[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “Very good, sir.” Jurgen’s arm twitched in the vague semblance of a salute, and he vanished through the door in the bulkhead. As he disappeared behind the thick metal plating Rakel’s expression relaxed into something approximating her usual air of distraction, and she nodded as though listening to a conversation only she could hear.

  “The wind’s blowing again,” she said, “and its teeth are sharp.”

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” I said diplomatically, resolving to keep Jurgen out of the way as much as possible. Not that I really gave a frak about the barmy little spook, of course, but she was armed again, and I didn’t want her becoming so agitated by his presence that she might think of alleviating the discomfort of it by using her laspistol. For one thing my aide’s peculiar gift had saved my life several times already, and I had every expectation of it continuing to do so for as long as he remained around, and for another I didn’t fancy the idea of her popping off a gun in such a confined space. It wouldn’t breach the hull, of course, that was proof against the heat and stresses of re-entry, never mind a puny little lasbolt, but it could easily ricochet off the metal, putting my life in danger.

  Mott was sitting at the table too, a mug of recaf in his hand, and a vaguely expectant air hovering about him that seemed to indicate that he was itching to start explaining what we were all doing here as soon as Amberley let him. Yanbel was in a corner next to the small door leading to the flight deck, doing arcane things to Amberley’s power suit, which loomed over everything like an Astartes captain at a garden party. As everyone’s presence registered with me, the obvious question occurred (apart from “what the frak are we doing here,” of course, which I knew better than to ask a second time. I knew Amberley well enough by now to know that she’d explain what was going on when she was good and ready, and no power in the galaxy could hurry her up).

  “Who’s flying this crate?” I asked.

  Amberley shrugged. “Pontius, I think,” she said, as though the name would mean anything to me.

  Pelton flicked a stray lock of hair, which had escaped his bandana, out of his eyes. “Ex-Navy, like most of the boss’ crew. He’s good. If he has to he can fling this thing around like a fighter in a fur-ball.”

  “Then let’s hope he doesn’t need to show off his skills,” I said, assimilating this latest piece of news as calmly as I could. So, Amberley had her own star-ship. Well, it wasn’t that surprising, I suppose, inquisitors need to get where they’re needed as fast as possible. It simply hadn’t occurred to me before now, probably because the first time I’d met her she’d been with a rogue trader, and since then I’d somehow assumed she just used the authority of her office to commandeer a vessel whenever she needed one.[1] [1. Which works too, of course, especially when you need something with enough firepower to put a dent in a planet, but it’s nice to have somewhere cosier to call home.]

  “That rather depends on what we find when we get there,” Amberley said, getting to the point at last.

  “Which would be where, exactly?” I asked, sipping the remains of my amasec, and trying to look as relaxed as possible.

  Amberley gestured to Mott. “A mining station, on one of the lowest of the plateaux. Caractacus will explain.” She smiled indulgently at her savant. “After all, he uncovered the lead we’re following.”

  “Thanks in no small measure to you, commissar,” Mott began, in his dry pedantic voice. “Your request for access to the Arbites files was answered in the fullest possible fashion, and one of the items appended was the working notes of the medicae who performed the post mortem examination of the psyker who attempted to assassinate you.”

  “I thought you’d already seen the autopsy report?” I asked Amberley, and she nodded.

  “Of course. Keesh passed it on as soon as it was completed, and there was nothing in it to help us, or so it seemed at the time. What Caractacus has been looking at, though, is the data the report was compiled from, and it seems the medicae missed something significant out of the final summary.”

  “Deliberately?” I asked, and Amberley shook her head, her blonde hair sweeping across her shoulders.

  “Probably not. Keesh is investigating, of course, but it looks like a genuine oversight.”

  “Quite understandably, too,” Mott put in. “There were merely trace amounts, barely detectable, and our medicae colleagues could hardly have been blamed if they’d missed them entirely. That they did not was the greatest good fortune, even though they failed to realise the importance of the discovery.”

  “Traces of what?” I asked, suspecting I was going to regret prompting the savant for an answer. Luckily, however, the question seemed to be specific enough not to have triggered a quincunx of random associations.

  “There were minute particles of dust in the cadaver’s lungs,” Mott said. “All quite normal, of course, but a few showed unusual characteristics. Cross-referencing them with the geophysical data of Periremunda, it became quite obvious to me that he had to have visited one particular plateau in the relatively recent past.”

  “Where there’s a mining station,” I said. I nodded thoughtfully. “Isolated, self-contained, a long way from civilisation. What would he have been doing there?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Amberley said. “Keesh tried the subtle approach, voxing to ask for their personnel records, but no one’s answering.”

  “I see.” I nodded again, the palms of my hands beginning to tingle in earnest. On a world like Periremunda, regular contact with other population centres was vital, and any isolated outpost would be certain to have backup systems to deal with a simple vox failure. “Does this interesting mining camp have a name?”

  “Hell’s Edge,” Amberley said, grinning happily.

  “Sounds delightful,” I said, looking around the compartment for the decanter of amasec.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I have to concede that, if nothing else, Hell’s Edge lived up to its name. I’ve seen less inviting places in a century or more of rattling around the galaxy, but damn few of them, and even fewer when no one was shooting at me. For one thing, as Amberley had said, the plateau was one of the lowest on the planet, which meant that it was pretty much on the margins of habitability. As we disembarked, the hot, thick air seared my lungs, and I hastily tied my sash around my face as a makeshift breathing mask, feeling a faint pang of envy at the thought of the cool recycled air inside Amberley’s power suit.[1] As well as being viscous and clogged with grit, the air was rank with the stench of brimstone, which was hardly surprising considering where we were. [1. Which, as anyone who’s ever worn one of the things can readily attest, is actually tainted with the lingering bouquet of Emperor knows how many centuries of old sweat and flatulence. That said, it’s still a major improvement over a great many external environments, including Hell’s Edge.]

  As Pontius brought the shuttle swooping low over the thin stalk of vertical rock I’d tensed involuntarily, reminded of far too many combat drops, and of our precipitate arrival on Simia Orichalcae thanks to a lucky shot by an ork with a portable rocket launcher. This time, however, no flashes of light strobed from the ground to greet us, and as we banked around for another pass I got my first proper look at our destination.

  “I can see how it got its name,” I said dryly. The massive outcrop on which the colony stood was perched on the bank of one of the equatorial lava flows, a thick soup of dully glowing liquid rock lapping around its base on the better part of three sides. Pipes and other manmade excrescences ran down the flanks of the plateau, apparently disappearing beneath the surface of the lava. I pointed them out, and Mott nodded thoughtfully, his augmented synapses flooding with related information at the sight.

  “The flow here is rich in a number of metals, which can be readily extracted in their molten state,” he began. “Normally the difficulty would lie in filtering the useful material from the magma in which it’s suspended, but the peculiar conditions here make that task considerably
easier. Of particular interest is the manner in which…”

  Ignoring the rest of the monologue, I looked out over the surface of the plateau. It was small by the standards of most of those I’d seen. Although I’d only set foot on Hoarfell and Principia Mons so far, I’d caught sight of several of the others from the air, and nothing as small as this had seemed to support a community of any significant size. Hell’s Edge was no more than a kilometre across in any direction, and the largest open area I could see was the inevitable landing field. Roughly the size of a scrum-ball pitch, it would just about take a heavy lift shuttle if it had to, although a dirigible mooring mast at the far end indicated that most of the processed material would be leaving at a rather more sedate pace for a final destination somewhere else on the planet.

  Like its grown-up cousin in Darien the landing field sprawled up to the edge of the plateau, but in this instance with no sign of a wall or fence to guard against an incautious misstep. Picturing a plunge of two or three klom into a pool of molten rock, I shuddered, and determined to remain well away from the brink. The rest of the surface was covered with buildings, mainly manufactoria of one sort or another that I took to be the processing plants where the useful material was extracted and cast into ingots, storage facilities for the blocks of cooled metal, and a scattering of hab units.

  “Anything on the vox?” I asked, as we clattered down the ramp together, Rakel keeping as far away from Jurgen as she could, and most of us with guns in our hands. Jurgen carried his beloved melta, of course, his standard issue lasgun slung across his shoulder, the all-pervading stench of brimstone robbing me of my usual method of keeping track of his whereabouts. I scanned the desolate ground around us, alert for any signs of ambush. Amberley shook her head, grimaced as the tainted air hit her nostrils, and sealed her helmet.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Pontius is continuing to scan, but there’s no signal traffic this side of Aceralbaterra.”[1] To my unspoken relief our pilot was doing a good deal more than that, keeping the shuttle’s engines idling just in case we needed to beat a hasty retreat. There was no point in unshipping the Salamander; comforting as I would have found its armour plate and heavy weapons right now, there was simply nowhere to go in it. [1. The nearest plateau with a sizeable population, some three hundred kilometres to the south, apparently named for the explorator who first catalogued this patchwork globe.]

  “That pretty much rules out a vox problem,” I said, little firecrackers of paranoia chasing themselves around my synapses every time I thought I caught a glimpse of a moving shadow.

  Pelton nodded in agreement. “We should have seen a welcoming committee by now,” he concurred, following my example, and hastily converting his bandana into a makeshift facemask. A moment later Zemelda followed suit, her green hair tumbling in untidy profusion, almost as disordered as Pelton’s blond thatch, as she removed the strip of cloth restraining it. Jurgen simply ignored the foul air stoically, as he did most sources of discomfort, although being an iceworlder he undoubtedly found the place even more unpleasant than the rest of us did.

  “We should,” I agreed, hefting my laspistol in sweat-slick fingers (apart from the augmetic ones, of course, which at least allowed me to keep a tight enough grip on it to aim properly), and wishing I’d had the foresight to jettison my greatcoat while I’d had the chance. Despite the stifling heat, thin chills of ice water seemed to be chasing one another down my spine. There was no sign of life here at all, which meant something was terribly wrong. “How many people are supposed to be here?”

  “Two hundred and thirty-seven,” Mott said, his voice apparently unaffected by the heat and dust. Like Yanbel, he seemed to have been insulated from the worst effects of the environment by his array of augmetic enhancements, while Rakel and Simeon just seemed too out of it in their respective fashions to care, but that was nothing new. “A hundred and ninety-six employees, forty-one ancillary staff, and eighteen dependants, of which seven are still minors.”

  “Then where the hell are they?” Simeon gripped his shotgun with whitening knuckles, his paranoia rising along with his chemically enhanced alertness.

  Rakel shook her head vehemently. “All gone, no one home.” It came out in a childish singsong, and I bit back the obvious rejoinder. After all, it wasn’t her fault she was barmy, and this was hardly a good time to be irritating Amberley. Instead, I made my voice as calm as possible, hoping I might prise a little more sense out of her that way.

  “What do you mean, gone?” I asked, and she glared at me as though I’d just mistaken her for a joygirl and offered her a credit.

  “Not here, idiot. Don’t you speak Gothic?”

  Well, there was obviously no point getting into a slanging match with a loon, so I just shrugged and let it go, trying not to notice the grin on Simeon’s face or picture the one on Amberley’s.

  “We’ll split up,” the inquisitor said, her voice still remarkably calm in my comm-bead, although I suppose it’s easier to ignore the possibility of a sudden ambush if you’re clumping around inside a couple of centimetres of ceramite. (Not that it does to get too complacent even then. I’ve seen genestealers ripping terminator armour apart like Jurgen with a plateful of shellfish, both of which are sights I’d rather not see again.) A black and gold arm rose with a faint whine of servos. “Flicker, take Rakel, Simeon and Zemmie and check out the hab blocks. Anything at all out of place, vox me a description of it, and wait for the rest of us to arrive before you start poking around.”

  “Got it.” The former arbitrator nodded once. “Don’t worry, boss, I’m not about to trip any booby traps, or start prodding Chaos sigils with a stick.”

  “Good.” Amberley’s voice held a faint hint of amusement. “Rakel should be able to pick up any psychic residue, so you’re unlikely to blunder into anything like that without warning, at least.” She turned to the rest of us. “Everyone else with me. We’ll start in the processing plant.”

  “We could cover more ground if we split into pairs,” Zemelda suggested diffidently, a glance at Pelton indicating which partner she had in mind for herself. Amberley shook her head, the gold-chased helmet rotating smoothly on its bearings.

  “No,” she said. “I want everyone in teams large enough to deal with anything unexpected we might stumble across. Yell for help at the first sign of trouble, and run like frak if you have to. Dead heroes are no help to me.”

  “Yes, boss.” Zemelda nodded, and fell into place at Pelton’s shoulder. After a moment Simeon and Rakel followed, and the four of them began making their way towards the hab units, exploiting whatever cover they could find on the way. Pelton seemed confident enough in his own leadership, and he and Simeon kept their advance covered with an efficiency my years attached to the Imperial Guard had left me well able to appreciate. Zemelda was doing her best to imitate them, and to my surprise showed every sign of being able to give a good account of herself once the shooting started. Rakel, of course, just slouched along, her eyes as unfocused as usual, either confident enough in her prediction of lifelessness not to fear any enemy presence or too bonkers to care if she was wrong.

  “Come on.” Amberley turned towards the nearest industrial block. “Let’s go and see if we can find out where all the people went.”

  “If they really have gone,” I said, angling myself to keep the bulk of her power armour between me and a row of pipe-festooned gantries any halfway competent sniper would have leapt at the chance to hole up in. “How much can you trust Rakel on something like this?”

  “She’s pretty reliable,” Amberley reassured me, before undercutting the effect by adding “usually”. Getting a sudden blast of my aide’s distinctive aroma, even through the all-pervading stench and the sash around my face, I nodded, the reason for her caution now clear. “She does seem pretty definite.”

  “For once,” Yanbel said dryly. The nearest processing plant was a few score metres to our left, and we made straight for it, angling towards a pallet of dull metal ingots stacked
on a motorised trolley on the fringe of the landing field. My only thought at first was to use it as cover. It was only as we got closer that a nagging sense of wrongness about it began to worry at my subconscious.

  “What’s this doing here?” I wondered aloud. “Shouldn’t it be in one of the warehouses?”

  “It certainly shouldn’t be parked out in the open,” the techpriest confirmed. “All this dust and ash in the air will degrade the motivator units. It’ll need stripping down and re-consecrating, that’s for sure.” He shook his head. “The enginseers shouldn’t have been that negligent.”

  “Maybe they were expecting to get it straight back inside,” Jurgen volunteered, his habitual expression of vague bafflement mirroring my own behind its makeshift mask.

  “Makes sense,” I agreed. “If they were bringing the ingots out to load in a shuttle…”

  “We’d have seen a shuttle,” Amberley pointed out reasonably. Her burnished helmet, its decoration dulling already beneath a thin veneer of pale grey ash, turned, taking in the sight of our Aquila squatting in the centre of the pad, most definitely alone. I shrugged.

  “Maybe the people went with it?” I suggested, not believing my own words for a moment.

  “Most interesting.” Mott ran a finger through the patina of volcanic fallout on the edge of the pallet, and held it up to his face. I almost expected him to taste it, but he just squinted at it for a moment before wiping the digit clean on the hem of his robe. “Judging by the depth of accumulated detritus, and assuming a uniform rate of deposition, this conveyance was abandoned approximately five days ago.”

  “Not just abandoned,” I said. I’d reached the driver’s seat, little more than a thinly padded shelf next to the control lever that seemed to govern direction and speed. Ash was accumulating in jagged rents torn into the fabric, and although it was hard to be sure under the thin grey coating, some dull brown residue seemed to make splash patterns against the backdrop of stacked metal bars. “That looks like blood.”