Defender of the Imperium Omnibus, page 100
Felicia wouldn’t be any too happy if we blew up the building, but it was beginning to look as though we weren’t going to get the choice. The enemy were surging forward now, suppressing our defences with withering amounts of fire, and would be in a position to make a final assault at any minute. In fact, if these had been run-of-the-mill Chaotics instead of using their heads like proper soldiers, they’d probably have started already, which would at least have allowed us to whittle them down a bit as they charged into our guns.
‘Acknowledged,’ Rorkins said, sounding far from happy, but then he had the tactical display to look at, which would be telling him precisely how badly we were currently frakked, something I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know right now.
‘Here they come,’ Nelys said in my earpiece, and the firing intensified on our south-west perimeter.
‘On our way,’ Julien’s voice responded, and I became aware of the clatter of armoured heels striking sparks from the ceramic tiles of the mosaic beneath our feet. I glanced round to see her and her novitiates double-timing it towards the thickest fighting, and she grinned at me, the light of holy fervour in her eyes. ‘Coming to join the fun, Cain?’
Cursing inwardly, as there was no way I could refuse so public an appeal, I nodded, with affected nonchalance. ‘Ladies first,’ I said, waving her through and inflecting it like a joke.
If anything, the situation at the perimeter was even worse than I’d imagined. The enemy had already broken through, judging by the number of corpses in desecrated PDF uniforms scattered about, only to be thrown back by the defenders at some considerable cost; Stebbins had been one of the lucky ones, that was clear, far too many of his charges having failed to make it at all. Nelys and Frister looked up as I approached with Julien and her novitiates, identical expressions of relief on their faces, and the motley collection of arbites cadets, PDF regulars and skitarii with them seemed to perk up too, their sudden surge of unwarranted optimism undiminished by the continuing barrage of mortar fire erupting behind us.
Getting through it to the shuttles wasn’t going to be easy, but that was a problem for later; right now we just had to live through the next few minutes, and throw back the next enemy assault decisively enough not to get cut down as soon as we tried to make a run for it.
‘Here they come,’ Yaitz said, his augmetic eyes giving him a clearer view than the rest of us, and gestured to the gun servitors. They opened up at once, while the rest of us huddled behind the makeshift barricade which had evidently been constructed from the stores displaced to make room for Rorkins’s command post.
A second or so later both constructs went silent, all but torn apart by a blizzard of bolter fire, and my heart turned to ice. I raised my head over the parapet as much as I dared, which wasn’t much, let me tell you, praying I wouldn’t see the sight I expected, and being just as disappointed as I knew I was going to be. A solid wave of corrupted Sororitas was advancing on our position, at least three full squads emerging from the early morning half-light, and I knew we didn’t have a hope in hell of stopping them. Come to that, I doubted we’d even be able to slow them down.
‘We’re reading another flare of warp energy,’ Felicia said in my earpiece, sounding puzzled rather than alarmed, and I looked over the barricade again, too terrified to tear my eyes away, despite the obvious risk of taking a bolt to the head.
‘What’s that?’ Yaitz asked, as a trio of vast, tapering structures materialised out of nowhere, right in the middle of the enemy host. The Chaotic advance faltered, no doubt asking the same question, then splintered, as arcs of ravening energy lashed out from the monoliths, blasting the nearest of the parked shuttles to smithereens. The onrushing sisterhood halted their charge, and turned to face the new threat, milling around uncertainly for a moment in a manner they most certainly wouldn’t have done if they’d been in their right minds, then began shooting at something behind them.
‘Something worse,’ I said, activating my comm-bead, and transmitting on all frequencies. ‘Cain to all units. Withdraw to the shuttles now.’ Flashes of green necrotic light were strobing in the distance, sinister metal figures advancing unhurriedly towards us, scything down the power armoured figures which blocked the way.
‘Our orders were to defend the Shadowlight,’ Yaitz said.
‘Against Varan,’ I said. ‘We can’t stand against these creatures. If we try, we’ll die, and they’ll still get their hands on it.’ The Sororitas renegades were breaking, trying to flee, and not getting very far; I pointed to one, caught in the beam of a gauss flayer, screaming as she evaporated like the smoke from a snuffed-out candle. ‘Our only hope is to run for the shuttles, and bury it with the demo charges.’
Everywhere I looked beyond the perimeter, straining my eyes to make out the horrifying details through the gloom, the story was the same, gleaming metal killers striking down the enemy with a casual disdain all the more chilling for being completely without emotion. Most sentient races enter combat with a mixture of fear and exultation, but necrons simply kill because that’s what necrons do. At least they’d taken the mortars out for us, so we could get to the shuttles in one piece.
Yaitz and Julien looked at one another, an unspoken question hanging in the air between them; neither was subject to my authority, and if one elected to stay and make a fight of it, I was sure the other would too.
‘You heard the commissar! Get moving!’ Nelys shouted, and his charges complied eagerly, running for the shuttles as I’d instructed, Frister and the arbites cadets hard on their heels. That broke the mood, I’m happy to say; when Jurgen and I followed, so did Julien and Yaitz, the skitarii and novitiates falling in around us.
My main fear as we lifted was that we’d left it too late, and that the levitating monoliths would strike us down as they floated inexorably towards the shrine, keeping pace with the walking abominations all about them, but either we were still out of range, or they were simply too fixated on their goal to bother about anyone not standing between them and it.88 We circled the valley a couple of times, keeping well away from the monoliths, until the vanguard of the necron army had passed inside the shrine, and I gave the signal.
‘Felicia,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but we have to blow it.’
‘I know.’ For a tech-priest she let a surprising amount of emotion leak into her voice. ‘It’s the only logical alternative.’ A long pause ensued.
‘Felicia,’ I said, as tactfully as I could, ‘push the frakking button!’
‘I did,’ she said bleakly. ‘Several times. The signal’s being jammed. We can’t detonate.’
We orbited aimlessly for another few minutes, unable to intervene, but reluctant to depart; then, as I’d half expected, the entire necron army wavered like lifting mist, and vanished completely, the ravaged landscape below where Varan’s invasion force had been obliterated the only trace of their passing.
‘What happened?’ Sprie asked, looking up from his console for a moment, an expression of stunned surprise on his face.
‘They got what they came for,’ I said.
Editorial Note:
The official version of these events is well enough known to need little in the way of elucidation: the following extract sums it up as well as any other.
From In Blackest Night: The Millennial Wars Appraised, by Ayjaepi Clothier, 127. M42.
Commissar Cain’s duel with Warmaster Varan, a turn of events so melodramatic that it would be hard to credit were it not for the famous pict recording, marked the effective end of the Chaos invasion of Perlia. Demoralised, the army Varan had built around himself disintegrated into internecine warfare as his subordinate commanders strove with one another to assume the overall leadership, succeeding only in depriving themselves of any force worth leading at all; the shattered remnants being easily overwhelmed and obliterated by the PDF, who lost no time in visiting the Emperor’s vengeance on the traitors who’d survived. The fortuitous arrival of a naval task force, dispatched in response to a distress call sent out as the invasion commenced, accounted for the enemy vessels still in orbit, which were all destroyed in a single, well-coordinated strike.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘And this is how you found the chamber when you returned?’ Amberley asked. I nodded, while she walked round the dais on which the crystal plinth and the Shadowlight had once stood, narrowing her clear blue eyes as though if she looked at it from a different angle the ancient device might suddenly reappear.
‘We thought it best to seal the room until your arrival,’ I said, as calmly as I could. I’d certainly done my best to carry out the impossible commission Orelius had dumped in my lap, but I was by no means certain that Amberley would see it that way.
‘Very prudent,’ she said, brushing a stray strand of blonde hair away from her forehead. Then, to my relief, the familiar mischievous grin appeared on her face. ‘Although horses and stable doors spring to mind.’
‘At least Varan didn’t get his hands on it,’ I said.
‘No, that’s something,’ Amberley agreed. ‘Although I can’t help wondering why the necrons wanted it too.’ A faint moue of concern drifted across her face. ‘All we can be certain of is that it’s nothing good.’
‘I think they were afraid of it,’ I said. I’d had plenty of time to think about the matter in the weeks following the battle at the shrine, in between hunting down the last of Varan’s converts, formally confirming the surviving cadets as fully-fledged commissars, and evading the Perlian media as much as I could, which wasn’t nearly enough. ‘They’re as old as the xenos who built it; maybe they were allies of theirs, or the katarn they were fighting, or maybe they just got caught in the middle. In any case, they were concerned enough to leave some observers in stasis, against the day the ancients might return, or someone else found out how to use their technology.’
‘The chamber in the asteroid you thought might be a necron tomb.’ Amberley nodded thoughtfully. ‘In the absence of a moon, it’s the most likely place for them to observe the planet from.’
‘It was just the miners’ bad luck to break into the chamber,’ I went on, encouraged. ‘The necrons revived, and detected the Shadowlight, but because it was shielded down here they couldn’t pinpoint it. So they called in a ship for backup, and started combing all the sites they knew the ancients used to have an interest in.’ I paused. ‘The asteroid…’
‘I’ve got a Deathwatch kill team going over it now,’ Amberley reassured me. ‘By the time they’ve finished, there won’t be any traces of the necrons left.’
‘I suppose, in a way, they did us a favour,’ I said. ‘They saw off Varan’s army for us, and took out his warships into the bargain.’ I smiled, savouring the irony. ‘Luckily the general populace already thought there was a naval flotilla on the way, so it was easy to convince them an Imperial battlefleet had done the job.’
‘You’ll still have some explaining to do when the real fleet arrives in system,’ Amberley said, looking uncharacteristically surprised when I laughed.
‘It’s not coming,’ I said. ‘It never was.’ I took out my data-slate, and showed her the full text of the message, which I’d picked up from Visiter shortly after he’d returned to the schola. ‘The communiqué’s signed by Fleet Captain Leerie.’
‘So?’ Amberley was never overly fond of guessing games, so I concluded my explanation succinctly.
‘Leerie retired in 954,’ I told her, ‘while I was serving on Zyvan’s staff. Pretty good party, as I recall.’ I restowed the slate. ‘The message was just an echo, bouncing around in the warp. It happens.’
‘But it arrived when you needed it,’ Amberley said. ‘Quite a coincidence.’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve always been lucky,’ I said.
Amberley grinned at me again, her expression appraising.
‘Not always,’ she said. ‘But maybe tonight.’
[On which cheerfully optimistic note, this volume of the Cain archive comes to a natural conclusion.]
FOOTNOTES
1. M41, of course. Most of the material presented in this volume was recorded piecemeal between 002 and 005 M42, with scant regard for strict chronological order even by Cain’s usual slapdash standards.
2. Though Jurgen was ostensibly excused shaving on medical grounds, due to his interesting collection of skin diseases, I always suspected the real reason he was allowed to grow a beard was Cain’s understandable apprehension about what might be revealed by the application of a razor.
3. Following the repulsion of the ork invasion in 923 M41, and in response to the growing number of tau incursions into Imperial space at about that time, the military presence in the sectors around the Damocles Gulf was greatly increased. Perlia, being both strategically located and in need of considerable reconstruction, became an obvious staging post for these forces, and benefited from the introduction of a number of Imperial institutions, the schola among them.
4. Cain’s activities during the later tyrannic wars, though both valuable and fascinating, need not detain us at this juncture.
5. Though relatively rare among the ranks of the Commissariat, there are a surprising number of female commissars: presumably because none of the all-women regiments in the Imperial Guard would take too kindly to being bossed about by a mere man.
6. Imperial Guard slang for raw recruits: apparently a phonetic rendering of FNG, or Frakking New Guys.
7. A mildly disparaging nickname for tech-priests, common among the Imperial Guard, apparently a reference to the cogwheel symbol of their calling.
8. A truly hideous timepiece, which was supposed to commemorate Cain’s victory over the greenskin invaders a couple of generations before. Every hour, on the hour, a clockwork commissar decapitated however many clockwork orks corresponded to the time, their falling heads chiming the hours as they fell into a resonant metal bin. Cain, not surprisingly, loathed it.
9. The crimson sash of the Commissariat, the mark of their authority, would be formally presented to them at their graduation ceremony.
10. Though Cain’s origins remain something of a mystery, he makes frequent allusions throughout his memoirs to having been native to a hive world. Which one, however, he never specifies: perhaps he never knew himself.
11. A phenomenon which seems to be related to their peculiar biology: for a short and relatively accessible précis of the current theory of spore dissemination, see The Fungoid Menace: Orkish Physiology And Its Implications by Migo Yuggoth.
12. Splitting a standard ten-man squad into two five-man fireteams is common practice among Imperial Guard regiments experienced in urban combat and counter-insurgency, but far rarer among Planetary Defence Forces.
13. Though their authority and responsibilities in the field are wide-ranging, members of the Commissariat are outside the chain of command. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be much point in having them.
14. Following their experiences during the ork invasion, the Perlian PDF paid particular attention to guerrilla and urban combat techniques; something which was to stand them in good stead during the Second Siege.
15. Vox operator, a common Imperial Guard abbreviation.
16. Opinion among the Ordo Xenos is still divided on that point. The prevailing theory is that the astonishing amount of variation in colour and patterning observed in the field in some way identifies the hiveship or digestion pool which spawned the organism in question, and some considerable effort has gone into attempting to codify them accordingly. Under this system, the genestealers Cain encountered here would appear to have originated in one of the splinter fleets currently infesting the Lambshead Nebula; which would indeed have put them in easy striking distance of Perlia.
17. Situation report. One of the many abbreviations common among the Imperial Guard.
18. Although most recruits to the Adepta Sororitas are, of course, trained in their own convents, it’s by no means unusual to have a battle-sister or two attached to a schola progenium, since many of the girls taken in by them are likely to feel a calling to join their ranks. Sister Julien would see to their initial induction, assessing which of the aspirants were best suited to the Ordos Militant, Hospitaller, Famulous, or what have you, and which were better redirected along other paths altogether.
19. The schola was sited on the outskirts of Salubria Parva, a mountain village conveniently close to Havendown, the planetary capital.
20. The bulk of the education provided at a schola progenium is the same whichever branch of Imperial service the student eventually enters; after this was determined in their early teens, the specialised training provided by Cain and his colleagues would begin. Although he’s never specific about the matter, the cadets under his tutelage would have been between thirteen and seventeen standard years of age, the younger ones still spending part of their time following a more general academic curriculum.
21. This is, perhaps, a little unfair to Cathcart, who, though plodding and unimaginative, did manage to provide a satisfactory basic education for most of his charges. As so often in his memoirs, Cain’s disdain for most of the ecclesiarchs he came into contact with may be colouring his view of their characters and abilities.
22. It seems fairly clear here that by ‘arbites’ Cain means law enforcers in general rather than the Adeptus Arbites itself. Like many seasoned travellers he often uses the word generically, rather than attempting to keep track of the bewildering variety of local nomenclature as it varies from planet to planet, although he is usually precise about the distinction when discussing occasions on which actual arbitrators were present.
23. The Perlian name for local law enforcers.
24. Cain’s first assignment as a fully-fledged commissar, some eighty years prior to the events he’s describing here.
