Duty Calls by Sandy Mitchell

Author:Sandy Mitchell [Sandy Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Warhammer 40K
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Sandy Mitchell «Duty Calls»

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WE FOUND IT after another half an hour or so of poking into corners and, in my case at least, jumping at shadows, wondering if a lictor was about to leap out on us from some place of concealment, its jaws slavering, but we were all still uneaten when Amberley paused in front of a section of wall that looked to me like any other, and regarded it quizzically.

'Nice work,' she said, then without warning she drew back her power fist and punched a hole clean through the solid rockrete partition, revealing a thin metal lining beyond. After a moment or two she'd enlarged the breach to a ragged hole, and shouldered her way inside, dislodging a small cascade of rubble as she stepped over the uneven lip of the gap she'd made. After a moment, sure the place had been abandoned, she popped the seal of her helmet, apparently intent on examining the place with her own eyes. Yanbel and Mott followed, bounding over the obstruction easily with their augmetic legs, and after a moment's hesitation I scrambled awkwardly after them. There was, after all, safety in numbers, even if that just meant keeping the sage and the cogboy between me and a hungry 'nid. Jurgen followed, of course, manhandling his clumsy heavy weapon through the hole with his usual expertise and a deal of sotto voce profanity, but I had little attention to spare for my aide's travails. I was too busy standing in dumbstruck astonishment, like some hick from the sump getting his first look at an uphive trading post.

The chamber we'd found ourselves in was much smaller than the halls full of machinery that we'd been labouring though until arcane mechanisms I couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of littering the floor in a fashion that seemed both functional and now, but no less choked with the Omnissiah's bounty for all that, data-lecterns and cogitator banks lining the bare steel walls, and virtually random. Yet again I was reminded of the hidden laboratory I'd stumbled across on Perlia, and the grisly secret it had concealed, but this place was mercifully devoid of eviscerated corpses to mar its air of pristine functionality.

Picking my way carefully over the rat's nest of cables linking everything together I went to join Amberley and Yanbel, who were discussing our discovery in hushed tones. They both seemed as surprised as I was at what we'd found, which I wasn't quite sure how to take. On the one hand it dispelled the conviction that had been growing in me from the start of this little jaunt that everyone else in the party (apart from Jurgen, of course) knew a great deal more than I did about what was going on, but on the other I'd been deriving a certain amount of solace from the assumption that at least Amberley was on top of things, and the idea that she was as far out of her depth as I felt hardly seemed reassuring.

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