Cain's Last Stand, page 29
With a sudden thrill of horror I realised I was backing straight towards the hole in reality. I had no idea whether I could fall through it into the warp beyond, and had no intention of finding out. I dived to one side, rolling past the abomination’s legs, and taking an opportunistic swipe at it in passing. Once again my blade bit deep, and the daemon stumbled, turning awkwardly to follow me. I cracked off a couple of shots from the laspistol in my other hand as I rose to my feet, and to my immeasurable relief I noticed that the las-bolt wounds seemed to be taking a little longer to heal than before.
That could only mean one thing. Sure enough, a familiar odour was wafting through the door, followed an instant later by an equally familiar voice.
‘Hang on, commissar, I’m coming!’ Jurgen came in at a run, his melta in his hands, and I don’t mind admitting my heart leapt to see him. The daemon hesitated, looking apprehensive, insofar as anything approximating a human expression could be said to exist on what passed for its face, and then charged in again. Fortunately I’d taken advantage of its momentary distraction to open the distance, and my aide was able to get off a shot with his melta.
The ravening beam of thermal energy took the thing full in the chest, blasting a hole clean through it, and the abomination fell heavily to the floor. I wasn’t about to take its demise for granted, though, and struck out with my chainsword as it writhed at my feet, gouging fresh furrows in the floor as it tried to regain its footing. Its head came free of its body, blinking up at me in outraged astonishment.
Even a daemon generally finds decapitation something of a handicap; after a moment it stopped twitching and lay still.
‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, with heartfelt relief.
‘You’re welcome, sir.’ My aide shouldered the melta again, and began to rummage through his collection of pouches. ‘A drop of tanna? I’ve got a flask somewhere…’
‘In a moment,’ I said, indicating the xenos device behind us. The warp portal was still open, and I wanted it sealed at once, before anything else came through. ‘Can you put those ball things back in the holes first?’
‘Of course, sir.’ If he was surprised, he didn’t show it, simply stepping up to the crystal plinth. As I’d expected, the tear in the air began to seal itself as Jurgen approached it, and the trio of balls to move less slowly. He reached out a grime-encrusted hand to seize the nearest, and the others stopped moving, simply hovering in place where they were. ‘Where would you like them?’
I indicated the holes they’d occupied the first time I’d seen the device, on the assumption that it had at least been relatively harmless then, and waited while Jurgen slotted the spheres home, one by one. As the last of the trio clicked into place the hole in reality sealed itself, the air returning to its normal consistency, and the corpse of the daemon flickered and vanished, back to wherever it had come from, with the same miniature thundercrack I always associated with the operation of Amberley’s displacer field[84].
‘Well, that takes care of that,’ I said, as a clatter of bootsoles in the corridor outside announced Makan’s return, along with Yaitz and as many skitarii as they’d been able to round up. They came to a sudden halt in the doorway, registering the sudden absence of daemon with surprise and evident relief.
‘What happened?’ Makan asked, glancing warily around the room, as though expecting the abomination to suddenly jump up and shout ‘Surprise!’
‘It destabilised,’ I said, knowing from long experience that a fragment of the truth is always better than a lie. ‘Just in time, too.’
‘And the portal?’ Makan asked.
‘Vanished at the same time the daemon did,’ I told him, truthfully enough. I made my way into the corridor, eager to be out of that dreadful chamber, Jurgen at my shoulder. The skitarii stood aside to make room for us to pass, although whether out of respect for men who’d just bested a daemon or reluctance to get too close to my aide I couldn’t rightly have said.
‘Well, that didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped,’ Felicia said, meeting us at the end of the passageway.
‘I’d rather gathered that,’ I agreed, gratefully taking the tanna which Jurgen had succeeded in locating by this time. ‘Any idea what happened?’
‘We seem to have increased the output of warp energy rather than damping it,’ she told me, which I’d pretty much managed to work out for myself. ‘Lucky you were there to deal with the immediate consequences.’
‘I suppose so,’ I agreed cautiously, before the full meaning of her words penetrated. I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. ‘What are the delayed ones likely to be?’
‘Well, the energy readings were far in excess of any we’ve ever recorded,’ Felicia admitted, a trifle reluctantly if I was any judge. ‘It’s quite likely that Varan has the psykers or the specialised equipment to have detected them. Which means he probably knows where we are now.’
‘I see,’ I said, all my old fears suddenly returning, and hoping that he was the only one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I didn’t have long to brood, however. No sooner had I emerged into the sunlight again, inhaling the clean air gratefully, despite the lingering aromas of Jurgen and the sun-baked algae lying around the shore of the lake diluting the effect somewhat, than Nelys accosted me.
‘Commander Rorkins would like a word,’ he said, ‘about defending the place. He thought you might have some useful input, having fought here before.’ His eyes drifted towards the obelisk for a moment, squinting against the glare. It seemed none the worse for the skirmish with the servitors the last time I’d been here, so far as I could tell, although the westering sun glancing from it replaced any real detail with eye-watering dazzle.
I nodded. After all, that had been my ostensible reason for dragging us out here in the first place, so now we’d arrived I could hardly just tell Rorkins to get on with it, I had more pressing matters to attend to. ‘I’ll be right there,’ I said. ‘Can you show me where he’s set up?’
Our new headquarters, it turned out, was very like the old one, in that whatever essential equipment we’d been able to jam into the shuttle with us had been ranged about a space never intended to house it, but with a few improvements. Felicia, or more probably Makan, given that the Inquisition apparently took most of the administrative decisions here, had turned over a storage bay used to house construction materials for running repairs to the buildings and infrastructure in more peaceful times, for our use as a makeshift command post. As I approached it, a utility servitor plodded past in the opposite direction, pushing a wheeled pallet of piping, apparently the last of the displaced stores. Being a Mechanicus facility, the cleared space was far cleaner and better equipped than most such warehouses would have been, however, and liberally equipped with power outlets; our communications and detection gear was already up and running when I walked through the door, the enginseers from the schola having been supplemented by a tranche of Felicia’s staff.
‘Cain. Good.’ Rorkins beckoned me over to the hololith as I entered, and I picked my way gingerly across the intervening expanse of floor, the tech-priests having been as cavalier as ever about the run of their cables. ‘What do you make of this?’ Despite being banged about in the cargo hold along with the rest of our kit, not to mention our people, the device was still functioning better than ever, in fact, which spoke volumes for the calibre of the tech-priests Felicia had assigned to assist us.
I glanced at the display, which showed a three-dimensional image of the valley, dotted with icons, recognising the basic troop deployments Yaitz and I had worked out between us on my previous visit almost at once. Rorkins had made a few minor amendments, shortening lines of communication and allowing more firelanes to overlap, and I nodded approvingly. ‘Should work,’ I conceded, after a long enough pause to give the impression that it was the first time I’d seen it. ‘But we’d need more troops.’ Yaitz and I had worked on the assumption that his skitarii and whatever help I could bring from the schola would be all the manpower we’d have available.
‘That’s what the skitarii captain said,’ Rorkins informed me. ‘But we should be able to get the extra bodies we need. Young Sprie’s volunteered to pick up some PDF from the Cainstead garrison.’[85]
‘Might as well,’ I agreed, switching the image to the spinning globe of Perlia, bringing it into focus with a well-judged thump on the housing of the projection unit, which earned me a reproving look from the most senior tech-priest present, and taking in the scattering of icons marking the presence of hostile and friendly forces. ‘There’s nothing for them to guard in the middle of the desert in any case.’
For a moment I remembered the raiding force that had vanished without trace in the first assault, and Kayla’s remark about sand devils, but forced the thought aside. Prosperity Wells (I never could take the new name seriously) was a long way from the landing site, and if there really were necrons roaming the desert there the local PDF wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway, other than dying in droves. Far better for them to join us here, and possibly tip the balance in keeping the Shadowlight out of Varan’s hands.
‘Yaitz did a good job, all things considered,’ Rorkins said, looking at me narrowly. ‘Almost as if he was expecting to be reinforced by a group of about our size.’
‘I’m sure he had contingency plans for all kinds of conditions,’ I answered blandly. ‘Probably just dusted off the one that best fitted the forces we brought with us.’
‘Probably,’ Rorkins said, in the tone of a man who doesn’t believe a word of it, but has more pressing matters to take care of at the moment. ‘Do you have any thoughts about how we should proceed?’
‘I think this is the best plan anyone’s likely to come up with,’ I said, having already thrashed out the alternatives with Yaitz and Makan at considerable length. ‘The weak point’s going to be the new road. The old one funnelled everything through the mouth of the valley, and across the dam, which played into our hands very nicely, but the new route bypasses most of the choke points.’ In order to compensate for that, Yaitz had mined the service road, and set up support weapon emplacements to bracket it from the brow of the ridge, but against a sufficiently determined assault that might not turn out to be enough.
‘Yes, I noticed that.’ Rorkins nodded judiciously. ‘Not a lot we can do about it, though. Except put more troopers on the ground.’
‘Maybe Sprie can ferry a few more in when he gets back from Prosperity Wells,’ I said, glancing at the hololith again. ‘There must be a few more garrisons some way from the fighting we can redeploy.’ On this continent, anyway; everything we could spare on the western one was being thrown into a cordon around Havendown, trying to stop the inexorable spread of the stain in the hololith marking the limits of Varan’s influence. It still seemed to be growing, although the fighting wasn’t any more intense than before, and I was put in mind of a tumour, inexorably turning the cells of a healthy body against itself. My palms tingled, usually a reliable sign that my subconscious has spotted something the forebrain hasn’t quite brought into focus yet, but the tenuous shiver of intuition didn’t coalesce into anything concrete. Knowing better than to try to force it, I was on the verge of turning away when something about the enemy icons attracted my attention. A lot of them were moving, eastwards, in our direction.
Luckily Sprie returned before nightfall, bringing a full platoon of PDF regulars to join us, which boosted morale considerably. Even better, from my point of view, were the half dozen Chimeras that came with them. I could have done with a Leman Russ or two as well, but in the absence of any actual tanks, the turreted multi-lasers of the APCs would give our collective firepower a very welcome shot in the arm. Not that it looked like making much of a difference against a force the size of the one I expected to be ranged against us, but right now I was prepared to accept every bit of help I could get.
‘It doesn’t look good,’ I confided to Makan, who, in the interest of maintaining his cover, had been excluded from the tactical meetings. We were standing by the obelisk, in the vague hope that anyone seeing us talking would assume I was reliving old glories. I suppose I could have briefed him properly in the hidden facility beneath the shrine itself, but I didn’t want anyone asking awkward questions about where I’d disappeared to, and, if I’m honest, my experiences down there earlier in the day had left me reluctant to return. ‘There’s a wave of shuttles inbound from Havendown, due within the hour, with another a short way behind them. Much larger, of course.’
‘Sounds like the same strategy they used before,’ Makan said speculatively. ‘Send in a wave of expendables to wear us down, and follow up with the heavy stuff.’
‘Pretty much how I read it,’ I agreed, raising my voice a little over the snarling of the Chimera engines, as the first of our reinforcements lurched down the shuttle’s boarding ramp. ‘The big question is what the expendables have been briefed to do: locate the Shadowlight, or just cause as much trouble as possible. I think the first incursion we saw off was an attempt to find it, maybe even extract it, but the damage Orelius did to their ships put paid to that.’ I pulled out my data-slate, and filled him in on the conclusions I’d drawn about some of the apparently random landings, and the connections Brasker had made to local legends which might point to the sites being connected to the ancients in some way.
‘Interesting,’ Makan said, having heard me out without interruption. ‘I’ll ask Sparsen to be on the alert for any sign of a psyker with them. If there is, they’ll probably be trying to locate the Shadowlight. If not, it’s just another commando raid.’
Leaving him to digest the information, I made my way back to the command centre, narrowing my eyes against the glare of the setting sun, which was making the wide expanse of water beside us look uncomfortably like a vast pool of blood. Rorkins and Julien were discussing the latest tactical updates with Yaitz as I entered the warehouse, any lingering animosity between skitarii and Sororitas apparently forgotten in the common cause of survival, and I lost no time in picking my way towards them through the tangle of cables, which, if anything, appeared to have thickened in my absence.
‘Our latest information puts the first wave at five shuttles,’ Rorkins was saying as I joined the group around the hololith. ‘The auspex contacts are strong, and we’ve got a good estimate of their speed and time of arrival.’
‘Which is when?’ I asked, as levelly as I could.
‘Thirty-five to forty minutes, if the headwinds remain constant,’ Julien told me.
‘Just before sunset, in other words,’ Yaitz added. That wasn’t good; approaching from the west, they’d be coming almost directly out of the sun, leaving our gunners dazzled by the glare.
I glanced at my chronograph. ‘The Chimeras should be in position by then,’ I said. ‘At least that’ll give us some air cover.’ Not much, though. In theory the multi-lasers could inflict a lot of damage on an aircraft, especially one that hadn’t been armoured and hardened to military specifications, but they’d need to be fired with considerable precision to do so. I found myself thinking nostalgically of the auspex-guided hydra batteries we’d relied on for air defence during my years with the Imperial Guard, or even the heavy bolters the Chimeras of the 597th had mounted, which could throw enough ordnance into the air to have at least a sporting chance of bringing a target down, but, as so often, we’d just have to make do with what we could get. I tapped my comm-bead. ‘Kayla, how’s the deployment coming?’
‘We’re on top of it,’ the cadet reassured me. ‘Just offloading the last of the Chimeras now, and Garvie’s pointing the troops in the direction they’re supposed to go.’
‘Good. Carry on.’ I nodded to the others. ‘We’ll be ready for them when they get here,’ I said, with a confidence I was far from feeling.
‘Glad to hear it,’ Rorkins said, turning to Yaitz. ‘Are the demo charges along the dam primed?’
‘They are.’ Yaitz nodded. ‘Although it goes without saying they should only be detonated as a last resort. The blessings of the Omnissiah should be venerated, not casually cast aside.’
‘Of course,’ Rorkins said, although I knew he was practical enough to be more concerned about wasting a major tactical advantage than the tech-priests’ sensibilities. ‘Chances are they’ll have more sense than to put down where we can flush them away anyhow.’
I nodded, finding it hard to disagree.
‘How’s morale holding up?’ Julien asked, glancing in my direction.
‘Reasonably well,’ I assured her. I had most of the cadets wandering around our deployment area, spouting the usual platitudes and listening out for any signs of defeatism, but so far all our people seemed focussed and disciplined. Which was pretty much what I’d have expected, given that they’d been trained for this since childhood, and their instructors had already completed a lifetime of exemplary service to the Imperium. (Apart from me, of course, but nobody needed to know that.) The PDF reinforcements were liable to be jumpy, though, and I made a mental note to visit their command squad, and send the cadets round to have a word with the rest. That ought to settle them nicely.
‘If anyone cares to participate, I’ll be holding a brief service next to the memorial, to ask the Emperor for his blessing,’ Julien said. ‘In about ten minutes.’
