Helsreach

Jurisian walked around the interior of the bunker, his thudding tread making the floor tremble.

'No,' he said, his vox-voice a slow, considering drawl. 'There is power. The installation sleeps, but does not lie dead. It is locked in hibernation. Power still beats through its veins. The resonance is low, the pulse is slow. I hear it, nevertheless.'

Grimaldus stroked his fingertips along the closest keypad, staring at the unknown sigils that marked each button. The language of the runes was not High Gothic.

'Can you open these doors?' he asked. 'Can you get us down into the complex?'

Jurisian's four machine-arms extended again, their claws articulating. Two of the servo-arms came over the Techmarine's shoulders. The other two remained closely aligned with his true arms. The Master of the Forge approached one of the other elevator bulkheads, already reaching for his enhanced auspex scanner mag-locked to his belt. The arms reaching over his shoulders took Jurisian's bolter and blade, gripping them in claw clamps and leaving the knight's hands free.

'Jurisian? Can you do this?'

'It will necessitate a great deal of rerouting power from auxiliary sources, and those will be difficult to reach from a remote connection point here. A parasitic feed is required from —'

'Jurisian. Answer the question.'

'Forgive me, Reclusiarch. Yes. I will need one hour.'

Grimaldus waited, statue-still, watching Jurisian work. Cyria quickly grew bored, and wandered through the complex, speaking with the storm-troopers on duty. Two were returning from their shift at a boundary post, and the adjutant waved them over as she stood in the avian shadow cast by the gunship.

'Ma'am,' the female trooper saluted. 'Welcome to D-16 West.'

'Now we have Helsreach brass coming to visit, okay?' said the other. He made the sign of the aquila a moment later. 'I told you it would be good.'

Cyria returned their salutes, not even a little off-guard at their nonchalance. Storm-troopers were the best of the best, and their distance from regular troops often bred a little… uniqueness… into their attitudes.

'I'm Adjutant Quintus Tyro.'

'We know. We were told this on the vox. Digging for secrets in the sand, yes? That is not going to make the Mechanicus smile, I think.'

Whether the Mechanicus would be pleased or not evidently didn't matter to this man. He was smiling, either way.

'A big risk,' he added, nodding sagely as if this was some hidden truth he had worked out alone. 'It may bring much trouble, eh?' He still seemed entertained by the concept.

'With respect,' the female trooper - her stormcoat badge read DOMOSKA in flat black letters - said, looking uncomfortable, 'Will this not anger the Legio Invigilata?'

Tyro stroked a stray lock of her dark hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She repeated exactly what Grimaldus had said to her when she'd asked the same question during the Thunderhawk flight here.

'Perhaps,' she said, 'but it's not like they can leave the city in protest, is it?'

T

he doors opened.

The motion was smooth, but the noise of resistant machine-innards was immense: a squealing, unlubricated whine that split the air. Inside the elevator, the spacious car had enough room for twenty humans. Its walls were a matte, gunmetal grey.

Jurisian stepped back from the control console.

'It was necessary to power down all other ascent/descent systems. This one shaft will function. The others are now soulless.'

Grimaldus nodded. 'Will we be able to return to the surface once we go down?'

'There is a thirty-three point eight per cent chance, given current system destabilisation, that a return ascent will require additional maintenance and reconfiguring. There is a further twenty-nine per cent chance that no reconfiguring will restore function without access to the primary installation power network.'

'The word you're looking for, brother,' Grimaldus stepped towards the open doors, 'is ''maybe''.'

They wandered down

there for hours.

The underground complex was a silent - and initially lightless - series of labyrinthine corridors and deserted chambers. Jurisian brought the installation's overhead lighting back online after several minutes at a wall console.

Cyria clicked her torch off. Grimaldus cancelled his helm's vision intensifier settings. With flickering reluctance, dull yellow lighting illuminated their surroundings.

'I have resuscitated the spirits of the illuminatory array,' Jurisian said. 'They are weak from slumber, but should hold.'

The bland greyness all around them soon grew uninspiring as they ventured deeper into the complex. Around corners, through silent chambers with inactive engines, motionless machinery and generators of unknowable purpose.

Jurisian would occasionally pause and examine some of the Mechanicus's abandoned technology.

'This is a magnetic field stabiliser housing,' he said at one point, walking around what looked to Cyria like an oversized tank engine as big as a Chimera APC.

'What does it do?' she made the mistake of asking.

'It houses the stabilisers for a magnetic field generator.'

Her fear of the Astartes had dimmed some way by this point. She fought the urge to sigh, but failed.

'Do you mean,' Jurisian enquired, 'what application does this have in Imperial technology?'

'That's close to what I meant, yes. What is its purpose?'

'Magnetic fields of significant size and intensity are difficult to create and a struggle to maintain. Many of these units would be required to work in synchronicity, stabilising a powerful field of magnetic force. Such standard constructs as this housing are used in anti-gravitational technology, much of which is kept sealed by Mechanicus secrecy. More commonly, the Imperial Navy would use these units in the construction and maintenance of starship-sized magnetic accelerator rings. Plasma weapon technology, on a grand scale.'

'No,' Cyria shook her head. 'It can't be.'

'We shall see,' Jurisian rumbled. 'This is only the installation's first level. From the angle of the buried roadway, I would conjecture that the complex proceeds beneath the earth for at least a kilometre. From my knowledge of template patterns used in Mechanicus facility construction, it is more likely to be two or three kilometres deep.'

N

ine hours after

Grimaldus, Jurisian and Cyria had entered the installation, they reached the fourth sublevel. The third level had taken almost six hours to traverse, with sealed doors requiring more and more intensive