Luckily, he’d calmed down enough to see sense in the end[97], and we’d worked out what we hoped would be a more diplomatic approach. After all, the lance batteries weren’t going anywhere, and would always be available as a last resort.
‘And how do you suggest we do that?’ Dysen droned, from the far side of the conference table. If he was at all angered at being dragged up here, he concealed it well, although since Zyvan had travelled to meet him to discuss the genestealer debacle, he could hardly complain about returning the favour. No doubt he would have preferred to be consulted over a vox-link, but on a world where information was constantly being exchanged at a bewildering rate, the only way to keep anything confidential was to discuss it face to face, preferably in a sealed room, and even then your chances were only marginally on the side of success.
Accordingly, we were a small and select gathering. Apart from myself, Zyvan, and Dysen, only El’hassai and Sholer were in the room, although Jurgen lurked just outside it, his lasgun and dubious personal hygiene equally ready to repel attempts at intrusion. Kildhar had protested at her exclusion, of course, but since the Magos Senioris outranked her, and Sholer could answer questions about the research they’d conducted together just as well as she could, her presence was hardly necessary. The Space Marine, on the other hand, was essential. If we were ever going to defend Fecundia successfully, then the Reclaimers had to be kept in the loop. Once again, I seemed to be the only one they were willing to even pretend to listen to, so that meant asking their advice at every opportunity, to keep them engaged in the conversation at all.
The same thing applied to the tau envoy, and I shuddered to think what might be in the reports he was preparing to send home. The only mercy was that, lacking astropaths, the other tau would still be in blissful ignorance of the utter shambles we were making of our end of the arrangement. Zyvan had, of course, offered the use of one of our own choir, through which he could contact the astropath accompanying Donali directly, and El’hassai had, just as politely, refused the offer, knowing full well that he might just as well drop a copy of everything he sent on Zyvan’s desk if he did.
‘It would be quite a task,’ Sholer agreed. ‘Every organism would have to be individually disinterred from the ice, and incinerated, or otherwise rendered incapable of revival. Hardly something which could be done at once; I’d estimate at least a month. And let us not forget we have an unprecedented opportunity to gain a decisive tactical advantage over the tyranids, one I would be loath to throw away.’
‘Quite so,’ Dysen agreed. ‘The genestealer breakout was unfortunate, but the organisms we have frozen are hardly in a position to emulate them.’
‘The commissar and I disagree,’ Zyvan said, his tone remarkably even under the circumstances.
I nodded. ‘I’ve seen how quickly these creatures can revive from hibernation,’ I said. ‘They almost overran Nusquam Fundumentibus after only a handful were thawed out to begin with. The last thing we need is to provide the hive fleet with an army of infiltrators before they’ve even got a spore on the ground.’ I might just as well have saved my breath, of course. Sholer looked as obdurate as only a Space Marine could, Dysen whirred and clicked quietly to himself, equally unmoved, and Zyvan glowered at the pair of them, his choler rising. Seeing that this could only end badly, I turned to the tau, more to divert everyone’s attention than because I expected it to do any good. ‘Envoy, do you have a comment to make?’
To my surprise, El’hassai nodded, doing a good job of looking thoughtful, unless a cogitating tau always looked that much like a ruminative human in private[98]. ‘Both arguments are compelling,’ he said, ever the diplomat, ‘but on balance I’m inclined to agree that disposing of the specimens prematurely would be unwise. If the Apothecary’s research does indeed reveal a weakness in the tyranids, the Greater Good can best be served by allowing him to continue unhindered for as long as possible.’
Tech-priest and Adeptus Astartes alike looked dumbfounded for a moment, then relaxed as this unexpected declaration of support sank in. Zyvan looked equally shocked, then took several deep breaths, a primed grenade willing itself not to explode. I, on the other hand, having spent as much time as I had around diplomats, homed in immediately on the thinly veiled get-out clause.
‘What exactly do you mean by “as long as possible”?’ I asked, making everyone else sit up as they began to digest the implications of the phrase.
El’hassai steepled his fingers, a gesture I had no doubt at all was a practised affectation for the benefit of the gue’la[99] in the room. ‘The dictates of the Greater Good notwithstanding,’ he said, ‘I also share the reservations you and the Lord General have expressed. I would suggest that while Apothecary Sholer and Magos Kildhar continue their endeavours, preparations are made to expunge the specimens quickly should that become necessary.’
‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ Zyvan agreed, seizing on the prospect of a face-saving compromise, to my unspoken relief. Against all the odds, it seemed, the tau was holding this ramshackle alliance together, rather than being the wedge that drove it apart, as I would have expected. He turned to Dysen. ‘Could something like that be rigged up?’
‘It would be a considerable challenge to ensure the physical destruction of so many all at once,’ the Magos Senioris said thoughtfully, ‘but the Omnissiah will undoubtedly guide us to a satisfactory solution. Perhaps venting the fusion reactor into the storage chamber would suffice.’
‘Then we’ll leave that in your capable hands,’ Zyvan said, avoiding any hint of sarcastic inflection by a miracle. ‘Please keep us informed of your progress.’
‘On both endeavours,’ I added, not wanting them to be able to claim they thought we only wanted to know about one or the other. As I’ve remarked before, the seeds of distrust they’d planted by trying to keep us in the dark about Kildhar’s research were germinating nicely, what else haven’t they told us becoming an almost constant refrain in the back of my head. I don’t mind admitting, the sooner we were out of there, and able to leave this benighted rock to its own devices, the better I’d like it.
Now we had at least the appearance of a consensus, the meeting wound down as quickly as possible in a flurry of broad generalisations and non-specific promises of action, everyone eager to be out of there before the others had a chance to change their minds or come up with further reasons to object. Sholer and Dysen departed in the direction of the docking bay as soon as they decently could, followed shortly by El’hassai, no doubt hurrying back to his quarters to compose an appropriately trenchant missive to his superiors, although how he intended to deliver it, I had no idea[100].
‘I want that facility completely surrounded,’ Zyvan said, as soon as the door clicked shut behind the tau. ‘If the ’nids get free, they’ll have to be contained.’
‘That’ll take a lot of manpower,’ I pointed out. ‘Even a full company would be stretched pretty thin, if you deployed them in a wide enough cordon to avoid an orbital bombardment.’
The Lord General smiled. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were a psyker.’
‘I ought to know how your mind works after all this time,’ I said. ‘Besides, it’s what I’d do.’ Which was true enough.
Zyvan nodded. ‘We’ll keep the lance batteries targeted, at least for now. We won’t need them for anything else, unless the hive fleet shows up.’
‘Which, Emperor willing, it won’t,’ I said, tempting fate as usual. I called up the area around Regio Quinquaginta Unus on the tactical display, and considered it carefully. ‘You’ll have to use the Death Korps. None of the other units will stand a chance, being deployed in the open like that.’
‘I hadn’t considered anyone else,’ Zyvan agreed, and shrugged. ‘The problem’s going to be keeping them concealed, though. They’re good at what they do, but that doesn’t generally involve much sneaking about.’
‘I wouldn’t bother trying,’ I said. ‘The cogboys’ll know they’re there anyway. If they sq
uark about it, just tell them you’ve decided to give the shrine some extra protection now you know how vital it is. They won’t believe you, but they won’t risk calling you on it.’
Zyvan chuckled. ‘They won’t have the nads,’ he agreed, which was literally true of most tech-priests, given their penchant for excessive augmentation.
At which point, our amusement was abruptly curtailed, as Jurgen knocked on the door. Even before the booming echo of knuckle against metal had time to die away, let alone either of us call out for him to enter, his aroma burst into the room, followed an instant later by his grime-encrusted face.
‘Sorry to interrupt, sir,’ he said, ‘but we’ve just heard from the scout fleet.’ He sucked his teeth, in the way he always did while trying to find the best way of putting something he knew I wouldn’t want to hear. ‘It doesn’t sound good,’ he added, after a pregnant pause.
I’ve never yet met an astropath I’d describe as sociable, which I suppose is hardly surprising given that at least part of their attention is constantly on the whispering of the warp in their minds, waiting for a message to form. I’m not easily spooked[101], but I can’t deny they make me uneasy. Perhaps it’s the tattoos of warding, a visible reminder that they might be possessed by a daemon at any moment, or perhaps it’s the way their blind, sunken eyes stare at you wherever you are in the room, as though they’re looking directly into your soul.
Madrigel, the most senior astropath on Zyvan’s staff, epitomised most of these traits: gaunt and skeletal, only his head and hands emerging from the shroud of his robe, he lurked inside his chamber like one of the tunnel ghouls said to haunt the lowest depths of the underhive in which I spent the first few years of my life[102]. There was no question of us receiving a message so sensitive in the middle of the command centre, surrounded by witnesses, even if he could have been prised out of his den, so I found myself hunched in the claustrophobic cell in which he lived and worked[103], trying to make him out as best I could through the all-pervading gloom. Having no need of light himself, he hadn’t bothered to kindle one, leaving Zyvan and I to make do with the flickering illumination of the candles beneath the incense burner, which, judging purely by the smell, seemed to contain a smouldering pair of Jurgen’s socks. (My aide, of course, I’d dispatched back to my quarters, having no wish for his secret to be revealed by Madrigel suffering a seizure in front of the Lord General.)
‘What have you got?’ I asked, a little more brusquely than I’d intended, keeping my eyes fixed on the astropath by a considerable effort of will.
His thin lips parted to allow his tongue to dart out, licking them in a faintly reptilian fashion which made my flesh creep. ‘A good deal,’ he replied, in a voice which put me uncomfortably in mind of the wind rustling through the flayed skins hanging from the ramparts of the eldar reaver citadel on Sanguia, ‘very little of which has been rendered in a manner comprehensible to you.’
Which, coming from most people, I’d have considered an outrageous and deliberate insult, but given Madrigel’s vocation it was probably no more than the literal truth. When I’d first been spat out by the schola progenium I’d assumed, like most of the line troopers I was serving alongside (or behind, if the enemy were about), that astropaths were little more than living vox-sets, capable of parroting anything dictated or shown to them. Only much later in my career, as I blundered my way into the upper echelons of the Imperial military, did I begin to apprehend the truth, that the crisply-worded dispatches and grainy pict feeds from outside whichever stellar system I happened to be desperate to vacate at the time had arrived in the form of fragmentary images and sensations in the mind of a sanctioned psyker, probably only marginally sane to begin with. Only after long and arduous processing could the original meaning be disentangled from whatever the astropath had first tried to transcribe, an undertaking which often involved the use of other sanctionites as filters, and which typically took far more time than the fluid situation in an active war zone could easily afford.
‘Then just tell us what we need to know,’ Zyvan said. ‘What have you heard from the scout fleet?’
‘Heard?’ The darting tongue tasted the air again. ‘Nothing. Babble. Still being worked on. But we all felt it. The whole choir.’
‘Felt what?’ I asked, already sure I wouldn’t like the answer. I was right, I didn’t.
‘Fear,’ Madrigel said, his dry whisper hanging in the air for several heartbeats. ‘The astropaths on the scout ships were all terrified.’
‘Doesn’t mean much,’ Zyvan said bluntly, trying to sound as though he meant it. ‘They’d been inside the warp shadow, cut off from the rest of the universe. Hardly surprising they would have found it upsetting.’
‘More of a blessed relief,’ Madrigel croaked, with absolute sincerity. ‘If there’s anywhere in the galaxy a psyker would feel at peace, it’s inside the shadow around a hive fleet.’
‘Apart from the tyranids coming after them,’ I added, feeling it was about time somebody in the room paid attention to the real issue. To my surprise, the astropath nodded.
‘Exactly,’ he pronounced sibilantly. ‘Which they did. There are many echoes of pain and fear, the smell of blood and burning. We don’t have the details, but the fleet has been in combat.’
‘That’s not good,’ I said, with considerable understatement. Their orders had been simply to observe and report, avoiding contact if at all possible. ‘Any idea how much of a mauling they took?’
‘A bad one,’ Madrigel said, and the last faint hope I’d clung to flickered and died. ‘Ships were lost.’
‘How many?’ Zyvan asked, his voice grim.
‘That will not be known until the processing is complete,’ Madrigel replied, his tongue flickering again. It was almost hypnotic, and I forced myself to concentrate on the rest of his face, which was hardly an improvement, all things considered. ‘But more than one.’
‘How about the survivors?’ I asked. ‘They must have got away if they’re back outside the shadow.’
‘Damaged,’ the astropath said. ‘Wounded. Traumatised.’ It was hard to tell if he was talking about the ships, their crews, or both; members of his order tended to talk in metaphor half the time anyway, worse than ecclesiarchs. ‘Limping home to lick their wounds.’
Zyvan and I exchanged troubled glances, the same thing occurring to both of us. There was only one world within reach where the battered fleet might hope to find the facilities they needed to repair any significant combat damage, and we were currently in orbit around it.
‘They’re heading here,’ I said, and Madrigel nodded.
‘They are. We can feel the connection with the minds of our brethren growing stronger with each passing hour.’
‘Then the ’nids will be right behind them,’ Zyvan said. That much was a given. Engaging with the hive fleet would have alerted it to the presence of prey, and, at the very least, a portion of it would be detached to follow the survivors, to see how much else was on the snack trolley. If we were really unlucky, the whole damn pack of them would be heading in our direction by now.
‘I’ll warn the cogboys,’ I said, my mouth dry, keeping my voice steady with a supreme effort. Our worst fears had just come to pass. All I could hope now was that the warning we’d been given would be enough to prepare for their arrival.
Editorial Note:
Unsurprisingly, Cain devotes no more of his attention to the fate of the scouting expedition. Accordingly, I’ve appended the following extracts, in order to place his account of events into a somewhat wider context.
Transcript of evidence given by Captain Nansi Blakit of the frigate Amazon to the board of enquiry into the loss of the vessels Egregious, Cleansing Flame, Emperor’s Hammer and Xenovore, 485992.M41.
Captain Blakit: We made all speed to the estimated position of the hive fleet, based on the information the tau had given us. In the light of the danger our orders put us in, I commanded the crew to charge weapons, and to prepare for incoming fire before m
aking the transition back into the materium.
Admiral Jaymstea Flynt (Chairman): A precaution also taken by the captains of the other vessels in the flotilla?
Captain Blakit: I believe so. None of them being blithering idiots with a death wish.
Codifier Mallum (Administratum observer, recorder of minutes): May I remind the captain that speculation and personal opinion are not evidence?
Admiral Flynt: You may not. Captain Blakit’s record speaks for itself, and any observations an officer of her experience sees fit to make are pertinent to this enquiry.
Captain Blakit: That’s telling her, Uncle Jym.
Admiral Flynt: Strike that last remark from the record. Carry on, Nansi.
Captain Blakit: There was nothing on the auspex, although we knew we must be close. None of the astropaths could get through to the main fleet, so we must have emerged inside the warp shadow cast by the tyranids.
Codifier Mallum: Speculation…
Admiral Flynt: Quiet, Mallum. You’re not the only drone around here who can push a quill.
Captain Blakit: So Commodore Stocker dispersed the fleet. Not much, but with a mean separation of about fifty million kilometres. I told him it was a bad idea, but he wouldn’t listen.
Inquisitor Vail (Ordo Xenos observer): Why so?
Captain Blakit: He was in command. He had every right to disagree with the opinion of a more junior officer.
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