one, sir. Wound up. I get it.”
DeViers smiled weakly. He hadn’t meant to make a joke at all, but fine. Let his adjutant think
what he would. Laughing in the face of such desperation made him seem strong in the eyes of
others. Let them think him unfazed by the frustrating turns the expedition had taken.
What lies ahead, he wondered? What obstacle will test me next?
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He was about to find out.
“Vox is flashing, sir,” said Gruber, indicating a blinking green light on the wall-mounted unit
above the general’s left shoulder. “Let me get that for you.”
Even though deViers was closest to the device, he let Gruber take care of the call. It was the
man’s job, and it didn’t do to have the other officers think they could bother their general directly
with every little detail. He had enough on his mind. Over the years, Gruber had learned to screen the
general’s incoming vox-calls with great intuition.
Absently, deViers half-listened as Gruber spoke into the vox-caster’s mouthpiece. Then the
adjutant turned and said, “It’s Colonel Marrenburg, sir. He says his scouts have found the end of the
tunnel.”
DeViers felt his pulse quicken.
“I’ll speak to him,” he said, and accepted the mouthpiece from Gruber, who immediately
returned to his seat and his flask of hot caffeine.
“General deViers, here. Go ahead, colonel.”
“Yes, sir,” said Marrenburg. “I’ve just had it confirmed. About three hundred metres ahead, the
main tunnel levels out. It straightens there, too. I’m told it ends another two hundred metres after
that.”
“I see, colonel. And just how does it end.”
“Well, sir, I’m not sure how to say—”
“Let’s not play guessing games, man. I don’t have the patience.”
Marrenburg’s voice was suddenly brusque as he answered. “My apologies, general. From what I
understand, it opens onto some kind of city, sir. An underground city.”
Of course it does, thought deViers sarcastically. Let’s see how the magos explains this one.
When Gerard Bergen’s Chimera, Pride of Caedus, emerged from the end of the tunnel and into the
huge open space under the mountain, half of the force’s vehicles were already there, the crews
gaping, staring wide-eyed at what lay before them. The other half were still moving down through
the last stretches of the main tunnel. The rearguard would enter within the hour.
Bergen stood in his cupola, turning his head from left to right, taking it all in. The air around him
was thick with exhaust fumes, but they were less dense than they had been in the confines of the
tunnel. There was more space for them to dissipate here. The air pressure had changed. He could
feel it on his skin. It was cooler here, too.
With the vehicles spreading out in an ever-widening perimeter, there was plenty of light, though
not nearly enough to illuminate the cavern’s ceiling or the far walls. Bergen still couldn’t begin to
estimate the size of the excavation. What he did see, however, stole his breath away.
A city of smooth, dark metal stretched out from the mouth of the tunnel into the blackness
beyond. It was a dead city, a city without movement or sound or energy of its own, but a city
nonetheless.
“So this is Dar Laq,” Bergen muttered to himself.
The buildings framed in the headlights of the Cadian vehicles shone back at him. Every single
surface, every corner, every wall, was made of a shimmering, iridescent metal the likes of which
Bergen had never seen before. As his eyes moved from one structure to the next, the colours seemed
to shift and change like sunlight on the surface of an oily pool. It was beautiful in its own way. It
reminded him of a shell he had once found on the south-western shores of the Caducades Sea. He
had been practically an infant back then. The memory had been lost in the recesses of his mind until
this very moment. Suddenly it was as sharp as a high-resolution pictograph.
Troopers were spilling out of trucks and halftracks around his Chimera. The beams from their
torches cut like sabres through the murk as their sergeants led them down alleys and avenues, each
footstep kicking up little puffs of dust. “Safeties off!” he heard one sergeant call out as he passed
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within a few metres of Pride of Caedus. “If there are any bloody xenos here, we’ll be ready for
them.”
Bergen doubted the barking sergeant would find any xenos alive down here. This place was as
dead as the desert they had ridden through to get here. He could feel it. More so, in fact, for there
was life in the desert if one only knew where to look. This place had all the atmosphere of a
mausoleum.
That was changing even as he watched. After the-Throne-knew how many millennia of utter
silence and stillness, Dar Laq was filling with bustle and noise. It seemed an almost sacrilegious
intrusion. Bergen watched the troopers march off until they were lost behind the rows of blocky
alien structures.
Each of the buildings he looked at raised the same questions in his mind. Where were the doors?
Where were the windows? There seemed no obvious access points to any of them.
General deViers had questions, too. Bergen heard him bark out a short order on the vox, and
powerful searchlights came on one at a time, reaching out for the ceiling and the far walls with their
brilliant white beams. For the first time, Bergen saw massive towers standing tall over all the other
structures. He looked up in wonder at the nearest, approximately three hundred metres away. It
recalled to his mind the famous Cadian pylons that protected his home world from the vicious warp
storm known as the Eye of Terror. As an officer-cadet, he had once visited the base of one of the
Cadian pylons, a rare privilege largely forbidden to those of the noncommissioned ranks. He
remembered the aura of power he had sensed around that inexplicable monolith. He had imagined at
the time that some kind of living force resided there, something of incredible energy and potency.
The Cadian pylons and the towers of Dar Laq were certainly both ancient and mysterious, but the
latter exuded no sense of power or presence, only an aura of death and decay, and of a splendour
lost forever to the ages.
The towers looked to be constructed of the same nacreous metal as the lower structures, but
there the similarities ended. They were less blocky, less angular, suggesting that they had been
conceived with a sense of the artistic at least as much as the functional. A few of them were broken,
the outer shells rusting or tearing away, revealing themselves to be stuffed full of what looked like
clockwork on the most massive scale. Great black cogs sat unmoving, frozen in the glare of the
searchlights, teeth bared at the human interlopers. Bergen’s natural curiosity kept throwing up
questions in his mind and it took some effort to quash them. What feats of science or wonders of
sorcery might the creators of Dar Laq have been able to work in their day? It was dangerous to ask,
more dangerous still to actively seek such knowledge. Heresy lurked at the boundaries of such
thinking. It was natural, too, though. It was part of the human condition to revel in discovery,
despite the warnings of the Imperial Creed.
The tech-priests were guiltier than anyone of that. Bergen imagined they would be readying their
bands of slaves and servitors to go out and search for answers. They must have planned all this from
the very beginning. Had they ever intended to help find The Fortress of Arrogance? Or did their real
interest in Golgotha begin and end with Dar Laq?
He watched the white discs thrown out by the searchlights as they climbed the far wall, and his
jaw dropped open. He had the measure of the cavern now, and it was vast, easily two to three
kilometres across at its widest, and a kilometre high where the cavern walls curved inwards to meet
at a single point. Every inch of the walls had been worked by alien hands. There were alcoves within
alcoves, pillared walkways, exquisitely wrought galleries of metal and so much more, all with the
same sharp, angular aesthetic of the ground-level buildings. How many had lived here? How had
they fashioned such a place? And why had they chosen to live down here inside the mountain,
shunning the light and the sky above?
As the searchlights reached for the ceiling of the chamber, Bergen gaped. There above him hung
the most incredible feature of all, perhaps a score of inverted black ziggurat-type structures linked
by metal gantries and platforms. They seemed to be floating in the air.
150
They can’t be, he told himself.
He dropped back down into his Chimera and pulled his magnoculars from their stowage box.
Returning to his cupola, he pressed the magnoculars to his eyes and looked up again. It was only
when he squinted hard through the lenses that he realised they truly were floating as they had no
right to.
“Emperor protect us,” he muttered. “What the devil is going on here?”
A sudden burst of loud static from his vox-bead almost made him drop his magnoculars. A
sharp, familiar voice said, “Bergen, come in. I’m calling a session of my senior officers at once.
Meet me at the rear of my Chimera in three minutes. I’m calling on the tech-priests to account for all
this. It’s about time we had some blasted answers.”
“I’d say so, sir,” said Bergen, thinking he had a few questions of his own.
Wulfe didn’t like this one damned bit, and neither did any of his crew. Tanks didn’t belong
underground. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. What if there was a cave-in or something? He wasn’t
claustrophobic. No tanker would last very long with that particular affliction, but something about
this whole place made his scar itch like crazy. No human hands had built it.
Damned xenos, he thought. Nowhere is safe from them.
Things could have been worse. Emperor protect all the footsloggers who’d gone off down those
dark alleyways looking for signs of alien occupation, and he wouldn’t have swapped places with the
Sentinel pilots and Hornet riders that were out mapping the cavern’s extents, but sitting and waiting
wasn’t much fun either.
He and his crew, like most of the other tankers, had got out to stretch their legs after the long
journey up the mountainside and down through the tunnel. Wulfe still felt stiff, but he tried to shake
it off. Metzger was sipping water from one of the jerrycans, while Beans and Siegler were standing
by the front of the tank speculating about what they saw.
Wulfe heard footsteps behind him.
“Your lot doing all right, Oskar?” asked Lieutenant van Droi, stopping right in front of him.
Perhaps it was just the quality of the light, but Wulfe thought the lieutenant looked terrible. He
had never seen him like this before, so gaunt and tinged with red. His concern must have shown on
his face, because van Droi suddenly stood up a little straighter, fixed his cap lower on his brow and
said, “You don’t look so hot yourself, you know.”
Wulfe winced. “I’m sure I don’t, lieutenant. Sorry.”
Van Droi waved the apology off.
Wulfe gestured around at the strange metal buildings. He didn’t like the angles, the proportions,
the lines. They didn’t look like any Imperial buildings he had ever seen, and that made them wrong.
“What the devil’s going on, sir?” he asked. “We weren’t told anything about underground cities
and alien races, excepting orks, that is.”
Van Droi nodded. “No, I wasn’t told about any of this either. To be honest, Oskar, I don’t think
the higher-ups expected this. General deViers was furious when The Fortress of Arrogance wasn’t
where it should have been.”
“Is it supposed to be down here somewhere? Or are we just improvising?”
Van Droi frowned. “According to the tech-priests, their little ritual in the valley was some kind
of communion with the Machine-God. They claim this route will take us directly to the objective.
The general’s buying it. He wants us to push on, despite the circumstances.”
“You ever met a general that didn’t want that?”
Van Droi grinned. “Not that I remember, no.”
When Wulfe spoke again, he was suddenly serious. “Listen, sir. I have to ask you something. I
hope you won’t take offence.”
“Sounds ominous.”
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“It’s about Palmeros.”
Van Droi looked immediately uncomfortable, but he said, “Go on.”
“We were talking about it in the officer’s mess back in Balkar. You remember, sir. The day we
lost Strieber and Kohl…”
“The canyon,” said Van Droi, not meeting Wulfe’s gaze. “Lugo’s Ditch.”
“Right,” said Wulfe. “Well, sir, things happened there… Things that I couldn’t come to terms
with at the time. I’m afraid I omitted them from my report, sir. I’m not sure if—”
“We don’t need to do this, Oskar,” van Droi interrupted. “I’ve never pushed you on what exactly
happened out there. If you hadn’t omitted certain things, I would have done it for you. I’ve seen
some things in my time, let me tell you, things that beggared belief. High Command doesn’t thank
you for reporting things like that.”
Wulfe knew van Droi was being deliberately vague, trying to offer him a nice safe exit from the
topic, but he had already committed himself.
“I saw the ghost of Dolphus Borscht in Lugo’s Ditch, sir. I saw him standing on the highway as
real as you are right now. He told me to stop the tank. And if I hadn’t listened to him, my crew and I
would be dead right now.”
Finally, it was out. The words hung in the air like ghosts themselves, hovering between the two
men.
“Damn it,” hissed van Droi. “Don’t ever say that out loud. You want other people to hear?”
“Did you know, sir?” Wulfe demanded.
“Of course, I knew, Oskar. I’m not a total idiot. It wasn’t hard to put it all together. But for
Throne’s sake, you’ve got to keep it to yourself, man. If the commissar ever finds out…”
“Someone would have to tell him first, sir. Someone like Corporal Lenck, perhaps.”
“Lenck?” asked van Droi. “Are you saying he knows?”
“I can’t be sure,” said Wulfe. “Just something he said to me last time we clashed.”
Van Droi actually looked hurt for a fraction of a second, but he recovered well. “He didn’t find
out from me, sergeant, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Wulfe shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking that, sir. Not really. But I had to ask.”
“Listen, Oskar, Lenck might be less of a problem if you hadn’t started some kind of damned
vendetta with him the moment he joined the regiment. If you’ve got something on him, something
