'I think you should take a look at this, L.T.'[32] she said. Knowing that she was unlikely to be perturbed without good reason I followed her, savouring the chill which struck through the weave of my greatcoat as I descended the boarding ramp.
It wasn't hard to see what had so excited her curiosity. A few metres ahead, cutting across our own course, was a twin line of tracks, clearly left by a vehicle of some kind. I commended the vigilance of our driver, for spotting them would have been no easy task in the constant darkness which enveloped us. I stooped to examine them.
'They're heading for the settlement,' Grifen concluded, and I was forced to agree; the constant wind was eroding the marks even as we watched, and over to our left they were all but obliterated already. Time was clearly of the essence: if we were to follow, and follow we surely must if only to assure ourselves of the innocence of these mysterious travellers, we had to set out quickly before their trail vanished before us like smoke in a gale.
A quick call to the command post confirmed that no other units were out here and no civilian traffic had been cleared through our perimeter, so as we commenced our pursuit I urged our women and men to be ready to face the enemies of the Emperor. True to form, they were enthused at the prospect and immediately fell to checking their lasguns and other equipment while our faithful Chimera closed the distance rapidly.
'There's a light ahead,' our driver reported, an instant before any doubts we may have had about the intentions of the vehicle we followed were answered by a pattering of stubber rounds against the armour of our hull. Our gunner swung the turret and unleashed a hail of retaliatory bolter fire.
Unable to resist seeing for myself what was going on, I clambered up to the top hatch and stuck my head out, shielding my eyes from the flurrying snow with the unconscious ease of reflexes ingrained since girlhood. A mining crawler stood crippled before us, great rents torn through its thin unarmoured body, its crew piling out to engage us with a variety of small-arms. They would no doubt have proved poor opponents for the doughty warriors under my command, but even as I opened my mouth to give the order to disembark and engage them the crawler exploded in a vivid orange fireball which reduced it to smouldering wreckage in an instant, immolating in the process the heretics who had dared oppose the Emperor's will.
SIX
'Paranoia is a very comforting state of mind. If you think they're out to get you, it means you think you matter.'
- Gilbran Quail, Collected Essays
'THE QUESTION IS,' I said, 'what were they doing out there in the first place?'
Kasteen nodded and handed me a steaming mug of tanna, which I accepted gratefully. 'Carrying weapons, we think. I had Federer go over what was left of the crawler, and he says he found traces of fyceline among the wreckage.' I had no trouble believing that. Captain Federer, the officer in command of our sappers, had an enthusiasm for all things explosive which bordered on the unhealthy and if there were traces of the stuff to be found he would undoubtedly be the man to uncover them. 'He says it looks like the bolter shells penetrated the cargo compartment and cooked off whatever was in there.'
'I suppose it would be too much to hope that just for once Sulla left us some survivors we could interrogate?' I asked, sipping the fragrant liquid and savouring the sensation of warmth it ignited on the way down. I'd just arrived in Glacier Peak, our main staging area, and found it even less inviting than it sounded. Not only was the coldside living up to its name, as I'd steeled myself to expect, the perpetual night was beginning to get to me, and I'd only been there for an hour.
Well, technically at any rate, we'd left the shadow zone some six hours before that, the pervasive gloom I'd got used to in Skitterfall gradually deepening over the preceding two, and I'd grown sleepy as the monotonous snowscape crept past the window. To my thinly-disguised dismay there were no air transports available, and I'd had to make do with a compartment on one of the railway trains transporting miners and their supplies back to the outpost we'd no doubt overrun with our own people.[33]
Despite the three carriages coupled to the rear of the freight wagons being crowded in the extreme, with several passengers being forced to sit on their luggage in the corridor, Jurgen and I were left with an entire compartment to ourselves. At first I thought this was due to the respect our Guard uniforms commanded, but after observing the way the crowd parted whenever my aide left his seat to use the sanitary facilities I was forced to conclude that this had more to do with his distinctive aroma than it did with my charisma. Used as I was to this, and pleased as I might otherwise have been to have the extra legroom, after eight hours with him in a confined space I was beginning to think they had a point.
The upshot of all this was that by the time I'd arrived at our destination I was tired and irritable, and in no mood to hear that Sulla had taken it upon herself to bag a crawler-full of heretics without bothering to find out what in the warp they were doing out here in the first place.
'All blown to frak, along with the crawler,' Kasteen said. She shrugged. 'On the plus side, I suppose at least that's one batch of weapons the heretics won't be getting their hands on.'
'Assuming they don't have a whole lot more where they came from,' I said.
The palms of my hands were tingling again, but for once I couldn't tell if it was from apprehension or returning circulation. The cold outside was every bit as bone-chewing as I'd anticipated, and chill as it was here in Kasteen's command post, where I could still see our breath puffing visibly with every word or exhalation, it felt almost tropical by comparison. She and Broklaw had their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and the vox operators and other specialists coming and going were similarly lightly clad.
All, I was pleased to note, still wore their flak armour though, the lord general's strictures on remaining alert still being in effect. (I still had the carapace armour I'd been given on Gravalax concealed beneath my greatcoat, as I generally did whenever things looked like they might get uncomfortable without warning; it was getting a bit battered by now, but as far as I was concerned that just reinforced the wisdom of forgetting to return it to the stores in the first place.)
'Quite.' Broklaw nodded, his eyes thoughtful, and kicked the portable hololith with all the assurance of a tech-priest. It hummed into life, projecting a topographic recreation of the surrounding countryside. (I use the word loosely, although no doubt the Valhallans could appreciate subtleties in it denied to me.) 'I think we can safely assume that whatever they had planned though, we were the target.'
'Almost certainly,' I agreed. The crawler had been heading for Glacier Peak, that much was certain, and we were the only significant military presence there, so it hardly needed an inquisitor to join the dots.
I gazed at the image, something nagging at the back of my mind. The ring of red icons around the town would be our sensor packages, of course, and the thin line snaking its way through the valleys was the railway which connected us to the civilised delights of the shadow zone. There were no roads, as the constant snow would have rendered them permanently impassable, so the ribbon of steel was the only way in or out apart from the occasional flyer. If you needed to go anywhere else, like an outlying settlement or mining claim, the only way to do it was by crawler.[34]
'The skirmish happened here,' Broklaw added helpfully, adding a contact icon more or less where I'd expected it to be. The heretics' intended course was clear enough, following a valley down towards the edge of Glacier Peak, at which point they'd simply have merged into the traffic on the streets and vanished.
'They must have had contacts somewhere in the town,' Kasteen said.
I nodded slowly. 'That seems likely. Even if they were planning to carry out the strike themselves, they'd need somewhere to hole up while they were preparing it. That means confederates.'
'We're liaising with the local praetors,' Broklaw said, forestalling the next inevitable question. 'But so far they don't have much to go on. Not even a missing person report.'
'Outsi
ders then, almost certainly,' I agreed. 'The question is, where did they come from?' There weren't that many outposts of civilisation on the coldside, and the others were all a long way from here; too far to make the trip by crawler anything other than insanely risky. Of course these were heretics we were talking about, so insanity was pretty much guaranteed, but even so I felt we were missing something.
I tried to trace the path of the crawler back from the point at which Sulla had encountered it, and felt a nagging sense of wrongness about the topography. The valley was broad and long, but surrounded by mountains and with no sign of a pass leading into it. I voiced my concern. 'That looks like a dead end to me.'
'You're right,' Kasteen said, dropping her head to examine the projection from eye level. She glanced at Broklaw for confirmation, seeing in his almost imperceptible nod that he'd reached the same conclusion. 'There must be a cache of weapons out there somewhere.'
'Sounds likely,' I said, unable to think of another explanation. 'Our heretics must have been on a supply run.' The thought wasn't comforting. For the crawler to have blown up like that implied that it was carrying a lot of ordnance, and that in turn probably meant there was a lot more of it out there. Certainly no one would bother taking a single crawler-load out to bury, then bring it all back again in one go. No one sane, in any case. Once again I reminded myself that we were dealing with the minions of Chaos here, and that nothing could be taken for granted.
'Where did it come from in the first place?' Broklaw asked.
I shrugged. 'The starport. Hekwyn said they had a problem with smugglers. The weapons must come in hidden among the cargoes and then cultists in the city distribute them. They probably arrived in Glacier Peak disguised as mining supplies.'
'Not that difficult if you think about it,' Kasteen agreed, pouring herself a fresh mug of tanna. 'There are legitimate shipments of explosives arriving on practically every train.'
'Then we have a place to start, at any rate,' I said, feeling a sudden flare of hope that we might just be getting one jump ahead after all. I turned to Broklaw. 'We need a list of everyone in the mines with access to explosive shipments. And who might have a chance to tamper with them while they're en route too.'
He nodded. 'I'll get on to the Administratum,' he said. 'They should have all the records we need.'
And a lot more besides, if I knew them. 'While you're doing that, I'll contact the Arbites in Skitterfall,' I said, the optimistic conviction beginning to grow in me that the key to all this lay in the planetary capital. With a bit of luck I could find an excuse to be on my way back there by the time the next train left. 'They must have some idea of how this stuff is getting through the starport.'
'IT'S AN ELEGANT theory, commissar.' Hekwyn's head floated in the hololith, nodding pleasantly, as if reluctant to batter my deductions with anything as crude as solid facts. He was looking a lot better than the last time I'd seen him, even allowing for the slight instability imparted to his virtual presence by the equipment. His image was partially overlaid with Zyvan's, since I felt the lord general should be kept informed of the latest developments, and the pair of them looked like some strange piece of two-headed warp spawn. I hit the projector the way I'd seen Broklaw do, and to my vague surprise the images from the two pictcasters separated, at least some of the time, flicking apart and back together at irregular intervals. 'But it's just not possible for large quantities of weapons to be coming through the starport.'
'You told me yourself that you have a smuggling problem,' I riposted, unwilling to let such a neat chain of reasoning go without a fight. The arbitrator nodded and scratched his chin with his new augmetic arm, not quite getting the distance right;
I remembered similar problems adjusting to my new fingers back on the Reclaimers'[35] battle barge' in the Interitus system all those years before.
'We do. With a port that size it's almost inevitable. But believe me, arms and explosives would almost certainly be detected. In the quantities you describe, they'd be found for sure.'
'I've known psykers pull some pretty slick disappearing acts,' I said, grasping at the last straw I could think of. 'And we are looking for Chaos worshippers. If they've got a witch or two in tow they could walk past your inspectors with a baneblade and no one would notice.'
'Except for our own sanctioned psykers,' Zyvan pointed out mildly. 'I've had a couple posted at the starport ever since we arrived. No one's used any witch talents there, you can be sure of that.'
Great. I watched the best lead I'd been able to construct crash into ruins in front of me, along with my ticket back to somewhere my blood wouldn't freeze. I sighed heavily.
'Ah well,' I said. 'My apologies for wasting your time then.'
'You've hardly done that,' Zyvan assured me, more from politeness than strict accuracy, I strongly suspected. 'It was an astute piece of deduction.' He smiled.
'But I'm afraid even you can't be right all the time.'
'But we're right back where we started,' I said, fighting the impulse to pinch the bridge of my nose. Now that the consuming sense of urgency to communicate my reasoning to the high command had been punctured, the weariness I felt from my journey was beginning to make itself felt again.
Hekwyn scratched his chin once more, a little more accurately this time.
'Not quite,' he pointed out, and Zyvan nodded in agreement. 'We know that your regiment seems to represent a particular threat to them.' I felt a shiver of apprehension running down my spine, already sure of the lord general's next words.
'Precisely. Of all the targets on the planet they could have struck at, they seem to be going to inordinate lengths to prepare an attack on you. Have you any idea why that might be?'
'None at all,' I said, hoping I hadn't answered too hastily. The only thing which made the 597th any different from a million other Guard regiments was the presence in it of Jurgen, whose peculiar gift of nullifying psychic or warp-derived sorceries had saved my life (and probably soul) on a number of occasions. If the heretic cult was aware that there was a blank somewhere on Adumbria, and had psykers among their number, they'd stop at nothing to eliminate so potent a threat, and the chances were that I'd be standing right beside him when they struck. After all, I could hardly start avoiding my own aide (however tempting the notion became when the temperature rose above the moderately warm). Then again, his strange ability was a secret known only to the two of us, Amberley, and presumably at least some in her retinue,[36] and I was damn sure no one on that select little list was in the habit of chatting with heretics.
'Perhaps there's something about the town which is significant to them,' I suggested, partly to deflect the conversation away from this sensitive area, and partly to try and allay my own fears, 'and our presence here is merely incidental.'
'Perhaps.' Zyvan looked unconvinced. 'But we're not going to know until you get some hard evidence.' I noted his use of ''you'' with intense foreboding, but nodded as sagely as I could.
'We're following up all the leads we can,' I said. 'If there's a heretic cell anywhere in Glacier Falls, you can rest assured we'll find it.'
'I don't doubt that for a minute,' the lord general said. 'But it's just as possible that the answer lies elsewhere.'
'I can be back in Skitterfall by tomorrow,' I started to say, but choked myself off after the first syllable as a familiar topographic projection superimposed itself over the two men in front of me. As luck would have it, the wretched machine was keeping their images separate at the time, or the combined interference would probably have rendered the whole thing incomprehensible.
Zyvan gestured at the valley next to the mountain ridge his head and torso were protruding from like some strange geological wart. 'You say that this valley is a dead end.'
Already sure of what was coming next, I nodded numbly, my mind racing to find an excuse and failing miserably. That's what happens when you call senior and influential people without sufficient sleep or recaf, and why I strongly recommend against it.
'It certainly appears to be,' I conceded.
'Then by your own logic there must be some trace of the heretics' arms cache out there,' Zyvan went on cheerfully, while Hekwyn nodded in agreement. 'Possibly more weapons we can trace back to their source.' He shrugged. 'Who knows, maybe even some hard evidence we can use to identify the ringleaders.'
'We can lend you a forensics team,' Hekwyn offered. 'You'd be surprised how many traces people leave behind, even when they think they've covered their tracks completely.'
'Thank you,' Zyvan responded, as though he'd just been offered a cyna bun.
'That would be very helpful. And we can bring in one of our spooks[37]to give the site the once-over too.'
'Assuming we ever manage to find it,' I said, my eyes drawn again to the vast expanse of snowscape represented by the hololithic valley.
Zyvan turned his head to stare straight into the pictcaster. 'You're a remarkably resourceful fellow, Ciaphas. I'm sure you won't let us down.'
Well what else was I supposed to say after that? Frak off, you're out of your mind? Tempting as it was, and don't forget that technically as a member of the commissariat I could have done just that, it really wasn't an option. My fraudulent reputation left me with only one possible response, and I gave it, nodding gravely as I did so.
'I'll get right on it,' I said.
TO BE HONEST, the thing I really got right on as soon as I finished my far from satisfactory conversation with the lord general was my bunk, where I remained for the next several hours sleeping off the rigours of the day's journey. Technically by now, I suppose, it would have been the previous day's journey, but the unvarying darkness outside made it hard to keep track, and I really didn't care much in any case. Being an old hive boy I'd grown up believing that light levels (or lack of them) were pretty much constant in any given location, and had found the whole business of day and night something of a wonder the first time I'd found myself on the surface of a planet somewhere; not to mention thoroughly disconcerting until I'd got used to it. So all in all I suppose I found the curious conditions on Adumbria rather less of a strain to adjust to than most of my companions (with the probable exception of Jurgen, who accepted them as phlegmatically as he did everything else).
[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand Page 8