TO: Lord General Zyvan, commanding officer Imperial ground forces, Periremunda system.
I’m pleased to report that deployment of our Naval assets has gone according to plan, and that eight separate flotillas of both Capital- and Escort-class vessels are standing ready to intercept the approaching hive fleet the moment it emerges from the warp. Our transport vessels are inbound, and should begin offloading your men within the hour. I’m sure you’ll know what to do with them.
Our astropaths can’t be entirely sure, with the shadow still blanking everything, but our best estimate is that the bulk of the tyranid forces will arrive in no more than a day or two, so you’d better get them deployed fast.
Hope we can get together for a drink and a regicide game once the dust settles.
Regards,
Benjamin
From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: The Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101 M42
The opening salvos in the final battle for Periremunda were to be fired before long, and as that storm broke around us, I found myself considering how frustrating Commissar Cain must have found it to be confined to the medicae facility while the regiment went into action against so vile and inhuman a foe.
The battle began, of course, in deep space, the living ships of the hive fleet vomiting forth from the warp as though even that abominable realm was unable to stomach their foulness, to be met head on by the cream of the Imperial Navy. The struggle that ensued in the never-ending night among the stars must have been titanic indeed. From our position on the ground we were able to discern quite clearly innumerable flashes in the heavens, as living behemoths of unnaturally sculpted flesh met metal hulls sanctified by the Adeptus Mechanicus in the name of the Emperor, the cleansing fire of their mighty weapons, and the indomitable courage of their crews.[1] [1. Given Cain’s repeated references to the near-constant cloud cover over Hoarfell, we can quite safely conclude that Sulla is exaggerating here for dramatic effect. Readers wanting a rather more accurate account of the battle in space are referred to chapter 87 of Leander Kasmides’ Swatting the Swarm: The Evolution of Imperial Navy Tactics Against the Hive Fleets.]
Though the fighting spirit of both crews and vessels alike remained undiminished the sheer number of tyranid organisms facing them eventually began to tell, in a manner strikingly similar to those instances when their ground dwelling monstrosities face the unyielding resistance of the Imperial Guard. Admiral Bowe quite properly concentrated much of the fire from his battleships against the larger behemoths, hoping thereby to diminish the effectiveness of the fleet as a whole, leaving the smaller tyranid creatures to his cruisers and escorts. Successful as they undoubtedly were in this task, despite the number of vessels crippled or destroyed by the vengeful monstrosities they faced, a goodly number of these insidious organisms were able to slip through the cordon, and, as we’d feared, begin to rain mycetic spores onto the planet below.
By great good fortune the vast majority of these seeds of destruction fell in the wasteland between plateaux, leaving relatively few to drop on the inhabited areas, many of which had been garrisoned by Imperial Guard troopers scarcely less able than those I was privileged to serve with. Suffice it to say that, whatever hopes of an easy victory the malign, inhuman intellect of the hive mind may have entertained, it was in for a rude awakening. Plateau after plateau was able to repulse the invaders, while those centres of population unfortunate enough still to be reliant on the Planetary Defence Forces for succour were evacuated as rapidly as possible.
On Hoarfell, I’m pleased to say, Colonel Kasteen’s far-sighted preparations proved more than adequate, and only one incursion actually succeeded in posing a serious threat to our position in Darien.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“It could simply have been an accident,” Kasteen said, a faint edge of doubt in her voice. “You said yourself they were totally exhausted, and the PDF aren’t exactly the best soldiers in the galaxy to begin with.” Broklaw nodded, and handed me a bowl of tanna, which I took, grateful for the augmetic fingers that let me hold it steady enough to drink without spilling. That morning I’d finally had enough of being prodded and mauled by our medicae, despite the obvious attractions of lounging around in bed while the regiment took on the latest tyranid incursions without me, and hauled myself upright, trying to ignore the waves of nausea that continued to overtake me every time I turned my head too suddenly. The notion that the ’nids might be moving in on our garrison while I lay there oblivious, suffering from nothing worse than what felt like a severe hangover, nagged at my innate sense of paranoia, to the point where nothing would settle my apprehension short of a trip to our command centre to check out the tactical situation for myself.
“I’d advise against it,” the chirurgeon had told me, holding up an indeterminate number of blurry fingers in front of my eyes. “Concussion’s a tricky thing.” He nodded at the pair of augmetic digits on my right hand. “Frak up your brain, and I won’t be able to replace it as easily as those.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” I told him shortly, and smiled to ease the sting of my unthinking retort. “At least for as long as I’ve got one.”
“Well, if you’re determined,” the fellow said, shrugging. I’d been expecting more of an argument, to be honest; only later did it dawn on me that, thanks to my undeserved reputation, he must have taken it for granted that I’d be itching to get back to the front line as quickly as possible and would be in no mood to take no for an answer. Either that, or the prospect of finally being able to rid his hospital of the health hazard posed by Jurgen, who had taken it upon himself to camp in the corridor outside my room for the entire duration of my stay, was too good to pass up. By the time my aide had appeared, a second or two after my nose had first registered his presence, bearing a clean uniform and my battered old weapons, I’d swung my legs off the bed and was beginning to feel more than satisfied with my decision.
It was only after we’d left, of course, that I began to doubt the wisdom of it the first blast of a breeze, quite mild by Hoarfell’s standards, making me stagger as the outer doors swung closed behind us. Jurgen held out a supporting arm, which, after a moment’s understandable hesitation, I took, reasoning that I was at least upwind of him, and that it would do the morale of the regiment, not to mention my status as a Hero of the Imperium, no good at all if I keeled over flat on my arse in front of a building full of sniggering troopers.
“Not far now, sir,” Jurgen assured me, leading the way to a comfortably appointed staff car that he’d managed to appropriate from somewhere, apparently having decided, quite correctly, that I was in no condition (or mood, come to that) to be bouncing around in the back of another Salamander at the moment. I settled into the soft upholstery with an involuntary sigh of relief, reminded of our eventful journey in Keesh’s limousine so shortly after our arrival, although of course this particular vehicle was nowhere near as luxurious as the arbitrator’s personal transport had been.
As Jurgen pulled away from the kerb I found myself recalling that earlier eventful trip, the first occasion after our arrival on which someone had tried to kill me without warning in some detail. That time, at least, my assailants’ motives had been clear enough. Keesh was the intended target, and I’d simply been the victim of an unfortunate case of mistaken identity.
The other attempts on my life had been very different, though, intended to kill me specifically without a shadow of a doubt, but that had been pretty much the only thing they’d had in common. Try as I might, I still couldn’t see any reason why a renegade techpriest would throw in his lot with a coven of Chaos cultists.
Nor, for that matter, why either would go to so much trouble to eliminate me, who hardly posed much of a threat to either of them. At least no one had tried again.
My palms began to tingle, in that old familiar fashion I’d learned to trust over the years. The PDF troopers with the rocket launcher could simply have been over
-excited or incompetent, of course, but they’d come within a hair of killing me just the same, and in a fashion no one could possibly consider deliberate; not unless they had a mind as nasty and devious as mine, anyway.
I voiced my suspicions as soon as I was alone with Kasteen and Broklaw, the two people in the regiment who were as close to friends as it was possible to be, given our respective positions, and the two whose judgement I was most inclined to trust.
Both officers listened in silence as I spoke, nodding as I finished speaking and sat back in my chair with an expectant air.
“If you are right,” the major said, resuming his seat and picking up his own tanna bowl, “you’re going to have Horus’ own time proving it. If they really wanted to kill you out there, why not just lob a krak round at you and make sure of the job?”
Kasteen nodded her agreement. “That would have taken out a Salamander pretty easily,” she pointed out. “Frag warheads are next to useless against an armoured vehicle. It was just a fluke your tracks getting jammed like that.”
“Normally I’d agree,” I said, sipping the fragrant liquid gratefully, “but I was in an open passenger compartment, standing up at the pintel mount. If they’d hit a little closer, I’d have been taken out by the shrapnel as readily as the ’nids.”
“And don’t forget most of fourth squad had a clear view of what was going on,” Broklaw added helpfully, having apparently been struck by a fresh idea. “If it really was another assassination attempt, popping off a krak round against a dispersed target would have seemed distinctly odd to most of them.”
“Whereas a frag rocket was exactly what anyone watching would have been expecting them to use. If they had shredded me, no one would have suspected a thing.” I shrugged ruefully. “Let’s face it, I’d hardly have been the first commissar to be killed by a friendly fire accident.”
“That’s true,” the colonel conceded, with a meaningful glance at Broklaw. It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that as many of my colleagues fall at the hands of the men they’re serving with as to the guns of the enemy, but far more do than is generally admitted, which, given the nature of our job, is hardly surprising. That, incidentally, is why I try to get the young whelps I’m responsible for these days to realise that they’ll do far better by relying on tact and commonsense than the letter of the regulations. (Or at least last a bit longer.) “But why would they want to? It’s not as if you’d executed any of their friends, is it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I sighed, already regretting the impulse to get out of bed. My head was throbbing gently again, as though I’d drunk about three glasses of amasec more than was sensible, but without the consolation of having had the convivial time that ought to have left me feeling that way. “But why would a Chaos cult and a renegade techpriest I’d never heard of be gunning for me either?”
“I’ve no idea,” Kasteen said cautiously. “I imagine that’s more the sort of question your other contacts could answer.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, knowing better than to expect any information from Amberley that she didn’t want to part with. I rubbed my throbbing temples. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m overreacting.”
“Hard not to, when some frakwit nearly blows your head off and feeds you to the ’nids,” Broklaw said tactfully. He shrugged. “If it was one of ours, of course, you could pull them in and question them about it.”
“I could,” I said, an idea beginning to form. Maybe it was the headache, but it seemed a pretty good one to me at the time. “And I still might. The commissariat gives me wide powers of investigation where the security of the Imperial forces is potentially compromised. Can we really be certain that the Gavarronian PDF hasn’t been infiltrated by ’stealers?”
“That canoness seemed pretty positive,” Kasteen reminded me.
“Exactly,” I nodded, then instantly regretted it. “That means Keesh hasn’t run the usual checks on them. If those trolls were hybrids they couldn’t attack the Sisters without blowing their cover, but the chance to take out an Imperial commissar would have been too good to pass up.”
“Especially as the picts have been building you up as the single-handed saviour of the planet,” Broklaw added. He nodded judiciously. “It does make a twisted kind of sense.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. I wobbled to my feet, leaning on Kasteen’s desk for support as I did so, pretending I hadn’t seen the flicker of concern that had passed between my companions. I smiled at Kasteen. “If you don’t mind, I’d like a vox link to the lord general’s office whenever it’s convenient.” Several of our platoons were currently engaged in running battles with ’nid swarms that had dropped from the skies while I’d been enjoying my enforced rest, and our comms net was pretty stretched as a result. Eager as I was to follow this up, it would have to wait until they’d been beaten back, at least for now.
“No problem.” The colonel looked a little puzzled. “May I ask why?”
I smiled grimly. “If I’m right, the Gavarronians should be pulled back from all front line duties at once, pending a full investigation.”
“I see.” Broklaw looked at me sardonically. “Which you’ll conduct, of course.”
“Who better?” I asked rhetorically.
After a few more minutes of chatting quietly and sipping tanna in Kasteen’s office I felt a little more like my usual self, and wandered down to the main command centre to see how the war was getting on. At the time, of course, I had no intention of actually participating in any more of the fighting, which, when you’ve experienced as much of it as I have, has considerably more appeal as a spectator sport. From long habit I’d slipped the comm-bead into my ear as I’d got dressed, as automatically as I’d buckled my weapon belt, and had been keeping half an ear on the signal traffic even while I’d been speaking to Kasteen and Broklaw, so I had a rough idea of the prevailing tactical situation already. But looking at it in the hololith display made everything much clearer, just as I’d expected.
While I’d been taking my enforced nap, it seemed, the nids had been dropping spores all over Hoarfell (and just about everywhere else too, of course, but that wasn’t my problem), and, naturally, obeying the genetically encoded imperatives of their kind, had swarmed towards Darien as rapidly as they could, drawn by the lure of the concentrated biomass the city represented. Kasteen had foreseen this, of course, and deployed our troops where they could harass them as they advanced, breaking up the smaller swarms before they could coalesce, and generally giving the scuttling horrors as hard a time as our people could contrive. And pretty successfully, too, if the display in the hololith could be believed. Most of the lesser broods had been eliminated piecemeal before they had a chance to join up with their siblings, and relatively few had made it through to reinforce the ones that had fallen on the city itself.
“We’ve kept them out of the streets, for the most part,” Kasteen said, indicating our deployment around the outskirts of Darien. “The few that have made it into the urban areas are heading straight for the starport, trying to join up with the group there.” The ghost of a grin flitted across her face. “That means we can ambush and eliminate most of those pretty easily.”
“So your only real problem’s here, at the aerodrome,” I said, noting with some relief that the fears that had driven me from my sickbed were apparently unfounded. So far, at least, none of the broods we’d detected seemed intent on attacking us in our garrison.
Broklaw nodded. “You don’t know the half of it. We’ve got nearly a thousand refugees trapped in the terminal building,” he said. “Evacuated from lower down.”
“Most of them have been stuck there for days,” Kasteen added, “waiting for genetic screening to weed out any hybrids among them, but the justicars have been a bit too busy to deal with that.”
“I can imagine,” I said dryly. The wide open spaces of the landing field had been tailor-made for an invasion force, of course, and our air defence assets could only bring d
own so many of the falling spores. If it hadn’t been for the Navy keeping the bulk of the hive fleet otherwise occupied, we’d have had our hands a lot fuller than they actually were by now. Once again, though, Kasteen had anticipated this very contingency, applying the lessons so painfully learned on the battlefields of Corania, and deployed our forces to keep them bottled up.
“To be honest,” Kasteen said, “the refugees are getting to be almost as much trouble as the ’nids. They can hear the fighting from where they are, and they’re pretty much on edge. The PDF is trying to keep the lid on them, but it’ll only take one idiot to panic and we’ll have a riot to deal with on top of the bugs.”
“Not good,” I said, seeing the problem at once. The last thing the beleaguered defenders needed was a horde of panic-stricken civilians running around blocking our fire lanes, and driving the tyranids into a killing frenzy. As soon as the creatures realised they were within spitting distance of a good square meal they’d surge forward, putting even more strain on our defensive positions. “Are you going to reinforce the line here, just in case?”
Broklaw nodded again. “We’re moving another platoon up as soon as their Chimeras are refuelled and their ammo replenished.” A thought seemed to strike him, and with a sudden quiver of apprehension I knew even before he spoke what he was about to suggest. “You could go in with them if you like.”
“That ought to calm the civilians down,” Kasteen agreed. “Half of them seem to think you’re the greatest warrior since Macharius.”
I looked at them both, cursing the impulse that had dragged me out of a nice cosy sickbed for no good reason, and which looked like dropping me straight into harm’s way again. I could always plead fatigue and weakness, of course, but how much harm would that do to the image I’d acquired of indomitable courage, however unmerited it actually was, and to the loyalty it seemed to inspire among the regiment?
[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls Page 24