Greater Good

by Sandy Mitchell

  Inquisitor Vail: I mean, why was it a bad idea?

  Captain Blakit: I thought it would be more prudent to keep the fleet close enough for the ships to be able to support one another with overlapping fire arcs. Captain Warka of the Hirundin agreed with me.

  Admiral Flynt: But the commodore didn’t?

  Captain Blakit: He felt we’d stand a better chance of returning an auspex echo with the fleet dispersed. As soon as one vessel got a contact it was supposed to vox the others, and we’d all rendezvous around it.

  Inquisitor Vail: Tyranid bioships are notoriously difficult to detect at a distance.

  Captain Blakit: That was the problem. By the time the Xenovore was close enough to be sure she had a hard return, the tyranids had detected her as well. Probably from a lot further away. She was jumped by a swarm of the smaller drones, backed up by a couple of things the size of cruisers. We all responded to her mayday, but we were so widely dispersed that even the closest ship didn’t pick it up until over two minutes after it was transmitted.

  Admiral Flynt: That was the Egregious?

  Captain Blakit: It was, the only cruiser in the squadron. Commodore Stocker’s flagship. The Emperor’s Hammer and Cleansing Flame arrived about three minutes after she did, just as the Xenovore blew up. The tyranids were already aboard and overrunning her. Detonating the plasma core was the only option the poor bastards had left.

  Codifier Mallum: More speculation? Or do you have hard evidence that the Xenovore was scuttled deliberately?

  Captain Blakit: I can show you the pict feed of their chief engineer overloading the reactors just before he was ripped apart by hormagaunts, if you like. You might find it educational.

  Admiral Flynt: You were receiving datafeeds from the Xenovore at this point?

  Captain Blakit: From all four vessels engaged with the enemy. Commodore Stocker ordered the rest of us to withdraw, and get the intelligence we’d gathered back to the main fleet. Captain Warka and I protested, but he threatened both of us with a court martial if we attempted to intervene.

  Inquisitor Vail: Very wise. If you’d tried, you’d be dead too, and we wouldn’t have a clue what killed you. I take it the tyranids were reinforcing the whole time?

  Captain Blakit: They were. We held station as long as we could, in case any survivors got off, but it was hopeless. The Emperor’s Hammer got some saviour pods away, but they were grabbed or swallowed by the drones. The screaming on the vox…

  Admiral Flynt: Were any of the surviving ships attacked?

  Captain Blakit: We all were. The void was full of them. Captain Warka took overall command of what was left of the squadron, as he had seniority, but we were still so widely dispersed it was impossible to coordinate a defensive strategy. We hung on as long as possible, to get as much of the datafeeds as we could record, but one by one we were forced to retreat back into the warp or be destroyed ourselves.

  Admiral Flynt: And after you’d made the transit?

  Captain Blakit: We rendezvoused in open space, outside the shadow, where our astropaths could make contact again. Assessed the damage, and ran for Fecundia, hoping we could get patched up enough to fight before the tyranids made planetfall.

  Inquisitor Vail: You seem very certain that that would be their next target.

  Captain Blakit: We were. The astropaths told us. The boundary of the shadow had shifted. Only one thing I know could account for that: the tyranids had changed direction to follow us.

  From The Crusade and After: A Military History of the Damocles Gulf, by Vargo Royz, 058.M42.

  The dire news brought by the battered survivors of the Imperial Navy scout squadron was soon in the hands of Battlefleet Damocles, and preparations for its deployment were made accordingly. From all over the sector, ships began to converge on the forge world Fecundia, determined to preserve it, for if it fell, the Imperium’s ability to fight on against these ghastly creatures would be dealt a crippling blow. The majority, of course, were to pass through the Quadravidia system, which itself had remained in Imperial hands only by a near miracle so short a time before.

  The tau, meanwhile, had turned their attention to fortifying a handful of worlds across the recently contested border between the two powers, seemingly unaware that at least some elements of the oncoming hive fleet had changed course away from them or, if they were, still fearing that these remained the most likely targets for the full fury of the tyranid invaders. In either event, they showed no inclination to divert any of their assets to the direct defence of an Imperial world, nor did the Imperium feel inclined to ask the xenos for their assistance.

  So it was that both partners in the uneasy alliance looked first to their own, and awaited the onslaught.

  FIFTEEN

  The news that the tyranids were on their way swept Fecundia like one of the bone-scouring winds continually ravaging the surface, and did about as much damage in the process. Most of the Guard units held steady, of course, largely due to the fact that the majority of regiments on planet had never encountered the scuttling horrors before, and I spent several days inspecting outposts and garrisons to spout encouraging platitudes, assuring them that if they could face down orks, eldar, and the dupes of the Ruinous Powers they could certainly send the hive fleet packing. The Death Korps were the exception, as in so many things, having lost scores of their number to a splinter fleet the year before, but, typically, were too heavily dosed up on combat drugs to care. As usual, the only thing that seemed to bother them was the prospect of not taking enough of the enemy with them when they fell[104]. Needless to say, this was an attitude I found hard to understand, but quite comforting, given that I fully intended to keep them between me and the onrushing horde.

  The real damage the news did was among the civilian population, of course. I must admit the cogboys managed to hold up surprisingly well, most of them making a reasonable fist of hiding their apprehension, but the foundry workers had no such inhibitions about expressing their emotions, and Kyper and his skitarii spent as much time suppressing riots as they did preparing the planet’s defences. Most of the thralls who weren’t out causing trouble preferred to spend their time in the temples of the Omnissiah praying for deliverance, although I gather they drifted back to the production lines quickly enough once the tech-priests started telling them He’d find the job a lot easier if they built up a good stockpile of arms and ammunition first.

  The only good news was the arrival of the battered remnants of the scout fleet, which reinforced our orbital defences a little, followed in short order by a steady stream of warships from all across the sector. Within a month Fecundia was surrounded by a hundred vessels[105], which went some way towards easing my mind. If Kildhar’s enhancements to the sensoria really worked as well as she seemed to think, it would take a very determined assault to land anything on the planet capable of hurting us.

  Of course determination was practically synonymous with the ’nids, so I didn’t rest entirely easily, not least because she and Sholer still had their collection of deep-frozen death and destruction stashed away beneath the foundations of Regio Quinquaginta Unus, and, despite their reassurances, I was far less sanguine about it not thawing out at the worst possible moment than they seemed to be.

  A concern I’m bound to say that Zyvan shared, and voiced aloud the morning I wandered into the operations centre aboard the flagship to find him staring at the hololith in a thoughtful manner. The festering globe of Fecundia was surrounded by glittering fireflies, colour coded to differentiate the warships from the cargo haulers, and I nodded in an approving manner. The net seemed as tight as we could make it, and anything attempting to land would have a hard time getting down unvaporised.

  ‘Heard anything from Madrigel?’ I greeted him, still clinging to the hope that the ’nids would realise the pickings were better among the tau, despite the improbability of such a development, and he shook his head.

  ‘Nothing good,’ he said. ‘None of our astropaths can detect a thing.’


  ‘Then we’re inside the shadow,’ I said, while a prickle of apprehension danced across my scalp.

  ‘We are.’ Zyvan nodded grimly. ‘There might be a few more ships on the way in, but we can’t count on that. And, bar any news they bring if they do turn up, the next thing we’ll know is the arrival of the ’nids.’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to hope Kildhar knows what she was doing to the auspexes,’ I said, feeling an almost irresistible urge to thumb my palm as I spoke.

  ‘I just hope she knows what she’s doing in that bloody meat locker,’ Zyvan rejoined. ‘They still haven’t worked out how the genestealers escaped, and that was bad enough.’

  ‘Sholer should be keeping an eye on her,’ I said, trying to sound less apprehensive than I felt. I hadn’t known the Apothecary all that well aboard the Revenant, having been unconscious for most of our time together[106], but he seemed to take his duty as seriously as any other Space Marine, which was about as reliable as you could get. ‘And the other Adeptus Astartes have got the analyticum pretty well locked down.’

  ‘Well, you’d know, I suppose,’ Zyvan said, sounding far from convinced. ‘You’ve served with them.’

  And seen them torn to shreds by the genestealers infesting the Spawn of Damnation; not the most comforting of thoughts, so I suppressed it firmly. Even more firmly than the associated idea that it would take a lot more than Yail and his combat squad[107] to keep a swarm that size bottled up if it decided it would rather be somewhere else.

  ‘How are the Navy contingent?’ I asked, looking again at the cloud of contact icons surrounding the leprous image of the forge world beneath us. A few warships were accompanied by runes indicating that they were still under repair, which was hardly surprising. Pretty much the first thing most of the captains had done was take advantage of the orbital docks to bring their vessels up to peak fighting efficiency, which was fine by me. The vast majority were registering as fully armed, crewed[108], and ready to get stuck in, which was something of a relief, but only a partial one. I’ve never been all that keen on being aboard a spaceship under fire, particularly since my mercifully short attempt to breathe vacuum aboard the Hand of Vengeance, and the pict images of the horrors which had overwhelmed the tau explorators were still far too fresh in my mind for comfort as well. The thought of playing tag with those things around the corridors of the battleship[109] was far from inviting, and I couldn’t help wondering if, formidable as it seemed, the fleet would be enough to check the advance of the tyranid hive.

  Zyvan shrugged. ‘Impatient,’ he said, which didn’t surprise me either. Most of the admirals I’d met were firm believers in carrying the fight to the enemy, an ethos the Navy as a whole subscribed to wholeheartedly, and I didn’t imagine twiddling their thumbs in orbit waiting to be shot at would sit at all well with the majority of the fleet.

  ‘Have the analysts got anywhere with the intelligence the scouts brought back?’ I asked, which was as close as I felt like coming to asking the real question on my mind: was the hive fleet big enough to give the matelots a bloody nose, or would the first assault be pushed back in short order?

  ‘Still chewing through it,’ Zyvan said, a remarkably tactless choice of words under the circumstances. ‘But we know there’s at least a couple of leviathans among them. Possibly more, judging by the number of smaller bioships the imagifers recorded.’

  Which was far from good news. Our only chance of killing one of the void-swimming giants would be to swarm it, and that would mean clearing a path through its screening escorts first. Large as the fleet around Fecundia was, it would be a very closely fought engagement indeed if it came down to that.

  ‘We need an edge,’ I said, uneasily aware that I was echoing Sholer’s words of justification for keeping his precious specimens intact. Maybe it was time to press him and Kildhar for some results.

  ‘We do,’ Zyvan said, unenthusiastically, coming to the same conclusion. ‘Think you can get some simple answers out of your Apothecary friend?’

  ‘Not if he doesn’t want to give us any,’ I said. My good standing with the Reclaimers had already won us more concessions than anyone else would have got out of a member of the Adeptus Astartes determined to mind his own business, but I was under no illusion that I could push that any further than I already had. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to ask.’ It was beginning to dawn on me that a diplomatic errand to consult Sholer in person would be just the thing to get me out of the firing line when the fleets engaged.

  ‘Then ask, by all means,’ Zyvan said, his enthusiasm for the proposal probably having as much to do with being able to get on with the war without having a scarlet-sashed backseat driver querying his every move[110] as with any expectation of a satisfactory answer.

  ‘I’ll get right on it,’ I said, in blissful ignorance of the consequences to come.

  To my relief, commandeering an Aquila was simple enough this time around, the locals having been considerate enough not to disrupt my travel plans with any more destructive mishaps. The atmosphere in the hangar bay was markedly different from our last flight, however, the tiny utility craft awaiting us dwarfed by the Furies and Starhawks[111] being fuelled and armed all around it. Jurgen and I walked towards our transport through a maelstrom of frantic activity: deckhands lugging armoured cables as thick as an ork’s forearm, small trains of warheads trundling past on wheeled trolleys and the stomping bulk of Sentinel power lifters, all reducing our progress to an erratic waltz, as we changed direction with every step to avoid a fresh obstruction. Servitors were everywhere too, of course, carrying loads too bulky or dangerous to be handled by the unaugmented, and there seemed to be an inordinate number of red-robed Mechanicus adepts about the place, chanting litanies, burning incense and sanctifying the systems of the spaceborne weapon platforms on which our very survival was so shortly to depend.

  ‘What kept you?’ our pilot greeted us, with a cheery wave through the armourglass cockpit canopy, his voice crackling a little through the comm-bead in my ear.

  ‘Sightseeing,’ I replied briefly, in no mood for banter, but well aware that distracting him with a visible show of annoyance was hardly the best way to ensure our safe and speedy delivery to our destination. The pilot nodded, taking the hint, and went back to checking his instrumentation, while my aide and I strode aboard and took our seats.

  Our departure was as straightforward as these things ever are, the deckplates on which the small vessel was parked falling away gently beneath us, seemingly in concert with the rising pitch of the engines. Slowly we began to move towards the gaping maw of the inner lock gates, the metre-thick slabs of metal grinding closed as we passed through them. As usual, it took several minutes to extract the air before their outer counterparts started moving apart, gradually revealing a speckling of pin-sharp stars, most of which were promptly occluded by the cankerous face of the forge world below. During this enforced wait the pilot kept us hovering, balanced in place on the manoeuvring thrusters, which greatly raised my opinion of his skills. It would have been no easy task in the cross-currents created by the air pumps, and most shuttle jockeys would have set down on the deck to make life a little easier.

  We drifted out into the void at last, surrounded by a faint puff of ice crystals from the residue of air the pumps had been unable to extract, and I looked about us, noting the visible signs of readiness to face the oncoming storm. A squadron of Furies coasted past with flaring engines, one of the groups screening the flagship from enemy drones, and, glancing back, I could see a score or more others clamped to the hull, awaiting the call to action[112].

  Everywhere I looked in the sky, it seemed, a loose star was drifting, its motion obvious against the fixed backdrop of the galaxy: the unmistakable spoor of a spacecraft, too far away to make out, but betrayed to the naked eye by the light reflecting from its hull.

  ‘There’s a lot of them,’ Jurgen remarked, although whether this was intended as reassurance or simply an observation I had no idea.


  ‘Good,’ I said, turning my attention to the world towards which we were descending. It looked no more inviting than it had on any of the previous occasions I’d done so, the portions of the surface visible between the thick clouds of airborne waste resembling nothing so much as rotting offal. Even the lights of the hives had little chance of punching through the murk, which was being stirred up across half the southern hemisphere by one of the periodic storms capable of laying waste to entire continents (assuming the vast midden had anything so clearly identifiable as a continent to lay waste to, of course). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help trying to pick out our destination, or, at least, its general location.

  Occupied as I was in this futile endeavour, it took me a moment to realise that our pilot was throwing us around in a rather more violent manner than usual. Fortunately the Aquila’s internal gravity field was remaining steady, or Jurgen and I would have been flung against the bulkheads hard enough to have broken bones. As it was, the rapid oscillation of the planet across the viewport was my first clue that things were beginning to go as wrong as they usually did.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I voxed the pilot, trying to keep an edge of testiness from my voice. It seemed as though he had his hands full, and none of the reasons that I could think of for that made distracting him now a particularly good idea.

  ‘We’ve got incoming,’ he told me, in a voice which didn’t have to add so shut up and let me get on with my job to append that particular message. Leaving him to it seemed like the best idea, so I switched channels and spoke to Zyvan instead.

  ‘Kildhar’s modified auspexes are picking something up,’ the Lord General told me, in tones of some surprise. ‘They started returning echoes about thirty seconds ago, and the Navy scrambled everything they’ve got to intercept.’ Which explained the violent manoeuvring, at least; our pilot must have been jumping around to get out of the way of the fighter squadrons.