The Emperor's Finest

SEVENTEEN

I SHOULD HAVE known better, of course. Gries was all for it; he didn't go quite so far as to pat me on the back and say ''Wish I was going with you, bag a 'stealer or two for me'', but he probably would have done if that sort of thing hadn't been unseemly in an Astartes of his rank and seniority. As it was, he simply nodded, said ''That would be acceptable'', and got one of the Chapter serfs to scurry off and make the arrangements before I could think of a plausible excuse for changing my mind.

The only bright side to the whole sorry mess was that Mira was so impressed with my apparent heroism she insisted on spending the few remaining hours before my departure in a protracted and strenuous farewell, which came close to making my imminent demise seem almost worth it. As I trudged across the hangar floor to our waiting Thunderhawk, though, the prospect of taking a few happy memories to my grave with me did little to offset the leaden weight of dread now freighting my stomach.

'Commissar,' Drumon greeted me as I approached. 'Good news. The vox relays with the CATs are functioning well, in most cases, and there appears to be no genestealer activity in the vicinity of our landing point.'

'Excellent,' I said, trying to appear relaxed, enthusiastic and quietly confident, and probably failing dismally in every respect, before the full import of his words filtered through my trepidation. 'What does ''in most cases'' mean, exactly?'

'Three of them are failing to transmit any data,' Drumon expanded. 'We infer that they materialised too deeply inside the derelict for the vox signal to reach through the hull.'

'Definitely not ripped apart by genestealers, then?' I asked, trying to sound as though I was joking.

'That seems most unlikely,' Yaffel assured me, scooting across to join us, and I found myself wondering how well he was going to fare if the Spawn of Damnation was as chewed up as wrecked ships usually seemed to be[104].

Drumon nodded. 'If they were disabled by enemy action, they would have transmitted some data back before we lost the link,' he pointed out, and, somewhat reassured, I echoed the gesture.

'One did,' Yaffel said, with perfect timing, and my burgeoning confidence wilted again like a Tallarn salad. 'But I can confidently rule out aggression by a genestealer as the cause.'

'I'm delighted to hear it,' I said. 'And the reason for your confidence would be...?'

Yaffel quivered a little, although whether it was from suppressed indignation at my manifest scepticism, or the vibrations set up in the deck by the synchronised plodding towards the Thunderhawk of our Terminator escort, I couldn't rightly have said. 'The CAT in question was equipped with motion sensors,' he said. 'Nothing could have approached it within twenty metres without registering, and nothing did. So, unless you're aware of a genestealer capable of travelling in excess of ninety metres a second, in order to overwhelm the response time of the auspex to movement within its vicinity, simple mechanical failure seems far more likely.' He seemed genuinely put out by the admission, which I suppose was only to be expected, having noted on previous occasions how loath tech-priests generally were to admit that anything might go wrong with their precious contraptions.

'Stealers are hellish fast,' I agreed, 'but not that quick.' Another thought struck me, and I seized on it eagerly, seeing a last, faint hope of avoiding this ridiculous enterprise. 'I don't suppose any of your mechanical moggies were able to tell if there's anything fit to breathe over there?' The Reclaimers wouldn't care one way or the other, of course, and for all I knew everyone in the tech-priest contingent had been fitted with augmetic lungs, but I most definitely required something with a dollop of oxygen in it to keep me going. I'd tried breathing vacuum once before, and that was novelty enough for one lifetime.

'They were,' Drumon assured me. 'Both composition and pressure are well within tolerable limits for an unmodified human.'

'Well, that's nice to know,' I said, as the air in my immediate vicinity became marginally less wholesome, announcing the arrival of my aide.

'Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,' Jurgen said, with a salute-like wave in the general direction of Drumon, a compromise he generally fell back on when unsure precisely where someone connected to the military stood in relation to his own somewhat nebulous position[105], and a businesslike nod to Yaffel. 'I was preparing a flask and a few sandwiches, in case you got a bit peckish later on.'

'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said, and although it would have taken a lot more than a quick slurp of tanna to perk me up at that point, I felt my spirits beginning to revive nevertheless. As I've remarked before, his phlegmatic demeanour and apparently boundless confidence in my leadership, however misplaced, was curiously heartening. His lasgun was slung from one shoulder, in an apparently casual fashion which belied the speed with which he could reverse and use it, and, as ever, he seemed perfectly willing to follow me on this absurd escapade with no more thought for the risks involved than he would have employed on a foray into the kitchen in search of a snack.

His flak armour was partially obscured by a tangle of pouches and webbing, containing Emperor alone knew what (apart from a flask of tanna and some sandwiches, of course, although their precise location was anybody's guess), but by now we'd served together for so long that something would have seemed seriously amiss if he was prepared to venture into the field without it. 'Your timing's impeccable, as always.' Which wasn't exactly true, but no one else seemed quite ready to leave either.

'We might as well board,' Drumon said, leading the way up the ramp and into the bowels of the Thunderhawk. Seeing no further reason to delay, I followed suit, Jurgen trotting at my heels. Yaffel stayed where he was, hovering anxiously, while a couple of loading servitors with the Adeptus Mechanicus sigil proudly displayed on their tabards plodded towards the Thunderhawk bearing brass-bound boxes, for all the galaxy like an apprehensive habwife watching the family porcelain being heaved into a pantechnicon by carters. What they contained I had no idea, and cared even less, beyond inferring that they had something to do with the tech-priests' scavenging expedition[106].

The interior of the passenger compartment seemed rather less commodious than I remembered, around a dozen Terminators taking up quite a lot of room[107], but we found seats with little difficulty - and this time I made sure that I got hold of a headset before strapping in. The seat Drumon had steered me to, before settling into his own, between the looming bulk of the Terminators and the red-robed tech-priests twittering away to one another in Binary, had a clear line of sight to a nearby viewport, through which I watched Yaffel directing the stowage of the last of his baggage before scooting up the ramp to join us.

No sooner had he done so than the boom of the closing hatch, felt rather than heard over the rising racket of the engines, echoed through my bones, and the suffocating sense of apprehension I'd fought so hard to dispel swept over me once more. Like it or not, I was committed, about to set foot aboard a warp-spawned deathtrap, and however devoutly I might wish it, there could be no turning back.

I DON'T SUPPOSE the short hop from the strike cruiser to the Spawn of Damnation took more than a handful of minutes[108], but it seemed an eternity to me, my apprehension growing with every passing second. To distract myself, I flicked through the frequencies the headset could pick up, but none of the conversations I overheard made much sense: the Mechanicus contingent seemed content to continue warbling at one another in their own private language, the Terminators were absorbed in one of the pre-battle litanies peculiar to their Chapter and Drumon seemed to be meditating, no doubt praying to the Omnissiah to provide a sufficiently juicy stash of archeotech to make the absurd risk we were running worth taking. Since Jurgen was never exactly a sparkling conversationalist at the best of times, I was effectively thrown back on my own company, with nothing to occupy my mind apart from the ominous view through the panel of armourcrys facing me.

Until our Thunderhawk left the docking bay, I'd had no idea how close to the space hulk the Revenant had moved; but almost as soon as the sturdy gunship moved out of the shadow of the hangar doors, the vast derelict was filling the viewport, like a misshapen metal asteroid. As our pilot boosted us away, on a parabolic trajectory towards the shattered hull of the Redeemer-class vessel somewhere on the far side of the vast conglomeration of scrap, the strike cruiser shrank rapidly, diminished by distance, while the dimensions of the space hulk seemed largely unchanged. I found myself reminded of the tiny fish that accompany oceanic leviathans[109], then, rather less comfortably, of the lesser bioforms which swarm about the massive bulk of a tyranid hive ship.

Though I tried to pick out some of the more identifiable features I remembered from the hololithic image Drumon and Yaffel had shown me, the effort was futile. I'd seen spacecraft from the outside before, of course, but in every case their hulls had been limned by a myriad of light sources, from the huge luminators guiding shuttle pilots into the hangar bays to the sputtering sparks of the welding torches in the hands of the void-suited tech-adepts pottering about on the hull, not to mention the warm, welcoming glow seeping from uncountable viewports. The immense bulk of the Spawn of Damnation was utterly dark, however, as bleak and inhospitable as the void itself, so that despite its size and solidity it seemed an insubstantial phantom, appearing only as a hole of greater darkness against the glittering backdrop of the stars.

After a few moments the glowering shadow had expanded to encompass the entire viewport, and I felt an overpowering sense of vertigo, as though we were falling down an infinite abyss ripped into the fabric of the universe. I gripped the armrests tightly and listened to the hammering of my heart, which for a moment or two seemed to drown out the perpetual howl of the Thunderhawk's engine[110].

It was only at this point, perhaps because we were so close by now, that I finally began to pick out patterns in the darkness, deeper shadows which spoke of fissures in the accretion of detritus below us, and the faint gleam of reflected starlight striking highlights from peaks and promontories in the horizon of twisted metal.

'Magnificent!' Yaffel breathed, apparently in all sincerity, and I found myself reflecting that there was never a heavy object around to throw when you really needed one.

'Let's hope you still think that when you've got a pack of genestealers snapping at your heels,' I said, momentarily forgetting that he didn't have any, and with a touch more asperity than politeness and protocol would normally have allowed.

'Our Terminators should be able to keep them at arm's length, at least,' Drumon commented wryly, rousing himself from his trance in time to forestall whatever riposte the tech-priest might have been about to make.

'Bolter range would be better,' I said, inflecting it like a pleasantry, and nodding to convey my gratitude to him for helping to smooth over a potentially awkward moment.

'Better for some,' the nearest Terminator put in, raising a hand to display the fearsome claws I'd last seen ripping apart an artillery piece. His helmet swivelled in my direction, the voice issuing from it imbued with the calmness which comes from unshakable confidence. 'Arm's length suits me.'

'I'm pleased to hear it,' I replied politely. 'In my experience, the one thing you can say for genestealers is that there are always enough to go around.'

'Well said,' the sergeant I'd last seen in the ruins of Fidelis put in. 'If they turn up, we'll be ready.'

'They're not going to turn up,' Yaffel said, with an edge to his voice which might have been irritation if tech-priests hadn't been supposed to be above such things. 'The corridors around the beachhead are completely free of the creatures. None of the CATs has registered any movement.'

'Then where the frak are they?' I asked, not unreasonably.

'In hibernation, probably,' Yaffel said. 'If there are any left alive at all.' Though he wasn't exactly built for shrugging, he made a creditable effort, which his shoulder harness effectively neutralised. 'We're only inferring their presence, after all, from the infiltration of Viridia. It's possible the infestation came from another source entirely.'

'Possible,' Drumon conceded, 'but hardly probable.'

'Be that as it may,' Yaffel said, effectively conceding the argument, probably because if he did bother to work out the odds as he usually did it would have demolished his own position[111], 'there's no reason to suppose that there was ever more than a handful of the creatures on board.'

'Can I have that in writing?' I asked, once again allowing something of the agitation I felt to imbue the words with rather more testiness than I'd intended. 'If there really are 'stealers aboard the hulk it's because the tyranids put them there, and they never bother with just a handful of anything when a few hundred will do.' As it turned out, even that was a woeful underestimate, but as I was still in blissful ignorance of that particular fact, my initial guess worried me more than enough to be going on with.

Any further debate was cut short by a few uncomfortable moments as the engines fired again, and the Thunderhawk pitched abruptly, its nose coming up as the pilot aligned it with whatever was left of the old Redeemer's docking bay. Then the gunship's external floodlights came on, throwing the wilderness of metal outside into clear visibility, and an audible gasp rose from the little coterie of tech-priests, despite most of them no doubt feeling such blatant displays of emotion were a trifle infra dig in the normal course of events.

Not that I could blame them for that. In its own way, the metallic landscape was quite awe-inspiring, though undeniably bleak. It spread out below us, filling the viewport to the jagged horizon, a wasteland of bent and buckled hull plates, sheared structural members and what looked to me uncomfortably like the wreck of a utility craft of a similar size to our Thunderhawk. Whatever it was had impacted too quickly for much to remain identifiable, but there was a wrongness about the proportions of the pieces of tangled wreckage which made me suspect it had been of xenos manufacture. Before I could draw Drumon's attention to it and ask his opinion, however, it had passed out of sight, and our descent had become even more precipitous.

Having been through more docking runs than I could count, even in those days, I gripped the armrests of my chair just as the pilot rolled us vertiginously around, the on-board gravity field fluctuating uncomfortably for a second or two as it synchronised with the local one and established a subtly different direction for down. Now, instead of descending, we appeared to be approaching a solid wall of fissured metal, and, despite knowing intellectually that our pilot was more than competent, I tensed involuntarily for an impact my hindbrain insisted was about to come.

It didn't, of course. No sooner had Jurgen's muttered imprecation about the flight crew's parentage faded into the echoes around us than the exterior of the derelict disappeared, to be replaced by the walls of a docking bay.

'This appears to still be functional,' Yaffel said, his tone adding an unspoken ''I told you so''.

'It does indeed,' Drumon agreed, 'but appearances are often deceptive.'

'Quite so,' Yaffel agreed. 'But we should be able to get the doors closed and the chamber pressurised without too much difficulty.' The hull-mounted luminators were reflecting brightly back from walls of age-dulled metal, their buttresses more slender and finely wrought than those I was used to seeing aboard Imperial vessels, and the arcane mechanisms scattered about the periphery of the docking bay seemed somehow simpler and more compact. What this meant I had no idea, beyond a vague notion that our intrepid hunters of archeotech had been pipped to the post, and that anything useful had probably been salvaged by others generations before; but Yaffel and the others didn't seem in the least bit downhearted, chirruping away to one another nineteen to the dozen, and pointing things out with fingers and mechadendrites like juvies in a confectionery store.

A final impact jarred against my spine, and the shrieking of the engines died back to a pitch which enabled me to remove the headset. Jurgen shook his head, scattering dandruff, as he followed suit.

'Well, that didn't take long,' he commented, checking his lasgun as he hopped down to the floor from the Astartes-sized chair he'd been sitting in. 'Better bring a footstool next time.'

'Good idea,' I said, flexing the pins and needles out of my legs, and wondering why I hadn't thought of that myself. A faint tremor was transmitting itself through the deck beneath my feet, which seemed a little odd, and I found myself looking around for the cause.

'Amazing,' Yaffel said, staring out of the viewport for a moment, before turning to Drumon with a self-congratulatory air. 'The autonomic relays appear still to be functioning.'

I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, of course, but the gist of it was clear enough: the ship's machine-spirit must still have been watching over the hangar bay, even after all these millennia, because the massive doors were sliding closed, with a smoothness and precision quite eerie to behold. Back on the Revenant it had taken a dozen void-suited crewmen to supervise the equivalent mechanism, and the same number again to begin pumping the atmosphere into the chamber once it was sealed. Here, it seemed, the ship was capable of doing the job for itself.

'Who's closing the hangar doors?' Jurgen asked, hefting his lasgun as he peered out of the viewport, evidently expecting hordes of ambushers to rush the Thunderhawk at any moment.

'The vessel's machine-spirit,' the tech-priest told him, no doubt relishing the chance to expound on the miracles of the Machine-God, despite my aide's manifest inability to grasp the finer points of technotheology. (Not that mine's all that great either, I must confess.

Either something works or it doesn't so far as I'm concerned, and if it doesn't it's an enginseer's problem. That's why we have tech-priests in the first place.) 'It's clearly aware of our presence.'

'Then let's hope it's the only one,' I said, scanning the shadows for signs of movement. I had no idea if genestealers could survive without air[112], but I learned a long time ago that it never pays to underestimate an enemy.

Drumon glanced in my direction, a data-slate in his hand, and nodded reassuringly. 'None of the CATs are registering movement,' he said, 'so it seems a reasonable inference.'

'So far,' I said.

'So far,' Drumon agreed, and donned his helmet. When he spoke again, his voice was flattened a little by the external vox speaker. 'I'll let you know the moment anything registers.' He began to make his way to the nearest airlock, no doubt intent on doing whatever was necessary to provide us with something outside we could breathe, but before he could enter it, I became aware of a faint tendril of mist wafting past the viewport.

'I think you've just been saved another job,' I said, beginning to understand why he and Yaffel were so keen to recover the ancient technologies which made marvels like this possible. Once they were understood, they could undoubtedly be used for the benefit of the Imperium in ways I couldn't even imagine. However great the hypothetical gains may have been, however, the threat of the genestealers was both real and immediate, and I resolved not to let my guard down for a second.

'So it appears,' the Techmarine agreed. He gestured towards the boarding ramp, including us all in the general invitation. 'Shall we take advantage of the fact?'

'By all means,' I agreed, determined to at least look as though I felt confident of surviving the next few hours, and fell into step beside him.