The Emperor's Finest, page 16
Which left Gries, Drumon, Yaffel and me arranged about the hololith, while the ship's crew scurried around us tidying up the bridge. The damage in here appeared remarkably slight, although the number of holes, scorch-marks and disquieting stains in the surrounding corridors bore mute and eloquent testament to the ferocity of the battle to preserve it. Hard to tell if I'd have been better off remaining here after all, or whether, despite my misadventures, I'd been prudent to get out while I could, so I gave up speculating about it in favour of the discussion.
'Damage to the enginarium was severe,' Drumon reported, 'but the guardian spirits of the circuit breakers responded promptly, preserving the core systems from harm. Our enginseers are performing the rites of reactivation, and have already honoured the guardians. The warp engines are performing as well as one might expect after a cold start, but will need shutting down for complete resanctification after we next emerge into the materium.'
'That sounds like a long job,' I ventured cautiously, not liking the sound of it at all. If our next port of call turned out to be a fire-wasp nest like the one we'd just escaped from, the last thing we needed was to find ourselves stranded there with no line of retreat.
'Roughly nine days standard,' Drumon replied promptly. 'Half that if we put in to a void station with a Mechanicus shrine, but we might as well wish for a forge world this deep into the Gulf.'
'I'll happily settle for a system free of orks,' I told him, while Gries and Yaffel reflexively meshed their fingers in the cogwheel gesture of the Adeptus Mechanicus, in response to the passing reference to one of the hallowed worlds devoted to the works of the Machine-God.
'Under the circumstances, so will I,' Drumon agreed.
'Then we must trust to the Omnissiah to provide the respite our systems require,' Gries said, in a voice which made it clear he'd take a dim view of it failing to honour the request, and moved on to the main topic on the agenda. 'Though your resourcefulness saved our vessel, it may have put the success of our mission at some hazard.'
'Quite so.' Yaffel nodded, oscillating a little as he always did, and went on. 'The conditions under which we enter the warp are crucial to our ability to follow the right current. Being somewhat distracted at the time 4 , I was unable to complete the relevant calculations before we made the transition, which in turn renders our ability to detect the next emergence point problematic at best.'
'What's the worst-case scenario?' I asked, to show I was paying attention, and trying not to seem visibly pleased that this fool's errand sounded likely to be coming to an end before too much longer. There was bound to be a Guard presence on any Imperial worlds in the vicinity, to discourage opportunistic raiding by our recent hosts, so if I made myself known, I should be able to find a ship heading back to Coronus without too much trouble. Mentioning this prior to my departure might get back to Mira, however, so I kept my own counsel, wary of finding her turning up at the bottom of the boarding ramp again.
'That we fail to find the emergence point at all, or any clue as to its whereabouts,' Yaffel said, looking at me as though I was a simpleton.
'And what are the chances of that?' I asked, refusing to be deflected. If I could get them to realise the mission was hopeless for themselves, it would circumvent any amount of arguing later on.
'Somewhere on the order of three per cent,' the wavering magos told me, looking as perturbed as though that was a real possibility.
'Why so high?' I asked, before reflecting that perhaps sarcasm wasn't particularly sensible under the circumstances, neither Gries nor Yaffel having shown much of a sense of humour about our quest. If either was offended by my flippancy, or even noticed it, come to that, they gave no sign, however. Yaffel merely gestured to the hololith, where the glowing green funnel was still projected over the starfield.
'We've been able to refine our estimates,' he said, 'but only so far. Given the flow of the current we're now in, our destination could be any one of these three systems, with a probability of seventeen, twelve and thirty-two per cent respectively. Other, less likely, destinations are here.' A rash of icons appeared throughout the cone, a few in planetary systems, the vast majority in the deep gulf between them. As I regarded these, I felt a faint shiver of apprehension; if we ended up in the void between the stars, and for some reason the warp engines failed to respond to Drumon's ministrations, we would all surely die in the fathomless dark, centuries from succour even at the best speed our vessel was capable of in the material realm.
'What if we return to the orkhold and re-enter the current after your calculations are complete?' Gries asked, as calmly as if committing suicide like that was a perfectly reasonable proposal.
To my horror, Yaffel nodded. 'I've considered this,' he said, his tone so even that they might merely have been discussing the weather, rather than condemning us all to certain death. All of a sudden, making a run for it in a saviour pod was beginning to look positively attractive.
'My estimate of a ninety-seven per cent probability of success was predicated on us having done so.'
'We'll have to lay over and resanctify the system before we try that,' Drumon said firmly. 'A lot of the machine-spirits are still traumatised, and need to be healed before we can take the ship into combat again.'
'So it looks as though we'll just have to carry on looking for the Spawn's next emergence point for the time being,' I said, trying not to sound too relieved. If we found it, all well and good; either the hulk would be there, or we'd carry on searching, and either way there'd be no reason to return to an ork-infested hellhole. On the other hand, if we didn't, at least I'd have nine days or thereabouts to find a plausible excuse to leave them to it - and failing that, there was always the pods. 'What are our chances of success under the present circumstances?'
'No more than seventy-two per cent,' Yaffel said gloomily, and I resisted the temptation to throw the nearest heavy object at him, with what I still consider a heroic feat of self-control. I'd come out ahead on considerably longer odds than that, on innumerable occasions, and said so. If I'm honest, I was almost giddy with relief, but still in sufficient control of my faculties to refrain from telling the desiccated tech-priest precisely what I thought about his willingness to sacrifice the lot of us just to tidy up his sums.
'Let us hope your confidence is justified, commissar,' Gries said dryly, and on that encouraging note the meeting came to an end.
WITH SO MUCH at stake, it was hardly surprising that the next few weeks were more than a little tense. I whiled away the time as best I could with one piece of makework after another, relishing my daily exercise with the practice drones, and a couple of sparring sessions with Drumon, who seemed as relieved to get away from his duties as I was. Though he never said so directly, I soon inferred that the orks had left a considerable legacy of damage behind them, and the task of coordinating the repairs was an onerous one. Despite my best efforts to ignore them, Yaffel's words had left me feeling unsettled, and although I knew the chances of being dragged back to the orks' domain on a suicidal attempt to make his calculations come out right were remote (practically non-existent if I had anything to do with it), I couldn't shake a nagging sense of disquiet, which refused to leave me entirely except when I was engaged in physical exercise.
Perhaps as a result of this, or perhaps because electrocuting a mob of orks seemed to have put her in a better mood, I found myself spending more time with Mira again. I can't claim to have enjoyed her society as much as I had done back in Fidelis, but her enthusiasm for mine seemed undiminished, and as I've noted before, my opportunities for social interaction aboard the Revenant were somewhat circumscribed. To be honest, I'd been a little wary of renewing our association at first, a faint voice at the back of my mind still insisting that this was a bad idea, for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, whenever I could be bothered to listen to it. But as the days passed, and she kept the virago side of her personality under better control, I began to feel a little more comfortable around her. Perhaps too much so; otherwise I'd certainly have paid more attention to the itching in my palms, which continued to flare up from time to time in the middle of apparently innocuous conversations.
There was one in particular which sticks in my mind, although the full significance of it didn't really occur to me at the time. Spurred on by our recent encounter with the greenskins, I'd been telling her a few colourful lies over a leisurely supper together about my supposedly glorious campaign to liberate Perlia from their kindred, and been duly rewarded by oohs and aahs of wide-eyed credulity in most of the right places - then she looked at me over the rim of her goblet as though taking aim.
'Haven't you ever thought about doing something else with your life?' she asked, in the studiedly neutral fashion she tended to adopt when trying to pretend she didn't care about the answer. I shook my head, in some perplexity, completely taken aback.
'Haven't you?' I asked in return, knowing that my question was equally ridiculous. Mira had been born into the ruling family of an Imperial world, destined since birth to take a hand in the governance of it, and her education and upbringing had no doubt been predicated on that assumption; she was no more in control of her own destiny than I was. From the day I'd been earmarked as a future commissar by a schola progenium functionary with a twisted sense of humour 5 , my destiny had been set in stone, just as surely as Mira's, but without the limitless wealth which had no doubt made her adolescence a great deal more comfortable than mine.
'All the time,' she said, to my surprise, an unexpected air of wistfulness entering her tone. Then she smiled, as if to make light of the revelation, and shrugged, setting up interesting oscillations in the clinging gold fabric of her favourite gown - which still made her look like a joygirl if you asked me. (Not that I considered that aspect of her appearance much of a disadvantage.) 'But I've never had the chance.' She glanced slyly at me. 'Not until now.'
'Being offworld, you mean,' I said, managing to look as though I was interested without too much difficulty. This was a happy knack I'd acquired early enough in life to make my time at the schola more tolerable than it might otherwise have been, and which had served me well in my subsequent career.
Mira nodded. 'Partly,' she agreed. She had a conspiratorial air about her now, as though she were about to impart some intimate confidence and feared being overheard by eavesdropping servants. Although since Jurgen was still the closest thing either of us had to domestic staff, and his presence was pretty noticeable even if he was out of sight, I didn't think she had too much to worry about on that score. 'It opens up a number of opportunities.'
'Does it?' I asked, unable for the life of me to see what she was driving at.
She nodded again. 'It does,' she confirmed, as though I'd grasped whatever she was blethering about, and tacitly agreed to it. 'With the right consort beside me, my father is bound to confirm me as his heir. Viridia will need strong leadership once the mess there has been cleaned up, and I mean to provide it.'
'Well, good for you,' I said, trying not to smile as I finally grasped the real reason she'd manoeuvred her way aboard our ship of fools. She was positioning herself to fend off any rival claimants to the throne, and wanted to prove she'd go to any lengths to protect her home world. And if she could bag herself a Space Marine to marry along the way, so much the better: the idea was quite ludicrous, of course, but somehow quite charming in its naivety 6 .
'I can't think of a safer pair of hands.'
'I was hoping you'd say that,' Mira replied, smiling at me in a way I hadn't seen for a long time. I returned it in kind, reflecting that this augured well for the subsequent progress of the evening, and I'm bound to say that I was far from disappointed.
FOURTEEN
I DIDN'T HAVE long to enjoy the sudden change in Mira's demeanour, although she certainly became more pleasant company after that. It was almost like reliving the earliest period of our association back on Viridia, and although I couldn't help wondering now and again just what lay behind it, particularly on the occasions I noticed her staring at me like a kroot at some choice piece of carrion, for the most part I was simply grateful for the improvement. So marked was it, in fact, that I was taken by surprise when a momentary flash of her old petulance surfaced one morning, just after Jurgen had knocked on the door of my quarters to inform me that Gries had requested my presence on the bridge at my earliest convenience.
'Do you really have to go rushing off like a lackey every time someone sends you a message?' she asked, as I scrambled into my uniform, considered the state of my cap, which, despite Jurgen's best efforts, was still looking the worse for wear, and decided it would just have to do. 'He said at your convenience, not right this minute.'
'It's the same thing,' I told her, tilting it to hide the worst of the damage and checking the effect in the mirror. 'You might be able to keep people waiting as long as you like, but I can't. That was just a polite way of phrasing an order.' Deciding I was now as presentable as I was ever going to be, I turned back, to find her expression softening again.
'That won't be the case forever,' she said, and I smiled back, touched by her evident faith in the upward trajectory of my future career. (Which has indeed left me in a position to keep people waiting as long as I care to, and has done for some decades now, although the realities of my job mean that it's still generally impolitic to indulge the impulse.)
'I'll be back as soon as I can,' I promised, and left as briskly as protocol demanded. It was pointless asking if she wanted to accompany me; even if she could be persuaded to get moving, which with Mira was always problematic at best, the summons had been for me alone. It was entirely possible that a separate message had been dispatched to her own quarters, of course, in the interest of diplomacy, but she was so unlikely to respond that it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that Gries had simply given up even the pretence of attempting to include her in whatever decisions needed to be made.
'Commissar.' The Space Marine captain nodded an affable greeting to me as I strode onto the bridge, before returning his attention to the shipmaster, with whom he was in animated conversation about matters which meant nothing to me.
If I'd had any lingering doubts about what I was doing here they were dispelled almost at once, as my eye fell on Yaffel and Drumon, who were standing by the hololith, examining the star chart with every sign of satisfaction. I ambled over to join them, and the Techmarine glanced up as I approached.
'Commissar,' he said, standing aside to allow me an unimpeded view of the display. 'Just in time.'
'So I see,' I replied, taking in the familiar star chart in a single glance. One of the three systems Yaffel had pointed out at our previous meeting was illuminated more brightly than any of the others, and the green funnel had shrunk again, to leave the icon apparently stuck in its narrowing throat. I nodded an acknowledgement to Yaffel. 'Congratulations, magos. It seems your calculations were as reliable as ever.'
'By the grace of the Omnissiah,' the tech-priest agreed, contriving to project an impression of smugness despite the monotone in which the words were delivered, and the impassive expression generally considered appropriate to one of his calling. 'We've detected another weakness in the interface between realities, consistent with those we recorded earlier in the voyage.'
'Which should put us about here,' Drumon added, prodding at the icon I'd already noticed with his servo-arm. 'The Serendipita System. Within the usual margins of error, of course.'
'Of course.' I nodded, to show I was paying attention, and tried not to reflect that predicting an emergence point from within the warp was always little more than an exercise in wishful thinking; although our Navigator had proven remarkably able in that regard, which no doubt accounted for the fact that he or she had been engaged by a Space Marine vessel in the first place 1 . Then something else struck me. 'We've always emerged blind before. How can you be so sure this is the system we're coming out in?'
I should have known better, of course, and spent most of the next ten minutes nodding politely while Yaffel sprayed technical terms around, and wondering if his augmetic enhancements really had left him without the need to inhale, or whether it simply sounded like that to my reeling eardrums. Eventually he ground to a halt.
'Something of an oversimplification,' Drumon observed sardonically, 'but accurate in its essentials.' Then, apparently to ensure I realised he was joking, he added, 'It seems the most likely candidate, given the flow of the currents our ship has been following.'
'I see,' I said, wondering why Yaffel couldn't have been equally succinct. 'Is it an Imperial system?'
'Absolutely Imperial,' Drumon assured me, with one of the faint smiles I'd grown more adept at noticing since we'd become sparring partners. 'One primary world, seven others supporting settlements, and thirty-eight void stations. Two of which are starports with dockyard facilities.' Which clearly accounted for his buoyant mood. I began to feel a sense of growing disquiet.
'That implies a sizeable population,' I pointed out. 'Which means it's the perfect place for the 'stealers to spread their taint.'
'Quite so,' Gries agreed, turning to look in our direction, and reminding me once again of the phenomenal hearing with which the Emperor had seen fit to endow him. 'You can rest assured we'll be prepared for any acts of treachery.'
'I'm glad to hear it,' I replied, though I felt a lot less easy than I tried to sound. We'd been ambushed almost as soon as we'd arrived in the Viridia System, and although the Revenant had shrugged off the attack easily enough, Drumon had made it abundantly clear that she was in no fit state to go into battle again. And Viridia had probably been infected by no more than a handful of implanted hosts; if the entire brood aboard the Spawn of Damnation had been roused, and able to rampage through the population virtually unchecked, the Serendipita System could already be lost to humanity. If that were the case, as my increasingly pessimistic imaginings were halfway to convincing me, then it would be like our arrival in the orkhold all over again.
