I tapped the comm-bead in my ear and contacted the pilot.
'We're changing course,' I said. 'Here are the new co-ordinates.' I'd expected him to argue, but he'd evidently been around Guard personnel for long enough to know that a commissar's authority outweighs even a lord general's.[91]After a brief acknowledgement I felt the subtle shift in my inner ear which told me the dropship was turning. Jurgen swallowed hard, his face white.
'Cheer up,' I told him. 'We'll be down before you know it.' And facing one of the most terrifying ordeals of my life to boot. But at the time, of course, I had no inkling of that.
SEVENTEEN
'If you go looking for trouble, you're sure to find it.'
- Gilbran Quail, Collected Essays
IF YOU'VE BEEN reading these memoirs with any degree of attention you're probably thinking that this apparent willingness of mine to rush headlong into danger is uncharacteristic to say the least. Well, perhaps it is. But the way I saw it, whatever the Slaaneshi were up to was the real threat, and seeing off a bunch of loony berserkers too carried away with bloodlust to use sensible tactics or even fire their guns half the time was little more than a sideshow. And, as I've said before, I knew from bitter experience that the only way to deal with warpcraft is to get in there straight away, before the witches or whatever's behind it have had time to finish what they've started.
So although I was as petrified as you might expect, I hid it with the ease of an experienced dissembler, and reflected that however alarming the prospect of facing sorcery might be, the consequences of not doing so were bound to be a damn sight worse. As so often in my life, it all came down to picking the course of action which offered the greatest chance of getting out with my hide intact, however great the immediate risk might be.
Besides, I had an entire company of Guard troopers to hide behind, and Jurgen's remarkable ability to chuck a spanner into whatever dark forces might be about to be unleashed, so all in all the odds seemed reasonably in my favour. And if they turned out not to be, at least I had a ship capable of making orbit.
On the whole I thought it might be polite to let Zyvan know his plan to disrupt the invasion was going to be short a company after all, but when I tried to raise him over the vox all I got was one of his aides.
'The lord general is unavailable,' he told me, with the unmistakable tone of a man who's making the most of the chance to be a pain in the arse. 'He's gone to inspect our forward positions.'
'Well, patch me through to his comm-bead,' I said.
The aide sighed audibly. 'Our orders are to maintain vox silence. If the enemy were to learn of his whereabouts—'
'Fine,' I said, making a mental note to find out exactly who I'd been talking to and make his life excessively unpleasant as soon as I got the opportunity. 'Then get me Maiden.'
Fortunately, the young psyker was still at headquarters, and his familiar dry tone in my earpiece was surprisingly calming. If anyone on the lord general's staff could appreciate the danger we were facing it was sure to be him.
'Commissar.' He paused for a moment. 'I take it this isn't a social call.'
'I've found the fourth ritual site,' I said without preamble. 'It's a mineral dredger in the middle of the equatorial sea. I'm diverting a dropship full of troopers there now.'
'A dredger.' His voice was so flat that for a moment I thought he hadn't believed me, and was about to tell me not to waste my time. 'I wasn't aware that the Adumbrians use them. But then no one ever tells Adepta Astra Telepathica anything.' He sighed audibly. 'That does put a different complexion on things.'
'So the ritual could take place on one?' I asked.
'Without a doubt.' An unaccustomed edge of uneasiness entered his voice. 'I can only pray to the Emperor that you'll get there in time.'
'Not the most comforting thing he might have said, I'm sure you'll agree. There's a time factor involved?' I asked.
'Probably.' The hint of emotion was draining away from his voice again as he became immersed in the problem at hand. 'My colleagues and I have been analysing the warp patterns and the timing of the previous shifts. It's very likely that the next and final one will take place within the next few hours.'
'Oh good,' I said, wondering if I should just tell the pilot to head for space now, commandeer a warp-capable merchant ship and have done with it. But then there was supposed to be an enemy battleship up there, or so I'd heard, so that didn't seem like a terribly healthy option either. Better to stick to the plan we already had, at least for now. 'No pressure then.'
'Not so you'd notice,' Maiden said dryly.
'We need to inform the lord general at once,' I said.
'I quite agree. Unfortunately, I don't have any way of getting in touch with him.'
A faint trace of amusement, almost imperceptible, seemed to enter his voice.
'However, I'll try to prevail on one of his aides to pass on a message. They can be surprisingly amenable if I talk to them in the right way.' Knowing how nervous most people were around spooks I could well believe it.
'I'll leave it with you then,' I said, and settled down for a long, tense wait.
THE SKY BEYOND the armourcrys viewport in the flight deck had lightened to twilight, the stars overhead fading to invisibility as the colour gradually brightened from the familiar blue-black through purple to a greyish blue which put me in mind of the pre-dawn quiet on some nice normal planet with a proper day-night cycle.
Only the brightest stars were still visible over our heads. Were we in the opposite hemisphere, we would have been able to see a great many more pinpoints of light, dancing like the sparks from a bonfire as the invisible sun reflected from the hulls of the hundreds of starships in orbit (at least away from the streetlights of Skitterfall), but here only a handful of genuine stars shone in the sky.
With difficulty I tore my mind away from the struggle taking place on the opposite side of the planet. Here, where the only things moving were the waves on the cold grey water below, it was hard to credit the scale of the carnage going on a few thousand kilometres beneath my bootsoles.
I'd listened in on some of the signal traffic, and it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that things were looking grim. Zyvan's counter-attack had checked the main body of the invaders well enough, driving a wedge through their heart and scattering them even despite our absence, but incredibly the Khornates had rallied and were making a grim and desperate last stand which looked like becoming a long and bloody affair. Scattered reports spoke of a giant in power armour leading them, so at least one other Chaos Marine had made it down to the surface unscathed, and I didn't envy whoever it was who finally got to take him out.[92]
I'd also gathered in the course of my eavesdropping that Beije had tagged along with the Tallarn company who'd joined the assault, no doubt spouting pious platitudes and getting in the way of the fighting men, and couldn't help wondering how he'd react if he came face to face with the Tainted Marine, which after his snide comments about my own encounter would have been poetic justice at least. (It never happened, of course; although if it had things would undoubtedly have worked out with far less fuss and bother all round.)
'There it is.' The pilot pointed, and I was just able to make out a glint of metal and a hint of solidity in the moving mass of water below us. I'd been in the flight deck for some time, trying to get Zyvan on the vox (with a complete lack of success so far) and exchanging messages with Maiden about what we might expect to find when we landed (which essentially boiled down to ''your guess is as good as mine''.)
If I'm honest, I was doing this mainly to keep my mind occupied in preference to sitting and brooding, but it also had the advantage of keeping me out of Jurgen's way. The prolonged flight wasn't agreeing with his stomach at all, and even though he'd managed to hang on to his last meal so far I'd rather not take the risk of being in the vicinity if his willpower gave out. 'Landing in five minutes.'
'Five minutes, everyone,' I voxed over the company command net, trying t
o think of a stock text to cover this and failing.
I moved to lean casually against the jamb of the cockpit door, where everyone in the forward compartment could see me, and looked into a row of tense, nervous faces. 'I can't honestly tell you what to expect when we get down there. But I do know that the fate of this world probably hangs on our actions when we do.' I paused, searching for the right words. 'All I can say is that I've faced warpcraft before, and I'm still here to brag about it.' A few nervous laughs rippled around the rows of seats as I played off my reputation for quiet heroism; Cain the Hero never boasted about his exploits, of course.
'Psykers and warpsmiths aren't to be taken lightly,' I went on, 'They in my experience they die just as easily as anyone else. I've yet to meet a witch who didn't find a las bolt in the head a severe inconvenience.' More laughter, a little louder and more confident this time. I shook off the mental image of Emeli, her green eyes filling with outraged astonishment as I shot her, and hesitated, my train of thought momentarily derailed. 'The Emperor protects,' I finished, finding refuge in a familiar platitude.
'We're on the final descent,' the pilot called. 'Better get strapped in, commissar.'
I took a final glance back through the viewport and felt my breath still in my chest. The dredger was vast, filling the whole of the pane, and we were still some distance away from it.
In my ignorance I'd expected something not too different from a conventional ocean-going ship, maybe a little larger, because after all they had to process the ore they extracted somewhere, but my guess had been a long way wide of the mark. It loomed out of the sea ahead of us like a stranded hab block, fully a couple of kilometres from stem to stern, about half that wide and several hundred metres in height. And that, I suddenly realised, would just be the part above the waterline, there would be almost as much of the thing below the surface too. Even with a full company of troopers, searching a structure that size could take hours. Days even…
Well, in my experience, enemies were never hard to find once the shooting started, so I deferred that problem until we had to face it and staggered back to my seat to find Detoi engrossed in a set of schematics he'd managed to pull up from the files in his data-slate.[93]With a quick glance at my white-faced aide, who seemed no worse than before, I leaned across to look at them.
'Where do you think they'll be?' Detoi asked. I took in the bewildering array of compartments, ore processors and connecting passageways, trying to get a sense of the layout in my head.
'I'm not sure,' I admitted. In my experience, heretic cults tended to go underground, literally as well as metaphorically, so somewhere below the waterline, down by the keel, seemed like a good bet. On the other hand, there seemed to be a lot of machinery down there, which might get in the way, and I had a vague memory that water was supposed to disrupt sorcery somehow.[94]I tried to picture the chambers I'd found in the hab dome and the bawdy house, hoping to find some clue in their layout. 'They'll need somewhere large and open, with a high ceiling.'
'Doesn't narrow it down much,' Detoi said thoughtfully. 'We've got the hangars next to the shuttle pad on the upper decks, a few recreation rooms, a chapel for the tech-priests, docking facilities for the cargo boats down by the waterline, and some of these manufactoria are vast.'
'Eliminate those, and the hangars, and the boat docks,' I said. 'At least for now. The rooms I saw before were big, but not that big.'
Detoi nodded. 'Still leaves us with a lot of ground to cover,' he said.
I couldn't dispute that. 'Well we'll just have to trust in the Emperor to show us a sign,' I said, with rather less sarcasm than I usually would.
'Brace for landing,' the pilot said, and all around me men and women tensed for the impact, readying their weapons and preparing to release their crash webbing, Jurgen cradled the melta like a juvie with a favourite toy, looking happier than he had done in several hours. The retros kicked in suddenly, compressing my spine with the abrupt deceleration, and a loud metallic clang rang through the hull. 'We're down,' he added unnecessarily.
'Third platoon, deploy and secure,' Detoi said, picking the unit nearest the cargo ramp. Lustig's voice responded, calm and confident, and the captain shot me a sudden and unexpected grin. 'Jenit's going to be sick as an ice weasel about missing this,' he said.
'Sulla's got enough to worry about in Glacier Peak,' I assured him, having used the vox to keep abreast of the rest of the regiment while we were in the air. But his mind was already on the deployment of our own troopers and I doubt he even heard me.
'Come on, Jurgen,' I said, turning to my aide. 'Let's see if a little sea air can perk you up.'
'Very good, sir,' he responded, looking a little better already (which, with Jurgen, was something of a relative term, of course).
I turned to Detoi. 'See you outside,' I said, and hurried to the nearest debarkation point. Landers on the ground are horribly vulnerable if the enemy has sufficient firepower, and I wanted to be out in the open if we were going to be taking any incoming.Not that that seemed particularly likely, of course, as we hadn't had a sniff of any anti-aircraft fire on the way in, but I found it hard to believe that the heretics we were hunting hadn't even noticed the arrival of a dropship; they're not exactly stealthy after all. Besides, if there were any abnatural forces at work here I wanted to get Jurgen where his peculiar gift would begin to disrupt them as quickly as possible; under the circumstances there was no way in the galaxy I was going to move far from his protective aura.
As we left the shelter of the dropship, I became aware of a keen wind whipping across the vast steel plain that surrounded us, bringing the unmistakable oceanic tang of ozone and salt. Next to the blood-freezing temperatures of the coldside, however, it felt positively balmy and I inhaled it gratefully, moving upwind of Jurgen as I did so.
If I hadn't seen the place from the air, I would probably have imagined we were in an industrial zone somewhere rather than aboard a floating construct. Structures the size of warehouses rose in the distance, looming threateningly in the perpetual twilight, and even the vast bulk of the dropship seemed shrunken to the size of an ordinary shuttle by the sheer scale of our surroundings. I'd seldom felt such a sense of insignificance, even in a titan maintenance bay (well, perhaps then).
Third platoon were moving out to secure the landing pad, the squads separating with practiced precision, advancing a team at a time to keep one another covered as they scurried from one piece of cover to the next. I saw Penlan jog past, shepherding her new squad with calm deliberation, and reflected that my confidence in her seemed to have been well placed. Lustig was standing at the base of the ramp, watching her go with an air of quiet pride.
'Good job all round, sergeant,' I said.
'She'll do.' He nodded. I indicated the rest of the troops, deploying with equal efficiency.
'I meant the whole platoon,' I said.
Lustig nodded again. 'We won't let you down, sir.'
'Fourth squad at the mark. No sign of hostiles.' I recognised the voice of Sergeant Grifen, and nodded.
'Stay put for the moment. And keep your eyes open.'
'No problem, commissar,' she assured me. I was pleased to have her squad on point. Grifen was a good leader who looked after her troopers but wasn't afraid to take the occasional chance when necessary. I'd been impressed by her qualities on Simia Orichalcae, when our routine recon mission had gone so spectacularly ploin-shaped, and in the years since she'd more than justified that confidence.
'Pad secured,' Lustig reported after a moment, and the other four platoons began doubling down the ramp to join us. As you'll appreciate, all those boots ringing on metal made a hell of a noise, and it took me a moment to realise that Detoi had joined us.
'Under the circumstances I don't think the vehicles will be much help,' he said.
'I think you're right.' There was undoubtedly enough open space to make use of them; indeed there were a few cargo haulers scattered around on the fringes of the pad, some of them still load
ed with crates and bundles. But the noise they'd make on that metallic surface would be the Emperor's own row, and we'd soon have to venture into some tight spaces where they'd be far too vulnerable. Far better to advance on foot.
'Lustig,' the captain went on. 'Detail a squad or two to cover the pad. I don't want us cut off from the dropship if we need to pull back in a hurry.' That was a sound precaution to my way of thinking too. Normally the lander would have pulled back, either returning to orbit (or in this case our staging area) to deploy another company of troopers, or remaining in a holding pattern overhead once we were satisfied there was no danger to it from ground fire, but under the circumstances neither option seemed terribly attractive. We were surrounded by water, with nowhere to go, and the dropship was our only lifeline.
'First and third squads, cover the pad. Second and fourth, stand by,' Lustig ordered at once.
Like it or not, I found myself thinking, he looked like getting a commission for sure if he kept this up.
Detoi briefed his platoon commanders quickly, giving each of them an area to reconnoitre, and I watched our troopers disperse with mixed feelings. True, we'd cover a lot more ground that way, but two hundred and fifty-odd soldiers seemed barely adequate to the task of searching an installation that size. I'd been counting on the idea of safety in numbers more than I'd realised, and as most of our complement disappeared into the shadows around us I began to feel uncomfortably exposed.
Well, standing around here wouldn't help much, so I began to jog forward, intent on attaching myself to the nearest squad (which, as it happened, was fourth, under Grifen). As I did so, I glanced across the landing pad, where Penlan was leading second squad from the front. She'd just reached the next mark, a light cargo hauler laden with something I took to be bins of processed ore, when she glanced back to wave her second team on, tripped on something at her feet and stumbled a pace before recovering her balance. Something about the way she and the troopers with her were looking down seemed vaguely disturbing.
[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand Page 23