Chương 33: Chapter Twenty-Nine - Deeper Down

The 14th Platoon, as it turned out, was one of the smaller ones. It was led by a young Voidsman Lieutenant called Gustav who seemed entirely out of his depth, and a grizzled old sergeant called Auscion who wasn't.

"Alright, you fucking ragamuffins," the Sergeant yelled. Alexis was pretty sure she was being included in that grouping and she wasn't sure how she felt about it. Was she a ragamuffin?

"Get in line! The boys in the other platoons are going to be clearing the path for us, but once we break into the big room with the shiny machines, it's all on us. We don't have no fancy sisters with us, but they'll be around, and what we do have is Tech Acolyte Alexis Lambda-3 here. She's as much of a VIP as any of our heavy gun boys. You got that?" Alexis blinked, then looked around. It took a moment to discover what he meant.

Most of the Voidsmen carried a mix of lasrifles, laspistols, and the occasional autogun, but a few among them had larger weapons. Meltas, flamers, even bolters with straps and braces to allow an otherwise normal soldier to fire the out-sized guns. She supposed that she kinda fit. Not with the stolen lasrifle she was still carrying, or the goo-gun that the Voidsmen were unlikely to be able to recognize, but rather with the arms that her servitors were carrying.

CS-3-2/11's big plasma welder alone probably counted as a big gun, and then there was the almost-a-bolter that 054-648 had. Alexis smiled and gave the few Voidsmen that glanced her way a little wave. She wasn't shy... but she wasn't not shy.

"Th-that's right," Lieutenant Gustav said, finally shifting his posture so that he was standing straight. Alexis had only just met him moments before, but she already firmly believed that he was the product of nepotism.

"Come on, 14th, let's do a good job of this. For our home!" The cheer that followed was rather anemic, but Alexis decided not to care. It was fine. They were here, mostly, to lead her to where there would be more enemies. So, with that in mind, she approached the group a little more, but kept a few feet apart. None of them looked keen on staying close to her, which was fine. She tried not to take it personally. The issue there was that the Adeptus Mechanicus worked hard to cultivate a sense of otherness.

It didn't help that a lot of the members of her religion, especially the leaders, only had a few vestiges of humanity left. It was almost a rite of passage for a member to discover a means of communication that they found more efficient and effective and use that instead of simple low gothic.

Of course, no two members agreed entirely on what that meant, so to the average member of the ship's crew, each time they had the dubious honour of bothering a member of the priesthood of Mars, they'd get a reply in a different format. The otherness came with a common feeling that any member of the priesthood only ever belonged with others of the priesthood, because normal people either feared or ostracized them. Alexis had noticed that at work a while ago.

Mostly because she had felt a little ostracized within the order itself. The irony wasn't lost on her. She set that train of thought aside when they started to move. The 14th platoon wasn't the first out of the room. That honour went to the others who were clearing out the path ahead. Instead, they kinda clumped up into a formation by the rear, then moved out when it was their turn. The first part was simple enough, down a corridor, then into an elevator that was large enough to carry a Leman Russ.

The elevator clanged downwards, moving at a pace a little slower than a brisk walk. When it came to the floor they were meant to be on, the elevator stopped, then the doors were opened by the ogryn on one side and a trio of Voidsmen on the other. The passage they stepped into stank. Alexis moved a hand up, the one which still had some sleeve left, and covered her mouth against the smell. The passage had marks that showed that they weren't the first here.

Lasfire burns marred the walls, blood was splattered across the floors and ceilings, and a few lumen had been busted. This wasn't a particularly nice part of the ship, and they were walking right into one of the wider main paths. A group was waiting to one side for them to exit and make room. Alexis winced on seeing them. Medics, with injured on stretchers behind them and what looked like some lightly injured Voidsmen carrying others who were in tougher spots.

"Let's move!" the sergeant called out, and the entire platoon double-timed it. Alexis had to encourage her servitor friends to move a little faster just to keep up, which meant that she inevitably started to fall behind a little.

"Do you need help, red machine lady?" the platoon's ogryn asked. Alexis smiled.

"No thank you! We'll catch up, don't worry!" Each time they crossed a side-passage, she'd look down. Often, she caught flashes of lasfire, or heard the echoing screams of Voidsmen and genestealers. The push was well and truly ongoing. She wasn't sure how effective it would be, but... Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

The platoon reached the end of the passage where a set of bulkhead doors were shut, the text 'Subsidiary Plasma Generation Site Tau-B' was stencilled across the door, with graffiti painted on beneath, most of it faded by time.

"Ad mech, you're up!" Sergeant Auscion called back. Alexis jumped, then scurried forwards.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Door's locked," the Sergeant said, and that was all the explanation she got before he turned back to the nearest vox-operator and the Lieutenant. Alexis stared at the massive bulkhead door. It didn't exactly have a handy little doorbell, but there was a control console off to the side. She moved over to it and tapped the button to open the door. Then she inputted a quick system reset--turning it off and on--and tried the same.

When that didn't work, she reached into her satchel for her dataslate and a wire to connect it to the console. The skull implanted just above glared balefully at her as she inserted the wire into one of its eye sockets, but the old runny paint that read 'The Imperium's Favourite Skull' splattered across the skull's forehead kind of robbed it of any ability to intimidate. Her dataslate, being rather old, and designed more for servitor diagnosis than anything else, took a while to connect.

So she had to sit there and look busy while a loading bar slowly ticked full.

"That's not normal, is it?" the Lieutenant was saying. Alexis pricked her ears, but other than a quick glance out of the corner of her eye, she didn't look over. The Lieutenant and the sergeant were talking nearby.

"No sir, it isn't. I expected this to be a death run, but it's a lot calmer than that."

"That's good, no?" the Lieutenant asked.

"The not-dying part sure is a welcome surprise, sir," was the snarky reply.

"Maybe the cowboys cooked something up? Or the medicae, more like. But those stingy bastards aren't the sort to lift a finger to help unless there are thrones to be made."

"It could be a matter of favours," the Lieutenant said.

"The nobility trade that kind of thing all the time." The Sergeant sniffed.

"You'd know better than I would, sir."

"Yeah... I don't know. Maybe the genestealers are all sick?"

"Sick enough to keel over mid-fight for no reason?" the Sergeant asked.

"Could be a miracle?" the Lieutenant said, though he sounded very doubtful as he said it.

"What, from that new saintess the soldiers are talking about?" the Sergeant asked.

"That's just rumours. The rabble will see one weird coincidence and decide that it's the Emperor blessing them all."

"Don't let the sisters hear you saying that."

"Hm. Hey, Ad Mech, is that damned door going to open anytime soon?" Alexis jumped.

"W-working on it!" she called back. She had not. She tapped the dataslate a few times and frowned. The door controls, even bypassing the panel's buttons, did nothing, so she looked at the code beneath and discovered that it was all messed up. Even she, someone who had a somewhat difficult time with numbers, knew that the holy binary shouldn't be filled with so many numbers and random symbols. It looked almost like scrapcode. Then she found a message, buried further within.

//Praise the Omnissiah //The HOly Motive Force Must Not be Overrrrrtaken //Protect the Motive Force //as IT has Protected US //Praise the Omnissiah //The guardians of the Motive Force have fallen //The heretics are at the gate //Shut the gates //THE HERETICS ARE IN THE HALLS //Praise the Omnissiah //Subsidiary Plasma Generation Site Tau-B Command System Alpha //Shut down //Purge //Protect //Praise the Omnissiah"Ad Mech?" the sergeant asked.

"Sorry, sir. I believe that Subsidiary Plasma Generation Site Tau-B's machine spirit has locked the doors shut," she said. She looked over a few other things, using the limited access she had to pull out logs, then she split her screen in half and compared the two. The recent output and that from forty-eight hours ago were nearly the same. The machines within were still functional, then? Temperature in the room was high, but not lethally so. No pict recorder access.

She chewed on her lip, then found the access to another door, similar to this one, but already marked as being opened. That one's code hadn't been corrupted. It was a little bit of a faux-pas, but she copied the code outright and then pasted that into the current door's controls. Reaching over, she tapped the Open button, then looked up as the huge doors ground their way open with surprising speed. Within was a room illuminated by the blue glow of plasma coils and the flashing spark of the motive force.

And in that room, crawling on every surface, were genestealers.