The complex was vast, larger than Rann could have imagined. The Salv had built a fortress to rival anything on the war-ravaged supercontinent, a whole mountain’s worth of interconnected chambers, stairwells, warehouses and mechanical bays. As expected, it was mostly intact, shielded by the great mass of rock above it. The loyalist bombardment had still made some impression, though – the walls were spiderwebbed with cracks, and the floors were littered with fragments of loosened concrete. The air that blew in from the overhead vents was cold and stale-tasting, sometimes laced with smoke. Water leaks, from burst pipes and bomb-damaged pumps, had left stagnant, dust-filmed pools through which the squad had to slosh as they navigated the maze of blank corridors. Rann had to repeatedly check his compass to ensure they weren’t doubling back on their route.
It was uncomfortably quiet. They heard other squads calling out “Clear!” or “Watch out, tripwires!”, and the occasional brief burst of gunfire, but there was no massed Salvator ambush. Most of the doors were unlocked, revealing empty rooms and cramped, dusty passageways. The silence kept them all on edge. Every groan and hiss of unseen machinery made Rann’s trigger finger tense. At one point, Iva, spooked by a sudden creak, fired three shots into what turned out to be a storage cupboard. She gave an embarrassed laugh when the others spun around with their rifles raised.
“Shooting rats, sergeant,” she told Rann apologetically.
They passed through high-ceilinged halls that brought to mind the colourful shopping arcades of the Crown City, if those arcades had been finished in bare concrete and buried underground. Occasionally there were grey Salvator banners hanging from the walls, and enormous posters of Nilen at his pulpit. Rann had always found the First Marshal’s gaunt face unnerving, and never more so than now. Those black eyes had a way of following one around the room.
The bombardment resumed when they had been inside the fortress for half an hour. There were still some surface defences intact on the north slope of the mountain, out of the path of yesterday’s advance. Dauman was evidently determined to uproot any last trace of the Salvators. The floors trembled underfoot as the shells and air-dropped bombs transmitted their impacts through half a mile of solid rock.
Geddan looked up and grimaced at the faraway rumble. “Hope the bloody gunners remember we’re still in here.”
“Nothing’ll hit us this deep,” Rann told him, hoping it was true. “Unless they start dropping atomics.”
“Should have just done that from the get-go, and saved us the trouble of storming this place,” Wace grunted. “Would’ve been a good fireworks show.”
Iva nudged an ajar steel door with the barrel of her rifle, revealing yet another barren room beyond. “Dauman would still have made us march into the crater, radiation be damned.”
“Where are all the bastards, anyway?” Wace glanced behind him, at the dusty, half-lit corridor they’d been traversing. “Doesn’t feel right, going so long without seeing any Salv. I’ve got all these spare mags to get through, be a shame not to-”
Rann stopped abruptly in the corridor, his eyes narrowing. He held up a hand for silence. Wace complied. The squad quickly brought their rifles to their shoulders, tensely scanning ahead and behind.
“Above us,” Rann said.
Amid the distant growl of the bombardment, he could hear scratching, shuffling movement overhead. Something much larger than rats in the walls.
Sudden gunfire erupted on all sides, echoing through the corridors, interspersed with urgent shouts and the brutish crack of explosives. Rann couldn’t tell where the shooting was coming from, whether it was a single major battle or a dozen small shootouts. The rest of the platoon was scattered through the rooms ahead and behind them, out of sight and out of reach.
Then he saw something clatter onto the concrete floor a few yards away.
“Into cover!” he yelled. He and Iva dodged into the nearest doorway, dropping to the floor in what turned out to be a cramped storeroom lined with empty shelves. He didn’t have the time to see where Wace and Geddan went.
The grenade went off seconds later. Shrapnel scythed through the corridor, rending the pipework and knocking out a string of light fixtures. In such close confines, the blast was hideously loud. Rann saw Iva yell out, but he couldn’t hear her words over the relentless ringing in his ears. They both struggled back to their feet, coughing amid the dry, swirling dust that filled the little storeroom.
Gunfire flashed beyond the doorway. Fast, rattling bursts – Salv submachine-guns, not the semi-automatic rifles of the loyalists. “They’re here!” Rann yelled to Iva. He could barely make out his own voice.
He chanced a quick look down the blasted corridor, hoping the dust and smoke would conceal him. He saw two dim shapes advancing his way, shadows in the murk. As he watched, another dark figure dropped from the ceiling further down the corridor, making a hard landing, then straightening up with gun in hand.
They were hiding in the crawlspaces, he thought, ducking back into cover. Waiting for us to move in deep enough. Just like the gunner who got Lidaro.
They hadn’t seen him. They were shooting at something past him, off in the distance. Wace and Geddan, perhaps. That created a brief window of opportunity.
He signalled wordlessly to Iva, indicating three hostiles on approach. She nodded, hefting her rifle.
Rann waited for a break in the Salvators’ gunfire. He motioned Iva to the shrapnel-scarred doorway, brought his rifle up, and spun out on one knee.
The Salv ambushers were barely five yards away, silhouetted in the smoke by the remaining light fixtures. Rann fired twice, killing the leading man instantly. The second Salv had no time to react, as Iva moved into the corridor and followed up with several rapid shots of her own, all of which found their mark. The third ambusher briefly managed to return fire, but both Rann and Iva were low to the ground, presenting smaller targets in the smoke, and the Salv never got a chance to correct his aim. Rann shot him in the face, splattering the cracked concrete with blood and chips of bone.
There was no time to celebrate. Rann saw doors swing open at the far end of the corridor, and more grey figures emerge. They opened fire without delay. Chased by ricocheting bullets, he led Iva into another empty room, this one part of a series of interlinked offices, with rows of scuffed wooded desks piled with abandoned paperwork. They passed through the dividing doors between the offices, low and fast, using the desks for cover where they could.
“Did you see where the others went?” Iva asked. She reloaded her rifle in a hurry, cursing as the magazine refused to slide home on her first try.
Rann shook his head. He could hear the Salv stomping along in pursuit. “They were back that way. We can’t get to them from here. We need to try and link up with the other squads. Then we can start sweeping the corridors.” It was a vague goal, and he knew it. The only way to find the other squads was to follow the shooting. “Wace and Geddan will know to do the same.”
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Iva nodded, somewhat hesitantly. “Those two can hold their own without us,” she said.
“They’ll have to.” Almighty, don’t take them as well, Rann prayed silently. The memory of Lidaro’s lifeless face flashed horribly through his mind.
*
They didn’t wait around for the Salvators to catch them. Beyond the empty offices, they found themselves at the top of a narrow stairwell, where a close-quarters battle had clearly just been fought. Gunsmoke hung in the air, and the stairs were littered with spent rifle cartridges. Two corpses – one royal paratrooper and one Salv – lay slumped on the landing, their blood running darkly together. There was no sign of the rest of the paratrooper squad, though more gunfire echoed from below. It came in irregular bursts, some close, some further off.
With danger on every side, there was nothing to do but follow the noise.
Rann and Iva skidded down the bloodied steps and burst through the bullet-pocked double doors at the foot of the stairs. The wide hallway beyond was a scene of slaughter, strewn with loyalist and Salvator dead, and cratered by what must have been easily a dozen grenade blasts. The smell of blood was everywhere, thick and metallic. The Salv had come off worst in the battle, as their dead noticeably outnumbered the fallen marines and paratroopers. Still, by Rann’s count, at least a full squad of marines had been wiped out. Any survivors had already moved on.
A twelve-foot-tall poster of Nilen looked down on the carnage, dramatically illuminated by recessed uplights. The First Marshal’s thin, pinched features almost seemed to sneer. Even a month after his own death, the man responsible for a hundred million corpses was cheerfully adding to his tally.
“We fought all the way up that fucking mountain. Just for this,” Iva said, in a bitter, hollow voice. She left bloody bootprints as she picked her way among the fallen.
“It’s almost over,” Rann told her. He tried not to look at the dead faces that stared up from the floor. He tried just as hard not to think about Wace and Geddan, where they might be, and in what condition. “The Salv have nothing left, after this. They can’t keep fighting any longer.”
“Tell that to these boys,” Iva replied curtly, almost snapping at him. He thought she might say Tell that to Lidaro, and he was sure she thought it. But she had the decency to bite her tongue.
The gunfire was still echoing from the far end of the hallway. It sounded like two or three distinct firefights, engagements between individuals rather than squads. Two more loyalist guns arriving at the right moment could be decisive. And there was no point trying to turn back, with the Salv prowling the levels above them.
He and Iva followed the sounds of combat to a warren of small, dusty rooms joined by short passageways. It was apparently an armoury complex, judging by the empty gun racks and ransacked steel lockers. The walls were stitched with bullet holes from an earlier running battle, though there were no dead bodies in sight. The fighting had moved on from here, maybe only moments before.
Rann directed Iva to sweep one of the armoury rooms, while he checked a spartan office space that must have been the quartermaster’s station. He scanned the narrow doorways, alert for tripwires, and then aimed his rifle up at the ceiling pipes. Thankfully, it didn’t look as though there were any crawlspaces overhead. He opened his mouth to call out to Iva.
The Salv soldier came from nowhere, or so it seemed. He dodged in from a passageway to one side and drove an elbow brutally into Rann’s belly, sending him sprawling onto the floor, winded and wheezing. Rann managed to suck in one painful breath before a savage kick connected with the side of his jaw. He felt his teeth rip into the soft inside of his cheek. Blood filled his mouth, hot and coppery. There was a flat click from above as the Salv cocked a pistol.
The thought of dying like this, executed on the floor like a dog, brought on a wave of blind panic and fury. Rann lashed out wildly with his foot. It struck hard, and the soldier grunted in pain as he was pushed off balance. Rann managed to roll himself over, kicking again with all his might to knock the soldier to the ground. His boot smashed the soldier’s legs out from under him. The pistol fell, bounced once and then spun across the floor out of reach.
Rann started to rise, looking around dazedly for his dropped rifle, and then the Salv leapt ferally onto him. He punched Rann in the gut, almost exactly where he had elbowed him before. The pain was hideous, momentarily wiping away everything else. Rann would have screamed, if he’d had any air to do so. When sense returned to him, he found himself straddled, pinned to the floor on his back under his attacker’s kneeling weight.
The soldier drew a long bayonet from his belt with awful calm slowness. He smiled. He was very young, no older than Lidaro had been. He clutched the wooden hilt of the bayonet in both hands and raised it for a downward stab.
Rann caught the soldier’s forearms by reflex as the blade whistled down. He squeezed with the mindless strength of a cornered beast, trying simultaneously to crush the Salv’s arms and shove him away. The Salv swore and momentarily loosened his grip on the bayonet. Rann allowed himself to believe it would drop free. Then the boy – He Above, he really was just a boy – recovered, and began to force the blade downwards.
“Nilen be praised,” he said, with a bestial grin of triumph and hate.
Rann pushed back as hard as he could, straining every sinew as adrenaline coursed through him. His arms shook with the effort. It wasn’t enough. The soldier was smaller, but fiendishly strong, and had gravity on his side. The world shrank to the dusty concrete floor, the taste of blood in Rann’s mouth, the blade coming down.
“Fucking traitor. Fucking heretic,” the soldier hissed. He was so close Rann could feel the sour heat of his breath, and see the threads of spittle between his yellowing teeth. The scratched blade of the bayonet glinted like a smile. Its point was nearly at Rann’s collarbone now, sinking lower and lower. He dug his nails hard into the Salvator’s wrists, trying to wrench them to one side, but he had no leverage. His lungs begged for air. The strength was ebbing from his arms.
There was a flash of motion, and a hard thud. The soldier was knocked aside with a startled curse. Rann gasped for air as he was freed from the boy’s weight. His vision swam like a drunkard’s. He struggled desperately to lift himself off the floor.
The soldier was trying to rise too, still clutching the bayonet, one eye now blackened and swelling shut. A deep cut in his forehead oozed blood down his face. He was snarling like something rabid at someone standing over them both. Rann tilted his head up, and saw Iva training her rifle on the Salv. She had struck him with the stock; the varnished wood was dripping with red.
“Surrender,” she barked.
“Whore,” the soldier said thickly. He wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, then moved to spring back onto Rann, raising the blade to strike.
Iva’s rifle roared, deafening in the confined space of the quartermaster’s office. The soldier was hurled back against the wall. He hit the concrete and slid to the floor, sagging onto his side. He gave a low, piteous, animal moan, clutching one hand weakly to his chest. Blood dribbled through his fingers.
For an instant, Rann saw a frightened, broken boy in an ill-fitting uniform. Another of the millions who had grown up in poverty, destitute and empty of purpose. Someone who had believed Nilen’s wild promises of glory and purification. Who had faithfully hated the people he was told were heretics and degenerates. Who was dying in a concrete hole, nameless, alone, for a cause that was already dead.
Then the soldier’s eyes became unfocused. His body went slack, as though a switch had been flicked. The bayonet clattered out of his hand.
Iva helped Rann back to his feet. He leaned heavily on the wall beside the dead Salv, panting for breath, spitting a dark gob of blood. He was shaking badly and his ears rang from the gunshot. His jaw was unbroken, but certainly didn’t feel it, and his stomach was a raw, pulsing knot of pain. He had to look down to verify that he hadn’t been stabbed.
Finally, he raised his head and caught Iva’s gaze. He saw concern in her watchful hazel eyes, concern and expectation.
“Not dead yet,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Not...not yet,” he coughed, picking his rifle up from where it had fallen, wincing at the pain in his gut.
Shouts echoed from the corridors ahead, broken up by the harsh reports of rifles and submachine-guns. A scattered loyalist unit was gathering, an officer calling for surviving men to form up. Marines and paratroopers were yelling back in hoarse reply.
Rann recognised Wace and Geddan’s voices, indistinct but unmistakeable. For a second, he felt something close to joy.
“Let’s go find them,” he told Iva. She nodded resignedly.
They moved on together, through the confusion of smoke and gunfire, deeper into the mountain.