[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  A trio of the refugees was advancing through the parting crowd, ignoring everyone else completely: an old man, a young woman, and a teenage boy. The woman and the boy were horrifying enough to behold, their eyes blank, and the hair around their heads waving wildly as though caught in a gale that no one else could feel, but the old man was a thousand times worse, levitating across the floor on bolts of lightning which sparked and crashed around him. Cackling maniacally he flung out a hand, and the eldritch discharge enveloped the lictor. The creature reeled back, shrieking and after a moment the girl muttered something conjuring a bolt of seething plasma out of thin air. With a feral grin on her face she sent it spinning across the concourse with a flick of her wrist, to burst against the pile of furniture I was cowering behind.

  “Avaunt, witch, in the name of the Emperor!” A balding middle-aged man in the robes of a minor ecclesiarch stepped out of the crowd, brandishing an aquila, his voice echoing resonantly around the concourse as he began to chant the rites of exorcism. The boy turned his head, an expression of contempt on his face, and stared at him as though the man was something he’d just found on the sole of his shoe.

  “What’s the Emperor ever done for us?” he asked, and the ecclesiarch fell to the floor as though punched in the face, writhing and screaming like a man possessed. “Only the True Powers can save us now.”

  Panic-stricken, I glanced from one menace to another; the lictor, still wreathed in eldritch energy, striking out at random in its agony, and the trio of psykers, approaching me inexorably. At least the ’nid was out of the fight for the time being, however temporarily, so I fired at the nearest witch. The lasbolt burst against the old man’s shield of lightning, and he cackled again, clearly no saner than the average Chaos cultist.

  “This is Cain,” I voxed frantically, shifting my aim just as the girl flung another bolt of warp plasma in my general direction. I ducked, and it impacted on the bellowing lictor, making it stagger. It might have killed the thing altogether if the ethereal discharge still crackling about it hadn’t absorbed some of the energy, but that’s Chaos for you. Even when they’re trying to co-operate, its acolytes tend to tread on one another’s toes. “The ’nids are inside the terminal! Psykers too!”

  I cracked off a shot at plasma girl, and she staggered, a bloody wound opening up on her torso. I expected her to fall, but the arcane energies she was manipulating seemed to be sustaining her, and she merely smiled grimly, conjuring another of the hellish bolts out of thin air. As I ducked back into cover the boy caught my eye, our gazes locking, and a tidal wave of despair flooded through me. There was no point in fighting any more that much was obvious. Their victory was certain, so was that of Chaos, and it was only a matter of time before the forces they served swept forth from the Eye of Terror to expunge the Imperium from the stars as though it had never been. Even the Emperor would fall, his soul shredded to sate the obscene appetites of daemons…

  For a hideous, endless instant, I felt myself teetering on the brink of insanity, then my tenacious survival instinct kicked in, and I fought it, as hard as I’d fought for my soul on Slawkenberg. The Ruinous Powers hadn’t managed to claim it then, despite their worst efforts, and they wouldn’t now, damn it.

  I drew in a deep breath, headily redolent of Jurgen, and snapped back to myself, suddenly aware that my aide had joined me behind the fused and melted remains of the pile of furniture that offered us the only shelter in sight, unslinging his lasgun as he did so, clearly reluctant to use the melta again with so many innocents in the way. The impossible nightmare the young psyker had somehow planted in my mind began to dwindle away, rapidly becoming as intangible and meaningless as any other dream does on waking.

  “Liar!” I roared, and the youngster’s eyes widened in shock, an instant before a vengeful lasbolt from my pistol spattered his brain, along with the taint of Chaos that permeated it, over both his companions. The priest went quiet too, apparently no longer under the dreamcaster’s baleful influence, although whether he eventually recovered his wits I have no idea.

  The other two slowed their advance, apparently no longer quite as sure as they had been of victory, and the girl staggered a little, as though beginning to feel the effect of her wound. The old man seemed a little closer to the floor now too, the eldritch energies crackling around him not quite as potent as they had been, and I began to feel a flare of hope. Jurgen, it seemed, was disrupting their powers even at this distance. A desperate idea began to form.

  “We need to close with them,” I said, and Jurgen nodded, accepting this apparently suicidal order as calmly as if I’d just asked for a bowl of tanna.

  “Ready when you are, sir,” he assured me, producing what looked like an unfeasibly large bayonet from the collection of equipment he was habitually festooned with, and clipping it to the barrel of his gun with precise and economical movements.

  “I never doubted it,” I assured him, and we popped off another couple of shots each to distract the witches again. Behind us the lictor staggered into the frame of the door, lashing out randomly with its rending claws and tearing a jagged lump of bronze out of it, while the surviving PDF troopers continued to pepper its immediate surroundings with badly aimed lasbolts. “Go!”

  We scrambled over the remains of the barricade, ripping the hem of my greatcoat in the process, and charged towards the astonished heretics, firing as we went. Both reeled back a pace or two under the impact of the hail of lasbolts, but their strange immunity to the full effect of them seemed to hold until we’d closed to within a handful of yards. The girl, her face panic-stricken, tried to conjure another ball of seething destruction into existence, but it fizzled and vanished in the air between us, and the old man fell suddenly to the floor as his shield of lightning abruptly disappeared. With a bellow of anger and revulsion I swiped his head from his shoulders with my chainsword before he had a chance to react, and watched it bounce a couple of times before coming to rest, glaring back at me in posthumous indignation.

  “How…?” the girl started to ask, before it apparently began to dawn on her that most of her torso was missing. Her knees buckled, an expression of stunned incomprehension flickered briefly across her face, and the light went out of her eyes. As she slumped to the floor, the grimace of baffled surprise fading into the slackness of death, most of the civilians around us made the sign of the aquila and spat on the three twitching bodies.

  “Well done, Jurgen,” I said, breathing hard. But of course it wasn’t over yet. The death of the psykers had released the lictor from their unnatural influence, and it lunged back into the attack, flinging aside the pile of furniture that barred its way in its eagerness to get to us.

  Jurgen and I braced ourselves to meet the monster’s charge, while the civilians scattered around us like gretchin and the PDF troopers hovered irresolute, apparently afraid to shoot at it again in case they hit us. Before we could fire our own weapons, though, the roar of a powerful engine echoed through the cavernous building and a Chimera appeared from nowhere, bouncing up the steps and ricocheting off the much-abused doors with a sound like a bell tower collapsing. Grifen’s head and shoulders were visible, sticking through the top hatch, and she waved as she caught sight of us.

  “Sorry we took so long getting here,” she voxed. “Our driver broke his arm when a carnifex tried to overturn us, and it took a moment to get someone else on the controls.”

  “Your timing’s impeccable,” I assured her, wondering how she expected to deal with the chitinous horror still limping towards us at an astonishing rate despite its wounds. The Chimera’s heavy bolters would have been lethal to the civilians cluttering up the place if she’d tried to use them, and the hull-mounted lasguns were all positioned to cover its flanks. I soon had my answer, though. Instead of stopping to disembark the troopers, as I’d expected, the blocky vehicle simply roared on into the concourse, flattening the remains of the barricade as it came, and reducing the astonished lictor to a large, unpleasant stain beneath its tre
ads before it had a chance to react. “Nice driving, Magot.”

  “You’re welcome, commissar,” the familiar cheerful tones of one of my perennial disciplinary problems assured me, before taking on a faintly puzzled air. “How did you know it was me?”

  “Lucky guess,” I told her, feeling a sudden overwhelming urge to sit down. The civilians were all babbling at me, apparently taking my desperate charge at the psykers as confirmation of everything they’d ever heard about my legendary courage under fire, my head was pounding again, and nothing around me seemed to make any sense at all.

  Well, almost nothing. Jurgen coughed diffidently, and produced a thermal flask from somewhere among his collection of pouches.

  “Tanna, sir?” he suggested. Without thinking I nodded, then winced at the inevitable result.

  “Thank you, Jurgen,” I said, once my vision had cleared again. “I think we’ve earned it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked, masking my considerable surprise with some difficulty.

  Keesh nodded. “Absolutely. It took a bit of digging once we’d identified your rogue psykers, but we’ve been able to establish their movements for the last few years with a fair degree of accuracy.” He brought up the data on the hololith in the centre of the conference table, and Amberley nodded, as though it merely confirmed something she’d long suspected. “They have a number of associates in common, of course, as you’d expect, but nothing away from their home plateau except this.”

  “It could just be a coincidence,” I said, despite the tingling in the palms of my hands that insisted otherwise. “There are still gaps in the records.”

  “That’s hardly surprising under the circumstances,” Amberley pointed out mildly. Although it seemed we had the tyranids on the run at last, having held on to all the major population centres and retaken a few of the ones they’d overrun, the war was still a long way from being over. The Navy had finally broken the back of the hive fleet, forcing what was left of it to withdraw in search of easier pickings, and the rain of spores had ceased almost a week ago. Nevertheless there were more than enough of the creatures left on the ground to pose a considerable problem for the Guard and what was left of the PDF for a long time to come. Even when the last of the plateaux were finally cleared, we’d still have the uncountable numbers of ravening organisms swarming in the deserts between them to deal with.

  At least that problem that was diminishing by the day. Now that they’d run out of bioships to kill the Navy were doing their best to pick off the largest concentrations from orbit, paying particular attention to any digestion pools capable of spawning reinforcements. Orbital bombardment could only achieve so much against so widely dispersed an enemy, though, and the last die-hard survivors would have to be tracked down and finished off the old-fashioned way. That wouldn’t be my problem though, thank the Emperor. Ordinary humans couldn’t even hope to survive in that hellish environment, let alone fight in it, and the honour of finally declaring Periremunda free of the xenos taint would fall to one of the Astartes Chapters.

  I nodded in agreement, still pleasantly surprised by the lack of nausea the motion produced. I hadn’t exactly been resting in the couple of weeks since my nerve-shredding encounter in the starport terminal, but I hadn’t seen much actual combat either, dividing the bulk of my time between the routine tasks of my office, pursuing my request for an investigation of the Gavarronian PDF now things had become quiet enough to devote some attention to the matter, and evading the local pictcasts, which were bordering on hagiography these days, after what everyone seemed determined to believe was my heroic single-handed defence of a thousand civilians against a horde of ravening tyranids and a coven of Chaos worshippers.

  Keesh’s request for a private meeting to discuss some highly sensitive matters had come as something of a surprise (as had Amberley’s presence in the conference chamber, which had been an even greater, and far more welcome, one), which I’d seized on gratefully, hoping that decamping to Principia Mons without warning would at least allow me to get though the next couple of days without some idiot shoving an imagifer in my face and asking me to comment on some momentous issue I’d never heard about before.

  “Quite true,” I said. The bulk of the records I was looking at had been recovered from Skywest[1] by an elite squad of justicars under Nyte’s personal supervision within hours of the ’nids being driven off from there, and had been classified so secret I wasn’t entirely sure that even Zyvan was allowed to look at them.[2] I nodded at several names, linked to the three we were interested in by thin red lines. “Are any of these people available for questioning?” [1. The home plateau of the three psykers Cain and Jurgen had encountered on Hoarfell.] [2. He would have been, hail I seen any reason to bring them w his attention.]

  “Not unless you want to stick your head down a tyranid’s throat and shout ‘anyone at home?’ ” Amberley said dryly.

  Keesh looked mildly disapproving of the note of levity creeping into the proceedings. “Our best indications are that none of them survived the tyranid assault on Skywest,” he said primly, “but we can still draw certain inferences from the way they appear to have interacted.”

  “A Chaos cult,” I said, recognising the signs. “Or at least a local cell of one.”

  Amberley nodded, looking a little surprised at the speed of my deduction, but I’d encountered such things often enough before to realise what I was looking at almost at once.

  “That would be my interpretation too,” Keesh said. “Although it does seem rather unusual for a group that small to have three members proficient in warpcraft.” He directed an enquiring look at the inquisitor.

  “It does,” Amberley confirmed. “Which is why the other lead should be followed up as quickly as possible.” She looked at me, smiling cheerfully, and I tried to suppress a shiver of apprehension. “Fortunately Ciaphas has given us the perfect opportunity to do just that.”

  “I have?” I asked. I indicated the hololith. “I grant you that they all visited Gavarrone at least once in the past five years, but my business there is entirely with the PDF.” After a lot of memos, and some unashamed trading on my reputation to get things moving, I’d finally got the Munitorum to agree that I might as well follow up the incident on Aceralbaterra myself in the absence of any local commissar capable of handling the case.[1] As nothing else had happened in the meantime to raise any questions about the local militia’s loyalty the chances were it was going to turn out to be a complete waste of time after all, but at least it would keep me comfortably away from the mopping up operation for a day or two. “I don’t see how I can follow this up as well.” [1. Though the Gavarronian PDF would, in theory, be under the jurisdiction of a commissar specifically attached to them, in practice the luckless individual in question had been given the task of overseeing morale and disciplinary matters for the PDF of the entire system, along with those of another thirty-seven equally sparsely settled Imperial worlds within the sector. As a result, Commissar Banning spent almost all his time in his cabin aboard one starship after another, drinking heavily, leaving the vast majority of the troopers nominally under his care in blissful ignorance of his existence.]

  “You won’t have to,” Amberley assured me. “But your enquiry into the friendly fire incident will be the perfect cover for a bit of discreet poking around into some other matters too.”

  “Like what?” I asked, feeling less and less happy.

  Amberley looked at me like one of my old schola tutors pointing out that I’d missed something obvious. “Well, you’re assuming that if the PDF on Gavarrone has been penetrated, it’s by genestealer hybrids. That is perfectly possible, of course, but the Imperium has other hidden enemies too, don’t forget.”

  “You really think there’s a Chaos cult hiding out in the middle of an Ecclesiarchy fiefdom?” I asked, unable to keep a note of incredulity out of my voice.

  Amberley shrugged. “Why not?” she asked.

&n
bsp; I felt my jaw working spasmodically for a moment before I could articulate a coherent reply. “Well for one thing, Eglantine and her singing harpies would have burned the lot of them for heretics years ago,” I pointed out reasonably.

  Amberley merely shrugged again. “If they’d even noticed,” she said, completely unperturbed by my manifest incredulity. “In my experience people like her tend to take an awful lot for granted.”

  “Well, I’ll let you know if I find anything,” I said, hoping to move the conversation on to safer ground. Amberley’s smile stretched, and I felt the shiver of apprehension grow stronger.

  “There won’t be any need for that,” she assured me happily. “I’ll be coming along too.” Then she smiled coquettishly. “I’ve always thought I look good in a uniform.”

  Well, she was right about that anyway, which was something of a consolation. She grinned at me happily from beneath a standard issue Valhallan uniform cap, its dark fur contrasting well with her pale complexion and blonde hair. The greatcoat that went with it was unfastened, revealing well-filled fatigues beneath, but an absence of body armour that had surprised me at first. Then again, this wasn’t supposed to be a combat assignment. Nevertheless, I had no doubt that she’d be as discreetly protected as she had been on Gravalax, despite the absence of any visible precautions.