“Indubitably,” Amberley agreed, keeping a straight face with some difficulty.
“I see.” Nyte coloured a little, no doubt regretting having started this conversation in the first place. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He disappeared down the corridor, and Jurgen looked at me placidly, all trace of truculence gone.
“Anything I can do for you, commissar?”
I shook my head. “Nothing springs to mind,” I admitted.
“Very good, sir.” He commandeered one of the sofas scattered around the place with a sigh of satisfaction, and fished a thermal flask of tanna and a porno slate out of his collection of pouches. “I’ll wait for you here then, shall I?”
“That’s probably best,” I conceded. After all, he’d had a busy day of it so far, so he might as well put his feet up while he could. Suppressing a twinge of envy, I turned to Kasteen, and gestured towards the door. “Shall we?”
“By all means.”
I swung it open, with a last regretful look at Amberley’s departing derriere, and we stepped through together.
The noise was the first thing to register, a babble of overlapping voices that echoed from the domed ceiling overhead, and then my eyes caught up with my ears. We were in a large amphitheatre, tiers of well-padded seats falling away to a podium on which Keesh was already seated, chatting to the unmistakable figure of Lord General Zyvan, the military leader of our little expeditionary force. He clearly remembered me from Gravalax. Glancing up, he made eye contact briefly, and inclined his head in greeting. Of course this just drew everyone else’s attention to us, and several scores of heads turned in our direction, the ambient noise dropping off considerably as the assembled notables registered the presence of the hero of the hour. I glanced around, looking for somewhere to sit, while every eye in the room swivelled in my direction.
“Commissar,” Zyvan said, a friendly smile elbowing its way past his neatly clipped beard. “A pleasure to see you again.” He nodded to Kasteen. “And you too, of course, colonel.”
Suddenly aware that we were the only two people in the room still standing, Kasteen nodded formally. “My lord general,” she said, her search for a seat becoming as unobtrusively urgent as my own.
“Allow me.” A nearby techpriest budged up a little, making room for the two of us, and Kasteen and I slipped onto the bench beside him gratefully. His robe concealed a few odd, solid protrusions, which nudged me uncomfortably from time to time, but at least I wasn’t standing there like a practice target on the firing range any more. His lower jaw had been replaced with metal, a grille of fine mesh where his mouth should have been, but in spite of being unable to smile he nodded a greeting, which seemed sincere enough, and his voxcoder unit managed to inject an affable tone into his speech. “Magos Lazurus, at your service.”
“Commissar Cain,” I replied, as if he hadn’t already known, and indicated my companion. “And Colonel Kasteen, of the 597th Valhallan.”
“Your reputation precedes you, commissar,” Lazurus said, with a trace of amusement. Reminded of the necessity of reinforcing it while I was still the centre of attention, I caught Zyvan’s eye again.
“My apologies for delaying you all,” I said, projecting my voice clearly through the now muted hum of conversation the way I’d been taught to as a callow young cadet. “I’m afraid our pilot was unable to depart on schedule.”
“That was quite fortunate for us, it seems.” Zyvan accepted the apology with the good grace I’d expected, then to my surprise smiled at me. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to fill in the details for me over dinner before you leave.”
“It would be my pleasure,” I assured him, having no doubt that his personal chef would be far more creative than the cooks of the 597th.
“If there are no more late arrivals expected, perhaps we can begin,” Keesh said, scanning the room, and Zyvan nodded his agreement.
“Seal the chamber,” he said, and a squad of his personal guards took up positions around the theatre, covering the exits, their hellguns ready for use.
As they moved up the aisles, I took the opportunity to scan the people present, surprised a little by their diversity. There were plenty of Guard uniforms, of course, the colonels of every regiment currently on Periremunda, some of them accompanied by a selection of their senior officers, and almost all with their commissars in tow. I recognised a few familiar faces from other wars, but most were strangers to me. Apart from Lazurus there were few tech adepts to be seen, but those that were here seemed clustered around him, as though they were part of the same party.
After the doubts Keesh had expressed about the loyalty of the PDF I wasn’t surprised to find them conspicuous by their absence, but one local institution seemed to have been taken into the Arbitrator’s trust. Down by the podium, watching him and Zyvan intently from the front row, was a small knot of figures in bright silver power armour, the black surplices wrapped around them broken only by the image of a single white rose.
“Battle Sisters,” Kasteen said, her voice taking on a tinge of awe.
I nodded. “I suppose if any planetary force can be considered uncompromised by the ’stealers it would be them,” I conceded. After all, they were hardly likely to pass on the taint even if they were infected, and in the atmosphere of Emperor-bothering piety in which they lived I doubted that anyone touched by the xenos would escape detection for long.
“By the Emperor’s grace,” Kasteen said, and I nodded again, rather less happy to see them than the colonel evidently was. I’d seen the Sororitas let loose on the battlefield before, and as I’ve said, they’ve always struck me as something of a blunt instrument tactically speaking, whereas what I thought we needed now was subtlety. Of course that opinion was about to change markedly, but I had no inkling of that at the time.
“As most of you have already been informed,” Zyvan said, while a hololith flickered erratically into life, projecting a map of the subsector above his head, “we’ve received a message from Coronus. A further two divisions of the Imperial Guard have been successfully mustered and are expected in system in a little over a week, along with a reinforced battlegroup from the sector fleet, if the warp currents remain favourable.”
“Praise the Emperor for His deliverance,” the woman in the most garishly decorated set of power armour said, and the others made the sign of the aquila at the sound of the holy name.
Zyvan nodded curtly. “Indeed. However, we haven’t been delivered yet. The hive fleet is also inbound, and as near as we can estimate its location from the warp shadow our astropaths have detected, is somewhere around here.” A vague blob appeared, swallowing a large chunk of space. “As you can clearly see, depending on where in the shadow the bulk of the tyranid fleet actually is, it could arrive anything up to a week before our reinforcements, or a fortnight afterwards. There’s simply no way of telling which until they get here.”
A ripple of unease began to slosh around the room, and I thought it was time to remind people what a hero I was supposed to be again.
“I’ve faced tyranids before,” I said, “and so has the colonel here. They’re formidable enough, I grant you, but we’re both living proof that they can be beaten.”
“Well said.” Zyvan looked at me with something like approval. “But there’s an additional complication to take into account.”
“The ’stealer cults,” I said, nodding. “We need to purge the PDF before the ’nids get here, so we can throw them into the fight with confidence.”
“We’re doing all we can to speed up the process,” Keesh assured us, “but that in itself has revealed a new problem.” Something about the way he spoke started the palms of my hands itching again, and I simply nodded, waiting for him to continue, unsure of whether I could trust my voice not to betray my sudden rush of apprehension.
“Quite so,” Zyvan said. His steely gaze swept the room, the force of his personality washing over everyone in turn. “What you are about to hear is highly sensitive. It’s no exaggeration
to say that the survival of this world may depend on your discretion.”
Better and better, I thought. I already had some inkling of Zyvan’s flair for the dramatic, a trait I was to grow a great deal better acquainted with in the years to come, but something about his body language told me that in this instance he meant every word of it. He nodded to Keesh.
“Last night we uncovered a brood of hybrids, which had successfully infiltrated the System Defence Force,” the arbitrator began without preamble. “The purge is still continuing, but among the facilities compromised was this one.” The hololith flickered, and began projecting a wobbly image of the Periremunda system, one of the outer orbitals highlighted in red.
“Argus five orbital,” Zyvan put in helpfully. “One of the eight aether platforms making up the system-wide auspex net.”
“Exactly,” Keesh said, returning to his theme. “Of course the moment we realised so sensitive an installation had been under the control of the enemy we began an immediate review of the datalogs. The results of which were disturbing, to say the least.”
“Disturbing how?” the woman in the gaudy armour put in again, the unspoken “get on with it” resonating around the room. Despite its source, it was a sentiment I felt myself warming to. Whatever the arbitrator was leading up to it was nothing good, of that I was certain, and I felt an intense desire to hear the worst and at least get it over with.
“Canoness Eglantine.” Keesh nodded, acknowledging her presence with a weariness that hinted heavily that they’d met before and seldom saw eye to eye, which I suppose was hardly surprising: the law dealt in hard evidence, the Ecclesiarchy in matters of faith, and the common ground between the two was generally pretty narrow. “You have something to add?”
“Merely that a true servant of the Emperor should feel no disquiet, however dire the news,” the woman said. “He protects.” She bowed her head, and the rest of her entourage did the same. Before they could turn the whole thing into a prayer meeting, Keesh got to the point, which was probably what Eglantine had intended all along.
“The datalogs had been tampered with,” he said, “to conceal the fact that the machine spirits of the auspexes had been blinded across a narrow arc of the entire system.”
Something which might have been a sharp intake of breath rattled the chest of the techpriest next to me, the thought of the blasphemous desecration wrought on the cogitators of the Argus station clearly distressing to him. The hololith changed again, a thin violet funnel appearing like a scratch across the face of the Periremunda system, linking the planet to its outer reaches. With grim inevitability the image in the hololith began to shrink, Periremunda, her sun, and the other planets and habitats dwindling to a single point as though floating in bathwater being sucked down a drainage pipe.
“The area of darkness only extended as far as the halo,”[1] Zyvan said, “but our tech adepts and Navigators were able to extrapolate the line it drew beyond the limits of the auspex web.” With a grim sense of inevitability I watched the image continuing to shrink until the previous view of the subsector had been restored. As I’d known it would, the thin violet line extended several parsecs from Periremunda, finally vanishing into the ominous shadow surrounding the tyranid hive fleet. [1. The fringe of cometary debris marking the nominal boundary of a solar system.]
“How long ago was this treason committed?” I asked, impatient to hear the worst. Keesh looked directly at me, his manner as serious as I’d ever seen it.
“The records were tampered with on 847 932,” he said heavily. I began to calculate the amount of time that had elapsed, a chill of apprehension shivering down my back, but before I could reach an answer Keesh saved me the bother. “So it seems highly probable that something from the hive fleet landed undetected around six months ago. The tyranids aren’t just coming, ladies and gentlemen. They’re already here.”
CHAPTER TEN
Well, that got everyone’s attention, you can be sure, the ensuing clamour at least giving me time to mask my own terror. This was far worse news than even the most pessimistic scenario Kasteen and I had been able to imagine during our chilly wait at the aerodrome back in Darien.
The colonel looked at me, her lips tight. “This is going to affect our strategy,” she said, with commendable understatement. “We’ve been working on the assumption that we’ll be dealing with an invasion from space. If the ’nids are already on the ground, we’re going to have to fortify in depth.”
“Once we know where they’re coming from,” I agreed. If they were already on Hoarfell, the scout creatures could be lurking anywhere. Deception and camouflage were what they were bred for.
There was a slim chance that we might be able to deduce their presence, though, if only by inference. “As soon as we get back, we’ll need access to all the PDF and justicar files on Hoarfell for the last six months. Missing persons, auspex glitches, friend of a friend tales, anything odd or suspicious.”
Kasteen nodded. “If we can trust the files,” she said, raising the old question of how much we could rely on institutions that might well have been infiltrated by the ’stealer cults.
“For now we’re going to have to,” I said. “They’re all we’ve got.”
Kasteen nodded again, looking far from happy. “I’ll get Ruput on it as soon as I can get a message out,” she said. Contacting Broklaw now would be impossible, the security measures Keesh had put in place for this meeting effectively blocking any outgoing vox transmissions.
“Good,” I said, and raised my voice over the babble of sound. “If I might ask a question?”
As so often in these cases, one man sounding as if he knew what he was doing was sufficient to make everyone else take a deep breath, at least metaphorically speaking, and start to calm down. The fact that in this case it was backed up by my fraudulent reputation for remaining calm and decisive in a crisis probably didn’t hurt either.
“By all means, commissar,” Keesh said, his tone relieved, although whether this was due to the fact that everyone was starting to attend to the matter at hand again, or that I seemed to have forestalled the Sororitas delegation from launching into the second verse of He Clasps Us to His Bosom Bright,[1] I couldn’t be sure. [1. A hymn invoking the Emperor’s protection in times of peril, somewhat mawkish to modern tastes, but still popular among the pious of a traditional disposition.]
Conscious that, once again, I was the centre of attention, I affected an air of unassuming modesty. “Has any trace of a tyranid vanguard actually been detected on any of the plateaux?” Amberley’s words about needing Darien were coming back to me, and from a tactical viewpoint they only made sense if other plateaux with starport facilities were felt to be under greater threat. After all, with two divisions of Imperial Guard in the warp, we’d need somewhere to offload them when they arrived.
“No,” Keesh admitted, his evident relief at the answer spreading little ripples of reassurance around the auditorium. “That at least indicates that whatever infiltration there has been, it’s on a small scale.”
“How can you be so sure?” Eglantine asked, a trace of asperity in her voice, as though one of her novices had failed to memorise some cherished piece of dogma correctly. Keesh looked at her almost pityingly.
“Because of the unique geography of this planet, your devoutness. The habitable surface of Periremunda is a minute fraction of the whole, and for the most part densely populated. If an infiltrating force has made it down, it must be small enough to evade detection under such conditions, or isolated on one of the lesser plateaux, and effectively trapped there. The lord general and I incline to the former view, and anticipate little difficulty in dealing with them once they reveal themselves.”
Eglantine looked less than convinced. “If they landed on any of the plateaux at all,” she pointed out. “Most of the planet is wilderness. If they came down in the desert, they could be anywhere.”
“If they came down in the desert they’ll be dead,” Keesh assured her. Having se
en how tough the chitinous horrors could be I wasn’t quite so sure about that myself, and from his dubious expression it seemed that Zyvan shared my opinion.
“Nevertheless,” I interjected, “a thorough orbital scan to make sure couldn’t hurt. Perhaps our ships in orbit could do the job?”
“They already are,” Zyvan assured me, with an approving nod. “So far they’ve found nothing, although much of the lower depths are hard to get an accurate auspex image from.” Remembering the vast sandstorm I’d flown over on my first visit to Principia Mons, I nodded. Anything could be hiding under that, or the smoke from the equatorial volcanoes. Nevertheless, the fact that they’d failed to find the scuttling horde we all dreaded offered at least a crumb of reassurance.
Now their minds had been relieved of the prospect of being engulfed under a tidal wave of chitin the moment we set foot outside the auditorium, everyone’s attention returned to the more mundane matters of tactical disposition. This basically boiled down to all the regimental commanders being given a free hand to secure their assigned plateau in whatever manner they saw fit, contingency plans for evacuating the bulk of the civilian population to peaks defended by the Guard if the hive fleet arrived or the putative infiltrating force showed their hand (or talons, or rending claws) before our reinforcements showed up, and a progress report from Keesh on the painfully slow process of identifying which PDF units were definitely free of the ’stealer taint and could be relied on to fight without having someone looking over their shoulder ready to call down an artillery barrage at the first sign of treachery. The number above suspicion was still depressingly low, and it seemed all too probable that we’d be forced to rely to an unsettling extent on the units in the next most trusted category, which Keesh had rated as no more than reasonably reliable. It was when the hololith displayed this second, much larger, list that Eglantine interrupted once again.
[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls Page 10