Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

The first couple of hours seemed uneventful enough, weaving our way down through the manufactory levels on ramps and roadways crowded with lorries and the omnibuses which transported the workers to and from their shifts. Sometimes the carriageway bore through tunnels, in which the fires of foundries roared away down side passages, or crossed chasms on stout bridges, the edges of uncountable lower levels lying open and exposed beneath us, but for the most part it followed the usual deep hive practice of simply running across the roofs of the layer below. Everything else on the road gave way to us with gratifying speed, and it wasn’t long before we were past the main industrial zone and heading deeper. Now our way took us through solid rock on occasion, before emerging again into caverns stacked with the same interlocking multiple levels of habitation we’d grown used to in the higher levels of the hive.

This deep, the hivescape began to change, the manufactoria becoming smaller and more specialised, with greater reliance on manpower than mechanisation. Several times I saw people raising showers of sparks from glowing metal with hammers, or filing the flash away from castings still hot enough to require gloves to hold. There were more hab units interspersed with them as well now, some solid, some bowing with the weight of antiquity, and some hastily constructed with whatever could be scavenged from their surroundings. There were signs of individual enterprise too, with vendors hawking a variety of wares from improvised stalls, barrows, or trays around their necks. What most of them were selling I couldn’t have said, as we were past them so quickly, although many appeared to be offering foodstuffs even Jurgen might have thought twice about eating.126 We passed through more checkpoints too, manned for the most part by the Ironfound Defence, although some seemed to be under the jurisdiction of the local law enforcers.

This far downhive, our Chimera was evidently something of a novelty127 judging by the number of people who broke off whatever they were doing to stare after us, with expressions ranging from apprehension to barely suppressed panic.

‘Almost there, sir.’ The driver, who had been commendably short of conversation on the way down, maintaining vox silence apart from an occasional tactical update from the command centre,128 began to slow, and I glanced ahead, seeing the gates to the underhive ahead of me for the first time.

I wasn’t quite sure what I’d expected them to look like, but the sheer solidity of the portals took me by surprise. There were three of them, each broad and high enough to have admitted a Baneblade with room to spare, opening away from us towards the downward-sloping tunnels. All three were flanked by emplaced weapons, tripod-mounted lascannons and heavy bolters for the most part, manned by defence force troopers, who kept a wary and suspicious eye on the huge doors, and on the steady procession of vehicles and pedestrians passing through them in each direction. At the moment two of the gates were admitting traffic from the underhive into the main complex, while the third was dealing with travel in the other direction.

‘Interesting,’ Amberley said, after a quick glance through the firing ports,129 when I mentioned the fact. ‘When we passed through here before, the traffic in each direction was about equal.’

‘And considerably lower in volume,’ Mott added. ‘I would estimate a forty-seven per cent increase in the number of people travelling uphive since that occasion. The central gateway was not in use then.’

‘Hardly surprising, if those rumours your informants were talking about are still spreading,’ I said, keeping my tone as casual as I could. If that many people were on the move, something really bad must be going on down in the lower depths. Hivesteaders are tenacious by nature, and won’t abandon their hard-won claims unless their lives are in imminent danger – and sometimes not even then. If they were being displaced in significant numbers, the eldar were almost certainly on the move.