The Emperor's Finest

TWENTY-TWO

THOUGH WE WERE retracing our steps exactly, it seemed to take far less time to get back to the enclave of the orks than it had done to cover the same distance in the opposite direction. Partly, I suppose, that must have been due to our familiarity with the terrain; heading away from it we'd been checking for unexpected hazards the whole way, whereas now we were able to place our feet with confidence, certain we weren't about to be pitched through some weakened section of flooring to the deck below, like the damaged CAT we'd got into this mess in the first place by attempting to recover. Mainly, however, I think it was due to us knowing all too well what we were heading towards.

As we passed the tunnel mouths I'd considered going back to in search of an alternative route when we'd first found our way blocked by the bulkhead, I had to exert all the willpower I possessed not to turn aside in the hope of being able to bypass the genestealer nest and attempt to reach the hangar again. The only thing that stopped me was the realisation that it would be impossible to evade the creatures now. The brood mind had become aware of our presence, and I was certain that the malignant mass of the creatures we'd stumbled across would be diffusing itself though every corridor, duct and passageway by this time, effectively isolating us from our goal, while hunting us down deck by deck. Our only chance, slender as it was, would be to give it something else to think about - which is where the orks came in.

Seeing the implanted ones among the swarm had pretty much confirmed the deduction I'd made about the brood mind's reasons for leaving the great mass of them in ignorance of the presence of genestealers aboard the Spawn of Damnation. The first few it had taken would have left it in no doubt of the single-minded viciousness of the species, and that any attempt to confront so many of them directly would have left the 'stealers in poor shape to continue spreading their blight through the galaxy, if any had survived at all. Far better to continue lurking in the shadows, picking off a few of the interlopers here and there, until the greenskins' warhost was thoroughly infiltrated and its ability to fight off the swarm had been critically compromised. In the meantime, it would get to invade Serendipita by proxy, through implanted and hybridised orks, who would spread the genestealer taint wherever they went, no doubt taking as many of the purestrains as they could along for the ride. And while they got on with that, the ork horde would be giving the defenders of the system more than enough to think about, allowing the 'stealers to start polluting the gene pool of Serendipita's human inhabitants unnoticed and unopposed.

The only way I could see to prevent that, and, more importantly, save my own skin, was to turn the brood mind's own tactics against it. Something easier said than done, of course, but my instinctive affinity for enclosed spaces and remaining orientated within them had given me the germ of an idea. A fairly nebulous one, it's true, the only part I was certain about being a great deal of running, but it was better than nothing. Thus it was, far too soon for comfort, I found myself skulking through the lit corridors of the section the orks had colonised again, hoping we were in the right area and that we wouldn't come across too many of the inhabitants before we were ready.

However, it seemed that the Emperor was with us once more, the creatures' habitual bellicosity and flatulence combining to produce more than enough audible warning of their presence for Jurgen and I to find concealment in time to escape notice. Before too long we found ourselves looking out for the second time over the vast metal cavern which their relentless energy and destructiveness had wrenched from the fabric of the space hulk.

Fortunately, my sense of direction hadn't let me down, and we'd arrived more or less where I'd hoped we would, overlooking the smoke-shrouded section where the mekboyz toiled, creating weapons and ammunition to lay waste to Serendipita. Even at this distance I could feel the heat from the roaring forges, and hear the clank of tools from the decks below us where gangs of gretchin riggers were scavenging fresh raw material for the furnaces. Between the murk and the heat haze it was hard to make out much detail, but the little I could was more than enough.

Almost immediately below us was an area devoted to the construction of battlewagons: mobile weapon platforms bristling with weapons, which I recognised from Perlia. No two were alike, of course, but I'd faced them often enough to know how hard they could be to knock out without armour support, and hoped Torven and Kregeen would be able to scrape up a fair number of tanks between them. There were plenty of smaller trucks about as well, armed too, of course, but for the moment at least being used to shift supplies about from one end of the cavern to the other. (And for all I knew, the orkish mindset being what it was, back again, just for the fun of charging around at life-threatening speeds.) In the middle distance was a latticework of scaffolding, where the minuscule figures of innumerable gretchin were swarming over a vast pile of scrap, which looked alarmingly like a half-completed gargant; but that, at least, would be a problem for later, and preferably somebody else.

'Those look like promethium tanks,' I said, nudging Jurgen and pointing to a cluster of domed cylinders on the periphery of the vehicle assembly area. 'Can you read the glyphs?'

My aide nodded and squinted a little, trying to bring the crudely daubed symbols on the sides of the tank into focus through the smoke-stained air. 'Looks like a warning,' he said at last. 'Fire, or burn, and zog off[140].'

'Excellent,' I said, my guess confirmed. 'Do you think you can hit it from here?'

'I reckon so,' Jurgen said, peering through the sights of his lasgun. 'It's a long shot, but at least there's no windage to worry about.'

He steadied his breathing, lining the shot up carefully, and fired once. I strained my eyes, but the distance and the obscuring murk were too great, and I could see no sign of the impact. 'Bit to the left.' He repeated the process, to no apparent effect, then tried a third time. I was just on the point of giving up and trying to find an alternative target, when my aide grunted with satisfaction. 'That ought to do it.'

'Did you hit the tank?' I asked, still waiting for some kind of visible effect with a sense of vague disappointment. I suppose I was hoping for something like the inferno which had engulfed the refuelling station in Prosperity Wells[141], although that had been sparked by a krak round from a rocket launcher rather than the feeble punch of a lasgun fired from far beyond its normal effective range.

Jurgen shook his head. 'The tank?' he echoed, looking puzzled, although that was nothing new. 'I was shooting at the outlet valve.' Squinting in the direction of the blocky cylinders, I was just able to make out some minute protmsions where a cluster of pipes joined the assembly. It may have been my imagination, but the haze seemed a little thicker there, and I thought I could make out the shimmer of liquid gushing from the nearest one, to form an evergrowing pool.

'That would work much better,' I assured him, marvelling, not for the first time, at his standard of marksmanship. To hit so small a target at this range would have involved a fair degree of luck as well, of course, but I wasn't going to turn up my nose at that either. 'Well done.'

'You're welcome, sir,' Jurgen said, allowing a faint air of satisfaction to enter his voice, then nodded judiciously. 'Just give it another moment to let the fumes build.' He sighted down the lasgun again. 'Only needs a little spark...'

He squeezed the trigger, and I stared at the fuel dump, hopeful anticipation narrowing my eyes. Where the shot hit, I had no idea, but the las-bolt must have struck metal, producing the spark Jurgen had wished for. For the briefest of instants nothing seemed to happen, then a bright orange flare blossomed from nowhere, racing through the air as it expanded, to engulf the entire complex.

'Good shot!' I started to say, then everything was drowned out by a thunderclap which left my ears ringing, the sound rebounding and redoubling in the confined space. A lake of liquid fire poured through the assembly area, washing over the newly completed battlewagons, immolating orks and gretchin by the hundred in the process. A couple of trucks on the fringes of the mekboyz' compound turned and raced away, trying to outrun the spreading flames; one made it to safety, while the other was overtaken and engulfed, its own fuel combusting in a miniature echo of the main fireball, all but lost in the general conflagration.

'That went well,' Jurgen said, sounding distinctly pleased with himself, over the rolling boom of a succession of secondary explosions, as the ammunition aboard the burning battlewagons began to cook off. I found myself wondering where the main munitions dumps were, and whether we'd perhaps overdone it a little. I'd been hoping to get the orks' attention, not wipe them out entirely.

Well, that wasn't going to happen, of course. Despite the vista of destruction spreading out beneath our feet, the greater part of the greenskins' colony had been left untouched. Tearing my eyes from the inferno we'd unleashed, I was gratified to see them charging around in even greater disarray than usual, while bellowing nobz[142] attempted to restore order with about as much success as you might expect. The warboss we'd seen before was forging his way through the milling throng, cracking heads and roaring at anything unfortunate enough to cross his path, and I gave Jurgen a nudge. This was too good an opportunity to miss. 'Isn't that the one you wanted to take a crack at the last time?' I asked.

'Looks like it,' Jurgen agreed, taking the hint and lining up another shot. It was too much to hope that he'd be able to drop the leader of the host from here (although given the devastation he'd already managed to wreak with just a few las-rounds I wouldn't have been all that surprised if he took the brute cleanly between the eyes), but I had another objective in mind in any case. 'Frak. Just winged him.'

The warboss looked up, snarling, as Jurgen's las-bolt impacted on the left shoulder plate of his armour, adding another barely visible dent to the impressive collection already decorating it, to glare furious hatred in our direction. Which was precisely what I'd hoped for. I stepped to the very brink of the vertiginous drop at the end of the abbreviated corridor, heedless of the suffocating heat rising from the inferno below, and flourished my chainsword, locking gazes over the intervening distance. It was a gesture I knew no greenskin would be able to interpret in any manner other than a challenge, and I was right; with a bellow of rage, inaudible over the roaring of the flames, and the cacophonous collapse of the partially completed gargant as the supporting scaffold softened in the furnace heat, he began running in our direction, skirting the inferno as closely as he could. His bodyguard came with him, of course, and, true to the mob mentality which seemed to govern all these creatures' actions, every other ork in the vicinity trailed along behind. Even from this distance, and over the deafening clamour of the destruction we'd unleashed, I could hear the rising communal shout of ''WAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!'' which betokened their unleashed bloodlust.

'Time we were going,' I said, estimating how long it would take for them to reach us. Several minutes, at least, but they wouldn't be expecting us to hang about either. As they climbed the intervening levels they'd be fanning out through them too, hoping to get ahead and cut us off. Which might even have worked, if there hadn't been a swarm of genestealers on our heels already, no doubt hoping to repeat the trick in the other direction.

For want of any better idea, I hurried back in the direction of the branching corridors which had attracted my attention on our way in, hoping the genestealers wouldn't have advanced that far by now. I was fairly sure they'd continue to avoid the orkish enclave, as penetrating its perimeter would reveal their presence, effectively frakking up their plan to use the greenskins for their own ends; but the orks must be spreading out too by now, maddened by blood-lust and the desire for revenge, and with any luck the two groups would encounter one another before either caught up with us. Of course that raised the interesting question of how we were going to slip through a minor war without being caught in the crossfire, but I'd worry about that when the time came.

In the event, however, it wasn't the 'stealers or the orks which found us first. We were still well inside the illuminated area when a pattering of running feet on the deck plates behind us snatched at my attention, and I whirled round to find the corridor choked with gretchin, charging towards us with shrill squeals of malevolent glee, urged on by the roaring bulk of their orkish overseer. Just our luck: they must have been foraging in this part of the wreck when we blew up the fuel dump, noticed the commotion, and got caught up in the general bloodlust.

'I'll take the big one!' I shouted, placing a couple of las-bolts from my pistol in the centre of the ork's chest, which, given how much he towered over the grotz[143] was hardly a difficult test of my marksmanship. He staggered, but rallied, and would probably have charged me if it hadn't been for the milling mass of smaller greenskins clustered around his feet. Jurgen thinned them out nicely with a couple of bursts from his lasgun, leaving the rest to decide they were more scared of us than the ork, and scatter squealing. Finding the way unexpectedly clear, the ork began to charge forwards, a club the thickness of my forearm raised to strike; but I was ready for him, and ducked under it, the edge of my chainsword chewing through his torso in a rising horizontal cut. Bellowing in surprise and outrage, the hulking greenskin tried to turn for another go, before the realisation that he'd been almost bisected finally sank in, and he toppled to the deck plates, staring in stupefaction at his widely distributed entrails.

'That was easy,' Jurgen remarked, and I nodded, flicking the speed setting of the chainsword back to idle. I suspected I'd be needing it a lot more in the next few hours, if I managed to last that long, and didn't want to find the powerpack depleted when I did.

'Better make the most of it,' I advised. 'Things are going to get a bit trickier from now on.'

In that expectation, I was far from disappointed. By the time we'd reached the relative sanctuary of the darkened corridors again, we'd seen off another half-dozen orks, in twos and threes[144], the first few of the mob hunting us to make it into these upper levels. But I knew there were bound to be more, hard on their heels, and I began to wonder about the wisdom of the course of action I'd begun.

Well, it was too late for second thoughts, of course. By now we were almost at the first of the side tunnels I'd been making for, and I picked up my pace a little, conscious that the genestealers would almost certainly have ripped their way through the bulkhead by this time, and could be skittering towards us from out of the darkness as fast as their six limbs could carry them. If they hadn't already got this far, and were now lurking in ambush, of course, or others of their kind hadn't found their way here by another route. I listened carefully, alert for any hint of scuttling in the gloom around us, but what I could hear over the hammering of my heart was too faint and diffuse to pinpoint.

No point worrying then, I told myself, before a barely perceptible change in the quality of the darkness enfolding us started tickling at the edge of my awareness. 'Kill the luminator,' I instructed Jurgen. Responsive as ever to orders he complied immediately, and I realised at once that I was right. There was a faint glow behind us, growing in intensity moment by moment, and as I strained my ears I was able to make out the irregular drumming of a large number of fast-moving feet. A moment later it was joined by the timbre of guttural voices, quarrelsomely raised, which dispelled any possible doubt there might have been about who they belonged to. 'This way! And try to stay quiet.'

The last admonition may not have been strictly necessary, I suppose, as the oncoming orks would almost certainly have drowned out any noise we might be making with their interminable bickering, but it never hurt to be careful. Besides, I hadn't forgotten that the genestealers were somewhere around too, and were probably listening out for us with just as much energy and interest as I was for them. Fortunately I'd memorised the position of the cross corridor we'd been aiming for before our luminator went out, and a few strides were sufficient to take me there; my nose enabled me to fix Jurgen's location just as easily, and guide him in the right direction too, so that by the time the diffuse glow behind us separated into a score of distinct light sources, the pair of us were comfortably ensconced behind a large lump of rust a few metres into the passageway, which looked as though it had once been a pump of some kind. From there we had a good view of the corridor we'd just left, so I hunkered down, my laspistol at the ready, and peered round the defunct mechanism, hoping to see enough to get an estimate of the size of the group behind us.

In the event, I was to see a great deal more than that. As the orks approached the junction, and Jurgen and I steadied our weapons, preparing to drop any which split off from the main body to explore our refuge, the light around us grew brighter with every step closer the greenskins took. As yet, although they were more than audible, the pursuing orks had still to become visible; the pump behind which Jurgen and I were lurking was on the side of the passageway they were approaching from, so the view we had of the main corridor was up towards the genestealer nest we'd stumbled across what felt like a lifetime ago, but which my chronograph stubbornly insisted had been barely an hour and a half.

I centred the junction of the two passageways in my sights, and blinked, thinking for a moment that fatigue and stress had finally caught up with me. The shadows were shrinking and deepening as the luminator-bearing greenskins approached, but one had appeared to ripple, moving in the wrong direction, before settling again, somewhere in a tangle of pipework depending from the ceiling.

My breath froze. 'Stealer,' I whispered, almost inaudibly, not daring to raise my voice any louder in case the chitinous obscenity heard me. 'In the main passage.'

'I make it three,' Jurgen responded, equally sotto voce, an instant after I spotted the others, clinging to the wall beside a ventilator grille a little above eye level, and lurking in the utility channel beneath the mesh deck plate. Then more shadows rippled, and a whole swarm of them was suddenly there, blocking the passageway entirely, just as the vanguard of the orks came pounding into view from the other direction.

I suppose humans in that position might have hesitated, paralysed for a moment by surprise or indecision, but both xenos breeds were governed by an instinctive aggression which generally served them well in such encounters. With a bone-rattling yell of 'WAAAAAGGHHH!' the greenskins surged forwards, firing their crude bolters and swinging their axe blades, and the purestrains flowed to meet them, meeting firearm with mandible, edged steel with claw. Blood and ichor flowed, neither side willing or capable of giving quarter, each equally determined to annihilate the other.

'Come on,' I instructed, leaving them to it and hurrying down the passageway as quickly as I could without breaking an ankle on some unseen obstruction. After barking my shins on pieces of scrap littering the place a couple of times, I told Jurgen to rekindle the luminator; after all, the orks were using them too, and wouldn't be able to tell us from allies at a distance, and I was already convinced the 'stealers would be able to find us just as easily whether we were using one or not. The noise of the skirmish behind us was drowning out any warning my ears might have given of purestrains lurking in ambush, so, like it or not, we had no option other than relying on our vision in any case.

'Sounds like they're all at it,' Jurgen observed, sounding no more concerned than if he'd been informing me that rain was expected by evening, and I nodded in agreement. Sporadic shooting and orkish war cries could be heard echoing down the shafts from every direction now, and it became clear to me that perhaps we wouldn't find a way out after all. My gift for remaining orientated in environments like this still seemed as reliable as ever, but it appeared the way back to the hangar was now blocked by two hordes of inimical xenoforms hell-bent on knocking the proverbial nine shades out of one another. If there was anything at all positive about the situation, I supposed, it was that the greenskins were now well and truly aware of the genestealer presence, which meant neither would have much time or attention to spare for launching an attack on Serendipita any time soon. This may have been gravy for the Serendipitans, but wasn't much help to me.

'Let's try this way,' I said, spotting lights moving up ahead, and turning aside down a passageway which looked, if anything, even more decrepit and dangerous than the one we'd just left. A flicker of motion caught the corner of my eye, and I turned, bringing up my chainsword instinctively, powering the teeth up to combat speed. Yet again, my duellist's reflexes saved my life, as the blade sliced cleanly through the arm of a genestealer millimetres from closing its claws around my head, and I pivoted out of the way of its rush, decapitating it neatly on the backswing. As it fell I looked around for more, but this one seemed to have been alone, much to my relief.

Any respite could only be temporary, however; I had no doubt that the brood mind was aware of our location now, and would be sending more of the creatures after us. All we could do was keep moving, and hope the orks were keeping the rest of the 'stealers in the vicinity occupied. At which point I became aware of the lights in the distance again, following us down the side passage we'd taken. It seemed they'd noticed us at the same time we'd seen them.

'Keep moving,' I said urgently. 'As fast as possible.'

'Right you are, sir,' Jurgen said, suiting the action to the word and breaking into an ungainly trot. It seemed we'd passed into yet another section of the hulk, in greater disrepair than the old freighter and whatever vessel the orks had been cannibalising had been. The corridor was narrow, and the floor plates badly corroded. The ubiquitous dust being kicked up by my hurrying footsteps was stained brown with rust here, and flakes of the stuff came off the walls every time my shoulders brushed against them. Loops of cable hung like jungle vines from the ceiling, where the brackets holding them in place had worked loose, or fallen away entirely, and for a moment I found myself wondering if we could somehow emulate Mira's trick with the power lines back on the Revenant, but the generators which used to feed them had ceased to function centuries ago, if not millennia, and even if they hadn't I'd probably just have ended up electrocuting myself in any case.

'It's a dead end,' Jurgen called, flashing his luminator round a rubble-choked chamber, which, judging by the control lecterns and the glass-fronted dials set into the walls, had probably once been a monitoring chapel for the ship's power core. There was no other way out that I could see, and I expressed my disappointment in several short phrases I think it best not to record for posterity. 'Can we go back the way we came?'

'If we clear the orks out of the way first,' I said, indicating the brightening glow some way off down the passageway.

Jurgen took cover behind a chunk of fallen ceiling, his lasgun aimed at the narrow entrance. 'Not a problem,' he assured me.

'Glad to hear it,' I said, hoping he wasn't being overly optimistic. It sounded like a fair-sized mob to me, and, although they could only enter the chamber one at a time, I'd fought greenskins too often to be sanguine about our ability to drop them all as they came in. I'd seen orks shrugging off lasgun wounds which would have killed or incapacitated a man, and it would only take a few of them to rush us in so confined a space before we were overwhelmed. 'Got any grenades left?'

'Sorry, sir,' Jurgen shook his head dolefully. 'We've used the last one[145].'

'Oh well,' I said, trying to sound casual. 'Can't be helped. We'll just have to do the best we can.' I popped off a few speculative las-bolts down the passageway, hoping to delay our pursuers, or goad them into doing something rash, but all I received for my pains was an answering flurry of bolter rounds, which punched holes in the metal walls surrounding us with a ripple of overlapping detonations which made my ears ring. That sparked another idea, and I scurried over to the walls, examining the damage. If the metal was thin enough, I might be able to cut us an exit with my chainsword, while Jurgen kept the greenskins at bay.

The hope was a forlorn one, though; a brief inspection was enough to convince me I'd never be able to slice through it in time, even if the teeth of my weapon didn't break in the attempt. What really made me decide against trying, however, was the flicker of movement I glimpsed through the nearest hole. I sprang back reflexively, as a claw a good thirty centimetres long poked through the aperture and wriggled around experimentally. After a moment it withdrew, then reappeared again, along with its four companions, punching through the metal as though it were cardboard. Slowly they drew together as the 'stealer beyond the wall closed its fist, the metal crumpling like the foil of a ration pack, then withdrew, ripping away an entire handful, to leave a hole roughly the size of my head.

'The 'stealers are coming through the walls!' I warned Jurgen, as a mouth with far too many fangs snapped at the gap, just failing to force its way inside. I fired my laspistol at it from point-blank range, and it withdrew in a spray of foul-smelling ichor, but the respite was only short-lived. The metal of the wall began to buckle and tear in several other places, and with a thrill of pure horror I realised there was an entire group of the monstrosities ripping their way through to us.

'The orks aren't getting out of our way either,' my aide responded, phlegmatic as ever, sending a burst of automatic fire down the corridor as he spoke. Another burst of bolts responded, hissing over our heads, to impact against the wall. The 'stealers reeled from the multiple detonations, but rallied quickly, renewing their attack on the weakened barrier; at this rate they'd be through in a matter of seconds.

I backed away another couple of paces, swinging my chainsword in a defensive pattern, and waiting for a target of opportunity for my laspistol. I'd only have time for one or two shots, and I intended to make them count.

Then a flicker of motion caught my attention again, half-hidden by the shadows at roughly the height of my shins, and I whipped round to face it, bringing the pistol to bear. My finger began to tighten on the trigger.

'Commissar! Is that you?' The voice in my comm-bead was attenuated and hazed with static, and for a moment I was too taken aback to respond. 'The pict link is considerably degraded.'

'Drumon?' I slackened the pressure on the trigger, just in time to avoid blowing a hole in a CAT, almost identical to the one we'd found shortly before Blain had gone to report to the Emperor. It trundled out from behind a sagging console, which had concealed it from view when Jurgen and I first entered the room. 'Where are you?' I fired a couple of las-bolts at a genestealer which had ripped a hole in the wall while I was speaking, sufficient to poke its head and shoulders through, and which was reaching out to grab me. It dropped, most of its head now missing, to dangle grotesquely, halfway through the aperture, like a badly mounted trophy.

'Aboard the Revenant,' the Techmarine replied, sounding faintly surprised. 'We thought you were dead.'

'I soon will be,' I replied, with a degree of brusqueness, cutting at another 'stealer, which had burst through the wall as though emerging from some nightmare chrysalis. It retreated, leaking fluid from its thorax, and prepared to charge again. 'The hulk's crawling with 'stealers and greenskins.' As if to emphasise the point, Jurgen fired again, eliciting a bellow of orkish rage, and abandoned his post to join me. 'We're boxed in between them.'

'Sorry, sir,' Jurgen reported, yanking the luminator from the barrel of his lasgun and dropping it unceremoniously to the deck, where it rolled around, casting grotesque shadows across the monsters hemming us in. He drew his bayonet and snapped it into place where the light had been. 'I'm completely dry.'

'Hold your position,' Drumon advised, and cut the link.

'Like I've got any choice!' I snarled, ducking under a scything blow from the rallying 'stealer, and laying it open from thorax to head before it could recover its balance. It dropped, and I turned to face the next, snapping off a shot at the first ork to enter the chamber as I did so. He staggered, then recovered, and began to charge, his clumsy axe raised for a killing blow, while the genestealer I was facing lunged, too fast for me to counter...

Then something seized me, crushed me and tore me inside out. For a timeless, blinding instant I lost all sense of who, what and where I was, overwhelmed by more pain and terror than I knew it was possible to experience. Then I felt another wrench, like that of a starship's transition from the warp back to real-space, and fell, feeling cold metal beneath my face.

'Commissar. Are you well?' It was Drumon's voice again, but real this time, not issuing from the tiny transceiver in my ear. I blinked my blurry vision as clear as I could, and felt huge ceramite gauntlets lifting me to my feet.

'I'll let you know,' I said, wondering vaguely why gretchin were hammering spikes into my temples, and no one was doing anything about it. 'Where are the 'stealers?'

'And the orks,' Jurgen added, looking about as healthy as I felt, which is to say not noticeably different from his usual demeanour.

'Back on the Spawn of Damnation,' Drumon said, as though that should have been obvious.

'Then where the hell are we?' I asked, trying to focus on our surroundings. We were in an echoing metal chamber, lit by functioning luminators. Arcane mechanisms were everywhere, being tended by solemnly-chanting tech-adepts, and the air was thick with incense and ozone. Everything I looked at made my headache worse, so I gave up trying to make sense of it.

'Aboard the Revenant,' Drumon said, in the same tone of voice. He indicated the automaton we'd stumbled across, which for some reason was still with us, and pottering around the echoing chamber at random. 'Fortunately the CAT's teleport homer was still functioning, so we were able to bring you back along with it.'

'You mean you could just have teleported the one we went to fetch back aboard any time you felt like it?' I asked, feeling foolish and angry in roughly equal measure.

The Techmarine shook his head. 'It was deactivated,' he reminded me.

'So it was.' And if I'd known then what I knew now, I'd have cheerfully left it to rot. I glanced at the doorway, as another towering Figure strode through it with a nod of greeting. 'Apothecary Sholer. A pleasure to see you.'

'I imagine so,' Sholer said. 'An unprotected teleportation can have unpleasant effects on the system.'

'Indeed it can,' I agreed. 'But, all things considered, a decided improvement on the alternative.'