[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand

by Sandy Mitchell

'Here it comes,' I murmured to Kasteen, who nodded grimly. Normally we would have expected to remain on the newly-cleansed world for some months at least, helping to rebuild the bits the greenskins had put a dent in, making sure the local PDF was back up to strength, and generally enjoying a bit of a breather before moving on to the next war. But instead we'd been hurried aboard the Emperor's Benificence almost as soon as we'd reached our staging area, the first shuttles already waiting to ferry our vehicles up to orbit as we'd arrived. One of the new Kastaforean regiments had already preceeded us starside. Fortunately they were too green to have staked out the most comfortable quarters and accessible mess halls for themselves and were easily displaced by the veterans of the 597th, so our troopers were as happy with the situation as it was possible to be. Which wasn't much: a mobilisation that rapid had to mean trouble had blown up without warning in a relatively close system and we were being sent to deal with it. That meant we'd be going in hot, with little idea of what we'd be facing, and already caught on the back foot. Not a situation any warrior likes to be in.

  Zyvan wasn't too happy about things either, I could tell, although I suppose being personally acquainted with him gave me an advantage in that regard. He was hiding it well, though, his usual air of bluff competence barely impeded by the distortions of the hololith. Certainly most of the people around me were buying it.

  'Ten days ago we received an astropathic message from a naval task force hunting a flotilla of Chaos raiders on the outer fringes of the subsector.' As I'd expected, Zyvan's face disappeared to be replaced by a map of the local star group. Kastafore was off to the bottom left, almost at the edge of the display, and a small cluster of contact icons overlapped it, marking the positions of our fleet.

  I drew in a deep breath. If I'd read the runes correctly, we were the only troopship on the move, accompanied by a handful of the warships. The rest were still sitting in orbit, twiddling their thumbs, no doubt feeling mightily relieved that for one reason or another they weren't quite ready to go. That meant we were the spearhead, first into whatever might be waiting for us, which in turn meant we were likely to soak up the bulk of the casualties. My stomach tightened at the thought. I didn't have long to digest the implications, though, as the display lurched suddenly, skipping a couple of parsecs to the right and dumping Kastafore ignominiously into the void outside the projection field. A couple of tech-priests started arguing in urgent undertones and one of them disappeared under the lectern, his mechadendrites twitching.

  'They've been tentatively identified as a group calling themselves the Ravagers,' Zyvan's voice continued, blissfully unaware that the starfield in the hololith was now bouncing like a joygirl on overtime. The image steadied itself as a shower of sparks erupted from the control lectern and the tech-priest emerged from beneath it, looking slightly singed. After a final wobble, it zoomed in on a cluster of contact icons bearing the runes of Chaos forces.

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickled at the sight. Emperor knows I've faced a lot over the years, but the thought of the Great Enemy still disturbs me more than most. Perhaps it's because I've seen so much of what they can do, but I think it's their sheer unpredictability which makes them so worrying. Most enemies are rational, at least in their own terms: tyranids want to absorb your genetic material, orks want to kill you messily and loot your corpse, and necrons just want to kill every living thing in the galaxy.[6]But Chaos is random, by its very nature, and even if you can work out what it is the enemy's after, half the time only the Emperor knows why they want it in the first place.

  'They've been hitting isolated systems and merchant convoys sporadically for the last few years,' Zyvan went on, while a red line considerately tracked the path of their depredations. 'Typical Chaos tactics, hit and run mostly, inflicting the maximum number of casualties, then withdrawing before the fleet arrives to give them what for.'

  'Sounds like a Khornate cult,' I whispered to Kasteen and Broklaw, who looked a little puzzled, before remembering they hadn't encountered any minions of the Ruinous Powers yet and I was probably the only one in the room with much idea of the divisions within the ranks of the Great Enemy. That was some degree of comfort, anyway. In my experience they were the easiest type of renegade to deal with, having little ambition beyond getting into combat as quickly as possible and killing as many of our people as they could before being cut down themselves. That made them particularly susceptible to ambushes and flanking attacks, which would work to our advantage, particularly if we could stick the Kastaforeans out in front as bait.

  'The Navy finally caught up with them on the fringes of the Salomine system, inflicting severe losses on their fleet,' Zyvan continued. I wasn't surprised, recognising the blue icon of a tau colony world, where the Ravagers were sure to have met far stronger resistance than they expected. That would have given the fleet time to catch up and join in slaughtering the heretics in the name of the greater good. The tau would have loved that, I was certain, until it dawned on them that they now had an Imperial fleet squatting on their doorstep instead, and the heretics had already weakened their defences. 'Several vessels did manage to flee into the warp, the exact number and type remain to be determined.'

  'Which affects us how, exactly?' Broklaw murmured, with the ground-pounder's typical distain for anything the Navy might be doing. A Guardsman to the core, his only interest in starships was how quickly and comfortably they could move the regiment to the next planet we were supposed to kick nine shades of hell out of to maintain peace and stability in the galaxy.

  As if to answer his question, Zyvan reappeared, pointing to an insignificant dot which looked to me pretty much like any other system.

  'Our Navigators consider it highly probable that they'll end up here, in the Adumbria system, especially if their warp engines have been damaged. Apparently the warp currents are particularly strong and turbulent around Adumbria Prime and they're likely to be drawn there.' He shrugged. 'Unless they're setting course for the place on purpose, which the fleet Navigator thinks is quite possible, given their previous heading. What they might be after on a backwater like that is anybody's guess. It could just be the next convenient target on the list.' His voice hardened in the manner that I knew from experience meant he'd made up his mind about something and wouldn't be dissuaded by anything short of a direct command from the Emperor himself (or possibly a quiet word from the Inquisition). 'In any case, when they arrive, they're going to be in for a surprise. If the warp currents remain favourable, we'll be there ahead of them. If we're really lucky, the rest of the task force will have had time to catch up too.'

  I don't mind admitting it, the last sentence sent a chill down my spine. What he meant was that barring a miracle, we'd be on our own, facing anything up to a full-scale invasion fleet with just five regiments and a handful of ships.

  'And if we're not?' Kasteen asked quietly, clearly coming to the same conclusion I had.

  'Then things are about to get very interesting,' I said, keeping my voice steady by a preternatural effort of will. As it turned out, that was to be one of the biggest understatements of my life, although even in my most pessimistic imaginings I never thought we'd find ourselves embroiled in a plot so diabolical as to threaten the very fabric of the Imperium itself.

  Editorial Note:

  Although Cain makes sufficient references to the peculiar conditions prevailing on Adumbria to enable an astute reader to deduce them, he never bothers to elucidate them explicitly. I've therefore appended the following extract, which I hope will make everything clear and help to explain much of what follows.

  From Interesting Places and Tedious People: a Wanderer's Waybook by Jerval Sekara, 145.M39

  ADUMBRIA IS ALMOST unique, even among an assemblage of worlds as vast as our beloved Imperium, being as it is rotationally locked to its sun. This in itself is not so unusual, of course: the point of interest being that, unlike most examples of such planets, Adumbria falls within the primary biosphere of the star around which it
orbits. The net result of this is that one side, a howling wilderness of blizzards and ice, is condemned to perpetual night, while its bright twin is seared by the pitiless heat of the sun without respite.

  Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the population live in the so-called Shadow Belt, a narrow strip running from pole to pole where temperatures remain tolerable. Here you will find cities to rival those of most civilised worlds, boasting bars, restaurants and places of entertainment of a standard ranging from the positively opulent right the way down to ''Society for the Assistance of Travellers recommended''.

  Away from the centres of population, you may find such scant agriculture as the planet supports and two inland seas, fed by the snowfields of the dark side and surrounded by pleasant resorts. The prices are, of course, higher the closer you get to the sunward side, since the temperature of the water is correspondingly greater, as are the ambient light levels. Discerning holidaymakers generally make for the so-called ''sunset strip'', where the sun is so close to the horizon as to leave the sky permanently reddened in an ever-changing display of breathtaking natural beauty…

  [Several paragraphs of extraneous travelogue omitted]

  The sunward and dark sides of Adumbria have little to offer the discriminating wanderer, consisting as they do of little more than life-threatening extremes of temperature. Nevertheless, a few hardy (or perhaps foolhardy!) individuals manage to scrape a living there, hunting the native wildlife, which has adapted to such extremes, scrabbling minerals from the rocks and generally pursuing such labours as occupy the time of the artisan classes.

  TWO

  'One thing you can say for enemies: they make life more interesting.'

  - Gilbran Quail, Collected Essays

  AT FIRST, DESPITE the apprehension which continued to gnaw at me as the Emperor's Benificence ground its way through the warp, it looked as though things might actually be going our way after all. We made the transition back to the material universe without incident, to find the Adumbria system completely free from heretical marauders. The only vessels to greet us were a somewhat surprised patrol cutter and the merchantman they were pursuing, who just had time to offer to sell us a variety of recreational products of dubious provenenace before the cutter crew boarded them and confiscated the entire cargo.

  In short, by the time we made orbit round Adumbria itself, I'd almost allowed myself to be lulled into that sense of false security my innate paranoia generally keeps firmly at bay.

  'Interesting place,' Kasteen said, joining me at the observation window of the portside recreation deck. I nodded, still lost in the contemplation of the planet below. I'd seen a fair few worlds in my years of rattling around the galaxy and was to see a great many more before finally making it through to an honourable retirement, but not many of them stick in my memory the way Adumbria did. It wasn't that it was beautiful, not by a long way, but it had a kind of defiant grandeur about it, like a faded dowager refusing to acknowledge the passing of the years.

  By this time our troopship had joined the cluster of merchant vessels which naturally accreted at the point where the equator crossed the shadow belt, hanging just a few kilometres above the planetary capital[7] which rejoiced in the uninspiring name of Skitterfall.[8]To my surprise, the eye was drawn naturally away from the glare of the bright face, which I'd expected to be the focus of attention, to the unexpectedly subtle attractions of the dark side. Far from being wrapped in impenetrable blackness, as I'd expected, this shone with the faint blue lustre of reflected starlight, bouncing back from the plains of ice and snow which covered the entire hemisphere. The more I stared, the more I became aware of a thousand subtle shades and stipplings in that apparently uniform glow, resulting from the light rebounding unevenly from mountains, canyons and who knew what other geographic irregularities.

  'It'll be good to get down there,' Kasteen said, following the direction of my gaze. That was a matter of opinion, of course; I've always disliked the sort of intense cold my Valhallan colleagues seemed to thrive in and was already anticipating the bone-crushing temperatures awaiting us on our deployment with less enthusiasm than the approaching Chaos fleet. But to be fair, I'd never heard a Valhallan complain about the excessive heat they felt they encountered pretty much wherever they went and I wasn't going to undermine my reputation, not to mention my leadership, by seeming less stoic than they were.

  'I'm sure the troopers would agree,' I said instead. We'd been through some winter seasons on temperate planets in the last few years, but hadn't visited an ice world since our brief and abruptly truncated sojourn on Simia Orichalcae. The dark side of Adumbria wasn't quite the same thing, but it would be cold enough to feel like home as far as they were concerned.

  A faint vibration shook the deck plates beneath our feet, too familiar even to register consciously, and we watched one of the dropships slipping away towards the planet below. Its engines flared brightly for a second as it corrected its course, and then it disappeared among the countless number of other shuttles coming and going from the starport beneath us. Sharp, distinct pinpricks of light in the distance would be the larger vessels they tended, merchants for the most part, as Zyvan had left the bulk of our warships to form a picket line in the outer system. Apart from the Emperor's Benificence, the only vessel from our relief flotilla to have made it all the way to Adumbria itself was the Indestructible II, an Armageddon-class battle cruiser the lord general had chosen to carry him and his senior command staff.[9] When I'd first arrived on the observation deck I'd amused myself by trying to pick it out, but at this distance the effort was futile and I'd rapidly abandoned the game in favour of studying the world we were here to defend.

  'It seems as though our Tallarn friends are equally eager to get down there,' Kasteen commented, watching the shuttle disappear. Her tone was studiously neutral, but the implication was clear; she was glad to see the back of them, and so was I. In the month or so we'd been transiting the warp, the regiment had passed the time in all the traditional ways, including challenging the others to a variety of sporting competitions. The 425th Armoured had thrown themselves into socialising with all the enthusiasm you might expect of a regiment which had discovered not only that they had the good fortune to be sharing a troopship with another unit from home, but that it consisted largely of women, while the Kastaforeans had done their best to hold their own against a regiment of battle-hardened veterans and acquitted themselves tolerably well, all things considered. The Tallarns, on the other hand, had remained aloof, their idea of a good time apparently consisting of innumerable prayer meetings of unimaginable tedium. Relations hadn't turned really frosty, however, until they'd refused to take part in the inter-regimental unarmed combat competition because the 597th had included some of our women in the team. This, Colonel Asmar curtly informed us, was ''unseemly''. To no one's surprise except Asmar and probably Beije, their regimental champion was promptly and informally challenged to an impromptu bout the next time he wandered into the recreation deck. I have to report with a certain degree of satisfaction that he was subsequently pounded flat by Corporal Magot, a cheerfully sociopathic young woman who barely came up to his chin.

  (Which made little difference, as it only took her about a tenth of a second to bring it down to the level of her knee.)

  Beije, of course, had been beside himself, and came storming into my office demanding to know what I intended to do about it.

  'Nothing at all,' I said, smiling disarmingly and offering him the least comfortable chair. 'I've already dealt with the matter.' I turned to Jurgen, my odiferous and indispensable aide. 'Jurgen. Would you be so kind as to fetch Commissar Beije some tea? He seems a little agitated.'

  'Please, don't bother on my account.' Beije paled quietly, having been exposed to the full effects of my aide's aroma while I left him to stew in the anteroom for as long as I thought I could leave it before he gave up and left. No doubt his appetite had been somewhat impaired by the experience.

  'It's no bother,' I r
eassured him. 'I normally have a little break for some refreshment at about this time. Two bowls, please, Jurgen.'

  'Commissar.' Jurgen saluted as awkwardly as ever and slouched out, somehow contriving to look as though his uniform never quite touched his body, which given his casual attitude to personal hygiene and perpetual eruptions of psoriasis, you could hardly blame it for. Beije watched him leave with an expression of stark incredulity.

  'Why in the name of the Emperor,' (and damn me if he didn't make the sign of the aquila as he pronounced the Holy Name), 'do you tolerate such a slovenly lack of standards? That man should be flogged!'

  'Jurgen's something of a special case,' I said. Quite how special I had no intention of disclosing, of course, as Amberley had impressed upon both of us the necessity of keeping his peculiar abilities as quiet as possible[10]and I had no wish to attract the attention of any inquisitors other than her. Beije looked sceptical, but commissarial etiquette demanded that he defer to me in all matters concerning the regiment whose morale I was entrusted with safeguarding, so he would just have to lump it. No doubt he'd assume some nefarious or discreditable reason, though, which he might be tempted to gossip about, so I decided to give him a little of the truth.

  'Despite his appearance, he's a remarkably able and efficient aide, and his loyalty to the Emperor is as fervent as that of any man I've ever met.' More to the point, he was the only man in the galaxy I completely trusted to watch my back, and his vigilance had saved my life on more occasions than I could recall without effort. 'I think that matters rather more than the fact that his uniform's a bit untidy.'

  All right, calling Jurgen a bit untidy was rather like saying Abaddon the Despoiler gets a bit cranky in the morning, but I knew adopting a casual attitude would be the surest way to get under Beije's skin. I knew my man well (as you'd expect given the number of times I'd left unpleasant surprises in his bunk at the schola), and noted the faint tightening of his lips with well-concealed satisfaction. 'That would be for you to decide, of course,' he said, as though trying to ignore a bad smell. A moment later he actually was, as Jurgen returned with a tray containing a couple of tea bowls and a gently steaming pot. I waited while he poured, enjoying the way Beije flinched before taking the bowl my aide proffered, then took my own. 'Thank you, Jurgen. That will be all for now.'