Cain's Last Stand, page 2
‘Quite right, they are,’ I agreed, my lifelong affinity for environments like that enabling me to picture them all too easily. ‘The PDF will be splitting up into squads, and sweeping a sector each. That means a pair of you will be going in with each one. If your assigned squad splits down into fireteams, you’ll have to decide for yourselves who goes with which.’
‘That seems clear enough,’ she agreed, looking thoughtful.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said. ‘Any more questions?’
‘Sir,’ Nelys said. ‘Are we to infer that we have full commissarial authority on this assignment?’
‘Up to a point,’ I said, with a distinct sinking feeling. ‘You’re there to encourage the troopers you’re attached to, in any manner you see fit. But that doesn’t mean you can execute anybody without asking me first, is that clear?’ That would be all I needed, some over-zealous cadet landing me with a mountain of paperwork.
‘Yes, sir,’ Nelys said, looking faintly disappointed, and the others all nodded too.
‘Good.’ I resumed my seat, not entirely sure whether I was pleased or not that the attitude of our shuttle had changed during my brief talk with the cadets, and that Perlia was no longer visible through the viewport as our pilot boosted us further out into deep space. Instead, the stars were staring in at me, sharp pinpricks of light speckling the void like the dandruff on Jurgen’s collar, and I found myself trying to spot the one that was moving; that would be the transport vessel we were rendezvousing with.
After a few moments of minor tedium it swam into view, resolving itself over the next ten minutes or so into a battered intra-system cargo hauler. Having had my first sight of it, I didn’t envy the PDF squaddies, no doubt jammed into a hold more suited to chunks of ore than passengers.
‘We’ve taken up formation,’ our pilot’s voice informed me through the comm-bead in my ear. ‘Estimated time of arrival at the objective seven hours, thirty-two minutes.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, reclining the seat as far as it would go. Before settling, I glanced back at the cadets. ‘I’d recommend catching some sleep. There’s no telling how much you’ll get later, if we do turn out to be heading into a combat zone.’ Or how much any of us were likely to get now, since Jurgen, a seasoned campaigner if ever there was one, had pre-empted my advice, and was already snoring loudly enough to intimidate an ork.
Nevertheless, I managed to doze off reasonably quickly; certainly far more rapidly than I would have done if I’d had any idea of what was waiting for us on the nameless rock tumbling through the void ahead, let alone the nightmare that was already poised to sweep across the galaxy, engulfing us along with everybody else.
EDITORIAL NOTE:
In the light of later developments, and Cain’s perennial tendency to skip over everything that didn’t affect him personally, this seems like a good point at which to insert a brief note about the asteroid, which he and his charges had been sent to reconnoitre. It comes from the Concise Compendium Of Extraplanetary Resources, a two hundred and thirty-seven thousand page document maintained by the Perlian Bureau of Tithes, Mineralogical Assessment and Fisheries, and is, unfortunately, as dry as most Administratum documents of that type. It does, however, point out one characteristic of the rock in question which, in the light of later events, is almost certainly highly significant: the italics highlighting this are, of course, mine.
Asteroid 761 kappa: approximate dimensions 4.75 kilometres by 1.39.
Primary extractable: ferrous metals.
Secondary extractables: silicates, volatiles.
Mining station established 887. M41: reclaimed from orks 923 M41, reclaimed from tyranids 998. M41, 999. M41.
Other remarks: Orbital path trailing Perlia by constant 2 degrees at equal distance from primary.
CHAPTER TWO
I can’t say for certain how the cadets fared, but certainly I managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep myself as we drifted closer to our objective. When I woke at last, roused by the mingled aromas of tanna and Jurgen’s halitosis, the asteroid was visible just beyond the viewport, resembling nothing so much as a diseased tuber, grey in colour, and roughly twice as long as it was thick around its widest point.
‘Breakfast, sir?’ my aide enquired, proffering another mug of the fragrant beverage, which I took with enthusiasm, and a standard-issue ration bar, which I accepted with rather less alacrity. ‘Sorry it’s a bit basic, but they haven’t got a galley I can use.’
‘This will do fine,’ I assured him insincerely, chewing the pulpy mass, which, as usual, tasted of nothing either particularly identifiable or particularly palatable. At least the tanna was as invigorating as ever, washing the peculiar absence of flavour from my mouth as I finished the bar.
Jurgen slurped at his own drink. ‘Maybe I can find a kitchen or something when we dock.’
‘Let’s hope that’s the most pressing matter on our minds,’ I said, mindful of the reason for our little expedition. To my complete lack of surprise none of the miners had resumed contact while I’d been asleep, and the palms of my hands began to itch in the disconcerting fashion which usually forewarned me of trouble to come. I turned to the gaggle of cadets, who, for the most part, were snacking lightly on their own ration bars, or ignoring them altogether. A few were looking distinctly queasy, which was hardly surprising given that they could find themselves in action against a genuine enemy for the first time in their lives within the hour. ‘Everyone ready?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The chorus of assent was distinctly half-hearted, apart from Nelys, who looked as if he couldn’t wait to get started, and Kayla, who still seemed to think she had something to prove. Donal didn’t say anything, but nodded, with an easy insouciance, which left me distinctly uneasy.
‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, pretending not to notice the desultory nature of the response. ‘Because I’m terrified.’
‘Sir?’ Nelys looked puzzled, as he always did when someone cracked a joke (or in this instance pretended to), but I was pleased to see a few wan smiles appearing on the faces of most of my charges.
‘Well,’ I said easily, ‘perhaps terrified is overstating it a little.’ (Though not as much as they thought, of course.) A few of them nodded gravely, as if they understood. ‘But I don’t mind admitting that I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’
‘But you’re a hero of the Imperium,’ Kayla said, an element of surprise creeping into her voice. ‘You’ve been in action hundreds of times. Why should this one be any different?’
‘Who said it was?’ I asked. I turned to the viewport behind me. ‘I haven’t a clue what’s waiting for us on that rock over there,’ I said, pointing to the asteroid, which had grown astonishingly large in the few minutes my back had been turned. Deeply shadowed cracks and fissures mottled its surface now, along with an indeterminate number of hummocks and ridges, interspersed with occasional man-made protrusions, which could have been anything from auspex arrays to washing lines for all I knew. ‘But I do know that as soon as we dock we’re going to have to convince the troopers that whatever it is, we can beat it.’ I pointed to the troopship, which dwarfed the shuttle we were in, occulting part of the asteroid like a metal echo of the drifting rock beyond. ‘And to do that, you have to allow yourself to feel a little of what they do.’ The girl nodded, along with Donal and a couple of the others.
Only Nelys seemed not to get it. ‘So what you’re saying is,’ he said slowly, ‘that to lead cowards we have to behave like cowards ourselves?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, trying to disguise my irritation at his obtuseness. From the expression on Kayla and Donal’s faces, I suspected that I hadn’t altogether succeeded. ‘But caution and cowardice aren’t the same thing at all. That fear is your friend; it sharpens your reactions, and it keeps you alive. Without it you’ll take needless risks, putting your own life in danger along with the soldiers you’re serving with. Casualties are inevitable on the battlefield, but we serve the Emperor best by making sure that the majority of them are the enemy’s, not ours. Every Imperial soldier killed by a bad call from us, or their own commanders, is a blow against our armies, and against the Golden Throne itself.’
There was an awestruck silence for a moment, and I began to wonder if perhaps I’d overdone it. But Nelys was nodding slowly. ‘That makes sense,’ he said.
‘I’m glad you agree,’ I said, feeling it was time to lighten the mood. I smiled at the cadets. ‘I’m afraid our job isn’t easy. There’s a lot more to it than a sash and a fancy hat. But you’re here because you’re the best and the brightest that the Imperium has to offer. If the responsibility feels heavy at times, then it should. But it’s a burden I hope you’ll be proud to shoulder when the time comes.’
And, just like that, I had them. After almost a century of trotting out morale-boosting platitudes for all occasions I could have done it in my sleep. Trying not to wonder how many of them would make it back to the shuttle once we were done here, I turned from the dozen eager faces in front of me to stare out of the viewport again. By now we were drifting gently towards an open pair of thick iron gates set into the rocky surface of the asteroid, through which light was spilling, sparking highlights from the rim of the portal and what I could see of the Aquila’s fuselage.
A moment later the view through the armourcrys altered abruptly from the cold, hard stars of open space and the looming bulk of the commandeered freighter accompanying us to a rough-hewn cavern about the size of a scrumball pitch. Luminators dangled from the ceiling, almost twenty metres above the more-or-less level floor, which, like the walls themselves, looked as though it had been hacked straight from the rock with mining tools as quickly as possible.
A couple of utility shuttles from which a variety of tools protruded, mounted on flexible metal tubes which strongly resembled the mechadendrites often sported by tech-priests, were parked on launch cradles in one corner; no doubt they were intended to service the surface-mounted ironmongery I’d noticed on the way in, although judging by the number of wires and prayer scrolls spilling from the open inspection hatches these were in no fit state to leave their makeshift hangar. As our pilot brought us gently to rest next to them, and the doors behind us began to close, I found myself staring at the tiny spacecraft next to our own with a sense of foreboding: I’d never known a cogboy[7] leave a job half-finished, at least not voluntarily, and if whatever rites of maintenance had been underway here had been interrupted, the chances were it had been by nothing good. The palms of my hands began to itch in earnest.
‘We’re down, sir,’ Jurgen reported unnecessarily, as the whine of our engines died away, and the narrow door to the cockpit banged open, just missing my knees.
A redheaded youth in the uniform of a naval cadet popped out of it as abruptly as one of the figures on the ridiculous ornamental clock in Liberation Square[8], and saluted in my general direction. The name tape on the left breast of his flight suit read ‘Sprie,’ presumably in case he forgot who he was, and the unit patch on his upper arm showed the entwined crests of the sector fleet and the schola progenium, to make sure he remembered where he lived, and which branch of the service he was in training for. ‘Any further instructions, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ I thought rapidly. ‘Take off again as soon as we’re clear, and loiter just outside the main airlock.’
‘Understood.’ He saluted again, and popped back inside the narrow flight deck, allowing me to see the brace of cadets manning the other lecterns, and the instructor overseeing the pack of them. I had a lot of time for Hubert Visiter, the grey-haired commodore in charge of the naval cadets, and was far less surprised to find him along for the ride than I would have done most of our colleagues among the faculty.
‘Expectin’ trouble, Cain?’ he asked, without preamble, his neatly clipped moustache vibrating on his upper lip.
‘Always,’ I replied, truthfully enough. ‘And if it gets this close, I want to make sure you’re still around to pick us up.’ Well, me, anyway, and Jurgen if possible. As for the rest, it was Horus take the hindmost so far as I was concerned.
‘It’ll take about three minutes to re-pressurise the cavern once we’re back inside,’ Sprie volunteered, earning an approving nod from his instructor. ‘That’s a long time if you need a quick dust-off.’ I began to warm to the lad as well at that point; in my experience it’s always a good sign when the pilot’s thinking about the fastest way to extract you if it all goes ploin-shaped.
‘Good point,’ Visiter agreed. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to hold that long on the other side of the pressure door if you have to?’
‘We shouldn’t have to,’ I countered. ‘If we need to make a run for it that badly we’ll head straight for the freighter. You can take us off from one of their personnel locks if necessary.’
‘That could work,’ Visiter conceded. The makeshift troopship was far too large to dock internally, and, according to the vox chatter in my comm-bead, which I was listening to with a small corner of my mind out of long habit, had just made a hard seal with one of the cargo locks on the next level.
‘Then we’ll be seeing you when we want a ride home,’ I concluded.
Something went ping! inside the cockpit, and a rune on one of the lecterns turned green. ‘The cavern’s pressurised,’ a female cadet informed us.
‘Then let’s go,’ I said, turning to my motley collection of would-be commissars. They certainly looked the part, although they hadn’t got their sashes yet, of course;[9] on the other hand, after much internal debate, I’d decided to issue them with a sidearm and a chainsword apiece. If we really were about to start playing hunt the ‘nid in a labyrinth of narrow passageways, sending them in unarmed would be tantamount to a death sentence. Most of them were at least familiar enough with the weapons not to shoot themselves in the foot or lop their own heads off (with the possible exception of young Stebbins, who was the worst shot with a laspistol I’d ever encountered, and considering the number of gretchin and Chaos cultists who’ve taken a pot at me over the years, that’s really saying something).
‘Yes sir!’ This time the chorus of assent sounded a little more robust, so drawing my laspistol and loosening my trusty chainsword in its scabbard (I’ve always found a dramatic gesture goes down well at a time like this), I led the way towards the exit ramp.
‘At least the gravity’s still on,’ Jurgen remarked as we disembarked, glancing around suspiciously, the melta he insisted on carrying whenever we were expecting serious trouble a reassuring presence in his hands.
‘That’s something,’ I agreed, getting the measure of our surroundings. Despite the suffocating sense of imminent danger, there was something almost homelike about it, and for a moment I wondered at that, before realising that the warren of tunnels we’d found ourselves in wasn’t very different from pretty much any underhive you care to point at[10]. My bootsoles crunched on the gritty surface as I left the boarding ramp, the harsh scent of mineral dust tickling my nostrils for a moment before Jurgen’s earthier bouquet nudged it out of the way. ‘Doing this in free fall wouldn’t have been much fun at all.’
‘It’s hardly going to be a stroll round the gardens as it is,’ Donal remarked, checking the power pack of his laspistol before stowing it back in its holster. More or less convinced that a pack of slavering hormagaunts wasn’t about to leap out from behind the eviscerated shuttles, I followed suit. No point alarming the PDF troops by waving weapons in their direction, at least unless I had to.
‘No, it’s not,’ I agreed levelly. ‘I’ve fought ’nids before, and the best piece of advice I can give you is never underestimate them. They might seem like mindless animals, and individually they are, but the intelligence directing them is anything but.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Donal told me, looking far too confident for my liking. No point in fretting about it, though, so I led the way towards the thick airtight door set into the cavern wall a score or so metres away. It squealed on its hinges as Nelys shouldered it open and disappeared though it; no screaming ensued, and his head didn’t bounce back at us, so I concluded it was safe to proceed.
The chamber beyond was pretty much what I was expecting, and once Stebbins and Frister, the last two cadets to follow us through, had dogged the door closed again to allow the shuttle to depart, I paused for a moment to glance at the schematic of the station displayed on the screen of my data-slate.
The internal layout was just as much of a jumbled mess as I remembered from my previous looks at it, the tangle of passageways wandering through the rock apparently at random, their direction dictated more by the presence of something extractable than any overall plan. Here and there larger chambers marked the points where significant deposits of something or other had been gouged out, several of them since converted into utility areas of one sort or another, while others had simply been abandoned, showing as nothing more than the nodes from which more questing corridors had been drilled.
This, judging by a quick visual inspection, had been one of the latter. We stood in a wide rocky chamber, its rough walls pitted with shaft entrances, and its undulating floor bare apart from a few scattered pieces of mining equipment I didn’t recognise. Portable luminators had been erected close to the door we’d entered the cavern by, and also by a similar door in the far wall, the cables trailing from both disappearing up one of the tunnels in between, but apart from that there wasn’t a clue which way to go. After a moment, though, I slipped the slate back into my greatcoat pocket, grateful for the insulation the thick garment afforded me against the clammy chill in the air, confident that my innate affinity for environments like this had kicked in, and that I’d be able to find my way back here if I needed to.
