[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “They’re building up their biomass reserves,” she said. “Now the hive fleet’s in range they’ll be creating an army to consolidate their beachhead, and pave the way for the main invasion force.”

  I felt a faint chill of dread as I pondered the implication of her words. “That means they’ll strike again,” I said. “Raid more settlements.”

  Amberley nodded grimly. “I’m afraid you’re right.” She drained her goblet, and poured another drink, a large one. “Hell’s Edge was only the beginning.”

  Editorial Note:

  Cain, of course, doesn’t bother to expand on the consequences of this development for the planet as a whole, or for the campaign to defend it. I have therefore appended the following extracts from other sources, in the hope that they wilt go some way towards filling in the gaps in his narrative.

  From Periremunda Today: The News That Matters to Your Planet, 264 933 M41

  TERRORISTS ARE XENOS INFILTRATORS!

  KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!

  In a startling announcement, endorsed by no lesser eminence than Lord General Zyvan, commander of the Imperial Guard heroes charged with eradicating the taint of un-mutual deviance from our fair world, Arbitrator Keesh today revealed the shocking truth that the campaign of terrorism that has rocked Periremunda for so long has an even more sinister purpose than simply challenging the benevolent rule of the Emperor’s divinely appointed regents. Far from being mere traitors and heretics, a crime that in itself deserves no less than utter annihilation and eternal damnation, the perpetrators are something even more foul: the changeling offspring of the vile xenos species known as genestealers, which taint the pure bodily essences of the Emperor-fearing, thus perverting them to the cause of the world-devouring tyranids.

  Though one of the dreaded hive fleets is reported to be on its way to Periremunda, all true human citizens may take heart from the knowledge that so is a taskforce drawn from the very cream of the Imperial Navy, and the redoubtable warriors of the Imperial Guard, which between them is more than powerful enough to obliterate the cancer of the xenos presence from our blessed corner of the galaxy. Moreover, we still have the unceasing vigilance of Commissar Cain and his valiant comrades-in-arms to protect all true followers of the Emperor.

  As for the xenos-tainted vermin still lurking among us, let them tremble in fear, knowing that their inevitable extermination is naught but a matter of time.

  IS YOUR NEIGHBOUR A GENESTEALER?

  20 WAYS TO TELL!

  (See page 7)

  Transcript of an address by Planetary Governor Merkin W. Pismire the younger, 266 933 M41

  My fellow Periremundans, it’s with a heavy heart that I address you all tonight. Um, unless you’re in a different time zone, of course, when I guess you’ll be having breakfast. Or sleeping, or whatever. Erm…

  By now you’ll all have heard what’s really been going on for the last few months, and no doubt you were as surprised as I was when I first saw the news picts this morning. Um, that’s to say my daughters saw them, and lost no time in bringing me up to speed. Um…

  You may all rest assured that I voxed Arbitrator Keesh as soon as I became aware of the situation, and demanded a full report, which, I’m sure, will prove extremely reassuring as soon as it arrives, or the young man I spoke to has time to pass on the message.

  Anyway, I can state quite confidently that things are completely under control. We’ve all heard these silly rumours about low altitude settlements suddenly losing contact with the rest of the planet, and I’m quite sure there’s no truth to any of them. It’s probably just these genestealer scallywags spreading scare stories to undermine our morale.

  I mean, if the enemy was already here in force, I’m sure I’d know all about it. My staff is pretty good at keeping on top of the important stuff.

  So goodnight, and Emperor bless you all. You can rest assured that everything that can be done will be done.

  Erm… How was that? Gubernatorial enough? Or should we go again?

  Err… What do you mean, it was live?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Amberley was right, of course. Over the next two days we lost contact with another seven outposts, all of them situated among the lowest altitude and most marginally habitable of the plateaux, which at least meant that relatively few people had vanished into the maw of the tyranids,[1] to be used as the raw material for spawning another generation of their hideous kind. That raised a whole new set of questions, of course. [1. Estimates vary between about 1,500 and just over 3,000. Records of that time are, understandably, somewhat fragmentary.]

  “You must have some idea of where their digester pools are,” I said. I was sitting in Kasteen’s office, along with the colonel, Major Broklaw, and a portable hololith, in which the disembodied heads of our counterparts from the other regiments on-planet flickered uneasily, orbiting Zyvan’s face and upper torso like cherubs round a high-ranking ecclesiarch. There was still no sign of the hive fleet, or our promised reinforcements, and, under the circumstances, ordering the senior command staff to Principia Mons for a face-to-face briefing would have been the height of folly. Zyvan shook his head.

  “We’ve been looking, believe me, but the sandstorms are still blocking too many of our orbital imagers, and our recon flights haven’t turned anything up either. By the time we’ve established the loss of another settlement and sent a response team in, the wind has obliterated any tracks that were left in the desert.”

  “The commissar does have a point though,” Kasteen put in, backing me up loyally, even if that did mean coming perilously close to sounding as though she had doubts about Zyvan’s strategy. “On Corania they clustered round the pools, depositing the dead they’d collected and spawning new creatures. Bombing from the air while they were vulnerable made a big difference, and denied them reinforcements. For a while at least.”

  “I quite agree,” Zyvan said, “and the minute they’re located, our ships will commence an all-out bombardment from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure of eradicating them.” He permitted himself a wintry smile. “One thing you can say for this place, we won’t have to worry too much about collateral damage.”

  Several of the faces around him nodded in agreement, and I recognised a few from the Gravalax campaign a couple of years earlier, whose names I’d never caught. Kasteen and Broklaw were looking vaguely cheered by the remark as well, and I’m bound to say I appreciated the point as much as they did. Despite our best efforts we’d put quite a dent in the planetary capital there, and it had gone against the grain to be killing and maiming so many of the civilians we were supposed to have been protecting. (Although, to be fair, a good half of the ones who didn’t turn out to be ’stealers were rabid xenoists who would have sold us out to the tau in a heartbeat, so I suppose we weren’t hurting nearly as many loyal subjects of the Emperor as we might have done.)

  “That’s some comfort, at least,” I said, taking shameless advantage of my position to consolidate the good opinion he evidently still had of me. After leaving Hell’s Edge behind us, Amberley had ordered our pilot to head straight for Principia Mons, where we’d lost no time in briefing the lord general about what we’d found in the ill-fated settlement. (The ’nid presence, at any rate. She never said a word about the hidden laboratory, and I knew better than to raise the subject myself.)

  Zyvan had been as courteous a host as before, politely ignoring the fact that we were both as malodorous as Jurgen (other than offering us the use of his bath, which was more like a swimming pool with soap, and sending my uniform out to be cleaned while we ate), and asking a number of pertinent questions about the numbers and types of organisms that had attacked us, which I did my best to answer. My input had evidently proven satisfactory, as he’d gone so far as to shake my hand when Jurgen and I had departed to meet the courier shuttle he’d ordered to meet us at the aerodrome.

  “Can’t we at least narrow it down?” Kasteen asked, worrying at the point she’d raised like a kroot with a
bone. “We know where they’ve struck, and at roughly what times. Surely we can estimate where the swarms are originating from.”

  “Our analysts have been trying to do just that, of course,” Zyvan said, nodding in approval, and clearly grateful for having at least one regimental commander to hand with some idea of what we were facing.[1] “Unfortunately it seems that the settlements the ’nids have hit are scattered right across the planet, and given our best knowledge of how fast they can move, the timing isn’t consistent with the activities of a single swarm.” [1. The 597th was the only regiment currently on Periremunda with previous experience of fighting tyranids, although the Karthelan 463rd had taken part in the cleansing of the Taragon underhive following the discovery of a recently established genestealer cult there in 929 M41.]

  “More than one.” Broklaw added something under his breath that the lord general pretended not to have heard. “Can you at least give us some idea of how many we’re dealing with?”

  Zyvan shook his head. “Our best guess is at least three distinct swarms,” he said heavily, provoking a flurry of consternation among his halo of floating heads, “but that’s just going by the number of raids we’ve discovered so far. We’re also assuming that the swarms are sufficiently numerous to have sent out more than one group of organisms at a time, and that each pack has already created a digester pool to process the biomass they’re harvesting.” I noted the euphemism with faint surprise. Zyvan had always struck me as fairly blunt in his mode of expression, a personality quirk he was renowned for, and I hadn’t expected him to shy away from the fact that it was the corpses of slaughtered civilians he was talking about.[1] “If they haven’t begun digesting the material they’ve collected after all, and are simply consuming it for energy, then we’re looking for a greater number of randomly roving swarms with no focus for their activities beyond finding the next pocket of life on this benighted globe and snuffing it out.” He shrugged, clearly thinking he might as well give us all the bad news in one go. “If the worst case estimate turns out to be the right one after all, we’re going to find five of the damned things running around loose out there.” That provoked further consternation among the hololithic heads. “Assuming there haven’t been even more raids we don’t know about yet, of course. That could revise the numbers even further upwards.” [1. In fact Zyvan probably chose his words carefully to reflect the fact that it wasn’t just humans the tyranids were taking: the settlements they’d attacked were denuded of all forms of life, including plants and domestic animals.]

  “Emperor on Earth,” Kasteen said, her face pale even for a Valhallan.

  I nodded judiciously. “It makes good tactical sense,” I said. “The hive fleets often infiltrate an advance force, to tie up the defenders before the main assault begins, and this planet’s tailor made for them to do just that. They could be pretty much anywhere, while we’re deployed in a few major population centres, waiting for them to come to us. We daren’t spread ourselves any thinner, either, which leaves the majority of the plateaux completely undefended.”

  “Apart from the local PDF garrisons,” an eager young commissar I didn’t recognise pointed out. He was assigned to one of the Harakoni regiments, and his uniform cap was embellished with one of the blue feathers commonly affected by veterans of a grav chute combat drop, so he clearly wasn’t the sort to either shirk his duty or feel he was too grand to ignore the traditions of the troopers he served with. Despite his air of puppy-like enthusiasm, which reminded me disconcertingly of Lieutenant Sulla, the keenest and most irritating of our platoon commanders,[1] I was inclined to listen to the lad. “Are any of them sufficiently reliable to deploy?” [1. Despite the eminence to which she would later rise, Cain’s attitude towards Sulla remains, at best, one of mild antipathy throughout his memoirs. She, ironically, appears to have remained in lifelong ignorance of his actual opinion of her, clearly regarding him as something of a mentor.]

  “The arbitrator informs me that roughly two-thirds of the PDF regiments are now believed to be free of genestealer infiltration,” Zyvan said dryly. “How well founded that belief is, however, remains to be seen; and of course the loyalty of the Gavaronian militia has been personally vouched for by the Canoness Eglantine.” The faint pause before he continued said all he needed to about that particular assurance. “So I suppose we can expect most of them to mount some kind of effective resistance when push comes to shove.”

  “Sounds like Keesh has been busy,” I said, surprised and relieved to hear that so much of the PDF had been effectively purged in so short a time.

  Zyvan nodded. “Apparently his office has received a great deal of first-hand intelligence gleaned during a series of raids on hidden ’stealer nests,” he said. Realising who had carried them out, and the wisdom of circumspection in this regard, I returned the gesture.

  “Then let’s hope his sources are accurate,” I said, knowing full well that they were.

  “Indeed,” Zyvan replied, diverting matters on to safer ground with as much finesse as a diplomat. “If they are, we’ll have a fighting chance of holding on until our fleet arrives.”

  “Assuming the hive fleet doesn’t get here ahead of them,” the Harakoni colonel put in, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice the young commissar nodding in agreement. A realist as well as a populist, maybe he was going to turn out to be one of those rare examples of our calling who don’t end up dying heroically on the battlefield leading from the front, or taking a lasbolt in the back from a disgruntled trooper goaded once too often with the threat of execution or the lash.

  “That might depend on how many of the unpurged regiments turn out to be loyal after all,” he pointed out reasonably.

  “Then we’ll have to hope that it’s most of them,” Zyvan said. “I’m deploying them in the outer defensive perimeters in any case.” Where our artillery could drop shells on them at the first sign of treachery, and the ’nids would be into them first regardless. Selling that to the high command of the local forces wouldn’t be an easy or pleasant job, and I didn’t envy whoever had got it. But there were enough bright, eager scions of the Imperial aristocracy whose families had bought them commissions cluttering up Zyvan’s general staff for him to be irritated by one of them on an almost daily basis, and I had no doubt that a suitable candidate had made himself obvious at just the right moment. (The obvious solution, assigning the whole pack of them to the front line somewhere, where if the enemy didn’t take care of them their own men probably would, didn’t seem to have occurred to him, nor would it, in all the years we were destined to serve together.)[1] [1. No doubt it did, frequently, but Zyvan was too conscientious a servant of the Emperor to risk Imperial interests, or the lives of the ordinary soldiers under his command, simply to rid himself of a trifling nuisance. Besides, there would always be plenty more to replace them, so any respite would have been fleeting at best.]

  “If it’s the splinter fleet I encountered in the Desolatia system,” I said, more to remind everyone who the real hero was supposed to be around here than because I thought it was strictly relevant, “it will be relatively weak. Our warships killed around seventy percent of its vessels before they could escape into the warp, and we dealt with the ’stealers on Keffia and Gravalax[2] effectively enough to prevent it being summoned there. It’s been over a dozen years, I admit, but I doubt it’s found enough to consume in the meantime to regain much of its strength.” [2. In actual fact, later events would point to a quite different interpretation of the Gravalax incident. The ’stealer cult there, as Cain points out in his own account of the affair, was intent on provoking a war of attrition with the tau, which would have seriously weakened the Imperium’s defences throughout the Damocles Gulf and its neighbouring sectors. Given the line of advance of Hive Fleet Kraken, it now seems more than probable that they were intending to prepare the way for this massive invasion force rather than a mere splinter fleet.]

  “Quite so.” Zyvan nodded in agreement. “Where the tyranids are conc
erned nothing can be certain, of course, but it does seem likely that this is the same fleet.”

  He smiled mirthlessly again. “I’d certainly prefer to believe that it’s the only one in this part of the galaxy.”

  “Then we should be able to hold out,” I said, nodding judiciously, and trying to sound more certain than I felt. “For a few days, at least. It’s already weak and wounded, and our reinforcements should be able to finish it off for good.” That’s always a pretty tall order when you’re dealing with ’nids, of course, they pop up again just when you think it’s all over with a persistence even a necron would envy, but it was what everyone needed to hear, and the expressions and voices of everyone in the link became a lot more confident and decisive after that.

  “All we need now is a strategy for holding out,” Broklaw remarked, as though this would be nothing too difficult, and Kasteen nodded her agreement.

  “We’ll need to be ready for rapid deployment, so we can get stuck into them wherever they appear.” The familiar self-confident smile was back on her face now that her old fear of the ’nids had been replaced by a genuine conviction that we could win. “At least requisitioning enough shuttles won’t be a problem on a world like this.”

  “The commerce commission will raise merry hell about it,” Zyvan pointed out, with enough of a grin lurking behind his beard to make me suspect that another young subaltern with razor-sharp creases in his uniform and an unfortunate tendency to irritate the lord general was about to have his diplomatic skills tested to the limit. “But they can frak off to the warp so far as I’m concerned. We’ve a war to win, and if they don’t want to help us do that, they can sit outside the perimeter and bitch about it to the ’nids.”