[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand

by Sandy Mitchell

  Before I could ask for some fresh tanna, the sludge at the bottom of my cup having turned unpalatably tepid, the window erupted in a hail of bolter fire which shredded the seat the lord general had vacated a moment before. I dived for cover, heedless of the shower of glass splinters still falling all over the room, knowing the explosive projectiles would wreak havoc with any of the furnishings I might seek refuge behind. The only option was the wall itself, beside the shattered window, and I flattened myself against it, drawing my faithful old laspistol as I did so.

  I didn't have to wait long for a target. A rising whine outside the building abruptly terminated in a crump of impact which left my ears ringing, and the nose of an aircar ploughed through the gap of the window frame, wedging itself fast. It was an open-topped model, I noted absently, the interior luxuriously appointed in furs and fine leather, the metal of its bodywork filigreed with gold decoration, mangled beyond recognition by the impact with the side of the hotel. The driver slumped over the brass handle of the grav regulator as I shot him through the head, making a real mess of his elaborate coiffure, and his front seat passenger bounded over the wreckage like a man possessed, brandishing the bolter.

  I looked round for my companions, but only Zyvan and Kolbe were reacting, both drawing bolt pistols and seeking a target. Vinzand was huddled in a corner, his face a bloodless mask of shock, and Hekwyn was down, bleeding heavily from the stump of where his left arm used to be.

  'Help him!' I shouted, and the paralised regent moved forward to try and stem the flow of blood before the arbitrator expired from shock. I had no more attention to pay to either, though, as bolter boy brought up the cumbersome weapon as smoothly as if he were wearing Astartes armour. I fired, the las bolt blowing a bloody crater in his bare torso and obliterating a tattoo which had made my eyes hurt. I expected him to drop, but to my astonishment and horror he just kept coming, giggling insanely.

  'Frak this!' I dropped and rolled as he aimed the bolter at me, staying ahead of the stream of explosive projectiles by a miracle as they gouged a line across the wall. The firing abruptly ceased with the bark of two bolt pistols almost simultaneously; the man with the bolter seemed to explode, spraying bloody offal around the room and doing the expensive wallpaper no favours at all. 'Thank you,' I added for the benefit of the two generals, and drew my chainsword to meet the charge of the rear seat passengers, who had spent the second or so it took to dispatch their comrade clambering over the driver's corpse. A space this confined was no place for firearms in a general melee, the chances of hitting a friend instead of a foe far too great.

  Not a consideration for the heretics, of course, who all seemed completely out of their skulls to begin with, onslaught unless I missed my guess, the distended veins in their flushed faces being a dead giveaway. I sidestepped a rush by a woman naked except for a leather mask, gloves and thigh boots, and kicked her in the back of the knee, bringing her down just as she aimed the stubber in her hand at Zyvan. No time to worry about her after that, as a fellow built like a Catachan in voluminous pink silks swung a power maul at my head. I ducked it, blocked with the chainsword and took his hand off at the wrist. By luck or the Emperor's blessing the maul kept going, pulping the head of the stubber girl as she rose to her feet, and I spun round to take the third assailant in the midriff, a willowy youth of indeterminate gender in a flowing purple gown and far too much makeup.

  He or she came apart in the middle, giggling gleefully and scrabbling forward on blood-slicked hands, trying to recover the laspistol that had fallen to the floor as they dropped. I kicked out, driving the sundered torso back, my boots slipping in the spreading lake of blood, but even enhanced with combat drugs, the human frame can't last too long in that state: the eyes rolled back in their sockets and after a few more twitches the hermaphrodite lay still.

  Which left only one, the muscleman in pink. Catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye I ducked, drove my elbow back into a midriff which felt like rockcrete, and reversed the humming blade in my hand to stab backwards under my own armpit. It spitted him nicely, opening up his entire ribcage as I withdrew the blade and turned, swinging the weapon to take his head off. This was a bit of a grandstanding gesture, to be honest, but probably necessary for all that. I'd seen before what 'slaught could do, and it was quite possible the fellow would have continued to fight until he bled to death in spite of his wounds.

  'Commissar!' Zyvan called, from over by the door, and I looked up to see the other four on the verge of leaving the room. Gradually it dawned on me that the whole fight had been over in less than a minute. 'Are you all right?'

  'Fine,' I said, as nonchalantly as I could, holstering my weapons. 'How's Hekwyn?' Not that I cared particularly, but it wouldn't hurt my reputation to seem more worried about someone else now that I was safe again.

  'Vinzand's stemmed the bleeding.' Zyvan was looking at me oddly, and for a moment I wondered what I'd done. 'I'll be recommending you for a commendation for this.'

  'Absolutely,' Kolbe chimed in, while I tried to mask my astonishment. All I'd done, as usual, was try to save my own neck. 'I can see your reputation for selflessness is richly merited. Holding them off single-handed like that, so we could attend to Hekwyn…' So that was it. My impulse to seek shelter by the wall had put me between the heretics and the others, and they thought I'd done it on purpose.

  I shrugged as modestly as I could. 'The Imperium needs its generals,' I said. 'And you can always get another commissar.'

  'Not like you, Ciaphas,' Zyvan said, using my given name for the first time. That was truer than he knew, of course, so I just looked embarrassed and asked after Hekwyn again. He was looking grey, even for an Adumbrian, and I was mildly relieved to see a medic among the squad of Zyvan's personal guard who were doubling along the corridor towards us, hellguns at the ready.

  'You can stand down,' I told them. 'The lord general's safe.' No point in not gently underlining my supposed heroism while I had the chance.

  The Guard commander looked a little embarrassed, having taken almost two minutes to respond to the first sound of gunfire, but the hotel was huge and Zyvan had insisted on seclusion for our conference, so I suppose it wasn't really his fault. In any event, he made up for it by dispatching Hekwyn to the medicae with commendable promptness and insisting that Vinzand went too: by now the regent was showing signs of shock, which I couldn't really blame him for, being a civilian and not really used to this sort of thing.

  'How did they get past our security cordon?' Zyvan asked.

  The Guard commander had a short, somewhat intense conversation with someone on the other end of his comm-bead. 'They were broadcasting the appropriate security codes,' he confirmed after a moment. Kolbe and Zyvan exchanged glances.

  'I suppose that answers the question of whether the PDF has been compromised at any rate,' I put in.

  The Guard commander frowned. 'I'm sorry, sir, perhaps I wasn't quite clear. The codes identified the vehicle as belonging to a member of the council of claimants.'

  'Find out which one and have him arrested,' Zyvan ordered. The commander saluted and trotted away. The lord general turned back to Kolbe and me. 'This is just getting better and better.'

  'It doesn't make sense, though,' I said, the palms of my hands tingling again. We were missing something, I was sure of it. 'If they have someone that highly placed it would be madness to expose them simply to carry out such a risky attack. They must have known their chances of success were minimal.' And that was putting it mildly. Five untrained civilians, however fanatical, could never have prevailed against a roomful of soldiers. True, the death of Zyvan would have crippled our command structure, but even so…

  'Clear the building!' I shouted, the coin dropping. This was a diversion, it had to be. The main attack would be somewhere or something else, and the instinctive paranoia jabbering at the back of my skull told me what that was most likely to be. Despite the clear breach of protocol, I shoved the two generals heavily in the s
mall of the back. 'Run like frak!'

  'Evacuate the building,' Zyvan said levelly into his comm-bead and started running down the corridor.

  After a moment Kolbe followed, with an astonished glance in my direction. I might have felt a moment of satisfaction at the sight, as there are precious few men alive who can say they've given orders to a lord general, let alone had them obeyed, but I suppose he was a bit more inclined to listen given my commissarial status.[29]As I watched them go, every fibre of my being urged me to sprint after them, or ahead if I could barge my way past in that narrow corridor cluttered with expensive nick nacks on delicate tables, but I forced myself to remain where I was.

  If I was wrong about the threat I perceived and the whole idea had been to force us out into the open, I'd be running headlong into a trap, and I didn't dare take that chance; despite the risk, I had to be sure. I turned and ran back in to the conference suite.

  The room was as big a mess as I remembered, the wreckage of the aircar filling my vision as I clambered over the splintered remains of the conference table, slipped in some spilled viscera and scrambled into the shattered vehicle. The dead driver was in the way, so I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him backwards out into space, where he fell the thirty or so floors to the rockcrete below. Belatedly I remembered that Zyvan's entire headquarters staff would be milling around down there by now, and hoped he didn't hit anyone, least of all the lord general; that would have been the crowning irony. (As it turned out, he burst harmlessly on a porch roof, so that was all right.)

  No point trying to pop any of the maintenance hatches, as the met-alwork was buckled beyond all hope of repair, so I thumbed the selector of my chainsword to maximum and sliced through the thin sheeting with a fine display of sparks and a screeching sound that set my teeth on edge. Heedless of the raggedness of the tear and the concomitant risk to my fingers (the real ones anyway), I levered the makeshift flap aside, taking as much of the pressure on the augmetics as I could.

  I stared into the engine compartment, my bowels spasming. My guess was right.

  'The powercells have been rigged to blow,' I said into my comm-bead. 'Get me a tech-priest - now!' There was no time to run, of that I was certain; I'd never make it out of the building in time. It was even debatable whether I could have made it if I'd fled with the others, who would barely have made it as far as the fire stairs by now.

  'This is Cogitator Ikmenedies,' a voice said in my ear, with the flat unmodulated cadences of an implanted vox unit. 'How may I assist you?'

  'I'm looking at a timer,' I told him, 'attached to what looks like the promethium flask of a flamer. They've both been taped to the power-cells of the aircar which rammed the building. The timer has less than a minute to run.' The wire connecting it to the powercells had been jarred loose by the impact, I noticed with a sudden thrill of horror. If it hadn't been for that it would probably have detonated almost as soon as the heretics hit the building. As it was, the timer was running in intermittent jerks, counting off a few seconds then pausing for a couple before resuming its inexorable march towards zero. 'I need you to tell me how to deactivate it.' For an instant I found myself wondering if the fault would give me enough time to get clear after all, but logic overrode the impulse to flee with the stark truth that doing so would just get me far enough for my shredded corpse to be entombed under most of the building when it collapsed.

  'The mysteries of the machine god cannot be lightly revealed to the unconsecrated,' Ikmenedies droned.

  I gritted my teeth. 'Unless you want to explain that to him in person in less than a minute that's precisely what you're going to have to do,' I told him. 'Because if I can't defuse the bloody bomb I'm going to use the last few seconds of my life to organise a firing squad.'

  'How is the timer powered?' Ikmenedies asked, as tonelessly as ever but with almost indecent haste.

  'There's a wire to the powercells. It's already loose.' I reached out a hand towards it. 'I can pull it out quite easily.'

  'Don't do that!' Somehow the tech-priest managed to inject a frisson of panic into his level mechanical drone. 'The power surge could trip the detonator. Are there wires leading to the promethium flask?'

  'Yes, two,' I said, trying to still my hammering heart and giving thanks to the Emperor that at least I still had two fingers which failed to tremble in reaction to my near-fatal mistake.

  'Then it should be simple,' Ikmenedies said. 'All you have to do is cut the red one.'

  'They're both purple,' I said, after a moment's inspection. I heard a muffled curse, then there was a short pause. 'You'll just have to use your best judgement.'

  'I don't have any!' I practically shouted. 'I'm a commissar, not a cogboy. This is supposed to be your department.'

  'I'll pray to the Omnissiah to guide your hand,' Ikmenedies said helpfully. I glanced at the timer, seeing only a handful of seconds left. Well, a fifty-fifty chance of survival is a lot better than some of the odds I've faced over the years, so I picked a wire at random, wrapped my augmetic fingers around it, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. For a moment fear paralysed my arm, until the survival reflex kicked in and reminded me that if I didn't do this I was dead for sure, and I tugged spasmodically at it with a whimper of apprehension. It came free surprisingly easily.

  'Commissar? Commissar, are you there?'

  I became aware of the voice in my ear after a moment and let my breath out in a single gush of relief. 'When you see the Omnissiah, say thanks,' I said, sagging back into the overstuffed upholstery.

  'Ciaphas?' Zyvan's voice cut in, concern and curiosity mingled in it. 'Where are you? We thought you were behind us.'

  'I'm still in the conference suite,' I said, noticing for the first time that the refreshment table had somehow survived the melee. I clambered out of the aircar and staggered towards it, avoiding the larger pieces of heretic. The tanna pot was still warm so I poured myself a generous mug. 'After all that excitement I feel I could do with some tea.'

  Editorial Note:

  While Cain was keeping himself occupied in Skitterfall, the rest of his regiment had been successfully deployed in and around Glacier Peak, a mining town situated conveniently close to the geographical centre of the dark face, or ''coldside'' as the Adumbrians succinctly termed it. Since this process had gone as smoothly as could reasonably be expected, the details of it need not concern us here: what is important is that they had seen action unexpectedly early, an encounter which would, with hindsight, prove to be a vital turning point in the campaign as a whole.

  As we might have expected, Cain has virtually nothing to say about this, displaying his usual disregard for anything which didn't affect him personally, so I have felt it incumbent upon me to insert an account of the incident from the perspective of an eyewitness. Unfortunately, this comes from the second volume of the memoirs of Jenit Sulla, which, as you'd no doubt realise within a sentence or two, is no more readable than the first. As ever I feel I should apologise for including it, out offer the shred of consolation that it is at least mercifully brief.

  From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: The Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101.M42

  THOSE OF MY readers not fortunate enough to have been native to an iceworld, as we were, can scarce imagine the fashion in which our spirits rose to find ourselves once more treading the permafrost which, with every bootfall, would send our blood thrilling with the visceral memory of home. Not that nostalgia was our ruling passion of course; far from it. That, as always, was our duty to the Emperor, which every woman and man of us held so dear, even to the shedding of our own precious blood in his glorious name.

  We had not been long in Glacier Peak, a picturesque spot surprisingly little blighted by the shaft heads and hab domes erected by the miners who worked so hard to scrabble a precarious living[30] from the veins of merconium[31] so far beneath our feet, when the chance we all longed for to fulfil that duty came at last.

/>   I was summoned to the command post set up by Colonel Kasteen early one morning (although in the constant night in which we now found ourselves living, such distinctions were all but irrelevant), to find myself entrusted with a mission of the utmost importance. Our perimeter sensor net was being constantly disrupted by the seismic disturbances of the miners as they went about their work, and, as she gravely informed me, no junior officer seemed so suited to the task of ensuring our security from heretic infiltrators as myself. It is no exaggeration to say that my heart swelled within me to hear so fulsome a vote of confidence from my commanding officer, and I accepted the assignment eagerly.

  As can be readily appreciated, this required the undertaking of periodic patrols to check the proper functioning of the sensors, for which the tech-priests assigned to our regiment as enginseers thoughtfully provided us with the appropriate rituals. Despite my natural trepidation that such things were best left in the hands of the duly ordained, they declined to accompany us on our excursions, assuring me that the prayers and data downloads would prove equally efficacious if performed by the highest ranking trooper present, and indeed this proved to be the case. In order to be even more certain of our success in this vital task I took to accompanying each patrol myself, reasoning that as the highest ranking member of the platoon I would thus ensure the greater favour of the Machine God. And so it was that I found myself present with the women and men of fourth squad in what at the time I took to be a mere skirmish. Only hindsight and the tactical genius of Commissar Cain were to later reveal just how significant that minor incident would prove to be.

  My first intimation of trouble appeared as our Chimera came to a halt some half a kilometre from the site of the sensor package we'd been sent to bless, and stood there, its engine idling, for some time. At length, Sergeant Grifen, an experienced trooper who had earned the respect of the commissar (which was no easy task as those of us who had done so could attest), approached me, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the rumble of our engine.