The Emperor's Finest

SIXTEEN

SEIZING GRATEFULLY ON my aide's timely intervention, I lost no time in hurrying to the bridge, leaving Mira happily planning her coup d'etat[94] with all the enthusiasm most women of her rank reserve for cotillions. Though my mind continued to reel with the shock of the realisation of what I'd blundered into, I must confess that the bustle of activity which met my eyes the moment I entered the nerve centre of the Revenant was almost sufficient to drive it out entirely.

'Contact confirmed,' the auspex operator was saying as I stepped through the doors, which were still showing faint traces of orkish small-arms fire despite the best efforts of the shipboard artisans to restore the devotional images adorning them, and the air of expectation suffusing the chamber became so dense I almost had to resort to hacking through it with my chainsword. 'It's definitely a hard return[95], refined metals by the signature.' For the first time I heard a tremor of suppressed excitement in the even tones I'd grown used to hearing from the Chapter serfs manning the bridge, and, despite my own concerns, felt an answering flicker of it within myself.

If this truly was the end of our quest, it could hardly have come at a more propitious time. It meant I'd be on my way to Serendipita almost immediately, and once I was there, I'd be able to avoid Mira far more effectively than I possibly could in the cramped confines of the Revenant. A faint flicker of optimism even dared to raise the hope that, once we were back on terra firma, and she was again immersed in her own social environment, she'd begin to see the huge gulf between our respective milieux for what it was, and abandon the absurd project she'd conceived of her own volition. (Not that it seemed particularly likely. When she made her mind up about something, she pursued it as tenaciously as a gaunt scenting blood.) It was possible, however, that I could get off the ship before she noticed I was gone, citing orders and duty, which would at least buy me a breathing space.

'Could it just be a vessel?' Gries asked, leaning forwards a little, as though he could force the pict screen to greater magnification purely by willpower. 'The SDF flotilla should be nearing the rendezvous point by now.'

'Unlikely,' Drumon told him. 'None of the System Defence boats would be that far out of position.' He loomed over the auspex operator and made some minute adjustments to the dials set into the surface of the control lectern, pinching them delicately between the fingers of his gauntlets, like an ogryn trying to pick up a porcelain tea bowl.

'Displacement reads in the gigatonnes.'

'Then it's the Spawn,' Yaffel said, sounding rather more excited than was strictly commensurate with his position. He wasn't exactly hopping up and down, which would have been difficult given his lack of legs, but he was definitely oscillating more violently than usual. 'It's the only reasonable inference.'

'And right where you predicted it would be,' I reminded him, which wasn't exactly true, as he'd only been able to narrow it down to a pretty wide volume of space, but he didn't seem inclined to quibble about it, merely nodding sagely in agreement.

'The Omnissiah leads us down the path of logic to a sure destination[96],' he said, with the comfortable certainty of a man for whom the universe not only ran like clockwork, but chimed the first few bars of ''Throne Eternal'' on the hour.

'Boosting the gain on the long-range imagifers,' Drumon said, doing something I couldn't see to the back of a nearby lectern with his servo-arm, and Yaffel trundled over to the hololith, where he began to poke around in turn.

'Then if the interociters hold together,' the tech-priest added, 'we should be able to... Omnissiah be praised.' The three-dimensional display flickered into life, and the image of what looked like a jagged piece of scrap metal began to tumble gently within it, growing larger with every passing minute, until it filled the space almost entirely. It wavered a bit, as such representations generally do, but Yaffel seemed to know what he was about, and with a few muttered benedictions, some fiddling with the controls, and a well-placed thump of his fist, he steadied the image.

'The Spawn of Damnation,' Drumon said, his voice remarkably hushed for a Space Marine. Gries nodded, apparently too overcome to speak at all, and his battered half-face relaxed into an expression I found hard to interpret, but had certainly never seen there before.

I studied the image, seeing nothing that made much sense at first. I was aware of the scale of the thing intellectually, of course, but it wasn't until I suddenly recognised a small blemish on the surface as a Galaxy-class troopship that something of the awe clearly felt by everyone else present transmitted itself to me. 'Throne on Earth,' I found myself saying. 'It's vast!'

Even that involuntary exclamation barely began to cover the sheer size of the hulk. It was big the way a small moon is, beyond any sense of scale a human can grasp or relate to[97]. Despite knowing the effort was pointless, I began to try to pick out more details, but any attempt to impose order or understanding on the tangled lump of wreckage was doomed to failure. Even trying to estimate the number of vessels which had fallen victim to this reef of space, only to become part of it in their turn, was impossible; at least for me, although I was sure Yaffel would have been able to take a shot at it. Drawn together by eddies in the warp currents, their physical structures had become combined and mingled, twisted around and within one another as they collided, rather than shattering and fragmenting as they would have done in the materium. It was as if a vast hand had scooped up a random selection of starships, and kneaded them together like a pastrycook with a fistful of dough. And it wasn't just ships: I was sure that here and there I could make out the harsher lines of pieces of natural debris, rocks and asteroids, drawn in by the gravitational field of the hulk during its periodic transitions through realspace, to become inextricable parts of it in the crucible of the warp.

The worst thing about it, however, was the sense of menace it radiated, an almost palpable threat, like the snarling of an ork just before it charges.

'Where are you planning to board it?' I asked Yaffel, and he indicated a semi-intact hull about three-quarters of the way round the lump from the wreck of the Galaxy I'd previously recognised.

'The docking bay here,' he told me, and I was orientated at last, my underhiver's synapses instinctively overlaying the internal structure I'd seen before on the exterior view. 'The sensor records we recovered from the archives are some centuries old, of course, but they seem to indicate that it could be made functional again with little effort.'

'So long as a 'stealer brood hasn't set up home there in the interim,' I said, not entirely sure how serious I was being.

'We'll take precautions,' Yaffel assured me, sounding blithely unconcerned; but I'd seen purestrains up close too often, and too recently, to dismiss the threat they represented so casually.

'Then you'd better hope to the Throne they're sufficient,' I counselled, perhaps a little more sharply than I'd intended. It may have been this which drew Drumon to join us, or perhaps he just wanted a better view of the space hulk. At any event he was suddenly at my side, looming over me like a well-disposed promontory.

'They will be,' he promised. 'By the time we get over there, we will know where the bulk of the brood is.' His demeanour was calm, and despite the improbability of his claim, I found myself reassured. After all, he was one of the Emperor's chosen, and he'd probably been facing 'stealers or worse since my great-grandfather was tracking bounties in the sump (or trying to outrun the would-be collectors of his own, most likely)[98], so he ought to know what he was doing.

'How soon will that be?' I asked, conscious of my responsibilities to Torven and the others. If I was going to make a good case for transferring my liaison post to the Imperial Guard headquarters on Serendipita, I'd better have some juicy titbits to throw to them.

Drumon considered the question a moment. 'Around twelve hours,' he said. 'The cats should have dispersed enough to locate any active genestealers by that point.'

'Cats?' I echoed, baffled. Plenty of Guard regiments use animals for one purpose or another on the battlefield, generally as cavalry mounts or attack beasts, but I'd never heard of Astartes doing so; and even if they did, felines would hardly seem the most likely creatures to give a genestealer a run for its money.

'See ay tee,' Yaffel elucidated, no doubt divining my confusion.

'Cyber-Altered Task units. Like very simple servitors, without the biological components.'

'Then how do they work?' I asked, even more puzzled than before. I might not have been a tech-priest, but even I knew it was the living brain which allowed a servitor to remember and process simple instructions.

'Quite satisfactorily,' Drumon said, with a momentary smile at his own wit, before continuing. 'They require no cognitive functions; just a simple vox circuit to relay picts and other environmental data. Once released, they just keep moving in a straight line until they reach an obstacle.'

'Of which,' I said, equally dryly, 'I suspect the Spawn of Damnation has more than its share.'

'Undoubtedly,' Yaffel agreed, apparently as constitutionally incapable of recognising sarcasm as the majority of those in his vocation.

'But the CATs have a simple mechanism attached to their tracks. When they reach an obstruction they can't negotiate, they simply rotate ten degrees on the spot, before moving forwards again. If they're still impeded, they repeat the process, and so on. Eventually they find a direction they can progress in.'

'They sound ingenious,' I said, wondering which of them had come up with the idea, and suspecting it was probably Drumon; the devices Yaffel was describing seemed to fit his practical turn of mind rather better than the tech-priest's analytical one[99].

'They should serve their purpose,' Drumon agreed. 'We plan to teleport thirty of them across to the hulk, around the area we intend operating in. If there are enough genestealers around to pose a threat, we'll know about it long before the Thunderhawk arrives.'

'That sounds like a wise precaution,' I agreed, nodding judiciously. If I'd been going off to loot a derelict, knowing there was a 'stealer brood lurking somewhere aboard, I'd feel a lot happier knowing where they were too - or, at least, that they weren't in the immediate vicinity of where I planned to be. 'Can you stick a bolter on them as well?'

Yaffel shook his head, failing to recognise the joke. 'That wouldn't be a practical option,' he began. 'The power-to-weight ratio-'

'Pity,' I said, little realising how prescient I was being. 'That might save everyone a lot of trouble.'

AS I'D ANTICIPATED, Torven and the Serendipitans were less than enthused by the tidings I bore, and the atmosphere around the makeshift conference table was distinctly frosty by the time I concluded my briefing. It was plain that all three of them shared my misgivings about the wisdom of boarding the Spawn of Damnation, and, as I'd expected, it was Duque who first put them into words.

'So what you're telling us,' he said slowly, 'is that not only are we prevented from destroying the thing by the presence of friendly units in the target zone, we can expect the genestealers to be handed a potential vector of contamination on a platter with a salad garnish?'

'Essentially, yes,' I told him, noting the restive fashion in which Torven and Kregeen shifted their weight on the benches as I did so.

'But I'm sure our gallant allies in the Astartes will take all due precautions.' Not for the first time, I found myself treading a delicate path between the conflicting agendas of the Reclaimers and the defenders of Serendipita. If I was going to turn this assignment into a comfortable refuge from a galaxy apparently hell-bent on killing me, I needed to keep both factions feeling I was more in sympathy with their point of view than the other.

'No doubt,' Kregeen said, in a voice which oozed dubiety.

'They should know what they're doing,' Torven said. 'They're Astartes after all. It's the cogboys that worry me. They seem so obsessed with the prospect of getting their hands on a stash of archeotech they're incapable of assessing the risk objectively.'

I couldn't argue with that, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that so far as I could see the Reclaimers were equally keen to go dashing off on a treasure hunt, so I simply nodded judiciously. 'They believe they can, of course, but I've yet to meet a 'stealer that'll back down and run away if you tell it its presence is a statistical fluke.' That lightened the mood, of course, as I'd hoped it would, as well as reminding them that I'd faced and fought the creatures on more than one occasion, and I followed up the advantage with a little careful morale-boosting. 'At least if anyone does fall prey to them, the damage ought to be self-limiting,' I added. 'Astartes and Mechanicus tend not to go in for large families.'

This time the witticism produced visible smiles, even from some of the aides, who generally seemed to feel that their chances of promotion depended on behaving as much like servitors as possible without a lobotomy.

'Quite so,' Torven agreed evenly. 'But the bulk of the Revenant's crew are ordinary men. If any of them should become tainted, and make their way to Serendipita, they'll start spawning hybrids almost at once.' This was true, of course, and I nodded reassuringly. 'Then it's fortunate that only Astartes and members of the Adeptus Mechanicus will be included in the boarding party. None of the Chapter serfs will be exposed.'

'Not initially,' Torven said. 'But you said it yourself, they intend to continue exploring the hulk for as long as it remains in the materium. That could be anything up to a decade, and a lot can happen in that amount of time.'

'And what happens if one of the Astartes does get implanted?' Kregeen asked. 'They don't have to father children to act in the interest of the brood mind, do they?' For a moment the image of the tainted PDF troopers who'd turned against Mira and I in the tunnels beneath Fidelis rose up in my mind, and I tried not to contemplate the havoc a similarly compromised Space Marine could wreak. Not to mention the prospect of an implanted Thunderhawk pilot smuggling a few purestrains on board, to cut a swathe through the crew, thereby seeding the nucleus of another genestealer cult in the heart of Serendipitan society.

'No, they don't,' I agreed, my resolve to get as far away from the Revenant as quickly as possible even stronger than before. 'I'll raise the possibility with Captain Gries at the earliest opportunity and let you know what precautions he'll be taking against it.' If nothing else, he was a realist, and I was sure he had contingency plans in place, even if they were just the same as the ones we had in the Guard: summary execution and burn the body. (Which was in fact the case: when I did eventually get the chance to raise the subject he became as close to agitated as I ever saw him, which I found strangely reassuring. Clearly he regarded the notion of losing one of his own to the brood mind as abhorrent as any mortal commander would have done[100]).

'That's all very well,' Duque said, 'but I'd rather take precautions of my own.' In the absence of a hololith, or pict screen large enough for us all to look at, he passed round a data-slate, on which a cluster of illuminated dots appeared, annotated with icons identifying them as the hulk, the Revenant and a dozen or so System Defence boats. 'I'm deploying the blockade in this pattern. Individual ships will rotate in and out, of course, according to operational requirements, refit and resupply, but the total number will never drop below this minimum.'

'It looks pretty tight,' I said, although my grasp of three-dimensional tactics was tenuous at best; one of the first things a good commissar (as opposed to the by-the-book martinets who'll execute a trooper at the drop of a hat, and like as not end up on the wrong end of a negligent discharge[101]) learns is when to dispense a few words of quiet encouragement. 'But won't committing so many vessels to this operation leave you overstretched elsewhere in the system?'

'We'll manage,' Duque said. 'We won't have much of a strategic reserve left, admittedly, but we can still respond to a greenskin raid effectively enough if we have to. And the genestealers are here now, so that's where I'm putting my ships. If the worst happens, we can still keep them from causing any harm.'

'Well, let's hope you don't have to,' I said, taking his meaning and nodding almost imperceptibly to let him know I'd done so. He'd positioned his ships where they could combine their fire against the Revenant if the worst came to the worst, and enough of the Reclaimers and their vassals were taken over by the brood mind to seize control of the cruiser. If it ever came down to it, the fight would be a bloody one, but the SDF would almost certainly prevail by sheer weight of numbers. 'I take it everyone else has been considering the worst-case scenarios?'

Torven and Kregeen glanced at one another, then nodded in unison, and I was pleased to see that they appeared to be working together reasonably well on this. 'We have,' Torven confirmed. 'The marshal and I are agreed that the existing contingency plans against an orkish invasion will prove sufficient if required.' So it seemed we were as prepared as we could ever be to defend ourselves against a strike force of implanted Space Marines spearheading a genestealer swarm: another possibility I devoutly hoped would remain purely theoretical.

'The trouble is,' Kregeen said, 'we've got no real idea of the scale of the threat. Best case, the Astartes and the Mechanicus really are as on top of things as they like to think, and we can let them get on with it knowing the admiral's blockade will be enough to do the job if they fumble. Worst case, it's all going to the warp in a sabretache, and we need to be ready to mobilise in a heartbeat.' She shrugged. 'So which is it?'

I adopted an expression intended to convey sober reflection. 'I don't suppose we'll know for sure until they've been over there,' I said, after pausing just long enough to give the impression I'd been mulling it over.

'Exactly,' Torven agreed. He leaned across the table towards me, as though about to impart a confidence he'd rather not have overheard. 'Which is why we'd all feel a lot happier if there was an objective observer attached to the boarding party.'

Duque and Kregeen nodded their agreement, and with a sudden thrill of horror uncannily reminiscent of my conversation with Mira, I realised what they were driving at. Nevertheless, I nodded again, as if I was seriously considering it.

'I could ask Captain Gries to let me tag along,' I said, which was perfectly true, I could; but I had about as much intention of doing so as going back to the orkhold to challenge the local warboss to an arm-wrestling match. 'How he'd feel about it, though...' I shrugged, to show I had no idea. Hardly a subtle piece of misdirection, I'm sure you'll agree, but it did the job. Everyone relaxed visibly, and although no one went so far as to pat me on the back, I was left in no doubt that a warm welcome awaited me on Serendipita.

'We couldn't ask for more,' Torven said.

I smiled, playing up to my reputation for modest heroism, as though being asked to take an insanely dangerous risk was merely routine (which, come to think of it, it more or less was by this point in my career), and glanced around the table. 'Then perhaps I'll have some more news for you when we meet on Serendipita,' I said. Whatever happened, this would be our last meeting aboard the Revenant: it seemed the parasites Mira had been herding had had enough of the Reclaimers' hospitality by now, a sentiment which I was certain was heartily reciprocated, or perhaps the governor just wanted his shuttle back. At any event, the delegation was due to depart the following day, and the military personnel along with it. (Apart from Duque and his people, who were hopping over to his flagship aboard an Aquila it had dispatched for the purpose, and which was rather pointedly timed to arrive several hours before the boarding party set off for the Spawn.)

Of course, despite the impression I'd gone some way to foster, I hadn't the slightest intention of attaching myself to what I was convinced was little more than a suicide mission. But, once again, I'd reckoned without Mira.

I'D TAKEN THE precaution of voxing Jurgen before leaving the conference room, to ensure that my quarters were currently free of my self-appointed helpmeet, so I must admit to feeling a little cheated by fate when she popped out of a cross corridor close to the guest quarters as abruptly as a villain in a mystery play[102].

Seeing her in the flesh again, aesthetically pleasing as it was, disconcerted me considerably, and the dilemma I'd managed to push to the back of my mind under the pressure of more recent events came flooding back, seemingly as intractable as ever.

'Ciaphas.' She smiled, evidently still in a good mood and apparently pleased to see me. 'This is a pleasant surprise.'

'I could say the same,' I returned, donning a smile of my own and wondering if I'd be able to head off the inevitable confrontation for a while longer, or whether I should simply get it over with as quickly as possible. I carried on walking in the direction of my stateroom while I spoke, in the vague hope that she had urgent business elsewhere, or that at least if it all went ploin-shaped she'd be less inclined to try to kill me with Jurgen in earshot. To my distinct lack of surprise she fell in beside me, chattering brightly as she undulated along the corridor.

'I've just had some excellent news,' she informed me, and despite the faint itching in my palms which these words provoked, I nodded, as if I couldn't wait to hear the details.

'Good,' I said, not entirely inaccurately. 'I could do with some.'

Mira smiled, looking for a moment as if I'd just complimented her on her finger painting. 'I've been talking to the seneschal,' she said brightly, as if I knew or cared which of the inbred drones among the delegation she meant, 'and he said not all the military people are going back to Serendipita on the shuttle tomorrow.'

'That's right,' I said, wondering how some gretch-frotting civilian had found out about this, while making a mental note to remind everyone in the SDF party what ''need to know'' meant, and put the fear of the Throne into them until it stuck.

'Duque and his people are joining the blockade[103].'

'Oh, you knew.' She looked faintly disappointed, as if I'd guessed the punchline of a joke she was telling before she'd reached it. Then she brightened again. 'So you know what that means, right?'

'A little more leg room for the others?' I hazarded, although from what I remembered of the shuttle's arrival, that didn't seem much of a consideration.

Mira smiled at me, unsure whether I was joking, or genuinely didn't get it. Correctly divining the latter, she grinned more widely. 'Room for more passengers,' she said. When I still didn't jump around punching the air, she amplified further. 'Us.'

Emperor help me, she was serious. I stopped moving and stared at her in perplexity.

'Mira, I can't just up and leave on a whim.' The first thunderclouds started to gather over her perfectly groomed eyebrows, which were moving together over deepening frown lines, and I carried on as though I'd always meant to, hoping to head them off. Now it was looking like a distinct possibility, I decided I really couldn't deal with a confrontation today. 'However much I'd like to. I have duties and responsibilities to consider. There are just too many people here counting on me to do my job.'

'Do they mean more to you than I do?' she asked, and I could hear the first rumble of the approaching storm, like distant artillery, in her voice.

'What I want doesn't come into it,' I said. That had been true, one way or another, from the first day I tied my sash, and lent verisimilitude to the rest of my words. 'What I'm doing now could be crucial to protecting Serendipita from the genestealers. If I could turn my back on that, would I really be the man you want beside you on Viridia?' To my relief, the first faint flicker of doubt was beginning to show on her face, as she began to think about it. I followed up the advantage. 'If I got on that shuttle with you now, you'd regret it. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life. You'd never know if I was there for you, and the good of Viridia, or for my own selfish reasons.'

'I'd know,' she said confidently, but the flicker of doubt in her eyes told a different story.

'If I could go with you, I would,' I said, truthfully enough; I had precious little idea what a governor's consort was supposed to do, other than supply an heir or two, which I was confident I could manage given the amount of practice we'd had, but I was sure they got shot at rather less frequently than I was used to, and the food and accommodation were certainly far superior to anything the Imperial Guard had to offer. 'But I'm needed here. The boarding party's going across in the next few hours, and the Guard and the Serendipitans need my reports. The security of the entire system might depend on it.' I don't mind admitting I was laying it on with a trowel by now, but the results were undeniably satisfying: Mira was looking at me with a kind of awed respect I hadn't seen before, and which, I must confess, I rather liked.

'You're going over to the space hulk?' she asked, all trace of her incipient tantrum gone, and I nodded, milking the moment.

'I've been asked to, at any rate. I was just on my way to discuss it with Captain Gries when I ran into you.' Too late, I realised the trap my tongue had laid for me. Mira could no more keep a juicy morsel of gossip like that to herself than she could give up breathing, and it was carrots to credits it would be all round the parasites she was herding before the hour was out. Which, in itself, didn't matter that much, except that Torven and Kregeen would be on the shuttle with them, so certain to hear all about it, and my chances of retaining their good opinion once they realised I'd been nowhere near the Spawn would be somewhere between slim and negligible.

'Then I'd better let you get on with things,' Mira said, disengaging from my arm as we arrived at the door to my quarters. As I opened it, Jurgen's distinctive aroma billowed out into the corridor, and she turned away quickly. 'Good luck.'

'Thank you,' I responded, stepping inside and hoping I wasn't going to need it.

'Are you all right, sir?' Jurgen asked, rearranging the grime on his face into an expression of puzzled concern. 'You look a bit peaky, if you don't mind me saying so.'

'I've felt better,' I admitted.

'I'll get some tanna on,' Jurgen said, slouching away in search of a kettle.

'Thank you,' I said. 'Then, if you wouldn't mind, can you arrange a meeting with Captain Gries?'

The situation wasn't entirely lost, I told myself, as the welcome scent of brewing tanna began to permeate the room. After all, he could always say no.