The Emperor's Finest

TEN

BY THE TIME Mira returned, rather more suitably attired in what she told me was one of her hunting outfits, I'd managed to convince myself that she'd been joking. After all, the very idea of me being resentful of other men appreciating her physical attributes was ludicrous enough to begin with, let alone the fact that most of the potential rivals for her affections aboard the Revenant would either have been tech-priests or Space Marines, and therefore out of the running. Which left only the serfs, who I doubted she'd even consider in that regard, given her typically aristocratic tendency to view the lower orders as little more than a refined type of servitor which didn't dribble lubricants on the carpet, and Jurgen, who was hardly the stuff a maiden's dreams were made of, unless she'd eaten too much cheese before turning in.

'Very suitable,' I complimented her, having had no idea until now that her wardrobe contained anything even remotely practical. It had definitely risen to the occasion this time, though, providing a jacket and trousers in muted colours, and a stout pair of boots, all of which lent her an air of businesslike efficiency, without overstating the effect. Fortunately, she appeared to have left the fowling piece that went with it at home.

Mira pulled a face. 'It's all a bit dowdy, if you ask me,' she said, examining the effect critically in a nearby mirror. 'Perhaps I should try again.'

'We're expected on the bridge,' I said, mindful of the length of time she'd already wasted rummaging through her luggage, and leaned in to straighten my cap in the looking glass she'd appropriated. Jurgen handed me my weapon belt. 'We can't keep our hosts waiting any longer,' I went on, checking the power levels in the laspistol and the chainsword's motivator cells, before fastening it into place. 'It wouldn't be polite or diplomatic.'

'Says the man who thinks ''tact'' means ''nailed down'',' Mira said, following me out into the corridor. At least she wasn't arguing about it, though, which I suppose was something.

'I'm a soldier,' I said, taking refuge behind my public persona. Something was getting to her, that much was obvious, but I couldn't for the life of me see what it was. 'That means I take my duties seriously.' Whenever there was a good chance that someone was watching me, anyway.

'You can be really pompous sometimes, do you know that?' Mira asked, in the tone of voice women use when they neither want nor expect an answer, and strode off ahead of me looking sulkier than ever. I remembered enough of the layout of the Revenant to find my way to the bridge without difficulty, and fortunately, by the time we got there, either Mira's mood had improved, or she was practising her diplomatic skills again. As I'd expected, the warren of corridors had proven sufficiently daunting for her to have rejoined me without a word a few moments after her inexplicable burst of bad temper, and she seemed to be on her best behaviour as soon as we were in the presence of our hosts once more.

'Commissar. You are prompt, as always,' Gries greeted me, politely and inaccurately as we entered the bridge, and Drumon looked up from a huddle of tech-priests he was conferring with next to the hololith just long enough to nod a greeting in my direction. Mira gave me a sharp look, as though I'd somehow contrived to upstage her on purpose. 'Milady DuPanya. Your presence is appreciated.'

'But not that much, apparently,' she muttered sotto voce, apparently forgetting the preternaturally keen senses with which the Emperor had seen fit to endow his chosen warriors. If either of the Astartes present overheard her, however, they were too polite, or indifferent, to respond.

'Are the last of your combat teams aboard yet?' I asked, keen to show that I was taking an interest, and Gries nodded.

'They are,' he assured me. 'Squad Trosque completed the cleansing of the forge complex on Asteroid 459 while you were sleeping, and their Thunderhawk docked a few moments ago. Nothing remains to be done beyond the mopping up of a few isolated remnants of the infection and the restoration of good governance, both tasks for which the Imperial Guard seem admirably suited.'

'I concur,' I said, although being far more familiar with the way the Guard worked than he was, I felt rather less sanguine than the Reclaimers' captain about how easy the job would turn out to be[54].

'Then it appears my people owe yours a considerable debt of gratitude,' Mira said, with a formal tilt of the head to the towering Space Marine, who turned his own to look at her as though one of the chairs had just spoken.

'Our service to the Emperor is reward enough,' he said, 'although your consideration is appreciated.'

'I'm pleased to hear it,' Mira replied dryly.

'Are we under way, then?' I asked, feeling faintly foolish at having to ask. The barely perceptible thrumming of the Revenant's engines had become so familiar to me in the course of our voyage to Viridia that I hadn't noticed it since boarding, although it was certainly there, a comforting presence in the background. They would have been idling while it was in orbit, of course, ticking over just sufficiently to provide power to feed the innumerable machine-spirits on whose health the vessel depended, and I listened hard, trying to determine if the note had deepened at all; but if it had, I wasn't able to tell the difference.

'We are,' the shipmaster informed me from his control throne.

I was a little surprised, but apparently questions regarding the functioning of the ship were delegated to him automatically by his masters, which was no bad thing; I'd hate to be aboard a vessel in combat whose captain had to refer every tactical decision to a higher authority. 'We'll be entering the warp at the designated material coordinates in approximately seven hours.'

'Six hours, fifty-four minutes and twelve point three one four seconds,' Magos Yaffel put in sharply from his position by the hololith.

'As I've explained, timing is absolutely crucial if we're to enter the warp currents in this particular region of space and time in precisely the right configuration to catch the fastest-flowing portion of the stream.'

'We'll catch it, magos,' the shipmaster assured him, 'Omnissiah willing.' Then, to my surprise, he made the sign of the cogwheel, which the tech-priests and Astartes present all echoed.

'Forgive my ignorance,' I said, approaching the hololith, 'but if we're merely going to be following the same current as the space hulk, how can we hope to catch up with it? Won't we be travelling at the same rate?'

'A very astute question,' Yaffel said, in the manner of a born didact pouncing on the opportunity to expound on his favourite subject. 'But the situation isn't as hopeless as you might suppose. Don't forget that the Spawn of Damnation is drifting, while the Revenant is moving under power. That means we can correct our attitude and orientation to the current, to optimise the flow around our Geller field.'

'And in simple language for the rest of us?' Mira muttered, then had the grace to blush as Drumon answered the comment she'd clearly believed to be inaudible.

'I gather the sport of waveboarding[55] is popular in some of the coastal regions of your world?' he asked, and Mira nodded, although Emperor alone knows how he discovered this. 'Then think of us as riding a waveboard, while the hulk just bobs about as the Emperor sees fit. Does that make things clearer?'

'I suppose so,' Mira said, as politely as she could. 'Thanks.'

'In addition,' Yaffel said, trying not to sound miffed at the interruption, 'the Spawn of Damnation will be returning to the materium at random intervals, for indeterminate periods of time, some of which will be in the order of years. We, on the other hand, can enter and leave the warp at will. As soon as we determine that it's not at a given exit point, we can re-enter the immaterium and continue our pursuit.'

'I see,' I said, vaguely surprised to find that I did. 'But how can we be sure we've found an exit point in the first place?'

The moment I'd finished speaking, I knew I was going to regret asking that particular question: Yaffel's gyrations increased markedly, as if he could barely contain his excitement, and he raised a hand to point at the hololith. Apparently divining what I'd just done, Mira kicked me sharply in the ankle, although I suspect my Guard-issue footwear made the gesture more uncomfortable for her than it did for me.

Fortunately, Drumon came to our rescue, intervening just before the magos could launch into the tirade of technotheological jargon I'd unwittingly come so close to unleashing. 'Essentially,' he said, 'the passage of so large an object between the two realms leaves a weak spot in the boundary between them, which our Librarian and Navigator believe they can detect.'

'How weak?' Mira asked, no doubt mindful that just such a spot now existed within her home system, and probably picturing a host of daemons flooding through it to lay waste to Viridia.

Yaffel nodded reassuringly at her, no doubt having had to assuage the fears of sufficient numbers of lay listeners by now to be aware of what she must be thinking, and grabbing the chance to display his expertise after all. 'Not enough to allow any of the warp's denizens access to the materium,' he said, his flat monotone sounding oddly sure of itself. 'The weakness is more akin to a deformation of the interface than a breach of it.'

'I see,' Mira said, managing to sound as if she meant it. 'But if you can predict where the weaknesses are, can't you just tell which systems are at risk and warn them by astropath before the hulk gets there?'

'Things are less simple than that,' Drumon said, drawing our attention to the hololith again. A moment's perusal was enough for me to recognise an astronomical display of the sector and a few of the systems surrounding it. 'Here is Viridia.' The system flared green. 'And these are the boundaries within which the Spawn of Damnation could have travelled.' A translucent tube began to extend itself from the green dot, the mouth of it widening the further it extended, so that by the time it reached its fullest extent, well over two dozen systems had been swallowed by the flickering funnel.

'It would take a lifetime to search all those systems,' I said, obscurely relieved at the realisation of just how impossible a task we were taking on. After a few months I'd find an excuse to leave them to it, and return to my desk, secure in the knowledge that whatever foolhardy undertaking General Lokris had been planning to drop me into the middle of would be safely over.

'Fortunately, we won't have to,' Yaffel told us, looking smugger by the second. 'Each emergence point we find will reduce the potential volume of space in which our quarry could be, and refine our predictions. After the first few have been plotted, we should be closing in on it nicely.'

'I'm glad to hear it,' I said.

'If they can find any weak spots in the first place,' Mira muttered beside me.

'How can we know until we try?' Drumon said, leaving everyone else looking faintly baffled.

After that, the briefing was clearly over to all intents and purposes, although I made sure I asked a few supplementary questions to show a proper concern for what we might be getting into. By this point Mira had given up even pretending to be interested, simply standing as close to me as she could in a grim silence I began to find increasingly oppressive.

As we eventually left, to let the shipmaster and his crew get on with whatever it is that starship bridge officers do, I felt it politic to pause for a moment in passing and pay our respects to Gries. To my surprise, he acknowledged my salute and nodded to me. 'I trust you have everything you require, commissar?'

Ignoring Mira's smug expression, I nodded. 'Your hospitality is as generous as I remembered,' I told him truthfully. 'But I was wondering, if it's no imposition, whether you had a little free space somewhere I could run through my combat drills every day. I rather neglected them while I was convalescing, and I almost paid the price for that in the 'stealer nest.' Shaken a little by the narrowness of our escape, I'd resumed my regular practice sessions with the chainblade forthwith, and I had no desire to forego them again if I could avoid it, although my quarters were rather too cramped for much in the way of physical exercise which didn't involve Mira.

'Of course.' Gries looked at me approvingly and nodded. 'I would expect nothing less from a warrior of your renown. I'll see to it that you're given access to one of our training chapels.'

'Thank you,' I said, only too aware of the magnitude of the accolade he'd so unexpectedly bestowed on me. All I'd been expecting was a corner of a cargo bay somewhere; this was tantamount to a senior ecclesiarch throwing open the door to the sepulchre of a saint and asking how many bones I'd like to take home[56]. 'I'll try to prove worthy of the honour.'

THE RECLAIMERS' CAPTAIN was as good as his word. We'd barely made the transition to the warp when Jurgen knocked on my door with the news that the tertiary training chapel had been put at my disposal for an hour a day. I've no idea what the other two were like, but this one turned out to be an airy chamber about the size of a scrumball pitch, floored with metal mesh, and with luminators in the ceiling which could be adjusted to replicate any light level, from the glimmering of stars on a moonless world to a dazzling glare. Much of the equipment ranged about the walls was either unfamiliar to me, or intended for users a great deal larger and stronger than I was, so I left it alone, preferring to run through the complex patterns of attack and defence with the chainsword which years of familiarity had made instinctive beyond conscious thought.

It's probably no exaggeration to say that those hours of solitary sword drills aboard the Revenant were among the happiest of my life. Throne alone knows I'm no Emperor-botherer, but centuries of use by His finest warriors had imbued the very walls of the place with a sense of dedication and reverence for tradition which made me feel as if everything I did there was part of something greater than myself. Not a sensation I'm used to, or particularly comfortable with in the normal course of events, but I couldn't deny it at the time.

If I'm honest, I also found the periods of solitude I spent there becoming an increasingly welcome respite from Mira's company. Which isn't to say that her companionship had become wearisome, exactly, but with very little to do herself, she seemed to want to spend every minute I wasn't attending to my duties attached to me like a Catachan faceeater. For a man as used to his own society as I was, that was a very mixed blessing indeed: so much so that, from time to time, I found myself inventing errands in order to delay my return to my quarters. On one occasion I even went so far as to ask Magos Yaffel for some further details of the techniques he was using to track the space hulk through the immaterium, which I dutifully transcribed into the report I knew full well General Lokris wasn't going to bother to read anyway when I eventually completed it, despite not having understood more than one word in twenty.

We all experienced a brief flurry of excitement about ten days into our voyage, when Gries announced that the Reclaimers' Librarian had sensed the deformation of the membrane between the warp and the material universe which Yaffel had predicted, but when the Revenant popped back into the real galaxy for a quick look round we turned out to be drifting through the silent void between the stars, with nothing on the auspex for light years in any direction except for the occasional gas cloud. Nevertheless, the Reclaimers and the tech-priests were all greatly heartened by this confirmation that the theory was sound, and since no one had seriously expected to bag the infernal relic on the first try anyway, we resumed our progress at once with high morale all round, except for Mira, who told me in no uncertain terms that she was bored stiff, and that this was all somehow my fault for persuading her to come along on this absurd junket in the first place. I can't deny, though, that when she finally calmed down enough to apologise, her idea of making things up to me was definitely worth it.

Our second emergence in the wake of the Spawn found us in a stellar system, which meant several days of frantic activity as we analysed auspex returns and sent the Thunderhawks scurrying around to check out anything which looked promising, but in the end we drew a complete blank. Fortunately, by luck or the grace of the Emperor, the star at its centre was a sullen, shrunken dwarf, husbanding the post-nova embers of a blaze which would have consumed anything in its habitable zone aeons before, and was now orbited by nothing more than barren chunks of scorched rock, which meant that the 'stealers would have found nothing or no one here to contaminate. So with a quick prayer of thanks to the Golden Throne, we were off again, casting ourselves adrift on the currents of the warp once more.

It must have been a day or so after we resumed our journey that I arrived in the training chapel at the appointed time to find it already occupied. I'd barely taken a couple of steps inside when I noticed Drumon in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by whirling cyberskulls, which he was fending off with the sword I'd noticed him wearing in the bunker under the palace in Fidelis, his plasma pistol gripped in his other hand. The blade was surrounded by a nimbus of crackling energy, like the claws I'd seen the Terminators use to tear apart the insurrectionist artillery pieces, although he must have moderated its strength in some way, as the tiny airborne servitors simply bounced away from each strike as though dazed by the impact rather than being sheared asunder. In a similar fashion, his plasma pistol had evidently been modified to unleash the merest fraction of its charge, as instead of being vaporised, each of the bobbing skulls he shot was only thrown aside for a moment, before returning to the attack.

The speed and precision of his movements were astonishing. I'm a pretty fair duellist myself[57], but I'd never seen anything to match the flurry of stroke and guard the Techmarine was displaying. Not only that, he was somehow able to employ his sidearm with undiminished accuracy too, and even divert a little of his attention to swat at any cyberskulls trying to attack him from behind with the servo-arm grafted to the back of his armour, which he employed with the same casual expertise Felicia had displayed with her similarly sited mechadendrite back on Perlia.

Much as I'd have liked to linger and enjoy the spectacle, I began to edge away towards the door by which I'd entered. It seemed to me that Drumon had a far stronger claim on the training chapel than I did, since the demands of his duties must of necessity supersede the convenience of his Chapter's guests, and that by my very presence I was intruding on something private and personal. (By this point, although I still felt I had little in common with the superhuman Astartes, I'd got to know a few slightly better as a result of the honour their captain had seen fit to bestow on me, and I'd gathered that there was little a Space Marine regarded as more important than honing his combat skills.) I must have betrayed my presence in some way, however, because Drumon broke off his exercise to look in my direction, while the darting cyberskulls stopped moving, other than to correct their positions slightly in the air currents issuing from the recirculators.

'Commissar. My apologies.' He inclined his head, and made safe his weapons, before sheathing his sword and holstering his pistol. 'I recently made some adjustments to my wargear and wished to assess their performance. I regret the trials have taken far longer than I believed they would.'

'Time flies when you're having fun,' I said, intending to reassure him that no offence had been caused, then found myself wondering if I'd sounded too flippant; after all, it was almost tantamount to joking about the sacraments with an ecclesiarch. To my relief, though, Drumon smiled.

'It does indeed,' he agreed, dismissing the cyberskulls with a gesture: they hummed away to one corner of the room, like ossiferous grox-flies, and the Techmarine followed them, pausing in front of one of the control lecterns whose purpose I'd been unable to guess at before now.

'Would you like me to leave the sparring drones active?' he asked, one gauntleted hand poised above the runes of the display.

'I think they'd be too much for me,' I told him honestly, remembering the rapidity and precision with which the Reclaimer had moved, unencumbered by the bulky armour he wore.

Drumon looked down at me, his head tilted quizzically to one side.

'You can vary the speed and number of the attacks from this lectern,' he explained, demonstrating the procedure, his fingers moving deftly around the dials despite their thickness and the ceramite gauntlets in which they were encased. 'Use these controls to activate and deactivate the system. If you wish to avail yourself of it another day, I can teach you the correct incantations of awakening.'

'Thank you,' I said. It was a tempting offer. Much as I'd enjoyed the last few weeks of what my old schola duelling instructor Myamoto de Bergerac always referred to as shadow practice, it wasn't the same as working with an opponent, and although it wasn't quite the same thing, the sparring drones would make an acceptable substitute. 'Are you sure my laspistol wouldn't damage them, though?'

'A good point,' Drumon said. 'I will obtain a practice powercell to fit it and reduce the power of your shots to within the limits of the drones' structural integrity.' So that was how they'd been able to keep bouncing back from hit after hit that should have pulverised them. 'In the meantime...' He powered down the system, and the cyberskulls settled onto their storage shelf like roosting birds.

'I'll look forward to trying them out,' I said. 'Running through the drills is all very well, but there's nothing quite like sparring with a partner to maintain your edge.'

'Indeed not,' Drumon agreed, and looked at me speculatively. 'I have a little time before I need to resume my duties. If you consider me a suitable match, I would be honoured to assist a guest of our Chapter to hone their skills.'

'More than suitable,' I said, wondering if I'd live long enough to regret accepting the offer. But I could hardly refuse without insulting him, and, by extension, the rest of my hosts. Not for the first time I wondered why I'd ever been persuaded to leave the 12th Field Artillery, where life had been relatively straightforward, but my snowballing reputation had finally attracted the attention of people of influence, and that had been that. If I'm honest, I'd thought a long and tedious career behind a desk, and a long way from anything lethal, had awaited me at brigade headquarters. The reality of being an independent commissar with a reputation for reckless heroism, and therefore a magnet for every hazardous assignment which came along, had been rather an unpleasant surprise.

'I suggest blades only to begin with,' Drumon said, drawing his and pressing the activation rune. The powerfield around it crackled into life, and a flicker of dubiety must have appeared on my face, as he added, 'the intensity of the field has been reduced to non-lethal levels.'

I smiled, with every appearance of being at ease. 'Non-lethal for an Astartes, or for a mere mortal like me?' I asked.

'Both, I assume,' Drumon replied, returning the smile. 'It should feel no more uncomfortable than a glancing blow from a shock maul.' Which, on its own, would be enough to return me to Sholer's domain if he wasn't careful, so he wasn't being quite as reassuring as he evidently thought he was. It was too late to back out now, though, so I drew my own weapon and started the teeth rotating.

'I'm afraid I can't return the favour with this one,' I said. 'If it hits, it hits.'

Drumon took up a guard position, which seemed familiar enough, and beckoned me on. 'If you can strike through my armour,' he pointed out reasonably, 'I deserve a few nicks.'

We began cautiously, feeling out each other's style and favoured strategies, but as we began to get the measure of one another the rhythm of our strikes and parries began to increase in tempo. I was conscious that he was holding back, giving me a chance, and although I continued to work at it, I didn't put everything I had into the combat either, content to pace myself instead of burning off all my energy in a single burst of do-or-die endeavour. He was blindingly fast, of course, as I'd already seen, but I trusted my reflexes rather than trying to think too hard about what I was doing. In my experience of close-quarter fighting, which is far greater than I'm comfortable with, it's usually better to wait for your opponent to make a mistake than it is to go charging in and suddenly find yourself on your hands and knees looking for your head. On the whole, it seemed to be paying off: I took a couple of jolts from his sword's power field, but held on to my own, and seeing a sudden opening drove in at Drumon's chest. The teeth of my blade had just started to skitter off his torso armour when his own reflexes cut in, and he parried my attack with a speed and precision which left me breathless.

'Very good,' the Techmarine said, with more animation than I'd ever seen from him (or any of the others for that matter). 'First blood to you, commissar.'

'I hope I haven't damaged your armour,' I said, knowing how precious it would be to him, but Drumon shook his head.

'I will leave that mark as a reminder,' he said, 'never to underestimate an opponent.'

'I'm full of nasty, underhanded tricks,' I said, truthfully enough, but inflecting it like a joke.

Drumon nodded. 'In my experience, survival is honour enough for the battlefield. Would you care to continue?'

Well, I would, and we did, although I never got through his guard again; even though he still held back, he was always more than a match for me. By the time we'd finished we found ourselves agreeing to meet again the next time his duties permitted, and over the next few weeks we managed to train together several times. I've no idea what his fellow Space Marines made of our arrangement[58], but many of them seemed to be making more of an effort to be friendly around the time Drumon and I started training together.

All in all, the growing undercurrent of tension between Mira and I notwithstanding, I was beginning to slip into a fairly comfortable routine aboard the Revenant; so much so that I began to take it for granted that the voyage would continue uneventfully until we either caught up with our quarry, or abandoned the search. But, of course, I was about to receive a salutary reminder of just how dangerous our quest was, and that the galaxy contained far more perils than the one we pursued so diligently.