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Da Portal of Darkness Chapta 3 | |
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Da Portal Of Darkness Chapta 3 |
Dariel Thayne rushed up the stairs of the apartment building. They creaked as he ran up them as fast as he could from the lack of regular maintenance over the past three decades, but they held together. The apartment he wanted was on the third floor, one of his officers, a man named Edris, lived there with his wife and family and Thayne hoped that he was in time to warn him about the attack on the police station. He had already reached two other officers, and after having them send their families to stay elsewhere he had ordered them to make their way to the station. It may have been destroyed, but given that it was surrounded by armed orks it was probably the safest place for them to meet. Thayne stopped suddenly when he reached the third floor. Ahead of him he saw the door to Edris’s apartment wide open. From the looks of it, it had been forced open by a strong blow to the lock. “Edris?” Thayne called out, sliding his sidearm from its holster and chambering a round, “Edris are you there?” Thayne paused for moment, but there was no reply, only silence. Cautiously, and with his weapon raised, he entered the apartment. He found Edris’s wife first. She was lying face down just beyond the door in the long, narrow hall and, even before Thayne crouched down to make sure, it was obvious that she was dead. Blood was seeping from her nose and mouth, forming a pool on the floor beside her head. As he pressed his fingers against her neck to check for a pulse, he noticed that her skin was still warm to the touch however, so she had not been dead for long. Standing up, Thayne caught sight of what was inside the nearest bedroom. It had been the room occupied by Edris’s children, and it seemed that they had died in their beds, though given the amount of damage to the bodies Thayne couldn’t be too sure of how many there were. Feeling his stomach churn at the carnage, Thayne backed away without going into the room. It was then that a sound caught Thayne’s attention; there was someone moving around in the living room at the far end of the hall. “Edris?” Thayne called out again, though given what he had seen so far, he thought it unlikely that his officer was still alive. Of course this meant that whoever was moving around was likely to be the killer, and the killer was clearly a very dangerous individual. “I’m armed,” Thayne said as he crept towards the living room, stabilising his grip on his gun with his free hand and looked directly down it’s sights. Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps, and a massive figure covered in a dirty grey cloak came charging out of the living room straight towards Thayne. At first Thayne thought that it was an ork, larger than the general rank and file orks, but not quite large enough to be one of their leaders just yet. But most orks gave off a powerful and distinctive smell that came from them having little regard for hygiene, and there was no such smell emanating from this figure. As the figure ran, Thayne also noticed that the cloak did cover its hands, and he could see that they had a human appearance, just larger than usual. In one of these hands, the figure held a blade that was covered in the blood of the Edris family. Normally Thayne liked his officers to give a warning before they opened fire, if only because it meant that hard to replace ammunition may be conserved, but in this case Thayne didn’t hesitate. He fired a single round into the figure as it came at him with the knife raised. The shot struck the figure in the shoulder, Thayne saw the fabric of the cloak ripple and split as the round cut through it into the flesh beneath. But as far as he could tell, his opponent didn’t notice that he had just been shot. He didn’t even cry out in pain, instead he just kept on coming towards Thayne. Thayne fired again, this time instead of a single round he fired repeatedly, aiming for the centre of his target. Each time his fired, the round struck the charging figure, and Thayne saw not only the cloak rip, but also what appeared to be blood erupt from the wound beneath, staining the cloak that covered the figure. But disconcertedly, the figure remained silent, not one single scream was emitted as the projectiles struck their target. Taking a step backwards, Thayne lost his balance and fell to the floor. He kept his grip on his weapon, accidentally discharging a round upwards into the ceiling as he fell, and rather than attempt to get back to his feet, Thayne instead aimed and fired at the figure again, a single shot coming from the pistol before its slide locked open to indicate that it was empty. This time the round caught Thayne’s assailant in the leg, about where he assumed its knee to be, and this time it caused him to topple forwards towards Thayne. Seeing his chance, Thayne scrabbled towards the doorway out of the apartment, leaving the empty pistol on the floor. He slammed his body to the side of the door as soon as he was outside of the door and drew his baton as he heard the giant figure inside getting back up again. He swung the baton as the figure appeared in the doorway, its massive bulk forcing it to bend over to fit through the wooden frame. By pausing to bend down the figure had given Thayne an easy target, and the upward swing of his baton brought it into contact with the giant’s head as it was lowered. His opponent’s head jerked back from the impact and smashed into the doorframe that he had tried to get under. Though disorientated by the blow from the baton followed by the impact with the doorframe, the figure still did not fall, instead stepping forwards onto the landing. Seeking to turn the tables on his attacker, Thayne dived at him, ramming his shoulder into the figure’s side. The impact failed to knock the massive figure over, instead causing Thayne to land in a heap on the floor, but it force him sideways into the banister rail around the stairs. The ancient wood of the banister could not support the figure’s enormous weight and it splintered under the impact. With nothing to help him keep his balance, the giant now fell from the landing down the stairwell. Gasping for breath, Thayne used the wall to help him get back to his feet before crossing the landing where his assailant had fallen and looked over the edge down the stairwell. Thayne had expected to see the massive, cloaked figure lying dead at the bottom of the staircase, but instead there were only the broken remains of the banister rail. Of Thayne’s assailant, there was no sign at all. Thayne now returned to the apartment where the Edris family had died. His gun still lay on the floor of the hall, and he bent down to retrieve it. He ejected the empty magazine, putting it in his pocket for refilling later, and then inserted a fresh one. As the pistol’s slide went forwards and chambered a round, Thayne looked up and saw a mark on the wall that he was certain had not been there when he had first made his way into the apartment. It was a patch of bright red liquid that was slowly running down the wall. Thayne stepped forwards for a closer look. Could this be blood? Thayne thought to himself. It certainly appeared to have come from the giant when he attacked Thayne, probably when he shot him in the leg, but its colour was wrong for human blood, instead of a deep crimson it was a much brighter red. Thayne reached into his trouser pocket and produced a clean white handkerchief, which he dabbed into the liquid. Perhaps someone else could help him figure out what this stuff was. Suddenly, Thayne realised that he hadn’t actually seen the body of constable Edris himself. Though it seemed unlikely that he could have survived the slaughter of his family by the giant that paid little attention to being repeatedly shot, Thayne had to find out for sure. Since the giant had come from the living room, that was where he now headed. Edris was lying in the middle of the room and it appeared that his killer had gutted him; his entrails lay in a heap beside his corpse and a final look of terror was frozen onto his lifeless face. Thayne didn’t bother checking for a pulse; even if he had found Edris before he had died there was no way that he could have lived with such a wound. Thayne caught sight of a wooden box sat on a high shelf and instantly recognised it. The box was where Edris kept his gun; he placed it on the top shelf to keep it out of his children’s reach. Thayne walked over to the shelf and reached up for the box. He was relieved to find that it felt heavy in his hand as he lifted it down, indicating that the firearm was still inside. He opened the box and saw that the gun, as well as a bag filled with extra ammunition, was indeed still inside it. Unlike the semi-automatic pistol that Thayne carried, Edris’s gun used a revolving cylinder to align five powerful rounds with the firing pin and barrel. Possessing much greater stopping power than Thayne’s gun, he had once seen Edris stop an ork with a single shot to the chest with the weapon. The memory of his own weapon’s inability to stop the mysterious cloaked and hooded giant still fresh in his mind, Thayne carefully loaded five rounds from the bag into the cylinder before tucking the gun into the back of his belt and putting the bag of spare ammunition into his pocket. Then he put the empty box back on the shelf, exactly where the late constable Edris had kept it while he was alive. Knowing that his remaining officers were definitely in danger, Thayne left the apartment and made his way towards the home of the next officer he thought might still be alive. He knew that he was leaving an entire family of corpses behind him, but for now his priority was to try and prevent any more killings. “Translation complete lord,” the flight officer said to Octus Saval, indicating that his vessel had successfully completed its exit from the imaterium. Ahead of the three mile long vessel lay the world of Crasus Minor, once an outlying colony of the Imperium, now a nest of xenos. Octus had been here several times before, twice before the ork invasion and four times after. When the planet had still been part of the Imperium, Octus had found that visits here were not even remotely profitable, while entries for the world in his ship’s logic engines indicated that it had many mineral riches the planets governor offered little of any worth to Octus. It was only after the orks had taken the world that Octus had turned a profit here. His particular Rogue Trader’s charter allowed him to trade with xenos providing he stayed within certain rules, so he couldn’t supply them weapons or war materiel for example, but he could exchange the teeth pulled from dead orks on the battlefield for raw mineral ore that his ship could refine on its return trip to Imperial controlled space. He had made a handsome profit doing that the first three times he had tried it, but unfortunately the handful of Blood Axes that there had been in the system had either been wiped out or moved on, so when he tried the voyage for a fourth time two years ago his ship had been fired on as it tried to enter orbit in spite of broadcasting its intention to trade goods instead of gunfire. Of course his visits here had been noted by the damnable agents of His Most Imperial Majesty’s Holy Inquisition, and he had been informed by that agency that unless he wanted his charter suspending while his trading with xenos species was investigated to make sure that there were no violations, in other words summarily revoked, he would be required to come here again on their business. Octus had known better than to ask if he would be paid for this trip. “And what of our passenger?” he asked out loud to no one in particular. “I believe he was already aboard his vessel before we began our translation to real space lord,” another of the bridge officers answered. Octus had seen the man on the bridge daily for many years, but he couldn’t think of the man’s name. Then again, he thought to himself, he didn’t really care anyway. “Double check with the torpedo deck,” Octus ordered, and the man activated the ship’s intercom to contact the forward weapons control room that lay more than two miles from the bridge. “Torpedo deck confirms drop ship is manned and ready lord.” Octus strode across the bridge and plucked a key on the end of a length of chain from within his jacket. He climbed the stairs to the command pulpit and inserted the key into one of the panels there and turned it. “Confirm that the torpedo deck weapons control panel is live,” he ordered, and the crewman spoke into the communicator once more. “Torpedo deck confirms their control panel is now live lord.” “Fire.” Jarr was pressed back into his acceleration couch by the sudden force as his craft was launched from the rogue trader’s vessel. Designed to be fired from a torpedo tube instead of taking off from a more conventional launch bay, his craft would now coast through the system towards Crasis Minor. Its minimal energy signature would mean that even if the orks were able to detect it on whatever crude devices the xenos used for that purpose they would most likely mistake it for a piece of fast moving debris such as an asteroid or fragment of wreckage. In either case, at only twenty-five metres long, it would be too small for them to bother with. There was a brief delay between the launch and the engaging of the craft’s artificial gravity field, and Jarr felt himself become weightless before the automatic system was activated. With little room to move about in, Jarr now faced the long wait for his craft to reach its destination where the machine spirit that guided it would adjust course into Crasis Minor’s atmosphere and fly over its pre-programmed target zone. The craft would not land, however. The discovery of it while on the ground could compromise his mission, so instead jar would bail out at high altitude and allowed the craft to crash into the ocean and sink beyond trace. As far as the locals would know, it would be just another meteorite impact. Or at least that was the theory. |
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