The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,76

It didn’t matter how many we tore down; within hours, hundreds more would reappear.

‘Target approaches, colonel,’ I voxed, watching the massive gates of an old Munitorum works emerge out of the smoggy haze.

‘Prep for disembark,’ he passed on to his sergeants, and the Valkyries dropped even lower.

Urbo and I had formed something of an effective partnership. Once his awe of me had dissipated a little, I discovered I could rely on him to follow a command. Once he’d witnessed me slaughter in the Emperor’s name, he discovered that I could be a killer after his own heart. It is surprising, I find, what connections can be made in adversity.

The gates to the facility were broken, and on either side of them thick bulwarks soared into the flickering air. The entire place was a labyrinth of smelters, forges and assembly lines, built aeons ago when Terra had presumed to manufacture things for itself, afterwards used to recycle defunct military equipment too high-value to destroy and too low-value to export off-world.

Our transports growled under the low lintel, plunging us into a penumbral world of muffled echoes. I was first out, crunching down onto a wet floor strewn with swarf. The rest of Urbo’s men piled out from hovering Valkyries, then sprinted across the resounding floor of the chamber, their lasgun-mounted lumens flashing in the dark.

The place was like some colossal mausoleum, with a high, empty roof that disappeared into gloom. They had serviced Militarum super-heavies in here, I had been informed, and there were still chain-lifters hanging amid the blown shells of dormant machine-clusters. It stank of sour oil and rotting metal.

I could already hear our enemies. They no longer made any attempt to hide their presence in those places, but conducted their depravities as if they were safely ensconced on some world far from our scrutiny. The fact they dared it at all disgusted me – a blasphemy I could no longer show indulgence to.

So I ran hard, delving deeper into the echoing depths. Empty cage-lifts hung like lanterns in the dark, rusting quietly over ­abyssal shafts. From ahead I could smell the chemical stench of burning and hear the roar of the crowds. I saw cloaked figures scuttle into the gloom, but ignored them – the real prey was ahead, congregating, organising, making ready to surge out against us. Urbo’s troops kept up as best they could, but they soon fell behind. I pulled ahead, driven by my zeal to end this, running faster and deeper into those stinking foundations.

I broke into what had once been an assembly hall. The conveyer belts were still in place, some with the carcasses of battle tanks lurking like monuments. The space was filled now with swaying masses, all clad in the ragged remains of their work-shifts. It was a shrine to corruption, that place – human bodies hung from chains locked into the distant ceiling, twisting amid foetid air, their eyes gouged out and their hands skinless. Huge eight-pointed stars had been graven into the walls with the facility’s own machine tools, then daubed with the residue of slaughter. On top of the smell of engine lubricants I could now detect human aromas – blood, sweat, desperation.

The mob of faces was turned away from me and angled up towards a Mechanicus command pulpit – a hovering mass of intricate metalwork, studded with cables and clattering with extended mechadendrites. That thing had the capacity for perhaps twenty tech-priests, but was now crawling with ten times that number of occupants. They were scratching and clawing at one another, swarming like rats over it, shinning up the cables and clambering towards the summit.

Atop that pulpit was a single priest in ripped Ecclesiarchy robes, though the old sigils of the Ministorum had been excised and replaced by crude octeds. The priest held aloft a still-shivering heart in two blood-slicked hands, offering it up like a benediction. Bodies of Imperial troops from a hundred different regiments lay strewn over the conveyer approaches, all with their chests ripped open and their ribs glistening whitely. Many more, still living, had been corralled into makeshift cages hewn from the rusting hulls of the tanks, ready to be dragged for sacrifice by the hordes who bayed around them.

All pretence at sanity had gone. The thousands of souls who jeered and cried out looked barely human any more. Their skin was white, their eyes ringed with black, their tongues a virulent red. Bleeding tattoos had been carved onto their faces with blunt knives,