Thaddeus drew his autopistol, feeling it click as an executioner round chambered itself in response to his hand around the grip. He sprinted the few steps towards the closest sculpture as laser blasts scored deep gouges into the crystal of the walkway beneath him.
He slid into cover beside two storm troopers, one [ of them hefting a grenade launcher and using it to lob occasional shots over the sculpture towards knots of servitors.
The trooper with the hellgun nodded curtly at Thaddeus as the inquisitor scrambled to a half-sitting position, back against the crystal.
'Musta lost half the lads!' shouted the trooper, voice muffled by the HE suit's faceplate. 'Do we have extraction?' Thaddeus recognised Trooper Telleryev, one of the platoon's sergeants.
Thaddeus shook his head. 'We break out the hard way'
Telleryev spat a word from his homeworld that Thaddeus assumed was profane, then flicked his hellgun onto full power and sent a bright lance of laser into the body of a servitor drifting ominously over to flank them. Thaddeus took aim with his pistol and loosed off three shots, the microcogitators in the rare executioner rounds sending the bullets curving as they flew, punching into the servitor with mechanical accuracy.
The servitor juddered and listed suddenly as one of its grav units burst in a shower of sparks - Thaddeus sighted down the barrel at the bundle of sensors that made up its head and pumped the rest of the autogun's ten-round magazine into it. Like swift metal insects the rounds looped towards their target and shattered the servitor's metal face, sending arcs of electricity spitting from the broken machinery and exposing the biological core of the machine, the part that had once been human.
Without anything to guide it, the servitor yawed aimlessly, exposing the underbelly to which its jointed limbs were attached. The other storm trooper swung the barrel of his grenade launcher around and fired a single frag grenade into the servitor's belly, ripping it clean open and spilling machine parts and pulped flesh down towards the lake.
The grenade trooper allowed himself a grim smile of triumph as he racked another round into his weapon.
'Get us to Kindarek!' shouted Thaddeus. Telleryev nodded and the two men broke cover at a run. The grenade trooper waved them forward, pumping a volley of grenades into the walkways above them to send hot shrapnel bursting through the air and momentarily blinding the servitors as Thaddeus and Telleryev ran.
Kindarek was trying to organise a strongpoint around a couple of sculptures and a length of walkway that had fallen down from above, with seven or eight troopers keeping up fields of fire and preventing the servitors from surrounding them. There were still a dozen of the machines left, spraying multilaser fire across the width of the cylinder - but they were avoiding blasting directly at the sculptures, and so they had to close to use their power saws while keeping the walkways between clear. Kindarek was trying to punish the servitors that drifted towards them and, though he would probably not succeed, he was at least buying time.
Thaddeus reached Kindarek's position, Telleryev beside him.
'We need to get men upwards.’ voxed Thaddeus breathlessly. We have to get a link set up.’
Kindarek paused as his soldier's mind rifled through the possibilities - stay here with at least some cover and a plan, or throw men through the gauntlet in an attempt to drag some information screaming from the cathedral's archives.
'We're dead here anyway.’ he replied. Then, on the squad frequency - 'Suppression fire and break cover! Head for the upper walkways and concentrate fire:. Move, move!'
Thaddeus slipped a single shell from one of his waist pouches into the breech of the autopistol. A single heavy shell, it was more expensive than many spaceships and a handful of them had cost Thaddeus a lot of favours. Now, he was immensely grateful he had shown the prescience to have brought them along.
Thaddeus ran alongside the storm troopers and fired once at a servitor turning to spray fire at them. The autopistol barked and a glittering trail followed the bullet. Its armour-piercing tip and micro-guidance systems let it punch repeatedly through the glossy carapace of the servitor before running out of propellant. Its concentrated explosive core detonated in the heart of the servitor and blew it apart in a shower of frozen flesh and shimmering metal.
Adeptus Mechanicus specials, the pinnacle of personal armaments technology. Now Thaddeus was using them to get him out of a spot where it was the Mechanicus that wanted him dead. There would be a moral in there somewhere if Thaddeus survived long enough to work it out.
Thaddeus managed to spend two more priceless rounds of ammunition blowing another servitor out of the air, and the frantic hellgun fire accounted for three more as the storm troopers ran to the closest junction that would lead them upwards towards the next levels.
Telleryev!' yelled Kindarek as the storm troopers made it to the next level and took cover behind a huge sculpture. 'Take three men and keep them occupied! The rest watch the boss's back!'
Thaddeus nodded at the lieutenant and took the hook-up equipment from a hip pocket of his suit. It was a simple portable cogitator linked to a data-slate by a thick bundle of wires, with various interfaces leading off on yet more wires. Thaddeus fumbled with the device as he crouched by the sculpture feeling the sudden hot flashes of laser blasts passing close by.
He couldn't find an interface. He passed his hands over the clear, angular crystal surface but there was no way in. Would he fail here because he had been stupid enough to assume the Mechanicus would use standard interfaces?
No - there was something, at the base of the crystal. A metal panel was bolted to the surface, an ugly flaw in the crystal. A data-thief probe extended from the plate into the body of the crystal and provided a low-tech way in. The data-sculptures were technology from a previous age and the Mechanicus had obviously lacked an equally elegant way of using them - they had been forced to make do with the technology they had, and that was the same technology used across the Imperium.
Thaddeus plugged one wire into the crude interface. There was a pause and suddenly the data-slate was full of solid information, dense columns of binary pouring across the screen.
The program loaded onto the cogitator had been almost as expensive in its own way as the bullets in Thaddeus's gun, taken from a tech-heretic that Thaddeus had helped capture back in his interrogator days. The Hereticus had ordered that the heretic be left alive so the Inquisition could make use of his skills - the man had escaped and Thaddeus had been a part of the mission that had finally killed him. The program he had given the Inquisition before his escape was a decoder, powerful enough to crunch through the encryption of just about any secure information source but simple enough to fit onto almost any computation device.
Skrin Kavansiel had been the man's name. A madman who had turned servitors and industrial machinery into rampaging monsters across half-a-dozen worlds in the Scarus sector, all in the name of the Change God. Thaddeus had shared the kill himself with two other interrogators on an agri-world near the galactic core. That Kavansiel had been allowed to live the first time had sowed the doubts in Thaddeus that Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had confirmed - the Inquisition was not the single, focused instrument of the Emperor's justice that he had learned of when he was first groomed as an interrogator. Half the time, it might as well be fighting itself.
The cogitator broke the mass of information down into categories and homed in on the records of Adeptus Mechanicus installations and personnel throughout the Stratix sector. There were still trillions of scraps of information in there - at least, thought Thaddeus as laser fire spattered around him and short, gargled screams told of troopers dying, the information vaults were all connected.