The Emperor's Finest

FIFTEEN

OVER THE NEXT few days, I must confess, I had good reason to be thankful for Mira's intervention. The delegation had proven to be every bit as overrun with time-serving bureaucrats, Emperor-bothering ecclesiarchs and inbred imbeciles from the local aristocracy as I'd feared, far too many of whom wanted their picts taken with honest-to-Emperor Astartes, the Hero of Perlia, or both, to keep my temper in check without the considerable exertion of willpower. Fortunately, the prospect of having to ingratiate themselves with Jurgen in order to gain access to me deterred all but the most persistent, and the few who persevered had no more luck getting past him than anyone else I didn't want to see; but it couldn't be denied that Mira was doing an excellent job of keeping the majority occupied, and I was duly grateful. Quite what she did with them I had no idea, and cared even less, but it was bound to have fewer repercussions than my favoured option of shoving the lot of them out of the nearest airlock and leaving them to walk home.

At any event, her willingness to suffer fools gladly, or at least to tolerate them without giving way to the impulse to violence, left the way clear for me to assess the threat with the aid of General Torven, the overall C-in-C[84] of the Guard units garrisoning the system against the possibility of an attack by the orks we'd run into on our way here, Planetary Marshal Kregeen, his opposite number in the local PDF (who, to my relieved surprise, seemed both to take her responsibilities seriously, and understand them, neither of which could normally be relied on when, as here, the senior command staff of the local standing army was drawn from the ranks of the local aristocracy), and Admiral Duque, whose stewardship of the SDF fleet may have lacked the swashbuckling panache of a Horatio Bugler[85], but seemed solidly competent at least. All of them had brought aides, adjutants and advisors with them, of course, but the ones who sat in on the meetings generally had the good sense to keep quiet unless they had something useful to contribute, and I must say we made pretty good progress between us. Gries was, of course, far too busy directing the hunt for the space hulk to participate himself, but that was the whole point of my liaison job, and I made sure he had a cogent summary of our deliberations at the end of every session.

The good news was that we seemed to be pretty well prepared to counter the genestealers if they were foolish enough to show their hand (or talons, to be a little more accurate) openly. The existing threat of the orks meant that Serendipita was in a constant state of vigilance anyway, and everyone present had been involved in seeing off a raid or two in recent years. I had no doubt that the Serendipitans, and their Guard allies, were more than capable of holding their own against even a full-scale incursion, but the more insidious long-term threat posed by 'stealer infiltration required more subtle counter-insurgency measures which simply hadn't seemed necessary up until now.

'We've got a couple of regiments with that kind of experience,' Torven said, one of which turned out to have acquired theirs on Keffia, which was a considerable bonus. 'They can take point on this, and bring the others up to speed,' As always, he spoke quietly, but with the deliberate emphasis of someone who didn't need to raise his voice to be sure he was being listened to - an assumption which, given his wealth of experience in the field against the enemies of the Emperor, he was perfectly entitled to make. His appearance was as unassuming as his voice; despite his rank he still dressed for the field, in fatigues and body armour, although few of the men under his command would have either which fitted so well, or were kept so scrupulously clean. Unsurprisingly, he was popular with the common troopers, who regarded him as one of their own; and he'd certainly done his time in the field, if the burn scar which still marked the left side of his face (the result of a nearby plasma burst, if I was any judge) and the worn condition of his pistol grip was anything to go by.

'My people could benefit from some instruction in that area too,' Kregeen added, 'if we could arrange to liaise on that.' She was astute enough to know that the PDF were regarded as something of a joke by the Guard contingent, but never acknowledged it, always speaking to Torven as an equal; and he was sensible enough not to resent it, or show the fact if he did. Despite betraying her aristocratic lineage by sporting a dress uniform even Mira might have regarded as a little over-ornamented, she paid close attention to our deliberations, and such interjections as she made were always cogent. Now she rested her elbows on the table, supporting her chin on her hands, and looked at the general as though she'd requested nothing more significant than a fresh mug of recaf.

'That would be prudent,' Torven agreed, and two sets of aides peeled away from the table, to go into a huddle in one corner of the conference room which had been set aside for our use. Given that the long table and the padded benches were a comfortable size, instead of being scaled for the more massive frame of the Astartes, I assumed that some of the crew were even now cursing us quietly for the disruption to their regular messing arrangements - an impression strengthened by a stain in the grain of the tabletop not far from where I was sitting, which looked uncannily like gravy.

Kregeen nodded, meeting the general's light brown eyes with her own, which were the same flinty grey as her hair. Although she presumably had the same access to juvenat treatments as anyone else of her status, she'd evidently chosen to fix her biological age at around the mid-forties, as a visible reminder of the significance of her office.

'I'll open some channels with the Arbites as well,' she said. 'I'm sure they'll have some useful advice about what to look for.'

'That sounds like a good idea,' I agreed. Like most civilised worlds, Serendipita had a small staff of resident arbitrators to oversee the local law enforcers, and I'd been vaguely surprised not to find one of them included in the delegation[86]. 'They've had more practice at rooting out clandestine activity than anyone else, so if a 'stealer cult does get established, they're almost certain to be the first to know.'

'If they know what they're looking for in the first place,' Torven added.

I nodded. 'Good point. Perhaps you could use the marshal's contacts to make sure they get the benefit of your Keffian veterans' experience.' Not a desperately subtle way of making sure the Guard and the PDF were working together, rather than following their natural inclinations to ignore one another as much as possible, but it seemed to do the job: Torven and Kregeen both nodded, a pair of aides next to them made eye contact and brief entries on their data-slates, and we were onto the next item for discussion.

'It's all well and prudent,' Duque said, having listened to the exchange without commenting, 'to be prepared to fight the genestealers if we have to, but surely it would be far more sensible to eliminate the threat entirely before things get to that point.' He had the pale complexion and ectomorphic build of a void-born, and no doubt felt more comfortable aboard a vessel in space than on the surface of a world, which was quite ironic given the unusual degree of choice his home system offered in that regard.

'It would,' I agreed, 'if that were possible. Do you have any suggestions as to how we go about achieving it?'

The admiral nodded, his pale face bobbing above a midnight-blue uniform which seemed even darker than it actually was by contrast. 'I do,' he assured me, with quiet confidence. He gestured to one of his staff, a junior lieutenant who bore a faint resemblance to him, a niece or a cousin perhaps, and took the data-slate she proffered. 'Given the progress of the search so far, we can assume that the Spawn of Damnation will be located within the week, and most probably a great deal sooner.' He consulted the display, then glanced around the table.

'I've already given orders for the majority of our System Defence Fleet to rendezvous with the Revenant, in the expectation that by the time they arrive, the hulk will have been found.'

'Well done.' Kregeen was nodding in approval. 'If we can keep it blockaded, nothing will be able to get on or off. All we'll have to do is wait for it to fall back into the warp, and blast anything which gets too close or tries to leave in the meantime.'

'Blockaded?' Duque looked surprised for a moment, then smiled, in what looked to me like honest amusement. 'You misunderstand me, madam marshal. I intend to destroy it.'

'With respect, admiral,' I said, 'I think you may be underestimating the sheer size of the thing. I'm given to understand that previous encounters recorded its mass as being on the order of a small planetoid, rather than a spacecraft as we'd normally understand the term.'

'Quite so.' The pale man didn't seem too put out at the interruption.

'But we'll have plenty of time to shoot at it. If the estimates the Astartes have given us are accurate, it will be at least a month before the Spawn passes close enough to any human habitation to pose a threat. We can reduce it a piece at a time if we have to, but reduce it we will.'

'Won't that create an even greater danger?' Torven asked, looking troubled. 'That amount of debris will pose a significant hazard to navigation throughout the system.'

'Not for long,' Duque assured him. 'The Spawn of Damnation is currently heading almost directly for the centre, and will end up falling into a cometary orbit about the sun within the next two to three years. It won't take much to time the attacks to nudge it a little, so that the bulk of the debris will pass close enough to be vaporised. Some of it will escape, of course, but that won't be passing close to Serendipita, or any of the other habs, on this orbit, and by the time it comes round again it'll be the middle of M43; time enough, I would have thought, to take any reasonable precautions against it hitting something.'

'It sounds a bit chancy,' I said, 'but I'd rather have a cloud of junk to deal with than a space hulk full of 'stealers.' After all, there was no telling how long it might take for the Spawn to drop back into the warp again; according to Yaffel they sometimes stayed in the real galaxy for decades, and the thought of thousands of genestealers drifting around a densely inhabited system, just waiting for some idiot whose greed was stronger than their sense of self-preservation to come dropping in looking for loot, made my blood run cold. After all, that's what appeared to have happened on Viridia, and the blasted hulk had only been in-system for less than a day. Duque's SDF could mount a blockade, of course, but the longer it went on, the higher the chances of a 'stealer or two somehow managing to infect a host and sneaking off to wreak havoc.

I nodded judiciously. 'In the absence of a more effective plan to preserve the security of the Serendipita system, I'll recommend we carry it out.'

'OUT OF THE question,' Gries said flatly. By now I'd got to know him well enough to realise a statement like that was effectively the end of the matter, but I have to admit I was taken aback by the speed and vehemence of his reaction.

Accordingly, I merely nodded in response, masking my dismay with the instinctive ease of a man who'd bet heavily on an inordinate number of promising-looking tarot hands in his time, only to realise shortly afterwards that everyone else's were better. (A reflex which had enabled me to scoop rather more pots than I'd otherwise have been entitled to, nevertheless.) 'Might I ask why?' I enquired, as though the answer were merely of academic interest.

I couldn't deny that Duque's scheme was chancy, to say the least, but it still seemed to me that the balance of risk was marginally in its favour.

'Because the Spawn's value is incalculable,' Drumon put in, glancing across the bridge towards the hololith, where Yaffel and a cadre of his red-robed acolytes were twittering away to one another in Binary, as they studied a three-dimensional image of what looked to me like the circulatory system of a diseased heart. 'A space hulk that venerable is a repository of archeotech almost beyond imagining.'

With a sudden sinking feeling, I realised that the diagram the tech-priests were studying so intently must be a schematic of the hulk's interior, no doubt reconstructed from generations of sensor scans culled from the archives, and therefore so out of date as to be worse than useless[87]. 'Don't tell me you're planning to board it?' I protested, too startled to give a frak for protocol.

'We are,' Gries said, in a voice which brooked no argument. It's probably a measure of how startled I was that I tried arguing anyway.

'The potential rewards may well be worth the risk,' I conceded, secure in the knowledge that someone else would be taking it, and determined to at least be diplomatic about my reservations, 'but surely our highest priority has to be the security of Serendipita?'

Clearly, Gries wasn't used to having his decisions called into question, at least by anyone outside his own Chapter[88], but fortunately he seemed willing to make an exception in my case. If anything he seemed surprised, rather than irked, which was fine by me; my sparring sessions with Drumon had left me well aware of the speed and precision with which an angry Astartes could strike down anyone provoking their wrath, and I had no desire to provide a bit of practice.

'Our highest priority is our duty to the Emperor,' Gries told me, looking down to meet my eyes, and I saw in his the kind of complete and utter conviction that I'm more used to seeing in madmen, inquisitors and members of the Adepta Sororitas[89]. 'And I will determine where that lies.' He didn't have to add, 'and not you,' because I heard it quite clearly in any case.

'Quite so,' I agreed, inclining my head in a respectful nod. I wanted him to continue to think of me as a trustworthy ally, rather than a potential problem. 'Given your wealth of knowledge and experience, I wouldn't have thought otherwise for a moment. But I'm afraid it's my job to keep the Serendipitans on side, and the only thing they seem concerned about is the clear and present danger to their home world.'

'Of course.' Gries nodded, apparently mollified. 'Then you must assure them we remain committed to that objective.'

'I'll make them see sense,' I promised, although to be honest that was something which seemed in very short supply aboard the Revenant at the moment. Gries and Drumon seemed to be buying it anyway, looking down at me in a faintly approving fashion which reminded me of my old schola tutors when I parroted the answer I knew they wanted to hear. 'Blockading the hulk seems a rather more practical option in any case.'

'Considerably more,' Drumon agreed. 'And the presence of an Astartes strike cruiser should dissuade anyone from trying to run it.'

'It would me,' I agreed. 'But I'm not a scav barge skipper who thinks the Emperor just dropped a fortune in his lap. Anyone stupid enough to risk boarding a hulk full of genestealers isn't going to be put off by the near certainty of being blown to bits on the way in.'

For a moment, as my brain caught up with my tongue, I wondered if I'd risked offending my hosts again, but apparently neither Astartes thought my remark about the idiocy of attempting to board the Spawn of Damnation applied to them. But just to make sure, I thought I'd better draw a distinction. 'I'm sure your operation over there will be rather better planned and resourced than a scawy raid[90], however.'

'Indeed,' Gries said, nodding again. Then, to my surprise, he strode to the hololith, scattering tech-priests as he went, and gestured to me to follow him.

I looked at the tangle of passageways laid out by the faintly flickering three-dimensional image, my underhiver's instinct translating the intersecting streaks of variously coloured light into an almost physical sense of the space they represented. (Something I was to be all too grateful for later, as it turned out, but which at the time seemed no more than a convenient aid to interpreting the briefing.)

'Our first entry point will be here,' Drumon said, indicating a chamber somewhere on the outer skin of the complex weave of ducts and corridors. 'A relatively undamaged docking bay, which seems large enough to accommodate a Thunderhawk, and defensible enough to provide a beachhead. The Terminators will suppress any resistance and secure the perimeter. Once that's been done, Magos Yaffel and myself will lead a working party here...'

He did something with his servo-arm which caused the image to zoom in on the sector he'd first indicated, separating the beachhead and the objective by almost a metre instead of just the millimetre or two they'd occupied of the overall schematic. As the area depicted enlarged, so did the detail, and a further tangle of intersecting capillaries grew around the veins and arteries we were already looking at, leaving the whole hololith just as crowded as it had been before. For the first time I began to appreciate just how vast and complex the leviathan of the warp we were pursuing really was, and wished the boarders every bit of luck the Emperor could spare; I was certain they were going to need it.

'...and attempt to recover the cogitator core of this vessel,' Drumon concluded.

'Why that one?' I asked.

'Because it has the most directly accessible cogitator banks of any of the derelicts making up the hulk,' Gries said, as though that should have been obvious from a cursory glance at the pile of virtual string hovering in front of my face.

'And because it's been tentatively identified as a Redeemer-class vessel, none of which have been in service for over five thousand years,' Yaffel put in, positively salivating at the prospect. 'The maintenance logs alone should yield untold blessings of the Omnissiah which have been lost to posterity.'

'A prize indeed,' I said evenly, which was far more tactful than verbalising my real thoughts would have been. It seemed to me that if the galaxy had been getting along perfectly well without these lost blessings for the last five millennia in any case, losing the 'stealers along with them would have been better all round. But it wasn't my call, so that was that. I'd just have to break it to Duque that he wouldn't be able to knock any lumps off the hulk, at least for the time being, and ride out the ensuing recrimination. Come to that, Torven and Kregeen would be far from thrilled too. At least I had Gries to blame, and I'd been a commissar for long enough to know how to use their common resentment to get them cooperating a bit more effectively than they otherwise would have done, so all in all, things could have been worse. Then something else occurred to me. 'This is probably a stupid question,' I asked, 'but what happens if the Spawn falls back into the warp while your sea... retrieval expedition is still aboard it?'

Yaffel gave me a faintly superior look, like an eldar deigning to notice one of the lesser breeds of the galaxy (which they consider to be everyone except them). 'That can't happen,' he said, with an airy confidence which left me far from convinced.

Drumon nodded. 'The hulk is coasting in towards the sun,' he reminded me. 'And natural warp fissures can only occur outside a gravity well. Even a starship with a properly focussed Geller field can only force its way between the realms on the fringes of a system.'

'So it's stuck here until it drifts out past the halo again,' I said, grateful as always for his pared-down summary of the situation.

Magos and Techmarine nodded in unison, apparently equally delighted at the prospect. They'd have years to poke around in the wreckage for technosorcerous trinkets, with nothing more to worry about than Emperor knew how many ravenous genestealers lurking in the dark.

Which also meant that, far from coming to a close as I'd expected, my assignment here looked like being prolonged indefinitely. Someone would have to liaise between the Reclaimers, the Serendipitans and the Imperial Guard, and, for better or worse, I'd been stuck with the job.

I considered the implications. It wouldn't be too hard to convince everyone that the best place to work from would be Torven's HQ on Serendipita, where I'd have ready access to system-wide intelligence, the PDF and SDF command structures, and, most importantly, all the little comforts available on a civilised world, instead of being stuck aboard a starship where the chances of finding a decent tarot game were about as high as Jurgen becoming the next lord general. And while I was getting on with looking busy, I'd be a long way from brigade headquarters on Coronus, along with anyone intent on roping me in to whatever suicide mission they happened to have to hand. All in all, I thought, I could live with that.

I RETURNED TO my quarters in a distinctly cheerful mood, to find Mira waiting for me while Jurgen laid out a tolerably pleasant supper, and lost no time in sharing the good news with her. She'd have found out anyway, soon enough, and I felt it prudent to be the one to tell her. That way, whatever else she might take exception to, at least I couldn't be accused of deceit.

Despite whatever forebodings I may have harboured, however, she seemed almost as pleased at the prospect as I was, which I suppose shouldn't have come as that much of a surprise. She'd clearly found life aboard the Revenant even more tedious than I had, and would no doubt seize the chance to relocate to more salubrious surroundings with equal alacrity.

'In fact,' she said, a forkful of smoked salma from her hoard of delicacies halfway to her mouth, 'I suppose my little errand here is pretty much over too.'

'I suppose so,' I agreed, taking a mouthful of my own and washing it down with an inoffensive vintage I strongly suspected was the best the Space Marine vessel had to offer. 'The hulk definitely isn't going to present any kind of threat to Viridia from now on.' When it eventually did drift back into the warp, I had no doubt that the Reclaimers and the Adeptus Mechanicus would go right along with it, as reluctant to let it go as a kroot with a bone; and their eagerness to carry on looting the hulk wherever it ended up would prevent it from posing a threat to any Imperial system it happened to arrive in, which was all to the good.

Mira smiled, as though I'd just said something witty. 'Quite,' she agreed. 'But I did have other motives for coming along, you'll recall.'

'Of course,' I said, dredging my memory. Something about strengthening her claim to the throne back home, and finding a consort able to help her grab it. 'I'm glad they seem to be working out for you too.' She seemed to have given up on the ridiculous idea of persuading a Space Marine to elope with her, and for a moment I wondered who else she'd found who looked like a suitable candidate. One of the Serendipitan delegation, presumably - they can't all have been as pointless as they looked.

Her smile spread. 'For both of us, surely.'

'Well, yes,' I agreed. It wouldn't take much to turn my liaison job into a sinecure guaranteed to keep me comfortably out of harm's way for years to come, which was pretty much as good as it ever got for someone in my position. I raised my goblet, in a slightly ironic toast.

'Here's to both of us getting what we want.'

'To both of us,' Mira said, her glass clinking against mine, and I found myself genuinely wishing her well, which for someone as focussed on my own concerns as I usually was, came as a bit of a surprise. Her cheeks coloured slightly, and as she lowered her drink, she looked at me in a manner I found a little odd. 'Are you sure about this?'

'Of course I am,' I said, touched by her concern. The sooner I could feel a world beneath my feet again the better.

'Good.' She became businesslike again. 'Serendipita doesn't do much trade with us, but there's a Charter ship or two linking the systems, with only a couple of intermediate layovers. We should be able to get passage within a few months.' She looked at me speculatively. 'Unless you've got some strings you can pull? We might as well use them while we can.'

'While we can?' I echoed, feeling oddly like a character in a ballroom farce[91]. Her words were undeniably Gothic, but the meaning behind them kept eluding me.

Mira nodded. 'While you still have some influence with the Munitorum,' she elucidated, as though that made perfect sense. 'Could you get us berths on a military ship?'

'I suppose so,' I said, falling back on the card player's instinct which generally helped me out at moments like this. Time and again I've found that if you appear to understand what's going on, and don't panic, sooner or later you'll get a clue. Everything will fall into place, and no one will ever know you were out of your depth. It's an important skill for a commissar, too, come to think of it, as we're supposed to look calm and in control whatever happens. It's remarkably difficult to rally troops under fire when you're dithering about screaming ''Frak, oh frak, we're all going to die!''. So I nodded judiciously, as though she'd just asked a perfectly reasonable question.

'If you wanted to hurry back, of course.'

'Good point,' she rejoined, smiling at me again, in a manner I can only describe as curiously cloying. 'Let's enjoy ourselves for a few weeks while we can. Serendipita's quite a pleasant world, apparently.'

'Something to do with the ring system, I suppose,' I said, having picked up a little bit about conditions there from Torven and the others.

'I hear it's quite spectacular.'

'Then you've talked me into it.' Mira's smile became coquettish. 'We might as well enjoy the honeymoon before we have to get down to work.'

'Exactly,' I heard my mouth say, the pieces finally dropping into place, and our earlier conversation taking on an entirely new meaning which had escaped me at the time. She hadn't been out to bag herself an Astartes at all. The Liberator of Perlia would do perfectly well as a consort, particularly as I seemed to be a hero on Viridia as well.

A chill prickle of panic chased itself down my spine. I can't deny that, in the abstract, the notion of continuing to enjoy Mira's more obvious charms indefinitely, along with the material comforts formalising our relationship would provide, had its appeal, but the idea was utterly preposterous. The Commissariat wasn't like one of the confection-box regiments[92] my would-be fiancee and her aristocratic cronies amused themselves by playing at officers in, which would cheerfully accept a resigned commission whenever more pressing or diverting business presented itself. If I abandoned my assignment to return to Viridia with her I'd be branded a deserter, and the only question left open about my future would be whether the ensuing tribunal had me shot by a firing squad, or packed me off to a penal legion to let the enemies of the Emperor save them the ammo. No doubt Mira believed that being the consort of a planetary governor would be sufficient protection from the wrath of my erstwhile colleagues, but I was under no such illusion: once you put on the scarlet sash, it's there till they bury you in it (assuming they can find enough bits for the ceremony, which in our vocation is never entirely certain). Even if you make it through to retirement intact, you can still be yanked back into the field pretty much on a whim, as I've found out only too well these last few years[93].

Even so, I hesitated before speaking. Mira was clearly under the impression that I'd not only divined her purpose, but somehow signalled my agreement to her absurd proposal. I knew only too well how she was likely to react to being disabused. I'd seen the lurking virago erupt from behind the refined facade over matters so minor they'd barely registered with me, and now I was about to take a chainsword to her most cherished ambitions. Worse still, of course, would be the blow to her vanity. Most women like to think they're irresistible, and discovering that she wasn't wouldn't sit well at all. Add to that the fact that I'd seen her kill people without turning an immaculately groomed hair, and my wariness becomes even more understandable.

All this being so, it can come as little surprise to hear that I remained paralysed by indecision, nodding and responding with automatic platitudes, while Mira prattled on about her grandiose plans for Viridia once we'd consolidated her grip on it, most of which seemed to consist of score-settling with people I'd never heard of. Whether I would eventually have found the courage to speak out, or just jumped on the first transport ship back to Coronus while her back was turned, I'll never know, however. I was just on the point of pouring myself the largest amasec I thought I could get away with, when Jurgen returned to my quarters, his face composed in the faintly dyspeptic expression he tended to adopt whenever he felt an air of gravitas was required.

'Sorry to interrupt your meal, sir,' he said, 'but your presence is requested on the bridge. They seem to think they've found it.'