Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

Paradoxically, the longer nothing happened the more uneasy I felt. The eldar we’d encountered had to have come from somewhere, and, since we’d found no side passages so far, wherever that was had to be ahead of us. My imagination began to picture a vast cavern in which an entire warhost had gathered, preparing even now to pour through these narrow tunnels like a flood through a storm drain, bursting out behind our carefully prepared defences to massacre us all. Of course, if that happened I’d already be dead, what was left of my carcass left to moulder in the dark for eternity, so at least it would be somebody else’s mess to sort out.

Which was little comfort. I moved with all the stealthy caution of a born-and-bred tunnel rat, but the troopers with me had no such innate advantage, and the confined space magnified every footfall, cough, muffled expletive and rattle of equipment to what sounded to me like the volume of an artillery barrage. In the end, despite my better judgement, I moved a little ahead of them so that my ears could function properly, the pattern of echoes being at least as reliable a guide to the location of the tunnel walls as the beam from the luminator one of the troopers carried.

Accordingly, I was the first to spot a faint flicker of stealthy movement in the blackness ahead of us, no more than a darker knot of shadow in the Stygian gloom. I held up a hand.

‘Wait one,’ I voxed, sotto voce, grateful for the tiny comm-beads everyone was equipped with;48 raising my voice to shout a warning would only tip off whoever or whatever was lurking in the darkness ahead of us. ‘Possible contact.’

‘Numbers?’ Grifen responded equally tersely, and behind me I could hear the faint rattle of lasguns being readied. Faint enough not to have been noticed by whoever was lurking further down the passageway, with any luck, but there could be no guarantee of that, and I shrank against the tunnel wall, anticipating a volley of hissing eldar shuriken aimed at the source of the sound. But nothing happened, and after a moment of breathing deeply to slow my hammering heart, I reached down cautiously to loosen the laspistol in its holster and the chainsword scabbarded at my waist.

‘Can’t tell,’ I said, peering into the gloom ahead of me. ‘Douse the light.’

The trooper carrying it complied at once, plunging us into even greater darkness, although since I had my back to him and had had the sense to close my eyes before he did so, I suppose I was less affected than most of my companions. Sure enough, as my vision adjusted, I began to see darker swirls of blackness clotting the gloom ahead, thrown into relief by a faint glow in the far distance. Almost without thinking I drew the laspistol, its familiar weight a reassuring presence in my hand, but left the chainsword in its scabbard. There was nothing to cut at or parry in the immediate vicinity, and if I needed to shoot in a hurry I’d be better off giving that matter my full attention.

‘Several,’ I said eventually, giving up the attempt to assess an accurate headcount, and inching my way forward with the greatest reluctance in an attempt to get a better view. But at any rate who or whatever it was seemed to be heading away from us, for which I thanked the Emperor wholeheartedly in an undertone.

‘Say again?’ Grifen queried, and I belatedly realised I’d left the vox-channel open.

‘Stay alert,’ I said, quite possibly the single most superfluous piece of advice I’d ever given. ‘And watch your step.’ Though quite how they were going to do that without being able to see their feet was beyond me.

Reasoning that the command squad was either going to have to put the light back on or stumble around in the dark making enough noise to rouse a hungover ork,49 I opened up the distance a little further, grateful for the sombre hues of my Commissarial uniform, which would render me all but invisible in darkness this profound. True, whoever it was I’d spotted had apparently disappeared, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by, and right now I’d take whatever advantages I could get.

My aide’s unmistakable aroma assaulted my nostrils, and his voice emerged from the darkness not far behind my left shoulder. ‘Should we take a look, do you think, sir?’