Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘I wish you hadn’t said that,’ Amberley said, echoing my own thoughts. ‘Because if there is a daemon on the loose down here, we’re walking right towards it.’ She took an uneasy glance down the tunnel ahead of us.

‘Maybe we should have brought Vekkman along,’ I said, regretting it the instant I saw the expression on Amberley’s face.

‘And maybe we shouldn’t,’ she said, in a tone I recognised as indicating that the subject was now definitively closed. She turned to Mott. ‘Got the stones packed?’

The savant nodded, and reshouldered his rucksack. ‘As safely as can be managed under the circumstances.’

‘Good.’ Amberley nodded decisively, and turned back to me. ‘Then let’s go and look for this daemon of yours.’

Seventeen

As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, I was hardly keen to take point, but I found myself doing so anyway, half a pace behind my aide’s left shoulder, breathing as shallowly as possible through my mouth, my eyes and ears straining to pierce the gloom surrounding us. (Given the melta’s destructive capability there was no way I was going to get in front of it while Jurgen had the safety off, quite aside from the possibility of blocking his line of fire at a crucial moment.) Zemelda had extinguished her luminator, stowing it in favour of drawing her laspistol, which showed a keen grasp of priorities so far as I could see, leaving Mott’s the only source of light anywhere in our vicinity. By staying a couple of dozen metres ahead of the others, and keeping our backs to it, Jurgen and I were able to make out enough of our surroundings not to stumble too often on the detritus littering the ground.

As so often in this kind of environment, however, I found myself relying on my ears more than my eyes, starting at every creak and rattle of dislodged rubble, mentally sifting the echoes for any warning of a sudden attack. The first couple of scavvies we’d found had presumably been aware of what had killed their companions, and the woman had even had a weapon in her hand judging by the position it had fallen in, but whatever had killed them had still been too fast for her to react to in time. Not a thought I was comfortable with, under the circumstances.

‘Still nothing on the auspex,’ Amberley called, which she presumably intended to be reassuring, but which most definitely wasn’t. If it couldn’t even detect the vermin infesting the place, then I didn’t have an awful lot of confidence in its ability to pick up the abnatural.

And at that thought, my palms started to tingle again. The skittering and rustling in the shadows which I associated with the rodents I’d normally expect to hear in a place like this was unusually muted, and had been for some time. In fact, now I came to think about it, I hadn’t heard any squeaking for several minutes.

‘Something’s definitely wrong,’ I said, holding up my hand to halt our advance, then my boot crunched against something yielding. I froze, images of tyranid spores flooding my brain, despite being well aware that such a thing down here was quite impossible.

Jurgen glanced down. ‘Bones,’ he said, his eyes already moving on to the floor ahead of us. ‘Hundreds of ’em.’

He was right. The stretch of tunnel in front of where we were standing was already growing brighter as Zemelda and the others approached, revealing a veritable carpet of rodentine corpses. What was left of them, anyway, which was little more than skeletons, even the hide and hair only present in shreds and patches – and for someone as familiar as I was with the unpalatability139 and impenetrability of underhive ratskin, that was a distinctly worrying prospect. Anything capable of gnawing through that – let alone consuming it – wasn’t something to take lightly.

‘Stay back,’ I said, gesturing to the others – not that I wouldn’t have welcomed a few more bodies between me and whatever had killed the rats, but it seemed to me that our best chance of survival was being able to see or hear it coming. To my vague surprise they complied at once, without argument, freezing in place and bringing their weapons to bear down the tunnel. Which, as it turned out, was just as well.