[Imperial Guard] - Commissar by Andy Hoare

Author:Andy Hoare
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2013-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Heart of Darkness

Becka squinted up into the clouds staining the vaults high above. It was raining again, and not just a fine drizzle. The closer the force got to the cooling tower and its crippled scrubbers, the worse the weather. She sneered in amusement at the thought of weather inside a prison, but it was the truth. The chamber’s roof space was in effect an artificial sky, and that sky was now dominated by boiling black clouds that looked for all the world like they were about to explode in lightning.

‘Becka, you okay?’ said Vahn over the personal vox-net. ‘You want someone else to take point?’

She didn’t answer straight away, but scanned the vista up ahead, cautious for the presence of more rebels. The infiltration force was approaching the northern wall of Carceri Resurecti, and that wall was now looming from the haze, pale and glistening, like the tallest cliff face rearing from an ocean. The base of the wall was still lost to almost oceanic fog, while the very top was wreathed in darkness and churning clouds. Inbetween was several hundred metres of slab-like, cyclopean rockcrete, studded with thousands of small openings, each a cell portal.

The sight made Becka shiver, for she knew that high atop the wall was the rebels’ fortress. And inside it, Colonel Strannik, the insane butcher who had orchestrated all of the bloodshed she had witnessed over the last few weeks. And that, she knew, was where the commissar was now saying they had to go.

‘Becka?’ Vahn repeated, the gain on the transmission pumped up so that his voice squawked painfully loud in her ear. ‘You reading me, Becka?’

Becka slowed as she walked, tracking her carbine slowly left to right. ‘Here, Argusti,’ she replied. ‘What’s up?’

There was a pause, during which Becka squinted into the drifting mists as she blinked the rain out of her eyes. The downpour was definitely getting worse, the entire surface of the chamber floor looking like one huge, shallow lake. The air was darkening too, what little natural light was able to shine down through the upper levels cut-off by the steadily thickening cloud layer. Then, Vahn’s voice came back.

‘I don’t like this, Becka,’ he said.

‘Hah!’ she snorted inside her mask. ‘You don’t like it?’ I’m the one on point, she thought.

‘I mean it,’ he said, his irritation obvious in his voice even over the static-laced personal vox-channel. ‘Something’s up.’

‘Repeat last,’ said Becka as the channel burst with distorted interference. ‘You’re breaking up, Vahn.’

‘I said,’ Vahn repeated, ‘Something isn’t right.’

Becka glanced back the way she’d come. All she could see was rearing machinery and massively over-scale chains hanging down from above, slick with rain and wreathed in coils of mist. She’d got too far ahead and would have to slow to allow the remainder of the force to catch up. ‘You sure this channel’s secure?’ she said.

‘As sure as I can be, Becka,’ he replied. ‘I can see things going very wrong, and I want us ready for it.’

‘By us, you mean the convicti,’ she said.

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