The Emperor's Finest, page 13
'Thank you,' I said, only too aware of the magnitude of the accolade he'd so unexpectedly bestowed on me. All I'd been expecting was a corner of a cargo bay somewhere; this was tantamount to a senior ecclesiarch throwing open the door to the sepulchre of a saint and asking how many bones I'd like to take home. 3 'I'll try to prove worthy of the honour.'
THE RECLAIMERS' CAPTAIN was as good as his word. We'd barely made the transition to the warp when Jurgen knocked on my door with the news that the tertiary training chapel had been put at my disposal for an hour a day. I've no idea what the other two were like, but this one turned out to be an airy chamber about the size of a scrumball pitch, floored with metal mesh, and with luminators in the ceiling which could be adjusted to replicate any light level, from the glimmering of stars on a moonless world to a dazzling glare. Much of the equipment ranged about the walls was either unfamiliar to me, or intended for users a great deal larger and stronger than I was, so I left it alone, preferring to run through the complex patterns of attack and defence with the chainsword which years of familiarity had made instinctive beyond conscious thought.
It's probably no exaggeration to say that those hours of solitary sword drills aboard the Revenant were among the happiest of my life. Throne alone knows I'm no Emperor-botherer, but centuries of use by His finest warriors had imbued the very walls of the place with a sense of dedication and reverence for tradition which made me feel as if everything I did there was part of something greater than myself. Not a sensation I'm used to, or particularly comfortable with in the normal course of events, but I couldn't deny it at the time.
If I'm honest, I also found the periods of solitude I spent there becoming an increasingly welcome respite from Mira's company. Which isn't to say that her companionship had become wearisome, exactly, but with very little to do herself, she seemed to want to spend every minute I wasn't attending to my duties attached to me like a Catachan faceeater. For a man as used to his own society as I was, that was a very mixed blessing indeed: so much so that, from time to time, I found myself inventing errands in order to delay my return to my quarters. On one occasion I even went so far as to ask Magos Yaffel for some further details of the techniques he was using to track the space hulk through the immaterium, which I dutifully transcribed into the report I knew full well General Lokris wasn't going to bother to read anyway when I eventually completed it, despite not having understood more than one word in twenty.
We all experienced a brief flurry of excitement about ten days into our voyage, when Gries announced that the Reclaimers' Librarian had sensed the deformation of the membrane between the warp and the material universe which Yaffel had predicted, but when the Revenant popped back into the real galaxy for a quick look round we turned out to be drifting through the silent void between the stars, with nothing on the auspex for light years in any direction except for the occasional gas cloud. Nevertheless, the Reclaimers and the tech-priests were all greatly heartened by this confirmation that the theory was sound, and since no one had seriously expected to bag the infernal relic on the first try anyway, we resumed our progress at once with high morale all round, except for Mira, who told me in no uncertain terms that she was bored stiff, and that this was all somehow my fault for persuading her to come along on this absurd junket in the first place. I can't deny, though, that when she finally calmed down enough to apologise, her idea of making things up to me was definitely worth it.
Our second emergence in the wake of the Spawn found us in a stellar system, which meant several days of frantic activity as we analysed auspex returns and sent the Thunderhawks scurrying around to check out anything which looked promising, but in the end we drew a complete blank. Fortunately, by luck or the grace of the Emperor, the star at its centre was a sullen, shrunken dwarf, husbanding the post-nova embers of a blaze which would have consumed anything in its habitable zone aeons before, and was now orbited by nothing more than barren chunks of scorched rock, which meant that the 'stealers would have found nothing or no one here to contaminate. So with a quick prayer of thanks to the Golden Throne, we were off again, casting ourselves adrift on the currents of the warp once more.
It must have been a day or so after we resumed our journey that I arrived in the training chapel at the appointed time to find it already occupied. I'd barely taken a couple of steps inside when I noticed Drumon in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by whirling cyberskulls, which he was fending off with the sword I'd noticed him wearing in the bunker under the palace in Fidelis, his plasma pistol gripped in his other hand. The blade was surrounded by a nimbus of crackling energy, like the claws I'd seen the Terminators use to tear apart the insurrectionist artillery pieces, although he must have moderated its strength in some way, as the tiny airborne servitors simply bounced away from each strike as though dazed by the impact rather than being sheared asunder. In a similar fashion, his plasma pistol had evidently been modified to unleash the merest fraction of its charge, as instead of being vaporised, each of the bobbing skulls he shot was only thrown aside for a moment, before returning to the attack.
The speed and precision of his movements were astonishing. I'm a pretty fair duellist myself 4 , but I'd never seen anything to match the flurry of stroke and guard the Techmarine was displaying. Not only that, he was somehow able to employ his sidearm with undiminished accuracy too, and even divert a little of his attention to swat at any cyberskulls trying to attack him from behind with the servo-arm grafted to the back of his armour, which he employed with the same casual expertise Felicia had displayed with her similarly sited mechadendrite back on Perlia.
Much as I'd have liked to linger and enjoy the spectacle, I began to edge away towards the door by which I'd entered. It seemed to me that Drumon had a far stronger claim on the training chapel than I did, since the demands of his duties must of necessity supersede the convenience of his Chapter's guests, and that by my very presence I was intruding on something private and personal. (By this point, although I still felt I had little in common with the superhuman Astartes, I'd got to know a few slightly better as a result of the honour their captain had seen fit to bestow on me, and I'd gathered that there was little a Space Marine regarded as more important than honing his combat skills.) I must have betrayed my presence in some way, however, because Drumon broke off his exercise to look in my direction, while the darting cyberskulls stopped moving, other than to correct their positions slightly in the air currents issuing from the recirculators.
'Commissar. My apologies.' He inclined his head, and made safe his weapons, before sheathing his sword and holstering his pistol. 'I recently made some adjustments to my wargear and wished to assess their performance. I regret the trials have taken far longer than I believed they would.'
'Time flies when you're having fun,' I said, intending to reassure him that no offence had been caused, then found myself wondering if I'd sounded too flippant; after all, it was almost tantamount to joking about the sacraments with an ecclesiarch. To my relief, though, Drumon smiled.
'It does indeed,' he agreed, dismissing the cyberskulls with a gesture: they hummed away to one corner of the room, like ossiferous grox-flies, and the Techmarine followed them, pausing in front of one of the control lecterns whose purpose I'd been unable to guess at before now.
'Would you like me to leave the sparring drones active?' he asked, one gauntleted hand poised above the runes of the display.
'I think they'd be too much for me,' I told him honestly, remembering the rapidity and precision with which the Reclaimer had moved, unencumbered by the bulky armour he wore.
Drumon looked down at me, his head tilted quizzically to one side.
'You can vary the speed and number of the attacks from this lectern,' he explained, demonstrating the procedure, his fingers moving deftly around the dials despite their thickness and the ceramite gauntlets in which they were encased. 'Use these controls to activate and deactivate the system. If you wish to avail yourself of it another day, I can teach you the correct incantations of awakening.'
'Thank you,' I said. It was a tempting offer. Much as I'd enjoyed the last few weeks of what my old schola duelling instructor Myamoto de Bergerac always referred to as shadow practice, it wasn't the same as working with an opponent, and although it wasn't quite the same thing, the sparring drones would make an acceptable substitute. 'Are you sure my laspistol wouldn't damage them, though?'
'A good point,' Drumon said. 'I will obtain a practice powercell to fit it and reduce the power of your shots to within the limits of the drones' structural integrity.' So that was how they'd been able to keep bouncing back from hit after hit that should have pulverised them. 'In the meantime...' He powered down the system, and the cyberskulls settled onto their storage shelf like roosting birds.
'I'll look forward to trying them out,' I said. 'Running through the drills is all very well, but there's nothing quite like sparring with a partner to maintain your edge.'
'Indeed not,' Drumon agreed, and looked at me speculatively. 'I have a little time before I need to resume my duties. If you consider me a suitable match, I would be honoured to assist a guest of our Chapter to hone their skills.'
'More than suitable,' I said, wondering if I'd live long enough to regret accepting the offer. But I could hardly refuse without insulting him, and, by extension, the rest of my hosts. Not for the first time I wondered why I'd ever been persuaded to leave the 12th Field Artillery, where life had been relatively straightforward, but my snowballing reputation had finally attracted the attention of people of influence, and that had been that. If I'm honest, I'd thought a long and tedious career behind a desk, and a long way from anything lethal, had awaited me at brigade headquarters. The reality of being an independent commissar with a reputation for reckless heroism, and therefore a magnet for every hazardous assignment which came along, had been rather an unpleasant surprise.
'I suggest blades only to begin with,' Drumon said, drawing his and pressing the activation rune. The powerfield around it crackled into life, and a flicker of dubiety must have appeared on my face, as he added, 'the intensity of the field has been reduced to non-lethal levels.'
I smiled, with every appearance of being at ease. 'Non-lethal for an Astartes, or for a mere mortal like me?' I asked.
'Both, I assume,' Drumon replied, returning the smile. 'It should feel no more uncomfortable than a glancing blow from a shock maul.' Which, on its own, would be enough to return me to Sholer's domain if he wasn't careful, so he wasn't being quite as reassuring as he evidently thought he was. It was too late to back out now, though, so I drew my own weapon and started the teeth rotating.
'I'm afraid I can't return the favour with this one,' I said. 'If it hits, it hits.'
Drumon took up a guard position, which seemed familiar enough, and beckoned me on. 'If you can strike through my armour,' he pointed out reasonably, 'I deserve a few nicks.'
We began cautiously, feeling out each other's style and favoured strategies, but as we began to get the measure of one another the rhythm of our strikes and parries began to increase in tempo. I was conscious that he was holding back, giving me a chance, and although I continued to work at it, I didn't put everything I had into the combat either, content to pace myself instead of burning off all my energy in a single burst of do-or-die endeavour. He was blindingly fast, of course, as I'd already seen, but I trusted my reflexes rather than trying to think too hard about what I was doing. In my experience of close-quarter fighting, which is far greater than I'm comfortable with, it's usually better to wait for your opponent to make a mistake than it is to go charging in and suddenly find yourself on your hands and knees looking for your head. On the whole, it seemed to be paying off: I took a couple of jolts from his sword's power field, but held on to my own, and seeing a sudden opening drove in at Drumon's chest. The teeth of my blade had just started to skitter off his torso armour when his own reflexes cut in, and he parried my attack with a speed and precision which left me breathless.
'Very good,' the Techmarine said, with more animation than I'd ever seen from him (or any of the others for that matter). 'First blood to you, commissar.'
'I hope I haven't damaged your armour,' I said, knowing how precious it would be to him, but Drumon shook his head.
'I will leave that mark as a reminder,' he said, 'never to underestimate an opponent.'
'I'm full of nasty, underhanded tricks,' I said, truthfully enough, but inflecting it like a joke.
Drumon nodded. 'In my experience, survival is honour enough for the battlefield. Would you care to continue?'
Well, I would, and we did, although I never got through his guard again; even though he still held back, he was always more than a match for me. By the time we'd finished we found ourselves agreeing to meet again the next time his duties permitted, and over the next few weeks we managed to train together several times. I've no idea what his fellow Space Marines made of our arrangement 5 , but many of them seemed to be making more of an effort to be friendly around the time Drumon and I started training together.
All in all, the growing undercurrent of tension between Mira and I notwithstanding, I was beginning to slip into a fairly comfortable routine aboard the Revenant; so much so that I began to take it for granted that the voyage would continue uneventfully until we either caught up with our quarry, or abandoned the search. But, of course, I was about to receive a salutary reminder of just how dangerous our quest was, and that the galaxy contained far more perils than the one we pursued so diligently.
ELEVEN
OUR THIRD ATTEMPT to locate the hulk in the material universe was almost the death of us all; not that we had any premonition of the fact as we prepared to make our latest transition back into the realm of the real. If anything, I suppose, by now we were growing a little complacent, confident that Yaffel's calculations could be relied on, and that the Librarian's abnatural talents would be sufficient to drop us into the materium more or less on top of the space hulk we sought - or, more likely, where it had been at some time in the past.
Accordingly, when Gries invited me to the bridge to observe the transition, my immediate expectation was of a repeat of our previous attempts: merely a wilderness of the void, the details probably a little different from those we'd investigated before, but essentially no more than another dead end to be discounted before moving on. Mira had been invited too, of course, as protocol demanded. But, no doubt to everyone's relief, she'd declined to drag herself out of bed, the summons having arrived in what she and the ship's chronographs insisted was the middle of the night.
I, of course, was enough of a seasoned campaigner to have hauled myself upright, yanked my laspistol out from under the pillow (provoking a tirade of most unladylike language in the process) and clambered into my uniform within moments of the message being delivered by a bleary-eyed Jurgen. Fortified by the mug of tanna he'd waved in my general direction as I made my exit, I arrived on the bridge a mere couple of minutes after the surge of nausea which generally accompanied the transition from the warp to the realm of reality had swept over me.
'Any luck?' I asked, and the crewman manning the sensorium display nodded in my direction.
'The system's teeming with life. If the 'stealers are here, or have been, there's a lot for them to infect.'
'What kind of life?' I asked. It couldn't have been an Imperial system we'd arrived in, or our vox receivers would have been flooded with comms traffic, and challenges from the local SDF, by now. 'Where in the Throne's name are we?'
'Processing the starfield data now,' Yaffel assured me calmly, gazing into the hololith. 'After correcting for parallax errors, our most probable location would be here, give or take approximately eight light-seconds.' One of the stellar systems inside the green funnel, which had been reduced substantially since the first time I'd seen it, flared more brightly, and the translucent cone obligingly shrank a little more.
'Anything on auspex?' I asked, and the operator raised his head to glance at me.
'I've got thousands of contacts,' he reported. 'It'll take a while to narrow them down.'
'Thousands?' I asked, as he returned to work, my palms itching worse than ever.
'Void shields to maximum. All gunnery stations stand to,' the shipmaster said, pretty much confirming what I most feared, before looking across at me as well. 'Many of them appear to be under power and closing on our position.'
'Wonderful,' I said, before realising that sarcasm wasn't quite what was expected of the dauntless warrior everyone here fondly imagined me to be, and plastering a smile on my face which I hoped would seem sufficiently insouciant. 'Always something to be said for a target-rich environment. Any idea whose day we're about to spoil?'
'Still scanning frequencies,' the vox operator reported, his voice almost as calm as Yaffel's mechanical one. 'Getting something...'
'Put it on the speakers,' Gries ordered, and a moment later an overlapping babble of harsh, guttural voices burst into the room.
My stomach knotted, and I took a deep breath, stilling the instinctive surge of panic which swept over me. I recognised that sound all too well, was even able to pick out a word or two I knew. 'Orks,' I said.
'Undoubtedly,' Gries agreed, no doubt familiar with every enemy of the Imperium I'd ever heard of, and a double handful of ones that I hadn't. 'And eager to welcome us in the manner of their kind.' He looked across at the shipmaster. 'Engage them at your leisure.'
'By your command,' the shipmaster responded, with a grave inclination of his head. 'All batteries, fire at will.'
I moved across to the hololith, where Yaffel had thoughtfully brought up a tactical display which enabled me to see just how frakked we were. Innumerable greenskin vessels were swarming in on our position, evoking a curious half-memory of Drumon surrounded by the sparring drones, before the full seriousness of our position elbowed the whimsical image aside.
