The Silent War Read online

  Hassan listened cautiously. He didn’t understand what Malcador meant when he said the Emperor was ‘gone’. He was not. Surely, He was not. Where would He have gone to? Hassan wanted to ask, but Malcador kept on talking, just as if the absence of the Master of Mankind from the eternal seat of power were a trivial thing, hardly worth lingering over.

  ‘This is our debate – He believes that the task of a ruler is to make himself obsolete, so that his people will replace him when they are mature enough. I disagree. I do not think we will ever be mature enough for that. I believe that no one but He will ever be strong enough to hold mankind together, even for a moment. He is quite exceptional, you know, perhaps in ways He doesn’t even understand Himself.’

  Malcador looked sidelong at Hassan. His gaze was shrewd. ‘So what do you think, Khalid? Whom would you side with, Him or me?’

  Hassan took a deep breath. He didn’t know whether to be flattered to be asked, or insulted.

  ‘Do not hesitate,’ warned the Sigillite. ‘Choose.’

  ‘I was going to say…’ began Hassan, haltingly. ‘I was going to say that the Emperor will lead us forever. That is what we are taught. What I believe.’

  Malcador nodded. ‘Well said. You are with me, then. And you are right, of course – He has such high aspirations for our species. Too high, perhaps, for He does not always appreciate His indispensability. But will He be around forever? That is the great question. That is the current test.’

  The Sigillite brought his hands together, linking his fingertips. He seemed distracted.

  ‘The war for the throne has already started,’ he said. ‘Even now I feel the eye of the Arch-traitor upon us, pressing against my mind like a cancer. I hear the voices of his brothers, fawning over him, plotting with him and against him. I remember how they were, each of them, in conception and in reality. I see them as they are now, and the withering of their souls pains my heart. They have unleashed forces they cannot control. They have been lied to, and not only by the enemy. It breaks me to witness it.’

  Hassan didn’t know whether to keep listening. It suddenly felt like he was intruding into some private grief.

  ‘Do you know,’ murmured the Sigillite, ‘out of them all, if I could have saved just one, it would have been Lorgar? Even though he despises me, and even though I was… wounded by him. He was such a fragile soul, so subtle and ready to bruise. We might have handled him better. Did we make mistakes with some of them? Surely, we did. Though I fear the time to correct them has now long passed.’

  Hassan watched, he waited. Little of what the Sigillite said made sense to him. He wondered if that was part of the ordeal or some convoluted means to catching him out. If so, it seemed so contrived, so unnecessary. Crueller than it needed to be.

  The Sigillite looked up at him, a tolerant expression on his face. ‘I can feel your mind wandering. You think these things have little to do with you. You are wrong. They have everything to do with you. They have everything to do with all of us.’

  Hassan felt impatience rise within him. He wanted to be dutiful, but had no idea what his duty demanded.

  ‘I do not know why I am here, lord,’ he confessed.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Malcador, nodding. ‘But you will.’ He pulled himself to his feet again, hauling his staff into line. ‘Follow me.’

  Hassan rose. ‘Where are we going?’

  Malcador paused for a moment. ‘To the catacombs,’ he said. ‘Where all this started. Prepare yourself – it’s a long way down.’

  It wasn’t a long way down. Hassan leapt through the gap, landing hard on a dirty rockcrete floor a metre below the shattered doorway. He swept his rifle around the space, ready to fire. As he did so, he heard the thud and gasp of Farouk landing beside him.

  ‘You’re up to this?’ he asked, surprised.

  Farouk grunted. ‘You and me, just as always. Let’s get it done.’

  The chamber was small – less than ten metres across, with a low ceiling and walls cut crudely from stone blocks. It was deserted, and smelled as musty as a tomb.

  Only one item stood in the centre of the room: a cargo transit crate made of ribbed adamantium and bolted to an iron pallet. It wasn’t particularly large – two metres long, a metre tall and wide – but it was shielded by an energy field that made the air hum and sent lurid light dancing across the chamber.

  ‘Signals closing,’ reported Farouk.

  ‘How long have we got?’ asked Hassan, stowing his weapon and approaching the casket.

  ‘A minute. No more.’

  Hassan shook his head. Not much time to work. ‘They’re quick to recover. Damn them.’

  He retrieved four disruptor beacons from his armour cache and placed them carefully, one at each corner of the casket. Then he stood back, checking the alignment carefully before activating the interference wave.

  The air seemed to shudder in front of him, rippling like broken water. He felt his stomach lurch uncomfortably. The energy field resisted for a moment, crackling and flexing, before giving out with a hard snap.

  Hassan moved over to the crate and attached anti-grav plates, four to each side. The plates clamped on tight and flickered into life, blinking red in the shadows.

  ‘Air defences down yet?’ he asked as he worked, relying on Farouk to get updates from the other two squads.

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Farouk.

  ‘And site shielding?’ Hassan asked, fixing the final plate.

  ‘All down. Lifter’s clear to approach.’

  Hassan glanced at his chronometer. It would still be close. ‘Call it in, then,’ he ordered.

  He activated the anti-grav plates. The transit crate broke its shackles and rose from the ground, hovering at knee-height. It was heavy, and Hassan heard the labouring whine of the repulsor fields as they struggled to keep it aloft.

  Farouk limped ahead, pulling himself awkwardly back up through the breach. Two pairs of hands reached down to drag the crate through the gap. It rose upwards shakily, buoyed by the plates, and Hassan followed it.

  Once regrouped in the corridor, the four of them moved quickly back through the bunker – Hassan leading, Farouk bringing up the rear and breathing heavily. The crate went between them, humming and growling like a surly bovine.

  Hassan regarded the thick-plated cover. The container was the kind used in the holds of void-going craft – heavy, banded, designed to resist hard impacts.

  ‘It’s a weapon,’ said Farouk, reading his mind.

  ‘What did you expect?’ replied Hassan, pushing the pace. ‘We’re at war.’

  ‘They were trying to get it off-world. Must be worth something. We get out with this, and someone’s going to be very upset indeed.’

  Hassan smiled, despite himself.

  ‘Keep your eyes locked on it,’ he said. ‘This casing gets hit, and Throne knows what’ll happen.’

  They drew close to the acid-burned entrance.

  ‘We’re going to have to fight our way out, captain,’ said Farouk, looking over the auspex readings a final time.

  ‘Expected nothing less,’ Hassan replied calmly, checking the ammo counter on his weapon. He watched the familiar target locators swim across his helm display. ‘Pick your targets, and watch for the lifter.’

  The four of them emerged from the melted blast doors and hunkered down in the wreckage. Hassan rested his gun barrel on a jutting spar of plasteel. The casket hovered alongside him, barely protected.

  By now the whole compound was burning, lit up vividly by raging fires on all sides. Palls of thick smoke rose from the destroyed shield generator and anti-aircraft turrets. As Hassan swept his eyes across the scene, he could see members of the other two squads fighting their way to his position.

  The sharp ping and snap of las-blasts cut up the ground around him – the enemy troops beginning to find their range. Hassan cur
sed, opening up in return fire, pressing his body closer to the bunker’s edge.

  ‘So then,’ murmured Farouk, aiming his rifle. ‘Where is it?’

  Before Hassan could reply he heard the rumbling echo of heavy engines. The dust around him began to swirl, and he heard enemy troops on the walls shouting panicked warnings to one another.

  ‘Right on time,’ he said.

  A second later, and the blocky silhouette of the Army lifter swept across the perimeter, churning up more smoke and sending it billowing away. Wing-mounted guns opened fire, sweeping the exposed parapets clear of the remaining sentries and blasting the rockcrete edges into flying shards.

  ‘Go, go, go!’ roared Hassan, breaking clear of the bunker wreckage. Farouk staggered along with him, as did the hovering transit crate. The other squads leapt from cover and raced across the compound floor.

  The lifter swung low over the ground, its four angled engines hammering the earth beneath them on a carpet of driving thrust. The main hatch swung down with a hiss of pistons, exposing a red-lit crew compartment within.

  The guards responded, aiming their fire upwards at the hovering craft. Their las-blasts fizzed against the armour plates, some of them biting. The lifter rocked drunkenly, buffeted by the rain of small-arms fire, holding position only with difficulty.

  ‘Faster!’ shouted Hassan, watching his men sprint towards the waiting ramp.

  He was last to make it, hauling the transit crate behind him, dragging it into the maw of the waiting cargo bay.

  ‘We’re taking hits,’ warned Farouk, wincing as he strapped himself in. His armour was still damp with blood.

  ‘Take us up!’ Hassan called over the vox to the lifter’s pilot, slamming home the last of the docking clamps.

  The engines mounted in a crescendo of downdraught, pulling the gunship away and bearing it aloft. The embarkation ramp swung closed, sealing them in. Muffled noises of gunfire faded away, replaced by the dull thunder of the thrusters switching alignment. Hassan felt the lifter gathering speed, powering upwards and veering into the trajectory that would take it away from Gyptus and out of danger.

  He leaned back against the walls of the crew compartment, breathing heavily. For a moment he did nothing else.

  He looked around. Out of the original three squads, only nine men had made it out. The survivors wearily braced against the shuddering walls of the lifter as it climbed. None of them looked triumphant – the atmosphere was decidedly muted.

  In the centre of the bay stood the object of the mission. The transit crate was undamaged. It hadn’t taken a single hit. It stood between the two ranks of men, dark and heavy like an outsized coffin. Lights strobed along its ridged surface. It looked almost belligerent.

  Hassan staggered over to it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Farouk, looking at him with alarm.

  Hassan began to deactivate the locking mechanism.

  ‘We lost men for this,’ he said coldly. ‘I have a right to see what they died for.’

  Hassan saw Imperial courtiers decked out in robes of vermillion and saffron-yellow, scholars with pale faces and work-curved spines, Tech-priests wearing golden facemasks with glowing clusters of green eyes. Each room had a different smell, a different sound, a different ambience. They were distillations of humanity, those rooms – variegated snapshots of what the species had become.

  Hassan found them mesmerising. He wanted to linger, to study them, to ask what tasks they were engaged in.

  Malcador seemed to read his mind. ‘Ignore them,’ he said. ‘They are ephemera compared to what I will show you.’

  They kept walking. The lights and splendour faded away. Hassan and the Sigillite descended through levels, travelling down ancient elevator shafts in sleet-grey cages hung from chains the width of a man’s waist.

  It got warmer. Uncomfortably so. Hassan began to have the sense of something vast and ancient pressing down upon him. He saw the ungilded roots of the mountain beneath the pooled light of bronze-rimmed lumens, dark with streaks of granite and feldspar.

  ‘When we reach our destination, remain close to me,’ warned the Sigillite. ‘While you are with me none will challenge you. Stray from my side and you will die. Do not be fooled by what you see. Not all the sentries down here are visible.’

  Hassan said nothing, but nodded.

  Eventually they reached the bottom, the very heart of the mountain. The cage ground to a halt and the doors slid open. A vaulted cavern stretched away from them, its floor smooth and polished like onyx, its vast emptiness broken by great pillars of hewn stone. It yawned away into the gloom of the underworld, as quiet and eerie as the upper levels had been bustling.

  ‘Immense,’ Hassan murmured to himself. ‘And under my feet the whole time. How could such a place be hidden? How many know of this?’

  Only a few figures moved across the glassy floors: senior Mechanicum adepts in blood-red robes, silent stony-faced women wearing ornate suits of battle-armour and long fur-lined cloaks, towering sentinels clad in baroque plates of gold and carrying force-staves that hummed with fierce energies. These last were, he knew, the Legio Custodes – the Emperor’s own. Hassan found himself sweating again.

  The Sigillite walked out across the cavern floor, the metal butt of his staff clanking as he moved. None of the others acknowledged him – they seemed preoccupied. Those whose faces were visible betrayed expressions of resolve. Some bore signs of extreme fatigue.

  Hassan followed. The whole place was almost unbearably strange. An austere, murmuring vault of shadows locked away beneath the foundations of the world.

  ‘What is this place?’ Hassan whispered, finding it surprisingly hard to keep up with the old man’s pace.

  ‘The beginning,’ said the Sigillite. ‘And perhaps the end.’

  They kept moving. Hassan saw branching tunnels leading off deeper into the mountain. Some were little more than man-sized doorways, some were gaping avenues large enough for a Titan to pass through. He smelled the acrid tang of incense and felt a seismic rumbling from far beneath his feet. Every so often the ground would shudder, as if rocked by distant quakes, though none of the silent figures around them seemed to react.

  ‘They are so subdued,’ said Hassan, not meaning to speak. His thoughts seemed to spill out of his mouth, as if eager to break the oppressive silence.

  The Sigillite paused to consider that. His head tilted as he observed the figures around him. ‘How do you wish them to be?’ he asked at length. ‘They dwell in the forgotten halls of gods, but each has his task. They cannot pause to reflect. None of us can.’ He smiled thinly. ‘That, of course, may be the origin of all of this. We never had time to reflect. A fine epitaph, for an overbold species.’

  He started to walk again, and Hassan hurried along in his wake.

  At length, the Sigillite paused before an opening in the cavern wall. The smell of chemicals bled out of the gap. Twenty sigils had been carved over a low granite lintel, most only half visible in the shadows. Hassan made out a wolf’s head, a snake, an angel, and other more obscure devices. It looked like two of the symbols had been scratched out or had worn away.

  The Sigillite studied them for a moment. His face was sombre.

  ‘That was where we planned them,’ he said. ‘The archives are still there – His notes, the first studies. Some of the early gene-banks might still be there too, for all I know. Left behind when we created the main facility. Sad, really.’

  Hassan looked down the long tunnel. He couldn’t see far. ‘Is that where we’re going?’ he asked.

  The Sigillite shook his head. His staff started to clank again. ‘No one goes there now.’

  They kept moving. More archways passed by, each one sunk deep in the cavern’s permanent gloom. As the sheer scale of the underground realm became apparent, Hassan began to feel a strange sense of regret. The entire complex
was evidently the work of many centuries, a subterranean city hidden from the eyes of the world and buried under miles of solid rock. So much of it was abandoned, left to moulder amid the echoes like the graves of ancient kings. So much else was unfinished.

  Something had gone badly wrong.

  Hassan wondered, where was the Emperor in all of this? Did He still tread these halls? The very thought of it sent cold shivers running down his back. For the first time Hassan began to wonder if worse things existed than civil war against a renegade Warmaster. If those things slumbered in semi-ruined chambers buried deep in Terra’s crust, then he was not sure that he wished to uncover them.

  ‘We are here,’ said the Sigillite abruptly, stopping before a great iron-bound doorway. It was spiked and padlocked, like the entrance to some torture chamber of the age-shrouded past.

  Hassan looked at it and barely suppressed a shudder. ‘We’re going in?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Malcador. ‘First, tell me how you failed.’

  Hassan reached for the locking pins and pulled them back. Once the seals had been broken they withdrew easily.

  Farouk and the others said nothing, but watched from around the shuddering edge of the lifter’s crew compartment.

  Hassan unclipped the final hooks and the lid shifted in his hands. The top plate ran the length of the crate – it was as thick as his hand. Hassan pushed his fingers under it and eased it up gently. As he did so, he smelled old dust sighing from the gap. A first twinge of unease ran through him.

  He pushed the lid further back. A single bulky object lay within the crate, bound with what looked like hessian sacking.

  He took a knife from his boot and started to cut. Even once he’d seen what was inside he kept cutting. He didn’t stop until every scrap of sacking was peeled back and hacked away, just to make sure.

  At the end, he stood straight, gazing down at his handiwork.

  He felt sick, light-headed. He reached out to steady himself.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Farouk.

  Hassan couldn’t reply immediately. A sense of painful emptiness fell over him, choking off a response. When he did speak, his voice was strained.