Chapter 19: The Square in the Shadow
Duvette brought the column to a halt in the passage before the final junction. He unfolded the map and read it by the amber light of the nearest gas lamp. According to the markings, this was the last fork before one of the exits into the shadow zone.
The map was dense with lines showing the entry positions assigned to the other companies. Every one of those exits pointed toward the same area: the shadow marked at the center of the map in red.
"We're here," Duvette said quietly, rolling the map and putting it away. "Now we wait for the other units to get into position."
He turned to face the soldiers behind him. Five hundred and more, packed into the narrow tunnel, the air thick and heavy with body heat.
"Hold position," he ordered. "Check weapons. Final preparations. Stay quiet."
The order moved down the column in low voices. A quiet metallic murmur followed as soldiers checked their weapons, the instruments they were going to need to stay alive.
Duvette walked to where Evan was crouching against the wall, working a cloth over an autopistol, the weapon Duvette had recently authorized him to draw from the armory.
He was not going to let the boy anywhere near the front of the engagement. Evan was to stay at the rear of the column, and that was the end of it. If the adjutant got himself killed, finding a replacement would be inconvenient.
"Sir." Evan looked up. "How long until the other units are in position?"
"Within the hour, all being well," Duvette said. "Colonel Fox will hold the attack order until every company confirms its designated position."
As he said it, urgent footsteps came from the direction of the shadow zone. Two scouts came back quickly out of the dark, their expressions tight. They stopped before Duvette and gave a brief acknowledgment.
"What have you got?" Duvette asked.
The lead scout steadied his breathing. "That shadow zone, sir. It is not a tunnel junction. It is a hall. A massive underground hall."
"A hall."
"Yes, sir." He kept his voice low. "We did not go in close, but looking from the tunnel mouth, the space is difficult to describe. Large enough to hold thousands of people. Inside, heretics everywhere, packed tight."
The second scout added: "Torches. Many of them. The blood smell in the air is bad enough to make your eyes water."
Duvette frowned. A hall. That was not what he had been expecting. He had assumed the shadow zone was a widened junction where the tunnel network converged, something that could be cleared with coordinated fire from multiple directions. An enclosed space large enough to hold thousands was a different problem entirely.
"Did you see Chaos Astartes?" he asked.
The two scouts looked at each other. "Too far to make out the details clearly. But there were tall figures in power armour standing near the far end."
Duvette was quiet for a moment. He needed to see it for himself. As the main assault element, his understanding of the ground could not be based on a secondhand description.
"Take me," he said.
He selected four veterans to come with them. Finn Valentine was among them. The sniper slung his long-barreled las-rifle without a word and fell in.
They moved out behind the two scouts, following the passage forward. The further they went, the worse the smell became, the familiar compound of sulfur and blood and rot thickening with each step.
The unpleasant feeling that had been building at the back of Duvette's thoughts for the past hour sharpened into something more physical. The dull ache behind his skull, the one that had started in the tunnels the first time, was back.
Fifteen minutes of careful movement.
The passage began to widen gradually, and the slope of the floor reversed, rising slightly. The ground underfoot changed from packed earth to rubble and broken stone. The marks in the rock walls became rougher, cut by crude tools rather than any professional effort, as if the space had been expanded a handspan at a time over many years.
Light appeared at the edge of his vision ahead.
The scouts stopped and gestured. Duvette signaled the group to slow and drop their profiles. They moved along the wall, one careful step at a time.
The tunnel ended at a gentle downward slope of piled rubble. Duvette crouched and eased his head forward.
The view below stopped his breathing.
A vast underground square stretched out beneath him.
The space was far larger than he had allowed himself to imagine. At minimum four standard drill-ground lengths across, the ceiling vaulting more than twenty meters overhead. The roof was rough natural rock, dozens of iron cages hanging from it on chains, burning with something that was not promethium, casting uneven orange light down across the floor. The shadows the cages made moved constantly.
Crude stone pillars had been raised at intervals to support the ceiling. Some had cracked and been reinforced with timber posts, the wood old and dark with age. Rotting wooden scaffolding still stood against the walls around the perimeter, draped with faded cloth strips and lengths of rusted chain.
Duvette's gaze moved across the support pillars and stopped.
Each one still bore the carved figures of angels. Rough work, nothing like the craftsmanship of proper Imperial iconography, but the intent was plain: generations of people had put what skill they had into making something that honored the God-Emperor. Every single head had been smashed away. What remained of each figure was covered in profane writing chiseled directly into the stone.
This had not been a natural cavern. Duvette understood that immediately and completely. This was what the people of Farrak IV had built with their hands, generation after generation, one load of excavated rubble at a time. A refuge. Dug to survive the winters that drove people underground. Dug to find whatever space the tax collectors and the nobility left them. They had prayed here. Lived here.
The slope of rubble beneath his boots was the spoil from that digging. He looked further along the rim and counted: several more similar spoil piles, each one with a tunnel entrance at the top. The other companies' designated entry points, exactly as the map had marked them.
People as resilient as this, and still they had broken. Because they had no other choice. Duvette let the thought sit for a moment, then moved past it. The only regret worth holding was that their desperation had been aimed at the wrong people.
He turned his attention back to the square.
Below, heretics moved like ants across a disturbed nest. Dozens of torches carried through the space, firelight catching the faces of the cultists as they crossed and recrossed the floor, hauling and arranging with the purposeful energy of people working toward a deadline.
At the exact center of the square, a massive eight-pointed star of Chaos had been drawn in blood across the floor. At each of the eight points stood a skull cairn, larger by a significant margin than anything Duvette had encountered in the surface ritual sites. The scale of them was different. These had been built by a great many people over a great deal of time.
Around the perimeter of the central area, several heavy guns had been mounted on fixed emplacements, each one with a small crew of cultists keeping watch.
But none of that was what drew Duvette's full attention.
Four figures stood at the outer edge of the eight-pointed star, one at each cardinal position, all facing inward toward the center. They wore black hooded robes. Their faces were not visible. But Duvette could feel the quality of the wrongness coming from their direction even at this distance.
Psykers.
Four of them. Conducting a ritual simultaneously. Of unknown tier.
He forced himself to keep looking.
In front of the skull cairns, seven Chaos Astartes in deep crimson power armour stood like statues. Each one was a full half-meter taller than the heretics moving around their feet. Their armour was layered with old damage, skulls mounted on every available surface.
Seven.
Seven, plus the one killed in the grain hub. Eight total. A small Chaos Warband.
We are finished, was Duvette's first coherent thought. This caliber of opposition. Nine soldiers out of ten are not walking back out of this. Maybe I should just run now.
The thought lasted approximately one second before he made himself keep observing.
At the far end of the square, the rock wall had been broken through. The fresh excavation was obvious, the raw stone pale compared to the darkened walls around it. Beyond the breach was a surface of silver alloy-steel, its regular seams and precise construction completely unlike anything else in this space. Heat came from it in visible waves, a constant pressure that explained the temperature in the air. The geothermal core's outer casing. Already exposed.
Heretics worked in front of the steel wall, their bare, Chaos-twisted skin slick with sweat. The ritual preparations were already in progress. They had arrived just in time.
Then Duvette's gaze stopped on a single figure near the steel wall.
Everyone else was working. This one was standing still, arms folded, watching. Taller than the heretics around him but shorter and narrower than the Chaos Astartes. He was wearing a PDF uniform, standard-issue, his back to Duvette's position.
Duvette was still trying to get a clearer look when the figure turned his head.
He pulled back into the tunnel so fast he nearly lost his footing on the rubble slope.
Close.
His heart was running hard. Almost seen. He waited and listened. Nothing from below.
Who was that? The PDF uniform, the stillness, the position near the core. He thought of what Fox had told him about the uprising's overall commander. The former PDF colonel.
"Fall back," Duvette said, voice barely audible. "Slowly. No sound."
They retreated along the way they had come, each step placed with care. When they had covered enough distance, Duvette let out a measured breath.
"Write everything down," he said to the scouts. "Hall dimensions, enemy positions, psyker locations, Chaos Astartes count. And that figure at the steel wall. Every detail you can give me."
"Yes, sir."
With this information they could go into the assault with something sharper than guesswork.
The attack was nearly here. And what they had just seen below them would be the battlefield that decided the fate of millions.