Hero of the Imperium, page 37
‘You may not. We’re here to fight a war, not push files around.’ There was an edge to Kasteen’s voice now which every officer in the regiment had learned to be wary of. Pryke bristled.
‘That’s just not good enough. There are procedures to be followed...’
‘Then let me relieve you of them,’ Kasteen snapped. ‘This facility is now under martial law.’ The result was hugely enjoyable, I have to admit. Pryke went scarlet, then white, then scarlet again. Ernulph probably would have done too, if he’d had enough organic bits left to manage it. Both stood at once, shouting excitably.
‘You can’t do that!’ Ernulph boomed, his voice apparently magnified by some implanted amplivox unit. It was a cheap trick, and one which remained resolutely un-terrifying to anyone who’d been shouted at by a daemon as I had.
‘Yes she can,’ I confirmed quietly, my voice carrying all the more effectively for not being raised like all the others. ‘A field commander has the right to declare martial law at any time with the approval of the highest ranking member of the Commissariat present. Which is me. And I do.’ I stood, and gestured to the plant outside, and the barren snowscape beyond. ‘By this time tomorrow all you’ll see out there is orks. We’re your only hope of not ending up dead or worse. So shut up, keep out of our way, and let us do our job.’ Morel and Quintus, I noticed, were openly enjoying their colleagues’ discomfiture.
‘This is unacceptable,’ Pryke said, her voice tight with outrage.
‘Live with it,’ Kasteen said. ‘Unless you prefer the alternative.’
‘I most certainly do.’ Pryke glared at both of us.
‘Fine.’ I drew my laspistol, and dropped it on the table from just the right height to produce a nicely resonant thud. ‘Under the powers bestowed upon me by the commissariat in the name of His Divine Majesty, I serve notice that any civilian obstructing His forces in the defence of His realm will be subject to summary execution under article seventeen of the rules of military justice.’ I raised an interrogative eyebrow at Pryke and the tech-priest. ‘You were saying?’
‘I withdraw my objections,’ she said tightly. Ernulph nodded too.
‘On reflection, the colonel’s assumption of authority seems entirely the best course of action,’ he conceded.
‘Good,’ I said, leaving the gun where it was – no harm in concentrating their minds a little further. ‘Colonel. You have the floor.’
Editorial Note:
There can be very few readers who will be unaware of the enormous importance of the promethium production facility which Cain describes, both strategically and economically. Since its retention or seizure was so vital an objective for the contending armies, I felt a little extra information on this amazing substance wouldn’t come amiss. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to lay my hands on very much, as such things remain the jealously-guarded province of the Adeptus Mechanicus, so this is the best I could do.
From Our Friend Promethium, Imperial Educational Press, 238th edition, 897 M41.
From the Emperor-blessed fighting machines of the Astartes to the most humble spaceport cargo-hauler, it can truly be said that the Imperium runs on promethium. This might seem amazing enough on its own, but this miraculous substance gives us so much more than just the power to feed the animating spirits of our vehicles. The alchemical by-products of its production provide the raw materials to create a vast array of everyday necessities, from dyes, plastics and pharmacopoeia to the synthetic protein bars which make up the bulk of the proletarian diet on some of the drearier forge worlds.
But it’s the combustibility of promethium which allows its most holy use. From the flamers which scourge the unholy with the purifying fire of the righteous to the alchemical constituents of the explosives which blast them into oblivion, it’s this most blessed of substances which keeps us safe and preserves our homes from the depredations of the alien, the mutant, and the heretic.
Promethium itself can be produced in a variety of ways, and from an astonishing number of sources. Among the most common are the atmospheres of gas giant planets, subterranean deposits of ancient organic materials, and certain kinds of rare ices found only on the coldest of worlds...
[Of course it’s the illustrations which are the real charm of this little book, particularly those of its narrator, Pyrus the flame. Even now I can’t help smiling at the expressions on the faces of the heretics he’s burning on page twenty-eight, just as I did as a child all those years ago.]
THREE
‘Sieur Morel. I’d like a quick word with you if you can spare the time.’ I judged my movement precisely, so that to the casual observer it would look as though we’d reached the door of the conference room together purely by chance. The grizzled miner turned in my direction, assessed the situation with keen intelligence, and nodded, dismissing his staff with a casual wave. They filed out along with the tech-priests and the quill-pushers, Ernulph and Pryke, still simmering nicely leaving us alone with Kasteen and Broklaw.
The major had joined the conference shortly after Kasteen dropped her little bombshell, taking over the tactical debriefing of the refinery staff. Now the two of them were huddled over data-slates refining their strategy for the defence of the plant. Ernulph, Pryke, and their respective hangers-on had turned out to be quite helpful after the sight of my sidearm had cleared the air, no doubt reflecting that the orks might very well get them if they didn’t do all they could to help, and if the greenies didn’t I most certainly would.
A handful of troopers were bustling in and out of the conference suite, setting up map boards and a large urn of tanna leaf tea. It looked as though this was going to be our command post, at least for the time being. (Kasteen claimed it was an excellent vantage point from which to direct the troops, but I suspected she just liked the view from the window.) I found the gradual transformation from civilian decadence to the purposeful military atmosphere quietly reassuring; how the miner viewed it I had no idea, or interest, come to that.
‘Of course. How can I help?’ Morel asked. I poured myself a bowl of tanna tea, and offered him one. After a moment he took it, sipped cautiously, and appeared to approve, although the Valhallan brew isn’t to everyone’s taste.
‘Earlier you mentioned some of your miners had disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Would you care to elaborate?’ An expression of mild surprise crossed his grizzled features. I suppose after being stonewalled by the other factions here for so long our interest was unexpected.
‘Five people, in just over a month. It might not sound much out of a workforce of six hundred, but believe me it matters to us.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course the Administratum and the Mechanicus don’t give a damn. Just trot out the same old line about the losses being within acceptable statistical parameters.’
‘What’s your opinion?’ I asked. Morel sipped his tea, formulating a response, and I forestalled him. ‘I want your gut reaction. Don’t feel you have to be polite.’ He laughed, and looked at me with renewed respect.
‘Just as well. Diplomacy isn’t exactly my strong point.’ He sipped again. ‘Something’s definitely wrong down there. Don’t ask me what, though.’
‘Then we need to find out,’ I said. Kasteen broke off from her conversation with Broklaw long enough to nod.
‘Quite,’ she said. Broklaw nodded too.
‘Absolutely. No point in fortifying the place if the trouble’s already inside with us.’
‘You think we’ve got orks in the tunnels?’ Morel paled at the thought. Whatever he’d thought the problem might be, this clearly wasn’t it. I shook my head doubtfully.
‘It’s possible. Although sneaking around picking people off one at a time isn’t exactly their style.’
‘And I don’t see how they could have got here that soon,’ Kasteen added, with a glance at the hemisphere map pinned to the wall close to her seat. ‘It’s taken them over six weeks to get here from the crash site. If an advance party was taking your miners they’d have had to have got halfway round the planet within a few days of their arrival, and we’ve seen no sign of any rapid deployment capability.’
‘Unless they teleported,’ I suggested. ‘It has been known.’12
‘We’re not jumping to conclusions are we?’ Broklaw mused. ‘Could it just be an unfortunate series of accidents after all?’
‘That hardly seems likely.’ Morel stared at the plan on the opposite wall. The straggling and meandering lines looked like nothing so much as a detailed diagram of a plate full of noodles. A map of the tunnels beneath us, I realised, where the precious veins of ice which could be transmuted into promethium had been hauled out for countless generations.13
‘Can you show us where the missing miners vanished from?’ I asked. That might give us some kind of clue. Morel nodded, picking up a stylus from the desk, and marked the points in rapidly; I realised he must have done this before, no doubt hoping to find some connection himself. I stared at the rumpled sheet of paper, translating the lines in my mind into a three dimensional image, and trying to get a feel for the space.14 If there was a pattern to be discerned, however, it eluded me.
‘Have you spotted something?’ Kasteen asked hopefully, aware of my tunnel rat’s instincts from my reports on the Gravalax incident. I shook my head.
‘There’s no obvious connection between these points,’ I said. I tapped one with a fingernail. ‘This gallery’s a dead end, for instance. An assailant would have to get past an entire shift of workers unobserved.’
‘And that’s just not possible,’ Morel confirmed. Which begged another question that Broklaw was obliging enough to ask.
‘Unless one of the refinery staff is responsible...’ he began, but trailed off as Morel’s face darkened.
‘If you’re planning to accuse any of my people of murder, you’d better have some damn good evidence.’
‘No one’s accusing anyone of anything,’ I soothed, biting back the unspoken yet. ‘You’ve brought a potentially serious security breach to our attention, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it, that’s all.’
‘If it saves any more of my people I’m glad to help,’ the miner said, somewhat mollified.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ I gazed at the map of the mine workings again, as though deep in thought. ‘But I don’t think we’ll solve the problem talking about it over a bowl of tea.’
‘Then what do you suggest?’ Kasteen asked. I sighed with every appearance of reluctance and shook my head.
‘I’ll just have to go down there and take a look around,’ I said.
Now if you’ve been reading my memoirs with any degree of attention it’s probably struck you that this apparent willingness to put myself in harm’s way is somewhat uncharacteristic, to say the least. But try to see things from my point of view. For one thing, if I hung around here while the defences were being prepared there was a pretty good chance I’d end up in that bone-chilling cold again, and I was most reluctant to do so. Not to mention the fact that there was a horde of greenskins on the way. True, they weren’t expected to arrive in force for another twenty-four hours or so, but that hadn’t held back the advance party we’d encountered already, and who knew how many more of them might be lurking out there waiting for an unwary target to show itself?
Tunnels, on the other hand, were an environment I felt right at home in, and I could match my fighting skills in a dark confined space with anything we might find down there. And it wasn’t as if I was going in alone either; anything used to taking on solitary unarmed civilians was in for a big surprise if it tried jumping a squad of troopers with lasguns. So all in all I was pretty confident that whatever might be lurking in the dark lower levels, it wouldn’t pose nearly as much of a threat to my continued well-being as hanging around outside like a chunk of deep-frozen ork bait. (In this assumption I was, as it turned out, both quite correct and catastrophically wrong. Of course I had no reason to suspect at that point what our investigation would ultimately lead to.)
I’ve seen some sights in my time, and it takes a lot to impress me, but I have to admit that even today, after more than a century, the ice caves of Simia Orichalcae stand out in my memory as a sight to behold. I don’t know what the troopers made of them, but to a born and bred tunnel rat like me they were quite spectacular. Though broad mining galleries ran off into the distance beyond the reach of our luminators, it was never quite dark, as the ice surrounding us reflected the light back so that it rippled away in a faint blue sheen as far as the eye could see.
And the walls glittered, every single irregularity in the surface reflecting and refracting the beams, so we moved through an ever-scintillating constellation of ephemeral stars. Our boots crunched gently on frost-packed floor, and our breath puffed visibly with every exhalation, but down here, away from the flensing wind, I found the temperatures tolerable enough. They were certainly no worse than those in the average Valhallan billet when they could get the air conditioning to work, and I was used to that. It was even warm enough for Jurgen’s characteristic odour to have returned, albeit in a slightly muted fashion, for which we were all grateful. I’d requested Lustig’s squad for backup, as after our adventures on Gravalax I was confident in their abilities, and I found the familiar faces and the sergeant’s taciturn presence a welcome boost to my spirits. I’d declined the offer of a guide from among the miners as I was confident in my own tunnel sense, and if there really were orks down here the last thing I wanted was some hysterical civilian getting in the way in the middle of a fire fight.
The early stages of our descent had been through the bustle of the upper workings, where miners and servitors hurried through broad, well-lit thoroughfares reminiscent of the streets of a Valhallan cavern city, and mobile ore bins full of shimmering ice shoved everything else unceremoniously out of the way. But as we penetrated further into the complex, into the lesser-used passages, they grew narrower and less well lit, until the only illumination was what we carried with us. From time to time we heard sounds of activity from the main galleries, where Morel’s colleagues were still hacking the precious ice away with the aid of tools which looked alarmingly like the meltas we used as weapons, but after an hour or so of steady descent even this had faded away.
‘What are we looking for, exactly, sir?’ Sergeant Lustig asked. I shrugged.
‘Emperor knows,’ I said. ‘Just something unusual.’ His squad was spread out in a standard search pattern, with everyone in visual range of at least two other troopers. I wasn’t going to have any more mysterious disappearances if I could help it, particularly if one of them was likely to be me. The sergeant’s broad face creased in a grin.
‘Well that narrows it down,’ he said, glancing round at our surroundings. Coming from an iceworld as he did, I suppose he found them bordering on the mundane. In a way, that’s what I was counting on; between the Valhallans’ feeling for ice and my hive boy’s affinity for enclosed spaces, whatever was down here was bound to have left some traces which would strike one or another of us as odd.
‘Penlan here.’ The voice of one of the troopers hissed in my comm-bead, followed a moment later by the attenuated sound of her actual speech overlapping the transmission like a distorted echo. She could only be a hundred metres or so away. ‘I’ve got something. Looks like tracks.’
‘Hold your position,’ I ordered, and worked my way towards her silhouette. She was backlit by the luminator she’d taped to the barrel of her lasgun. Jurgen trotted at my heels, his own weapon levelled and ready for use. Experience had taught both of us you could never be too cautious in circumstances like this.
‘What do you make of it, sir?’ Penlan asked, turning towards us. As she did so, she brought the patch of discoloured skin on her left cheek where she’d taken a glancing las hit on Gravalax into the beam of Jurgen’s luminator. Her expression was as puzzled as her voice, brown hair falling into her grey eyes from around the rim of her hat.
‘Damned if I know,’ I said, not relishing the doubt. She shone her light directly on the marks she’d found, deep gouges in the frozen floor, which indeed looked uncomfortably like claw marks. After more than a decade and a half in Imperial service, during which time I thought I’d encountered pretty much every malevolent life form in the galaxy, I should have been able to recognise them. The fact that I couldn’t was deeply disconcerting. Even the mark of ork boots, which I’d been half expecting, would have been preferable.
‘They look a bit like genestealer tracks,’ Jurgen said uncertainly. He was partially right: they’d been gouged out by what looked like powerful talons, but the spacing was all wrong to be the work of a ‘stealer. ‘Or ‘nids, maybe?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘The weight distribution’s all wrong.’ Which given the hive fleets’ ability to conjure new and unpleasant creatures out of thin air wasn’t exactly a certainty, but if there was a bio-ship or two in the sector the chances of them getting this far into Imperial space undetected were negligible. I pointed that out too, and pretended I hadn’t seen the momentary flicker of visible relief on Penlan’s face. The two original regiments which now made up the 597th had fought the tyranids shortly before I joined them, and both had been all but annihilated. Come to that, I’d seen more than enough of the ‘nids to last me more than a lifetime by this point too.
‘We’d best press on,’ I decided after a few moments’ reflection. Somehow the confirmation that there was something down there made it easier to do that than go back, however strong the impulse to retreat I now felt. I knew from experience that an unknown enemy is always a bigger threat than one you’ve identified, and, in truth, nothing much had changed. I still had a crack squad of veteran troopers between me and anything malevolent lurking up ahead. Not to mention Jurgen, whose peculiar gifts had saved my hide on more than one occasion, even though neither of us had been aware of their existence until our encounter with Amberley and her entourage on Gravalax.15 Lustig nodded, and gave the order to move on.
