down with the other. The birthmark was there, centred on his nape.
'We haven't got time for this!' Aemos said. Running footsteps were pounding through the building behind us and we could hear shouts and curses.
'Where did you get this mark?' I willed at the ginger-haired man.
'Kaleil gave it me/ he said slackly.
Driven by my undeniable will-force, he tried to say something that the rest of his mind and soul simply forbade. It sounded like 'Lith' but it was impossible to say for sure as the effort killed him.
'Dammit, Gregor! We have to go!' Aemos roared.
As if to prove his point, two miners burst out of the doorway we had come through, aiming autorifles. Medea and I whipped around as one and dropped them both, one kill shot each.
Aemos's faultless recall led us through the winding sub-streets of Cin-chare Minehead to the massive, dank bulk of Imperial Allied. There was a hue and cry behind us, mixed with the whine of electric buggies.
We ran across the plant's wide, metal drawbridge, through a rockcrete gatehouse festooned with razorwire, and on down through the echoing entrance hall.
Footsteps followed.
The excursion terminal was a semi-circular barn of corrugated steel overlooking the mouth of the main working. Six prospecting pods sat in oily iron cradles under the barn's roof. They were slug-shaped machines, painted in the silver and khaki colours of Imperial Allied. Each one had a rack of flood and spotlights mounted above the cockpit, and several large servo arms and locator dishes arrayed under the chin.
That one!' Medea yelled, heading for the third in line. She was still trying to fasten her flight suit properly. I carried my jacket and motion tracker. There had been no time to stop and get dressed.
'Why this one?' I yelled, following her.
The power hoses are all still attached and it's showing green across the board on the telltales! Unclamp the hoses!'
I threw my stuff to Aemos, who hurried aboard behind Medea through the small side hatch, and ran to where three thick power cables were attached to the multi-socket in the flank of the pod. Just as Medea had noticed, all the indicator lights above the socket were green.
I twisted the valves and pulled them free, one by one. The last one was reluctant and needed a moment of brute force.
Las-shots spanked into the hull casing beside me.
I jerked the hose free and then turned, firing back down the length of the barn terminal. The pod's attitude thrusters began to cough and wheeze as Medea brought the craft to life.
Solid and las-shots peppered around me. I ran to the hatch and climbed in. Medea was at the helm in the cramped cockpit.
'Go!' I cried, slamming the hatch shut.
'Come on! Come on!' Medea cursed at the pod's controls. The over-urged engines whined painfully.
'Cradle lock!' Aemos spluttered desperately.
Realising her mistake, Medea swore expertly, eased the power down a tad, and threw a greasy yellow lever on the right-hand bulkhead. There was a jarring clank as the locking cuff that held the pod tight in the cradle disengaged.
'Sorry,' she grinned.
Freed, the pod lifted out of its landing cradle, swayed to the right as gunfire hunted for it, and then accelerated away, into the lightless mouth of the mine tunnels.
The upper workings of the Imperial Allied mines were huge excavations reinforced with rockcrete and filled with abandoned mining machines. Medea kicked in the pod's lamp array and illuminated our path with hard spot-beams of clear white light. At the far end of one reinforced spur, the lamps picked out a sudden, wide gradient where the horizontal incuts of the surface mines began their descent. Running down the steep slope were derelict cable-trams of filthy ore-hoppers and a funicular railway for transporting workcrews to the lower faces.
Aemos sat behind us in the pod's small cabin, reviewing the charts he had obtained from the security office. 'Continue down,' was all he said.
The steep access bore descended for about a kilometre and a half, occasionally flattening into work-shelves with entries to side seams. The view through the front screen seemed to be in black and white: the fierce white light piercing the blackness and revealing only pale grey dust and rock, and the occasional sparkle of druse.
Medea slowed us as we passed over more fragmented and extensive piles of breakdown and then, under Aemos's instruction, manoeuvred us down into the throat of an almost vertical chimney. This chimney – a pitch in mining terms – was a natural formation, possibly an ancient lava tube. Slowly revolving laterally, we hovered down into it. Flowstone caked the walls like swathes of creamy drapery and quilled bushes of volcanic glass sprouted from outcrops. The space was small, even for a compact pod like the one we had borrowed. Occasionally, Medea would nudge or clip an out thrust of quills and the glass fragments would fall silently, glittering, into the pit below.
About two kilometres down, the pitch opened out into a complex series of curving tubes, sub-caves and sumps. It was like moving out of an oesophagus into the complex chambers of an intestinal tract. The flow-stone started to show more colour: steely blues with milky calcite swirls, mottled reds glinting with oolites. Flinty black druse and other clastic litter covered the smoothed folds of the ancient floor.
Medea pointed my attention to the small scanner box mounted below the main petrographic assayer. The little screen was awash with an almost indecipherable graphic of ghosting strata layers and reflecting lithic densities. Three bright yellow cursors showed clearly in the upper quadrant.
They're coming after us,' she said.
They seem to know where we are right enough. How are they tracking us?'
'Same way we're getting such a clean return on their position.'
'Are the locators on this crate that powerful?'
Medea shook her head. They're fine for the immediate locality, but they've got nowhere near enough gain to penetrate the rock.'
'So?'
'I think all these prospector pods have high-powered beacons, probably built into flight recorders. They'd need them for routine search and recovery.'
'I'll take a look.'
I swung out of my seat and moved back down the pod, stooping, and using the overhead hand-rails to support myself. Aemos was still at work. He'd fired up the pod's mineralogicae auspex, and was running a complex cross-search for the spectographic fingerprints that appeared on the Adep-tus Mechanicus transmissions. He didn't even have the scrolls open any more: the complex subtleties of the colour bars had long since been committed to memory.
Every few minutes, he consulted the main chart and called a course-correction to Medea.
At the rear of the pod, between racks holding old rebreathers with perishing rubber visor-seals, I found a small crawl space into the engine bay.
I stuck my head and shoulders inside, and shone around with a lamp-pack I'd unbuckled from one of the rebreather sets. A simple process of elimination directed me to a fat metal drum clamped to the underside of the gravitic assembly and the housing for the kinaesthetic gyroscopes. Adeptus Mechanicus purity seals secured its cover.
I slid back out into the cabin, selected a medium plasma cutter from the tool
