01.1 - Knee Deep Read online

“Why, to perform my allotted task, of course. I can see your work instruction has been entirely deficient, Layperson Davir. The sewers of this city are a marvel of engineering, many thousands of years old. They are designed to be a self-sustaining system in which nothing of potential value is left unused. Human waste is converted into methane gas by the action of gene-sculpted bacteria bred specifically for that purpose. In turn, this methane is pumped to the surface to be used as fuel in some of the city’s manufactoriums.”

  “I see.”

  Briefly, Davir considered the matter.

  “So, if I understand this, you recently noticed the methane levels were falling? So you started heating the sewers, so the bacteria would create more methane. Is that right?”

  “Indeed.”

  “You do understand there is a war on?”

  “Certainly,” Serberus gazed at him blithely. “It is why we are short-handed. My fellow adepts in the sewers were transferred to other duties, years ago. I have been alone, with just these few servitors to help maintain the entire system. I will confess, Layperson Davir, I had even begun to wonder if my presence here had been somehow overlooked. But then, you arrived.”

  “I’m not a coghead. I’m a Guardsman. As to the fall in methane production, I suspect that is to do with the war. At last count, more than four-fifths of the city’s civilian population are dead. That’s why your methane levels are falling. Less people means less shit, means less raw material for your bacteria to work on.”

  In response, Serberus was silent. He stared at Davir with incomprehension.

  “Don’t you understand?” Davir asked him. “Raising the temperature in the sewers was a mistake. In fact, it has put the city in danger. It has allowed the orks to infest the sewers.”

  Still, the old man just stared at him.

  “Are you deaf?” Davir said in mounting annoyance. “I’m telling you that you’ve been wasting your time. Your work here is meaningless. Given the way that things operate in Broucheroc, there’s every chance you’ve been forgotten. No one even knows you’re down here.”

  Suddenly, Serberus sprang to life. Screaming with incoherent rage, he leapt at Davir and tried to strangle him. Madness burned in his eyes. Catching his wrists, Davir fought to hold him back. Now they were standing so close, he could see the old man’s skin was raddled with weeping sores. His gums were swollen and bleeding. Years of malnourishment had taken their toll. Despite this, Serberus was stronger than he looked. Insanity fuelled his strength.

  As they struggled, the tech-adept’s mechadendrites whipped into a frenzy. Davir felt them scrabbling at his uniform, scratching at him. One of the dendrites gouged into his cheek, breaking the skin. He winced. Red with his blood, the dendrite withdrew and blindly stabbed at his face once more. Appalled, he realised it was trying to find his eyes, attempting to hook them from their sockets.

  He felt a surge of anger. He had been trying to hold back so as not to hurt the old man, but it was time to end this.

  Lowering his head like a bull, Davir butted Serberus across the bridge of the nose. As the pain made the old man shy away, the dendrites loosened their hold. Pressing home his momentary advantage, Davir twisted his body and levered Serberus over his shoulder. It was a demonstration of the effectiveness of the Guard’s unarmed combat doctrine. Davir would not have cared to try it on an ork, but the tech-adept was a different story. Shrieking, the old man landed with a thump and was briefly still.

  “Listen to me,” Davir said, holding out a placating hand as he saw Serberus stir back to life. “Stay where you are. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Kill him,” the old man whispered, his voice as dry as dust and cracked with age. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

  For a second, Davir wondered who Serberus was talking to—until he heard the sound of heavy footsteps and saw the servitors lurching towards him.

  They were hulking monstrosities, created from the union of machine and human corpse. There were six of them, each as old and poorly maintained as their master, Serberus: shambling, blank-eyed things that moved with the whirr of gears and the whine of motors.

  Davir had seen servitors before. On some Imperial worlds they were relatively common, but he could never escape a feeling of horror when he looked at them. He understood enough to know they were not truly alive. For all that, the human parts still moved with the semblance of life, their owners were long dead, their bodies harvested and grafted to the machine for use as organic components.

  Still, there was something unsettling about them, something sickening. The only reason that Davir did not give in to the impulse to flee in terror was that he was confident he could deal with them. He was armed, and they moved so slowly. Raising his lasgun to his shoulder, he sighted in on the lead servitor and drilled a las-blast through the centre of its forehead.

  The abomination kept on moving.

  Davir fired again. Another las-blast hit the servitor, destroying even more of its brain. It made no difference. The monster continued to advance towards him. They all did. Their slow, shuffling footsteps were like drumbeats, sounding his death-knell.

  Realising the seriousness of his predicament, Davir looked around for somewhere to run. But it was too late. While he had been firing at the lead servitor, the others had moved to cut off every avenue of escape.

  He fired his lasgun again, letting off a salvo of rapid shots in the hope of blasting his way through them. It was to no avail. No matter how much damage he did to their human parts, the servitors seemed indifferent to his efforts. When he fired at the machine parts, it barely dented them—the las-blasts were simply absorbed or deflected.

  Trying to buy time, Davir retreated. His hand went to his belt in search of a grenade, only to remember he had used them all up against the orks. He switched his lasgun to full auto and fired off the remainder of the power pack in a matter of seconds. It achieved nothing. The servitors kept coming.

  They had backed him into a corner. As one, the servitors lifted their arms towards him. In the background, he could hear Serberus still screaming at them to kill him. Horrified, Davir realised he was going to die.

  “Adept! Desist immediately!” a strangely familiar voice called out in a commanding tone. “Code command: epsilon beta nine-five, alpha seven-seven-seven omega! Adept! I am giving you an order!”

  It was Scholar. Clutching at the wound on his temple, supported by Bulaven to the side of him, he advanced toward Serberus. The effect of his words was dramatic.

  At a gesture from Serberus, the servitors suddenly stopped. Abruptly docile, the old man bowed to Scholar.

  “Magos, I acknowledge your authority. I am yours to command.”

  “Very good, adept,” Scholar said. “Return to your duties. I will speak with you later.”

  “I never thought I’d ever be quite so happy to see you, Scholar,” Davir said to him, once the tech-adept and the servitors had tottered away. “Some day you will have to tell me just how you did that. In the meantime, however, with your help, I think perhaps I have a solution to all our problems…”

  “Fire-team Three to Sergeant Chelkar. Are you receiving this, sergeant? Please respond.”

  Chelkar was getting ready to make his peace with death by the time the call arrived. He did not intend to go quietly, but he could see no choice other than to accept the inevitable.

  He had lost nearly half his men. It was all the remainder could do to hold off the orks. The enemy were everywhere. The Vardans were attempting to stage a fighting retreat, but it was hopeless. There was no way they could hold back the orks while making the long journey to the surface.

  The call changed everything. Chelkar heard the comm-bead in his ear buzz into life, while a familiar voice came over the airwaves.

  “Fire-team Three to Sergeant Chelkar. Are you receiving? Over.”

  “Davir?” Chelkar voxed him back. “Is that you?”

  “Most definitely, sergeant. Listen, we have to make this quick. We’re using some of the
equipment down here to boost the signal and beat the interference from the tunnels, but Scholar says it won’t take long for it to burn out. I have some directions for you. I know you outrank me, but you have to do what I say. Trust me. I have a way to pull your fat out of the fire.”

  “It’s called Tunnel Section A-92,” Davir had said, before giving him precise directions on how to reach it. Guiding his men toward it, Chelkar could only hope it wasn’t some sick joke. Davir had promised him a miracle. He hoped he could deliver.

  “Sergeant! This way!”

  Leading his men down the tunnels with the orks in hot pursuit, Chelkar suddenly saw Bulaven ahead. The big man was gesturing frantically, urging the Vardans forward.

  “Quickly! Quickly!” Bulaven shouted, herding them towards a place where the tunnel briefly narrowed before widening again. “Scholar has jury-rigged the mechanism, but we don’t have much time!”

  Chelkar turned to ask what he was talking about, but when the last of the Vardans were past the section of narrowed tunnel, Bulaven gave a signal.

  “Now! Do it! They’re all across!”

  A concealed metal shutter slammed down with the screech of rusted gears, cutting them off from the advancing horde of orks. Once the shutter came down, Davir and Scholar emerged from by the side of it.

  “Not bad, eh, sergeant?” Davir smiled like a feline with a mouthful of cream. “It is an old sluice gate. We saw it on the sewer schematics and knew it was just what we needed.”

  “That shutter won’t hold them back long,” Chelkar said. Already, he could hear as the orks pounded against it from the other side.

  “It won’t need to,” Davir’s smile widened. “It only has to buy us the time to get back to the surface.”

  He had lived in the sewers for so long. A lifetime, he supposed. Now, finally, it was over.

  Deep below the city of Broucheroc, in the pumping station that had been his home for decades, Serberus stood in the main control room and felt an abiding sense of sorrow.

  The feeling was unfamiliar to him. In many ways, so was every emotion. In order that he might better perform his labours, long ago his brain had been fitted with cybernetic implants designed to regulate and moderate his emotional responses.

  He suspected the implants had begun to fail. Similarly, he was experiencing a curious malfunction in some of his organic systems. The ducts intended to provide lubrication to his eyes were overflowing. Tears stained his face.

  For years, he had known nothing but duty. He had maintained the sewers, dedicated his every waking hour to ensure the system worked efficiently. It had been a constant losing battle, even more so since he had been left alone with only the servitors to help him.

  Still, he had done what was expected. He had kept to his appointed task, foreswearing the half-remembered pleasures of friendship and human interaction. In the face of advancing age, and the progressive decline of his own augmetic systems, he had continued his labours.

  He had not asked for thanks. As a servant of the Machine God, it was not his place to expect any honour for his work. In many ways, he was as much a component of the system as a bleed-valve or a humble restraining bolt. As with any component, ultimately he would wear down and need to be replaced. The only surprise was that he had continued in service as long as he had.

  The news he was no longer needed had been unexpected. He had been told he was obsolete, as were the sewers. That last news had been the most surprising. With a single stroke, his entire life, every sacrifice he had endured, had been rendered meaningless.

  He had been shocked, but there was no questioning his orders. They had come from the tall tech-priest—the one his bodyguards called “Scholar”. He looked and acted strangely for a magos, but that was hardly an issue. His status was clear. He had spoken to Serberus in machine code, using all the correct commandments and overrides.

  A tiny part of Serberus had wanted to rebel. He had wanted to refuse the order, but the impulse had quickly passed. He understood he was merely a small cog in the Great Machine. It was not his place to defy his superiors. The fact that he had even considered it was simply further proof of his growing malfunction. His life was no longer useful. It was time to put an end to it.

  Moving his hands over the controls responsible for overseeing the sewers’ function, Serberus adjusted the valves in the massive methane storage tanks beneath the pumping station. He raised the pressure in the tanks to critical levels.

  He felt a tremor beneath his feet as the tanks struggled to hold together. He had pushed the system as far as it would go. His hand went to a red ignition switch, set under a protective plexiplast bubble in the centre of the control panel. He lifted the bubble, exposing the switch.

  With a last prayer to the Machine God, Serberus followed the orders that Scholar had given him. He pressed the switch, sending a spark into the system, and welcomed oblivion.

  The effect was spectacular. As the spark entered the system, the methane tanks ruptured as the gases inside ignited. Serberus was atomised by the blast, along with the pumping station.

  A vast superheated cloud of burning methane exploded outward, expanding in every direction. Channelled by the tunnels, it moved at a speed faster than sound. By the time the roar of the explosion reached any given point in the sewers, there was nothing alive there to hear it—the fire cloud had already raced ahead, incinerating everything in its path.

  In the ork-infested atrium, devastation came without warning. The weird fungal landscape of the birthing grounds was destroyed in an instant. Embryonic orks, yet to be born, burst into flame. Caught in the raging firestorm, every ork in the sewers was burned to ash. There were no survivors. The fire scoured the tunnels of life. Even ork spores could not withstand the inferno.

  The fire cloud sped on. By the time it reached the surface the worst of the heat had dissipated, but sewer coverings were suddenly sent vaulting into the air all over Broucheroc due to the massive change of pressure. The ground beneath the city trembled. It was like an earthquake. Across the city, the pious made the sign of the aquila and prayed to the Emperor to stop the ground from rising to swallow them. Some wondered whether an angry god had awoken beneath their feet, a new horror to be added to the city’s ills.

  Briefly, the ground rumbled once more.

  Then, it was quiet.

  “We survived,” Chelkar said, afterwards.

  He was standing in the shadow of a burned-out building, watching as the first glimmers of dawn touched the sky. Half an hour earlier, the Vardans had emerged from the sewers with hardly any time to spare. A few seconds, either way, and they would have been caught in the blast. As it was, they were still alive. Normally, it would have been a cause for celebration, but there were still other matters to which he needed to attend.

  “Yes, we survived,” Davir said, standing beside him. He smiled, showing his bad teeth. “Of course, I never had any doubt of it—that I would survive myself, you understand. Frankly, this city hasn’t yet come up with the ork who can kill me.”

  “Thank the Emperor for small mercies, then,” Chelkar said. “It would be a shame to lose you.”

  Nearby, the other survivors from the patrol were doing their best to recover from their ordeal. Men tended their wounds, or helped injured comrades. One of the Guardsmen had even managed to find fuel and a brazier. Troopers huddled around it for warmth. Ration bars were being handed around.

  They had survived, but only at the cost of the lives of half the platoon. Chelkar hadn’t lied to Davir when he said he did not want to lose him. He did not want to lose any of them.

  “You realise, there will have to be a report made,” Chelkar told Davir. “Probably a lot of them. General HQ and Sector Command will want to know about the orks in the sewers and where they came from. Most of all, they’ll want to know how we destroyed the orks and we blew up the sewers. For that matter, I’d like the answer to it myself.”

  “It is a long story, sergeant,” Davir shrugged. “Though, suffice to
say, I acted with extraordinary heroism throughout the entire business. Still, perhaps it would be better if you heard the story tomorrow. When we are both more rested.”

  “When you have had the chance to come up with some convincing lies, you mean?”

  “Precisely, sergeant.”

  “Very well,” Chelkar agreed. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Do you think we’ll be in trouble?” Bulaven asked, later, once dawn had broken. “For destroying the sewers, I mean?”

  He stood around the brazier with Davir and Scholar, trying to keep warm. The balmy warmth of the sewers was a distant memory.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Davir said. “They were mostly derelict, anyway. If some general now finds his indoor plumbing no longer works, it is just tough luck. He can shit in a ditch like the rest of us. Besides, Chelkar will help cover for us. He’s a good man, the sergeant. Of course, one thing still interests me.”

  He turned toward Scholar and favoured him with a penetrating stare.

  “I know you’ve always been a mine of information, Scholar. But I can’t wait to hear your explanation for what happened in the sewers. Serberus may have been crazy, but it doesn’t explain how you knew the codes the cogheads use. Well? I’m waiting.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Scholar said. “Perhaps you will let me tell you tomorrow?”

  Davir grimaced, looking out at the landscape of the city where he woke up every day knowing it could be his last. He shrugged.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he said.

  Scanning by Flandrel,

  formatting and

  proofing by Undead.