besieging rebels, and was therefore unthinkable), and I was pleased to see that he appeared to be right about that. Apart from a regrettable tendency to believe intelligence assessments without asking too many questions, he seemed to be competent enough, and I felt a certain amount of satisfaction that my judgement about leaving him alive and in charge appeared to be sound.
Abruptly we were plunged into darkness, as the trapdoor above us was dropped back into place, and I felt my other senses reaching out as they always did in the absence of light. A faint current of air against my face provided a sense of direction, and the overlapping echoes of bootsoles against 'crete pinpointed the walls nicely. 'Close your eyes for a moment,' I advised. 'It'll help them to adjust.'
'Or we could just kindle the luminators,' Mira said, suiting the action to the word. A sudden flare of light made me squint, and a couple of the troopers followed her lead, filling the narrow corridor with dancing beams, which struck highlights from the pipes and cable runs fixed to the walls and depending from the ceiling. At least she'd had the sense to attach the thing to the bayonet lugs of her lasgun, leaving both hands free to handle the weapon, and the others weren't slow to do the same.
'Good idea, colonel,' I said, with heavy sarcasm. 'And how about a rousing chorus of ''Soldiers of the Throne'' while we're about it, so the enemy can hear us coming as well?'
'You're the one who said we're running out of time,' she rejoined, turning to lead the way at a brisk jog, which did interesting things to her over-filled uniform. 'We won't get anywhere stumbling along in the dark.'
Reluctant to admit that she had a point, I contented myself with hanging back enough to take advantage of the shadows, in the comforting certainty that my black greatcoat would be almost perfect camouflage in the dark, particularly against an enemy still dazzled after gunning down Mira.
After a few hundred metres, which by my estimate put us more or less beneath the outer wall, I was able to see the reason for her confidence. The corridor up ahead was blocked by a fresh rockcrete wall, into which a narrow iron door had been set, just wide enough for one man to pass through at a time. Mira stopped just ahead of it and slapped her palm down on the scanner plate of a genecode reader, which had evidently been wired into the locking plate by a tech-priest with rather more pressing concerns than doing a neat job. The device buzzed and hummed to itself for a moment, giving me time to catch up with her, then the latch clicked, and the door swung outwards. Unbelievably, I was the only one covering it.[15]
'How do you know the enemy aren't just waiting on the other side?' I asked, nettled by her smirk as she paused on the threshold to look back at me.
'Because none of the mines have gone off,' she answered. 'Better hurry, they'll be set again in thirty seconds.' Then she was gone, trotting off into the darkness beyond, her troopers pelting through the doorway in her wake.
I followed, the door booming back into place at my back, content to see by the relatively dim light from her luminator, and picked up my pace when I saw she hadn't been exaggerating about the mines. There was a big cluster of frag charges, fixed to the walls and ceiling, their curved casings designed to spread their deadly payload as widely as possible. In the open they'd be lethal enough, but in a space as confined as this, they'd quite simply shred anyone incautious enough to approach them into bloody mist.
I picked up my pace until I was sure I'd passed beyond the range of the lethal devices, hearing them rearm with a faint click! a second or two after I was through the choke point, and suppressed a shudder. 'Any more little surprises like that one?' I asked, keeping my voice steady nonetheless.
'None we'll have to worry about,' Mira assured me. In my experience, statements like that are just tempting fate, and, sure enough, before the day was out, we were to be presented with a surprise greater and more deadly than either of us could possibly have imagined. But since I was still in blissful ignorance, I turned and followed her, instead of running in the opposite direction as hard as I could.
ANOTHER HOUR OR so of brisk walking got us to our destination. According to the map Orten had provided, and which I'd immediately loaded into my slate, it wasn't the most direct route; but it did avoid having to pass through any choke points where we'd have had to crawl, climb or negotiate obstacles, which Mira had neither the build nor the temperament to deal with. Since I didn't think we'd lost any appreciable time by the detour, which had taken us through the usual collection of utility ducts, watercourses and sewers (the last of which had clearly raised Mira's fastidious patrician hackles, to my carefully concealed amusement), I didn't bother to call her on it.
Despite my fears, her luminator didn't seem to have attracted any unwelcome attention, which, contrary to what you might expect, did nothing to relieve the tension I was feeling. The longer we remained undiscovered, the more I became certain that we were surely about to be, and I found myself listening out for any trace of sound which might betray ambushers lurking ahead of us in the darkness. I heard plenty, of course, but instinct and experience enabled me to identify most of the noises almost at once, and discount them as any kind of threat.
Most common was the scuttling of vermin, running for cover at the approach of light and noise, but occasionally the scuffling was louder, indicating a human presence. Invariably these would be fleeing too, however, rather than advancing to contact, which meant they were civilians, with an understandably cautious attitude to men with guns. Whether they were artisans, trying to keep the fractured infrastructure of the city from falling apart completely, or merely the luckless dispossessed endemic to large-scale civil disorder, desperate or fearful enough to attempt to find some kind of refuge down here, I had no idea. They weren't shooting at us, and that was all that mattered to me.
'We're here,' Mira said at last, and I checked my chronograph, wondering what sort of progress Gries and his squad were making. From what I'd seen of them, I'd have laid pretty fair odds that they'd reached their objective by now, and were making short work of it. Once again, I found myself reaching for the comra-bead which would normally have been sitting in my ear, and rueing its absence. It had, of course, occurred to me to scrounge one from the command bunker, but such refinements appeared to be lacking among the Viridian PDF. The best they could offer me was a bulky portable voxcaster, which was currently bouncing along on the back of its operator. Stopping to use the thing would have taken up time we could ill afford, however, so I'd had to resign myself to remaining out of touch for a while longer, and trying to ignore my misgivings as best I could.
'Good,' I responded, surreptitiously checking my slate to see where ''here'' actually was. It turned out to be a sewer, running directly under the piazza the rebels had decided to use as an artillery park, and I began to get the first inkling of a battle plan. A little late for that, you may be thinking, and you'd probably be right, but I'd been bounced into this fool's errand by circumstance, not choice, and I hadn't had much of a chance to think about anything much, beyond the most immediate concern of ensuring my own survival. I beckoned the vox man forwards, and he came to join me, unclipping the bulky handset as he did so.
'Cain to Astartes,' I said, praying to the Emperor that the frequency I'd been given was correct, and keeping it short in case we were being monitored. 'In position. Query yours.'
'Engaging,' Gries responded, to my relief. 'Resistance light. The Thunderhawk will commence diversionary attacks in two minutes.'
'Thanks,' I replied, taking in the single squad of troopers accompanying me, and the distinctly unmartial figure of Mira, who was listening intently, but who, for once, seemed able to resist the temptation to shove her oar in, thank the Emperor. 'We're going to need all the help we can get.'
'Leave this channel open,' Gries said, then cut the link at his end.
'What did he mean by that?' Mira demanded, as if I knew the answer and was merely withholding it out of pique.
I shrugged. 'Probably wants an accurate position fix for the Thunderhawk, so we don't end up on the wrong end of some friendly fire,' I hazarded. Considering the amount of concentrated lethality that the gunship represented, it seemed a reasonable precaution to me. I turned to the sergeant in charge of the squad, whose name I didn't know. Mira hadn't bothered with introductions, if she'd even considered the men under her nominal command as individuals in the first place. 'We'll need to get up top and find out exactly where the artillery pieces are. With a bit of luck we can use the demo charges to collapse this tunnel underneath them, and cripple the battery without having to fight our way through the sentries.'
'If they're parked close enough to it,' the sergeant agreed, homing in on the weak spot of the plan without undermining my authority by actually stating it, like efficient noncoms[16] have been doing since humanity first swung down from the trees on Holy Terra and started hitting one another with rocks.
'Let's hope they are,' I said, 'or we'll just have to do this the hard way.'
