[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Not that I expected to see any, cogboys of his rank are more clockwork than human anyway, but I imagine that whatever conversation ensued between him and Amberley after I left the room would have been interesting to overhear. “If I ask Zyvan for access to the raw data, I might find something they missed, because it fell outside the parameters they were looking for.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Amberley said, nodding thoughtfully “I’ve only been getting the filtered stuff, and asking to look at the source material myself would only give rise to awkward questions. So far as the Guard is concerned, I’m just here to advise on the tyranid problem.”

  “Regrettably, I find myself in a similar position,” Lazurus agreed. “I may be advising the lord general on the most judicious use of the Omnissiah’s bounty in the furtherance of our cause, but, as a mere civilian, any intelligence I may be privy to is strictly on a need to know basis.”

  “I’ll talk to Zyvan,” I said. “Keesh too. If I tell them I’m looking for leads on our mystery assassin, they ought to co-operate.” I glanced at the elaborate chronograph on the wall, which was ten minutes fast and encrusted with far too many gilt angels. “I’ll have to swing by the Arbites building anyway, to pick Jurgen up.”

  In all honesty the only thing I expected my offer of help to lead to was an excellent excuse to visit Amberley every few days to report in person on my regrettable lack of progress, and enjoy a pleasant few hours of her company. But, as so often seems to happen, that apparently trivial gesture was to fling me into a maelstrom of danger and treachery far beyond anything I could possibly have imagined.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The next few days were as unnerving as you might imagine, the nebulous outline of the shadow in the warp continuing to creep towards the feeble glow of the Periremunda system centred in the imaging field of our hololiths, until the morning it engulfed us altogether. I happened to be in the command centre at the time, with Kasteen and Broklaw, and all three of us exhaled audibly as the boundary of the zone of darkness lapped around the flickering pinpoint of light at last, and began to draw it ever deeper inside itself, like an amoeba digesting some microscopic piece of flotsam.

  “That’s it,” Broklaw said laconically, and I found myself glancing up at the skylights in the roof of the old warehouse, an irrational corner of my mind half expecting us to be plunged into literal darkness.

  Nothing of the kind actually happened, of course. Ironically, the almost perpetual cloud cover had lifted across most of Hoarfell that day, and bright sunlight lanced down into the seething mass of soldiers going about their business from a blue sky dappled with blotches of cloud. Of course it was still far too cold outside for my liking, the wind cutting straight to the bone even through the weave of my greatcoat, and just as inevitably the Valhallans had cranked the big doors open a little to make the most of it. I’d found the relief from the usual dank murkiness positively cheering, at least until I’d dropped by to see what was going on among the senior command staff.

  “Any luck yet?” Kasteen had greeted me as I’d arrived, and I’d shaken my head ruefully. As I might have expected, Zyvan and Keesh had accumulated an impressive amount of raw intelligence between them, with more coming in all the time, and I’d normally have found the task of wading through it onerous in the extreme, not to mention impossible without help. Luckily I’d been able to pass the bulk of the files over to Mott, who positively relished that sort of thing, and he’d reduced most of the data to neatly cross-referenced summaries before lobbing it back to me for my expert evaluation; which, so far, I’m bound to admit, had come up with precisely nothing.

  Nevertheless, I’d been grateful for the distraction, as otherwise I’d have had little else to do apart from worrying about the hive fleet approaching us, and whatever its still undetected advance guard might have been up to. So I suppose it was just sheer bad luck that I happened to stop by to ask Kasteen for a progress report at almost exactly the same moment that the Shockwave in warp space preceding the ’nid swarm engulfed the system.

  “We’re on our own,” Kasteen agreed with her subordinate, watching the stain spread further across the wavering and insubstantial starfield projected above the hololith table. This was quite literally true. Now that we were inside the shadow there could be no hope of any astropathic communication from Coronus, or from the flotilla of starships hurrying to our aid. We could still estimate the fleet’s position, though, and I stared at the little cluster of contact icons, willing it to arrive before whatever tide of chittering death was lurking inside the pool of darkness that was now swallowing us whole. Of course that was even more problematic now than it had been, as the warp currents themselves would be affected by the mass of the hive fleet, although whether that was going to speed or hinder our would-be rescuers only the Emperor could say.

  “Better step up our alert status,” I suggested, and Kasteen nodded tightly.

  “Already on it. Whenever they show themselves, we’ll be ready.” She nodded at the hololith. “Irrational I know, but I half expected them to start pouring out of the woodwork as soon as the shadow arrived.” Her tone was light, but in the slightly forced way that revealed an element of barely-contained fear. Knowing the regiment’s history, I could hardly blame her for that: both the former units that now made it up had been chewed to pieces on Corania. Kasteen had been a mere company commander at the time, and had ended up being saddled with the responsibility for an entire regiment by the simple fact of being practically the only senior officer to survive. It was the merest good fortune that she’d turned out to be so levelheaded and gifted a leader.

  “Me too,” I admitted, and we shared a moment of wry amusement, although I don’t suppose she thought I was anywhere near as sincere as I actually was. I’d fought tyranids before too, and the idea of facing wave after wave of genetically engineered killing machines was a sobering one to say the least.

  “We stopped them before, we can stop them again,” Broklaw said briskly, and we all nodded gravely as though we believed it.

  “Colonel.” A vox operator looked up from her control lectern, and waved to attract our attention. “A message from the lord general.”

  “My office. Put it through.” Kasteen acknowledged the woman briskly, as though the moment of hesitation had never been, and led the way towards the metal staircase giving access to the mezzanine. As we hurried up the clattering stairs she glanced back at Broklaw and myself. “Looks like it’s going to be sooner rather than later.”

  In that, to everyone’s unspoken relief except mine, she was completely wrong. Zyvan’s voice was clipped and incisive as he acknowledged her greeting.

  “Colonel. Is Commissar Cain with you?”

  “He’s right here.” She glanced across at me, and I tapped the comm-bead in my ear, joining the conversation.

  “How can I help you, general?” I asked, trying to ignore the faint flutter of apprehension that flickered in my gut. In my experience, whenever someone powerful and well connected asks for you by name, it seldom presages anything good.

  “I’ve a message from Inquisitor Vail,” Zyvan said, almost succeeding in masking his irritation at acting as an intermediary. It made sense, though. If she still wanted to keep her presence on Periremunda a secret, there could be fewer more secure lines of communication than going through the lord general’s office “She’s on her way to Hoarfell, and wants you to meet her at the aerodrome.”

  “You can tell her I’m on my way,” I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. Even the prospect of seeing Amberley again wasn’t quite enough to outweigh the near certainty that she was about to drag me deeper into whatever it was she was really here to do. Refusal being completely out of the question, though, I took refuge in the public persona of Cain the modest hero. I turned to Kasteen and Broklaw, who both looked vaguely stunned by this unexpected turn of events, not to mention a little awestruck by the sudden reminder of my exalted connections. “I’m afraid you’ll have to manage witho
ut me for a while,” I told them.

  “We’ll manage,” Kasteen assured me gravely, as if my presence there would make the slightest difference to her battle plans. “Any idea what this is all about?”

  “Not a clue,” I admitted, trying to sound as though the prospect wasn’t almost as terrifying as facing the ’nids. I shrugged, in as carefree a manner as I could contrive. “I’ll tell you when I get back, if it’s not too highly classified,” I said breezily, hoping I’d live long enough to get the chance.

  * * * * *

  The journey to the aerodrome was as brief and eventful as such trips generally were with Jurgen driving, our scout-pattern Salamander carving its way through the civilian traffic as though they were enemy foot soldiers although with fewer casualties. Jurgen was as familiar with the sturdy little vehicle as he was with his lasgun, and although his approach to driving was as robust as ever, we never actually hit anything sharing the road with us. We came pretty close at times, but since we were surrounded by armour plate, and the civilian traffic wasn’t, neither of us found the occasional near miss unduly alarming.

  As we rattled and roared our way along the main access road to the landing field, leaving a turbulent wake of profanity and blaring clarions behind us, I noticed that the melta he habitually carried when things got even more dangerous than usual was tucked into the driver’s compartment beside him. He was clearly expecting trouble too, which was no bad thing.

  There was no one else in the galaxy I’d rather have covering my back if we turned out to be right, and the heavy weapon had made a crucial difference to our chances of survival on more than one occasion.

  I’d taken what precautions I could as well, fitting fresh power cells into my chainsword and laspistol, and strapping on the carapace armour I’d acquired on Gravalax beneath my greatcoat, which concealed it nicely.

  “Do you think that’s them now?” Jurgen asked, swinging us around a wallowing heavy transporter with what looked like the guts of a shuttle engine protruding perilously from the flatbed on every side, and I ducked reflexively as a tangle of pipe work thicker than my forearm all but brushed the cap from my head. He took his hand from the throttle for a moment, to point a grime-encrusted finger at a sleek Aquila class shuttle descending on the pad we’d been told to head for.

  Ignoring the eloquent hand gestures of the startled driver behind us, I nodded. “Must be,” I said. In keeping with her desire to remain incognito as much as possible Amberley tended to avoid plastering her personal transport with Inquisition sigils, but the crimson and grey colour scheme was a fair indication of its ownership to anyone familiar with the organisation she worked for. I found myself wondering for a moment if the presence of a space-capable shuttle meant that her old associate Orelius was orbiting patiently somewhere above our heads, but doubted that. Periremunda was a small and provincial kind of place, and the presence of a rogue trader in the system would hardly have gone unnoticed for long.[1] I glanced at my chronograph. “She’s punctual, at any rate.” [1. In fact it was from my personal yacht, the Externus Exterminatus, which was waiting in orbit as usual, broadcasting the idem code of an ore barge from Desolatia.]

  I should have known better than to verbalise the thought. As I’ve mentioned innumerable times before in the course of these memoirs, Jurgen’s adherence to protocol had a tendency to border on the obsessive. Now, no doubt considering it in some way essential to be waiting on the pad when the shuttle grounded, he accelerated, flinging me back against the heavy bolter on its pintel mount, and scattering the gaggle of PDF troopers manning the checkpoint at the aerodrome perimeter. Glancing back, I saw one of them yelling excitedly into a vox unit, but at least none of them had the wit to fire at us,[1] which was an unexpected blessing. Thanking the Emperor for small mercies I clung to whatever handholds I could find, while Jurgen slalomed us around an obstacle course of fuel bowsers, slack-jawed enginseers, and cargo-handling servitors as though trying to avoid an incoming artillery barrage shell by shell. My comm-bead crackled. [1. In fact they probably recognised Cain, who was a familiar figure across the entire planet, especially in Hoarfell, where his actions in the fuel tanker incident had made him an even greater hero to the local populace.]

  “Commissar Cain, this is Darien Down.” The traffic controller’s voice was tense, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. “The poor frakker probably thought we were about to be blown halfway to the Golden Throne again, and I was in another frantic dash to avert disaster, is there an emergency we should be appraised of?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I assured him, with all the soothing sincerity I could muster while my fillings were being shaken loose by Jurgen’s driving. “Vital military dispatches to collect, that’s all.”

  “I see.” He clearly didn’t, but then in my experience civilians never really expect to understand military matters. All that mattered to him was that whatever I was up to had nothing to do with the safety of the starport, and that was that.

  Despite Jurgen’s heroic efforts the shuttle touched down a few seconds before we reached the pad, its cargo ramp descending as it came, so that the lip of it kissed the rockrete a mere heartbeat behind the landing skids. I looked at it expectantly, waiting for Amberley to appear at the top of the dull iron gradient, but the cargo compartment remained empty, and the engines continued to scream, throttled back just enough to keep the whole thing from lifting again. Recognising the telltale signs of a pilot prepared for a rapid dust-off in a hot LZ,[1] I ducked instinctively below the level of the armour plate surrounding me, my eyes scanning our surroundings for any sign of a threat. [1. Taking off quickly from a dangerous landingzone. Sometimes I think Imperial Guard should be classified as a distinct dialect of Gothic all by itself.]

  “Get aboard as fast as you can,” Amberley’s voice said in my ear, and taking her words as literally as he did any other instruction Jurgen gunned the engine again, hurtling towards the narrow ramp at a speed anyone else would have regarded as insane.

  Even inured as I was to his cavalier handling of the little vehicle by a decade and a half of familiarity, I found myself flinching as we bounced up the metal incline, our spinning treads millimetres from the edge, and into the tight confines of the miniscule cargo bay. Even now I find it hard to believe that we didn’t just bounce off the bulkhead facing us, but as always my aide had judged it to a nicety, slamming the abused gears into reverse, and bringing us to a halt with barely a centimetre to spare. As he cut the engine our pilot fed full power to his own, and I felt a familiar surge of acceleration at the base of my much-abused spine. As I clambered out I caught a final dizzying glimpse of Darien Down receding into the distance before the rising ramp thudded into place, and sealed us in. I took an unsteady breath, redolent of Jurgen.

  “Nice driving,” Amberley said, entering the narrow hold through a door in the forward bulkhead.

  Jurgen scratched his head, beaming at the unexpected compliment. “Thank you miss,” he said, blushing beneath the grime.

  Amberley smiled at me, and I returned the expression as best I could. She was dressed in a skin-tight bodyglove, which would normally have been more than enough to raise my spirits, but unlike the one I’d seen her in at the Arbites building in Principia Mons this one was midnight black and festooned with sockets and truncated power cables. It just had to be the dermal interface layer for her power armour, and that realisation was enough to start my palms tingling in earnest. Wherever we were going, she thought she was going to need it.

  “I always thought it was impolite to keep a lady waiting,” I said, trying to sound as relaxed as I could, and Amberley grinned at me, probably not fooled for a second.

  “Come on through,” she said, indicating the door behind her. “You might as well be comfortable while we get where we’re going.”

  “Which is where, exactly?” I asked, following her into a compartment that might almost have been the lounge of a small hotel suite, if it hadn’t been for the sets of crash webbing
on the generously padded seats. I dropped into the nearest, one of a group around a crystal-topped beverage table, and Zemelda leaned across it to deposit a welcome goblet of amasec in front of me, still apparently playing the servant with undiminished enthusiasm.

  “Thought you might need this,” she said.

  “You thought right,” I agreed, swallowing half of it too quickly to fully appreciate so finely aged an example of the distiller’s art, and taking in her appearance with vague surprise. Like Amberley, the former snack vendor was dressed for trouble, in dark fatigues stippled with hive-pattern camo,[1] a bandana of the same material keeping her hair, which seemed brighter and greener than ever by contrast, out of her eyes. Her laspistol was holstered openly at her waist, and a couple of frag grenades hung from the utility vest around her torso, next to a wicked looking combat blade. Amberley dropped into the seat opposite me, and smiled indulgently at her protege. [1. Dark greys, blues, and black, intended to let the wearer blend into the shadows of the underhive.]

  “Our little girl is growing up,” she said cheerfully.

  “So I see,” I said. I glanced around the compartment, the barren wastes of the Periremundan landscape hurtling past beneath us too quickly to distinguish any details, the occasional plateau there and gone in a mere flicker of shadow. Most of her entourage were here, Pelton dressed almost identically to his green-haired girlfriend and cradling his autorifle protectively, while Simeon glowered at us from the corner, twitching a little now and again as his automatic implants regulated the flow of chemicals coursing through his system. His shotgun was across his lap, and he kept touching the spare magazines of reloads hanging from the bandolier across his chest, muttering something too low to be audible, but which had the cadences of the prayer of accuracy. Rakel stood next to him, her face even more strained than usual, directing a pained and venomous glance behind my head. My nose apprising me of the reason, I turned to Jurgen. “Perhaps you’d better check out the Salamander,” I suggested. “We might need it when we land.”