Caves of Ice, page 16
The conference room was the most crowded I’d ever seen it as I entered the command post, the babble of conflicting voices almost loud enough to drown out the muffled explosions from the battlefield beyond the large picture window. My eye was drawn to it at once, searching for some sign of the gargant, and despite the ever-present snow whirling against the glass like a disconnected pict screen I was sure I could make out a dark, hulking shape against the mountains in the distance which hadn’t been there before. Merciful Emperor, it was almost close enough to open fire on us, a handful of kilometres distant now. I thought of the havoc the massive belly gun would surely wreak, blowing apart buildings and storage tanks alike, and shuddered. Of course the greenskins would be trying to take the installation relatively intact, or at least the vast reserves of refined promethium it contained, so it couldn’t really do its worst, but no one ever said orks were rational[62]. If the ork princeps, or whatever he called himself[63], got over-excited this whole affair could end very loudly and suddenly.
‘Commissar.’ Colonel Kasteen looked up from her place at the head of the table, and indicated a vacant seat next to her. I dropped into it gratefully, while Jurgen went to find me some more tanna tea, and exchanged a nod of greeting with Broklaw who was seated on the other side of her. ‘I’m pleased to see you looking so much better.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, as Jurgen materialised behind me with a large steaming bowl of the fragrant liquid. I glanced up and down the table, seeing all the faces I remembered from the previous meeting, and a lot more besides. ‘Shall we get started?’
‘By all means.’ She nodded to Broklaw, who cleared his throat loudly, and to my astonishment everyone shut up and looked at him expectantly.
‘Thank you for coming at such short notice,’ he began, with barely a trace of sarcasm. ‘As most of you are no doubt aware, the commissar’s scouting trip has uncovered a much greater problem than the orks.’ At this point he glanced meaningfully at the little knot of tech-priests clustered around Ernulph. Logash was sitting next to him, still wearing the imbecilic grin he’d been sporting ever since we found him in the tomb below our feet. I’d invoked my commissarial privileges to unlock some highly classified files, so that everyone who needed to would know precisely what we were up against, but now the seed of suspicion had been planted it was hard not to wonder if the magos had known most of it already.
‘How sure are we that it’s a problem?’ Ernulph asked, an edge of eager acquisitiveness in his voice. ‘If the necrons are in stasis we can surely concentrate our efforts on repelling the immediate threat.’ Meaning let the poor bloody Guardsmen keep the orks off their backs while he and his cronies pillaged the tomb, of course.
‘They are the immediate threat,’ I said, as mildly as I could. I sipped my bowl of tea while the sudden flare of apprehension in my gut at the very thought of those mechanical killers subsided. ‘If we were up to our armpits in orks, with a side order of kroot and eldar backing them up, I’d turn my back on the lot of them to take out a single necron. I’ve fought them before, and they’re the biggest single menace in the entire galaxy.’
‘Surely you exaggerate,’ Pryke said, looking at me sternly, as though I was making the whole thing up. ‘I’ve accessed the records of previous encounters with these... whatever they are, and reports of them are practically non-existent.’
‘That’s because they hardly ever leave any survivors to report anything,’ I rejoined, feeling my hand begin to tremble as old memories came rushing back. A small gobbet of tea escaped the bowl to pool on the polished wooden tabletop, and Jurgen leant forward to mop up the spillage with a handkerchief that left the surface even grubbier than before. ‘Everything else in the galaxy fights for a reason, whether it’s for territory, honour, or souls for the dark gods.’ I heard a satisfying intake of breath at that, having deliberately invoked the most shocking image I could think of to wrong-foot any objectors. ‘Necrons don’t. They exist purely to kill, and they know we’re here now.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Ernulph persisted. ‘They certainly know about the greenskins. But you escaped unscathed, I gather.’ He glanced at Logash for confirmation.
‘The Omnissiah guided our steps,’ the young tech-priest declared, ‘so that we might claim the bounty prepared for us.’
‘The only preparation you’ll get from the necrons is if one of them fancies your skin as a waistcoat,’ I said, having the slight satisfaction of seeing him blench for a moment before his fanaticism kicked in again.
‘The commissar is convinced that the party he encountered were simply scouts,’ Kasteen said, determined to keep the business of the meeting moving. ‘And while the warp portal remains active down there we can expect a full-scale incursion at any time.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Morel declared, cutting through the subsequent babble of consternation, ‘is why now? They’ve been down there for Emperor knows how long. What got them so stirred up all of a sudden?’
‘I think I can answer that.’ As everyone turned to look at him, Quintus cleared his throat a little nervously.
‘If you can make any sense of this mess I’d like to hear it,’ Kasteen prompted after a moment. Quintus flushed even more, and stood, grinning nervously at the colonel. He produced a data-slate from the recesses of his robes, and projected a page onto the main hololith, which still jumped annoyingly as I tried to make sense of what I was looking at.
‘These are the sensor logs from the traffic control system,’ he began, before Ernulph interrupted.
‘Those are technical documents which fall under the purview of the Adeptus Mechanicus. You have no business dabbling in theological matters!’
‘I think you’ll find,’ Pryke rejoined, equally forcefully, ‘that they are archive material, and therefore clearly the responsibility of the Administratum.’
‘Their care and maintenance, possibly,’ Ernulph persisted. ‘But interpretation and consultation are the business of those appointed to commune with the numinous, not some jumped-up inky-fingered quill-pusher!’ Pryke seemed on the verge of responding in equally trenchant tones, when Broklaw cleared his throat again. The room went suddenly quiet.
‘Might I remind everyone,’ Kasteen said mildly, ‘that I’m in charge here and I decide who does what. And I want to hear what the scrivener has to say. Are there any objections?’ Surprisingly there weren’t, which might have had something to do with the way both officers had a hand resting casually on the butts of their bolt pistols; I began to suspect they’d been hanging around me a bit too much lately. She smiled at Quintus, who looked quite flustered for a moment, and nodded judiciously. ‘Please continue.’
‘Ah. Right. Yes.’ Quintus cleared his throat again, and pointed to something in the middle of the display which looked like a stain of ackenberry juice. ‘This is the flare of warp energy released when the greenskins’ space hulk emerged into the materium.’ Ernulph harrumphed disapprovingly at the young scrivener’s use of the technical term, and a faint, fleeting grin appeared on Quintus’ face just long enough for me to realise he’d done it on purpose to irritate the magos. ‘And there was another one almost as strong when it dropped back into the warp.’
‘We already knew this,’ Ernulph said dismissively. ‘Our instrumentation was practically overloaded. It’s how we knew they were coming in the first place.’
‘Precisely,’ Quintus said. ‘And because of the strength of the flare we missed that.’ He pointed to something else with an air of triumph, undermined a little by the almost total inability of anyone else at the table to see what was hidden by his finger.
‘Could you magnify it a little?’ Kasteen asked. Quintus flushed, and complied, revealing another, almost imperceptible ackenberry stain. A murmur of voices rippled around the table, and Ernulph at least had the grace to look surprised.
‘We missed that,’ he admitted grudgingly.
‘Quite understandably,’ Kasteen assured him diplomatically. ‘But can you tell us what it is?’
‘I can guess,’ the magos admitted reluctantly. Then he grimaced, as though biting into a bitterroot pasty someone had assured him was filled with sweetbriar[64], and gestured to Quintus to continue. ‘But I’m sure the young man has worked it out already. He seems quite bright for a bureaucrat, and we’d never have noticed this anomaly at all if it wasn’t for his diligence.’ I suppose for all his bluster he was a fair-minded man, but it must have pained him to swallow his pride like that. His colleagues looked positively dyspeptic, and Pryke was gazing at him in open-mouthed astonishment. Kasteen just nodded coolly.
‘Thank you magos. I’m glad to see we all seem to be on the same side at last. Quintus?’ For some reason the young scrivener became flustered all over again as she looked in his direction, and stuttered for a moment before resuming.
‘Well it’s outside my realm of expertise, as the magos pointed out, but it seems logical to assume that the flare of warp energy somehow activated the dormant portal in the tomb.’ Ernulph was nodding in agreement.
‘That would be my interpretation,’ he conceded.
‘Of course!’ Logash butted in with the single-minded enthusiasm of the obsessive. ‘That’s how the ambulls got down there! They came through the portal, and dug their way out of the tomb! That explains the anomalous habitat...’ He trailed off, suddenly conscious of how very much nobody else in the meeting cared.
‘And somehow the necrons noticed that it had reactivated.’ Broklaw nodded. ‘So they sent a scouting party through. That makes sense.’
‘But where from, though?’ Pryke asked, anxious to establish that her department was fully involved in things.
‘Could be anywhere in the galaxy,’ I said. ‘Somewhere with ambulls, by the look of it, but that doesn’t narrow it down much.’[65]
‘That’s not really the question at the moment,’ Kasteen said, dragging everyone back to the point. ‘What we need to decide now is what we do about them.’
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ I said, as calmly and decisively as I could. ‘Evacuate the planet, while we still have enough time to get clear.’
‘Evacuate?’ Kasteen echoed, clearly stunned. I nodded, conscious that I was risking my whole fraudulent reputation, but that it was precisely that reputation for heroism which might just do the trick now. I adopted an expression of barely-contained frustration.
‘I know how you feel. I’ve never run from a fight yet,’ (which was not entirely true, of course, but no one needed to know that), ‘and it goes against the grain to start now. But there are wider issues at stake here. The necrons in that tomb outnumber us by hundreds to one, and that’s assuming we could disengage from the orks cleanly enough to take them on in a stand-up fight.’
‘They’d still know they’d been in a scrap,’ Kasteen said grimly. I nodded again.
‘I don’t doubt the fighting spirit of anyone in the regiment. But if we stand and fight now we will all die. That’s a plain, simple fact. They’ll overrun us in a matter of hours.’ More like minutes, if the ones I’d seen before were anything to go by, but if I told her that she’d never believe me. ‘And that’s just the start.’
‘The portal,’ Kasteen said, the coin dropping. I nodded again.
‘Hundreds of thousands of them would be let loose on the galaxy. We simply can’t allow that to happen.’ I paused for a moment, letting the implications sink in. ‘We have to call in the Navy to sterilise the whole site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Pryke and Ernulph both shouted at the same time, then broke off to boggle at one another, completely taken aback to find themselves in agreement for once.
‘I can, and will,’ I contradicted them. ‘This facility is under martial law, which means the commissariat is the final arbiter of what can or cannot be done.’
‘Have you any idea of the economic value of this installation?’ Pryke asked, recovering first.
‘None at all, and I care even less,’ I said. ‘So far as I’m concerned it’s not worth the life of one soldier.’ The soldier I had in mind being me, of course.
‘But the archeotech!’ Ernulph spluttered. ‘Think of the knowledge, the spiritual advancement of mankind that you’d be sacrificing...’
‘All we’d be sacrificing if we left that tomb intact is our lives,’ I rejoined. ‘Not to mention the millions of others who’d be slaughtered if the necrons down there revive and escape through the portal.’
‘But they’re in stasis,’ the magos persisted. ‘While they’re dormant we can safely examine...’
‘We don’t know that,’ Kasteen cut in. ‘For all we know they’re up and about by now. And even if they aren’t, their friends could be flocking through the portal from somewhere else. We simply can’t risk sending anyone back down there, and that’s final.’
‘On the contrary,’ Ernulph replied. ‘I don’t think you can risk not sending anyone back.’
‘Explain,’ Kasteen said, although in a sudden agony of panic I realised what the magos was driving at. The worst of it was that he was right, damn it, and the spasming of my bowels told me who was by far the most likely candidate to get stuck with the job.
‘You said it yourself,’ he said triumphantly. ‘The portal’s still active. Even if you called in your naval strike it would be left intact and functioning for months before a flotilla could get here, possibly even years. The necrons would be long gone.’
‘Emperor’s bowels, he’s right.’ Broklaw looked more shaken than I’d ever seen him. ‘We have to blow the portal before we pull out.’
I felt every pair of eyes at the table lock on to me like the targeting auspex of a hydra battery. The air grew tense with expectation, while my mind whirled frantically, trying to find some plausible reason why this was a truly terrible idea. But inspiration had, for once, deserted me. At length I nodded, my mouth dry.
‘I can’t see any alternative.’
‘Neither can I.’ Kasteen turned to me, solemnly pronouncing what I truly believed to be my death sentence. ‘Can you lead a team back down to the tomb, commissar?’
THIRTEEN
Of course I couldn’t refuse, could I? Not in front of all those people. I’d been neatly impaled on my own rhetoric, and pulling out at this stage would have ruined the reputation I didn’t deserve. More to the point it would have lost me the respect of the troops, which was probably the only thing I had left capable of preserving my miserable hide. So I made a few appropriately modest comments about appreciating everybody’s confidence and hoping I wouldn’t let them down before sinking into a torpor of absolute terror which, as luck would have it, was generally mistaken for fatigue.
As a result the rest of the meeting went by in a blur so far as I was concerned, and if anything else of consequence was discussed I must have missed it[66]. I did rouse myself for long enough to listen to a progress report into some suicidal scheme for disabling the gargant, which Broklaw assured everyone would be effective if the orks in command of it were spectacularly stupid enough to blunder into an obvious trap, but given the intelligence of the ones I’d encountered before in my chequered career this seemed like a safe enough bet. Other than that I took no interest in anything apart from my bowl of tea, which Jurgen, attentive as ever, refilled at intervals.
So it came as something of a surprise when all the civilians stood up and filed out, the quill-pushers and cogboys predictably butting heads at the door over which of them had precedence while Morel and the miners guild delegation sailed serenely past them, and finally the room fell quiet.
‘That went well,’ Broklaw said, clearly not meaning it. Kasteen nodded.
‘They’ve agreed to the evacuation, anyway. Not that they had a choice, but at least we won’t have to waste any manpower herding them onto the shuttles at gunpoint.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ I said. ‘Once they’ve had time to think it over the tech-priests probably won’t go without a fight.’ At least most of the miners and Administratum staff had already gone, which only left a couple of hundred civilians still planetside. A couple of shuttle flights, no more than that, although lifting the regiment would be a lot more time consuming when the time came for us to pull out.
‘Then they can stay and fight the necrons,’ Kasteen said. ‘I’m not putting any of our people at risk if they start playing silly frakkers.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ I said. Not that it would make any difference to me, with my molecules scrambled by a necron gauss gun. And that would be if I was lucky; I thought of the other monstrosities in their coats of ork hide, and hoped fervently never to meet them again. I turned my thoughts in more productive directions with an effort. I wasn’t dead yet, and by the Emperor I didn’t intend to be if I could find the slightest chance of weaselling out of the suicidal assignment I’d backed myself into. ‘What’s the tactical situation?’ We hadn’t discussed that in front of the civvies, of course, they were best being jollied along with vague generalities, and a resolute avoidance of phrases like ‘we’re frakked’ which would only upset them.
By way of an answer Kasteen activated the hololith again and Mazarin appeared at her station on the bridge of the Pure of Heart, bobbing slightly in the current from a nearby air vent.
‘None of this makes a lot of sense to me,’ she admitted cheerfully. ‘But you’re the soldiers. What do you think?’ Kasteen, Broklaw and I stared at the latest sensor downloads from the orbiting starship. The ork advance had unmistakably faltered, breaking against our battle line, and pulling back in places to cluster on their left flank. Broklaw frowned.
