mass/
'Oh great Emperor/ said Aemos suddenly. 'Some of them are unar-moured/
It was true. A good many of the men assaulting us wore no shielding or environment armour. Their clothes were charred to black rags and their flesh was blistered and raw. Some force was keeping them active and functioning in this great infernal depth where no living thing should have been able to survive unprotected. Not the pressure, the extreme heat, not even the toxic, corrosive atmosphere was stopping them. The taint of the Lith had transmuted them into denizens of this underworld.
The wave of stalkers strode forward inexorably, and the translithopede followed them slowly, its impelling lines of adamantium cilia dragging it across the cavern rock. The multi-lasers fired again, destroying another vehicle – a large ore transporter that had been attempting to crash itself into our machine.
The mighty plasma screw churned again and ruptured apart a curtain of massive dripstones. Drizzles of dust obscured our picture for a few seconds.
When it cleared, we saw the true horror, and realised the ultimate, blasphemous fate of Cinchare minehead's population.
The blasphemy was huge, a writhing mound of baked, raw flesh and cooking bone. One by one, the tainted workers of Cinchare, even Bure's corrupted brethren from the Adeptus, had come down here to willingly contribute their organic matter to this mass.
As the translithopede came into view, it rose up, forming a great, rearing worm of red ooze and blackened meat fifty metres high. A ghastly mouth, big enough to swallow a prospecting pod, gaped wide in its cresting head, and it belched a vast ball of flaming gases at us.
The translithopede shook, warning hooters sounded, and the picture was lost. One control station below exploded, throwing its servitor to the deck. Smoke billowed through the chamber.
'Such power/ Bure marvelled, emotionless. The whole machine lurched again, more violently, and we stumbled, despite the internal gravity systems and inertial dampers.
The screen image restored, jumping, for a brief moment, enough to see that the blasphemy seemed to be coiling itself around us. The hull creaked and protested. Minor explosions rang out from lower decks. Plated seams bulged and several rivets flew out like bullets.
'Bure!'
'I will break it! I will cast it out!'
'Bure! In the name of the Emperor!'
He wasn't listening. All his efforts were focussed on the mind-impulse link driving the translithopede, on the orchestration of his stalkers as they rallied to counter-attack the monstrosity. His confidence in the supremacy of the Machine over all things was blinding him to the very real possibility that the formidable Cult Mechanicus had just met its match.
I turned to Medea and Aemos.
'Come on!' I cried.
We were halfway down the translithopede's main companionway, heading towards the rear of the great machine, when a still more violent impact shook it. Without warning, the inertial dampers failed and we tumbled as the burrower was rolled onto its side. The glass mantles of the gas lights smashed, and weak flame sputtered and danced along the walls. There was a further series of terrific impacts.
We got to our feet, now forced to use the curving wall as a floor. The pulsing shriek of the multi-lasers was by then a constant noise outside.
Red warning lights were flashing in the arched dock-bay. Our pod had been torn from its cradle by the latest impact and lay crumpled on its side, reclining against part of the roof arching. But the oxide-red pod was still safely locked in place.
Medea and I jumped down from the dock's inner hatch onto the ceiling, but Aemos called after us.
'I can't make that jump/ he protested. I knew he was right.
Then seal the hatch and get back to help Bure!'
The Emperor protect you both!' he shouted as the hatch closed.
Power cables that had once lain on the deck now dangled like ropes. Grabbing one each, we began to rappel up towards the pod in its cradle. We were halfway there when the world seemed to shudder again and the translithopede righted itself violently. Medea and I went sprawling, loose debris skittering all around us. I had barely enough time to dive and heave Medea aside before our own wrecked pod came crunching back down the wall, slamming sideways onto the floor.
Another lurch and the deck tipped the other way, out of true by about twenty degrees. The unanchored pod began sliding across the deck towards us.
'Get in!' Medea yelled. 'Get in!' She had the side hatch of the red pod open and dragged me halfway inside. A moment later, and the translithopede rocked back thirty degrees in the other direction.
The loose pod immediately squealed back across the deck and crashed into the wall bulkheads. I was dangling by my hands from the open hatch.
'Crap! Get in! Get the hell in!' Medea wailed, fighting to hold on to me. I grunted and swung my legs up so that my toe caps caught the door sill. With a further effort, I managed to pull myself up, and Medea slammed the hatch.
There was still more shaking and rocking. We clambered in to the seats of the pilot station in the low cockpit, and strapped on the harnesses. Medea was keying the pod's drive ignition when the translithopede inverted again and left us hanging in our seats by the safety straps. The pod was now locked in its cradle on the roof.
This'll be fun/ Medea laughed aggressively. She had sent a remote command to open the dock-bay's shutter doors. Then she powered the pod's engines to full thrust and disengaged the cradle lock.
For a dizzying second, we dropped, upside down, like a rock. Then she hit the thrusters and looped us. We missed the dock-bay roof by a hands-breadth and flew out through the opening shutters even as the entire translithopede rolled over again.
The blasphemy had wrapped itself around Bure's great subterranean bur-rower with constricting coils. It thrashed and shook the machine, and I could clearly see the armoured hull beginning to buckle and crumple. There were smoking sockets where some of the multi-laser batteries had been ripped away. The stalkers were converging on the wrestling giants, strafing the Chaos worm with furious barrages. The remains of several lay crushed where the translithopede had rolled on them.
Medea banked us around, trying to speed-familiarise herself with the control layout.
'What do we do? I take it you've got a plan?'
I shook my head. 'I'm working on it.' Bure's pod was unarmed – I know this because I checked feverishly the moment we were airborne – and there was nothing that might be turned into an offensive weapon apart from a mining laser under the chin of the cockpit. A mining laser with fierce cutting power and a range of about five metres.
Take us deeper into the cavern/ I said, consulting the display on the pod's geologicae auspex.
'Away from the fight?'
'We can't engage that thing… so we find the Lith instead. And that return has got to be it/
There was a pulsing cursor on the screen: big, unmistakable.
Cultists on the cave floor blasted at us as we zipped over them and headed off down the long, volcanic cavern. Spumes of pyroclastic wrath detonated up from the lava lakes and threatened to envelop us.
Then we saw the Lith.
