Duty Calls, page 12
‘Let’s look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘Maybe the ’nids will eat them all for us.’ Amberley laughed mellifluously.
‘Maybe they will,’ she said.
‘The thing I don’t understand,’ Zyvan said, glancing at the slate again, ‘is why they’d reveal themselves now. He must have known there was a chance he’d get caught.’
‘He probably wasn’t the most rational person on the planet,’ I said, thinking of Rakel, and most of the other psykers I’d ever met, ‘and he thought he was undetectable, remember. He probably thought he’d be able to stroll into the Arbites building, carry out his assignment…’ for some reason I found myself reluctant to use the phrase ‘kill me’, as it reminded me a little too forcefully of how close he’d come to succeeding, ‘and walk straight out again. If he’d managed to pull it off the insurgents would have got the blame, and no one would even have suspected the existence of his cult.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ Zyvan said. ‘If they hadn’t shown their hand this afternoon, we still wouldn’t know they were there. Why bother?’
‘We’ve been lifting a lot of stones looking for the ’stealer broods,’ I pointed out. ‘Maybe they were just afraid that we’d start pulling their people in as well, and get on to them that way. So they panicked, and thought they’d disrupt the counter-insurgency effort before we stumbled across them by accident.’
‘That sounds plausible,’ Zyvan said. Well it was no more irrational than anything else I’d seen the minions of Chaos do over the years, and I couldn’t think of any other explanation, so I just nodded and let it go.
The rest of the evening passed in a pleasant haze of small talk, a regicide game with Zyvan (which I won quite comfortably, despite Amberley leaning over my shoulder suggesting alternative moves every five minutes), and enough of the lord general’s excellent amasec to reinforce the mood of light-hearted merriment despite the terrible danger hanging over us. All in all it had been a long time since I’d felt quite so relaxed, despite the rigours of the day, and Zyvan clearly felt the same. From then on I was to receive periodic invitations to dine with him whenever our respective duties permitted.
At length, however, the evening wore itself out, and I offered to escort Amberley back to her hotel suite. Not that she required escorting, of course, being perfectly capable of decking an ork if she had to, but it was the polite thing to do, and it would enable me to spend a little more time in her company. After a moment’s consideration she nodded, smiling.
‘That would be nice,’ she agreed.
Zyvan had set up his headquarters in the Arbites building, more for the security it offered than from any other consideration I suspected, and Amberley led me through a twisting maze of utility corridors until we found ourselves back in the underground chamber our Rhino had come to rest in a few hours before. A gleaming speeder the size of a limousine was parked there now, its windows blacked out, hovering a couple of centimetres above the stained rockrete floor with its grav units humming faintly.
‘Very nice,’ I said, taking in the thing’s sleek lines and air of barely restrained power. I wasn’t terribly au fait with civilian vehicles, but I doubted anything that efficient and expensive-looking had originated on Periremunda[41].
As we approached it the door hissed open, and Pelton grinned out at us, a chauffeur’s cap perched incongruously on his mop of wheat-coloured hair. ‘Home, milady?’ he asked, playing the part about as convincingly as a marionette, and Amberley nodded, sliding across a rear seat almost as wide and well padded as the one I’d occupied in Keesh’s mangled limousine.
‘Home, Pelton.’ She glanced up at me. ‘Coming?’
‘Of course.’ I masked my surprise with the ease of long practice, and clambered in beside her. I raised an eyebrow as the rear door hissed closed. ‘Milady?’
Amberley nodded, as Pelton fed power to the motivators, and the long, sleek vehicle began to move, turning on the spot as it rose to about a metre above the floor and humming towards the blast door. ‘I’m travelling as the Lady haut Vail, minor aristocracy from the Krytenward system. It explains the servants and other riff-raff hanging around my suite.’ The last sentence was delivered in the bored drawl of the nobility, and Pelton grinned again, apparently enjoying the joke.
‘That’s us,’ he explained, in case I hadn’t got it, and returned his attention to the controls. ‘Whoops, didn’t see that coming.’ He kicked a little more power to the repulsors, bouncing us over a Rhino that was just emerging from the access tunnel, with barely a centimetre to spare between us, the blocky armoured vehicle, and the roof of the tunnel[42].
‘Flicker, stop showing off for the commissar,’ Amberley said, her tone indulgently reproving.
‘Sorry boss.’ We shot out of the tunnel like a shell from the barrel of an Earthshaker, and headed skyward at a pace that would undoubtedly have tried Jurgen’s stomach had he still been with us: mine too, to be honest, if the aircar hadn’t been fitted with inertial dampers. As it was the ride seemed smooth enough, and I settled back to enjoy it.
‘I met Lazurus at the briefing,’ I said conversationally. Amberley regarded me with cool detachment, giving nothing away beyond a barely concerned acknowledgement of the name. ‘He asked how you were.’
‘Did you tell him?’ Amberley asked casually. I shook my head.
‘I said you’d seemed well enough when I saw you on Gravalax.’ To my surprise she actually laughed out loud at that, as mellifluously as ever.
‘You really do have a talent for this sort of thing, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said cautiously. Amberley knew me as well as anyone in the galaxy, and saw further beneath the mask I usually presented to it than anyone else, but I was still not sure quite how far that was. ‘It depends what sort of thing we’re talking about.’
‘Diplomacy, misdirection, sneaking about.’ She grinned happily at me again. ‘You know, inquisitor stuff.’
‘You’d know more about that than I would,’ I said, and she laughed again.
‘See what I mean?’
‘He seemed to think I was looking for someone called Metheius,’ I said, refusing to be deflected. ‘Why would he think that?’
‘Because he knows I am, and he knows you’re an associate of mine. Lazurus and I are working together, sort of.’
‘Sort of?’ I asked, looking out at the lights of Principia Mons below and around us. The night was humming with life, and the thought of the ravening swarm about to descend on all those happy, oblivious people was a depressing one. Amberley nodded.
‘The Mechanicus and the Ordo Xenos have a joint project running. It’s been going on for decades, but about a dozen years ago it ran into a bit of a hiccough, on Perlia.’ She looked at me narrowly, and after a moment a sudden horrified understanding burst over me.
‘The Valley of Daemons,’ I said, the memory of the hidden Mechanicus shrine I’d stumbled across while leading my ragtag army to safety surfacing for the first time in years. The facility had been gutted when we found it, everyone and everything dead apart from a single surviving combat servitor, which had given me an anxious few moments, and at the time I’d been too busy trying to fend off an army of blood-maddened orks to think too much about the mystery. I did so again now, though, in the light of this new and disturbing information.
‘That’s right,’ Amberley said evenly, no doubt waiting to see how much I’d be able to work out for myself. I tried to dredge as much detail out of my memory as possible, seeing again the vast dam collapsing, the tidal wave we’d unleashed scouring its way down the valley, and the ork army besieging us being swept into welcome oblivion. But it was what I’d seen before that that had been, in its own way, even more disturbing.
‘Everyone had been killed,’ I said slowly. ‘We thought the orks had done it at first, but there wasn’t enough damage for that. The place had been hit cleanly and surgically.’ I remembered something else. ‘All the databanks in the cogitators had been wiped, and something had been taken from a vault there. It looked like a melta had been used on it.’
‘That was Metheius’s doing,’ Amberley said. She leaned forward to tap Pelton on the shoulder. ‘Take the scenic route, Flicker.’ Understanding what she meant, Pelton peeled away from our original heading to begin a leisurely circuit of the palace gardens, where it seemed the governor was holding a ball. Lanterns flickered in the ornamental shrubs beneath us, and elegantly dressed couples strolled arm in arm along illuminated paths or rotated around one another on the dance floor floating in the centre of the lake. No one glanced up as we passed, apparently taking us for just another late arrival, if they even noticed us at all.
‘All by himself?’ I asked, finding that hard to credit.
Amberley shook her head. ‘Of course not. He had help, and outside contacts, but for a long time he was one of the most senior magi working on the project.’
‘Which was what, exactly?’ I asked. Amberley hesitated, as if wondering how far to take me into her confidence.
‘While the dam was being built,’ she said at last, ‘the Mechanicus unearthed an artefact. It was unlike anything they’d ever seen before, so they brought it to the Ordo Xenos, to see if we might be able to help them identify it.’
I felt a prickling sensation in my scalp. There could be only one explanation for such a discovery. ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘It predated humanity’s presence on Perlia.’
Amberley shook her head slowly. ‘It predated humanity’s presence in the galaxy,’ she said quietly. ‘Us, and every other race we know of, except possibly the Necrontyr.’ She paused for a moment. ‘And it was still functional.’ The tingling sensation worked its way down my spine in a far from pleasant fashion.
‘What does it do?’ I asked, unable to keep a note of awe from my voice.
‘We still don’t know, even after generations of study, but what little data we were able to recover once the orks were eliminated and we could return to the site would seem to indicate that Metheius had made some kind of breakthrough.’
‘Which he seems reluctant to share,’ I concluded.
Amberley nodded grimly. ‘Quite. He must have had confederates within the facility for their attack to have succeeded so completely. Eight of his fellow techpriests vanished along with him, so it’s not hard to guess who they might have been.’
‘The damage we saw was consistent with an assault from the outside,’ I said. ‘So he must have had help there too. A mercenary band, something like that.’ The memory of the dead techpriests and their guards came back to haunt me once again. ‘A competent one too. There was hardly any collateral damage. Even a squad of Astartes could hardly have been more precise.’
‘That’s what we concluded,’ Amberley said, ‘and in the confusion surrounding the orkish invasion, they were able to get clean off-planet before anyone knew they were gone.’
‘I see,’ I said, my head spinning. ‘And you think he’s taken refuge on Periremunda.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Amberley said. ‘I came here to check it out, and found Lazurus following up the same lead. We’ve been sharing our findings ever since.’ She chewed her lower lip, looking mildly vexed. ‘Unfortunately this tyranid thing complicates matters a bit. I can’t really sit back and leave the ’stealers to bring the sky down on our heads, so Lazurus is getting a clear run at Metheius while I’m out bug-swatting.’
‘I thought you were on the same side,’ I said, confused. Amberley looked at me thoughtfully.
‘You know how it is. The Inquisition and the Mechanicus are meant to be equal partners, but whichever of us recovers the artefact gets to be a bit more equal than the other.’
I sighed, and shook my head. ‘It’s a lot simpler in the Guard,’ I said. ‘See the enemy, kill the enemy. We don’t have to worry about all this political stuff.’ That wasn’t entirely true, of course, but life was certainly a great deal less complicated where I usually sat.
‘No doubt,’ Amberley said, not fooled for a moment. She shrugged. ‘So there it is: unimaginably ancient xenos artefact somewhere on the planet in the hands of a renegade, the hive fleet poised above our heads ready to rip this world apart, hidden ’stealer broods everywhere making an early start on their behalf, and now a bloody Chaos cult crawling out of the woodwork just in case we were getting bored.’ She forced a carefree smile to her face, with an effort few people other than me would have been able to detect. ‘Welcome to my world, Ciaphas.’
EDITORIAL NOTE:
While Cain was running around the planetary capital, getting himself tangled up in my investigation, the rest of the Imperial Guard was reacting to the dire news Zyvan had just imparted to its senior commanders with its usual efficiency. Since, almost inevitably, Cain doesn’t bother to mention any of this in his own account I’ve appended the following extract from the memoirs of Jenit Sulla, who at the time was a mere lieutenant in the 597th, in the faint hope that it might prove illuminating. As always where this particular author is concerned, readers with a refined appreciation of the complex and subtle nuances of which the Gothic language is capable may wish to skip this passage entirely.
From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: The Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101 M42
My readers can readily appreciate the consternation with which Colonel Kasteen’s news was greeted upon her return from the capital, and the keenness with which we felt the absence of Commissar Cain, whose steady demeanour and steely resolve in the face of even the most dire of crises was so unfailingly inspirational to those of us who were privileged to serve alongside him. I for one, however, took heart from the fact that he would soon be among us once again, and resolved that upon his return he would not find me, or any of the women and men under my command, any the less prepared to confront this most terrifying of foes than he would be himself. After all, we had faced and bested the tyranid fiends on Corania, albeit at the most terrible cost, and I had no doubt that we would prevail once again, under the steadfast leadership of our colonel and the inspiring presence of our commissar.
By the time he returned, his habitual jaunty demeanour somewhat muted by the heavy responsibility he must now have felt[43], our preparations to meet this fearsome foe were well advanced. Colonel Kasteen’s foresight in anticipating that the presence of genestealers on this fascinatingly fractured world might presage the arrival of a splinter fleet had been well founded, and I like to think that the 597th was by far the most prepared of all the regiments on Periremunda for the onslaught to come. For my part, I had been drilling my platoon in the painfully learned lessons we had acquired on Corania ever since the colonel had issued her far-sighted order to practise them, and felt nothing but confidence in the women and men under my command.
When the flesh-moulded abominations of the hive fleets dared to show themselves openly, they would not find us wanting in fighting spirit, of that I had not the faintest scintilla of doubt. But when the foe eventually appeared in front of our eagerly waiting weapons, it was to be far from the comforting chill of Hoarfell, and in a manner none of us could possibly have anticipated.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Making the most of her pose as an aristocratic parasite, Amberley had taken over the penthouse suite of the most exclusive hotel in Principia Mons, which, among many other amenities, boasted its own landing pad, tucked away behind a small but pleasantly-scented roof garden. Pelton conveyed us there without further ado, coasting to a halt and popping the rear doors of the luxurious speeder with all the aplomb of the chauffeur he was pretending to be. The scent of hegantha and callium drifted inside the aircar, both blooms, I recalled, of which Amberley was particularly fond. I found myself wondering for a moment if she’d chosen the penthouse because they were already growing there, or if she’d had them planted after she’d arrived[44].
‘Very nice,’ I commented, stepping out into the cool night air. The city was spread out almost as far as the eye could see, until it ended abruptly at the lip of the plateau in a sudden cessation of light and motion as sharp as a knife-edge. Most of it was far enough below us for the never-ending noise to be muted, and the ground cars scuttling around like glowbugs seemed to skitter silently along the luminated thoroughfares in the distance.
Amberley nodded. ‘It’ll do. It fits my cover, and the flight pad means we can come and go as we please without exciting any more comment than necessary.’
I nodded too, picturing her walking though the lobby in power armour, and suppressed a grin. The staff of such an establishment was discreet, I had no doubt, but there were still some things that would raise a few eyebrows. ‘I’m sure it does,’ I said.
Amberley shrugged. ‘They’re used to all kinds of eccentric behaviour here. They’ll tolerate pretty much anything if you pay them enough, and they won’t ask too many questions. Even so, it never hurts to be circumspect.’
‘I’m sure it doesn’t,’ I said. I got a bit more used to her methods over the years, as she dragged me into her covert activities time and time again, but I never quite managed to shake off the feeling that she tended to adopt disguises and elaborate cover stories more for the fun of it than because they were strictly necessary[45]. Amberley laughed, took my arm, and led me inside while Pelton powered the luxurious speeder down. ‘Modest little place you’ve got here.’
The main living room was huge, tinted windows looking out and down at the urban panorama, the neat, comfortable furnishings supplemented by plants in tasteful ceramic urns and a surprising amount of weaponry left lying around the place. Amberley shrugged as my eyes fell on the scattering of ordnance.
‘It pays to be prepared,’ she said cheerfully.
