Duty Calls, page 18
‘The commissar does have a point though,’ Kasteen put in, backing me up loyally, even if that did mean coming perilously close to sounding as though she had doubts about Zyvan’s strategy. ‘On Corania they clustered round the pools, depositing the dead they’d collected and spawning new creatures. Bombing from the air while they were vulnerable made a big difference, and denied them reinforcements. For a while at least.’
‘I quite agree,’ Zyvan said, ‘and the minute they’re located, our ships will commence an all-out bombardment from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure of eradicating them.’ He permitted himself a wintry smile. ‘One thing you can say for this place, we won’t have to worry too much about collateral damage.’
Several of the faces around him nodded in agreement, and I recognised a few from the Gravalax campaign a couple of years earlier, whose names I’d never caught. Kasteen and Broklaw were looking vaguely cheered by the remark as well, and I’m bound to say I appreciated the point as much as they did. Despite our best efforts we’d put quite a dent in the planetary capital there, and it had gone against the grain to be killing and maiming so many of the civilians we were supposed to have been protecting. (Although, to be fair, a good half of the ones who didn’t turn out to be ’stealers were rabid xenoists who would have sold us out to the tau in a heartbeat, so I suppose we weren’t hurting nearly as many loyal subjects of the Emperor as we might have done.)
‘That’s some comfort, at least,’ I said, taking shameless advantage of my position to consolidate the good opinion he evidently still had of me. After leaving Hell’s Edge behind us, Amberley had ordered our pilot to head straight for Principia Mons, where we’d lost no time in briefing the lord general about what we’d found in the ill-fated settlement. (The ’nid presence, at any rate. She never said a word about the hidden laboratory, and I knew better than to raise the subject myself.)
Zyvan had been as courteous a host as before, politely ignoring the fact that we were both as malodorous as Jurgen (other than offering us the use of his bath, which was more like a swimming pool with soap, and sending my uniform out to be cleaned while we ate), and asking a number of pertinent questions about the numbers and types of organisms that had attacked us, which I did my best to answer. My input had evidently proven satisfactory, as he’d gone so far as to shake my hand when Jurgen and I had departed to meet the courier shuttle he’d ordered to meet us at the aerodrome.
‘Can’t we at least narrow it down?’ Kasteen asked, worrying at the point she’d raised like a kroot with a bone. ‘We know where they’ve struck, and at roughly what times. Surely we can estimate where the swarms are originating from.’
‘Our analysts have been trying to do just that, of course,’ Zyvan said, nodding in approval, and clearly grateful for having at least one regimental commander to hand with some idea of what we were facing[58]. ‘Unfortunately it seems that the settlements the ’nids have hit are scattered right across the planet, and given our best knowledge of how fast they can move, the timing isn’t consistent with the activities of a single swarm.’
‘More than one.’ Broklaw added something under his breath that the lord general pretended not to have heard. ‘Can you at least give us some idea of how many we’re dealing with?’
Zyvan shook his head. ‘Our best guess is at least three distinct swarms,’ he said heavily, provoking a flurry of consternation among his halo of floating heads, ‘but that’s just going by the number of raids we’ve discovered so far. We’re also assuming that the swarms are sufficiently numerous to have sent out more than one group of organisms at a time, and that each pack has already created a digester pool to process the biomass they’re harvesting.’ I noted the euphemism with faint surprise. Zyvan had always struck me as fairly blunt in his mode of expression, a personality quirk he was renowned for, and I hadn’t expected him to shy away from the fact that it was the corpses of slaughtered civilians he was talking about[59]. ‘If they haven’t begun digesting the material they’ve collected after all, and are simply consuming it for energy, then we’re looking for a greater number of randomly roving swarms with no focus for their activities beyond finding the next pocket of life on this benighted globe and snuffing it out.’ He shrugged, clearly thinking he might as well give us all the bad news in one go. ‘If the worst case estimate turns out to be the right one after all, we’re going to find five of the damned things running around loose out there.’ That provoked further consternation among the hololithic heads. ‘Assuming there haven’t been even more raids we don’t know about yet, of course. That could revise the numbers even further upwards.’
‘Emperor on Earth,’ Kasteen said, her face pale even for a Valhallan.
I nodded judiciously. ‘It makes good tactical sense,’ I said. ‘The hive fleets often infiltrate an advance force, to tie up the defenders before the main assault begins, and this planet’s tailor made for them to do just that. They could be pretty much anywhere, while we’re deployed in a few major population centres, waiting for them to come to us. We daren’t spread ourselves any thinner, either, which leaves the majority of the plateaux completely undefended.’
‘Apart from the local PDF garrisons,’ an eager young commissar I didn’t recognise pointed out. He was assigned to one of the Harakoni regiments, and his uniform cap was embellished with one of the blue feathers commonly affected by veterans of a grav chute combat drop, so he clearly wasn’t the sort to either shirk his duty or feel he was too grand to ignore the traditions of the troopers he served with. Despite his air of puppy-like enthusiasm, which reminded me disconcertingly of Lieutenant Sulla, the keenest and most irritating of our platoon commanders,[60] I was inclined to listen to the lad. ‘Are any of them sufficiently reliable to deploy?’
‘The arbitrator informs me that roughly two-thirds of the PDF regiments are now believed to be free of genestealer infiltration,’ Zyvan said dryly. ‘How well founded that belief is, however, remains to be seen; and of course the loyalty of the Gavaronian militia has been personally vouched for by the Canoness Eglantine.’ The faint pause before he continued said all he needed to about that particular assurance. ‘So I suppose we can expect most of them to mount some kind of effective resistance when push comes to shove.’
‘Sounds like Keesh has been busy,’ I said, surprised and relieved to hear that so much of the PDF had been effectively purged in so short a time.
Zyvan nodded. ‘Apparently his office has received a great deal of first-hand intelligence gleaned during a series of raids on hidden ’stealer nests,’ he said. Realising who had carried them out, and the wisdom of circumspection in this regard, I returned the gesture.
‘Then let’s hope his sources are accurate,’ I said, knowing full well that they were.
‘Indeed,’ Zyvan replied, diverting matters on to safer ground with as much finesse as a diplomat. ‘If they are, we’ll have a fighting chance of holding on until our fleet arrives.’
‘Assuming the hive fleet doesn’t get here ahead of them,’ the Harakoni colonel put in, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice the young commissar nodding in agreement. A realist as well as a populist, maybe he was going to turn out to be one of those rare examples of our calling who don’t end up dying heroically on the battlefield leading from the front, or taking a lasbolt in the back from a disgruntled trooper goaded once too often with the threat of execution or the lash.
‘That might depend on how many of the unpurged regiments turn out to be loyal after all,’ he pointed out reasonably.
‘Then we’ll have to hope that it’s most of them,’ Zyvan said. ‘I’m deploying them in the outer defensive perimeters in any case.’ Where our artillery could drop shells on them at the first sign of treachery, and the ’nids would be into them first regardless. Selling that to the high command of the local forces wouldn’t be an easy or pleasant job, and I didn’t envy whoever had got it. But there were enough bright, eager scions of the Imperial aristocracy whose families had bought them commissions cluttering up Zyvan’s general staff for him to be irritated by one of them on an almost daily basis, and I had no doubt that a suitable candidate had made himself obvious at just the right moment. (The obvious solution, assigning the whole pack of them to the front line somewhere, where if the enemy didn’t take care of them their own men probably would, didn’t seem to have occurred to him, nor would it, in all the years we were destined to serve together[61].)
‘If it’s the splinter fleet I encountered in the Desolatia system,’ I said, more to remind everyone who the real hero was supposed to be around here than because I thought it was strictly relevant, ‘it will be relatively weak. Our warships killed around seventy percent of its vessels before they could escape into the warp, and we dealt with the ’stealers on Keffia and Gravalax[62] effectively enough to prevent it being summoned there. It’s been over a dozen years, I admit, but I doubt it’s found enough to consume in the meantime to regain much of its strength.’
‘Quite so.’ Zyvan nodded in agreement. ‘Where the tyranids are concerned nothing can be certain, of course, but it does seem likely that this is the same fleet.’ He smiled mirthlessly again. ‘I’d certainly prefer to believe that it’s the only one in this part of the galaxy.’
‘Then we should be able to hold out,’ I said, nodding judiciously, and trying to sound more certain than I felt. ‘For a few days, at least. It’s already weak and wounded, and our reinforcements should be able to finish it off for good.’ That’s always a pretty tall order when you’re dealing with ’nids, of course, they pop up again just when you think it’s all over with a persistence even a necron would envy, but it was what everyone needed to hear, and the expressions and voices of everyone in the link became a lot more confident and decisive after that.
‘All we need now is a strategy for holding out,’ Broklaw remarked, as though this would be nothing too difficult, and Kasteen nodded her agreement.
‘We’ll need to be ready for rapid deployment, so we can get stuck into them wherever they appear.’ The familiar self-confident smile was back on her face now that her old fear of the ’nids had been replaced by a genuine conviction that we could win. ‘At least requisitioning enough shuttles won’t be a problem on a world like this.’
‘The commerce commission will raise merry hell about it,’ Zyvan pointed out, with enough of a grin lurking behind his beard to make me suspect that another young subaltern with razor-sharp creases in his uniform and an unfortunate tendency to irritate the lord general was about to have his diplomatic skills tested to the limit. ‘But they can frak off to the warp so far as I’m concerned. We’ve a war to win, and if they don’t want to help us do that, they can sit outside the perimeter and bitch about it to the ’nids.’
‘We can’t defend everywhere,’ Broklaw pointed out. ‘Even if every regiment becomes air mobile, it’ll take time to respond to an attack.’
‘Precisely,’ Zyvan said, ‘which is why we’re implementing a strategy of phased reinforcement.’ He smiled, looking more relaxed than he had done since I’d left him in earnest discussion with Amberley the evening before to return to Hoarfell. ‘Not unlike the way the Guard responds to an attack on the Imperium itself, as it happens, but on a much smaller scale, of course.’
‘I’m not sure I follow,’ the young commissar said.
‘It’s fairly straightforward,’ Zyvan assured him. ‘When the ’nids attack a populated plateau, the local PDF garrison will respond, and report the situation. Reinforcements from the nearest plateaux with PDF garrisons will start arriving at once, giving the nearest Guard regiment time to put its own rapid response force into the air.’
‘That should work,’ I agreed. If nothing else, it would buy Keesh’s people a little more time to evacuate the civilians, and the PDF gaunt fodder should at least slow down the ’nids long enough for the real soldiers to get there. All in all I couldn’t think of a better plan, although if I’d realised Zyvan was inadvertently setting me up for another attempt on my life, no doubt I’d have been a good deal less sanguine about it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
For the next couple of days Zyvan’s strategy seemed to be working. So far as we could tell the ’nids were still confining their depredations to the lowest lying and most sparsely populated plateaux, as our analysts had anticipated, and I have to confess to finding that curiously reassuring, Hoarfell being neither of those things. That wasn’t to say that we were at all complacent about the possibility of an unexpected attack on our own position, of course: the one thing we all knew from experience was that the scuttling horrors were nothing if not unpredictable, and Kasteen kept the regiment on high alert in case a lictor or a purestrain ’stealer brood had somehow managed to sneak onto the plateau despite our vigilance.
Apart from that unnerving possibility, of course, there was the constant looming threat of the hive fleet to worry about. Though its advent was expected hourly it still seemed in no hurry to arrive, which was fine by me, as once it emerged from the warp we could expect the entire planet to be blanketed in spores and battle to be joined in earnest wherever we happened to be.
The one piece of good news was that we didn’t have any more guerrilla attacks by ’stealer hybrids to worry about, the security precautions we’d imposed in the wake of the fuel tanker incident apparently proving enough to prevent them from re-establishing a presence in Darien, although hitherto unsuspected broods were emerging elsewhere around the planet to commit acts of sabotage aimed at undermining resistance to the swarms. I heard little from Amberley during this tense interlude of sporadic fighting, her attention apparently entirely taken up with rooting out the cancers in our midst, or following up whatever leads she’d discovered in Hell’s Edge that might lead her to the missing techpriest before the tyranids found him first (or Lazurus and his team managed to locate him, which she seemed to regard as almost as bad).
Keesh hadn’t been idle either. He and his justicars were attempting to evacuate the settlements deemed most at risk from the tyranid swarms roaming the desert, relocating the populations of the lowest plateaux to higher and safer ground (at least until the hive fleet turned up, and ‘safe’ ceased to have any meaning other than a large metal box with a lock on it), a strategy which, in addition to saving countless lives, would also deny the invaders the resources they needed to increase their numbers. It was a massive undertaking, though, and all too frequently the dirigible fleet arrived too late at some luckless community to find nothing of it remaining beyond the kind of desolation we’d discovered in Hell’s Edge.
While all this was going on, the regiment was getting its first taste of action against the chittering nightmares that continued to besiege us. Several of our platoons had been airlifted to bolster the sagging resistance of the PDF when the ’nids moved against towns or industrial zones large enough to be worth defending, and, I’m pleased to say, had given a good account of themselves in the process, despite the trauma of facing their most dreaded foe once again[63].
Of course the more successful we were at evacuating the smaller colonies the more we were forcing the ’nids to mass their forces against larger, more vital targets, so in retrospect I suppose each victory we gained was somewhat pyrrhic, merely forcing us into another more desperate battle within a matter of hours, but the grim statistics of attrition seemed to be marginally in our favour. There was no doubt in my mind that we were making the tyranids pay for every centimetre of ground they gained in ichor. Any other foe would at least have been given pause by the pounding they took, but true to type they took no more notice of their own casualties than we would of an expended power cell. Nevertheless, just as we would have been handicapped by a shortage of ammunition, every hole we blasted through their ranks represented a marginal degradation of their ability to fight, and our policy of burning every ’nid corpse we could recover (to say nothing of our own) denied them the opportunity of replenishing their ranks. If the hive fleet that spawned them hadn’t arrived when it did, I suspect, we might even have been able to force our advantage past the tipping point, and succeeded in cleansing them entirely from the surface of Periremunda unaided.
That didn’t happen, of course. The fleet did arrive, along with our own reinforcements, and the focus of the campaign shifted to a more conventional system-wide engagement, where the battle in space became as important as events on the ground. (At least so far as the official record goes. The events I was to become involved in could well have changed the face of the entire galaxy, although just how far-reaching they were I’d have no idea until decades later, at the turn of the millennium, when Abbadon’s insane assault on the heart of the Imperium began[64].)
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I meant to be talking about was the day all hell broke loose, my shadowy enemies made another attempt to kill me, and I discovered far more than I ever wanted to know about the true nature of the Holy Inquisition.
It all started innocently enough, although in my experience it usually does when I’m about to be pitched yet again into mortal peril and bowel clenching terror. I’d been hanging around our command centre, trying, like everyone else, not to look as though I was staring at the hololith for the first sign of the hive fleet emerging from the warp, and discussing our state of readiness with Kasteen. So far we’d deployed four platoons in support of the PDF, and they’d all returned in high spirits, despite the inevitable casualties they’d taken[65]. I complimented the colonel once again on her decision to practise the anti-tyranid tactics the veterans among us had learned at so great a cost on Corania, and she nodded gravely.
‘It seems to be paying off,’ she conceded. I glanced at the status board. Second company was on standby for rapid deployment at the moment, a couple of platoons already sitting out at the aerodrome waiting for a vox message to pile into the transport shuttles we’d requisitioned, along with a couple of civilian pilots who seemed less than thrilled to be hopping in and out of war zones pretty much on a daily basis, but understandably disinclined to argue with an awful lot of people carrying guns. The dropships from our troop carriers would have been preferable, of course, but in the nature of things there were far fewer of those to go round than there were regiments demanding their use and our position on Hoarfell made us a low priority. Zyvan had decided that the company-sized transports would be better employed shifting troopers who were nearer to the enemy (which meant more of them could be plucked to safety if things went seriously ploin-shaped, but of course no one would have been tactless enough to mention that to the civilian authorities). I nodded approvingly.
