Choose Your Enemies, page 4
‘No help to us,’ Kasteen said briskly. ‘They can hit anything on the surface from there, and from any direction.’
‘Though they do seem to have a preference for “up”,’ I added dryly, having developed the habit of scanning the skies whenever my duties took me outdoors. Even when they weren’t mounting a raid in search of loot, the eldar roamed the air constantly, swooping on any military assets they spotted, popping off a round or two, then scuttling off like the cowards they were.
‘Which makes it a job for the system defence force,’[33] Broklaw concluded.
Proktor shook his head slowly. ‘It would be if we had one,’ he agreed, ‘but we don’t. In theory, we’re part of the Ironfound System, so we’re supposed to be protected by their system defence assets, and the authorities here decided it would be a waste of resources to build our own.’ He coughed delicately. ‘Unfortunately, the Ironfounders have a different view. They contend that we have our own governor and Administratum, so their military responsibilities end at the halo as well.’
‘Is it too late to shoot the governor for gross incompetence?’ I asked, more as a joke than a serious suggestion. True, one of the dubious benefits of a scarlet sash[34] is a free hand to shoot pretty much anyone in the Imperial military you feel like, and as the head of the system’s armed forces a planetary governor theoretically falls under that heading, but in practice the political fallout would be immense, and at least the bloody woman was staying out of our way, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case with her successor. Besides, that sort of thing wouldn’t sit too well with the firm but fair image I’ve worked so hard to create. Nevertheless, to my surprise, Proktor seemed to be taking me seriously.
‘Though it pains me to say it,’ he said, ‘it isn’t exactly her fault. The jurisdictional dispute has been going on for the last nine hundred years.’
Which meant that, even allowing for the aristocracy’s fondness for excessive juvenat treatments, this would be a situation she’d inherited from an ancestor.
‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. ‘Though it could hardly have hurt her to have approved the commissioning of a cutter or two once she took office.’
‘Which would have been blown to perdition as soon as the xenos turned up anyway,’ Kasteen pointed out. ‘Might as well wish for a flotilla of battleships while you’re about it.’ She turned back to the hololith. ‘Any others?’
‘Possibly,’ Proktor said, dismissing the tangle of string with an abrupt gesture which elicited a whine of dismay from the onlooking tech-priest, unless it was just a worn servo somewhere beneath his robe. This revealed more threads, running from mineheads and storage facilities to wrap the globe in a spider web of intertwining lines. ‘These are the approach and retreat vectors we can most reliably extrapolate from the data we were given.’ Which, to my immense lack of surprise, were almost all from actions carried out by the 597th – although, to be fair, a few of the local defence force’s skirmishes were also marked, for the most part in locations where the relatively open ground would have made the raiders’ incoming and outgoing courses fairly obvious.
‘Most of those could just as easily have entered the atmosphere below the horizon,’ Broklaw pointed out, an instant before I could.
Kasteen nodded. ‘A lot of them probably did. But there are a few places where the vectors intersect that might be worth a look.’
‘There are.’ Proktor obligingly highlighted them, to Kasteen’s obvious and pleased surprise. ‘Though none of them seem particularly accessible.’
‘Which would be the point, I imagine,’ Broklaw commented dryly. ‘They’re hardly going to put the end of a warp tunnel in the middle of the main hab zone, are they?’
‘I imagine the tunnel would have predated Imperial settlement,’ Proktor said, with considerable understatement.
‘Either way, we’ll need to check them out,’ Kasteen said, with a jaundiced look at the hololith. ‘Although what we’re actually looking for, Throne alone knows.’ She glanced in my direction. ‘Ciaphas?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ I admitted, which, to be honest, was fine by me. I dredged my memory, trying to come up with some nugget of information Amberley might have imparted over the years, but came up blank. ‘I suppose anything that might look a bit eldary.’
‘Eldary?’ she repeated, as though it just might make sense if she heard it often enough. ‘Is that even a word?’
‘If it isn’t, it’ll just have to do until a proper one comes along,’ I said. I looked at the half a dozen or so locations Proktor had highlighted, finding each one less promising than the last. Nothing but snow, ice and crevasses which could swallow a Chimera whole without pausing to belch afterwards. A playground for the Valhallans, in other words: if we asked for volunteers we’d be trampled in the rush. I glanced hopefully at Proktor. ‘None of these sites figure in the local folklore, I suppose?’
‘Folklore?’ If anything he looked even more taken aback than Kasteen had at my impromptu coinage of ‘eldary.’ ‘Why would they?’
‘Because in my experience, anything tainted by xenos or the warp leaves traces of some kind,’ I said, as kindly as I could. It wasn’t Proktor’s fault he was a civilian, and concomitantly inexperienced in the ways of the galaxy. ‘Even if it’s as tenuous as ghost stories.’
‘I see what you mean.’ He nodded judiciously. ‘Things like the snow walkers.’
‘Probably,’ I said, having no idea what snow walkers were, but pretty much every world had its bogeymen and they all seemed to be pretty much alike. ‘Things people only ever catch a glimpse of, usually when the weather’s really bad, or they’ve had a drink or two?’
‘That’s right,’ Proktor confirmed. ‘Shadowy figures made of snowflakes that hide in the blizzards. Most people think they’re just thicker flurries and overactive imaginations.’
‘Most people are probably right,’ Kasteen said, dismissing the matter. ‘But they don’t sound particularly eldary,’ at which she smiled wryly in my direction, ‘in any case.’
‘They don’t,’ Broklaw agreed. He turned to Proktor. ‘But are any of these sites associated with the stories at all?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ Proktor said. He thought for a moment. ‘But I’ll have someone look into it. Just in case.’
‘Thank you.’ Kasteen returned her attention to the hololith. ‘We’ll just have to send someone out to take a look then.’
‘Several someones,’ I said, considering the matter. ‘And it’ll take some time. They’re pretty widespread.’
‘That they are,’ Kasteen agreed. ‘And the more troopers we send out, the less able we are to defend the mines. I don’t want to weaken our defences any more than we can help, especially after that last attack.’
‘Neither do I,’ I agreed. The fight had been long and bloody, the eldar attacking with their largest force yet, and if it hadn’t been for the Valhallans’ innate ability to take full advantage of the hostile terrain it could easily have gone the other way; even as it was it had been a damnably close run thing. ‘I’m in no hurry to tangle with those Dreadnoughts again.’ They’d been hellishly fast and agile, far more so than their Imperial counterparts. Going by what I’d seen – from as far away as possible – they might even have outclassed the ones the t’au use, which was a sobering thought indeed.
‘We don’t need to assign a scouting party to each objective,’ Broklaw said, replacing Proktor at the hololith controls, to the markedly increased agitation of the hovering tech-priest. He poked at them for a moment, overlaying long, looping paths across the locations the Administratum adept had highlighted. ‘Two or three should be enough, if we’re prepared to wait another couple of days for them to complete the circuit.’
‘Works for me,’ Kasteen said, and I nodded my own agreement. Not that it was strictly necessary, given my position outside the chain of command, but we’d worked together long enough to trust each other’s judgement, and it never hurt to have the record show that the regimental commissar was on side too. She indicated the longest of the loops. ‘Shambas can take that one. The Sentinels will move faster over broken terrain than the Chimeras can.’
‘It’s what they’re for, after all,’ I concurred. The Sentinel troop was on our SO&E[35] as a scout unit, although the walkers’ ability to move rapidly through a combat zone and deliver a considerable punch with their multilasers when they reached their objective made them pretty useful for hit-and-run attacks, or outflanking a static or slow-moving enemy, too. If Kasteen hadn’t thrown them in against the eldar Dreadnoughts, turning the xenos’ own tactics against them, things would probably have turned out far worse. ‘Who else are you sending?’
Kasteen shrugged. ‘I’ll get Sulla to assign one of her platoon commanders to sort it out. A couple of squads apiece ought to do it.’ Which made sense. The two vehicles could watch each other’s backs, and in the event of one being disabled by mishap or enemy action no one would be left stranded in the wilderness – although the ride back would be uncomfortably crowded.
‘That’s what I’d do,’ Broklaw said, and sighed with as close as he ever got to visible frustration, at least with a civilian within earshot. ‘But what I wouldn’t give for a Valkyrie or two.’
I nodded; with a couple of the sturdy aerial transports at our disposal we could have checked out all the sites in a matter of hours. The 597th, however, had no aerial assets of its own, relying on liaising with other regiments when they were required – or, if there was no other alternative, the local planetary defence force. As we were the only Imperial Guard regiment on Drechia, however, the first was not an option, and since the eldar had shot down all the local aircraft in the early days of their campaign, neither was the second.
‘And if wishing made it so, Horus would be the Emperor,’ I concluded, falling back on one of the platitudes from my childhood which censorious adults used to use to manage over-inflated expectations,[36] though inflecting it as a joke, in case it was taken for a genuine rebuke. ‘We’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got.’
‘We always do,’ Kasteen said.
FOUR
Our Sentinels went stomping off into the swirling, blood-tinged snow shortly after dawn the next day, their pilots waving cheerily from the open cockpits, despite the bone-freezing temperatures which had me watching on a vid screen from the relative warmth of the command centre – a former planetary defence force facility into which we’d been welcomed on our arrival with every outward courtesy and barely concealed resentment. It was far from the first time the 597th had found itself in this kind of position, though, and I’d been able to bring the commanders round fairly quickly by asking their advice about local conditions (which we generally ignored) and chairing interminable liaison meetings until we were actively cooperating as much as could be expected under the circumstances.
In the interests of keeping our reluctant allies on side I’d invited their lord marshal (who, in a less protocol-obsessed society, would just have been the most senior general and addressed as such) and a handful of his aides to join us for a briefing on what we were up to, and to witness the departure of our scouting parties. In the interests of staying warm, and keeping them out from under the feet of the rest of the regiment, I’d offered to keep them entertained with a pict show while Kasteen and Broklaw got on with some proper work. Needless to say my inflated reputation more than came into its own here, our guests delighted to be hobnobbing with a Hero of the Imperium, while I was perfectly happy to stay out of the wind, drink tanna, and not get shot at by any passing eldar.
‘I imagine you wish you were going with them,’ the lord marshal said, cradling the bowl of tanna Jurgen had just handed him, while breathing through his mouth until my aide had moved a couple of paces away. Which was the sort of thing people imagined all the time, although why they might think I was eager to put myself in imminent danger of a messy and painful death after having narrowly avoided one so often before was beyond me.
I shrugged, in my best self-deprecating manner. ‘Sentinels are one man vehicles,’ I said, as though that were a matter of thinly veiled disappointment rather than a relief. ‘I could hardly crowd into the cockpit with the pilot.’
‘But the other group are going in Chimeras,’ a sharp-featured middle- aged woman put in, the resemblance between her and the lord marshal sufficiently close to make the likelihood of her not being a close relative, daughter or niece perhaps, vanishingly small. ‘I’m sure they could squeeze you in.’
‘I’m sure they could,’ I said diplomatically, ‘but they have a job to do, and I’m sure they’ll get on with it a lot better without me in the way. Sometimes you need to show you have confidence in people to bring out their best.’
‘Indeed you do,’ the lord marshal agreed, to my faint surprise. ‘If you hover over their shoulder all the time you just put them off.’
The woman gave him a hard stare, in which much past history was encoded for those with the key to decipher it, but as that didn’t include me and I didn’t care anyway I pretended not to notice.
‘Quite so,’ I said, noncommittally, and activated the hololith. This time it was tended by an enginseer who seemed so bored she might just as well have been part of the equipment, although no doubt she was keeping herself occupied in whatever arcane manner acolytes of the Omnissiah generally do, meditating on left-handed stem bolts or something. In the interests of clarity – since these people were, after all, the cream of the local defence force, which meant they’d achieved their high rank through family connection rather than quick wits or military acumen – I’d elected to dispense with the vector analysis, simply highlighting the spots we were interested in. ‘These are the locations we feel may be of interest to the eldar.’
‘Why?’ the woman cut in again. ‘They’re all in the middle of nowhere.’
I hesitated. I didn’t want to spook anybody by invoking the spectre of the warp, but there didn’t seem much of an alternative. ‘We think it’s possible they may have established a beachhead somewhere on Drechia itself,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘Our analysis of the data you provided,’ and the rather more useful information we’d collected ourselves, but they didn’t need to know that, ‘leads us to believe that these are the most likely locations.’
‘You think they have up to seven beachheads?’ The lord marshal laughed, sipped at his tanna, then hastily put his bowl down. ‘I’m pretty sure we would have noticed at least one of them by now.’
‘As am I,’ I lied smoothly, although I doubted some of these people would have noticed if a squad of Banshees had wandered into the command centre and helped themselves to the tanna while we were talking. ‘But we would have been derelict in our duty to the Emperor if we hadn’t taken steps to discount the possibility.’
‘That may be so,’ the woman cut in again, ‘but you still haven’t told us exactly what you’re looking for.’ Throne help me, I was either beginning to admire her persistence or wish she’d drop dead. Perhaps a little of both.
‘We’re not entirely sure,’ I admitted, ‘but we’ll certainly know it if we see it.’
She nodded. ‘They’re just looking for anything that seems a bit eldary.’
‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I said. The images on the vid screen blurred for a moment, although whether from static or a sudden flurry of snow I couldn’t have said, and if the enginseer knew, she wasn’t letting on. It cleared to show the last of the Chimeras setting off, farting promethium fumes which obscured the image even more, then the screen went blank. ‘Well, that seems to be that. Shall we get down to business?’
‘By all means,’ the lord marshal agreed, leading the way over to the conference table in the corner, and sitting down in what should have been Kasteen’s seat at the head of the table. Since she wasn’t planning to attend, having expressed a preference when asked for going ork hunting with a pointy stick,[37] the matter was moot, and I decided to let it go. As the senior Astra Militarum representative I stationed myself at the other end of the table, warding off any rival claims by holding out my tanna bowl for a refill; I was still a little on the chilly side, and the approach of Jurgen with the teapot would be guaranteed to keep the chairs on either side of me comfortably clear of interlopers.
‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, taking a sip of the warm and fragrant liquid, partly for the warmth it afforded and partly to displace his own, more earthy aroma from my nostrils. ‘Most welcome.’
‘Very good, sir.’ At which point he lumbered off to wait as unobtrusively as possible beside the refreshment table – which in his case was about as effective as an ogryn trying to blend in at a cotillion – while those who’d snaffled seats by the samovar for the extra warmth it afforded began to fidget uneasily as they found themselves within nasal range of him again.
‘Will that charming colonel of yours be joining us today?’ the lord marshal asked, and I shook my head with every sign of sincere regret.
‘She sends her apologies, but she and Major Broklaw are discussing improvements to our defences with the company commanders in the field. You would, of course, be welcome to join them.’
