By the time he returned, his habitual jaunty demeanour somewhat muted by the heavy responsibility he must now have felt,[1] our preparations to meet this fearsome foe were well advanced. Colonel Kasteen’s foresight in anticipating that the presence of genestealers on this fascinatingly fractured world might presage the arrival of a splinter fleet had been well founded, and I like to think that the 597th was by far the most prepared of all the regiments on Periremunda for the onslaught to come. For my part, I had been drilling my platoon in the painfully learned lessons we had acquired on Corania ever since the colonel had issued her far-sighted order to practise them, and felt nothing but confidence in the women and men under my command. [1. Or, more likely, a hangover of monumental proportions.]
When the flesh-moulded abominations of the hive fleets dared to show themselves openly, they would not find us wanting in fighting spirit, of that I had not the faintest scintilla of doubt. But when the foe eventually appeared in front of our eagerly waiting weapons, it was to be far from the comforting chill of Hoarfell, and in a manner none of us could possibly have anticipated.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Making the most of her pose as an aristocratic parasite, Amberley had taken over the penthouse suite of the most exclusive hotel in Principia Mons, which, among many other amenities, boasted its own landing pad, tucked away behind a small but pleasantly-scented roof garden. Pelton conveyed us there without further ado, coasting to a halt and popping the rear doors of the luxurious speeder with all the aplomb of the chauffeur he was pretending to be. The scent of hegantha and callium drifted inside the aircar, both blooms, I recalled, of which Amberley was particularly fond. I found myself wondering for a moment if she’d chosen the penthouse because they were already growing there, or if she’d had them planted after she’d arrived.[1] [1. Well, if you have to play the spoiled little rich girl, you might as well embrace the role. Nothing convinces people you’ve more money than sense quite as effectively as indulging a ludicrously expensive whim.]
“Very nice,” I commented, stepping out into the cool night air. The city was spread out almost as far as the eye could see, until it ended abruptly at the lip of the plateau in a sudden cessation of light and motion as sharp as a knife-edge. Most of it was far enough below us for the never-ending noise to be muted, and the ground cars scuttling around like glowbugs seemed to skitter silently along the luminated thoroughfares in the distance.
Amberley nodded. “It’ll do. It fits my cover, and the flight pad means we can come and go as we please without exciting any more comment than necessary.”
I nodded too, picturing her walking though the lobby in power armour, and suppressed a grin. The staff of such an establishment was discreet, I had no doubt, but there were still some things that would raise a few eyebrows. “I’m sure it does,” I said.
Amberley shrugged. “They’re used to all kinds of eccentric behaviour here. They’ll tolerate pretty much anything if you pay them enough, and they won’t ask too many questions. Even so, it never hurts to be circumspect.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t,” I said. I got a bit more used to her methods over the years, as she dragged me into her covert activities time and time again, but I never quite managed to shake off the feeling that she tended to adopt disguises and elaborate cover stories more for the fun of it than because they were strictly necessary.[1] Amberley laughed, took my arm, and led me inside while Pelton powered the luxurious speeder down. “Modest little place you’ve got here.” [1. That, of course, is entirely a matter of opinion. Some inquisitors believe the Emperor’s work is best done by charging around the place like a grox in a ceramic emporium, leaving a trail of carnage and destruction in their wake, while others prefer not to let the enemies of all that’s good and holy get away clean by making it blindingly obvious that they’re coming for them.]
The main living room was huge, tinted windows looking out and down at the urban panorama, the neat, comfortable furnishings supplemented by plants in tasteful ceramic urns and a surprising amount of weaponry left lying around the place. Amberley shrugged as my eyes fell on the scattering of ordnance.
“It pays to be prepared,” she said cheerfully.
“That it does,” Yanbel agreed, doing something with his mechadendrites to the barrel of the heavy bolter I’d last seen attached to the forearm of Amberley’s power suit. He held it up to the light, squinting along its length with a faint whirring sound as his augmetic eyes focused on something too minute to see, and emitted a grunt of satisfaction before reaching for a small jar of sanctified oil with one of his natural hands and beginning to bless the thing.
Over in the far corner, Rakel looked up from what looked like a hushed conversation with Simeon (they seemed to spend a lot of time together, I noticed, probably because in their differing ways they were both as marginally sane as one another), and shot me a venomous look.
“It’s you,” she informed me unnecessarily, her eyes skittering around the space behind me as she spoke. “But I don’t feel the void.”
“Jurgen’s still back at the Arbites building,” I said, taking my best guess at what she was blathering about. If Keesh came up with anything else about our mysterious assassin, or Zyvan learned anything new about the tyranid threat, I wanted to know right away, and I wanted my aide on the spot as a visible and odoriferous reminder to both of them to keep me in the loop. The psyker relaxed a little.
“The shadow’s hungry,” she told me seriously, then turned back to Simeon. “His mind’s all shiny, like a mirror.” I hadn’t a clue what to make of that, so I just smiled politely.
“Commissar. Mainly brisk of ya!” Zemelda entered the room, looking like a bad actress in a drawing room farce, her crisply-starched maid’s uniform at incongruous odds with the green fringe hanging over her face, and the bulge of a badly concealed laspistol just below her left breast. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me, despite making no more sense than Rakel, and I smiled in return.
“It’s good to see you too,” I said, taking my best guess at the meaning of the Periremundan street slang, and the erstwhile snack vendor beamed at me as though I’d just told her she’d won a thousand credits. “I see you’re settling in all right.”
“You bet.” She nodded vigorously. “Best job I ever had. Beats the hell out of flogging gristle pies or fly-posting for slash gigs,[1] I can tell you.” [1. No, I don’t know either.]
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, trying to mask my bemusement.
Zemelda nodded again, with undiminished enthusiasm. “It’s like when we were juves, playing games, but this time it’s for real, you know?”
I nodded, not really trusting myself to speak. It was the same eager enthusiasm I was used to seeing in the fungs[2] just arrived from the recruiting stations on Valhalla, all fired up with martial zeal and the supposed glory of combat. The bright ones wised up fast, kept their heads down, and got on with the grim business of survival. The rest became heroes or dead, quite often both, and almost instantly forgotten by their squadmates. With an unexpected pang, I found myself wondering which category Zemelda would fall into. [2. An Imperial Guard slang term for raw recruits. It’s apparently a phonetic rendering of FNGs, which I’m told stands for Frakking New Guys.]
“She’s being a big help,” Amberley said, with an indulgent grin at her eager new assistant. “The sort of inbred imbecile I’m supposed to be wouldn’t be seen dead without a ladies maid to run errands for her, and Zemmie fits the bill perfectly.” She nodded at the psyker in the corner. “Rakel doesn’t really look the part, even on a good day.”
“And I look like a kleeb in a dress,” Pelton added, following us into the room. That conjured up an image I’d rather not have had inflicted on my synapses, and I nodded slowly.
“I can believe that,” I said. Zemelda had gravitated towards him the moment he appeared, and I couldn’t help noticing the half-smiles they’d exchanged as they registered one another’s presence.
Pelton shrugged. “Joking a
side, she’s got a real aptitude for dark ops.” Zemelda coloured slightly at the words of praise. “She can live a legend as well as a pro, and she’s getting to be a pretty good pistol shot. Took down a hybrid the last brood we raided with a single lasbolt, just as it was drawing a bead on Simeon.” The familiar easygoing grin appeared on his face. “Not that I suppose he’d have noticed even if he had been shot.”
“That’s beside the point,” Amberley said, her tone mildly reproving. “I prefer my associates imperforated. They’re more useful that way” Not for the first time I found myself impressed by the easy camaraderie she seemed able to inspire in the motley rabble she tended to surround herself with. I saw a lot of faces come and go over the years, but all of them seemed to share it, however diverse their lives and backgrounds had been before they found themselves swept into her orbit.
“You won’t get any argument from me,” Pelton agreed, and the two of them wandered off, leaving Amberley and me to gaze out at the night-shrouded city together.
“They seem to have hit it off,” I said, and Amberley nodded.
“No bad thing,” she said. “If she’s going to hang around with us she’ll need a good grounding in combat techniques, and Flicker’s the only one in the group proficient enough to teach her.” A self-mocking grin appeared on her face. “Apart from me, of course, and I don’t have the time to baby-sit.”
“He seems to know a lot about undercover work,” I said. Amberley nodded again.
“He was in deep for a long time, infiltrating a shadow cartel in the Torredon Gap. Too long, probably. He had to do some questionable things to maintain his cover, and there were suspicions he’d turned.” I nodded slowly. Much of the Torredon subsector was riven by warp storms, leaving only a few safe routes for the merchant vessels plying the trade routes there, and piracy was a never-ending problem.
“So he was with the Naval Provosts before you recruited him?” I asked.
Amberley shook her head. “He was an arbitrator, until the chastener running him decided he’d become more of a liability than an asset, and tried to reel him in. Flicker disagreed with that assessment, and it ended badly.”
“How badly?” I asked.
Amberley sighed. “There were a lot of bodies. Flicker thought if he was going to be yanked out of the field he was going to clean house first, and started taking out all the key players he’d identified in the cartel.” A note of grudging admiration entered her voice. “He was smart, I have to give him that: set one of the senior directors up as a pretender to the high seat, took out a couple of the second echelon, and pointed the finger. It was a bloodbath. By the time his handlers caught up with him the cartel was in shreds and anyone capable of repairing the damage was dead.”
“So what was wrong with that?” I asked, in honest perplexity. It sounded to me as if he’d done the galaxy a favour.
Amberley looked at me pityingly. “Think about it. An arbitrator stepping outside the law, however laudable his motives, isn’t something the Arbites can take lightly. Luckily I happened to be around when they were getting ready to flush him, and thought a talent like that shouldn’t go to waste.”
“I see.” I nodded, reflecting yet again how relatively uncomplicated things were in the Imperial Guard. On the battlefield you do whatever it takes to win, and that’s the end of it. “Well, at least it seems Zemelda’s in good hands.”
Amberley looked at me speculatively. “I’m hoping she won’t be the only one tonight,” she said.
We were enjoying a leisurely breakfast the next morning when Lazurus arrived unexpectedly, a clattering ornithopter bearing the cogwheel sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus settling onto the flight pad beyond the hegantha bushes with all the fluttering grace of an iron chicken. Amberley looked up from her ackenberry waffles as he entered through the patio doors, and nodded a cordial greeting.
“Pull up a chair,” she invited, a trifle indistinctly, while Zemelda, still apparently revelling in her impenetrable disguise, poured a cup of recaf and placed it on the table in front of him. Emperor alone knows how she expected him to drink it, what with not having a mouth and all, but it was the sort of thing a servant was supposed to do, so she probably thought it added to the solidity of her cover or something. The simple task accomplished she went to poke the dish of salma kedgeree on the sideboard with a serving ladle, and try to look as though she wasn’t listening avidly to the conversation around the table.
Lazurus inclined his head courteously as he took the proffered seat. “Thank you, but I’ve already ingested nutrient this week,” he returned, with an obvious effort at good manners. He glanced in my direction, but if he was surprised to see me there, made no sign of the fact. “Commissar, you look well. I trust your interaction with the inquisitor has proven satisfactory?”
“It has,” Amberley said, with a barely perceptible grin in my direction, “but I fear you’ve had a wasted journey. Ciaphas has no more idea of Metheius’ whereabouts than either of us do.”
“That’s most disappointing,” the magos said, managing to sound as if it was anything but. “I had hoped a man of his apparent resourcefulness could open a few of the doors that have so far remained closed to us.”
“As had I,” I assured him blandly, as if I’d been privy to the search for the renegade cogboy since the beginning, and as I spoke I found a number of possibilities suggesting themselves. “My position in the Commissariat gives me access to all the intelligence being analysed by the Guard and the Arbites, for instance.” I glanced at Amberley. “Unless, of course, you’ve already taken Zyvan and Keesh into your confidence?”
“Not about this,” she confirmed. “They have enough to worry about with the ’stealers and the hive fleet.” She shrugged, pushing her plate away, and taking a sip of her recaf. “Besides, the shadowlight—”
“The what?” I interrupted, a forkful of kedgeree halfway to my mouth.
Lazurus chimed in helpfully. “The xenos artefact Metheius absconded with. Since his departure we’ve uncovered more items in the Valley of Daemons, including a selection of metal tablets of unknown composition containing fragments of script, one of which appears to refer to it by that name.”
A familiar dry cough announced the arrival of Mott, who had been listening to the latter stages of the conversation, and seemed unable to resist verbalising the torrent of related information encoded within his augmetically enhanced cerebellum any longer.
“The language has never been reliably deciphered,” he put in, reaching for the insulated jug of recaf Zemelda had recently put down on the sideboard and pouring himself a cupful without seeming to look at it. I flinched, anticipating scalded fingers and the crash of the cup on the carpet, but he judged it to a nicety and carried on talking without apparently pausing to draw breath. “However, a few earlier examples have been discovered scattered across the galaxy, and a rough attempt made to assign meaning to some of the symbols. The main difficulty with this is that the examples so far recovered, though uniformly ancient beyond imagining, appear to originate from different points within a span of aeons, so it’s by no means certain that any established symbology would have remained unchanged during the lifetime of the civilisation that produced them.”
Remembering the fractured Gothic Zemelda lapsed into when she forgot no one else present was from around here, I could well believe that, but suppressed the urge to nod in agreement. Once Mott got going, the last thing you wanted to do was encourage him. “On the other hand, the regularity of the script, and the uniformity of workmanship of the few artefacts and other fragments recovered across such a diverse range of sites would seem to indicate that it was a remarkably stable society, as well as long lasting, so it’s by no means beyond the realm of possibility that at least a fair degree of consistency was maintained.”
“Thank you, Caractacus,” Amberley said, glaring at me with a “now look what you’ve done” expression on her face. “As I was saying, the existence of the artefact, whatever it might have been cal
led, is a secret known only to a few, and both we and the Mechanicus would prefer to keep it that way.” Lazurus nodded his agreement, but my mind was only just catching up with the last thing he’d said before Mott’s logorrhea got triggered, and I stared at him in some perplexity.
“Hold on a minute,” I said. “You’ve found more of this stuff? When did that happen?”
“When do you think?” Amberley asked, reaching for a slice of buttered toast. “While they were rebuilding the dam you blew up, of course.”
Lazurus nodded again. “The resulting flood rearranged the topography of the valley quite substantially.” A warning glance from Amberley forestalled Mott from filling us all in on quite how much that was, how much topsoil had been removed in the process, and how many orks had got their feet wet. “In particular a new site was revealed, containing quite a lot of interest to us, including further devices that, as yet, have failed to yield up their secrets.”
“Which is all very interesting,” Amberley put in, bisecting her toast with a small, precise bite, and spraying me with crumbs as she completed the sentence, “but we’re drifting away from the point.” She looked at me speculatively. “How do you think your access to the military intelligence grid can help us to pinpoint Metheius? Preferably before he becomes indigestion for a ’nid.”
“Because the analysts are looking for evidence of ’stealer infestation,” I pointed out, “and nothing else. The fact that they missed the Chaos cult that tried to kill me last night proves that.” I glanced at Lazurus as I spoke, but he betrayed no surprise at my words.
[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls Page 13