The Emperor's Finest, page 11
Jurgen, fortunately, remained as phlegmatic as ever, apparently considering it nothing more than a ship like any other, and weaved his way through the distracted ground crews with his usual aplomb, missing cargo haulers and foot sloggers by a typically narrow margin. Fortunately the noise of our engine, and the idling Thunderhawk, drowned out the comments which followed us, although the gestures which accompanied them were more than sufficient to convey their gist.
As he steered us through the slalom of blast walls surrounding the pad 6 , it became clear that Jurgen and I weren't the only guests of the Chapter intending to embark for the Revenant that afternoon. Magos Yaffel was there too, oscillating even more than usual in the backwash from the idling thrusters, accompanied by a handful of tech-adepts, and a couple of servitors, which were busily engaged in transferring an unfeasibly large collection of boxes and bundles aboard. As Jurgen coasted the Salamander to a halt, and began collecting our kit together, I hopped down and nodded a cordial greeting to the cogboys 7 .
'Magos,' I said, raising my voice a little to be heard over the screaming engines, 'I wasn't aware that you'd be accompanying us.'
'The Omnissiah directs our footsteps along the path of knowledge,' Yaffel replied, cranking up the volume of his voxcaster to overcome the din. Refraining from pointing out that in his case that would be singularly difficult, I merely nodded, as if the evident quotation 8 meant something to me. 'And the potential store of data to be reaped on this endeavour is incalculable.' At the time I thought his words to be no more than a simple figure of speech. If I'd known then what he was driving at, I'd have clambered back aboard the Salamander and told Jurgen to head for the horizon with all the speed he could squeeze from it (which I've no doubt would have been considerable). As it was, however, I merely exchanged a few more reflexive pleasantries, before following my overloaded aide to the bottom of the boarding ramp, and dodging out of the way of a servitor on its way back for another load of whatever Yaffel and his cronies considered essential on the voyage.
As I regained my balance, another vehicle drew up smoothly alongside our abandoned Salamander, and I felt a strange unease descend upon me. It was a groundcar, long and sleek, its armourcrys windows polarised to the same glossy black as the bodywork. For some reason I was put in mind of the blank, reflective faces of the metal killers I'd fled from on Interims Prime. Which I'd almost rather have faced again, if my sudden intuition about the car's passenger turned out to be right.
It was. A uniformed chauffeur, in a livery I'd come to know well since my arrival here, unfolded himself from the driver's compartment and glided round to the rear door. As he opened it Mira emerged, the sudden change in her expression a clear indication that the vehicle was soundproofed as effectively as it was shielded from the vulgar gaze of the hoi polloi, and waved cheerfully in my direction.
I waved back, masking my relief at her evident good humour with a faint smile meant to convey pleased surprise, and she came trotting over, grinning like a puppy who's just discovered how to open the meat locker. She'd evidently got tired of playing soldiers, as she'd discarded the dress-up uniform in favour of something a little more feminine: an indigo blouse, low-cut, like pretty much everything else in her wardrobe, and a crimson knee-length skirt, which, like the blouse, was fashioned from some material that shimmered slightly as the light caught it. In the turbulence thrown up by the Thunderhawks idling thrusters it rippled constantly, so that Mira seemed to be clothed by a nimbus of rainbows. Her footwear was surprisingly practical: calf-high boots made from the hide of some local animal, although I doubted that their original owner had been quite so fluorescently pink.
'Mira,' I said, exhaling a little more strongly than I intended as she enveloped me in a hug which would have cracked an ork's ribs. 'It was kind of you to come and see me off.'
'I'm not.' She grinned again, and with a definite sense of foreboding I belatedly registered the fact that the chauffeur was removing what looked like almost as much baggage as the tech-priests had accumulated from the car. 'I'm coming too. Isn't that a wonderful surprise?'
'Wonderful doesn't even begin to cover it,' I said truthfully.
NINE
PERHAPS FORTUNATELY, THE ear-splitting noise inside the Thunderhawk after it took off made further conversation impossible. There were the headsets Veren had drawn my attention to on the journey down, of course, but the last thing I needed was Mira vox-casting the details of our association across an open comm-net, so I made sure the one I gave her just prior to our departure was switched off before handing it over. Though grateful for the aural protection it offered, I declined to activate mine, either: I had no interest in anything the tech-priests might have to say, and I knew from long experience that Jurgen would simply lapse into sullen silence the second our skids left the ground, too preoccupied with holding on to his last meal until we reached the turbulence-free zone beyond the atmosphere to respond to anything short of a life-threatening emergency. Or possibly an acute lack of tanna. In any event, he was hardly a sparkling conversationalist at the best of times, so I wasn't exactly left feeling deprived.
All of which left me with far too much time to brood. I'd had a few moments before we lifted to ask Mira what the frak she was doing here, although of course I was rather more circumspect about the manner in which I phrased the question, and she'd smiled in a manner I found distinctly disturbing. Before she could answer, though, the tech-priests had started trooping aboard, and Jurgen returned to inform me that our kit was properly stowed, so I'd had little option but to follow the herd and hope everything had a rational explanation. Mira certainly wasn't behaving in the usual fashion of people bidding farewell to their home world, gazing at it through the viewports as long as they could, trying to burn the image of it into their memories in the near certainty of never seeing it again, preferring instead to smile at me in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of a bored eldar reaver looking for someone to torture to death to pass the time. Perhaps she simply lacked the imagination to grasp what embarking on a voyage through the warp actually meant. Even if she did return home, the chances were that decades, or even a century or two, were likely to have passed, and that she'd be as much of a stranger to the altered Viridia as an offworlder setting eyes on it for the first time. 1
Predictably, I didn't get another chance to broach the subject until after the Thunderhawk had docked with the Revenant, after a journey Jurgen had probably found mercifully brief. The strike cruiser was still orbiting Viridia at a relatively low altitude, barely beyond the point where the first faint wisps of upper atmosphere would begin to drag at her hull, no doubt to facilitate the use of her teleportarium, or allow her weapon batteries to strike at targets on the surface in the unlikely event of her Space Marine complement requiring a little additional assistance. It still seemed long enough to me, though, and it was with a great sense of relief that I heard our engines throttling back, and the series of metallic clangs which preceded our arrival. What Yaffel and his tech-priests found to amuse them, I have no idea. Perhaps they conversed among themselves, in the peculiar manner of their kind, or just remained absorbed in communing with their data-slates.
I didn't have much opportunity to talk to Mira after we disembarked, either. To my pleased surprise Drumon was standing at the bottom of the ramp, and exchanged a few words of greeting with me, before striding on to confer with the tech-priests and begin examining the equipment they'd brought with them. By the time I'd completed the pleasantries and looked round for Milady DuPanya, she'd already snared a couple of faintly stunned-looking Chapter serfs, who'd evidently been incautious enough to wander within hectoring range, and was holding forth to them in great detail about the correct disposal of her luggage. I decided to leave her to it, and went to separate Jurgen and Gladden, the factotum who'd been assigned to look after me on the voyage here, who were already squabbling over the matter of who should be responsible for my kit with belligerent tenacity and icy politeness respectively. Apparently no one had expected me to bring my own aide, let alone one who looked more like a Nurgle cultist than a member of the Imperial Guard, so his arrival had caught them on the hop, rather.
By the time I'd sorted that one out, Drumon and the tech-priests had disappeared about whatever business they had together, and the pile of luggage Mira had brought with her had diminished to something approaching portable. I lingered while the last of it was thrown onto a trolley which looked as though it was more usually employed to rearm the Thunderhawks, and fell into step beside her. 'I give up,' I said lightly, contriving to look as though I was joking. 'What did you say you were doing here?'
'I'm the official representative of the Governor of Viridia,' she said, grinning impishly at me from under her fringe. 'My father's sent me to assess whether the space hulk remains any kind of threat to our system.'
'How can it?' I asked, no doubt looking and sounding as baffled as I felt. 'It's been gone for a century and a half, and it's hardly likely to come back.'
'But it could have left other threats behind, as well as the genestealers,' Mira said, in tones which made it abundantly clear that she didn't believe that any more than I did. 'We'd be failing in our duty to the Viridian populace if we didn't make every effort to ensure their safety, particularly now.'
'So your father asked you to come along on the hunt for the Spawn?' I enquired, trying to keep my scepticism from becoming audible in my voice.
Mira grinned again. 'I sort of volunteered,' she said cheerfully, taking hold of my arm.
I nodded, being able to reconstruct that conversation all too easily. This had all been her idea, clearly, although I still found it hard to credit that she'd become sufficiently infatuated during our brief affair to be willing to wave goodbye to everything she'd known just to follow me through the warp. 2 'How very dutiful of you,' I responded. 'No doubt the populace will be suitably grateful.'
'No doubt,' Mira agreed, clearly not giving a flying one what the hoi polloi thought, and attaching herself to me with a tight grip. 'So it looks as though we'll be liaising together for the foreseeable future.'
DESPITE THE FAINT sense of unease about the situation which continued to oppress me, particularly in the quieter moments when I had time to reflect on the potential ramifications, I had to admit that Mira's words in the hangar bay had cheered me at least as much as they gave me cause for disquiet. As I've said before, she was pleasant enough company, and I'd felt rather starved of companionship during the voyage to Viridia once I'd recovered enough to start taking notice of my surroundings. This time round, although the circumstances were somewhat bizarre, I had someone I felt I could converse with, as well as engaging in a variety of recreational pursuits, all of which promised to make my second sojourn aboard the Revenant a great deal more congenial than the first had been.
Then, too, I had Jurgen with me again, which fact alone eased my mind considerably. We'd been through a lot together since our first chance meeting on Desolatia (and were to go through even more in the years to come, although, perhaps mercifully, I had little inkling of quite how much terror and bloodshed awaited me before I could sink into a relatively peaceful retirement 3 ), and the prospect of facing whatever horrors awaited us aboard the Spawn of Damnation seemed far less daunting than they would have done without the knowledge that he would be watching my back as steadfastly as always. Not that I had any intention of getting within a thousand kilometres of the cursed piece of warp flotsam, of course, so anything lurking within the tangled mess of conjoined starships was of little interest to me; once we'd caught up with it, if we ever did, the shipmaster and his gunnery teams could carve it up at their leisure, and in the unlikely event of anything getting off before they did, it would have to be foolish in the extreme to try boarding a Space Marine vessel.
All in all, I suppose, I felt as happy about the fool's errand we were on as it was possible to under the circumstances, and resolved to make the best of things - an endeavour which Mira seemed determined to help with.
'I'm still not sure how you managed to persuade Gries to let you aboard in the first place,' I said, over a surprisingly palatable meal in my quarters, a few hours after we'd boarded. A fair proportion of her mountain of luggage turned out to have been delicacies of one sort or another, no doubt with my comments about the Spartan fare I'd subsisted on during our voyage to Viridia fresh in her mind. It felt odd to be eating a second breakfast when my body clock insisted it was late evening, but I'd hopped between enough worlds by now to be confident that I'd have readjusted to the Revenant's idea of chronology before too much longer. Gladden had got used to bringing my meals in to me here on the previous voyage, and resumed the arrangement without being asked; no doubt the serfs would have been as uncomfortable to see Mira and I in their mess hall as we would have felt about being there. What the Reclaimers did about meals, I had no idea, but if they ate together at all I was certain they'd find catering to the tastes and needs of ordinary mortals something of a trial. At any event, neither Mira nor myself were ever invited to join them, which I'm sure we found as much of a relief as our hosts did. 4
Mira shrugged and bit into the florn cake she'd just spread with ackenberry preserve. 'You know how it is,' she began, a trifle indistinctly, before swallowing and continuing more clearly. 'You can get people to do pretty much anything, if you put your mind to it. You just need to know how to ask.'
Which didn't really answer my question, of course, and being an old hand at verbal evasion myself, I persisted, even as I admired her technique. After a few more moments of verbal sparring, which I have to confess I rather enjoved. I eventually backed her into having to give a straight answer.
'It was easy enough,' she admitted, licking a few stray traces of the sticky preserve from her fingers with a coquettish glance in my direction, to see if I'd be distracted by that old trick. (Which, I'm bound to say, I might have been if I didn't already know her as well as I did, so I just kept looking at her with an expression of polite enquiry until she gave it up as a bad job and carried on.) 'I simply told him it was my duty as a member of the ruling house to confirm that Viridia was safe, just as it was his after having pledged his aid to our people to make sure that the job was complete.'
'I see,' I said, contriving to look unimpressed, although if I'd still been wearing my cap at the time I'd have taken it off to her. Basically, she'd just told a captain of the Astartes that charging off on a private quest before making sure that every single 'stealer, hybrid and implant on Viridia had been tracked down and eradicated 5 would be a gross dereliction of his duty, but he could do what he liked without impugning the honour of his Chapter if he took her along too, as that would make it an extension of his original assignment. Had it not been for her complete self-absorption, she would have been an extraordinary asset to Imperial diplomacy.
'How long do you think it'll be before we catch up with the Spawn?'
Mira asked, after her final recon sweep among the empty platters littering the tray had failed to turn up any further comestibles.
I shrugged 'Hard to say,' I said, which sounded a little more authoritative than ''frakked if I know'', which was actually the truth of the matter. 'I suppose it depends on how good the Navigator is at reading the warp currents, and whether Yaffel has got his calculations right. Even if everything goes perfectly which it never does, we'll probably be following the damned thing for months - if we ever catch up with it at all.'
'Sounds like we're in for rather a dull time, then,' Mira concluded.
'Yes, I'm afraid so,' I agreed, little guessing how far off the mark that was going to turn out to be, and just as well too for my peace of mind 'We'll just have to amuse ourselves as best we can.'
'I'm sure we can think of something,' she said, before yawning spectacularly and stretching in a manner which emphasised her natural undulations in a decidedly pleasing fashion.
'Looks like you're ready for bed,' I said, chiming for Jurgen to come in and clear the debris of our meal. It seemed he and Gladden had reached the sort of compromise that only occurs or matters to underlings jealous of their status in colliding hierarchies, and that henceforth refreshments and their subsequent remains were to be handed from one to the other in the corridor leading to the guest quarters - which seemed like a pointless duplication of effort to me, but if it kept my aide happy, then good luck to him.
Mira grinned at me, the familiar mischievous expression on her face.
'I thought you'd never ask,' she said.
IN THE END, we weren't left to speculate about our mission for very long. After a few hours' sleep, which left me sufficiently refreshed to resume my duties, and left Mira somewhat cranky to say the least, Jurgen's distinctive aroma oozed into my quarters again, accompanied by the more fragrant one of freshly brewed tanna. 'Captain Gries presents his compliments, sir, and would like to see you on the bridge at your earliest convenience,' he informed me, busying himself with the tanna pot and a pair of tea bowls.
'What about me?' Mira asked, following him in from the direction of her own stateroom, still looking somewhat the worse for wear despite a change of clothes and a spraybath. It seemed she found the beds the Reclaimers provided for their guests a little too firm for comfort, although I found mine considerably more conducive to sleep than the overstuffed mattresses of the palace in Fidelis had been.
Jurgen nodded. 'I brought an extra bowl in, miss, in case you fancied one too.'
'Just get me a recaf,' she snapped. 'And that's not what I meant.'
The intransigent expression I knew only too well began to settle across my aide's grimy features, and I stepped in hastily to head off the inevitable clash. 'If you wouldn't mind, Jurgen,' I added.
