Hero of the Imperium, page 21
‘Probably lots of things.’ Amberley sounded wary, though not particularly concerned. ‘But we’ll just have to make do with what we know, and proceed with caution.’
Easier said than done with Jurgen driving, I thought, but she was the expert. I watched as he swerved us around a slow-moving cargo lifter, its flatbed jammed with civilians carrying hastily assembled bundles of possessions. Probably just spooked by our raid on the Heights, but the implications troubled me. I began to look out for similar sights, and found several in the space of a handful of seconds. I voxed Amberley again.
‘It’s looking like refugee traffic up here,’ I said.
‘Intriguing,’ she responded, a note of curiosity entering her voice. ‘What would they be fleeing, I wonder?’
‘Nothing good,’ I said, speaking from bitter experience, although in truth it wouldn’t be that unexpected for anyone who could to be leaving the city by now. The political and military situation was still balanced on a knife-edge, and it wouldn’t need someone of Mott’s intellect to deduce that things would be a lot healthier somewhere else if it all boiled over. No harm in checking everything, I thought, so I hopped through the tactical frequencies, finding a lot of garbled traffic on the PDF net. Very little of it seemed to be making sense, though.
‘Commissar.’ Kasteen’s voice cut in suddenly. ‘I think you should know. We’ve just had instructions to go to combat readiness.’
‘Who from?’ Amberley interrupted before I could respond. I suppose I might have resented her butting in, let alone monitoring my supposedly secure messages, but right then I was too busy swinging the bolter round and taking the safety off. A thick column of smoke was visible ahead of us, rising from a burning truck in the middle of the road, and the traffic was beginning to stall and gridlock as panicked drivers tried to find a way around it or turn back. Bright las-bolts were scoring the air, but who was shooting and what they were aiming at remained obscured behind the smoke.
‘By order of the governor,’ Kasteen said.
‘Imbecile!’ Amberley said, along with some qualifying adjectives which I’d last heard in an underhive drinking den when someone turned out to have more than the conventional number of emperors in their tarot deck. I began to suspect that Governor Grice’s political future was going to be short and uncomfortable. ‘We’ll have the tau on our arses like flies round a corpse.’
‘I think we already have,’ I said. Something was moving inside the smoke, fast and agile, twice the height of a man. It wasn’t alone, either. There were more of them moving back there, and the whole pack of them was surrounded by little darting dots. I suddenly remembered the flying platters we’d seen at the tau enclave, and that they were armed too.
Abruptly, unnervingly, the leading dreadnought (the same type El’sorath had called battlesuits) swung its head in our direction, and turned, a pair of long-barrelled weapons mounted on its shoulders coming to bear. We were still a long way away from being an easy target, but I’ve always been cautious, so I hailed our driver.
‘Jurgen!’ I shouted, ‘get us out of here!’
By way of reply, he swung us abruptly towards a narrow alleyway, crushing a raised bed of ornamental shrubs beneath our left-hand tread, and barging a small, sleek groundcar out of the way. The driver’s volley of profanity was drowned out by a sudden thunderclap of displaced air as something hit the front of an omnibus right where we’d been a moment before, reducing its entire nose to metallic confetti before raking the length of it, blowing a tangled mass of wreckage, blood and bone out of the back. Before I could see anything more, we were behind the shelter of a building, our hurtling metallic shell gouging lumps out of the walls, our tracks leaving a trail of burst and flattened waste containers in our wake.
‘Emperor’s bowels!’ I said, stunned by the narrowness of our escape.
‘What was that?’ Amberley asked, her voice almost drowned out by the complaints of the troopers around her. I tried to explain the best I could, still shaken by the range and accuracy of the weapon deployed against us. ‘Sounds like a railgun,’ she said, apparently unperturbed. ‘Nasty things.’
‘Could it have damaged us?’ I asked, making sure the spare ammo boxes were in easy reach. There was nothing ahead of us now except more panicking civilians, but I wasn’t planning on being taken by surprise twice, you can be sure.
‘Easily,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘Even at that range it could have gutted us like a fish.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Jurgen said piously. Well He hadn’t done a hell of a lot for the bus passengers, I thought, but decided it wouldn’t be tactful to say so. He’d only take it as a sign that we were important to His ineffable plan anyway.
‘Who were the tau engaging?’ I asked.
‘The PDF,’ Kasteen said. ‘Who else? We’re getting reports in that some of the loyalists have mutinied, and opened fire on the tau compound. The diplomats are trying to calm things, but the bluies are claiming they have a right to retaliate, and have entered the city. They’re engaging every PDF unit they come across.’
‘What about the Guard?’ I asked, already sure I wouldn’t like the answer.
‘The governor’s orders are to contain the situation by any means necessary. The lord general is asking for clarification.’ Playing for time, in other words. If the Guard units entered the city, they’d be caught in the middle; with half the PDF unreliable, they’d become a target for both sides. My stomach lurched, and for once, it wasn’t due to Jurgen’s driving.
‘Well, that’s it then,’ I said, the words like ashes in my mouth. ‘We’ve run out of time.’ The war so many people had sacrificed so much to avoid was upon us at last, and it seemed there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.
Editorial Note:
It goes without saying that the unrest which Cain noticed breaking out across the city was being duplicated to a lesser extent across the whole of Gravalax; although with the bulk of both the Imperial and tau expeditionary forces based around the capital, the situation deteriorated further and faster in Mayoh than anywhere else on the planet. Minor clashes did take place around several of the starports, as both sides realised keeping them open or denying them to the enemy would be vital in either reinforcing or evacuating their forces. For the most part, the warfare was internecine, pro- and anti-xenoist factions within the PDF turning on one another with the terrible ferocity unique to civil war.
The following extract may prove useful in appreciating the wider picture.
From Purge the Guilty! An impartial account of the liberation of Gravalax, by Stententious Logar. 085.M42
Thus it was, spurred by the workings of a vast, malign conspiracy, the entire world was rent asunder in an orgy of fratricide which shames the survivors and their descendents even to the present day. If anything at all can be said to have been learned from these terrible events, it must surely be this; that however benign they may appear, the alien is not to be trusted, and that turning aside from the word of the Emperor in even the smallest respect is the most certain route to damnation for us all.
It must have been the belated realisation of this which spurred the loyal cadre of Planetary Defence Force regulars into turning on the traitors in their midst, taking heart from the salutary way in which the Imperial Guard had dealt with the alien-lovers who had dared to desecrate the streets of an Imperial city with open rebellion. Their patriotic fervour at last aroused, His Divine Majesty’s most loyal servants began to cleanse the hideous stain on their honour in the only way possible; by shedding the blood of those whose craven panderings to the aliens in their midst had led the whole planet to the very brink of the abyss.
At first, the renewal of martial spirit was sporadic, beginning with the arrest of those unit commanders whose loyalties were, for one reason or another, suspect. Inevitably, however, faced with the threat of exposure, those whose souls were stained with the guilt of collaboration resisted, proving their black-heartedness by opening fire on the heroic defenders of Imperial virtue. The rot spread exponentially after that, until almost every PDF unit was engaged on one side or the other; indeed, such was the confusion that many were unable to tell friend from foe and simply engaged every other unit they encountered indiscriminately.
Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the most fervent of the loyalists lost no time in placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of those ultimately responsible, the xenos themselves, and resolved to rid our world of the taint of their presence without further delay. These heroes of legendary proportions, whose names would undoubtedly ring down the ages of Gravalax forever more if enough of their bodies had remained intact to identify, turned on the corruption at its source and threw themselves against the very citadel of the invader.
Alas, faced with the overwhelming firepower of this redoubt of the unholy, they were cut to pieces, but the damage had been done. Aware for the first time of their own vulnerability, the tau advanced into the city to slaughter the righteous, and the very future of Gravalax hung in the balance.
Throughout these events, one question remains unanswered. Why did the Imperial Guard take so long to respond? Accusations of cowardice are clearly ridiculous, if not treasonous, the lord general’s reputation alone being sufficient to belie them without a moment’s thought. Once again, the only credible explanation is that of conspiracy, some dark machination hindering their deployment for reasons we can only guess at. As to the hand behind that conspiracy, a careful sifting of the evidence once again points us firmly to the shadowy presence of the rogue traders...
[And after a reasonably concise summary of events up to that point, he veers off on his personal obsession once more. Perhaps it’s just as well, though; if anyone were to deduce the real enemy we were facing, we would have to take steps to obscure the truth.]
ELEVEN
‘Whatever happens, we have got
The Emperor’s blessing. They have not.’
– From ‘The Guardsman’s Duty,’
a popular ballad. (Trad.)
The warehouse was just as we’d left it, which is to say it was a tangled mess of collapsed rubble and gently smoking debris. As we disembarked from the Chimera, the scent of old burning caught at the back of my throat, making me cough. We hadn’t seen any more of the supernaturally fast tau dreadnoughts before we reached our destination, but I remained cautious nevertheless, ordering the troopers to consider the area enemy territory as we left the relative safety of the armoured carrier. What little I’d been able to glean from the vox traffic was less than encouraging, and my attempts to get through to someone more senior at divisional HQ for clarification were futile; no one there seemed to have a clue what was going on either. Besides, this was the inquisitor’s little expedition, and she showed no sign of calling it off, so I gave up after a while and just let her get on with it.
‘It seems clear enough,’ Amberley said, consulting an auspex she’d produced from somewhere, and for a moment, I wondered what else the dark cape concealed. Nevertheless, the troopers debarked with commendable precision, covering each other as they moved. Kelp on point, while the others remained protected by the vehicle’s armour plate until he’d reached the cover of a nearby heap of rubble, then Trebek, who headed for a tumbled wall on the opposite flank. Once they were established, Velade followed, taking up a position behind them, then Holenbi, who, I noticed, picked a spot where he could cover her as effectively as possible despite leaving a small blind spot in his coverage of Trebek. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided to let it go just this once. After all, they weren’t the most cohesive team I might have wished for, and it could have been an honest mistake. Sorel swept the area with the targeter of his long-las, and raised a hand.
‘It’s clear, commissar,’ he said. ‘You can move.’
‘After you,’ I said. He shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and was gone, crouching low, hurrying over the uneven ground to a point about fifty metres ahead of Kelp, where a fallen structural beam lay across a tumbled internal wall. He scrambled up it, worming his way into a gap between the chunks of masonry, and froze, scanning the rubble around us through his magnifying sight. If I hadn’t been keeping an eye on him the whole way, I would barely have known he was there.
Amberley raised a quizzical eyebrow at me.
‘Wouldn’t it have been more prudent to have moved out while he kept you covered?’ she asked.
‘Any other sharpshooter, yes,’ I said. ‘But after what he said at the briefing–’
‘Better safe than sorry,’ she finished for me. I nodded, and indicated the open ramp.
‘Whenever you’re ready, inquisitor.’
‘After you,’ she said, and I almost missed the grin that accompanied her echo of my own words. I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if she didn’t trust me, mind you; I wouldn’t have trusted me either, but then I suppose I know myself better than most.
So I smiled in return, to let her think I thought she was joking, and dropped to the ground, my boots crunching on the scattered ash. Jurgen had left the driver’s compartment by now and I was joined by his odour, followed an instant later by the man himself. In spite of myself, my eyebrows rose.
‘Are you sure you’re not a little lightly armed for this?’ I asked, and a momentary frown of concern flashed across his face before he realised I was joking.
Like the rest of us, except for Amberley (for all I knew, she might just have concealed hers the way I had), he was wearing a carapace jacket, but in a reassuring nod to the Guard I knew, his was definitely one of the standard sizes – too big – although most of his kit looked like that at the best of times. He had a hellgun like the others, but it was slung across his shoulders. In his hands was the unmistakable bulk of a meltagun, a heavy thermal weapon normally used to give tanks a hard time in close terrain, which was about the only time you stood a chance of getting near enough to use one without being spread across the landscape. Emperor alone knew where he’d got it from, but it was a reassuring sight nonetheless. He shrugged.
‘I thought if we were tunnel fighting we might want to clear a path quickly,’ he said. Well, it would certainly do that, I thought, whether our path was blocked by rubble or enemy troopers.
‘Good idea,’ I said. On this kind of mission there was no such thing as overkill.
‘Did you remember the marshmallows?’ Amberley asked, appearing at my elbow. Jurgen looked a little worried.
‘I don’t think so...’ he began.
‘She’s joking, Jurgen,’ I reassured him. A slow grin spread across his face.
‘Oh, I get it. It’s a thermal weapon, and you toast–’
‘Quite.’ I turned to see Sorel signal the all-clear, and Kelp begin the next step in the complex game of leapfrog which would get us to our objective.
I’d half expected us not to find it, what with the building having collapsed and all, but Amberley’s auspex pointed us in the right direction, and after a few moments of alternately dashing forward, ducking for cover, and trying to keep an eye on five former mutineers I didn’t trust for a second, we assembled again in the shadow of a wall. Or what was left of one, at least.
‘It should be around here,’ Amberley said, sweeping the little instrument around so its guiding spirit could get a better view. Something on the readout seemed to satisfy her, and it vanished into the recesses of her cloak as deftly as it had appeared in the first place. She indicated a small heap of rubble, and smiled. ‘Under that, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Kelp, Sorel,’ I said, indicating the debris, and the two men stepped forward, Kelp with a scowl and the sniper with his usual lack of expression. They slung their weapons and began the onerous task of shifting the rubble. ‘The rest of you keep watching our perimeter,’ I ordered, diverting their attention from the work. Somewhat shamefaced, Trebek, Velade, and Holenbi stopped gawping at the rapidly growing hole and resumed their guard duties.
‘Not good,’ I muttered to Jurgen. They shouldn’t have let themselves get distracted that easily, even if the inquisitor’s little gadget had assured them there were no hostiles in the area. He nodded.
‘Sloppy,’ he agreed, unconscious of the irony.
‘Is that what you’re looking for?’ Kelp asked, after a few more moments of heavy lifting. What looked like a maintenance hatch of some kind had been revealed, bent and twisted by the heat and the pounding it had received from the falling rubble. He wiped a grimy hand across his sweating face, leaving a streak of soot and masonry dust. Sorel, more fastidious, wiped his hands against the knees of his trousers.
‘I think so,’ Amberley said. Kelp nodded, grasped the handle, and pulled, every one of his overdeveloped muscles standing out as he strained against it. After a moment he gasped and let go.
‘We’ll need a demo charge to shift that.’
‘Maybe if I...’ Jurgen took a step forward, and aimed the melta at it. Kelp and Sorel scrambled back with almost indecent haste, and even Amberley looked a little disconcerted as she raised a hand to forestall him.
‘We just want the hatch open, not the whole building down.’
‘Right idea, though,’ I added, seeing his crestfallen expression. ‘Velade, Holenbi, front and centre. Five rounds rapid.’ The twisted metal flashed into vapour under the combined power of the hellgun volley, and I clapped Jurgen on the back encouragingly. ‘Good thinking.’ Which, by his standards, it had been.
‘Or that might do it,’ Kelp conceded, staring down into the darkened hole which had opened up at our feet. I aimed my trusty pistol at it, but it was a pointless precaution; anyone waiting in ambush would have been vaporised along with the inspection panel, and anyone outside the hellguns’ area of effect would have been shooting back by now.
