Duty Calls, page 26
I nodded in agreement, still pleasantly surprised by the lack of nausea the motion produced. I hadn’t exactly been resting in the couple of weeks since my nerve-shredding encounter in the starport terminal, but I hadn’t seen much actual combat either, dividing the bulk of my time between the routine tasks of my office, pursuing my request for an investigation of the Gavarronian PDF now things had become quiet enough to devote some attention to the matter, and evading the local pictcasts, which were bordering on hagiography these days, after what everyone seemed determined to believe was my heroic single-handed defence of a thousand civilians against a horde of ravening tyranids and a coven of Chaos worshippers.
Keesh’s request for a private meeting to discuss some highly sensitive matters had come as something of a surprise (as had Amberley’s presence in the conference chamber, which had been an even greater, and far more welcome, one), which I’d seized on gratefully, hoping that decamping to Principia Mons without warning would at least allow me to get though the next couple of days without some idiot shoving an imagifer in my face and asking me to comment on some momentous issue I’d never heard about before.
‘Quite true,’ I said. The bulk of the records I was looking at had been recovered from Skywest[83] by an elite squad of justicars under Nyte’s personal supervision within hours of the ’nids being driven off from there, and had been classified so secret I wasn’t entirely sure that even Zyvan was allowed to look at them[84]. I nodded at several names, linked to the three we were interested in by thin red lines. ‘Are any of these people available for questioning?’
‘Not unless you want to stick your head down a tyranid’s throat and shout “anyone at home?”’ Amberley said dryly.
Keesh looked mildly disapproving of the note of levity creeping into the proceedings. ‘Our best indications are that none of them survived the tyranid assault on Skywest,’ he said primly, ‘but we can still draw certain inferences from the way they appear to have interacted.’
‘A Chaos cult,’ I said, recognising the signs. ‘Or at least a local cell of one.’
Amberley nodded, looking a little surprised at the speed of my deduction, but I’d encountered such things often enough before to realise what I was looking at almost at once.
‘That would be my interpretation too,’ Keesh said. ‘Although it does seem rather unusual for a group that small to have three members proficient in warpcraft.’ He directed an enquiring look at the inquisitor.
‘It does,’ Amberley confirmed. ‘Which is why the other lead should be followed up as quickly as possible.’ She looked at me, smiling cheerfully, and I tried to suppress a shiver of apprehension. ‘Fortunately Ciaphas has given us the perfect opportunity to do just that.’
‘I have?’ I asked. I indicated the hololith. ‘I grant you that they all visited Gavarrone at least once in the past five years, but my business there is entirely with the PDF.’ After a lot of memos, and some unashamed trading on my reputation to get things moving, I’d finally got the Munitorum to agree that I might as well follow up the incident on Aceralbaterra myself in the absence of any local commissar capable of handling the case[85]. As nothing else had happened in the meantime to raise any questions about the local militia’s loyalty the chances were it was going to turn out to be a complete waste of time after all, but at least it would keep me comfortably away from the mopping up operation for a day or two. ‘I don’t see how I can follow this up as well.’
‘You won’t have to,’ Amberley assured me. ‘But your enquiry into the friendly fire incident will be the perfect cover for a bit of discreet poking around into some other matters too.’
‘Like what?’ I asked, feeling less and less happy.
Amberley looked at me like one of my old schola tutors pointing out that I’d missed something obvious. ‘Well, you’re assuming that if the PDF on Gavarrone has been penetrated, it’s by genestealer hybrids. That is perfectly possible, of course, but the Imperium has other hidden enemies too, don’t forget.’
‘You really think there’s a Chaos cult hiding out in the middle of an Ecclesiarchy fiefdom?’ I asked, unable to keep a note of incredulity out of my voice.
Amberley shrugged. ‘Why not?’ she asked.
I felt my jaw working spasmodically for a moment before I could articulate a coherent reply. ‘Well for one thing, Eglantine and her singing harpies would have burned the lot of them for heretics years ago,’ I pointed out reasonably.
Amberley merely shrugged again. ‘If they’d even noticed,’ she said, completely unperturbed by my manifest incredulity. ‘In my experience people like her tend to take an awful lot for granted.’
‘Well, I’ll let you know if I find anything,’ I said, hoping to move the conversation on to safer ground. Amberley’s smile stretched, and I felt the shiver of apprehension grow stronger.
‘There won’t be any need for that,’ she assured me happily. ‘I’ll be coming along too.’ Then she smiled coquettishly. ‘I’ve always thought I look good in a uniform.’
Well, she was right about that anyway, which was something of a consolation. She grinned at me happily from beneath a standard issue Valhallan uniform cap, its dark fur contrasting well with her pale complexion and blonde hair. The greatcoat that went with it was unfastened, revealing well-filled fatigues beneath, but an absence of body armour that had surprised me at first. Then again, this wasn’t supposed to be a combat assignment. Nevertheless, I had no doubt that she’d be as discreetly protected as she had been on Gravalax, despite the absence of any visible precautions.
‘How do I look?’ she asked, taking a sip of amasec from the crystal goblet in her hand.
We were sitting in the forward compartment of her Aquila, which had been repainted for the occasion in the drab livery of the Munitorum, and which now looked, from the outside at least, like a utility cargo hauler that hadn’t seen the inside of a maintenance bay since the Gothic Wars. Precisely the kind of thing, in other words, that I might have requisitioned to transport me on a low priority administrative errand. (But it would have been considerably less comfortable, of course, not to mention lacking in cunningly concealed firepower.)
‘Very fetching,’ I assured her, accurately enough. ‘You ought to pass for a soldier, if no one looks too closely.’ That was more or less true of the rest of them as well, I supposed. After all, next to Jurgen, even Simeon looked like a storm trooper. With his implants hidden beneath the traditional Valhallan greatcoat and hat he looked more human than I’d ever seen him, a massive dose of some tranquiliser or other stilling the usual range of twitches and tics. Pelton looked the part too, his years in the Arbites no doubt contributing to the air of disciplined efficiency the uniform lent him.
The weak link, of course, was Zemelda, who, try as she might, would never look like anything other than a civilian in borrowed clothes to anyone familiar with the Imperial Guard. She’d done her best, though, even returning her hair to its natural colour for the occasion, which turned out to be a rather pleasant shade of brown. Faced with Amberley’s implacable determination to bring her along I’d bowed to the inevitable, merely suggesting that we add a bandage or two to give the impression that she’d recently suffered a head wound in action. Anyone noticing some oddity of posture or behaviour might just ascribe it to the kind of disorientation I’d become all too familiar with myself in the last couple of weeks. The hope was a faint one, admittedly, but since we were going to be dealing with PDF personnel, who were barely a step up from civilians in uniform themselves, we might just get away with it.
Needless to say Zemelda was just as thrilled at this chance to dress up and play act as she had been when asked to impersonate a lady’s maid, and had to be prevailed upon in no uncertain terms not to wince and limp like a mummer in a mystery play[86]. At least, to my intense relief, Rakel and Yanbel had both been left behind, since even Amberley’s relentless optimism had baulked at the prospect of successfully disguising either of them as soldiers.
I sipped my own amasec, trying to still the flutter of apprehension in my stomach. She knew what she was doing, of course, I took that for granted; the trouble was, I had no idea of what that might be. The theory certainly seemed sound enough: infiltrate her people in the guise of my escort, which ought to raise few eyebrows, since taking one was well within the bounds of established protocol for the kind of investigation I was pursuing. After all, if the Gavarronians did turn out to be riddled with hybrids, I could hardly rely on their own comrades to back me up in a physical confrontation.
With that grim possibility in mind I’d intended bringing Lustig or Grifen’s squad with me, until Amberley had proposed this imposture, and truth to tell I would still have preferred to do so. I had no doubt of her people’s fighting ability if push came to shove, but I hadn’t been in action with them as often as I had with the Valhallans, and I couldn’t rely on them to cover my back in quite the same way. Their primary loyalty would be to Amberley, the Inquisition, and whatever mission she was on. I had no doubt at all that if a conflict of interest arose they’d hang me out to dry without a second’s hesitation. Not only that, I still had no more than the vaguest idea of what they might be doing once we’d arrived at our destination, and I have to admit that it was probably just as well. If I had realised what they were hoping to find, you can be sure I’d have been even more apprehensive than I already was.
At least I knew I could trust Jurgen implicitly, and I resolved to stick as closely to him as I could, despite the obvious disadvantages of doing so. He’d accepted the necessity of leaving his favourite toy behind, a melta hardly being the kind of thing a commissar’s aide carries around routinely on a fact-finding mission, but had been manifestly unhappy about ditching it, no doubt anticipating the possibility of further trouble. (Which, given the way things had gone since we’d arrived on this Emperor-forsaken joke of nature, I could hardly fault him for.) Denied the solace of some serious firepower he remained slumped in his seat, his lasgun cradled on his knees, obsessively checking the functioning of every component and reciting the appropriate litany from the Book of Armaments repeatedly under his breath. At least it kept his mind off his usual airsickness, so I thanked the Emperor for small mercies, and tried to get a picture of the fiefdom of Gavarrone as Pontius circled widely around it, preparing to bring the shuttle in to land on the pad in the main PDF compound.
My first impression was one of neatness, in marked contrast to the other plateaux I’d flown into since my arrival on Periremunda, the usual disorderly sprawl of human habitation or untrammelled nature tidied to within an inch of its life. Broad, straight avenues cut through well-tended fields in which any weeds or wildflowers with the temerity to stick their heads above the soil would be expunged as ruthlessly as heretics, bordered by squared-off hedges whose corners seemed to form perfect right angles. The town we passed over was laid out with an equal degree of geometric precision, its streets forming a precise grid, leading naturally to the vast square in its centre where the temple of the Emperor soared majestically skyward in a positive effusion of buttresses, crenelations, and superfluous statuary.
‘It’s like a toy town,’ Zemelda said, a note of disapproval in her voice, no doubt comparing it unfavourably to the cosy human confusion of Principia Mons, and I nodded in agreement. The relentless perfection of it all, no doubt intended to display devotion to Him on Earth in the little details of everyday life, struck me as sterile, as alien to the cluttered human psyche as the smooth functionality of a tau sept[87]. She craned her neck for a better view of something in the distance. ‘Is that where we’re going?’
‘No.’ Amberley shook her head. ‘That’s the convent. We’re putting down on the PDF landing field.’
Despite myself I was unable to resist turning my gaze in the direction they were looking. The Order of the White Rose, it seemed, was not exactly constrained by vows of poverty. The convent looked more like the country estate of some provincial nobleman on an agriworld somewhere, long white buildings rising no more than three storeys from the ground forming a complex series of interlocking quadrangles in which fountains played and flowers nodded gently in the breeze. Other, larger squares clearly had more utilitarian purposes, Sisters in power armour drilling or practising combat techniques with a precision Sergeant Lermie[88] would have nodded grudging approval of, or full of glossy black Rhinos ornamented with votive iconography that made them look more like self-propelled chapels than practical AFVs. The amount of detail I could make out was astonishing, given that our destination was supposed to be several kilometres from the place, and I felt a familiar tingling sensation beneath my gloves.
‘Aren’t we getting a bit close to their airspace?’ I asked, and Amberley nodded.
‘We are,’ she agreed, sounding more intrigued than alarmed by this development, and voxed the cockpit. ‘Pontius, what’s going on?’
‘Inquisitor?’ Our pilot sounded genuinely baffled by the question. ‘I’m following the co-ordinates the local traffic controller gave me. Do you want me to break off our approach?’
‘No, not yet.’ Amberley nodded thoughtfully, as if something she strongly suspected had just been confirmed. ‘Let’s play this one out, and see what happens.’ She looked at me, and grinned. ‘I think he’s just made his first mistake,’ she said, a palpable tone of satisfaction in her voice. ‘You must really have got him rattled.’
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Metheius?’ Amberley nodded again.
‘Him too, probably,’ she agreed. That old, and profoundly disagreeable, sensation of not being told everything that was going on began to grow in me again, but there was no sense in letting my disquiet show, so I merely glanced across to where Jurgen was sitting. He seemed satisfied with the condition of his lasgun at last, and snapped the power cell into place with a finality that no doubt comforted us both.
‘We’re on the final approach, ma’am,’ Pontius voxed a moment or two later, and I glanced outside again, trying to orientate myself. The wide, close-clipped lawns surrounding the convent suddenly vanished, along with everything else except a panorama of desert impossibly far below, and I suddenly realised that they bordered the sheer drop of the plateau edge. Unlike the starport on Hoarfell, however, there was no fence to prevent an incautious misstep pitching an unfortunate stroller into infinity, and not for the first time I found myself wondering if the blessed Sisters were a couple of beads short of a rosary[89]. I just had time to notice a brief, actinic flicker in the lowering clouds to our south-west, like the largest bolt of lightning imaginable, before the smooth green grass was back below us, much closer this time. We passed low over a grove of fruit trees, whose branches waved lazily in the breeze from our passing, and skimmed a couple of red-tiled roofs, in which repeating motifs of aquilae and fleur de lys had been picked out in contrasting hues.
‘We’re on final approach,’ Pontius told us, a moment before arresting our forward motion entirely, and the familiar hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach combined with Jurgen’s audible discomfiture to inform me that we were dropping vertically towards the landing field. White walls rose past the viewports, to enclose us on all sides, and a moment later a faint bump echoed through the fuselage as our landing gear made contact with the surface of the pad. Pontius powered down the engines.
‘Right,’ Amberley said, standing decisively, ‘let’s go and see what all this is about.’ I nodded, following suit.
‘Jurgen,’ I said, and waited for my aide to take up his usual position at my shoulder, before savouring my small moment of self-assertion. I raised a hand to forestall Amberley from leading the way out of the passenger compartment. ‘Carry on, corporal,’ I instructed.
‘Commissar.’ She saluted briskly, falling into the role she’d assumed at once with barely a hint of amusement, and formed the others up into a passable impersonation of a short team[90], which followed me down the ramp, their lasguns at the port. Jurgen had slung his own weapon, as was his habit on these occasions, leaving his hands free to respond more readily to any request I might make of him.
We emerged onto a wide landing pad, surrounded by the white buildings of the convent, and a gaggle of power-armoured Sisters strode forward to meet us, bolters at the ready. Stilling the growing sense of apprehension knotting my stomach I nodded an affable greeting, and waited for them to move within earshot.
As our feet hit the rockcrete Pontius powered up his engines again, and the Aquila rose gently into the air behind us. The immediate departure of our transport shuttle would be perfectly normal if we were all who we purported to be, and the last thing we wanted to do was give our unseen adversaries (if they even existed) the smallest hint that there was anything out of the ordinary about my errand. Instead of returning to Principia Mons, however, Pontius would loiter in the immediate vicinity of Gavarrone, safely below the rim of the plateau, in the blind spot of any local auspex systems that might reveal his whereabouts.
As the roar of his engines faded I became aware of a faint rumbling in the distance, like far off artillery, and remembered the flash of light I’d seen from the air.
‘Thunder?’ Jurgen asked, glancing suspiciously up at the sky.
Amberley shook her head. ‘The Navy,’ she said. ‘There must be a large concentration of ’nids around here somewhere.’
‘Lovely,’ I muttered under my breath, eliciting a brief, unmilitary grin from the disguised inquisitor, before her cover reasserted itself. Assuming an air of easy confidence I strode forward, addressing the Sister Superior of the Battle Sisters approaching us, and raised my hand in formal greeting.
