This was the view directly ahead of us, the rock disintegrating before the awesome destructive force of the plasma cutting-screw. We were travelling straight through solid rock.
'Perhaps it's time we discussed what's going on here/ I said.
We hunt,' sad Bure.
'You've been hunting for a long time, magos/ said Aemos. 'Eleven weeks now. What are you hunting for?'
'And why is Cinchare minehead derelict?' I added.
Bure paused as he selected the correct electrograft memory. He was almost lost in the euphoria of mind-impulse union.
'Ninety-two days ago, as far as I am able to reason it, an independent prospector called Farluke, working under license for Ortog Promethium, returned from a long tour of assay rock side and presented his masters with a unique discovery. They tried to keep it secret for a while, hoping, I believe, to exploit it for their own ends. That error in judgment was costly. By the time they realised their mistake, and shared their data with the Adeptus, it was already too late/
'What had Farluke found?' asked Aemos.
'It is called the Lith. I have not seen it, but I have studied extracts recovered from the bodies of tainted men/
'Recovered?' breathed Medea, unnerved.
'Posthumously. The Lith is a hyper-dense geode of approximately seven hundred tonnes. It is, as I understand it, a perfect decahedron four metres in diameter. Its mineral composition is exotic and inexplicable. And it is alive/
'What? Magos! Alive?'
'Sentient, at least. It is infused with the wretched filth of Chaos. How long it has lain undiscovered in the depths of this world, I do not know. Perhaps it has always been here, or perhaps it was hidden in pre-Imperial times by unknown hands to keep it safe… or to dispose of it. Perhaps, indeed, it is the reason Cinchare has broken from the order of its stellar dance and drifted, rogue and wild, through the stars. I had hoped, initially, to find it and recover it. Its composition alone promised a wealth of precious knowledge. But now I hunt for it… simply to destroy it/
'It has corrupted this world, hasn't it?' I said.
'Completely. As soon as it came in contact with men, it began to twist their minds with its malign power. It subjugated them. The Ortog work teams sent down to examine it were the first. What is, to all intents and purposes, a cult sprang up spontaneously. Each initiate had a splinter of rock shaved from the Lith buried beneath his skin in a simple, brutal ritual/
'We've seen the marks/
'Disorder spread through Cinchare minehead as the cult grew. The Lith couldn't be moved, but splinters were brought up and used to infect more
and more of the workforce. Once tainted, the workers began to disappear, setting off on pilgrimages down into the mines to make worship to the Lith. Many never made it. Most have simply vanished. I've tried to follow their tracks, sometimes encountering hostile cult elements bent on protecting their deity. But Farluke's original data is unreliable. I cannot find the Lith's true location. I fear it is just a matter of time before the cult manages to extend its reach beyond Cinchare. Or…'
'Or?'
'Or they will complete some arcane task instructed by the Lith and awaken its power in full… or allow it to connect with its own kind/
We considered this grim possibility for a moment. Aemos quietly pulled up an entry on the screen of his data-slate, undipped the device from his wrist, and handed it to Bure.
'Does this help?' he asked.
Bure stared at the slate. His green eyebeams dilated into hard, bright points.
'How in the name of the Warpsmiths did you…'
'What is it?' 1 asked, stepped forward.
The location of the Lith/ said Aemos proudly.
'How did you get this?' Bure cried, his vox undercut by excited binary chatter.
The cult needs to know where it is. The reference was clearly marked in the charts I downloaded from the security office. I didn't realise its significance until now/
'You just downloaded this?' Bure said.
'I believe they thought they had no reason to hide it. It wasn't encrypted/
Bure threw back his chrome skull and laughed, a screeching, mocking cackle. 'Eleven weeks! Eleven weeks I have scoured and searched and fought my way through the bowels of this rock, hunting for clues, and the answer was up there all the time! In plain sight!'
He turned to Aemos and laid a steel hand on the savant's stooped shoulder. 'I have always admired your wisdom, Uber, and recognised why Hapshant valued you so… but now I realise that great wisdom comes from simplicity/
'It was luck, nothing more/
'It was bold simplicity, savant! A moment of direct, clear thought that quite dwarfs my labours down here/
'You're too kind…' Aemos mumbled.
'Kind? No, I am not kind/ Bure's eye-lights swelled and flashed. 'I will cut my way to the heart of the Lith, and then its spawn will see how unkind my soul can be/
Two hours later, after Bure's servitors had taken us to a sparely furnished cabin and provided us with flavourless, odourless nutrient broth and hard cakes of fibre bread, we were summoned back to the control chamber.
Outside, a small war was going on.
I had already sensed we had decelerated from tunnelling speed by the reduced throb of the impellers, and now I saw why. We had bored out of the rock into a towering vault lit by spurting pools of magma and flaming spouts of gas. On the chamber's holographic screen, I could see distorted, jarring images of the cavern outside. Silent laser fire was jabbing at us.
Bure was linked to the podium's lectern.
We've found their nest/ he said. They resist/
As I watched, two soot-stained prospector pods powered in towards us, firing small arms from their open hatches.
Bure nodded to one of his tech-adepts, and the shriek of multi-laser blasts rang through the hull. One pod exploded in a ball of light, the other tumbled away, shredded and burning.
I realised there were men on the ground too: miners in armoured work-suits scurrying forward and firing at the translithopede.
Bure increased magnification, and we saw that some of them carried pallets of mining charges, hoping to get close enough to breach our hull.
'Stalkers/ Bure said. It was evidently an order. There was a clank and a thud as hatches opened somewhere below us, and then new shapes began to move into view on the screen.
They were combat servitors. Heavyweight and burnished silver, they strode on powerful, backward-jointed legs, puffing black exhaust from their upthrust smoke stacks. Cannons in their upper limbs jerked with pneumatic recoil as they systematically targeted and cut down the cultists.
'Stalker 453, left and target/ Bure murmured. They were all slaved to his direct control.
One of the stalkers retrained its weapons and gunned four more cultists down. The charge-load they had been hefting exploded in a bright flash that blacked out the display for a second. When the holo-image returned, the stalker was already pacing on after new targets.
'Stalker 130 and Stalker 252, fan right. Opposition in cover behind that stalactite
