upwards, get as close as we can to our goal before the enemy knows we’re here.”
So far, Grayle had seen precious little of the enemy — just a few shapes flitting across high
walkways, and at one point a cloaked figure slumped in the gutter, singing to herself. That changed
as he guided his truck around a tight corner and was confronted by at least twenty of them.
It looked like they had been celebrating here, among the ruins. There were bottles everywhere.
The revelry had died down now, though, and most of the cultists were lying around listlessly. That
was, until they clapped eyes on the new arrivals. A half-hearted cheer went up at the sight of what
the drunken cultists took to be friends, partners in their recent victory — and they rushed to
surround the truck, banging on its sides and rocking it on its suspension.
Grayle fought down his natural disgust, forced a tight smile onto his lips and gave a thumbs-up
sign through the window. Beside him, Barreski tried to do likewise, but his smile didn’t quite reach
his eyes. The cultists were probably too far gone to notice anyway, thought Grayle. The real
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problems would arise if they were to open the truck’s back door and find a squad of Valhallan Ice
Warriors seated inside.
He had to get away from here — but the cultists were in front of him too, slowing him to a crawl
lest he crush three or four of them beneath his wheels. The temptation to do just that was almost
irresistible. However, he kept his cool, and was soon through the crowd, able to pull away from
them.
A moment later, Barreski sat bolt upright and cried, “Stop! Stop here!” And Grayle stepped hard
on the brakes, although he couldn’t see the reason for the urgency.
Barreski hopped out of the cab, and scurried over to the corpse of an Imperial Guard officer.
Grayle almost laughed with relief. There was no danger, his fellow tanker had just noticed a
salvageable piece of kit and hadn’t been able to resist it. He peeled a metal gauntlet from the dead
Guardsman’s hand, and his face was alight with enthusiasm as he climbed back into his seat with it.
“Nice glove,” said Grayle. “What’s it supposed to be?”
“A power fist, of course,” said Barreski, sounding surprised that his comrade didn’t know. “You
put this on your arm, and it generates an energy field, lets you punch with the strength of ten men. It
doesn’t seem too badly damaged, either. The casing is a little scorched, that’s all. Never used one
before, but I’ve seen them in action. I’m pretty sure I can work out how to activate it.”
“Activate it?” said Grayle. “You can barely even lift it!”
“Once this thing is working,” said Barreski, “it’ll lift itself.”
At that moment, knuckles rapped on the partition behind them, a reminder from their colonel
that they had a deadline. Grayle started up the truck again, and guided it into an area of relatively
untouched streets, where the going was a little easier and cover more plentiful. The habitats of the
lower-level hive-dwellers rose up around them, rows of tiny windows stretching to the roof.
They made good progress for a couple of hours — but eventually, inevitably, they ran into more
cultists. The further they went, the more they saw, no matter how many detours Grayle took to avoid
them. Their comings and goings appeared to be centred around a large, black building. It was
obviously a manufactorum, and its great steaming chimneys signified that it was in use.
He performed a U-turn, heading back into the dark residential sector. He pulled up in the
shadows just out of range of a sputtering light, and when Barreski asked him why, he explained,
“There are just a few too many heretics out there for my liking. Someone’s bound to notice us soon,
and start asking questions.”
He had been intending to consult Colonel Steele, to ask his permission to abandon the truck. He
was surprised to find his comrades already disembarking onto the street.
“I think you’re right, Grayle,” Steele said — and Grayle realised that, thanks to his augmented
senses, he had been well aware of everything that was happening outside the vehicle, had probably
heard its driver’s every word. “It’s far too much of a risk to go through that crowd. It’s time we
headed upwards.”
It was Palinev who found the lifter.
On Gavotski’s orders, the Ice Warriors had spread out in search of a way up to the hive’s higher
levels. Creeping down an unlit street, Palinev had found himself uncomfortably close to the
manufactorum that Grayle had described. He had seen cultists thronging in the lit area before it, but
so long as he kept close to the wall they couldn’t see him — and there had been a ladder in front of
him.
He had climbed it carefully, disappointed to find that it led only to a high bridge. He had decided
to scout along it anyway — but before he could do so, his attention had been drawn to the scene laid
out beneath him.
The manufactorum had no roof. This appeared to be by design rather than the result of battle
damage, as all six of its walls were whole. Palinev was looking down into an enormous, round vat
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filled with what he could only describe as liquid fire. Suspended above this were a number of thick
chains, attached to pulley systems, many of them trailing into the vat itself-and surrounding the vat
were hundreds of cultists, cheering and chanting while some of their number operated the levers of
squat grey machines in precise, arcane sequences.
Palinev could feel the heat of the fire, but that wasn’t the only thing that made his throat dry.
This, then, was the Chaos war machine at work, extracting iron from Cressida’s fertile ore as the
Imperium had done before it, using foul practices to fashion that iron into weapons, armour, vehicles
of destruction. Cressida had fallen, but its occupiers were already equipping themselves for the next
conquest.
The lifter doors were tucked around the corner of a narrow walkway, out of sight of the evil
below. The summoning rune was lit, so Palinev pressed it and took cover as, with a grinding and a
screeching of gears, the cab rose from what sounded like it must have been the lowest level of the
underhive. The lifter was functional, and empty, so Palinev returned to the others to report his
discovery, being sure to keep low as he crossed the bridge again.
A few minutes later, the nine Ice Warriors packed themselves into the cramped cab, and Steele
activated one of the highest runes on its wall.
The journey upward took an age. The wall runes lit in sequence as they passed each of the hive’s
hundred-plus levels. Palinev was uncomfortably aware, as he was sure the others were, that were
anyone to hear their noisy approach, were they to stop the lifter for any reason, then its occupants
would be sitting ducks.
His heart sank as they bumped to a halt and, although the doors failed to open, the cab was filled
with a soft but insistent chime.
Gavotski sighed. “I was afraid of this. We can’t go any higher without an access code. It’s to
keep the underhive dwellers from the higher levels.”
“Let me,” said Barreski. He produced a knife, and inserted its blade into a vertical seam beside
the runes. With some expert manipulation, he was able to flip open a section of the wall to reveal a
jumble of wires. Palinev gasped as his comrade cavalierly plunged his hands into them.
Barreski pulled on several wires, tearing them from their mountings, seeming not to care as the
machine-spirits spat their disapproval. He grinned as the chiming sound cut out and the lifter began
to rise again.
“A little trick I picked up as a boy,” he said.
They reached their destination at last, and the doors rumbled open, allowing nine grateful soldiers to
spill out onto a wide, empty street.
The contrast with the ground floor was extreme. Although the Ice Warriors were still surrounded
by buildings, there were open walkways and squares in between, into which some natural light fell
from translucent panels in the hive’s roof some ten levels above them. Below, the architecture had
been strictly utilitarian, but up here there were statues and fluted columns and fountains and
gargoyles.
Many of the buildings sported eagle crests over their doorways — administrative offices — but
Barreski could also see an apartment block with wide windows opening onto balconies.
Not that Chaos hadn’t left its mark here too. Many of the walls had been defaced with hateful
sigils, most of the buildings looted and some burned out. And the air was cold, far colder than it had
been below — almost as cold as it had been outside.
Steele had found something: a rectangular, white-framed data panel, mounted on a free-standing,
pivoting base. He motioned Barreski to join him at it, and had him confirm that it was a public
terminal. The interface was designed to be accessible, the inlaid runes simple to interpret, and
Barreski was soon able to punch up a plan of the hive, and to show Steele how to select more
detailed views of each of its levels and sectors. Then he watched in fascination as the colonel
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scrolled through map after map, hardly pausing at some long enough to read their labels, but —
Barreski felt sure — somehow committing the details of each one to his augmented memory.
“Spaceport,” Steele muttered, as he lingered briefly over one map. “That’s good to know. Could
be a way out of here for us, if we’re lucky.”
“No mention of an Ice Palace though, sir?” asked Barreski.
“I wouldn’t have expected one. I should think the Ice Palace is a recent addition, something
Mangellan has had built for himself.”
“It was Gavotski who suggested sending someone further upwards, to the roof of one of the
taller buildings. We must be close to the centre of the hive,” he said. “If the palace is on this level, it
should be visible from up there. If not, then we’ll know we’re wasting our time here.”
Palinev volunteered to be the scout, of course. Everyone was surprised when Steele sent Grayle
instead.
“Get up there,” he instructed, “take a quick sighting and come straight down again. You still
have your cloak, so if any heretic does spot you he should think you’re an ally. Still, I’d rather not
take that chance.”
Grayle disappeared into the apartment building, emerged a few minutes later onto one of its
topmost balconies, and began to find handholds in the brickwork, hauling himself all the way up to
the roof. It was only then that Barreski realised why it was that his fellow tanker had been assigned
to the task. Grayle was the only one of them who had a solid alibi for when the vox-caster was
destroyed, an alibi that Barreski had provided. He was the only one Steele trusted to stray so far
from the squad on his own.
A few minutes later, Grayle was back, flushed and breathless.
“It’s on this level, all right,” he reported, “the Ice Palace. It’s on all the levels, all the ones up
here. Its foundations are a couple of floors down, but it reaches all the way up to the roof. It looks
like… like it’s almost organic, like it wasn’t built or carved or whatever, like it must have…
grown.”
“Like the so-called trees in the forest,” said Mikhaelev.
“Like them, yes,” said Grayle. “It’s huge, at least a kilometre square, and the area around it is in
ruins, as if the palace just… as if it burst through from below, destroying everything in its path as it
sprouted upwards. I could see bridges, great bridges of ice, leading across to it from the streets.”
“How far?” asked Steele.
“It was hard to tell,” said Grayle, “with the sheer scale of the thing. Another three or four hours,
I’d say, on foot. But there are patrols in the streets: Traitor Guard, lots of them, between the Ice
Palace and here. I don’t think it’s safe to take a vehicle.”
“Mangellan is well protected,” said Steele. “I’d expect no less. The sound of an engine won’t go
unnoticed up here, and I can’t see a couple of cultists’ robes fooling anyone either.” This was good
news for Barreski, whose borrowed cloak had been making his skin crawl where it touched his bare
neck. He ripped it from his shoulders, bundled it into a ball and flung it into a nearby gutter.
“We have to face the fact,” said Gavotski, “that we have come almost as far as we can on stealth
alone. I think we all knew from the start that our chances of surviving this mission were slim. Once
we learned that Confessor Wollkenden had been brought here, to this hive… well, that’s when this
turned into a suicide run. Most of us will die here today, but remember: if just one of us can beat the
odds, if one of us can escape with the confessor, then we will have won the kind of victory that men
sing about. We will have secured the memory of the Valhallan 319th for a thousand years, and I
think that’s a cause well worth fighting for.”
The first patrol, they heard coming.
They took cover on the portico of a great librarium, crouching behind its pillars as the welldrilled
ranks of a traitor platoon marched through the bordering public square. While the other Ice
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Warriors were watching the traitors, Blonsky watched his comrades. Would this be the moment, he
wondered, when one of them would make his move, give them away? Or just lose his nerve and
run?
And then the traitors had passed them by, and the Ice Warriors let out a collective sigh of relief
— all except for Pozhar, who was itching for a fight as always — and they moved on.
It seemed to Blonsky that the further they went — the deeper into the hive — the colder it
became, in defiance of all logic. It had already been a long, tiring day, but Steele set his usual
brusque pace — and Gavotski, in particular, was starting to flag, although he tried not to show it.
And then it came, at last. The moment they had all been dreading.
Steele must have heard something, seen something, sensed something, because he threw himself
at Palinev an instant before they all heard the crack of a lasgun, and knocked him out of the path of
its beam. The sniper had to have been on a nearby roof, but Blonsky didn’t have time to locate him.
Steele was running, yelling at the others to follow him. Two more las-beams stabbed into the street
like lightning bolts, but then they were around a corner, out of the firing line.
“We can’t just let them get away with that,” protested Pozhar, “with firing at the Emperor’s
troops. We have to—”
Gavotski interrupted him firmly, saying, “We can’t kill every heretic in this place, much as we’d
