by Dan Abnett
'Eisenhom!' Fischig hissed.
'An answer?' laughed Glaw. Some of his men laughed too, and Mandragore rumbled a snigger. I noticed Dazzo and Malahite were both unamused.
'This material is archaeoxenon, from an old saruthi site/ I said, lifting one of the ancient, unsymmetrical tablets from the crate in Fischig's grasp with my free hand. 'It clearly has value to you, because it must have value to the saruthi. You're recovering it for them in return for what?'
'I'm not about to tell you anything/ Glaw said. 'I'm not even going to confirm your suppositions/
I shrugged. 'It was worth trying/
'My question remains/ said Glaw. 'What now?'
4Ve leave/ I told him. 'Unmolested/
'So leave/ he said, with a mild, dismissive hand gesture. 'Put down the crate and leave/
This crate is the only thing that's stopping you from obliterating us. It comes with us, as insurance/
'No!' Dazzo cried, pushing forward. 'Unacceptable! We would lose it forever!' He looked at Glaw. This man is our blood foe. We could never recover the artefacts. Even if we agreed to safe passage, he would not honour a deal and leave them for our recovery/
'Of course not/ I said. 'Just as you would not honour any deal struck with me. It is a sad but true fact that no commitment or agreement of honour can be made between us. Which is why this crate comes with me. We have no other surety/
4Ve're not here to offer you surety, flesh-blister/ Mandragore said sonorously. 'Only death. Or if you're unlucky, pain and death/
'You should keep him out of the negotiations,' I told Glaw with a sideways nod at Mandragore. 'We are leaving with the crate, because you will destroy us otherwise.'
'No/ said Glaw. He stepped forward, pulling a lasgun from his coat. You are tripping on your own smooth logic, inquisitor. If we are to lose those artefacts for ever, I'd rather it was here, with your deaths as consolation. If you try to leave with the crate, we will fire anyway and damn the consequences. Set them down and I will give you ten heartbeats to leave.'
I could tell it was no bluff. They would go only so far to protect their trinkets. And they were not fools. They knew I would never return these items. Ten heartbeats. If we tried to board with the crate, they would fire at once. If we set it down… they would fire, but perhaps more hesitantly for fear of hitting the crate. And the cutter's guns were still a point in our favour.
'Back up to the ramp,' I whispered to Bequin and Fischig. Throw the crate down when I say'
Are you sure?'
'Do as I say. Midas?'
'Ready drive, ready cannons.'
'Now!'
The crate crashed over in the dust. The cutter's engines shrieked into power. They didn't wait ten heartbeats. The three of us were on the ramp, and the ramp was swinging shut under us, and the cutter was lifting around us. A fusillade of weapons fire hammered off the hull. The cutter's cannons roared.
The cutter swung hard about, and we tumbled as the deck pitched. Fischig cried out and fell on the ramp, spilling half out of the gently closing entryway. I grabbed him and hauled him inside before his dangling legs could be severed by the vicing ramp or shot by the enemy below.
We were away. I could tell by the angle of the deck and the vibration of the ship's frame that Midas was accelerating hard and keeping low, letting the landscape shield us from the ground fire. Alarm lights flashed in the crew-bay, indicating damage.
'Strap yourself in!' I yelled at Aemos, who was attempting to rise to assist us. 'Fischig, get Bequin in a harness! Yourself too!'
The chastener pulled the terrified girl across the deck and into a seat. I clambered forward, along the companionway, and up into the cockpit.
Midas was pulling on the controls, taking us higher. The blotchy landscape of Damask flickered past beneath us. I dropped into the seat beside him.
'How close?'
The fighters have peeled back, on a direct intercept course. They have altitude in their favour.'
'How close?'
'Six minutes to intercept. Damn!'
What?'
He pointed to the main tactical screen. Behind the smaller bright cursors, larger shapes were moving against the three-dimensional magnetic map of the planet's magnetosphere. Their fleet's moving too. The capital ships. And that's two more fighter wings launched/
They don't want us to get away, do they?' he added.
"With what we know?'
'They won't let us out of the system alive, will they?'
'Midas, I think I've told you the answer to that.'
He grinned, white teeth contrasting sharply with his dark skin in the cabin's half-light.
We're going to have some fun, then,' he decided. His bare hands, sparkling with the inlay of Glavian bio-circuits, darted across the controls, adjusting our course.
'Ideas?' I asked.
'A few possibles. Let me massage the data.'
What?'
Trust me, Gregor, if we've even a shred of hope of getting out of the Damask system alive, it'll be through skill and subtlety. Shut up and let me compute their speeds and intercept vectors.'
We took damage from the ground fire,' I persisted. That hopelessness was seeping into me again, the feeling of having no ability to influence the situation.
'Minor, just minor/ he said distractedly. 'The servitors have got it covered/
He made a course change. From the screen, I saw this brought us around almost side on to the chasing fleet components, drastically reducing their time to intercept and firing range.
What are you doing?'
'Playing the percentages. Playing safe/
The bright globe of Damask was dropping away beneath us, and we were driving out into planetary space beyond the highest orbit points at full thrust.
'See?' he said. Another light had appeared on the tactical screen, moving around ahead of us.
'Standard Imperial battlefleet dispersal. There's always a picket ship positioned on the blind side of the subject world. If we'd kept straight on we'd have flown right into its fire-field/
Lights flashed out in the void beyond the cockpit windows. The picket ship, a medium frigate, was firing anyway, running interference, driving us on.
'It's launched fighters/ Midas reported in a sing-song voice. 'Range in two. Chasers have range in four/
So matter-of-fact.
I looked at the power levels. Every one of the cutter's powerful thrusters was red-lining.
'Midas…'
'Sit back. There it is.'
'What is?'
The small moon was suddenly filling our front ports as we veered around. It didn't look that small. It looked like we were about to smash into it.
I blurted out a curse.
'Relax, dammit!' he assured me, then added, 'range in one.'
We dived towards the scarred, pocked lime-green rock that filled our vision at full thrust. Nose guns beginning to flash; six interceptors of the Battlefleet Scarus elite fighter school followed us in.
SIXTEEN
Void duel.
Betancore's last stand.
Traces.
The moon was called Obol, the smallest and innermost of Damask's fourteen satellites. It was a dented, irregular nugget of nickel, zinc and selenium, six hundred kilometres across at its widest dimension. Lacking atmosphere and riddled with cavities and gorges, it shone with a lambent green glow in the light of the star, ragged terrain features and craters thrown into stark relief.
I was forcing my mind to calm, forcing my pulse rate down. The old mind skills Hapshant had trained me in.
I focused on the data-file for Obol that I had punched up on the screen – nickel, zinc, selenium, smallest of fourteen – not because I wanted to know but because the facts would act as psychopomps, little fetishes of detail to occupy my mind and steal it away from the hazard.
I looked up from the glowing text bar. A jagged crater, vast enough to swallow Dorsay city and its lagoon whole yawned up at us.
'Brace yourselves/ Midas told
us all.
Just a kilometre above, he executed his move. By then, we were deeply committed to Obol's gravity and diving at full thrust. There was no question of performing a landing, or even a conventional turn.
But Midas had been flying ships since he was young, schooled in the pilot academies of Glavia. By way of his inlaid circuitry, he understood the nuances of flight, power and manoeuvre better than me, and better than
most professional pilots in the Imperium. He had also tested the capabilities of the gun-cutter almost to destruction, and knew exactly what it could and couldn't do.
What worried me most was what he hoped it might do.
He cut the drive, fired all the landing thrusters, and pulled the nose around so that the cutter began to corkscrew. The view whirled before my eyes and I was flung around in my harness.
The spin seemed uncontrolled. But it was measured and perfect. With the landing jets driving us up away from the vertical, we fluttered, like a leaf, using the corkscrew motion to rob the vessel of downward momentum. Ninety metres from the dust of the crater floor, we flattened out, burning jets hard, white hot, and then arced around as Midas cut the main drive in again.
The ground leapt away under us, and we hugged across it, climbing in a savage jerk to skip over the crater lip.
From the tactical display, I saw all six fighters had dropped back to six minutes behind us. None wanted to try duplicating that move. They were diving in more conventional, slower arcs.
Midas hugged the moon, slicing us low around bluffs and buttes, down deep dry valleys hidden from the sun, across wide dust plains that had never seen a footprint. At one point, we flew between two massive cliffs of striated rock.
'They're breaking,' Midas said, leaning us to port.
They were. Four dropped into dogged pursuit, chasing us low over the landscape. The other two had broken and were heading anti-clockwise around the blindside of Obol.
'Contact?'
'We'll meet them head on in eight minutes/ said Midas. He was smiling.
He pulled a hard starboard turn down a rift valley the topographer screen had only just illuminated.
Then he slowed down to what seemed a painful, easy velocity, and banked the gun cutter around a butte that glistened green and yellow in the hard sunlight.
'What are you doing?'
Wait… wait…'
The tactical screen showed that our four chasers had swept beyond the rift valley.
This low to the terrain, it'll take them a moment to figure out we're no longer ahead of them.'
'What now?'
He gunned the engines and threw us out over a dust bowl after the pursuit ships.
'Mouse becomes cat/ he said.
Within seconds, a bright blob on the weapons array had been covered with red crosshairs.
Ahead of us, through a landscape of giant rocks and towering mesas that whipped by at a distressing speed, I saw the flare of afterburners.
'Scratch one/ said Midas, firing the wing cannons.
The engine flare far ahead flashed and then turned into an expanding ball of burning gases which swept past us in jagged streaks.
I was pulled back into my seat as we jinked painfully down another valley. There was another flash, of sunlight off metal, a kilometre ahead.
'And two/ said Midas.
The read-out on the autoloaders notched up red tags as drums expended. The flash blossomed with light, and then again more brightly as it spun and struck the valley wall.
Something blindingly brilliant went off to our right, and the cabin rocked, alarms squealing.
'Smart boy, too close/ said Midas, hauling on the stick to avoid an incoming cliff.
One of the fighters had gauged our feint and come around across us.
Where's the other? Where's the other?' Midas murmured.
We had firepower on our side, firepower and Midas. The fighters were Lightnings, small, fast and dextrous, less than a quarter our size. For all intents and purposes, the gun-cutter was a transport, but its drive and weapon enhancements and its vertical thrust capability made it a formidable fighting ship when it came to a skirmish close down over terrain like this.
Something hit us hard, and we went over in a dizzying fall. Midas cursed and drew us back round in a tight turn. An Imperial fighter, just a blur of silver, crossed our field of vision.
Midas turned us again, and went after it. It ducked and turned down the deep gorges of the moon, flying by instruments alone in the cold shadows.
The gun-sensors picked up its heat trail. Midas fired on it.
He missed.
It tried to turn in a loop to come round at us. Midas fired again.
Another miss.
It came right at us. I could see the tracer jewels of its shots ripping at us.
Head to head. In a steep, deep gorge.
No room for manoeuvre. No room for error.
'Goodbye/ said Midas, thumbing the fire stud.
An explosion lit the deep gulf and we flew right through the flame wash.
'Had enough yet?' Midas asked me.
I didn't reply. I was too busy gripping my armrests.
'I have/ he said. Time for phase two. There's another hunter right around us, and the blindsiders will be coming up in ninety seconds. A little theatrics now. Uclid?'
The chief servitor warbled a response.
We went into a dive, hard. A display told me we were venting a trail of engine gases.
'Damage?' I asked.
'Play acting/ he told me.
The dark canyon floor rushed up to meet us.
'Jettison, Uclid/ Midas ordered.
There was a thump and a bang. The cutter rocked. Behind us, something flared.
What was that?'
Two tonnes of spares, trash and expendable supplies. Plus all the grenades from your weapons store.'
He banked us around hard, and we zoomed into a darker cavity, a wide, deep cave in the canyon base. The walls and roof seemed dangerously close.
Six hundred metres into the cave, Midas turned the cutter to the left, cutting the thrust, floodlights piercing the gloom and reflecting off the jagged cavity.
Another hundred metres, and we settled into the dust on our landing struts. Midas cut power, cut the lights, cut everything except the most rudimentary life support.
'Nobody make a sound/ he said.
The wait, which lasted for sixty-six hours, was neither comfortable nor pleasant. We wore heat gowns and sat in the gloom as, above us, the heretic fleet scoured Obol and its immediate zone for traces of us. Eight times in the first ten hours our passive sensors registered vehicle movement and scanning in the gorge where we had faked our destruction. The deception was apparently convincing.
But we bided our time. There was no telling how persistent they would be, or how patient. Midas thought it likely they might be playing the same trick as us, lying up quiet and waiting until we betrayed ourselves by movement or signal.
After forty hours, Lowink was confident he had overheard astropathic traffic exchanges indicating a fleet departure, shortly followed by a tremor in the fabric of the fathomless immaterium. But still we waited. Waited for the one thing that I would take as convincing.
Just after the turn of the sixty-sixth hour, it came. An astropathic signal in Glossia: 'Nunc dimittis.'
We lofted from the darkness of Obol into the starlight. Everyone on the ship, myself included, I freely admit, was suddenly talking too loud and too much as we moved around, basking in the bright cabin lights and the restored heating systems. The silent, cold wait had been like a penance.
The Essene, slow and majestic, moved in to meet us. Once the heretic fleet had left the system, Maxilla had emerged from hiding in the star's corona and sent his signal.
As soon as we were docked, I went straight to the bridge where Maxilla greeted me like a brother.
'Are we all alive?' he asked.
'In one piece, though it was close/
'I'm sorry I
had to desert you, but you saw the size of that battlegroup/
I nodded. 'I'm hoping you can tell me where it went/
'Naturally/ he replied. His astronavigators had not been idle. The chief of them emerged from their annexe at the side of the domed bridge and hummed across the red-black marble of the floor to join us. Like all of his crew, it was essentially mechanical. Its organic, human component – my guess was no more than a brain and some key organs – supported both physically and biologically in a polished silver servitor sculpted in the form of a griffin, its draconian neck swept back so its beaked visage stared down at us. It floated on anti-grav plates built into its eagle wings.
It paused before us, and projected a holographic chart from its open beak. The star map was complex, and incomprehensible to the unschooled eye, but I made out some detail.
The navigators have analysed the warp-wake of the departing fleet and made a number of algorithmic computations. The heretics are moving out of the Helican sub-sector, out of Imperial space itself, into the forbidden stellar territories of a breed I believe are known as the saruthi/
'I had guessed as much. But that in itself is a considerable area, more than a dozen systems. We need specifics/
'Here/ said Maxilla, indicating a point on the shimmering three dimensional chart with one gloved hand. The charts have it as KCX-1288. Under optimal conditions, it's thirty weeks away from here/
And what is the margin for error on this calculation?'
'No greater than point zero six. The warp-wake of the fleet was quite considerable. They may of course break the journey and re-route, but we will be watching for changes in their wake/
'Of course/ he added, 'They will presume us to be following. Even if they think you're dead, they'll know you had to have had a starship that brought you here. One they couldn't find/
The thought had crossed my mind too. Glaw and his conspirators must at least now be expecting pursuit, or expecting someone to inform on their whereabouts and destination. They would now be trusting on vigilance, their considerable massed firepower, and their headstart.
I already had Lowink busy preparing an emergency communique to send back to Gudrun and Inquisition command.
4Vhat do you know of the saruthi and their territory?'
'Nothing/ he said. 'I've never travelled there/