293 – For Real?
Amberley Veil had found herself in what some may generously refer to as a ‘tight spot’ more times than she could count. She liked to mitigate and minimise risks wherever she could, but she was still a member of His Majesty's Most Holy Inquisition, and that meant negating risks was impossible.
Her entire job was about taking carefully managed risks; it was about taking care of problems that no one else in the Imperium could handle, or could be trusted to handle.
So yes, she had thought that accepting to follow the powerful Psyker into battle was a calculated risk. Amberley prided herself on her ability to read people, and she had gotten more than enough time with Echidna to form an understanding of the woman.
Unfortunately, Echidna had one of the most troublesome personalities, making her difficult to predict. A rational and pragmatic person could be trusted to follow logic and their own benefit. They were the easiest to predict. Echidna though? She was a strange mix of pragmatic, whimsical and … maybe a bit crazy.
That last part was iffy. Many people over the years had called her ‘crazy’, and most of the time it was only because she operated on a level above their own brittle little worldviews. To them, she seemed mad, but they were just frogs in wells, unable to understand someone who didn’t share their ‘common sense’.
Amberley was still undecided on whether Echidna was like that, or if she really had a handful of screws loose.
So yes. Getting another opportunity to test these ridiculous Power Armours and observe Echidna in combat seemed like a worthwhile reward for putting herself at a bit of risk. Echidna seemed like the type of person who did her best to protect people under her protection; after all, so in truth, this might have been one of her safest missions to date. In theory, that is.
As far as plans went, it was simple, as most should be. It was easier to adjust to changing circumstances when one didn’t have a complex, ten-layered stratagem with a dozen moving parts.
But even the simplest plans could be utterly obliterated when the one person on whom it was built decided to take a stroll, leaving them behind with a pat on the back. Inside a Genestealer nest.
Still, maybe she was being a bit uncharitable — and who could judge her ? — considering that the woman had somehow actually accomplished what she’d said she would. The Genestealers were unquestionably in disarray. Amberley recognised the feral chaos that descended over them, overwriting the malign yet cunning will of the Hive Mind. Only the sudden death of one or more crucial synapse nodes could have caused a reaction this severe in a Tyranid horde of this size.
Maybe she really did manage to assassinate two Norn Queens at the same time. And wasn’t that a horrifying thought? That Echidna could teleport killers so adept at their craft that even Tyranids failed to sense them halfway across a system? At least I will have some substantial to add to her file, not that we can raise her threat rating any higher.
The only thing keeping Echidna from being branded with the same threat rating as the Despoiler was that she hadn’t devoted her entire existence to seeing the Imperium brought to ruin.
“JURGEN!” Ciaphas roared behind her. “NOW!”
A beam of pure plasma roared through the air, radiating heat like a miniature sun as it evaporated a dozen Tyranids in its path. More importantly, it struck the towering monstrosity Ciaphas was duelling in the knee, making it buckle.
Amberley didn't have the freedom to pay more attention to the fight than to keep it within her peripheral sight, so she only vaguely saw the retired Commissar take advantage of his foe stumbling to drive his strange bone-sword up through its neck. He wrenched his wrist sideways, tearing the sword out in a way that all but detached the monster’s head from its shoulders.
Had the Hive Mind been in control, Amberley knew such a simple trick wouldn’t have worked. The beast would have dodged. No, it would have dismantled Cain ages ago. Alas, it wasn’t, and the Hive Tyrant was much worse off for it, fighting more like a rabid beast than a cunning creature bred for war.
Amberley dodged to the side, weaving past a wickedly sharp blade with surprising ease. The Power Armour giving her strength, speed and toughness beyond the norm, was one thing … but she’d noticed that it also somehow sped up her reaction time. She could see bullets fly; not only that, she could watch them, following them with her eyes. It made no sense. She wasn’t sure even Space Marines could see objects moving as fast as las-bolts.
She still couldn’t quite believe just how easy killing Tyranids that she would have run from on sight before became when wearing this thing. The Lictor that had tried to stab her faded from view, its skin rippling as it engaged that dreadful camouflage ability its kind were known for.
She managed to keep track of it for a few moments, seeing how space seemed to warp slightly around its cloaked form. But being assaulted by a swarm of rabid Tyranids made focusing on that somewhat difficult.
She had been using a nail-gun — as Echidna called it — to fight, initially at least, but that rifle turned out to be rather suboptimal against a swarm of rabid Tyranids. So she had been forced to draw her own organic Power Sword that looked disturbingly like it was made of bone, and use it to fend off the unending tide of monsters.
They were halfway up the spires of the Hive City, but it seemed like the Tyranids were still swarming inside, flowing in through tunnels leading to the Undercity. Whatever defenders remained in this particular Hive City were holed up in the upper spires, or in the outer sections, near the defensive walls surrounding the colossal structure.
The silver lining of all this was that she really was getting a number of new pieces of intel that she could add to Echidna’s file. And also that her armour seemed all but impervious to all the weapons the Tyranids had, so in the worst-case scenario, she could do her best impression of a turtle and wait inside her protective shell until Echidna came back to get her … if she ever did.
She felt, more than heard, the sharp claw cutting through the air, seemingly wanting to try its luck against the deceptively thin armour on her neck.
Got you. Amberley danced out of the way with a small, vicious grin. Her free hand came up and clamped down on the large monster’s wrist, her fingers making the carapace armour shatter as they dug into the monster’s flesh.
This armour really was ridiculous, she thought as she spun around and yanked the massive Tyranid bioform over her shoulder and slammed it into the ground. Her blade flashed out, ripping through its neck in a blink, and then she had to retreat again as the rest of the horde leapt over the body of their dead kin to attack her, though some stopped and were already gnawing at the Lictor’s body.
“Come!” Ciaphas shouted, and Amberley reacted instantly, grabbing the hand held out for her. Cain yanked up and over the Hive Tyrant’s corpse, nudging her behind himself and then turned to his aide. “Jurgen, now!”
The stoic man went about doing his duty with the same attitude she’d long grown used to over the years. He stepped up to the tip of the staircase and aimed his massive melta cannon down the tight corridor, though just by looking at his expression, one wouldn’t have been mistaken in thinking he was merely doing an everyday chore. Then again, to him, this was probably the equivalent of taking out the trash.
She heard the telltale thrum of the melta’s discharge, then the intense heat that accompanied it washed over her. Without the armour, it would have been uncomfortably warm — as she knew from experience — but now it was little more than a breeze.
“Pull back!” Ciaphas shouted, and his dutiful aide obeyed without thinking.
They rushed up the length of the staircase, though Amberley’s ears caught the distinctive metallic clatter of something bouncing down the metallic steps. When she glanced back, she saw Ciaphas use his wickedly sharp blade to cut a large plane of metal off the ceiling, then kick it down the tunnel. A moment later, the familiar sound of an entire set of frag grenades exploding rang out from the other side.
They reached the top not long after, their heads on a swivel as they looked down the three corridors curling away from each other. None of them had Tyranids in them. Yet.
“Jurgen, any more grenades?” Ciaphas asked.
“Afraid not, Sir,” the Pariah said with the slightest hint of annoyance. “This armour doesn’t have enough straps; we used most of ‘em to collapse that tunnel a while back.”
Well, considering Jurgen usually carried an entire armoury on his person, no armour ever had enough clasps and pockets for him.
“That won’t keep them for long,” Amberley noted, though she knew they would know that. She just had a bad habit of thinking out loud when stressed.
“This is a good chokepoint,” Ciaphas said, peering down the stairwell. It was just wide enough for two grown men to run up on it side by side, but not much more. “If we kill enough here, we might be able to turn their bodies into a barricade. That should give us enough time to retreat and link up with the defenders.”
Technically, they should have been able to outrun the Tyranids in their ridiculous Power Armours, but being fast and being agile were two very different things. Increased reaction speed or not. Worse, they didn’t have a map of the Hive City and its twisting tunnels, so all they had to rely on were guesswork and Cain’s superhuman instincts for navigating tunnel complexes.
They weren’t that much faster than the swifter Tyranids; a single wrong turn, and they would catch up, and then they’d get swarmed again.
“As far as plans go, I’ve heard worse,” Amberley mused. “Which way?”
She had given up on that wager to gain a ‘Wish’ from Echidna after seeing that Selene woman fight. So her only priority at the moment was waiting for Echidna to come back and pick them up. Oh well, this was far from the worst situation she’d been in. She could distinctly remember one, for example, where she had found herself on a planet similarly overrun by Tyranids, and she had to make her own way off the planet with a stolen merchant vessel.
At least here they had someone to extract them, hopefully. And death was also not a very likely possibility. If the scenery wasn’t so dreary, she might have even treated their few hours as a short vacation.
Cain paused for a moment at the intersection, squinting at the rusted signs and the deteriorated marks painted onto the walls. Then he did that thing of his, zoning out for a few seconds before decisively raising his hand, pointing at one of the tunnels.
“This one,” he said. “This one will lead us upwards. It will curve down a level first, but it will lead us back up, hopefully far enough that we will be able to access the actual Hive’s structures.”
She’d long learned not to question him on this, or doubt his instincts. For all she knew, he had a latent psychic ability for it, because the way he tried to explain his thought process once sounded entirely nonsensical to her.
How he could glean which way a tunnel would curve hundreds of metres away from the sound of the machinery working in the background and the taste of the air, or other such things, she’d never know. He couldn’t explain it much either. He just knew. Just like how seeing a three-dimensional map a single time would seemingly engrave itself onto his mind permanently.
Just as they were about to set off on a hasty jog down the dark tunnel, space ahead of them peeled away, and a familiar woman stepped through.
Amberley came to a sudden halt, her face turning blank as she stared at the cheerfully smiling Echidna. Why did she have a pair of white horns? And a long white tail ending in a rhombus? And what in the Emperor’s name was she even wearing? Who in their right mind would make tights out of a fishing net? And why wear shorts over tights? Amberley was very confused. Is this some ancient Terran fashion? … Well, I suppose people wore weird things even back then. It looks better than the atrocious things some nobles dare call ‘fashion’, at least, so that’s something.
No, it didn’t matter. Amberley sighed, wondering whether the immeasurably powerful Psyker had been reading her mind, waiting for just the right moment to step in and stomp on her barebones plans for the second time that day. Echidna certainly seemed the type to gain amusement out of those sorts of inane pranks.
Her eyes narrowed, taking in the slight bounce in her steps, the subconscious sway of her hips, the air of immense contentment radiating off her in waves. Had this been that Selene woman, Amberley would have chalked what she saw up to the post-battle bliss of a battle addict.
It wasn’t, though, and more tellingly, she saw what appeared to be a bedroom on the other side of the portal for a brief instant.
“Hello, minions!” Even her voice had a sing-song quality to it, and she seemed to be humming an unfamiliar tune under her breath. “How is it going?”
The conclusion was obvious, and it made a vein throb on her forehead in frustration. So while we were here, wading through damp tunnels full of Tyranids, she was getting laid? … Really?