The result of all this was that by the time I awoke, feeling a great deal better about things and with my aide's distinctive odour wafting into the room laced with the rather more inviting one of fresh tanna, the problem I'd been handed last night seemed a lot less intractable. (Which I like to think proves the wisdom of my course of action. Rushing off to try and organise things while my mind was still clouded with fatigue wouldn't have got us anywhere, or at the very least would have got us to the same place with a great deal more stress and irritation to all concerned.)
'Good morning, sir.' Jurgen's voice joined his odour, and I cranked my eyes open in time to see him place the tray of tea things beside the narrow bed. The room he'd found for me was comfortable enough, as I'd have expected given his almost preternatural talent for scrounging things, but it was a far cry from the standard of luxury I'd grown used to while hanging around in Zyvan's headquarters. (On the other hand, it was a considerable improvement on some of the accommodation I've occupied over the years. Believe me, once you've experienced the hold of an eldar slavers' ship even the most spartan of conditions seem perfectly tolerable.)
'Good morning,' I responded, although the darkness beyond the window was as absolute as ever, relieved only by the faint gleam of arclights in the compound below. The reassuringly familiar sounds of Chimera engines and shouted orders drifted in, even through the double thickness of thermocrys, which at least kept the temperature in here at a reasonable level. 'Any news on the heretic hunt?'
Jurgen shook his head dolefully as he poured the tea. 'No progress to report, sir. Major Broklaw was quite definite on the point when I asked on your behalf.' I could well believe it. Broklaw was a man who'd never seen the point of internalising his frustrations.
'Well, let's see if we can improve his mood,' I said, savouring the first mouthful of tanna. 'The lord general has suggested a rather interesting approach.'
'I'M NOT SAYING it can't be done.' Broklaw stared at the hololithic image of the valley as though wishing he could somehow strangle it. It seemed Jurgen hadn't been exaggerating about his mood; but then, knowing his propensity for literal-mindedness, I'd hardly expected him to be. 'I'm just saying it'll take a long time. Searching an area that size could take weeks, even with an entire platoon on the job. Which we can't spare,' he added hastily, in case I thought that was reasonable. To his visible relief I nodded. 'I quite agree,' I said. 'Even if we were desperate enough to try it, the chances are the enemy fleet would have arrived here long before we found anything.'
'Then what do you propose?' Kasteen asked levelly. She'd probably had no more sleep than her executive officer, but still managed to project an air of calm authority.
By way of an answer I pointed to the little red dot almost overlapping the contact icon which marked the spot where Sulla had terminated the renegades' journey with such lethal emphasis. 'Sulla was on her way to bless this sensor package, yes?'
Kasteen and Broklaw nodded, not seeing the connection. 'That's right. They've all been malfunctioning since the day we got here.' The colonel looked at me curiously, no doubt wondering if I still needed a few more hours of sleep to clear my brain. 'What with the mining charges going off all the time, and the vibrations from the railway every few hours, I'm amazed we're getting any usable data from them at all.'
'Exactly,' I said, and the two officers glanced at one another, clearly wondering what the procedure was for notifying the Commissariat that my elastic had finally snapped and could they have a sane replacement please. 'And both those things are known events. The mines have records of when their charges were set, and the trains run to a timetable. More or less.'
Expressions of dawning comprehension broke across their faces as they finally realised what had occurred to me in the curious state between sleep and full wakefulness, when the mind makes connections it might otherwise have missed.
'So if we filter out the known interference from the data we've recorded, we might pick up some sign of activity that'll point us in the right direction,' Broklaw said, looking happier than I'd seen him since I'd got up. I nodded.
'We just might,' I said.
Of course it was all far easier said than done, and it took most of our enginseers most of the day to carry out the appropriate rituals. Long before they were finished the drone of their chanting and the choking clouds of incense around their data lecterns had driven all but the hardiest of us from the command centre. Nevertheless, by the evening I was able to report to Zyvan that we'd tentatively identified about a dozen sites where anomalous readings might, just possibly, indicate human activity where no human was meant to be.
'Why did your people miss this in the first place?' he asked, not unreasonably.
I stifled a sneeze, my eyes still sore from the acrid smoke, and tried to look composed. 'They had no reason to look for it. The data was being swamped by other readings, and they were only looking for anomalies on or near the perimeter. Until Lieutenant Sulla ran into that crawler, no one even suspected there might be heretics lurking that far out in the wilderness.'
'Fair enough,' the lord general conceded. Then he smiled. 'I look forward to hearing what you find. I'm sure you're itching to get out there and get stuck in.'
At those words my blood ran as cold as if I was already being exposed to the biting winds that were sure to be howling through the mountain passes, and I suppressed a shiver. If I'd managed to cling to a vestige of hope that I'd be able to stay safe and warm in the command centre while I palmed the dirty work off on some deserving candidate (and I had the perfect one in mind, you can be sure), Zyvan's pleasantry torpedoed it as thoroughly as a battleship swatting a destroyer.
If I didn't seem to be leading from the front now I'd lose his confidence, which meant no more bunking up in the lap of luxury the next time I was able to wrangle my way into his headquarters, and no more pleasant social evenings enjoying the genius of his personal chef. So I nodded soberly, like the stoic old warhorse he took me for, and tried not to cough.
'As eager as I always am,' I told him truthfully.
SEVEN
'The most dangerous thing on the battlefield is a junior officer with a compass and a map.'
- General Sulla
GIVEN THE LORD general's personal interest in our little recon sweep and the number of potential sites we had to check, I found it easier than I'd expected to persuade Kasteen and Broklaw to assign a full platoon to carrying it out, along with our entire troop of sentinels. After all, we now had a definite mission to complete. It wasn't as if we'd be wasting our time out there for days on end, casting around searching for nothing in particular.
After some consideration (or at least the show of it) I'd picked Sulla's platoon for this assignment. After all, she'd got us into this mess, so she might as well clean it up too. Not that she saw it like that of course, prattling on about how much she was looking forward to gutting more heretics until I felt like strangling her. Feeling that, on the whole, it would be unwise to give in to the impulse, I decided to risk sticking my head out of the Chimera despite the cold - right then pneumonia seemed distinctly preferable to much more of her conversation.
It was my first real view of the coldside, and despite the sensation of having my face flayed by flying razor blades the moment my head cleared the rim of the top hatch I found it curiously captivating. Up until then all I'd seen of it had been from inside well-lit windows, which the all-pervading blackness turned into mirrors, or within the precincts of Glacier Peak. There, of course, the streets were permanently lined with luminators, supplemented by the light spilling from every building, and all that had done was intensify the darkness surrounding them until it seemed the entire town was enveloped in suffocating velvet.
Out here, though, there was nothing apart from the spotlights of our vehicles to get in the way, and I found myself staring at a night sky littered with stars in a profusion I had seldom seen from the surface of a civilised world. They burned, too, with a cold, hard brightness, which struck
from the snows all around us, imparting a faint blue glow to our surroundings.[38]So uniform was this illumination that it cast no shadows except in the deepest of crevices, which appeared by contrast to be maws of the uttermost darkness, exuding a sinister fascination; after all, anything could be lurking inside them undetected. As I considered this I caught sight of a flicker of starlight reflecting from the metallic shell of one of our sentinels, keeping easy pace with us and shining its spotlight into each of the crevices we passed, and the knowledge that we were unlikely to be ambushed by unseen lurkers put my mind as much at ease as was possible under the circumstances. And even if we were, I suppose we wouldn't have had too much to worry about; the firepower of the three walkers and second squad's Chimera a score or so metres behind us, would be more than enough to even the odds.
After some consideration, Kasteen had decided to split our recon force into three, in order to minimise the amount of time it would take to check out all the possible sites we'd identified. That had seemed reasonable enough to me: two full squads and their Chimeras, with a squadron of sentinels for backup, ought to be more than enough to handle the handful of heretics we might expect to find out here. And if we were wrong about that, they'd certainly be strong enough to disengage without any problems and keep the traitors pinned for long enough to call in some backup.
Despite the obvious drawbacks, I'd decided to attach myself to Sulla's command squad for the duration of the mission. For one thing there were only five of them, which meant that even with all the extra vox and sensoria equipment cluttering up the passenger compartment there was still a lot more room for Jurgen and myself than if we'd been jammed in alongside half a score of troopers, and for another I thought we might actually acquire some useful intelligence if I was around to restrain her generally commendable impulse to slaughter everything in sight that was not wearing an Imperial uniform. I suppose we could have tagged along in the Salamander, which would probably have helped my mood, but only at the expense of frostbite. One look at the open-topped vehicle was enough to resign me to Sulla's company as by far the lesser of two evils.
'Rooster one to mother hen,' a voice crackled in my comm-bead. After a moment I recognised it as Sergeant Karta, whose recent elevation to the leadership of first squad had opened the way for Magot's problematic (and probably temporary, knowing her record) promotion. 'Objective two's a bust. Proceeding to three.'
'Acknowledged, rooster one.' Sulla sounded vaguely affronted, as though the heretics were somehow cheating by not coming out to play according to the plan.
It was no surprise to me, though; conditions were hellish out here, the landscape unstable, and the first site on our list had turned out to be nothing more than an icefall of quite epic proportions. Our third group, squads four and five, had had no more luck than the rest of us, and the young lieutenant was visibly champing at the bit. (An analogy which occurred quite naturally to me, since her long narrow face bore a distinct resemblance to an irritable horse at the best of times.) I have to say, though, had I realised just how soon her craving for action would be satisfied I would have been considerably less casual about my next remark.
'Stay sharp,' I cut in, more to remind everyone that I was there than because I had anything useful to say. 'Every site we eliminate brings us closer to the real one.' As I spoke I narrowed my eyes against the swirling snow, sure I'd caught a glimpse of yellow light out here where none should be. It could have been nothing, of course, but I didn't get to my second century and an honourable retirement by ignoring the slightest presentiment of danger.
I switched frequencies to the local tacnet, bringing in Sulla, Sergeant Lustig in the other Chimera, and the three sentinel pilots. 'Kill the lights,' I ordered.
'Commissar?' Sulla sounded curious, but the spotlight of our own vehicle went out immediately, as did the one on second squad's transport and the sole sentinel I could still see. I peered through the obscuring flurry of whiteness, seeing nothing for a moment, and had almost convinced myself I'd imagined it when the momentary gleam came again.
'There's something out there,' I said, ducking back behind the armour plate, and regaining the blessed warmth of the passenger compartment. (All right, the temperature had been adjusted by Valhallans, so it was still pretty cool by most objective standards, but after a moment or two outside it felt positively hot.) 'Two o'clock relative, moving slowly.'
'Got it,' the auspex operator confirmed after a moment. 'Big, metallic, heading for town. Doing about forty klom per hour.'[39]
'Captain, if you wouldn't mind?' I asked the comm-bead.
'My pleasure.' Captain Shambas, commander of our sentinel troop, ordered his squadron into the attack with the gusto I'd come to expect from him. 'You heard the man. Last one to bag a heretic buys the beers. And try to leave a couple alive for the commissar to interrogate.'
'Yes, sir.' His flankers acknowledged, and I watched the screen of the auspex tensely as the three dots of the fast-moving sentinels peeled away from us to intercept the contact.
'Tea, sir?' Jurgen appeared at my shoulder, pouring a cup of steaming tanna from the flask he'd produced from one of the equipment pouches he was habitually festooned with. I took it and sipped the warming liquid gratefully.
'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said. The auspex operator flinched away from him, momentarily blocking my view of the display, so I heard rather than saw the engagement begin.
'It's a crawler,' Shambas reported, to my total lack of surprise. 'Looks like an ore truck. Jek, take the tracks.' The distinctive crack of ionising air told me he'd triggered his own multi-lasers an instant ahead of his subordinate's lascannon.
'On it,' Jek acknowledged. A moment later his voice took on a smug note. 'Tracks frakked.'
'They're popping hatches,' a female voice added, an instant ahead of a confused babble of noise. A moment later she was back. 'Sorry commissar. They had a rocket launcher.'
'Can't be helped, Paola,' I said, pleased that the momentary hesitation before I recalled her name had been so slight. But then there were only nine sentinel pilots in the entire regiment, and, in the nature of things, their names tended to cross my desk rather more frequently than most of the other troopers.[40]
The third sentinel in the squadron carried a heavy flamer, so there was no point in asking if there'd been any survivors; the gout of burning promethium would have flooded the cab, incinerating anyone inside. 'Better them than one of you.'
'My sentiments exactly,' Shambas said, the bright dots of the sentinels peeling away across the auspex display to rejoin us. A moment later the stationary blip disappeared and a dull whump punched its way through the hull to reach our ears.
'Oops,' Paola said, with the flat tone of someone who doesn't really mean it.
I shrugged. 'Well I guess that answers the question of whether they had any more weapons back at the cache,' I said.
'And where it is.' Sulla had been busy at the chart table behind us, and directed my attention to the hololithic image displayed there.
My heart sank. Our position was on a line almost directly between Glacier Peak and the next objective on our list. There could be little doubt that we were heading directly for the heretics' outpost.
'I think you're right,' I said, doing my best to sound casual. I shrank the scale of the holomap to the point where the other two groups appeared, far too far away to have any hope of joining us until long after we'd reached the objective. Sulla watched curiously.
'Do you want me to bring the others up to join us?' she asked. I nodded as though I'd been thinking about it, which of course I hadn't. We knew for certain there were heretics where we were going, so waiting an hour or so to assault them with a full platoon instead of two squads, one of them half strength,[41] was the only sensible thing to do as far as I was concerned. Mildly embarrassing if the outpost turned out to be deserted, of course, but I thought that would be something I could live with.
'That might be prudent,' I said, as though her raising the point had
been the thing to make up my mind. 'Normally I'd be inclined to push on and see what's there, just as we planned, but now that we know there's a heretic stronghold of some kind up ahead I'd like to be sure we've got them properly surrounded before we move in. No point in letting any of them slip away if we can avoid it.'
'Of course,' Sulla said, slouching over to the vox unit as though I'd just insisted she finish her homework before she could go out. She gave the orders as crisply and efficiently as any other officer, though, and I was relieved to see both icons respond by changing course to join us.
Group three (fourth and fifth squads along with Sentinel squadron three) was the closer and had the advantage of clearer terrain to boot, with any luck they'd be with us in half an hour or so. Group one had a crevasse field to negotiate so would take at least twice as long.
As I listened to the brief exchange of messages, however, another thought struck me. Surely there hadn't been time to get another crawler out here, loaded, and halfway back to town in little more than a day? The shipment we'd intercepted was probably a replacement for the one Sulla had destroyed, which meant the heretics manning the outpost had somehow known that it had failed to reach its destination and had dispatched a replacement. And that meant…
'Scan all the frequencies,' I ordered the vox operator, rounding on him so suddenly he visibly started. He hastened to comply, while Sulla watched me curiously.
After a moment the man began to nod. 'I'm getting some traffic,' he said. 'Hard to pin down, but it's local. They're trying to contact someone called Andros.'
[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand Page 9