attempting to annihilate alien warriors in harlequin garb. Slim, tall, and eerily handsome, those exotics wielded glowing swords; while the Squats favoured axes. The dwarfs’ breastplates were decorated with scenes from some earlier heroic victory – or defeat. Hard to tell which. Victory blurred into defeat, into victory. A frieze of incomprehensible Squattish runes perhaps was barbaric poetry.

  The contrast between the buoyant, fertile garden and the Stygian tunnel had quickly aroused Biff’s animosity.

  When a great stone hatch swung open to disgorge the very image of those painted hearthguardians in identical armour and trappings – as if they were simply emerging from the flatness of the frescoes into three-dimensional solidity, though wielding now a medley of bolt guns, plasma pistols, and laspistols – Biff fired at those targets without hesitation…

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PUMPKINS SPLATTERED APART – and so did a couple of Squattish bodies, though their armoured rinds were harder.

  In the immediate return fire, plasma hit Stossen repeatedly, melting his right shoulder pauldron to slag, disabling his arm. His suit, of course, would anaesthetise the area, even if the pain pleased a part of him.

  Inflamed with battle and careless of their vegetable heaven, the squat hearthguard ducked behind tanks and machinery. Chanting invective, they pumped plasma, searing light, and explosive bolts through a hundred metres of torn fronds and stems. Tanks ruptured; nutrient liquids spilled in a shallow tide.

  Half a dozen more Squats appeared at the mouth of a large tunnel giving exit from the cavern. They wore ochre flak-jackets with scarlet piping. Brandishing bolters and rock-cutters, these newcomers signalled their intention of hemming the Marines within the hydroponics plant. Consequently Lexandro charged in their direction, power-leaping through a tangle of vines.

  In Biff’s mind’s eye the spider expanded, stretching itself like a web before suddenly clutching tightly around the pus-armoured figure of Lexandro.

  “No, don’t go that way, Lex!” Biff shouted. “It’s too easy! Drop back to the narrow tunnel.”

  It was the kind of warning cry that Yeri might have uttered, and indeed Yeri did add his voice a moment later like some echolalaic Psittacus bird:

  “Drop back, Lex!”

  “Cowards!” Lex took a moment to mock.

  The armoured hearthguard were hustling from cover to cover, spraying a swathe of fire except in the very direction of their ochre-clad kin. Vegetable ichor spattered the sanguinary frescoes, adding gangrenous hues.

  “Follow d’Arquebus!” ordered Stossen just as Lex reached the other dwarfs. Now that Lex was in close, he was using his power glove to punch. The rock-cutters of the flak-jacket brigade clashed fountains of sparks against his gauntlet as of knives being sharpened on a grindstone.

  How nimbly those dwarfs danced in and out of range, taunting the armoured giant like cunning hairy rats baiting a wild bull auroch. Lex seized one and crushed its neck with a squeeze of his plasteel power fingers, so that the squat’s eyes popped right out on their optic cords upon the hirsute cheeks.

  Snatching another by the arm, he threw it so powerfully against a wall that for a moment the body actually hung in position as part of a fresco, held by a glue of brains and blood. A fungoid mass seemed to have erupted from the painting. Then the corpse fell.

  IN BIFF’S HUMBLE opinion Lex burst through that little gang of Squats all too easily. That gang was suspiciously underarmoured and underarmed compared with the hearthguard who were so ostentatiously kitted out. If a hearthguard’s gun jammed, he could snatch two replacements from holster or bandolier. But the flak-jacket fellows? A few bolters – and rock-cutters!

  Lexandro was through into the exit tunnel, with Yeri in hot pursuit. Then Stossen, right arm dangling uselessly. Then Biff.

  A thunderous clatter of bolts erupted as the hearthguard pursued. Biff fired rearward in reply.

  The din almost drowned an ominous crashing noise. Biff suspected, suspected, that the orifice by which they had entered the hydroponics garden had been blocked…

  The tunnel they now hastened along was rib-roofed and lined with stout pillars. Fat cables looped along from iron hoop to iron hoop. The pillars were carved from naked rock, and each was embossed with runes or with stylised Squattish faces. These pillars seemed to be the very bones of the planet, the mystic anatomy of a world laid bare. Fierce little pursuers darted from on
e pillar to the next, hugging those adornments for protection.

  The tunnel debouched into a fan-vaulted chamber splaying upward from around a central pillar. So the Marines halted by that pillar, from which they could cover the various approaches. Several passages snaked away – upward, downward.

  Along one of those passages lay the corpse of a man – of ordinary stature, and dressed in bloodstained silken Sagramoso livery.

  Was that another lure…? For who had killed the Kark?

  Surely Marines hadn’t done so. Surely no other Marines had yet penetrated so deeply into the granite nest.

  In which case, had the Kark’s own Squattish allies been responsible? Thus Biff reasoned.

  But Biff was the rearguard, the arse-flap, busy firing the occasional bolt back along the tunnel to deter the slyly advancing hearthguard. Stossen, power sword in his left hand, was already gesturing Lex to investigate the corpse.

  Biff’s exploding bolts scattered splinters of stone from carved columns, causing several angry squeals. He had no spare bolt magazines left, though. Soon he’d be an empty arse, with only a power glove to claw and pummel with. So yes, the only way was onward…

  Though which choice of onward?

  Yeri darted after Lex to cover him.

  “Guy’s been axed,” Lex reported. “Chest stove in. Wasn’t a power axe. There’s some chest left.”

  Were some of the Squats conceivably fighting Sagramoso’s minions, resentful of his sway over their stronghold? This seemed implausible to Biff.

  Maybe the Squats hoped that the Imperial Fists might imagine something of the sort. The spreading of confusion was a tool of war, too.

  Biff thunk.

  Had the recce squad been lured here especially to find this corpse? Would the Squats, if sufficiently hard-pressed, sue for peace and offer up a corpse which they swore to be that of Fulgor Sagramoso? In reality it might be that of, say, a twin brother kept by Sagramoso in some dungeon or in a stasis casket expressly for some such future contingency, should a substitute some day be needed.

  How many of his Kark minions did Sagramoso have here inside Antro? Not too many could have come along with him in the survival ship. But others could have been here already, overseeing their Lord’s economic interests.

  How many others of his loyal retinue might Sagramoso sacrifice – aye, blatantly with a Squattish axe – so as to maintain a pretence and safeguard his own life?

  Sagramoso might calculate that battle-brothers would not envisage such a ploy. Would a Commander Pugh sacrifice Marines under his command so as to save his own skin? No. No pious Chapter commander would. Lord Pugh had his own taste buds excised as penance, once…

  To kill one’s own men! Would many scumgang leaders even contemplate treachery of this order?

  Of course, Sagramoso thought he was a god…

  And gods demanded sacrifices from their most ardent and pious followers, did they not? Willing sacrifices!

  Thus did the Emperor on Earth feed on the souls of shiploads of bright young psychic youths so as to sustain his own life-in-death…

  The God-Emperor’s feast of souls was reputed to be a bitter, agonising one for him.

  Ice crawled up Biff’s spine. Here were patterns… of passages, tunnels, caves – and here were other species of patterns too, patterns of subterfuge and semblances.

  Still guarding the rear, Biff was about to voice his thunks when, with a roar, a cyborged Ambull charged along the tunnel from the direction of the ravaged garden.

  It was a giant of an Ambull, a veritable living tank. Improvised armour plates hung from hooks on its hairy, horny barrel of a body. Riding it, strapped into the saddle, an armoured squat war-brother hunched over a heavy bolter. Cables linked the rider’s helmet to the control hump on the beast’s spine. A second heavy bolter, of antique design, had replaced one of the creature’s forearms, and a shuriken catapult the other.

  Shuriken stars whinnied off Biff’s armour. Several bolts impacted on his plastron. A detonation half-spun him around. He felt his buckled armour crimp his flesh within, and blood flow then solidify.

  Grasping a column to steady himself, Biff fired at the dwarf squatting on the thundering cyborg-beast. A bolt shattered the war-brother’s grinning hairy face – and the Ambull passed Biff by, bellowing and blundering, to crash into the central pillar.

  Deprived of its command-mind now that the rider was dead, the beast was savagely confused. Biff swung back to cover the tunnel.

  Click.

  The click of imminent death. The click of an empty boltgun.

  Tossing his useless weapon down, Biff rushed to the frenzied Ambull, which was still trying to push the pillar aside. His power gauntlet tore the mounted heavy bolter loose – his gauntlet, or himself? He wasn’t sure. The beast bucked and kicked but since it seemed to think that its true enemy was that pillar, Biff forebore to poleaxe it. For each movement made his side ache fiercely.

  He thought that his subcutaneous carapace had been quite deeply punctured. Perhaps an inner organ had been ruptured. His visor readout flickered a few red tell-tales, bloody cyphers interposed upon his field of view.

  Pain lanced through him – and he welcomed the pain as an earnest that he was alive, and far from paralysed.

  Swinging round, he sprayed a burst of bolts along the tunnel at the oncoming hearthguard. Percussive detonations cascaded, ricocheting. Lugging the cumbersome weapon, he backed away in the wake of his brothers, noting dully how the gun’s stock was inlaid with tooled silver and how its barrel was studded with round-topped cabochon-cut garnets. Truly, the weapon was part of a treasured war-hoard… How sweetly it would grace a trophy niche in the fortress-monastery…

  His liver was lacerated, he realised, squinting at the phantom diagnostic runes that overlaid the scene.

  Yet that was not especially fatal for a Marine. And pain would only lend him strength.

  YERI SHOULDERED LEX aside with a blocking tackle. A squat sniper was taking aim from a high catwalk…

  They had entered a cavern crowded with engines. Some of these burped and thumped vigorously; others were quiescent or moribund. Iron catwalks angled around the walls: up, down, hardly ever straight. Steaming pipes, the girth of a squat, choked one exit tunnel as if they were hot worms infesting the bowel of some constipated leviathan.

  The little abhuman, in his dingy, red-piped flak-jacket, seemed absurdly diminished as he angled a multi-melta. Its support tripod was clamped to the catwalk. The dwarf’s whole body appeared to be but a mere mottled hand wrapped around the grip of the large weapon – a fleshy appendage to its polished power cell, its ribbed accumulator, its clustered vent-grooved barrels.

  A beam of effulgent heat brushed Yeri’s shoulder, melting his pauldron superficially, spraying effervescing beadlets of liquid metal.

  The main force of that discharge struck an antiquated, dead machine of grinning grilles, fluted coils, and counterbalanced brazen globes. Some worthy ancestor, perhaps, of younger engines still operating in this room, preserved by the superstitious dwarfs for the sake of machine honour…

  Liquefying, the ornate device slumped in upon itself, shrinking into a bubbling, wrinkled scrotum of sintered alloys.

  Swivelling, Yeri fired at the sniper and was satisfied to see the thermionic generator of that heavy weapon rupture. One of his bolts had penetrated that middle chamber. The pivoted barrels jerked upwards, slamming the grip down upon the marksman, who squirmed away howling across the catwalk, clutching for one of his several supplementary handguns.

  A burst from Biff’s captured heavy bolter chewed that high iron eyrie and the ambusher. Staggering at the recoil, the ex-scumnik let his weapon sink. He pressed his damaged armoured flank with his power glove as if to infuse its strength into his wounds.

  “Apologies for bumping you aside, Brother Lex,” shouted Yeri, “Otherwise you’d have been somewhat… slagged off.”

  “Gratia, Frater,” Lex replied sardonically. He used a phrase of the hi
eratic tongue, as though to indicate his personal detachment from those thanks – and maybe also to stress his awareness of the furtive and galling ceremonial being enacted between the two “brothers”.

  “Heat’s so tiresome, isn’t it? Melta-beams… Heat-sinks…” Lex made to slap a fraternal gauntlet upon Yeri’s warped and blistered pauldron.

  Yet Yeri was already ostentatiously scanning the other catwalks, training his almost empty weapon here then there to emphasise his ongoing vigilance on Lex’s behalf.

  HOW YERI’S TATTOOED cheek-runes itched, at long-remembered indignity. Tush, Yeri was almost as proud as Lex himself. Yet at least he wasn’t manic.

  An almighty din began a-booming back along the passage they’d come by. Clashing armour; the bellowing of a goaded Ambull; random boltfire.

  Yeri heard Biff voice the opinion, “We’re being herded, sergeant.”

  “Imperial Fists, herded by dwarfs?” Tightly controlled loathing was evident in the tone of the lamed officer.

  BIFF WAS STILL pressing his punctured side stiffly with his plasteel gauntlet as if he had devised a new form of salute – which might propagate through his plating, poultice-like, into his torn anatomy, into the superhuman snail within the shell.

  “Sir, should we fight our way back through those… scum… try to rejoin our comrades and report? And reload, ’course. This heavy bolter should help clear the way…”

  “Scum” should appeal to the Sergeant’s nanophobia, his antipathy to little neo-men.

  “Report?” jeered Lex. “Report what?”

  “The axed Kark we found, of course,” said Biff. “That’s peculiar.”

  “A route to the rebel lord is what we must report, or nothing!” brayed Lex. “Are we feeling weary, brother? Are we feeling wounded?”

  “It’s nothing vital,” Biff snapped.

  “An injured Fist fights on,” declared Stossen. “I certainly shall. But a Fist thinks too. Why should they ‘herd’ us, as you put it?” he demanded of Biff. “Do you suppose Sagramoso wishes to capture a squad of Fists? Why so? As hostages? That’s ludicrous. To interrogate us about our battle-plan? The plan’s simple: to sweep these warrens and extinguish him. Pah! Why should he wish to capture four Marines? Tell me that!”