Chapter 114: Arrival at Omicron
The tactical session on the flagship's flag bridge was brief. Primary landing coordinates, communication frequencies, operational division of responsibilities: covered in one sitting, no extended complications. Duvette took his adjutant back to the lower-deck billet and slept.
He had already formed his assessment of Omicron-Nine.
The surface would not be the problem.
A world that had been through a Life-Eater Exterminatus and a global firestorm did not produce surface threats that required serious ground combat. Whatever had survived in exposed positions could be located through standard orbital sensors and removed with a strike call. The 112th's real work, as it had been since Farrak IV, would be in the confined spaces below ground, in the labyrinthine depths of a dead hive city's underhive.
Several centuries was a considerable interval. An uninhabited world on the edge of the Sabbat Worlds sector, in a region with permanently unstable conditions, had time to accumulate complications that no survey at launch date would have predicted. Small Chaos cult contingents occasionally found their way to isolated worlds, forced down by damaged vessels or pursuing some agenda too minor for broader attention. And the deep underhive fortifications of a fully developed hive city had been designed to survive exactly the kind of macro-scale sterilization event this world had experienced, which meant there was a non-trivial probability that something had survived down there regardless of what the surface reading showed.
That kind of problem required elite infantry with extensive confined-space experience to resolve. Which was precisely what the Carpé family was paying to observe.
Duvette ran his hand along the power sword's hilt as he walked the billet corridor. Whatever was at the bottom of that dead hive, he intended to find out firsthand.
The Warp transit lasted the better part of two weeks. The fleet dropped back into realspace and entered a system with the quality of something that had been forgotten by whatever had originally taken an interest in it. The light reaching the ship was thin and directionless, and the planet that resolved in the viewports was the color of old ash.
Duvette was on the flag bridge when the preliminary scan results came in.
The Mechanicus Explorator attached to the Carpé fleet, a tech-priest in deep red robes, his relationship with the dynasty clearly one of long-standing practical partnership, approached the patriarch with the scan readout and exchanged several lines in the synthesized tones of someone for whom vocal communication was a secondary mode.
The man identified as Olivier Carpé, the dynasty's patriarch, received the report and conveyed the summary to the assembled staff.
"The planet's surface is clear." His voice carried the particular quality of someone whose authority was never exercised at high volume because it did not need to be. "No significant biological activity detected. Heat signatures at essentially zero. The atmosphere was damaged severely by the original firestorm event, what remains is minimal and dispersing. Within a relatively short geological period, it will be entirely gone."
He moved to the hololithic projection table and indicated the slow-rotating globe on its surface.
"Based on the family's historical records and the current scan overlay, the recoverable heavy metals the Munitorum are expecting can be found concentrated in the secondary hive ruins on the western continent. The ancient site that represents our primary interest is in the main hive at the central continent. Two separate objectives."
Rogue Trader operational doctrine, at its most fundamental: always maximize concurrent return.
Olivier continued with the task assignments.
"The Carpé family will deploy our main transport group to the secondary hive for resource recovery. Colonel-Commissar Duvette, under our agreed division of responsibilities, you will need to assign a portion of your forces there to supervise extraction and ensure security for the recovery teams."
Duvette had anticipated this. He turned to his officers.
"Kleist. Elias. Take the 112th's armoured main body to the secondary hive. Clear any surface threats, establish a security perimeter, keep the recovery operation moving without interference."
Both officers came to attention and confirmed. Duvette then indicated that he would take the remaining specialist element and accompany the Carpé family's forces directly to the main hive.
Olivier assigned the main hive exploration, the search for the ancient site, carrying whatever prize or hazard it contained: entirely to Venus.
In the background, Julius Carpé's expression produced something that no amount of aristocratic training had fully succeeded in suppressing. The patriarch had assigned the prestigious mission to his daughter and the salvage work to his son, and the imbalance in the ledger was perfectly legible on Julius's face.
The briefing ended. Duvette went back to the lower deck immediately.
For an underhive descent of this scale, size was a liability. He selected five companies from the 112th, five hundred soldiers total, drawn almost entirely from the original Ash Watchers 101st veterans.
For the specific environment ahead of them, these were the right people. The veterans who had come up through Farrak IV's tunnel networks, through the Eternal Lament's corridors, through Macragge City's underground passages, had a relationship with confined-space combat that most Imperial regiments never developed in a full career. The Eisenmark armoured crews were excellent at their own kind of fighting. This was not their kind of fighting.
The five hundred equipped: full carapace armour. Hellguns with high-capacity external power packs for sustained fire without supply constraints. Fragmentation grenades and demolition charges per soldier.
Kleist and Elias departed for the heavy transport bay with the main force, presenting a formal salute before they went. Duvette led his five hundred to the separate lander bays.
Venus was already there. She had exchanged the aristocratic dress for a suit of light power armour, and the household troops assembled behind her were equipped at the same grade as the 112th's veterans, someone had listened to his requirement. The Carpé family's Explorator was there as well, clearly assigned to the main hive descent.
Duvette gave Venus's light power armour a brief look, adequate to assess grade.
She noticed the look and turned.
The Colonel-Commissar was wearing a flak vest under his greatcoat and a filtration mask. He was not wearing a helmet. He was carrying the power sword.
"Colonel-Commissar." A slight pause. "We could provide you with something equivalent to this before departure." She indicated her own armour. "A Void Stalker light power suit."
He produced a short sound that was not a laugh and waved it off. "No need, Miss Carpé."
She appeared momentarily uncertain about how to receive this. She did not press it.
What she did not have the context for was this: Veteran's Frame's passive conditioning had been running continuously for months, pushing his physiology's baseline performance incrementally beyond what standard military training produced. With Limiter Break available on top of that, and the power sword in his hand, the category of physical threat that could not be managed was already small. The cases that fell outside it were what the six hundred Emperor's Wrath sitting unused in his reserves existed to address.
Light power armour was a reasonable precaution for most people. He was not most people.
Venus gave the order to board. The landers filled in organized groups and the hatches sealed.
Pre-mission assessment on the entry point: forcing entry through the main hive's collapsed surface levels was not the plan. The surface had been damaged beyond easy traversal, and working downward through that material would cost time and energy before reaching anything useful. The alternative: the main hive's primary sewage trunk lines. Before the Exterminatus, these channels had carried enormous volumes of toxic chemical waste: the processed refuse of a hive city's industrial base. The firestorm had solved the toxicity problem, if not through any means that would have appealed to anyone living through it. The heat had vaporized the volatile components and baked the residual mass into crystalline solids. What had once been a river of lethal chemical waste was now a passable, if extremely unpleasant, natural passage straight down to the deep underhive.
The landers tore through the thin atmosphere with the graceless efficiency of craft that did not require the air to be cooperative.
The surface came up.
When the hatches dropped and Duvette's boots met the ground, he raised his head.
The hive was enormous.
Centuries of abandonment and destruction had done nothing fundamental to its scale. The structure rising out of the ash plain ahead of them was a creation of the Dark Age of Technology, tens of thousands of metres of dense industrial construction reaching upward until its upper levels were simply gone into the weak grey sky. It had been built to last and it had lasted, in the specific way that things last when everyone who built them is dead and everything organic within them has been dissolved. The mass of it blocked the already limited light and put everything beneath it in permanent shadow.
The ground underfoot was pale green crystals. The firestorm had fused the drained chemical waste residue into something glassy and brittle, and each step broke through the surface layer with a sound that carried in the absolute silence.
There was no other sound. No wind in air this thin. Nothing moving anywhere in the visible distance.
Duvette activated his vox link.
"Communications check. Respond in sequence."
"Anderson. Heavy fire element. Receiving clearly. Visibility confirmed."
"Stroud. Recon element. Receiving. Auspex is running clean."
"Finn. Sniper team. Receiving."
Each company captain completed their report in the same clipped professional register. Then, last:
"Venus. Carpé household element. Communications nominal. Ready to move on your order, Colonel-Commissar."
Duvette's expression did not change. He gave a single nod.
The greatcoat lifted slightly in a cold current that moved through the dead air from somewhere deeper in the structure.
The combined force of nearly a thousand soldiers, in full combat configuration, moved toward the entrance of the old sewage main, and descended into the dark.