Gav Thorpe - 13th Legion

Picking our way across the ruined landscape is a time-consum­ing process. We need to move quickly, but the route to Coritanorum is littered with burning tanks and mounds of corpses, not to mention the fact that the ground has been torn up and in places the rims of the shellholes are six metres high and fifty metres across. As we get nearer, within a few hundred metres of the gate, a thick layer of ash carpets the ground, in places piled up in drifts which go knee-deep. I remember that this is where the plasma torpedoes impacted.

'Do you know what happens to someone who gets caught in the noval centre of a plasma warhead explosion?' Gudmanz asks nobody in particular as he hauls himself up the slope of

another impact crater, his robes covered with flecks of grey ash. We all shrug or shake our heads. Gudmanz bends down and grabs a handful of the dusty grey ash and lets it trickle through his fingers with a cruel, rasping laugh.

'You don't mean...' starts Lorii and then she groans with dis­taste when Gudmanz nods.

'Emperor, I swallowed some of that!' curses Loron, spitting repeatedly to clear his mouth.

'Silence, all of you!' barks the Colonel. We are almost at the gates.'

I step through the small portal into the left watchtower with lasgun ready. When I'm inside I understand how the Colonel could lead us through the gate with such confidence. Inside the tower men and women are strewn haphazardly across the floor and up the spiral stairs, their faces blue, contorted by the parox­ysms of death.

'Airborne toxin, I suspect/ mutters Gudmanz, peering closely at one of the bodies, a young woman perhaps twenty years old, dressed in a Typhos sergeant's uniform.

'From where?' Striden voices the question that had just popped into my head.

'Keep moving,' the Colonel orders from further up the stair­well. When we reach the top, the whole upper level is a single chamber. There are gunslits all around, and a few emplaced autocannons, their crews lying dead beside their guns.

'Gudmanz/ the Colonel attracts the tech-priest's attention and nods towards a terminal in the inner wall, facing away from the gate. The tech-priest lurches over and leans against the wall. He reaches up and pulls something from behind his ear. It's like a small plug, the size of a thumbnail, and as he pulls it further I see a glistening wire stretching between it and Gudmanz's head. Punching a few runes on the terminal he inserts the plug into a recess in the middle of the contraption and closes his eyes. The display screen flickers into life, throw­ing a green glow onto the ageing tech-priest's craggy features. A succession of images flickers across the screen, too quick to see each one individually but giving an overall impression of a map or blueprints. Then a lot of numbers scroll up, again too fast to read, a succession of digits that barely appear before they are replaced by new data. With a grunt, Gudmanz steps back,

the plug being ejected from the port and whipping back into his skull.

'Just as well that I checked/ he tells the Colonel. They have changed some of the security protocols in the inner areas and remapped the plasma chamber access passages/

'You have a map of this place?' asks Lorii in amazement. 'How can you remember all that information? This place is over forty kilometres across!'

'Subcutaneous cerebral memograph/ Gudmanz replies, tap­ping an area of his skull just above his right ear. They did not take all of my implants/

'I'm not going to even pretend I understood a word of that/ I butt in, 'but I take it you have an exact copy of the latest schematics in your head now?'

That is correct/ he affirms with a single nod before pulling his hood up over his head. I turn to the Colonel.

'He mentioned plasma chambers, Colonel/ I say to him. 'VniaX are we actually going to do here?'

'Coritanorum is run by three plasma reactors/ he explains as everyone else gathers around. 'We will get into the primary gen­erators and disable them. Every system, every defence screen and sited energy weapon, as well as many of the major bom­bardment turrets, are linked into mat power system/

'I can see mat/ agrees Lorii. 'But how do we get in?'

The Colonel simply points to the nearest body.

'Getting into the next circle is going to be harder/ Gudmanz warns the Colonel.

With our stolen uniforms, chosen to fit us better than my scrappy attempt with the Mordian outfit, getting around hasn't been too difficult. Everybody seems to take it for granted when an officer and a bunch of guardsmen, accompanied by a tech-priest, walk past. They've been on a war footing for two years now, I suspect the security is a little bit lax. After all, nobody would be stupid enough to come in here without an army. Except us, of course.

With their extraordinary hair concealed beneath Typhon Guard helmets, and their faces partially obscured by the high collars of the blue jackets, even Lorii and Loron have gone unnoticed. I'm not sure what uniform die Colonel procured for himself, but it seems to be one that makes the Typhons look

the other way lest they attract his attention. It's black, without any decoration at all, and I wonder if it isn't some local branch of the commissariat. Even in stolen domes he's managed to come up as someone everyone else is scared stiff of. Typical. With his camo-cape discarded, Striden is revealed as a skinny young man of about twenty, almost painful in his lankiness, though he doesn't walk with the gawkiness you might reason­ably expect.

I'm beginning to understand even more now about how impossible it would be to take Coritanorum by open attack. Even if a sizeable enough force could gain access, the layout of die lower levels is roughly circular, a series of four concentric rings according to Gudmanz. Each is only linked to die next by a single access tunnel, which are on opposite sides of each ring so that to get from one to the next you have to get around half the circumference of die ring. The builders even made the air ducts and power conduits circular, so there's no quick route dirough there eidier. It's taken us a day and a half just to get around the outer circle. We grabbed a few hours sleep in an empty barracks block during the morning, and it's about mid­day now, and we're in a small chamber leading off from the passageway that goes to the next security gate.

'What do we need to do?' asks Schaeffer, dragging a chair from behind a chrome desk and sitting down. The plain, white room is bare except for the desk and chair, obviously disused now.

*We have to get one of the security officers - a senior one, I mean/ Gudmanz tells us. The Colonel looks over at me where I'm lounging against the wall.

'Kage, take Lorii and get me a senior security officer/ he says, as calmly as if asking me to pop out and get him some fresh boot polish or something. Lorii and I exchange glances and head out of the door. The corridor smells faindy of disinfectant and gleams brighdy from a recent cleaning. The main tunnel is quite high and wide, its rhombic cross-section five metres tall and ten metres wide at die base widi gradually sloping walls. Every surface is sheathed in shining metal panels, like steel planks, riveted into the naked rock. A few people go this way and that, paying us almost no attention at all. Most of them are guardsmen, but the odd Administratum scribe goes past now and then. Lorii and I wander along the corridor a bit until we

come to a junction, much narrower and leading off in a curve to our right. We lean against the wall and start chatting, eyes looking over each other's shoulders for a sign of someone who might be the sort of man we're looking for. To everyone else, we just look like we're loafing, merely off-duty guardsmen passing the time.

'Do you think we can pull this off?' Lorii asks, keeping her voice low, a gentle purr in fact.