Why?'
Voke pointed. Close to five hundred citizens were now advancing towards us from streets on all sides.
'Because as you pointed out, Heldane, the monster can hear us, and he clearly doesn't like the sound of this plan/
It took Kurvel about ten minutes to gouge out the pavement and a section of garden wall with his lightning claw, and all the while we were under attack from the growing mob of puppets.
'Sewer!' Kurvel announced.
I turned to the others as shots and missiles rained down. 'Commodus… you have to hold them off a while longer/
'Count on it/ he said.
'Roban, get a small squad and follow me/
Heldane wasn't happy. But by then, Heldane wasn't calling the shots any more. I believe he took his rage out on the enslaved citizens.
I dropped into the sewer hole with Kurvel, Roban, Inshabel and three troopers of the Interior Guard. The defence on the street above could barely spare any of them.
The filthy sewer tube went in under the wall itself before dropping sharply away. Old, patched stone swelled around the base of the buttress. The stone was warm, and foamy clumps of fungus were growing on it.
Inshabel trained a spotbeam in so I could see.
Kurvel could see in the dark. He took out his last two krak grenades and fixed them to the stonework with smears of adhesive paste from a tube he carried in his pack.
'I wish we had more. We could blow the wall right through/
'We could, brother-sergeant, but this might be better/
"Why?'
'Because if we can simply make this projector fail, the energies of the shield will short out before they collapse. Rather than blowing outwards, that'll cause an electromagnetic pulse within the field itself. And I think an EM pulse is the last thing Esarhaddon wants right now/
As if to prove my suspicions right, a stabbing sheet of psychic power lashed at us. Esarhaddon had realised his vulnerability, and was turning
his immense power on us now. The puppets had been sport, but now it was time to control or blast out the minds of his hunters before they stopped being playthings and became a danger.
The psyker attack was devastating. Two of the Interior guardsmen simply died. Another started firing, hitting Kurvel twice and wounding Inshabel. Regretfully, Roban blasted the trooper down with his laspistol.
Our minds were harder to attack, especially given the shield formed by the rock above us and our proximity to the energy flux of the shield.
But Roban, Inshabel, Kurvel and I would be dead or homicidal in seconds.
How I wished for Alizebeth, or any of the Distaff right then.
'Trigger it! Trigger it!' I gasped, the blood vessels in my nose and throat opening yet again that day.
'We're right on top of the-'
'Just do it, brother-sergeant! In the name of the God-Emperor!'
The blast took out the projector. It filled the sewer tunnel with flickering destruction. It would have killed us but for the fact that Brother-Sergeant Kurvel shielded us with his massive armoured body.
It cost him his life.
I have made a point to have his name and memory celebrated by the Pri-march of the White Consuls.
With the generating projector killed, the void shield collapsed in on itself, blacking out the palace systems with the thunderclap of electromagnetic rage.
Blacking out Esarhaddon's seething mind too.
My research into untouchables, through Alizebeth and then through the Distaff she created and ran, had indicated to me that perhaps psychic power, no matter how potent, relied in the final analysis on the electrical workings of the human mind, the firing of impulse charges between synapses. Untouchables somehow blanked this, and triggered a disturbing and disarming vacancy in the natural and fundamental processes of the human brain. That, I had initially concluded, was why psykers don't work around untouchables… and why forgetfulness and unease is prevalent in their company. And, ultimately, why they disturb and upset humans so, and psykers doubly so.
I'd turned the old void shield into a brief, bright untouchable event.
And now, Emperor damn him, the heretic psyker Esarhaddon, temporarily rendered deaf, blind and mute, was mine.
