‘Better hurry,’ I said, ‘it won’t take them long to climb half a dozen levels.’
‘But they’re not climbing,’ the cogboy put in. ‘Look.’
His instrumentation made no more sense to me than it had done the last time I looked, but Yail seemed able to read it without too much trouble. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said. ‘Can you transfer this to the hololith?’
The cogboy nodded, and a moment later contact icons began to appear, clustered in the lower levels of the schematic. ‘Best I can do,’ he said.
‘It’s good enough,’ I assured him, and turned to Yail. ‘They’re in the plasma vents.’
‘Some of them, anyway,’ the Space Marine agreed. ‘I doubt many will fit.’
‘They won’t have to,’ I reminded him, the picture of the huge serpentine burrower I’d found myself standing on the first time I’d visited the cryogenitorium fresh in my mind. ‘The trygon will leave them a tunnel to follow.’
‘Why are they heading for the surface?’ Jurgen asked. ‘They usually want to attack us as quick as they can.’
‘Because there’s more prey to be had outside,’ I said, with a sudden flare of realisation, ‘and the ones attacking us are just as eager to kill the bioship node. We’ll keep for both of them.’ Which was hardly a comforting thought in the long term, but if it gave us a respite now, I wasn’t going to argue.
‘There’s the first one,’ Jurgen said, returning to the window and looking down at the landscape below. Ignoring the sudden assault on my sinuses which joining him entailed, I stood next to him, and followed the direction of his grubby forefinger. As I did so, something fast and scuttling flung aside the grating it had just ripped from the nearest vent, and leapt at the unprotected back of the gun servitor still doggedly guarding it from the encroaching swarm. The construct fell in a flurry of slashing blows, flesh, bone and metal parting like morning mist, and its slayer bounded off into the darkness. ‘’Stealer, you reckon?’
‘Could be,’ I said, as a dozen more bioforms swarmed out of the narrow opening, and followed their fellow. A brood of termagants, outnumbering them at least two to one, and being herded by one of the hulking warrior forms, turned their fleshborers on them, bringing the first few down, then the purestrains were among them, slashing and tearing at their prey.
‘Structural breach,’ the cogboy said, and for one terrifying moment I thought he meant that the swarm below had changed their minds and decided to come after us instead. But the icons on the hololith were moving out, beyond the subterranean boundaries of the shrine.
‘The burrowers are loose,’ Jurgen remarked, as though commenting on the weather, and a moment or two later I saw something monstrously huge surfacing within the heart of the swarm, knocking uncountable scuttling horrors from their feet. Some fell into its gaping maw, others were mashed to paste beneath its gargantuan coils, then it was gone again, leaving only an eddy of disorientated abominations on the surface to mark its passing.
‘They seem to be targeting the synapse creatures,’ Yail said, and I nodded.
‘Just the same tactics we’d employ,’ I agreed, although the two swarms seemed able to exploit one another’s vulnerabilities with an instinctive speed and precision we could only gasp at. ‘But this can’t go on for long.’
‘It can’t,’ the Adeptus Astartes sergeant agreed. ‘We just have to hope that the loser weakens the victor sufficiently to tip the odds in our favour.’
‘It’ll have to tip ’em a long way to keep this place secure with little more than a mob of cogboys waving sharpened sticks,’ I said, ‘even with you and your men to lead them[171].’
‘And you,’ Yail reminded me.
‘We’re just prolonging the inevitable,’ I said, switching the hololith back to the overall strategic view to emphasise the point. ‘So long as that bioship fragment is here, they’ll just keep on coming.’ The scrimmage in orbit seemed just as desperate and bloody, the hive fleet pressing the Navy hard, although at least it looked as though no more spores were falling. I switched the view again, to the region surrounding us. ‘There are more ’nids inbound all the time.’ I zoomed the image, taking in a cluster of contact icons scuttling towards us as fast as their legs could carry them. ‘This group could have joined the assault on the main hive, but it’s coming here instead.’
‘We need reinforcements,’ Yail said, scanning the datafeed for any unengaged units,