The Emperor's Finest

THIRTEEN

AS I'D SURMISED , now they'd been deprived of the almost infinite number of reinforcements they'd surely been counting on to take the Revenant, the remaining greenskins were easy meat for the Reclaimers. Tracking them down took a little time, of course, given the size of the vessel, but a fully-grown ork isn't exactly hard to miss, and the Astartes were extremely adept at xenos hunting. By the time Gries called a meeting to discuss the situation, the shredded remains of the last one had been hauled away to the taxidermist[72], and the ship's enginseers were inhaling through their teeth[73] at the damage all those bolter shells had done to their nice clean bulkheads. Mira had, of course, been invited, but to no one's surprise elected to return to bed instead. Before doing so she disinterred her laspistol from the bottom of her luggage and tucked it under her pillow, as I habitually did. Better late than never, I supposed, but just in case there was still a kommando[74] lurking somewhere in the bowels of the ship, I'd asked Jurgen to keep an eye on the corridor. Needless to say, his vigil was a vain one, but he took the disappointment as stoically as he did everything else.

Which left Gries, Drumon, Yaffel and me arranged about the hololith, while the ship's crew scurried around us tidying up the bridge. The damage in here appeared remarkably slight, although the number of holes, scorch-marks and disquieting stains in the surrounding corridors bore mute and eloquent testament to the ferocity of the battle to preserve it. Hard to tell if I'd have been better off remaining here after all, or whether, despite my misadventures, I'd been prudent to get out while I could, so I gave up speculating about it in favour of the discussion.

'Damage to the enginarium was severe,' Drumon reported, 'but the guardian spirits of the circuit breakers responded promptly, preserving the core systems from harm. Our enginseers are performing the rites of reactivation, and have already honoured the guardians. The warp engines are performing as well as one might expect after a cold start, but will need shutting down for complete resanctification after we next emerge into the materium.'

'That sounds like a long job,' I ventured cautiously, not liking the sound of it at all. If our next port of call turned out to be a fire-wasp nest like the one we'd just escaped from, the last thing we needed was to find ourselves stranded there with no line of retreat.

'Roughly nine days standard,' Drumon replied promptly. 'Half that if we put in to a void station with a Mechanicus shrine, but we might as well wish for a forge world this deep into the Gulf.'

'I'll happily settle for a system free of orks,' I told him, while Gries and Yaffel reflexively meshed their fingers in the cogwheel gesture of the Adeptus Mechanicus, in response to the passing reference to one of the hallowed worlds devoted to the works of the Machine-God.

'Under the circumstances, so will I,' Drumon agreed.

'Then we must trust to the Omnissiah to provide the respite our systems require,' Gries said, in a voice which made it clear he'd take a dim view of it failing to honour the request, and moved on to the main topic on the agenda. 'Though your resourcefulness saved our vessel, it may have put the success of our mission at some hazard.'

'Quite so.' Yaffel nodded, oscillating a little as he always did, and went on. 'The conditions under which we enter the warp are crucial to our ability to follow the right current. Being somewhat distracted at the time[75], I was unable to complete the relevant calculations before we made the transition, which in turn renders our ability to detect the next emergence point problematic at best.'

'What's the worst-case scenario?' I asked, to show I was paying attention, and trying not to seem visibly pleased that this fool's errand sounded likely to be coming to an end before too much longer. There was bound to be a Guard presence on any Imperial worlds in the vicinity, to discourage opportunistic raiding by our recent hosts, so if I made myself known, I should be able to find a ship heading back to Coronus without too much trouble. Mentioning this prior to my departure might get back to Mira, however, so I kept my own counsel, wary of finding her turning up at the bottom of the boarding ramp again.

'That we fail to find the emergence point at all, or any clue as to its whereabouts,' Yaffel said, looking at me as though I was a simpleton.

'And what are the chances of that?' I asked, refusing to be deflected. If I could get them to realise the mission was hopeless for themselves, it would circumvent any amount of arguing later on.

'Somewhere on the order of three per cent,' the wavering magos told me, looking as perturbed as though that was a real possibility.

'Why so high?' I asked, before reflecting that perhaps sarcasm wasn't particularly sensible under the circumstances, neither Gries nor Yaffel having shown much of a sense of humour about our quest. If either was offended by my flippancy, or even noticed it, come to that, they gave no sign, however. Yaffel merely gestured to the hololith, where the glowing green funnel was still projected over the starfield.

'We've been able to refine our estimates,' he said, 'but only so far. Given the flow of the current we're now in, our destination could be any one of these three systems, with a probability of seventeen, twelve and thirty-two per cent respectively. Other, less likely, destinations are here.' A rash of icons appeared throughout the cone, a few in planetary systems, the vast majority in the deep gulf between them. As I regarded these, I felt a faint shiver of apprehension; if we ended up in the void between the stars, and for some reason the warp engines failed to respond to Drumon's ministrations, we would all surely die in the fathomless dark, centuries from succour even at the best speed our vessel was capable of in the material realm.

'What if we return to the orkhold and re-enter the current after your calculations are complete?' Gries asked, as calmly as if committing suicide like that was a perfectly reasonable proposal.

To my horror, Yaffel nodded. 'I've considered this,' he said, his tone so even that they might merely have been discussing the weather, rather than condemning us all to certain death. All of a sudden, making a run for it in a saviour pod was beginning to look positively attractive.

'My estimate of a ninety-seven per cent probability of success was predicated on us having done so.'

'We'll have to lay over and resanctify the system before we try that,' Drumon said firmly. 'A lot of the machine-spirits are still traumatised, and need to be healed before we can take the ship into combat again.'

'So it looks as though we'll just have to carry on looking for the Spawn's next emergence point for the time being,' I said, trying not to sound too relieved. If we found it, all well and good; either the hulk would be there, or we'd carry on searching, and either way there'd be no reason to return to an ork-infested hellhole. On the other hand, if we didn't, at least I'd have nine days or thereabouts to find a plausible excuse to leave them to it - and failing that, there was always the pods. 'What are our chances of success under the present circumstances?'

'No more than seventy-two per cent,' Yaffel said gloomily, and I resisted the temptation to throw the nearest heavy object at him, with what I still consider a heroic feat of self-control. I'd come out ahead on considerably longer odds than that, on innumerable occasions, and said so. If I'm honest, I was almost giddy with relief, but still in sufficient control of my faculties to refrain from telling the desiccated tech-priest precisely what I thought about his willingness to sacrifice the lot of us just to tidy up his sums.

'Let us hope your confidence is justified, commissar,' Gries said dryly, and on that encouraging note the meeting came to an end.

WITH SO MUCH at stake, it was hardly surprising that the next few weeks were more than a little tense. I whiled away the time as best I could with one piece of makework after another, relishing my daily exercise with the practice drones, and a couple of sparring sessions with Drumon, who seemed as relieved to get away from his duties as I was. Though he never said so directly, I soon inferred that the orks had left a considerable legacy of damage behind them, and the task of coordinating the repairs was an onerous one. Despite my best efforts to ignore them, Yaffel's words had left me feeling unsettled, and although I knew the chances of being dragged back to the orks' domain on a suicidal attempt to make his calculations come out right were remote (practically non-existent if I had anything to do with it), I couldn't shake a nagging sense of disquiet, which refused to leave me entirely except when I was engaged in physical exercise.

Perhaps as a result of this, or perhaps because electrocuting a mob of orks seemed to have put her in a better mood, I found myself spending more time with Mira again. I can't claim to have enjoyed her society as much as I had done back in Fidelis, but her enthusiasm for mine seemed undiminished, and as I've noted before, my opportunities for social interaction aboard the Revenant were somewhat circumscribed. To be honest, I'd been a little wary of renewing our association at first, a faint voice at the back of my mind still insisting that this was a bad idea, for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, whenever I could be bothered to listen to it. But as the days passed, and she kept the virago side of her personality under better control, I began to feel a little more comfortable around her. Perhaps too much so; otherwise I'd certainly have paid more attention to the itching in my palms, which continued to flare up from time to time in the middle of apparently innocuous conversations.

There was one in particular which sticks in my mind, although the full significance of it didn't really occur to me at the time. Spurred on by our recent encounter with the greenskins, I'd been telling her a few colourful lies over a leisurely supper together about my supposedly glorious campaign to liberate Perlia from their kindred, and been duly rewarded by oohs and aahs of wide-eyed credulity in most of the right places - then she looked at me over the rim of her goblet as though taking aim.

'Haven't you ever thought about doing something else with your life?' she asked, in the studiedly neutral fashion she tended to adopt when trying to pretend she didn't care about the answer. I shook my head, in some perplexity, completely taken aback.

'Haven't you?' I asked in return, knowing that my question was equally ridiculous. Mira had been born into the ruling family of an Imperial world, destined since birth to take a hand in the governance of it, and her education and upbringing had no doubt been predicated on that assumption; she was no more in control of her own destiny than I was. From the day I'd been earmarked as a future commissar by a schola progenium functionary with a twisted sense of humour[76], my destiny had been set in stone, just as surely as Mira's, but without the limitless wealth which had no doubt made her adolescence a great deal more comfortable than mine.

'All the time,' she said, to my surprise, an unexpected air of wistfulness entering her tone. Then she smiled, as if to make light of the revelation, and shrugged, setting up interesting oscillations in the clinging gold fabric of her favourite gown - which still made her look like a joygirl if you asked me. (Not that I considered that aspect of her appearance much of a disadvantage.) 'But I've never had the chance.' She glanced slyly at me. 'Not until now.'

'Being offworld, you mean,' I said, managing to look as though I was interested without too much difficulty. This was a happy knack I'd acquired early enough in life to make my time at the schola more tolerable than it might otherwise have been, and which had served me well in my subsequent career.

Mira nodded. 'Partly,' she agreed. She had a conspiratorial air about her now, as though she were about to impart some intimate confidence and feared being overheard by eavesdropping servants. Although since Jurgen was still the closest thing either of us had to domestic staff, and his presence was pretty noticeable even if he was out of sight, I didn't think she had too much to worry about on that score. 'It opens up a number of opportunities.'

'Does it?' I asked, unable for the life of me to see what she was driving at.

She nodded again. 'It does,' she confirmed, as though I'd grasped whatever she was blethering about, and tacitly agreed to it. 'With the right consort beside me, my father is bound to confirm me as his heir. Viridia will need strong leadership once the mess there has been cleaned up, and I mean to provide it.'

'Well, good for you,' I said, trying not to smile as I finally grasped the real reason she'd manoeuvred her way aboard our ship of fools. She was positioning herself to fend off any rival claimants to the throne, and wanted to prove she'd go to any lengths to protect her home world. And if she could bag herself a Space Marine to marry along the way, so much the better: the idea was quite ludicrous, of course, but somehow quite charming in its naivety[77].

'I can't think of a safer pair of hands.'

'I was hoping you'd say that,' Mira replied, smiling at me in a way I hadn't seen for a long time. I returned it in kind, reflecting that this augured well for the subsequent progress of the evening, and I'm bound to say that I was far from disappointed.