REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 72: What, Tunnels Again?
After Casiel issued maximum martial law, Duvette took his three fighters, collected weapons and ammunition from the dead Genestealer infiltrators among the auxiliary forces, and moved quickly toward the dispatch hub building at the center of the city.
The building's interior was wrapped in the same unsettling darkness they had found throughout the facility. A few emergency lighting fixtures cast a weak yellow glow along the corridors, barely enough to suggest where the walls were.
Duvette kept his attention on the Strategic Display throughout. The semi-transparent map floated at the edge of his vision as he swept every floor and corridor with absolute concentration.
Nothing. Every contact in the building was blue.
"No enemies?" He studied the map with a furrowed brow. Ground floor, second floor, third floor — empty silence on every level. Had the aliens evacuated entirely the moment the explosion detonated?
Casiel had noticed the same. He raised a gauntleted hand and produced a sequence of tactical gestures. The Astartes behind him split into two groups immediately and began a rapid and professional sweep of the upper floors.
Duvette's team followed the Chaplain up the central staircase. They cleared every office, every archive room, every conference chamber.
The building was as if someone had simply removed everyone from it. Desks and chairs sat in their proper positions. Cogitator array screens flickered at standby. Not a person anywhere.
"Every official gone. Vanished into nothing." Stroud kept his voice down and his fingers near the trigger guard of his autopistol, eyes moving across the dark.
Duvette said nothing. He kept his gaze on the Strategic Display and followed Casiel to the top floor, into the spacious and expensive-looking office belonging to Parmenio's Departmento Munitorum Chief Administrator.
The office door stood open. Empty, like everywhere else. The heavy curtains had been pulled half-aside, letting the distant fire cast a faint glow across the interior. Casiel's power armor boots produced a dull, heavy sound on the carpet as he crossed the threshold.
Duvette stood at the door and let his gaze move across the room. Then he stopped.
He walked directly to a section of wall in the far corner. Following the Strategic Display's indication, he pressed his hand against the surface and knocked.
Hollow.
"Chaplain Casiel. There is an anomaly here."
Casiel came over, confirmed the location, and drove a gauntleted fist through the wall. The structure gave a sharp crack and behind the broken surface was a hidden compartment.
Not large. Inside it: a single silver-grey data-slate.
The Chaplain extracted the data-slate, activated the screen, and his crimson eye lenses swept across the stored files. Duvette stood at his shoulder and read alongside him.
Detailed architectural blueprints.
According to the records, Parmenio's Munitorum Chief Administrator had over the years approved and authorized a substantial sequence of underground construction projects through legitimate procedure, filed under the headings of "underground storage expansion" and "air-raid supply shelter construction."
The problem was in the blueprints themselves. The ventilation duct routing and the placement of the load-bearing structural columns violated the Imperial standard construction code at every turn.
The duct diameters were abnormally wide. The column spacing had been deliberately opened up. This structure had not been designed for human occupancy or for standard mechanized use. It had been designed for something larger to move through.
Duvette understood completely.
"Chaplain Casiel, this is likely how they have been able to maintain a long-term presence here. They used legitimate construction authorizations to build an underground network suited to their own movement. The Genestealer Patriarch is very likely holding position underground."
The Chaplain studied the blueprints in silence. The vox-amplifier carried his response in a low, measured register.
"Your assessment is correct, Commissar. This structure was not built for humans."
He set the data-slate on the desk for recovery personnel to collect later, then turned toward the office door.
"We will clear them completely. If the underground is overrun with aliens, I will simply order all underground spaces collapsed and bury those abominations beneath rock permanently."
Duvette kept pace with him. "If we can eliminate their Patriarch first, the remaining Genestealers will likely lose their cohesion. The surface cleansing will be considerably easier."
"Agreed." Casiel's answer was brief.
The group left the office quickly and descended to the building's ground floor. When they had all reassembled at the basement entrance, the Strategic Display in Duvette's vision shifted.
What had previously appeared as solid structure beneath the basement level unfolded into a new and considerable spatial outline.
He allowed himself a single private thought: what, tunnels again.
Though this time he had the Strategic Display. That changed the situation considerably.
And judging by the map's indicated scale, this underground network was nothing like the vast labyrinth beneath Farrak IV. It looked more like several large modified storage warehouses.
While he was taking stock of this, Casiel at the front of the group stopped. He raised the crozius arcanum and pointed toward the far end of the corridor, where a section of wall was half-obscured by piled miscellaneous crates.
"Here." The Chaplain's voice was flat.
Two Astartes stepped forward and cleared the stacked empty crates away from the wall. A concealed heavy metal door was revealed beneath. It had not been locked — only pulled to, the gap at its edge admitting a cold draught carrying something organic and unpleasant from below.
"They ran," Duvette said.
"They will still be brought to account." Casiel struck the crozius arcanum against the floor once, and the resonance of it served as the order. "We go down and reconnoiter. The moment we confirm the underground is full of aliens, we withdraw immediately and I will order this entire space collapsed."
He pushed the metal door open. Behind it, a narrow and steep metal staircase dropped into absolute darkness.
The Chaplain looked back at Duvette. "Commissar. Underground combat is not the province of mortals. You and your soldiers may return to the surface and assist in clearing the concealed infiltrators up there."
Duvette shook his head.
He had already run the calculation. A Genestealer Patriarch — a creature with both formidable psychic capability and physical power well beyond any ordinary organism — would be extraordinarily difficult to neutralize. But [Silence], which created a reality anchoring field and suppressed psychic ability entirely, was precisely suited to countering the Patriarch's advantages. Paired with the Strategic Display's early warning, it could prevent ambush and, at a critical moment, buy the withdrawal time the entire group would need.
"We come with you, Chaplain." He met the crimson eye lenses directly. "I have some knowledge of these alien habits. I may be of use. If the situation turns against us, we withdraw without argument."
Casiel was silent for a measured moment. Then he gave a single nod. "Stay within my line of sight at all times."
"Understood."
They began the descent. The metal stairs groaned under the weight of power armor. The stairwell was long, carrying them down for approximately three minutes before the structure leveled out onto a bare, undecorated ferrocrete platform. Ahead: another dark corridor leading into unknown space.
Casiel didn't hesitate. He moved into the corridor and Duvette followed close behind, the Strategic Display continuously updating the surrounding three-dimensional spatial structure in his vision.
The corridor was shorter than expected. Fewer than fifty meters in, the space opened ahead and a weak light source became visible from the far end.
When they emerged, they found themselves in a large underground chamber filled with stored materiel.
This had clearly once been a proper warehouse. Old fluorescent lighting tubes ran along the high ceiling in rows, emitting an intermittent and sickly pale light that shifted without settling. The floor was occupied by stacked cargo containers rising in irregular formations and the scattered wrecks of rusted Chimera APCs, the combined effect producing a landscape of blind corners and compressed sight lines. The air was heavy with dust and an organic chemical smell that had no straightforward name.
Exactly as the Strategic Display had shown, the moment they entered the chamber they walked into a prepared ambush.
"Twelve o'clock position, top of the containers! Three o'clock, behind the derelict track assembly!" Duvette called the coordinates before the first shadow had fully separated from the dark.
The Astartes gave the ambushers nothing. Casiel and the veterans adjusted their fields of fire in the same instant Duvette's warning landed. The boltguns broke the underground silence like hammer blows.
Hybrid mutants dropping from the container tops were torn apart in mid-air by the mass-reactive rounds before they reached the ground. The lower-grade cult members attempting to close from behind the wrecked vehicles were eliminated by Finn and Anderson's las-fire before they made it to open ground.
The engagement was brief and entirely one-sided. First wave neutralized without a casualty.
Casiel turned. The crimson eye lenses fixed on Duvette.
"Commissar. How did you know where they would emerge from?"
Duvette was quiet for a moment. He had known the question would come.
"Instinct, Chaplain," he said, giving the answer he had given before. "Survive enough battlefields and you develop a natural awareness of killing intent. It becomes a physical sense."
Casiel did not press the matter further, because at that moment the Strategic Display lit with multiple new contacts, fast-moving.
From the shadows at the warehouse's far end, several purebred Genestealers launched themselves into the open. The monomolecular rending claws on their four arms reflected the pale ceiling light in cold flashes. Their misshapen eyes fixed on the intruders with absolute single-mindedness.
"For the Emperor!"
Casiel went forward to meet them.
The fight reached its full intensity almost before it had begun. Purebred Genestealers moved and hit at a level that exceeded every hybrid variant by a significant margin. Their rending claws left deep gouges in ceramite and could punch through it on a committed strike. Their attack angles were precise and designed to exploit any break in defense.
The Seventh Company veterans were equal to it. They met the Genestealers through coordinated positioning and the raw superiority of Astartes physiology, pressing them back and keeping them from establishing the close-quarters isolation they preferred.
Duvette's group did not stand idle. Stroud and Finn worked from behind the cargo stacks, placing accurate shots into any Genestealer that extended too far forward. Anderson moved to anchor the flank with the heavy bolter, suppressing the charge routes. Duvette himself drew his bolt pistol and picked off the ones attempting to work around the perimeter.
The fight ran for nearly two minutes. When the last purebred Genestealer's skull was caved in by Casiel's crozius arcanum, the warehouse floor was covered in deformed bodies. Purple blood had spread across the nearby ground and up the sides of the cargo containers.
Two Astartes had taken deep claw marks across their armor plate, neither penetrated. Duvette's four had emerged without injury, though at the cost of a significant portion of their ammunition.
He was about to suggest a brief consolidation when the Strategic Display showed a single red contact moving rapidly away from them.
"Chaplain." Duvette spoke immediately. "During the fighting, one contact didn't attack. It withdrew. I believe it is a priority target."
Casiel didn't deliberate. "Pursue."
They pushed forward fast. At the far end of the warehouse a second corridor opened, darker than the first, without a single working light source.
This one was considerably longer than the corridor they had used to enter. When they emerged at the far end they were in a dim underground space that had the unfinished quality of a construction project abandoned before completion. Construction materials and rusted mechanical components were heaped across the floor. The far walls had not been fully built, bare rebar and poured concrete extending from them into the dark in shapes that suggested bones.
At the deepest part of the space, positioned near the unfinished wall, stood a figure.
Casiel locked onto it immediately.
A figure in a tattered senior Munitorum official's uniform. But the body wearing that uniform had been severely deformed. The proportions were wrong in too many places to attribute to injury.
Parmenio's Departmento Munitorum Chief Administrator.
The deformed figure saw the pursuers arrive and did not attempt to run. It turned slowly to face them instead, and the expression that spread across its face was a smile that no human jaw was structured to produce.
Casiel said nothing. He raised the crozius arcanum and moved forward to execute the abomination.
In the same instant, the deformed Administrator did something that sent a cold charge through the air of the underground chamber. It split open its inhuman mouth and from somewhere deep in its throat produced a shriek — high-frequency, sustained, pitched to feel like a physical thing driving through the skull.
It was a signal.
At almost the exact moment the shriek sounded, the Strategic Display's spatial outline of the entire chamber filled with red.
The contacts came from everywhere at once. Ceiling vents. Drainage grates in the floor. Cracks in the concrete walls. Every dark corner in the chamber. Dense and fast-moving and closing.
Not even a warning was needed. Casiel and every Astartes in the chamber had already heard it: the layered and shrill screeching of alien voices, and the sound of rending claws dragging across metal on every side, advancing like a rising tide from all directions simultaneously.
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